Emma Camp:

One California high school has eliminated honors classes for ninth- and 10th-grade students. While school officials claim that the change was necessary to increase “equity,” the move has angered students and parents alike.

“We really feel equity means offering opportunities to students of diverse backgrounds, not taking away opportunities for advanced education and study,” one parent who opposed the change told The Wall Street Journal.

Starting this school year, Culver City High School, a public school in a middle-class suburb of Los Angles, eliminated its honors English classes for ninth- and 10th-graders. Instead, students are only able to enroll in one course called “College Prep” English. The decision, according to school administrators, came after teachers noticed that only a small number of black and Hispanic students were enrolling in Advanced Placement (A.P.) courses.

“It was very jarring when teachers looked at their AP enrollment and realized Black and brown kids were not there. They felt obligated to do something,” said Quoc Tran, the district’s superintendent. According to an article by The Wall Street Journal‘s Sara Randazzo, data presented at a school board meeting last year showed that Latino students made up 13 percent of 12th-grade A.P. English students, despite comprising 37 percent of the student body, while black students made up 14 percent of A.P. English students while comprising 15 percent of the student body.

Deja vu: One size fits all in Madison – English 10

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Sandra Stotsky:

It is an oft-quoted truism that teachers cannot teach what they do not know. In the past half century, most states have tolerated a weak licensing system for prospective teachers. This weak system has been accompanied by an increasingly emptier curriculum for most of our students, depriving them of the knowledge and skills they need for this country’s experiment in self-government and for their careers in a highly industrialized country.

It is reasonable to believe that an academically stronger licensing system for teachers would raise the academic quality of our teaching force, strengthen the school curriculum, and, in turn, increase student achievement. And it is reasonable to believe that is what happened in the Bay State. But that doesn’t seem to be what the US Department of Education wants, to judge by the policies it has required all Common Core states to implement since 2010.

While the first step in strengthening public education in this country is the development of strong academic standards in all major subjects, something we do not have in any state since 2011, the second should be the tightening up of the academic screws, so to speak, of every state’s teacher licensing system, not, as is now the case, the development of costly national K-12 student tests that may be as poor in quality as the standards on which they are based. Instead of content-poor licensure tests, as most states have, states could adopt. at relatively no cost to themselves (and with no consultant or royalty fees for me), the Massachusetts licensure tests of subject matter knowledge that helped to propel the “Massachusetts education miracle.” They can apply easily to whatever K-12 standards states now have.

Ben Chrisinger:

Almost immediately after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November, people began wondering what it would mean for teaching and learning. A widely read piece in The Atlantic that provided one of the first looks at the tool’s ability to put together high-quality writing concluded that it would kill the student essay. Since then, academics everywhere have done their own experimenting with the technology — and weighed in on what to do about it. Some have banned students from using it, while others have offered tips on how to create essay assignments that are AI-proof. Many have suggested that we embrace the technology and incorporate it into the classroom.

While we’ve been busy worrying about what ChatGPT could mean for students, we haven’t devoted nearly as much attention to what it could mean for academics themselves. And it could mean a lot. Critically, academics disagree on exactly how AI can and should be used. And with the rapidly improving technology at our doorstep, we have little time to deliberate.

Already some researchers are using the technology. Among only the small sample of my work colleagues, I’ve learned that it is being used for such daily tasks as: translating code from one programming language to another, potentially saving hours spent searching web forums for a solution; generating plain-language summaries of published research, or identifying key arguments on a particular topic; and creating bullet points to pull into a presentation or lecture.

Even this limited use is complicated. Different audiences — journal editors, grant panels, conference attendees, students — will have different expectations about originality for particular tasks. For example, while peer reviewers might accept translated statistical code, students might balk at AI-generated lecture slides.

But it’s in the realm of academic writing and research where ethical debates about transparency and fairness really come into play.

Ben Chrisinger:

Almost immediately after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November, people began wondering what it would mean for teaching and learning. A widely read piece in The Atlantic that provided one of the first looks at the tool’s ability to put together high-quality writing concluded that it would kill the student essay. Since then, academics everywhere have done their own experimenting with the technology — and weighed in on what to do about it. Some have banned students from using it, while others have offered tips on how to create essay assignments that are AI-proof. Many have suggested that we embrace the technology and incorporate it into the classroom.

While we’ve been busy worrying about what ChatGPT could mean for students, we haven’t devoted nearly as much attention to what it could mean for academics themselves. And it could mean a lot. Critically, academics disagree on exactly how AI can and should be used. And with the rapidly improving technology at our doorstep, we have little time to deliberate.

Already some researchers are using the technology. Among only the small sample of my work colleagues, I’ve learned that it is being used for such daily tasks as: translating code from one programming language to another, potentially saving hours spent searching web forums for a solution; generating plain-language summaries of published research, or identifying key arguments on a particular topic; and creating bullet points to pull into a presentation or lecture.

Even this limited use is complicated. Different audiences — journal editors, grant panels, conference attendees, students — will have different expectations about originality for particular tasks. For example, while peer reviewers might accept translated statistical code, students might balk at AI-generated lecture slides.

But it’s in the realm of academic writing and research where ethical debates about transparency and fairness really come into play.

Nadia Asparouhava:

Growing up, my dad would always remind us that America doesn’t guarantee anyone happiness. “It guarantees us the pursuit of happiness,” he’d say. Sounds like a cheap deal: America gives us opportunities, but we still have to put in all the work. But that is more than any other country offers its citizens.

Tech is where “doing research” does not require me to have a Ph.D., and where “writing for a living” does not require me to scribble articles for pennies into the void. In tech, writing thoughtfully and persuasively about a topic means that others genuinely engage with those ideas, remix them freely and reach out with opportunities to transform them into reality. My peers in tech have never questioned the importance of my (sometimes eccentric) obsessions and rabbit holes, but instead urge me to act upon the ideas I care about and to take my own dreams seriously.

Nadia Asparouhava:

Growing up, my dad would always remind us that America doesn’t guarantee anyone happiness. “It guarantees us the pursuit of happiness,” he’d say. Sounds like a cheap deal: America gives us opportunities, but we still have to put in all the work. But that is more than any other country offers its citizens.

Tech is where “doing research” does not require me to have a Ph.D., and where “writing for a living” does not require me to scribble articles for pennies into the void. In tech, writing thoughtfully and persuasively about a topic means that others genuinely engage with those ideas, remix them freely and reach out with opportunities to transform them into reality. My peers in tech have never questioned the importance of my (sometimes eccentric) obsessions and rabbit holes, but instead urge me to act upon the ideas I care about and to take my own dreams seriously.

James Kirchick:

Perhaps the most enduring of communism’s many ignominious contributions to Western intellectual life is the collective letter of denunciation.

In 1958, after the writer Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature, the presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers voted unanimously to expel him in a move that was reported on the front page of The New York Times. According to this governmentally controlled body, the author of Dr. Zhivago had committed “treason with regard to the Soviet people, the cause of socialism, peace, and progress paid for by a Nobel Prize in order to intensify the Cold War.” Articles in Literaturnaya Gazeta, an official organ of the union, denounced the Jewish author as a “Judas” and likened him to a “snake” that had emerged from the “poetical dungwaters of lyrical manure.”

In 1969, the union expelled another author whose work challenged the Soviet regime, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, for “antisocial behavior.” The following year, Solzhenitsyn, like Pasternak before him, won the Nobel. In an angry statement, also reported on the front page of the Times, the union decried how “works by this writer that were illegally taken abroad and published there have long been used by Western reactionary circles for anti-Soviet aims.”

In 1973, an open letter signed by 40 members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences denounced the physicist Andrei Sakharov for his criticisms of Kremlin human rights abuses, which, they alleged, had found favor with “the most reactionary imperialist circles” abroad. Sakharov, too, won the Nobel Prize (for peace) two years later, only for 72 members of the academy—a full third of its membership—to sign a florid statement declaring that the award was “of an unworthy and provocatory nature and is blasphemy against the noble ideals cherished by us all of humanism, peace, justice, and friendship between peoples of all countries.”

Wisconsin Senate (and Assembly) Committee on Education:

Department of Public Instruction
Laura Adams -Policy Initiatives Advisor for the State Superintendent
Duy Nguyen – Assistant Superintendent for the Division of Academic Excellence
Tom McCarthy – Executive Director for the Office of the State Superintendent

ExcelinEd
Dr. Kymyona Burk – Senior Policy Fellow

University of Wisconsin–Madison
Mark S. Seidenberg – Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor

Luxemburg-Casco School District
Kyle Thayse – 4k-12 Instructional Coach

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

students, schmoodents.

from 2020-22, yale university received more money just in HHS grants than from all student tuition, room, and board payments combined.

but sure kids, keep thinking “you’re the customer”… pic.twitter.com/P0EUwvA7q2

— el gato malo (@boriquagato) February 25, 2023

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

Irwin Collier:

On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At a long table sat the Rector Magnificus, Harnack [1], the mighty theologian, and the professors of the various faculties. Moving about the room were students of three types: foreigners like ourselves; wanderers from other universities of the Fatherland; and boys from the “Gymnasium,” who had passed the “Abiturient” examination and become “mules” or freshmen. These last we regard with interest. They are unquestionably the best trained school boys in the world. For nine years they have been drilled by the best masters, every one a doctor, for some thirty hours a week. They have been taught not simply to remember, but to analyze, compare and classify, until, at the age of eighteen or nineteen stand often on a better footing than graduates of our colleges. But there is another side to the shield, as I learned when I grew to know them better. They have marred their sight — sixty per cent of Germans over eighteen wear glasses. They have hurt their health by long hours of work at home and by little play save perhaps skating in winter and gymnastic exercises on the “Turnboden.” With all his learning, the German Jack is often a dull boy.

Irwin Collier:

On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At a long table sat the Rector Magnificus, Harnack [1], the mighty theologian, and the professors of the various faculties. Moving about the room were students of three types: foreigners like ourselves; wanderers from other universities of the Fatherland; and boys from the “Gymnasium,” who had passed the “Abiturient” examination and become “mules” or freshmen. These last we regard with interest. They are unquestionably the best trained school boys in the world. For nine years they have been drilled by the best masters, every one a doctor, for some thirty hours a week. They have been taught not simply to remember, but to analyze, compare and classify, until, at the age of eighteen or nineteen stand often on a better footing than graduates of our colleges. But there is another side to the shield, as I learned when I grew to know them better. They have marred their sight — sixty per cent of Germans over eighteen wear glasses. They have hurt their health by long hours of work at home and by little play save perhaps skating in winter and gymnastic exercises on the “Turnboden.” With all his learning, the German Jack is often a dull boy.

Arman Rahman
Arman Rahman
Arman Rahman
Reporter

Author email
:

According to Caire, the school was forced to take its foot off the gas by closing 9th and 10th grades, when five core subject teachers left between last September and December.

“We didn’t hire teachers, enough teachers, that could retool their curriculum to serve students that were 5,6,7 years behind academically,” he said.

But in literature distributed to parents, Caire laid out their plan to start bringing the grades back in 2025.

According to the Founder and CEO, over 67% of their 9th and 10th graders tested five or more years behind in reading, and 59% tested five or more years behind in math, on the “nationally-normed STAR assessment.”

Caire says they did not test all of their students before the first day of last school year, making it hard for new teachers.

Going forward, that will change and their prep-year program, an “intense, customized, remedial instruction,” for 6th-8th graders on the first day.

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:

When an airplane crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration conducts a detailed and thorough investigation. The purpose is not to find a scapegoat, but to ensure the same problem never resurfaces again.

Our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted history’s biggest public health mistake. We did not properly protect older high-risk Americans, while many ineffective COVID restrictions have generated long-term collateral public health damage that is now upon us. Both have yielded excess deaths. Public health crashed.

It is now imperative to form a commission to conduct a thorough and open-minded COVID inquiry. To help such a commission, we have produced an 80-page blueprint with essential questions that such a commission should ask. We wrote this document with six colleagues with expertise in infectious disease, epidemiology, immunology, health policy, and public health. We call ourselves the Norfolk Group.

Here is a sample of the questions from that report:

• Limiting COVID Transmission in Nursing Homes: It was common for staff to work multiple jobs at different facilities during the same day or week. Were there any efforts from nursing care companies, state health departments, or the CDC to reduce staff rotation?
• Natural Immunity: Why did the CDC routinely downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust scientific evidence demonstrating its importance?
• School Closures: In July 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine published an articleconcerning “reopening primary schools during the pandemic” without mentioning data from Sweden, the only major western country that had kept schools open throughout the 2020 spring semester. Why?
• Excess Deaths: The U.S. had around 170,000excess non-COVID deaths through 2021, while countries with fewer restrictions, such as Sweden and Denmark, had negative excess deaths over the same period. Why did the U.S. focus almost exclusively on COVID, while Scandinavia took a more balanced approach that considered all aspects of public health?
• Estimating Disease Spread: In early 2020, it was critical to quickly estimate disease prevalence. Why did the CDC fail to conduct seroprevalence surveys in representative communities?

Gurwinder:

The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. This may be true in some cases, but just as often the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.

In 2013 the Yale law professor Dan Kahan conducted experiments testing the effect of intelligence on ideological bias. In one study he scored people on intelligence using the “cognitive reflection test,” a task to measure a person’s reasoning ability. He found that liberals and conservatives scored roughly equally on average, but the highest scoring individuals in both groups were the most likely to display political bias when assessing the truth of various political statements. 

In a further study (replicated here), Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as data regarding a polarizing subject—gun control—those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias.

The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding. So what is it about intelligent people that makes them so prone to bias? To understand, we must consider what intelligence actually is.

Walter Hussman Jr.:

Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication recently released a survey of some 75 journalists titled “Beyond Objectivity.” Many of them argued that objectivity should no longer be the standard in news reporting.

“I never understood what ‘objectivity’ meant,” Prof. Leonard Downie Jr., a co-author of the report and a former executive editor of the Washington Post, wrote in a Post op-ed. “My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.” Much of the public would regard that as far more objective than what they read, hear and view now.

Stephen Engelberg, editor in chief of ProPublica, echoed Mr. Downie’s mystification: “I don’t know what it means.” While they may not understand objectivity, the public certainly does. A Gallup/Knight Foundation survey released in 2020 found that 68% of Americans “say they see too much bias in the reporting of news that is supposed to be objective as ‘a major problem.’ ” The Gallup poll, which questioned 20,000 Americans in all 50 states, also found “a majority of Americans currently see a ‘great deal’ (46%) or a ‘fair amount’ (37%) of political bias in news coverage”—a total of 83%. In 2021, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University surveyed 92,000 people in 46 countries. One question was “Do you trust the news media in your country?” Finland had the highest positive response, at 65%. The U.S. was dead last, at 29%.

David Rozado:

There’s been some talk online about whether we are post peak wokeness. I will have more to say about this when I complete my analysis of several institutions language usage dynamics. For the time being, I provide a timely update of a chart I made in 2019 about prevalence of terms in New York Times news and opinion articles.

This is the chart from 2019:

Scott Girard:

One of the key arguments during the debate over standalone honors courses for ninth- and 10th-graders earlier this school year was the lack of diversity in those classrooms.

What did those classrooms look like in the first semester of the 2022-23 school year? Similar to how they’ve looked in each of the preceding four years, according to new data from the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Standalone honors classes are designated “honors” and require students to sign up when selecting courses. Earned honors, on the other hand, allows students to achieve an honors designation in a regular education course through specific grade benchmarks or additional projects.

The district provided demographic data for standalone and earned honors classes for the first semester in response to a public records request from the Cap Times. It shows that white students are overrepresented in both types of honors opportunities compared to their overall proportion of the district’s students, while Black and Hispanic/Latino students are underrepresented in standalone honors.

That has been consistent over the past five years for standalone honors classes, with white students making up between 54% and 60% of students in those classrooms annually since the 2018-19 school year. During this year’s first semester, white students made up 58% of students in standalone honors classrooms, according to the data.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Girard:

One of the key arguments during the debate over standalone honors courses for ninth- and 10th-graders earlier this school year was the lack of diversity in those classrooms.

What did those classrooms look like in the first semester of the 2022-23 school year? Similar to how they’ve looked in each of the preceding four years, according to new data from the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Standalone honors classes are designated “honors” and require students to sign up when selecting courses. Earned honors, on the other hand, allows students to achieve an honors designation in a regular education course through specific grade benchmarks or additional projects.

The district provided demographic data for standalone and earned honors classes for the first semester in response to a public records request from the Cap Times. It shows that white students are overrepresented in both types of honors opportunities compared to their overall proportion of the district’s students, while Black and Hispanic/Latino students are underrepresented in standalone honors.

That has been consistent over the past five years for standalone honors classes, with white students making up between 54% and 60% of students in those classrooms annually since the 2018-19 school year. During this year’s first semester, white students made up 58% of students in standalone honors classrooms, according to the data.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Gearge Leef:

Sometimes you come across a book with such an intriguing title that you just have to dive into it. That was the case when I saw a reference to Paper Belt on Fire by Michael Gibson. The book’s subtitle sealed the deal: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. Too iconoclastic to pass up!

The author, I learned, is a college graduate (New York University) who had embarked on a Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford when he decided that the academic life wasn’t really what he wanted. Why? Because, he came to understand, it wouldn’t allow him free rein for deep and original thinking.

So he bailed out on the doctorate and, after doing nothing at all for a while, found himself working for Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel. He was hired as an investment analyst but was soon on the Thiel Fellowshipteam, evaluating young people for the $100,000 grants that Thiel was making available to innovation-minded Americans who would get the money in lieu of enrolling in college.

College degrees have become a new form of the indulgences the Church used to sell the faithful.

That assignment was ideal for Gibson, who had already concluded that college degrees had become a new form of the indulgences the Church used to sell to the faithful who wanted salvation. Just like the Church, today’s universities are flush with money, looking obsessively to amass even more. They sell prestige degrees at a high price, but most of the graduates have forgotten everything they have learned by the time they get into the workforce, usually doing jobs that have nothing to do with what they studied.

It’s a huge waste of time and talent.

Gearge Leef:

Sometimes you come across a book with such an intriguing title that you just have to dive into it. That was the case when I saw a reference to Paper Belt on Fire by Michael Gibson. The book’s subtitle sealed the deal: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. Too iconoclastic to pass up!

The author, I learned, is a college graduate (New York University) who had embarked on a Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford when he decided that the academic life wasn’t really what he wanted. Why? Because, he came to understand, it wouldn’t allow him free rein for deep and original thinking.

So he bailed out on the doctorate and, after doing nothing at all for a while, found himself working for Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel. He was hired as an investment analyst but was soon on the Thiel Fellowshipteam, evaluating young people for the $100,000 grants that Thiel was making available to innovation-minded Americans who would get the money in lieu of enrolling in college.

College degrees have become a new form of the indulgences the Church used to sell the faithful.

That assignment was ideal for Gibson, who had already concluded that college degrees had become a new form of the indulgences the Church used to sell to the faithful who wanted salvation. Just like the Church, today’s universities are flush with money, looking obsessively to amass even more. They sell prestige degrees at a high price, but most of the graduates have forgotten everything they have learned by the time they get into the workforce, usually doing jobs that have nothing to do with what they studied.

It’s a huge waste of time and talent.

John Sailer:

Increasingly, medical schools and schools of public health are enthusiastically embracing the values of DEI and instituting far-reaching policies to demonstrate their commitments to the cause. To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.

That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health—which asserts that “the ubiquity of racism, not its absence, characterizes society’s normal state.” In practice, PHCRP involves embracing sweeping claims about the primacy of racialization, guided by statements like “socially constructed racial categories are the bases for ordering society.”

These race-first imperatives have now come to influence the research priorities of major institutions. Perhaps no better case study exists than that of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), an institution devoted exclusively to the medical sciences, and one of the top recipients of federal grants from the National Institutes of Health. Last May, UCSF took the unprecedented step of creating a separate Task Force on Equity and Anti-Racism in Research, which proceeded to make dozens of recommendations.

That task force builds on layers of prior DEI bureaucratic expansion, spanning nearly a decade. This programming includes the “UCSF Anti-Racism Initiative,” started after the summer of 2020, which established dozens of new institutional policies throughout the university, such as “evaluating contributions to diversity statements in faculty advancement portfolios.” The School of Medicine, meanwhile, has published its own Timeline of DEI and Anti-Racism Efforts, which documents such steps as adding a “social justice pillar” to the school’s curriculum and creating an anti-racist curriculum advisory committee.

John Sailer:

Increasingly, medical schools and schools of public health are enthusiastically embracing the values of DEI and instituting far-reaching policies to demonstrate their commitments to the cause. To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.

That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health—which asserts that “the ubiquity of racism, not its absence, characterizes society’s normal state.” In practice, PHCRP involves embracing sweeping claims about the primacy of racialization, guided by statements like “socially constructed racial categories are the bases for ordering society.”

These race-first imperatives have now come to influence the research priorities of major institutions. Perhaps no better case study exists than that of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), an institution devoted exclusively to the medical sciences, and one of the top recipients of federal grants from the National Institutes of Health. Last May, UCSF took the unprecedented step of creating a separate Task Force on Equity and Anti-Racism in Research, which proceeded to make dozens of recommendations.

That task force builds on layers of prior DEI bureaucratic expansion, spanning nearly a decade. This programming includes the “UCSF Anti-Racism Initiative,” started after the summer of 2020, which established dozens of new institutional policies throughout the university, such as “evaluating contributions to diversity statements in faculty advancement portfolios.” The School of Medicine, meanwhile, has published its own Timeline of DEI and Anti-Racism Efforts, which documents such steps as adding a “social justice pillar” to the school’s curriculum and creating an anti-racist curriculum advisory committee.

Angela Davis’ ancestors arrived in America on the Mayflower. pic.twitter.com/dnwrG6fB6U

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 22, 2023

Governor Jay Inslee PDF:

“Key Take-Aways

Programs that offer alternative methods to complete high school provide a pathway for students to achieve their dreams.

A larger proportion of students in institutional education need to catch up on credits. Students often need more access to timely special education evaluations and supports.”

Commentary.

Governor Jay Inslee PDF:

“Key Take-Aways

Programs that offer alternative methods to complete high school provide a pathway for students to achieve their dreams.

A larger proportion of students in institutional education need to catch up on credits. Students often need more access to timely special education evaluations and supports.”

Nick Anderson:

A politically charged adjective popped up repeatedly in the evolving plans for a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies. It was “systemic.”

The February 2022 version declared that students should learn how African American communities combat effects of “systemic marginalization.” An April update paired “systemic” with discrimination, oppression, inequality, disempowerment and racism. A December version said it was essential to know links between Black Panther activism and “systemic inequality that disproportionately affected African Americans.”

Then the word vanished. “Systemic,” a crucial term for many scholars and civil rights advocates, appears nowhere in the official version released Feb. 1. This late deletion and others reflect the extraordinary political friction that often shadows efforts in the nation’s schools to teach about history, culture and race.

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The College Board, which oversees the AP program, denies that it diluted the African American studies course in response to complaints from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) or his allies. But a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.

“All of those terms were going to be challenging,” said Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.

Nick Anderson:

A politically charged adjective popped up repeatedly in the evolving plans for a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies. It was “systemic.”

The February 2022 version declared that students should learn how African American communities combat effects of “systemic marginalization.” An April update paired “systemic” with discrimination, oppression, inequality, disempowerment and racism. A December version said it was essential to know links between Black Panther activism and “systemic inequality that disproportionately affected African Americans.”

Then the word vanished. “Systemic,” a crucial term for many scholars and civil rights advocates, appears nowhere in the official version released Feb. 1. This late deletion and others reflect the extraordinary political friction that often shadows efforts in the nation’s schools to teach about history, culture and race.

Story continues below advertisement

The College Board, which oversees the AP program, denies that it diluted the African American studies course in response to complaints from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) or his allies. But a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.

“All of those terms were going to be challenging,” said Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.

Wall Street Journal:

We’d also like to compliment the paper on its acquisition of the list of potential course offerings at the school. The article cites former UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp as noting that our reporting confirmed the presence of a vast right-wing conspiracy. So let’s have a look at the list of scandalous potential course offerings for the new school.

UNC students might study subjects like “Democracy: Ancient and Modern,” “Liberty and Equality in American Political Thought” and “Race and the American Story.” Wait, it gets worse. There’s also “Capitalism and its Critics,” “Conservatism and its Critics,” “Liberalism and Its Critics,” “The Role of Science and Religion in Society” and even “Leadership for Engineers.”

This isn’t exactly a potboiler of right-wing propaganda, but more like an attempt at an even-handed curriculum educating students on the big political themes that endure in a democracy. If this stuff is threatening, we have to ask: Are progressives really ready to cast any effort to debate ideas and reduce polarization as the sole province of conservatives?

Tawnell Hobbs:

The TikTok spokesperson said that child sexual abuse material and so-called grooming behavior is instantly removed from the site, the user’s account immediately banned and a report made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, a centralized reporting system for incidents of online sexual exploitation of children. Federal law requires electronic service providers such as social-media companies to report child sexual abuse material to the tip line.

The federal law doesn’t require sites to actively seek out child sexual abuse material, considered a visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor. The law also doesn’t stipulate what evidence must be turned over to the tip line. Fines for knowingly failing to report can go up to $300,000, though as of Jan. 20, the national center wasn’t aware of any company ever being fined. Legislation aimed at toughening the law has been introduced in the Senate.

TikTok made 154,618 reports in 2021 to the tip line, a record for the platform with over one billion monthly active users, up from 596 reports in 2019.

John Shehan, senior vice president of the national center’s Exploited Children Division and Internal Engagement, said TikTok’s numbers had grown but remained lower than some other comparable sites, some of which made millions of reports in 2021.

Mel Leonor Barclay

Joan Johns Cobbs was 13 and afraid as she looked onto the stage where her older sister, Barbara Johns, urged her fellow students at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Va., to protest the poor conditions of their segregated Black school. Like the students around her, Cobbs was inspired to join, and the 1951 student-led strike would eventually make civil rights history. 

Their student-initiated lawsuit protesting the conditions of their school would eventually become part of Brown v. Board of Education, the case that led to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional.

A statue of Cobbs’ sister, Barbara Johns, is being built to represent Virginia in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, replacing a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Last month, the Virginia commission tasked with leading the effort selected a sculptor and unveiled a mock-up of the coming statue, which is rife with symbols alluding to the historic strike. The mock-up shows a teenage Johns in a defiant stance holding up a book; the floorboards beneath her feet are held up by stacks of books by Black authors. Johns died in 1991, and the high school is now a National Historic Landmark and civil rights museum.

Mel Leonor Barclay

Joan Johns Cobbs was 13 and afraid as she looked onto the stage where her older sister, Barbara Johns, urged her fellow students at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Va., to protest the poor conditions of their segregated Black school. Like the students around her, Cobbs was inspired to join, and the 1951 student-led strike would eventually make civil rights history. 

Their student-initiated lawsuit protesting the conditions of their school would eventually become part of Brown v. Board of Education, the case that led to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional.

A statue of Cobbs’ sister, Barbara Johns, is being built to represent Virginia in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, replacing a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Last month, the Virginia commission tasked with leading the effort selected a sculptor and unveiled a mock-up of the coming statue, which is rife with symbols alluding to the historic strike. The mock-up shows a teenage Johns in a defiant stance holding up a book; the floorboards beneath her feet are held up by stacks of books by Black authors. Johns died in 1991, and the high school is now a National Historic Landmark and civil rights museum.

www site:

The Equal Protection Project is devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity.

Our guiding principle is that there is no ‘good’ form of racism. The remedy for racism never is more racism.

We will INVESTIGATE wrongdoing, EDUCATE the public, and LITIGATE when necessary.

After 2008, Wall Street & Silicon Valley got in bed with the new left. Together they birthed a new woke-industrial complex that duped both political parties into submission. It’s a new hybrid of government & business that together can do what neither can on its own. pic.twitter.com/Nh19aCrT7G

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 23, 2023

After 2008, Wall Street & Silicon Valley got in bed with the new left. Together they birthed a new woke-industrial complex that duped both political parties into submission. It’s a new hybrid of government & business that together can do what neither can on its own. pic.twitter.com/Nh19aCrT7G

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 23, 2023

The University of Chicago is offering a racially segregated scholarship that explicitly prohibits white and Asian men from applying. This is a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—U Chicago is brazenly and openly violating the law.https://t.co/BqHAmt1ttB pic.twitter.com/5uCQtq31Cn

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 23, 2023

Jonathan Turley:

Where are the Oompa Loompas when you need them. Willy Wonka’s helpers asked “who do you blame when your kid is a brat? Pampered and spoiled like a Siamese cat?” The same question could be asked about publishers after Puffin Books hired sensitivity readers to “update” portions Roald Dahl’s classic books. The changes include dropping references to Augustus Gloop being “fat.”  Yet, unlike the Oompa Loompas, who found sanctuary “from hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles,” there is no safe place from woke whangdoodles today.

While European publishers have refused to rewrite Dahl’s classics, Puffin Books believes that it is perfectly acceptable to change books after an author has died. Puffin simply could not abide references to things like the weight of Gloop. So they changed “fat” to “enormous.” (It is not clear what Puffin Books will do with Walter Tevis’ character “Minnesota Fats” in The Hustler. “Minnesota Enormous” just doesn’t quite have that same authentic gritty quality in a pool hall drama).

Jonathan Turley:

Where are the Oompa Loompas when you need them. Willy Wonka’s helpers asked “who do you blame when your kid is a brat? Pampered and spoiled like a Siamese cat?” The same question could be asked about publishers after Puffin Books hired sensitivity readers to “update” portions Roald Dahl’s classic books. The changes include dropping references to Augustus Gloop being “fat.”  Yet, unlike the Oompa Loompas, who found sanctuary “from hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles,” there is no safe place from woke whangdoodles today.

While European publishers have refused to rewrite Dahl’s classics, Puffin Books believes that it is perfectly acceptable to change books after an author has died. Puffin simply could not abide references to things like the weight of Gloop. So they changed “fat” to “enormous.” (It is not clear what Puffin Books will do with Walter Tevis’ character “Minnesota Fats” in The Hustler. “Minnesota Enormous” just doesn’t quite have that same authentic gritty quality in a pool hall drama).

DOCUMENTS: Through a records request, I have acquired the University of Missouri’s rubric for evaluating diversity statements.

As usual, the rubric proves the critics’ point: DEI evaluations invite viewpoint discrimination. pic.twitter.com/5FX9dCTg0e

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) February 23, 2023

DOCUMENTS: Through a records request, I have acquired the University of Missouri’s rubric for evaluating diversity statements.

As usual, the rubric proves the critics’ point: DEI evaluations invite viewpoint discrimination. pic.twitter.com/5FX9dCTg0e

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) February 23, 2023

Sarah Karp and Tessa Weinberg:

When news broke last month that Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reelection campaign had solicited help from Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago educators to recruit student volunteers, the incumbent candidate apologized, calling the effort a “bad mistake” by one young staffer.

But the campaign had for months been sending CPS and City Colleges staff thousands of other emails unrelated to the student volunteer solicitation — some from multiple campaign staffers. The emails ranged from generic fundraising appeals to invitations to private town halls and requests for help gathering petitions, records newly obtained by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times show. 

Four emails were sent to City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor Juan Salgado — who reports to the mayor — at his work email address inviting him to a Lightfoot campaign event.

In all, the mayor’s reelection campaign sent more than 9,900 emails to CPS and City Colleges staff since last April, according to documents obtained through public records requests that reveal the previously unreported breadth of the outreach to government employees. The emails went to at least 64 City Colleges staff members since July. It’s unclear how many individual CPS staff members were emailed, as those details were not provided.

mildly interesting:

A tricky math exam question aimed at fifth graders has gone viral after perplexing thousands of people on the internet.

The challenging problem was posted to a Reddit group called ‘r/mildyinteresting community’ under the subject line: ‘A test problem on my 5th grade brother’s math exam’

The question, meant for students aged between 10 and 11, said: ‘Klein read 30 pages of a book on Monday and 1/8 of the book on Tuesday. He completed the remaining 1/4 of the book on Wednesday. How many pages are there in the book?’

Scores of commenters appeared to have no idea what the answer was, claiming they were almost certainly fail fifth grade math as adults.

Thankfully, others were quick off the mark to solve the tough equation and posted the answer – but can you work it out?

Thompson Center Summit on Early Literacy Event Archive:

Over one third of Wisconsin students are unable to read at grade level and our state’s Black children have the lowest reading scores in the nation. Reading below grade level brings both short term and long term challenges, from a lower chance of graduating high school to a higher chance of living in poverty.

Join the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership for a luncheon discussion with state and national experts on how Wisconsin can address our literacy crisis.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

#1 David Sacks breaks down how the safety layer of ‘ChatGPT is a Democrat’:

“There is mounting evidence OpenAI’s safety layer is very biased… If you thought trust and safety were bad under Vijaya or Yoel, wait until the AI does it.”https://t.co/X63j1DmJdu@DavidSacks @amuse pic.twitter.com/yyzLb19NLy

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 20, 2023

Reuters:

South Korea’s fertility rate dropped last year to a record low, data showed on Wednesday, in yet another grim milestone for the country with the world’s lowest number of expected children for each woman.

The average number of expected babies per South Korean woman over her reproductive life fell to 0.78 in 2022 down from 0.81 a year earlier, the official annual reading from the Statistics Korea showed.

Reuters:

South Korea’s fertility rate dropped last year to a record low, data showed on Wednesday, in yet another grim milestone for the country with the world’s lowest number of expected children for each woman.

The average number of expected babies per South Korean woman over her reproductive life fell to 0.78 in 2022 down from 0.81 a year earlier, the official annual reading from the Statistics Korea showed.

NEW: @UTSystem Board of Regents chairman Kevin Eltife says the @UTSystem has paused any new DEI efforts at all of its campuses.

The system has also asked for a report on DEI policies at each campus for review.

The full statement he made at the regents meeting just now: pic.twitter.com/HXOlwcvbrN

— Megan Menchaca (@meganmmenchaca) February 22, 2023

Whenever the Biden Administration lectures us about DEI, I will think of this cross dresser fetishist stealing a Tanzanian woman’s luggage to wear her clothes. pic.twitter.com/HRRTsu53L7

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) February 23, 2023

Jonathan Turley:

We have been discussing various cases of professors being investigated or terminated for raising dissenting views on subjects like systemic racism or Critical Race Theory (CRT). The latest such controversy is at the University of Texas where a professor is suing after he was allegedly threatened for criticizing as having “no scientific basis.” Notably, the complaint of Dr. Richard Lowery (below) admits that, despite being tenured, he began to self-censor his comments — a problem that is widespread among academics who now fear to speak freely in class or even outside of their universities.

Dr. Richard Lowery is an associate professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business and has written on a variety of subjects in The Hill, the Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, the Washington Times, and The College Fix.

He claims that he was warned about his continuing criticism, including the possible loss of his affiliation with the Salem Center, which would cost him a $20,000 stipend and research opportunities.

The complaint details pressure put on Lowery and his superior to get him to “tone down” his criticisms. The includes alleged lobbying by Meeta Kothare, director of the Global Sustainability Leadership Institute “to have UT Administrators censor Lowery.” At the same time, another Sustainability Institute employee, Madison Gove, emailed UT police officer Joseph Bishop, to ask for police surveillance of Lowery’s public statements.

Jonathan Turley:

We have been discussing various cases of professors being investigated or terminated for raising dissenting views on subjects like systemic racism or Critical Race Theory (CRT). The latest such controversy is at the University of Texas where a professor is suing after he was allegedly threatened for criticizing as having “no scientific basis.” Notably, the complaint of Dr. Richard Lowery (below) admits that, despite being tenured, he began to self-censor his comments — a problem that is widespread among academics who now fear to speak freely in class or even outside of their universities.

Dr. Richard Lowery is an associate professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business and has written on a variety of subjects in The Hill, the Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, the Washington Times, and The College Fix.

He claims that he was warned about his continuing criticism, including the possible loss of his affiliation with the Salem Center, which would cost him a $20,000 stipend and research opportunities.

The complaint details pressure put on Lowery and his superior to get him to “tone down” his criticisms. The includes alleged lobbying by Meeta Kothare, director of the Global Sustainability Leadership Institute “to have UT Administrators censor Lowery.” At the same time, another Sustainability Institute employee, Madison Gove, emailed UT police officer Joseph Bishop, to ask for police surveillance of Lowery’s public statements.

Jan Wolfe and Dustin Volz

The Supreme Court declined to hear a constitutional challenge to a secretive government surveillance program, dealing a setback to privacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a looming debate in Congress over whether to renew the law that authorizes the intelligence tool.

In a brief order issued on Tuesday, the high court said it wouldn’t hear arguments challenging the legality of the National Security Agency program known as “Upstream,” in which the intelligence agency collects and monitors internet communications without obtaining search warrants. Classified details about the program were among those exposed a decade ago by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been charged with theft of government property and violating espionage laws and lives in Russia.

Jan Wolfe and Dustin Volz

The Supreme Court declined to hear a constitutional challenge to a secretive government surveillance program, dealing a setback to privacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a looming debate in Congress over whether to renew the law that authorizes the intelligence tool.

In a brief order issued on Tuesday, the high court said it wouldn’t hear arguments challenging the legality of the National Security Agency program known as “Upstream,” in which the intelligence agency collects and monitors internet communications without obtaining search warrants. Classified details about the program were among those exposed a decade ago by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been charged with theft of government property and violating espionage laws and lives in Russia.

Biden’s new executive order creating a national DEI bureaucracy has a special mandate for woke AI. The order instructs the federal government to “[protect] the public from algorithmic discrimination” and to deploy AI systems “in a manner that advances equity.” pic.twitter.com/pGKRWdTtIS

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 21, 2023

Biden’s new executive order creating a national DEI bureaucracy has a special mandate for woke AI. The order instructs the federal government to “[protect] the public from algorithmic discrimination” and to deploy AI systems “in a manner that advances equity.” pic.twitter.com/pGKRWdTtIS

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 21, 2023

Reminder that 45% of all black students at Harvard only got in because they’re black pic.twitter.com/bzpTYb58w6

— Daniel Schmidt (@RealDSchmidt) February 20, 2023

Reminder that 45% of all black students at Harvard only got in because they’re black pic.twitter.com/bzpTYb58w6

— Daniel Schmidt (@RealDSchmidt) February 20, 2023

Professor Ornery:

A post from seven years ago floated up in my FB memories this morning. It was a rant from a former student about the loss of discourse and discussion in the classroom. At the time, this student was in a grad class and had raised a differing point of view only to be greeted with gasps of astonishment. I had copied the rant and posted it as Reason #47 for why I teach. In reality, rants like this, demonstrating the critical thinking skills of my students, remain Reason #1 for why I taught. Yes, I’ve left that world, and the inability to have constructive discussions and arguments in the classroom is my primary reason for leaving.

Here’s the rant: When did the classroom become an echo chamber? I was not taught to blindly consume everything a professor says, let alone a fellow classmate. I just had a class where I offered a different view point on a subject matter and people literally gasped audibly. It was not even a “provocative” view point or even a hot topic issue. When did conformity become the goal? What happened to intellectual discourse?!

As I said in my original FB post, I am a very proud professor here. I worked very hard to keep my political opinions out of classroom discussions. At the beginning of every semester, and periodically throughout, I told all my classes that they were free to speak any opinion or analysis of a problem they held… with one caveat. They had to be ready to defend the logic behind that opinion, point to reputable sources backing up that opinion, and be open to having everything questioned. They were also informed, that if they were going to question an opinion or analysis, they needed to be ready to back that up as well. It was perfectly fine if they didn’t have an answer right then and there, but I let them know that they were expected to return with a response for the next class meeting.

My college education taught me to always ask “why?” and I still pride myself on the fact that I strived to instill that questioning in my students and to teach them howto think and not what to think. How do I know I succeeded even a little bit? By running across rants like that above, and by the comments/complaints in my end-of-semester evaluations – from students in the same class, mind you – that I was both a flaming liberal and a hard-core conservative. I had evals where students commented that they had figured out the political opinions of most of my colleagues, including all my political science departmental colleagues, but they couldn’t figure out mine.

That’s how I know I had at least a small impact.

Professor Ornery:

A post from seven years ago floated up in my FB memories this morning. It was a rant from a former student about the loss of discourse and discussion in the classroom. At the time, this student was in a grad class and had raised a differing point of view only to be greeted with gasps of astonishment. I had copied the rant and posted it as Reason #47 for why I teach. In reality, rants like this, demonstrating the critical thinking skills of my students, remain Reason #1 for why I taught. Yes, I’ve left that world, and the inability to have constructive discussions and arguments in the classroom is my primary reason for leaving.

Here’s the rant: When did the classroom become an echo chamber? I was not taught to blindly consume everything a professor says, let alone a fellow classmate. I just had a class where I offered a different view point on a subject matter and people literally gasped audibly. It was not even a “provocative” view point or even a hot topic issue. When did conformity become the goal? What happened to intellectual discourse?!

As I said in my original FB post, I am a very proud professor here. I worked very hard to keep my political opinions out of classroom discussions. At the beginning of every semester, and periodically throughout, I told all my classes that they were free to speak any opinion or analysis of a problem they held… with one caveat. They had to be ready to defend the logic behind that opinion, point to reputable sources backing up that opinion, and be open to having everything questioned. They were also informed, that if they were going to question an opinion or analysis, they needed to be ready to back that up as well. It was perfectly fine if they didn’t have an answer right then and there, but I let them know that they were expected to return with a response for the next class meeting.

My college education taught me to always ask “why?” and I still pride myself on the fact that I strived to instill that questioning in my students and to teach them howto think and not what to think. How do I know I succeeded even a little bit? By running across rants like that above, and by the comments/complaints in my end-of-semester evaluations – from students in the same class, mind you – that I was both a flaming liberal and a hard-core conservative. I had evals where students commented that they had figured out the political opinions of most of my colleagues, including all my political science departmental colleagues, but they couldn’t figure out mine.

That’s how I know I had at least a small impact.

David Henderson and Philip Magness:

Hulu’s se­ries “The 1619 Project” blames eco­nomic in­equal­ity be­tween blacks and whites on “racial cap­i­tal­ism.” But al­most every ex­am­ple pre­sented is the re­sult of gov­ern­ment poli­cies that, in pur­pose or ef­fect, dis­crim­i­nated against African-Amer­i­cans. “The 1619 Project” makes an un­in­ten­tional case for cap­i­tal­ism.

These and other gov­ern­ment poli­cies caused im­mense eco­nomic harm to African-Amer­i­cans. But they aren’t cap­i­tal­ism. They’re in­ter­ven­tions into mar­kets, state-sanc­tioned theft, and po­lit­i­cal pay­offs to seg­re­ga­tion­ists.

The an­swer to these prob­lems isn’t to place the bur­den on the mar­ket through repa­ra­tions. It’s to root out bad gov­ern­ment poli­cies that con­tinue, some­times un­in­ten­tion­ally, the long legacy of state-spon­sored racial dis­crim­i­na­tion. That would be a wor­thy 2023 project.

David Henderson and Philip Magness:

Hulu’s se­ries “The 1619 Project” blames eco­nomic in­equal­ity be­tween blacks and whites on “racial cap­i­tal­ism.” But al­most every ex­am­ple pre­sented is the re­sult of gov­ern­ment poli­cies that, in pur­pose or ef­fect, dis­crim­i­nated against African-Amer­i­cans. “The 1619 Project” makes an un­in­ten­tional case for cap­i­tal­ism.

These and other gov­ern­ment poli­cies caused im­mense eco­nomic harm to African-Amer­i­cans. But they aren’t cap­i­tal­ism. They’re in­ter­ven­tions into mar­kets, state-sanc­tioned theft, and po­lit­i­cal pay­offs to seg­re­ga­tion­ists.

The an­swer to these prob­lems isn’t to place the bur­den on the mar­ket through repa­ra­tions. It’s to root out bad gov­ern­ment poli­cies that con­tinue, some­times un­in­ten­tion­ally, the long legacy of state-spon­sored racial dis­crim­i­na­tion. That would be a wor­thy 2023 project.

Morgan Meaker:

But when Hamburg passed new legislation in 2019 allowing police to use data analytics software built by the CIA-backed company Palantir, she feared she could be pulled further into the big data dragnet. A feature of Palantir’s Gotham platform allows police to map networks of phone contacts, placing people like Eder—who are connected to alleged criminals but are not criminals themselves—effectively under surveillance.

“I thought, this is the next step in police trying to get more possibilities to observe people without any concrete evidence linking them to a crime,” Eder says. So she decided to become one of 11 claimants trying to get the Hamburg law annulled. Yesterday, they succeeded.

Morgan Meaker:

But when Hamburg passed new legislation in 2019 allowing police to use data analytics software built by the CIA-backed company Palantir, she feared she could be pulled further into the big data dragnet. A feature of Palantir’s Gotham platform allows police to map networks of phone contacts, placing people like Eder—who are connected to alleged criminals but are not criminals themselves—effectively under surveillance.

“I thought, this is the next step in police trying to get more possibilities to observe people without any concrete evidence linking them to a crime,” Eder says. So she decided to become one of 11 claimants trying to get the Hamburg law annulled. Yesterday, they succeeded.

Wall Street Journal:

I agree with Tyler Goodspeed in his critique of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s two-pillar project: It’s an overly complicated proposal that will do little to limit competition for direct investment from multinationals (“The Global Minimum Tax Crackup,” op-ed, Feb. 6). Unfortunately, the complexity also means some of his arguments fall flat.

His suggestion that only low-tax jurisdictions have a new playbook available to them is incorrect. Large, high-tax countries can review their systems of capital allowances, top personal income-tax rates and other aspects of their tax system in light of the OECD rules. This new form of tax competition could end up being pervasive.

Mr. Goodspeed is right to suggest that double taxation is a risk for U.S. companies because of the mismatch between U.S. rules and the minimum-tax rules. But this risk isn’t new. The limitation on foreign tax credits under the Global Intangible Low-Tax Income (Gilti) regime leads directly to double taxation even without the new “Pillar Two” rules in place.

Fritz François and Gbenga Ogedegbe:

A growing number of medical schools have announced that they will no longer share data with U.S. News & World Report. These schools claim that the magazine’s annual rankings hinder their ability to increase diversity. New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai asserted that the rankings undermine its “commitment to anti-racism, and outreach to diverse communities.”

Such claims aren’t supported by evidence. The ranking methodology, as currently constructed, includes consideration of students’ Medical College Admission Test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages, as well as other criteria. But medical schools have always been free to admit anyone they choose, regardless of their rankings. It’s true that diversity isn’t a criterion in the U.S. News methodology, but why should that stop schools from recruiting minority applicants or establishing a campus culture that encourages and values diversity? There is nothing in a thoughtful admissions process that explicitly prevents medical schools from assembling a student body based on anything other than academic performance, holistic reviews and interviews of candidates.

Additionally, U.S. News makes its decisions independent of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education standards on diversity and inclusion, which are part of the accreditation requirements for all medical schools. These schools have always had the opportunity to demonstrate a strategic approach with respect to diversity in their accreditations.

What these schools are really saying is that meritocracy can’t coexist with diversity. This is a presumptuous—and dangerous—perpetuation of the negative stereotype that students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in medicine are of lesser quality or unable to compete. Diversity is no reason to opt out of a competitive process, especially as some of those medical schools actually encourage their alumni to vote in the U.S. News “Best Hospitals” ranking.

Ed Cumming ; Genevieve Holl-Allen and Benedict Smith

“Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”…

Ed Cumming ; Genevieve Holl-Allen and Benedict Smith

“Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”…

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.

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.

Matt Barnum:

Maybe — most insidiously — poor children of color weren’t likely to succeed in school no matter how well-funded their schools. This idea was spreading, appearing in academic journals and publications like the Atlantic and the Washington Post. A New York Times news article from 1970 included this startling line: “In the case of a slum child,” it read, citing supposedly cutting-edge research, “his chances of learning to read were quite limited, even though large amounts of money might be devoted to his education.” 

Fifty years ago this year, the Supreme Court cited some of that same research to rule against the Rodriguez family. The racist notion that children in poverty could not benefit from additional or even equal resources may well have influenced the court’s decision. 

“The poor people have lost again, not only in Texas but in the United States, because we definitely need changes in the educational system,” Demetrio Rodriguez told one of the reporters that Alex recalls descending on their home. The media soon left, and Alex went back to the same underfunded school. “It was famous for a day or two — then that was it,” he says now. 

Admittedly, the legal and practical merits of the Court’s 1973 decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez are complex and up for legitimate debate. In the long run, the ruling was not the devastating blow to funding equality efforts that many advocates feared. Funding gaps due to property taxes have narrowed or fully closed, in part because state courts stepped in after the Supreme Court stepped aside.

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

I gave a talk at Urbit Assembly in the fall and turned part of it into a movie with my friends at Praxis.

Trailer here

[Full movie below] pic.twitter.com/xcU1XkdRJx

— Riva (@rivatez) February 8, 2023

I gave a talk at Urbit Assembly in the fall and turned part of it into a movie with my friends at Praxis.

Trailer here

[Full movie below] pic.twitter.com/xcU1XkdRJx

— Riva (@rivatez) February 8, 2023

Peter Drucker:

Resources and expectations:

Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy…Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters and salespeople, indeed even farmers…Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modern world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man.

This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of…Signs abound that all is not well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing–and will keep on going up–the taxpayers are getting visibly restless.

Credentials and social mobility:

The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.

Peter Drucker:

Resources and expectations:

Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy…Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters and salespeople, indeed even farmers…Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modern world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man.

This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of…Signs abound that all is not well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing–and will keep on going up–the taxpayers are getting visibly restless.

Credentials and social mobility:

The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.

Bret Stephens:

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?

“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?

“They were convinced by non-randomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”.

Bret Stephens:

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?

“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?

“They were convinced by non-randomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”.

Book Excerpt:

McCreesh told Krakauer that leadership at the Times “completely lost their nerve” in the face of “angry backbiting staffers” including some Bennet had brought to the Times. McCreesh said he was “so fucking freaked out” by the mob and remarked that the scene “was like a murder.”

McCreesh said:

“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” he told me. “And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”

“The worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he hired and brought to the newspaper,” McCreesh added. “It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something. Just this sort of horrible moment, and I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine, even though it was at like noon. Because I was so fucking freaked out by what we had just witnessed.”

Book Excerpt:

McCreesh told Krakauer that leadership at the Times “completely lost their nerve” in the face of “angry backbiting staffers” including some Bennet had brought to the Times. McCreesh said he was “so fucking freaked out” by the mob and remarked that the scene “was like a murder.”

McCreesh said:

“There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” he told me. “And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on Slack. And the leadership was so horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve.”

“The worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he hired and brought to the newspaper,” McCreesh added. “It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something. Just this sort of horrible moment, and I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine, even though it was at like noon. Because I was so fucking freaked out by what we had just witnessed.”

Texas Education Agency:

Each school district and open-enrollment charter school shall provide for the use of a phonics curriculum that uses systematic direct instruction in kindergarten through third grade to ensure all students obtain necessary early literacy skills (TEC §28.0062)

Texas Education Agency:

Each school district and open-enrollment charter school shall provide for the use of a phonics curriculum that uses systematic direct instruction in kindergarten through third grade to ensure all students obtain necessary early literacy skills (TEC §28.0062)

Dr Joel Ginsburg:

Our finding: States with more severe government interventions did not have better health outcomes than less restrictive states.

But imposing more severe lockdowns led to much worse economic outcomes — increased unemployment and decreased gross domestic product — and much worse education outcomes — less in-person schooling, which studies show leads to decreased test scores and long-term, possibly permanent, educational and economic disadvantages.

Natalie Eilbert:

In just the last two years, Hurst said, the number of children under 13 coming into her department with suicidal ideation has gone up 77%. And over the last decade, the number of pediatric visitors needing psychiatric care has nearly tripled, with the majority of cases the result of suicidal ideation, drug or alcohol intoxication, and overdoses.

Dr Joel Ginsburg:

Our finding: States with more severe government interventions did not have better health outcomes than less restrictive states.

But imposing more severe lockdowns led to much worse economic outcomes — increased unemployment and decreased gross domestic product — and much worse education outcomes — less in-person schooling, which studies show leads to decreased test scores and long-term, possibly permanent, educational and economic disadvantages.

Another interesting point about “Adams-we’re going out of business if you don’t raise taxes-Friendship” is that 76% of their students cannot read at grade level, and 74% of their students can’t do math at grade level. What exactly are taxpayers paying for? @oherken https://t.co/612WTC21nJ

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 21, 2023

Another interesting point about “Adams-we’re going out of business if you don’t raise taxes-Friendship” is that 76% of their students cannot read at grade level, and 74% of their students can’t do math at grade level. What exactly are taxpayers paying for? @oherken https://t.co/612WTC21nJ

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 21, 2023

Robert Rudolf & Dirk Bethmann

Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.

Commentary.

According to nationwide MAP testing, the average high school student in the United States learns… nothing. 👇

— Austin Scholar (@AustinScholar) February 17, 2023

Trevor Owens:

The following post was co-authored with Steve Morris, Chief of Digital Collections Management and Services and Tom Rieger, Manager of Digitization Services. 

The Library of Congress has a new Digitization Strategy for its collections. As we did for the Library’s Digital Collections Strategy, we are excited to share this overview of it with readers of The Signal blog. We get a lot of questions about what we digitize and why, and hopefully this provides a little bit of insight into our institutional plans and priorities.

The Library has expanded the amount and throughput of our digitization efforts dramatically over the past three decades. In 2020 we finished digitizing the last of our presidential papers – all of the personal papers of the presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge are now available to anyone with an internet connection. In 2021, we opened a new Digital Scan Center, which significantly increased digital image production capabilities and postproduction processes. So far, we have digitized more than nine million items in our collections, with particular strengths in newspaper issues, manuscripts, and pictorial materials.

Over the next five years, the Library will expand, optimize, and centralize its collections digitization program to significantly expand access to users across the country to rare, distinctive, and unique collection materials which can be made openly available online and use digitization as a core method for preservation reformatting of rights restricted collection materials. Below are the five guiding strategic objectives for this work.

Trevor Owens:

The following post was co-authored with Steve Morris, Chief of Digital Collections Management and Services and Tom Rieger, Manager of Digitization Services. 

The Library of Congress has a new Digitization Strategy for its collections. As we did for the Library’s Digital Collections Strategy, we are excited to share this overview of it with readers of The Signal blog. We get a lot of questions about what we digitize and why, and hopefully this provides a little bit of insight into our institutional plans and priorities.

The Library has expanded the amount and throughput of our digitization efforts dramatically over the past three decades. In 2020 we finished digitizing the last of our presidential papers – all of the personal papers of the presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge are now available to anyone with an internet connection. In 2021, we opened a new Digital Scan Center, which significantly increased digital image production capabilities and postproduction processes. So far, we have digitized more than nine million items in our collections, with particular strengths in newspaper issues, manuscripts, and pictorial materials.

Over the next five years, the Library will expand, optimize, and centralize its collections digitization program to significantly expand access to users across the country to rare, distinctive, and unique collection materials which can be made openly available online and use digitization as a core method for preservation reformatting of rights restricted collection materials. Below are the five guiding strategic objectives for this work.

Jemima Kelly:

Over lunch recently a fellow writer uttered a word that rather took me by surprise. My companion described the trend of people making private digital communications public — such as Kanye West’s recent leaking of text messages from his personal trainer, or a Vox journalist’s decision to publish Twitter messages from the former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — as plain “dishonourable”.

The idea that our behaviour should be guided not solely by respect for the law, nor even by a certain moral code, but by a sense of honour is an unfashionable one. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the frequency with which words and phrases are used in books from 1800 onwards, shows a sharp decline in the use of the words “honour”, “honourable” and “dishonourable” from the early 19th century to the present day. Usage of all three words has fallen by about 90 per cent over the period.

When members of the British parliament sling insults at the “honourable” members sitting across the chamber from them — or indeed at their own side — we are not, one assumes, expected to take this descriptor seriously.

Yet while it might be an antiquated notion, if these members of parliament did have a sense that they should behave with honour, we would have much better politicians, who were more concerned with telling the truth and doing the right thing even when they thought they could get away with the opposite.

According to nationwide MAP testing, the average high school student in the United States learns… nothing. 👇

— Austin Scholar (@AustinScholar) February 17, 2023

Laura Hancock:

His budget proposal contains $162 million over the next two years to get the science of reading instructional approach into all of Ohio’s public schools.

At the same time, Ohio State University has been an epicenter of the approach to reading instruction that DeWine wants to get away from – known as “balanced literacy” or “whole language” – since 1984, holding a trademark for an intervention program used to catch struggling readers up with their peers. Hundreds of thousands of students across the country have been educated using the program – called Reading Recovery – which OSU professors take into local schools across the country.

Balanced literacy encourages students, when they encounter a word they don’t know, to use strategies such as looking at the book’s pictures and considering context, sentence structure and the word’s letters.

But DeWine, in his State of the State speech, cited the most recent results of Ohio’s State Test as a reason for schools to change their approach. Just 60.1% of third-grade students scored proficient or higher on reading.

Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Virginia Postrel:

Earlier this week I had dinner with a small group of MIT professors from a variety of scientific disciplines. Among other topics, they shared their concerns about threats to the culture of free inquiry and the intellectual playfulness and audacity on which it depends. Whatever the form of threat—and they vary—these scientists worry that the institute is letting its concern for protecting its brand and pleasing government funders trump its dedication to scientific inquiry. In response, I recalled this talk I gave at a FIRE conference in, I believe, 2017. I’ve long thought I’d expand it into a “real article,” backed by more research, but never have. Until that day comes, I’m posting it here. (For more on FIRE, now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, visit their website here.)

I am speaking this afternoon (Thursday, February 16) at Brown. Details here.

Two stories to start, one about academic ethics and intellectual safety, and the other about how strange an American university seems to a foreigner.

First story: When I was a senior in college, I took a graduate class in Elizabethan drama. When we got to the final paper, I had a big problem. The Christopher Marlowe plays that I found most interesting were already the subject of my senior thesis. I wasn’t inspired by the Shakespeare comedies that made up most of the other good stuff in the course and, while I liked Richard II, I had nothing interesting to say about it. The only play I found thought-provoking enough for a paper was The Merchant of Venice. That presented another problem: The professor had written a whole book about it. To make matters worse, I disagreed with his thesis, and even though it wasn’t exactly what I set out to write, once I’d read his book that disagreement inevitably became the subject of my paper.

I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious. I just didn’t have anything to say about the other plays.

There are two problems with writing a paper disagreeing with your professor’s book. The first is that he has spent years, not weeks, thinking about the subject. He’s the expert and you are not. He will find every flaw in your argument and you won’t find every flaw in his. Plus he has a whole book to make his case and you have only a few pages. The second, of course, is that he could get mad and give you a bad grade just for disagreeing with him.

I worried a little about the first but not at all about the second.

David Foster:

1)There is a perception that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials

2)It is increasingly observed that these credentials actually have fairly low predictive power concerning an individual’s actual ability to perform important tasks and make wise judgments about institutional or national issues. The assumption that school-based knowledge generally trumps practical experience seems increasingly questionable as the sphere of activity for which this assertion is made has expanded, and is indeed increasingly viewed with suspicion or with outright disdain.

3)It is observed that people working in certain fields arrogate to themselves an assumed elite status despite the fact that their jobs actually require relatively little in terms of skill and judgment. Ace of Spades cites a history writer on class distinctions in Victorian England:

She noted, for example, that a Bank of England clerk would be a member of the middle/professional class, despite the fact that what he did all day was hand-write numbers into ledgers and do simple arithmetic and some filing work and the like, whereas, say, a carpenter actually did real thinking, real planning, at his job, with elements of real creativity. And yet it was the Bank of England clerk who was considered a “mind” worker and the carpenter merely a hand-laborer.

Ace suggests that “that distinction has obviously persisted, even in America, with the ingrained sort of idea that a low-level associate producer making crap money and rote choices on an MSNBC daytime talk show was somehow “above” someone making real command decisions in his occupation, like a plumber. And this sort of idea is very important to that low-level producer at MSNBC, because by thinking this way, he puts himself in the league of doctors and engineers.”

David Foster:

1)There is a perception that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials

2)It is increasingly observed that these credentials actually have fairly low predictive power concerning an individual’s actual ability to perform important tasks and make wise judgments about institutional or national issues. The assumption that school-based knowledge generally trumps practical experience seems increasingly questionable as the sphere of activity for which this assertion is made has expanded, and is indeed increasingly viewed with suspicion or with outright disdain.

3)It is observed that people working in certain fields arrogate to themselves an assumed elite status despite the fact that their jobs actually require relatively little in terms of skill and judgment. Ace of Spades cites a history writer on class distinctions in Victorian England:

She noted, for example, that a Bank of England clerk would be a member of the middle/professional class, despite the fact that what he did all day was hand-write numbers into ledgers and do simple arithmetic and some filing work and the like, whereas, say, a carpenter actually did real thinking, real planning, at his job, with elements of real creativity. And yet it was the Bank of England clerk who was considered a “mind” worker and the carpenter merely a hand-laborer.

Ace suggests that “that distinction has obviously persisted, even in America, with the ingrained sort of idea that a low-level associate producer making crap money and rote choices on an MSNBC daytime talk show was somehow “above” someone making real command decisions in his occupation, like a plumber. And this sort of idea is very important to that low-level producer at MSNBC, because by thinking this way, he puts himself in the league of doctors and engineers.”

David Zweig:

The free speech advocacy organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) creates an annual ranking of colleges from best to worst environments for free speech on campus. 2022/2023’s list, based on responses from 45,000 students at more than 200 schools, placed University of Chicago in the top spot, meaning the school “promotes and protects the free exchange of ideas” more than any other college on the list. Columbia University was dead last, with “by far, the lowest score,” and its speech climate rated as “abysmal.” 

There are a few notable things about the rankings (a detailed methodology, highlights, summary, and full list is available here). Many of our nation’s most prestigious private universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst, Vassar, Johns Hopkins, Penn, and Northwestern, are in the bottom twenty percent. Conversely, the majority of the top fifth of the list are public and state schools. 

It seems pretty clear that while the alumni of fancy colleges may get to enjoy humblebragging and an easier acceptance into top graduate programs or certain professional tracks, if a student is interested in an environment that encourages a diverse range of views and in becoming a heterodox thinker they’re likely better off elsewhere. 

But, as someone who has investigated and writtenextensively about Covid-19 vaccines, and vaccine mandates, there’s something even more intriguing about the list:

David Zweig:

The free speech advocacy organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) creates an annual ranking of colleges from best to worst environments for free speech on campus. 2022/2023’s list, based on responses from 45,000 students at more than 200 schools, placed University of Chicago in the top spot, meaning the school “promotes and protects the free exchange of ideas” more than any other college on the list. Columbia University was dead last, with “by far, the lowest score,” and its speech climate rated as “abysmal.” 

There are a few notable things about the rankings (a detailed methodology, highlights, summary, and full list is available here). Many of our nation’s most prestigious private universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst, Vassar, Johns Hopkins, Penn, and Northwestern, are in the bottom twenty percent. Conversely, the majority of the top fifth of the list are public and state schools. 

It seems pretty clear that while the alumni of fancy colleges may get to enjoy humblebragging and an easier acceptance into top graduate programs or certain professional tracks, if a student is interested in an environment that encourages a diverse range of views and in becoming a heterodox thinker they’re likely better off elsewhere. 

But, as someone who has investigated and writtenextensively about Covid-19 vaccines, and vaccine mandates, there’s something even more intriguing about the list:

Matt Taibbi:

At the same time, Rouleau refused to confine “misinformation and disinformation” to protesters:

Protest organizers’ mistrust of government officials was reinforced by unfair generalizations from some public officials that suggested all protesters were extremists… Where there was misinformation and disinformation about the protests, it was prone to amplification in news media… The fact that protesters could be at once both the victims and perpetrators of misinformation simply shows how pernicious misinformation is in modern society.

In the report you also find significant criticism of Canda’s Covid-19 policies and heavy-handed emergency measures like allowing Canada’s Border Services Agency (CBSA) to keep foreigners out. Rouleau even said he came to his main conclusion, that Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Order was legal, “with reluctance.” 

But such musings have no propaganda benefit, and Rouleau’s report was reduced to a single thought, that Trudeau’s Emergencies Order “Met the Threshhold.” This was almost exactly like the American press reaction to the 2019 report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which tore into FBI malfeasance for hundreds of pages but gave the press the headline it wanted: “Justice Watchdog Finds Russia Probe Was Justified, Not Biased Against Trump.”

1/ Trying to signal boost w a short 🧵

Amateur Go player Kellin Pelrine can consistently beat “KataGo”, an AI system that was once classified as “strongly superhuman”.

Strikingly, the strategies employed to beat the AI do not foil other amateur players. https://t.co/2AgK3gKVYP pic.twitter.com/couAi5sHfG

— Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) February 18, 2023

1/ Trying to signal boost w a short 🧵

Amateur Go player Kellin Pelrine can consistently beat “KataGo”, an AI system that was once classified as “strongly superhuman”.

Strikingly, the strategies employed to beat the AI do not foil other amateur players. https://t.co/2AgK3gKVYP pic.twitter.com/couAi5sHfG

— Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) February 18, 2023

Nathan Cofnas\:

The purge of heretical scholars and ideas in academia is intensifying.¹ Many job applications now require loyalty oaths to woke orthodoxy in the form of “diversity statements.”² In the humanities and social sciences, large numbers of faculty are being hired to engage in what is effectively leftist activism.³Simply ranting about how much you hate conservatives, Christians, or straight white men can be considered “scholarship” and the basis for a distinguished career. Entire departments devoted to ideology-driven fields like gender studies have been established to promote “social justice” and provide sinecures to activists.⁴ Academic papers that undermine the woke narrative are being retracted,⁵ and journals are adopting implicit or explicit polices to ensure that crimethink is never published again.⁶ Many undergraduate and graduate programs have stopped asking for standardized test scores and are increasingly making admissions decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological conformity.

Seven years ago, Heterodox Academy (HxA) came on the scene to promote “ideological diversity” in academia. Cofounder Jonathan Haidt—a prominent social psychologist who is now chair of the board of directors and the person most associated with the organization—spoke forcefully about the scholarship-corrupting effects of liberal groupthink. The leaders of HxA led people to believe that they were going to organize a meaningful resistance.

Seven years later, you can count HxA’s accomplishments in promoting heterodoxy on the fingers of zero hands. It has focused mainly on aggrandizing celebrity academics who hold conventional leftist views, and giving a platform to liberals to engage in empty virtue signaling about their alleged commitment to free inquiry. Scholars whose work is genuinely heterodox have been systematically marginalized. In at least one instance, a psychologist known for his work on race differences (Helmuth Nyborg) was denied membership.

Nathan Cofnas\:

The purge of heretical scholars and ideas in academia is intensifying.¹ Many job applications now require loyalty oaths to woke orthodoxy in the form of “diversity statements.”² In the humanities and social sciences, large numbers of faculty are being hired to engage in what is effectively leftist activism.³Simply ranting about how much you hate conservatives, Christians, or straight white men can be considered “scholarship” and the basis for a distinguished career. Entire departments devoted to ideology-driven fields like gender studies have been established to promote “social justice” and provide sinecures to activists.⁴ Academic papers that undermine the woke narrative are being retracted,⁵ and journals are adopting implicit or explicit polices to ensure that crimethink is never published again.⁶ Many undergraduate and graduate programs have stopped asking for standardized test scores and are increasingly making admissions decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological conformity.

Seven years ago, Heterodox Academy (HxA) came on the scene to promote “ideological diversity” in academia. Cofounder Jonathan Haidt—a prominent social psychologist who is now chair of the board of directors and the person most associated with the organization—spoke forcefully about the scholarship-corrupting effects of liberal groupthink. The leaders of HxA led people to believe that they were going to organize a meaningful resistance.

Seven years later, you can count HxA’s accomplishments in promoting heterodoxy on the fingers of zero hands. It has focused mainly on aggrandizing celebrity academics who hold conventional leftist views, and giving a platform to liberals to engage in empty virtue signaling about their alleged commitment to free inquiry. Scholars whose work is genuinely heterodox have been systematically marginalized. In at least one instance, a psychologist known for his work on race differences (Helmuth Nyborg) was denied membership.

Jacquelyn Elias:

Net-tuition revenue — the money that institutions earn through enrollment minus any discounts and allowances provided to students — is the lifeblood of many universities.

It’s the largest source of revenue for private four-year institutions, and it accounts for just over $1 of every $5 of revenue for public four-year institutions, about the same, on average, as their combined earnings from state grants, contracts, and appropriations.

Walker [17-19] Last Biennial Budget: $76 billion
Evers[19-21] First Biennial Budget: $87.5 billion
Evers [23-25] Proposed Biennial Budget: $103.8 billion

Will you get $27.8 BILLION more value from govt? Sell underused properties, consolidate overlapping agencies. $0 INCREASE! pic.twitter.com/DNXG1aSozd

— Will Martin, Business Owner & Govt Reformer (@willmartinWI) February 20, 2023

WILL budget primer:

• Massive Spending Growth: Governor Evers proposed budget increases spending by 18.5% compared to the previous budget. GPR spending would rise by 22.85% compared to the previous budget.
• Agency GPR Growth: Some agencies would see massive growth in GPR spending. For example, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s GPR allocation would grow by 3351%. The Department of Tourism would have a 1027% increase in GPR spending.
• Voucher Freeze: The governor proposes freezing enrollment in Wisconsin’s school choice programs at 2024 enrollment levels. This would shut the school house door on thousands of families in Wisconsin desperate for options stuck in schools that aren’t working for them.
• DEI Positions: Governor Evers wants to spend more than $2.9 million of taxpayer dollars on 15 new executive-tier positions whose mandate is to use government activity to increase “equity.”
• Work Requirements: Able-bodied adults are required to participate in the Food Share Employment and Training program to continue receiving Food Share benefits after the first three months. Governor Evers would repeal this requirement despite the economic and personal benefits they bring to the state and its participants.

Yet:

Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?