Matt Taibbi:

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen. 

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

More importantly, there’s no term for the offense Democrats committed in 2016, though it was similar to Watergate. Instead of a “third-rate burglary” and a bug, Democrats sent schlock research to the FBI, who in turn lied to the secret FISA court and obtained “legal” surveillance authority over former Trump aide Carter Page (which opened doors to searches of everyone connected to Page). Worse, instead of petty “ratfucking” like Donald Segretti’s “Canuck letter,” the Clinton campaign created and fueled a successful, years-long campaign of official harassment and media fraud. They innovated an extraordinary trick, using government connections and press to generate real criminal and counterintelligence investigations of political enemies, mostly all based on what we now know to be self-generated nonsense. 

The Clintons, and especially Hillary, have been baselessly accused of all sorts of things in the past, the murder of Vince Foster being just one example. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” was so successful that the Clintons ended up aligning with and helping fund its chief architect, David Brock, ahead of the 2016 cycle. Along with Perkins Coie and the research agency Fusion-GPS, headed by former Wall Street Journal reporter and current self-admiring sleaze-merchant Glenn Simpson, they engineered three long years of phony “collusion” headlines. No matter what papers like the Washington Post try to argue this week, this was an enormous scandal.

James Bikales & Michelle Kurilla

More than two-thirds of respondents — about 69 percent — said they have a GPA of 3.8 or higher rounded to one decimal place, compared to 64 percent last year and 54 percent in 2020.

Eighty-two percent reported a GPA of 3.7 or higher. An A- corresponds to a 3.67 in the College’s grading system.

Sixteen percent of respondents said they had a near-perfect GPA, rounded to 4.0, compared to 12 percent in 2021 and 9 percent in 2020.

Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D.

Student debt forgiveness schemes are both inefficient and unfair policies for helping low-income families. First, it is clear that any plan to eliminate student debt across the board would end up benefiting doctors, lawyers and many others who have or are likely to get high-earning jobs and won’t need help paying off their loans. Further, because the majority of student debt—both nationally and in Wisconsin—is held by those in the top 40% of the income distribution, such a plan would most benefit the wealthy, contributing further to income and wealth inequality. In addition, debt forgiveness would add to inflationary pressures, as the former debt holders have freed-up money to spend on other uses.

Debt forgiveness amounts to spending $1 trillion from the federal Treasury exclusively on people who went to—and in most cases graduated from—college. This essentially punishes Americans who didn’t go to college and, because of that fact, are more likely to need government help.

In all, 58% of college student debt is held by students from the top 40% of incomes. Further, 56% of student debt is held by those with master’s, professional or doctoral degrees. Such groups are not typically targeted for federal welfare or subsidy programs. But that is exactly what any across-the-board student loan forgiveness program would do. Further, such a plan seems exceedingly unfair for families whose children either didn’t attend college or, if they did and borrowed money to do so, paid off their loans as most responsible borrowers do.

Carly Moore:

At the school, the Problem Solvers found a sign that says “Kiss and Drop Zone” and numerous tents across the street. He takes issue with cleanliness and safety close to the school grounds.   

“Most of the time we have to walk into the street because there’s literally no walking room there. We walk through piles of human excrement I mean, there is feces, there is trash, there’s urine, and that’s going to school and I never say a word. But when I get to school and it’s there, it’s you know, it’s not safe. It’s not clean,” Schweidel said.  

DPS sent us a statement about the camp saying: 

The safety and well-being of our students are the primary priorities for Denver Public Schools. Recently, an encampment of people experiencing homelessness has appeared across the street from Polaris Elementary. While we are optimistic that the people here will be good neighbors, school officials have shared concerns about trash, drug paraphernalia and human waste on the playground and the sidewalks students use to get to and from the school. We are working with the community to address these issues. Our efforts include asking the City of Denver to help us ensure that students are safe while they are on the playground and on their way to and from school.

Jeremy Tedesco and Robert Netzly

Writing at the Wall Street Journal, two key leaders behind the Viewpoint Diversity Score and 2022 Business Index highlighted the initiative’s long-term goal of encouraging Corporate America to do their part in fostering a culture that values free speech, religious liberty, and free markets.

Titled, “Companies Flunk Free Speech,” the opinion piece marks the official launch of the initiative, which brings together leaders from business, civil society, and academia who are committed to preserving the freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief in the market, workplace, and public square.

The column was written by Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement for Alliance Defending Freedom, and Robert Netzly, CEO of Inspire Investing.

As Tedesco and Netzly write, the Index scores 50 Fortune 1000 companies from industries that have the greatest potential to impact free speech and religious freedom. These include industries that provide essential banking, payment processing, and cloud services, or that serve as platforms for third-party expression in the digital space.

Jenna Russell:

The discussion came one day after the release of the state’s latest report on Boston schools, which tracked the district’s progress since 2020 in addressing a series of critical shortcomings. The review, part of an ongoing process of state oversight, found a few encouraging results, but mostly highlighted wide swaths of continuing stagnation, intensifying fears that the state’s next step will be to seize control of local schools, as it has done elsewhere in the state.

For now at least, the state’s approach appears to be gentler than some had feared. Board members — who would need to vote to approve a state receivership — appeared in no hurry to call the question. Several acknowledged the passionate opposition to receivership voiced by students, parents, teachers and elected officials who testified at the meeting, and some expressed doubt that a full state takeover could work in the face of such aversion.

James Morton, the vice chairman, said the goal should be a “negotiated plan to address six or seven critical core needs,” undertaken “with a collaborative spirit.” Board member Paymon Rouhanifard, a former superintendent in Camden, N.J., invoked the impact of “decades of institutional racism” in the current state of BPS, and called for a sensitive approach.

“I think you can pathologize a community, and [impact] young people,” he said. “To do it delicately is the task at hand.”

Josiehanna Colon, a student at New Mission High School who testified Tuesday, said she has felt the impact of state oversight. Too much of her education has been centered around standardized testing, she said; further intervention would likely bring more emphasis on tests and less diverse curriculum. “I’m angry that our voices may be ignored,” she said, “and that again and again we care about a test score instead of a child.”

Brooke Kato:

Mothers, ages 35 to 44, gave birth the most of any age group — with a nearly 3% increase — which comes after a trend of women hesitant about having children.

In a state-by-state case, the Northeast region was amongst the boom of births. New Hampshire came out on top, with a 7% yearly birth-rate increase, trailed by Connecticut (6.5%), Vermont (5.2%) and New Jersey (5.09%). While only New Mexico saw a 1.9% percent fall and Hawaii only 1%, no other states saw a birth decrease greater than 1% from 2020 to 2021.

Solveig Lucia Gold

We’ve run plenty of stories about people who have been the target of  mobs—what’s happened to them and their challenges and resilience in the aftermath.

What we’ve rarely heard—here or anywhere else—is what it’s like for the person who loves the mob’s target. What it’s like to watch someone you love being torn to pieces.

Solveig Gold is one of those people. She’s smart, funny, angry and brave. Mostly brave.

Below is Solveig’s story. It’s about bullies and Puritanism and the insane state of our universities, but really it’s a story about freedom and love and the things that endure, no matter what.

—BW 

---

I decided to apply for early admission to Princeton after sitting in on Professor Joshua Katz’s seminar in April of 2012. I’m afraid I don’t remember the content of the seminar, but I do remember the way he captivated the classroom—the way his students hung onto his every word and the way he hung onto theirs.

Last summer, I married him. This week, Princeton fired him.

He isn’t the Princeton Charming I expected to win in my undergraduate years. I entered college in 2013 under the shadow of Susan Patton, a Princeton alumna and mom who had some months before written a widely read letter to female students in the Daily Princetonian, urging them to find a husband on campus before they graduated. My friends and I mocked Patton relentlessly, and yet deep down we knew what she said was true: Smart women have a hard time finding worthy men. We set out to find ours.

George Will:

Government pratfalls such as the Disinformation Governance Board are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace.

…Using radio spectrum scarcity as an excuse, even before the Fairness Doctrine was created, Republicans running Washington in the late 1920s pressured a New York station owned by the Socialist Party to show “due regard” for other opinions. What regard was “due”? The government knew. So, it prevented the Chicago Federation of Labor from buying a station, saying all stations should serve “the general public.”

In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on compliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”) John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response.

Commentary: Alex Tabarrock.

Sandy Flores-Ruiz:

Baylor University, based in central Texas, is one of the many institutions that uses a federal loan program called Parent Plus. Among private schools with a minimum of $1 billion endowment, Baylor also had the lowest repayment rate for this particular type of loan. 

The Parent Plus program offers federal loans to parents and allows them to help pay for their children’s tuition. Before the introduction of this program, undergraduate students were the largest demographic taking out college loans requiring payment. Now, in the Parent Plus era, parents and graduate students take out the most loans. 

The fast-growing Parent Plus program does not have income limits or a cap on the amount of money parents can borrow, unlike other undergraduate loan programs. This makes Parent Plus appealing and accessible to parents, especially to those who want to send their children to the best ranking schools. They often hastily agree to take out these loans without realizing the magnitude and future impact of their debt. 

At Baylor, the Parent Plus loan program has allowed the university to shift its reputation from being a locally appreciated Baptist college to a nationally accredited and endorsed institution. The university has funneled its resources into building a new sports complex and expanding its existing research facilities to match those of the top schools in the nation.

Alex Tabarrok:

Hilger is correct. No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.

Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.

But what about discrimination? When it comes to wage discrimination, Hilger is brutally honest:

Chris Rickert:

After failing to get a waiver from the state’s minimum instructional hours requirement, the Madison School District has devised a plan for the last week of this school year that will allow students getting Cs or better at its four main high schools to forgo getting that minimum amount of instruction.

The district stopped requiring students at its four main high schools to take final exams about two and a half years ago, largely because of COVID-19 pandemic-related shutdowns, and instead offers an end-of-semester “bridge week” to give students time to complete missing assignments and raise their grades.

This year, East High School parents received an email saying its version of bridge week, called “Finish Strong,” will not require students getting Cs or above to attend school on June 7 or June 8, although they will be marked present for those days.

“On these days, students with D or F grades will have the opportunity to improve their learning, make up key assessments and earn credit,” the email says, and staff have contacted those students.

“Students who were not asked to come in will not be marked unexcused and parents do not need to call in to excuse their student on these days,” the email says.

DPI spokesperson Chris Bucher said districts are responsible for documenting changes to their school calendars, which are reported as part of their annual reports to the agency during the summer after a school year.

But the agency does not seek to verify that districts have met the minimum number of instructional hours requirement.

“We rely on school districts and school boards to meet the requirements laid out in statute,” Bucher said.

In another policy aimed at helping the lowest-performing high school students, the district, beginning with the 2020-21 school year, changed grading protocols so that no assignment, including ones that aren’t turned in, receives a score of less than 50%. The idea is to avoid overly penalizing students who missed some assignments but proved through others that they understood the material

Meanwhile: TSMC And Intel Are In A Mad Dash To Hire Semiconductor Technicians For Their New Plants In Arizona

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Will Flanders:

Here are the biggest findings:

• Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public-school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were 4.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 4.5% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee.
• Charter school students in Milwaukee continue to outperform their public-school peers. In both math and ELA, independent charter school students in Milwaukee saw about 2.6% higher proficiency on average than traditional public-school students.
• Forward Exam participation was higher in Milwaukee choice and charter schools. Compared to public schools, choice students in Milwaukee participated in the Forward Exam at a 46% higher rate. Independent charter school students participated at a 39% higher rate.
• Statewide, choice students outperform their public-school peers in ELA. Proficiency rates were about 4.6% higher for students participating in school choice statewide than traditional public-school students. No difference was found in math performance.
• Wisconsin continues to struggle with its achievement gaps. Statewide, a school with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency rates 42% lower than a school with no low-income students. For African American students, that gap is 14% in ELA and 15% in math.
• Little evidence was found that more spending affects student performance. Once student and district demographics are taken into account, the level of per capita spending in a public school district has no statistical impact on student proficiency.
• Data inaccuracy is a major concern. Proficiency reported in the media and in WiseDash did not accurately reflect student proficiency and the impact of the non-test- takers. Proficiency rates were deflated this year and will, consequently, be inflated next year.
• District size has a small, positive relationship with proficiency. Contrary to the argument that smaller districts perform better, larger districts performed better to a very small extent (0.03%) in Wisconsin when controlling for other factors.
• For the first time, proficiency fell below 40% statewide in both math and ELA. Even accounting for test non-participation rates, proficiency in Wisconsin’s schools hit a record low in the 2020-21 school year.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

C Bradley Thompson:

Parents en masse organized to protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory (and Critical Gender Theory) in America’s government schools. We’ve all seen the videos of school board meetings that erupted in anger as parents vented their frustrations with local school board officials. It’s clear from those meetings that the parents opposing CRT believe that the doctrine is racist both in theory and practice and that it is fomenting racial division and hatred.

In response to this burst of parental outrage, the Education Establishment and its lackeys in the mainstream media launched a PR campaign dedicated to mocking and dismissing the claim CRT was being taught in America’s classrooms. The Washington Post claimed that “critical race theory is not part of the local school systems’ K-12 curriculum, nor mentioned in the state’s Standards of Learning . . . There is scant evidence it’s taught anywhere – let alone everywhere.”[1] According to a headline in a NBC News report, “Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teacher survey says.”[2] PBS New Hour declared “[t]here is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students.”[3]Speaking on behalf of the Education Deep State, The New York Times asserted, “Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, deny that there is any critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.”[4]

Interestingly, after denying that CRT is taught in America’s schools, most mainstream media articles on the controversy typically went on to suggest that even though CRT is not taught in America’s schools, it would in fact be a good thing if it were as a tool in the fight against racism. And then of course, the articles typically ended with the obligatory “Kafka-trap” in which it would be suggested that any claim that CRT was being taught in the government schools was itself evidence of racism, thereby proving the need to teach CRT. The Washington Postsuggested, for instance, that Republicans were using CRT as a racist “dog whistle,” the purpose of which was to fan the flames of “moral panic.”[5]

Rachel Cohen:

There were early signs that this narrative didn’t explain the full story. If allegiance to former President Donald Trump (in schools that opened) or teacher unions (in those that stayed closed) were all that mattered, why did support for reopening schools also drop among Republican voters over the summer? And what about the conflicting recommendations coming from federal health and education departments at that time? Nevertheless, the idea that Covid-19 was not a real factor was repeated by some of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets, and framed as though the question was generally settled. 

This is typical in policy research: Initial waves of data often attract lots of attention, and can quickly ossify into conventional wisdom. When subsequent, often deeper inquiry reveals alternative or more nuanced explanations, it tends to receive far less notice. 

That’s what’s been happening with research into school closures. More recent studies have found that, far from being irrelevant, Covid-19 indicators were among central factors predicting whether schools would reopen. 

Researchers say they also still haven’t fully understood how other factors — like school governance and parent preferences — influenced Covid-19 school decisions. A new study, published recently by two education researchers from George Mason University, replicates some earlier findings and explores new potential variables. All in all, it continues adding to a picture that’s more complex than the early analyses suggested.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Joy Pullman

Under this new demand, establishments that accept any federal food funding, including food stamps, must also allow males who claim to be female to access female private spaces, such as showers, bathrooms, and sleeping areas. Such organizations must also follow protocols such as requiring staff to use inaccurate pronouns to describe transgender people and allowing male staff to dress as women while on the job.

Religious institutions, however, qualify for a waiver exempting them from these requirements, said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Greg Baylor in an interview Monday. According to the 1972 Title IX law, he said, religious institutions don’t have to file any paperwork to be exempt, although they can if they wish. 

Baylor noted, however, that publicly affirming a commitment to sexual reality by seeking an exemption acknowledgment from federal agencies may assist extremist pressure campaigns. The activist group Human Rights Campaign’s blueprint for the Biden administration pushed for narrowing religious exemptions for multiple federal regulations and for the administration to “out” individuals and institutions who request such exemptions.

Brad Schmitt:

“I need to get inside! I need to get inside!” he shouted.

Davis, terrified, planted her 5-foot-5, 130-pound body in front of the door, saying loudly, “No sir! You cannot come through this door. I need you to leave the playground.”

Davis paused in telling the story, looked down and said softly, “I can feel my heart pounding again.”

‘The fun of art is creating it’

Davis wanted to be an elementary school teacher for as long as she can remember, probably because she loved her kindergarten teacher, Ms. Drinkwine, who always made school fun.

As a girl growing up in Charlotte Park in West Nashville, she made little notebooks out of paper for her dolls. Then Davis sat them in rows and began her lessons, she said.

A few years later, Davis tried holding class for her two younger siblings, reading stories to them. But her brother, Daniel, and sister, Crystal, didn’t pay attention as well as her dolls did.

WILL

The News: Attorneys at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) warning the state agency that an attempt to revoke an educator’s license for her remarks at a feminist rally in Madison violate the First Amendment. The Milwaukee Public Schools counselor spoke in opposition to “gender identity ideology” and expressed opposition to “gender ideology” in elementary schools at a rally in April. DPI opened an investigation into whether her educator license should be revoked for “immoral conduct.”

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, said, “The state is, quite simply, trying to punish a public-school counselor for her views on gender ideology. This is a classic, clear-cut violation of the First Amendment and the state can expect a federal lawsuit if it proceeds.”

Marissa Darlingh, a school counselor threatened with a DPI investigation, said, “My views on the harms of gender ideology to children are informed by a desire to serve and protect children. That’s why I got into education. I will love and serve every child under my care, no matter what. But I won’t recant under threat from the state.”

Ronald Kessler:

Essentially, that meant kids were not being taught to read at all.

Whole language proponents even said that when children guessed wrong, they should not be corrected.

“It is unpleasant to be corrected,” Paul Jennings, an Australian whole language enthusiast, said. “It has to be fun, fun, fun.”

But reading, like devising algebraic equations, is anything but natural. It must be learned.

Whole language had one thing going for it: Instead of teaching the 44 sounds or phonemes that the 26 letters of the English alphabet can make, with whole language, teachers could sit back and relax.

They gave kids books and passively watched as students struggled to make sense of the material placed in front of them. When their children failed to learn to read, they could blame it on their homes or on poor motivation.

Egged on by teachers’ unions, public schools across the country widely adopted the whole language approach. As evidenced by their reading scores, Blacks often struggled the most. Unable to read even a simple road map, they faced a lifetime of failure.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Ian Miller:

For two years the pervasive groupthink amongst the public health profession, the media and many politicians ensured that there would be no criticism of public health policies, no matter how absurd or useless they immediately proved to be.

Lockdowns, business closures, capacity limits, closed schools and playgrounds, masks, vaccine passports, travel restrictions, mass testing and contact tracing all accomplished nothing but significant harm to the public. 

More importantly, researchers and scientists mostly stayed silent — afraid of retribution from the National Institute of Health’s Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci who organized PR campaigns to disparage and impugn the credibility of anyone who criticized their mandates.

Martin Geddes:

The academy has become a temple to the ego, worshipping personal aggrandisement, worthless certifications, and social privilege. The self-righteous, self-important, and self-serving are an easy target for evil, since they believe themselves too clever to be deceived. Even writing an article like this is a battle with one’s own classist narcissism.

There is one public room in my college that I have never set foot in: the chapel. My disturbing childhood brush with organised religion means I get the creeps whenever I go near any kind of collective worship. It also struck me as strange that the spiritual was relegated to a game reserve where wilder souls could be tamed into conformity. Now in later life I am realising how all institutions are prone to capture into the service of power via spiritual subversion.

I have previously observed how the university was founded around the Divinity School, but later abandoned this for the Cult of Scientific Materialism. It may have taken several centuries for this to cause the catastrophic failure of the culture of academia, but the damage is now hard to ignore. I feel like an air crash investigator pre-positioned watching the fatally off course craft predictably hurtling towards the ground, ready to survey the final wreckage.

Justin McBrayer:

Many faculty positions now require diversity statements as part of an application packet. The standard justification for this is that doing so will improve the success of diverse student bodies and enhance diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campus. Job ads have a short shelf life online, but here are a few examples.

New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering requires that all faculty applicants include “a statement of your experience with or knowledge of inclusion, diversity, equity, and belonging efforts and your plans for incorporating them into your teaching, research, mentoring, and service.”

California State University, Sacramento, requires applicants for a history job to submit a statement showing, among other things, how the candidate would “advance the History Department’s goal of promoting an anti-racist and anti-oppressive campus to recruit, retain, and mentor students.”

For another history job, Northern Arizona University requires a diversity statement “that highlights an understanding of the role of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice in a university setting. Please include examples from past experiences and reference plans to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in your teaching, research, and service.”

Hofstra University in New York welcomes applications for an assistant professor of sociology as long as that person can demonstrate her commitment to critical criminology, restorative justice and racial equity in the criminal justice system and show how her teaching, research and service would contribute to a culturally diverse and inclusive environment.

Leighton Woodhouse

If you write an article that’s published in an absurdly specialized academic journal that’s read by all of 50 people, you’re presumed to be engaged in real scholarship. If you write an academic book that sells like hotcakes and gets reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, the assumption is that your work must be somehow frivolous, and that you’re a dilettante.

I bring this up because it illustrates one of the key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production. And that concept, I believe, explains a lot about why our shared social reality is fracturing into a thousand partisan sub-realities and competing conspiracy theories.

Bourdieu viewed the world of professional cultural producers (artists, academics, journalists, etc.) as a collection of what he called “fields.” There’s the artistic field, the journalistic field, the juridical field, the political field, and so on. A field is the constellation of individuals, organizations and stakeholders that constitute the market for a given profession. For the artistic field, it would include artists, art dealers, gallery owners, agents, critics, collectors, and probably a dozen other groups that I don’t know enough about art to think of. The artistic field is roughly comparable to what you might call the art “industry.”

The “field” metaphor works in two ways. First, it’s a field of battle, where all the competitors and hostile factions within a given enterprise endeavor to defeat their rivals. You can see this most plainly within the journalistic field just by logging onto Twitter, where you will behold the endless, vicious, public feuds between blue check mark media employees. But it’s not unique to media. In every field, you have people occupying disparate positions of power, in shifting alliances with one another, jealously defending their positions from usurpers while undermining those they aim to topple, using the cultural norms of the field in question as a weapon and a shield.

The anecdote above illustrates the dynamic well within academia: A social scientist’s work gains a broad popular audience, accolades from non-academic critics, and perhaps some influence in actual policymaking circles. One might consider this a clear sign of success within the field. In response, rival academics use that very success as evidence of the scholar’s inauthenticity: she must be dumbing down her research to pander to the public, in cheap pursuit of media attention and political influence. The rivals’ own lack of public recognition, on the other hand, is proof of their legitimacy: their work doesn’t appeal to lay readers because they’re speaking to other experts, in the language of expertise. Lay readers aren’t supposed to “get it”; if they did, then the work must be too shallow for real scholars take seriously.

@gpp475 issues statement on Judge Lanphear’s ruling in favor of the Barrington, RI school teachers he represents who were fired for not getting Covid-19 vaccinations https://t.co/vnO6gIADWM pic.twitter.com/8CQivW0JgP

— Andrew Bostom, MD, MS (@andrewbostom) May 25, 2022

Jeff Hoffman

Our leaders must remember that education doesn’t begin with some isolated bureaucrat’s hidden agenda or union boss in Washington (in our case, across the river). It doesn’t even begin with state or local officials – like a General Assembly in Richmond who can’t even pass a state budget. It begins with the parents!

This Thursday, May 26, the Fairfax County School Board is scheduled to vote on measures to enhance the so-called “gender identity” language in the Student Rights & Responsibilities (SR&R) regulation. Measures include a decrease in the age of children susceptible to greater disciplinary actions. According to recent articles in media outlets like the “New York Post”, this could result in suspension or expulsion for what the SR&R regulation defines as “malicious misgendering or deadnaming.” Kids as young as K-3 are susceptible to some form of discipline.

Eugene Volokh:

The claims arise out of “UPMC’s purported disclosure of their confidential medical information to [child protection authorities] for the purpose of targeting them with highly intrusive, humiliating and coercive child abuse investigations starting before taking their newborn babies home from UPMC’s hospitals shortly after childbirth.”

Scott Girard:

At issue is an April 2018 document, titled “Guidance & Policies to Support Transgender, Non-binary & Gender-Expansive Students,” which outlined a series of ways staff should work with students who share they are transgender or gender-questioning at school, including using their preferred names and pronouns. It also prohibited staff from disclosing to parents “any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardians and other school staff, unless legally required to do so or unless the student has authorized such disclosure.”

“Transgender, non-binary, and gender-expansive students have the right to discuss and express their gender identity and expression openly and to decide when, with whom, and how much to share private information,” the guidance states. “If a student chooses to use a different name, to transition at school, or to disclose their gender identity to staff or other students, this does not authorize school staff to disclose a student’s personally identifiable or medical information.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and the Alliance Defending Freedom, on behalf of 14 parents, argue it violated parents’ constitutional right to raise their children.

A temporary circuit court injunction in September 2020 forbid the district from “applying or enforcing any policy, guideline, or practice” in the document that “allows or requires District staff to conceal information or to answer untruthfully in response to any question that parents ask about their child at school, including information about the name and pronouns being used to address their child at school.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

If you give us just two weeks, we can slow the spread of Monkeypox.

— U.S. Ministry of Truth (@USMiniTru) May 23, 2022

Charles Mitchell and Scott Walker:

The goal of Act 10 was to remove unfair powers wielded by government union executives over state budgets, education policy, and politics.

A recent study from the Commonwealth Foundation found that Act 10 saved Wisconsin taxpayers nearly $7 billion in 2018. Other analyses from a free-market think tank in Wisconsin suggested it helped resolve a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes, while the savings produced by Act 10 enabled future tax cuts that helped create 42,000 new jobs — including 20,000 jobs in manufacturing. Thanks to the reduced influence of government unions over state education policies, the number of low-income children benefiting from Wisconsin’s school choice program has increased nearly thirtyfold, to almost 15,000 students.

“As seen in Wisconsin, where public-sector labor reform leads, prosperity follows.”Charles Mitchell and Scott Walkernone

Pennsylvania and other similarly situated states could benefit from following Wisconsin’s example. The Keystone State has more government union workers than any other state except California, New York, and Illinois. Most of these workers lose a chunk of their paychecks each month to pay union executives who often prioritize a political agenda ahead of the workers they claim to represent. And look at what those government unions are achieving: Pennsylvania has the country’s fourth-highest unemployment rate and the second-highest business tax rate, while ranking 45th in economic performance.

As was the case in Wisconsin before Act 10, government unions are the largest campaign contributors in Pennsylvania. Since 2007, these groups have spent more than $150 million on politics, with 90% of campaign contributions going toward Pennsylvania Democrats. These government unions lobby for more government spending, against reforming the state’s pension system, for a government-run liquor monopoly, and against educational options for children and families.

Pennsylvania is not alone. A recent analysis showed that during the last academic year, the nation’s largest teachers’ union spent more on politics than on representing its own members.

Those interested in the rise of Scott Walker might find the Milwaukee County Pension Scandal illuminating.

The Reactionary:

The influence that FBI leadership (Comey and McCabe) had on the investigations related to the Trump/Russia accusations is notable – but not an exception. This is the first time we heard that the Alfa Bank hoax was pushed by FBI leadership. However, this fits their broader pattern. Recall the statement of FBI agent William Barnett. He was part of the FBI’s investigation of General Flynn and decided it should be closed down. The FBI’s senior officials, who ran the investigation from the “top down,” called the shots.

Sam Adler-Bell:

“Disinformation” was the liberal Establishment’s traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection. It wasn’t that the country was riven by profound antinomies and resentments born of material realities that would need to be navigated by new kinds of politics. No, the problem was that large swaths of the country had been duped, brainwashed by nefarious forces both foreign and domestic. And if only the best minds, the most credentialed experts, could be given new authority to regulate the flow of “fake news,” the scales would fall from the eyes of the people and they would re-embrace the old order they had been tricked into despising. This fantasy turned a political problem into a scientific one. The rise of Trump called not for new politics but new technocrats.

Like other pathological reactions to trauma, the disinformation neurosis tended to re-create the conditions that produced the affliction in the first place. (Freud called this “repetition compulsion.”) By doubling down on elite technocracy — and condescension toward the uneducated rubes suffering from false consciousness — liberals have tended to exacerbate the sources of populist hostility. As Joe Bernstein documented in Harper’s last year, the “antidisinformation industry” has attracted massive investment from wealthy Democratic donors, the tech industry, and cash-rich foundations. Hundreds of millions of disinfo dollars are sloshing around the nonprofit world, funding institutes at universities and extravagant conventions across the world. Last month’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference was headlined by Barack Obama and featured Anne Applebaum, David Axelrod, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a lengthy list of other academic, journalistic, and political luminaries. I’m sure very interesting ideas were discussed there. But gathering the leading lights of liberalism to an auditorium at the University of Chicago — so that they together can decide which information is true and safe to be consumed by the rabble outside — strikes me as a hollow exercise in self-soothing, more likely to aggravate the symptoms of our legitimacy crisis (distrust and cynicism) than resolve any of its impasses.

Don’t get me wrong: There are obviously hard problems to be worked out regarding technology, speech, and democracy, and I have great respect for scholars working in that nettlesome nexus. But as Bernstein put it, the new class of disinformation experts, however well intentioned, “don’t have special access to the fabric of reality.” If faith in our institutions is to be restored, I don’t think it will be accomplished by stigmatizing doubt or obstructing the dissemination of falsehood. After all, faith is not a matter of fact and fiction.

Denis Campbell:

The latest NHS figures show “open referrals” – troubled children and young people in England undergoing treatment or waiting to start care – reached 420,314 in February, the highest number since records began in 2016.

The total has risen by 147,853 since February 2020, a 54% increase, and by 80,096 over the last year alone, a jump of 24%. January’s tally of 411,132 cases was the first time the figure had topped 400,000.

Mental health charities welcomed the fact that an all-time high number of young people are receiving psychological support. But they fear the figures are the tip of the iceberg of the true number of people who need care, and that many more under-18s in distress are being denied help by arbitrary eligibility criteria.

“Open referrals” are under-18s who are being cared for by child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) or are waiting to see a specialist, having been assessed as needing help against treatment thresholds. GPs, teachers and mental health charities believe the criteria are too strict, exclude many who are deemed not ill enough, and amount to rationing of care.

Jonathan Turkey:

In academia, there have been growing controversies over language guides and usages, including the use of pronouns that some object to as matters of religion or grammar. Now the largest association of science teachers in the world has issued a guide for “anti-oppression” terminology for science teachers. In the guide, titled “Gender-Inclusive Biology: A framework in action,” the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) has called for “gender-inclusive biology,” which includes the abandonment of terms like “parent,” “men,” “women,” “mother,” and “father.”

Under the guide, mothers are now referred to as “persons with ovaries” in reference to reproduction cycles while fathers are now “persons with testes.” Additionally, the association declares the move of various states toward “Sex verification in sports” as an example of oppression.

The use of such a guide by a state school would raise serious First Amendment issues. We have already seen successful litigation challenging mandatory pronoun usage, including the recent litigation involving a teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia. Yet we have also seen new cases, including the charging of three high school students for not using preferred pronouns.

Under the new guidelines, teachers are encouraged to drop terms like “male” in favor of “XY individuals.”

Elizabeth Beyer:

Jones told the board that 67 staff members are leaving this year, but the district is only hiring 10 new staff.

Prior to the meeting, Jones noted that school districts of all sizes across Wisconsin are offering base wage increases to their teachers that are near or at 4.7% to keep in line with the hike in the cost of living.

The Milwaukee School Board unanimously approved a 4.7% base wage increase for all staff in the district at the end of April, the largest increase in more than a decade, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The Kenosha School Board and Green Bay School Board also unanimously approved a 4.7% base wage increase for staff in March for the coming school year. The Oshkosh Area School District also approved a 4.7% wage increase for all staff in January.

Scott Girard:

The difference between the 4.7% increase and 2% increase is approximately $7 million. Despite an influx of federal and state dollars for COVID-19 relief funding, district officials have called the budget a difficult one as they attempt to limit the amount of structural deficits they create with that one-time funding.

The revenue limit, which is the maximum a district can take in through the combination of property taxes and state aid, remained frozen in the 2021-23 state budget.

With declining enrollment, MMSD’s revenue limit would have dropped without the successful 2020 operating referendum. Instead, with the extra revenue authority from that vote, the district’s revenue limit is projected to rise by $6 million over the current year.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Thomas Kane

A third alternative would be lengthening the school year for the next two years. Of course, districts would have to pay teachers, janitors, and bus drivers more, perhaps at time and a half, to work the extra weeks. But unlike with tutoring or double-dose math, districts already have the personnel, the buildings, the buses, the schedules. As long as educators, parents, and students view the extra instructional time as just an extension of the school year—like days added to make up for snow closures—the power of family and school routine will deliver higher attendance than summer school.

The primary problem with a longer school year is political, not logistical. After opposition from the local teachers’ union and some parents, the Los Angeles Unified School District was able to add only four optional days of school next year. This is, to be sure, more make-up time than many other school systems have planned, but quite inadequate given that the nation’s second-largest school district was remote for three-quarters of 2020–21.

I fear that, in areas where classrooms remained closed for long periods, school officials are not doing the basic math. High-dosage tutoring may produce the equivalent of 19 weeks of instruction for students who receive it, but is a district prepared to offer it to everyone? Alternatively, suppose that a school offers double-dose math for every single student and somehow convinces them to attend summer school, too. That, educational research suggests, would help students make up a total of 15 weeks of lost instruction. Even if every single student in a high-poverty school received both interventions, they would still face a seven-week gap.

Educational interventions have a way of being watered down in practice; many superintendents and school boards may tell themselves that they are taking a variety of steps to help students make up lost time. And yet most district plans are currently nowhere near commensurate with their students’ losses.

NSBA:

Independent Review Findings 

The review revealed the following:

• The September 2021 letter was “principally directed, reviewed, and approved by” NSBA’s former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven, who was responsible for both the “origin and substance of the letter.”
• Other than review by four Board Officers, the letter was not widely reviewed or approved within the organization, and the finalized letter was not disclosed to the full NSBA Board of Directors or NSBA members until after it was submitted. 
• The review points to collaboration between Mr. Slaven and the White House, but “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the Administration requested the letter.”

“The letter directly contradicts our core commitments to parent engagement, local control, and nonpartisanship,” said NSBA Executive Director & CEO John Heim. “The sentiments shared in the letter do not represent the views or position of the NSBA. The NSBA does not seek or advocate for federal law enforcement intervention at local school board meetings.”

“Sending the letter without full Board approval highlighted a concerning lack of internal process and accountability and harmed the mission of our organization,” added Dr. Heim. “While the events as recounted in the review are unfortunate, there are a number of important takeaways that will help our organization as we move forward.”

“As you saw in the report, a draft of the letter was shared with the Board Officers,” shared NSBA Board President Frank S. Henderson, Jr. “We regret that we did not review the letter more closely at the time. We apologized in 2021 and acknowledged that the letter should have never been sent—the sentiments shared do not represent the Board’s views or the views of the NSBA. We are focused now on implementing processes to ensure this does not happen again.”

Parents Defending Education emailed 47 state school board associations for comment on the NSBA’s Sept. 29, 2021, letter (Hawaii and Washington DC are not members of NSBA, and Virginia & Louisiana had already made public statements). We asked all organizations the following questions:

Ian Miller:

They kept schools open in defiance of teacher’s unions and politically motivated “experts” in the United States who advocated for a policy with zero benefits and tremendous harms.

Essentially, Sweden followed the actual science and not The Science™, with the requisite trademark and capital letters. That would include the guides that were prepared prior to the panic, inaccurate modeling, political motivations and crisis obsession took over.

Even last year it became readily apparent that no one in the media or public health establishment was willing to discuss the inarguable reality that Sweden’s results were no worse than many countries across the globe — and significantly better than many, many others. 

In general, comparisons have been mainly focused on COVID specific outcomes, but now the World Health Organization, fresh off demanding authoritarian powers over sovereign nations whenever they deem necessary, has released a new report on their estimates of excess mortality.

Tyler Cowen:

One of the most consequential statistic passed by without much noise.

India’s total fertility rate fell below population replacement rate to 2.0, with many states far below that level, thanks to effective campaigns around family planning & contraception.

Deanna Paul::

For decades, budding law students have had to stare down the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, a rigorous test of abilities in logic, analytical reasoning and reading comprehension.

An American Bar Association panel that accredits law schools is considering whether to make standardized tests optional for admission, a move that would follow a trend seen in undergraduate admissions offices and give schools more flexibility in how they select law students.

ABA officials have said little so far about their current deliberations. But in earlier discussions former leaders have suggested that standardized tests might deter institutions from adopting innovative ways to evaluate candidates.

Will Flanders

Unfortunately, Gov. Tony Evers rejected recent attempts to create a friendlier environment for charters. In April, he vetoed bills to expand the number of authorizers, make it easier for high-quality charter schools to expand, and lift the cap on the number of charter schools authorized by the College of Menominee Nation or the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College. These bills would have made it easier for more charter schools to open across the state, either under existing authorizers or a new authorizer. After charter school enrollment jumped by nearly 5,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, Evers’ vetoes ignore the demand for public charter schools by Wisconsin families.

Charter schools find themselves under attack not only in Wisconsin, but around the nation. Recent proposed rules from the Department of Education for charters would work to restrict supply, and decrease the ability of charters to compete on a level playing field with other public schools around the country. To remain a leader in education reform, Wisconsin must buck this trend. Let’s create an environment where innovative educators feel welcomed rather than shunned, and where students who aren’t having their needs met in their zone public school have all possible options for an alternative.

Apollo Surveys:

Our mission is to aggregate the views of academic experts in all fields, making them freely available to everyone. We have started working with academics to organize surveys. If you are interested in designing and organizing surveys for your field, please reach out via email or our Twitter account. We may be able to offer financial support, both to organizers and to academic societies they represent. Apollo Academic Surveys is a nonprofit organization.

Related: the death of expertise

COVID-19 Misinformation from Official Sources During the Pandemic

Keith Whittington:

In Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, a divided three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit put a shot across the bow of the administrative state. In an opinion written by Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, the court ruled against the SEC in a securities fraud enforcement case on several constitutional claims. The full opinion can be found here.

Petitioners raise several constitutional challenges tothe SEC enforcement proceedings. We agree withPetitioners that the proceedings suffered from threeindependent constitutional defects: (1) Petitioners were deprived of their constitutional right to a jurytrial; (2) Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the SEC by failing to provide itwith an intelligible principle by which to exercise the delegated power; and (3) statutory removal restrictions on SEC ALJs violate Article II.

A nondelegation ruling against the SEC is a big deal, but the actual argument is somewhat more modest. The claim is that Congress did not articulate an intelligible principle to guide the SEC on whether to bring enforcement actions in Article III courts or through administrative decision-making. Significant, but pretty fixable.

Stephen Miller:

Some observers today object to teaching dark material to high-school or even college students because they fear it will be psychologically damaging. In one case, I read about a Virginia mother’s push to get her son’s high school to ban a novel about slavery that gave him nightmares. I was struck that such a standard would preclude reading many outstanding literary works. The “Iliad,” “Macbeth,” “The Trial” and “1984” come immediately to mind. If literature can cause nightmares, so can history. “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” Stephen Dedalus famously says in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” “Ulysses” was published in 1922, four years after World War I ended.

It’s true that becoming educated means learning about, in the words of Matthew Arnold, “the best which has been thought and said.” It also requires learning about the dark passions that drive human beings. Young children shouldn’t be required to read disturbing literary or historical material, but it is important that older students learn what our world is really like.

Josh Zumbrun:

Earlier this year, the police in Eugene, Ore., said they had identified a serial killer who committed three murders from 1986 to 1988. The man, John Charles Bolsinger, had escaped attention so thoroughly for three decades because he had killed himself in 1988.

Investigators had stored DNA from the crimes, and recently plugged it into a genealogy database, zeroing in on Bolsinger by first finding his distant cousins. It is the latest in a growing string of cold cases solved by law enforcement using techniques developed by genealogy hobbyists. Take a DNA sample, identify a second cousin here, a third cousin there, and then use public records to reconstruct a killer’s family tree.

If you’re concerned about the privacy implications of this, you might think, “Well, I would never submit my DNA to one of those sites.”

Tori Gorman:

With no end to the war in sight, reconstruction costs on the horizon once the war ends, and a U.S. Treasury facing trillion-dollar deficits every year for the foreseeable future, our role in Ukraine raises important questions about the duration and extent of our commitment and how we finance it. 

What is our role? What is our goal?

When economic sanctions failed to prevent Russia’s invasion, the Biden Administration proceeded cautiously, eager to avoid direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed nation, especially since Ukraine was expected to fall within days or weeks. Initial aid packages were modest—$350 million on February 25, $800 million on March 16, $1 billion on March 24—and focused on non-provocative, defense-oriented materiel and humanitarian aid. President Biden’s words matched his deeds saying, “[T]he American people will be steadfast in our support of the people of Ukraine in the face of Putin’s immoral, unethical attacks on civilian populations.  We are united in our abhorrence of Putin’s depraved onslaught, and we’re going to continue to have their back as they fight for their freedom, their democracy, their very survival.  And we’re going to give Ukraine the arms to fight and defend themselves through all the difficult days ahead.” (March 16, 2022). President Biden was clear: This was Ukraine’s fight.

But in the nine weeks since the war began, the role of the United States has morphed into something bigger and more aggressive, in parallel with Ukraine’s success in battle. The current aid package for Ukraine is enormous—it exceeds the annual federal budget for at least seven different cabinet-level agencies—and provides a significant upgrade in weaponry: armored personnel carriers, long-range howitzers, lethal attack drones, and helicopters.

Dana Goldstein:

How Professor Calkins ended up influencing tens of millions of children is, in one sense, the story of education in America. Unlike many developed countries, the United States lacks a national curriculum or teacher-training standards. Local policies change constantly, as governors, school boards, mayors and superintendents flow in and out of jobs.

Amid this churn, a single charismatic thinker, backed by universities and publishing houses, can wield massive power over how and what children learn.

Some children seem to turn magically into readers, without deliberate phonics coaching. That has helped fuel a mistaken belief that reading is as natural as speaking. In fact, functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates that humans process written language letter by letter, sound by sound. Far from being automatic, reading requires a rewiring of the brain, which is primed by evolution to recognize faces, not words.

But that finding — by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists — is often disconnected from the work of training teachers and producing classroom materials.

Indeed, Professor Calkins, 70, is far more typical in the world of curriculum development: She is a teacher, a writer and a theorist.

But her influential 2001 book, “The Art of Teaching Reading,” warned about what she saw as the risks of too much sounding-it-out. She praised one teacher for avoiding “an intricate series of activities with phonics,” and argued that a simple way to build “lifelong readers” was to allow children to spend time with books they chose, regardless of content or difficulty.

For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing. This practice is one of the most controversial legacies of balanced literacy. It directs children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters.

Three-cueing is embedded in schools. Online, novice teachers can view thousands of how-to guides. In a 2020 video, a teacher tells children to use a picture to guess the word “car,” even though simple phonics make it decodable.

Professor Calkins said word-guessing would not be included in her revised curriculum. But in some ways, she is offering a hybrid of her old and new methods. In a sample of the new materials that she provided to The Times, teachers are told that students should first decode words using “slider power” — running their fingers under letters and sounding them out — but then check for mistakes using “picture power.”

Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while he found some of the revisions “encouraging,” he was concerned that “objectionable” concepts remain.

Ann Althouse notes a comment:

The top-rated comment is from someone who has taught in a NYC public school for 21 years where they use Calkin’s “Units of Study”: “The degree to which we have had to supplement them with other approaches and sources is immense. Most kids would not learn literacy with these curricula alone. There really has been a sort of cult of personality around Lucy Calkins. The professional developers she hires parrot her ideas and demeanor. Regardless of her claim that she wants to support and respect teachers, the message was always ‘Lucy knows best.'”

1. I spoke to a dozen educators and parents in Units of Study schools for this piece. Many could not be named. One thing notable in movements led by charisma is that adherents often develop more extreme views than leaders. For example… https://t.co/EgtKkryxle

— Dana Goldstein (@DanaGoldstein) May 22, 2022

We Madisonions have long tolerated disastrous reading results. To wit:2005:

What the superintendent is saying is that MMSD has closed the achievement gap associated with race now that roughly the same percentage of students in each subgroup score at the minimal level (limited achievement in reading, major misconceptions or gaps in knowledge and skills of reading). That’s far from the original goal of the board. We committed to helping all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level as demonstrated by all students in all subgroups scoring at proficient or advanced reading levels on the WRCT.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Susan Dunham:

The battlefield is still warm, following Canada’s war on the unvaccinated. The mandates have let up, and both sides stumble back into something that looks like the old normal — except that there is a fresh and present injury done to the people we tried to break. And no one wants to talk about it.

Only weeks ago, it was the admitted goal of our own leaders to make life unlivable for the unvaccinated. And as a deputized collective, we force-multiplied that pain, taking the fight into our families, friendships, and workplaces. Today, we face the hard truth that none of it was justified — and, in doing that, uncover a precious lesson.

It was a quick slide from righteousness to cruelty, and however much we might blame our leaders for the push, we’re accountable for stepping into the trap despite better judgement.

We knew that waning immunity put vast numbers of the fully vaccinated on par with the shrinking minority of unvaccinated, yet we marked them for special persecution. We said they hadn’t “done the right thing” by turning their bodies over to state care — even though we knew that principled opposition to such a thing is priceless in any circumstance. And we truly let ourselves believe that going into another ineffectual lockdown would be their fault, not the fault of toxic policy.

And so it was by the wilful ignorance of science, civics, and politics that we squeezed the unvaccinated to the degree that we did.

Becky Dernbach:

The announcement went out to media outlets and school staff in the predawn hours of Friday, March 25: The three-week Minneapolis teachers strike was nearly over. District officials had reached a tentative deal with the union. The union hailed the “historic agreements” and “major gains.”

At a press conference at district headquarters a few hours later, school officials seemed elated to welcome students back to class. 

But a few miles away, at the Get Down Coffee Company near Patrick Henry High School, English teacher Nafeesah Muhammad and some of her Henry colleagues had a different story to tell about the strike. 

I joined the Henry teachers in a circle of couches at the coffee shop. Brightly colored records lined the walls, and R&B played from the loudspeakers.

NACUBO:

Average private college and university tuition discount rates continue to climb—but a new analysis from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) shows correlation between the longstanding financial aid strategy and admissions selectivity.

In the 2021 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study, 359 private, nonprofit colleges and universities reported an estimated 54.5 percent average institutional tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time, first-year students in 2020-21 and 49 percent for all undergraduates—both record highs. By providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships, these institutions forgo about half the revenue they otherwise would collect if they charged all students the tuition and fee sticker price.

Chris Rickert:

or the second time in less than two weeks, the Madison School District is being sued over its response to a public records request.

The conservative Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, or WILL, filed suit Thursday asking a judge to order the district to release staff training materials entitled “LGBTQA+ 101.”

LGBTQA+ typically refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and asexual individuals and groups. The + refers to “the limitless sexual orientations and gender identities used by members of our community,” according to the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, which has conducted trainings with the school district in the past.

The suit comes after the district’s teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., filed suit May 9 alleging the district violated Wisconsin’s public records law by failing to fulfill a Nov. 3 records request for information on staff benefits and contracts.

This.Gaslight.MUST.End.

Each parent has a responsibility to be an active partner in their child’s education, BUT…

Children on the receiving end of any teachers’ #dysteachia are victims of teaching malpractice and #FAPEdenied.#ScienceofReading #OrtonGillingham @Moms4FAPE pic.twitter.com/HBcPLyt1Gn

— Marilyn Muller ~ #LiteracyIsEquity (@1in5advocacy) July 21, 2021

Very interesting study from Cornell. Mandatory masking, mandatory student vaccination, required PCR tests once/wk, isolation and contact tracing within hours of positive test result.

Mask mandates failed (go figure) and 98.6% of cases were breakthroughs.https://t.co/YBcu8PIyNM

— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) May 21, 2022

JAMA paper.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. pic.twitter.com/RY2ATTA40b

— John Robb (@johnrobb) May 19, 2022

David Ong:

We investigate the contribution of college admissions to the labor market beauty premium. We sampled 1800 social media profiles of students from universities ranked from 1 to 200 in China and the US. Chinese universities use standardized test scores for admissions. US universities use also extracurricular activities. Consistent with beauty-blind admissions, alumni’s beauty is uncorrelated with the rank of the school they attended in China. In the US, White men who attended high-ranked schools are better looking, especially attendees of private schools. A one percentage point increase in beauty rank corresponds to a half-point increase in the school rank.

Evelyn douek & Genevieve Lakier

There are two main genres of content moderation controversy. In the first, a platform takes down a post. Then there are the inevitable screams of “First Amendment!!” and protests that such infringements on speech are downright un-American. This is followed by others rolling their eyes, exasperated at the need to remind people yet again that the First Amendment only applies to the government and that private companies are free to moderate speech as they see fit, dummies! Eventually the controversy dies down. … Until a platform takes down another high-profile post. Then it’s rinse and repeat.

In the second genre of content moderation controversy, platforms do not take down a high-profile controversial post. The post sits there while commentators and politicians erupt into a furor and lambast the platforms for failing to remove such harmful speech. The First Amendment is then invoked in another way. The speech is obviously protected, say critics, and it would be un-American to suggest otherwise! Don’t you remember that the First Amendment is exceptional and extraordinary in its protection for the thought we hate?

What unites both genres of controversy is the tendency of many of those who participate to invoke the First Amendment as a conversation-ending and self-evident trump card. But these invocations often make two false assumptions about First Amendment law: first, that First Amendment precedents are unambiguous in how they apply; second, that First Amendment rules are set in stone. But neither of these assumptions holds. The First Amendment—in all cases, but especially with respect to new technologies—is anything but clear or fixed. As we will show in this series of blog posts, neither the past nor the future of the First Amendment, nor how it will apply to the internet, are certain. The result is a public debate that rests on an oversimplified understanding of what the First Amendment is and can do.

Mordechai Levy-Eichel and Daniel Scheinerman

There’s an old, self-deprecating Jewish joke about our collective differences. A French student, a German student, an American student, and a Jewish student are each asked to write a paper on the elephant. The French student, of course, writes about the elephant’s sex life; the German one composes a thick tome entitled “Prologue to a Comprehensive Bibliography on the Classification of the Pachyderm”; the American writes about how to make bigger and better elephants; and the Jewish student, as ever, writes about “The Elephant and the Jewish Question.” While neither of the authors of this review essay is especially fond of playing the Jew, certain works — not so much by their focus on Jews, but rather by their omission and marginalization of them — prompt one to sit up and wonder: Wait, just where are the Jews? And why is it so hard to count well in the first place — and not just with regard to Jews — when it comes to the study of literature and the humanities?

Isabel Coles:

The first entry in Tymofiy Zozulia’s war diary is dated March 12, days after Russian forces occupied this village east of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. By then, his mother and stepfather were dead, but the 12-year-old had yet to discover the truth.

“For four days my brother Serafim and I are staying with our auntie,” Tymofiy wrote in a blue notebook. “We often went to hide in their neighbor’s cellar. I have lost count of how many times we went to the cellar but that’s OK. My mom and [stepfather] Sirozha have been stuck in Kyiv since last week.”

For Tymofiy, the war began when he returned from school on Feb. 23 and learned he would stay home the next day. His mother, Yuliya Vashchenko, and her partner, Serhiy Yesypenko—nicknamed Sirozha—instructed him to switch off the lights early that evening, he recalled.

In the dark, he wrote in his diary before trying to sleep, but his mind was racing. “I had millions of questions,” he said. “The uncertainty was killing me.”

Hannah Natanson and Laura Vozzella

“We are not serving all of Virginia’s children and we must,” Youngkin said at a news conference in Richmond, where he and his education team presented the report. “We want to be the best in education. We should be the best in education. And the data that is compiled and shared with you today suggests that we have a lot of work to do to be the best.”

A Washington Post analysis of the report, though, suggests its use of data is misleading, and shows Virginia students performed at least as well as or better than students nationwide over the past several years. And some educators and politicians took immediate exception to the report Thursday, criticizing its presentation and analysis of student test scores.

Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) said in a statement: “To accuse Virginia’s education system of failure is an outright lie, supported by cherry-picked data and warped perspective.”

Although Youngkin has rejected equity initiatives in education and called “equity” a “very confusing word,” he promised on Thursday to address racial and socioeconomic performance gaps by providing more funding for school facilities, raises for teachers, and innovation in early childhood and literacy programs — all things expected to be included in the two-year state budget that the General Assembly must finalize before July 1. And he vowed to employ the best teachers to serve the students most in need.

The Education Department report also outlines steps to improve students’ academic skills, including developing an improved in-state assessment system, revising Virginia’s school accreditation standards and hiring reading specialists to improve student literacy.

At Thursday’s news conference, Virginia’s top education officials condemned education policy decisions made by previous administrations, especially a 2017 revision of Virginia accreditation standards that allowed students’ academic progress to count toward accreditation along with their test scores. Education Secretary Aimee Guidera said such initiatives were part of a misguided push for equity.

“There was a general culture of lowering expectations,” Guidera said. “What happened before was we took our eye off the ball in the state of Virginia.”

Notes on mediocrity.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

This is the first page of Paul Ehrlich’s book ‘The Population Bomb’, published in 1968.
The book sold millions of copies and was taken very seriously.

Extraordinary how confident Ehrlich was when making these extremely dark predictions. pic.twitter.com/2wHTLo3vXu

— Max Roser (@MaxCRoser) May 20, 2022

Tom Knighton:

Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk a bit about Kirkland Middle School in Kirkland, Washington. It seems that some hinky stuff went on there with some “diversity” education the students received.

Kirkland Middle School (KiMS) used wholly unsubstantiated claims about hate speech on campus to justify left-wing equity training for kids. What’s worse, the school appears to have cooked up data to justify the training after it had already begun. The incorrect data may have been used to address the complaints of two parents who questioned the hate speech claims.

According to emails shared with the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH, KiMS principal Niki Cassaro alleged there was “an increase in the use of racial and identity slurs.” She said the incidents were occurring across all grade levels and were “pervasive rather than a single isolated incident.” Consequently, the school conducted student training to discuss the importance of diversity and the dangers of hate speech and slurs. The district, through a spokesperson, confirmed the training came “in response to a trend” about biased behavior.

Except, after a couple of parents pressed the issue, it turns out there’s little to no evidence of there being any such trend.

Paul Thacker:

Beginning last week, I sent the NIH a series of questions asking them to confirm how many referrals they had sent to the Inspector General about EcoHealth Alliance. Hill sources had told me that the NIH had sent the IG several referrals about EcoHeatlh Alliance, although the exact number is unknown. I also asked NIH to explain if the Inspector General had then contacted NIH for further information, or if the referrals were ignored.

“NIH does not comment on OIG investigations,” emailed an NIH spokesperson.

I then pointed out that it was public knowledge that the NIH had sent 51 criminal referrals to the IG and that I just needed to know how many specifically involved EcoHealth Alliance. I also asked NIH if they were still working with the FBI to investigate EcoHealth Alliance. The Intercept had discovered an email that showed the NIH was working with the FBI to investigate EcoHealth Alliance’s grants.

George Will:

Since then, Heriot and Mulder say, the court has not explained “why, alone among government instrumentalities, public colleges and universities should be exempt from the strong presumption against racially discriminatory laws and policies (or why, alone among industries, private colleges and universities should be exempt).” Research into schools’ practices shows that race-based admissions are the product not of empirical educational research but “of political winds from both inside and outside each institution,” and are intended to keep campus peace and attract funds.

The authors correctly say, “The quality of a college education is a difficult thing to judge, especially in the short run,” so education is “prone to fads,” especially politically fashionable ones. Today’s fad — racial monomania — deepens the contradictory nature of the argument for the constitutionality of race-based admissions: Preferences supposedly improve the diversity pertinent to education — diversity of views — yet also dissolve stereotypes about race being a reliable indicator of mentalities.

Presenting “diversity” as an educational benefit for all students is academia’s way of justifying racial discrimination actually intended for aims that the Supreme Court has not said justify such discrimination — “social justice,” or compensation for past injuries. As Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who supports affirmative action, writes, many advocates of racial preferences in the name of diversity’s benefits (“only a contingent, pedagogical hypothesis”) “would rightly defend affirmative action even if social science demonstrated uncontrovertibly that diversity (or its absence) has no effect (or even a negative effect) on the learning environment.”

Lori Lowenthal Marcus and Jesse M. Fried:

A group of Jewish public-school parents and teachers filed a federal lawsuit Thursday challenging the adoption of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist curricular materials in Los Angeles public schools.

Last year California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring public-school students in the state to complete a course in ethnic studies to graduate from high school. He said it was needed because “students deserve to see themselves in their studies, and they must understand our nation’s full history if we expect them to one day build a more just society.” But the ethnic-studies movement has never been about representation or justice. A creature of 1960s radical left-wing activism, ethnic studies was from the start about attacking the U.S., capitalism and Zionism.

Advocates—including teachers union officials, public-school teachers and other ideologues—have formed the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, through which they hope to influence the teaching of ethnic studies in the state. The consortium, which disseminates teaching materials lifted directly from radical anti-Israel websites, rejects the idea that all cultures should be studied. It asserts that ethnic studies is about only four groups: Native Americans, black Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, and Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders. That last group includes Arabs from the Middle East—but not Jews, who’ve lived in that same region for millennia.

Neil Harrison and Jeffrey Sachs:

This lack of an independent and transparent US-based scientific investigation has had four highly adverse consequences. First, public trust in the ability of US scientific institutions to govern the activities of US science in a responsible manner has been shaken. Second, the investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has become politicized within the US Congress (5); as a result, the inception of an independent and transparent investigation has been obstructed and delayed. Third, US researchers with deep knowledge of the possibilities of a laboratory-associated incident have not been enabled to share their expertise effectively. Fourth, the failure of NIH, one of the main funders of the US–China collaborative work, to facilitate the investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (4) has fostered distrust regarding US biodefense research activities.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Michael J. Petrilli

The connection between the excellence gap and affirmative action should be obvious. College administrators would not have to twist themselves into knots to find ways to admit more Black, Hispanic, and low-income students into highly selective institutions were it not for the pervasiveness of the excellence gap.

Consider: In 2015–16, the most recent year for which we have national data, Black, Hispanic, and poor students remained underrepresented in America’s “very selective”[1] universities—this despite widespread use of various forms of affirmative action.

Commentary.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Jackson Walker:

There has been no improvement in the UW-Madison campus climate over the last six years despite the public university pouring millions of dollars into programs and staff positions to support diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Students of color, students with disabilities, nonbinary students, transgender students, and other LGBTQ+ students responded less positively than their counterparts” when rating whether they feel welcome, safe and respected, according to the results of a recently released campus climate survey.

“The gap in reported perceptions between these students and other students did not change between 2016 and 2021,” the survey found.

Outgoing Chancellor Rebecca Blank said the survey results were disappointing and she hopes her replacement can do a better job on diversity.

“It’s clear that there do remain gaps between more marginalized groups and their degree of satisfaction and their sense of belonging and comfort on this campus,” Blank said during her final press conference on campus May 11.

“I think we’ve done a number of things that have helped move the university forward, but as others have noted, we are a predominantly white institution in a predominantly white state and this is work that is going to be ongoing for a long time.”

Ann Althouse

Experts, eh? Would those be left-wing experts? Who thought it was a good idea to use the government to help “government, the media and educational bodies” “understand” how political rhetoric works? Taylor Lorenz is openly stating that the Disinformation Governance Board was supposed to go after the right wing! 

Lorenz goes on to say that the right followed its standard methodology to go after Jankowicz: 

Jankowicz’s case is a perfect example of this system at work, said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They try to define people by these single, decontextualized moments,” Brooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few TikTok videos, or one or two comments out of thousands of public appearances. They fixate on these small instances and they define this villain.”…

“The irony is that Nina’s role was to come up with strategies for the department to counter this type of campaign, and now they’ve just succumbed to it themselves,” said one Hill staffer with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the issue. “They didn’t even fight, they just rolled over.”

I think they didn’t fight because they saw they’d only be digging a bigger hole for themselves. It is ironic, but that makes it funny. And it’s a great thing to be in a position to laugh at what happened.

Adam Andrzejewski

Musk also tweeted “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

We agree, so OpenTheBooks.com got to work. We searched federal spending to find that nine of the 26 organizations collected about $10.5 million in federal funds over the past few years.

Black Lives Matter was one of them, receiving $19,000 in grants from the Small Business Administration in 2020 and $11,300 in forgivable SBA loans in 2020. However, the organization was collecting these funds at the same time that some of their leaders were encouraging protests that looted small businesses.

The other organizations that received federal funding are:

• Friends of the Earth – $1.2 million grant in 2020
• GLAAD – $7,650 grants in 2019 and 2020 and $2 million in forgivable loans from the SBA in 2020 and 2021
• Media Matters for America – $1.1 millionforgivable SBA loan in 2020
• MediaJustice (formerly Center for Media Justice) – $210,255 forgivable SBA loan in 2020
• NARAL Pro-Choice America – $936,350forgivable SBA loan in 2020
• National Hispanic Media Coalition – $194,789 in two forgivable SBA loans in 2020 and 2021
• Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice – $195,722 in three forgivable SBA loans in 2020 and 2021
• Union of Concerned Scientists – $4.5 millionin a forgivable SBA loan in 2020

Christopher Rufo:

I have obtained videos from a publicly accessible website that show that the conference went far beyond the school district’s euphemism about “issues facing the trans community.” The event included sessions on topics such as “The Adolescent Pathway: Preparing Young People for Gender-Affirming Care,” “Bigger Dick Energy: Life After Masculinizing [Gender Reassignment Surgery],” “Prosthetics for Sex,” “The Ins and Outs of Masturbation Sleeves,” and “Trans Sex: Banging Beyond Binaries.” The conference attendees included educators, activists, adults, and adolescents. There were graphic sessions on prosthetic penises, masturbation toys, and artificial ejaculation devices, which some hosts explicitly promoted to minors. As one session host explained, “there’s no age limit, because I feel like everybody should be able to access certain information.”

The conference began with presentations promoting puberty blockers, hormone treatments, breast removals, and genital surgeries. In one session, “The Adolescent Pathway Preparing Young People for Gender-Affirming Care,” Dr. Scott Mosser, the principal at the Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, explained that he has performed “over two thousand top surgeries,” which involve removing girls’ breasts, and that there is no age limit for beginning the “gender journey.” “I do not have a minimum age of any sort in my practice,” he said, explaining that he would be willing to consult with children as young as ten years old with parental consent. In another session open to children, “Gender-Affirming Masculine and Feminizing Hormones for Adolescents and Adults,” Dane Menkin, divisional director of LGBTQ services at Main Line Health, endorsed treatments ranging from puberty-blocking hormones to manual breast-binding for “masculinizing” adolescent girls. “I’m a strong proponent that you can bind for as many hours a day as you can tolerate binding,” he said.

Other presentations at the Trans Wellness Conference involved explicit sexual themes. Two female-to-male trans activists, Kofi Opam, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, and Sami Brussels, a medical illustrator, hosted a presentation called “Bigger Dick Energy,” in which they explained the process of phalloplasty and using an artificial penis for “navigating cruising and anonymous/casual sex life.” Chase Ross, a transgender activist and YouTuber, hosted a series of sessions on “packers,” “masturbation sleeves,” and “prosthetics for sex,” demonstrating various devices from his collection of more than 500 genital prosthetics. “I have tried and touched many dicks, right—prosthetics, real dicks, all dicks. This is one of the most realistic feeling in terms of like the inside of a penis,” he said during one demonstration. “It’s a big boy, this is, like, gigantic. Alright, give me two hours alone and I’ll get this in my butt,” he said during another.

David Blaska:

If you doubt that the Woke Wobblies have taken over Madison’s public schools, we submit the following: School board president Ali Muldrow and immediate past member Ananda Mirilli are accusing Ismael Ozanne, a black man, of racism most foul.

They want him to resign (!!!) because police arrested Freedom Inc. spokesperson Jessica Williams for threatening the district attorney during a courtroom trial. (Freedom Inc. apologists at The Capital Times have more.) Freedom Inc. is the BLM affiliate that harassed parents, taxpayers, and (ultimately) elected officials to expel school resource officers on the grounds that the four minority-race police were racist. Ironically, minority students are disproportionately victims of the resultant classroom chaos.

Two summers ago, the Freedom Inc. mob hit the school board president at the time, Gloria Reyes — an hispanic, at her residence, in late evening. Bullhorns blasted F-bombs; her yard was littered with F-bombed signage. One’s home should be off-limits. Holds for abortion protesters, as well. So, good on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing legislation prohibiting the practice. The Werkes makes its living off the First Amendment, but protestors do not lack for public venues, physical and virtual. One more point: physical threats are not protest.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Omar Abdel-Baqui:

A Duke University student said she is taking “full responsibility” for parts of her commencement speech that included passages similar to those in a Harvard University graduation speech years ago, prompting a university probe.

Undergraduate commencement speaker Priya Parkash spoke to her fellow classmates at Duke’s graduation ceremony on Sunday. The following day the Duke Chronicle—the university’s student newspaper—reported that several passages of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to that of a Harvard speech in 2014 given by then-student Sarah Abushaar.

Duke is investigating the matter, a spokesman said. Ms. Parkash said she would fully cooperate with the university’s probe.

She said she incorporated ideas for passages provided by friends without researching if they had been used previously. Ms. Parkash said she didn’t find out until the day after the speech that those passages had come from the speech given at Harvard, which she said she hadn’t previously seen.

By Shawn Hubler

All together, America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey. State enrollment figures show no sign of a rebound to the previous national levels any time soon.

A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen, particularly in cities. But the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed.

No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.

Now educators and school officials are confronting a potentially harsh future of lasting setbacks in learning, hardened inequities in education and smaller budgets accompanying smaller student populations.

“This has been a seismic hit to public education,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “Student outcomes are low. Habits have been broken. School finances are really shaken. We shouldn’t think that this is going to be like a rubber band that bounces back to where it was before.”

https://t.co/VzjVP0XigW pic.twitter.com/Qfe3qodyzl

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) May 18, 2022

In some states where schools eschewed remote instruction — Florida, for instance — enrollment has not only rebounded, but remains robust. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, concluded last month that remote instruction was a major driver around the country, with enrollment falling most in districts most likely to have delayed their return to in-person classrooms.

Private schools have also seen some gains in enrollment. Federal head counts have not yet been released, but both the National Association of Independent Schools and the National Catholic Educational Association have reported increases that total about 73,000 K-12 students during the past two years.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Helen Dale

America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one.

State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s ability to achieve policy goals in reference to specific aims, collect taxes, uphold law and order, and provide public goods. Its absence at the extremes is terrifying, and often used to illustrate things like “fragile states” or “failed states.” However, denoting calamitous governance in the developing world is not its only value. State capacity allows one to draw distinctions at varying levels of granularity between developed countries, and is especially salient when it comes to healthcare, policing, and immigration. It has a knock-on effect in the private sector, too, as business responds to government in administrative kind.

Think, for example, of Covid-19. The most reliable metric—if you wish to compare different countries’ responses to the pandemic—is excess deaths per 100,000 people over the relevant period. That is, count how many extra people died beyond the pre-pandemic mortality rate on a country-by-country basis. For the sake of argument, drop the five countries leading this grim pack. Four of them are developing countries, and the fifth is Russia, which while developed, is both an autocracy and suffers from chronic low state capacity.

At the other end of the scale, ignore China, too. It may be lying about its success or, more plausibly, may have achieved it by dint of being an authoritarian state with high state capacity(notably, the latest round of draconian lockdowns in Shanghai commenced after the WHO collated that data).

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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:

Officials outlined a total of $28 million in additional costs to the School Board Monday night. Of that, $11 million is related to high inflation, $9 million is for additional mechanical and electrical work and $8 million for additional environmental projects.

MMSD chief financial officer Ross MacPherson said those costs are likely to be split over the next three years as the referendum construction projects play out. MacPherson suggested a mix of funds could help cover the additional costs, including the future closure of a tax incremental financing district.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Bruno Sauce, Magnus Liebherr, Nicholas Judd & Torkel Klingberg

Digital media defines modern childhood, but its cognitive effects are unclear and hotly debated. We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status. We analyzed 9855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.17), but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming. Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.12), contrary to prior research on the effect of watching TV. Although, in a posthoc analysis, this was not significant if parental education (instead of SES) was controlled for. Broadly, our results are in line with research on the malleability of cognitive abilities from environmental factors, such as cognitive training and the Flynn effect.

Todd Rokita, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Kulldorff;

The Office of the Surgeon General requested information on the prevalence of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of such misinformation on the U.S. public health system in order to be better prepared to respond to a future public health crisis.
We agree that misinformation has been a major problem during the pandemic. The spread of inaccurate scientific information has made it difficult for the public to make the right decisions to protect themselves, their families, and their communities from COVID-19 and the collateral public health damage arising from the pandemic countermeasures. As such, the disinformation has led to great harm in the lives and livelihoods of Americans. We submit the following examples of disinformation from the CDC and other health organizations that have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.

1 Overcounting COVID-19: The official CDC numbers for COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations are inaccurate. The official tallies include many people who have died with rather than from COVID-19. CDC has not distinguished deaths where COVID-19 was the primary cause of death, where COVID-19 was a contributing cause of death, or where the death was entirely unrelated to COVID-19, but they incidentally tested positive.

There are three reasons for this problem. (i) The counting of COVID-19 cases and deaths is unlike the way that public health counts the incidence and mortality caused by other diseases; physicians have been advised to fill out death certificates to privilege COVID-19 as a proximal cause, even when the medical facts suggest otherwise.1 (ii) The population-wide testing to identify asymptomatic individuals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is unprecedented in human history. (iii) Although it would have been easy, CDC has not conducted random national surveys of medical charts to determine what proportion of reported COVID-19 deaths were truly due to COVID-19. Ex-post audits of death certificates and medical records in

Santa Clara County2 and Alameda County3, California, for instance, found that in ~25% of death certificates in which COVID-19 was labeled as the primary cause of death, other causes of death were more likely. The peer-reviewed literature confirms that COVID-19 is overcounted in other developed countries. Ex post audits of death certificates should be conducted to establish an accurate death count from COVID-19.

2 Questioning Natural Immunity: There has been consistent questioning and denying of natural immunity after COVID-19 recovery. Using seriously flawed studies, CDC falsely claimed that natural immunity is worse than vaccine acquired immunity.4 In October 2020, the CDC director published a “memorandum” in The Lancet, questioning natural immunity.5 Most critically, by mandating vaccination for people who have recovered from COVID-19, the government, corporations, and universities de facto deny natural immunity.

For scientists, this has been the most surprising disinformation. We have known about natural immunity since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC; other coronaviruses generate natural immunity; and throughout the pandemic, we knew that the COVID-19 recovered have good natural immunity if and when they get exposed the next time. That is, six months after the start of the pandemic, we had epidemiological evidence that natural immunity lasts at least six months; a year into the pandemic, we knew that natural immunity lasted at least one year, and so on. 6

3 COVID-19 Vaccines Prevent Transmission: The CDC director and other health officials falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine prevents the transmission of COVID-19 to others.7 This was also the rationale for vaccine mandates and passports — to prevent the spread of the virus to others. At the time, we did not know, and it turned out to be wrong.8 When the COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use, the manufacturers presented randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that showed that the vaccines reduced symptomatic disease. The trials were not designed to determine whether they could also limit transmission or prevent death, even though they could have been designed to do so9. As it turned out, vaccinated individuals spread the disease to others10. While it was unfortunate that the RCTs were not designed to answer the disease transmission question, it is irresponsible for public health officials to claim that they did when the RCTs did not even attempt to answer that question.

Felicia Fonseca

Boarding school survivors also might be hesitant to recount the painful past and trust a government whose policies were to eradicate tribes and, later, assimilate them under the veil of education. Some have welcomed the opportunity to share their stories for the first time.

Haaland, the first and only Native American Cabinet secretary, has the support of President Joe Biden to investigate further. Congress has provided the Interior Department with $7 million for its work on the next phase of the report, which will focus on burial sites, and identifying Native children and their ages. Haaland also said a year-long tour would seek to gather stories of boarding school survivors for an oral history collection. 

A bill that’s previously been introduced in Congress to create a truth and healing commission on boarding schools got its first hearing Thursday. It’s sponsored by two Native American U.S. representatives — Democrat Sharice Davids of Kansas, who is Ho-Chunk, and Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is Chickasaw.

Arian Campo-Flores:

The databases—assembled by research companies such as Ebsco Information Services and Gale, part of Cengage Group—are collections of newspaper, magazine and journal articles, as well as ebooks and other resources. State agencies, libraries and school districts typically contract with the companies to make the databases available to students, who can access them in class as well as through local libraries and online accounts.

Conservative parents’ groups have mounted various challenges to the databases since at least the mid-2010s. The rise of parents’ rights groups in the past few years, focused on issues of race and gender in school curricula and classroom discussion, has added fuel to the database effort.

At least eight states—most dominated by Republicans—including Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah, passed or considered database legislation in the past year, according to EveryLibrary, an advocacy organization opposed to the measures.

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed into law this week a bill passed by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature that would require companies to verify that their databases block access to obscene content and prevent users from viewing material harmful to minors, as defined under current law. School districts could withhold payment to a database provider if it failed to do so, under the bill.

Richard Phelps:

Sincere scholars work to expand society’s knowledge and understanding. They cite all the relevant research, even that produced by those they disagree with or personally dislike. They encourage debate. For the sincere scholar, a citation is a responsibility, and proper and thorough citations demonstrate research quality.

For the strategic scholar, a citation is an asset to be used career-advantageously. As a certain former governor of the State of Illinois once said about his responsibility to fill an open US senate position, “I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden. I’m not just giving it up for (expletive) nothing.”

Strategic scholars cite the work of their friends, working colleagues, those they agree with, and those who reference them. Indeed, the most successful career-strategic scholars operate in groups of like-minded colleagues in which they promote each other’s careers together—citation cartels. They draw attention to that other work which supports their own and their careers.

Career-strategic scholars do not cite the work of those outside their group, unless they must because that other work is so well known their slight would be widely noticed. Debates are generally avoided with those outside one’s cartel.

Given the contrasting dynamics, over time the work of career-strategic scholars will attract more attention, produce better scholarly metrics which, in turn, leads to better employment outcomes and higher status. The work of sincere scholars, unreferenced by the career-strategic scholars now leading their professions, drifts into the internet age’s vast sea of ignored information.

Wall Street Journal:

Parents continue to fight for a say in their children’s education, often against hostile administrators. Three cheers, then, for Ohio mother Ashley Ryder for successfully challenging a policy that limited what parents could say at school board meetings.

Ms. Ryder sued the Big Walnut Local School District Board of Education in an Ohio federal court in March. She said it had violated the First Amendment with a policy that allows the presiding officer at school board meetings to “interrupt, warn, or terminate” any public statements he deems “abusive,” “personally directed” or “antagonistic.” In late April the board settled with Ms. Ryder and agreed to end its restrictions on speech.

Really interesting data here on how market-based competition in health care reduces delivery costs. From 1998-2021, medical care costs are + 132%, hospital costs are +230%. https://t.co/WKHqBEJzam

— Scott Kupor (@skupor) May 15, 2022

Nevil Gibson:

The most profound will be the overall drop in per capita GDP, reinforced by likely lowered life expectancy, inadequate treatment of screening and other diseases, delayed or abandoned vaccinations for polio, measles and diphtheria, mental health problems and self-harm, and adverse effects on educational outcomes.

All are what an economist would call the opportunity cost of closing much of the economy and building a government debt mountain for future generations that has ballooned from $57 billion in 2019 to an estimated $200b in 2023. (This  has since been revised downward to a debt of $170b or 40% of GDP.) 

Behavioural economics explains the failure to incorporate human response factors into the epidemiological models on which the lockdowns were based. Humans tend to focus on losses that are immediately in front of them rather than those that are more diffuse and dispersed in the background, even when they are larger.

Cass Sunstein:

The administrative state has been with us since the founding. But much of modern government can be traced to the 1930s, when in response to the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt created a host of new agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Social Security Administration. These agencies exercise a great deal of discretion, and they affect the lives of millions of Americans every day. (They also have international influence.) They were born in a period of enthusiasm for technical expertise: Roosevelt and his New Dealers believed in the rule of law, but they did not believe in the rule of courts; they wanted to give authority to specialists.

NEW: Students at Yale Law School are responding to Alito’s leaked opinion with calls to accost their conservative classmates through “unrelenting daily confrontation” and toss the Constitution by the wayside.

We’ve got the screenshots.🧵https://t.co/T9cddLgltS

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) May 14, 2022

Irwin Collier:

ANSWER ALL FIVE QUESTIONS: The first two questions should take no more than ten or twenty minutes each, allowing at least forty-five minutes each for the last three.

1. The following entry was submitted to the PUNCH “Toby competition” calling for an “unpleasing codicil to a will,” and received a runner-up award in the issue of July 6, 1960:

To my daughter, Judith Georgina Margaret, I leave my house, land and all my worldly possessions therein on the condition that it should be run as either an hotel, a college for gardeners or a rest-house for disappointed Beatniks.

My cash and capital are to be put into a trust. My widow, three daughters and nine grandchildren will each have an equal share in the trust. No income or capital can be drawn from the trust until the will is contested by a legatee. If this happens, the contesting legatee will lose his share to the others. If the others pay compensation for this loss, all capital will go untied to a charity.

Describe and discuss in game-theoretical terms the arrangement described in the second paragraph. Draw a matrix to represent it. (For purposes of the matrix, you may reduce the number of legatees to two.) Include, with respect to the two-person matrix, any pertinent references to a “solution,” “equilibrium point,” dominant or dominated strategies, or “efficiency” of outcome.

Paul Hill & Kate Destler:

The solutions will require new modes of spending, performance measurement, and school oversight, as well as much greater flexibility in teacher hiring, training, and work. Superintendents and school-board leaders can’t make these changes all by themselves. They’ll need serious help and new thinking from governors, state legislators, the federal government, and philanthropy.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Alan Borsuk:

Amidzich and Maggy Olson, director of equity and instruction for the district, said that they told all involved that, in fact, the material being taught would have more depth and that a wider range of students would bring additional and good ideas to classrooms. They said they were raising the floor, but they were also raising the ceiling.

The results so far? Kim Amidzich, superintendent of the district in the southern suburbs, said the number of students succeeding in getting honors marks on their transcripts is up. And all students are getting challenging academic work that research has shown prepares them better for college or other opportunities beyond high school.

Brian Lopez:

But more GOP involvement in local politics may not be the only effect of Saturday’s elections. Experts believe campaigning on culture wars is a winning strategy for the GOP. And, they say, it will embolden Republicans to continue passing laws based on political wedge issues during next year’s legislative session.

“The state party wants to continue to ride this wave,” said Rebecca Deen, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Teachers and public education experts have repeatedly pointed out that critical race theory — a university-level concept that examines how racism shapes laws and policies — is not taught in K-12 public schools. And many of the books targeted for removal from school libraries in recent months tell the stories of LGBTQ characters and people of color.

But Texas Republicans are following a national playbook of feeding off conservative parents’ fears that “critical race theory” is being taught in public schools and children are being exposed to obscene sexual content.

Conservative school board candidates saw victories across the state, but most notably, they won big in Tarrant County, which has been moving away from its perch as one of America’s reddest urban counties. The county had 10 candidates win their races with the backing of the conservative Patriot Mobile Action PAC, which poured half a million dollars into the races.

Toby Green:

Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment inNovember 2021.

Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.

Another example of Gates’s eye for detail is his discussion of Remdesivir, which was approved as “Standard of Care” for Covid in the US by the Federal Drug Agency. Again, like Molnupiravir, much of the funding and institutional support for the drug originally came from the US government. Remdesivir was the baby of the drug company Gilead.

Gates describes how one study showed that “it may have a major impact in patients who aren’t yet sick enough to be in the hospital”. But other details are ignored. He doesn’t tell us that in an earlier, peer-reviewed study from China, published in the Lancet in May 2020, “Remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits”, and that the trial was “stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early”. All the same, the profits were good: while the drug cost Gilead just US$10per dose to manufacture, it was being retailed to US taxpayers at US$3,120.

Maybe Gates knows nothing about the Lancet study. Perhaps he doesn’t know that in both of these cases, public investment has funded enormous private profits — and that in the case of one of the drugs, there’s little evidence that this was to any benefit. He’s just a software engineer after all. 

For Gates, technology really does provide all the answers, as it certainly has in his own life. He believes humanity belongs online: “once people learn the digital approach, they generally stick to it”. Post-Covid, he envisages a world of flexible working, in which regular guys like him with large mansions and decent living space can languidly choose between going into the office on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The problem with Gates’s digital utopia — full of virtual spaces where 3D avatars attend business meetings — is that I suspect many of us will not want to live in it.

Josh Gerstein:

Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving sitting member of the Supreme Court, declared Friday that the publication of a draft majority opinion on abortion has permanently damaged trust within the nation’s highest court and is a symptom of a broader decline in America’s institutions.

When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder,” Thomas said. “It’s kind of like infidelity that you can explain it, but you can’t undo it.”

“If someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone … you would say: ‘That’s impossible. No one would ever do that,’” the justice said. “That was verboten. It was beyond anyone’s understanding or at least anyone’s imagination.”

Speaking at the Old Parkland Conference, Thomas did not criticize any of his colleagues by name, but he indicated that the atmosphere on the court now is different than it was a few years ago.

“This is not the court of that era,” said Thomas, who was confirmed in 1991. “I sat with Ruth Ginsburg for almost 30 years and she was actually an easy colleague to deal with. … We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.”

At times, Thomas seemed to suggest that a fellow justice or law clerk might be responsible for the disclosure.

“Anybody who would, for example, have an attitude to leak documents, that is your general attitude, that is your future on the bench,” he said.

Ross Douthat:

For many people, dynamism is contingent — on how invested you are in the world as it is, whether you stand to lose or benefit from innovations, and where your moral intuitions lie. (I am personally a dynamist about Musk’s Mars colony but not Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse; flying cars, yes, sex robots, not so much.) Even in the tech world, your appetite for dynamism depends on where you stand: If you’re lucky enough to work for one of Silicon Valley’s near monopolies, the new powers of the age, you may not be that interested in further churn or change.

Musk himself may yet evolve into that kind of comfortable monopolist, but for now, pending the I.P.O. for MarsCorp in 2047, he remains a dynamist in full. And seen in this light, his recent transformation from Obama Democrat to progressive foil makes perfect sense in light of the transformations that liberalism itself has undergone of late.

Liberalism in the Obama era was an essentially dynamist enterprise not because liberals were absolutely committed to capital-S Science but because those years encouraged a confidence that the major technological changes of the 21st century were making the world a more liberal place. Whether it was social media shaking Middle Eastern autocrats, the Obama campaign running circles around its Republican opponents with online organizing or just the general drift leftward on social issues that seemed to accompany the internet revolution, progressives around 2010 felt a general confidence that technological and political progress were conjoined.

Johannes Schmidt:

A new study has found that although “high-poverty schools” suffered large losses in achievement by switching to remote learning during the coronavirus lockdowns, districts that remained largely in-person lost relatively little ground.

The report, titled “The consequences of remote and hybrid instruction during the pandemic,” was published by a team of researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, a nonprofit research and educational services provider.

According to Harvard professor and education economist Thomas Kane, “Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen. Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.”

In states like Florida and Texas, this is vindicating news after critics blasted the states’ Republican leadership for dismissing federal pandemic guidelines and returning to in-person learning much earlier than Democratic-led states.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Alec Johnson:

The Shorewood School Board decided unanimously Wednesday to fire the district’s director of instructional technology after a hearing over how he handled what he said were messages with “deficit-based and racist language” found on a district laptop.

“Deficit-based language” is language that reinforces negative stereotypes.

Board members voted, 5-0, to end Michael Chavannes’ employment after an almost 3½-hour meeting, which was mostly held in open session at Chavannes’ request.

Jonathan Chait:

Over the last decade, evidence has grown increasingly strong that public charter schools create better educational outcomes, especially for low-income, minority students in cities. The question hovering over the Biden administration has been whether it will encourage and work to improve charter schools, as the Obama administration did, or instead try to smother them, as teachers unions and some left-wing activists have urged.

This spring, the administration released new guidelines restricting the $440 million in annual federal funding for charter schools. The effect of these guidelines, and almost certainly its objective as well, is to choke off the growth of public charters.

The administration’s proposed rules, which impose a blizzard of new conditions for accessing funds for charter schools, have three major flaws. First, they impose unnecessarily onerous application requirements that will make it hard for small charter schools to comply.

Second, the rules require, or at least strongly encourage, charters to collaborate with the districts that operate schools in their area. Of course, since the purpose of charter schools is to provide competition and an alternative to schools that are failing, this effectively gives districts a veto to block competition. The requirements are the equivalent of “letting Starbucks decide if anyone else can run a  coffee shop in various communities,” as Andy Rotherham puts it.

Third, the rules push prospective new charter schools to demonstrate that existing public schools in the area do not have enough seats to meet existing demand. This completely misses the reason parents want charter schools, which is not because they lack access to a school, but because they lack access to a good school. Affluent parents who don’t have a high-quality public-school option can go to a private school or move to a more affluent neighborhood. Charters give the chance at a decent education to parents who can’t afford to do those things.

And while the Biden administration is treating charters as a threat to the quality of existing traditional public schools, the evidence shows the opposite. One recent study finds that adding charter schools increases performance for students in all schools across the district. Another study finds that adding charters leads to higher performance in math and science for Black and Latino students across the metropolitan area, as well as a narrowing of the racial-achievement gap.

The most revealing aspect of the administration’s rules is its defense of them — or rather, its lack thereof. When Chalkbeat asked the Education Department for an interview about the charter-school regulations, it declined. Instead, a spokesperson “recommended that Chalkbeat speak to supporters of the proposal, including Carol Burris, executive director for the Network for Public Education.”

“An emphasis on adult employment”

How the press modifies terms to disparage a target.

“Supporter of free speech” becomes “free speech absolutist”

It also works in reverse: “censorship” becomes “reasonable free speech”

>>Yet the data is an indication of how Musk’s leadership as a “free speech absolutist”<< https://t.co/bvjbToxdDB

— John Robb (@johnrobb) May 13, 2022

“The Federation of State Medical Boards is setting up an ideological infrastructure for disciplining physicians who don’t follow the… scientific consensus…”

The Science™️ got everything right except school closures, natural immunity, lockdowns, …https://t.co/hOoLvFwnp6

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) May 13, 2022

C Bradley Thompson

The corollary principles of CRT include:

First, the rejection of concepts such as “objectivity” and “truth” as white constructs. According to two leading CRT proponents, Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate, all “knowledge” and “truth” is relative: “truths only exist for this person in this predicament at this time.”[2] This is how many schools around the country are trying to apply CRT principles to subjects such as math and the sciences, which they believe have hitherto been grounded in racism. The fact that there are performance disparities between races in subjects such as math and the various sciences is all the proof necessary to declare that truth-bearing and reality-oriented subjects such as math and science must be racist and therefore in need of curricular reconstruction.

Second, the repudiation of all the core values, principles, virtues, and institutions associated with the West, such as equality, liberty, individual rights, private property, merit, work, personal responsibility, equal protection under the law, neutrality, due process, federalism, freedom of speech color blindness, constitutionalism, separation of powers, and, most of all, capitalism because white people identify with them. According to the Seattle educators, racist values include “emphasizing individualism” as opposed to collectivism and having “a future time orientation.”[3] In other words, you are a racist if you like to plan ahead.

Third, the assumption that virtually everything good or great produced by Anglo-European culture and its American offshoots is inherently racist and built on the slave labor of others, and therefore must be deconstructed, dismissed, or destroyed. Racism is everywhere, and it has infected everything. It’s in western painting, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, etc., which means that Michelangelo, Beethoven, Christopher Wren, Jane Austen, and Aristotle must be abandoned or forgotten. CRT rejects all that is good and great in Western Civilization.

Fourth, the demand that “critical” education be used to delegitimize, subvert, and overturn American society. Critical Race Theory is concerned first and foremost with turning students into advocates, activists, and change agents pushing a political agenda defined by radical egalitarianism. This means that CRT is not concerned with having students learn the great body of knowledge developed in the West over the course of several thousand years; it’s goal is to destroy all knowledge generated by white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men and replace it with a kind of politicized learning that seeks to transform society. According to education activist Christine Sleeter: “Working for social justice—redistribution of the world’s resources—is at the heart of what multicultural education should be about.”[4]

How did Critical Race Theory go from being a crazy theory taught in America’s law schools to being the hegemonic curricular framework for America’s government schools? More to the point, how was CRT smuggled into America’s government school system? What are the institutions that are delivering CRT to America’s children?

ES and Wllilliam McGill:

1972

Center on Privacy & Technology:

In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has – without any judicial, legislative or public oversight – reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity. 

ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality. 

This report synthesizes what is already known about ICE surveillance with new information from thousands of previously unseen and unanalyzed records, illustrating the on-the-ground impact of ICE surveillance through three case studies – ICE access to driver data, utility customer data and data collected about the families of unaccompanied children. The report builds on, and would not have been possible without, the powerful research, organizing and advocacy of immigrant rights organizations like CASA, the Immigrant Defense Project, Just Futures Law, Mijente, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Project South and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California (among many others), which have been leading the effort to expose and dissever ICE’s American dragnet.

Dan Shafer:

The crisis in Milwaukee K-12 education is huge. This cannot be overstated. Yet, the trend seems to be toward getting smaller and smaller.

For example, Milwaukee Public Schools just released its annual budget proposal noting it expects to lose 1,000 students between now and the start of the 2022-2023 school year, reducing enrollment to about 67,500 students. MPS has been shrinking for the better part of three decades for many reasons—some political, some demographic. Either way, the trend is shrinkage.

Some want to accelerate that. A bill passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature this year, sponsored by State Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), would have split MPS into between four and eight smaller districts. This bill was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers.

There is another law actually on the books that, if triggered by MPS’s status on state report cards, would force the district to hand over control of a handful of schools—called the “Opportunity Schools District”—to the Milwaukee County Executive. And for decades now, the legislature has been expanding the city’s non-MPS schooling options, from the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) program to schools chartered by UW-Milwaukee and the City of Milwaukee.

These other “districts” are all pretty small compared to MPS—the LUMIN Lutheran schools in the voucher program enroll about 1,800 students; the Messmer schools, 725; the Seton Catholic schools, 2,500. Plus lots of other individual schools and even small “districts” are affiliated with MPS. On the whole, some small “districts” outperform MPS somewhat; others, not so much.

The Signers:

To the extent that these notions are falling out of favor, it is the responsibility of those who love America to revivify them.

Even some on the right have become disenchanted with the American project and are prepared to quit on it on grounds that it is already lost or hopelessly corrupted.

There is no doubt that the country faces severe challenges, many the result of shortsightedness and wishful thinking, but we still have an enormous capacity for renewal. It is because our ancestor patriots rejected despair and kept faith with America that we are here to fight another day.

The ultimate answer to the illiberalism ascendant on college campuses and elsewhere and to the rampaging anti-Americanism of our elite culture will have to be found in the common sense and decency of the American people. The rule of law, federalism, and the protections of the U.S. Constitution continue to be bulwarks against the most ambitious designs of ideological fanatics. Families, churches and synagogues, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations — all under pressure — remain the foundations of society, more relevant to the lives of individuals and communities than social media or edicts from Washington.