Jill Barshay:

Schneider thinks that a lot of so-called rigorous high school classes are now terribly watered down. He pointed to an old 2005 course content study, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. It looked at the actual content and curriculum underneath course titles. Analysts concluded only 18 percent of honors algebra I courses and 33 percent of honors geometry courses actually used a rigorous curriculum. 

“What we found is that the titles and what was being advertised by the schools as an advanced course in these areas really did not pan out when we actually looked at what was being taught,” said NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr at a March 2022 presentation, where she referred to this study. 

NCES is planning to update this course content study in 2024 to see if course content has deteriorated further.

Schneider argues that the nation is pretending to increase science and math (so-called STEM) skills by putting high schoolers in courses with fancy titles. “Simply telling students who have not truly mastered STEM skills that they are “A students” who have finished a rigorous math and science curriculum is not the way to produce that workforce,” Schneider concludes. “If education runs on lies, this is one of the more pernicious lies around.”

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.

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

Sunny Labh:

I have been writing about Richard Feynman for quite some time now and if you are reading this you probably already know this thing. One of the reasons why many of my articles are surrounded around the life and work of Richard Feynman is because he had a different, and quite interesting perspective towards life, love, science, teaching, and learning. The man was one hell of a character himself who feared no one.

When it comes to teaching and learning, Feynman was an exemplary personality. He was an impeccable student who taught himself advanced calculus and mastered it by the age of 15. He developed his own mathematical notations and symbols before he entered college. According to physicist Steve Hsu, Feynman was one of the highest scorers from the USA in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, which is one of the toughest math competitions in the world, and the Princeton entrance exams where he scored highest in physics and mathematics. The guy was hell of a genius!

As brilliant as he was as a student, he was an amazing teacher too. His capabilities to simplify complicated phenomena and explain them to general public in a simple and understandable way are not unknown to anyone. His lectures in physics, his literary writings, and recordings are perfect examples of his wit and clarity that he portrayed in his explanations. I have written several stories about the physicist that you can read in my previous publications and my Twitter handle. In this article, however, I shall explain five brilliant study tips that we all can learn from the late physicist. All the below mentioned quotes/lessons are extracted from his books, and interviews. These lessons are not just limited for people in academics but anyone in general who believes that learning is an eternal process.

“You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.”

One City Schools (expanding in Monona…)

Our formal enrollment for Elementary School period for the 2022-23 school year will begin on March 1, 2022 at 8 am. Applications will be accepted for all Elementary grades from 4K through 5th. One City Preparatory Academy enrollment period starts on April 4, 2022 for Sixth grade only for Middle School. Ninth and tenth grade only for High School.

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:

Throughout the pandemic, the media have eagerly compared Covid statistics between different countries. But such comparisons are often deceptive.

Take, for example, the use of Covid case counts. These depend not only on the number of people infected but also on the amount of testing performed. While useful for evaluating whether cases are increasing or decreasing within a particular country, they are deceptive when comparing countries. If we truly wanted to know, it would be easy, through random seroprevalence surveys that measure the proportion of people with antibodies. But not all governments have been eager to conduct these surveys, while some scientists have even got into trouble for doing them.

Sacramento School District

The district leaders are fiscal stewards who must follow the law and ensure the district remains fiscally solvent, but also that it retains the financial ability to provide programs to lift up our neediest students and afford them maximum opportunity.

In fact, as part of the regular reviews my staff performed of the district’s financial reports over the last few months, we have repeatedly warned that the current improvement in the district’s fiscal position is likely to be temporary. Even with no increases in employee compensation, significant cost growth and revenue losses resulting from enrollment declines will eventually threaten the district’s fiscal solvency.

Think about this. REALLY think about it https://t.co/UPCD3raCpl

— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) April 3, 2022

Kathryn Paige Harden

MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.

Critics of standardized tests have had plenty of reasons to celebrate lately. More than three-quarters of colleges are not requiring the SAT or the ACT for admission this fall, an all-time high, and more than 400 Ph.D. programs have dropped the GRE, up from a mere handful a few years ago. MIT’s announcement on Monday that it is reinstating a testing requirement for fall 2023 admissions was a major departure from these recent trends. Just as striking, amid the widespread perception of standardized testing as an engine of inequality, was MIT’s rationale: “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider,” MIT’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, wrote, “tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.” Dropping the SAT, it turns out, actually hurts low-income students, rather than helping them.

MIT’s conclusion is counterintuitive because students from richer families, on average, score higher on the SAT and other standardized tests than students from poorer ones. The correlation between family background and SAT performance is from about .25 to .40—that is, meaningful but far from perfect. Still, it’s strong enough that some researchers dismiss standardized tests as nothing more than a proxy for asking, “Are you rich?” (The ACT measures roughly the same skills as the more widely used SAT, and the arguments for and against both tests are similar.)

But the income-related disparities we see in SAT scores are not evidence of an unfair test. They are evidence of an unfair society. The test measures differences in academic preparedness, including the ability to write a clear sentence, to understand a complex passage, and to solve a mathematical problem. The SAT doesn’t create inequalities in these academic skills. It revealsthem. Throwing the measurement away doesn’t remedy underlying injustices in children’s academic opportunities, any more than throwing a thermometer away changes the weather.

Tanya Lewis:

Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months of 2020 and first months of 2021, compared with the same period in previous years. Hungary, Italy, Spain and Portugal had some of the largest drops: reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4 and 6.6 percent, respectively. The U.S. saw a decline of 3.8 percent, but this was not statistically significant—perhaps because the pandemic’s effects were more spread out in the country and because the study only had U.S. data through December 2020, Aassve says. The findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Birth rates fluctuate seasonally within a year, and many of the countries in the study had experienced falling rates for years before the pandemic. But the declines that began nine months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, were even more stark. “We are very confident that the effect for those countries is real,” Aassve says. “Even though they might have had a bit of a mild downward trend [before], we’re pretty sure about the fact that there was an impact of the pandemic.”

Choose life:

Daniel Payne:

Hmm. Young adults assessing the sky-high costs of college, the apparently limited payoffs, the attraction of starting work and making money and building your career instead of taking a bunch of irrelevant classes for four years…

John Hindraker:

Yale Law School has long been a disgrace. I was surprised, when I searched for YLS on our site, at how often we have commented on farcical events there. Way back in 2003, we wrote about Yale Law School’s disgusting treatment of military recruiters. That was followed by Yale’s lawsuit trying to have the Solomon Amendment declared unconstitutional. The Solomon Amendment provides that universities that receive federal funding must treat military recruiters in non-discriminatory fashion. The horror! Yale and its fellow left-wing institutions lost 8-0 in the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan was among those leading the anti-military charge.

In 2014, we commented on a pitifully weak op-ed co-authored by the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Provost of Yale Law School complaining about the fact that police officers were not charged with homicide in the Michael Brown (a clear case of self-defense) and Eric Garner cases. 

Then there was the hysterical anti-Brett Kavanaugh letter signed by YLS students, alumni and professors. (“Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. … He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are. . . people will die if he is confirmed.”)

So said a former Madison School District Administrator some years ago.

Rod Dreher on recent taxpayer supported federal government actions:

I remind you that this very US government policy document actually states that there are “no scientifically sound” reasons to doubt whether hormones and surgery for minors is harmful, and to say, therefore, that children may be removed from their families so that their bodies can be altered by the state.

This is the Democratic Party at work. This is what it means to have a Democratic government. Does having a Republican government mean reversing all of this? One hopes so.

Folks, they really are coming for our children. It’s right there on the government website. They are propagandizing doctors to act as agents of the state in the seizure of kids. Read the document yourself!

Christopher Tremoglie:

Imagine a scenario in which your child comes home from school and tells you that they now identify as “pansexual.” Or, while telling you about the school day, your child mentions that he or she was told he or she was gay based on a test a teacher gave them. Or you discover he or she was recruited by a teacher to lead a gay and transgender student club but was instructed not to tell any parents because “what happens in the student club, stays in the club.” These are the alarming contents of a packet distributed by the California Teachers Association regarding the formation of gay and transgender clubs in schools.

There’s nothing ‘pro-trans’ about deleting women

Thomas Prosser:

In an important new paper, Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson show that half of the effect size in observational studies, even in conservative estimates, is composed of confounding. In laypeople’s terms, this means that many academic studies considerably overestimate the effect of the variables which they study. Such results erode confidence in academic work, yet there have been a series of these findings. In a 2018 paper, 29 expert teams used a single dataset to analyze whether football referees were more likely to red card dark-skin-toned players, the teams coming to radically different results, none of which could be proved incorrect. Such findings follow the replication crisis. In 2015, researchers replicated 100 leading studies in the field of psychology, finding that only 36% of the replications yielded significant findings. Moreover, the mean effect size in the replications was about half the effect reported in the original studies. In other fields, similar crises followed.   

Within academia, such developments are well known. Yet public awareness is limited and few reflect on practical consequences for politics. Though such challenges do not affect academic confidence in the reality of (say) climate change and Coronavirus, there are significant consequences for policies which address such issues; if scholars worry about findings, how can we be confident that policy interventions are effective? Admittedly, political implications are indirect. Decades ago, postmodern philosophers deconstructed social reality, engendering loss of confidence in liberal democracy among certain intellectuals. Yet this had questionable impact on practical politics. At this time, politicians such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush promoted liberal democracy with an evangelical zeal, reflecting a popular culture in which confidence in democracy remained overwhelming. But recent trends are distinct. Quantitative social scientists now worry about the validity of methods, previous crises of confidence being confined to the humanities.

Thomas Boyd:

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals handed down a long-awaited decision Thursday in the case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College. The court dismissed all of Oberlin’s appellate claims and confirmed the jury’s finding that the college, a small private liberal arts institution in rural Ohio, was liable for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with a business relationship. It then upheld the trial jury’s award to Gibson’s Bakery of $11.1 million in compensatory damages, $33.2 million in punitive damages and $6.3 million in attorneys’ fees.

When the original verdict was issued, Oberlin and much of the academic community, as evidenced by friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case, generally hyperventilated, as though academic freedom were at stake. Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, told a CBS reporter at the time that the jury had inappropriately held the college responsible for the exercise by its students of their First Amendment right to protest. She claimed that the proper question should have been “whether a college should be held liable for the speech of its students.” When confronted by the reporter with Gibson’s lawyer’s point that the First Amendment wasn’t at issue in the trial, she blithely replied that those claims were “misstating what the jury found.” In its ruling, the Court of Appeals agreed with Gibson.

Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell

The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending “2-3X more time” on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook’s popularity among young people had plummeted.

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Targeted Victory declined to respond to questions about the campaign, saying only that it has represented Meta for several years and is “proud of the work we have done.”

In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a “back channel” for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm “would definitely want it to be hands off.”

In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app’s purported harms. “Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?” a Targeted Victory staffer asked.

“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’ ” the staffer wrote.

LinkedIn post.

A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board rejected (2011) Kaleem’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. Consider the implications for the many children…

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.

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

Will Flanders:

Last month, the Biden Administration announced new regulations on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). The CSP is designed to offer a funding source for charter schools to expand access for students to high-quality school options, as well as to help schools fund facilities. The regulations are ostensibly designed to create better oversight. But they are largely based on strawman arguments about charters and will have a chilling effect on one of the most important educational options for families across the U.S.

There are several troubling aspects to the new regulations. Among the most troubling is that charters would be evaluated for funding based on whether they’re located in areas that have excess students in traditional, local schools. This provision shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of charter schools. Charter schools are meant to be much more than an overflow valve for the excess capacity needs of a school district. They’re meant to offer competition to the existing schools by being freed from existing rules that hamper innovation. It is only by offering this competition that charters can work to improve the performance of the district, as traditional schools will be incentivized to improve.

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.

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

William Turton:

Law enforcement around the world routinely asks social media platforms for information about users as part of criminal investigations. In the U.S., such requests usually include a signed order from a judge. The emergency requests are intended to be used in cases of imminent danger and don’t require a judge to sign off on it. 

Hackers affiliated with a cybercrime group known as “Recursion Team” are believed to be behind some of the forged legal requests, which were sent to companies throughout 2021, according to the three people who are involved in the investigation.

Recursion Team is no longer active, but many of its members continue to carry out hacks under different names, including as part of Lapsus$, the people said. 

The information obtained by the hackers using the forged legal requests has been used to enable harassment campaigns, according to one of the people familiar with the inquiry. The three people said it may be primarily used to facilitate financial fraud schemes. By knowing the victim’s information, the hackers could use it to assist in attempting to bypass account security.

Bill Glauber:

One panelist from suburban Milwaukee was critical of the amount of time schoolchildren spend on electronic devices, including computers, claiming that it connects students to pornographic images and affects their learning.

Johnson said: “This is their testimony, this is their viewpoint … that is something that should concern parents if that is happening.”

“I think there are good parts of technology and potentially bad parts of technology,” Johnson said. “I think we should make sure that the bad doesn’t come with the good. So I am concerned.”

Johnson said he was prompted to hold the meeting because he has been listening to parents in different formats — “in a completely nonpartisan way,” he said. “It’s interesting how many people that don’t necessarily agree with me on some issues come in here and want to talk about this.”

Asked about what he heard during the session, in which panelists spoke followed by audience members, Johnson said: “I think there’s some real concern about our public school system not listening to parents, not hearing their voices, not hearing their concerns, a lack of accountability. That should concern us all.”

On schools, Johnson said he was concerned “about the influence of national groups, teachers unions, that type of thing, trying to impose their ideology on our children.”

Dylan Brogan:

Every bad change in education over the last 50 years started with university professors,” says Pesta. “And don’t underestimate those teachers unions.” 

But Pesta’s evidence of how Critical Race Theory is taught in Wisconsin public schools mostly came from out-of-context examples from other states. The tenured professor did include in his presentation a February tweet from state Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Appleton) stating that “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.”

Snodgrass later deleted and apologized for the tweet. Another example was from an email sent by the Ozaukee County Democrats: “Public schools have the responsibility of the parents when their children are in their care.” 

A parent from Burlington cited comedian Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, which chronicles his early life growing up in South Africa during apartheid, as evidence that Critical Race Theory is pushed on her kid.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson held a listening session on education in Madison. It got a little weird.https://t.co/YsZSqYOZad pic.twitter.com/nxjVox7Obz

— Isthmus (@isthmus) April 1, 2022

Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship pic.twitter.com/UZ0OWJJOy5

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 1, 2022

Nice to see STEM folks making it go!

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.

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

Chester Finn

It’s no secret that Denver’s latest school board is wreaking havoc on the suite of bold education reforms that the Mile High City was known for over the past two decades. Parker Baxter and Alan Gottlieb recount the sorrowful saga at some length in the latest issue of Education Next.

As they write:

Denver Public Schools’ plunge over three years from one of the nation’s most carefully planned and promising examples of public-education transformation into a district led by a school board in disarray has multiple causes, and there’s plenty of blame to spread around.

Ultimately, however, it is the result of a concerted effort over more than a decade by organized and committed activists, local and national, who have opposed changing the governance and operation of school districts in any significant way. 

The reforms now consigned to (or fast heading toward) the scrap heap took multiple shapes, consistent with the basic principle that comprehensiveness is essential if real change is to occur in something as complex and deeply rooted as public education. They focused chiefly on teacher quality (including a much-discussed merit-linked compensation plan), school accountability, and several forms of choice. For a long time—including fourteen years under superintendents Michael Bennet (now U.S. Senator) and Tom Boasberg—they enjoyed steady hands on the tiller and bipartisan support on the board and in the community. That’s strategically important in blue-ing Denver (and Colorado), and is important everywhere if changes are to endure. (Massachusetts was another long-running example of such support that’s beginning to show signs of unraveling.)

School choice took two important forms in Denver. The first was originally imposed by Colorado’s vigorous and early (third in the country) approach to charter schools, which included backup state authorizing of quality charter applicants rejected by districts. Denver resisted chartering at first—and got overruled more than once—but its twenty-first-century charter strategy was positive until the recent turnabout. As a result, Denver has a fine crop of charter schools—nearly sixty of them, attended by more than a fifth of the city’s pupils—including such highly regarded examples as the eight-campus Denver School of Science and Technology. Charters long benefited from a cooperative relationship with the district, including a unified enrollment system and a shared approach to special education. Now, however, the climate is chilling. Chalkbeat reported a year ago that “The Denver school district once represented fertile ground for charter schools. But shifting politics and declining enrollment mean Colorado’s largest school district is becoming less friendly territory for the independent public schools.”

As Baxter and Gottlieb put it:

Rachel Aviv:

In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the “pros of telling”: “no more physical/emotional attacks,” “I get out of this dangerous house,” “the truth is finally out, I don’t have to lie or cover things up.” Under “cons of telling,” she wrote, “damaging mom’s life,” “could go into foster care,” “basically I would probably lose everything.” After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it.

Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the school’s wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the “queen of compartmentalization.” She got A’s, served in student government, played varsity soccer, managed the field-hockey team, and volunteered for the Special Olympics. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hair—“the picture of Americana,” as one friend described her. Mackenzie’s parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Chesterfield, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. But Mackenzie’s friends and teachers noticed that in her mother’s presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. Lisa Smith, the mother of one of Mackenzie’s best friends at Whitfield, said that her daughter once asked why Mackenzie was always injured: “My daughter kind of looked at me funny, and I looked back at her and said, ‘What are you trying to say?’ ”

When Fendell asked Mackenzie about her bruises, Mackenzie offered vague comments about being clumsy. Fendell told her that, if she couldn’t talk about why she was injured, she should write it down. “I don’t ever want to cause her any pain or anything, which is why I’ll probably end up burning this,” Mackenzie wrote in the journal. “I wish that I had the courage to tell someone. Or even to write everything down in here. Because if I’m being honest, there are things that I’m too ashamed to even speak of.”

Jason Gay:

We’re into college acceptance season, when high-school seniors find out which institutions of higher learning have accepted them for enrollment, which have not, and which will ask them to ride that purgatory surfboard called the “wait list.”

It’s a stressful period for many. If you’re a well-organized high-school senior who’s already been accepted early—congratulations, I have no idea what that wonderful feeling is like, but you have my profound admiration and awe.

If you’re sitting there, sweating, panicking, wondering if any school is going to take you, wishing you’d spent a little more time hitting the books—I’ve been there.

If you’re waiting, a couple pieces of advice:

C Bradley Thompson:

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

—H. L. Mencken

I have thus far attempted in this series of essays to examine 1) the intellectual origins and history of government schooling in America; 2) the nature and purposes of government schooling; and, 3) the moral case for adopting the principle of “Separation of School and State” and with it the need for abolishing America’s government school system.

You are all by now familiar with my judgment on America’s government school system. I consider it to be immoral and anathema to the principles and institutions of a free society. The evidence for my position is overwhelming and the logic is irrefutable.

Still, some of you might not yet be fully persuaded by facts and logic, or at least maybe you can’t give up your attachment (for any one of a number of reasons) to the government schools. Those who know that the government schools are a mess but can’t quite give up their attachment to them do so almost always for sentimental reasons.

Maybe it’s because you’re a product of the government schools (as most of us are), and, well you “turned out ‘ok’ after all.” Or maybe your kids go to a government school and it doesn’t seem all that bad despite the fact that you know that the America’s system of government education is failing nationwide (this phenomenon has been dubbed by others as the “Thompson paradox”). Or maybe you think that the government school system is the one and only institution that holds small-town America together (or what I refer to as “Friday Night Lights” syndrome). Or maybe you hold the cynical view that ordinary Americans don’t love their children enough to do whatever it takes to educate them properly. Or maybe you think (incorrectly) that poor families couldn’t afford to educate their children if there were no government schools. Or, finally, maybe you think that government schooling is a good thing in principle (just like Marxism) but just needs to be “reformed” in practice.

It might also be the case that you’re one of those hard-headed realists who doesn’t like to think in terms of moral principles. Maybe you’re put off by my moralistic rhetoric. Maybe you’re one of those pragmatists, who is only concerned with whether an institution works or does not work. Maybe you just need to see some 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.

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

My email exchange today with an NBC News producer wanting to know whether a certain front-page journalist with the world’s most powerful newspapers (NYT & WashPost) should be off-limits from criticism because of the harsh criticisms from the public it provokes: pic.twitter.com/mDv1VLrijm

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 30, 2022

Ariel Dorfman:

According to Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas, the first public book burning in recorded history likely occurred in 430 BCE. Because the Sophist philosopher Protagoras questioned the existence of the gods, who had inflicted defeats in war and a devastating pestilence on Athens, his fellow citizens wanted to appease them by incinerating his sacrilegious writings.

Two hundred years after Protagoras’s works were devoured by flames, Chinese scrolls and wooden tablets suffered the same fate during the reign of Qin Shi Huang.In Imperial Rome books were burned assiduously, including many Christian texts, and then pagan texts once the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century. A religion “rent by its own internal battles,” Berkowitz writes, required fiery measures to ensure orthodoxy and a unified church, which “became the model for speech suppression for centuries to come.” And so the pyres continued to blaze, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age, and reaching, shamefully, into our own times.

Fire’s sheer destructiveness and capacity for spectacle make it dear to censors, as exemplified by two of the most infamous cases of book burning in recent centuries. The first comes from the United States, where in 1873 Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to enact laws making it illegal to send lascivious materials through the mail. As a postal inspector, and with the help of mobs associated with his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock claimed to have burned 160 tons of obscene literary material in the forty-year period following passage of the so-called Comstock laws, as well as illustrated playing cards, sex toys, marriage guides, and abortion and birth control devices.

The second example is the notorious Nazi bonfires in 1933 that turned to cinders and smoke hundreds of thousands of books, including “degenerate” works by Marx, Mann, Proust, and Einstein. Both at the time and subsequently, this was so widely condemned that it seemed no one would dare to repeat it, or at least would not film and display it to the world. And yet in Chile, forty years later, that is exactly what happened after the coup against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Watching television in September 1973, I saw soldiers casting books on a smoldering pyre, among which was my own How to Read Donald Duck, an experience that helped convince me, as it has authors over the ages, that it was necessary to go into exile lest I endure the same mistreatment. Heinrich Heine expressed it best in 1823: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” Eight years later, he went into exile in Paris to escape German censorship.

Emma Petit:

The demonstrators are calling for a vaccine mandate. In the center of the frame is a counterprotester. He’s conspicuous, wearing a neon vest. He walks through the crowd, holding a placard above his head. As he moves away from the front of the demonstration, a handful of people follow him, including a man wearing jeans and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt. The counterprotester is talking, or maybe shouting. It’s hard to make out what’s said. The man gestures to the counterprotester and takes a few steps toward him.

Justin LaHart:

The inflation numbers that people pay the most attention to and the inflation numbers that the Federal Reserve cares about aren’t the same. In the months ahead, those differences could really matter.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expect Thursday’s consumer inflation report from the Labor Department will show that overall prices in February rose by 7.8% from a year earlier, their biggest gain since January 1982. Core prices, which exclude food and energy items in an attempt to better capture inflation’s trend, are expected to show a 6.4% rise, which would be the biggest gain since August 1982.

The February reading for the Commerce Department inflation gauge that the Fed watches, and bases its 2% inflation target on, won’t come out until March 31. But it will almost certainly show milder price increases than the Labor Department measure. The January core reading for the Commerce Department measure showed a 5.2% gain from a year earlier, for example, versus the 6% gain the Labor Department showed.

The differences between the two inflation measures largely come down to differences in how they are constructed. The weightings for items in the consumption baskets the Labor Department uses to put together its main inflation indexes are based on surveys of urban consumers and only measure out-of-pocket expenses. The Commerce Department’s indexes are based on the actual expenditures of both urban and rural consumers and includes spending done on the part of consumers, such as employers’ contributions to health insurance.

Wall Street Journal:

Once Congress adopts a bad idea even in an initially worthy cause, it invariably spreads to become a terrible idea. That’s the case with federal “stimulus” checks, which began as Covid relief and now are being proposed to offset the rising price of gasoline.

A trio of House Democrats—Mike Thompson (Calif.), John Larson (Conn.), and Lauren Underwood (Illinois)—have introduced the Gas Rebate Act of 2022 to send Americans a $100 check in any month this year when the national average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon. Dependents will get another $100, so the family of four can fill up that SUV on Uncle Sam’s dime. The national average price has exceeded $4 in recent weeks.

The word “rebate” is a misnomer because this isn’t rebated from any payment to the federal government. It’s a government check to pay for higher gas prices caused in large part by government. Voters are blaming Democratic policies for inflation and for making it harder to produce American oil and gas. With an election coming, and their majority in peril, Democrats are resorting to what they do best: Spending more of your money.

The non-rebate rebate is even worse policy than the gas tax holiday that some states are proposing. Neither addresses the real problem, but at least the tax holiday lets people keep their own money. The rebate idea deserves to die in the crib, but the spectacle of climate-change warriors suddenly trying to subsidize fossil-fuel consumption is almost worth it.

Patrick Hauf:

The video, “Ten Years on Testosterone,” details the transition of LGBT activist Aydian Dowling through hormone injections. Teachers and administrators at Pearl R. Miller Middle School in Kinnelon, N.J., did not notify parents about the lesson, which included slideshows with definitions of different gender ideologies, beforehand.

“You can build up the courage to stand up for yourself in a way that this is what you want to do with your life,” Dowling says in the video after injecting testosterone.

Dowling later spoke at a school-wide assembly as part of the school’s “Stories Of Adversity & Resilience Program,” about which administrators notified parents ahead of time, giving them the option to opt out their children. Concerned parents flocked to a school board meeting last Thursday, where board members admitted parents should have similarly been informed about the hormone therapy video.

“I felt as if I was blindsided,” Loren Malfitano, whose two sons were shown the video, told the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re learning about this ideology of gender before they even have classes on the actual biologies of males and females.”

Joel Kotkin:

Consider that in 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population; today the share is under 15 percent. Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas accounted for about 90% of all US metropolitan growth; over that time suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2.0 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million .

Kristen Waggoner:

As the students filled the room holding signs and loudly protesting, someone passed a folded piece of paper up to me. I didn’t even see who it was. I could feel myself tensing up, and my legs were a bit shaky. It was hard to concentrate in the chaos of what was quickly becoming a volatile event.

The note was typewritten, anonymous, with Jesus’ words from John 15: “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me first. … As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.” Underneath it said, “Keep the faith. Good luck!”

There are a few moments in my legal career where I’ve known God had me somewhere for a particular reason. As I walked out of the Yale Law School classroom, escorted by police officers, I also knew that God had used the student who had written that message to give me courage and inspiration right when I needed it.

I try to say yes to every opportunity to talk about stewarding our freedoms, especially when I have an audience that may disagree with me. I also choose to enter hostile places to demonstrate that Christians not only think deeply about legal and societal issues, but they also engage with civility and not anger. That’s why I readily agreed when I was invited to Yale to participate in a bipartisan panel on the First Amendment.

Kathy Gannon:

A news presenter on Afghanistan’s TOLO TV wept as he read the announcement. Images of girls crying after being turned back from school flooded social media. Aid groups and many others remained baffled.

The Taliban have so far refused to explain their sudden decision to renege on the pledge to allow girls to go to school beyond sixth grade. Schools were supposed to reopen to older girls on Wednesday, the start of the new school year.

The ban caught even the Taliban-appointed Education Ministry unprepared. In many places across Afghanistan, some girls in higher grades returned to schools, only to be told to go home.

The move may have been designed to appease the Taliban’s hard-line base but it came at the expense of further alienating the international community. The world has been reluctant to officially recognize Afghanistan’s new rulers, concerned the Taliban would impose similar harsh measures and restrictions — particularly limiting women’s rights to education and work — as when they previously ruled the country in the late 1990s.

The United Nations children’s agency told The Associated Press on Thursday they were blindsided by the announcement.

“I think that yesterday was a very confusing day for all of us,” said Jeannette Vogelaar, UNICEF’s chief of education in Afghanistan.

Elizabeth Beyer:

A contract, inked in February with the UW System, greenlit Caire’s 33-year dream of growing One City Schools from early childhood education and elementary to include students through grade 12, roughly a decade after the Madison School Board rejected a similar proposal for a charter school overseen by the Madison School District that would have been called Madison Preparatory Academy.

The Charter School Growth fund, a nonprofit, philanthropic venture capital fund, will contribute $850,000 over the next two years to One City. That along with a recently awarded $900,000 grant to the school from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction through a federally funded program, will total $1.75 million in funds for the opening of the academy over the course of the next 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.

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

I’m voting for David Blaska. God help me. But God help us all if we continue down the path laid out for us by the current board without at least someone to challenge the status quo. 

Postscript: This is not just a Madison problem. Liberal San Francisco voters recently recalled three hard-left school board members for similar issues. And today long-time Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Alan Borsuk reportson what’s going on in Milwaukee’s public schools. To quote part of his story:

Referring to students, (an MPS teacher) went on to say: ”Teachers at Grantosa are in abusive relationships that are only escaped by quitting. … We see the individuals committing these abusive acts return to our classes repeatedly without consequence. We struggle to make contact with parents as many of their phone numbers change weekly.” And when they do make contact, “some teachers are not met with support, but blame and further verbal abuse.”  

The letter continued, “Today I have a student who I’ve developed a great relationship with cussed me out and threatened me for stopping her from watching Netflix” in class. The students had found a way to get around the system in place to block that.

. Wisconsin Working Families Party www.

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.

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

Elisabeth Gruner:

I’ve been teaching college English for more than 30 years. Four years ago, I stopped putting grades on written work, and it has transformed my teaching and my students’ learning. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

Starting in elementary school, teachers rate student work – sometimes with stars and checkmarks, sometimes with actual grades. Usually by middle school, when most students are about 11, a system of grading is firmly in place. In the U.S., the most common system is an “A” for superior work, through “F” for failure, with “E” almost always skipped. 

This system was widely adopted only in the 1940s, and even now, some schools, colleges and universities use other means of assessing students. But the practice of grading, and ranking, students is so widespread as to seem necessary, even though many researchers say it is highly inequitable. For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material. Grades have other problems: They are demotivating, they don’t actually measure learning and they increase students’ stress. 

During the pandemic, many instructors and even whole institutions offered pass/fail options or mandated pass/fail grading. They did so both to reduce the stress of remote education and because they saw that the emergency, disruptive to everyone, was disproportionately challenging for students of color. Many, however, later resumed grading, not acknowledging the ways that traditional assessments can both perpetuate inequity and impede learning.

Colleagues & I are writing about the politics of reopening schools for 2020-21 in 5 urban districts. I wanted to share our lit review so far 🧵

(a) You may find it helpful!

(b) Please tell us if we are missing anything!

(c) We think qualitative work can contribute a lot!

1/18 pic.twitter.com/C1IiyLyj32

— Jeremy Singer (@jeremylsinger) March 29, 2022

Lydie A. Lebrun-Harris, PhD, MPH ; Reem M. Ghandour, DrPH, MPA; Michael D. Kogan, PhD:

Findings Between 2016 and 2020, there were significant increases in children’s diagnosed anxiety and depression, decreases in physical activity, and decreases in caregiver mental and emotional well-being and coping with parenting demands. After the onset of the pandemic specifically, there were significant year-over-year increases in children’s diagnosed behavioral or conduct problems, decreases in preventive medical care visits, increases in unmet health care needs, and increases in the proportion of young children whose parents quit, declined, or changed jobs because of child care problems.

Meaning Study findings point to several areas of concern that can inform future research, clinical care, policy decision making, and programmatic investments to improve the health and well-being of children and their families.

Daniel Buck:

It’s worthwhile to stymie the flow of politics into our classrooms. But the real fallout of our woke-ified teacher-prep programs is simply mediocrity.

My teacher training featured Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets, lectures on acupuncture and essential oils, acrostic poems as final projects, and a solid grounding in critical race theory. Notably lacking was a robust emphasis on teaching, learning, cognitive science, child psychology, behavior management, curriculum, or any other practicalities of the classroom. They were present but secondary to progressive politics.

When I’ve written about my teacher prep before, I’m usually accused of nutpicking — using a fringe example to castigate the many. We assume that prospective teachers go to such programs and learn to, well, teach. Little of the sort happens. The …

Christopher Buckley

The first point is that human children face a monumental learning task, which has resulted in the evolution of a much longer childhood than that exhibited by other animals. They must acquire and reproduce a very large amount of cultural information and skills related to language, human society (kin and non-kin relationships), subsistence activities (hunting, agriculture, dwelling construction), tool and clothing manufacture and use, ritual observances (to name but a few).

 The second point is that innovation is detrimental to the learning process. If (for example) you are learning to use a bow and arrow (an essential tool in many pre-modern societies) you should attend to copying precisely the actions of your elders, who embody several thousand years of experience and innovation. You don’t deviate from their practice, and if (as a novice learner) you try to make changes, they will reprimand you. The ethnographic literature on these kinds of apprenticeship-like processes in cultural transmission is extensive (I recommend David Lancy’s “First you must master pain” as a starting point). Your job as a learner is to acquire all the knowledge you can from your elders, and to practice it until you are perfect, since your survival may depend on it. For younger children, practice takes the form of play, so (for example) young boys in Highland New Guinea play a game where they attempt to shoot an arrow through a rolling cane hoop. Children’s play is often ‘creative’ (a poorly defined term, admittedly), but it is not ‘innovative’. Most play is imitative, it consists of rehearsing skills that have been taught or are in the process of acquisition, such as play-acting adult roles. The BaYaka children used the pipe cleaners to imitate adult adornment (necklaces and bracelets).

I am not exaggerating when I say: ‘your survival may depend on it’. Kirai hunters in New Guinea were taught to hunt wild boar with a bow and arrow. If they succeeded in hitting the animal they are taught to climb a tree as fast as possible, since the boar would not die immediately and would often attack the hunter. Similarly, if you are learning to drive a car, you will fail your test (for good reasons) if you add an innovative element. And would you like to be operated on by a novice surgeon who has this ‘weird new trick’ she’d like to try?

Alana Goodman:

Although there was no evidence in 2020 that the Post’s reporting was inaccurate—and even Hunter Biden didn’t deny that the emails were real—Democrats decried the story as Russian “misinformation,” and Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps to prevent users from viewing or sharing it weeks before the election.

Facebook announced that it would be “reducing [the story’s] distribution on our platform” and changed its algorithm to make posts about the article less visible. Twitter locked the Post’s account and barred users from sharing the link, claiming it was “potentially harmful.”

Facebook declined to comment.

Numerous other news outlets have since corroborated the Post’s reporting.

TA Frank:

This February, Bruce Harrell, newly installed as mayor of Seattle, made it official that his city has gone into decline. “The truth is the status quo is unacceptable,” he said in his first state of the city address. “It seems like every day I hear stories of longtime small businesses closing their doors for good or leaving our city.” But it’s not just small businesses. In mid-March, Amazon announced that it was abandoning a 312,000-square-foot office space in downtown, citing concerns over crime.

That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.

What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.

Emily Burns, with Josh Stevenson, and Phil Kerpen

(Figure 1).The same districts also had 2.5 times higher case rates during the same period as we demonstrated in analysis published on March 9th, 2022.

This result is as important as it was expected. The CDC promised that whatever potential (and willfully ignored) harms might come to children from two full years of forced masking, they must be risked, due to the added safety and schooling that masking would ensure. Neither claim ended up being true. As we demonstrated in our analysis of March 9th, during the January peak of the omicron wave, masked districts had 2.5-fold higher case rates than un-masked districts. Yet, during the same period, as we saw in Figure 1 above, those same schools experienced more than 4-fold higher rates of school disruptions—significantly higher rates of disruption even than their increases in case rates. 

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.

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

Wall Street Journal:Everything you dislike about Congress and more—in 2,727 pages.

The House on Wednesday passed a $1.5 trillion, 2,727-page bill to fund the government this year, and at least the Members don’t have to worry about inflation. They’ve got the government covered.

Perhaps the best that can be said about the spending bill is it could have been worse. Republicans and Democrats agreed to $730 billion in discretionary spending (6.7% increase over last year) and $782 billion for defense (5.6% increase). The bill also includes $13.6 billion in humanitarian and military assistance for Ukraine.

This is better than President Biden’s budget, which sought a 17% increase for non-defense programs and 2% more for defense. Mercifully, the bill doesn’t include $40 billion for the restaurant industry or an extension of the pandemic employee retention tax credit, which many Members of both parties wanted.

Michelle Hackman & Dustin Volz:

A law-enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security participated in a secret bulk surveillance program that collected millions of records about certain money transfers of some Americans without a warrant, according to officials and a U.S. senator.

The surveillance program, overseen by investigators with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, collected records of any money transfer greater than $500 to or from Mexico, Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said in a letter sent to the DHS inspector general. It also collected information on domestic or international transfers exceeding $500 to or from the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

Officials at the Homeland Security Investigations unit at DHS provided staffers for Mr. Wyden with details about the surveillance activity last month after the senator’s office first contacted the agency seeking information about the previously undisclosed program. The briefing was the first time Congress was made aware of the program’s existence, according to Mr. Wyden’s letter.

“Given the many serious issues raised by this troubling program, I request that you investigate the program’s origins, how the program operated, and whether the program was consistent with agency policy, statutory law, and the Constitution,” Mr. Wyden wrote in his letter to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wyden also asked the inspector general to probe whether Homeland Security Investigations was operating similar programs and to ensure that such activities were subject to congressional oversight.

Justin Lahart and Jon Sindreu:

At the end of 2011, the U.S. public sector had $15 trillion in debt, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, equal to 99% of gross domestic product, a post-World War II record. By last year it had swelled to $30 trillion, or 131% of GDP. In Japan, anemic growth has pushed public debt to a whopping 242% of GDP. In Europe, Britain’s debt load is 156%, and Italy’s is 183%.

Yet the amount of money required to pay interest on this massive pile has fallen across the board. In the U.S., it went from 4.4% of GDP in 2011 to only 3.6% a decade later. Subtracting some types of interest that the government receives, the net figure is an even smaller 2.5% of GDP.

Wall Street Journal:

Students at Yale Law School recently disrupted speakers in an example of cancel culture that is common on so many university campuses these days. Now comes a senior federal judge advising his judicial colleagues against hiring the protesting students for clerkships.

The March 10 panel was intended as a debate over civil liberties. It was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society and featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative outfit that promotes religious liberty. The two broadly agree on protecting free speech, despite their differences on other issues.

A hundred or so students heckled and tried to shout down the panel and Federalist Society members in attendance. One protester told a member of the conservative legal group she would “literally fight you, bitch,” according to the Washington Free Beacon, which obtained an audio and videotape of the ruckus. The speakers were escorted from the event by police for their safety. It’s not too much to say that the students were a political mob.

No punishment seems forthcoming from Yale Law School, despite its ostensible policy barring protests that disrupt free speech. But the event prompted Senior Judge Laurence Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to write the following letter to all of his fellow Article III judges last week:

Stu Schmill

Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education. All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements.⁠05 The substance and pace of these courses are both very demanding, and they culminate in long, challenging final exams that students must pass⁠06to proceed with their education.⁠07 In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive.⁠08   

To be clear, performance on standardized tests is not the central focus of our holistic admissions process. We do not prefer people with perfect scores; indeed, despite what some people infer from our statistics, we do not consider an applicant’s scores at all beyond the point where preparedness has been established as part of a multifactor analysis. Nor are strong scores themselves sufficient: our research shows students also need to do well in high school and have a strong match for MIT, including the resilience to rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of its resources. That’s why we don’t select students solely on how well they score on the tests, but only consider scores to the extent they help us feel more confident about an applicant’s preparedness⁠09 to not just to survive, but thrive, at MIT.

MD Kittle:

Who was the state superintendent who violated state law at the time? Gov. Tony Evers, who led the Department of Public Instruction for a decade before becoming governor in 2019.

WILL previously won its lawsuit after an appeals court ruled Evers’ DPI broke the law, but  the court did not resolve the core constitutional questions of religious liberty at stake in the case.

It’s been a long legal journey.

The legal battle goes back some six years, when, in 2016, WILL first took Evers and DPI to court after the agency denied transportation aid to St. Augustine School, a private and independent K-12 school in Colgate.

Wisconsin provides aid to qualifying private school students as long as there is not an overlapping attendance area between private schools that are affiliated with one another, or, more specifically, affiliated with the same sponsoring group.

In this case, DPI and Friess Lake School District (now part of Holy Hill Area School District) denied St. Augustine students busing rights because there is an Archdiocesan Catholic school in the attendance area. But St. Augustine is independent and unaffiliated with the Archdiocese.

The school district and DPI determined the definition of Catholic and withheld government benefits until St. Augustine agreed not to call itself “Catholic.”

Megan McArdle:

That’s a whole lot of effort to suppress a story that seems to be … true? The New York Times reported March 16 that the emails are part of the evidence in a federal investigation now before a grand jury.

One week into the “Oops, it was real” news cycle, I have now heard all the excuses as to why this actually is an instance of journalism and tech moderation working like they should. It was unverified, I’ve heard. Too close to an election. And even if the emails were real, they may have been obtained illegally — can’t have that!

All of which might sound very reasonable if only my profession had displayed the same caution with stories that made conservatives look bad.

In September 2020 the New York Times revealed all sorts of details from two decades of Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns. It seems possible, even likely, that whoever leaked the information had a legal or fiduciary duty to keep it confidential. Yet the story ran, and as far as I know, Twitter didn’t block it from being shared.

The fact that the now-discredited Steele dossier was unverified did not stop BuzzFeed from publishing it, or the rest of the mainstream media from engaging in an orgy of speculationabout Trump’s connections to Russia. When unverifiable accusations of sexual assault against Brett M. Kavanaugh surfaced, mainstream outlets relaxed their journalistic standards — but were considerably more skeptical when the accused was Joe Biden. Many easily believed misleading videos about Catholic kids at the March for Life, but when Project Veritas releases a new sting video, the instinct is to point out how deceptive edited video can be.

As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, the difference in mainstream reporting is the difference between can and must. When it comes to stories that flatter Democrats, we often ask “Can I believe it?” If it’s not obviously false, we do. But if the story flatters the right, we are more likely to ask “Must I believe it?” If we can find any reason to disbelieve, we take it — and keep the story off our pages.

The New York Times now admits the story was real. News and social-media companies will pay no price for suppressing vital information in 2020.

Tyler Cowen:

The educational migration idea also has potential for the U.S., though with additional hurdles. American universities typically offer some tuition aid to foreign students, but they could pledge to do more. Imagine if every school in America offered 10 additional zero-tuition slots a year to students from very poor countries. The strain on the facilities of most schools would be minimal, yet with about 5,000 institutions of higher education in America, that could amount to tens of thousands of new slots for educational migrants.

Given the great and justified interest in helping emigrants from Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries might also consider special programs for Ukrainian students. Millions are leaving Ukraine, and while the charitable response has been impressive, over the longer term these individuals will need to find good jobs. Education is one major step toward this end.

William Jacobson:

You know, it’s not quite deplatforming, but we’re, there’s no question we’re throttled on Facebook and Twitter. I mean, perfect example. We, every Christmas Eve for years, we used to post a post that I wrote, called Christmas Eve in the Ardennes about U.s. soldiers on Christmas Eve during the Battle of the Bulge, always a huge hit on Facebook. I mean, four, five, 6,000 shares, which for our page is pretty good. All of a sudden, a couple of years ago they started throttling us and now we get 50 shares, 70 shares. They don’t show our stuff to anybody. We have 350,000 followers on Facebook. We’re lucky if they show our content to three or 4,000 people. So there’s deplatforming in a different way.

Coleman (19:07):

So Bill, you know, you’re a lawyer, your background is a securities lawyer, certainly you understand a thing or two about supply and demand and how markets work. Isn’t it astonishing that companies would agree to throttle the sales. And we have to think of every page was a sale for them. Every engagement is a sale for them to their own customers, to their own users, to reduce the options of what they offer to their customers. It seems so counterintuitive to what guys, our age grew up learning about how markets work

Jacobson (19:48):

Well. They’re so big, to them, there’s no market. There really is no alternative to Facebook. There’s not. There are pockets where you can reach a specific audience, but there’s no alternative to Facebook. There’s no alternative to Twitter. There’s just not, I mean, there are, you know, Facebook of course bought Instagram, which might have been a competitor to Facebook. So there’s not, there is no market force here. They can do whatever they want.

And one thing we’ve always covered since day one is this campus culture, this campus anti-free speech culture, cancel culture before they called it cancel culture. and how it has migrated into big tech. All the crazy stuff that you thought was like, so out of line 10, 12 years ago on campus that you read about it, Oberlin college or someplace like that, well guess where those people are working. Now, those students are now in their late twenties and early thirties, and they’re in positions of responsibility at major tech companies. And they’ve brought those campus anti-free speech values to high tech and that’s obvious and to public at the public education….

Chris Hedges:

The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. 

I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia. I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.

Eugene Volokh:

For my earlier post on the incident, see here; three follow-ups:

[1.] Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (Berkeley Law)—one of the most prominent liberal constitutional law scholars in the country—and Chancellor Howard Gillman (UC Irvine) had a Washington Post op-ed, “Free speech doesn’t mean hecklers get to shut down campus debate“; an excerpt:

Freedom of speech does not include a right to shout down others so they cannot be heard…. It is profoundly disturbing that some students assert a right to determine what messages are acceptable on a campus and try to deprive others within the community of their right to invite or listen to speakers of their choice.

If such a “heckler’s veto” is allowed, the only speech that occurs will be that which no one cares enough about to shout down. If the Hastings protesters believe that they are entitled to drown out speakers invited by the Federalist Society, then they must accept that nothing prevents Federalist Society members from drowning out speakers that they support. Before too long, no one would be able to hold any events worth attending.

[2.] David Lat had a follow-up, “Free Speech At Yale Law School: One Progressive’s Perspective / You don’t need to be conservative to be troubled by goings-on at YLS.” An excerpt, quoting a progressive student with whom Lat was corresponding [UPDATE: My editing originally edited out the fact that this was a quote from a progressive student; my apologies for the error]:

Clara Molot:

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, many of these oligarchs’ names have disappeared from their previously prominent places on Yale boards and councils. As recently as late February, Aven and Abramov were listed as members of Yale’s President’s Council on International Activities. And then they weren’t.

When asked why the men’s names were no longer publicly displayed, a Yale spokesperson said “both men’s terms expired last year,” apparently unaware of the fact that the terms were not set to expire until June 2022.

Jason Rantz:

A Washington school board butted heads over a new student discipline policy that considers a student’s race before deciding on a punishment.

The Clover Park School District debated its new “culturally responsive” student discipline policy. It means student discipline would not be consistent based on conduct. Instead, a school considers a student’s race and background. It would likely offer harsher punishments to white students, even if the conduct is identical to that of a Black or Hispanic student.

The disparate treatment is championed in the name of inclusion. But it’s not just a Clover Park School District controversy.

The culturally responsive policy impacts every Washington school district after Democrats passed a law institutionalizing critical race theory in student discipline.

Annmarie Hilton:

Home-schooling has grown like never before since the pandemic first upended traditional in-school education at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. The number of U.S. households that were home-schooling doubled at the start of the 2020-21 school year, according to the Census Bureau.

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.

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

Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider

Democrats can reclaim education as a winning issue. They might even be able to carve out some badly needed common ground, bridging the gap between those who have college degrees and those who don’t by telling a more compelling story about why we have public education in this country. But that story must go beyond the scramble for social mobility if the party is to win back some of the working people it has lost over the past few decades.

Schools may not be able to solve inequality. But they can give young people a common set of social and civic values, as well as the kind of education that is valuable in its own right and not merely as a means to an end. We don’t fund education with our tax dollars to wash our hands of whatever we might owe to the next generation. Instead, we do it to strengthen our communities — by preparing students for the wide range of roles they will inevitably play as equal members of a democratic society.

The CDC & teachers' unions did more harm to kids in two years than the virus ever did.

— Meghan Maureen (@Keggs719) March 27, 2022

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.

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

Marie Szaniszlo

A loaded 9 mm pistol was found inside a city school this week, renewing cries for police to be allowed back patrolling the hallways.

The gun was found in a storage room at the Young Achievers Science and Math Pilot K-8 School, according to Boston Police investigating the incident.

“If there are armed security at City Hall, the State House and Mayor (Michelle) Wu’s house — not to mention at elite, mostly white universities like Harvard and MIT — then the mayor needs to explain why white adults are protected while children whose only crime is being Black and poor are not,” said the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a vocal leader in Boston for neighborhood rights.

Last November, the principal of the Dr. William Henderson K-12 Inclusion School was beaten unconscious, forcing school officials to cancel classes for several days and to come up with a new plan that would allow for a safe return.

And on March 13 of this year, a girl was brutally beaten at Boston Arts Academy by a group of students who had been threatening to “jump” her, according to police. She was taken by ambulance to Boston Children’s Hospital, where she continued to receive threats via text to hunt her down there, police said.

The girl told officers she was extremely shaken and feared for her life, according to Boston Police, who are also investigating that incident.

Josh Blackman:

During President Trump’s second impeachment trial, Seth Barrett Tillman and I wrote that elected officials, including the President, retained their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. (See here, here, here, and here.) We often quoted from Chief Justice Rehnquist’s classic book about presidential impeachments, Grand Inquests. He observed that, during times of conflict, “[p]rovisions in the Constitution for judicial independence, or provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech to the President as well as others, suddenly appear as obstacles to the accomplishment of the greater good.” Yet, some of our critics argued that elected officials had reduced First Amendment rights, and their speech was subject to the Pickering/Garcetti line of cases. In other words, elected officials would be treated in the same fashion as civil servants.

Francis Menton:

If you have followed the news coming out of Yale — and why would you, really? — you would know that it’s one ever more embarrassing thing after another for the seemingly “smart” people at this elite university. Wokeism run amok; overt racism in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”; an uproar over a professor who offered a gentle defense of “culturally appropriative” Halloween costumes; and on and on. Most recently, a couple of weeks ago it was 100 loud law student protesters shouting down a free speech debate while the Dean of the Law School (Heather Gerken) stood by and did nothing.

But if I had to pick the very worst thing about Yale, a good candidate would be how Yale has inflicted its progressive/socialist ideology on its home city of New Haven, Connecticut, to the great harm of New Haven. Unlike many of the events listed above which are frequently in the news, the consequences of these progressive ideas on a city take the form of a gradual decline that can pass unnoticed until one day you stop to take stock. But I was reminded of New Haven’s ongoing Yale-induced tragedy today when I received an email from one of my Yale classmates on the subject of our upcoming 50th reunion. My classmate informs us that Yale has created a “New Haven Fund,” and urges us to make contributions to Yale that will then be designated to go to this Fund. From the email:

Elizabeth Beyer:

Four-time Badger State Spelling Bee champion Maya Jadhav will go on to represent Wisconsin at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in May.

Jadhav, an eighth-grader from Vishva Home School in Fitchburg, won the competition Saturday against 54 other spellers in grades 4-8 from across the state at the first in-person statewide spelling bee since March 2020. The bee went roughly 25 rounds before Jadhav was declared the champion.

“I feel great. I worked hard and I’m really happy,” she said. “I’m really excited. This year is just to have fun. It’s my last year, so I’m just going to study and try to have fun (at the Scripps National Spelling Bee).”

Jadhav said she studies the spelling of words online using a variety of different programs, and practices language rules and root words, while repeating the words she learns. She plans to travel with her family to the Washington, D.C., area twice in the coming months, for the Scripps National Spelling Bee and for the 2022 Raytheon Technologies Mathcounts Competition.

“I’m amazed at what Maya has done, and it’s never an easy thing. She really works hard,” said Nitin Jadhav, Maya’s parent. “This is her last year, eighth grade, so she has this last chance to go to D.C. She’s looking forward to it, and I’m happy for her. … It’s like she takes us on adventures every year.”

Jadhav won the 2019, 2020, 2021 and now the 2022 Badger State bees but was unable to travel to the national competition in 2020 or 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 national bee was canceled, and the 2021 competition took place. Jadhav came in 12th place in the 2021 national bee.

Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya, of Madison, and Jadhav were the last two students left standing on the stage after about 15 rounds as they grappled with a volley of words such as “ocotillo”, “persiflage” and “etagere”. The two students exchanged words for roughly another 10 rounds. Jadhav won the day with the word “obrotund” in the 25th round.

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.

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

Kim Bojórquez and Bryan Schott

“I think though, at this point, we are doing our best to try to thread a needle … to preserve women’s sports and find a path forward,” she said.

Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman:

Of the numerous political battles sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, some of the most bitterly contested have taken place over K-12 education. Schools have been a site of decisive struggles over the norms, values, and policies of the U.S. response to the public health crisis. While teachers collectively fought for stronger COVID mitigation measures, a small but vocal minority of parents confronted school boards in acrimonious meetings, demanding an end to remote instruction and mask mandates. These local skirmishes took place against the backdrop of successive COVID surges and a national media narrative that cast doubt on the usefulness of public health measures. It is impossible to understand the failed U.S. pandemic response, which has left over one million people dead, without understanding the role that schools have played as sites of political contestation. And it is impossible to understand the school reopening debate without understanding one of its main interlocutors: academic economist Emily Oster.

Joshua Benton:

Benton: So it’s the big academic publishing companies that bought up rights to microfilm that was created 50 or 80 years ago?

Kahle: There’s a play I really want to see put on at the Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square — a two-person play, fictitious, of Binkley meeting Eugene Power.5

Eugene Power started University Microfilms, and Binkley had this dream of microfilm playing a different role. And basically, Eugene Power won — Binkley died. And we ended up with it being a corporation, which then got bought and bought and bought and bought again. And then they think that, if you want to move something to the next medium, you need to go back and get a new license. That transaction cost is so high, right? You don’t do it very often. So things get left behind because of this idea of licensing.

Enabling news and archiving news

Benton: I wanted to ask you specifically about how you see the role that journalism has played and does play in the Archives’ history.

Kahle: There are two dimensions, right? There’s being a useful tool for journalists, having materials that they want to use. And then there’s documenting the output of journalism, of news. And those are both probably best illustrated with the Wayback Machine. 

Being a resource for journalists has been a major goal of ours. We’ve got an internal Slack channel that uses Google Alerts to find uses of the Wayback Machine in news stories, and they come in all the time. I actually find that a useful stream of news to read, because it indicates that the journalist has done some work.

Benton: Journalists’ use of the Wayback Machine reminds me a bit of the way that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was able to gain a certain amount of rhetorical authority by finding all these old clips of politicians saying something six months ago that was the opposite of what he is saying today. Using that archive of video information to build accountability. I think journalists use the Wayback Machine for the same reason. It’s “This company says X now, but only three months ago, on their website, they said Y.”

Kahle: Absolutely. And Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was really inspiring to us. We did a grant-funded program to try to build a tool that would allow anyone to become a Jon Stewart research intern. And that was what became the Television Archive.

We’d been archiving television, and then we wanted to make it available. And so we tried to make it so you could search on what people said and then make clips. And it didn’t happen as much as I thought it would.

So those are tools that we’ve helped make that are useful to journalists. Then there’s trying to archive news. And we’ve really done a lot work to try to make sure that we capture news from around the world. What’s becoming really tricky now is paywalls and robot traps. Newspapers are becoming very sophisticated to try to make sure that people don’t crawl them. They’re employing more and more sophisticated tools.

You have to give the US corporate media credit where it’s due: they are 100% correct that the US faces a *grave* problem of disinformation.

But as this great video shows — by @0rf for @mtaibbi — they’re wrong about the source. It doesn’t come from FB or QAnon but themselves: pic.twitter.com/6doeUVnAAI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2022

NCLA Takes on U.S. Surgeon General’s Censoring of Alleged Covid-19 “Misinformation” on Twitter

The world’s #1 tennis player, Russia’s @DaniilMedwed, has publicly called for peace and an end to war, but Wimbledon continues to suggest that’s not good enough for him to be allowed to play. He must denounce Putin publicly and vocally, or else be banned:https://t.co/Oj3G1mxNqd

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2022

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.

What should be done? https://t.co/aPS9ycji37

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022

Victor Davis Hanson

These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes. 

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. 

Hunter Biden’s lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank “collusion” narrative will be national headline news for weeks. 

Middle class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.

In truth, we are about to see a radical reset—of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear. 

The world and the United States are furious over hyperinflation that may soon exceed 10 percent per year. We will be lucky if it ends only in recession or stagflation, rather than global depression. 

The mess was created by the same apparat who bought into “modern monetary theory.” That silly university idea claimed prosperity would follow vastly expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates at de facto zero levels, running huge annual deficits, piling up unsustainable national debt, and subsidizing workers to stay home. 

Natural gas and oil costs are now soaring to unsustainable levels—and to the point where the middle class simply will not be able to travel, keep warm in winter, or cool in summer.

Glenn Reynolds:

People used to talk about “resistance” to President Donald Trump. That’s old hat. Now it’s resistance to the woke.

And we’re seeing more and more of that resistance. University of Michigan economics professor Mark J. Perry is working with numerous folks across the nation to file equal-opportunity complaints with the federal Department of Education when colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race and sex.

Perry recounts that in three years of research, he’s found more than 1,200 Title IX and Title VI violations — and continues to uncover more. “The significant and troubling frequency of violations of federal civil rights laws in higher education demonstrates unaddressed systemic sexism and racism that needs greater awareness, exposure and legal challenges,” he writes.

“Typical and frequent” Title IX violations “that have gone unchallenged for many decades,” he says, include “female-only scholarships, fellowships, awards, study spaces, mentoring, tutoring, special freshman orientations, industry meetings, summer STEM programs, summer STEM camps, coding clubs, leadership programs, entrepreneurship programs, gym hours, etc. that operate exclusively for women while illegally excluding and discriminating against boys and men.”

Perry says that “racially segregated or racially preferential” programs and events that violate Title VI have also “become increasingly common in higher education.”

Barbara Biasi & Song Ma:

aper documents differences across higher-education courses in the coverage of frontier knowledge. Comparing the text of 1.7M syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” a syllabus’s relative proximity to old and new knowledge. We show that courses differ greatly in the extent to which they cover frontier knowledge. More selective and better funded schools, and those enrolling socio-economically advantaged students, teach more frontier knowledge. Instructors play a big role in shaping course content; research-active instructors teach more frontier knowledge. Students from schools teaching more frontier knowledge are more likely to complete a PhD, produce more patents, and earn more after graduation.

Pearlleff:

Memorization means purposely learning something so that you remember it with muscle memory; that is, you know the information without needing to look it up.

Every educator knows that memorization is passé in today’s day and age. Facts are so effortlessly accessible with modern technology and the internet that it’s understanding how to analyze them that’s important. Names, places, dates, and other kinds of trivia don’t matter, so much as the ability to logically reason about them. Today anything can be easily looked up. 

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we can look anything up, but it’s knowing what knowledge is available and how to integrate it into our existing knowledge base that’s important.

“Whites Only” – If you think we’ve gotten past the horrifying racial segregation of the 20th Century, think again. @WisconsinDPI promotes “whites only” affinity groups (image below). More examples of how EQUITY leads to segregation @WILawLiberty: https://t.co/AQbl41jQlQ pic.twitter.com/7q0bVFaW8e

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 25, 2022

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.

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

Scott Girard

According to an email sent to board members Tuesday morning, there are currently 286 students enrolled in online programming, with 150 in third through fifth grades and 136 in grades six to 12. When the school year began, there were about 750 requests for virtual instruction in elementary grades and 452 applications for grades six through 12, with 234 of those offered enrollment.

The email, which Vander Meulen shared with the Cap Times, also outlines future enrollment plans.

Next year, the program will have 100 students maximum in each of fourth and fifth grades, with 150 maximum in grades six to 10. The 100-student maximum will remain for fourth and fifth grades, while the secondary grades will expand by 25 as they add a grade level each of the following two years, with 175 for grades six to 11 in 2023-24 and 200 for grades six through 12 in 2024-25.

Vander Meulen and Gomez Schmidt proposed pushing a vote to at least April 11, giving administrators time to provide further information on how the year has gone and for board members to consider the enrollment information they received earlier that day. 

“I want to vote for this program, I just can’t do it yet,” Vander Meulen said.

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.

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

gao.gov

For millions of students, teachers and their families, the last couple of school years during COVID-19 were rife with challenges that disrupted education. But many teachers nationwide reported having students who never even showed up during the entire 2020-2021 school year. We’ll find out more from GAO’s Jackie Nowicki.

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.

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

Nicholas Wade:

The argument is ingenious. Its fatal flaw lies in assuming that the non-market cases chosen for study were selected at random by the Chinese authorities. In fact, as Chan has noted, one of the authorities’ criteria was closeness to the market. The spatial pattern of non-market cases reflects this selection bias, not a hidden chain of infection to the market. “Since their assumption of no ascertainment bias is most likely incorrect, their analysis is therefore also meaningless,” Chan says.

Unlike most journalists, science writers seldom consider the motives of their sources. Few or none remarked on Andersen’s deep personal interest in the result he was trying to prove. He and his colleagues concluded on January 31, 2020, that the Covid virus did not have a natural origin. But Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, immediately decreed this view to be a conspiracy theory that will do “great potential harm to science and international harmony.” Not to mention to his own reputation and that of his lieutenant Anthony Fauci. Both have long advocated for gain-of-function research—enhancing the infectivity of natural viruses—and they funded such research involving bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Technology.

No scientist wishes to get on the wrong side of NIH administrators, the major funders of biomedical research. If Collins said the lab leak was a conspiracy theory, why then, so it must be. A mere four days later, Andersen changed his mind and derided lab leak as a conspiracy theory. No one in his group has provided a convincing explanation for this 180-degree reversal. Andersen’s new paper, if true, would go a long way to justifying his otherwise unsupported second take on the issue.

WILL:

But the discrimination does not stop there. English learners (often the very minority students that “equity” seems to target) are placed at the back of the line: “Prioritize your English Language learners meeting with you second and more often.” Below is the screenshot from Madison’s policy:

Unfortunately, this is not the only example of how school districts are allocating resources based on race. In the Middleton Cross Plains Area School District, official district policy is to provide a “particular focus on our black and brown students.” MCPASD also argues that “equity” requires distributing resources to a particular “group of students,” which means non-white students. Middleton also correctly explains that “equity does not mean equal.”

From Elmbrook. In March 2022, WILL published a report from an Elmbrook Assistant Superintendent, who claimed that non-discrimination laws do not apply to white students. Elmbrook subsequently admitted that they didn’t mean what they said, but here is what they said as of March 2022:

Just took the kids to the Museum of Science in Boston for the first time in ages, and look what we found? Notice any differences? How long until they take this down? pic.twitter.com/SPatmlQ2Of

— Boston Mom (@paulanoukas) March 23, 2022

Cayla Bamberger

The city’s Department of Education is determined to attract families to the public school system — but is bracing for the reality if it can’t.

Schools Chancellor David Banks addressed the City Council’s education committee Monday on the proposed education budget, which accounts for student enrollment predictions and trends. Previously during the pandemic, schools did not lose funding if enrollment dropped.

George Packer:

What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”

School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.

If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime. In 1960, when Richard Nixon chose not to contest an extremely narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, and Nixon partisans didn’t storm the Capitol looking to hang the speaker of the House, 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees. By the time of last year’s insurrection, that proportion had surpassed one-third. Law degrees from Harvard and Yale didn’t keep Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from trying to tear up the Constitution. Americans with college degrees are likelier to vote and otherwise participate in civic life than those without; they’re also likelier to spend hours throwing clever online darts. One study found that college-educated Democrats were more likely to hold false views about their political enemies than those without four-year degrees. More education generally makes people more Democratic, but not more democratic.

We owe our beleaguered children, the victims of our inadequacy, a chance to be better than we are.

Charles Moore: “Hong Kong National Security Bureau ordered Benedict Rogers, of @hk_watch, to take down the website within 72 hours or face a big fine and anything from one year to life imprisonment. Mr Rogers is a British citizen, living in Britain” /https://t.co/AxGXf0f2u6

— Benedict Rogers 羅傑斯 (@benedictrogers) March 22, 2022

Darcy Moore:

The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and literary experiences.

Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners, dragons and wizards – in a modest print run of 1500 copies. Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain, when The Road to Wigan Pier was published that same year. Commissioned for The Left Book Club, it examined the appalling living and working conditions of miners in the North of England.

Vagabondish and restless, Orwell was iconoclastic, eschewed academia and rejected religion. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. Orwell could not have despised this tradition more vehemently, often mocking adherents with jibes such as:

‘In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree.’

Orwell especially doubted the usefulness of this faith to novelists:

Melissa Korn:

USC Provost Charles F. Zukoski told students and staff at the Rossier School of Education in a letter Wednesday that the school’s dean, Pedro A. Noguera, notified him recently of “a history of inaccuracies in the survey data.”  A school representative declined to comment beyond the letter.

Dr. Zukoski said the school pulled itself from a set of graduate-school rankings that was set to be released in coming days “while we seek to understand the situation further.”

A faculty member familiar with the investigation said the probe is related to whether the school included information about the correct groups of graduate students in its rankings submission. The person said faculty at the education school expressed concern a few years ago about proposed changes to that set of data, which could have artificially inflated average GRE scores.

USC tied at No. 11 in the latest U.S. News & World Report ranking of graduate education schools, released last year. “We rely on schools to accurately report their data and ask academic officials to verify that data,” said Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News & World Report.

USC hired law firm Jones Day to conduct a review of its submissions for the rankings. They interviewed multiple staff and faculty members in recent weeks, according to the faculty member familiar with the investigation.

Dr. Zukoski said USC will release findings from the Jones Day investigation when it is complete, which he expects would happen in the next two weeks. He said the school has already notified the U.S. Education Department and its accreditor of the data inaccuracies.

Rossier’s erroneous U.S. News & World Report submissions are the latest in a string of controversies over college rankings, and highlight the ease with which schools can provide faulty data, accidentally or otherwise.

Elizabeth Beyer

“I do feel like I need more information on how the current program is functioning and the potential consequences of expanding this program by 10 (full-time staff members) with non-reoccurring ESSER funding,” Gomez-Schmidt said.

“I think we’re just creating a problem that a future board in two years is going to have to grapple with,” Carusi said.

Castro said the board would need to revisit those concerns “down the road.”

Pearson said she agreed with the concern regarding the use of one-time ESSER funding to hire for permanent positions but at the same time recognized the need for the early approval to expand the program.

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.

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

Josh Christensen:

Amid a nearly imperceptible rise in COVID-19 cases, Chicago Public Schools returned to masking kids in K-12 classrooms, and its teachers’ union is still pressing for further COVID restrictions.

The city’s schools were among the last in the nation to drop universal mask mandates for children. Having promised to shift to a “mask-optional” policy on March 14, however, CPS published a flyer that says students must wear masks whenever visiting a school nurse, for at least 10 days after a COVID exposure, and for at least 5 days after a weeklong period of at-home learning. The Chicago Department of Public Health can also require an entire class to mask up at any point, the flyer reads, and CPS “may require masks again if community transmission reaches a moderate or high level.”

The Chicago Tribune first reported the return to masking on Monday, writing that CPS and the city’s health department had ordered parents of elementary school children to mask their children due to a recent classroom exposure.

Studies have shown children are at very low risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. In-school transmission is also “extremely rare,” according to a peer-reviewed study done by the American Academy of Pediatrics in January 2021.

The news comes as the Chicago Teachers Union agitates for a return to universal masking as part of a safety deal it signed with the city in January. Alleged violations of that deal, which ended in a five-day cancellation of classes citywide, prompted the teachers’ union to appeal to the state’s Educational Labor Relations Board. The board declined the union’s request for an emergency injunction but will hear its complaint in June. The safety agreement between the city and teachers’ union expires in August.

The safety agreement states all schools must universally mask students and provide universal testing. Any school may also flip to remote learning provided at least 30 percent of teachers are absent for at least two days or at least 40 percent of students have been told to quarantine by the city’s health department.

Cook County, which encompasses Chicago’s school districts, is at low risk of community spread, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The public health agency recently changed its metrics for tracking community transmission of COVID, opting to give a locality’s hospitalizations more weight than case counts in its recommendations.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Aaron Sibarium:

“The idea that guilty people shouldn’t get lawyers attacks the legal system at its root,” Andrew Koppelman, a prominent liberal scholar of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said. “People will ask: ‘How can you represent someone who’s guilty?’ The answer is that a society where accused people don’t get a defense as a matter of course is a society you don’t want to live in. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

Logan Kugler:

Can technology affect human morality?

This is not an esoteric test question from a college philosophy class, but a real, growing concern among leading technologists and thinkers. Technologies like social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence can create moral issues at scale, and technology experts specifically and society generally are struggling to navigate these issues. 

On the one hand, technology can empower us with better information on the consequences of our actions, as when we use the Internet to research how to reduce our environmental footprint. In the past, such information may have been inaccessible or impossible to source, but today we can easily arm ourselves with data that helps us make choices we perceive to be more moral.

On the other hand, technology can bring out our worst behaviors. Social media platforms can serve us content that enrages or depresses us, making it more (or less) likely we will take immoral actions based on our feelings. These platforms also can be used by bad actors to take immoral actions more easily.

Not to mention, technology companies themselves may use their creations in ways that, intentionally or accidentally, cause real harm.

One prominent example of how technology can impact morality is Facebook. The company’s social media platform makes it easier for us to connect with people and issues we care about, which enables us to take moral actions, like supporting a friend having a hard time or raising money for an important cause.

Anna Nordberg, via a kind reader:

California’s reading scores are dismal, with 68% of fourth-graders reading below grade level. This is the result of the disastrous decision in the 1980s for the state to embrace whole language, the idea that children should learn to recognize words and phrases through context, guessing and memorization. But evidence shows the whole language approach has left millions of kids behind. What children actually need is to be taught how to decode, or sound out, words — a phonics-based approach called structured literacy that requires explicit instruction and works with all students, including those with learning disabilities and second language learners.

The debate over whether children should be taught to read through whole language (rebranded as balanced literacy in the ’90s) or phonics became known as the Reading Wars, turning a complex issue into a catchy cultural meme. Which is depressing, because how we teach kids to read really matters. It can be the difference between an intact, confident child and one who thinks they can’t succeed in school.

One of the biggest challenges, explains Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd and the former state literacy director at the Department of Education in Mississippi, is changing the mindset of a state’s education system. “California has long been a whole language state,” she says, and that’s influenced an entire generation of teachers and administrators.
The first step is teacher knowledge. “All the new curricula in the world doesn’t matter if teachers don’t have the training to pivot during instruction,” says Burk, who oversaw the implementation of Mississippi’s Literacy-based Promotion Act from 2013-2019, which dramatically increased the state’s reading scores. “When a child says, ‘I don’t understand,’ does the teacher have the knowledge to fill the gap?” In Mississippi, Burk ensured that teachers had access to high-quality professional development, and put literacy coaches into the highest need schools.

McCourt School of Public Policy via a kind Deb Britt email:

The one-of-a-kind Certificate in Education Finance (CEF) equips participants with the practical skills they need in strategic fiscal management, policy analysis, and leadership to deploy resources in ways that do the most for students.

By allowing men to compete in women’s sports, the NCAA is destroying opportunities for women, making a mockery of its championships, and perpetuating a fraud.

In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota’s Emma Weyant as the best women’s swimmer in the 500y freestyle. pic.twitter.com/tBmFxFE3q6

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 22, 2022

Roni Caryn Rabin

Drug overdose deaths also reached record levels during the first year of the pandemic, with more than 100,000 Americans dying of overdoses during the 12-month period that ended in April 2021, a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous year, according to reports issued in November. The number of deaths from opioids in which alcohol played a role also increased.

Young adults ages 25 to 44 experienced the greatest increases in alcohol-related deaths in 2020, rising nearly 40 percent over the previous year, according to the new report.

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.

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

David Lat:

Not confronting the protesters on March 10 was, I submit, a failure of leadership—but it might have been understandable, in the heat of the moment and the chaos of the situation. A less understandable failure of leadership is not sending out a school-wide email after things calmed down, like the one that Dean David Faigman sent out after a similar event at UC Hastings Law, offering a ringing affirmation of free speech and explaining how the protesters violated university free-speech policies. It’s now more than a week after the event—by the time YLS students return from spring break, more than two weeks after the event—and you have not said anything publicly, despite ample opportunity to do so.

We don’t know each other super-well, so I apologize if this next part is overly familiar, but I think we share something in common: we both want to be liked. This is a common trait, and it’s not always a problem, but it can be when one is a leader or manager. (This is why I’m much happier as a one-man band here at Original Jurisdiction, instead of running Above the Law; I don’t enjoy managing, and my desire to be liked prevents me from doing it as well as I should.)

As the Dean of Yale Law School, you can’t be liked by all people, all of the time. You can be liked by most people, most of the time—and you are—but sometimes you have to anger people, if that’s the price of doing the right thing. And right now, the right thing to do is to make clear to the entire YLS community, liberals and conservatives alike, that they must comply with Yale’s free-speech policies—whether they like it or not.2

There’s been a problem with the intellectual climate at Yale Law School for several years now. Some of it flows from the fact that progressive students (“Progressives”) view those who disagree with them—definitely conservatives, and even some moderates—as bad people (“Bad People”).

Progressives are free to think that their opponents are Bad People. They can exclude them from social gatherings. They can make Bad People feel unwelcome in affinity groups (already happening at YLS, with members of certain affinity groups being forced to choose between affinity-group and FedSoc membership). They can make fun of Bad People with satirical fliers.3

But it’s your job, as the Dean of Yale Law School, to tell Progressives that in an academic community based on free expression, there are limits to how much they can act on the view that their opponents are Bad People.4 Progressives can’t shut down duly organized events because they disagree with the speakers. They can’t weaponize anti-discrimination policies to punish the protected speech of their opponents. They can’t make up and spread liesabout professors with unpopular views (or the students who dare to associate with those professors). It’s your job, as the Dean of Yale Law School, to remind Progressives of all this—even if they complain, call you “complicit,” or say you’re a Bad Person too.

Robert Zimmerman:

A major victory for free speech: A federal judge ruled on March 11th that officials at the University of North Texas can be held personally responsible for firing a professor because they did not like his political opinions.

In his 69-page order of March 11, Judge Sean Jordan, of the United States District Court for Eastern Texas, found that university officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” before they fired him for going public with his disagreement with the left-wing concept of “microaggressions.”

The university was claiming qualified immunity for school officials in the case, meaning that the school wanted its officials to be excluded from being held responsible for their actions merely because they were acting in their position as state employees. Jordan denied the claim of qualified immunity and also denied the school’s demand to have the case dismissed outright.

You can read the judge’s order here [pdf].

The background: Hiers, having found flyers in math department’s lounge warning faculty against triggering “microaggessions” in their conversations, responded as shown in the picture above, placing one flyer on the chalk rack of the blackboard and wrote his own opinion of it above.

Ralf Schmidt, the Math department’s head, immediately criticized Hiers for doing this, and within a week fired him without notice.

WOW: Virginia Tech swimmer Reka Gyorgy says her finals spot was stolen from her by Lia Thomas because of “the @NCAA‘s decision to let someone who is not a biological female to compete.” pic.twitter.com/vrtEfqZ0LW

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) March 20, 2022

Elizabeth Beyer:

“include instituting law and order in schools, questioning diversity and equity initiatives in curriculum and promoting charter schools. His viewpoint, an outlier among the predominantly left-leaning board, would create diversity of thought if he is elected, he said.”

I did not see Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results mentioned in this article.

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.

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

Scott Girard

In MMSD, 34.9% of students in grades 3-8 scored “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the statewide Forward Exam in 2018-19, the most recent year the exam was given with a high percentage of students participating. If the overall number isn’t bad enough, the results were worse for every non-white group of students other than Asians, who had the same percentage as the district as a whole in those two categories.

Just 10.1% of Black students taking the exam scored above “Basic,” with 58.9% scoring “Below Basic,” the lowest level. For Hispanic students, meanwhile, 16% scored “Proficient” or “Advanced,” with 46.9% scoring “Below Basic.”

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.

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

Paul Rossi:

Parents at the elite private Westminster Schoolsin Atlanta are rebelling against the imposition of Critical Social Justice on their students. Westminster is a member school of National Association of Independent Schools.

A letter sent to the Internal Revenue Service signed “a Taxpayer” includes a list of 16 partisan incidents the author says qualifies Westminster as an “action organization,” violating the school’s tax-exempt status.

More, here.

Madeline Fox:

“I plan to focus on a broad spectrum of issues, including making sure students have access to high quality schools across the state, curriculum transparency and making sure that schools follow the constitution in enacting policies that respect and empower parents and their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their child,” Brewer said.

Even before Brewer was hired, the organization has been working on school issues for years. It supported a legislative effort to create a parental bill of rights that would permit parents to review instructional materials and determine which pronouns are used for their children. And, WILL is currently suing the Madison and Kettle Moraine school districts over guidance to staff to use kids’ preferred pronouns and gender identity without first running it by parents. 

WILL has also been supportive of plans to expand the state’s school voucher programs and create a new body to approve charter schools. It’s intervened in school district battles over masking policies, issues around race and what books are available in school libraries. 

The Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which often champions liberal causes, has also focused more heavily on schools, in large part through the work of its Equal Justice Works Fellow, Elizabeth Lambert, who started a two-year fellowship with the organization in September 2020.

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.

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

1/Since Sept, we have spent hundreds of hours scouring NAIS and the socials of their admins and discovered bits and pieces that come together to tell an extraordinary story of the coordinated dismantling of private education from inside out. We used THEIR MATERIALS against them.

— UNDERCOVER MOTHER – EXPOSING PRIVATE SCHOOLS (@UndercoverMoth9) March 21, 2022

Eugene Volokh:

From a decision in D.C. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. by D.C. Superior Court Judge Anthony Epstein, handed down earlier this month but just posted on Westlaw:

The Court grants the District of Columbia’s petition for enforcement of an investigative subpoena to Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook, Inc. ….

Through the Office of the Attorney General (“OAG”), the District has responsibility for enforcing the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (“CPPA”). OAG is investigating whether Meta made any false or misleading public statements about its efforts to enforce its “content moderation policies” prohibiting misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines in Facebook posts.

OAG issued an investigative subpoena to Meta that seeks, among other things [in Request No. 2], the identities of Facebook users that Meta determined violated its content moderation policies for vaccine misinformation through public posts[:]

{Documents sufficient to identify all Facebook groups, pages, and accounts that have violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policy with respect to content concerning vaccines, including the identity of any individuals or entities associated with the groups, pages, and accounts; the nature of the violation(s); and the consequences imposed by Facebook for the violation, including whether content was removed or banned from these sources.}

Meta has refused to disclose this information. The Court concludes that this request for public posts is a reasonable and lawful exercise of the District’s subpoena power and that it is consistent with the federal Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) [details of this omitted -EV] and with the First Amendment

Chris Mills Rodrigo:

Multiple covert government surveillance operations hoovering up Americans’ information without oversight have been exposed in the last year. Those not following closely may not have noticed.

Recent revelations about government spying have failed to make a major splash in Congress, the media or public discourse. 

Stories about surveillance have broken through before — perhaps most notably in the case of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency but also in the 1970s when the Senate’s Church Committee investigated abuses by multiple intelligence agencies.

What made those cases so much more salient? And how can privacy advocates get the public’s attention more consistently?

Over the past several months, lawmakers and reporters have revealed that the country’s intelligence agencies have been using broad executive authority and taking advantage of a loophole in the Fourth Amendment to obtain much more data than was previously known.

Three of these major discoveries, all made public by Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office, concern the CIA gathering American data, a defense agency buying consumer data from a third-party broker and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) participating in a program stealthily compiling money transfer records.

There are some major differences between these revelations and ones that have attracted public attention in the past.

Scott Girard:

While the walkout was focused on Assad, as Yang continually reminded the group when conversation drifted to other resources and solutions, it also highlighted a larger concern: many of the students there said they couldn’t trust any other adult in the school.

“If you’re not a minority, you wouldn’t understand the impact of having someone that looks like you that’s someone you can go to,” La Follette junior Josepha Da Costa told the Cap Times. “That’s why Coach is so important to us because we have actually built those relationships with him and we see him as someone we can kind of look up to and teach us about ourselves.”

Junior Xodus More described Assad in an interview as “pretty much the only person that kids can go to.”

Multiple staff members spoke to the students during the walkout, offering their ear and a safe place to come and talk. Thompson pointed to The Den, another open walk-in space for students with counselors on hand.

“I’m going to have to work with the counseling team, our student services team to think about how we can be way more present and available to meet your mental health needs,” Thompson said.

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.

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