Kelly Meyers:

The governor says he doesn’t want to expand the program because he doesn’t want to take money away from traditional public schools.

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]

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

Trisha Thadani:

San Francisco’s homelessness department is pushing to continue an expensive tent encampment program that it says is crucial for keeping people off the sidewalks, despite its high price tag of more than $60,000 per tent, per year.

The city has six so-called “safe sleeping villages,” where homeless people sleep in tents and also receive three meals a day, around-the-clock security, bathrooms and showers. The city created these sites during the pandemic to quickly get people off crowded sidewalks and into a place where they can socially distance and access basic services.

The program currently costs $18.2 million for about 260 tents. Unlike the city’s homeless hotel program, the tent villages are not eligible for federal reimbursement. Some of the sites have been run by nonprofits Urban Alchemy, Dolores Street Community Services and Larkin Street Youth Services.

Gilles E.Gignac & Marcin Zajenkowski:

People can estimate their own and their romantic partner’s intelligence (IQ) with some level of accuracy, which may facilitate the observation of assortative mating for IQ. However, the degree to which people may overestimate their own (IQ), as well as overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ, is less well established. In the current study, we investigated four outstanding issues in this area. First, in a sample of 218 couples, we examined the degree to which people overestimate their own and their partner’s IQ, on the basis of comparisons between self-estimated intelligence (SEI) and objectively measured IQ (Advanced Progressive Matrices). Secondly, we evaluated whether assortative mating for intelligence was driven principally by women (the males-compete/females choose model of sexual selection) or both women and men (the mutual mate model of sexual selection). Thirdly, we tested the hypothesis that assortative mating for intelligence may occur for both SEI and objective IQ. Finally, the possibility that degree of intellectual compatibility may relate positively to relationship satisfaction was examined. We found that people overestimated their own IQ (women and men ≈ 30 IQ points) and their partner’s IQ (women = 38 IQ points; men = 36 IQ points). Furthermore, both women and men predicted their partner’s IQ with some degree of accuracy (women: r = 0.30; men: r = 0.19). However, the numerical difference in the correlations was not found to be significant statistically. Finally, the degree of intellectual compatibility (objectively and subjectively assessed) failed to correlate significantly with relationship satisfaction for both sexes. It would appear that women and men participate in the process of mate selection, with respect to evaluating IQ, consistent with the mutual mate model of sexual selection. However, the personal benefits of intellectual compatibility seem less obvious.

Peter Wood:

Is the popular outrage against CRT truly a pro-censorship movement? Is it disrespectful of education?

The way to tell is to look at what vexes the anti-CRTers — and what they favor instead. Among the more widely watched videos is one of a citizen opposing his school board’s pro-CRT stance: the T-shirted, tattooed British expat Simon Campbell sticks it to the Pennsbury, Pennsylvania school board. The audience cheers as Mr Campbell charges the school board, ‘It seems to me that you think you can supersede the United States Constitution.’ As the cheers die down, he continues, ‘I’ve got news for you school board president Benito Mussolini, your power does not exceed that of the US Constitution and the First Amendment Rights of the citizens of this great nation.’ His five minute bravura performance needs to be savored in the original.

Mr Campbell was moved to speak by an email from the district’s director of ‘Equity, Diversity & Education’ in which she advised the superintendent on how to censor public comments she disagreed with — and the president of the school board agreed with that proposal. This is a good place to pause on the terminology. The defenders of critical race theory frequently create a maze of distinctions. If you challenge the 1619 Project as an instance of CRT, they loftily inform you that you don’t know what you are talking about. CRT is an exquisitely refined doctrine that has been crafted by law professors over the years — and has nothing to do with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’s confected fantasy about the slave origins of American society. Or if you challenge the Ibram X. Kendi’s virulently anti-white ‘anti-racism’ agenda, the proponents of CRT sneer that Kendi’s approach differs entirely. In schools, the rubric under which CRT is most commonly deployed is ‘DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’. And once again, school officials intone from Olympian heights that DEI and CRT are as different as apple pie and applejack.

Stanley Kurtz:

Advocates of “Action Civics” are poised to press a novel practice on every state education system in the Union. Bills mandating Action civics will soon be introduced in state legislatures across the country; it is already required in Massachusetts and Illinois. The Biden administration is likely to support that effort with federal carrots and sticks, using the model of the Obama administration’s support for Common Core.

Unfortunately, widespread adoption of Action Civics will definitively politicize an already politically tainted K-12 educational system, irrevocably cementing the partisan Left’s hold upon our culture. Action civics amounts to school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions. It must be energetically opposed by all who value authentic liberal education.

Despite its growing influence, the goals and premises of Action Civics (sometimes called “Civic Engagement,” “New Civics,” or “Project-Based Civics”) remain little-known to most Americans. The recent report of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission included a welcome, if brief, warning against Action Civics. The need for a more thoroughgoing critique of Action civics remains urgent, however.

Jonathan Turley:

The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism. We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. Even journalists are leading attacks on free speech and the free press.  This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories. Even waiting for the facts is viewed as unethical today by journalism professors who demand that reporters make political or social declarations through their coverage.

One of the lowest moments came with the New York Times’ mea culpa for publishing an opinion column by a conservative senator. The New York Times was denounced by many of us for its cringing apology after publishing a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Ark.). and promising not to publish future such columns. It will not publish a column from a Republican senator on protests in the United States but it will publish columns from one of the Chinese leaders crushing protests for freedom in Hong Kong. Cotton was arguing that the use of national guard troops may be necessary to quell violent riots, noting the historical use of this option in past protests. This option was used most recently after the Capitol riot.

Sarah Pruitt:

But for social and educational reformers, it wasn’t enough that children attend school—they also needed to stay safe and healthy when they got there. Schools were renovated and reorganized to allow better ventilation in classrooms and ensure access to fresh drinking water. Beginning in the 1890s, many cities launched medical inspection programs, with doctors visiting schools to check on students’ health and identify any ailments, from head lice to tuberculosis.

In 1902, Lina Rogers became the nation’s first school nurse, when she was hired to improve student health and attendance at four New York City schools. Absenteeism fell by 90 percent within six months of her coming on the job, and by 1914 the city’s schools employed nearly 400 nurses.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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]

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

Mark Simon:

In the land of the First Amendment, it’s hard to convey what it’s like to lose the freedom of the press. So ingrained is a free press in the United States’ law and way of life, it is almost impossible for Americans to conceive of their government wiping out one of the country’s most popular press outlets and clapping its owner, officers and writers in jail.

It used to also be unimaginable in Hong Kong, an international financial center whose success once relied on offering freedoms not granted in mainland China. But this is precisely what happened on Thursday, when one of Hong Kong’s largest newspapers, with more than 600,000 paid subscribers to its online news platform, was effectively closed down by Hong Kong authorities beholden to the Chinese Communist government in Beijing.

Matt Taibbi:

On December 31st of last year, an 80 year-old Buffalo-area woman named Judith Smentkiewicz fell ill with Covid-19. She was rushed by ambulance to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Williamsville, New York, where she was put on a ventilator. Her son Michael and his wife flew up from Georgia, and were given grim news. Judith, doctors said, had a 20% chance at survival, and even if she made it, she’d be on a ventilator for a month. 

As December passed into the New Year, Judith’s health declined. Her family members, increasingly desperate, had been doing what people in the Internet age do, Googling in search of potential treatments. They saw stories about the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, learning among other things that a pulmonologist named Pierre Kory had just testifiedbefore the Senate that the drug had a “miraculous” impact on Covid-19 patients. The family pressured doctors at the hospital to give Judith the drug. The hospital initially complied, administering one dose on January 2nd. According to her family’s court testimony, a dramatic change in her condition ensued.

“In less than 48 hours, my mother was taken off the ventilator, transferred out of the Intensive Care Unit, sitting up on her own and communicating,” the patient’s daughter Michelle Kulbacki told a court.

Stephanie Reeves:

The present research examines the conditions under which educating non-stigmatized individuals about the experiences of members of stigmatized groups leads to paternalistic or more respectful views of the target. We propose that when these efforts ask members of non-stigmatized groups to focus only on the difficulties experienced by stigmatized targets, they will lead to more paternalistic views of targets because they portray targets as being in need of help. In contrast, we propose that when these efforts take a broader focus on stigmatized targets and include their resilience in the face of their difficulties, they will lead to more respectful views of targets. Four studies supported these predictions. Across studies, White participants who focused only on a Black target’s difficulties subsequently perceived the target as more helpless and less competent than controls. Participants who focused on the target’s resilience in the face of difficulties perceived him as more competent.

Rony Fadel:

Fooled By Randomness (NN Taleb): Taleb is a complicated personality, but this book gave me a heuristic for thinking about long-tails and uncertain events that I could never have derived myself from a probability textbook.

• Designing Data Intensive Applications (M Kleppmann): Provided a first-principles approach for thinking about the design of modern large-scale data infrastructure. It’s not just about assembling different technologies — there are principles behind how data moves and transforms that transcend current technology, and DDIA is an articulation of those principles. After reading this, I began to notice general patterns in data infrastructure, which helped me quickly grasp how new technologies worked. (most are variations on the same principles)
• Introduction to Statistical Learning (James et al) and Applied Predictive Modeling (Kuhn et al). These two books gave me a grand sweep of predictive modeling methods pre-deep learning, methods which continue to be useful and applicable to a wider variety of problem contexts than AI/Deep Learning. (neural networks aren’t appropriate for huge classes of problems)
• High Output Management (A Grove): oft-recommended book by former Intel CEO Andy Grove on how middle management in large corporations actually works, from promotions to meetings (as a unit of work). This was my guide to interpreting my experiences when I joined a large corporation and boy was it accurate. It gave me a language and a framework for thinking about what was happening around me. I heard this was 1 of 2 books Tobi Luetke read to understand management when he went from being a technical person to CEO of Shopify. (the other book being Cialdini’s Influence). Hard Things about Hard Things (B Horowitz) is a different take that is also worth a read to understand the hidden–but intentional–managerial design of a modern tech company. These some of the very few books written by practitioners–rather than management gurus–that I’ve found to track pretty closely with my own real life experiences.
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The Economist:

HOURS BEFORE Jo Phoenix, a professor of criminology at Britain’s Open University, was due to give a talk at Essex University about placing transgender women in women’s prisons, students threatened to barricade the hall. They complained that Ms Phoenix was a “transphobe” likely to engage in “hate speech”. A flyer with an image of a gun and text reading “shut the fuck up, TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a slur) was circulating. The university told Ms Phoenix it was postponing the event. Then the sociology department asked her for a copy of her talk. Days later it told her it had voted to rescind its invitation, and would issue no more. Ms Phoenix says she was “absolutely furious and deeply upset” about both the damage to her reputation and to academic freedom.

Essex University’s vice-chancellor asked Akua Reindorf, a lawyer who specialises in employment and discrimination law, to investigate. Eighteen months later, in mid-May, the university published Ms Reindorf’s report on its website. It said Essex had infringed Ms Phoenix’s right to freedom of expression and that its decision to “exclude and blacklist” her was also unlawful. It advised the university to apologise to Ms Phoenix and to Rosa Freedman, a professor of law at Reading University whom it had excluded from an event during Holocaust Memorial Week “because of her views on gender identity”. (Essex in the end allowed Ms Freedman to attend.)

Beth Schwartzapfel AND Tony Plohetski:

When Taylor sued the officers who put him in those cells and ignored his cries for help, federal judges agreed that the conditions were unconstitutional — but they threw out his lawsuit, citing qualified immunity. The issue has come up again and again as the country grapples with what accountability for law enforcement should look like.

For years, courts upheld this legal shield. The Supreme Court granted qualified immunity to police in Oklahoma who arrived at a hospital to help staff restrain an agitated patient, but instead shocked him with a stun gun and pinned him to the ground until he died. In another case where the court allowed qualified immunity, a Georgia deputy sheriff shot a 10-year-old who was laying face down on the ground. The cop had been aiming at the family dog and missed.

Courts have used qualified immunity “to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing,” Mississippi District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves wrote in a ruling last summer. Even when police commit egregious abuse and misconduct, the judge said, “qualified immunity has served as a shield for these officers, protecting them from accountability.”

Then, for the first time in decades, the Supreme Court signaled in Taylor’s case that this shield has gone too far: “Any reasonable officer should have realized that Taylor’s conditions of confinement offended the Constitution,” the justices wrote. Taylor could sue, after all.

“This is a new message,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor who studies qualified immunity at UCLA. “This is not a reversal of qualified immunity — it is not a new doctrine,” she said, but it does indicate that courts should start thinking more critically about when officers need protection and when that protection becomes a free pass for abuse. 

Advocates of qualified immunity warn that the fear of being sued will cause officers to be less proactive and more reluctant to intervene in potentially risky situations. “Do you really want the police officer thinking about whether they are going to be sued? Or do you want them focusing on how the facts are emerging, perceived by them?” said Philip Savrin, an attorney who often represents law enforcement officers in civil suits, including in one suit before the Supreme Courtwhere qualified immunity was at issue. “We’ve got to have a cushion.”

Victoria Waldersee Paresh Dave:

On June 15, the channel was blocked for violating YouTube’s guidelines, according to a screenshot seen by Reuters, after twelve of its videos had been reported for breaching its ‘cyberbullying and harassment’ policy.

The channel’s administrators had appealed the blocking of all twelve videos between April and June, with some reinstated – but YouTube did not provide an explanation as to why others were kept out of public view, the administrators told Reuters.

Following inquiries from Reuters as to why the channel was removed, YouTube restored it on June 18, explaining that it had received multiple so-called ‘strikes’ for videos which contained people holding up ID cards to prove they were related to the missing, violating a YouTube policy which prohibits personally identifiable information from appearing in its content.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Brian Skinner:

In technical terms, the relevant concept is Archimedes’ principle: the upward buoyant force on an object is equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. This, in turn, is an immediate consequence of the deeper principle that is a bedrock of physics: the universe is a giant energy minimization machine. If the universe can lower its potential energy by displacing your hot air balloon upward to make room for heavier (colder) air, then it will do so. All you have to do is hold on.

In this way, “flight by flotation” is a simple, natural, and almost timeless idea. It feels clear and intuitive at every conceptual level.

We just found it impractical for some reason.

Justice center for constitutional freedoms:

There is a recording of Dr. Christian’s meeting today between Dr. Christian and Dr. Preston Smith, the Dean of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, College of Medicine, Dr. Susan Shaw, the Chief Medical Officer of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and Dr. Brian Ulmer, Head of the Department of Surgery at the Saskatchewan College of Medicine.

In addition, the Justice Centre will represent Dr. Christian in his defence of a complaint that was made against him and an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan. The complaint objects to Dr. Christian having advocated for the informed consent of Covid vaccines for children.

Dr. Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.

On June 17, Dr. Christian released a statement to over 200 doctors which contained his concerns regarding giving the Covid shots to children. In it he noted that he is pro-vaccine, and that he did not represent any group, the Saskatchewan Health Authority, or the University of Saskatchewan. “I speak to you directly as a physician, a surgeon, and a fellow human being.” Dr. Christian noted that the principle of informed consent was sacrosanct and noted that a patient should always be “fully aware of the risks of the medical intervention, the benefits of the intervention, and if any alternatives exist to the intervention.”

“This should apply particularly to a new vaccine that has never before been tried in humans… before the vaccine is rolled out to children, both children and parents must know the risks of m-RNA vaccines,” he wrote.

Abigail Becker:

Activists have called for the end of the police strategy, which utilizes the element of surprise, since police officers in Louisville, Kentucky, shot and killed Breonna Taylor in a raid in 2020. The Dane County Sheriff’s Office historically has used no-knock warrants sparingly. 

By adopting the resolution Thursday, Supervisor Carousel Bayrd, District 8, said board members “stand behind the Dane County way” and oppose the way no-knock warrants have been used across the nation to “perpetuate the war on drugs.”

Jill Tucker:

After her son fell behind during distance learning, and his school appeared to have no specific plan to address learning loss in the fall, she and her husband decided to make the move to private school.

Laguana’s high-profile departure from the district — which includes resigning from her parent leadership role — is the latest blow to the city’s public schools, which have already lost hundreds of students during the drawn-out distance learning last school year. It’s likely they will lose hundreds more by the fall, as families with the means to leave officially inform their schools of their departure or simply don’t show up in August.

“I had to do what’s right for my kid,” she said Wednesday. “I gave it my all, and it just didn’t work out.”

Her son, who will be in the eighth grade in the fall, “basically didn’t learn anything,” during the year of distance learning. Private assessments showed he was at least a year behind in math and not writing at grade level.

Laguana asked the district a simple question about the first day of school: “What is the plan on Aug. 17 to address the thousands and thousands of kids that have suffered from learning loss,” she said. “I don’t hear anyone talking about it.”

The district’s stated goal is to “foster highly engaged and joyful learners and support every student reaching his or her potential,” but that’s not happening, said Laguana, whose husband, Sharky Laguana, is president of the San Francisco Small Business Commission.

“They’re providing an education for all, a perfunctory education for all. They’re not going above and beyond,” she said. “It’s a broken system. This is not something a few angry parents can take on.”

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]

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

Alec Johnson:

Citing an abdication of duties since March 2020, a group of parents filed paperwork June 21 seeking to recall four of the seven Mequon-Thiensville School Board members.

A news release from the group said the group wants to recall board members Wendy Francour, Erik Hollander, Akram Khan and Chris Schultz.

The group has 60 days to collect about 4,200 signatures for each of the board members being recalled.

The group also said it has recruited four candidates to run against the recalled board members once the recall is certified. Those candidates plan to run on a platform of educational excellence, the news release said. The names of those candidates were not immediately available. More information is expected soon, according to the website RecallMTSD.com.

Wisconsin statutes require recall petitions to have the signatures of enough qualified electors equal to at least 25% of the votes cast within the district from the 2018 gubernatorial election. People signing the petition must be of voting age and live in the district.

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]

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

Ari Hoffman:

After an investigation Hogan said, “Previously, Planned Parenthood taught within our schools and supplied the slyer which was distributed to students. We discovered a binder of curriculum materials was left behind for an incoming teacher to use for this year, and the flyer was in the binder.”
Hogan added that the teacher did not realize that the flyer was not approved and that “corrective action” had been taken against the employee. Hogan added that Planned Parenthood was no longer giving presentations within their schools. The director apologized and noted that unapproved curriculum had been removed and faculty had been instructed on what was included in approved material.
In the last election cycle, Washington voters approved Referredum 90, a graphic state-wide, sex ed curriculum created and endorsed by Planned Parenthood and radical activist organizations.

Shannon Whitworth:

Unfortunately, those who are trying to fight critical race theory and keep it out of our schools have missed the boat: It’s already here.

Critical race theory claims that America is “systemically racist,” and the only solution is discrimination against “whites” in order to make up for past racism against “people of color” — what is often called racial “equity.” It puts power in claiming oppression and has millions climbing over each other to assert the ultimate victimhood status.

Mara Hvistendahl:

She came away believing that the lead FBI agent in the case had pursued the investigation out of ambition rather than an interest in justice. She also believed that when faced with questions from federal agents, the administrators who had advised Hu on his grant applications caved and hastily sacrificed their employee. “This poor man just got sold down the river by his university and everyone else,” Chandler said.

Alex Nester and Santucci Ruiz:

Asra Nomani, vice president of Parents Defending Education, the watchdog group that obtained the emails through a public records request, called Amazon’s prioritization of “antiracism” efforts during a pandemic “shortsighted” in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

“Instead of donating Kindles and hot spots to students in Arlington Public Schools, Amazon chose to spread the controversial ideology of critical race theory,” Nomani said. “The shortsighted decisions during a pandemic, with so many students vulnerable, reflect the national crisis of school districts circumventing parents to indoctrinate students—in this case, with the help of corporate America.”

Purchasing Kendi’s book was one of Amazon’s many Black History Month initiatives. The company also promoted work by black authors and created an “Amplify Black Voices” channel on Prime Video. Amazon came under fire for removing a top-rated documentary about Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas during Black History Month. The film was number one on Amazon’s documentary list before it was pulled, and Amazon has refused to explain the move.

Stamped is billed as a young adult “remix” of Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Kendi, who also wrote the commercially successful How to Be An Antiracist, has become a lightning rod in the national debate over critical race theory.

openstenoproject.org

Plover (rhymes with “hover”) is a free, open source stenography engine. It allows individuals to replace their keyboard and write into any program at speeds of over 200 words per minute.

Stenography

The art of stenography has existed for over a century, and has been computerized since the late twentieth century. All over the world, professional stenographers write at realtime speeds in order to take depositions and caption live television. Plover brings this powerful technology to anyone who is willing to learn it.

Open Steno Project

The , formed to support Plover and related projects, acts as a driver for truly free steno-related resources. While Plover is at the core of the OSP’s effort, it is just as important to ensure that we have affordable hardware and open learning resources. Newcomers are encouraged to read through Learn Plover!, a free online textbook, and to see Steno Arcade, a free game made for stenographers-in-training.

Why Plover

Before there was Plover, there was deposition software, often called CAT software. While this software is very useful for stenographers making depositions, it is not well-fitted to any other purpose. It is sandboxed, proprietary, and often bloated. Plover is a small, slick Python application that you run in the background. It acts as a translator to read steno movements and then emulate keystrokes, so the programs you use can’t tell that you are using steno.

Last night, Ibram Kendi told Joy Reid he had zero connection with critical race theory.

But two weeks ago, he said critical race theory was “foundational” to his work.

Their philosophy is collapsing and they’re all running from the debris.https://t.co/N7wXCypZGz pic.twitter.com/pCuSJ4ah7W

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 24, 2021

The Economist:

n the first three months of the pandemic Shawnie Bennett, a single mother from Oakland in California, lost her job and her brother, who died of covid-19. Grief made the trials of lockdown more difficult—including that of helping her eight-year-old daughter, Xa’viar, continue her schooling online. In November Ms Bennett signed her daughter up for online classes provided by a local parents’ group, which arranged for her to see a tutor every Saturday morning. A test this month showed that her reading skills are improving fast.

The weekend lessons are among several online services created over the past year by The Oakland Reach, an advocacy group. Less than a third of black and brown children in Oakland read at their grade level, says Lakisha Young, its co-founder. For five years her group has lobbied for improvements to their schooling. But when learning shifted online it began hiring teachers to work with children directly. Ms Young thinks families who have benefited from this will demand more from their schools in future; the local district has already found cash to adopt and expand some of her group’s work. She says the pandemic brought a moment “to create the things we have been fighting our asses off for”.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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]

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

The Economist:

The immense harm this has done to children’s prospects might be justified if closing classrooms were one of the best ways of preventing lethal infections among adults. But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. Many have kept schools shut even as bars and restaurants open, either to appease teachers’ unions, whose members get paid whether they teach in person or not, or to placate nervous parents.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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]

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

Rob Mentzer:

Jeffrey Schley demanded teachers provide documentation for his daughter’s grades and pressured teachers and the school principal to change her grades, referring to his wife’s position and threatening to take the matter to the school board, according to the complaint. In a later email to school staff, he wrote that he found it “absolutely ridiculous that a low priority class such as Phy Ed would result in (my) daughter losing class rank,” and claimed that the teacher was biased against his daughter because of her gender.

The complaint indicates that Erica Schley was copied on emails sent by her husband; it does not indicate that she participated in the meeting at the school or sent messages herself.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

Champions of a deal, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, are stuck balancing the competing demands of the labor unions, environmentalists, the equity movement and big business – all while cramming an enormous change down on Illinois’ energy sector and the general public.

Those competing interests are the reason why the package stalled. Primarily, there’s the jobs vs. climate issue that labor and environmentalists are clashing over.

But there are other sticking points, as well. Exelon wants subsidies to keep its Illinois nuclear plants running. Climate activists want subsidies of their own for renewable energy sources, electric cars, and more. Not to mention the struggle over who controls the money that will flow to new programs, commissions, task forces and infrastructure projects.

Perhaps what best defines what this bill is, and what it is not, are the comments by State Rep. Ann Williams: “We need to pass a climate bill, not a utility bill…Without climate, and without equity, we have no deal.”

“Energy” package delay unsurprising

The senate’s failure to pass the energy package after months of negotiations isn’t that surprising.

For one, the plan faces lots of scrutiny for the previous ties between former-House Speaker Mike Madigan’s staff and ComEd – nobody wants to be perceived as going too far to help a massive, profitable company that already benefited from previous graft (ComEd agreed to pay $200 million in fines to resolve an investigation into its bribery schemes). This new deal calls for Exelon, ComEd’s parent, to get nearly $700 million in ratepayer support for three of its nuke plants (two of which they’re threatening to shut down this year if no help is given).

Second, the package is a highly political and lucrative deal within the left, with interest groups fighting over the details. Gov. J.B. Pritzker summed up the competition saying: “This is not two interested parties – unions and environmentalists – this was not that. This was an eight-sided negotiation [and] very difficult to bring people together.”

Andrea Widburg:

One of the Ground Zeroes for parents pushing back has been Loudoun County in Virginia, which was an early adopter of Critical Race Theory. The first overt evidence of its departure from American values and sanity was its decision to ban Dr. Seuss. Not long after, we learned that current and former teachers within the school district had plotted to attack parents who were opposing them (in case you were wondering where the Iowa teacher got the idea to stage her little Marxist rebellion).

Parents have been pushing back. They’ve been doing so because they believe that, by electing school officials and paying for school salaries, they are the ones in the driver’s seat. At the Loudoun County school board meeting on Tuesday, though, the school board swiftly asserted its dominance by shutting down a public meeting and having attendees arrested. You can see the narrative unfold in these tweets.

Joanne Jacobs:

Some parents and community members had complained the list, which includes How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, promoted critical race theory.

Now students will have the option of picking a nonfiction book dealing with science or nature or a memoir for their pre-AP reading.

I’ve only read two books on the list: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and Black Boy by Richard Wright. And maybe Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcom X.

Students in the elective course were asked to think about how they would define “social justice and racial reckoning,” “antiracism and structural racism” and “white privilege and authority,” before reading their chosen book, writes Duggan.

Perhaps parents thought students needed to see their identities and experiences reflected in their summer reading. The population of Gardiner, a town in central Maine, is 95.4 percent White, 1 percent Hispanic, 0.7 percent Asian, 0.7 percent Native American and 0.3 percent African American.
Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson

Davide Castelvecchi:

Peter Scholze wants to rebuild much of modern mathematics, starting from one of its cornerstones. Now, he has received validation for a proof at the heart of his quest from an unlikely source: a computer.

Although most mathematicians doubt that machines will replace the creative aspects of their profession anytime soon, some acknowledge that technology will have an increasingly important role in their research — and this particular feat could be a turning point towards its acceptance.

Scholze, a number theorist, set forth the ambitious plan — which he co-created with his collaborator Dustin Clausen from the University of Copenhagen — in a series of lectures in 2019 at the University of Bonn, Germany, where he is based. The two researchers dubbed it ‘condensed mathematics’, and they say it promises to bring new insights and connections between fields ranging from geometry to number theory.

Joanne Jacobs:

Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia have “exemplary” civics and U.S. history standards, concludes a new Fordham report, which looks at quality, completeness, rigor and clarity.

Another 10 states were “good” in both subjects, 15 were “mediocre” in at least one subject and 20 states were “inadequate” in both.

It’s possible to teach civics and history in a balanced way, write David Griffith and Chester E. Finn, Jr. And it’s important to build “shared allegiance to a common set of ideas and core principles that is grounded in a common understanding. . . . there is no such thing as ‘progressive civics’ or ‘conservative civics,’ because if you have to put an adjective in front of it, it isn’t really civics.”
Weak standards are broad and vague, the report notes.

Aaricka Washington:

So that the public can see how Indianapolis Public Schools is using federal coronavirus relief funds, district officials plan to post online a tracker detailing how they are spending $213.5 million federal funds.

“We know folks are paying close attention to how schools are leveraging these dollars,” Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said on Tuesday. “We want to make sure that we are being as transparent as possible.”

The tracker will categorize spending within each of the three federal aid packages. It will show how much the district has spent in categories like instructional support and personal protective equipment. The tracker, which will include charts, will not break down expenditures by school.

The district plans to update the data quarterly. Viewers will be able to see the tracker on the district website later this week.

IPS has only recently begun to spend its federal aid.

“We’re not three or four years down the road where we know what we’ve spent. We’re at the very beginning,” said Weston Young, the district’s chief financial officer. “So our decision-making process with community feedback, that’s critical.”

Madison has apparently received $70M+ in the most recently redistributed federal taxpayer funds.

Karol Markowicz

Math, for example, long considered a strictly egalitarian subject, is now racist. That isn’t a bad joke — it’s America’s grim reality. The Oregon Department of Education sent a toolkit to middle-school teachers in February alleging that the focus on getting the right answer, and making students show their work, was “white-supremacy culture.” California took things a step further in May, introducing a draft framework for teaching math that prioritizes “equity” over, you know, quantitative reasoning.

SEE ALSO

American moms are taking a stand against Critical Race Theory: Devine
Then parents in California rose up, forcing the state to drop the equity language in the draft framework.

Parents also fought back in Southlake, Texas, with anti-CRT candidates winning the mayoralty and sweeping the city council and school board. CNN framed them as opposing efforts “to incorporate cultural awareness into the curriculum.” Parents are seeing through this mendacious jargon. Thanks, but no, thanks, on that “cultural awareness,” CNN.

Loudoun County, Va., has been in the national spotlight because of its explosive school-board meetings. Parents there are trying to recall six members of the board who support CRT.

Cherokee County, Ga., banned CRT after a particularly contentious board meeting. So did Cobb County, Ga. (with the Democratic members of the board notably abstaining from the vote). The Gallatin County School District board of education, in Kentucky, voted unanimously to ban CRT. The uprising is spreading.

Paul Bedard:

The trust people in the United States have in the media is the lowest in the free world and is likely driving more and more away from traditional news sources, according to a blockbuster study of international media consumption.

Of 29 free nations surveyed in the Digital News Report 2021, U.S. “trust” in the media ranked 46th of 46.

And cable TV is the worst, according to the report from Oxford University and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The 164-page report said, “Cable news channels Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC have some of the highest levels of distrust.”

US ranks last among 46 countries in trust in media, Reuters Institute report finds

Greg Price:

“It’s crucial to ensure that we teach our students how to be responsible citizens,” DeSantis said during the press conference. “They need to have a good working knowledge of American history, American government and the principles that underline our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Florida HB 5 adds a requirement to the high school government curriculum that students be taught the “evils of communism and totalitarian ideologies.”

“We have a number of people in Florida, particularly southern Florida, who’ve escaped totalitarian regimes, who’ve escaped communist dictatorships to be able to come to America. We want all students to understand the difference, why would somebody flee across shark-infested waters, say leaving from Cuba to come to southern Florida. Why would somebody leave a place like Vietnam? Why would people leave these countries and risk their life to be able to come here. It’s important students understand that,” DeSantis said.

The bill also contains a provision that will create a “Portraits and Patriotism Library,” the purpose of which is for students to learn about “real patriots” who came to America after fleeing communist and socialist regimes, DeSantis explained.

The governor also signed SB 1108, which requires state college and university students to take a civic literacy course and a civic literacy assessment as a graduation requirement, and HB 233, which requires colleges and universities to conduct annual assessments on the “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” at their institutions.

“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said. “Unfortunately now, the norm is really that these are more intellectually oppressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida.”

Nicquel Terry Ellis:

The study found that 81% of regions with more than 200,000 residents were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990, despite fair housing laws and policies created to promote integration. Some of the most segregated areas included Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit in the Midwest and New York, northern New Jersey and Philadelphia in the mid-Atlantic. 

Conversely, large metropolitan regions that saw the biggest decrease in segregation included Savannah, Georgia, San Antonio and Miami.

Related: Shorewood Hills accused of racial bias in rejection of low-income apartments

Madison recently expanded our least diverse schools, despite nearby space.

Chris Sheldon:

The Randolph Board of Education did an about-face Monday evening on its decision to remove holiday names from the school calendar following tremendous backlash from the public.

Following the board’s action, all holidays will be listed by name on the school calendar, including Columbus Day.

At its May meeting, the board voted to refer to Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Then on June 10 — over loud objections — the board voted to label holidays generically on its one-page calendar. Holidays including Christmas and Veterans Day were just listed as a “Day Off,” with no mention of the holiday name.

Shibani Mahtani:

Samuel Bickett, an American corporate lawyer in Hong Kong, was on his way to dinner in late 2019 when he saw a man hitting a teenager with a baton and stopped to intervene. The assailant turned out to be an off-duty policeman, and Bickett was arrested and charged with assaulting an officer and common assault.

Wesley Messamore:

Forget high school financial literacy for a moment–– adult financial literacy in America is shockingly low. Maybe not that shocking:
The U.S. national debt recently soared past $30 trillion, leaving pensioners and younger generations wondering how the federal government will meet all its outstanding obligations. If Congress can’t even set a balanced budget, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, recently told Yahoo Finance Live that the U.S. “standard of living is lower” because of that.

Brad Polumbo:

Life under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality.  

In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline. 

The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key. 

The results aren’t pretty.

Sandra Murray:

Elections and pandemics highlight how much one’s safety depends on fellow community members, a realization that is especially threatening when this collective perceives political realities inconsistent with one’s own. Two longitudinal studies examined how people restored safety to social bonds when everyday experience suggested that fellow community members inhabited inconsistent realities. We operationalized consensus political realities through the negativity of daily nationwide social media posts mentioning President Trump (Studies 1 and 2), and the risks of depending on fellow community members through the pending transition to a divided Congress during the 2018 election season (Study 1), and escalating daily U.S. COVID-19 infections (Study 2). On days that revealed people could not count on fellow community members to perceive the same reality of President Trump’s stewardship they perceived, being at greater risk from the judgment and behavior of the collective community motivated people to find greater happiness in their family relationships.

Jason Delisle & Preston Cooper:

The 2020 elections showcased what was easily the most radical higher-education agenda the Democratic Party has ever endorsed. Mass student-loan forgiveness, $13,000 Pell Grants for undergraduates, and free-college programs were all on the wish list. This was a far cry from the Obama-era platform, which consisted largely of proposals to increase tax breaks for tuition and reduce interest rates on student loans.

Some credit for this leftward lurch belongs to senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sanders first proposed a national free-college program during his 2016 presidential bid, and the Democratic Party has since adopted his plan as its own. Then during the 2020 presidential primaries, both Warren and Sanders called for the government to forgive most of the outstanding $1.6 trillion in federal student-loan debt. Although the official Democratic platform calls for a slightly less radical $10,000 in forgiveness per borrower, mass loan forgiveness is now a central pillar of the party’s agenda.

Warren and Sanders can’t claim all the credit, however. A second impetus behind the party’s acceptance of increasingly radical higher-education policies is the fact that contemporary debates over the subject are dominated by claims that access to college is severely inequitable and unaffordable, and that matters have grown worse in recent years. This message, advanced by left-leaning advocacy groups and sympathetic media outlets, appears to have convinced many Democrats that their agenda of the not-too-distant past — one based on modestly more generous aid for students — has failed. This, in turn, has led them to endorse proposals that are more far-reaching than they were in the past.

Ali Breland:

On a press call a few years ago, I asked Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, if the company would treat a misinformation campaign orchestrated by the US government the same as it would as one from a foreign adversary.

Facebook had organized the call to tout how it had discovered and deleted dozens of Iranian accounts, groups, and pages linked to “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—the company’s term for when people and organizations create fake accounts in an attempt to mislead and manipulate other users and the broader information landscape. The conversation came at a time when Facebook was conducting a spate of such announcements and media briefings championing its work removing phony networks tied to foreign governments.Recent reporting says US operatives “engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

Gleicher’s response to my hypothetical question about whether they would react the same way was quite clear: “Yes. Part of the key of our operations here is that we engage based on behavior—not based on content and not based on the nature of the actor. And that’s been a very intentional choice on our part.”

The question I posed is no longer so hypothetical. Last month, William M. Arkin broke a massive story for Newsweek, reporting that the Pentagon is administering a 60,000-person “secret army” that conducts “signature reduction.” This is a newish discipline, similar to operational security, that focuses on helping keep clandestine operations hidden. 

Sometimes, Arkin writes, this means taking both digital and physical steps—like helping send out bills, tax documents, manufactured IDs, and driver’s licenses—to help operatives maintain covers. “Fake birthplaces and home addresses have to be carefully researched, fake email lives and social media accounts have to be created,” he writes. “And those existences need to have corresponding ‘friends.’” As that would indicate, the work can include manufacturing fake social media networks to create a believable online person—a “trail of fake existence.” In some instances, Arkin reports, the Pentagon’s signature reduction efforts involve “the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.” 

While Arkin’s story suggests much of the effort is to help clandestine operators move about in the real world free of detection, he writes that the Pentagon’s operatives sometimes “engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.” In that way, what Arkin’s story describes sounds something like the Internet Research Agency, the Russian group that interfered in the 2016 election, or other state-sponsored groups that work to manipulate social media through “misattribution”—making posts while posing as being someone, or from somewhere, false.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook and Instagram services, including Madison.

Thomas Edsall:

There has been almost no increase in the increment to individual earnings for each year of schooling between K and 12 since 1980. It was roughly 6 percentage points per year in 1980, and it still is. The earnings increment for a B.A. has risen from 30.4 percent in 1980 to 50.4 percent in 2000 to 56.4 percent in 2017. The gain to a four-year graduate degree (a Ph.D., for example, but an M.D., J.D., or perhaps even an M.B.A.) relative to high school was approximately 57 percent in 1980, rising to 127 percent in 2017.

These differences result in large part because ever greater levels of skill — critical thinking, problem-solving, originality, strategizing — are needed in a knowledge-based society.

“The idea of a race between education and technology goes back to the Nobel Laureate Jan Tinbergen, who posited that technological change is continually raising skill requirements while education’s job is to supply those rising skill levels,” Autor wrote in explaining the gains for those with higher levels of income. “If technology ‘gets ahead’ of education, the skill premium will tend to rise.”

But something more homely may also be relevant. Several researchers argue that parenting style contributes to where a child ends up in life.

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]

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

Drew Wilder, Jackie Bensen and Andrea Swalec:

The school board unanimously voted to shut down the public comment portion of the meeting after repeatedly issuing warnings about decorum and disruptions.

Parents chanted “Shame on you” and raised their middle fingers. They held signs that said “We the parents stand up” and “Education not indoctrination.” Nearly 260 people had signed up to speak at the meeting.

“The meeting has degenerated” a school district spokesperson said as the board shut down comments and ordered people to leave.

School board bylaws adopted in 1979 and last reviewed in 2016 say the board “welcomes comments from the public and believes strong community engagement is important to a successful school system.” But “the civility, decorum and respect for the functioning and dignity of the School Board shall be maintained at all times,” the bylaws say. “When reasonable,” the chair can warn a speaker of a breach of the rules, end speaking privileges or “take other action.”

One man was “acting disorderly and displayed aggressive behavior towards another attendee,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. A deputy intervened and the man continued to be disorderly. Deputies tried to take him into custody and he resisted arrest, the sheriff’s office said. The man, whose name was not immediately released, was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Notes and links.

Rasmussen Reports:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters say requiring voters to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote is necessary to “a fair and secure election process.” Nineteen percent (19%) disagree. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on April 1 and 4, 2021 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Beth Blauer:

There are currently 1,098 different demographic categories reported by the U.S. states and territories, which is an unmanageable quantity.

More concerning is the fact that the data is so disparate it’s essentially impossible to compare between states. There are no standards for categorizing demographic data, so individual decisions to label categories with similar but different names, such as “Hawaiian” vs. “Hawaiian/Pacific Islander,” complicate the data. There are currently 1,098 different demographic categories reported by the U.S. states and territories, which is an unmanageable quantity. This description of data disarray does not even include testing, hospitalization, or cross-categorization metrics, such as “white women aged 30-45,” which would add thousands more categories.

There are even discrepancies within the same state. In Georgia, the demographic age categories on the state COVID-19 dashboard do not match the age categories on the state vaccination dashboard. A 60-year-old Georgia resident would be in the 60-69 age demographic group for a COVID-19 case, but in the 55-64 age group for their COVID-19 vaccination. This one person has already contributed data to two separate demographic pools, before accounting for sex, ethnicity, and race.

Joe Killian:

Nikole Hannah-Jones will not join the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill without tenure, according to a letter from her legal team to the university this week.

According to the letter, Hannah-Jones will not begin her position as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism on July 1, as scheduled, and will not take the position without tenure.

The letter makes clear that Hannah-Jones has not withdrawn her application for tenure and does not intend to do so.

As Policy Watch has reported, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees declined to vote on tenure for Hannah-Jones, acclaimed journalist and creator of “The 1619 Project,” when she was recruited for the position. She was then offered a five-year fixed-term contract — a striking departure from precedent. Previous Knight Chairs at UNC, who are by definition media professionals rather than career academics, have been hired with tenure.

Edward Snowden:

Yet the apparatus of censorship doesn’t end there. There is also what I might call the “first resort,” those censors who exist below everyone, and yet above everyone too: the author who self-censors — a figure who in contemporary Internet terms might be called the “creator,” or “maker.” This figure is me — and this figure is you. It’s someone who takes the burden of censorship unto themselves, without any official censor or cover-censor commanding them. In Kiš’s estimation, this figure threatens to become the ultimate vessel or incarnation of the State, a person who has internalized its oppressions and works them on themselves. According to Kiš, the more censorship happens at this level — at the Marxist level of production, or at the level of your posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the more the presence of censorship, indeed the more the very existence of censorship, is hidden from the public.

Think about it: if the suppression is happening in your own home, if you’re suppressing your own speech, who will know? And how can you ever call for help?

The alleged FBI misconduct and mistrial in the case of Professor Hu has echoes of Wen Ho Lee, Sherry Chen & Professor Xi, all of whom were falsely accused by @TheJusticeDept of spying for China. Joined @RepMondaire and @RepJayapal in urging the IG to investigate. pic.twitter.com/Q9i9O6cnIg

— Rep. Ted Lieu (@RepTedLieu) June 18, 2021

Lizzie:

A decade ago, back when we talked about things besides new coronavirus strains and vaccination rates, there was a weeks-long media frenzy over a parenting memoir called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In that book, Amy Chua, an American daughter of Chinese immigrants, described her efforts to raise her children the “Chinese” way. For her, that meant dispensing with squishy Western conventions like “child-led learning” and participation trophies, and ruthlessly driving her two young daughters to master their classical instruments and maintain perfect grades. The book provoked a fierce backlash, much of which centered on Chua’s tactics, which ranged from threatening to burn her older daughter’s stuffed animals to rejecting a hand-scrawled birthday card that demonstrated insufficient effort. Chua’s younger daughter “rebelled” at the age of thirteen, choosing competitive tennis over concert-level violin, but, for the most part, Chua’s system worked. Her daughters became musical prodigies and successful athletes, who attended Harvard and Yale. The phrase “tiger mom” entered the cultural lexicon and spawned a Singaporean TV show, “Tiger Mum,” and a show in Hong Kong, “Tiger Mom Blues.”

That was the last time many of us heard about Amy Chua—unless you’ve been following the news out of Yale Law School, where Chua is a professor. If so, you know that the discussion kept going. Over the past few months, Chua has been at the center of a campus-wide fracas that, nominally, concerns the question of whether she hosted drunken dinner parties at her home this past winter. The controversy began in April, when the Yale Daily News reported that the law-school administration was punishing Chua for the alleged offense by removing her from the list of professors leading a special first-year law class called a “small group.”

Eric Lindberg:

It’s a simple setup: a sheet of plexiglass surrounded by a wood frame and LED lighting. Think of it as a glass chalkboard infused with light. When Nix draws on the board, her words and diagrams glow in front of her. She quickly assembled a small prototype and was thrilled with the result. When she posted a short video to her Twitter feed showing off her homemade creation, she expected a muted response. Thousands of people proved her wrong.

“It blew up,” she said. “If I had known 50,000 people were going to watch this, I might have not just rolled out of bed. One of my friends did tell me that kind of adds to the appeal, that I just thought this was cool and threw it on the web.”

Her lightboard hack is just one strategy Nix will employ to bring energy and innovation to her course this fall. She also taught herself how to create short and colorful animated introduction videos. She switches seamlessly among her PowerPoint slides, video clips and a live lecture feed. Next, she plans to dive into the world of breakout rooms, polls, online tests and other virtual learning tools — including those highlighted by the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.

Julie Driebe:

Self-reported mate preferences suggest intelligence is valued across cultures, consistent with the idea that human intelligence evolved as a sexually selected trait. The validity of self-reports has been questioned though, so it remains unclear whether objectively assessed intelligence is indeed attractive. In Study 1, 88 target men had their intelligence measured and based on short video clips were rated on intelligence, funniness, physical attractiveness and mate appeal by 179 women. In Study 2 (N = 763), participants took part in 2 to 5 speed-dating sessions in which their intelligence was measured and they rated each other’s intelligence, funniness, and mate appeal. Measured intelligence did not predict increased mate appeal in either study, whereas perceived intelligence and funniness did. More intelligent people were perceived as more intelligent, but not as funnier. Results suggest that intelligence is not important for initial attraction, which raises doubts concerning the sexual selection theory of intelligence.

Empower Wisconsin:

Vierkant drew from a profanity-laced exchange between a vile — and fictional — cop — and the main character, a black teen named Justyce. Vierkant literally spelled out the F-bombs and other profane language in the section. He stopped and asked, “Do I need to go further?”

“Please not,” urged board member Erin Hosking. “I’m not even sure what the point is. I’d like for you to explain the point but I don’t think we need that kind of language being spelled out.”

And that’s the point, isn’t it? If school board members bristle at “that kind of language” at a school board meeting of adults, should they be comfortable with it in school curriculum?

For Vierkant, it’s not necessarily the language. It’s the overall message, It’s the leftist lessons indoctrinating young minds into believing all police officers are racists, are villains, the bad guys. It’s the broad brush, the sweeping generalities at the core of the “white privilege” education model that demands that America is a land of white supremacy steeped in systemic racism.

Kate Marino:

Behind the scenes in colleges across the U.S., institutions are having trouble paying their bills.

Why it matters: There’s a reckoning coming in higher education — especially for smaller, private liberal arts schools — that’s been years in the making. In obvious ways, COVID-19 accelerated some of the trends, but college finances have been hurting for a while.

Pandemic-era government stimulus funds helped a slew of schools gain another year or two of financial runway.
Yes, but: Restructuring advisors that work with higher ed institutions as clients say there’s been an uptick in schools that are beginning to explore financial transactions to keep from going under.
Demographics is destiny: A declining birthrate means the pool of college-age Americans has been declining, and could it be as much as 15% lower by the mid-2020s compared with the early 2000s.

Catch up quick: Smaller, nonurban liberal arts schools take the brunt of the shrinking student body, more so than elite universities with huge endowments, or large state schools that receive public funding.

Maciver:

The Superintendent of Germantown Schools, Brett Stousland, has been adamant that Critical Race Theory is not present in the school district, save for two elective courses offered at the high school. In a letter to parents dated April 29, 2021, Stousland said “Currently, CRT is presented as a theory in just two high school elective courses; AP Literature & Composition and Critical Thinking & Writing. CRT is one of many critical theories that the students are exposed to in these classes.”  

According to Christopher Rufo, Director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, says “There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo marxism would be a hard sell.” 

So even though the education establishment will adamantly state “we do not teach Critical Race Theory”, they are often teaching Critical Race Theory to their teachers and their students under a different name.

Thanks to a FOIA request from a group of parents in the district, we can confirm that Critical Race Theory is more widespread in the district than Stousland is letting on. In fact, the very next day after Superintendent Stousland assured parents CRT was only “presented as a theory in just two high school elective courses”, many Germantown teachers participated in a “Cultural Responsiveness” seminar on April 30th, 2021 that studied books like Me and White Supremacy and Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching.

Reddit:

The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history.

Look, I get it. Of all the people on AskHistorians, I get it. You don’t “love history;” you love history with everything in your soul and you read history books outside your subfield for fun and you spend 90% of your free time trying to get other people to love history as much as you do, or even a quarter as much, or even just think about it for a few minutes and your day is made. I get it.

You have a professor who’s told you you’re perfect to teach college. You have a professor who has assured you you’re the exception and will succeed. You have a friend who just got their PhD and has a tenure track job at UCLA. You don’t need an R1 school; you just want to teach so you’d be fine with a small, 4-year liberal arts college position.

You’ve spent four or six subsistence-level years sleeping on an air mattress and eating poverty burritos and working three part-time jobs to pay for undergrad. You’re not worried about more. Heck, a PhD stipend looks like a pay raise. Or maybe you have parents or grandparents willing to step in, maybe you have no loans from undergrad to pay back.

Robby Soave:

The Vancouver School Board in British Columbia, Canada, is eliminating honors courses as part of a push to foster inclusivity and equity in the classroom.

The board had previously eliminated the high school honors English program, and math and science will now get the ax as well.

“By phasing out these courses, all students will have access to an inclusive model of education, and all students will be able to participate in the curriculum fulsomely,” said the school board in a statement, according to the CBC.

Related: English 10.

Joseph Simonson:

ProPublica made waves after it obtained thousands of private tax documents for the country’s wealthiest citizens and published a scathing investigation centered on the tax rates of Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg, among others. Absent from the report: any of the publication’s largest donors, including Laurene Powell Jobs, David Filo, and Pierre Omidyar.

The nonprofit news organization’s June 8 story boasted about a “trove of never-before-seen records [that] reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax.” ProPublica documented the staggering wealth of business and finance titans, while emphasizing that they paid taxes to the federal government at a lower rate than many middle-class Americans. Conspicuously missing from the report, however, were details on whether the billionaires who fund ProPublica engage in similar tax avoidance schemes. ProPublica declined to say whether it had obtained tax returns for any of its donors or whether it planned on publishing them.

The organization initially stayed mum when asked by the Washington Free Beacon how they chose which tax returns to divulge out of the “thousands” they obtained. In a follow-up email, ProPublica president Richard Tofel said he is “not commenting on what we have until and unless we publish it.”

“I note that your list of questions seems to involve individuals who have contributed to ProPublica, directly or through entities they have created,” Tofel said. “I would note that our first story contained information about George Soros, who is similarly situated, but about whom you didn’t ask.”

Although ProPublica did make a passing reference to Soros—alleging that he “paid no federal income tax three years in a row” and printing a statement from his spokesman—the Hungarian-born billionaire is not a major funder of ProPublica.

LIVE NOW: @citizenstewart w/ @BernitaBneeneeb on family advocacy, parent voice and Black homeschooling.https://t.co/9vnyz85u2O pic.twitter.com/c5xq43Jj8z

— Citizen Ed (@CitizenEdu) June 21, 2021

Melinda Baldwin:

In January 1861 John Tyndall, a physicist at London’s Royal Institution, submitted a paper to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The paper bore the title “On the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours, and on the physical connexion of radiation, absorption, and conduction.” After testing the heat-retaining properties of several gases, Tyndall had concluded that some were capable of trapping heat, and thus he became one of the first physicists to recognize and describe that basis for the greenhouse effect. A month after its submission, the paper was read aloud at a meeting of the society, and several months after that, a revised version of the paper was in print.

That path from submission to revision and publication will sound familiar to modern scientists. However, Tyndall’s experience with the Philosophical Transactions—in particular, with its refereeing system—was quite different from what authors experience today. Tracing “On the absorption and radiation of heat” through the Royal Society’s editorial process highlights how one of the world’s most established refereeing systems worked in the 1860s. Rather than relying on anonymous referee reports to improve their papers, authors engaged in extensive personal exchanges with their reviewers. Such a collegial approach gradually lost favor but recently has undergone something of a resurgence.

Joanne Jacobs:

“If your mommy is a commie, then you’d better turn her in,” we used to chant when I was in elementary school in the ’50s. Ironically.

In a national survey, 85 percent of college students who identify as “liberal” say they’d report a professor who made an “offensive” comment. Sixty-five percent of “independent/apolitical” students and 41 percent of “conservatives” also would report a professor to the university.

Students were almost as eager to report their classmates: 76 percent of liberals, 57 percent of independents and 31 percent of conservatives say that a student who says something that offends other students should be reported.

Carly Mayberry:

Christian legal organization First Liberty Institute is appealing the recent denial by the IRS to grant tax exemption status to a Texas Christian group that the federal agency alleges supports the Republican Party.

In May the IRS denied 501(c)(3) status to the Texas-based prayer group Christians Engaged because it encourages its members to vote for state and national leaders. The federal agency specifically noted in its rejection that the group supports Republican candidates.

In its letter, IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Stephen A. Martin concluded the group does not qualify as an organization described in IRS Section 501(c)(3) because it is not operated exclusively for religious and educational purposes. Specifically Martin noted, “You are engaged in prohibited political campaign invention” and “You are also not operated exclusively for one or more exempt purposes…because you operate for a substantial non-exempt private purpose and for the private interest of the ‘D party.'” The “D party” is a reference to the Republican Party, according to a “legend” provided at the top of Martin’s letter to the religious group.

Mississippi’s remarkable NAEP progress was dismissed by some as “nowhere to go but up.” This regression to the mean theory often gets used to dismiss progress in previously low performing states, including AZ and FL. There however is **nothing** inevitable about progress/THREAD pic.twitter.com/fQDhBEpdnh

— Matthew Ladner (@matthewladner) June 21, 2021

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]

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

Libby Sobic:

On Thursday, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) finalized the state budget, which now heads for a full vote of the legislature. Legislative Republicans voted to invest in our students, their families and Wisconsin taxpayers.  Here are four takeaways you should know:

1. JFC Republicans updated the budget and addressed the issue of the federal mandate for maintenance of effort. 

The various iterations of federal COVID-19 packages required states to meet a maintenance of effort requirement. Specifically, the federal packages limited state budgets and required that states invest a minimum of overall state spending into public schools.

JFC Republicans voted to increase spending in general school aids to ensure that Wisconsin K-12 and higher education schools receive the $2.2 billion from the federal COVID bills.  By investing additional state dollars into general aid, Wisconsin should be in compliance with maintenance of effort requirements.

2. The investment into the general aid fund will also lower property taxes – a win-win for Wisconsin students, families and taxpayers.

The budget invests $408 million in general school aids. The Wisconsin school finance formula is a combination of state and local aid. By increasing the percentage of state aid to districts, it will decrease the amount of money that local property taxpayers must allocate for public schools. This means that districts with high local support, such as school districts in Door County, will receive more state funding and could see property tax levels lower than ever before. The proposal also limits the levy limits so the net effect of this additional funding must be allocated towards lowering property tax burdens.

Additionally, JFC Republicans previously voted to increase state aid to students through categorical aids, including increasing special education, transportation aid, and sparsity aid. A slight increase in per pupil amounts for private schools in the choice programs, public charter schools and open enrollment students will occur – $37 per pupil in 2021-22 and $64 per pupil in 2022-23.

As a reminder – $2.2 billion in federal aid is flooding into Wisconsin public schools.

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]

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

Jeneen Interlandi:

Scientists there had been far too slow to detect the virus, to develop an accurate diagnostic test for it or to grasp how fast it was mutating. Their advisories on mask-wearing, quarantine and ventilation had been confusing, inconsistent and occasionally dead wrong. And during the Trump administration, agency leaders stood by while politicians and political appointees repeatedly undermined the agency’s staff. Scientific reports were blocked or altered. Quarantine powers were used to achieve political goals. Dangerous strategies for controlling the virus were not only promoted but actively employed. And state and local leaders were left to fend for themselves — to decide which of the agency’s recommendations to follow or modify or ignore.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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]

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

Marty Mac:

A mind trained with the written word is different from a mind without it. The organization of thought required for reading is very different from that in an oral environment. The differences come entirely from communicative form.

Oral communication is nearly always discursive. Even when someone gives a monologue, it is to an audience, which reacts (perhaps silently) and participates. But monologues are rare and nearly always have a particular social purpose: relating important cultural narratives, or persuading people or expounding to them from a position of authority (what the ancients called rhetoric). But discourse is more typical of oral communication.

Discourse is by its nature unstructured. When you speak with someone, the other person can disagree, change the subject, extend your thoughts in a new direction, or bring up something new. Discourse is extremely unlikely to follow a set of logical presuppositions and explore them all the way to their end. By its nature it jumps around, assembling different ideas from multiple people in a back-and-forth which may or may not represent a coherent whole.

None of this is bad. It is just the nature of having multiple minds in real-time communication with one another through the medium of linear speech. Valuable knowledge can be imparted and also discovered in this process. A single mind following a single set of logical presuppositions cannot arrive at complete knowledge. But oral communication is by nature unstructured.

Not so the written word. Writing forces communication to be continuous and follow some particular path. There is no interlocutor to correct, derail, or add to the argumentation. If discourse is by nature a hodge-podge, with different thoughts from different minds combining to make a gestalt, writing has the ability to unmask whether the thought itself, expressed in language, has internal coherence. The act of writing forces the writer to pay attention to this. The act of reading brings to the attention of the reader whether what is being said has structure and consistency. Literacy is an avenue to greater coherence and precision of thought.

Literacy changes the way people think, or rather it opens up a new manner of thinking. It doesn’t necessarily supplant the discursive oral communication (elite Ancient Greek society, existing on the bleeding edge of the novel technology of writing, considered both oral and written language, in their proper uses, to be learned forms of culture). However, literate cultures have different qualities from illiterate ones. This kind of research is inevitably controversial, but it appears to be the case that written languages (even when they are spoken) more frequently use conjunctions and have more types of conjunctions. Many languages around the world lack a word for ‘or’, not to speak of ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, or ‘yet.’ You can get on just fine with no conjunctions, or with a smaller number of conjunctions, or just a single generic conjunction that means ‘mostly and.’ This should not be surprising. If language occurs mostly in a context of unstructured discourse, there is less need for lots of connectives that link one set of thoughts to the next (contrariwise, there is more need for discourse elements acknowledging and addressing the interlocutor!). The increased attention to internal coherence in writing seeps back into the oral language here it is in an unexpected way: a multiplication of conjunctions.

Complex mathematics do not arise in oral cultures. This is not to say oral cultures cannot do math — you can find oral cultures comfortable with surprisingly high multiplication baked into their number systems. However, no purely oral culture has developed algebra or complex geometry. This kind of lengthy, step-by-step algorithmic process is something our brains are not naturally very good at. We seem to require an external aid for structuring, in the form of writing, to jump-start higher mathematics. After people are taught step-by-step mathematical processes, they can become quite adept at doing (some limited amount of) math in their heads. It just seems to be true that to take that first step requires writing the mathematical formulae.

We have achieved in virtually the entire developed world an extremely high rate of basic literacy. With vanishingly few exceptions, everyone can read and write either their native language or the dominant language of their local state. However, there have been two technologies that have changed how literacy functions in society.

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]

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

Anton Trianovski:

Dr. Meselson and his wife, the medical anthropologist Jeanne Guillemin, came to Yekaterinburg with other American experts for a painstaking study. They documented how a northeasterly wind on April 2, 1979, must have scattered as little as a few milligrams of anthrax spores accidentally released from the factory across a narrow zone extending at least 30 miles downwind.

“You can concoct a completely crazy story and make it plausible by the way you design it,” Dr. Meselson said, explaining why the Soviets had succeeded in dispelling suspicions about a lab leak.

In Sverdlovsk, as Yekaterinburg was known in Soviet times, those suspicions appeared as soon as people started falling mysteriously ill, according to interviews this month with residents who remember those days.

Raisa Smirnova, then a 32-year-old worker at a ceramics factory nearby, says she had friends at the mysterious compound who used their special privileges to help her procure otherwise hard-to-find oranges and canned meat. She also heard that there was some sort of secret work on germs being done there, and local rumors would attribute occasional disease outbreaks to the lab.

Adam Cadre:

Even before the advent of the internets, catching students cheating was generally not particularly hard.  When a kid who can’t string a sentence together in class shows up with an essay full of phrases like “prone to disintegration” and “underscore the paradoxes”, something doesn’t add up.  (The appearance of the word “whilst” is another reliable red flag.)  Catching this sort of malfeasance has gotten even easier with the development of plagiarism detection software.  You click on a student’s submission and it pops onto the screen with the bits that have been copied from Sparknotes already highlighted.  Recently I encountered a student who thought that he had figured out an ingenious way to defeat these programs.  You know how sometimes you will run a web search on a phrase and it pulls up a bunch of sites with URLs that look like randomly generated passwords, whose preview text reveals that they collect other people’s posts and run them through thesaurus software?  This kid turned in a bunch of assignments that looked like that preview text.  I had asked students to write responses to each chapter as they read through Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle; here was how one of this kid’s submissions began:
In chapet 4 candidates welding abilities were sharpened at W-M corporation which makes created Iron articles even as pre-war American ancient Rarity phonies, sold at places like childan’s shop. the biggest interest from the Japanese has made an immense Marketplace for such things and no one addresses them intently.

Here is the original text from gradesaver.com:

Frank’s welding skills were honed at W-M Corporation, which makes wrought-iron objects as well as pre-war American artifact forgeries, sold at places like Childan’s shop. The massive demand from the Japanese has created a huge market for such items, and no one questions them very closely.

What I found particularly amusing was that, as you can see above, one of the main characters is named Frank; the student’s responses repeatedly referred to this character as “Candid” (which, above, was further mutated into “candidate”).  And the plagiarism detection software was indeed fooled!  What the student didn’t realize is that teachers don’t need software to be able to tell the difference between honestly composed sentences and computer-generated gibberish.

Odette Yousef:

But a WBEZ analysis of mass shootings suggests that Chicago is, in fact, unique for its frequency and volume of mass shootings. Defining such incidents as those involving at least four shooting victims or deaths — excluding the shooter — the city has seen 124 such events since Jan. 1, 2019. That’s at least twice as many as the city with the second-highest tally, Philadelphia. Despite media coverage of shootings in Chicago, this fact is rarely highlighted.

For the analysis, WBEZ used data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a nonprofit research group that compiles information from several sources about gun-related activity, as well as from the Chicago Police Department. While data from the GVA show that mass shootings drastically spiked across the nation during the pandemic, particularly over the warmer months of June through September, Chicago continues to outpace other large cities.

The analysis shows that Chicago is averaging just under one mass shooting per week since the start of 2019. In all, 82 people have been killed and another 535 have been shot or injured. A map of those incidents shows that they are clustered in the city’s historically disinvested South and West sides. And among the cases where the Chicago Police Department has identified the race of mass shooting victims, more than 82% were Black, according to the analysis.

Andrew Sullivan:

The stories in the mainstream media this past week about the broadening campaign to ban critical race theory in public schools have been fascinating — and particularly in how they describe what CRT is. Here’s the Atlantic’s benign summary of CRT: “recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses.” NBC News calls it the “academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.” NPR calls CRT: “teaching about the effects of racism.” The New York Times calls it, with a straight face, “classroom discussion of race, racism” and goes on to describe it as a “framework used to look at how racism is woven into seemingly neutral laws and institutions.”

How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don’t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term “critical race theory” as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable — when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.

When pushed to describe it themselves, elite journalists refer to the legal theories Derrick Bell came up with, in the 1970s — obscure, esoteric and nothing really to do with high-school teaching. “If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school,” snarked one. Marc Lamont Hill even tried to pull off some strained references to Gramsci to prove his Marxian intellectual cred, and to condescend to his opponents.

Matthias Revers & Richard Traunmüller:

Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends on university campuses are a clear indicator of the dire future for freedom of speech. Others view these incidents as scandalized singular events and regard campus intolerance as a mere myth. We take an empirical look at some of the claims in the debate and present original survey evidence from a most likely case: the leftist social science studentship at Goethe University Frankfurt. Our results show that taking offense is a common experience and that a sizable number of students are in favor of restricting speech on campus. We also find evidence for conformity pressures on campus and that both the desire to restrict speech and the reluctance to speak openly differ significantly across political ideology. Left- leaning students are less likely to tolerate controversial viewpoints and right-leaning students are more likely to self-censor on politically sensitive issues such as gender, immigration, or sexual and ethnic minorities. Although preliminary, these findings may have implications for the social sciences and academia more broadly.
Keywords Freedom of expression.

Study: “Nearly one in four teachers said that they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2020–2021 school year”

CBS “News”: https://t.co/R5SLfnSNor

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) June 20, 2021

Marta Serra-Garcia and URI Gneezy:

We use publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of postreplication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure. Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is that the review team faces a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility.

Matt Ridley:

Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China. In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.

Around the same time Nature also attached an editorial note to a number of its old articles reading:

“We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”

The headline on one such article, from 2015, read: ‘Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research’, and it concerned an experiment done by a team partly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sceptics have noticed that any paper arguing against a lab leak is rushed into print in days, while ones that argue for a lab leak are rejected or delayed for months. Elsewhere a paper about pangolins and the coronavirus has been exposed as rehashing data from an older paper, but has not been retracted.

Now, in an episode that would be farcical if it was not about such a serious topic, one of Nature’s journalists has got in a muddle contradicting herself in a bid to distance herself from one of the scientists most vocally defensive of China.

She denied having ever met him, then claimed that a picture of them together was “doctored” by rightwing meda, then deleted a bunch of her tweets confirming that she had indeed met him – but missed one – then retweeted a page from another organisation that appears to have been doctored to omit his name from a record of their meeting. Finally, confronted with the missed tweet, she admits she met him but claims she forgot.

The journalist in question, Amy Maxmen, has been covering the issue of the origin of the virus for Nature and on May 27 she published an article headlined: ‘Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers’, in which she reported that scientists found the speculation about the possibility of a lab leak “unsettling” and that they were warning “that the growing demands are exacerbating tensions between the United States and China”, while the debate “has grown so toxic that it’s fuelling online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment in the United States, as well as offending researchers and authorities in China whose cooperation is needed.” (When I was a journalist, offending authorities was a badge of honour.)

Chuck Ross:

Authorities in Hong Kong this week used a Chinese national security law defended in the New York Times to arrest five editors at a newspaper critical of Beijing.

Police raided the offices of Apple Daily and arrested the editors for violating a national security law imposed last year that makes it illegal to call for sanctions against China. In October 2020, Regina Ip, a Hong Kong official known to have close ties to Beijing, defended the law in a New York Times op-ed. Ip credited the measure for ending protests in Hong Kong, which she claimed had devolved into violence.

“The scale and frequency of antigovernment protests has now subsided — thanks to a national security law for Hong Kong promulgated in Beijing on June 30,” she wrote in the Times.

The arrests come as the Chinese government cracks down on media outlets and activists who support the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Police arrested Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai last year on charges under the national security law. Lai was convicted this year on fraud charges that Western observers have claimed were fabricated against him because of his staunch opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

Matt Taibbi:

“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”

Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Ōmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?

Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.

“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”

Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.

Mitchell Schmidt:

At the same time, Stein noted that the infusion of $2.3 billion could ease some of that pressure on school districts to pursue tax increases.

Madison recently received $70M ! in additional redistributed taxpayer funds.. along with substantial recent tax and spending increase referendums.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts. This, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

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

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

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]

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

The Economist:

Academic historians tend to be sniffy about all this. But though their own work may be unsullied by ingratiating ornament, it is also, often, untouched by readers. In one exemplary if extreme comparison, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s exhaustive biography of Thomas Cromwell sold a respectable 32,000 copies in Britain. Ms Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, which also recounts Cromwell’s life, has sold 1.9m and counting. As Dan Jones, a popular writer of medieval history, says diplomatically,academic histories tend “not to have crisp readability at the top of their list of priorities”. More bluntly, he reckons that “most academic history is unreadable”.

Jelena Brankovic:

Earlier this month, QS published its annual World University Rankings by Subject, spurring excitement across academic social media. “Thrilled to be part of the world’s No. 1,” said a faculty member. “Proud alumna and staff member,” wrote another. “So proud to be part of the team. Well done everyone”… And so on. You get the picture.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with people liking their job and enjoying working in a stimulating environment. There is, however, something unsettling about scholars taking things like a ranking produced by QS, Shanghai, or whichever organization, as confirmation, or evidence, of how good—or bad for that matter—they are having it as compared to everyone else.

One may wonder, do scholars respond to rankings in this way because they are just carried away in the moment? Or because they take rankings seriously? Or is it, perhaps, something else?

To be clear from the start, my intention here is not to criticise rankings. At least not in the way this is usually done. In this sense, this is not a story about rankings’ flawed methodologies or their adverse effects, about how some rankings are produced for making profit, or about how opaque or poorly governed they are. None of that matters here.

One may wonder, do scholars respond to rankings in this way because they are just carried away in the moment?

Statement:

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE ASSEMBLY:

I am vetoing Assembly Bill 59 in its entirety.

This bill increases the income eligibility threshold for the Wisconsin Parental Choice

Program (WPCP) for the 2021-22 school year to 300 percent of the federal poverty level; allows pupils to submit full-time open enrollment applications to more than three nonresident school districts in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years; and prohibits a resident school board from denying an alternative open enrollment application in the 202021 and 2021-22 school years if the application is made on the basis of best interest of the pupil. I am vetoing this bill because I object to its proposed changes to the WPCP and open enrollment processes for multiple reasons.

First, I object to diverting resources from school districts to private schools. While the bill authors present this bill as a temporary increase in the income threshold, students who participate in any choice program are not required to meet the income requirement in subsequent years of participation. Therefore, a one-time change in the WPCP income threshold has the potential for long-term financial impacts. Additionally, participation in the WPCP increased by over 30 percent in the 2019-20 school year and 25 percent in the 2020-21 school with the 220 percent income threshold in place, indicating that the current income threshold does not prevent program growth.

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]

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

North Dakota State:

The American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey is an annual survey conducted by the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth. The survey assesses student perceptions about viewpoint diversity and campus freedom; human progress and beliefs about the future; and student attitudes toward entrepreneurship, capitalism and socialism, and how college is influencing their views.

American colleges and universities play a vital role in shaping future political, cultural, and business leaders. However, there are growing concerns among the American public regarding the current state and direction of higher education and its influence on society. Recent surveys have begun to identify important challenges on college campuses related to free speech and tolerance of diverse viewpoints. To build on this understanding, we endeavored to explore how students’ experiences in higher education influence their thoughts about the current and future state of the world and their place in it.

Survey results are divided into three sections. The first section examines student perceptions of viewpoint diversity in the classroom, as well as student attitudes toward regulating speech in the classroom and on campus. The second section examines student perceptions of how their college education is shaping their views on the world, the United States, their futures, and their ability to contribute to society. The third section examines students’ entrepreneurial beliefs and goals, as well as their views on capitalism and socialism and the ways that these views have been shaped by the college experience.

Chaak:

On WWDC 2021, Apple released a set of new features for iOS 15. Among which a new feature aroused people’s concern:

David Foster and Joseph Warren:

Early support for expert policymaking through administrative agencies was rooted in concerns over political power. In a context of formal universal male suffrage, late 19th-century liberals (typically well-educated, urban professionals) opposed policies to regulate business out of fear of working-class radicalism. Yet by the 1910s, liberals supported redistributive policies—through administrative agencies. We use a formal model to show how potential policy feedback effects made an anti-business coalition between liberals and populists unachievable, and how, by diminishing feedback effects, agencies facilitated a successful progressive-liberal coalition. Because administrative agencies guaranteed a central policymaking role for credentialed urban professionals, liberals could support farmers and industrial workers against big business while no longer fearing the rising power of their coalition partners. In this way, the strategic dilemma created by a changing distribution of power among social groups explains the development of broad political support for bureaucratic agencies.

Keywords: bureaucracy, formal model, American political development, policy feedback, shifting power, ideology

Joe Mullin:

Imagine this: a limited liability company (LLC) is formed, for the sole purpose of acquiring patents, including what are likely to be low-quality patents of suspect validity. Patents in hand, the LLC starts approaching high-tech companies and demanding licensing fees. If they don’t get paid, the company will use contingency-fee lawyers and a litigation finance firm to make sure the licensing campaign doesn’t have much in the way of up-front costs. This helps give them leverage to extract settlements from companies that don’t want to pay to defend the matter in court, even if a court might ultimately invalidate the patent if it reached the issue.

That sounds an awful lot like a patent troll. That’s the kind of entity that EFF criticizes because they use flimsy patents to squeeze money from operating companies, rather than making their own products. Unfortunately, this description also applies to a company that has just been formed by a consortium of 15 large research universities. 

This patent commercialization company has been secretly under discussion since 2018. In September 2020, it quietly went public, when the University of California Regents authorized making UC Berkeley and UCLA two of its founding members. In January, the DOJ said it wouldn’t challenge the program on antitrust grounds. 

It’s good news when universities share technology with the private sector, and when startup companies get formed based on university research. That’s part of why so much university research is publicly funded. But there’s not much evidence that university patenting helps technology reach the public, and there’s a growing body of evidence that patents hinder it. Patents in this context are legal tools that allow someone to monopolize publicly-funded research and capture its promise for a private end.

While larger tech companies can absorb the cost of either litigating or paying off the patent assertion entity, smaller innovators will face a much larger burden, proportionately. That means that that the existence of this licensing entity could harm innovation and competition. When taxpayers fund research, the fruits of the research should be available for all. 

With 15 universities now forming a consortium to license electronics and software patents, it’s going to be a mess for innovators and lead to worse, more expensive products.

Jamie Satterfield:

Armed with a Chinese press release translated on the fly via Google, federal agents falsely accused an internationally-renown welding technology expert at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville of being a spy and brought him to professional ruin.

FBI Agent Kujtim Sadiku admitted last week in an ongoing trial in Knoxville that federal agents:

Falsely accused former UTK associate professor Dr. Anming Hu of being a Chinese spy.
Falsely implicated him as an operative for the Chinese military in meetings with Hu’s bosses
Used false information to put Hu on the federal no-fly list.
Spurred U.S. customs agents to seize Hu’s computer and phone and spread word throughout the international research community that Hu was poison.
Used false information to justify putting a team of agents to spy on Hu and his son, a freshman at UTK, for nearly two years.
Used false information to press Hu to become a spy for the U.S. government.
Why?

“You wanted to find a Chinese spy in Knoxville,” defense attorney Phil Lomonaco offered as he cross-examined Sadiku on his tactics to secure a fraud indictment against Hu after the agency’s economic espionage probe fell apart.

Sadiku responded, “My job is to find spies, yes.”

Chris Rickert:

Conservative law firm calls on Sun Prairie to reject race-based ‘community conversation’ groups

A conservative, Milwaukee-based law firm on Wednesday called on the city of Sun Prairie and its school district to cancel plans to host race-based “affinity” groups as part of their effort to address issues of race, diversity and inclusion.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty says holding meetings specifically for Asian, white, Black and other racial groups runs counter to federal civil rights laws and American values.

“Some may claim that imposing racial distinctions, like affinity groups, is somehow necessary to address ‘systemic racism,'” the group says in a letter to the city and school district. “Discrimination to cure discrimination is antithetical to the principle of equality under the law.”

As part of the Sun Prairie effort, facilitators with the Las Vegas-based Courageous Conversation Global Foundation are to host six meetings over Zoom between Monday and June 30, with five meetings reserved for a specific racial category — East Indian, Asian, white, Black and Latino — and one intended to be multiracial.

An announcement of the meetings on the city’s website says they “are open to the public,” but “it is respectfully requested that individuals only sign up for the intraracial conversations for the race that they identify with.”

WILL deputy counsel Dan Lennington said the firm isn’t commenting on whether it intends to sue if the city and Sun Prairie School District don’t end plans for the race-based groups but would make a decision on what to do next by Monday.

Thomas Kuhn:

Kuhn begins by formulating some assumptions that lay the foundation for subsequent discussion and by briefly outlining the key contentions of the book.

1. A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs (p. 4).
   1. These beliefs form the foundation of the “educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice” (5).
   2. The nature of the “rigorous and rigid” preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a “deep hold” on the student’s mind.
2. Normal science “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like” (5)—scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.
3. To this end, “normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments” (5).
4. Research is “a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education” (5).
5. A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly “subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice” (6). These shifts are what Kuhn describes as scientific revolutions—”the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science” (6).
   1. New assumptions (paradigms/theories) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior facts. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established community.
   2. When a shift takes place, “a scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory” (7).

Collateral Global:

The COVID-19 pandemic and restrictive mitigation policies have forced millions of children worldwide into poverty, with devastating effects on their access to education, nutrition, shelter, sanitation, and overall likelihood of survival.

Before the pandemic, children were already disproportionately affected by poverty. Despite comprising only 1/3 of the world’s population, over half of those living in extreme poverty were children, subsisting on less than $1.90USD per day. Over the course of the pandemic, families teetering on the financial edge have been plunged into poverty by lack of access to healthcare, travel restrictions, and loss of employment. As a result, the number of children living in multidimensional poverty – meaning they lack basic necessities – has soared by 15% to 1.2 billion, according to a UNICEF and Save The Children analysis.

Edward Lucas:

But this week’s winner is the Chinese embassy in Budapest for its press secretary’s all-too-understandable Facebook rant about protests against the proposed Fudan University campus (see below).

Sample: “in broad daylight, it is unseemly to criticize the internal affairs of another country,” he wrote, while lambasting things he didn’t like in, er, Hungary’s internal affairs.

Democracy-minded Hungarians have had fun in the comments below the post.

We wonder what the embassy will say now that the Hungarian authorities are backtracking on the $1.8 billion project. A senior aide to Victor Orbán, Gergely Gulyás, said that the project “was not even at the planning phase,” and would be subject to approval by referendum. Words in praise of China (like the prime minister’s latest polemic) are cheap. The wily Magyars take a different approach when it comes to deeds.

Adelle X Yang, Christopher K Hsee:

To entice new donors and spread awareness of the charitable cause, many charity campaigns encourage donors to broadcast their charitable acts with self-promotion devices such as donor pins, logoed apparel, and social media hashtags. However, this voluntary-publicity strategy may not be particularly attractive because potential donors may worry that observers will attribute their publicized charitable behavior to “impure” image motives rather than “pure” altruistic motives. We propose and test a counterintuitive campaign strategy—obligatory publicity, which requires prospective donors to use a self-promotion device as a prerequisite for contributing to the campaign. Five studies (N = 10,866) test the application and effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The first three studies, including two field experiments, find that obligatory-publicity campaigns recruit more contributions and campaign promoters than voluntary-publicity campaigns. The last two studies demonstrate that the obligatory-publicity strategy produces a greater effect among people with stronger image motives and that the effect is mitigated when the publicized charitable act signals a low level of altruism. Finally, we discuss limitations and implications of this research.

Wendy McElroy:

In the next paragraph of Letter Five, Voltaire pursued a theme that contributed heavily to the danger of publishing his work in France. He examined the intellectual and institutional foundation of England’s religious tolerance. He rejected a political explanation. Referring to the established Church of England, he acknowledged that politics strongly favored prejudice rather than tolerance. He wrote, “No one can hold office in England or in Ireland unless he is a faithful Anglican.” Such political exclusion hardly promoted religious good will. Nor did the religious preaching of the dominant church lead the nation toward toleration. According to Voltaire, the Anglican clergy worked “up in their flocks as much holy zeal against nonconformists as possible.” Yet, in recent decades, the “fury of the sects” “went no further than sometimes breaking the windows of heretical chapels.”

What, then, accounted for the extreme religious toleration in the streets of London as compared to those of Paris?

In Letter Six, On The Presbyterians Voltaire ascribed the “peace” in which “they lived happily together” to a mechanism that was a pure expression of the free market—the London stock exchange. In the most famous passage from Philosophical Letters, Voltaire observed, “Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.”

Legally and historically, England was not a bastion of religious toleration: laws against nonconformists and atheists were still in force. Yet in England, and not in France, there was an air of toleration on the street level which existed quite apart from what the law said. Moreover, even though both countries had aristocracies, England was not burdened with the unyielding class structure that crippled social and economic mobility in France. As Voltaire wrote in Letter Nine, On the Government, “You hear no talk in this country [England] of high, middle, and low justice, nor of the right of hunting over the property of a citizen who himself has not the liberty of firing a shot in his own field.”

Rick Esenberg & Daniel Lennington:

In a proposed rule April 19, the Biden administration’s Education Department laid out plans to strongly encourage, if not require, federally funded “American History and Civics Education” programs to focus on “the consequences of slavery” and “the ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism.” The program would “incorporate anti-racist practices into teaching and learning.”

There could be legal problems, however. The use of highly charged and stylized code words like “equity,” “systemic racism,” and “anti-racism” make clear that this is far more than a plan to teach American history, flaws and all. On the contrary, the administration seeks to entrench a comprehensive – almost ontological – historical view, often referred to as critical race theory.

According to the department’s rulemaking notice, grant-funded teachers must emphasize racial “identities” and create an “identity-safe learning environment.” Teachers also must teach the tenets of critical race theory: “systemic racism, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history.” One critical race theory proponent even called Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society “racist.”

Teachers will also be required to emphasize “equity” as the solution.

Here is where the legal problems begin. By incorporating these ideas into a federally funded grant program, the administration sends a clear message: America is not a country that has struggled to overcome racism but one that itself remains deeply racist – and this premise should form the foundation of “American History and Civics.”

Kate Duguid:

The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet topped $8 trillion for the first time, weekly data published on Thursday by the U.S. central bank on its holdings showed.

At $8 trillion, the Fed’s stash of assets has roughly doubled since it kicked off large-scale purchases in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted and brought the economy to a near standstill.

The report also showed the Fed appears to have sold around $160 million of its corporate debt holdings since Monday, following the announcement it would unwind its nearly $14 billion corporate credit portfolio. As a first step, the central bank began selling its stakes in 16 bond exchange-traded funds on Monday.

Ben Zeisloft:

Meanwhile, free college programs discourage American parents from making smart financial decisions. They force fiscally conscientious, tax-paying families to bear the brunt of the programs’ expenses.

Take, for example, President Biden’s recent American Families Plan, which proposes $311 billion on higher education spending. As Campus Reform higher education fellow Angela Morabito points out, free tuition would spur increases in education costs across the board as students use federal dollars to complete their payments, preventing market forces from producing high-quality education at low costs.

[RELATED: OPINION: Biden’s American Families Plan would make college a worse deal for American families]

In stating that the cost of post-secondary education has increased 439% since 1982, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder argues in a Heritage Foundation report that federal financial aid programs “have contributed mightily to the explosion in tuition and fees in modern times.” 

“When someone else is paying the bills, people want to buy more of the good or service in question at prevailing prices than when the customer pays the bills,” continues Vedder. “This means a higher demand for higher education, and other things being equal, higher tuition costs.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.”

Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.

Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.

The people⁠—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places.

Joanne Jacobs:

“I reject the hostile culture of conformity and fear that has taken hold of our school,” says English teacher Dana Stangel-Plowe in resigning from Dwight-Englewood School, a New Jersey private school.

“Over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students’ intellectual and emotional growth and destroying any chance at creating a true community among our diverse population,” says the teacher, who sent her own children to Dwight-Englewood.

Teny Sahakian

As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States’ future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim.

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.