Robert Wright & Connor Echols:

This week Peter Beinart, writing in the New York Times, took aim at one of the Blob’s favorite terms: the “rules-based order.” The Biden administration often invokes the term, typically in reference to the threat allegedly posed to that order by China. The problem, Beinart notes, is that no one ever bothers to explain what rules constitute the order—what rules America is supposedly abiding by while its adversaries violate them. “Since the ‘rules-based order’ is never adequately defined, America’s claim to uphold it can never be disproved,” Beinart writes.

This sort of skepticism about boilerplate “rules-based order” rhetoric has been growing lately, and that’s a welcome development in foreign policy discourse—maybe even a sign that the Blob’s days of hegemony are numbered. The trend dates back to the Trump administration, when observers noted that some of the Blobsters most loudly complaining about Trump’s failure to uphold the “rules-based order” had championed things like invading and bombing countries in violation of international law. When Biden took office, and staffed his foreign policy team with exactly this kind of rules-based-order scold, it was an open invitation for Beinart and other Blob critics to turn up the heat.

And yet—so much more heat is needed! The average member of the foreign policy establishment, to say nothing of the average American voter, has no idea how hypocritical America’s sermons about following the rules look from abroad. As it happens, an object lesson in this hypocrisy took shape on the same day Beinart’s piece was published, when the US Justice Department announced that it had disabled 36 Iran-linked websites. Let’s take a look at this exercise in American rules enforcement and try to imagine how it might look from perspectives other than America’s. Three kinds of rules, in particular, are implicated in the Justice Department’s website takedown:

Hannah Murphy:

Matthew Mitchell doesn’t want my phone number. He knows that if he got it, he could hack into my digital life. “It’s just easier for everybody,” he says as we begin our interview. “I’m not going to let you expose yourself.”

This is not a boast. Mitchell, who is in his forties, wants me to grasp how easily I can be hacked, spied on and have my civil liberties breached. He’s only agreed to video-chat with me from New York if I download a little-known encrypted communications app, Wire.

When I do, Mitchell tells me about his fear of governments and law enforcement aided by powerful tech companies and why he wants to help fight back.

A security researcher by day, Mitchell also co-hosts “crypto parties”. The grassroots movement began in 2012 and consists mainly of technologists leading free workshops that teach people how to use the internet anonymously. (The “crypto” in this case refers to the online anonymity you learn to achieve; the “party” is a matter of personal definition.)

Matt Taibbi:

Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Donald Trump’s social media suspension, Apple and Amazon’s kneecapping of Parler, the removal of real raw footage from the January 6th riots, and others. 

This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes. 

Profiled in this space two weeks ago, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying — both biologists — host the podcast DarkHorse, which by any measure is among the more successful independent media operations in the country. They have two YouTube channels, a main channel featuring whole episodes and livestreams, and a “clips” channel featuring excerpts from those shows.

Between the two channels, they’ve been flagged 11 times in the last month or so. Specifically, YouTube has honed in on two areas of discussion it believes promote “medical misinformation.” The first is the potential efficacy of the repurposed drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. The second is the third rail of third rails, i.e. the possible shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.

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

Penelope Green:

In 2008, she graduated from the College of San Mateo, a two-year community college in Silicon Valley, along with her younger brother, Stoyan. With scholarships from the San Mateo Rotary Club, among other awards, they were both accepted at Berkeley, where Boryana earned a degree in economics. She worked as an account manager at Brocade, a software company, before joining Tesla in 2011.

Richard Vedder:

When society wants to encourage something, the government serving it subsidizes that activity. Conversely, when it wishes to discourage an activity, often it taxes it. Thus we have high taxes on cigarettes and alcoholic beverages to help curb lung cancer and alcoholism. And we give subsidies to universities because we think doing so will help produce a better society —higher incomes, more enlightened leaders, greater opportunities for individuals to advance themselves financially and maybe even spiritually, etc. Universities allegedly reek with positive spillover effects.

But then there is Yale University. We give it all sorts of subsidies despite the fact that it is one of the greatest private concentrations of wealth on the planet, with at least $2.5 million dollars of endowment for every student attending providing about $100,000 income annually or roughly $300 daily per student (whether school is in session or not) in investment income to educate each of the 12,000 students enrolled. Donations to the school are tax deductible. The school’s earnings (including capital gains) from the over $30 billion endowment are not taxable as they are for private individuals. To be sure, the U.S. recently imposed an endowment tax on ultra-rich schools like Yale, but still the tax benefits of its university status far exceed the costs.

What sort of oversight is there of this highly favored institution? How transparent is its decision making process? Recent articles by two fine graduates of the Yale Law School (typically rated as the nation’s finest), Lanny Davis (Wall Street Journal) and Glenn Reynolds (New York Post) suggest the governance of Yale probably more closely resembles that of, say, Belarus, than it does of a typical U.S. governmental body or publicly traded U.S. corporation. The Board of Trustees of Yale is elected theoretically at least in part by university alumni, but in reality the only candidates considered for election are selected by the board itself, and candidates are not allowed to campaign or provide alumni with detailed information about their lives or their positions of interest to the Yale community.

Until recently, it was possible for alumni to petition to be on the ballot, and occasionally there would be contested elections, but Yale’s anti-democratic aristocrats have put a stop to that, changing the rules to allow voting only for the two Board-approved candidates who are forbidden to really campaign. And this is at a university that openly allows public inspection of its Board minutes only after 50 years. And one that still has “secret societies” like Skull and Bones for the most elite amongst the elite kids populating the place.

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously declared that an order from the City of Racine’s public health officer closing all schools, public and private, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is invalid and lacked proper legal authority. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on November 19, on behalf of a group of parents, schools, and membership associations. The Court granted WILL’s original action and issued a temporary injunction blocking the City of Racine’s school closure order before it could go into effect on November 27.

Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “The Court determined, once again, that a local public health officer violated the law when it ordered all schools in her jurisdiction closed. This marks another important case reminding public officials that emergencies do not override the rule of law.”

Background: The City of Racine Public Health Department issued an order on November 12, closing all school buildings in the City of Racine, private and public, from November 27 to January 15, as a means of addressing COVID-19. When Racine issued this order, WILL had already filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court challenging Dane County’s school closure order and obtained an order enjoining it.

WILL filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on November 19, on behalf of a group of parents, schools, and membership associations and similarly earned a temporary injunction blocking Racine’s school order while the Court decided the challenge to Dane County.

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.

Astral Codex:

[edit: existing polygenic screening companies might not read enough genes to do this. Although it would be easy to offer a more complete service that reads most genes, banning the more complete version might be one way regulators could prevent this otherwise hard-to-prevent thing.]

What about IQ? There are definitely scientists who have figured out how to do polygenic analyses to predict a modest amount of variation in IQ, though I don’t know if their algorithms are public, and they’re certainly not convenient for amateurs to use. If you had them, would they work? Gwern has done some calculations and finds that with ten embryos (a near-best-case scenario of what you’re likely to get from egg extraction) and modern (as of 2016) polygenic scoring technology, you could get on average +3 IQ points by implanting the smartest. If polygenic scoring technology reached the limits of its potential (might happen within a decade or two) you could get +9 IQ points. Embryos from the same parents only vary a certain amount in IQ, and about half of IQ variation is non-genetic, so you can’t work miracles with this (if you want to know how to work miracles, read the rest of Gwern’s article).

Morgan Sung:

The police are attempting to use YouTube’s stringent copyright system to keep people from posting recordings of encounters with law enforcement. 

In a video posted Thursday by the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), a community organization dedicated to defunding the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy David Shelby pulled out his phone and began playing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” during an encounter. He openly admitted, “it can’t be posted to YouTube.” 

“Are we having a dance party right now?” APTP’s policy director James Burch asked in the video, which is posted on YouTube.

“Are you playing pop music to drown out the conversation?” the person recording asked. You can record all you want, I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.

Vivian Wang and Alexandra Stevenson:

The Hong Kong government has issued hundreds of pages of new curriculum guidelines designed to instill “affection for the Chinese people.” Geography classes must affirm China’s control over disputed areas of the South China Sea. Students as young as 6 will learn the offenses under the security law.

Lo Kit Ling, who teaches a high school civics course, is now careful to say only positive things about China in class. While she had always tried to offer multiple perspectives on any topic, she said, she worries that a critical view could be quoted out of context by a student or parent.

A display at the Hong Kong Museum of History on Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997.
Ms. Lo’s subject is especially fraught; the city’s leaders have accused it of poisoning Hong Kong’s youth. The course had encouraged students to analyze China critically, teaching the country’s economic successes alongside topics such as the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Officials have ordered the subject replaced with a truncated version that emphasizes the positive.

“It’s not teaching,” Ms. Lo said. “It’s just like a kind of brainwashing.” She will teach an elective on hospitality studies instead.

David Lat:

“Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door, the girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She’s been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she was and when and where she’s going. Eve. You all know all about Eve.”

— Addison DeWitt, All About Eve (1950)

Over the seven months that I’ve been writing at Original Jurisdiction, I have covered some of the most prominent figures in the legal profession, including leading judges, law firm partners, in-house lawyers, and law professors. Who has been the best for ratings?1

According to the list of my most popular posts, none other than Amy Chua. She’s the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School (YLS), although she’s most famous not as a legal academic but as the author of a controversial, bestselling parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She also happens to be the wife of another longtime YLS faculty member, Jed Rubenfeld (and some refer to them collectively as “Chubenfeld”).

Over the past few weeks, articles about Chua have appeared in multiple major news outlets. Right now, it seems that every journalist in the country is chasing Amy.

Why is this 58-year-old law professor back in the headlines, more than a decade after the viral Wall Street Journal op-ed that propelled Tiger Mother onto the bestseller list? To catch up, check out my earlier story on Chua, or read this CliffsNotes version:

William Jacobson:

Nicole Solas is the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, mother of a child entering kindergarten in the fall who has been targeted by the School District, School Committee, and Rhode Island School Superintendents Association, after she filed a large number of public records requests regarding Critical Race and Gender teaching in the elementary school.

Solas first told her story in an op-ed at Legal Insurrection, and her story went national with multiple media appearances, including on Fox and Friends, and Tucker Carlson. Here are our posts about her story:

Robert Pondisco:

My 2009 copy of Why Don’t Students Like School by Dan Willingham is among the most dog-eared and annotated books I own. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit (2006) and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion (2010), I’m hard-pressed to think of another book in the last twenty years that had a greater impact on my teaching, thinking, or writing about education. I’m clearly not alone: Dan’s book has been translated into thirteen languages.

A second-edition has just been published. There’s plenty of new and refreshed material, but the strength of the book—its proof point, actually—is how much has not changed from its first printing. Willingham set out to put between two covers a set of enduring principles from cognitive science (“People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers”; “factual knowledge precedes skill”; “proficiency requires practice,” et al.) that can reliably inform and shape classroom practice—a rich vein of ore that Willingham began to mine in his “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” columns for The American Educator starting nearly twenty years ago. His many admirers will appreciate the opportunity to refresh their familiarity with the book. But the primary beneficiaries may be younger teachers who might be encountering it for the first time.

I recently talked to Dan about his masterful and accessible book, its origin and impact, the importance of explaining the findings of cognitive science to teachers, and the decision to bring out a second edition. Here’s our conversation, edited for concision:

Simon Sarris:

Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most people today more-or-less know what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life—being in some kind of school (the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”). Beyond that age there is of course the proverbial worker, in modern stories usually an office worker, who is often so inert that he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality (that forces him out of his inertia, and in doing so the story begins).

Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?

Laine Higgins:

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos’s office in Memorial Stadium, you can hear heavy machinery ripping up a sidewalk to make room for a new $155 million indoor training facility. But that’s not the biggest change to campus Moos will oversee this year.

The university is angling hard to be at the front of the pack in persuading recruits it can help them take advantage of a new era of compensation for college athletes that is dawning.

Nebraska will be among the first states to permit college athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness. The state’s law does not take effect until July 1, 2023, but allows universities to give their athletes the right to monetize their names before then, at the school’s discretion.

Moos is using his discretion to start immediately. Laws in at least six states will take effect on July 1 that allow athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness, beginning a new era of compensation for college athletes.

Joanne Jacobs:

The movement for academic equity — that is, for equal outcomes — is splitting the Democratic coalition, warns David Frum in The Atlantic.

Eighty-three percent of Americans support testing for entry into honors programs, he writes, citing a PDK poll. Yet, “blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost all of its forms.”

Jonathan Zittrain:

Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.

Underpinning our vast and simple-seeming digital networks are technologies that, if they hadn’t already been invented, probably wouldn’t unfold the same way again. They are artifacts of a very particular circumstance, and it’s unlikely that in an alternate timeline they would have been designed the same way.

The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention.

The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to deploy liveried planes, trucks, people, and drop-off boxes, creating a single point-to-point delivery system. Instead, they settled on the equivalent of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.

Eric Tucker & Matt O’Brien:

Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.

Richard Vedder:

The estimable National Student Clearinghouse recently released data on spring 2021 enrollments. The press accounts stressed continuing decline; total numbers were down 3.5% from spring 2020 to spring 2021. By exploring the NSC website in greater detail, I learned that since spring 2011, total enrollment has fallen over 14 percent. In 2011, there were about 63 college students for every 1,000 American population; now there are less than 51, a decline of nearly 20 percent. As colleges shrink in immediate importance in people’s lives, support for colleges wanes.

Yet the aggregate numbers disguise a striking additional trend: the decline in male enrollment is dramatically greater than that for women. In the 2020-21 year, for example, the number of women enrolled declined by nearly 203,000, but the male decline was nearly double that, over 400,000. In the 2011-21 decade, spring enrollment for men fell strikingly more than 18%, nearly double the female decline.

If recent trends continue, we will soon reach a milestone: there will be more than three female students for every two male ones. Girl students may find it hard to get dates with guys!! Ironically, the reverse was the case a half century earlier; almost 60% of students in the 1969-70 school year were male. At that time, the burning issue was: should elite Ivy League schools admit female students! They did, and the number of all-male schools is approaching zero.

Kurt Schlosser:

A handful of teams from the Seattle area and another from southeastern Washington state made a strong showing in the finals this month of the American Rocketry Challenge, the world’s largest student rocket contest.

Competition concluded on June 20 and a virtual awards ceremony was held on Monday. The Argonauts, a team from WISE Camps in Bellevue, Wash., finished eighth among the 100 best teams in the country. Five other Seattle-area teams also placed in the finals:

Jeff Pao:

Several online media outlets in Hong Kong took down opinion articles and videos from their websites or said they would move out of the city after one more columnist of the Apple Daily was arrested at the airport on Sunday.

Stand News, a pro-democracy news outlet, said in a statement that it had temporarily removed commentaries written by its bloggers and readers from May this year and before until it had decided whether it was appropriate to publish them again.

It said it had decided to stop accepting monthly sponsorship from readers and to shelve older commentaries. It added that it had enough money to run for another nine to 12 months and maintain its current editorial guidelines.

The news outlet said six of its directors, including barrister Margaret Ng, singer Denise Ho and columnist Joseph Lian, have accepted recommendations to resign. Two founding directors, Tony Tsoi and chief editor Chung Pui-kuen, will stay on,

Jess Bravin:

The Supreme Court extended its protection of student speech to social media on Wednesday, by an 8-1 ruling that a Pennsylvania school district overstepped its authority by punishing a high-school cheerleader who used a vulgar word on Snapchat when she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading team.

The court said there are some occasions when schools can reach beyond campus to regulate student speech, mentioning bullying and cheating as subject to discipline whether they occur in the classroom or in cyberspace.

But the court has long held that even on campus, students retain First Amendment rights to speak on controversial matters so long as they don’t cause a substantial disruption. Beyond school grounds, administrators’ power to punish students diminishes further still, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court.

In this instance, “the school’s interest in teaching good manners is not sufficient, in this case, to overcome [the student’s] interest in free expression,” Justice Breyer wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Chris Mertes:

Sun Prairie School Board members who questioned district administrative team decisions to end “high stakes summative” semester and final exams on Monday, June 21 were cautioned to remember board governance procedures and reminded it was not an area over which the board could take action.

The questioning of administrators began during the board’s discussions surrounding the handling of COVID-19. Board member Alwyn Foster questioned the decision to end final exams, and heard more than he was expecting in response from Stephanie Leonard-Witte, the Sun Prairie Area School District Assistant Superintendent for Teaching, Learning & Equity.

“During COVID we said no finals, and now that we have built, I’ll say, better and more current assessment strategies, we just won’t be re-instituting finals as we move forward,” Leonard-Witte said.

“If you do an assessment of best practice — like what’s best for kids in learning — there is very little out there that would support final full summative assessments,” Leonard-Witte said.

“Best practice is that kids have assessment throughout the semester, throughout the quarter, that builds on itself. So they’re committing that knowledge more to, I would say, a working knowledge, as opposed to cramming for a test the night before,” Leonard-Witte added. “So I would say it’s a practice that’s been outdated for a bit and we’re taking the opportunity now to not reinstate something that isn’t supported as best practice in most of the research around assessment.”

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.

Andrew Sullivan:

The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.

In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.

My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.

NJ Education Report:

Marguerite Roza, Director of the Edunomics Lab and Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and national expert on school finance, has some suggestions for how districts should spend their collective $125 billion in federal stimulus funds through the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan. (For individual district allocations, see here.) Notably, Roza is focused on key components that “buy back time” for students and accelerate learning, an approach aligned with JerseyCAN’s online hub, released last week, that showcases best practices for school districts.

What is your district doing with its money? Is it using these funds efficiently, equitably, and in the best interest of students? During this time of reckoning with the academic toll of Covid-19, there’s never been a better time to advocate for your child’s education!

MIT:

MIT and Harvard University have announced a major transition for edX, the nonprofit organization they launched in 2012 to provide an open online platform for university courses: edX’s assets are to be acquired by the publicly-traded education technology company 2U, and reorganized as a public benefit company under the 2U umbrella.

The transaction is structured to ensure that edX continues in its founding mission, and features a wide array of protections for edX learners, partners, and faculty who contribute courses.

In exchange, 2U will transfer $800 million to a nonprofit organization, also led by MIT and Harvard, to explore the next generation of online education. Backed by these substantial resources, the nonprofit will focus on overcoming persistent inequities in online learning, in part through exploring how to apply artificial intelligence to enable personalized learning that responds and adapts to the style and needs of the individual learner.

The nonprofit venture will be overseen by a board appointed by MIT and Harvard, and its future work will draw on ideas from current edX partners, as well as MIT and Harvard faculty.

Anna Blaustein:

Behold the highest-resolution image of atoms ever seen. Cornell University researchers captured a sample from a crystal in three dimensions and magnified it 100 million times, doubling the resolution that earned the same scientists a Guinness World Record in 2018. Their work could help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries.
The researchers obtained the image using a technique called electron ptychography. It involves shooting a beam of electrons, about a billion of them per second, at a target material. The beam moves infinitesimally as the electrons are fired, so they hit the sample from slightly different angles each time—sometimes they pass through cleanly, and other times they hit atoms and bounce around inside the sample on their way out. Cornell physicist David Muller, whose team conducted the recent study, likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and the targets are individual atoms. Though Muller cannot see the targets, he can see where the “dodgeballs” end up, thanks to advanced detectors. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of electrons, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be.

Diomidis Spinellis:

Learning to program is—for many practical, historical, as well as some vacuous reasons—a rite of passage in probably all computer science, informatics, software engineering, and computer engineering courses. For many decades, this skill would reliably set computing graduates apart from their peers in other disciplines. In this Viewpoint, I argue that in the 21^stcentury programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Accordingly, I propose that computing students should be encouraged to contribute code to open source software projects through their curricular activities. I have been practicing and honing this approach for more than 15 years in a software engineering course where open source contributions are an assessed compulsory requirement.² Based on this experience, I explain why the ability to make such contributions is the modern generalization of coding skills acquisition, outline what students can learn from such activities, describe how an open source contribution exercise is embedded in the course, and conclude with practices that have underpinned the assignment’s success.

Contributing Is the New Coding

Programming skills nowadays are only a part of what a software developer should know. This is the case for two reasons. First, practices have advanced well beyond the chief programmer/surgeon model popularized by Fred Brooks in the 1970s,¹to include work on orders of magnitude larger systems, advanced tooling, pervasive process automation, as well as sophisticated teamwork, workflows, and management. Second, industrial best practices have homogenized with those followed by large and successful open source software projects. Businesses have assimilated and contributed many open source development practices. This has made the corresponding knowledge and skills portable between volunteer projects and enterprise ones. 

Consequently, instruction must move from a course’s educational laboratory to an organizational setting. By contributing to open source projects, students acquire in practice a formidable range of skills, knowledge, and experiences, allowing them to work productively as modern well-rounded developers rather than as the lone-wolf coders portrayed by Hollywood. The most difficult skills to acquire in a traditional programming assignment are the following social and organizational skills.

Clifton Mark:

Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

David Meyer:

Pulitzer Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates took to her popular Twitter account on Thursday to poke fun at the list, which was developed by the school’s Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center.

“What is strange is that while the word ‘picnic’ is suggested for censorship, because it evokes, in some persons, lynchings of Black persons in the US, the word ‘lynching’ is not itself censored,” Oates said in one post.

“Picnic” disappeared from the online Oppressive Language List sometime last week as reports of its existence spread, according to reports.

The university-sponsored website previously said the word “has been associated with lynchings of Black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating.”

Rory Linnane:

Facing the task of helping more than 70,000 students recover from the pandemic as state lawmakers are poised to hold education funding flat, Milwaukee School Board members Thursday approved a tight annual budget and historic temporary infusion of federal stimulus dollars.

Board members directed funding toward several new programs, including more trades courses and a major expansion to the district’s Black and Latino Male Achievement program to offer mentorship and other support for female and LGBTQIA+ students of color.

Students and community leaders had asked for some additional changes. At a rally Wednesday night, students with Leaders Igniting Transformation called for more mental health services and less spending on security. Though the district previously cut contracts with police, the district still employs 274 safety assistants.

Speaking outside the district’s central offices, MPS student Soleil Harvey said she had been involved in conflicts that ended in suspensions and expulsions and left underlying issues unresolved.

Christopher F. Rufo:

Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. Since the murder of George Floyd last year, critical race theory’s key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income programs and racially segregated vaccine distribution.

The ideology has sparked an immense backlash. As Americans have sought to understand critical race theory, they have discovered that it has divided Americans into racial categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” and promotes radical concepts such as “spirit murder” (what public schools supposedly do to black children) and “abolishing whiteness” (a purported precondition for social justice). In the classroom, critical race theory-inspired lessons have often devolved into race-based struggle sessions, with public schools forcing children to rank themselves according to a racial hierarchy, subjecting white teachers to “antiracist therapy,” and encouraging parents to become “white traitors.”

Bethan Staton:

Pupil absences as a result of coronavirus have tripled in English secondary schools indicating the worst disruption to education since March, as the Delta variant first identified in India continued to spread across the county, new data showed.

About 4.2 per cent of older students from state schools were absent on June 17 because of the virus, up from 1.4 per cent the previous week, according to figures from the Department for Education published on Tuesday. 

Teacher unions have called on government for improved safety measures and more freedom to respond to outbreaks, warning that the interruption to learning could deteriorate further to levels of last winter, when up to 9-11 per cent of pupils were off for Covid-related reasons as the second wave peaked. 

“We are now seeing the effect of the spreading Delta variant on national figures, and absences from school are only likely to continue rising in the coming weeks, along with obvious disruption to pupils’ education,” Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said.

Rowan Jacobsen:

In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano, Shi had detected the genome of a new virus, called SHC014, that was one of the two closest relatives to the original SARS virus, but her team had not been able to culture it in the lab.

Baric had developed a way around that problem—a technique for “reverse genetics” in coronaviruses. Not only did it allow him to bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code, but he could mix and match parts of multiple viruses. He wanted to take the “spike” gene from SHC014 and move it into a genetic copy of the SARS virus he already had in his lab. The spike molecule is what lets a coronavirus open a cell and get inside it. The resulting chimera would demonstrate whether the spike of SHC014 would attach to human cells.

If it could, then it could help him with his long-term project of developing universal drugs and vaccines against the full spectrum of SARS-like viruses that he increasingly considered sources of potential pandemics. A SARS vaccine had been developed, but it wasn’t expected to be very effective against related coronaviruses, just as flu shots rarely work against new strains. To develop a universal vaccine that will elicit an antibody response against a gamut of SARS-like viruses, you need to show the immune system a cocktail of spikes. SHC014 could be one of them.

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.

David Rosenbaum:

At 3 o’clock one day last week, Senator Mike Gravel, carrying a briefcase, a shav ing kit and a clean suit, left Friendship International Air port near Baltimore on a plane to Los Angeles.

After a fund‐raising speech that night for a California Representative, Senator Gra vel, an Alaska Democrat, boarded a return flight to Washington, arriving at 6:30 the next morning, just in time for a shower, a shave and 15 minutes of picketing the White House to protest the planned nuclear test on Amchitka Island in the Aleu tians.

He could not stay in front of the White House any longer because he had to drive to Warrenton, Va., for a lecture that afternoon and be back in time for a flight to Canton, Ohio, for an eve ning speech to a county Democrat committee.

Alex Gutentag:

On March 13, 2020, the public school district where I teach announced that all classrooms and buildings would be closed for two weeks. Then two weeks turned into two months, and two months turned into over a full year without in-person instruction. My school serves a diverse population of low-income students in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is impossible to overstate the severity of this disruption caused by school closures for these students, many of whom did not have a computer or internet at home when virtual learning began. Online, my students got only a fraction of the regular curriculum. Kids who had once loved the social aspects of school were left with only the parts of school they hated, and students with disabilities who depended on school for daily living needs were cut off from a vital service.

“Public health” and “the safety of our children” came to mean students Zooming from homeless encampments, experiencing severe abuse, regressing academically, falling into depression, going hungry, struggling through catastrophic learning loss, and, in the saddest cases, not making it through the year alive. Despite consistent evidence that schools were not sites of high transmission for COVID-19, many teachers failed to put aside baseless fears about classroom superspreading and rampant infection. As a result, many of the most vulnerable children in our society suffered outrageous hardships, while their affluent peers attended private schools in person. We’ve all been told that school closures and lockdowns were mandated by science, but what if these mandates were immoral? What if they were based on a series of lies? In fact, what if the entire rationale for most restrictions was actually rotten to the core?

We’re watching the mainstream pandemic narrative starting to unravel. While the Senate and House intelligence committees investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2, many reporters are openly wondering why they initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as “misinformation.” Few in media consider the possibility that their approach to the theory was not an anomaly, but rather a long-established pattern of journalistic dereliction of duty. For the public, these renewed questions about the virus (and their hard-to-face answers) speak to a deep sense that something is amiss in the story we’ve been told by major media outlets. But gain-of-function research is just the tip of the iceberg.

Daniel Benjamin Miller:

Since YouTube is the dominant video platform, a lot has already been said about its copyright claims system. Most of that has had to do with questions about what constitutes fair use (in movie reviews, for instance). Google’s AI is mostly trained to recognize the presence or non-presence of content in your video, not whether or not your use is fair (something that varies between jurisdictions, by the way). But what I’m going to discuss here is much more clear-cut: the performance of public domain music.

While there’s certainly artistic merit in new compositions, there are also a lot of us who enjoy performing existing classical music. Luckily for us, there’s lots of that in the public domain. The boundaries of what’s fallen out of copyright depend on the country, but virtually everything published in the nineteenth century and earlier is free for everyone to use.

Unfortunately, Google seems not to be aware of this fact. Recently, I uploaded a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury to YouTube, and it instantly got hit by four copyright claims. I went to go contest them — something I’ve done before for this kind of thing, and always with success for public domain music — but that really shouldn’t be necessary. Trial was first published in the 1870s. Gilbert and Sullivan died in 1911 and 1900, respectively. As far as I know, this opera isn’t under copyright anywhere in the world.

Of course, while the music is definitely in the public domain, new recordings can definitely be under copyright. If I’d uploaded a copyrighted D’Oyly Carte Company performance of Trial, I’d expect a copyright claim — it’d be totally justified. But that’s not what I did! In fact, the recording I uploaded was an entirely new one (in which I was myself involved). Maybe it got confused with another performance? Nope! YouTube flagged four segments as using the melody of “copyrighted” songs — but all the compositions on which I had supposedly infringed were just numbers from Trial!

So the AI is good. It correctly identified what I was using, and that I’d uploaded a new recording using a melodies from Google’s database of copyrighted compositions. The only problem is that these melodies aren’t copyrighted.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google services, including Madison.

Daniel:

Since I first started working on my website at age fourteen, the site has gone through many revisions, and hopefully changed for the better. This blog was originally dynamically served using a Python/Flask backend, having a custom login system and post “editor” (just an input box). One of the more strange things about my website, though, was how I displayed content.

It was clear to me, even at my young age, that writing raw HTML was suboptimal. Somehow (perhaps through GitHub) I heard about Markdown, and realized that a human-readable markup language was probably a much better way to go. What remained was, of course, rendering the content. The easiest way I found was to just stick a JavaScript script, calling out to marked, to run on page load and convert all the markup into pretty HTML.

This rendering would happen on every page load. Every time I navigated between pages on my site, for a second or two, I’d see the raw, unrendered Markdown that I had written, which would then disappear and be replaced with a proper view of the page’s content. The rendering wasn’t error-proof, either. If my connection was particularly slow (which it was, thanks, Comcast), or if I forgot to disable uMatrix, I would be left having to sift through the frequent occurences of #, _, *… Eventually I realized my mistake, and switched to rendering Markdown on the backend. Now, my content would appear to the user already formatted, and they wouldn’t have to wait for a JavaScript program to finish to read what I had written. All was well.

Amanda Cameron:

Robots could be used in schools to take the place of children who cannot attend class in person in South Gloucestershire.

The local authority is considering the use of ‘telepresence’ robots to allow pupils whose special needs prevent them from physically being in school to interact with their classmates and teachers virtually from home.

Such robots sit in classrooms and perform a child’s commands at a distance during the day.

They also translate what is happening, move, organise communication with the class and teachers, and even go with everyone for dinner, according to specialist publication Robotics Tomorrow.

The possibility of introducing the technology in local schools was raised by South Gloucestershire Council’s head of education, Hilary Smith, at a meeting of the local authority’s scrutiny commission on Wednesday, June 23.

Ms Smith said: “One thing that we are looking to do is…using robots for children who can’t be in classroom.

Rachel Hall:

Nearly half of all students thought their degree offered poor value for money this year, according to a survey that sheds light on the scale of student anger with their universities’ response to the pandemic.

Twice as many students thought their courses offered poor value (44%) than in 2019-20, despite pandemic disruption that year, according to the survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank. The increase is thought to reflect a view among students that universities misled them about how much in-person teaching they could expect this year.

This year is the first in which more students felt let down by their courses than were satisfied since the survey began 15 years ago. Students were unhappy with the cost of tuition as well as the lack of contact hours and in-person teaching, commenting that online learning “isn’t worth £9k” and “is extremely different to in-person learning”.

Bethan Staton:

GCSEs and A-Levels next year will be adjusted to make up for the disruption to student learning in England during the pandemic, said the UK education secretary. 

Gavin Williamson confirmed government officials were considering “mitigating measures” to grade exams in 2022, after they were cancelled this summer for the second year in a row owing to the coronavirus crisis.

The adjustments, to ensure pupils whose learning has been interrupted by the continued lockdowns are fairly graded, will be “similar” to modifications planned for this year, Williamson told MPs at an education select committee on Wednesday.

The education secretary said he “very much hoped and intended for exams to go ahead in 2022” and that action was needed “to ensure fairness” for pupils whose learning had been halted by the pandemic.

John Rose:

The conservative critique of American higher education is well known to Journal readers: The universities are run by intolerant progressives. The left counters with an insult: The lack of intellectually respectable conservative arguments is responsible for campus political uniformity. Perhaps a better starting point in this debate is the students, most of whom actually want freer discourse on campus. They want to be challenged by views they don’t hold.

This, at least, has been my recurring experience with undergraduates at Duke University, where I teach classes called “Political Polarization” and “Conservatism” that require my students to engage with all sides of today’s hottest political issues.

True engagement, though, requires honesty. In an anonymous survey of my 110 students this spring, 68% told me they self-censor on certain political topics even around good friends. That includes self-described conservative students, but also half of the liberals. “As a Duke student, it is difficult to be both a liberal and a Zionist,” one wrote. Another remarked, “Although I support most BLM ideas, I do not feel that I can have any conversation that even slightly criticizes the movement.”

Elizabeth Beyer:

e Madison School Board voted unanimously Monday night to adopt the district’s $529.8 million preliminary budget, a 7% increase over the previous year, amid state funding uncertainty…

The Madison School District is scheduled to receive $70.6 million over the course of the three payment installments. The district’s first installment, ESSER I, was approximately $9.2 million and has already been exhausted as of the end of the 2020-21 school year. District planning for the use of funds from ESSER II and III has been put on hold as the administration awaits more information on how the state budget will affect eligibility.

Guidelines dictate the types of expenses ESSER funds can cover. ESSER II funds, for example, are to mitigate learning loss, restore and maintain high-quality learning environments, and safely reopen elementary and secondary schools as soon as possible.

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.

Katja Hoyer:

Oh please…not the letters I sent to my mom,’ sighed the East German pastor Gernot Friedrich as he randomly pulled pages out of the 3,000-page file. Since January 1992, Germany has attempted a unique experiment in addressing its own past: anyone can request to view their Stasi file.

Founded in 1950 as the Socialist party’s ‘sword and shield’, the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, spent its 40-year existence gathering information about real and imagined political opponents. It created one of the most comprehensive police states in the world, dwarfing even the Nazi’s infamous Gestapo. Where the latter operated at around one officer to 10,000 citizens, at its peak the Stasi had one officer to every 180 East Germans.

The scale of the GDR’s surveillance took on such proportions that the Stasi began to recruit hundreds of thousands of ‘unofficial’ employees, casual informants who could provide information about individuals or entire communities. Such collaborators could be work colleagues, neighbors or friends and their motivations ranged from monetary incentives to personal vendetta. Many felt safe in the knowledge that their Stasi activities would remain forever concealed.

Lant Pritchett in conversation with Ann Bernstein:

Ann Bernstein: Let’s move to education now. You’ve made a controversial statement, which forms part of the title of your book, that ‘schooling ain’t learning’. And more recently, you’ve followed that up with ‘spending ain’t investment’. What do you mean by these phrases and why are they so important?

Lant Pritchett: In the post-World War II period, at the start of the ‘development era’, there was a UN Declaration of Human Rights, which declared in Article 26 that every child had a right to education. What everyone meant by ‘education’ was that children would acquire the skills and capabilities they needed to be successful adults in their society: literacy, numeracy, thinking skills, and an array of other skills.

Subsequently, in countries around the world, there have been huge successes in putting ‘butts in seats’. Unfortunately, this has not, by and large, been accompanied by increases in the levels of education. There are many countries in the world where the skills acquired per unit of time in school is so small that children emerge from up to 10 years of schooling fundamentally ill-equipped for the world they face. So, we cannot simply assume that schooling is learning.

The extension of that idea is ‘spending ain’t investment’. It is only ‘investment’ if it works. If I worship a god of the ocean, and I throw gold into the ocean, and call that investment in my prosperity, I have made a mistake because there is no causal link between my spending and my prosperity. Unless you are causally right about the chain of events that leads from your spending to the desired outcomes, you can spend all you want and not actually improve outcomes. In Indonesia, which is a reasonably well functioning country, teacher’s pay was doubled and the amount of spending per child tripled over the past 20 years, yet learning has not budged a bit; if anything, it has deteriorated. I think people have confused ticking the box of spending money on a budget item called ‘Education’, with true investment in human beings.

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.

Catherine Evans:

NHS prescriptions for gardening and dancing are “vitally needed” to help tackle rising levels of loneliness after lockdown, people suffering from isolation have said.
Social prescribing has been included in the Welsh government’s list of priorities for the next five years.

A Mind Cymru pilot project is looking into its impact on mental health.

One woman who felt isolated in lockdown said loneliness was now a bigger health risk than smoking or obesity.

Alice Gray, a 29-year-old science communicator and producer from Cardiff who struggled with loneliness during lockdown, said social prescribing was “vitally needed”.

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.

Free to Learn Coalition:

We support the basic principle that students should be Free to Learn:

Free to ask questions
Free to develop individual thoughts and opinions
Free to think critically of ideas and concepts
Free to achieve

All while being free from pressure or requirements to subscribe to a singular worldview and activist curriculum with a political agenda.

This principle is the backbone to adequately preparing students for life outside the classroom.

Resident Contrarian:

This is drive-someone-out behavior; it’s what you do when you want someone to quit, or you want to give yourself enough cover to fire them. This in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad; after all, there might be good reasons to drive someone out or fire them. But to know that, we need to go back a bit and understand why Chua was being censured in the first place. Only somewhat oddly, our step back involves Brett Kavanaugh.

The year was 2018, and for reasons half of us consider legitimate and half of us don’t, the media was desperate for any dirt of any kind that anyone at all could dish up on Brett Kavanaugh. It was a quaint time. Michael Avenatti was still taken kind-of seriously in those pre-Nike-extortion case days; all accusations of any kind were given serious screen time. Regardless of what you believe about Kav, it’s hard to argue it wasn’t good business; we were pretty much all watching for some reason or another.

In June of 2018, Chua wrote an opinion piece based on her knowledge of working with him as a part of her work with YLS’s clerkship committee for the better part of a decade.

Here’s a challenge: Try to find something negative about her in print before that date that doesn’t have to do with parenting style in relation to her controversial parenting book. Seriously, go. I couldn’t – it wasn’t for lack of trying. Granted it’s not an easy Google search to do, so I might have missed something; tell me if I did, keep me honest. 

In September (note: Kavanaugh was confirmed in October) entirely anonymous accusations started to surface – Chua, who had defended Kavanaugh, was reportedly now telling students he preferred to hire pretty girls and that they should dress slutty for the interviews. You might note the meta of the story is particularly strong in one direction. See? Kavanaugh is a pervy rapist type. See? Anyone who defends him is literally pimping girls to him for him to rape. 

The article is designed to capture both elements. Re: Chua-as-pimp:

Chua advised the same student Rubenfeld spoke to that she ought to dress in an “outgoing” way for her interview with Kavanaugh, and that the student should send Chua pictures of herself in different outfits before going to interview. The student did not send the photos.

There is no allegation that the female students who worked for Kavanaugh were chosen because of their physical appearance or that they were not qualified.

And re: “See? Kavanaugh is a rapist, this proves it!”:

Kavanaugh is facing intense scrutiny in Washington following an allegation made by Christine Blasey Ford that he forcibly held her down and groped her while they were in high school. He has denied the allegation. The accusation has mired Kavanaugh’s confirmation in controversy, drawing parallels to allegations of sexual harassment against Justice Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill in the 1990.

From later in the article:

However, the remarks from Chua and Rubenfeld raise questions about why the couple believed it was important to emphasize the students’ physical appearance when discussing jobs with Kavanaugh. The couple were not known to do that in connection with other judges, sources said. 

Chua, for her part, denies all this:

Everything that is being said about the advice I give to students applying to Brett Kavanaugh – or any judge – is outrageous, 100% false, and the exact opposite of everything I have stood for and said for the last 15 years,” Chua said in a letter that was sent to the Yale Law School community. 

I don’t think you guys are dumb and heaven knows I’m not subtle; I think you know already the direction I lean regarding the veracity of these particular accusations, at least to the extent that they were relayed with anything like the same tone they were delivered. But holding off on that, let’s assume the what they’ve accused her of is true; that she told some of her students that Kav tends to hire pretty women, and that if they want to be hired they should look pretty. This is at least plausible:

PBS Newshour:

That’s right. Some privilege, meaning about the same as an American middle class family; there are many reviewers who have actually mistaken my account for that of a wealthy child. It wasn’t wealth. It was just what in America would be a middle class life. Yes, and it was all lost very, very rapidly, and very violently. And that’s what I try to get across.

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.
  reply

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