Hams Bader:

The Biden administration is expected to reinstate the Obama administration’s 2014 school-discipline guidelines, which prodded schools to suspend all racial groups at the same rate, even if there was more misbehavior among students of one race than another. In response to those guidelines, and worried about being investigated by the Education Department, some school officials adopted unconstitutional racial quotas for school suspensions, or mandated special review of any suspensions of black or Hispanic students, effectively creating special privileges based on race.

The Biden administration renewed this pressure for quotas on June 4, by issuing a notice that called for new federal policies about school discipline, in light of the fact that “students of color are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary actions in contrast to their White peers.” It further implied that there are no racial differences in misbehavior rates, even though studies and surveys show that black students do have higher rates of misbehavior in school. It cited a controversial report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that claimed that “Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.”

But as the Washington Post noted in 2019, the Commission never showed that claim was true. The Commission’s chairwoman, who is now Biden’s nominee to head the Office for Civil Rights, “pointed to a few spots” in the Commission’s report to “claim that there are no underlying differences in student behavior. But those citations did not offer such evidence. One set of data referenced in the report showed the opposite,” noted The Post.

Maximilian Forte:

The documentary itself establishes its lead questions at the outset. Nico Sloot, described as an international entrepreneur, acts as the main voice in the film and our lead detective. What struck me from the start was how he framed the central problem that provoked his investigative journey: when would herd immunity be achieved? On the question of risk: who is going to get sick and who is going to die?

Sloot formed an independent research team that grew to include up to 20 scientists in four countries, across a range of specialties. This was something of an ad hoc think tank. The team encompassed doctors, economists, accountants, data specialists, among other specialties, and each member of the team had his/her own specific research task. It is quite impressive to see such an independent citizens’ initiative form, and it is a welcome antidote to the authoritarian, top-down, ask no questions, just follow orders approach involved with state proclamations and directives by top public health officers. Such independent initiatives should serve as a refreshing reminder—because apparently one is needed—that it is not wrong to ask questions and challenge assertions.

What or who provoked Nico Sloot? In part, he admits, it was a speech given early in the crisis by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. This compelled Sloot to conduct what he estimates is about 1,000 hours of research, added to others who joined him, totalling at least 5,000 hours. I suspect he is providing a low estimate. On his motivation, Sloot explains: “In business you always work with risk…so the first thing I looked at was: What are the facts here? How many will die and how many will fall victim to COVID-19?”

We hear and view the same speech by Prime Minister Rutte to which Sloot refers at the opening, and it is the standard kind of dramatic announcement that we all heard in our respective locales (it is included in the trailer I created, in the absence of an English-language trailer).

Yet Sloot himself apparently disagrees: the “collateral damage” of the measures taken were worse than the virus. He mentions that, for The Netherlands alone, around 300,000 hospital procedures had to be postponed. In Canada it was reported that many crucial cancer treatments, colonoscopies, and important surgeries that had been scheduled, were all pushed back thus creating a massive backlog. Even more: Canadian media reported the common occurrence of people suffering from heart problems, or even actual heart attacks, and not going to the hospital (either out of fear of getting infected by the virus, or because they knew hospitals were already dedicated almost exclusively to COVID-19 patients).

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 destruction of scientific credibility has been monumental… pic.twitter.com/zly3dHZDR2

— Dave Collum (@DavidBCollum) June 5, 2021

Martin Kulldorff:

I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.

Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.

For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.

Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.

Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.

In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.

Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University.

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.

Lindsey Ellis:

Universities are luring remote staff at corporations to move from urban hubs to college towns, as companies look to continue flexible work arrangements for their employees.

At least two colleges — Purdue University and West Virginia University — are supporting programs for these remote workers, betting that this mode of work will have staying power after the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to scattered workplaces.

Universities have long hosted corporate incubators, but the new programs represent another way the pandemic has shifted the way colleges think about who works on campus, and why. Many universities are considering how employees’ desires for remote work will affect their own human-resources policies. These colleges, however, are making a play for other people’s employees, showing that campuses will both influence and be affected by this major shift in where Americans live and work.

Purdue is set to hold a visitors’ weekend for a small group of applicants for a so-called “remote-working community” in the campus’s business-and-research park, which is operated by the university’s research foundation and a development company. These people will uproot their lives — some with a deal-sweetening $5,000 — to move to West Lafayette, Ind. They can live at discounted rates in housing built in the Purdue park and access campus facilities, including the library and a co-working space.

ALEXANDER GABUEV, LEONID KOVACHICH:

Amid the deluge of online disinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, geopolitical tensions pitting China and Russia against the West have continued to ratchet up, especially in the digital domain. Russian information operations have drawn greater attention in the West since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and many analysts have seen echoes of such online trolling and disinformation in the more assertive, confrontational posture of Chinese diplomats on social media during the coronavirus pandemic. Russian and Chinese propagandists also seem to be mirroring each other’s tactics and cross-promoting each other’s content, leading some Western analysts and governments to warn of deepening digital cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.

China and Russia do indeed share a lot of strategic objectives, and their partnership has been deepening across the board since the 2014 outbreak of war in Ukraine and Western sanctions against Moscow. After all, both countries’ leaders decry U.S. hegemony and see the United States and its alliances as challenges to their national security and national interests. And both Chinese and Russian policymakers are striving to exploit existing fissures in Western societies while weakening ties between the United States and its allies through information operations and other means. Furthermore, both the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai are intent on defusing Western criticisms of (and perceived designs to topple) their political regimes, while advancing their own self-serving, government-friendly narratives. Beyond these commonly held strategic objectives, both countries have drawn tactically on their own histories while also learning from one another and others.

Joanne Jacobs:

Paying “thank you” bonuses to teachers is sparking controversy, reports Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat. “Several states — including Georgia, Michigan, Florida, and Hawaii — and school districts have issued or are considering” paying bonuses to boost teacher morale after a stressful year.

Jill Tucker:

Yet it’s clear many families vowed to leave after losing faith in the district because of the slow reopening of classrooms and ongoing drama among district leadership. That includes an $87 million lawsuit filed by board member Alison Collins against five colleagues after they removed her from the vice presidency and committee positions following the discovery of racist tweets against Asian Americans, which have remained online since 2016.

Claire Raj’s family is among those who have opted out. The mother of three, with a former first-grader and third-grader at McCoppin Elementary, said she felt the district let students and schools down this year.

Despite being a parent leader at the school, she pulled her kids out in January, enrolling them at St. Anne School, which had resumed in-person learning in October. Her youngest son’s teacher at St. Anne informed her that her son didn’t have enough muscle control in his hand to write after months on a computer tablet and that he was well behind peers in reading and writing.

The district just didn’t do enough to help families, she said.

“It’s something we had never considered, going to private school. We aren’t Catholic,” Raj said. “Once we started considering it, it seemed we just didn’t have any choice.”

SF kindergarten enrollment is down 10%.

It's down 55% among white families.

City stands to lose $20M/year as a result.

This is what happens when the BOE spends the entire year debating how to rename schools instead of how to safely reopen.

A thread… (1/x) https://t.co/hKZ559IaoT

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) June 3, 2021

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:

MOST PEOPLE feel, from time to time, that their work is meaningless. David Graeber, the late anthropologist, built an elaborate thesis out of this insight. He argued in a book in 2018 that society has been deliberately creating more and more “bullshit jobs” in professions such as financial services to fill the time of educated workers who need the money to pay off student debts but who suffer from depression because of their work. His thesis has been cited more than 800 times by academics, according to Google Scholar, and often repeated in the media.

When the book came out, this columnist was unimpressed, arguing that the thesis was a partial reworking of the insights of C. Northcote Parkinson, who argued that bureaucracy has an innate tendency to expand and make work for itself. Three academics—Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell—have undertaken a systematic analysis* of the claims behind Mr Graeber’s work and found that the data often show the exact opposite of what he predicted. The bullshit-jobs thesis, in other words, is largely bullshit.

Robby Soave:

Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,” the social media platform declared in a statement.

This change in policy comes in the midst of heated debate about how to respond to the perception that social media is amplifying the spread of false information. For the last several years, journalists and politicians have pushed to police so-called misinformation through various means. Major news organizations have hired mis- or disinformation reporters. Lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) have urged social media sites to prohibit speech deemed wrong or dangerous—and have sometimes suggested that this should be required by law. More recently, various groups have asked President Joe Biden to establish a federal initiative to combat online misinformation.

But Facebook’s concession that the lab leak story it once viewed as demonstrably false is actually possibly true should put to rest the idea that banning or regulating misinformation should be a chief public policy goal.

JD Vance:

I thought I’d start today by sketching out a vision for what we should be about in the conservative movement in the twenty-first century, because I think it’s useful to anchor ourselves, not just in first principles but in the lives of the people affected by those principles, and then I’ll talk about why I think “woke capital” is such a problem.

I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family in dignity on a single middle-class job. It’s a simple vision: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to live a good life in this country that is your own, that was built by your parents and grandparents, that will be inherited by your children.

Now that’s of course more complicated than it sounds. I think it requires that we respect our history so people are anchored in the traditions of this country, so they can teach their children those traditions, and so they can pass on a feeling of rootedness in their own community. That’s why we worry about the assault on our history and our schools. I think it requires that we give our children and ourselves the right to speak openly and participate meaningfully in this democratic society of ours.

Monica Wichgers says @MMSDschools teachers are promoting racial division through #CriticalRaceTheory.
Republican lawmakers announced new legislation that would ban Wisconsin schools from teaching the divisive, Marxist ideology. #WIright pic.twitter.com/mNN2rjMi4d

— MacIver News Service (@NewsMacIver) June 3, 2021

Machine generated transcript:

My mother was the first African-American graduate of Edgewood college. She was a first grade teacher in the Madison schools. I was a product of the Madison schools and my kids are currently in the Madison’s school district. What I am seeing now in the school is something I’ve never seen before. It’s like the teachers are promoting the vision.

We’re always taught unity. And how to get along with one another silver rights helped us advance. And now my children are being made to think of themselves as perpetual victims and to think of the white race as perpetual oppressors. This isn’t right. As a veteran of the United States army, I served to uphold and defend the principles that this bill promotes.

My achievements honor, graduate in basic training. My efforts in the Gulf war and my honorable discharge are a reflection of my individual efforts and sacrifice not given to me due to my race.

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

Joel Breakstone:

Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.

Jonathan Turley:

However, the new change allows for sweeping and ill-defined authority. It is a convoluted structure but under the new rule you can be punished for off-campus conduct if it is a substantial disruption to any member of the university that involves “academic work or any University records, documents, or identifications”

That would seem to encompass references to school “identifications” in the form of other students or associations. That ambiguity can be a chilling element in such a speech limitation. Indeed, if a student identifies herself as an Oregon student, is that sufficient “identification”? What does “involved” with an identification mean?

Nathan Schachtman:

In his 1994 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Hungarian born chemist George Andrew Olah acknowledged an aspect of science that rarely is noted in popular discussions:

“[One] way of dealing with errors is to have friends who are willing to spend the time necessary to carry out a critical examination of the experimental design beforehand and the results after the experiments have been completed. An even better way is to have an enemy. An enemy is willing to devote a vast amount of time and brain power to ferreting out errors both large and small, and this without any compensation. The trouble is that really capable enemies are scarce; most of them are only ordinary. Another trouble with enemies is that they sometimes develop into friends and lose a good deal of their zeal. It was in this way the writer lost his three best enemies. Everyone, not just scientists, need a few good enemies!”[1]

If you take science seriously, you must take error as something for which we should always be vigilant, and something we are committed to eliminate. As Olah and Von Békésy have acknowledged, sometimes an enemy is required. It would thus seem to be quite unscientific to complain that an enemy was harassing you, when she was criticizing your data, study design, methods, or motives.

Wilfred McClay:

We live in anxious times. But many times in our past were far more anxious, and the reasons for anxiety then were more compelling. Consider, for example, the situation facing the world in the early months of 1941, when Hitler’s triumphant armies controlled continental Europe, when only the British Isles managed to hold out, and when the future of liberty looked very dim—indeed, when civilization itself seemed imperiled. Yet at that moment, the novelist John Dos Passos chose to pen these words: “In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.”

He must have been tempted to declare, as journalists like to do, that the present situation was utterly without precedent and that the past had nothing to teach the present. After all, had the world ever before seen a more fearsome and pitiless fighting machine than the one that Adolf Hitler had assembled? But Dos Passos chose to convey an exactly opposite message. He urged that we look backward to a past that could be a source of sanity and direction, a lifeline of sustenance and instruction.

Damian D. Guerra and Daniel J. Guerra:

Background: Containment of the COVID-19 pandemic requires evidence-based strategies to reduce transmission. 11 Because COVID-19 can spread via respired droplets, many states have mandated mask use in public settings. 12 Randomized control trials have not clearly demonstrated mask efficacy against respiratory viruses, and 13 observational studies conflict on whether mask use predicts lower infection rates. We hypothesized that statewide 14 mask mandates and mask use are associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates in the United States. 15 Methods: We calculated total COVID-19 case growth and mask use for the continental United States with data from 16 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. We estimated post-17 mask mandate case growth in non-mandate states using median issuance dates of neighboring states with mandates. 18 Results: Case growth was not significantly different between mandate and non-mandate states at low or high 19 transmission rates, and surges were equivocal. Mask use predicted lower case growth at low, but not high 20 transmission rates. Growth rates were comparable between states in the first and last mask use quintiles adjusted for 21 normalized total cases early in the pandemic and unadjusted after peak Fall-Winter infections. Mask use did not 22 predict Summer 2020 case growth for non-Northeast states or Fall-Winter 2020 growth for all continental states. 23 Conclusions: Mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-24 19 growth surges. Containment requires future research and implementation of existing efficacious strategies.

Pia Ceres:

Espitia is a part of a wave of parents and caregivers who withdrew their children from US public schools and elected to homeschool because of the pandemic—and she’s part of a group that isn’t going back. The crisis gave rise to a diverse swath of families that are using tech to totally customize their kids’ learning, and they might even change what “going to school” means in the post-pandemic world.

A More Diverse Class of Homeschoolers

While homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, it has never been considered the American norm. In 2019, homeschooled students represented just 3.2 percent of US students in grades K through 12, or around 1.7 million students. By comparison, 90 percent of US students attend public school. But a March 2021 report from the US Census Bureau indicates an uptick in homeschooling during the pandemic: In spring 2020, 5.4 percent of surveyed households reported homeschooling their children (homeschooling being distinct from remote learning at home through a public or private school). By fall 2020, the figure had doubled to 11.1 percent.

“I like the idea of presenting material to my kids that’s not necessarily the colonized experience.”

James Marriott:

In my early twenties I was fixated on the idea of taking a masters degree. I made myself fairly miserable in pursuit of this goal: I saved almost all the money I earned, moved into my grandmother’s spare bedroom and took out an enormous loan from the government. The obsession was not rational. I am not sure I could ever have coherently explained why I thought I needed a second degree in English literature.

I was, I think, a victim of what the American writer Fredrik deBoer calls “the cult of smart”: the pervasive modern idea that intelligence is the defining human quality and that academic performance is a “shorthand for total human value”.

I believe deBoer is correct: academic intelligence is absurdly overvalued. For

Ann Althouse Commentary:

If you, like me, wondered what’s in 17th-century sermons, here’s a big page of links to English sermons from the 17th century. Lots of John Donne sermons here. Sample:

William Jacobsen:

The story has been covered not only by FoxNews.com, but also by GoLocalProv, which quoted the local ACLU Director:

Rhode Island ACLU Executive Director Steve Brown told GoLocal on Tuesday he believes the South Kingstown School Committee’s response is “inappropriate.”

“I can certainly understand the difficulties facing a municipal body when confronted with such a huge number of APRA requests in a short period of time,” said Brown “However, I am also hopeful that, upon consideration, the school committee will recognize that suing a resident for this activity is not an appropriate response.”

Additional outlets included The Daily Wire, The Washington Examiner, Real Clear Politics, Yahoo News, MSN, The UK Independent, and The Providence Journal, which detailed some vicious personal attacks from the school committee chairperson and local unions:

The committee’s chairwoman said Wednesday the requests were part of a national strategy of a “racist group.” ….

South Kingstown School Committee Chairwoman Emily Cummiskey described the possible suit Wednesday as a “potential injunction” to blunt “a nationally-organized, racist group [attempting] to create chaos and intimidate our district. …This is their MO nation-wide and I anticipate other districts in our state will soon experience the same unfortunate influx we have.”

Julie C. Driebea and Ruben C. Arslang

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

Fairfaxparents.org:

Fairfax County Parents Association is a nonpartisan volunteer grassroots organization of parents that seeks to ensure students are the first priority in Fairfax County Public Schools. This is accomplished by educating parents about the governance and administration of the school system and empowering parents to advocate on behalf of their children. We seek to ensure the school board is governed in accordance with the law, specifically that the roles are non-partisan. The FCPA will work to support teachers and staff of the school system to aid their efforts to educate our children.

Matt Beienburg:

It should not be this way, and fortunately, it doesn’t have to be.

The Goldwater Institute’s Academic Transparency Act model language, which has been adapted into legislation passed by the Arizona State Senate and the North Carolina House of Representatives this spring and is now also being advanced in Wisconsin—would provide parents unprecedented access to the classroom materials being presented to their kids. Under the legislation, schools would post on a publicly accessible portion of their website a simple list (i.e., syllabus) of the actual materials being used in student instruction so that prospective parents like Nicole Solas could immediately review the type of content awaiting her daughter if she were to enroll at the local public district school.

Teachers wouldn’t be required to violate copyright law or spend time scanning materials, but rather simply account for whatever curriculum resources they used during instructional periods—whether that be textbooks, essays like those from the 1619 Project, or online news articles—in a format as simple as a Google Doc.

It should not take hundreds or thousands of dollars—much less a willingness to brave the threat of retaliatory lawsuits, as in Ms. Solas’ case—for parents to know what is being taught in the nearby schools in which they’re considering enrolling their students.

With academic transparency, those roadblocks to parental awareness and engagement can become a thing of the past.

Fan Yiyang:

One of China’s elite universities has a new student that’s distinguishable from the rest of her peers — she’s human-like but powered by artificial intelligence.

Named Hua Zhibing, the virtual student is enrolled at Tsinghua University’s department of computer science and technology, where she will study under the tutelage of a dedicated professor, domestic media reported. Claimed to be the first AI-powered student to attend university, Hua started school on Tuesday and will focus on technology and data-related courses. 

Hua was jointly trained by the non-profit research institute Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, along with technology companies Zhipu.AI and Xiaoice, though the motive behind its development was not immediately clear.

The Chinese government has an ambitious vision for the country’s AI sector, with plans to achieve a “major breakthrough” in the basic theory of artificial intelligence by 2025. Officials hope the technology will become a driving force in the country’s economic transformation and in upgrading its industrial capabilities.

In recent years, China has increasingly applied artificial intelligence in several sectors, including health and education, though the growing use of facial recognition technologies has raised privacy concerns. Meanwhile, companies have used AI to develop anything from an app to help save local dialects to self-driving cars, digital doppelgangers for news anchors, and even a chat bot to provide company to lonely men.

Sam Haselby and Matt Stoller

Power in the U.S. flows through the gates of the Ivy League and a very small tier of other top universities. These institutions set and sanction the boundaries of knowledge, including what kinds of political and social views are welcomed in prestige cultural spaces. This has long been the case. In 1805, for example, Unitarianism won a real degree of respectability when Harvard, then a Calvinist institution, appointed the Unitarian Henry Ware to the Hollis chair, long the most prestigious endowed chair in the country. Last year, in a 21st-century version of the Ware affair, conservatives won when Harvard’s president and provost overruled the faculty and turned away the economist Gabriel Zucman, whose renown rests in large part on his empirical work substantiating the democratic benefits of a wealth tax. Lawrence H. Summers, who once said that “inequality has … gone up in our society” because “people are being treated closer to the way they’re supposed to be treated,” supported the hire but nevertheless explained, shortly thereafter, that raising taxes on the rich is a bad idea.

Roy Peter Clark:

This sense of atrophy is one way that individuals experience the larger existential crises facing journalism. As an enterprise, journalism has suffered the devastating loss of resources from the collapse of its business model — money from advertising — magnified by the disruption of the internet and the growth of social media.

Who will pay for quality journalism in the future? Many experiments are underway, but no one has the answer. The loss of news and editorial power has left communities — whole states — under-covered, depriving citizens of the information they need to make good decisions about their lives. Some locations are so depleted they have been tagged as news deserts.

But that is just the half of it. The other half of the existential crisis involves vicious attempts to decertify the press, to dismiss it as biased and unethical, to transform its reputation from that of responsible watchdog to enemy of the people. The act of blaming the messenger for the delivery of bad news is ancient, but in the modern world its effect has been to make the practice of journalism more disheartening and at times dangerous.

Virginia Hughes:

New laws in Maryland and Montana are the first in the nation to restrict law enforcement’s use of genetic genealogy, the DNA matching technique that in 2018 identified the Golden State Killer, in an effort to ensure the genetic privacy of the accused and their relatives.

Beginning on Oct. 1, investigators working on Maryland cases will need a judge’s signoff before using the method, in which a “profile” of thousands of DNA markers from a crime scene is uploaded to genealogy websites to find relatives of the culprit. The new law, sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, also dictates that the technique be used only for serious crimes, such as murder and sexual assault. And it states that investigators may only use websites with strict policies around user consent.

Montana’s new law, sponsored by a Republican, is narrower, requiring that government investigators obtain a search warrant before using a consumer DNA database, unless the consumer has waived the right to privacy.

The laws “demonstrate that people across the political spectrum find law enforcement use of consumer genetic data chilling, concerning and privacy-invasive,” said Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland who championed the Maryland law. “I hope to see more states embrace robust regulation of this law enforcement technique in the future.”

Kashmir Hill:

People were thinking about this a lot a decade ago. During an August 2010 interview, it was on the mind of Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, the creator of the best fossil-digging equipment out there. Mr. Schmidt predicted, “apparently seriously,” according to The Wall Street Journal, that young people would change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to escape their digital pasts. The prediction was widely mocked for its impossibility.

The same month, another prominent data scientist, Jeff Jonas, offered a more utopian prediction: “I hope for a highly tolerant society in the future,” he wrote on a legal blog called Concurring Opinions. “A place where it is widely known I am four or five standard deviations off center, and despite such deviance, my personal and professional relationships carry on, unaffected.”

I remember this prediction because I cited it a decade ago when a 28-year-old woman had her Congressional campaign upended by a “scandal,” one that seems quaint by today’s standards but was a glimpse into our future. The woman who provided it was named, coincidentally, Krystal Ball.

Ms. Ball was running as a Democrat for a House seat in Virginia at the time; a conservative blog got its hands on decade-old photos from a post-college Christmas party, where Ms. Ball was dressed as a “naughty Santa” and her husband at the time was Rudolph with a red dildo for a nose. This sounds ridiculous, but the “raunchy party photos” fueled news stories across the world. I thought that what she was experiencing was notable for its limited shelf life: As more and more people got smartphones and flocked to apps like Instagram and Twitter that encouraged them to thoroughly document their lives and thoughts, this sort of shaming of people’s past selves would surely stop, because the throwing of stones would become hypocritical and dangerous.

The Canadian Press:

The remains of 215 children have been found buried on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said in a news release Thursday that the remains were confirmed last weekend with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist.

Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.

Some of the children were as young as three, she said.

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders, Ph.D.

Wisconsin invests in our K-12 schools by creating options for families. On average, Wisconsin school districts average revenue (of local, state and federal funding) per student was $14,737 in 2019-2020.

The majority of K-12 education funding is directly distributed to school districts. Under current law, even the lowest funded school districts receive more funding per pupil than independent charter schools and private schools in the parental choice programs.

Today, the claims for more funding for districts are rendered almost comedic in light of all of the federal stimulus funds flooding into the state.

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”

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

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.

KC Johnson:

‘One of the most sweeping bipartisan judicial rejections of an administration’s policy in decades,” commentator David French recently noted, involved the Obama administration using Title IX to undermine due process on American college campuses. The administration’s record, French wrote, “has been rejected by judges across the ideological spectrum and has cost universities millions.”

Given this legacy, George Mason law professor David Bernstein hoped that “legal actors responsible for rather blatant constitutional violations, such as Obama administration OCR [Office of Civil Rights] Chief Catherine Lhamon, will not in the future be rewarded with plum political appointments.” Yet the Biden administration has recently selected Lhamon to return to her old perch atop the OCR, the Education Department office with jurisdiction over Title IX — the federal law that bans gender discrimination in education — and racial-discrimination issues.

Perhaps no public figure in the past decade has done more to decimate the rights of accused students than Lhamon. No wonder that FIRE, the scrupulously non-partisan campus-civil-liberties organization, denounced her nomination and urged senators to reject it unless she committed, under oath, to upholding specific due-process provisions in Title IX tribunals. Given her record, it seems extremely unlikely that she would ever do so.

In 2011, the Obama administration invoked Title IX to address what it considered a surge in campus sexual assaults. The resulting “Dear Colleague” letter mandated a series of procedural changes making guilty findings more likely to result from campus tribunals. The policy’s underlying assumption was that one-sided procedures would change campus culture and lead otherwise-reluctant victims to file reports with their schools. After taking over at OCR in 2013, Lhamon unilaterally produced a second, lengthy guidance document, taking aim at schools’ allowing accused students to conduct cross-examination (most schools already prevented students’ lawyers from doing so) and cautioning universities against prioritizing the due-process rights of the accused.

Wall Street Journal:

Po­lice ar­rested Ms. Mo, along with nearly the en­tire op­po­si­tion move­ment, in Jan­uary. She and 46 oth­ers are charged with con­spir­acy to com­mit sub­ver­sion un­der the na­tional se­cu­rity law for or­ga­niz­ing or par­tic­i­pat­ing in an in­for­mal pro-democ­racy pri­mary elec­tion last July. Judge Es­ther Toh de­nied Ms. Mo bail in April, and the world learned why on Fri­day.

Bloomberg:

China is escalating a crackdown on its online education sector, forcing once high-flying startups to mothball plans for multi-billion-dollar initial public offerings this year.

Just months ago, edtech outfits were one of the hottest investments in China’s post-Covid internet industry, pulling in more than $10 billion of venture funding last year from powerhouses like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and SoftBank Group Corp. Then Beijing stepped in.

President Xi Jinping suggested in March the surge in after-school tutoring was putting immense pressure on on China’s kids, signaling a personal interest in curbing excesses. That led to warnings in state-owned media and penalties aimed at predatory practices that play on a nation’s obsession with academic achievement. Now, the country’s education ministry plans to create a dedicated division to oversee all private education platforms for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter.

Victor Ashe:

Fearful of transparency and change, Yale’s governing body has resorted to procedural tactics to keep alumni from joining that wouldn’t be out of place in a dictatorship. 

Back in March 2020, I signed up to gather the 4,394 signatures required to become a petition candidate for the Yale Corporation. In a four-month period, I gathered over 7,200 signatures and won a place on the ballot for the Yale Corporation (which is the governing body of Yale University). It hires the president, grants tenure, adopts the annual budget and sets policy on whatever it wants to affect.

I ran because, as a Yale alumnus, I was tired of getting two names each year of persons I did not know, with no information on why they were running provided. All we got was a bio, and now a video lacking any comments from candidates on issues facing Yale. In my campaign, I also emphasized openness, and my opposition both to expensive administrative growth and to rising tuition during the pandemic.

MD Kittle:

As the new complaint filed Monday against Madison lays out, the Center for Tech and Civic Life showered the WI-5 cities with more than $8 million in grant funding, with Madison receiving more than $1.27 million of the cut. The complaint, filed Tuesday, names Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, a Democrat, and City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.

In total, CTCL received $400 million from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, ostensibly to promote “safe and secure” elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, critics say, Zuckerberg’s mammoth social network was silencing many conservatives and conservative viewpoints.

Emails show liberal activists and election officials sharing raw voter data and discussing how best to maximize turnout of traditionally Democratic voters in “areas with predominantly minorities.”

Washougal Moms:

On May 11th the Washougal School District discriminated and harassed three female community members who came to a public meeting about critical race theory and mask mandates for their children. They were kicked out by Vice Superintendent Aaron Hansen (Salary $142,100+) and Superintendent Mary Templeton (Salary $168,634+), who are vocal supporters of critical race theory. FYI: WA State budget is facing a 9 billion dollar shortfall.

The board voted to end the meeting because they claimed there was a disruption when one member would not put on a mask due to medical and religious exemptions, which she stated multiple times. However, after the three left and everyone pretended they were leaving in their cars, the board started another meeting which is against the law. They have to publicly post a 24 hour notice before any new meeting. When the three citizens learned about this from parents watching on zoom, they came back. The doors were locked (against the law) and all the attendants (fellow educators) from the earlier “adjourned” meeting were inside. They refused to let the community members in and even shut the window closed in their faces and proceeded to laugh and mock them (visibly laughing). Washougal board members called the police and demanded the three be trespassed from City of Washougal property or face arrest for the length of one year. The police trespassed all three, including the two single mothers who wore masks and have children who attend WSD, at the request of the board: police were not given an option to say no to this. There is no way to challenge this trespass besides civil litigation.

Howard Blume:

A plan to reimagine math instruction for 6 million California students has become ensnared in equity and fairness issues — with critics saying proposed guidelines will hold back gifted students and supporters saying it will, over time, give all kindergartners through 12th-graders a better chance to excel.

The proposed new guidelines aim to accelerate achievement while making mathematical understanding more accessible and valuable to as many students as possible, including those shut out from high-level math in the past because they had been “tracked” in lower level classes. The guidelines call on educators generally to keep all students in the same courses until their junior year in high school, when they can choose advanced subjects, including calculus, statistics and other forms of data science.

Brittany Bernstein:

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer,” according to faculty.

Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.

Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics, said the shift will give students more opportunities to major in classics.

Billings said the changes had been floated before university president Christopher Eisgruber called for addressing systemic racism at the university, but the curriculum shift resurfaced as a priority after the president’s call to action and the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

“We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.”

Matt I. Brown, Jonathan Wai, Christopher F. Chabris:

Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence-based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.

Jonathan Christensen:

In 1998 I loaded up on student loans against the advice of Amherst College’s financial aid advisor, and left our shores for jolly old England. In my first week at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, I was told to choose subjects for my tutorials. These are one-on-one meetings with professors once or twice per week. I told the faculty advisor that I wanted to steep myself in history and literature to accompany the feeling that I got from wandering the storybook campus. He said he had just the tutor for me. And with that, I ended up studying English Romantic poetry with the late Jonathan Wordsworth, who was a great-great-great nephew of the famous poet William Wordsworth.

The way tutorials work is that you meet your tutor, you discuss a subject, and then the tutor assigns one or more essays for the next meeting that will require some additional reading and research to complete. Then at that next meeting, you read your essays aloud to the tutor during the first 10 minutes. The tutor gives direct feedback on your writing, and you move on to repeat the process from the top.

On a cold day in January, Professor Wordsworth’s study smelled like the scout’s cleaning supplies and old books. I sat across from him at his computerless desk sweating and stumbling through a timid technical analysis of a poem by Coleridge. I knew I had blown it. My writing sucked. Professor Wordsworth told me firstly, I needed to write more about how the poems made me feel rather than all their technical details, and secondly, I might want to take a bit more time to proofread my future essays. In that moment he was Dumbledore—kind, intelligent, and insistent that I do my best.

Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, Jae Song, and Justin Weidner:

The lifetime earnings of the median male worker declined by 10 percent from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort. Further, more than three-quarters of the distribution of men experienced no rise in their lifetime earnings across these cohorts. Accounting for rising employer-provided health and pension benefits partly mitigates these findings but does not alter the substantive conclusions.

How are these changes reflected in wage/salary earnings? When nominal earnings are deflated by the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator, the annualized value of median lifetime wage/salary earnings for male workers declined by $4,400 per year from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort, or $136,400 over the 31-year working period.

Peter Anderson:

The Capital Times editorializes, “Madison has a great public schools system” and Board President “Ali Muldrow, is a dynamic leader “who will move Madison schools in the right direction” — sentiments reminiscent of the acclaim it offered former Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, whose policies Muldrow seems poised to continue.

But is it really great?

Cheatham and Muldrow committed to eliminate the Black achievement gap. After seven years of their leadership, 89% of black third graders remain unable to read, plummeting to 5% by eighth grade — no better than when they began.

Why?

First, the school district persisted in teaching reading with obsolete whole and balanced language methods for two decades after research demonstrated that phonics is superior for disadvantaged kids.

Worse, the district has focused not on fixing its mistakes, but, like a magician’s misdirection, on shifting attention away from those embarrassing reading scores to graduation rates. Then it promptly lowered standards to pump up graduation stats.

The second reason for the district’s failure has been a breakdown in discipline. Just two years ago, Madisonian’s, who like the Cap Times had thought the city still had great schools, woke up to read a shocking article in Isthmus titled “A Rotten Year.”

The article meticulously documented the unraveling of discipline at Madison’s middle and high schools that followed the policies of Cheatham, who threw dedicated teachers committed to racial justice under the bus when they sought to maintain order, and Muldrow, who accused teachers worried about disruptive behavior of being racist.

“What’s new this year,” one teacher said, “is you don’t know how an interaction with a kid is going to go or that the district will support you after the fact. What ends up happening is teachers do nothing.”

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.

Brendan O’Neil:

In recent months it wasn’t only the inhabitants of China who were forbidden from speaking ill of the Chinese regime. So were billions of others around the world. Thanks to Facebook and its clampdown on any discussion of the theory that Covid-19 might have been ‘manufactured’ or might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, people in America, Britain, France and across the globe were subjected to Chinese-style silencing. They were essentially banned from saying things that might embarrass the Chinese Communist Party. The supposedly woke, chilled overlords of the World Wide Web helped to globalise the CCP’s repression of free thought and open debate.

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

Thomas Frank:

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

Barrett Swanson:

That my students followed the accounts of these influencers made me curious about their manner of living. And as the enrollment numbers at my university continued to worsen and two of my former students emailed to say that they were dropping out of college and moving to L.A., I spent much of last summer cold-calling publicists, wanting to see where the nation’s young people were heading. I swiftly discovered that the influencer industry had become a piñata for COVID-related outrage, with a number of New York Times stories characterizing these creators as incorrigible Dionysians. The Clubhouse in particular had become a repeated target. Several of their neighbors in Beverly Hills had filed a report with the local police department claiming that, despite quarantine, Clubhouse BH had hosted a party of “over a hundred” people, with cars blocking both sides of the street and even parking in several neighbors’ driveways.

All of this led me to reasonably expect that publicists would be wary of press inquiries—let alone the kind of immersive, fly-on-the-wall piece I was proposing. So I was somewhat surprised to find, one morning in August, an email from the Clubhouse at the top of my inbox. For reasons I cannot explain, their publicists were strangely receptive to this idea. They wanted to know how long I’d stay and when I could come out. They seemed to be under the impression that I wanted to learn how to become an influencer myself. The kids would be more than happy to help me make an account, they said. “Plus, if you get three influencers to tag you in a post,” they said, “you could have half a million followers by the end of the week.”

Latest @BurbioCalendar school mask map. pic.twitter.com/7pBA3xiOHS

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) May 31, 2021

James Rebanks:

Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

David Stanway & Tony Munroe:

Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try and stave off risks to its economy from a rapidly aging population. But that failed to result in a sustained surge in births given the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities, a challenge that persiststo this day.

The policy change will come with “supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an ageing population”, the official Xinhua news agency said following a politburo meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping.

Among those measures, China will lower educational costs for families, step up tax and housing support, guarantee the legal interests of working women and clamp down on “sky-high” dowries, it said, without giving specifics. It would also look to educate young people “on marriage and love”.

The Economist:

A new paper by Thomas Piketty makes the rise of right-wing populism look like a historical inevitability

Rebecca Solnit:

I was ravenous to learn. I’d waited for years for a proper chance at it, and the high school in my town didn’t seem like a place where I was going to get it. I passed the G.E.D. test at fifteen, started community college the following fall, and transferred after two semesters to a four-year college, where I began, at last, to get an education commensurate with my appetite.

What was it, I sometimes wonder, that I was supposed to have learned in the years of high school that I avoided? High school is often considered a definitive American experience, in two senses: an experience that nearly everyone shares, and one that can define who you are, for better or worse, for the rest of your life. I’m grateful I escaped the particular definition that high school would have imposed on me, and I wish everyone else who suffered could have escaped it, too.

For a long time I’ve thought that high school should be abolished. I don’t mean that people in their teens should not be educated at public expense. The question is what they are educated in. An abolitionist proposal should begin by acknowledging all the excellent schools and teachers and educations out there; the people who have a pleasant, useful time in high school; and the changes being wrought in the nature of secondary education today. It should also recognize the tremendous variety of schools, including charter and magnet schools in the public system and the private schools — religious, single-sex, military, and prep — that about 10 percent of American students attend, in which the values and pedagogical systems may be radically different. But despite the caveats and anomalies, the good schools and the students who thrive (or at least survive), high school is hell for too many Americans. If this is so, I wonder why people should be automatically consigned to it.

The Economist:

The Mainichi:

Some 80% of Tokyo metropolitan high schools have in recent years continued to require higher admission exam scores for girls than boys, despite metro government attempts to fix the discrepancies, the Mainichi Shimbun has learned.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education has applied corrective measures to 30 to 40 schools a year, but still admissions tests from academic 2015 to 2020 for about 80% of schools had higher passing requirements for girls, internal education board documents show. In one case, an entrance exam with the perfect score set at 1,000 had a passing-grade discrepancy 243 points higher for girls, and in another 20 girls failed despite scoring higher than the lowest-scoring successful male applicant.

According to the Mainichi Shimbun’s research, high schools under Tokyo Metropolitan Government jurisdiction are the only prefectural schools to have separate enrollment caps for male and female students. The numbers at each high school are based on the ratio of boys to girls at public junior high schools in Tokyo.

Niccolo Soldo:

This hyperconformity seems to have developed in two phases: Phase One was a collapse of previously distinct media types (network TV, cable TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, et al) into just “web sites” and now “mobile apps”. This was not their fault. Phase Two was the virtually universal industry-wide adoption of a strident ideological monoculture. This is their fault. I’m a First Amendment absolutist, so I don’t begrudge anyone the freedom to say and write what they think, but we are told that we live in a marketplace of ideas. But if you mainly consume the standard media product, what you are experiencing is closer to a marketplace of idea.

This monoculture challenges two of my most fundamental beliefs. First, in business — and these are businesses — you seek to differentiate, to offer a unique product that your customers can’t get anywhere else. In economic terms, differentiation is the key to pricing power, which is the key to profits, which is the key to staying in business. This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect. Second, civilizational progress happens not by top down unanimity and ideological instruction, but by debate and dispute. That this should happen, but is not happening, in the institutional media today is obvious.

And so I think it’s obvious that the incumbents are handing us, by their own considered and determinedly executed choices, a sparkling opportunity to both build better businesses and an actual marketplace of ideas. I’m intensely proud of both Substack and Clubhouse and have very high hopes that they can deliver.

Locally, the traditional media has largely supported K-12 status quo governance, to the long term detriment of our students and community vigor.

Maximilian C. Forte:

If this was a good time for Canadian academia, you would not be able to tell from the blanket of almost absolute silence that has been pulled over universities. There is no euphoria, no celebratory mood, no applause for the changes that are happening. There is, however, a degree of infighting, mutual suspicion, recrimination, and a palpable tension that divides faculty and also pits them against students and administrations. Against a backdrop of publicized cases of ostracism, real worry exists that expressing a perspective that has not been authorized could lead to termination or at least media-driven defamation. University administrations are all-too-quick to proclaim that what Professor X said or wrote, “does not represent the values of this institution”. Why would it? Why should it? These are not private religious colleges; Canada’s universities are public and secular. When applicants go through the hiring process, are they ever once presented with a list of the university’s “values”—a manifesto—and are they then told that if they do not agree with the document they can apply elsewhere, or else sign at the bottom line? No, that never happens (to my knowledge), and yet we work under the dictates of a party line—a decidedly partisan thrust that is distinctly and clearly a carbon-copy of the ideology of the ruling Liberal Party. This is far from the only instance where copy-and-paste has displaced academic reasoning, questioning, and debating.

Brian Gallagher and Kevin Berger:

I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to … germs. The former Princeton University undergraduate and Afghanistan counterinsurgency instructor said, to the mirth of his co-hosts, that he hadn’t washed his hands in a decade. Naturally this germ of misinformation went viral on social media.

The next day, as serendipity would have it, the authors of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread—philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall—sat down with Nautilus. In their book, O’Connor and Weatherall, both professors at the University of California, Irvine, illustrate mathematical models of how information spreads—and how consensus on truth or falsity manages or fails to take hold—in society, but particularly in social networks of scientists. The coathors argue “we cannot understand changes in our political situation by focusing only on individuals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs.”

O’Connor and Weatherall, who are married, are deft communicators of complex ideas. Our conversation ranged from the tobacco industry’s wiles to social media’s complicity in bad data. We discussed how science is subtly manipulated and how the public should make sense of contradictory studies. The science philosophers also had a sharp tip or two for science journalists.

New York Times:

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computer’s camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa.

Ms. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with.

“This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the G.P.A. contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the G.P.A.,” Ms. Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District “was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it.”

School officials said she ranked third in her class. Ms. Sullivan disagreed.

Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu & Kaushik Vasudevan

Immigrant founders of venture capital-backed companies have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We document the channels through which immigrant founders find their way to the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Immigrants have been an important source of founders for venture capital-backed startups accounting for roughly 20% of all founders over the past 30 years. Immigrants coming to the United States for their education have been the primary source of founders with those coming after being educated abroad and then arriving for work decreasing in importance over time. The importance of undergraduate education as a channel for immigrant founders has increased over time. Immigrant founders coming for education are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, especially states where they received their graduate education, leading to potentially large local economic benefits. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Joe Heim:

The word valedictorian comes from the Latin vale dicere or “to say farewell.” So it is a goodbye speech, but also a “Look at what we’ve done” speech. And what seniors have done this year has never been done before. From start to finish, this school year has been under a cloud. At some schools, the doors never opened and learning took place not in thousands of classrooms but in millions of bedrooms and kitchens, on back porches and in parking lots or wherever the WiFi signal was strongest.

Jonathan Turley:

Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.” Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.

That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system will go from two years of “optional” testing to a “test-blind” system until or unless it develops its own test.

Ending standardized testing will have a notable impact on legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions. Last November, Californians rejected a resolution to restore affirmative action in college admissions.

The Supreme Court has issued a series of 5-4 decisions that have ruled both for and against such race criteria admissions — but even justices supporting such systems have expressed reservations. The author of the 2003 majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, said she expected “that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” That 25 years is about up.

Liam Kofi Bright:

It’s natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits uncomfortably with the reality and prevalence of scientific fraud. If one wants to get at the truth about nature, why lie? Won’t that just set inquiry back, as people pursue false leads? To understand why this occurs – and what can be done about it – we need to understand the social structures scientists work within, and how some of the institutions which enable science to be such a successful endeavour all things considered, also abet and encourage fraud.

Christopher Rufo:

Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.

The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helpingwhite males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)

At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.”

The White Men As Full Diversity Partners team—Jim Morris, Mark Havens, and Michael Welp—framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy. In response to a prompt about “what’s in it for white men,” the participants listed benefits such as: “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,” “[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”

Rory Mir:

Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists are quickly responding to make that impossible. 

More than half of academic publishing is controlled by only five publishers. This position is built on the premise that users should pay for access to scientific research, to compensate publishers for their investment in editing, curating, and publishing it. In reality, research is typically submitted and evaluated by scholars without compensation from the publisher. What this model is actually doing is profiting off of a restriction on article access using burdensome paywalls. One project in particular, Sci-Hub, has threatened to break down this barrier by sharing articles without restriction. As a result, publishers are going to every corner of the map to destroy the project and wipe it from the internet. Continuing the long tradition of internet hacktivism, however, redditors are mobilizing to create an uncensorable back-up of Sci-Hub.

David Haggith:

e Fed is financing the government at this level to save the nation from the economic devastation caused by the government-mandated COVID closures of 2020, but it is doing it at the cost of crushing monetary policy. No one in the main financial or political media is calling the Fed out on this outright debt financing, and no one is likely to care because everyone quietly realizes the entire economy and all markets would crumple into the dust if the Fed stopped doing what it is doing.

What they don’t allow themselves to realize is that this situation predictably developed because the Fed has been creating total economic dependence on itself for the last decade. We are now witnessing the terminus of years of bad Fed policy that piled up as the Fed tried to centrally control the US economy under its own superior intelligence as to what is best for markets. (At a level that has made Chinese central planning look like the “B” team.)

Most financial writers and political writers wore blinders to block out that reality throughout the long period over which the Fed tried to create a recovery from the Great Recession. I have always argued they were creating a permanently Fed-dependent recovery that could never withstand the Fed’s withdrawal of stimulus money and never withstand the next major financial crisis.

Nuria Martinez-Keel:

That was the first time Matthews learned of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses and homes in the affluent Greenwood District were reduced to ash in the two-day rampage. Estimates place the death toll between 100 and 300.

One of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history took place in his hometown, and Matthews, who now leads the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, never heard a word of it in school.

“That’s a very common experience of a lot of Oklahomans,” said Joy Hofmeister, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public schools.

Many, like Matthews and Hofmeister, were well into adulthood when they discovered a wealthy African American district — nicknamed Black Wall Street — existed in Tulsa and that it had been razed in a spree of white violence.

Daniel Oliver:

All the News That’s Fit to Click

Above all, though, we have to factor in the enormous social cost of leaving our entire public discourse in the hands of a censorious few. There may be tremendous social advantages provided by, e.g., Amazon: with the click of a button, a shopper can satisfy almost any want. But is this social wealth enough to offset every other drawback? Who says? If what you want is a conservative book, a click on Amazon may not bring satisfaction. In February, Ryan T. Anderson’s empathetic and well-researched book on transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally (2018), was stripped from the online shelves. And last October, Amazon Prime rejected Shelby Steele’s documentary on race relations in America, What Killed Michael Brown? (2020). Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution; neither is a bigot. You can look them both up on Google—before Google stuffs them, too, down the memory hole.

The same discriminatory behavior, mutatis mutandis, exists at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Last June, under massive pressure from both advertisers and employees, Facebook majority stockholder Mark Zuckerberg formed a committee to decide what is acceptable for publication. According to the New York Post, there may be at least half a dozen Chinese nationals at Facebook working in this “Hate-Speech Engineering” group. You can’t make this stuff up—unless you’re George Orwell. So Facebook users will read only the truth…as Facebook understands it. Or perhaps, as they want you to understand it. But truth, most notably scientific truth, has proved elusive recently. At first, the World Health Organization said the Chinese flu could not be transmitted from person to person. At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against wearing face masks—until they were for it. Now there is, again, serious doubt about the efficacy of masks. Throughout, Facebook has decided which studies are licit and which must be suppressed. How does the public benefit from such diktats?

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Ron Matus:

Today its grad rate is 90% and its public schools rank No. 3 in K-12 achievement, according to Education Week. Since 2009, it’s finished in or near that Top 10 every year.

This, with some of the lowest education spending in America.

Florida spent $9,374 per pupil, according to the most recent federal stats, putting it No. 43 among states.

New York, the No. 1 spending state, spends nearly two and a half times more per student than Florida, with not as much to show for it. (More on that in a sec).

Madison spends about 2X Florida per student, yet we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Elena Debre:

Government reliance on the manual entrance of COVID-19 data into basic software has caused data errors and civilian confusion across the globe. The U.K. used a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track COVID cases—until the high caseload became too large for the software to handle. The maxed-out file stopped loading cases into the government’s system and left more than 15,000 cases behind in the national count. As a result, exposed people were not contact-traced and quarantined, causing an additional 125,000 infections and an estimated 1,500 deaths. One employee’s misstep in Ohioprevented 4,000 COVID deaths from being reported in the state’s system. The newest entry to the COVID count glitch list comes from Spain.

On March 10, a respected peer-reviewed medical journal, the Lancet, published Spain’s child COVID mortality rate as around two to four times that of the U.S., U.K., Italy, Germany, France, and South Korea. The paper said that 54 children (defined as below 19) had died of COVID in the small country, making Spain’s reported death rates a staggering 4.9 percent for kids aged 10-19—which is at least 2.92 percentage points higher than other country in the report.

Elissa Nadworny:

During the pandemic, many colleges backed off on using SAT and ACT scores in admissions. Research has shown — and lawsuits have argued — that the tests, long used to measure aptitude for college, are far more connected to family income and don’t provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college. Wealthier families are also more likely to pay for test prep courses, or attend schools with curricula that focus on the exams. 

As pandemic restrictions loosen up, and in-person testing resumes, some universities have begun to reincorporate the SAT and ACT into their admissions. But others have made the temporary changes permanent. That includes Washington state’s public universities, which announced earlier this month that its schools will no longer require test scores for admission. 

This spring, the University of California system agreed to continue a test-free admissions policy through 2025. California sends the largest number of high school students to U.S. colleges, and if the UC system no longer uses the tests, it’s unclear whether those students will be interested in applying to other schools that do require them.

Avi Loeb:

When my Harvard colleague Stephen Greenblatt saw my book Extraterrestrial featured on the coverof the Orthodox Jewish magazine Ami, he commented “It is interesting that the Orthodox evidently do not consider their faith threatened by the possibility of other inhabited worlds.” To which I replied: “They appear to be less orthodox than my colleagues in the scientific community.” This was in reference to the pushback that my book received regarding the possibility that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been manufactured by another civilization.

Innovation blossoms in a culture willing to acquire new knowledge rather than being trapped in its past belief system. A mainstream astronomer who worked on rocks in the solar system for decades commented grudgingly: “‘Oumuamua is so strange…. I wish it never existed.” Such a sentiment is not the trademark of an intellectual culture that fosters discovery. In the weeks following the publication of my book I received numerous e-mails from astronomers, some tenured, who confessed that they agree with me but are afraid to speak out because of the potential repercussions to their careers.

Resistance to innovation is not a new phenomenon. When the astronomer Otto Struve suggested in a 1952 paper to search for hot Jupiters—massive, gaseous planets like our own Jupiter orbiting very close to their stars—his proposal was ignored until Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor found 51 Pegasi b. Prior to this discovery, astronomers argued that telescope time should not be “wasted” on this search because a Jupiter-like planet is unlikely to form so close to a sunlike star. Many even doubted whether exoplanets are common in the first place. The fact that this predictive “baby” was born four decades after it was conceived implies that there must be more “babies” that have never born because their existence is still in doubt. Placing blinders on our telescopes keeps us in our comfort zone at the expense of prolonging our ignorance. But reality does not abide by our prejudice; the existence of exoplanets or neighboring civilizations does not depend on whether we search for them.

Peter Dizikes:

So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Allow us to respectfully offer evidence to the contrary.

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

Ann Althouse:

That headline has been changed to “Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea/Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19.” The new headline minimizes the problem with Facebook, which was censorship. That’s more than just treating something like a crackpot idea. One way to treat a crackpot idea is to call it a crackpot idea — that’s the “more speech” remedy that should be our first idea for dealing with bad speech. In this case, more speech would have given us a better chance to approach the truth. By going to censorship, Facebook gummed up the speech process for a year.

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

Freddie deBoer:

I received a lot of support for my recent post on the folly of the University of California’s decision to drop the SAT, as well as a lot of pushback. I’ve done several podcasts in the past week on this question and will share them in this week’s Saturday evening roundup post. I recommend this resource for an exhaustive exploration of the SES-SAT question specifically. I want to take a little time and go through a few dynamics of this conversation that I think are important. I will say that I find this a particularly frustrating debate in large measure because many liberals loudly and confidently repeat “facts” that are in reality empirically indefensible half-truths or out-and-out errors and will not relent when this is brought to their attention. That’s no way to arrive at more equitable and fair college admissions.

Research has found again and again that considering GPA+SAT results in the most accurate predictions of college success.

This paper aggregates three of the most commonly-cited studies performed to answer the question of how best to quantitatively predict college performance. Again and again, we have found that SAT scores explain variance in college GPA and graduation rates not explained by GPA. In other words, they provide useful predictive information that can be utilized to reduce the number of students who are accepted into college who then fail out, a major negative event in a young person’s life due to opportunity cost and taking on student loan debt. The predictive effectiveness of the SAT is inconvenient for liberals who hate the test, but it is about as empirically well-justified as a claim about education can be, so they try to dissemble their way around it. The simple fact of the matter is that, for making the determinations that college admissions departments are meant to make, the SAT is a useful tool. Getting rid of it just makes us dumber.

David Keltz:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2010 and 2019, California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois lost a combined four million residents. Meanwhile, the top five states that saw the greatest influx of new residents were the Republican-led states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona. It does not hurt that Florida, Texas, and Tennessee also have no income tax.

But the pandemic, in conjunction with disastrous Democrat policies, has only accelerated the blue-state exodus. It turns out that draconian lockdowns in the form of school, restaurant, and business closures; massive spikes in violent crime; few entertainment options; higher taxes; and scarce job opportunities do not make for a desirable living environment or a suitable place to raise a family.

Shocking, I know.

Look at California, a state that, with its sprawling beaches and sunny weather, has long been a desirable place to live. But not anymore, thanks to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s totalitarian leadership and unscientific mismanagement of his state’s pandemic response. He faces a likely recall election, but many people are simply voting with their feet.

In 2020, 135,600 more people left the state of California than moved there, the third-largest population loss ever recorded in the Golden State and only the 12th time since 1900 that California has had a net migration loss. From July 1, 2019, to July 1, 2020, California added just 21,200 people, increasing the state’s population by 0.05 percent. Over the past year, Newsom has done all he can to make living in California essentially a prison sentence.

Tom Knighton:

I’m not a huge fan of public schools. Part of that is because public schools in my neck of the woods are almost universally bad. The best school in the area is still not all that great compared to the rest of the state, much less the rest of the nation.

Yet the purpose of school is to educate, even if it doesn’t do the job as well as we might like.

Here in the Deep South, there are reasons our schools are crap. That’s a whole post unto itself, though, so I won’t delve into why, but the point is that they still educate.

At least, in theory.

However, it seems that’s not the case in New York City public schools where teachers are being urged not just to be teachers, but also activists. Not just that, but to focus that activism along a particular ideological line.

A New York City principal sent an email to her staff this past week urging them to “take action” in support of Palestinians during the current crisis in Israel and Gaza.

According to the New York Post, the email from Middle School 136’s Amanda Bueno reads “You can take action today by protesting, attending a vigil, making a public commitment to Palestinian Liberation, signing a petition, or calling your government officials to place sanctions on Isreal [sic].”

The message also says people “need not prove [Palestinians’] humanity and right to exist […] Empathy is a bare minimum.” It includes various hashtags such as #GazaUnderAttack and #SaveSheikhJarrah.

“Additional resource” links at the end of the email feature the Teach Palestine website, the main page of which states “We know you share our outrage at attacks by the Israeli military and settlers against the people of Palestine.”

Teach Palestine also has a “Stolen Land” section which compares the plight of Palestinians to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

One problem: A teacher who works for Bueno is Jewish.

Stephen Wolfram:

Everyone Has to Have Numbers… Don’t They?

The aliens arrive in a starship. Surely, one might think, to have all that technology they must have the idea of numbers. Or maybe one finds an uncontacted tribe deep in the jungle. Surely they too must have the idea of numbers. To us numbers seem so natural—and “obvious”—that it’s hard to imagine everyone wouldn’t have them. But if one digs a little deeper, it’s not so clear.

It’s said that there are human languages that have words for “one”, “a pair” and “many”, but no words for specific larger numbers. In our modern technological world that seems unthinkable. But imagine you’re out in the jungle, with your dogs. Each dog has particular characteristics, and most likely a particular name. Why should you ever think about them collectively, as all “just dogs”, amenable to being counted?

Imagine you have some sophisticated AI. Maybe it’s part of the starship. And in it this computationis going on:

Dave Cieslewicz

There isn’t much of anything that I agreed with the Trump Administration about, but I think they got at least one thing right. His Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, rolled back Obama era “guidance” (read: “mandate”) to strip those accused of sexual assault or harassment on college campuses of their fundamental rights.

The Obama rules, provided in a “Dear Colleague” letter, but short of actual legislation or formal rules, suggested that any school that received Federal money (basically, all of them) had to tip the scales in favor of the accuser. The standard of proof was reduced to “a preponderance of the evidence,” the accused could not question the accuser, and one person could function as both investigator and judge.

And it expanded the definition of sexual harassment to a ridiculous extent. As staff writer Emily Yoffe wrote in The Atlantic, “It resulted in a radical inflation of the definition of sexual misconduct on campus to potentially include virtually any sexual encounter—from behavior that could meet the criminal definition of rape, to jokes and unwanted flirtation. And schools, desperate to avoid displeasing federal Department of Education investigators, established Title IX procedures that flouted the rights of the accused.”

Heather Mac Donald:

Turn on CNN or open the New York Times, and you may encounter someone explaining how exhausting it is to be a black person. The idea that systemic racism is leaving blacks scarred and spent has been embraced across mainstream America, articulated by corporate CEOs and university presidents. The latest performative assertion of black oppression is playing out at the Juilliard School in New York City. The controversy has significance beyond the school.

In September 2020, the Juilliard School’s Drama Division announced a series of “community meetings” to address “Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) issues.” The school’s growing cadre of diversity bureaucrats would discuss Juilliard’s’ “anti-racism work.” The head of the Center for Racial Healing would give a presentation. Workshops would address such topics as “race in rehearsal” and “voice and speech and race.” NYU theater professor Michael McElroy, one of the school’s two external diversity consultants, would offer a three-day seminar in black musical culture.

🚨Today WI will have a big debate about K-12 spending. If you are following it, you must understand these 3 charts by @LibbySobic @WillFlandersWI.

Want more $? Explain where the current $ went & new federal COVID $$ will go – and commit to #transparency so parents are informed pic.twitter.com/ll9c7iiiPa

— CJ Szafir (@CJSzafir) May 27, 2021

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Christiano Lima:

Shifting definitions on social media: Facebook announced in February it had expanded the list of misleading health claims that it would remove from its platforms to include those asserting that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.” The tech giant has updated its policies against false and misleading coronavirus information, including its running list of debunked claims, over the course of the pandemic in consultation with global health officials.

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

Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod

This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and masking. We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates. Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates. All rates are lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination is underway.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

The News: A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is urging the adoption of curriculum transparency legislation to arm parents and taxpayers with the ability to access and review controversial curriculum material in public schools. WILL recently issued identical open records requests to nine large Wisconsin school districts and experienced, first-hand, the cost, time, and difficulty of accessing curriculum material.

The Quotes: WILL Policy Associate, Jessica Holmberg, said, “America’s culture wars are finding their way into public school classrooms. With curriculum transparency legislation, we can arm parents and taxpayers with access to curriculum material to ensure that local school districts are held accountable.”

Scarlett Johnson, a Hispanic American parent in the Mequon-Thiensville School District, said, “Parents like myself are at a disadvantage when school districts are not forthright about philosophies like Critical Race Theory being taught in the classroom. More transparency is vital for parents to ensure that our students are not being taught propaganda that denies the fundamentals of the U.S. Constitution or losing precious learning time in critical topics like math, science, and reading.”

We wanted to know how difficult it is to access curriculum material?

Turns out, it's pretty difficult. pic.twitter.com/EP9kif2Mn7

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) May 26, 2021

Brad Polumbo:

In the mood for a depressing statistic? A new report from the financial services firm Self concludes that the average American will pay an astounding $525,037 in taxes over their lifetime—roughly 34 percent of their lifetime earnings. 

But the numbers aren’t uniform across the country; they vary wildly from state to state. Based on taxes on earnings, spending, property, and cars, here are the 10 states where residents pay the highest taxes over a lifetime.

Kate Prickett & Jennifer March Augustine:

Scholars have been increasingly concerned about the rise in “intensive mothering” and its implications for the well-being of children and women and for inequality more broadly. These concerns, however, reflect a key assumption: that socioeconomic disparities in mothers’ parenting time observed in earlier eras have continued to grow. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003–2005 and 2015–2017 (n = 13,755), we test this assumption by examining whether maternal education gaps in active time spent with children have persisted across the 2000s. We pay particular attention to the continued socioeconomic bifurcation in women’s access to full-time stable work, assessing whether changes in the education-related time gap are due to changes in who works and how much. We find that the gap in active childcare time between mothers with a college degree and those without has closed dramatically. Although some of this narrowing was driven by declines in time among college-educated mothers, most was driven by increases among mothers with less education. These trends, however, are observed only among mothers who were not employed full-time. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses further reveal that although most of the increase in active care time among nonworking mothers with less education was attributable to behavioral change, 58% of the decline among nonworking, college-educated mothers was a result of sociodemographic compositional changes. These findings illuminate population-level trends in mothers’ active parenting time, provide insights into the driving factors, and help update theories, qualitative findings, and policy considerations related to mothers’ and children’s well-being.

Jenna Robinson:

Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.”

But politics needn’t have come into it at all. For one thing, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has a long history of granting tenure to left-leaning faculty members—if the political make-up of the school is anything to go by. But more important is Hannah-Jones’ own record. Her history of shoddy journalism, unprofessional conduct, and lack of scholarship is more than enough to disqualify her from tenure at any university.

These shortcomings have been well-documented.

In December of 2019, five historians, led by Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, wrote an open letter expressing their “strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” The signatories were a politically diverse group: Victoria Bynum at Texas State University, James M. McPherson at Princeton, James Oakes at City University of New York, and Gordon S. Wood at Brown University. They called attention to serious factual errors in the project, including its central thesis that the American Revolution was fought to protect the institution of slavery:

These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds—that they are the objections of only “white historians”—has affirmed that displacement.

Then in March 2020, a fact-checker who had been employed by The New York Times to vet the project came forward to say that Hannah-Jones and the Times knew about these errors before they went to print. Leslie M. Harris, a professor of history at Northwestern University, is no conservative ideologue. Her criticism of Hannah-Jones essay is based on fact. “Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay,” she wrote in Politico.

Livia Gershon:

In high school history class, you might have learned that US leaders and citizens in the nineteenth century believed in “Manifest Destiny,” the inevitable extension of national power across the continent. From that perspective it might look like the destruction of Native nations, the establishment of the western states, and the creation of the US as we know it was almost inevitable. But, as Andrew C. Isenberg and Thomas Richards Jr. write, that’s not really how it looked to a lot of people at the time.

The first known use of the phrase appeared in 1845, as part of a pitch for the annexation of Texas. Newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan wrote of the “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

But, Isenberg and Richards write, this was not conventional wisdom at the time. Just ten years earlier, former President John Quincy Adams had warned that any conflict with Mexico would be chancy, particularly given the likelihood that Native American nations and enslaved people would ally with the other side. Many US leaders also opposed President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, not for humanitarian reasons but because, as a writer for the Arkansas Gazette put it in 1839, “the policy of concentrating on our borders large bodies of armed and hostile Indians, smarting under a sense of recent injury, was generally supposed to be rather dangerous to the quiet of the frontier.”

Carina Julig:

He teared up while discussing a conversation he had with the father of a high school boy who had attempted suicide.

“Our kids have run out of resilience,” he said. “Their tank is empty.”

Chief nursing officer Pat Givens said that the hospital system does not have enough capacity for the number of children in crisis.

“We can’t build enough beds to keep pace with the demand,” she said.

Children with behavioral health needs are now being placed in medical or surgical beds because of the shortage while they wait for a bed in a behavioral unit, she said. Children as young as eight years old have come to the hospital after suicide attempts.

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.

John Naughton

Why not? The answer is that the EU delegates regulatory power to the relevant institutions – in this case data protection authorities – of its member states. And these local outfits are overwhelmed by the scale of the task and are lamentably under-resourced for it. Half of Europe’s DPAs have only five technical experts or fewer. And the Irish data protection authority, on whose patch most of the tech giants have their European HQs, has the heaviest enforcement workload in Europe and is clearly swamped.

So here’s where we are: an online system has been running wild for years, generating billions in profits for its participants. We have evidence of its illegitimacy and a powerful law on the statute book that in principle could bring it under control, but which we appear unable to enforce. And the only body that has, to date, been able to exert real control over the aforementioned racket is… a giant private company that itself is subject to serious concerns about its monopolistic behaviour. And the question for today: where is democracy in all this? You only have to ask to know the answer.

John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain:

We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).

Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.

Nils-Christian Bormann, Yannick I. Pengl, Lars-Erik Cederman and Nils B. Weidmann:

Recent research has shown that inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state’s resources toward their constituencies. Most of the existing literature assumes that these politically induced inequalities are static and rarely change over time. We challenge this claim and argue that economic globalization and domestic institutions interact in shaping inequality between groups. In weakly institutionalized states, gains from trade primarily accrue to political insiders and their co-ethnics. By contrast, politically excluded groups gain ground where a capable and meritocratic state apparatus governs trade liberalization. Using nighttime luminosity data from 1992 to 2012 and a global sample of ethnic groups, we show that the gap between politically marginalized groups and their included counterparts has narrowed over time while economic globalization progressed at a steady pace. Our quantitative analysis and four qualitative case narratives show, however, that increasing trade openness is associated with economic gains accruing to excluded groups in only institutionally strong states, as predicted by our theoretical argument. In contrast, the economic gap between ethnopolitical insiders and outsiders remains constant or even widens in weakly institutionalized countries.

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

The Economist:

But lately the pendulum has started to swing back. One reason is that more than in other sectors, discussions in tech firms mostly take place over Slack and other corporate communication services—not ideal forums in which to advance nuanced arguments. This has been a problem in large tech firms particularly, which is why Google and Facebook now have moderators to keep internal online debates from getting out of hand.

Many Taxpayer a Supported K – 12 school districts use Google and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Derek Hawkins

“Given the number of entities whose approval would be required, I just don’t think it will happen,” Norman Williams, a constitutional law professor at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., said in an email.

Even if there was support among Democrats, Williams said, “no legislature or governor wants to be one (I think) who goes down in history as having given away half of the state’s territory to Idaho.”

His proposal for Idaho to swallow parts of Oregon’s south and east shares DNA with a long-standing push to create a “State of Jefferson,” including Northern California and southwestern Oregon. But asking to join an existing state is a slightly less difficult task than forming an entirely new one. McCarter points to a 1961 land transfer between Minnesota and North Dakota as evidence that it can be done.

McCarter has called the effort “a peaceful revolution” and a way “to gain political refuge from blue states” in interviews with the Oregonian. He claims that relocating the border could bring tax benefits to both states and ease some political gridlock in Oregon.

A signature-gathering campaign by McCarter’s organization paid off last year when Jefferson County in the central part of the state and Union County in the northeast voted to study the proposal. Other counties added referendums on the move to their ballots.

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

Without fail, each state budget cycle always results in cries from the public school establishment that “we need more money in public schools!” Governor Evers continues this status quo assertion with his 2021-23 budget proposal for massive increases in spending for K12 education (about $1.7 billion). These declarations are often made without regard to the research showing that more money does not improve student proficiency.  But as taxpayers in a state with low reading proficiency statewide, the largest racial achievement gap for minority students nationwide and immense learning disruption after the pandemic, Wisconsinites must expect local school districts to be smart about their investment of taxpayer dollars.

As the Joint Finance Committee debates Wisconsin’s education budget this week, the following will provide clarity around the state and local funds and federal stimulus funds flooding into the state.

K-12 Funding Pre-Pandemic 

Wisconsin invests in our K-12 schools by creating options for families. On average, Wisconsin school districts average revenue (of local, state and federal funding) per student was $14,737 in 2019-2020.

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.

Dustin Gardner:

State legislators have accused San Francisco’s school district of trying to exploit a legal loophole to receive $12 million in state funding to reopen schools for in-person learning, arguing the district did not bring back enough students to qualify for the money.

California set aside $2 billion earlier this spring to help school districts reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. To qualify for the money, districts needed to reopen for all elementary grades and at least one grade in middle or high school by May 15.

The San Francisco Unified School District chose to bring back high school seniors but instead of offering in-person instruction to the entire grade, only some seniors were invited to return before the deadline. District officials have said they launched a “hybrid schedule” for seniors by the deadline, which might not qualify under the law.

Mike Antonucci:

AFT Pennsylvania called for the resignationsof most of the board of the state school employees pension system amid allegations of dubious investments, lack of transparency and funny math.

A federal grand jury is investigating the Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System (PSERS) “looking for evidence of kickbacks or bribery” and “potential concealment of material information,” according to reports.

“Through alleged errors and omissions, and under a shroud of secrecy, this PSERS Board appears to have jeopardized the present and future financial security of our Commonwealth’s most dedicated public servants,” wrote Arthur Steinberg, president of AFT Pennsylvania, in a letter to PSERS board members.

Jamie Goldberg:

Oregon will allow people to go maskless outside but will require them to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — and be able to prove it — to forgo masks in most public indoor settings.

That’s according to new guidance released by the Oregon Health Authority on Tuesday.

Oregonians will no longer be required to wear masks in public outdoor areas, regardless of their vaccination status, under the new guidance. However, the state is still recommending that people wear masks in crowds and large gatherings, especially if they are unvaccinated or at high risk for COVID-19.

The state will also allow fully vaccinated people to forgo masks in most indoor spaces if their inoculation status can be verified, putting the onus on businesses, employers and faith institutions to check vaccination records.

The new guidance comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that fully vaccinated people generally do not need to wear masks or maintain physical distance in most public settings. Masks had been required in most circumstances across all of Oregon since July 1.

Dr. Denise K. Lajimodiere:

American Indian boarding schools, which operated in Minnesota and across the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, represent a dark chapter in U.S. history. Also called industrial schools, these institutions prepared boys for manual labor and farming and girls for domestic work. The boarding school, whether on or off a reservation, carried out the government’s mission to restructure Indians’ minds and personalities by severing children’s physical, cultural, and spiritual connections to their tribes.

On March 3, 1891, Congress authorized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to create legal rules that required Indian children to attend boarding schools. It also authorized the Indian Office to withhold rations, clothing, and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who would not send and keep their children in school. Indian Agents forcibly abducted children as young as four from their homes and enrolled them in Christian- and government-run boarding schools beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing into the 1970s.

Captain Richard H. Pratt’s boarding school experiment began in the late nineteenth century. A staunch nineteenth-century assimilationist, Pratt advocated a position that diverged slightly from the white majority’s. Convinced of the U.S. government’s duty to “Americanize” Indians, he offered a variation of the slogan—popular in the American West— that stated the only good Indian was a dead one. The proper goal, Pratt claimed, was to “kill the Indian…and save the man.”

Robin Hanson:

Are elites nicer than other people? No, but they are better at being nice contingently, in the right situations where niceness is rewarded. And also with being mean contingently, in the situations where that is rewarded. Other people aren’t as good on average with correlating their niceness with rewards for niceness. A similar pattern applies to elites and arguments.

In a world with many strong prediction markets, social consensus would be set by the people willing and able to trade in those markets. Which could be most anyone. And those traders would in general be responsive to good arguments, as they are on the hook to win or lose a lot of money if they fail to listen to good arguments. So then arguments would be a powerful force for producing better beliefs.

But in our world, the perceived social consensus is mostly set by elites. That is, by whatever seems to be elites’ shared opinion. And so the power of arguments depends on elites being willing and able to listen to them. Do they?

Many elites are selected for their ability to generate and evaluate good arguments. So many are quite able to listen. But as with being nice, elites are especially good at a contingent strategy: they listen to and generate good arguments when they are rewarded for that, but not otherwise.

Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason:

Kreiss said he anticipated that, given the national controversy around “The 1619 Project,” there would be some political pushback about hiring Hannah-Jones. At the same time, he said, the Chapel Hill professors would not have brought someone on board who did not embrace the university’s fundamental commitment to intellectual rigor and evidence-based argument.

“If we saw Nikole Hannah-Jones as being an ideologue, who was coming here to push a political point of view, I don’t think the faculty would have so overwhelmingly endorsed her,” Kreiss said. “That’s not the way we teach. It’s not part of our values here.”

The Chicago school board will vote on a resolution this week to automatically promote all elementary and middle school students to the next grade, regardless of their grades — a nod to the pandemic’s disruption to learning.

— Mila Koumpilova (@MilaKoumpilova) May 24, 2021

Chelsea Mitchell:

It’s February 2020. I’m crouched at the starting line of the high school girls’ 55-meter indoor race. This should be one of the best days of my life. I’m running in the state championship, and I’m ranked the fastest high school female in the 55-meter dash in the state. I should be feeling confident. I should know that I have a strong shot at winning.

Instead, all I can think about is how all my training, everything I’ve done to maximize my performance, might not be enough, simply because there’s a runner on the line with an enormous physical advantage: a male body.

I won that race, and I’m grateful. But time after time, I have lost. I’ve lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners. With every loss, it gets harder and harder to try again.