Quinton Klabon: 1 year and $1 BILLION in federal relief later, it’s still tragic. •6,000 fewer kids on college track•101,000 kids below grade level•Green Bay, Janesville stuck at pandemic low•Milwaukee Black kids not catching up Scott Girard: In the Madison Metropolitan School District, proficiency rates in both subjects are well above the state for white … Continue reading Notes, Politics and our long term, disastrous reading results; Madison + State →

Carl Cannon: The concept of free speech dates to the 5thcentury B.C. in ancient Greece and was codified in America’s founding documents on Dec. 15, 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. The 45-word First Amendment prohibited Congress from “abridging freedom of speech, or of the press,” and has been long understood to … Continue reading “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” →

David Blaska: Jill Underly is Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction. The position is elected for four years on the Spring non-partisan ballot along with city alders and circuit court judges. We are one of only 12 states to elect them. One of Jill Underly’s predecessors was Tony Evers, now governor of Wisconsin. A Democrat. If … Continue reading Notes on K-12 $pending and Governance: Wisconsin Edition →

The Economist: In 1980 roughly 12% of the population lived in places that were especially rich or especially poor. By 2013, one-third did. That made local schools less of a melting pot. Meanwhile colleges became a sorting machine for adults. Low and high-wage workers rarely work in the same sectors. And though some high-paid men … Continue reading Schools are the least economically integrated institution in America →

David Bernstein: (UPDATE: I have been rightly taken to task for not noting the earlier court cases in which either whites or non-black Americans were the group getting preferences. I of course am aware of that phenomenon and its significance. I happen to be working on an article about how courts dealt with (or ignored) … Continue reading Which Groups Have Received Racial Preferences in Higher Education Over the Years? →

Jon Askonas: There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life. What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet … Continue reading An America of Secrets →

Kappan: Based on an extensive research review, the National Reading Panel (NRP) report was an inflection point in the history of reading research and education policy. It found that instruction in five related areas — phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — benefits early readers. And, in the minds of many, including … Continue reading More than 20 years ago, the federal government released a review of decades of reading research whose findings should have charted a path toward better instruction and higher reading levels. →

The Reith In his sixth and final lecture entitled ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’, Professor Oppenheimer explains how the “House of Science” helps us to understand the underlying profundities of the earth and our lives. He draws parallels between the construction of human society and the atom: each man is dependent on the next, and … Continue reading Oppenheimer Lecture →

Corinne Hess: Wisconsin schools reported nearly 6,000 instances of seclusion and nearly 7,000 occurrences of physical restraint during the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Among those instances, 1,920 students at 32 percent of Wisconsin’s schools were secluded and 2,856 students at 44 percent of the … Continue reading Wisconsin DPI data from 2021-22 shows 76 percent of students physically restrained have a disability →

Tyler Katzenberger: The new version of the bill, passed Wednesday afternoon by the Assembly in 67-27 vote, would prescribe an “intensive” personal literacy plan, including summer classes, for incoming fourth graders who failed to meet third-grade reading benchmarks. Students would exit the plan after they pass a grade-level reading test and their parents agree the … Continue reading Legislation and Early Reading: Wisconsin’s odyssey continues →

Josh Anderson: In 2024, eligibility will increase to include people whose only underlying condition is mental illness. By the way, in 2021, Mental Health Research Canada concluded that they’d found a correlation “between vaccine hesitancy and mental illness.” Not even COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy specifically, just vaccine hesitancy broadly speaking, because surely there are no legitimate reasons anyone might reasonably regard … Continue reading Euthanasia is Not Healthcare →

Who is being held accountable for causing the city of Milwaukee’s pension disaster? All we hear Democrats doing is trashing legislative Republicans, who disagree over how or whether to fix it. But why is no one being held accountable for causing the underlying mess? Tom Barrett… pic.twitter.com/Z2sojod9oU — Wisconsin Right Now (@wisconsin_now) May 24, 2023 … Continue reading Notes on Milwaukee’s latest pension disaster →

Emily Hanford notes the “surge in legislative activity” amidst our long term, disastrous reading results [link]. Longtime SIS readers may recall a few of these articles, bookmarking our times, so to speak: 2004: [Link] “In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the WCKE in reading. However, in the same year … Continue reading Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004- →

DRAKE BENTLEY: In her letter, Underly stated, “Whether you realize it or not, you are, under the guise of protection, causing undue harm to students and staff. However, this damage is reversible. It is paramount that you change course now.” Underly requested that the administration reverse the policy to “foster inclusive environments,” saying the controversial … Continue reading Wisconsin DPI Superintendent’s priorities: Waukesha School District Letter →

Scott Girard: “The Joint Committee on Finance does not need to bring in Dr. Underly to hear more empty promises about how DPI wants to better serve our kids,” Born said. “Republicans are gathering feedback from families and local school district officials across the state and will craft a budget that supports our kids and … Continue reading Commentary on Cost Disease and K-12 outcomes: Wisconsin DPI edition →

Matt Welsh: How does all of this change how we think about the field of computer science? The new atomic unit of computation becomes not a processor, memory, and I/O system implementing a von Neumann machine, but rather a massive, pre-trained, highly adaptive AI model. This is a seismic shift in the way we think about … Continue reading The end of programming →

Freddie deBoer: Columbia University is the latest high-profile university to abandon the SAT. As these institutions always are, they’re cagey about why, couching everything in buzzwords and euphemism. But you can be sure that the most powerful force driving the widespread effort to drop the SAT is the insistence that the SAT is an engine of … Continue reading “you want to replace the SAT because it’s racially stratified with a metric that’s… also racially stratified” →

Musa al-garbi Data show that there was a significant uptick in research focused on various forms of bias and discrimination starting in 2011, but the rate of production of scholarly papers exploring these topics seems to have slowed in recent years. After 2011, there was a rapid change in discourse and norms around social justice … Continue reading A decline in “woke academic” output? →

Musa al-garbi Data show that there was a significant uptick in research focused on various forms of bias and discrimination starting in 2011, but the rate of production of scholarly papers exploring these topics seems to have slowed in recent years. After 2011, there was a rapid change in discourse and norms around social justice … Continue reading A decline in “woke academic” output? →

Dan Mcquillan: Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical … Continue reading We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it. →

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education The dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School has refused to approve the fellowship of the man — hailed as  the “godfather” of human rights work — because he disagrees with his stance on Israel.  HKS, one of the top public policy institutions in the world, has violated Harvard’s clear commitments to free expression by denying … Continue reading FIRE criticizes Harvard for rescinding human rights champion Ken Roth’s fellowship →

Hal Pashler and Gail L. Heriot Are people’s perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed … Continue reading Civics: “Perceptions of Newsworthiness are Contaminated by a Political Usefulness Bias” →

Will-Law The News: On behalf of School Choice Wisconsin Action, Inc. (SCWA), Catholic Memorial High School of Waukesha, Inc., and Roncalli Catholic Schools, Inc., the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jill Underly. The suit challenges several of DPI’s rules … Continue reading WILL holds Wisconsin DPI accountable for bureaucratic overreach, minimal barriers should be implemented for families to apply to school choice programs →

We also discussed state report cards with @DrJillUnderly. More kids performed at ‘below basic’ levels than pre-pandemic. In MKE and Beloit, about 2/3 students are ‘below basic.’ Dr. Underly says the solution is more funding. “Revenue, honestly, is what creates opportunities.” pic.twitter.com/JaRX6bXPGQ — A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) November 27, 2022 Complete Interview. The data clearly indicate that … Continue reading K-12 Governance – Wisconsin DPI; all about the Money… →

Bill Henderson: Yale Law School’s $1.2 billion share of the Yale University endowment provides approximately $63 million in operating funds, which translates into $106,000 per student, though this amount appears to be headed up due to the 40.2% increase in Yale’s endowment in 2021. See “Yale endowment earns 40.2% investment return in fiscal 2021,” Yale News, … Continue reading Dollars, rankings and Yale Law School →

Tyler Cowen: Change is coming. Consider Twitter, which I use each morning to gather information about the world. Less than two years from now, maybe I will speak into my computer, outline my topics of interest, and somebody’s version of AI will spit back to me a kind of Twitter remix, in a readable format … Continue reading Commentary on ai and discourse →

Scott Girard: “This means a lot to me because I don’t want students who are younger than me to lack various resources and opportunities that will be offered,” La Follette’s Yoanna Hoskins said. “I want my teachers to be well compensated and respected for all the hard work they put in every single day.” Adding … Continue reading “all of them stressed the importance of more funding for public schools” →

Emiko Terazono in London, Benjamin Parkin in New Delhi and Nic Fildes in Sydney: From little wild orchids to the sound of warblers, nothing much gets past Jake Fiennes as he surveys a strip of wild flowers that borders a field of spring barley on the 25,000-acre Holkham estate in the east of England, where he … Continue reading The future of farming: how global crises are reshaping agriculture →

Leah Triedler: But in a statement after the speech, Republican Sen. Alberta Darling, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said Wisconsin students’ poor performance stems from Gov. Tony Evers “refusing to reform education in Wisconsin” despite Republican efforts, including a literacy bill Evers vetoed twice. Darling said Underly is following in his footsteps. “The DPI Secretary … Continue reading Commentary on legacy taxpayer supported K-12 Governance outcomes →

John McGinnis: What differentiates a simple democracy from a republic is the complex system of checks and balances that the latter employs to promote both liberty and stability. In the federal American Republic, authorities are divided vertically between the states and the national government. Powers are also separated among the President, Congress. and federal Judiciary. The … Continue reading Civics: A discussion of Checks & Balances →

MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY: This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.

TikTok: Do any ByteDance employees have a role in shaping TikTok’s algorithm? Subjectto the controls described in our response to question 1, ByteDance engineers around the world may assist in developing those algorithms, however our solution with Oracle will ensure that training of the TikTok algorithm only occurs in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and will … Continue reading “Employees outside the U.S., including China- based employees , can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to…” →

Roland Fryer: One of the most important developments in the study of racial inequality has been the quantification of the importance of pre-market skills in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between Black and white workers. In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% … Continue reading Advocating “data first” DIE: diversity, inclusion and equity →

Ben Shreckinger In Argentina, a runaway inflation rate that is now close to 60 percent has led citizens to embrace cryptocurrency. It also led President Alberto Fernández to openly toy with making Bitcoin legal tender before the government’s recent commitment to the IMF to crack down on cryptocurrency.  The IMF, whose work on cryptocurrency includes recent consultations with India … Continue reading Central banks try to block attempts by poor countries to use digital currency to upend monetary norms. →

Frances Fukuyama: The social contract establishing the state is an agreement on the part of citizens to give up their natural freedom to deprive others of their lives, in return for protection of their own rights. The horizon of politics was thereby lowered: instead of seeking the good life, as determined by religious doctrine, the … Continue reading Civics: Political Consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Part III →

Zaid Jilani: “So we stay true to our mission since our founding in 1906. We still look after and provide an education to those who are worthy but without sufficient means,” College of the Ozarks Dean of Work Bryan Cizek said.  According to Cizek, 90 percent of each class attending the school must demonstrate financial … Continue reading At these US colleges everyone works and there’s no tuition →

Andrew Sullivan: The premise here is that all women support abortion rights. But there is no serious gender gap on this question. In fact, a majority of “pro-lifers” are women, not men. So Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate? Join the Dish mailing list Within minutes of the SCOTUS leak, … Continue reading Notes on bullying vs civic engagement →

Daniel Lennington and Will Flanders Last week, Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly put out a press releasebroadly outlining her plans to address Wisconsin’s racial achievement gap. While it is perhaps a positive to finally see the superintendent addressing the failings of Wisconsin’s public schools, this release offers a disturbing window into the way … Continue reading Notes on politics and the achievement gap →

Rory Linnane: In an emailed statement, the Republican Party of Wisconsin touted “flipping” some school boards to conservative majorities and highlighted Manitowoc as now having a “fully conservative board.” “Parents are fed up with far-left school boards who have kept students out of the classroom, implemented divisive curriculum, and put teachers unions over kids,” Republican … Continue reading Commentary on Competitive school board races →

Kathryn Paige Harden MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society. Critics of standardized tests have had plenty of reasons to celebrate lately. More than three-quarters of colleges are not requiring the SAT or the ACT for admission this fall, an all-time high, and more than 400 Ph.D. programs have dropped … Continue reading The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair →

Bryan Caplan: The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised me … Continue reading Notes on the returns to Education →

DPI Superintendent Jill Underly: Dear Wisconsin Families and Educators, I am writing this letter to you as a fellow parent and a former teacher. Like you, I know what it means to be involved with my children’s education, and I love it. But I look at the way politicians talk about parental involvement, and I … Continue reading Commentary on Parents and Taxpayer supported k-12 Wisconsin schools →

Will Flanders, DPI itself has also contributed to this problem in a number of ways.  Nearly $150,000,000 of state education spending is retained at the state level for operations.  In addition, DPI has contributed and created the barriers for teachers to access the classroom. With barrier upon barrier to get licensed to teach, it is difficult to recruit and … Continue reading almost half of education spending in the state goes for activities other than instruction, including nearly 23% on administrative costs. →

WILL: The News: A three-judge panel of the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in St. Augustine v. Underly, a lawsuit first filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) in 2016, that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) violated state law when denying transportation benefits to families attending St. Augustine School, an independent Catholic … Continue reading Federal Court of Appeals Rules DPI Violated State Law When Denying Transportation Benefits to Private School Families →

Jonah Beleckis: They’re going to have to get away from the notion that we’re using this money to reward schools that were open for in-person instruction. Maybe we can use that $77 million for after-school programming, for tutoring, for learning loss. That’s what we need to do. Notes and links on Jill Underly. The data clearly … Continue reading Commentary from the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent →

The Economist: Randomness valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on random numbers for the generation of unbreakable keys. Better, cheaper ways of generating and handling such numbers are therefore always welcome. And doing just that is the … Continue reading How to generate better, cheaper, more abundant random numbers
And why that is important →

Alex Thompson: They are caught up in their own drama and playing ‘Boys State’ government,” said the same Democrat. “They think they’re the hottest s— on Earth.” “I can’t just make a tweet about pop culture without it being ripped apart for underlying messages and hidden meanings.” Nourhan Mesbah, the College Democrats of America The … Continue reading Civics: The situation is so bad that the DNC is considering disaffiliation with the national organization. →

Abbi Debelack: The latest data on testing and proficiency rates for Wisconsin’s children were recently released by the Department of Public Instruction and it is not pretty. Yet despite the alarmingly low test scores, there appears to be little to no outrage by the media and education establishment. Each year, Wisconsin students, in various grades, … Continue reading Deeper Dive: Wisconsin K12 Schools’ Abysmal Proficiency Rates →

MD Kittle: The latest woeful proficiency numbers show what conservative lawmakers have been saying for a long time: It’s not about dumping more money on the problem. These are failing grades a long time in the making, and they have much to do with the failings of the “Education Governor.” Before winning election in 2018, … Continue reading More failing grades for the ‘Education Governor’ →

Elizabeth Beyer: More than half of Madison School District students opted out of statewide assessments last school year, far more than the unusually high number of students statewide who opted out amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The high opt-out rate makes comparing the test results with those of previous years nearly impossible. The results showed Madison … Continue reading Flying Blind: majority of taxpayer funded Madison Students opt out of state tests…, wordsmithing at the DPI →

Representative Robin Vos: “Funding for K-12 education in Wisconsin is at historic levels, and this year our schools received a massive amount of one-time federal dollars. The Democrats’ singular focus to push more money into schools isn’t a winning strategy for our kids. We need to look at improving how they are being taught and … Continue reading “Funding for K-12 education in Wisconsin is at historic levels” →

Rory Linnane: Though the position is technically nonpartisan, Underly’s campaign was heavily funded by the Democratic Party in a race that saw unprecedented spending. Her campaign spent seven times that of her opponent, former Brown Deer Schools Superintendent Deborah Kerr. The only action Underly announced Thursday was the creation of a literacy task force to … Continue reading Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Rhetoric, amidst long term, disastrous reading results →

In her State of Education Address, State Superintendent Jill Underly commented on the divestment of schools in WI. But schools don’t have a funding crisis. With COVID aid coming into WI, schools received a record amount of funding in the 21-23 budget. https://t.co/h3IP4iCwYq pic.twitter.com/zHwFCpNTgu — MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) September 23, 2021 2017: West High Reading … Continue reading Wisconsin: spending more on K-12 Government schools, for less →

Philippa Roxby and Nick Triggle: The UK’s vaccine advisory body has refused to give the green light to vaccinating healthy children aged 12-15 years on health grounds alone. The JCVI said children were at such a low risk from the virus that jabs would offer only a marginal benefit. The UK’s four chief medical officers … Continue reading Scientists not backing Covid jabs for 12 to 15-year-olds →

John Ohno: The problem of generating interesting long-form text (whether fiction or non-fiction) is a problem of information density: people do not like to be told things they already know (or can guess), particularly at length, nor do they generally find the strain of interpreting content that’s too informationally-dense interesting for long. There’s a relatively … Continue reading Generating Interesting Stories →

George Soros: The underlying cause is that China’s birth rate is much lower than the statistics indicate. The officially reported figure overstates the population by a significant amount. Xi inherited these demographics, but his attempts to change them have made matters worse. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top … Continue reading On China’s birthdate and economic conditions →

Jonny Thakar: Swarthmore College, where I have taught for the last four years, is run pretty democratically as a result of its Quaker heritage, to the point where any erosion of faculty governance is still noticed and lamented even if the most important decisions seem to be out of our hands. Much of the work … Continue reading Reflections On Elite Education: In A Just World, Would The College I Teach At Exist? →

Chia C. Wang, Kimberly A. Prather,, Josué Sznitman, Jose L. Jimenez, Seema S. Lakdawala, Zeynep Tufekci, Linsey C. Marr: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted controversies and unknowns about how respiratory pathogens spread between hosts. Traditionally, it was thought that respiratory pathogens spread between people through large droplets produced in coughs and through contact with contaminated … Continue reading Mechanisms of airborne transmission →

Stephanie Lee: A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they … Continue reading A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out To Be Based On Fake Data →

Joanne Jacobs: Only 45 percent of would-be elementary teachers pass state licensing tests on the first try in states with strong testing systems concludes a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Twenty-two percent of those who fail — 30 percent of test takers of color — never try again, reports Driven by … Continue reading Would-be teachers fail licensing tests →

Curious Notions: Resources included online minority language newsletters showing months in their mastheads, articles, localization tables (a gold mine), cold contacts with university linguistics departments, YouTube videos, minority language souvenir calendars, Wikipedia pages (especially their foreign language versions), Peace Corps language primers, tourist phrasebooks, and questions and answers posted in online forums. Dictionaries? Yes and … Continue reading Twelve Months, 850 Languages, 63 Fonts, No Waiting
Or: Thank God for Google Noto! →

Rory Linnane: Facing the task of helping more than 70,000 students recover from the pandemic as state lawmakers are poised to hold education funding flat, Milwaukee School Board members Thursday approved a tight annual budget and historic temporary infusion of federal stimulus dollars. Board members directed funding toward several new programs, including more trades courses … Continue reading Milwaukee School Board approves budget, stimulus funds as it looks to offer more career and college courses, mentorship, mental health support →

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 … Continue reading Commentary on federal education practices →

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 … Continue reading The Biggest Enemy of Campus Due Process from the Obama Years Is Back →

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 … Continue reading Civics: “The most startling aspect, to me, about the modern institutional media is its hyperconformity” →

There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments … Continue reading Commentary on the SAT →

Michael Horn: That means, as Stephen Covey wrote in one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” beginning “with the end in mind.” Or, as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote in the context of education in “Understanding by Design,” good teachers start with the goals and … Continue reading Begin With The End: What’s The Purpose Of Schooling? →

Michael Horn: What’s the purpose of schooling? Even though it may seem like a straightforward question, once you scratch the surface, it’s anything but. There are countless views on the topic. But as we seek to build schools back better—and not just return to how schools operated prior to the pandemic when the system writ … Continue reading Begin With The End: What’s The Purpose Of Schooling? →

Will Flanders and Libby Sobic: For many years, Wisconsin has reserved the position of state superintendent of schools for someone steeped in union politics and promising the status quo. But over the past year, COVID-19 has turned many such situations on their heads and polarized politics in a way never seen before. The superintendent election … Continue reading Commentary on the 2021 Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Election →

Armand Fusco: What is the real underlying reason why schools put up with disrespectful, outrageous and uncivil student behaviors? Unfortunately, the culture of victimology is the insidious philosophy that permeates the school and the societal landscape e.g. troubled kids are not responsible for their actions—they are viewed, instead, as victims of school and society’s injustices. … Continue reading Part 2 Discipline: Can corporal punishment bring back discipline? →

Hui Zheng, Paola Echave: Morbidity and mortality have been increasing among middle-aged and young-old Americans since the turn of the century. We investigate whether these unfavorable trends extend to younger cohorts and their underlying physiological, psychological, and behavioral mechanisms. Applying generalized linear mixed effects models to 62,833 adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination … Continue reading Trends in U.S. Adult Physiological Status, Mental Health, and Health Behaviors across a Century of Birth Cohorts →

Scott Girard: [I have received 3 text messages and a door knock from a paid lit drop person, for one of the candidates. Guess?] 13-1 Special interest $pending for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Candidate Jill Underly, running against Deborah Kerr. In that same forum, Kerr outlined a plan to decentralize the Department of Public Instruction by … Continue reading Commentary on the 2021 Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Superintendent election →

Joanne Ingram, Christopher J. Hand and Greg Maciejewski: Studies examining the effect of social isolation on cognitive function typically involve older adults and/or specialist groups (e.g., expeditions). We considered the effects of COVID‐19‐induced social isolation on cognitive function within a representative sample of the general population. We additionally considered how participants ‘shielding’ due to underlying … Continue reading Social isolation during COVID‐19 lockdown impairs cognitive function →

Wispolitics: State superintendent candidate Deb Kerr called for all K-12 schools to reopen for in-person instruction, claiming “the science is clear” such a move is kids’ best interest. Meanwhile, Kerr’s opponent Jill Underly slammed her for lying about the science behind reopening schools. At a Saturday news conference on the Capitol steps, Kerr warned the … Continue reading Wisconsin’s open and closed taxpayer supported K-12 Schools; on the April 6 Ballot →

Will Flanders: In the last few days, a debate has jump-started regarding grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) following reporting from Wisconsin Spotlight on questionable activities in Green Bay.  CTCL is a foundation heavily funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.   It describes its mission as “ensur(ing) elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows.” However, … Continue reading Civics: Special Interest Grants and US election sausage making →

Rory Linnane: Deborah Kerr, one of two candidates competing to lead the state Department of Public Instruction, said she would move or rehire most of the agency’s over 400 employees  away from Madison and into offices around the state.  “Under DPI’s current model, agency staff are plucked from the Madison area, and that’s not inclusive … Continue reading A proposal to decentralize the Wisconsin DPI →

Bion Bartning: We started to ask questions. I have always felt a strong connection with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s dream of an America where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology … Continue reading Dividing by Race Comes to Grade School: Students, ages 5 through 11, are urged to ‘check each other’s words and actions’ and become committed activists. →

Esteban M. Aucejo, Jacob F. French & Basit Zafar: The college experience involves much more than credit hours and degrees. Students likely derive utility from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities. Quantitative measures of the value of these individual components have been hard to come by. Leveraging the COVID-19 shock, we elicit students’ intended likelihood … Continue reading Estimating Students’ Valuation for College Experiences →

Matt Taibbi: This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 … Continue reading Civics: News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi journalism. →

Andrew Michta: Collectivism in any guise, including its postmodern progressivist variety, has been historically antithetical to a free society. The idea of the self-constituting citizen, endowed with rights and constrained by law, has been indispensable to the forging of a stable democratic political system in America, legitimizing its institutions and ultimately birthing a cohesive nation … Continue reading “The oligarchization of American elites and the parallel pauperization of the citizenry” →

George Leaf: Geher invited professor Jonathan Haidt, founder of Heterodox Academy and a firm believer in freedom of speech for all, to give a talk at the school. Haidt gave his presentation, arguing that academia cannot be devoted to the search for truth if it also has a political agenda. Geher found Haidt’s talk to … Continue reading The Campaign to Stamp Out Academic Heresy →

: Six of the seven candidates to become Wisconsin’s next state superintendent of public instruction participated in a forum Wednesday night focused on funding and equity. The Association for Equitable Funding hosted the virtual forum with candidates Steve Krull, Jill Underly, Sheila Briggs, Troy Gunderson, Shandowlyon Hendricks-Williams and Deb Kerr. Candidate Joe Fenrick was unable … Continue reading Wisconsin DPI superintendent candidates talk equity, school funding in forum →

David Bernstein: 13. Rather, I am concerned about institutional legitimacy. When you have a country divided into two tribes, and one tribe increasingly dominates most major cultural institutions, regardless of why, those institutions will gradually lose legitimacy within the other tribe. 14. Imagine instead of liberals and conservatives, the U.S. was divided between Catholics and … Continue reading The Need for Ideological Diversity in American Cultural Institutions →

Robby Soave: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) told her social media followers earlier this week that Democrats in Congress might respond to the Capitol riot with some sort of “media literacy” initiative. The phrase media literacy ordinarily implies helping individuals make sense of the media landscape, but AOC seems to have more in mind than that: She suggested … Continue reading The First Amendment doesn’t come with an exception for “disinformation.” →

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: Seven candidates who want to be the state’s next top school chief in the upcoming spring elections collectively raised more than $200,000 last year. The seven candidates will face off in the Feb. 16 primary. The top two finishers will vie for a four-year term as state school superintendent in the April … Continue reading Top Contributors to the Candidates for Wisconsin School Superintendent →

Elizabeth Beyer: “I think it is becoming a little too precise to say that adding one title in an otherwise completely perfect document should be sufficient to overcome the nomination,” she said. Hendricks-Williams has worked in Gov. Tony Evers’ Milwaukee office and as an assistant director of teacher education at the state Department of Public … Continue reading Commentary on The Wisconsin DPI candidate Nomination Process →

MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.

Devi Shastri: State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor announced a year ago that she would not seek another term. Gov. Tony Evers named Taylor as his replacement in the post in 2018, when he was elected governor. This is the first open race for the position in 20 years. The candidates are: Deborah Kerr, the former superintendent of … Continue reading Seven candidates file paperwork to run for Wisconsin superintendent of public instruction (2 Madison School Board Seats are uncontested….) →

Quanta: Science seeks the basic laws of nature. Mathematics searches for new theorems to build upon the old. Engineering builds systems to solve human needs. The three disciplines are interdependent but distinct. Very rarely does one individual simultaneously make central contributions to all three — but Claude Shannon was a rare individual. Despite being the … Continue reading How Claude Shannon Invented the Future →

Inciteful: Find the most relevant literature, faster The vast majority of academic search engines focus on “importance” (as measured by number of citations) and keyword matching to retrieve their results. They typically show you stats about who the papers cite and who cites those papers. But there is value and information in the underlying structure … Continue reading A better way to search through academic literature →

Marcella Alsan , Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, David Y. Yang: The respect for and protection of civil liberties are one of the fundamental roles of the state, and many consider civil liberties as sacred and “nontradable.” Using cross-country representative surveys that cover 15 countries and over 370,000 respondents, we study … Continue reading Civics: Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis →

Tony Young: You probably haven’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is a petition started by three scientists on October 4 calling for governments to adopt a policy of ‘focused protection’ when it comes to COVID-19. They believe those most at risk should be offered protection — although it shouldn’t be mandatory — and those … Continue reading Civics: Why can’t we talk about the Great Barrington Declaration? →

The Gradient: As the field of machine learning has become ever more popular, a litany of online courses has emerged claiming to teach the skills necessary to “build a career in AI”. But before signing up for such a course, you should know whether the skills acquired will directly allow you to apply machine learning … Continue reading The Gap: Where Machine Learning Education Falls Short →

Eugene Volokh: The legally strange dimension: A claim that the magazine article author sexually harassed the subject of her article, apparently by “seek[ing] inappropriate personal and romantic intimacy with Plaintiff.” See Hay v. New York Media LLC, a breach of contract, libel, and sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Bruce Hay (representing himself) against New York Media … Continue reading “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge” Story Gets Even Stranger →

Joel Kotkin:  Where there is no bread, there is no Law. Where there is no Law, there is no bread. — Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah Racial identity politics has become the rage in the media, entertainment, and political worlds. You cannot read a mainstream publication, attend a sporting event, or browse a new educational curriculum … Continue reading How Race Politics Burns Out →

Wisconsin State Journal: Unfortunately, the Madison School District announced Friday it will offer online classes only this fall — despite six or seven weeks to go before the fall semester begins. By then, a lot could change with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dane County recently and wisely implemented a mask requirementfor inside … Continue reading Commentary on 2020 K-12 Governance and opening this fall →

Veronique de Rugy: New data confirm what we already knew; namely, that many people did not wait for the governments to lock down the economy to stay home and shelter in place. Such fear-based behavior contributed much to the economic collapse. That means that most consumers will be careful and watch out for their health … Continue reading Surrounded by Government Failure, Why Do People Still Believe? →

Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself. That may sound like a bold or even hyperbolic claim, but the reality is that the cluster of ideas and values at the root of postmodernism have broken the bounds of academia and gained great cultural power in western society. … Continue reading How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained →

Katherine Ye, Wode Ni, Max Krieger, Dor Ma’ayan, Jenna Wise, Jonathan Aldrich, Joshua Sunshine, and Keenan Crane: We introduce a system called Penrose for creating mathematical diagrams. Its basic functionality is to translate abstract statements written in familiar math-like notation into one or more possible visual representations. Rather than rely on a fixed library of … Continue reading Penrose: from mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams →

Brendan O’Neill: It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. … Continue reading Commentary on The Price of “we Know Best →