Summary of Key Points

“you can’t teach what you don’t know”

Educhatter:

Teacher qualifications and shifts in Faculty of Education admissions policies once attracted little public attention. That all changed in November 2024 when the Canadian province of Manitoba made a fateful decision to remove minimum subject knowledge requirements from its admissions process. Leading Mathematics professors and subject specialists saw it as a ‘declaration of war’ against what remained of subject specialization in the preparation and certification of teachers.

Recent amendments to the Teaching Certificates and Qualifications Regulation by the Wab Kinew Government under The Education Administration Actstirred considerable public opposition. University of Winnipeg Mathematics professor Anna Stokke and a vocal group mathematics professors objected to amendments which lifted subject-specific admissions qualifications and significantly reduced the subject-area expertise required for teacher certification.

Research Battleground – Mathematicians Shred Math Education Research Claims

The educational controversy exploded into a firestorm when Mathematics Education professors came out in favour of relaxing subject knowledge requirements. Dr. Martha Koch, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, claimed that teachers’ college admissions should be based upon “research” in a field known as the “Pedagogy of Math Knowledge.” Her brief in defense of the changes buttressed her claims with the familiar line “research shows” repeated 15 times in a commentary.

Civil Rights Complaint against the Wauwatosa School District

WILL

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against the Wauwatosa School District (WSD) for its plan to shut down the Wauwatosa STEM School, currently ranked the fifth-best elementary school in Wisconsin by U.S News and World Report. The District’s racially discriminatory plan also includes phasing out other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) programs because too many white students use the programs. In our complaint, WILL highlights a current WSD school board member, who will provide further evidence that WSD’s actions are racially motivated.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, declared, “Shutting down science and math programs because too many white students are in the program is despicable, and illegal. As we promised to do, WILL is taking every legal action available to reverse this damaging decision. If the Biden Administration does not open an investigation, we hope the new Trump Administration will.”

WSD School Board Member, Michael Meier, stated, “Students and families deserve a high-quality education, which is why I am speaking out. The prolonged, arbitrary DEI-driven focus on racial composition has, in my view, undermined both education and safety, now culminating in the push to close the WSTEM school. I welcome a federal investigation and urge the public to join me in speaking out.”

This Basic Math Question Took Decades to Answer.

Quanta:

In June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would present a proof that one of the most famous numbers in mathematics — “zeta of 3,” or ζ(3), as mathematicians write it — could not be expressed as a fraction of two whole numbers. It was what mathematicians call “irrational.”

Conference attendees were skeptical. The Riemann zeta function is one of the most central functions in number theory, and mathematicians had been trying for centuries to prove the irrationality of ζ(3) — the number that the zeta function outputs when its input is 3. Apéry, who was 61, was not widely viewed as a top mathematician. He had the French equivalent of a hillbilly accent and a reputation as a provocateur. Many attendees, assuming Apéry was pulling an elaborate hoax, arrived ready to pay the prankster back in his own coin. As one mathematician later recounted, they “came to cause a ruckus.”

The lecture quickly descended into pandemonium. With little explanation, Apéry presented equation after equation, some involving impossible operations like dividing by zero. When asked where his formulas came from, he claimed, “They grow in my garden.” Mathematicians greeted his assertions with hoots of laughter, called out to friends across the room, and threw paper airplanes.

Civics: “But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth”

Peter Thiel:

The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.

It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein. But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects — Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles — gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure.

We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”

In that spirit, Morens and former chief US medical adviser Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania

——

Mark Zuckerberg says the Biden admin called his employees and “screamed and cursed” at them to take down Covid/vaccine content. They wanted Meta to censor memes too.

When he pushed back, the Biden regime started investigating his companies.

“It was brutal.”

“They basically pushed us and said, ‘anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’”

——

—

Izabella Kaminska

As I’ve been saying for months: Glasnost is coming. And glasnost = apocalpyse. I had not read this before I penned the intro to my newsletter this week (which is out this weekend and essentially makes a similar argument.)

Travis Hill:

Closely related to the agencies’ recent approach to digital assets is the problem of “debanking.”Over the past few years, there have been various accounts of individuals and businesses associated with the crypto industry losing access to bank accounts without explanation. This follows a long history of other types of customers experiencing the problem of debanking, including the politically disfavored business groups targeted by the original “Operation Choke Point,”¹¹ individuals associated with certain religious or political groups,¹² and many others.

“unethical to continue to do things that don’t work for kid.”

Laura Shkylnik:

If you don’t know what Project Follow Through, this episode gives a great overview.

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Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Lorenz K.F. Ekerdt and Kai-Jie Wu

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Only pennies of new public-school dollars make it to teacher salaries

Christian Barnard

Teacher shortages have been a chief concern of public school leaders since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020. According to an August 2023 surveyby the National Center for Education Statistics, 79 percent of public schools with at least one vacant teaching position reported difficulty filling slots for the 2023–24 school year.

The most commonly discussed solution to mitigating K–12 teacher vacancies is spending more on K–12 education so that teachers receive more competitive pay and the profession becomes more attractive to prospective hires. By this logic, the teacher shortage represents a failure of state legislatures to invest adequate dollars in education over the long run.

But for legislators hoping to improve teacher pay and attract more people to the profession, increasing education spending is surprisingly ineffective. Data published in Reason Foundation’s new study Public Education at a Crossroads indicates that states do a poor job of translating additional education investments into higher teacher salaries. Many states have lost ground on average teacher salaries over the past two decades despite spending more. Those states that do manage to raise teacher salaries largely do so only after investing exorbitant amounts in public education, with most of those dollars still being diverted to expenditures besides take-home pay for current teachers.

Sex and the Academy: How is the increasing representation of women in higher education transforming academic culture?

Cory Clark / Bo Winegard

In 1987, less than a third of faculty at postsecondary institutions in the United States were women. Today, 50.7 percent are. In the coming years and decades, this percentage is likely to grow. One way to predict future trends (albeit imperfectly) is to look at the percentage of men and women at different career stages: older cohorts retire and are replaced by new ones.

As of 2020, men made up about 63 percent of full professors, about 52 percent of associate professors, and about 45 percent of assistant professors. Among scholars employed at universities and four-year colleges in 2019 in science and engineering disciplines, faculty with 30 years of experience or more were about 25 percent female, and faculty with less than 10 years of experience were about 42 percent female. Across biological and life sciences, computer sciences, mathematical sciences, physical sciences, psychology, social sciences, and engineering, the percentage of female faculty with less than 10 years of experience is 1.6 to 4.8 times higher than the percentage of female faculty with 30 years of experience or more.

If current trends persist, women will gain increasing influence over the direction of the university.

Civics: “All the Americans against free speech, gathered in one humorously pretentious place”

Matt Taibbi:

What kind of person is opposed in principle to less censorship? Readers of the New York Times, apparently! One of this site’s readers chuckled about the predictably mortified Times article(“Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False”) being filled with commenters “rending their garments over a prospect of an Internet full of propagandized idiots.” I looked and found a perfect cross-section of upper-class genitorture enthusiasts begging for harder, firmer content domination. The Washington Post headline was nearly as Onion-ish as the Times (“Meta ends fact-checking, drawing praise from Trump,” putting “free expression” in scare quotes in the sub-head), and its nearly 5000 comments were equally revealing. “User generated notes? The prisoners are now guarding the prison!” wrote one Post reader, who apparently sees life as a prison with insufficiently empowered jailers.

…..

But Facebook wasn’t just pressured to remove “covid-related misinformation,” but what Facebook itself internally described as “often-true content.” The firm was badgered to remove clearly protected satire (a joke ad comparing Covid vaccine to asbestos), unwelcome political opinion (“vaccine discouraging content”), content that didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service (a Tucker Carlson video, for instance) and content related to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Even Joe Biden’s own account was temporarily deamplified on Facebook, thanks to algorithms that punished accounts mentioning vaccines too often.

Self-Selection and the Diminishing Returns of Research∗

The downward historical trend of research productivity has been used to suggest that there are severe permanent diminishing returns of knowledge production. We argue that a substantial portion of the trend is a transitory composition effect resulting from self-selection in researchers’ ability and the expansion of the researcher sector. We quantify said effect with a Roy model of researchers’ labor supply estimated using microdata on sectoral earnings distributions. Our results suggest that the average ability of researchers has fallen substantially. We then revisit the estimation of the knowledge production function and its resulting prediction on long-run economic growth. We find that separating transitory diminishing returns from permanent ones more than doubles the long-run growth rate of per capita income predicted by a broadclass of growth models.

——

Paper argues that the productivity of researchers has fallen in large part because “the average ability of researchers has fallen substantially” due to dumber people selecting into research careers.

Depopulation

Quinton Klabon

I genuinely cannot believe @CBS58 nailed the importance of Wisconsin’s declining population so viewers could grasp it. Having @jdjmke and @CavalierJohnson lay out the stakes and solutions was the perfect touch. Stellar job, @AdamRifeReports.

—-

Meanwhile, Madison is increasing taxes & $pending to add bricks & mortar

“We find that lowering income tax rates has a significantly positive impact on Wisconsin’s economy”

CROWE

Moving to a flat statutory rate of 4.25% (as in Michigan) increases output and
household consumption by more than 2.4%, and the impact is greater when the
rate is lower, for example, 3.05% as in Indiana or 2.50% as in Arizona.
Since the effective tax rate is higher than the statutory rate for most middleincome
households due to the sliding scale standard deductions, moving to a
flat effective rate of 4.25% requires a larger reduction in the second highest
statutory rate and has a larger impact on output and household consumption.
When a larger share of government revenue is transferred back to households,
it raises the disposable income for each dollar of gross income earned by a
household. This has a positive effect on labor supply and the economy.

Does eliminating Mathematics subject requirements from teacher training and certification make any sense?

Anna Stocke:

US students’ poor performance on TIMSS has received much media attention. Canadian students scored worse than US students. Why is this not receiving the same degree of attention?

——

2007 math forum audio video

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

notes on higher education governance

Kimberly Wethal

Following a rare 45-minute discussion Tuesday, the UW Board of Regents tabled a vote to change UW system policy to allow Rothman and future UW system presidents to appoint senior leadership roles without guidance from a committee.

Those who spoke seemed in agreement that the current policy is wasteful and inefficient. The policy requires search and screen committees to fill such posts as vice presidents who oversee finance and student affairs. But Regents also were wary of authorizing unchecked powers.

So instead, the Regents want Rothman to write a revised policy that meets them halfway: It would grant Rothman the authority to appoint senior leaders but would add back in formal processes he or Regent members would have to follow in the hiring process.

Challenge to California Policy Limiting Teachers’ Disclosure to Parents of Student’s Changed Gender Identity …

Eugene Volokh

From Mirabelli v. Olson, decided today by Judge Roger Benitez (S.D. Cal.), the introduction and the conclusion:

Plaintiffs are teachers in the Escondido Union School District (“EUSD”) and parents of students in other California school districts…. The Plaintiffs contend that a state policy promulgated by the California Department of Education and adopted by local school districts violate their rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments …. The gravamen of the state policy is that public school teachers are not to reveal to parents a student’s announced change of gender identity in order to maintain the student’s privacy, except where the student consents to disclosure….

It is still true that a request to change one’s own name and pronouns may be the first visible sign that a child or adolescent may be dealing with issues that could lead to gender dysphoria or related health issues. Yet, for teachers, communicating to a parent the social transition of a school student to a new gender—by using preferred pronouns or incongruent dress—is not generally permitted under EUSD’s and the State Defendants’ policies.

Underly says critics of new Wisconsin testing benchmarks ‘getting it wrong’

Corrinne Hess:

She wants to make it easier for failing schools to somehow seem like they’re succeeding,” Vos said during a press conference. “I hope that’s one of the areas that we’ll get some speedy discussion on, hopefully bipartisan support. Because I would hope that no one, the most liberal person or the most conservative person, would want to dumb down our standards.”

In an interview with WPR, Underly said the change was made to make test scores more meaningful.

She said decisions were not made in a vacuum.

“So we aligned the standards to actual scores that would mean something. Updating those scores aligned the Wisconsin test to the Wisconsin standards, so Wisconsin teachers and parents know how Wisconsin kids are doing,” Underly said. “The critics are absolutely getting it wrong. They’re talking about two different things, and that’s what’s frustrating about it.”

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taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Facebook Censorship vs Free Speech

Margo Conklin:

When I first heard that Mark Zuckerberg was shutting down Facebook’s fact-checking department, my first thought was: Too little, too late.

That’s because I’ve had my own experience with his team of fact-checkers.

Back in February 2020, when I was the Sunday editor of the New York Post, China expert Steven Mosher pitched me a theory about how the coronavirus started. Back then, it was believed it came from a wet market in Wuhan, but Steven was unconvinced. He said it was much more likely it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been doing experiments with the coronavirus for years.

This was before the lockdowns, and before Covid had spread across America and killed millions worldwide. Some experts had just started talking about the possibility of a global pandemic.

I was happy to publish Steven’s piece, because I figured the world would want to hear an alternative idea at an important moment from a social scientistwho had lived in China and written books about the country.

I was right about the story. (In fact, the lab leak theory is now seen as the most likely explanation for Covid’s origins.) But I was wrong—and naive—to think anyone in power would want to hear it.

We published the piece on February 22, under the headline “Don’t Buy China’s Story: The Coronavirus May Have Leaked from a Lab.” It immediately went viral, its audience swelling for a few hours as readers liked and shared it over and over again.

I had a data tracker on my screen that showed our web traffic, and I could see the green line for my story surging up and up. Then suddenly, for no reason, the green line dropped like a stone. No one was reading or sharing the piece. It was as though it had never existed at all.

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Civics: Censorship at Facebook, Instagram & Threads

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Corrinne Hess:

More than 40 percent of Wisconsin parents believe their child is “above grade level” in math, and 45 percent said the same about reading, according to Wisconsin survey results.

Only 9.5 percent of students were ranked “advanced” in math and just over 8 percent rated “advanced” in reading on the 2022-23 Forward Exam, a statewide test taken by Wisconsin’s 3rd through 8th graders. Fewer than 40 percent were rated “proficient.”

But measuring student achievement is difficult. This year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction changed its state test score benchmarks, making it so 2023-24 scores can’t be compared to previous years.

Looking at DPI numbers for 2023-24, 11.6 percent of Wisconsin students are “advanced” and 39.5 percent are “meeting expectations” in reading, while 19.8 percent of students are “advanced” and 33.4 percent are “meeting expectations” in math.

WILL Research Director Will Flanders said parents have little knowledge of how poorly many students are doing in school.

“We need to think about ways to make parents more aware of how their kids are actually performing, and not whistle past the graveyard of student performance as we continue to see low results,” Flanders said.

But the survey shows only 12 percent of parents are forming their opinions about student achievement from state test scores. The majority surveyed, 70 percent, said they rely on information their child’s teacher tells them at conferences, on the report card or through other communication.

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taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

“Underly noted other states, such as Oklahoma and New York, have recently lowered their testing benchmarks”

Emilee Fannon:

Are standards lower?

DPI officials have defended the new benchmarks, saying they align more directly with the state’s Forward Exam and teaching standards. Underly noted other states, such as Oklahoma and New York, have recently lowered their testing benchmarks.

However, the Institute for Reforming Government, a conservative think tank, points to changes for the benchmarks on ACT testing.

The changes adopted last year mean students who score a 19 on the exam are considered to be meeting expectations. That standard was formerly labeled as “proficient,” but the DPI also softened the language with changing the cut scores, replacing terms like “basic” and “below basic” with “approaching expectations” and “developing.”

“[The ACT] passing standard basically went from a 21 to a 19,” Klabon said. “That is the definition of lowering standards.”

The ACT, itself considers a 19 at the low end of its “average score range,” which includes scores between 17 and 24. According to a 2011 primer put together by the Portage School District, a 19 on the ACT would’ve been lower than the minimum score required for admission to every UW System school.

According to DPI data, the average statewide composite ACT score in the 2023-24 school year was 19.2.

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much more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor.

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Morgan Polikoff and Paul Bruno

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Madison clinics are witnessing unprecedented demand for long-term birth control services

Medical providers in Madison are seeing increased demand for long-term birth control, with UW Health inserting a record number of IUDs in patients last month and UnityPoint Health-Meriter scheduling special clinics for IUDs and implants.

Notes on declining enrollment while Madison increases taxes & $pending on bricks and mortar.

Congress Can Block Student Loan Cancellation—Forever

Preston Cooper

Specifically, Congress could block the Education Department from issuing new regulations or executive actions related to the student loan program that increase costs to taxpayers. Had it been in effect during the last four years, such a law would have killed all of President Biden’s attempts at loan cancellation in the cradle.

During the last Congress, Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI) introduced a simple bill to do exactly that. The four-page Protecting Taxpayers From Student Loan Bailouts Actwould have barred the Secretary of Education from issuing “economically significant” regulations or executive actions (those with a $100 million or greater annual impact on the economy) that increase the costs of the federal student loan program. Minor regulations, or regulations which don’t increase the costs of student loans, would still be allowed.

Even though President-elect Trump is weeks from inauguration, and is unlikely to cancel student loans on a large scale, Congress might still consider taking action to block future administrations from forgiving debts. After all, the next Democratic president may decide to finish what President Biden started.

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: two otherwise identical employees can be treated dramatically different by Social Security

Andrew Biggs:

Let’s start with Teacher 1, who pays into Social Security in her teaching job. Assuming she retired in 2025 at the full retirement age of 67, her $72,000 annual teaching salary would entitle her to an annual Social Security benefit of $25,064. The additional $10,000 in annual earnings she received from summer jobs would boost her annual Social Security benefits by an additional $1,500.

Now consider Teacher 2. She pays into a government pension for her teaching job. Usually these public sector plans are more generous than Social Security, but for these purposes let’s assume the benefits are the same. Her $10,000 in summer earnings each year, however, entitle her to an annual Social Security benefit of $7,305. That’s $5,805 more than the $1,500 annual benefit that Teacher 1 receives based on her summer earnings. How can that be right?

It’s not right, in any fairness sense. It’s also not right when we consider need, since we assumed the two teachers had the same annual earnings and received the same government pension or Social Security benefits based on their teaching job. Yet Teacher 2, who mostly paid into a government pension in her teaching job, receives a total retirement income that’s $5,805 higher than Teacher 1. And that difference arises solely from how the two teachers are treated by Social Security.

Computer Science Coursetaking and Science and Math Course Performance in Milwaukee

Using data from Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), this report analyzes the association of high school computer science (CS) coursetaking with subsequent performance in mathematics and science courses. The report includes CS, mathematics, and science coursetaking and grade data for approximately 60,000 high school students between 2014-15 and 2021-22, of whom approximately 21% took at least one CS course. In addition to looking at an overall CS effect, we consider the effect separately for different types of CS classes—EC, IB, and other CS classes.

To analyze the data, we use econometric techniques, with two main forms of statistical models. In the first model, we leverage variation among students in a given math or science course in terms of their prior CS coursetaking, controlling as well for their prior math/science GPA. In the second model, we examine variation in grades within individual students before and after having taken CS courses.

Looking across the results, we generally find small negative associations of CS coursetaking with subsequent grades, typically in the range of .01 to .03 GPA points. These associations are sometimes, but not always, statistically significant. There is some suggestive evidence that these negative associations are driven by non-ECS CS courses, especially in mathematics. We do not find strong evidence that these associations differ across the types of science and mathematics courses. We conclude by discussing limitations of the available data for answering the questions of interest, contextual differences between this study and prior similar studies of CS coursetaking, as well as potential threats to the validity of the findings.

6-Year-Olds in England Get a Phonics Check. American Kids Should Get One, Too

Chad Aldeman:

Not that much happens with the results. For example, England doesn’t require that kids who fail the phonics check have to repeat a grade. But parents get to see their child’s result, and kids who fail the test have to retake it the next year. The results are also shared with officials who use them to evaluate each school’s performance.

In this light, England’s phonics check is a light-touch intervention with relatively low stakes. But it has driven dramatic increases in student performance. The percentage of kids passing the phonics check on their first try soared from 58% in 2012 to 82% in 2019. (The check was paused in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and the pass rate fell to 75% in 2022, but it was back up to 80% this year.)

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How did the English Reformation happen?

Mark Koyama:

As this quote from Patrick Collinson (the historian, not the tech entrepreneur) indicates, the Reformation was a truly transformative event.

“England, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century seems to have been one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, became, by the seventeenth century, the most virulently anti-Catholic, and the almost dominant ideology of anti-Catholicism fueled the civil wars that engulfed all parts of the British Isles in mid-century and later provoked the Bloodless Revolution, from which what passes for a British constitution derives” (Collinson, 2004, p 10).

We think that focusing on the Dissolution of the Monasteries provides crucial insights into the political economy of this transformation.

This will be the first of a two posts describing the gist of our argument.

Part (1) below will examine how the allocation of land following the Dissolution created a vested interest opposed to Mary’s policies of restoring Catholicism in the 1550s. Part (2) will demonstrate that the political economy interests created by the Dissolution remained important into the late 17th century and will focus on the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s.

Civics: Chief Justice John Roberts addresses threats against judges.

Wall Street Journal “ai” summary:

• Judicial Independence: The Chief Justice emphasizes the importance of an independent judiciary for liberty, citing the founding constitutional debates.

• Threats to Judicial Independence: The Chief Justice highlights the rise in violence, intimidation, disinformation, and threats to defy lawful judgments as threats to judicial independence.

• Defiance of Judicial Decisions: The Chief Justice condemns calls from elected officials across the political spectrum to disregard federal court rulings, citing the example of President Biden’s response to the student loan forgiveness case.

• Biden’s Stance on Supreme Court: Biden defied the Court’s warning on the eviction moratorium and endorsed term limits for Justices.

• Democratic Criticism of Supreme Court: Democrats propose binding codes of conduct for Justices and forcing recusals based on political demands.

• Public Perception of Threat to Democracy: Many Americans believe Biden’s attacks on the Court are a greater threat to democracy than Trump’s actions.

notes on teacher licensing and the taxpayer funded Madison School District

Kayla Huynh:

Over 10% of the Madison school district’s teachers are relying on one-year emergency licenses to work in classrooms, according to figures obtained by the Cap Times under state open records laws.

A majority of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s nearly 300 emergency licensed educators were teaching classes in bilingual education, English as a second language or cross-categorical special education as of last month.

The state Department of Public Instruction may issue one-year emergency teaching licenses to people with bachelor’s degrees in any subject, allowing them to teach in schools without meeting the requirements for full certification. The state may also renew emergency licenses for those working toward full licensure.

Supporters say these licenses help fill roles with significant turnover or a lack of certified candidates as school districts continue to struggle with a shortage of teachers. Still, critics worry these educators may not yet be equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to teach students.

“Students struggle to learn when the teachers have not been effectively prepared,” said Heather Peske, who leads the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit called National Council on Teacher Quality. “When education leaders take shortcuts on teacher certification, it costs everyone, and most of all, it costs students.”

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more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor.

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

https://x.com/markpinc/status/1876659312355143831?s=46:

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Censorship: Facebook (meta) continues

Testing Mark Zuckerberg’s free speech rhetoric, I shared this post on Facebook:

Civics: Censorship at Facebook, Instagram & Threads

The result, in screenshots below:

——–

Rather unsurprising.

Civics: Censorship at Facebook, Instagram & Threads

transcript (machine generated)meta/Facebook blog post: More speech and fewer mistakes.

John Robb:

There’s a reason people don’t trust Mark.

He doesn’t have a highly evolved digital ledger on X.

People learn to trust the digital ledger before they trust the person.

It won’t work.

There’s not enough flow/dynamism on the platform anymore (since they nerfed it in 2014) to make it possible.

Antonia Garcia Martinez:

I distinctly recall when, days after the 2016 election, Zuck posted FB would start adjudicating truth in posts.

As a former employee, I was shocked that a company focused on free speech for all would spin up a censorship apparatus.

That finally ends.

more…

A whole cadre of ‘misinformation’ experts sprung up to morally justify (and cash in on) the enterprise.

For years, a much smaller group warned of where this would lead, and that 1A should be our guide to online speech.

We were universally reviled.

Eoghan Mccabe:

On one hand, it’s frustrating to see Silicon Valley CEOs locate their testicles only after it’s easy to do so. (Although many are still quiet!) On the other, it’s incredible to see how hard the vibe is truly shifting. This is feeling more durable now.

Glenn Greenwald: more and more

One of the worst, most toxic “disinformation” groups in the West is the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” and its conniving President Imran Ahmed.

Leaked documents previously showed their attempt to “kill Musk’s Twitter.” Now @MaxBlumenthal obtained emails showing this:

David Hansson:

I’ve given Zuckerberg a lot of shit over the years, but this is an incredible pivot. You can speculate about motives and authenticity all day long, but reducing political censorship in a world bent on pursuing it is worthy of unqualified applause. Bravo 👏

The most successful leaders like zuck and benioff know how to ride the culture wave. This is a master class! They distance themself from the last where they were active participants, protraying themselves as victims too. Now theyre finally free to do whats right. Only they waited until Trump won. But still amazing to watch their skill!

They let @elonmusk and others take the arrows and then ride in when it’s safe. Nice work!

Hans Mancke:

It’s astonishing how easily people forgive or forget the tremendous, often irreversible damage caused by Facebook’s actions.

First off, Facebook banned mentions of the lab leak theory. This had real consequences. If it had been more widely understood that Covid originated in a lab, the entire course of the pandemic would have been very different. Unlike natural viruses, Covid was engineered for human transmission. That rendered mitigation measures such as lockdowns, contact tracing, masks, etc totally useless. Facebook prevented the truth from coming out.

Brendan Eich:

What consequence for malfeasance? These liars even tried evading FOIA, but the judge wasn’t having it. They should not have any position of authority in government, not even dog catcher in a zero dog town.

Amjad Masad:

I was at Facebook in 2013 and it was already in full swing where activist employees were demanding more and more censorship. And user ops teams were clearly political.

David Sacks:

For those of us who have been fighting the free speech wars for years, this feels like a major victory and turning point.

Justin Amash

I know it’s hard to uncover the truth. I don’t blame most people for getting confused from all the noise or tuning it all out because it’s just too much.

But the fact is that this scam continues because people keep falling for it. The only hope we have for our constitutional republic is if enough of us stop letting them take us for a ride.

Nicole Shanahan:

“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.”

“ai summary” via gpt4:

Matt Taibbi:

For now, his comments feel significant both as confirmation of reporting on the topic, and as an assessment of coming challenges.

Pavel Durov

I’m proud that Telegram has supported freedom of speech long before it became politically safe to do so. Our values don’t depend on US electoral cycles.

Today, other platforms are announcing they’ll now have less censorship. But the real test of their newly discovered values will come once the political winds change again. It’s easy to say you support something when you risk nothing.

Dave Lee:

If Zuck is serious then let’s see the equivalent of the Twitter Files for Facebook. Show all the communication back and forth (not just handpicked ones) between the government and Facebook regarding COVID/vaccine censorship.

Summary of Key Points

Main Themes

Focus on Free Expression: Commitment to restoring free expression on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Content Moderation Issues: Challenges with complex moderation systems causing censorship mistakes.
Shift in Approach: Fact-checkers replaced with community notes, simplifying policies on sensitive topics.
New Policy Enforcement: Focus on illegal and high-severity issues; rely on user reporting for lower-severity cases.
Reintroduction of Civic Content: Plans to recommend political and civic content again while ensuring positivity.
Operational Changes: Relocating trust and safety teams from California to Texas to address bias concerns.
Global Advocacy: Collaboration with the US government to counter international censorship efforts.
Trade-offs and Challenges: Acknowledgment that reducing moderation may catch less bad content but will minimize censorship mistakes.
Commitment to Improvement: Emphasis on evolving systems to prioritize user voice and build trust over time.

Notable Actions

Transitioning to a community-driven moderation model.
Simplifying rules to better align with mainstream discourse.
Dialing back automated filters and increasing confidence thresholds for content removal.
Reviving civic and political discussions on platforms.

Conclusion

This vision emphasizes empowering user voices, reducing moderation mistakes, and advocating for free expression in the face of global censorship pressures.

Katie Harbath (links) discusses the 2016 election & Facebook at a 2018 WisPolitics event (audio + transcript).

———-

Backstory: Matt Taibbi:

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out [of] the control of its designer.

4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.

7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”

Legacy media notes:
Gareth Vipers:

Zuckerberg directly referenced Trump several times in the video, criticizing the legacy media for their coverage of his first term in office. He also said that fact-checkers had become “too politically biased.”

The company also announced it would be relocating what it calls the “trust and safety teams” responsible for writing policy and reviewing content from California to Texas and other U.S. locations.

Meta implemented its third-party fact-checking function after the 2016 election in what it has said was an effort to restrict misinformation and the spread of false news on its platforms.

In 2019 the company drew the ire of some employees when it said it wouldn’t fact-check paid-for advertising by political candidates.

“Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing,” the employees said in an open letter to Facebook in October 2019. They argued that exempting candidates’ ads from fact checking “allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.”

In response to the letter, the company said it welcomed internal debate and criticism of its policies.

Tim Bradshaw and Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu:

The $1.6tn company on Tuesday said it would “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” and “take a more personalised approach to political content”.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive and co-founder, said in a video post.

“Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Meta said in a blog post.

Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac:

Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Notes and links on censorship.

Steve Guest:

Never forget that in 2020, PolitiFact said it was “false” to say COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Jason Koebler:

Meta’s HR team is deleting internal employee criticism of new board member, UFC president and CEO Dana White, at the same time that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Meta will “get back to our roots around free expression,” 404 Media has learned. Some employee posts questioning why criticism of White is being deleted are also being deleted.

Wall Street Journal:

Facebook in March 2021 flagged a Journal op-ed by Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary about the pace at which Americans would develop herd immunity. The platform also targeted the Journal’s review of climate contrarian Steven Koonin’s excellent book “Unsettled.”

Legal discovery in Murthy v. Missouri revealed how Meta executives bowed to demands by Biden officials to censor “misinformation.” The Supreme Court ruled last year that the plaintiffs didn’t prove they were censored in direct response to government pressure, but the case exposed the collusion between the Biden Administration and Big Tech.

The progressive censorship spurred Elon Musk to buy X.com (formerly Twitter) to provide a free-speech forum. To liberal shock, Mr. Musk eliminated the platform’s political speech controls and implemented a Community Notes system in which users can flag posts to provide more context. In other words, counter bad speech with more speech.

We shall see.

Civics: Madison uncounted ballots, city clerk under state investigation

Enjoyiana Nururdin:

The Wisconsin Elections Commission will investigate not just how Madison failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots from the November election but specifically the actions of City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, who notified the state about the error over a month after missing votes were discovered.

The commission voted unanimously during a special meeting Thursday to begin the bipartisan investigation into the city clerk’s office and whether “Witzel-Behl has failed to comply with the law or abused her discretion regarding the 193 uncounted absentee ballots.”

Although the Elections Commission confirmed that the voters’ choices on the 193 ballots were not enough to alter any election outcomes, commission Chair Ann Jacobs called the incident egregious and said the city’s response lacked the transparency she has experienced with other mishaps.

Wisconsin makes it hard for parents to access data and understand report cards

Morgan Polikoff and William Hughes

It’s been over four years since schools closed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and by now there is no question that the pandemic has a long shadow over Wisconsin education.

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam show Wisconsin students’ performance lags far behind historical peaks in the early to mid-2010s, and absenteeism data show about a 50% increase in chronic absenteeism since pre-COVID. Wisconsin also has cavernous, long-standing Black-white test score gaps, gaps that have not been narrowing.

There is a perhaps well-intentioned desire to move past the pandemic and its effects on children, but we still need urgency to get children back on track. And before this, there needs to be clarity about what the problems are — what effects COVID has had on Wisconsin’s schoolchildren, and how much work is needed to recover.

——-

more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor.

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

International Tests Are Not All the Same

Tom Loveless:

It is true that scores from the two tests are highly correlated at the national level. But the two tests do not measure the same learning. Scores from NAEP’s math and reading tests are also highly correlated when aggregated to the state level. No one would argue that NAEP’s reading and math tests measure the same learning.

Discrepant results from PISA and TIMSS are revealing. When releasing the latest PISA results in 2010, Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD called New Zealand a “high flier.” New Zealand is definitely not a high flyer on the TIMSS math tests, scoring only 486 in 4th grade and 488 in 8th grade–significantly below the international means of 500.

The PISA math assessment is based on a philosophy known as Real Mathematics Education (RME), championed by the Freudenthal Institute in the Netherlands. Jan deLange of the Freudenthal Institute chairs the PISA expert group in mathematics. RME’s constructivist, problem solving orientation is controversial among mathematicians. In the U.S. in the 1990s, a coalition of mathematicians, parents, and local educators opposed similar types of curricula in what became known as the “math wars.” In 2010, New Zealand implemented national standards that are compatible with RME and PISA—and less compatible with TIMSS.

——-

Sara Randazzo & Zusha Elinson:

Schools squander millions of dollars on so-called “bulletproof” windows, only to find that these windows are ineffective in protecting students and staff from gun violence.

Ryan Wilcox peered through his binoculars as a gunman fired at a large piece of glass propped up at a shooting range in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch mountains.

Wilcox, a Republican state lawmaker charged with securing Utah’s schools, was eager to see if a polyester-based film, thinner than a credit card and applied to glass windows and doors, might answer a desperate nationwide query: How can schools stop attackers from shooting their way in?

Window-film dealers who sell to school districts claim their product is the answer.

Wilcox and other high-ranking state officials watched the bullet strike the film-coated glass. “It just went right through,” he said. “It failed right in front of the whole group.”

The largest U.S. manufacturers of window film, including 3M, say it can’t stop bullets or intruders. But that hasn’t stopped some window-film dealers from cashing in on false or exaggerated claims of ballistic protection.

The Wall Street Journal found that more than $100 million has been spent for the purchase and installation of window film at school districts nationwide. The film is attractive to school officials because it is a fraction of the cost of bulletproof glass.

New mandates in Utah and Texas require all public schools to install window-security measures, either window film or bulletproof glass. Tennessee now requires the application of window film at new or remodeled schools. The new requirements have spawned a proliferation of dealers in the high-profit window-film business.

The Wisconsin DPI and our long term, disastrous reading results

Jenny Warner

DPI sends email defending LLI and Reading Recovery as OK at a WI school. THESE CURRICULUM DON’T HAVE A PHONICS SCOPE AND SEQUENCE. @WisconsinDPI again what curriculum are outlawed because the law says you can’t buy programs with MSV. Lead don’t mislead!

Representative Barbara Dittrich

So let me get this straight Reading Recovery and LLI can be used in WI because a school can tell the DPI that they removed 3 cueing…even though the law says

teacher content knowledge notes

Michael Strong notes:

When they got rid of the CBEST in California because too many potential teachers weren’t passing it, I knew we were cooked. These are sample questions from the state-sanctioned practice test:

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

More on the Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing rigor reduction campaign.

“We need to restore standards that demand excellence, not throw more cash at it”

Evers’ statement is completely out of touch with voters. In my district, people complained to me about all of their wasted tax dollars producing MKE kids who can’t read, write, or do simple math. We need to restore standards that demand excellence, not throw more cash at it.

——

more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor.

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Sam Ashworth-Hayes and Charlie Peters

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

“A huge avenue for us to grow is, frankly, Department of Defense”

Becky Jacobs:

We don’t have a lot of money coming from DOD, and we have a lot of relevant expertise,” she said.

Over the last couple of months, Grejner-Brzezinska said her office has strategized with faculty about how to work more with the Department of Defense.

UW-Madison should also expand and diversify its research, she said. Bigger awards, combined with state and industry dollars, can be an “enormous economic benefit for the state and the region,” she said.

“Encouraging Debate, Not Settling It”

Eugene Volokh

A very interesting exchange in the Autumn 2024 Sapir Journal; a short excerpt, just to give a flavor of the whole thing:

We’ve seen the same data, and I’ve been very concerned about the drop in approval and trust in higher education. The decline has been larger among people on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but it’s across the board, from the Left and the Right. My sense is that it comes from two concerns. From the progressive side, the concern is that highly selective universities are perpetuating inequality. And the concern from the Right is that we’re woke factories….

The question of the politicization of higher education has come into stark relief after what we’ve seen last year: the conflict in the Middle East and the drama on campus. These developments have elevated into the public consciousness concerns that have been present for years. They now are front and center, much more serious, and they require a course correction by many universities….

If you look back, there were three pillars of how a university thought about its role in society.

If you look at the University of Chicago, one pillar was this commitment to free speech that goes back to the founding and then through a whole variety of presidents, reaffirmed, most recently, by the 2015 report, often referred to as the Chicago Principles. Universities need to be places for open debate.

related – Ben Wikler:

In Wisconsin, we run a permanent campaign. We organize and communicate year-round, in every community—and it works. We’ve ended GOP control and unrigged our state.

The latest math fad is another excuse to teach nothing

Daniel Buck:

The fundamental misconception to this approach is that mimicry, memorization, and structured practice somehow constitute lower-order thinking. Liljedahl includes a staircase diagram that proceeds from doing to justifying, explaining, teaching, and creating to demonstrate his point. Merely doing math problems isn’t thinking in his framework.

This hierarchy of thinking almost perfectly mimics (I thought mimicry was bad) the ubiquitous “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” which similarly ranks types of thinking from remembering and understanding up to evaluation and creation. But in the 1956 Handbook where he introduced the topic, education professor Benjamin Bloom created his taxonomy simply to help teachers discuss classroom activities “with greater precision,” not to rank or judge them.

In fact, he refers to knowledge acquisition as the “primary” objective in education. Knowledge and comprehension are the bases of far more complex thinking. If students are busy counting out basic math facts on their fingers, they can’t attend to more difficult math problems. If they’re busy sounding out words, they can’t attend to higher-order thinking, such as evaluating the text in hand or creating their own poems. Factual knowledge, memorization, and comprehension facilitate and allow robust analysis, synthesis, and creation

civics: “values, she said, ‘that we’ve forgotten to defend.’

Douglas Murray:

This has been a week of mourning for the families of the Americans who lost their lives to Islamism in New Orleans. The attack bears all the hallmarks of the atrocities that have taken place in European capitals in the past decade. Indeed, in a disturbing coincidence, this coming week marks the 10th anniversary of one of the most appalling acts of terrorism seen in modern times.

It was on January 7, 2015, that two Islamists went into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, murdering a caretaker on their way in, and burst into the weekly editorial meeting. Calling for the editor, Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, and four other cartoonists by name, they proceeded to murder them all—as well as three other members of the editorial staff, one of Charb’s police bodyguards, and a guest at the meeting. While fleeing the scene, the two terrorists, who turned out to be brothers, shot and killed a Muslim police officerat point-blank range.

It was the worst attack on the free press in a Western country in our lifetimes. And the massacre presaged another massacre, at a kosher supermarket in Paris days later, which served as a reminder that the Islamists have a distinct set of enemies in their literal sights. For once, albeit only for a moment, the free world seemed to rally in support of the victims. Soon afterward, world leaders—including, slightly surprisingly, the head of the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas, and Queen Rania and King Abdullah of Jordan, none with a glowing record on combating terrorism—marched through the streets of Paris in a show of solidarity. The slogan “Je Suis Charlie” was seen everywhere.

——-

More.

The Fall of Florida’s ‘Zombie Unions’

Wall Street Journal: “ai” summary:

• Union Decertification in Florida: Over 63,000 public employees in Florida have become unrepresented since 2023 due to a law requiring public unions to hold new elections whenever the share of members paying dues drops below 60%.

• Impact on Florida Education Association (FEA): The FEA’s revenue dropped 14% due to chapter closures, impacting its ability to fund elections and lobbying activities.

• Reason for Decertification: The law banning school districts from deducting dues from teachers’ paychecks has led to a decrease in union membership as members are now required to actively choose to pay dues.

• Legal Challenge: The union is suing to block the 2022 law that requires recertification and allows schools to deduct dues.

• Court Ruling: A federal judge ruled in favor of the union, stating the law violated their First Amendment right, but the decision is likely to be appealed.

• Union’s Performance: The need for coercion to maintain local chapters suggests unions are failing to meet the needs of their members.

They played a role in establishing DEI, and even they acknowledge that it requires an overhaul

Callum Borchers:

And the unconscious bias training that was supposed to produce antiracist allies? Turns out people hate being told they have hidden prejudices.

Dobbin’s research with fellow sociologist Alexandra Kalev found that diversity-training programs commonly involve unconscious bias tests for employees—rapid-fire word-association exercises with white and Black faces, for example. The drills push people to confront evidence of the invisible bigots living inside their brains.

Instead of feeling energized to improve, though, participants often respond with shame and anger.

“They tend to walk away from it thinking they’ve been accused of something they’re not really guilty of, which is the whole history of the United States when it comes to race and gender,” says Dobbin. “It really pisses people off.”

DEI is an important response to that history and has accomplished much, despite sometimes uneven execution, says Olivia Christian, who juggles dual careers as a sportscaster and consultant to employee-resource groups for women and people of color at Google, Visa, Amazon and other firms.

“Why should I be embarrassed, as a Black woman, about efforts to give people like me the chances we should have had all along?” she says.

AI will replace human teachers in new Arizona charter school

joanne Jacobs summary:

In the afternoon, students will attend virtual “life skills workshops” on topics such as “financial literacy, public speaking, resilience, and critical thinking led by what Unbound calls ‘community mentors,’ who range ‘from local entrepreneurs to civic leaders’,” she writes.

“The AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues [via webcam] to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” Unbound’s charter application states. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”

Civics: George Washington, the wisest president, proposed that we live by three fundamental principles: liberty, conscience, and tolerance.

Daniel Henninger:

Elon Musk, in a set-to about immigration, made a superb point: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.” Then of course he added: “Take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face.”

The 2024 presidential election was for many a vote against—against not just Kamala Harris or Donald Trump but everything each one conceivably represented.

Despite the alienation, one senses a postelection mood that enough is finally enough.

“Common ground” is generally thought of as political compromise, which presumably is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s crime against humanity with his infinitesimal majority. But maybe it would be progress to establish as a baseline that we occupy the same plot of earth.

A reader this past week sent a note suggesting that everyone would benefit from reading George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, R.I. He’s right. The brief, famous letter from the first president—maybe America’s wisest man—is appropriate today:

How the UK grooming gangs scandal was covered up

The child victims of rape were denied justice and protection from the state to preserve the image of a successful multicultural society

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.

A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.

This is a scandal that should be rooted out entirely, and investigated by the full might of the British state. Voices ranging from Elon Musk to Kemi Badenoch have joined the calls for an inquiry. Yet the Government seems curiously reluctant to dig into the failings of officials.

This reluctance is not new. Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.

———

Here are the 158 Democrats who opposed the deportation of illegal immigrants for sex offenses:

go easy on the homework

Joanne Jacobs summary:

Are U.S. students working too hard? Really? California’s new “healthy homework” law tells schools to set homework policies that alleviate stress and “promote learning equity and well-being,” reports Newsweek‘s Khaleda Rahman. Homework policies should “consider the resources available to students to successfully complete homework, including parental support and access to technology.”

Homework is overwhelming students, says Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, who sponsored the bill. Students get behind on homework and can’t catch up, says the mother of a sixth-grader.

While students trying to get into elite colleges load up on AP courses, extracurriculars and sports, the average U.S. students spends about an hour a night on homework. Students from low-income homes do less, non-poor students do more.

Civics: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a ‘clean slate’

Sam Levin:

It was long considered taboo in media to retract or alter old stories, particularly when there are no concerns about accuracy. But Quinn said he felt an ethical obligation to rethink those norms. “I couldn’t take it any more … I just got tired of telling people no and standing on tradition instead of being thoughtful.”

He recalled an early case of a drunken teenager who broke part of a monument in a cemetery and was charged. Years later, he had “completely atoned” and was starting to apply for jobs, Quinn said. “He did something stupid as a kid … and he said: ‘I can’t move on.’” The editor granted his request, removed his name and presented it to his colleagues as a model for similar cases.

There was some initial internal resistance, but eventually Quinn and his staff came up with general parameters: they would not erase names in cases of violence, sex offenses, crimes against children or corruption. Police officers would be treated as public officials, so stories of their wrongdoing would remain. The incident typically had to be at least four years old, although the paper has made exceptions. Quinn did not want to have strict rules, since every case is different. The guiding question, he said, was: “What’s more valuable – this story remaining available to the public, or this person being able to move on?”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Confronting the New Property Tax Revolt

Jared Walczak:

Property values have skyrocketed in recent years, rising almost 27 percent faster than inflation since 2020, which yields dramatically higher property taxes in jurisdictions that fail to adjust millages (rates) downward.
Legitimate discontent over high property taxes is fueling a movement to significantly curtail or even eliminate the property tax , but many of the policy solutions offered, like assessment limits and tax swaps, create more problems than they solve, distorting property markets and undermining long-term housing affordability.
Despite its unpopularity, the property tax is relatively economically efficient, and shifting to any alternative tax would harm economic growth.
Well-designed levy limits can provide homeowners with much-needed relief from soaring property tax bills without the harms associated with other policy responses, and narrowly tailored circuit breakers can help ensure that low-income families are not priced out of their homes.
The property tax is a tax worth saving—and therefore worth reforming. Policymakers should work to constrain the runaway growth of property tax liability witnessed in some parts of the country but should not overcompensate by eliminating or dramatically curtailing an economically efficient tax.

Is American culture biased towards celebrating mediocrity rather than excellence?

John Hawkins:

Perhaps worst of all, if we treat kids like they’re pieces of glass that will break if they’re pushed too hard, they won’t have what it takes to do anything truly exceptional. The sort of people who create new companies, build rocket ships, and code paradigm-changing pieces of software are not working 40 hours per week from home. They’re getting after it in a way that many people never do in their whole lives. Furthermore, the skills it takes to do those things are typically not the same skills you get from being an influencer, a model, a star football player, or a badass who can wreck five guys in a fight, which are the types of things we lionize in American society.

I have had the privilege of being around more than a few people who raised successful kids and from the outside, you know what it looked like?

The Dangers of “Data Fixation”

The Economist:

In a recent paper Linda Chang of the Toyota Research Institute and her co-authors identify a cognitive bias that they call “quantification fixation”. The risk of depending on data alone to make decisions is familiar: it is sometimes referred to as the McNamara fallacy, after the emphasis that an American secretary of defence put on misleading quantitative measures in assessing the Vietnam war. But Ms Chang and her co-authors help explain why people put disproportionate weight on numbers.

The reason seems to be that data are particularly suited to making comparisons. In one experiment, participants were asked to imagine choosing between two software engineers for a promotion. One engineer had been assessed as more likely to climb the ladder but less likely to stay at the firm; the other, by contrast, had a higher probability of retention but a lower chance of advancement. The researchers varied the way that this information was presented. They found that participants were more likely to choose on the basis of future promotion prospects when only that criterion was quantified, and to select on retention probability when that was the thing with a number attached.

One answer to this bias is to quantify everything. But, as the authors point out, some things are mushier than others. A firm’s culture is harder to express as a number for job-seekers than its salary levels. Data can tell an early-stage investor more about a startup’s financials than a founder’s resilience. Numbers allow for easy comparisons. The problem is that they do not always tell the whole story.

UW system has added 34 new programs since fall 2023

Kimberly Wethal:

Between October 2023 and the UW Board of Regents meeting in December, the board approved 34 new programs, with most of them at the bachelor’s degree level, in addition to a handful of master’s or doctorate programs.

The majority already existed in some form on their campuses or across the UW system but have been restructured and needed a refreshed stamp of approval.

But there are several new majors and degree programs, as universities look to respond to student interest or workforce needs.

UW-Superior is being added to the UW systemwide program that lets students earn a nursing degree online. Other programs are currently minors, such as the UW-Madison School of Ecology’s Design, Innovation and Society program, which is expanding to become a major due to rabid interest.

Why Public Schools Struggle to Teach: A Substitute’s Perspective “how It’s the developmental job of children to learn where limits are”

Connie Marshner

A computer-based curriculum effectively cuts parents out of the helping process. The school district where I worked issues Chromebook laptops to second graders, and from then on, everything happens on that machine. It’s like that in many schools across the country.

Even the books elementary students are supposed to read for “free reading” are preloaded onto it. The teacher “assesses” their progress by seeing that they clicked pages open. There are expensive illustrated paper readers in lower grades, but those don’t leave the classroom. In one history class in a high school, I saw some textbooks stacked in a corner, but students told me they were never opened. At every level, all classwork is done on the Chromebook and sent to the internet cloud, where an acknowledgment of the work is entered into the teacher’s electronic record book—perhaps the fact that the work was “completed.”

If there is any homework, which there usually isn’t in elementary school, it’s done on the Chromebook. By sixth grade, a parent cannot see homework unless her child logs in while sitting beside the parent—but that only works if the child hasn’t already clicked to submit it to the teacher before mom or dad has found the time to sit down. With this digital system, a parent can’t know what his child doesn’t know—and thus cannot support the teacher by reinforcing or reteaching lessons at home.

Third, computerization hinders, not helps, the learning process.

Neuroscience shows that the effort of writing with the hand intrinsically enhances and reinforces the learning process in the brain. But even in kindergarten, the classroom is dominated by the “smart board.” In the classes where I was an aide or a teacher, kindergartners actually wrote with their hands for about 15 minutes of their six-hour days—not counting filling in worksheets. From second grade on, everything is done on Chromebooks.

k-12 tax, $pending & Governance Climate: Chicago Teachers Union in 2025

Paul Vallas

Make no mistake, due to the upcoming CTU elections and her job being on the line, Stacy Davis Gates began a war against Pedro Martinez, who she is using as a scapegoat for the irresponsible contract she is trying to force onto the Chicago taxpayers.

After using her member’s union dues to elect her lobbyist to become mayor, she promised members enormous raises in her first contract negotiation as CTU President. Now, it is clear that her promises, which would mean increasing taxes by billions and billions of dollars, are simply not based in reality.

She remains unconcerned about the havoc that she is causing with the firing of Martinez and that the contract she is proposing will create a financial crisis that will raise taxes on Chicagoans, including CTU members, for years to come.

Meanwhile, she refuses to release her union’s financial audits, which is mandated by law. Why hasn’t the Illinois Attorney General stepped in to demand their release?
CTU members, please pay attention: Your vote matters in the upcoming election.

Fiddling with what works and not dealing with what doesn’t

The Economist:

Another tendency in education (as elsewhere) is deference to public-sector unions, whose members make up much of Labour’s rank and file. The party is right to fret that teachers are getting harder to recruit and retain. The long-term answer is higher pay. But the government seems keener to offer other concessions that put standards at risk. It has ordered schools inspectors to issue vaguer, gentler (and thus less informative) reports. It says it will reduce schools’ freedom to set curriculums and pay star teachers better. Some school leaders have used their autonomy poorly. But others have bred excellence.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has identified some serious problems in state education. One is absenteeism: about a quarter of secondary-schoolers are missing at least 10% of the time, twice as many as before the pandemic. The share who miss half their lessons is going up. Another is the buckling system for the one-fifth of pupils with special educational needs, who are not doing any better than they were five years ago, even though spending on it has soared. Yet in both these areas Labour has little by way of convincing plans.

Another Madison independent charter school Proposal…

Abbey Machtig:

During an initial conversation, some Madison School Board members said they wanted to avoid creating competition with the district’s technical education and youth apprenticeship opportunities.

McKenzie told the Wisconsin State Journal via email he is still pursuing a charter agreement with the UW Office of Educational Opportunity. The final application to UW is due on Jan. 13.

Organizers are aiming for the school to open in fall 2026 with a cohort of 150 ninth-grade students. Enrollment would ideally grow to 600 students over the next three school years. The proposed charter school has not yet secured a location. If granted a charter agreement, it plans to use a facility already within the district.

Here are other important details to know about the Forward Career and College Academy:

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more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor.

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Midwest teacher settles for $450,000 after refusing student pronouns.

David Rees:

An Ohio school district will pay $450,000 to a middle school teacher who resigned for refusing to address two transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns.

Jackson Local School District reached a settlement in December with the teacher, Vivian Geraghty, after she claimed in a 2022 lawsuit her First Amendment rights were violated when she was told to resign from a middle school language arts position.

The agreement follows a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in August that said forcing Geraghty to use students’ preferred names amounts to “compelled speech”and that the school’s “pronoun practice was not neutral.”

Notes on population/enrollment decline while Madison adds bricks & mortar $

Quinton Klabon

Wisconsin predicts -69,053 fewer grade-school-age children (5 to 14) from 2020 to 2030, -9.4%. They predict -106,513 fewer from 2020 to 2050, -14.5%.

The first 2 images are population loss by count. The second 2 are population loss by percentage.

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Madison’s 2024 tax & $pending increase referendum

choose life

k-12 finance notes

Education finance sets the foundation for what is possible in every school in the country. Education finance equity is critical to leveling the playing field for underserved students in under-resourced schools. But in too many states, the education funding system remains inequitable, inadequate, and opaque to all but a few. Even state school finance systems designed to reflect strong principles around equity can be rife with technical pitfalls or loopholes that jeopardize the realization of those principles for students and schools.

How can states make school funding formulas work more effectively to provide the necessary resources for all students?

Splitting the Bill: A Bellwether Series on Education Finance Equity gives advocates, state policymakers, and other stakeholders a crash course in the fundamentals of education finance and in key questions to ask in their states and communities. First published in 2021, we are adding new briefs to the series on an ongoing basis.

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Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

In Search of Types

Stephen Kell

The concept of “type” has been used without a consistent, precise definition in discussions about programming languages for 60 years.1 In this essay I explore various concepts lurking behind distinct uses of this word, highlighting two traditions in which the word came into use largely independently: engineering traditions on the one hand, and those of symbolic logic on the other. These traditions are founded on differing attitudes to the nature and purpose of abstraction, but their distinct uses of “type” have never been explicitly unified. One result is that discourse across these traditions often finds itself at cross purposes, such as overapplying one sense of “type” where another is appropriate, and occasionally proceeding to draw wrong conclusions. I illustrate this with examples from well-known and justly well-regarded literature, and argue that ongoing developments in both the theory and practice of programming make now a good time to resolve these problems.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Taxes on the unit are $39,000 per year, and the monthly assessment is $5,642.

JD Busch:

This unit sold for $1.05 million in November, down from $1.97 million in April of 1995 (nearly 30 years ago!)

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Nation’s highest real estate taxes

Illinois lawmakers refuse to do anything about the state’s punitive property taxes, so Illinoisans continue to get crushed. Not only with the taxes, but with stagnant home values. Many Illinoisans are being squeezed out of their homes and forced to move elsewhere.

A recent analysis by SmartAsset, a consumer-focused financial information company, finds that six of the top 20 cities with the highest real estate taxes in the nation are located in Illinois, including the top two spots. SmartAsset analyzed the 342 cities across the country with populations greater than 100,000.

Peoria, Illinois led the entire country with the highest effective property tax rate in 2023 at 2.64%. The median tax bill there was $4,455 a year. Rockford came in second, at 2.46% and a median tax bill of $3,452. For contrast, the average tax rate across the 342 cities, weighted by aggregate real estate taxes paid, was 1.04%,

The SmartAsset data corroborates what ATTOM, another real estate data firm, found last year: that Illinoisans pay the nation’s highest property taxes.

25 AI Predictions for 2025

Gary Marcus:

Hallucinations (which should really be called confabulations) will continue to haunt generative AI.
Reasoning flubs will continue to haunt generative AI.
AI “Agents” will be endlessly hyped throughout 2025 but far from reliable, except possibly in very narrow use cases.
Humanoid robotics will see a lot of hype, but nobody will release anything to remotely as capable as Rosie the Robot. Motor control may be impressive, but situational awareness and cognitive flexibility will remain poor. (Rodney Brooks continues to make the same prediction.)

The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM

Matthew Garrett:

This is part of an overall argument that Microsoft’s insistence that only hardware with a TPM can run Windows 11 is with the goal of aiding streaming companies in their attempt to ensure media can only be played in tightly constrained environments.

2025 Banished Words List

Lake Superior State:

A new year brings the promise of fresh beginnings, but it is also the perfect moment to reflect on the words and phrases that may have worn out their welcome. Lake Superior State University (LSSU) proudly reveals the 2025 edition of its Banished Words List, a quirky tradition that dates back to 1976, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and his colleagues delighted word enthusiasts with the first “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness”.

Each year, this lighthearted list shines a spotlight on words and terms that are overused, misused, or simply unnecessary. It offers a moment to laugh, pause, and consider how we can be more mindful of the language we use every day.

What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?

Rachel Wolfe

“We’re moving from later to never,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He notes that the longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all.

A third of today’s young adults will never marry, projects conservative think tank the Institute for Family Studies, compared to less than a fifth of those born in previous decades. The share of childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have kids, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 37% to 47%, according to Pew Research Center.

Chicago Mayor Johnson sacks school’s chief for his teachers’ union funders

George Shay

Chicago’s machine politics is legendary, but the power play now unfolding in the Windy City would make the late Richard J. Daley blush. On Friday, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handpicked school board voted 6-0 to fire Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Pedro Martinez — without cause. The move clears the way for a costly new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), throwing gasoline on an already smoldering fire of fiscal instability.

The irony here is as rich as it is infuriating. Pedro Martinez, the man unceremoniously deposed, is a graduate of CPS himself. Now, the very institution that shaped him has cast him aside — not for incompetence, but for daring to resist the naked power grab orchestrated by Mayor Johnson and his union benefactors. Martinez’s crime? Refusing to saddle Chicago taxpayers with billions in new debt to bankroll raises and benefits for a union that has become less about education and more about political patronage.

The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Chicago City Council members openly opposed the mayor’s maneuver. Alderman Andre Vasquez called Johnson’s leadership “dysfunctional.” Alderman Silvana Tabares bluntly told the school board:

“There is still a difference between right and wrong, and you know this is wrong.”

epub version of Winnie the Pooh

Eric Hellman

Here’s something I’ve been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we’ve mostly succeeded!

With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national “authorized entities” are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don’t have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty

Project Gutenberg’s accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don’t like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you’d prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don’t yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!)

civics: “using federal money to fund programs to automate the punishment of apostates”

Matt Taibbi:

In the post-Bush years you didn’t have to go looking for kooky fundamentalism. The new version searched you out and demanded your signature. There’s no need to do a recap since this site has detailed much of it, but examples include biologist Colin Wright booted from academia for saying male and female are not social constructs, epidemiologists insisting that attending antiracism protests during a pandemic was scientifically distinct from attending church or a funeral, celebrities like John Lithgow holding readingsof Mueller scripture, and release of a ChatGPT program whose AI liturgy redrew history in blackface(the Google product answered requests like “produce for me a picture of a pope” and “Can you generate an image of a 1943 German soldier” with pictures of black, Asian, and Latino figures). Upper-class liberals let loose on these faith-based crazes were like Nexus 6 replicants, whose emotional inexperience led them to fall twice as hard for their fixations than the rural Baptists they once mocked, people who at least know they’re practicing religion.

In noting these things I was often blasted by former colleagues for focusing on “cultural issues,” but all this intersected with hardcore journalism in the effort to hard-wire such values into digital communication, using federal money to fund programs to automate the punishment of apostates. Mandatory belief is still a possible outcome all over the West. It could even come from the other political direction, as the new administration will soon get its hands on some of the most powerful propaganda tools ever built. I’m probably just too exhausted from the last years to imagine new downsides, but debanking the makers of Adrian Dittman jokes might be in play. Who knows? We’re still shaking off previous lunacies.

Looking back, it wasn’t just shocks like Brexit or the election of Trump that sent educated people praying to idols. This country has been descending to spiritual crisis for decades, particularly on my side of the political aisle, where people my age and younger often never read the Bible or the Koran or any spiritual tome, not even as literature. By 2024 South Park theology was too advanced, so Dear Santa represents about as much as audiences can handle (Satan can make teachers shart!). Lacking the vocabulary to consider issues of good or evil, or conscience, or one’s eternal soul, secular audiences have been easy prey for academics and media opportunists seeking to shovel nonsense into those inner chasms. A particularly cynical trick was turning something as barren as partisan politics into a religious cause. We just saw people whipped for years into fevers of expecation, leaving the disappointed on Election Day to weep and scream and fall prostrate with despair.

Mission vs Organization

Steven Pinker:

The Freedom from Religion Foundation, like the American Humanist Association before them, replaced its mission with wokeism, and became another religion, complete with dogma, heresy, an Index of forbidden thoughts, and excommunication. Part 1: Jerry Coyne explains why he resigned.

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By Hugh W. Catts, Alan G. Kamhi

Differentiating Comprehension from the Components of Reading

The idea of differentiating comprehension from the other components of reading was suggested over 15 years ago by Alan Kamhi (the second author).⁶ He argued that many assessments of reading conflated word reading accuracy and fluency with comprehension, which could lead to misconceptions about why children performed poorly on reading tests. Was it due to their inability to accurately or fluently read words, their inability to comprehend, or both? To address this problem, he argued that reading should be viewed narrowly as just word recognition. This narrow view of reading would include the components of phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency. Comprehension (and vocabulary) in this view is treated as a separate and distinct cognitive process and ability. In a companion article, Hugh Catts (the first author) argued that adopting a narrow view of reading leads to a broader view of comprehension, one that goes beyond skill-based notions and recognizes the similarity of reading and listening comprehension.⁷

In proposing and advocating for this narrow view, we had no expectations that it would be widely accepted by educators or policymakers because the skill-based approach to comprehension has long been entrenched in the research and educational communities. In recent years, however, there have been significant advancements in the science of how to teach and assess comprehension that are beginning to impact educational practices. At the forefront is the movement toward providing integrated comprehension and knowledge instruction within content-rich literacy curricula. In these curricula, which are often implemented during English language arts (ELA) class time, students are taught the appropriate strategies (i.e., ways of thinking), vocabulary, and language needed to understand texts on subject-specific topics drawn from science, history, and the arts as well as more traditional ELA content. This instruction is also combined with oral discussions, hands-on activities, and writing opportunities with the goal of facilitating literacy and increasing knowledge. This is similar to the broad view of comprehension that we had advocated for in our earlier papers.

Illinois, the nation’s self-proclaimed most progressive state, is first in tax burden and last in equity and has residents of all demographics leaving in record numbers

Paul Vallas:

Since 2000, over 266,000 African Americans have left Chicago. An overwhelming majority of blacks exiting Chicago are middle-class families with children. Within the black exodus from Chicago, children are overrepresented in the black population’s decline. In comparison to black adults over the same time period, 2000-2020, the number of black children 17 and younger have fallen by nearly 50 percent. How can this startling decline occur in this most progressive of states, whose leaders have portrayed Illinois as a progressive model of success for the nation?

Despite the state and city government’s years-long efforts at promoting racial equality of outcomes — “equity” — the extraordinarily uneven consequences of government policies under Democratic state and local leadership prove these promises to be mere rhetorical flourish. State and local policies, like those of Illinois, directly undermine the four most important elements of improving outcomes for black residents: Public safety, quality public education, taxation, and public services.

Illinois ranks first in tax burden and last in equity

Lamentably, Illinois ranks at or near the bottom among states in terms of racial equity. A 2023 study by WalletHub placed the state dead last in disparity between blacks and whites according to eight measures of prosperity: Poverty rate, homelessness rate, share of unsheltered homeless, labor-force participation rate, homeownership rate, share of executive positions, median annual household income, and unemployment rate.

More troubling for Illinois, the Archbridge Foundation Index ranked the Prairie State the tenth-worst state for social mobility, or a person’s ability to climb the income ladder and out-earn the previous generation. A Wirepoints‘ examination of 2023 U.S. Census Data reported that median black household incomes in Illinois are only 54 percent of white incomes — the 3rd-worst ratio in the nation, behind only Louisiana (52 percent) and Wisconsin (50 percent).

God and Man at Chicago Schools

George Shay:

How progressive lawfare created a moral vacuum in our schools that destroyed the character of our most vulnerable

With the impending arrival of a new administration, we may expect the subject of school prayer, last in the headlines in the early days of the first Trump administration, to re-emerge.

At that time, Eric Zorn’s lament in a piece titled “The emptiness behind Trump school prayer references,” in the February 9, 2020, edition of The Chicago Tribune, ignored the worst emptiness in public education: The absence of moral values.

Zorn correctly cited the 1962 Engel v. Vitale, Supreme Court decision as a death sentence for God in public education, although was not until April 8, 1968, that Time magazine ran His obituary as its cover story.

Few mourned His passing at the time, as was the case on the first Good Friday. Later, exponential increases in crime, drug abuse, and nuclear family disintegration gave even some of His executioners cause for concern.

Few, if any, were found in public education. Public school students, graduates, and teachers are unconscious inheritors of the anticlerical trend that began in 16^th Century Europe in the wake of the reformation, which condemned the unholy alliance between the aristocracy and the Church as a tool of subjugation, culminating in Marx’s denunciation of religion as the opiate of the people. Only in the 20^th Century did we find, much to our horror, that in the absence of religion, opiates become the opiates of the people.

What’s Wrong with Chicago Public Schools and How to Fix Them

George Shay:

Saving CPS is not an easy task by any means, but our schools can be returned to centers of learning

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are in crisis, and it’s impossible to ignore the role the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) plays in Chicago’s ongoing educational failures. The CTU wields immense influence — over the mayor, city budget, and school policies — yet students, parents, and taxpayers continue to pay the price for a dysfunctional system.

The question is no longer whether CPS is broken, but how to fix it.

The problems

1. Poor Performance, High Costs: CPS students consistently underperform on basic literacy and numeracy metrics, with only about 30 percent reading at grade level. Meanwhile, Chicago teachers are among the highest-paid in the nation, earning well above the city’s median income. Despite this, the return on investment for taxpayers is abysmal.

2. Absenteeism and Accountability: Teacher absenteeism reportedly hovers around 40 percent, while student truancy is even higher. Yet, no concrete solutions are implemented. Critics argue that the CTU focuses on protecting its members rather than ensuring student success, creating a cycle of unaccountability.‍

3. Union Overreach: CTU’s grip on city politics is undeniable. From negotiating contracts to influencing mayoral elections, the union is often accused of prioritizing its agenda over student needs. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration, elected with CTU backing, exemplifies this dynamic. Critics fear that this dual role — advocating for teachers while influencing city policy — leaves students as an afterthought.

4. Inefficient Resource Allocation: Despite declining enrollment, CPS continues to increase teacher headcount, leading to unsustainable budgets. Instances of schools with more staff than students highlight systemic inefficiencies, compounded by rising pension obligations that drain city resources.

Why history is always political

Rosario Lopez:

At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support their own political goals and potentially falling into presentism. The past few decades have seen the rise of this hybrid profile, and while some have claimed that politicians need historians so that we can transform current political debates and use their expertise to help us project ourselves into the future, critical voices have warned that ‘rapid-fire’ superficial histories might serve political aims at the price of historical accuracy.

Therefore, defining J G A Pocock (1924-2023) both as a historian and a political actor stands in need of clarification since, arguably, he does not fit into a two-camp debate on the usefulness of history, but instead he shows how history inhabitsus at a much deeper political level.

Originally published in 1975, Pocock’s book TheMachiavellian Moment is an acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most influential 20th-century works for intellectual historians, political philosophers and political theorists. By 2025, itwill have inspired scholars and public debates for 50 years. The Machiavellian Moment presents a fluid, non-linear and geographically diverse history of republicanism as a transatlantic political language that can travel among different periods and contexts, namely, from classical antiquity to Renaissance Florence, early modern England and colonial America.

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Huge Dem-run city on verge of bankruptcy thanks to ultra-generous public sector pension scheme

Sonya Gugliara

Chicago‘s projected budget deficit is a whopping $982.4 million, according to The Civic Federation.

Despite several tactics to save the city from bankruptcy, politicians have failed to get to the root of the issue – increasing pension payments to Chicago’s more than 40,000 public employees.

‘Retirement benefits are like free junk food to politicians – everyone loves them, and the bills don’t arrive until later,’ Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a New York Times opinions piece.

‘They can be ruinous for a city’s long-term fiscal health.’

Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson’s latest attempt to reduce the city’s debt – a proposed $300 million property tax increase – was shot down by City Council.

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more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor.

taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]