Close some Madison schools, and a no on the November Referendums

Danielle DuClos and Kayla Huynh:

Presidential Immunity From Plato to Trump

Harvey Mansfield:

The Supreme Court case of Trump v. U.S. was about more than special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump, which continues under a superseding indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in Washington. The decision and the dissents contain a fundamental debate about the presidency that looks beyond the present personalities and campaign. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts concludes that the president has broad, though not unlimited, immunity from criminal prosecution. Outraged, the other side, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, declares that this makes him a king above the law and America not a republic (or a democracy).

The testy thrusts in the debate—“deeply wrong” from the minority and “tone of chilling doom” from the majority mocking the dissent—share the partisan heat of the case and the general bipartisan anger in our country. But this isn’t a new debate. In a separate lone dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson takes it back to Plato, where, let a professor tell you, it begins.

“more than half of educators failed their first attempt on an exam that seeks to measure knowledge of reading instruction”

Most Wisconsin students are poor readers. Each year, about three out of every five typically fail to score proficient in state reading tests.

But it’s not just students struggling. Wisconsin’s prospective teachers haven’t fared much better in exams they must pass to become a licensed educator.

In the most recent year of reported results, more than half of educators failed their first attempt on an exam that seeks to measure knowledge of reading instruction.

Like statewide student test scores, Wisconsin’s passage rates for these exams have steadily declined in the last eight years. A recent report by state authorities even raised alarm that a downward trend in these exams “is undoubtedly impacting the workforce.”

This fall, a new law called Act 20 is taking effect in Wisconsin with the goal of improving student literacy by making sure educators use evidence-based practices known as the science of reading.

The law is also focusing more attention on teachers transitioning from college to Act 20 changes in classrooms, said Andrea Ednie, associate dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

“It’s kind of an opportune time to really learn about how that transition works and what’s happening in the schools,” she said.

Donna Hejtmanek, a national reading advocate and former Wisconsin teacher, helped author the new literacy law. While others question the significance of Wisconsin’s passage rates on teacher exams, Hejtmanek said the results are reflecting a teacher knowledge problem.

Hejtmanek runs a Facebook group with over 200,000 members that serves as a space for conversations and training about teaching literacy. If more educators learned evidence-based reading practices in college, Hejtmanek said, Wisconsin would have fewer struggling students.

“We have kids struggling to read and teachers that don’t have the adequate skills to teach reading.”

“We have kids struggling to read and teachers that don’t have the adequate skills to teach reading,” Hejtmanek said. “They don’t understand how kids learn to read. They’re using ineffective practices of what they had learned in college because that’s what they were told.”

Teachers educated at UW-Madison have historically produced the state’s best passage rates on the reading instruction exam. Two years ago, 17% failed to pass on their first attempts. In the same year, by comparison, two-thirds of test-takers from UW-Whitewater, a top conferrer of education degrees in the state, failed to pass on their first attempts.

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This is an -essential- story.

1 addition: Does Massachusetts truly have less trouble with the FORT?

1 comment: “Educator programs are required under the new [reading] law to show DPI that evidence-based instruction is part of their curriculums.” I cannot wait to see! Woo hoo!

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Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Civics: Spies and Politicians Notes

John Schindler

Above all, Democrats don’t want to discuss our enormous Chinese espionage problem because so many Democrats, including top elected officials, are mixed up in it. Here’s the point where certain readers who are obsessively interested in speculation about Russian espionage and the GOP, who remain giddy about my extensive reporting on the murky myths and complex realities of Trump and the Kremlin, start to get upset. Don’t: the problem is you. I take a professional approach to counterintelligence, ignoring partisan matters altogether. When FBI Director Wray, America’s top counterintelligence official, states repeatedly in public that the biggest spy-influence problem we face is China, and it’s much bigger than any such challenge the country has ever confronted, I take him at his word, and so should you.

There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab

Matt Ridley:

What was the worst industrial accident in history? Bhopal in India, where in 1984, at least 25,000 people died as a result of a leak of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant? No, if – as most people who have examined the evidence now believe – the Covid pandemic began as a result of a laboratory leak, then what happened in Wuhan, China was worse than a thousand Bhopals. It killed around 28million people – and was by far the most lethal industrial or scientific accident that has ever occurred.

Yet the silence of members of the scientific establishment about even the possibility of a laboratory leak in Wuhan is deafening. They refuse to debate it – quite literally. The World Health Organisation studiously avoids talking about it. I tried to get the Royal Society to organise a debate: it’s not a suitable topic for discussion, it replied. I tried the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow: too controversial, it said. A former president of the Royal Society told me he hopes we never find out what happened, lest it annoy the Chinese. Would he have said the same about Bhopal, I wondered, or a plane crash?

Earlier this year, I was approached by Open to Debate, an online debating forum, to propose the motion that Covid probably began with a lab accident. I quickly agreed. The organiser then asked more than 30 scientists, journalists and politicians to oppose me, including some who have vocally argued that it cannot possibly have come from a lab. They all said no, sometimes with a barrage of insults about me. Finally, a Nobel-prize winning immunologist in Australia agreed. But two weeks later, he pulled out.

Civics: Evaluating Judges

Jonathan Adler:

A new paper by Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati, “How Different Are the Trump Judges?” seeks to evaluate the quality of Trump’s judicial appointments as compared to their colleagues on the bench. It produces some interesting results. Here’s the abstract.

Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking “good” judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges. Specifically, one that would underperform compared to sets of judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as “maverick” behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges.

Some of the data Choi and Gulati compile is quite interesting, in particular some of the rankings of the most productive and most-cited judges.

The New Teams In the Business of Preventing School Shootings.

Zusha Elision:

The 14-year-old charged with killing two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school this week cut a sickeningly familiar figure: A troubled teen who had been reported to authorities for alleged past threats to carry out a school shooting.

Most mass shooters let the world know they are going to strike. When researchers at the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center studied school attacks between 2008 and 2017, they found that 77% of perpetrators threatened their targets or shared their intentions beforehand.

So why can’t they be stopped?

In the growing field of threat assessment, professionals say there is a way to stop them long before they pick up a gun. These experts work at schools, businesses and police agencies to identify, evaluate and manage threats with interventions such as monitoring, therapy or, in extreme cases, arrest.

“You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful.”

Ben Smith:

The part of the book that kind of stuck with me most was something George W. Bush said to you about the financial crisis of 2007:

I listened to (Hank) Paulson and (Ben) Bernanke and spent your money to bail out the guys who created the instruments in the first place, which is an absolute political disaster,” Bush said. “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful. It really irritated a lot of Americans, and they haven’t gotten over it yet. That’s just part of it; there’s a lot of other reasons why. But we’ve had candidates say, “You’re mad, I’m going to make you madder.” As opposed to, “You’re mad, I have some solutions to make you less mad.” We’re kind of in the madder stage, where people are exploiting the anger as opposed to dealing with it like leaders should.

Do you agree with his diagnosis of this political moment?

David: George W. Bush, although he went to Harvard Business School, was not basically a Wall Street fan, needless to say. And when the financial crisis came, he couldn’t believe that his Secretary of Treasury and everybody were telling him, Ben Bernanke, that they have to do this kind of bailout, because he thought this is basically bailing out the banks for the mistakes they made. But eventually he became convinced that if he didn’t do that, the economy would collapse. So I think to a large extent, what was going on in that period of time was that Hank Paulson did not want to be Secretary of Treasury. He had to be importuned several times to take the job. And in the end, he took it because he was assured that he could run economic policy, wasn’t going to be run out of the White House, and therefore Bush tended to honor that commitment and basically delegated everything to Paulson. And so Bush went along with what Paulson wanted. Though I think George Bush’s Midland Texas instincts were the opposite of what his administration actually did.

Which School Districts Do the Best Job of Teaching Kids to Read?

Chad Aldeman:

As poverty rates rise, reading proficiency rates tend to fall.

Every state has a downward-sloping line like this. But it’s not fate. Districts, schools and students nationwide are outperforming what might be expected of them.

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Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Teacher Prep Review: Reading Foundations

NCTQ:

Analysis for the Reading Foundations standard began by determining the programs to be included. Both undergraduate and graduate (or post-baccalaureate) elementary teacher preparation programs that lead to initial licensure at all public institutions and private institutions that have an annual production of at least 10 elementary teachers were eligible for inclusion. This resulted in a universe of 1,147 programs housed within 960 institutions that qualified for analysis.²³ Because not all programs provided sufficient documentation to be rated, the final sample includes 702 programs housed in 580 institutions of higher education, and is inclusive of programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Once the sample was determined, a team of analysts used course catalogs to identify the required coursework for each elementary program. Course titles and descriptions were used to identify all courses that addressed reading instruction. Next, NCTQ sent a request for course material to each program in the universe of programs. Programs were asked to identify any missing courses to ensure that no reading courses were excluded. The majority of syllabi analyzed were from fall 2018 to fall 2022, although some programs submitted materials from spring 2023 in response to the preliminary analysis. In total, collecting evidence, analyzing materials, and conducting the preliminary review process with all programs took 12 months to complete.

Students aren’t benefiting much from tutoring, one new study shows

Jill Barshay:

The study, which was posted online in late August 2024, tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.

Civics: Tracking Movement of Illegal Aliens From NGOs to the U.S. Interior

The Oversight Project:

The Biden border crisis was sparked by the deliberate implementation of open-borders policies and the removal of Trump-era borders security policies by the Biden administration. While the Biden administration caused the crisis and allows it to persist, they are not the only party responsible for facilitating this crisis. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a substantial role in exacerbating the crisis by actively helping process and transport tens of thousands of illegal aliens into the interior of the United States.

After observing this dynamic, the Heritage Oversight Project and Heritage Border Security and Immigration Center obtained and analyzed movement patterns of anonymized mobile devices that were detected on the premises of over 30 NGO facilities at or near the border. These locations were selected either based on public knowledge of these facilities being used to process illegal aliens or on reliable human source information. All physical locations were verified and physical location boundaries were defined to include building and parking areas to minimize false positives.

The investigation found approximately 30,000 cell phone devices in the NGO facilities and traced the location of those devices in the U.S. during the month of January 2022. We assign a high degree of confidence to the assumption that the vast majority of these devices belong to individuals who illegally crossed the border. This is based on first-hand observation of facilities in which illegal aliens invariably outnumber facility workers and volunteers by many degrees. Additionally, based on the travel patterns and the end location of these devices, we assume that the vast majority of the devices reflect a migration pattern from the border of illegal aliens as opposed to a consistent travel pattern of NGO workers traveling from around the country to the border and back.

A falling U.S. birthrate means some lament missing a key chapter in life

Clare Ansberry:

There are still plenty of grandparents—about 67 million Americans as of 2021. But the percentage of older parents without grandchildren is accelerating, says Krista Westrick-Payne, assistant director at the Bowling Green center. Of American parents between the ages of 50 and 90, some 35% don’t have grandkids. In 2018, that share was 30%.

Fewer babies were born in the U.S. in 2023 than any year since 1979, according to federal data. Reasons vary. Some young adults, juggling housing costs and student debt, don’t see how they can afford child care, or don’t see kids as compatible with their career aims. Others simply don’t want children, or are spooked by political divisiveness, climate change and rising expectations of parenthood.

“There is currently a Manitoba Human Rights Inquiry being conducted into reading instruction in Manitoba public schools.”

Anna Stokke:

Unfortunately, illiteracy remains largely hidden and its impact on our society largely underappreciated. I agree that more needs to be done to support adult education.

But we should also ask ourselves how so many adults, who were once children, did not learn to read at elementary or middle school in Manitoba.

Without understanding these factors, we risk dumping more funds into ineffective approaches, programs and training, as well as contributing to the likely growing number of adults requiring literacy education.

There is currently a Manitoba Human Rights inquiry being conducted into reading instruction in Manitoba public schools.

Like similar investigations in Saskatchewan and Ontario, it will likely find schools do not use evidence-based approaches to teaching children to read.

Unfortunately, Manitoba Education has already indicated it does not accept the Ontario report, as outlined by Maggie Macintosh (Gaps in province’s literacy education probed, Feb. 23, 2023).

Somewhat comically, the Ontario report indicated bureaucrats would resist change.

Jim Silver cites that 192,000 Manitoba adults have literacy levels that are so low they are unable to participate in society. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding!

Dr. Natalie Riediger

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Civics: “unresponsive to our records requests, including Madison”

Will Flanders:

Our 2020 election report dismissed many allegations of potential election fraud. But one issue we flagged as important to address in subsequent years was the indefinitely confined loophole that lets voters in the status avoid showing an ID.

Tom Corrigan & Kevin McAllister:

To gather this data, WILL went through a multi-month research effort that involved purchasing data from WEC and initiating open records requests to a sampling of 15 municipalities around the state. We generally found compliance with requirements for clerks to remove voters from the list, but did not receive a response from 1 municipality (Madison), while another admitted to not keeping the list up-to-date (Lake Geneva).

Bottom Line: While there is no concrete evidence of fraudulent votes under the indefinitely confined status, it poses a risk to election integrity by allowing many individuals to vote without providing identification. To address this issue, Wisconsin should follow the example of other states and implement commonsense changes to the process for obtaining this status. Previous legislative attempts to close this loophole were subsequently vetoed by Governor Evers. Additionally, Wisconsin should continue to remove individuals from the indefinitely confined list if they fail to renew their status after not voting in an election.

Commentary.

City of Madison Clerk. Maribeth, WCPC, Clerk

Madison citizens have seen many unopposed local elections, including the city clerk.

Notes on generative ai and students

Angie Basiouny

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Students performed better in practice sessions with gen AI, but worse on tests when the software was taken away.

Tutorial software that guided students with hints instead of direct answers was more beneficial to their learning.

Students who relied on gen AI were overly optimistic about their abilities.

Even when it sides with the right, big government suppresses both freedom and economic growth.

Jeb Hensarling:

Many big-name companies this summer have scrapped their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The manufacturer of Jack Daniel’s whiskey announced it will end its DEI initiatives, saying, “the world has evolved.” Harley-Davidson similarly dropped its DEI policies, saying it will focus on “retaining our loyal riding community.” Tractor Supply said it’s eliminating its DEI roles. “We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them,” the company said.

Companies are also getting pushback from shareholders on their environmental, social and governance policies. A report from shareholder consulting firm Georgeson found that investors submitted more anti-ESG proposals at annual shareholder meetings between July 2023 and May 2024 than in any previous year.

Pensioners are pushing back, too. Employees of American Airlines have filed a class-action lawsuit against the airline, alleging it mismanaged employees’ 401(k)s by loading their accounts up with ESG investments.

Conservatives were slow to recognize how deeply the left had burrowed into corporate human-resources departments and C-suites, but they’re clearly making up for lost time. Consumers and shareholders are showing that they’re willing and able to defend their values with cash, credit cards and investments.

Strict school zones are reinforcing inequality, new study finds

Russell Contreras:

Rigid school attendance zones allow districts to legally keep many students of color and low-income families out of coveted, elite K-12 public schools, a new study finds.

Why it matters: The U.S. will soon mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in public schools. Yet, researchers found growing inequality in school access as the nation has become more diverse, according to the new study by nonpartisan education watchdog Available to All.

School segregation between Black and white students has returned to 1968 levels.

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Madison expanded its least diverse schools recently as well; Van Hise and Hamilton…. Nearby schools have plenty of space.

Civics: Census Bureau Errors Distort Congressional Representation for the States

Hans von Spakovsky

The 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) revealed significant errors in the 2020 Census count. As a result, certain states will be shorted in their congressional representation until after the 2030 Census, while other states will get more representation than they are entitled to. Congress should investigate the 2020 Census to find out the cause of these errors and mandate changes to minimize, if not eliminate, problems in future counts. An effective investigation should determine why there were no such statistically significant errors in the 2010 Census in contrast to the 2020 Census. Congress should determine if federal funds should be distributed based on the corrected PES numbers, which requires an examination of the accuracy of the PES methods.

2025 US College Rankings

With faith in higher education continuing to slide and colleges making headlines this year for on-campus protests, the investment in a college degree has come under increased scrutiny. As such, the WSJ/College Pulse ranking seeks to reward institutions that showcase demonstrable positive outcomes for their students and alumni.

However, viewing higher education through this lens may not be best for everyone. The best school for any particular student might be one that’s close to family or friends, offers a particular program of study or matches their values—factors that can’t be analyzed in any one ranking.

Civics & Economics: Price Controls on heirloom tomatoes

It’s that time of year. I’ve been observing and buying heirloom tomatoes at several Madison area Farmer’s Markets. Prices have ranged from $2.00 to $5.00 per pound.

Vice President Harris proposed banning ‘price gouging’ for food, groceries. Jeff Stein, writes in the Bezos’ Washington Post:

Harris’s plan will include “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” the campaign said in a statement.

The exact details of the campaign’s plan were not immediately clear, but Harris said she would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on firms that break new limits on price gouging. The statement did not define price gouging or “excessive” profits.

Republican and many Democratic economists see mandatory price controls as a counterproductive form of government intervention that discourages firms from producing enough supply to meet demand.

I am in favor of letting entrepreneurs grow their tomatoes, brand and market them and determine the best price to reward their work. No taxpayer funded brainboxing necessary.

Free speech and New York City Schools

NY daily news

The bar for removing an elected official from her position for saying something politically inappropriate should be extremely high — so high the whole city should have to squint to see it. Which is why we side with Brooklyn Federal Judge Diane Gujarati, who threw a legal brush-back pitch at a de Blasio era regulation used by Schools Chancellor David Banks for removing Maud Maron from a Manhattan p …

When most students get As, grading loses all meaning as a way to encourage exceptional work and recognize excellence.

Yascha Mounk:

Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar

Junta Haider, Kristofer Rolf Soderstrom, Bjorn Eckstrom and Malte Rodl;

A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.

Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).

Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

Civics: censorship and the legacy media

Paul Thacker:

In the recent Supreme Court ruling, judges skipped over claims of whether the Biden administration had actually censored Americans, arguing that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the White House. Swisher could have learned this by reading an article on the decision in the New York Times, the very publication where she was a contributor.

As for the Biden administration pressure to censor—something that Swisher denies—the evidence of this was made clear from Meta internal communications released by the House Judiciary Committee last May.

Zuckerberg texted three Meta officials—Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Joel Kaplan—on July 16, 2021, “Can we include that the [White House] put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?”

Civics: Political Contributions, elections and fiscal indulgences

Open the Books:

Many large bank chains have blocked employees from donating to the Harris-Walz presidential campaign out of fear of violating federal “pay-to-play” rules. No such restraint was shown in Minnesota when Walz ran for governor.

Wells Fargo employees donated $8,090 to Walz’s campaign, and separately the bank got $266.6 million of state money. U.S. Bank received just over $1 billion from the state, and its employees donated $3,925. Bremer Bank employees donated $1,485 and also received almost $11.7 million from the state.

None of that is to say the donations are one-sided.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics recently called out 3M, U.S. Bank and other Minnesota-based corporations for donating to Republican candidates who disputed the results of the 2020 election, even after the companies promised not to.

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Fiscal indulgences.

Civics: media veracity and source material

Bill Ackman:

I am one of many who have been extraordinarily misled by the media on @realDonaldTrump. The reporter below outlines a number of important such examples of media manipulation in a four-minute segment that I strongly encourage you to watch.

These examples are often the ones that are brought to my attention by friends and family who say: ‘How can you support Trump when he said ….’

When I explain that his excerpted words were presented out of context and give an example like the ‘very fine people’ quote and show them the source video, they are stunned when they realize for the first time that they have been manipulated by the media about Trump for nearly a decade.

In a world with increasing demands on our time and an infinite amount of media and social media, very few people go to the source to check facts. As a result, the opportunity for media manipulation has become much greater.

Ironically, I was accused by the same friends and family of manipulation when I shared videos of @POTUS Biden which demonstrated his cognitive decline. I was scolded for sharing ‘right wing propaganda.’

An extremely well said 90 seconds on the media. https://t.co/yTM3g6EIDs
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) September 7, 2024

“The Minnesota Internship Center had 4% attendance and 5% graduation rates, while its leader took co-workers to Topgolf”

By Jeffrey Meitrodt

One of Minnesota’s worst-performing charter schools is still being run by a director who was leading the school when it fraudulently obtained more than $1 million in taxpayer funds by intentionally inflating the school’s attendance.

Notes on United Kimgdom’s teacher climate

The Economist:

nqts’ salaries were raised to £30,000 ($39,400) last year, and will increase by 5.5% this month. But teachers will still be paid less in real terms than in 2010 (see chart) and less than many of their peers in other rich countries. On average teachers work six hours longer each week than other graduates during term time, although holiday and pension benefits are more generous. Teachers have had to tackle a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour after covid-19 lockdowns: suspensions have doubled compared with the pre-pandemic average. And flexible working, one of the principal benefits of the pandemic, has passed teachers by: schooling children remains an in-person job.

Regulatory battles over young people & phones

Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley:

“Age verifying app by app is a case of whack-a-mole,” said Chris McKenna, founder of advocacy group Protect Young Eyes, who also advises Apple on digital-safety issues for children. “Every device knows the age of its user. We give our devices an enormous amount of our identity.”

An Apple spokesman said that websites and social-media companies are best positioned to verify a user’s age and that user privacy expectations would be violated if the company was required to share the age of its users with third-party apps. Apple provides tools that allow parents to control the devices of their children, the spokesman said.

The company reiterated its allegation that Meta Platforms’s META 0.60% efforts to steer legislative responsibility toward Apple are an attempt to deflect responsibility for its challenges with child-safety issues.

A spokeswoman for Meta—the parent of Facebook, Instagram and other apps—disputed that assertion, saying that verifying a child’s age app-by-app isn’t practical.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Administrative Changes

Zenz:

Really bad news for the Humanities at UW. The College of Letters and Science unwittingly confirms rumors that CS,Stats, and Info Sciences are breaking off to form their own college. Admin services in other departments are being centrally consolidated into monster “pods.”

Civics: “Political Warfare”

William Boyd:

All the same, Churchill’s task, as he himself saw it, was clear: somehow, in some way, the great mass of the population of the US had to be persuaded that it was in their interests to join the war in Europe, that to sit on the sidelines was in some way un-American. And so British Security Coordination came into being.

BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But nobody on the American side of the fence knew what BSC’s full agenda was nor, indeed, what would be the massive scale of its operations. What eventually occurred as 1940 became 1941 was that BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist (such as the notoriously anti-British America First Committee – it had more than a million paid-up members).

Stephenson called his methods “political warfare”, but the remarkable fact about BSC was that no one had ever tried to achieve such a level of “spin”, as we would call it today, on such a vast and pervasive scale in another country. The aim was to change the minds of an entire population: to make the people of America think that joining the war in Europe was a “good thing” and thereby free Roosevelt to act without fear of censure from Congress or at the polls in an election.

Against school choice

Linda Blackford:

Cowen’s book is instructive for Kentucky because in just a couple of months we will be voting on Amendment 2, which would rewrite our state constitution to erase language that explicitly forbids public school dollars from going to private schools. Cowen is a former Kentuckian — he spent five years as a public policy professor at the University of Kentucky’s Martin School — and understands how harmful the amendment is to the state’s public schools.

Meanwhile, Cottage Grove and 6 year olds.

The future of college in the asset economy

Erik Baker:

On campus, the atmosphere of disillusionment is just as thick—including at elite schools like Harvard, where I teach. College administrators have made it clear that education is no longer their top priority. Teachers’ working conditions are proof of this: more and more college classes, even at the wealthiest institutions, are being taught by underpaid and overworked contingent faculty members. College students appear to have gotten the memo: the amount of time they spend studying has declined significantly over the past half century. “Harvard has increasingly become a place in Cambridge for bright students to gather—that happens to offer lectures on the side,” one undergraduate recently wrote in Harvard Magazine. Survey data suggests that more and more students view college education in transactional terms: an exchange of time and tuition dollars for credentials and social connections more than a site of valuable learning. The Harvard Crimson’s survey of the graduating class of 2024 found that nearly half admitted to cheating, almost twice the figure in last year’s survey, conducted when ChatGPT was still new. The population of cheaters includes close to a third of students with GPAs rounded to 4.0, more than three times what it was just two years ago.

The response to this year’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza threw our ruling class’s skepticism of higher education into sharp relief. On campus, crackdowns on encampments proved an ideal opportunity for university administrators to vent their pent-up fury against students and faculty alike. Columbia’s quasi-military campaign against its protesters resulted, at its peak, in the near-total shutdown of its campus; meanwhile, my employer’s highest governing authority, the Harvard Corporation, composed largely of ultra-wealthy philanthropists, overruled the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and barred thirteen student activists from graduating, including two Rhodes Scholarship recipients. In the media, many political and economic elites have cheered on the repression of pro-Palestinian speech, revealing in the process their contempt for the very concept of college. “Higher education in four words: Garbage in, garbage out,” the Democratic New York representative Ritchie Torres wrote in a post on Twitter, mocking the research of a Columbia student involved in the school’s encampment. Bill Maher rolled out a symptomatic “New Rule” on his show in late October: “Don’t go to college.”

Notes on the taxpayer funded bus tour

Robert Pondiscio

US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona this week embarked on a five-state bus tour to “fight for public education.” His campaign, amplified on social media, is ostensibly to rally support for traditional public schools. However, this “fight” is built on two flawed assumptions that, when scrutinized, reveal both the limitations of Cardona’s vision and an overtly political agenda. What Cardona is really fighting for is Kamala Harris’ White House bid (three of the five states on the tour are swing states critical to Democrats’ chances in November) and to enshrine in voters’ minds a narrow and impoverished view of public education strictly limited to traditional, district-run schools—a view that is already becoming an anachronism as new models and mechanisms for educating America’s children continue to gain traction post-Covid.

Cardona, who was Connecticut’s education commissioner before he was plucked from obscurity and named Education Secretary by President Biden, tweeted earlier this week that public schools are a “powerful engine driving the American Dream.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? This homily suggests that public schools are an equalizing force, particularly for low-income students and students of color. The reality has never matched the rhetoric: Despite decades of reform efforts, substantial public investment, and increased staffing levels, outcomes in public schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities, have barely budged in half a century, leaving many students ill-prepared for college or the workforce.

WILL Sues Biden-Harris Over Race-Based Educational Program

WIlL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed its 12th lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Administration, this time targeting the U.S. Department of Education’s McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. This $60 million program provides financial and educational opportunities to students nationwide who want to pursue graduate studies. But many college students are ineligible because of their race, including Asians, whites, Arabs, Jews, and some Latinos.

WILL is representing Young Americans for Freedom Chapter at the University of North Dakota, the nationwide student organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), and two students who are ineligible for the program solely due to their skin color.

The Quotes: Scott Walker, President of Young America’s Foundation, stated, “Denying a student the chance to compete for a scholarship based on their skin color is not only discriminatory but also demeaning and unconstitutional. At YAF, we proudly defend our students’ right to be judged on their merit and abilities, not on race.”

How I stood up for free speech — and won my case against NYC’s education censors

Maud Maron

I know — I am the Manhattan mom removed from an elected school board because my words, about an anonymous author’s antisemitism in a student newspaper at my daughter’s school, offended the leader of New York City’s Public Schools.

This week, a U.S. District Court Judge in Brooklyn made clear that the First Amendment protects all of us in a comprehensive ruling that ordered me reseated and enjoined some of the most censorious provisions of the Chancellor’s Regulations.

Judge Gujarati told my censor — Chancellor David Banks — that “securing First Amendment rights is in the public interest.”

She’s right.

Big Brother Is Teaching You

Gerard Baker:

But it was the “teacher voice” remark that I found instructive.

It unintentionally captured the Democratic idea of the polity they seek to lead and reshape. It spoke to how they view themselves—and us. They are the teachers, equipped with the knowledge and authority to direct their hapless charges. We are the students, naive and ill-informed, sometimes attentive but too often insubordinate, with minds that need to be shaped and disciplined.

This self-image of Democrats and their role in government as benevolent, omniscient educators emerges from a mindset that represents a greater challenge to our freedoms than any attempts at interference in the lives of law-abiding Americans the Republicans are accused of planning. The didactic ethic, in which our leaders treat us as people who can’t make good decisions for ourselves, has been vividly on display in the last decade

Additional discussion on the Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing rigor reduction campaign

@Emilee_Fannon talked about the test score changes, the test category name changes, the lagging student performance in Wisconsin (whatever the cut scores are) and legislation affecting all of those.

K-12 Referendum Climate: Madison’s $607,000,000

Paul Fanlund:

It is all about the many thousands of people who theoretically may want to live here one day. Who knows, by the time they all get here, the city might have become considerably less appealing.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

As a no-confidence vote against Woke (Madison) school board!

David Blaska:

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Dave C. says voting NO is actually the progressive thing to do! Now if we could just find someone more electable than Blaska to run for school board next Spring.

Close some Madison schools, and a no on the November Referendums

Restore Madison School Resource Officers

David Blaska:

As the Chief of Police in Madison, I am deeply concerned about the safety of our students in the wake of the most recent school shooting in Georgia. It is a tragic reminder of the harsh reality that we live in a world where school shootings have become all too common.

Yesterday’s tragic incident marks over 40 school shootings nationwide in just over one month of education. We cannot afford to be complacent, nor can we allow our biases or political beliefs to oppose good common sense when it comes to the safety of our children.

Civics: “Criticizing the press is more speech”

Ann Althouse:

I gave you a gift link to read the whole thing in what was my first post of the day: “A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: ‘How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America.'”

It was a long piece, and I really did have a lot to say about it myself, but I didn’t want to get dragged down dissecting what was so infuriatingly wrong about it. So I appreciated the active comments section.

The #1 thing I didn’t say but wanted to say was that contrary to Sulzberger’s perverted argument, criticizing the press is not censorship. Criticizing the press is more speech. Trump has been criticizing the press. It is Trump’s antagonists who have pursued censorship, for many reasons, including his criticism of the press.

“The University of Virginia is this year’s top ranked school for free speech.”

FIRE:

For the fifth year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit organization committed to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, and College Pulse surveyed college undergraduates about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech on their campuses.

This year’s survey includes 58,807 student respondents from 257 colleges and universities. Students who were enrolled in four-year degree programs were surveyed via the College Pulse mobile app and web portal from January 25 through June 17, 2024.

The College Free Speech Rankings are available online and are presented in an interactive dashboard (rankings.thefire.org) that allows for easy comparison between institutions.

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Katherine Bindley and Chip Cutter:

Washington Monthly ranks UW as No. 1 national public university

Mike Klein:

Boosted by strong scores in metrics measuring public service and an improved score in social mobility, the University of Wisconsin–Madison is ranked first among national public universities and 12th overall in Washington Monthly’s 2024 College Guide and Rankings.

Last year, UW was ranked second among public universities and 11th overall in the rankings released on Aug. 26.

”Public universities have a mission to provide an education both inside and outside of the classroom so that our students become more active, thoughtful, and well-rounded citizens of the world,” said Provost Charles Lee Isbell Jr. “While no single ranking tells the entire story, I’m pleased that Washington Monthly rankings value the Wisconsin Experience we provide to students.”

Washington Monthly says it rates schools “based on what they do for the country.”

The rankings are based on a school’s contribution to the public good in three categories: social mobility, research, and providing opportunities for public service.

Commentary on elections and social studies curriculum

Beatrice Lawrence:

Social studies teachers are returning to the classroom during the home stretch of a contentious election season in Wisconsin. On top of their back-to-school responsibilities, they’re navigating how to teach about the topic in a politically polarized state.

Sarah Kopplin is a social studies teacher at Shorewood Intermediate School and president of the Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies. She said an alarming number of social studies teachers around the state have seen pushback on their lessons about elections and other current events.

A survey from the council found 42 percent of council member respondents reported that building administration, school boards or community members lodged complaints or put restrictions on lessons related to politics, an election or current events, Kopplin said on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”

Notes on university admissions demographics

Dan Lennington

Universities are starting to report the racial composition of their incoming class (Class of 2028), the first report post-SFFA. As expected, most schools are reporting a change in racial composition. What to expect from @UWMadison? A few points to consider:

UW calculates their demographics on the 10th day of classes, so 9/16. They release numbers a few days later (at the latest by Oct. 1).

UW admitted that it used race as a factor in admissions for the Class of 2027 and prior years. In response to SFFA, it stopped (they say). So the numbers should change. Otherwise why were they using race?

Chiefs cater to younger workers’ needs and give them advice; ‘nobody told them how to be’

Gen Z workers are expected to outnumber baby boomers in the U.S. workforce this year. If only their bosses could understand them.

Companies find their youngest employees the most difficult to work with, surveys show. Now executives are making efforts to engage them more. They are arranging mentorship for employees who entered the workforce remotely during the pandemic; they are giving guidance on how to communicate and when to keep their thoughts to themselves; and they are offering new kinds of perks, like an on-site therapist.

Each new generation coming up in the workforce tends to confuse corporate management, at least initially. Members of Gen Z—generally defined as born between 1997 and 2012—are no exception. Dozens of board members from public companies gathered in June at the Sheraton hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., to discuss the questions this latest cohort raises.

Christine Heckart, who has worked as an executive in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years, told the audience that younger generations want meaning, mentorship and a sense of purpose.

More commentary on the Wisconsin DPI’s reduced rigor approach

Benjamin Yount:

A lot of students in Wisconsin are about to get far better grades on the state’s standardized tests, but advocates say it’s not because they are suddenly better at reading or math.

Wisconsin’s State Superintendent of Schools is defending the decision to change the standards for Wisconsin’s Fordward Exam and the ACT.

The Department of Public Instruction is both lowering the threshold for what is proficient, a 19 on the ACT will now count as proficient and changing the terms to measure student success. The most noticeable change is dropping the terms basic and below basic in exchange for approaching and developing.

“I feel again like this is easier to understand where kids are, and where they stand on the spectrum of learning,” Superintendent Jill Underly said in an interview.

Quinton Klabon, with the Institute for Reforming Government, said the changes are, once again, going to muddy the water to figuring out if students in Milwaukee Public Schools are actually learning.

——-

Defending Reduced Rigor….

“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT” – taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

Wisconsin earned a FAILING grade for our public school student data reporting.

Morgan Polikoff:

The high-level takeaway from our report: It is extremely difficult on most state report card websites to track longitudinal performance data at the school level going back to before COVID. There are a few exceptions — seven states (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee) earned an A for having this data available.

——

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin Property Tax Growth amidst November Referendums

Wisconsin Policy Forum

Gross property tax levies approved in 2023 by local taxing jurisdictions in Wisconsin increased by 4.6% statewide, which exceeded inflation and was the largest increase since 2007.

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Madison offers voters a $607,000,000 tax & spending increase on the November ballot…

Close some Madison schools, and a no on the November Referendums

Dave Cieslewicz (former Madison Mayor)

———

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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]

Anna Shapiro, Rebecca Sutherland, Julia H. Kaufman

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?

Hey, What Happened to Times Tables?

James Bacon

Virginia’s new Mathematics Standards of Learning (SOL) includes a return to memorizing the times tables this school year, like 44 other states and the District of Columbia, following a 6-year absence on ideological grounds.

The prior SOLs’ end goal for basic number facts was Virginia students using cognitively taxing computation strategies (e.g., repeated addition for multiplication), ignoring the cognitive science that, in addition, those facts need to be memorized. The return of Virginia’s evidence-based standards on number facts (the SOL also includes memorizing addition, subtraction, and division facts) are especially important for Virginia’s least advantaged children, who are much less likely to learn such essential skills through outside resources like parents and/or tutors.

But will Virginia school districts follow these standards or instead repeat the same mistake with math that they did with literacy, choosing ideology over science-based instruction?

R.I. takeover of Providence schools extended for 3 more years

Steph Machado:

Nearly five years into the state takeover of the Providence public schools, Rhode Island education officials have extended it for three more years until late 2027.

State Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green made the recommendation to the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education Thursday night, which unanimously voted to approve the plan.

“I am recommending an extension of the PPSD intervention for up to three years because the absence of an aligned, shared vision of governance and limited focus on improving student outcomes troubles me and is not conducive to continued success,” Infante-Green wrote in a memo to the council, which governs K-12 education.

The extension will last until Oct. 15, 2027. The order said Infante-Green has the discretion to recommend an end to the takeover “at any point” during the extension and return the schools to local control.

What’s Missing from Teachers’ Toolkits to Support Student Reading in Grades 3–8

Despite the growing body of research on how to support older readers, few studies consider whether U.S. teachers can identify students who have difficulty reading instructional materials across content areas or whether teachers feel like they have the knowledge and resources to support those students. Such information could lay the groundwork for states and school systems to provide better supports to teachers to address students’ reading difficulties. In this report, researchers explore U.S. public school teachers’ perceptions of students’ difficulties with reading in grades 3–8, those teachers’ knowledge about how students learn to read, their experiences supporting these readers, and what they need to help students become proficient readers.

The findings in this report highlight the importance of including teachers in upper elementary and middle school grades in resource development and allocation and offer guidance to policymakers designing or implementing reading instruction reforms.

Civics: “I am now suing the Biden Administration and two Pfizer officials for their conspiracy to censor me”

Pfizer/White House Files:

But the crucial “fifth strike” and permanent censoring of my account caught them by surprise – because a Twitter lobbyist who was the company’s closest White House contact pushed it through in hours. The lobbyist, Todd O’Boyle, acted outside Twitter’s normal safeguards for actions against large accounts like mine. Instead, O’Boyle repeatedly pressured a junior Twitter employee to ban me on a Saturday evening in late August, when few employees were working.

“Hi all – did we perm suspend Alex berenson?” Gadde wrote an hour after my ban to a senior manager in “site integrity” unit, which was usually responsible for enforcement actions on accounts like mine. “Typically these are flagged to me first? Did I miss something[?]”

O’Boyle’s sudden move to ban me caught not just Gadde but the site integrity unit by surprise, the emails show. The manager responded, “this was not an action taken by SI [site integrity]. We’re investigating what happened.”

America’s Oldest Board Game Teaches 19th-Century Geography

Shiori Chen:

Travelers’ Tour Through the United States was first published by Frederick and Roe Lockwood in 1822, 46 years after America gained its independence. This geography-centric game, designed for 2 to 4 players, is based on a map of the United States at the time. It features 24 states, ranging from the Atlantic coast to new Southern ones such as Missouri and Arkansas. The map includes 139 numbered cities and towns, which serve as spots for players to move to.

Open Mathematics

Tuxfamily

Depository

The primary intention of this project is to provide open access to mathematical texts in PDF format which individual mathematicians find particularly useful and which are clearly in the public domain or under open license. This provides a middle ground between large depositories like archive.org which host “everything” and subscription download services which often monopolize access to public domain texts. Please notify us, using the email below, if any of our PDF files are corrupted so that we can re-upload the readable file.

The PDFs of our mathematical texts are here.

the papers that most heavily cite retracted studies

Richard Van Noorden & Miryam Naddaf

In January, a review paper¹ about ways to detect human illnesses by examining the eye appeared in a conference proceedings published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. But neither its authors nor its editors noticed that 60% of the papers it cited had already been retracted.

The case is one of the most extreme spotted by a giant project to find papers whose results might be in question because they cite retracted or problematic research. The project’s creator, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, shared his data with Nature’s news team, which analysed them to find the papers that most heavily cite retracted work yet haven’t themselves been withdrawn (see ‘Retracted references’).

“We are not accusing anybody of doing something wrong. We are just observing that in some bibliographies, the references have been retracted or withdrawn, meaning that the paper may be unreliable,” Cabanac says. He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations.

The IEEE paper is the second-highest on the list assembled by Nature, with 18 of the 30 studies it cites withdrawn. Its authors didn’t respond to requests for comment, but IEEE integrity director Luigi Longobardi says that the publisher didn’t know about the issue until Nature asked, and that it is investigating.

Close some Madison schools, and a no on the November Referendums

Dave Cieslewicz

And the district’s argument in favor of what seems like madness? Enrollments may turn around some day. But that’s unlikely for two reasons.

The first is that fertility rates are down and enrollment declines are an issue for districts all over the country. In addition, the COVID pandemic resulted in an increase in homeschooling, a switch to schools outside of public school systems, and a mysterious disappearance of some part of the school age population.

The second reason that enrollments are not likely to turn around has to do with the policies of this district. District officials point to Dane County’s rapid growth projections, but the county has been growing at a steady pace for decades and yet MMSD has been losing students for over a decade. The numbers did stabilize this year, but they did not go up and it’s foolish to base hundreds of millions of dollars of long-term investments on a single year’s data.

This raises a broader question and points to the reason that I’ll be voting against both this and the $100 million operating referendum, which will also be on the ballot. The district is losing market share because it is badly managed. Test scores are some of the worst in the state, absenteeism remains high, and the racial achievement gap hasn’t improved.

Parents are voting with their kids and taking them out of the district. And it’s not because the buildings aren’t nice enough. It’s because this school board obsesses over solving all of society’s problems rather than focusing on teaching kids how to read, write, do math, and behave in a way that respects their teachers and peers. If you want to do something to solve stubborn problems of racism in our society the best way to do that is with high-achieving Black students

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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]

S. Mac Healey and Angelina J. Parker

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?

Remedial math at Harvard

“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities,” Kelly added.

Despite the schedule differences, MA5 will reflect the material and structure of MA and MB, collectively known as Math M.

“Math MA5 is actually embedded in Math M,” Kelly said.

“They’ll have the same psets, they’ll have the same office hours, they’ll have MQC, they’ll take the same exams,” Kelly added, referring to the department’s Math Question Center. “So if you’re in MA5, you will experience Math M.”

Madison math forum audio and video and math task force.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

Defending reduced rigor….

AJ Bayatpour:

Wisconsin’s top education official is defending changes this year to the statewide standardized test taken by students in grades 3-8. The overhaul of the Forward Exam lowers the cut scores between groups, and it changes the terminology used to describe student performance.

In her first interview since the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) enacted the changes, State Superintendent Jill Underly said the changes will provide a more accurate picture of how students fared on the test.

“They were appearing to be doing worse than they really were,” she said. “And so, this will give us a better measure of where kids are.”

However, Gov. Tony Evers, who enacted the previous standards in 2012 when he was state superintendent, told reporters Tuesday he did not support lowering statewide testing standards. Critics have said scale of the test has also been changed to such an extent, it’ll be nearly impossible to compare future results to previous trends.

The changes, which the DPI made in June, affect scoring on the English language, arts and math sections of the exam.

——

——

Yet, Wisconsin’s well funded DPI continues to reduce rigor….

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Why is LAUSD spending $70 million to boost capacity at a school in Silver Lake, when nearby schools have thousands of empty seats?

Tim Deroche:

It’s the feel-good story of the year for the Los Angeles Unified School District campuses. L.A. Unified recently broke ground on a beautiful new $70 million renovation of Ivanhoe Elementary in Silver Lake, adding a shiny new building that will boost permanent capacity at the school.

Ivanhoe is one of the shining stars of LAUSD with over 80% of the children reading at grade level. In an era of rapidly declining enrollment across L.A., Ivanhoe has bucked the trend, showing a 31% increase in enrollment from 2009 to 2019. It sounds like that rarest of birds: the public school success story.

But there was no need for this project. There are six other elementary schools in the neighborhood that are literally half-empty. These schools — Allesandro, Atwater Avenue, Clifford Street, Franklin Avenue, Mayberry Street and Micheltorena — once educated 3,215 elementary school students. But their enrollment in 2023-24 was just 1,642. All of these schools are less than 10 minutes from Ivanhoe.

The district could have saved that $70 million in taxpayer money by simply opening up those other schools to the Ivanhoe families.

But that wasn’t politically possible. Why? Ivanhoe is a coveted school, and parents have often paid a significant premium to live in the attendance zone and be assured of a spot in Ivanhoe. Tanya Anton, a public school admissions consultant and author of the GoMamaGuide to Los Angeles schools, has said that parents will often spend up to $300,000 extra for a home that is within the zone of a coveted public school like Ivanhoe. These parents often feel that they have already “paid for” their child’s “free” public school via their hefty mortgage.

——-

Madison expanded its least diverse schools recently as well; Van Hise and Hamilton…

“I provide the first estimates of temperature s impact on high-stakes exam performance and subsequent educational attainment”

R. Jisung Park:

Cognitively intensive assessments such as college entrance exams or
job interviews have become a routine fixture of modern economies, due in large part to the increasing importance of cognitive skills in the workplace.1 Such assessments often take place in high-stakes environments, where performance over a relatively short win-
dow can have lasting educational and economic consequences and where resche-duling may be costly due to coordination costs or other frictions.2 Given potential welfare consequences, it is important to understand whether the physical conditions under which such assessments take place can affect realized performance. This is
especially true if the playing field may not be level or may be changing over time.

Notes on US vs Denmark childhood vaccine practices

Tracy Hoeg

Having raised my kids, given birth & practiced medicine in both the US & Denmark, I am also fascinated by how many more vaccines the US gives to children than Denmark & most Americans I meet are shocked to learn:
Denmark 🇩🇰

‘They’re about two years behind’: fears for children born during lockdown as they start at school

Anna Fazackerley

Babies born in 2020 started life in the strange world of lockdown in a small bubble of people with faces hidden behind masks. Social experiences, such as seeing extended family, trips to the playground or mother and baby groups, could not happen. And struggling public services meant infants were likely to miss out on face-to-face appointments with a health visitor who might have been able to spot developmental difficulties early.

Those babies are now four years old, and in England are arriving at school for the first time this week. Experts say teachers should be braced to encounter – and tackle – problems ranging from poor speech and language development to social and emotional difficulties.

Similar problems have been seen in children who were very young during the pandemic and are already in the system.

“We’ve had an increase in reception children biting one another, throwing things, running off, spitting,” said the headteacher of a primary school in north-west England. He added they were often frustrated or struggled with taking turns, sharing, or following routines and listening in class.

Forget DEI—Fire the Admissions Office

Steven Hayward:

There has been some salutary progress in recent months shutting down the divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rackets on college campuses in many red states, but after the job of ridding us of the scourge of DEI attention needs to be turned to admissions offices. Thesis: Most admissions offices should be purged wholesale. Not only are most of them likely still violating civil rights law in the aftermath of the Harvard/UNC Supreme Court ruling, but they bear a large share of the responsibility for the campus climate of hate against Jews we are currently witnessing on a mass scale. Admissions officers actually seek out these horrible students.

I made this argument once before a few months back, but a fresh new episode sharpens the problem. There’s an active boycott being waged by anti-Semitic students at Sarah Lawrence College against political science professor Sam Abrams, because Abrams is Jewish. Here’s part of Sam’s account from Minding the Campus:

Notes on edtech

Nancy Bailey:

Halfway into 2024, most parents have some awareness that “technology use in school” is pretty different from our own childhoods. Before the pandemic, 60% of school administrators in the U.S. provided 1:1 digital devices for every middle and high school student. For elementary schools, it was about 40%.

In 2021, a year into the pandemic, the rates for middle and high school 1:1 programs rose to 90% and for elementary schools, it was 84%.

And three years later, these numbers have gone up, not down. In fact, when a parent recently emailed me to ask, “Do you know of any middle or high school in America where there is no 1:1 or tech-based curriculum?” (with the exception of perhaps some Waldorf schools), I knew of no other options.

This is kind of insane, when you think about it. Even just a decade ago, elementary schools used tech minimally, perhaps via classroom computers or labs to teach skills like typing and research. But somehow, in part thanks to remote learning, today it’s very difficult to find schools still operating under the “less is more” approach to technology in schools.

The Far-Reaching Ripple Effects of a Discredited Cancer Study

Nidhi Subbaraman

Four years ago, a team of researchers led by a heavyweight in the field of microbiology made a stunning claim: Cancers have unique microbial signatures that could one day allow tumors to be diagnosed with a blood test.

The discovery captured the attention of the scientific community, as well as investors.

Forget DEI—Fire the Admissions Office

Steven Hayward:

There has been some salutary progress in recent months shutting down the divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rackets on college campuses in many red states, but after the job of ridding us of the scourge of DEI attention needs to be turned to admissions offices. Thesis: Most admissions offices should be purged wholesale. Not only are most of them likely still violating civil rights law in the aftermath of the Harvard/UNC Supreme Court ruling, but they bear a large share of the responsibility for the campus climate of hate against Jews we are currently witnessing on a mass scale. Admissions officers actually seek out these horrible students.

I made this argument once before a few months back, but a fresh new episode sharpens the problem. There’s an active boycott being waged by anti-Semitic students at Sarah Lawrence College against political science professor Sam Abrams, because Abrams is Jewish. Here’s part of Sam’s account from Minding the Campus:

Mississippi students of color outperform Minnesota’s in reading and math

Catron Wigfall:

Despite spending far less per student than Minnesota, Mississippi has a better track record than Minnesota when it comes to helping its students of color grow academically. Mississippi’s overhaul of its reading pedagogy and its investment in training educators in the science of reading became a model other states are learning from. Mississippi lawmakers also passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) that retains third graders who cannot read on grade level. The state’s retention policy is not just “repeating the grade,” writes Todd Collins at the Fordham Institute.

——

Yet, Wisconsin’s well funded DPI continues to reduce rigor….

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Civics: “it is now possible to vote in person without any form of identification”

Admin Rosen:

If the average American ever thinks about the Horn of Africa, they likely imagine it as one of those interchangeably poor and faraway places that is many decades behind advanced Western countries like our own. Yet in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, it is now possible to vote in person without any form of identification. In Michigan, you can vote without a photo ID, as long as you sign an affidavit saying you don’t have one. Unlike Somalilanders, most Americans no longer have to physically show up at a polling place to vote. Instead they have the choice of filling out and submitting their ballots beyond the observation of election officials, which means there is no assurance that the people in whose names ballots are cast actually signed—or saw—their ballots, voted free of duress or the promise of some benefit, or are even still alive.

In the 2020 election, more than two-thirds of voters exercised their franchise by mail or before election day—meaning that election day itself was a mass civic formality, rather than the deciding event of a long campaign. The same is likely to be true this year. At least 20 states now open the voting more than three weeks before the campaign ends. Fifty days before an election, Pennsylvania begins holding “in-person absentee” voting, where a ballot can be filled out and submitted in a location that does not have poll watchers present or any of the privacy safeguards of a normal polling station. Thirty-six states, including every 2024 swing state in the presidential election, now either have all-mail elections in which a ballot is automatically sent to every registered voter, or no-excuse absentee voting in which any voter can ask to vote by mail for any reason. In a number of states, including Arizona, a voter only has to register as an absentee once in order to receive a ballot in the mail in every subsequent election. According to the National Vote at Home Institute, the eight states with all-mail elections automatically send out at least 77 million ballots each cycle.

“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT” – taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider:

NEW WISCONSIN STATE TEST SCORE STANDARDS
“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT.

Yes, parents across Wisconsin will hear their children are “Meeting Standards,” only to have multiple UW schools reject them in senior year.

Let’s support educators and kids striving for better.

Related: “Median number of years of business experience are ZERO”

If WI DPI would like to improve mental health perhaps they should get serious about literacy! Most WI schools have used 3 cueing which has been outlawed for the harm it does- but DPI continues to cite resources using 3 cueing in guidance documents for the weakest readers.

AJ Bayatpour

Wisconsin is changing its standardized test: Cut scores are lower, and the terminology is different.

We asked former state supt. @GovEvers about the changes.

“I don’t think we should be lowering them, but the fact of the matter is that’s a DPI issue, not a governor’s issue”

Will Flanders:

Even Gov Evers disagrees with DPI changing the cut points for the Forward Exam/ACT. The legislature must rein in this unilateral DPI power next session.

And.

The Democrats Are Finally Running a Teacher. What Took Them So Long?

To understand why Democrats have been so reluctant to run teachers requires a trip back into the party’s history. In the 1970s, Democrats were in the throes of an identity crisis over what they stood for—and whom to blame for their electoral setbacks. For the better part of four decades, the party had been defined by the New Deal, which made it a dominant force in American politics. “The simple but powerful idea of the Democrats’ New Deal order,” observed historian Gary Gerstle, “was that a strong interventionist state was necessary to regulate capitalism.” In practice, that meant redistributing wealth via progressive taxation, growing the welfare state to provide a safety net for those left behind by the capitalist economy, supporting organized labor, and expanding educational opportunity.

By the late 1960s, however, the New Deal order had begun to deteriorate. Decades of postwar prosperity were replaced by uneven economic growth and high inflation, which the Republican Party seized on. Embracing the dynamism of free markets, the GOP offered a distinctly different vision of the good life—one built around individuals and their buying power. Between 1969 and 1993, Democrats held the White House for just a single term. The New Deal was dead, replaced by a new political order: neoliberalism.

The neoliberal order was particularly bad for teachers. Public education is one of the nation’s most costly annual projects, and suddenly both parties seemed to agree that taxes were too high. In the era of free markets, unions were out of vogue—and government employees became political punching bags; for most public school teachers, that meant a double stigma. And while educators continued to voice support for more federal programs to meet student needs, leaders in Washington increasingly agreed with Bill Clinton that “the era of big government [was] over.”

On top of all this, teachers were also becoming more politically active. In 1975 alone, teachers walked off the job in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and several other cities. Their lengthy and often bitter strikes played out against a backdrop of fiscal crisis. And for a growing segment within the Democratic Party, the specter of teachers demanding higher pay and better working conditions—even as the communities that employed them struggled to keep the lights on—was a sign that the New Deal model was exhausted.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Taxpayer funded education Secretary Cardona’s anti school choice rhetoric (Madison: $23 to 28k per student)

Miguel Cardona:

This vision matters because students enrolled in well-funded public schools get a better shot at quality instruction and additional support—including tutoring and after-school programming. They get better access to nutrition assistance, mental health services, and learning environments that embrace who they are. It is this vision, when fully realized, that will allow every child in Wisconsin a chance at an education that expands their horizons regardless of race, place, or income.

Madison per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Will Flanders rebuts:

You were saying? https://t.co/AAra8Wfit1 pic.twitter.com/Kw33MwSCeC

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) September 3, 2024

SchoolChoice is broadly popular in Wisconsin and the nation, but that hasn’t stopped @SecCardona from penning an anti-choice screed in the Milwaukee JS. This op ed is full of misconceptions we’ll address below. 🧵

Libby Sobic:

Why is @SecCardona attacking a program that has helped thousands of families send their kids to a school of their choice? The only people that are hurt by school choice are public school establishments! Who is @SecCardona really representing?

Chrissy:

More money =/= higher proficiency (not always)

@SecCardona should look at where the money schools are receiving is going before calling it underfunded. Districts that need more help receive more money, but it doesn’t guarantee improved scores.

Notes and links on Miguel Cardona.

Yet:

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Civics: Upper-class America pretended to care about rights, until the rabble moved too close to home

Matt Taibbi:

There’s no “vibe shift.” Having written bestselling books on criminal justice for blue-leaning audiences, I can attest: American liberalism’s trumpeting of “rights” always stopped at the border of whatever tony suburb or upscale city neighborhood it inhabited. While public defenders fought rights violations at peasant wages, wealthy Democrats in the privacy of voting booths always voted in the truncheon, lapping even law-and-order Republicans in aristocratic disgust of the rabble. As podcast partner Walter Kirn put it, the mask is off:

Madison tax & $pending growth and November 2024 referendum rhetoric

Dave Zweifel:

I remember writing a column a couple of years after the pool opened chiding a group of Madison alders who, during budget deliberations, were upset that the pool’s admission charges didn’t cover 100% of its annual costs. My column declared that a city that had just been given a first-class swimming pool for a paltry $500,000 of taxpayer money could afford to subsidize a few pennies of the kids’ admission fees.

The Goodman brothers called me the next day to say thanks. That was their sentiments, exactly.

If Madison has any respect for the two brothers who have contributed so mightily to better all our lives, it will stop using the pool as a pawn in its budget crisis.

It’s closed for the season now, but thousands of children learned how to swim, how to compete or just had fun or had something to do during the long, hot summer. If we can’t afford that, levy limits or not, we should be ashamed.

The strings program was used in this way over the years, as well.

Notes and links on the well funded Madison School District’s $607,000,000 November tax & $pending increase referendum along with the City of Madison’s vote on the same.

“Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) share of all property taxes has grown to 56%”

Paul Vallas:

Let’s be clear, the CTU poses a threat to other labor unions by its demands and seems determined to have the city and state write them a Blank Check regardless of its impact on other city workers or hard pressed property taxpayers.

Ponder the following:

•The City’s $1 billion budget crisis is in part due to its massive school subsidies that last year exceeded $900 million. Despite the city’s own $1 billion deficit the CTU presses its former lobbyist-made Mayor to give schools more. City employees, not CTU member jobs, will go unfilled.

•CTU saw member salaries grew between 24-50% and head count climb 18.7% in last contract while other city public employees saw their much smaller salary increases delayed and their numbers shrink.

Are kids learning math, or are they getting the “think system”?

Holly Korbey

The problem is that none of the boys know how to play the instruments. Don’t worry, Hill assures families—they don’t have to actually learn music. He’s come up with a brilliant innovation, a new way of learning music, the “think system,” where all you have to do is think the “Minuet in G,” or the “Moonlight Sonata.” No need to mess with learning scales or notes, or learning to read the music—just thinking about great music will have the boys playing well in no time at all.

The comedy, of course, comes from the fact that everyone in the audience knows Hill is dead wrong about how people learn to play music. You can’t become a great musician by thinking music, you have to learn the basics of the scales and the notes, you have to know how to position your fingers, you have to be fast and accurate with the notes and practice a lot of songs to become a real musician.

Being a good musician is less of an attitude that you take, and more a set of skills that you possess.

The reason I bring up the “think system” is because it was on my mind this week as I read two bestselling, relatively new books about math, Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity and Meaning in Mathematics, by Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler, and Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, by online learning platform Zearn founder Shalinee Sharma. I found myself wondering if both books, written by intelligent, compassionate people who clearly care about kids and math learning, are essentially arguing for a math version of the “think system.”

Odds of political contribution from a UW-Madison humanities or social science prof going to Republican: 1 in 530

Wyatt Eichholz

And when it comes to faculty in social sciences and the humanities, where professors’ viewpoints on politics and culture have more of a bearing on the lectures than fields like engineering, the odds of finding a Republican donor fall to just 1 in 530.

The numbers back-up in stark terms comments Owens made in a recent interview with the Badger Institute in which he discussed the skewed ideological climate at the Badger state’s flagship university and said the atmosphere is full of an omnipresent “left-wing, dogmatic orthodoxy.”

Owens substantiated this with another staggering statistic in that interview: over 99% of political dollars contributed by UW faculty went to Democrats and left-wing groups over the past decade.

The pair looked at data from the Federal Election Commission on contributions to candidates or PACs between 2011 and 2022. Their study looked at all UW faculty, excluding medical school donations.

Owens’ and Tahk’s study has its limitations. It might be the case that conservative professors are less likely to make political donations, given that the records are publicly accessible, in which case the count of Republican versus Democrat donors would underestimate the true ratio of conservatives to progressives among the faculty.

Netherlands: Nationwide ban on phones in schools underway

DW:

Cell phones, smart watches, and tablets are now banned for pupils at Dutch primary and secondary schools. The Dutch government called them a “distraction” that reduces academic performance and social interaction.

As pupils returned to primary schools in the Netherlands on Monday, a new ban on smart devices went into effect. With the technology banned in secondary schools since January, that means there is now a blanket ban across the country.

“There is increasing evidence that cell phones in class are harmful. Students can concentrate less and their performance suffers. We need to protect students from that,” the Dutch government said in a statement.

Commentary on school choice

Joshua Cowen:

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

Japan plans cash incentive for women to marry and leave Tokyo

Asahi Shimbun:

Under a program to revitalize regional economies, the government plans to offer up to 600,000 yen ($4,100) to newlywed women who move from Tokyo’s 23 wards to rural areas.

The new system, part of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s “Vision for a Digital Garden City Nation,” would expand the existing “relocation support fund,” which has been in place since fiscal 2019.

The fund currently provides up to 600,000 yen through local governments to single people, regardless of gender, who move to rural areas to work or start a business after living in or commuting to Tokyo’s 23 wards.

The new system would limit eligibility to women and remove the work or business requirement in rural areas.

It would first cover transportation costs for women attending matchmaking events in rural areas.

A Brief History of Accelerationism

Matt Southey:

For those who are not terminally online, Nick Land might be the most influential philosopher that they have never heard of. Widely credited as the father of accelerationism, Land’s influence is felt most powerfully across two spheres: the realm of academic continental philosophy, and the tech world. In the 90s, while an academic philosopher at the University of Warwick, Land led a group called the CCRU, or the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Land’s writings from this period are an exciting blend of philosophy, esoterica, and science fiction. One can hear the pulpy inspirations of Terminator and Neuromancer when he writes:

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. 10

After leaving Warwick, Land gained a broader following on the internet, lost much of his continental jargon, and became accessible to a more general audience. 11 The most essential point of Land’s philosophy is the identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence: they are one and the same thing apprehended from different temporal vantage points. 12 What we understand as a market based economy is the chaotic adolescence of a future AI superintelligence. Capitalism and technology form a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that has been speeding up ever since the beginning of tool use. The natural end point of this process is an AI that is capable of increasing its own intelligence. 13 What first appears as a beneficial capitalist system to the humans working inside it is later revealed to be an AI that will shed humanity like a snakeskin when it is no longer needed.

“Spend, sure, but funds fizzle without good instruction”

Minnesota 2024 school test scores: 🙃.

12th in spending per student, cost-of-living-adjusted (18th unadjusted)

free meals for all

4th-lowest poverty rate

stable enrollment

among easier state tests in America

More on spending more for less in Minnesota.

Oregon law rolling back drug decriminalization set to take effect and make possession a crime again

Claire Rush:

The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed the recriminalization law in March, overhauling a measure approved by 58% of voters in 2020 that made possessing illicit drugs like heroin punishable by a ticket and a maximum $100 fine. The measure directed hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue toward addiction services, but the money was slow to get out the door at a time when the fentanyl crisis was causing a spike in deadly overdoses and health officials — grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic — were struggling to stand up the new treatment system, state auditors found.

The new law taking effect Sunday, which passed with the support of Republican lawmakers who had long opposed decriminalization, makes so-called personal use possession a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. It aims to make it easier for police to crack down on drug use in public and introduced harsher penalties for selling drugs near places such as parks.

Supporters of decriminalization say treatment is more effective than jail in helping people overcome addiction and that the decadeslong approach of arresting people for possessing and using drugs hasn’t worked.

Civics: “The momentum is deeply authoritarian at the moment”

David Hansson:

The only way to defend free speech is to nuke the idea of benevolent censorship from orbit. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth, nobody can discern “misinformation” from truth consistently or without bias, and nobody can define “hate speech” in universally acceptable terms that don’t recall blasphemy laws of centuries past. The alternative, betting on more speech to counter bad speech, isn’t a guaranteed win every time, but it’s by far the best option we’ve found so far.

David Sacks:

At no point has the White House expressed concern about this new iron curtain that seems to be descending across the West. Quite the contrary, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured Meta to censor during Covid. Worse, the FBI primed Facebook to censor true stories about Biden Family corruption by suggesting that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation (even though the FBI knew it was authentic).

Barring court intervention, TikTok will shut down in the U.S. on January 19, 2025 thanks to a new power authorized by Congress to ban websites and applications that the President determines are subject to the influence of a foreign adversary. X may not be far behind if liberal elites and deep state apparatchiks like Robert Reich and Alexander Vindman get their wish. They have called for the U.S. to adopt Brazil’s and the EU’s approach and “rein in” Elon Musk.

Curious: “no contact”

Anna Russell:

Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out of unhealthy family relationships without shame. There is relatively little data on the subject, but some psychologists cite anecdotal evidence that an increasing number of young people are cutting out their parents. Others think that we’re simply becoming more transparent about it. Discussion about the issue has “just exploded,” Yasmin Kerkez, the co-founder of Family Support Resources, a group for people dealing with estrangement and other family issues, told me. Several organizations now raise awareness and hold meetings or events to provide support for people who are estranged from their families. Becca Bland, who founded a nonprofit estrangement group called Stand Alone, told me that society tends to promote the message that “it’s good for people to have a family at all costs,” when, in fact, “it can be much healthier for people to have a life beyond their family relationships, and find a new sense of family with friends or peer groups.” Those who have cut ties often gather in forums online, where they share a new vocabulary, and a new set of norms, pertaining to estrangement. Members call cutting out relatives going “no contact.” “Can I tell you how great it was to skip out on my first Thanksgiving?” one woman who no longer speaks with her parents told me. “I haven’t heard family drama in years.”

John Robb:

Social stigmas on dysfunctional behavior and negative social outcomes are good for society.

A society without them falls apart as the behaviors and outcomes that damage it lose all opposition.

‘No contact’ is a bad outcome. If it becomes an acceptable outcome, we all lose.

To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.

Ted Chiang

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

“If they are capable and dependable, they are in.”

Katja Hoyer:

I meet the owner Sebastian Wehland who brings a friend (a fireman from the Kerkwitz branch) and a few bottles of beer. We sit in his beautiful but abandoned beer garden as he tells me about his grandparents Gisela and Günther who ran the place for half a century. Now their grandson, who has returned with his young family after years spent living in western Germany, finds it difficult to get this village institution back up on its feet. Converting the pub into holiday flats seemed the only viable solution. But Wehland tries to open the place twice a year for the traditional spring festivals, determined not to “allow the Dorfkrug to disappear from Kerkwitz.”

“Is this sort of decline the reason why you have so many AfD voters here?” I ask the two young men. It’s gone dark and not a single sound fills the warm night air. “Well, there is a sense that some of the traditions here are lost,” says Wehland’s friend, who doesn’t want to be named. “We used to have a lively club here for those of us breeding pigeons, chickens and rabbits as a hobby. Now that’s as good as dead.”

Liz Magill hired by Harvard Law School despite resignation over anti-Semitism controversy

Patrick McDonald:

Less than a year after resigning her position as the president of the University of Pennsylvania following controversial statements regarding anti-Semitism on campus, Liz Magill has been hired by Harvard University for a research position.

Magill’s CV was recently obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian and shows that she will soon be a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession. Additionally, she will be a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Magill remains a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school.

Campus Reform has previously reported about Magill’s resignation in December. Magill, alongside the leaders of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), each failed to say in testimony before the U.S. Congress that they would prohibit rhetoric advocating the “genocide of Jews.”

SAVE Plan Is Another Student Loan Forgiveness Boondoggle

Michael Brickman:

The Biden-Harris administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education Repayment Plan, or SAVE, sounds honorable until you scrutinize the details. The program, styled as loan repayment, is really loan forgiveness. Eighteen states are suing to stop this election-year giveaway, and a federal appeals court has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Education Department from administering it. But if the states eventually lose in court and the plan goes into effect, taxpayers will foot the bill not only for tuition, books and student fees but also for rent, groceries, gasoline and other “living expenses.”

College students are already able to use federal loans to cover a variety of living expenses. Because students know they’ll have to pay that sum back, many borrow reasonably, or not at all, live modestly, and work while they attend school. The SAVE plan would turn that incentive on its head. Knowing that other people would foot their bills, students would have every reason to stay in school as long as they want, live lavishly and borrow to the max. If a student knows taxpayers will pay off his loans, he’ll have less incentive to try hard in school, earn a serious degree, or get a job after graduation.

The administration created the SAVE plan without clear authorization from Congress. Like some other federal loan-repayment schemes, the plan ties loan payments to a student’s future earnings. Yet the program dramatically reduces the required payments, so that even many middle-class borrowers would never pay anything. According to an analysis from the Urban Institute, only 11% of borrowers with certificates and associate degrees would have to pay back their loans in full, and 38% would never have to pay a cent. Only 22% of borrowers with bachelor’s degrees would repay in full, and 20% would pay nothing.

Notes on Madison’s facility expansion (enrollment, achievement?)

Abbey Machtig:

Nearly two years after construction began, the renovations of Madison’s four comprehensive high schools are complete.

Funded by a $317 million referendum approved by voters in 2020, the aging schools got major upgrades. Dated hallways and cramped classrooms were replaced with bright and airy spaces geared toward modern learning.

Extra natural light, expanded arts and science classrooms, and new workshops where students can get experience working in the skilled trades were among the other improvements at East, La Follette, West and Memorial high schools, which the district showed off in a public tour Friday.

Memorial High School now has a newly improved arts wing, auditorium, planetarium and commons space.

——-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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]