Kendall Keys:

“MPS cannot continue to give administrators big raises while at the same time laying off teachers,” Beverly Hamilton-Williams said. 

The proposed budget the school board approved this summer cut 149 teacher jobs. Still, interim superintendent Eduardo Galvan penned $200,000 salary adjustments for four administrators under an agenda item.

The salary increases would have affected Chief of Staff Paulette Chambers, Interim Chief School Administration Officer Michael Harris, Chief Human Resources Officer Adria Maddaleni and Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Mims-Howell.

The recommended adjustments were crossed off before Tuesday’s meeting started. 

“My constituents in the seventh district let me have it,” MPS school board director Henry Leonard said.

Wall Street Journal:

“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government,” Mr. Trump said in his speech to the Economic Club of New York.

He added that “as a first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. This will save trillions of dollars. Trillions.” That’s typical Trump hyperbole, but there’s no doubt a huge amount that could be saved merely by fixing loopholes in programs that invite fraud.

The government paid tens of billions in fraudulent unemployment benefits and Paycheck Protection grants during the pandemic. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a California prison inmate allegedly claimed more than $550 million in Covid-era Employee Retention Tax Credits. The ERTC is one of the great Beltway boondoggles and will continue to add to the deficit with dubious payouts.

But there are countless other programs that run on autopilot with little evidence that they yield any results. Does anyone think federal job training works? Or the Jobs Corps? Or for that matter, Pentagon procurement?

Kimberly Wethal 

“Only in government would you witness a 6,000 person staffing increase in an organization with no new customers,” Steffen said in a statement. “If the UW system wants the Legislature and taxpayers to take their massive $855 million budget increase seriously, they’ll need to provide much more than flowery talking points.”

Sarah Fields:

For some, it is difficult to see the text on the slides. Here is the link to the article by Children’s Health Defense and @RobertfKennedJr.

1. childrenshealthdefense.org/child-health-t…
2. childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/upl…

And the second link with the full slide show.

More.

I read the article linked. The slides are NOT the summary of CDC in house researcher Thomas Verstraeten from 1999, (though he did find problems.) The slides summarise several other studies done by who RFK calls independent experts.
It’s best to be completely factual.

Mallika Seshadri:

Ten Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) community schools will be given an opportunity to pilot new approaches to assessments in the 2025-26 academic year. 

And once the schools adopt alternative assessments, they won’t have to participate in standardized tests, other than those mandated by state and federal governments, the district school board decided in a 4-3 vote on Tuesday. 

The policy, which comes as part of the Supporting Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the LAUSD Community Schools Initiative, was authored by LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg and board members Rocio Rivas and Kelly Gonez. 

Goldberg said that over the past several decades, corporate entities have turned education’s focus away from cultivating a love for learning — and toward test taking, which she believes has become the “be-all and judge-all of schools.” 

She emphasized that multiple choice, standardized assessments are not the only way to gauge students’ learning. 

Anna North:

Even now, according to a new report released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic. 

The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the American student” — combines test scores and academic research with parent interviews to paint a picture of the challenges facing public schools and the families they serve. That picture is sobering: In spring 2023, just 56 percent of American fourth-graders were performing on grade level in math, down from 69 percent in 2019, according to just one example of test score data cited in the report. 

Declines in reading were less stark but still concerning, and concentrated in earlier grades, with 65 percent of third-graders performing on grade level, compared with 72 percent in 2019. Recovery in reading has also been slower, with some researchers finding essentially no rebound since students returned to the classroom.

The report mirrors what many teachers say they are seeing in their classrooms, as some sound the alarm publicly about kids who they say can’t write a sentence or pay attention to a three-minute video.

Claire Reid

In collaboration with research partners College Pulse and Statista, WSJ determined the nation’s top 500 colleges and universities. Rankings were based on numerous factors, including student outcomes and graduate salaries, career preparation, learning facilities and opportunities, and multiple diversity measures.

WSJ’s salaries rankings are based on salary impact — the extent to which a college boosts its graduates’ salaries beyond what they would be expected to earn regardless of which college they attended — and how long it takes to pay back attending.

Dan Lennington:

This woman’s statement here (about classifications) is 100% correct, AND it demonstrates the harm, irrationality & unconstitutionality of our laws. Biden-Harris Admin says that only certain racial groups are “disadvantaged” & worthy of “priority” or “preference.” Everyone from the Middle East is “white” according to federal law. This includes Gazans, Israelis, Egyptians, Moroccans, Iranians, Saudis, & Turks. The Biden-Harris Admin’s discrimination also targets Asians, calling them “overrepresented,” which is the subject of our latest lawsuit.
The answer to this outrageous policy is not to include new groups as “disadvantaged” or “marginalized,” but to treat all people as individuals & not as members of groups. That’s stereotyping and bigotry.

Associated Press:

In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world. 

The National Council of Teachers of English acknowledged the shift in a 2022 statement on media education, saying: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” 

The idea is not to remove books but to teach media literacy and add other texts that feel relevant to students, said Seth French, one of the statement’s co-authors. In the English class he taught before becoming a dean last year at Bentonville High School in Arkansas, students engaged with plays, poetry and articles but read just one book together as a class.

“At the end of the day, a lot of our students are not interested in some of these texts that they didn’t have a choice in,” he said.

The emphasis on shorter, digital texts does not sit well with everyone.

Jean Mackenzie and Leehyun Choi

Last Saturday, a Telegram message popped up on Heejin’s phone from an anonymous sender. “Your pictures and personal information have been leaked. Let’s discuss.”

As the university student entered the chatroom to read the message, she received a photo of herself taken a few years ago while she was still at school. It was followed by a second image using the same photo, only this one was sexually explicit, and fake.

Terrified, Heejin, which is not her real name, did not respond, but the images kept coming. In all of them, her face had been attached to a body engaged in a sex act, using sophisticated deepfake technology.

Deepfakes, the majority of which combine a real person’s face with a fake, sexually explicit body, are increasingly being generated using artificial intelligence.

Wall Street Journal:

CBO’s update for August, out Tuesday, says revenues in the first 11 months of fiscal 2024 were running 11% above a year ago. Total receipts were $4.4 trillion, including $2.2 trillion in individual income taxes (up 11%), $1.6 trillion in payroll taxes (up 6%), and $420 billion in corporate income taxes (up 29%). That kind of growth should push the budget toward balance.

Yet outlays so far this year were $6.3 trillion, up 7% once CBO excludes the Education Department’s “2023 savings” after President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness lost in court. Social Security benefits were $1.3 trillion, up 8% with cost-of-living adjustments and new enrollees. Medicare was $847 billion, up 10% after new beneficiaries and higher service costs.

Net interest on the public debt was $870 billion, up 35% thanks to higher borrowing rates. That exceeded military spending of $753 billion. Pentagon spending was up 7%, nowhere near enough to match the rising global threats facing the U.S.

The end of Covid paid fiscal dividends. Medicaid spending of $561 billion was down 1%, as those who no longer qualify were disenrolled. Other savings included $51 billion “attributable in part to the IRS’s moratorium on processing claims for the Employee Retention Tax Credit,” as well as $24 billion in decreased food assistance.

Melissa Korn:

Diversity is down at some of the nation’s most selective colleges this fall.

The share of Black students entering Amherst College fell to 3%, from 11% last school year. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where students could identify themselves racially in more than one category, the percentage dropped to 7.8% from 10.5%. And at Brown University, the share of first-year domestic students who are Black fell to 9%, from 15%.

The Wall Street Journal examined first-year classes at more than 20 colleges to see how class makeup is starting to change after last summer’s Supreme Court ruling barring schools from explicitly considering race in their admissions decisions. While some schools reported steady numbers, several posted sharp declines among racial minorities, including Black students in particular.

Leaders of those institutions, a group that includes Washington University in St. Louis and some Ivy League schools, are now trying to figure out why their numbers shook out the way they did. They argue that diversity helps all students encounter new ideas and prepares them to succeed in a multicultural society. They also say previous growth didn’t come at the cost of academic talent.

Chavie Lieber:

Kayleigh Sloan’s students are years from drinking coffee. But every day, when the first and second-graders burst into class, they get a taste of cafe culture: Sloan has meticulously renovated the room to channel a 1970s coffee shop.

Her classroom in Northern Idaho is now bathed in brown, cream and beige, for a “homey, cozy feeling,” as the 27-year-old teacher puts it. Thrifted bohemian rugs, groovy flower pillows, wicker baskets and a mod green armchair round out the ambience.

“I have been in a boring classroom where you can’t wait to leave,” she says, “but a decorated classroom that’s outside the norm is fun and inspiring.” And, “It can affect the way they learn.”

Teachers have long poured energy into enhancing their learning spaces. But now, some are crafting spaces that could grace Architectural Digest.

Ling Xin:

Award-winning Japanese mathematician Kenji Fukaya has left Stony Brook University in the US to join China’s Tsinghua University as a full-time professor.

Fukaya, previously a permanent member of the Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook, delivered his first lecture at Tsinghua on September 11, according to the university’s Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre.

Daniel Feldman:

Francesca Block

Another microschool owner, Shiren Rattigan, referring to the absenteeism, low pay, and culture wars in public schools, told me, “We see all these different things in societies and how it comes into the school. We’re so done with it.”

“Teachers are really wanting a space where they can express themselves,” added Rattigan, whose company, Colossal Academy, operates four microschools in the Sunshine State. “And in Florida, it’s really about being able to run a sustainable business that can be out of the red in three years, so you can make a good living for yourself doing your calling.” 

The four microschool owners and handful of microschool teachers I spoke to told me parents like the fact they can be more involved in their children’s education. “Families want to understand what’s going on,” Rattigan said. “They might not understand all the education stuff, but they want to be a part of the education of their child.” 

Corrinne Hess:

Bookmobiles. Online mental health. Reading coaches. Robots. Therapy dogs. 

These are all things Wisconsin school districts have been able to bring to students because of the $2.4 billion in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funding.

ESSER dollars were meant to help students make up for learning loss brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether that’s been accomplished is hard to measure. But there’s no question the millions of dollars that went to schools over the last three years provided educators with an opportunity to hire staff and create programs they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Benj Edwards:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”

Matt Taibbi:

The issue wasn’t the size of the award, but rather what that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “Dynamic Exclusion List” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated “neutral, fact-based content”) and The Atlantic (a perfect 100/100) topped trust lists.

In efforts to investigate GEC, Kaminsky and I ran into the same problem: almost no other records of GEC contractors were public. An April 2020 audit of GEC by the State Department Inspector General showed a list of 39 agency contractors. As noted here before, 36 were redacted. If GEC was funding one contractor like GDI that impacted domestic news in defiance of State’s explicit legal mandate to keep its eyes overseas, how many other such contractors were there? What mischief was under these black boxes?

…..

For that reason, I raised an eyebrow at the new Committee report, which contains an entry about GEC briefing employees at Zoom. “Zoom staff asked about ‘lists’ that could be shared around ‘malign actors,’” the Committee wrote, “to which the GEC recommended the GDI and the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard”:

Daniel Libit:

NEWS: I’ve filed a public records lawsuit against @UofIllinois for its refusal to provide communications its chancellor exchanged with other @BigTen chancellors and presidents via conference’s BoardVantage portal.

Wall Street Journal:

As political attacks on the Supreme Court become more heated, the institution could use more defenders. Most of the press and the professoriate are hostile. So it’s welcome that a leading member of the appellate bar is speaking up to defend the Court and urging his colleagues to do the same.

“I believe that the criticisms of the Court’s legitimacy are unfounded,” said Kannon Shanmugam in a notable speech Monday at Duke Law School. “But more than that, I believe that attacks on the Court’s legitimacy are dangerous, undermining public confidence in the Court and imperiling the rule of law.”

Tyler Cowen:

We, the undersigned, wish to express our deep concern about the ongoing attacks by Big Tech companies and their allies against Brazil’s digital sovereignty. The Brazilian judiciary’s dispute with Elon Musk is just the latest example of a broader effort to restrict the ability of sovereign nations to define a digital development agenda free from the control of mega-corporations based in the United States. At the end of August, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court banned the X platform from Brazilian cyberspace for failing to comply with court decisions that required the suspension of accounts that instigated right-wing extremists to participate in riots and occupy the Legislative, Judicial, and Governmental palaces on January 8, 2023. Subsequently, President Lula da Silva made clear the Brazilian government’s intention to seek digital independence: to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign entities for data, AI capabilities, and digital infrastructure, as well as to promote the development of local technological ecosystems. In line with these objectives, the Brazilian state also intends to force Big Tech to pay fair taxes, comply with local laws, and be held accountable for the social externalities of their business models, which often promote violence and inequality.

Signed by Acemoglu, Zucman, Varoufakis, Cory Doctorow, Morozov, Mazzucato, Piketty, and many others.  Somehow no one is talking about this petition and its embrace of censorship?

———

Civics: an update on taxpayer funded censorship

Graham Hillard:

Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood as an act of self-preservation. We stand by that analysis. Nevertheless, the Martin Center has since learned that the cuts in question may well have been unethical in part. If that is the case, UNCG should reconsider whether all of its announced retrenchments are indeed in students’ and taxpayers’ best interests.

Among the motives governing program retrenchments were concerns that professors were holding students to too high a standard.As the Chronicle of Higher Education recalled in its own investigative feature last month, UNCG’s “academic-portfolio review” (APR) was conceived in late 2022 as a collaboration between university administrators and the consulting firm RPK Group. Intended to rescue the institution’s finances in the wake of a 10-percent enrollment decline since 2017, the APR took place alongside attempts to outsource custodial operations, right-size the secretarial pool, and merge redundant campus-police processes.

Yet, predictably, cuts with the potential to affect faculty assignments received the most pushback. In January of this year, the UNCG faculty senate voted to censure both Chancellor Frank Gilliam and then-Provost Debbie Storrs, asserting that the pair had “not initiat[ed] consultation with the Senate at the start of the APR process [or provided] a clear rationale of the choice of program closures.” When, on February 1, Gilliam announced his approval of 20 program discontinuations proposed by Storrs, the faculty responded with a vote of “no confidence” in the latter. (Storrs resigned in April, citing health reasons.)

John Sailer:

1/ Harvard and MIT ended mandatory DEI statements for hiring faculty. Yet a mirror image of the policy is gaining traction in federal grant applications.

The NIH, perhaps most notably, has begun rolling out mandatory “Plans for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives.”

Greg Semenza:

A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has retracted two more papers, bringing his total to 13.

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori – who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard – brings the total to 13.

William McGurn:

Presidential debates typically don’t determine the outcomes of elections, notwithstanding the large television audiences they draw and the dramatic moments they produce. But Tuesday night’s dustup between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may be different.

Press failure has inflated it into the seminal event of the Trump-Harris race. Because reporters haven’t insisted that Ms. Harris answer basic questions, the debate, moderated by ABC News, may provide the only moment in the 2024 election when Americans get to see how Ms. Harris performs under pressure.

This failure would be appalling at any time, but the circumstances of Ms. Harris’s campaign turn simple media bias into journalistic malpractice. The vice president secured the top slot on the Democratic ticket without having to contest a single primary—and therefore without having to lay out and defend her record. This leaves her largely unknown to American voters, a situation Ms. Harris is now exploiting to reinvent herself as a moderate challenger rather than a woke incumbent.

In addition, Ms. Harris is a mother lode of unanswered questions on most of the issues that once defined her. This includes her previous support for everything from defunding the police and banning plastic straws to getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and starting from “scratch,” stances she now apparently disavows.

Duncan Agnew:

“As the district’s financial adviser, I cannot stress enough the magnitude of the financial challenges facing this district. Status quo will lead the district into either financial or academic bankruptcy,” said financial consultant Robert Grossi.

“I’ve been appointed twice by the Illinois State Board of Education in my career to oversee school districts that have been taken over by the state due to fiscal insolvency. Unless decisions are made that are bold and immediate, it is my assessment that the district is heading in that direction.”

Grossi was referring to the imminent risk, if the status quo continues, of the state taking over the district, which happens periodically with Illinois school districts that repeatedly fail to pay their bills.

The district’s spending over the last several years, which has gone up by an average of 9.75% per year since the 2021 fiscal year, was the elephant in the room. Cash on hand for District 65 was at $90 million to start this year, but Grossi and Chief Financial Officer Tamara Mitchell are projecting that number to fall to $54.96 million by the end of the year. That means the district is expecting to have 72 days’ worth of reserve funds when the 2024-25 year wraps up.

More.

www

We will run a two-day conference on remote work, including hybrid arrangements that involve a mix of onsite and offsite work. The conference is open to papers on remote-work measurement, the drivers of remote work, managing remote and hybrid workforces, performance outcomes with remote work, and the implications of remote work for workers, organizations, and society.

Minnesota parents alliance:

Everyone should listen to this Rochester Public Schools board meeting presentation. Start at the 10 min mark. Minnesotans are paying $1 BILLION dollars on MCA testing only to be told that the results don’t really tell us much and they’ll just change the test to stop measuring whether students retain facts. 😳😳😳

Paris Martineau:

In early January, Marty Sharpe thought he’d get a few dozen teachers to show up to his professional development course on using generative artificial intelligence in the classroom. After all, it was an optional workday after the two-week winter break at the Catawba County Schools in North Carolina.

Instead, Sharpe—the Catawba school district’s chief technology officer—was stunned that nearly a hundred educators signed up for the course, and that it had a waitlist. “We were maxed out,” said Sharpe, who afterward was flooded with emails from teachers who had missed the session asking him to schedule another. “It blew my mind.”

Over the last nine months, Catawba County Schools has gone all in on AI, propelled by a surge in demand from educators. Many teachers across the district’s 28 schools now regularly use generative AI tools to develop lesson plans, generate multiple choice quizzes and create customized chatbots to explain topics to students, said Sharpe.

The district recently got a six-figure, multiyear grant from the North Carolina State Board of Education to further those AI efforts. Sharpe says the district intends to use the money—up to $95,000 annually for three years—to roll out mandatory AI literacy courses for students and develop new generative AI tools for teachers.

Paul Vallas:

CTU is not only destroying the schools financial health but the city’s as well as the city picks up more of the schools costs forcing city to raise taxes & cut services including police. Schools already spend $30K per student & CTU contract demands cost $10 billion. READ ON.

    •    Since 2019 before COVID, despite enrollment loss, 8% loss, school district staff grew by 14.5%

    •    School district has ONE employee for every 7.1 students and ONE teacher for every 14.5.

    •    The district has more NON teaching staff than teachers, for every 13.8 students.

    •    Despite 8% loss in enrollment since 2019 the district hired 3% more teachers and 28% more non teacher employees.

    •    The city last year provided $900 million in additional subsidies on top of the 56% of all property taxes schools receive.

    •    Meanwhile CTU blocks closing near empty schools, improvements to schools that impact its members and wants to get rid of public charter and magnet schools to eliminate competition.

The CTU under its present leadership and their supporters pose a clear and present danger to the health of the cities finances and the welfare of its residents.

Richard Rubin:

This year’s budget deficit is on track to top $1.9 trillion, or more than 6% of economic output, a threshold reached only around World War II, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Publicly held federal debt—the sum of all deficits—just passed $28 trillion or almost 100% of GDP.

If Congress does nothing, the total debt will climb by another $22 trillion through 2034. Interest costs alone are poised to exceed annual defense spending.

Publicly held debt as a share of GDP

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

John Sailer:

1/ The country’s largest private funder of medical research is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which boasts a $24.2 billion endowment. It’s America’s second wealthiest foundation.

The NIH, meanwhile, has an annual budget of $47.5 billion.

More:

Ryan McNeil, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who advises policymakers on “harm reduction and addiction treatment interventions,” conducts his research thanks to a $2.5 million R01 grant, the gold standard of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.

In July, as a part of his project, McNeil interviewedShawn Hill, cofounder of an organization that objects to concentrating addiction-related harm reduction services (e.g. safe injection sites) in neighborhoods like Harlem. Unsurprisingly, the two disagree, though the depth of philosophical disagreement only became explicit after the interview, when McNeil unintentionally broadcasted his unvarnished thoughts, revealing the political orientation of his taxpayer-funded project.

“That dude sucked,” McNeil groaned to his research assistant after Hill logged off, unaware that their transcription software would email all participants a recording of the entire call. “His primary concerns were basically around, frankly, white discomfort,” he later added. “Let’s try to get some more interviews with people who suck,” he said while wrapping up his unintentionally public debrief, “I want to find someone who we can give enough rope to hang themself with.”

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Derek Thompson:

I wish I saw more scientists grappling with the tradeoffs at stake here.

In fact, a 2023 paper found that the journal Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden

1. “caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters”
2. “lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature”
3. “reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general”
4. while “estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust … were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant”

Emma Jacobs:

A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5).

Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children . . . The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”

Jon Tabbush, senior researcher for the Centre for London, a think-tank, worries about the capital becoming a “more segregated city, less culturally vibrant and, in the long run, a less productive city. High house and rent prices causing poor and middle-income residents to move outwards and leave the city would likely increase racial segregation, and damage the city’s shared culture that has made some of the most popular music, art and film of anywhere in the world.”

---

Childlessness, wrote the urbanist Richard Florida in 2019, “reflects how certain neighbourhoods come to specialise in certain kinds of residents by income and stage of life”. In London, children are spread unevenly, with families moving to the outer edges. Data from the Centre for London shows that in the 20 years to 2021, there was a decline in households with at least one dependent child in the inner London boroughs of Hackney (9 per cent), Islington (7 per cent), Lambeth (10 per cent) and Southwark (11 per cent). Further east, in Barking and Dagenham, there was a 34 per cent increase over the period, spurred by low land prices and an enormous programme of housebuilding.

——

Choose life!

Aaron Sibarium:

HHS announced last week that it had launched an investigation of the clinic’s Minority Stroke Program, which is dedicated to “treating stroke in racial and ethnic minorities,” and its Minority Men’s Health Center, which screens black and Hispanic men for disease, in response to a discrimination complaintfiled by Do No Harm, an advocacy group that opposes identity politics in medicine.

“[The Office of Civil Rights] has reviewed the complaint and has determined that it has sufficient authority and cause to investigate the allegations,” HHS wrote in a letter to Do No Harm’s attorneys. “Therefore, we have initiated an investigation.”

Founded in 2023 by Stanley Goldfarb—a physician at the University of Pennsylvania and the father of Washington Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb—Do No Harm has filed more than 160 discrimination complaints against hospitals and medical schools around the country, six of which were referred by the Department of Education to HHS’s Office of Civil Rights. The probe marks the first time that HHS has agreed to investigate a hospital based on the group’s complaints, though the Department of Education has launched its own inquiries.

Ruxandra Teslo

Those critical of Communism often highlight how it’s underpinned by Envy; But I think supporting Communism is first and foremost a result of the Sin of Pride: there’s immense hubris in believing one can design a centralised economic system that beats evolutionary forces. In “The Road to Serfdom” F.A. Hayek contends that government control of economic decision-making, even with good intentions, inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Hayek was a visionary: a lot of intellectuals persisted in their love for Communism even after the horrors of the Soviet Regime became apparent. 

While at the moment outright advocacy for Communism may not be widespread among intellectuals, there remains a latent affinity for top-down control – a kind of ember of ideology that, though subdued, is still smouldering, waiting for the right conditions to reignite. Often, the catalyst for such a resurgence is the perception of a looming threat (that might very well be a justified worry in itself), such as the recent concern over misinformation. The same pride that made intellectuals believe in centralised control over the economy now leads them to often support a form of epistemic control to fight off misinformation. US even briefly had a “misinformation czar” to deal with this problem; The political and media movement feeds off the actual academic field of misinformation studies. This is a heterogeneous domain, but there is certainly an element of it that veers into justifying top-down control over the information ecosystem, often by overstating how good researchers are at detecting false information and why we should trust them. Perhaps nowhere is this overstatement more prominent than in the book “Foolproof” by Sander Van Der Linden, one of the foremost researchers in the field. If you are inclined to dismiss this book as a sort of inconsequential academic exercise, don’t! These are the kind of outlets that recommend it (particularly disappointed by Financial Times). The book also has a blurb from Marianna Spring, BBC’s first disinformation correspondent. Funnily enough, she was recently revealed to have lied on her CV – I guess misinforming employers is ok (they are evil capitalists anyway) if you are doing it for the “Greater Good”.

Event @ Goodman Center:

Thursday Oct. 3, 5-8pm, Ironworks
Movie night, discussion and resource share with pizza, ice cream and activities for kids 3+.

In 1997, Wisconsin ranked 3rd in the US for literacy, and only 13 years later, we dropped to 30th, with proficiency for our Black youth ranking last. Today, the gap between white and Black students in Wisconsin is four grades wide — larger than any other state. Our students across race, age and income-levels are struggling learning to read.

What can we do to change this story?

We start by coming together as a community.

——

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The University of Wisconsin System is no longer reporting enrollment by campus, making it more difficult for the public to know where their local branch campus stands financially.

Six of the 13 branch campuses have closed or will by the end of this school year, with declining enrollment cited as the primary justification for closure.

Jay P. Greene & Frederick M. Hess

We estimate that public colleges and universities spend nearly $200 million a year subsidizing faculty dues and paying conference registration fees to politicized associations. While faculty certainly have a right to participate in such organizations, they have no right to do so with public funds.

——-

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

The State of Florida is conducting its own investigation into the second attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. It is not in the best interests of our state and nation to have the same federal agencies seeking to prosecute Trump leading this investigation.

As… pic.twitter.com/l61XCoe0ls

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) September 17, 2024

Civics: Lawfare at Its Most Dishonest (Wisconsin Attorney General)

The Florida Governor also mentioned the use of open records vis a vis a state vs federal investigation…

more.

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats are pushing election-year lawfare in the states, and a case in Wisconsin is being exposed for its unfairness. Documents unsealed Thursday show that Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul is prosecuting Republicans for actions his Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Election Commission knew about and didn’t object to.

But Mr. Kaul’s office didn’t think this was criminal behavior in 2020. On Dec. 13, 2020, Assistant Attorney General Steven Kilpatrick, a Kaul deputy, emailed Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) officials Meagan Wolfe and James Witecha, sharing documents from the Trump campaign. Mr. Kilpatrick noted that in one document “there is statement that the Trump electors are going to meet and vote on Monday, Dec. 14, in the event the Supreme court case comes out in their favor after Dec. 14 — to ensure that there is a slate of elector [sic] for Trump on Jan. 6.”

Ms. Wolfe forwarded those documents to her fellow commissioners without comment, and the WEC and state Department of Justice have since acknowledged that the lawyers’ action was acceptable under state law. In a Feb. 9, 2022, memo to the WEC, the state DOJ notes that while complainants say the Dec. 14 meeting was an “unlawful” plot to undermine the election, it wasn’t illegal.

“Based upon the text of the relevant statutes, and in light of the facts, historical precedent, and related federal authorities,” the DOJ wrote, “this memorandum concludes that the Complaint does not raise a reasonable suspicion that Respondents violated Wisconsin election law.” But suddenly in 2024, when Democrats are running to “protect democracy,” AG Kaul files charges.

In July, Mr. Troupis’s lawyers filed a motion to quash a subpoena against him, and the AG asked the court to keep the motion under seal. No wonder: The motion, now unsealed, lays out historical precedent for creating an alternate slate of electors in case they are needed.

In the past, the motion notes, states have handled competing slates of electors while election results were under a legal challenge, as the Wisconsin defendants were trying to do. In 1960 Richard Nixon initially won Hawaii by 141 votes. There was a legal challenge and while the recount was under way, the motion explains, “both the Democrats and the Republicans had their respective (alternate) slates of electors meet and cast their ballots.”

The Republican slate was initially certified and sent to Congress but the judge in charge of the recount ultimately decided more votes had been cast for John F. Kennedy and the Democratic slate was sent to Congress. Vice President Nixon opened the envelopes in front of Congress and directed that Hawaii’s electoral votes for Kennedy be counted.

Kayla Huynh:

Under the agreement, employees will also get an additional 2.06% increase to their base wages if voters in November approve the Madison Metropolitan School District’s $100 million operating referendum.

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Abbey Machtig

Last school year, the food and nutrition department used $1.5 million from the district’s general education fund to cover expenses. Another $2.9 million is set to be transferred this school year. 

“Those are dollars that we now don’t get to dream with in many ways,” School Board President Nichelle Nichols said Monday night.

—-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Nusaiba Mizan:

“And then the notion that, well, you have to be a certified teacher to be effective,” Miles said. “Yes, more likely than not you will be more effective than a teacher without a certification. Yes, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean in effect where non-certified teachers will be ineffective. We came in. We changed that concept.”

It is unclear at this time what subjects and grade levels uncertified teachers are covering. Waivers to hire uncertified teachers cannot be applied to special education, bilingual education, English as a Second Language or pre-kindergarten teaching roles, according to the Texas Education Agency. ABC 13 reported that uncertified teachers were hired into prohibited positions, including special education roles, last academic year.

Matthew Ladner:

Fortunately research has repeatedly demonstrated that certification has nothing to do with student learning gains.

—-

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

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

Jackie Longo and Christopher Maynard

In the fall of 2022, more than 49 million studentswere enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools across the U.S. About 32% ended the last academic year performing below their current grade level in at least one subject. Unfortunately, many of these kids were afforded different levels of assistance to help bridge the gap. For instance, 13% of public schools didn’t provide academic tutoring, while only a little over half offered after-school instruction.

Liz Cohen, Georgetown University’s FutureEd policy director, told ConsumerAffairs that parents should consider many factors when deciding what school will best fit their child, as there can be significant differences among schools — even within the same state.

“Look at the school culture. How does the school feel? Is my child going to feel like they belong in that community?” Cohen said. “There are bright spots and wonderful schools in every state in this country,” she added.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont told ConsumerAffairs he knows how vital schools are to a state’s overall success. “The success of our state is highly dependent upon the success of our schools,” he said. “Our administration remains committed to strengthening all the schools in our state so that every child — no matter their neighborhood or family income level — has the opportunity to receive an education that prepares them for achievement.”

Adopt Gupta:

One of the features of exclusionary zoning which really surprised me are the associations with educational outcomes: test scores are better in areas with exclusionary zoning, spending per pupil is a lot higher, as are Chetty opportunity measures — these are good places for social mobility.

I think one way to rationalize this set of regulations is the decentralized nature of school funding and administration. In many developed countries around the world, there don’t seem to be massive differences in the funding or curriculum of public schools. As a result, you don’t often hear of people in, say, Italy or France moving to specific neighborhoods to access local schools. School quality is, at least compared to the US, relatively homogenous, at least at the within-city level (there do seem to be large regional variations in some of these countries). 

As a result, with less scope for educational sorting, you typically see rich people live in the center of the city. And some of these people in the city center, in places like Madrid or Buenos Aires, vote for the right wing party. This basically never happens in the US, where the rich have decamped in many cities, and city centers are invariably left-wing strongholds.

So what explains this differential sorting of people and partisanship across countries?

We can’t prove it in our data conclusively, but I think a very plausible hypothesis is that tying school quality to local conditions generates incentives for rich people to decamp for suburban areas, exclude the poor through high bulk regulatory barriers, and thereby produce enclaves of high quality educational.

Quinton Klabon

Here are four concrete things we can do to change children’s lives by this time next year

“Progress is incremental. It is something that we all have to show up for, because…if we don’t care about our kids and our public schools, then we are destined to fail.,” said Milwaukee Public School Board Vice President Jilly Gokalgandhi at the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.

She was right.

With the start of a new school year for 66,000 students, Milwaukee’s civic, business, and cultural leaders have an opportunity to consider how they have supported MPS since its financial strife in May and how the city can show up going forward. Here are four ways they could change children’s lives by this time next year:

Amit N Sawant,  Mats J Stensrud

Birth rates in Canada and the USA declined sharply in March 2020 and deviated from historical trends. This decline was absent in similarly developed European countries. We argue that the selective decline was driven by incoming individuals, who would have travelled from abroad and given birth in Canada and the USA, had there been no travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, by leveraging data from periods before and during the COVID-19 travel restrictions, we quantified the extent of births by incoming individuals. In an interrupted time series analysis, the expected number of such births in Canada was 970 per month (95% CI: 710-1,200), which is 3.2% of all births in the country. The corresponding estimate for the USA was 6,700 per month (95% CI: 3,400-10,000), which is 2.2% of all births. A secondary difference-in-differences analysis gave similar estimates at 2.8% and 3.4% for Canada and the USA, respectively. Our study reveals the extent of births by recent international arrivals, which hitherto has been unknown and infeasible to study.

Danielle DuClos:

Urban Triage also provides the county’s housing navigation services, which aim to help residents find housing and fill out rental applications. The nonprofit’s contract with the county for housing navigation and other services is $456,000, according to county records.

Last year’s nonprofit tax filings show Urban Triage had 24 employees and $2.8 million in net assets. Grayson received $292,000 in reportable compensation from the nonprofit, the documents show.

The Salvation Army of Dane County offers rental assistance and rehousing support for homeless residents through some of its programs and was awarded part of the county contract. Its housing program is restricted to families and women.

Ted Goia:

Not long ago, 12 million families in the US subscribed to National Geographic, and many held on to every issue. Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches.

Anna Hansen

Middleton High School’s former head football coach has filed a lawsuit against the Middleton-Cross Plains School District over his resignation last year.

Jason Pertzborn, who resigned from coaching and teaching at the district in 2023 amid a hazing investigation involving the football team, filed the lawsuit Monday, alleging that the district “lied to, threatened and intimidated” him to pressure him into signing a resignation agreement.

The Middleton Police Department launched an investigation into the Middleton High School football team in early January of last year. A 22-page incident report provided to the Wisconsin State Journal through an open records request indicated that football players allegedly urinated on a fellow teammate, tried to grab his genitals in the shower, urged him to “kill himself” and engaged in additional hazing and bullying so severe one student worried the bullied player might harm himself or others.

Wall Street Journal:

The story’s theme is that in three cases last term the Chief steered the Court to help Donald Trump: “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak.” It is slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times, minimizing the constitutional arguments in the cases and highlighting the political benefit to Mr. Trump. The piece spins the cases from the legal and political view of critics, notably Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the member of the Court who has been most nonplussed in public about her status as a losing Justice in many constitutional decisions.

Most striking, and damaging to the comity at the Court, are leaks about the internal discussions among the Justices. The story describes a memo from the Chief to fellow Justices in February 2022 recommending that the Justices accept the appeal over presidential immunity, as well as follow-up notes from Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Also leaked is an account of the private conversation among the Justices after an oral argument. This is a betrayal of confidence that will affect how the Justices do their work. It’s arguably worse than the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs, the 2022 abortion case. That leaker still hasn’t been identified, but it was probably a clerk or functionary at the Court. This leak bears the possible fingerprints of one or more of the Justices.

Kayla Huynh

The total increase would be 4.12% — the maximum base wage increase allowed by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. The limit is based on inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index.

The increase would require approval from Madison School Board members. Jones said the union hopes that step will happen soon. He said union members voted to support the proposal in August.

“Given the lack of sufficient funding from the state and the expiration of federal funds related to the pandemic, we need our community to support the referendum to retain highly qualified educators and support professionals,” Jones said. “Otherwise, we anticipate higher vacancies in future years when educators leave for more stable district situations.”

Last school year, 255 employees resigned from the district by May, according to figures presented to the School Board by Jennifer Trendel, the district’s executive director of human resources. That number is a 64% decrease from 711 resignations during the 2022-23 school year.

Asked to verify the base wage proposal between the union and district leaders, Folger said the district had no information that it was able to share at this time.

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Erin McCormick

It’s part of a tragic pattern playing out across the country. An average of 22 high school-aged teens died of overdoses each week in the United States in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to a 2024 study by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard. The same study found that the overdose rate among high school-aged kidsdoubled between 2019 and 2022, the most recent year for which data was available – even though surveys show far fewer teens are using drugs than in previous decades.

Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig and David Dunning:

Recognizing one’s ignorance is a fundamental skill. We ask whether superior background knowledge or expertise improves the ability to distinguish what one knows from what one does not know, i.e., whether expertise leads to superior meta-knowledge. Supporting this hypothesis, we find that the more a person knows about a topic, the less likely they are to “overclaim” knowledge of nonexistent terms in that topic. Moreover, such expertise protects against overclaiming especially when people are most prone to overclaim – when they view themselves subjectively as experts. We find support for these conclusions in an internal meta-analysis (17 studies), in comparisons of experts and novices in medicine and developmental psychology, and in an experiment manipulating expertise. Finally, we find that more knowledgeable people make knowledge judgments more automatically, which is related to less false familiarity and more accurate recognition. In contrast, their less knowledgeable peers are more likely to deliberate about their knowledge judgments, potentially thinking their way into false familiarity. Whereas feeling like an expert predisposes one to overclaim impossible knowledge, true expertise provides a modest protection against doing so.

Debbie Kuether:

MPS interim superintendent bumps salaries of 6 figure admins once again. I don’t think this was mentioned in the referendum…

Josh Blackman:

Randy Barnett and I have written a new essay, titled Coping With a Court One Disagrees With. This essay was inspired, in part, by a recent New York Times article that identified a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law. In our view, there is no crisis. But we can relate with professors who are having difficulty teaching decisions they disagree with. We’ve done it for the entirety of our careers. We suggests that our method of teaching may be useful for liberal and progressive professors who are having trouble coping with the current court.

Here is the abstract:

Is there a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law? In our view, there is not. Still, we can empathize. As libertarian-conservative-ish law professors, for years we taught Supreme Court decisions that we disagreed with. We teach constitutional law as a historical narrative that began at the founding and continues to this day. The narrative approach underscores the contingent nature of what at any given time appears to be fixed and unchangeable. The narrative also remains remarkably stable from year to year even as new cases are added. This approach also makes preparing one’s syllabus relatively easy to do each year, regardless of what the Supreme Court may have decided in its most recent term.

The pedagogy we developed was premised on a Supreme Court jurisprudence we largely disagreed with. Indeed, we still disagree with much of this jurisprudence, especially the cases that were decided right before, during, and after Reconstruction. While some of these cases, like Prigg, Dred Scott, and Plessy are now in the anti-canon, others like Slaughter-House, Cruikshank, and the Civil Rights Cases remain good law. This pedagogy worked before 2016 and it will continue to work no matter what happens in the future. We submit that the time is ripe for liberal and progressive professors, especially those who are having trouble coping with the current Supreme Court, to consider adopting our narrative approach to the constitutional canon and anticanon.

Nancy Moews:

Many understand Wisconsin’s eventual inability to adequately support two school systems(public and private voucher schools).

I would not oppose vouchers to non-religious private schools that would be required, like public schools, to accept all applicants and to provide for special needs students. Also, required reading and math scores should be made public at the end of each school year, no exceptions.

I’m opposed to our tax dollars going to schools that teach that only Christians or any other denomination adherents are “saved.”

Meanwhile:

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”

A recent Henry Tyson talk.

Kulak:

What changed was the rise of the professional academic avante garde and their almost immediate capture by the ethnic, sexual-socio, and class enemies of the productive classes.

Every western ethnicity has had non-aristocratic class that has always produced objects almost the exact same as the ones now derided as kitsch, indeed these traditions have been core to the folklore, mythology, ethnic identity and sense of place of western peoples… It hard to name a part of old europe that did NOT have tales and regional arts depicting some diminutive forest people, anthropomorphic animals, or sexual joke. And it’s even harder to think of ones that did not produce intense amounts of idealized folklore, and almost parodically over the top depictions of their folklore.

Just as Americans now make art of bigfoot or other cryptids, Europeans for thousands of years produced sculptures and art of their monsters.

It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate. 

Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”

Anand Sanwal:

The results were predictable, if you knew where to look. In 2003, total student loan debt was around $250 billion. Today? It’s over $1.7 trillion. 

That’s not growth; that’s an explosion.

But here’s the real kicker: this debt isn’t just a personal burden. It’s propping up a deeply flawed system.

The results are insidious:

1. Millions of Americans graduate from college overloaded with debt and underprepared for the job market.
2. The institutions that create these outcomes are not held to account because market forces are not at play.
3. Colleges have no incentive to control costs or improve outcomes, as they get paid regardless.
4. Lenders keep issuing loans without regard for the borrower’s ability to repay, knowing the debt can’t be discharged.

In essence, the non-dischargeability of student loans has created a perfect storm of misaligned incentives. It’s a system that rewards failure and punishes success.

Consider these facts:

Anna Hansen:

Madison police have launched an investigation into the Goodman Community Center’s finances after an internal records review prompted by the discovery of “financial inconsistencies and impropriety,” according to a statement from spokesperson Florence Edwards-Miller.

In addition to cooperating with the police, the East Side center has retained a forensic accounting firm and made internal changes to promote financial security and integrity, Edwards-Miller wrote. 

“As an organization that prides itself on offering a helping hand to so many in our community, we find ourselves hurt by this difficult situation,” she wrote. “We are confident that the process we have in place will allow us to address this challenge and we humbly ask for your understanding, patience and continued support.”

Edwards-Miller declined to release any further information amid the ongoing investigation. Madison police spokesperson Korrie Rondorf confirmed the investigation but remained similarly tight-lipped on any additional details.

Sean Stevens:

This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June. 

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

This Year’s College Free Speech Rankings

FIRE launched the College Free Speech Rankings in 2020, surveying almost 20,000 students at 55 colleges and universities. Every year since, we have increased the number of students and schools surveyed. This year, almost 59,000 students were surveyed at over 250 campuses — once again the largest survey of student opinion about free speech in higher education ever conducted. 

The survey responses are broken down into seven components which form the bulk of a school’s score. Schools can gain or lose points based on the outcomes of speech controversies including attempts to deplatform speakers, attempts to cancel professors, and calls to sanction students for their protected expression. The scores are then standardized, so schools are only being measured against what other schools have actually achieved — as opposed to some arbitrary standard any of us might devise. This could also mean that even the best performing schools may not be bastions of free speech, just that they are simply better than everyone else. Finally, schools were given bonuses or penalties based on their campus policies, with good policies adding a standard deviation, ambiguous policies losing half of one, and policies that clearly restrain speech losing one. 

Steve Ballmer

Abbey Machtig:

After months of negotiations, the Madison School District has tentatively agreed to a 2.06% pay increase for teachers and staff, with an additional 2.06% tacked on if a $100 million operating referendum passes in November. 

The initial increase would be more than the wage freeze originally proposed by district officials in March, but it’s only half of the 4.12% wage increase Madison Teachers Inc. requested, MTI President Mike Jones said. 

The district is asking voters to approve two referendums on the Nov. 5 ballot: A $507 million capital referendum to fund new and updated schools and a $100 million referendum to pay for the costs of operating the school district, including wages.

——

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Via John Robb:

“I just keep thinking about all of the videos and first hand accounts of what’s really happening that will never ever make it to the legacy media or the nightly news where so much of the older population still gets their “news” and has their worldviews shaped”

Jeffrey Brainard:

When University of Seville researcher Maria Ángeles Oviedo‑García began to look at the peer reviews some journals publish alongside their papers, she was surprised to see the same vague, generic phrases kept turning up.

“In abstract, the author should add more scientific findings.” “Discuss the novelty and clear application of the work in the abstract as well as in introduction section.”

She ultimately identified 263 suspicious reviews prepared for 37 journals in multiple disciplines between 2021 and this year. One reviewer used duplicated phrases in 56 reviews, she reported last month in Scientometrics.

By Daniel T. Willingham

Question: Memory is mysterious. You may lose a memory created 15 seconds earlier, such as when you find yourself standing in your kitchen trying to remember what you came there to fetch. Other seemingly trivial memories (for example, advertisements) may last a lifetime. What makes something stick in memory, and what is likely to slip away?
Answer: We can’t store everything we experience in memory. Too much happens. So what should the memory system tuck away? How can the memory system know what you’ll need to remember later? Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.

A teacher once told me that for a fourth-grade unit on the Underground Railroad he had his students bake biscuits, because this was a staple food for enslaved people seeking escape. He asked what I thought about the assignment. I pointed out that his students probably thought for 40 seconds about the relationship of biscuits to the Underground Railroad, and for 40 minutes about measuring flour, mixing shortening, and so on. Whatever students think about is what they will remember.

The cognitive principle that guides this article is memory is the residue of thought. To teach well, consider what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.

Julie Jargon:

Parents worried about how much time students spend on iPads and laptops during school are trying to opt their kids out of classroom tech. They’re finding it isn’t easy.

Cellphone bans are taking effect in big districts across the country, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The next logical question, at least for some, is: What about the other screens? These concerned parents argue that the Covid-era shift that put Chromebooks and tablets in more students’ hands is fueling distraction more than learning.

Teachers and school systems point to the ease of online instruction and say switching for just one student puts a burden on teachers. Tech is woven so deeply into lesson plans and assessments that students using only pencil and paper would be at a disadvantage, they add.

Andrea Boyd of West Des Moines, Iowa, has spent a couple of years pushing for less school technology for her two children. When her son Colin’s school issued him an iPad in the sixth grade, he couldn’t put it down. Other students nicknamed him the “iPad kid.”

Dean Gorrell:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly recently took to defending her decision to lower the cut scores for the Wisconsin Forward Exam.

Lowering the cut scores will make it appear that a greater percentage of students are performing at higher levels. Underly offered this reason for the change: “They (the students) were appearing to be doing worse than they really were. And so, this will give us a better measure of where kids are.”

One can only imagine the psychometric gymnastics the data analysts at DPI went through to advise her on that soundbite. We’re used to gaslighting, spin, hyperbole and falsehoods from politicians, but with that statement, Superintendent Underly may have just set the new benchmark for nonsensical claims made by a politician.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the new cut scores are installed after the old cut scores were in place long enough, since 2012, to potentially yield valuable data and draw causal relationships between instruction, resource allocation and outcomes. So much for using assessments to help inform instruction, guide curricular programming and budgeting.

Lowering achievement standards does not serve the children, teachers or school districts of Wisconsin well in the short or long term.

Dean Gorrell, Verona

——

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Jessica Winter:

Such behavior—at once self-indulgent and masochistic, and as common as it is ostensibly irrational—“is basically a nonadaptive coping mechanism for the pressure and the stress that you are experiencing,” Jan Dirk Capelle, a psychologist who studies motivation, told me recently. These patterns may seem timeless, but in recent years many higher-learning institutions in the United States have felt the need to intervene. Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, in the spring of 2020, educators have seen a significant decline in virtually every metric of student performance: attendance, class participation, completed coursework, test scores. According to survey data collected during the 2022-23 school year by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, at Penn State, students’ self-reported levels of generalized anxiety, along with anxiety related directly to academics, family, and social life, still had not returned to pre-pandemic rates—and, in fact, social anxiety had continued to rise slightly. Students’ use of psychotropic medications was at its highest rate since the center began collecting such data, more than a decade ago. (Anyone with proximity to academia can find reams of anecdotal support for this bleak picture.)

The responses from colleges and universities to these worrying trends have run the gamut, from enhancing mental-health services on campus to incorporating more hands-on and student-directed learning. But there’s one lever that educators have pulled again and again: the deadline. Schools began hitting pause on strict due dates not long after the pandemic forced classes to move online. In 2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that faculty members from a range of colleges and universities had embraced more “fluid” and “flexible” policies on granting extensions on papers or arranging makeup exams. A writing professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, went so far as to let his students set their own deadlines. This softened stance reached younger students, too: in some public-school districts—including those in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Shaker Heights, Ohio—teachers were instructed not to dock the grades of students who turned in work late.

Carolyn Gorman:

School-based mental health initiatives have expanded over the past half-century. In recent years, troubling increases in the prevalence of school violence and youth emotional distress have prompted a sense of urgency among policymakers, leading to the bipartisan action of committing billions of dollars annually in federal funding to bolster these programs.

But school-based mental health initiatives face fundamental challenges that warrant more thoughtful attention: mental health interventions for youth are not a panacea and warrant judicious utilization; the goals of the education and mental health systems are often in conflict; and vague policy, guidance, and expected outcomes undermine accountability and confuse responsibilities within and across systems.

Policymakers and education authorities should be clear-eyed about these challenges and the unintended consequences of administering mental health services through the education system. A decades-long track record of inconsistent marginal benefit, poor implementation, and some evidence of harm tempers confidence that effective, comprehensive school-based mental health services are attainable or desirable.

Steve McGuire:

“It is not the role of the institution to render opinions—doing so risks suppressing the creativity and academic freedom of our faculty and students. Even as they seem to provide emotional support to individuals in our communities, institutional pronouncements undermine the diversity of thought that strengthens us and that is central to our missions.”

“Going forward, the University of Pennsylvania will refrain from institutional statements made in response to local and world events except for those which have direct and significant bearing on University functions. The University will issue messages on local or world events rarely, and only when those events lie within our operational remit.”

Wall Street Journal:

Should parents be held criminally liable if a child goes on a shooting spree with a gun from the home? That question is now in sharp public relief with the indictments this week after 14-year-old Colt Gray murdered two students and two adults at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga.

The U.S. has been mired for decades in a partisan gun debate that has stymied practical answers for school shootings. The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, and gun control has become a political and practical dead end.

But Americans are understandably frustrated, angry and searching for other ways to prevent mass murder, especially against children in schools. Holding parents criminally responsible for abuses by their children may make sense when the facts of a case demonstrate negligence or aiding or abetting the child’s commission of a crime.

Georgia authorities clearly feel they have enough facts to warrant a charge against Colin Gray. Colt and his father were interviewed by police in 2023 after the FBI received anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting” on the social-media platform Discord.

Jerry Ponio:

Seriously, what does @DrJillUnderly do all day?

Her administration at @WisconsinDPI allowed @MilwaukeeMPS to jeopardize school aid to every district in Wisconsin.

And now this…..

(@GovEvers, anytime you want to intervene the kids in MKE would benefit)

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) announced its newest addition to the education policy team. Daniel Buck is a senior visiting fellow at WILL, where he will write and advise on projects related to K-12 education policy. Daniel will play a key role in WILL’s Restoring American Education initiative.  

The Quotes: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “We’re excited to have Daniel join our expanding education policy team. His real-world expertise and insight are invaluable as we continue to address what’s lacking in American education and advance our efforts to restore it.” 

Daniel Buck remarked, “WILL continues to bring forward policies and ideas to reform education in Wisconsin and across the country. It’s an honor to join this team and work alongside these dedicated professionals. 

Alex Thompson and Sara Fischer

White House News Photographers Association president said Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team has engaged in an “unprecedented reduction in access” to the news media, according to an Aug. 28 letter from the association (WHNPA) to the Harris team obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: It adds to a growing frustration among the press corps about limiting access to leaders at the top of the Democratic Party.

• That includes Harris, who has yet to do a solo TV interview and has avoided unscripted moments since she entered the race on July 21.

Driving the news: Jessica Koscielniak, president of the WHNPA, wrote to Harris’ top aides last month protesting that “the four independent news photographer seats have been downgraded to one.”

Internet Archive

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Security week;

The ‘Serve for America’ initiative, announced by National Cyber Director Harry Coker, removes the four-year degree requirement in federal IT contracts and will push agencies to hire based on experience, certifications, and aptitude tests. 

“Our nation has a critical need for cyber talent. Today, there are approximately 500,000 – half a million! – open cyber jobs in the United States and that number is only going to grow as more services and products go online with the expansion of technologies like artificial intelligence,” Coker said in a note announcing the initiative.

“We are working to remove unnecessary degree requirements, moving toward a skills-based approach that emphasizes candidates’ ability to perform a job, rather than where they acquired their skills,” he added.

CRA:

The Center for Renewing America (“CRA”),1 a recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity, hereby respectfully requests that the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) immediately investigate Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan for unlawful personal income tax deduction(s) tracing to non-exempt Section 501(c)(3) activity.

Christina Buttons and Christopher F. Rufo

This was only the beginning. As the Venezuelan migrants settled in the apartments, they caused lots of trouble. According to a confidential legal report we have obtained, based on witness reports, the apartments saw a string of crimes, including trespassing, assault, extortion, drug use, illegal firearm possession, human trafficking, and sexual abuse of minors. Each of the three apartment complexes has since shown a localized spike in crime.

Volunteers who spoke with us on condition of anonymity said they were initially eager to assist with migrant resettlement but grew disillusioned with the NGOs running it. “I am passionate about helping migrants and I have been honestly shocked at the way the city is sending funds to an organization that clearly is not equipped to handle it,” one volunteer said.

The City of Denver, for its part, appears to be charging ahead. It recently voted to provide additional funding for migrant programs and, according to the right-leaning Common Sense Institute, the total cost to Denver could be up to $340 million, factoring in new burdens on schools and the health-care system. And the city also appears to have no qualms about exporting the crisis to the surrounding suburbs, including Aurora, which, in 2017, had declared itself a non-sanctuary city.

The truth is that there is no sanctuary for a city, a county, or a country that welcomes—and, in fact, attracts—violent gang members from Venezuela. This is cruelty, not compassion. Unfortunately, it might take more than the seizure of an apartment building, a dramatic rise in crime, and a grisly murder for cities like Denver to change course.

———

More.

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.

Danielle DuClos and Kayla Huynh:

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.

—–

Quinton Klabon:

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!

—–

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

——

More.

——

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

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.

More.

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.

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.

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.

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.

——

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

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.

Tom Corrigan & Kevin McAllister:

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.