Wall Street Journal:

Massachusetts students are currently required to take an assessment during their sophomore year and meet thresholds for proficiency in math, English and science. Students who meet the minimum requirement are cleared for graduation. Those who don’t are assigned extra help and an “educational proficiency” plan to make sure they catch up by senior year.

The point is to make sure students don’t fall through the cracks, and it works. Massachusetts ranks at the top in student achievement among states. In 2022 the state tied for first for eighth grade student achievement in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Most states envy that performance, but the Massachusetts Teachers Association wants to end it. At a 2022 state Board of Education meeting, president Max Page explained the union’s thinking: “The focus on income, on college and career readiness speaks to a system tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.”

Wow. In their hostility to measuring student achievement, the union is now hostile to upward economic mobility. What’s the goal: Keep kids on the dole all their lives?

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test isn’t a barrier to success: Some 80% of black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged children still pass it on the first try. For those who don’t, the graduation requirement commits resources to helping close the achievement gap. Students are given five chances to pass the test. Of the roughly 70,000 students in each graduating class, some 700 don’t receive a diploma because of failure on the state test.

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah:

Harvard will not remove the Sackler name from one of three University art museums and another campus building, ending a yearslong campaign by student activists for Harvard to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.

A committee tasked with reviewing a request to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from the two buildings announced in a report on Wednesday that it did not recommend denaming. The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s recommendation last month.

Sackler’s family, which owned the company that became Purdue Pharma, has been considered by some activists to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin — a drug credited with fueling the opioid crisis.

Leo Lewis in Tokyo and Wang Xueqiao and Thomas Hale in Shanghai

In the US, which is by far the world’s largest pet market, there are more pets than children of any age. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there were 84mn-89mn dogs and 60mn-62mn cats in 2020. Government data shows there were 73mn children of all ages in the same year. Chinese pet ownership also came into focus under the country’s strict lockdowns between 2020 and 2022. A survey by UBS of 1,500 pet owners found 80 per cent maintained or increased pet-related spending “after the pandemic versus before the pandemic”.

Analysts at the Swiss bank said this was “evidence of the pet market’s strong resilience in the face of macro headwinds”. It attributed resilience during the pandemic to “the significant role that pets can play in households”.

—-1

Choose life.

Dr. Mindle

Before we examine the origin of the reverse diversity problem, let’s define a few terms:

• American Elites. The powerful, the rich, the establishment who control policies, corporations and institutions.
• American Majority. The majority of American population who are not or not yet elites. 
• Model minority. Asian Americans were characterized as a “model” minorityamid the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

It all started with Outsourcing which as a term originated no later than 1981 and it took four decades in the making:

1. American elites outsourced manufacturing to China.
2. American elites outsourced IT to India.
3. American majority value finance and management jobs over manufacturing, IT and STEM.
4. American model minorities occupy domestic IT and STEM positions.
5. All-model-minority teams emerge across IT and STEM industries. 

Matt Taibbi:

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes. 

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter. 

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

Abbey Machtig:

The two referendums total $607 million, making them the second-largest request of voters by a school district in state history. It comes in behind Racine’s $1 billion school referendum, which passed in 2020 by only five votes

Lucas Robinson and Gayle Worland

“Residents in Madison are likely looking at a higher cost of living across the board, whether you’re a renter or an owner,” said Adam Nelson, who noted two other Madison School District referendums that voters will decide in November. “If you’re in the middle or lower-income bracket, if you’re cost-burdened in housing, this could be a harder pill to swallow.”

The School District’s two referendums would add $1,370 to the property tax bill of the average home by 2028.

More.

——

Meanwhile:

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

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

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?

Marguerite Roza:

In our next 30-min webinar, we’ll cover:

The “Big Hire” in MA schools.

A typical high poverty school got > 11 new staff:
2.5 new teachers
2.5 new specialists
6 new aides

Is it working?

CTUP:

The Democrats are mighty nervous about Trump’s latest idea to stop the unfair taxation of Social Security benefits. Why? Because it turns out the policy is popular with voters over the age of 65.

Unleash Prosperity’s lead piece in Fox Business this weekend notes that seniors who continue to work after they’re eligible for Social Security face marginal tax rates that can easily rise above 50 to 60%. In other words, for every dollar they earn, the federal government takes away more than 50 cents.

John Goodman of the Goodman Institute finds the rates can be above 70%.

—-

Meanwhile, large tax & $pending referendums will be on the fall ballot:

Sequoyah Sudler:

Avila would only find out about this new language when she was nineteen years old. She was at home when she received a knock at the door from a man who she had never met before. Strangely, the man was American. He had a long, thin face, adorned with wiry metal glasses perched above a graying goatee. His name was James Shepard-Kegl, and he had helped establish a boarding school for deaf children in Bluefields, a city in southeastern Nicaragua. He had a proposition for Avila.

Shepard-Kegl offered Avila the chance to study at the boarding school, where Nicaraguan Sign Language was the standard language for all students and faculty. However, she would have to leave behind her family and the small town that she had known her entire life, only to be immersed in a language that was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The transition would be difficult, but Avila agreed. In 1999, she packed up her bags and boarded a plane to Bluefields.

It was a decision that would change her life forever.

Katha Pollitt:

KP: What is “left”? You criticize “progressives” for what you see as an excessive focus on victimhood and identity politics, in which people are lumped together according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on, with massive assumptions made about what they want and need. You want universalist values. But isn’t a major feature of today’s left that people are demanding the right to speak up for themselves about their own issues and problems?

SN: Traditionally, the left was concerned with universal justice, which included the right to speak up about each group’s own problems but was never confined to it. Thanks to a combination of ideologies that took hold at the end of the 20th century, including neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, we have come to normalize the idea that self-interest is the only thing that motivates us to action. That’s actually a right-wing philosophical assumption.

KP: You support universalism over what you call tribalism, but where does that leave women and minorities? Universal programs, such as national health insurance, are important and help everybody, but it takes a lot more to give disadvantaged people equal access to good care. Countries that have universal programs, like the United Kingdom, still have big problems with racism and sexism in medical care. Doesn’t universalism use white men as the (unconscious) norm?

Jacob Sullum:

In a “specification of charges” filed with the D.C. Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility last month, Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III alleges that Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, who is now a federal prosecutor in Utah but previously worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, violated six rules of professional conduct while trying to convict “DisruptJ20” protesters, including many who had not participated in vandalism or violence. Muyskens “knew that most defendants did not commit violent acts themselves,” Fox notes, but “she argued that these defendants were still liable for felony rioting and felony property destruction because they joined a criminal conspiracy to use the protest march to further the violence and destruction that occurred.”

To support that theory, Muyskens presented video of a DisruptJ20 planning meeting that had been clandestinely recorded by an “operative” from Project Veritas, a conservative group that frequently has been accused of using misleadingly edited videos to portray progressive and leftist organizations in a negative light. Although Muyskens “understood Project Veritas had a reputation for editing videos in a misleading way,” Fox says, she initially concealed the source of the video, saying in court that “who provided it is irrelevant.” And although Muyskens “knew that Project Veritas had omitted and edited some of its videos” before releasing them, Fox adds, she “did not request or obtain Project Veritas’s missing videos or unedited footage.”

Chris Rickert:

The first half of Rhodes-Conway’s signature initiative, a Bus Rapid Transit system, is also expected to launch this fall, and while the federal government is picking up from 75% to 80% of the costs to build it, that still leaves the city on the hook for at least $70 million. City officials say the borrowing needed to cover that amount will not be significant, and the system will not cost more to operate than the traditional bus system it replaces.

Madison’s population has grown by 13.3% over the last five years, the city’s Finance Department reports, and the consumer price index, also known as inflation, is up 23% in that time.

Voters are already sure to see two referendums from the Madison School District on the Nov. 5 ballot. They would raise annual property taxes $1,370 by 2028.

———

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

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

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?

Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today.

And that’s just the average. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran more than 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.

TJ Harker:

For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” were used to advance the Left’s racist social policies, first on the pretense that they remedied prior discrimination, next in alignment with the theory that diversity was good for the nation, and most recently to deal with the pretend phenomena known as “systemic racism” and “white privilege.”

More Americans are fighting back against the Left’s racist admissions policies, scholarship criteria, and related practices.Such racist, utopian scheming used to be called “affirmative action,” an innocuous term designed to conceal blatantly racist and unlawful discrimination. But despite the anodyne packaging, discrimination against whites and Asians violates the plain meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and amendments thereto) and the Fourteenth Amendment. It always has. Today, more Americans, including more white and Asian-American students, are fighting back against the Left’s racist university-admissions policies, scholarship eligibility criteria, and related practices.

These changes are happening around the nation, including in North Carolina’s leading institutions, with Duke walking back a race-based scholarship program on the heels of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling against the University of North Carolina and Harvard College in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions.

Micaiah Bilger:

A Penn State University trustee who ran on a fiscal responsibility platform says he has been denied access to financial records about its $5 billion endowment.

Now, after facing a “runaround” for years, Trustee Barry Fenchak said he is suing the university in an attempt to gain access to the documents.

“For raising issues, requesting information I am legally entitled to, and trying to engage my fellow trustees in honest deliberation I have been stripped of committee assignments, issued a Letter of Censure from the Executive Committee, and had my social privileges revoked,” Fenchak wrote Wednesday in his personal newsletter, shared with The College Fix.

April Rubin:

The class of 2023 had the worst ACT performance in more than three decades, according to newly released data from the nonprofit that administers the college admissions test.

Why it matters: The scores are the latest indication of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education, with academic performance and test scores declining at all levels. The 2023 cohort was in its first year of high school when the pandemic began.

By the numbers: The 2023 composite score, an average of the scores for the English, math, reading and science sections, was 19.5 out of 36.

Derek Thompson:

But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.

First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new analysis of Census databy Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

——

Meanwhile, Madison, amidst excess space, seeks additional taxpayer funds to replace schools with excess space, rather than address boundaries.

Justin;

If you depend on a massive base of learners, most of whom are unserious, that puts hard constraints on how you teach. You have to employ ineffective learning strategies that do not repel unserious students.

When I tell people I work in math edtech, it’s initially kind of embarrassing.

They think of edutainment videos or arithmetic games where dinosaurs dance in front of you for answering 2+2 correctly.

Now, I’m fortunate enough to work on a learning system that’s pretty hardcore. Every decision we make is based on the science of optimizing student learning. It’s like quantitative finance but instead of optimizing return in the stock market, we’re optimizing learning efficiency in students’ brains. We go all the way up from 4th grade to university-level math (like, serious math major math, well beyond calculus).

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The power of tuition promise programs like Ripon’s is in the simple message it sends.

Students may not understand the college’s posted sticker price of more than $50,000 isn’t what they will actually pay. The Ripon Commitment is aimed at cutting through the confusing financial aid system, which can be particularly challenging for low-income students who rely on multiple sources of aid.

Other Wisconsin colleges offer tuition promise programs

College Promise, a nonprofit that advocates making the first two or more years of college free, identified at least 19 other promise programs in Wisconsin.

Most state technical colleges offer programs, including Milwaukee Area Technical College. So do a few other private institutions, including Lakeland College and Carthage College.

Among public universities, UW-Madison covers tuition for students whose families earn $65,000 or less. The program launched in 2018 and is funded through a mix of private money and institutional resources, not taxpayer money.

Kelly Meyerhofer and Sophie Carson:

At UW-Madison, Mnookin made the call for police to break up the encampment May 1. She texted the dean of students just before 7 a.m. to make clear protesters could walk away instead of facing arrest. She would later say using law enforcement against the campus community is “the last thing” a chancellor ever wants to do.

UW-Madison’s action raised the temperature in Milwaukee. Some began to call out UWM for what they saw as inaction, including UWM donors Jodi and Karen Peck. The university’s Peck School of the Arts is named after their family.

“We believe that you are ‘passing the buck’, burying your head in the sand and not actively dealing with this serious issue,” they emailed Mone on May 1. “Your communications have been weak and an affront to the Jewish community.”

That same day, Joel Berkowitz, director of UWM’s Center for Jewish Studies, reached out to Mone and the UWM police chief, urging them to stand down.

“I’m finding it literally painful to see so many campuses getting this moment very wrong,” Berkowitz emailed. “I hope we can continue to get it right.”

Mone thanked Berkowitz for the encouragement, then asked him for help.

Madison Lammert :

If you ask Wisconsin families about their child care situation, you’re bound to hear some startling anecdotes.

Often, child care is one of the biggest expenses in a household’s budget, sometimes surpassing mortgage payments. In dual-income households, one parent may decide it’s more economical to quit their job than pay for care each month.

Chances are by now you’ve also seen headlines about child care costing more than college.

How much does child care cost in Wisconsin, and how do costs fluctuate from county to county? The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families’ newly-released market-rate survey, which examines the cost of licensed full-time care for different age groups in most counties, shines light on these questions.

How much does child care cost in Wisconsin?

Child care prices fluctuate depending on a child’s age, the type of care they receive and where the child care is located.

Madison Lammert:

Child care prices in Wisconsin are increasing, yet they are often less than what it costs to provide care for children. At the same time, teachers are making less than what’s recommended.

These are all findings from Wisconsin’s latest Child Care Market Survey Results, which the state Department of Children and Families released Wednesday. The report, which is required to receive federal funding for the state’s child care subsidy program, draws on multiple data points from 2023 to better understand the state’s child care landscape.

Here are some key insights:

DCF’s Market Rate Survey breaks down care costs by location, type of care and children’s ages. The department surveys two types of child care providers: licensed family child care providers, who typically run their child care businesses out of their homes and can care for up to 8 children, and licensed group, or center-based, providers. These centers can care for more children than family providers.

Ben Landau-Taylor:

That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer review” processes of Nature and six other academic journals undetected, before eventually being uncovered by unrelated channels.

Schrag’s investigation that uncovered the fraudulent papers began as a tangent from his work uncovering doctored images used in studies supporting simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease. The suspicion would prove vindicated when in June 2024 Hoau-Yan Wang, a paid adviser to simufilam’s developer, was indicted by a federal grand juryfor fabricating data and images in simufilam studies for which he obtained $16 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, following a 2021 petition to the Food and Drug Administration, a method of reporting research fraud which is highly unusual if not unique.

Follow-up to evidence of Lesné’s fraud was slow. Schrag’s discovery kicked off two years of wrangling, eventually leading all of Lesné’s coauthors—but not Lesné himself—to agree to retract the 2006 Nature paper. As Sciencereported in 2022, “The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled ‘amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s’ has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and [his coauthor] Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.”

Scientists must now untangle the strands of fraud woven through decades of arguments stretching across a billion dollars worth of research. The paper’s contribution to the allocation of this billion dollars might also be a reason why such a widely-cited paper, presumably read by thousands of experts where some must have spotted the fraud, wasn’t reported earlier. Whether the amyloid hypothesis survives or not, this fraud has likely delayed the arrival of life-saving medication for tens of millions of people, perhaps by many years. If so, it is a humanitarian disaster larger than most wars.

No Consequences for Fraud 

Lee Smith:

But without a primary, without a popular referendum, without even the open convention that Obama was rumored to favor, how did the people make their will known, and strongly? Was it social media influencers? Mass rallies across the country? Media chronicling the excitement surrounding a Harris candidacy? No, it was nothing like that. Obama is the people. The people are Obama.

The endorsement was more than five years in the making. Obama had long wanted her in that spot. Their families are old friends. Like him, Harris is progressive, multiracial, physically attractive, nominally hip, a child of academics—in other words, according to Obama-friendly media, she’s a “female Barack Obama.” He directed donors to support her 2020 presidential campaign, Capitol Hill sources told me at the time. More billionaires, 47, backed her campaign than any other candidate’s—with Obama strongholds in Hollywood (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and Big Tech (Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Craig Newmark, etc.) leading the way.

Obama got her the vice presidential nod even when she was forced to drop out of the primary race after hitting just 3 percent in the polls. Jill Biden objected—Harris had called her husband a racist! The First Lady’s reported recent tantrums show that even after four years, she never fully grasped the arrangement the party had made with her husband. Biden was just an imperfect placeholder for Obama, and it was only a matter of time before the superior avatar would be slotted in.

The question is when, exactly, did it become clear to Obama that it was time for Harris to finally replace Biden? Was it after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump? After the attempted assassination of Trump? No, it seems the countdown officially began Oct. 7. The Palestinians’ murderous assault on communities in southern Israel exposed Biden’s limited ability to represent the interests of the party he was tapped to temporarily preside over. It didn’t require an especially refined moral sensibility to be appalled and terrified by the carnivalesque depravity of Oct. 7—but to give Biden credit, he evidently was. And that was the signal his time was up.

He‘s no John Fetterman. Biden is not a particularly courageous friend of the Jewish state, nor does he appear to much value the strategic importance of an ally that lessens America’s burden in a region vital to U.S. interests. When it comes to Israel, the 81-year-old president is just a normal late-20th-century Democrat who likes the country well enough, recognizes Jews as an important albeit small voting bloc and a crucial source of campaign funds, and performs ritualistic contempt for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But last Wednesday’s pro-Hamas riots in Washington, D.C.—in which domestic left-wing extremists linked arms with Middle East terror supporters and other foreigners to burn the American flag, deface monuments, and brawl with police, all in the name of protesting Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress—was only the latest evidence that the crux of Biden’s Oct. 7 problem was not that Michigan and Minnesota’s voter rolls are swollen with advocates of Muslim and Arab terror. The issue was not a party constituency at all, but rather the party itself and its leader. Barack Obama fundamentally reshaped the party when he struck the 2015 deal legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Hamas’ sponsor, Iran. By legitimizing the apocalyptic foreign policy aims of the world power that embodies Jew hatred, Obama sidelined the Jews and other centrists and made the progressive, anti-Israel faction the party’s new center of gravity.

The media did yeoman’s work obscuring the details and purpose of the agreement, but the fact is, by putting Iran’s bomb under a protective American umbrella, Obama was arming an American adversary to make it his own ally. The Iran deal was the first clear sign that Obama was not a normal U.S. commander in chief. When Biden extended even half-hearted, halting support to Israel’s response to Oct. 7, he crossed the only real red line Obama has ever had. Harris—who, unlike Biden, has no foreign policy beliefs or instincts of her own—never will.

Kyle Peterson:

How did it come to this? “That is the question of the book, and I don’t have a complete answer for you,” Justice Gorsuch says. But it involves a shift “both up and across in our separation of powers.” By “up” he means a movement of responsibilities from states and localities to Washington. By “across” he means a flow of authority from Congress to the D.C. agency apparatus.

Take the latter problem first, since it might be more tractable, as well as easier to follow through history, leading to Woodrow Wilson. “Part of the intellectual patrimony of our current predicament really traces, I think, back to Wilson,” Justice Gorsuch says. “He thought that the tripartite system of government was antiquated.” Wilson signed a bill in 1914 that created the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency whose members can’t be replaced at will—meaning controlled—by the president.

“The FTC was supposed to be experts,” Justice Gorsuch says. Instead, “it’s either aspiring or former politicians who often get those jobs.” President Calvin Coolidge named former Rep. William Humphrey to the FTC in 1925, and Herbert Hoover gave him another term in 1931. Two years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to fire him. Justice Gorsuch channels FDR’s thinking: “He’s not one of my pols. If we’re going to have pols, I want mine.” The Supreme Court ruled against FDR’s view in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (1935), upholding independent federal agencies.

Yet much of Justice Gorsuch’s lament has a later vintage: “Some people think this story is a New Deal story,” but “the number of federal crimes has probably doubled in my lifetime.” (He was born in 1967.) “Today the federal government funds about a third of all state activities,” he says. “That’s new again, in my lifetime.” The book quotes then-Gov. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in 1995 about doing his first state budget: “I honestly wondered if I was actually elected governor or just branch manager of the state of Nebraska for the federal government.”

What has driven the change? “I’m no social scientist. I’m no psychologist. But I think it has something to do with trust,” Justice Gorsuch says. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how Americans solved problems in their communities. “We trusted one another, and we worked with one another, and we debated and we talked with one another,” the justice says. If people no longer trust their neighbors, much less folks across the town or the state, where do they turn?

Jeffrey Jones:

A review of the historical trends shows that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the U.S. population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. Americans who lack confidence in higher education today say their concerns lie in colleges pushing political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and being overly expensive.

A separate article in the Gallup-Lumina series will report that Americans are significantly more confident in two-year colleges than four-year colleges when evaluating the two types of institutions separately.

More.

University of Chicago

Chicago Quantum Exchange partner PsiQuantum joins Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park

Palo Alto-based startup PsiQuantum is coming to Chicago to build and operate quantum computers—bringing as many as 150 jobs in the next five years and anchoring a massive quantum campus to be built at the former U.S. Steel South Works plant on Chicago’s South Side, the company announced July 25.

PsiQuantum is aiming to build the first U.S.-based, utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer; it will construct a 300,000-square-foot Quantum Computer Operations Center on the long-empty industrial site near the mouth of the Calumet River. That campus, known as the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, will also include the multimillion-dollar Illinois-DARPA Quantum Proving Ground that was announced July 16.

PsiQuantum is a corporate partner of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a hub that connects leading universities, national labs, and industry partners to advance quantum technology and is based at the University of Chicago.

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Jordan Cernek, a former teacher in the Argyle School District, for violating Mr. Cernek’s Title VII rights, as well as his First Amendment right to Free Exercise of his religion under the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 18 of the Wisconsin Constitution.

Argyle School District required staff members to use the preferred names and pronouns of transgender students; however, after voicing his religious objection to this rule, Mr. Cernek’s contract was not renewed, effectively firing him from his job.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, said, “WILL is proud to fight for individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law. There is no room for religious discrimination in our communities. It’s critical that we defend those across the country seeking to exercise their religion freely in America.”

WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “Freedom of religion is a core liberty that our nation and our state was founded on. Winning this case is critical, not just for our client, but for everyday Americans across the country.” 

Roy H. Perlis, Katherine Ognyanova and Ata Uslu:

Findings  In every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443 455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the US, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024. Individuals with lower levels of trust were less likely to have been vaccinated or received boosters for COVID-19.

Meaning  This study suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a continuing decrease in trust in physicians and hospitals, which may necessitate strategies to rebuild that trust to achieve public health priorities.

Rand Paul:

KOSA only leads to silencing free speech

KOSA supporters will tell you that they have no desire to regulate content. But the requirement that platforms mitigate undefined harms belies the bill’s effect to regulate online content. Imposing a “duty of care” on online platforms to mitigate harms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: The silencing of constitutionally protected speech.

The bill empowers the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the duty of care requirement to prevent mental health disorders, yet KOSA does not explicitly define the term “mental health disorder.” Instead, it references the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders . . . or “the most current successor edition.” That mean the scope of the bill could change overnight without any action from America’s elected representatives.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

 “how are you criticise the EU/Federal government” and the promotion of cancellation against those who go against the established narrative on issues such as the speed/scope/direction of Net Zero, stand up for women’s rights against the trans ideology or who critique the current model of immigration/integration.

The cosmopolitan liberals are on a hiding to nothing with all of these issues. And why? Because they as a political wing represent the status quo, and what we are seeing now is the beginning of the end for the dominant post 1945 social democratic settlement. 2020-21 I would argue, with the twin pillars of massive state control through the excuse of COVID and the cultural dominance of the BLM/Woke movement,  was Western social democracy at its apex and the longer that model to hold the more it will corrode and wither into either a Robespierre-esque focus on equity, or else a degeneration into deep green anti growth nihilism, either of which will kill it as a force anyway. This is why Emmanuel Macron now seems out of his depth, why Trudeau keeps failing, and why the European Union continues to stagnate – they are the status quo establishment and they’ve run out of ideas.

So what then do I think will take its place. Well inevitably one wing of politics seeks to preserve the status quo and one wing seeks to overturn it and looking at the ideas floating around the populist/rightist/nationalist camp we can already see trends emerging. Now I will caveat that it will take a while for these to develop as intellectually there is no fertile “home” for this wing (being excluded from academia and more generally all sympathetic intellectual figures being shunned/condemned/cancelled but substack seems to be developing into a way “rightist” intellectuals can work and be paid to be intellectuals. And those intellectuals will not be drinking from a barren pool and when we look at the expected intellectual influencers it gets hard for classical liberals/libertarians to pretend they have no sympathy with this movement.

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Improving state capacity through slewing the deadwood of the bureaucratic state with a burn it down/drain the swamp mentality.

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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

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

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?

House judiciary

including boycotts of disfavored social
media platforms, podcasts, and news outlets.3 Accordingly, to inform the Committee’s oversight
and potential legislative remedies, we write to ask Adidas Group to preserve documents and
provide information.

Beginning as an initiative of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), GARM was
founded to “create a more sustainable and responsible digital environment that protects
consumers, the media industry, and society as a result.”4 Additionally, GARM claims to utilize its
cross-industry “uncommon collaboration” to “effectively reduce the availability and monetization of harmful content.”5 However, the Committee’s oversight has shown that GARM
has deviated far from its original intent, and has collectively used its immense market power to
demonetize voices and viewpoints the group disagrees with—even intervening in situations that
do not have a so-called “brand safety” concern.6 A copy of the Committee’s report detailing this
collusion is attached for your reference.

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More.

Corinne Hess:

One of Wisconsin’s private colleges will offer free tuition to in-state students whose families earn $75,000 or less. 

Ripon College in Fond du Lac County is the latest higher education institution in the state to make pricing more affordable for middle and lower income families. 

Wisconsin students whose families earn more than $75,000 can attend Ripon College for the same cost as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s tuition in 2025, $11,606.

Brendan Bartanen, Aliza N. Husain and Laura K. Rogers:

Despite increasing recognition of the importance of high-quality school leadership, we know remarkably little about principal skill development. Using administrative data from Tennessee, Oregon, and New York City, we estimate the returns to principal experience as measured by student outcomes, teacher hiring and retention patterns, and teacher and supervisor ratings of principals. The typical principal leads a school for only 3 to 5 years and leaves the principalship after 6 to 7 years. We find little evidence that school performance improves as principals gain experience, despite substantial improvement in supervisor ratings. Our results suggest that strategies intended to increase principal retention are unlikely to improve school outcomes absent more comprehensive efforts to strengthen the link between principal skill development and student and school outcomes.

Paul Thacker:

Leg Affairs Adrienne Hallett explains how NIH will not answer questions from Congress and then “run out the clock”

Francis Collins: “Sounds like a good plan.”

America First Legal:

We sued the Department of Education for failing to investigate a NJ school district for forcing children as young as 8 to take DEI surveys without parental consent.

Following our lawsuit, the gov’t concluded that the school district DID violate parental rights.

Danielle DuClos:

Child care in Wisconsin can cost more than college and eat up 18% to 36% of a family’s median household income, according to a report last year by the nonpartisan research group Forward Analytics. Statewide, providers are struggling with staffing after losing a quarter of workers in the last decade as demand for care remains high

Matt Taibbi:

The “Border Czar” insanity has hit new depths. In the last 48 hours we’ve raced from denial to paradox, with head-scratching stops in between. In the first stage, “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Border Czar” became “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Bad Border Czar.” This is from the new Reuters piece, “Republicans call Harris a failed border czar. The facts tell a different story”:

Tasked to deal with the root causes of migration… [Vice President Harris] immediately ran into the enormity of the mission… The region is riddled with corrupt government officials, the drivers of migration are deeply rooted in economic inequality and social factors… “She was given a very hard, difficult, convoluted portfolio,” said U.S. Senator Chris Murphy.

As we say in Boston, the job was wicked hahd. Not only that, she didn’t even have it! “Harris was never given the portfolio of border czar,” is how Reuters put it, adding, “Instead, Biden asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty, violence and corruption in Central America’s Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as engage with Mexico.” Of course, Reuters used different language in 2021:

Wall Street Journal:

From tech to tractors, companies are dialing back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, a DEI alternative endorsed by Elon Musk could alter the fate of your next job application.

It’s known as MEI, short for merit, excellence and intelligence. As described by Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, who helped popularize the term, MEI means hiring the best candidates for open roles without considering demographics. 

“A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas,” he wroteon his company’s website last month, adding that casting a wide recruiting net was important. “We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on.” …

Whether diversity does, in fact, happen naturally in what Wang and others deem merit-based systems is hotly contested a year after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions.

More.

adastraschool.org

Ad Astra’s mission is to foster curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking in the next generation of problem solvers and builders.

Ad Astra’s approach to education is centered around hands-on, project-based learning, where children are encouraged to explore, experiment, and discover solutions to real-world problems. Ad Astra offers a progressive learning environment that emphasizes the integration of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) into its curriculum.

Currently open to all children ages 3 – 9.

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More.

Susan Goldsmith

The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

When these depressing statistics were published in a high school newspaper in mid-1997, black parents were troubled by the news and upset that the newspaper had exposed the problem in such a public way. Seeking guidance, one parent called a prominent authority on minority academic achievement.

Brian Riedl:

Paradoxically, the faster government debt escalates toward an inevitable debt crisis, the less politicians and voters seem to care. In the 1980s and 1990s, more modest deficits dominated economic policy debates and prompted six major deficit reduction deals that balanced the budget from 1998 through 2001. That era is long gone. In the past eight years, President Donald Trump and then Biden enacted $12 trillion in deficit-expanding legislation even as Social Security and Medicare shortfalls drove baseline deficits higher. When even liberal economists warned politicians that the post-pandemic economy faced a modest degree of rising inflation and interest rates—and that a federal spending spree would pour gasoline on that fire—lawmakers responded by enacting the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. When inflation and mortgage rates resultantly surged to 9.1 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively, lawmakers brazenly continued the inflationary spending spree.

Will Flanders:

Non-white students are more likely to feel unsafe in school. This suggests, once again, that discipline policies more concerned with racial quotas than safety harm the students they are supposedly trying to help. We’ve written about this several times:

Rich Kremer:

The Universities of Wisconsin is suspending work on required changes to campus Title IX sex discrimination rules after a federal judge in Kansas blocked President Joe Biden’s administration from expanding the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity. 

Attorneys and Title IX coordinators with the Universities of Wisconsin administration office have been working since April to bring Wisconsin’s campuses into compliance with federal changes to Title IX regulations that were announced by Biden’s U.S. Department of Education that month.

One of the most contentious changes to the federal rules is an expansion of Title IX protections against discrimination of students and employees who are pregnant, gay or transgender. When it was announced, the change was supported by LGBTQ groups like GLAAD, which called it “a huge step forward to ensure all young people can thrive at school” in a social media post. The organization also said there was still more to do, noting the new regulations did not address transgender athletes.

“Trans students who want to play sports should have the same opportunities to do so as all students,” the post said. “GLAAD will continue advocating for fairness and equal access for all, including trans youth.”

Daniel Buck:

Surveying American institutions, one searches in earnest for even a few organizations or systems that progressives have been unable to control. News story after news story confirms that indeed that one, that one, and, yes, that one too have all succumbed to ideological capture.

Naïfs like myself once held out hope for science and mathematics. How could geometry be racist or gravitational waves foster systemic oppression? Sadly, we were wrong. The latest institution to go is medical education.

“Health equity” pushes doctors beyond surgeries or appointments to perform advocacy against systems of oppression.A recent essay at Inside Higher Ed bravely declares that all prospective doctors must be trained not to become skilled surgeons or perceptive dermatologists. Rather, their training must direct them towards “health equity.” This shift pushes doctors beyond surgeries or appointments to perform advocacy against systems of oppression and various “-isms.” Many medical schools have already adopted such advocacy-focused instruction.

For example, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has an entire center dedicated to health-equity research, the stated goal of which is to dismantle systems of oppression, systemic racism, and other internalized oppressions. Among its recommended resources are the 1619 Project’s podcast, Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, and Becoming an Anti-Racist Church. What any of these resources has to do with medical education is left to the imagination.

Alexander Russo:

The education-related coverage is also an expression of her interest in broadening journalism’s definition of expert sources to include more so-called “real people,” including students, parents, and community members.

“I think there’s this tendency in journalism to narrow down who we consider experts,” Fernandes told me. “But if we just expanded the person who has the problem into the person who might have solutions to the problem, it would change the frame of how we reported education.”

“I think there’s this tendency in journalism to narrow down who we consider experts.”

Vivek:

greater risk to our future than, say, climate change – yet most politicians are too scared to talk about it & now it’s apparently taboo. But here are the facts: our nation’s birth rate is now down to 1.62 births per woman, the lowest in history and well below replacement rate.

It’s not even that people don’t want kids. In fact, American women on average have fewer children than they say they’d hoped for.

The “graying” of America means an overloaded healthcare system & eventually higher taxes for all. Today, there are only about 3 workers for every retiree. By 2060, that number will be down to 2. This is staggering & unlike any other period in our history.

An aging labor force also means lower rates of business formation and slower economic growth. Every 10% increase in the proportion of individuals over 60 is estimated to reduce GDP per capita by 5.7%.

Elizabeth Rosenthal:

One owns a for-profit insurer, a venture capitalcompany, and for-profit hospitals in Italy and Kazakhstan; it has just acquired its fourth for-profit hospital in Ireland. Another owns one of the largest for-profit hospitals in London, is partnering to build a massive training facility for a professional basketball team, and has launched and financed 80 for-profit start-ups. Another partners with a wellness spa where rooms cost $4,000 a night and co-invests with “leading private equity firms.”

Do these sound like charities?

These diversified businesses are, in fact, some of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital systems. And they have somehow managed to keep myriad for-profit enterprises under their nonprofit umbrella — a status that means they pay little or no taxes, float bonds at preferred rates, and gain numerous other financial advantages.

Through legal maneuvering, regulatory neglect, and a large dollop of lobbying, they have remained tax-exempt charities, classified as 501(c)(3)s.

“Hospitals are some of the biggest businesses in the U.S. — nonprofit in name only,” said Martin Gaynor, an economics and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “They realized they could own for-profit businesses and keep their not-for-profit status. So the parking lot is for-profit; the laundry service is for-profit; they open up for-profit entities in other countries that are expressly for making money. Great work if you can get it.”

——

“The nonprofit industrial complex”

Steve Hsu:

Syd Hersh broke the story (we had actual reporters in those days), and won a real Pullitzer Prize (we don’t really have those anymore).

Calley (the fall guy) was initially sentenced to life in prison, but ultimately served almost no jail time.

Calley was only made an officer bc the Army was desperate for manpower. They relaxed intelligence testing standards, for which they have special legal dispensation from Congress. There are important reasons to protect meritocracy in all institutions.

WILL:

On July 30th and 31st, the Wisconsin Public Education Network (WPEN) will hold its annual conference in Madison.  While the name of the Network sounds harmless, it belies an organization with a far-left agenda that is contrary to what most parents in the state want for their kids. The worst part? Wisconsin taxpayers are going to foot some of the bill.  According to records obtained by WILL, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is contributing $5,000 towards the conference, while the Department of Children and Family Services (DCF) is also contributing $1,000.  DPI’s donation was enough to get them listed as a “Blue Ribbon”-level sponsor.  Below, we catalogue just some of the questionable panels that are part of the conference agenda.  

The Politics of Literacy and Its Impact on Wisconsin’s Public Education. Last year, Wisconsin’s Act 20 was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Evers. The notion that education should move away from so-called “three-cuing” in teaching reading back to more traditional methods of teaching reading like phonics is broadly supported in the educational literature. But this panel appears to be focused on undermining the notion that the science of reading is good for most every student and may somehow reduce “equity.”  In a state where only 10.5% of African American students are proficient in reading, one questions how effective an equity-based approach has been. 

Becky Jacobs:

Employees of the Wisconsin Technical College System moved into a new space this summer near the Hilldale Shopping Center. From President Morna Foy’s new fifth-floor office, the view outside features a green tree canopy and the blue waters of Lake Mendota.

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Is there anything you’re particularly proud of or something you wish you were able to do?

There’s always more stuff that you would want to do. If I was going to be perfectly honest, I would have liked to have seen us make a little bit more progress on attracting more students into different professions.

For example, our apprenticeship programs are still dominated by white males in this state. We’re just now exploring different professions, and in partnership with the Department of Workforce Development, thinking about apprenticeship more as a learning method, as opposed to an alternative to college. So, that process of getting more men into health care, more women into the trades, more folks from rural areas into some high tech fields.

One of the great pleasures of my time with this system is learning about all the different ways a person can support themselves. We often have pretty narrow options that we think of, that have to do with our parents and communities we live in. Not everybody wanted to be a pro-athlete like me, but whether that was realistic or not isn’t really a part of your thinking when you’re a kid. There just are so many cool things to do in life.

The district is asking voters for the money as funding from federal pandemic aid and a 2020 referendum are set to expire. If voters also approve of the district’s other referendum on the November ballot — a $100 million request to help fund day-to-day expenses — district officials estimate the owner of an average-value home in Madison would see a $1,376 increase on property tax bills by 2028.

For the larger referendum to rebuild or fix 10 schools, Soldner said the district selected schools partially based on a promise from the 2020 referendum. The School Board pledged future upgrades would target the district’s remaining alternative high school and focus on middle schools. The 2020 referendum had funded fixes at four comprehensive high schools and a new building for Southside Elementary School.

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The School Board has yet to finalize plans for which buildings should be entirely replaced, if any. District leaders are recommending five new buildings and the cost of each would be:

• $70.6 million for Cherokee Heights Middle School
• $89 million for Sennett Middle School
• $84.2 million for Black Hawk Middle School and Gompers Elementary School
• $90.8 million for Toki Middle School and Orchard Ridge Elementary School
• $108.3 million for Sherman Middle School and Shabazz City High School

Soldner said some of the original buildings would remain open during construction to avoid displacing students. The buildings could also be used for other students whose schools must be renovated or entirely rebuilt. New schools could be built on existing green space adjacent to old schools, he told the School Board in June.

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As school district leaders ask voters to raise property taxes, demographers are anticipating future declines in enrollment. While district-wide enrollment is expected to remain flat this fall, the student population is likely to trend downward for at least the next five years, according to projections by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

Four of the five middle schools on the referendum are also being used at 60% capacity, according to a June analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The school district typically targets a 90% use rate.

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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

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

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?

David E Bernstein

I examine and critique three influential propositions regarding race promoted by some academic theorists and pundits.

Part I discusses and rejects the notion that differences in socioeconomic status among different American subgroups are best explained by the power relationships groups have with the dominant white majority.

Part II considers the claim that racial categories define collective actors who inevitably have common interests and outlooks. This Part concludes that this idea is flawed and perhaps incoherent.

Part III addresses the proposition that white Americans should be encouraged to cultivate a “white racial consciousness” so that whites will recognize their privilege and become “antiracists.” Part III concludes that such encouragement is both wrongheaded and dangerous.

Those who promote the ideas discussed and critiqued in this essay share several premises: pessimism about the US overcoming its racist history; what I consider a naïve belief in an identitarianism shaped by antiracist ideology as the best way to mitigate racism; and a concomitant belief that preserving the salience of existing socially (and legally) constructed racial categories is both inevitable and mostly desirable.

These premises, in turn, are ultimately based on a skepticism of or hostility to the ability of liberalism to overcome racism. In other words, they represent a rejection of the optimistic racial liberalism prevalent among civil rights activists when Brown was decided.

Corrinne Hess:

One of the main drivers of the MPS School Board Recall Collaborative’s campaign is criticism over what recall members said is a lack of transparency by Milwaukee Public Schools. 

But since the group was launched last month to unseat four MPS board members, there have been questions about how the collaborative’s efforts are being funded. 

The group says they have anonymous donors, whose names they are not disclosing. That’s led the MPS teachers’ union to file an ethics complaint with the state. 

During a press conference last week, members of the media questioned the group about who is paying canvassers for positions they advertised. 

Recall organizers did not list expenses and the contributions to fund the canvassers on their July 15 campaign finance reports.

The group announced last week they’ve collected more than 37,000 signatures so far to recall school board president Marva Herndon, vice president Jilly Gokalgandhi, school board member at large Missy Zombor and board member Erika Siemsen.

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More. And.

Ann Althouse:

Is it not abnormal for a person to serve as U.S. Senator for 36 years, then to go on to be Vice President for 8 years, and still have time left to serve as President, and even to run for reelection as President when he is 81, and then to drop the nomination after excluding competitors and winning it in the primaries, handing the nomination to a person who never won any votes in any bid for the presidency? Is it not abnormal for a President to oversee the criminal prosecution of his predecessor, his rival, and then, after dropping out, to seek to rearrange the Supreme Court to enhance the likelihood that his rival will suffer real criminal punishment?

Marguerite Roza and Ash Dhammani:

Spending choices must prioritize students without angering communities.

Talk about a thankless job. In Washington state, school district budgeting has suddenly become much more difficult.

After more than a decade of strong revenue growth, districts are facing deficits. In 2013, the average expenditure per student in Washington was $9,600. Since then, the Legislature has steadily increased funding for schools. Then came federal pandemic relief funds. In this last school year, Washington schools averaged over $18,000 per student. That’s an 89% increase (far outpacing inflation at 32%).

Flush with cash, districts could bring on new staff. Our state’s schools now employ over 20,000 more people than they did a decade ago (a jump of 20% even as enrollment grew only by 3%). Leaders could make employees happy by giving out pay raises: Washington’s average teacher pay is currently $86,804—the 4th highest in the nation.

But the era of big year-over-year spending increases has ended. Federal relief funds disappear in September. Enrollments are projected to drop 7% by the end of the decade. Even when state funds rise with inflation, fewer students mean fewer dollars; in the coming years many Washington districts will have no choice but to shrink programs, reduce staffing, and close schools.

Understandably, most leaders would rather avoid this part of the job. And many do, kicking the can down the road for others to deal with. But delaying only makes it worse.

Jonathan Turley:

The rating of sites is arguably the most effective way of silencing or marginalizing opposing views. I previously wrote about other sites supported by the Biden administration that performed a similar function, including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

GDI then released a list of the 10 most dangerous sites, all of which are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers that they were accepting “reputational and brand risk” by “financially supporting disinformation online.” The blacklisted sites included Reason, a respected libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. However, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation. 

When NewsGuard came looking for Res Ipsa, the questions sounded like they came directly from CGI.

I was first asked for information on the financial or revenue sources used to support my blog, on which I republish my opinion pieces from various newspapers and publish original blog columns.

Given NewsGuard’s reputation, the email would ordinarily trigger panic on many sites. But I pay not to have advertising, and the closest I come to financial support would be my wife, since we live in a community property state. If NewsGuard wants to blacklist me with my wife, it is a bit late. Trust me, she knows.

JOSH GERSTEIN and KYLE CHENEY

Strzok and Page have denied those allegations, saying their private political opinions did not influence their work on FBI matters, and many comments quoted by GOP lawmakers and the press were misconstrued.

During a House hearing in 2018, Strzok said the message about stopping Trump “was written late at night, off-the-cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States.”

Justice Department officials shared the messages with journalists on the evening of Dec. 12, 2017, as copies of them were being delivered to Congress in response to requests from committees there.

Depositions taken during the litigation indicated the release was approved by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who said he hoped sharing the messages with reporters would avoid the most inflammatory messages being taken out of context by lawmakers. Top career officials confirmed they approved the release.

Matthew Petti:

The Fourth Amendment still applies at the border, despite the feds’ insistence that it doesn’t. 

For years, courts have ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine, warrantless searches for contraband at the border. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has taken advantage of that loophole in the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures to force travelers to hand over data from their phones and laptops.

But on Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison in the Eastern District of New York ruled that cellphone searches are a “nonroutine” search, more akin to a strip search than scanning a suitcase or passing a traveler through a metal detector.

Mario Nawfal:

The Olympics and NBC are taking down videos of the controversial Olympics opening ceremony, citing copyright infringement, instead of addressing the criticism.

Lenore Skenazy

“One time when I went to pick up Sean from wrestling, I wanted to figure out which door he’d be coming out of at the high school,” my friend Nancy McDermott told me when I asked whether the phone had changed her as a mom. “We had Find My iPhone and he popped up like two blocks away, and I went, ’Oh My God—what is he doing there?’ I sort of went to this place in my brain like, ‘He’s being held in a basement!’ And then, of course, what had happened was he had turned off his phone when he was running and it showed the last place he’d been. And I knew he wasn’t being held in a basement, but in my head, it was, ‘What if he is?’”

Nancy is the author of The Problem with Parenting, so she thinks a lot about the parenting zeitgeist. Unfortunately, she concluded, “Even those of us who try to be normal cannot be normal when we have the technology.” 

Parents have always worried, of course. But until about 15 years ago, we had no option but to learn to live with it. When my mom let me walk to school as a kindergartener—I know, call the cops—she could see me until I turned the corner. After that, she had to wait till about 3 o’clock before she would see me again. In between, she had no contact. No tracking. No alerts from the school. She didn’t even pack a note in my lunch, because during school, I was sort of off her radar, and she was sort of off mine. That didn’t mean she loved me less. But it did mean that she assumed I was fine without her watching or contacting me.

Raul Castro Fernandez, Aaron J. Elmore, Michael J. Franklin, Sanjay Krishnan and Chenhao Tan

language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, are revolutionizing software’s ability to understand, process, and synthesize language. The authors of this paper believe that this advance in technology is significant enough to prompt introspection in the data management community, similar to previous technological disruptions such as the advents of the world wide web, cloud computing, and statisti- cal machine learning. We argue that the disruptive influence that LLMs will have on data management will come from two angles. (1) A number of hard database problems, namely, entity resolution, schema matching, data discovery, and query synthesis, hit a ceiling of automation because the system does not fully understand the semantics of the underlying data. Based on large training corpora of natural language, structured data, and code, LLMs have an unprece- dented ability to ground database tuples, schemas, and queries in real-world concepts. We will provide examples of how LLMs may completely change our approaches to these problems. (2) LLMs blur the line between predictive models and information retrieval systems with their ability to answer questions. We will present examples showing how large databases and information retrieval systems have complementary functionality.
PVLDB Reference Format:
Raul Castro Fernandez, Aaron J. Elmore, Michael J. Frankl

Mina Stopar:

But what about his life? Let’s consider the following paragraph from the book: “I spent hours and hours doing math problems without a teacher forcing me. Whole books of algebra problems – I did them one after another. I was only seven or eight, but I always wanted mathematics.”

That might be something you’d find in many biographies of world-renowned mathematicians, right? However, Carol Parikh notes: “Although Zariski was by all accounts an exceptionally quick and eager math student, the full extent of his gifts became apparent relatively late in life. He was almost twenty-five before he published his first paper and almost fifty when he did his great work on holomorphic functions…”

In fact, Zariski remained active and productive even into his eighties.

But how did Zariski’s story begin? It seems his older brother Moses played a significant role in shaping young Oscar. He taught him elementary algebra, and even when Oscar began surpassing him, he never resented it. While Oscar was in gymnasium, Moses would buy math and philosophy books for him during his business trips to Moscow and Petrograd. Oscar was especially interested in Hegel and Marx.

Justin Lahart:

For all our divisions, Americans have been united by a singular obsession: How can we have a better life? Economists call this economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder and make it to a higher rung than your parents.

Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has spent more than a decade working to understand what makes mobility possible, and why in some places the children of poor parents have been more able to move up than in others.

Caitlin Cassidy:

The New South Wales curriculum has had its biggest shakeup in five decades with better connections between subjects, more detailed concepts and skills, and a move away from the student-led approach to learning towards “explicit instruction”.

On Wednesday, new K-6 syllabuses for health, creative arts, human society and its environment, and science were released to teachers, with updated maths and English syllabuses in classrooms from this year.

The NSW education minister, Prue Car, said the curriculum reform would “reshape education” for decades to come.

“For the first time, primary school teachers have a set of syllabuses that make sense together and will ensure students have a strong foundation upon which to build their knowledge,” she said.

Human society and its environment will replace the separate subjects of history and geography, including compulsory content on democracy and citizenship and ancient civilisations, while new health content will include the healthy use of digital devices and age-appropriate consent from kindergarten.

In science, students will study the human body for the first time, as well as the earth and solar systems, climate, energy, food chains and electricity.

Matt Egan:

Nearly four in ten (39%) of US adults say they worry most or all of the time that their family’s income won’t be enough to meet expenses, according to a new CNN poll. That’s up from 28% who expressed those concerns in December 2021, and it’s similar to the numbers seen during the Great Recession (37%).

To cope, significant shares of Americans said they are adding side jobs, cutting down on driving and putting more expenses on credit cards.

Even higher percentages of Latino (52%) and Black (46%) Americans said they’re worried most or all of the time about making ends meet, according to the poll.

More than half (55%) of those making less than $50,000 a year similarly worry about having enough money to meet expenses.

The findings underscore how, despite national statistics that show unemployment is low and inflation is cooling, millions of Americans are hurting from years of rising prices.

Locally, the taxpayer funded Madison School district is planning a large tax & $pending increase referendum this fall

Claire Fox:

Less than a week before the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 was to come into force – over a year since it was given royal assent in May last year after passing through two houses of parliament – the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced her “decision to stop further commencement … in order to consider options, including its repeal…

Notes by Kevin Fulton:

I always like is when you see surprising endorsements. Here, Richard C. Anderson endorsed the book. He is a brilliant researcher (see link) who I would say generally writes from a different perspective than Hirsch but found his work meaningful. 2/

Michael Lind:

In reality, the global trade system has already disintegrated, thanks precisely to the policy of appeasing Chinese mercantilism that The Economistadvocates. Electric vehicles (EVs) are the perfect example. Using tariffs, subsidies, and other tools of industrial policy, state-supported Chinese firms have exploited access to American innovations and now seek to flood the American market with underpriced exports. Other than the obnoxiously anonymous lead writers at The Economist and a few libertarian dead-enders, who really believes that China’s crushing of the American EV industry would be a “free market” outcome that enhances American prosperity?

The market utopianism that The Economist shares with—and helped teach to—the neoliberal establishment has collided headlong with the market realism that long governed the international economy and American trade policy, and is now returning to its rightful place. Realizing this, savvier defenders of neoliberal globalism are changing the subject from the alleged benefits of cheap imports to the argument that tariffs are “taxes on consumers” and “regressive” ones at that.

The attack on tariffs as regressive taxes unites two of the themes of early twenty-first-century neoliberalism.

The attack on tariffs as regressive taxes unites two of the themes of early twenty-first-century neoliberalism. One is the left-neoliberal dogma that each individual tax—not government policy or the economy as a whole—must be progressive in its effects. The other is the right-neoliberal dogma that deregulating trade and immigration to reduce wages for workers and thus reduce prices for consumers is the “efficient” and thus best policy, as long as the “winners” compensate the “losers”—preferably in the form of redistribution through the tax code.

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard:

The American Worker Project from EIG compares the U.S. worker of today against the U.S. worker of the past. My aim is to add a new dimension, comparing U.S. workers to their counterparts in the rest of the world.

Specifically, I look at the abundance of jobs in the U.S. and abroad, trends in wage growth, and the distribution of worker pay.

Jobs have been abundant in the United States and other advanced economies.

BWorkers in the United States have experienced dramatic events in recent years, ranging from the global Covid-19 pandemic to the enormous fiscal response to lockdowns and related threats to

Americans’ income security.

Price inflation and real wage declines returned across advanced economies for the first time in over a generation, triggered in the United States partly by the scale of fiscal stimulus.

Real wage levels, however, have held up far better for American workers than for European workers in recent years.1 The strong recovery in U.S. job creation pushed down the unemployment rate to below 4 percent for an unprecedented period of more than two years, and it has restored employment-to- population ratios to their pre-Covid ranges.
But at the same time, Figure 1 illustrates that in the United States the recovery in the employment-to- population ratio for the 15–64 year old working age population—arguably the most relevant metric for broad labor market health—actually lags behind the recoveries in the EU27 and Japan, even though the U.S. has outpaced them in GDP growth and enacted a much larger fiscal stimulus

Sara Randazzo:

The nonprofit behind the tests, College Board, says it updated the scoring by replacing its panel of experts with a large-scale data analysis to better reflect the skills students learn in the courses. Some skeptical teachers, test-prep companies and college administrators see the recent changes as another form of grade inflation, and a way to boost the organization’s business by making AP courses seem more attractive.

“It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment at Oregon State University. “But I think it’s a business move.”

The number of students cheering their higher AP scores could rise again next year. The College Board said it is still recalibrating several other subjects, including its most popular course, AP English Language, which attracts more than half a million test takers.

Trevor Packer, the head of College Board’s AP program, said the changes aren’t motivated by a desire to sign up more students. The organization, which also makes the SAT, has touted its tests as an antidote to grade inflation in schools.

Quinton Klabon:

DPI EXPLAINS THEIR WRONG READING OF THE LETRS RETRAINING DEADLINE
Calls it “strange.” “WE CAN SEE THERE IS AN INTENTION IN THE LAW TO COMPLETE BY JULY 1, 2025,” but says language is not plain to hold up in court. OH, BROTHER.

DPI says districts should create trackers locally.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Courtney Everett:

Rob Ferrett: What does Act 20 say?

Caroline Pate-Hefty: Wisconsin Act 20 has changed the landscape of what’s going to be required in literacy. Act 20 is a really exciting thing for educators, but it has some really intense deadlines and mandatory requirements around literacy. The intention of this state law is to bring us up because our reading levels are unacceptable. 

Act 20 affects kindergarten through third grade. Last year, we focused on kindergarten through fifth grade at Whitewater. All of our teachers were trained in the science of reading and its implementation. Our principals were trained on coaching on the implementation.

We started with 26 percent of our students being on target in the Forward Examassessment. We closed the first year of intense implementation with 55 percent of our students being on target for utilizing the science of reading. That’s really what Act 20 is going to require.

RF: What is the science of reading approach?

CPH: I always say the science of reading isn’t an ideology. It’s not a philosophy. It’s certainly not a political agenda. It’s really a consensus among educators. In education, we based the science of reading on thousands of meta analyses on how kids read.

The Economist:

A new study by Raj Chetty, of Harvard University, and colleagues provides fresh data on how America’s landscape of opportunity has shifted sharply over the past decades. Although at the national level there have been only small declines in mobility, the places and groups that have become more (or less) likely to enable children to rise up have changed a lot. The most striking finding is that, compared with the past, a child’s race is now less relevant for predicting their future and their socioeconomic class more so.

The greatest drops in mobility have been not in the places evoked in song, but on the coasts and the Great Plains, which historically provided pathways up (see maps). “Fifteen years ago, the American Dream was alive and well for white children born to low-income parents in much of the North-east and West Coast,” says Benjamin Goldman of Cornell University, one of the co-authors. “Now those areas have outcomes on par with Appalachia, the rustbelt and parts of the South-east.”

The fact that white children have become more likely to remain in poverty than before, whereas for black children the reverse is true, raises many questions. The finding comes from tracing the trajectories of 57m children born in America between 1978 and 1992 and looking at their outcomes by the age of 27. “This is really the first look with modern big data into how opportunity can change within a place over time,” says Mr Goldman. For children born into high-income families, household income increased for all races between birth cohorts. Yet among those from low-income families, earnings rose for black children and fell for white children.

David Blaska:

Like hobo stew, the cost of living has many ingredients. Pumping increasingly worthless dollars into the economy is one of them. Democrats in Washington injected billions into America’s economic bloodstream in the name of Covid relief. Yet another casualty of the pandemic panic, along with closing schools and wearing masks on the bike path!

The National Bureau of Economic Research identifies the CARES Act and the National Rescue Plan as a prime contributor to inflationthat peaked at 9% in June 2022. 

The federal government showered $350 billion on state and local governments. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, spent most of the $5.7 billion federal largesse at his sole discretion.

 City will pay you to sue it

The City of Madison spent one-time money to paper overoperational expenses and to avoid hard decisions, such as deep sixing the $1.1 million Police Civilian* Oversight Board, which is now advertising for attorneys willing to be paid up to $15,000 for each anti-cop lawsuit they bring against the city. That’s right — the City of Madison will pay you to sue itself! ( * which the bid document misnames “Citizen” Oversight Board.)

Glenn Reynolds

They want to include everyone — except the people they don’t like.

For a while we were told that DEI was good for business, and good for encouraging people to get along. 

But in fact there’s no evidence that corporate DEI efforts help the bottom line: The chief support for that notion was a McKinsey study that was, well, questionable. 

Moreover, there’s considerable evidence on college campuses that DEI efforts increase racial division and prejudice, rather than reducing it. 

Shockingly, calling attention to people’s differences, and handing out goodies based on those differences, doesn’t promote fellow-feeling.

Jean M. Twenge, Heejung Park

The social and historical contexts may influence the speed of development. In seven large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adolescents 1976–2016 (N =8.44 million, ages 13–19), fewer adolescents in recent years engaged in adult activities such as having sex, dating, drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without their parents, and driving, suggesting a slow life strategy. Adult activities were less common when median income, life expectancy, college enrollment, and age at first birth were higher and family size and pathogen prevalence were lower, consistent with life history theory. The trends are unlikely to be due to homework and extracurricular time, which stayed steady or declined, and may or may not be linked to increased Internet use.

Patrick Brown:

Child care in Canada is starting to look a lot like health care in Canada – nominally universal, but with long waiting lines acting as the implicit form of rationing, particularly for low-income parents

Rachel Wolfe:

Americans aren’t just waiting longer to have kids and having fewer once they start—they’re less likely to have any at all.

The shift means that childlessness may be emerging as the main driver of the country’s record-low birthrate.

Women without children, rather than those having fewer, are responsible for most of the decline in average births among 35- to 44-year-olds during their lifetimes so far, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data by University of Texas demographer Dean Spears for The Wall Street Journal. Childlessness accounted for over two-thirds of the 6.5% drop in average births between 2012 to 2022.

While more people are becoming parents later in life, 80% of the babies born in 2022 were to women under 35, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics data.

“Some may still have children, but whether it’ll be enough to compensate for the delays that are driving down fertility overall seems unlikely,” says Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

By Kayla Huynh

But the school failed to ensure the teacher had the proper licensing to teach a portion of the students’ instruction.

The error meant Steffen’s son, Theodore, and his son’s six classmates would need to redo thousands of minutes of instruction to stay on track with other students.

“I don’t think the problem was on the employee,” Steffen said. “(The school district) hired her, they put her in the position for the job she was going to do, so it seems like a district issue to me.” 

The Madison Metropolitan School District realized the problem when another parent filed a complaint with the state Department of Public Instruction, which credentials teachers, according to a district employee. The staff member requested anonymity because they were not authorized by the district to speak on the matter.

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?

Steven Sinofsky and Peter Savodnik:

Politics reporter Stef W. Kight informed us that the vice president would be “addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border” and that Harris would “lead efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) to manage the flow of unaccompanied children and migrant families arriving at the border in numbers not seen since a surge in 2019.”

Lest anyone wonder whether this was a big job with a great deal of responsibility, a White House official told reporters: “President Biden said during the transition, whatever the most urgent need, he would turn to the vice president, and today he is turning to the vice president.”

Today—July 24, 2024—the same reporter at the same outlet has a story headlined“Harris Border Confusion Haunts Her New Campaign.” 

Kight now reports: “In early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue.” (Emphasis mine.)

We are told that there is “confusion around the VP’s exact role” and that “early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent. And it has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.” The story also quotes former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson: “She is not the border czar.” 

Just to make sure readers understand that Axios, in 2021, in no way intended to provide Republicans, in 2024, with a talking point that might help Donald Trump, Axioshas added an editor’s note at the bottom of the new piece: “This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.” 

——

More.

And:

In April 2021, Axios itself published multiple articles referring to Harris as Biden’s “border czar”.

John Dvorak:

Here is the White House memo putting Kamala Harris in charge of the Border.

James Lynch:

Wikipedia completely scrubbed Kamala from its executive branch czar page. The Axios article is no longer even listed in the citations.

Matthew Continetti:

Keeping up with the changing party line is exhausting. Not long ago, remember, it was considered a slur to suggest that Joe Biden was too old and infirm to be reelected president.

FIRE:

This opens the door to insidious government regulation of speech of both minors and adults, which the bill enables by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to define how social media platforms can operate.

KOSA also threatens everyone’s right to speak anonymously, a time-honored tradition in the United States. Because the bill requires treating minors’ accounts differently, and websites cannot discern users’ ages without confirming their identity, platforms will inevitably face pressure to avoid regulatory risk by verifying each account holder. This would force all Americans, including adults, to reveal their identity in order to express themselves online.

Timothy K. Minella

Near the end of this academic year, two elite universities announced the elimination of one of the most prominent symbols of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) apparatus on campus: the dreaded “diversity statement” for academic positions.

If you were an academic on the job market during the past decade, you couldn’t escape this ubiquitous requirement. It seemed nearly every job opening, from assistant professor of history to dean of an engineering college, asked applicants to write a statement discussing their experience with DEI and their commitment to advancing it. In some cases, hiring committees reviewed the diversity statement first, before even considering a candidate’s scholarship and teaching. At UC Berkeley, up to 75 percent of applicants were eliminated from consideration based on their diversity statements alone.

Why the backlash against diversity statements now, especially from the liberal bastions of elite academia?The first half of 2024 saw a cascade of diversity-statement cancelations. The trend started with state legislatures that acted to ban the requirement in state universities. Legislators in Idaho, Utah, Alabama, Kansas, and Indiana all passed measures to end the practice in hiring and admissions. These states followed the lead of Florida, Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, which had adopted similar policies.

Then, in May, MIT became the first elite private university to end the practice in question. Less than a month later, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences also announced that applications for tenure-track positions would no longer require diversity statements.

Peterson Foundation

America is on a dangerously unsustainable fiscal path, which threatens our economic future.

The Peterson Foundation asked experts from seven leading organizations — the American Action Forum, the American Enterprise Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Progressive Policy Institute — to develop specific policy proposals and recommendations to address our fiscal situation and meet their policy priorities over the next 30 years. 

All seven organizations — through a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases — successfully put our debt on a sustainable path.

Pierre Bienaime:

For die-hard fans of the Rubik’s Cube, it isn’t about whether you can crack the iconic puzzle. It’s about how fast.

In a bustling hotel ballroom in Queens, some 90 competitors are practicing or locked in a speed-cubing showdown, racing to match all sides of the three-dimensional puzzle.

Over a loudspeaker, event organizers summon participants to join one of six tables for a round. When the scrambled cube appears, players have 15 seconds to scrutinize it, turning it this way and that to plot out a flurry of rotations. The fastest solve took teen whiz Jerry Yao just 5.5 seconds.

After a ceremony honoring the winners, Yao playfully boasted in response to questions from a reporter. “If my friends are listening, I’m like, I’m a lot better than all of them,” he said. “And I want to like, keep it that way.”

Paul Buchheit:

The Biden situation is a good example of why single-party states are dangerous — the incentives always favor party loyalty over truth. If it weren’t for the disastrous debate and upcoming elections, experts and insiders would still be insisting that Biden is “sharp as a tack”, and that all evidence to the contrary are “cheapfakes” and dangerous misinformation.

Our two-party system isn’t always great, but it’s far preferable to one in which a single party gains total control. I believe this is also a significant factor in the California/SF dysfunction. Without a viable opposition party, party leaders can get away with just about anything, and corruption and incompetence grows unchecked.

—-

Madison has had many uncontested elections in recent years….

Yet:

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?

City Forward Collective:

Key finding #1: Milwaukee residents remain deeply dissatisfied with the state of affairs at MPS, and believe more must be done to address the district’s academic and financial shortcomings (2/6)

Key finding #2: Milwaukee residents believe MPS School Board members should be held accountable for the district’s issues. 2 out of 3 respondents support the recall of MPS School Board members. (3/6)

Key Finding #3: Milwaukee residents remain concerned by the financial impact of MPS’ incompetence and financial mismanagement on their own pocketbooks. (4/6)

——

More.

And.

Neal McCluskey

Much worse than K‑12 has been higher education, where the Department of Education has essentially run almost the entire student loan industry. In 2022, the GAO reported that twenty-five years’ worth of federal student loans would cost taxpayers nearly $200 billion due to forgiveness plans and other non-repayment. There is, though, difficulty in making estimates, in part because the Department has failed in its basic operations, including tracking borrower repayments, as documented in another 2022 GAO report. And while the Biden administration focused on unconstitutional mass student debt cancelation, the Department failed at another basic job: simplifying the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

The FAFSA is the gateway to student aid that is, unfortunately, baked into the price of collegeand, hence, necessary for many people to attend college. Of course, the necessity of aid is another major reason to end fed ed: it is a hugely negative, unintended consequence of federal “help” that is almost certainly a disease worse than the cure.

And do not think the feds have historically been essential for education. A major federal funding role only began in the mid-1960s; the Department has only existed since 1980. This is in large part because the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern education (alas, a point neglected in the Project 2025 chapter) and for most of our history few people would have imagined a major federal role.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Several European countries are betting on open-source software. In the United States, eh, not so much. In the latest news from across the Atlantic, Switzerland has taken a major step forward with its “Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks” (EMBAG). This groundbreaking legislation mandates using open-source software (OSS) in the public sector.

This new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it. This “public money, public code” approach aims to enhance government operations’ transparency, security, and efficiency.

Jeremy Scahill:

A few weeks ago, Meta removed Instagram videos of me discussing my interviews with Hamas officials. Now Facebook is immediately removing my latest article about Kamala Harris’s record on Israel when people post it.

Victor Davis Hanson:

2) So, primaries and delegates won by popular vote now mean zilch. They are erasable at the whim of the back-roomers in the darkness. Will Democratic primaries cease to exist? If not, why would anyone take the time to vote in them?

3) Remember the same coup plotters today in 2020 engineered the sudden abdications of all of Biden’s socialist primary rivals to ensure that he would be a suitable veneer for their own extremist agendas. In that now infamous Faustian bargain, Joe and Jill got the ceremonial White House spotlight. In exchange, the team of Barack and Michelle ran things stealthily. So did Joe live by the coup, and then die by the coup?

4) The donors and politico grandees (did anyone vote for these people?) determine who runs and who doesn’t—not the people who vote in the primaries.

5) The convention will be as rigged as was the coup to depose Biden.

Chad Aldeman:

Last fall, I wrote a piece for The 74 Million titled, “The 50 Very Different States of American Public Education.” In that piece, I chronicled how public education looks very different depending on where you happen to live. From spending and staffing levels to the types of teachers they employ, what might look weird to a New Yorker is now common in Florida, and vice versa. 

For example, schools in New York and Washington, D.C. now spend about three times what schools in Utah and Idaho spend. These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, but they are operating very different schools. A typical school in New York pays its staff a lot higher salaries and can still afford to employ almost twice the number of people (per student) than a school in Utah or Arizona can. 

There are similarly large differences when it comes to who those employees are. Do teachers have to go through traditional, university-based preparation programs, or are they coming from alternative routes? Do most teachers have Master’s degrees or not? These answers vary tremendously across the states. For instance, only about one-third of public school teachers in Oklahoma have a Master’s degree, compared to nearly all of them in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. 

Joe Pinker:

U.S. workers paid more than $1 trillion into Social Security last year. Younger ones doubt they will get a dime when they retire.

The idea of Social Security disappearing is one of the country’s longer-running neuroses and shows few signs of abating. Some 47% of U.S. nonretirees believe Social Security won’t be able to pay them benefits when they retire, according to a 2023 Gallup survey, a level that has been mostly steady over more than three decades of polling.

Confidence today is lowest among those who are mid-career, ages 30 to 49.

Policy analysts say Social Security isn’t going away. Workers say their frustrations aren’t just about having little faith that the government will address a possible funding shortfall. They are also annoyed because they see older people enjoying benefits they don’t expect to receive.

Some of these younger workers are increasing their savings rates or subtracting Social Security from their retirement planning completely. Others say they are bitter, frustrated and uneasy about their long-term future.

WILL

Lost amongst the news of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released data on school district spending and enrollment around Wisconsin. The spending data is already significantly outdated—covering the 2022-23 school year that ended more than a year ago. Nonetheless, it does represent our best window into the current state of education in the state.

Among the key points:

• In the past five years, public school enrollment has declined by 4.79%, while choice enrollment is up 26.7%.
• Inflation-adjusted spending per student is down from 2 years ago, but up nearly $1,000 per student from 2010.
• Facilities spending accounts for a large share of the jump in spending—up 71% from 2010.

Enrollment Trends

More.

Corrinne Hess:

During the July 11 Waukesha School Board meeting, members had a lengthy discussion about the district’s membership with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, before ultimately voting 8-1 to quit.

Board members said the organization no longer represents the values evolving school boards have.

Some of those “values” have to do with controversial legislative bills that were debated during the last session. 

The Wisconsin Association of School Boards opposed a bill that would have excluded trans women and girls from playing sports. The group also opposed bills related to “curriculum transparency,” competitive bidding for school districts and allowing paraprofessionals to become teachers.

School Board member Eric Brooks said the association supports bills that are easy to get behind, like Act 20, the statewide reading initiative.

“When it comes to the issues that I think a lot of people deeply care about and that are maybe a little bit more contentious in nature, they seem to more often than not go against what many people in this community value,” said Brooks, who also works for Republican State Sen. Duey Stroebel.

In 2021, COVID-era frustrations led to big gains for Republican-backed candidates on Wisconsin school boards, especially in the Milwaukee suburbs. 

By Rick Hess

As for the specifics of Project 2025? There’s a good chance that it doesn’t say what you think it does. For instance, one graphic that’s been widely circulated (which The Dispatch reportshas racked up millions of views across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, and X) lists 31 policies supposedly found in Project 2025. These falsehoods include raising the retirement age, teaching Christian religious beliefs in public schools, banning books and curriculum about slavery, ending birthright citizenship, and eliminating the FDA and EPA. Project 2025 mentions none of these.

In fact, as Libby Stanford has capably reportedfor Education Week, most of what Project 2025 actually proposes for education is neither surprising nor all that new. The 44 pages devoted to the Department of Education call for shuttering the Department, block-granting Title I funding and then phasing it out, turning IDEA into a block grant, adopting a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights, spotlighting the extent of DEI efforts and then working to curtail them, requiring the office of civil rights to work through the courts rather than rely on “Dear Colleague” letters, and so forth. Anyone surprised by this kind of conservative wish list needs to get out more.

For what it’s worth, I mostly like what Project 2025 has to say on education. Block-granting is reasonable given the morass of regulation that’s made these programs intrusive and counterproductive. Curtailing the office of civil rights’ use of extrajudicial pressure tactics is overdue. Miguel Cardona’s politicized, legally dubious, inept tenure as secretary of education has powerfully made the case for dismantling the department. People of goodwill can disagree about all of this, but there’s nothing especially scary, theocratic, or fascist about it.

Rachel Wolf and Justin Lahore:

More women than ever have entered the American workforce.

Heady demand for employees combined with more opportunities for remote work and a surge in female entrepreneurs are sending a flood of women into the labor market. Women now hold a record 79 million jobs, and the share of women in their prime working years who are employed or seeking work now stands at 77.9%, up from 75.8% five years ago.

But it’s not time for a victory lap just yet.

The same work-from-home opportunities that have enabled many moms in particular to enter or rejoin the workforce are also shackling them with fresh responsibilities. Many say they are effectively working two full-time jobs: managing their households and their careers.

Sarika Paralkar left her job in tech after giving birth to twin girls almost 10 years ago to focus on raising them. She recently started a full-time fellowship with her Oakland, Calif., city government focused on furthering local climate initiatives.

Tom Dotan::

The blue screen of death has been a dreaded symbol of technological failure since Microsoft’s Windows became the world’s dominant operating system in the 1990s.

On Friday, it showed up on millions of computers around the world at once, highlighting both Microsoft’s continued ubiquity in workplaces and decades-old design choices that allowed the actions of a little-known software company to disable millions of Windows machines. Some security professionals also say Microsoft MSFT -0.74%decrease; red down pointing triangle hasn’t taken the vulnerability of its software seriously enough.

Microsoft said in a blog post Saturday that 8.5 million Windows machines were hit, or less than 1% of its global footprint. That number was enough to bring down the operations of major businesses across industries including healthcare, media and restaurants.

The effects continued to reverberate in airports Saturday, as U.S. carriers canceled close to 2,000 flights, compared with 3,400 Friday. Delta, which accounted for more than half the canceled flights Saturday, has been trying to make sure it has crews to cover flights and told pilots at hub airports to depart when planes are fully boarded and ready to safely go, no matter the scheduled departure time.

Friday’s outage was caused by a buggy update sent to corporate clients by CrowdStrike CRWD -11.10%decrease; red down pointing triangle, one of hundreds of cybersecurity firms that have built a business promising to make Windows more secure. Microsoft has its own competing product, called Windows Defender.

Anil Ananthaswamy

A study of the concepts that power AI.

In this demanding but rewarding book, Ananthaswamy, author of The Man Who Wasn’t There, “explains the elegant mathematics and algorithms [behind]…machine learning, a type of AI that involves building machines that can learn to discern patterns in data without being explicitly programmed to do so.” With astute reference to principles from the disciplines of math, computer science, physics, and neuroscience, the author guides readers through the conceptual frameworks involved in the creation of AI. While it would be helpful to come to the book with a strong background in math (especially statistics and calculus), clear and detailed illustrations help make it accessible to anyone willing to immerse themselves in the material. Ananthaswamy makes the power of AI obvious, and his engaging case studies explore its emerging abilities in the generation of new media—text, images, video, and music—and contributions to discoveries in areas such as drug development and the dynamics of gene expression. The author also provides a vivid picture of how AI will continue to transform everyday activities and, very soon, revolutionize our social and economic lives. Ananthaswamy demonstrates how a profound merging of human activities with machine processes is already far along and will soon accelerate strikingly. 

Aimee Picchi:

While 55% of Americans are “cost secure,” meaning they can afford care and medicine, that’s a decline from 61% who fell into that category in 2022, the study found. 

Americans spend an average of $12,555 per person annually on health care, according to the Peterson-KFF Health Care Tracker. By comparison, typical health care spending across other developed nations is about $6,651, their analysis found. 

“What we found as we string together the trend of data points is really quite concerning,” Lash said. “It’s that health care affordability has been getting worse — it shines a light on the number of families that can’t afford things like prescription drugs.”

Rising insurance costs

The average family insurance deductible in the U.S. stood at about $3,800 in 2022, up from $2,500 in 2013, according to KFF. The IRS considers insurance for families with deductibles of $3,200 or more to be high deductible plans.