Don Surber:

Most politicians lie like the devil because they work for him. Their stated goals — peace, love and soil — are cow droppings. Results matter. Given the low birth rates in Western countries, a childless world is one of their goals. Why would that be?

Matthew 18:2-5 explains:

And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

The Lord said go forth and multiply, He did not mean do your math homework. That Democrats offer free vasectomies and abortions at their convention shows which side they are on. 

They are after your children. Let us review recent headlines.

From the Telegraph: “Patron of LGBT charity that urged children to query concept of gender charged with child sex abuse.”

From Fox: “Princeton grad, LGBTQ activist who led queer alumni charged with possession of child porn.”

From the Advocate: “First out gay NCAA wrestler gets hard jail time for child porn.”

Also from the Advocate: “Adult film star Austin Wolf arrested on child pornography charges.”

You can see why LGBT calls groomer a slur; they don’t want you to tell the truth. Those drag queen story hours are held in schools, not nursing homes. 

I can go on but this is a newsletter, not a police blotter.

Jesse Singal:

Since then, though, a more disturbing trend has emerged: Otherwise respected, well-credentialed experts have begun disseminating blatant misinformation about seemingly every facet of the Cass Review and its findings. The worst example of this, by far, was a July 1 white paper published by The Integrity Project, a Yale Law School organization. It’s titled “An Evidence-Based Critique of ‘The Cass Review’ on Gender-affirming Care for Adolescent Gender Dysphoria.” 

Tyler Cowen:

Scholar’s Stage has a long post on why public intellectuals often have such short careers in terms of quality output.  Here are my tips for extending your shelf life, noting that I am not myself suggesting I have managed all of these, do as I say not necessarily as I do:

1. Take a cue from Kobe Bryant.  As you get older, you have to practice critical thinking more, and harder, compared to when you were young.  Most people let up on their practice habits over time.

2. Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals.  In fact, avoid the negative as much as possible.  However pressing a social or economic issue may be, there is almost always a positive and constructive way to reframe your potential contribution.  This also will force you to keep on thinking harder, because it is easier to take apparently justified negative slaps at the wrongdoers.

3. You probably don’t have as much actual influence as you like to think, and besides fame is a mix of benefits and costs.  So write to meet your own standards of quality, and no I don’t mean your standards for how much influence you think you ought to have.

“Clear Trouble:”

This! I would love to be a mom. But I can’t afford to move out of my parents’ house. Why would I have a kid if I can’t support myself?

Campus Reform:

Support for initiatives to make community college free has grown in recent years, but new analysis suggests that such reforms may fail to achieve their intended goals.

A new study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found that so-called “last-dollar tuition guarantee programs” for two-year community colleges do not meaningfully increase the number of enrolled students.

Study authors David B. Monaghan and Elizabeth A. Hawke investigated the impact of two Pennsylvania programs that fully cover the cost of community college, the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars program (CCPAS) and the Morgan Success Scholarship (MSS). 

Monaghan and Hawke stated in the study’s abstract that they found little to no evidence that CCPAS “has any impact on college-going behavior.”

Conversely, they found that MSS increased community college enrollment, but much of this increase was because the program temporarily “diverts students away from four-year colleges.”

Kimberly Wethal:

Universities of Wisconsin schools would keep in-state undergraduate tuition steady for the next two academic years if lawmakers hike state aid by $855 million of state dollars as part of the upcoming budget cycle, UW system President Jay Rothman said in a budget request Monday.

The proposed budget, which goes before the UW Board of Regents for a vote on Thursday, also seeks legislative approval — for a third time — to fund the Wisconsin Tuition Promise, a scholarship program for students from low-income families, and money to help keep the system’s remaining branch campuses viable.

The $855 million increase in state aid would put Wisconsin at the median level for state investment in its public four-year university system, Rothman said. For years, the UW system has complained that the state ranks lower than many of its neighbors in state funding per full-time student.

Snats

How would you classify all the pdfs in the internet? Well, that is what I tried doing this time.

Lets begin with the mother of all datasets: Common Crawl or CC is a web archive of all of the internet, it currently is petabytes in size and has been running since 2007. Maybe, you know about the Internet Archive which is almost the same but with the main difference being that Common Crawl focuses more on archiving the internet for scientists and researchers instead of digital preservation.

What this translates into is that CC doesn’t save all of the pdfs when it finds them. Specifically, when Common Crawl gets to a pdf, it just stores the first megabyte of information and truncates the rest.

This is where SafeDocs or CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED enters the picture. This corpus was originally created by the DARPA SafeDocs program and what it did was refetch all the different pdfs from a snapshot of Common Crawl to have untruncated versions of them. This dataset is incredibly big, it has roughly 8.4~ million pdfs that uncompressed total 8TB. This corpus is the biggest pure pdf dataset on the internet¹.

Donna Lee Elm

Google’s location history data are prized by law enforcement because they can be highly precise. Instead of the indeterminant and broad scope of cell tower location data, Google’s data can potentially identify a device’s location to within a yard or two. Moreover, Google tracked devices’ location quite often (sometimes as frequently as every two minutes), so the data can show movement and direction again with far greater precision than cell tower data. Google had been receiving warrants for its location history information on specified individuals’ devices, but in 2016, law enforcement recognized a new way to use those data.

The FBI for the first time sought what has come to be known as Geofence or Reverse-Location search warrants. Instead of identifying an individual whose data is sought, these warrants identified a place and a time where a crime occurred and sought information about who was there then. The government required Google to turn over information revealing all devices that were present in a certain geographic area at a particular period in time. Google imposed some limits on this process, requiring law enforcement to reasonably narrow its geographic area (the geofence) as well as the time frame to be searched. Then it established a three-step process to winnow down the number of “hits” that were produced before giving out identifying information; it sought to limit the invasion of its users’ privacy. Courts authorizing these warrants happily embraced that practice. But as discussed in my earlier article, see Donna Lee Elm, Geofence Warrants: Challenging Digital Dragnets, 35 Crim. Just. 2 (Summer 2020), these warrants have been criticized as being inherently overbroad, ignore the “particularity” requirement of the Fourth Amendment’s warrants clause, and, in the majority of instances, fail to actually identify the suspect.

Robert Schneider:

There are already a number of lesson plans available through the Keysight partnership that introduce students to electrical concepts, with more being developed. The most popular one thus far is Series and Parallel Circuits, which has been viewed more than 100 times each month. Teams of pupils predict the difference between a parallel and serial circuit design by building examples using wires, light bulbs, and batteries.

“TryEngineering is proud to be Keysight’s partner in attaining the ambitious goal of bringing engineering lessons to 1 million students in 2024.” —Debra Gulick

The newest of the Keysight-sponsored lesson plans, Light Up Name Badge, teaches the basics of circuitry, such as the components of a circuit, series and parallel circuits, and electronic component symbols. Students can apply their newfound knowledge in a design challenge wherein they create a light-up badge with their name.

Joshua C. Robertson:

Black voters have repeatedly expressed support for school choice, with nearly 80% endorsing policies like education savings accounts and vouchers, according to Morning Consult. Polling by RealClear Opinion Research also shows that black voters support school choice more than any other race. Clearly, our communities want our children to have the same opportunities as others, regardless of race, geography or socioeconomic status. We need courageous leadership that will equip our students to thrive.

Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are widely courting black voters. They hear, firsthand, from the same people we as pastors and community leaders hear from. But do they listen to these constituents when it comes to education freedom?

The answer has been a resounding no. The Minnesota governor has refused opportunities to work with the Legislature to pass education savings accounts or vouchers. He said in his defense: “We are not going to defund our public schools.” This is a gross misinterpretation of ESAs and vouchers. Black families don’t want to harm our public schools financially. We want properly funded public schools and education freedom at the same time. It’s possible if our leaders don’t play politics.

Will Flanders:

DPI changed the scales completely, so that parents, policymakers, and taxpayers have 0 ability to compare scores to previous years.

Related: Tony Evers use of teacher mulligans.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Washington’s unchecked borrowing is evidence of a decadent society that has lost all self-discipline.

Never before has the US entered an economic downturn with a combined federal, state, and local budget deficit anywhere near 8pc of GDP…

Philip Pilkington:

Actually its worse than that. They’re spending like crazy while trying to push a major creditor into some sort of Cold War. Basically no one in DC has a clue what’s going on anymore. Autopilot has been activated – but the controls have been set by a monkey. 🇺🇸

CTUP and Casey Mulligan:

Government regulation may be the single greatest policy barrier to prosperity. The federal executive branch alone issues thousands of new regulations each year that add to the 200,000 pages of federal rules already in place.

With so many components, regulation can be difficult to distill into important trends or even to comprehend its cumulative costs. This report compares the regulatory records of Presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama based on a dataset of more than 5,000 federal agency rules.

The main findings are:

• The Biden-Harris administration is on pace to add $47,000 in net present value regulatory costs per household from rules finalized during its first term.
  • This is almost twice the costs imposed during President Obama’s first term.
  • $47,000 in net present value corresponds to an annual cost of $6,300 for ten years or an annual cost of $3,300 forever.
• Even without counting Operation Warp speed, President Trump’s first term reduced regulatory costs by $11,000 per household.

Kyle Jaeger

“Look, I’m the parent of three young kids… A seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about this yet, but I’m certain—because kids are kids—that one day, one of my kids is going to take something or do something that I don’t want them to take. But I don’t want that mistake to ruin their life.”

Nicholas Carlini:

If I were to categorize these examples into two broad categories, they would be “helping me learn” and “automating boring tasks”. Helping me learn is obviously important because it means that I can now do things I previously would have found challenging; but automating boring tasks is (to me) actually equally important because it lets me focus on what I do best, and solve the hard problems.

Most importantly, these examples are real ways I’ve used LLMs to help me. They’re not designed to showcase some impressive capabiltiy; they come from my need to get actual work done. This means the examples aren’t glamorous, but a large fraction of the work I do every day isn’t, and the LLMs that are available to me today let me automate away almost all of that work.

Max Tami:

On the first day of the Republican National Convention in July — a smoothly operated event in Milwaukee that offered journalists an unexpected welcome — the DNC sent an email to the committee laying out what access was going to look like, including the number of credentialed media. The committee was horrified that the number of press stands were significantly lower than those provided for previous conventions, including the RNC earlier this year. The daily press gallery organizations were only given 35 seats, as well as 90 unassigned stadium seats with table tops. There were other more practical concerns: The New York Times seats had electrical machinery underneath, which the press gallery staff asked to change.

In a tense call with DNC Director of Media Logistics Pete Velz, the members of the Standing Committee pleaded with the DNC to expand access. Velz informed the committee that there would be no substantive changes.

Paul Vallas:

In either intent or outcome, racism is the defining feature of Stacy Davis Gates and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s education policies and minorities are hurt most

Let’s be clear, the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) blocks any changes to improve schools that impact its members, their numbers, work load or job security. So CTU President Stacy Davis Gates blames the system’s disastrous test scores on white supremacists who she claims deliberately design tests to fail black children. Meanwhile, former-lobbyist-turned-mayor, Brandon Johnson, rejects high expectations and standards in the classroom and dismisses the significance of a grading system, asserts that school success is measured not in student performance but in massive funding increases to a failing school system.

This blame shifting from the CTU failing to prepare students to a system fueled by white supremacy is hardly surprising from the race-baiting Davis Gates. A former CPS teacher who survived a mere six years as a classroom educator before turning to union organizing, Davis Gates often resorts to personal attacks against critics or declaring systemic racism a characteristic of the schooling system to deflect from the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators’ (CORE) role in Chicago’s hopelessly failing schools.

Like Davis Gate’s ally at City Hall, Mayor Brandon Johnson to frequently wields racial antagonism. A former elementary school teacher of five years who spent an additional year teaching high school social studies, Johnson followed Davis Gates career path and eventually turned to union organizing before becoming a CTU lobbyist.

With both Davis Gates and Johnson are blind to CTU’s myriad faults, it is predictable they would use racism and the excuse of underfunded schools to explain a failing system that has seen a massive exodus of students since the CORE faction took over CTU leadership in 2010. Since CORE took power, it has distinguished itself for its radicalism and frequent strikes or work stoppages.

If funding were the true measure of success, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) would be the most successful large school system in the country. Today, CPS spends $30,000 per student, budgeting one school employee for every 7.3 students and one teacher for every 15 students. Since 2019, the district has increased spending by a startling 40 percent per student and added 14.5 percent staff, despite an eight percent drop in enrollment. CPS now spends over $2,000 more per student than the Illinois average in a state that spends between 19-64 percent more per pupil than neighboring and other Midwestern states.

——

Notes & links on Paul Vallas. He spoke at Madison’s LaFollette high school in 2012.

David Hansson

America’s first amendment, the constitutional right to free speech, including the right to “misinformation” and even “hate speech”, has proven a surprisingly effective and resilient bulwark against the new rise of censorship and blasphemy laws gaining steam across the Atlantic.

That’s what the song is on about with “but at least I know I’m free”!

Now, I’m not an American. But I sure am becoming a lot more appreciative of the core principles my adopted country was founded on. (While keeping my eyes wide open to all its trade-offs and contradictions.)

Americans should be proud of these principles. Whatever the age, there’ll always be blasphemous talk, offensive jokes, mean insults, and wild conspiracy theories (that occasionally turn out to be true!). I’d much rather live in a country that embraces everyone’s right to BE FULL OF SHIT than one that pretends it can declare a priori what’s true and what’s false or one that makes false equivalences between violence and speech

Patrick McDonald:

Though law enforcement does not have to return property “instantaneously,” Katsas wrote, the Fourth Amendment requires that any “continuing retention of seized property” be reasonable. So while police can use seized items for “legitimate law-enforcement purposes,” such as for evidence at trial, and are permitted some delay for “matching a person with his effects,” prolonged seizures serving no important function can implicate the Fourth Amendment, the court ruled.

Given that the D.C. court finds itself in the minority on the question, some say that the case may be primed for the Supreme Court if the District chooses to appeal. “This case has potential to make national precedent,” Paul Belonick, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco law school, tells Reason. “The influential D.C. Circuit deliberately intensified a circuit split and put itself in the minority of circuits on the question, teeing it up cleanly for certiorari.”

Susan Edelman:

Scores on Algebra 1 Regents exam plummeted by 14 percentage points at south Queens schools that used a controversial new curriculum teachers have blasted as “a complete disaster,” a superintendent revealed this week

Josephine Van Ess, superintendent of Queens South High Schools, told parent leaders Wednesday that the 29 high schools under her watch, all but one of which used the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, saw their average pass rate plunge from 59% to 45%. 

The commercial curriculum — which forces teachers to give scripted lessons on a rigid schedule, expects students to “discover” solutions with little instruction, and frustrates kids lacking prerequisite skills — is partly to blame.

Sanvi Bangalore:

Northeastern University is one of the hottest schools in America. With applications soaring, the Boston school’s acceptance rate now rivals some Ivy League institutions.

The draw: letting students alternate academics and up to 18 months of full-time paid work experience, boosting their chances of landing a job afterward.

Viewed as a safety school a generation ago, Northeastern is one of a number of universities, including Drexel University in Philadelphia and Georgia Tech in Atlanta, whose career-oriented academic models are gaining attention from students and rival institutions as more Americans question the value of a college degree.

For families and businesses alike, the debate isn’t over just soaring tuition costs and student debt loads, but also whether U.S. universities are producing the kind of talent that companies say they need. Five years after graduation, nearly half of workers with bachelor’s degrees are in jobs that don’t make use of their college credentials or skills, according to a recent analysis of millions of graduates’ career paths by the labor analytics firm Burning Glass Institute and the nonprofit Strada Education Foundation.

Schools that help their students get at least one six-month professional job, or “co-op,” during their studies, usually through the university’s employer network, say they have better outcomes.

Minouche Shafik:

When I was inaugurated as Columbia’s 20th president on October 4, 2023, I called for strengthening the bond between universities and society through a recommitment to academia’s contribution to the common good. The horrors of the Hamas attack three days later, the ensuing war with Israel and the tragic loss of civilian lives in Gaza have tested that bond in unimaginable ways. I have seen the campus engulfed in tensions and divisions deepened by powerful external forces. 

The wave of protests, encampments, and building takeovers has since spread across the US and around the world. Whatever one thinks of the response of university leaders — denouncing hurtful rhetoric, enforcing rules and discipline, and summoning police to restore order — these are actions, not solutions. All of us who believe in higher education must now engage in serious soul searching about why this is happening. Only then can universities recover and begin to realise their potential to heal and unify.

From my perspective, there are two issues at stake. First, we must do a better job of defining the boundaries between the free speech rights of one part of our community and the rights of others to be educated in a place free of discrimination and harassment.

It would be a mistake to think that a small group of students with connections to the Arab world drove these protests. What I saw was a broad representation of young people of every ethnic and religious background — passionate, intelligent and committed. Unfortunately, the actions and antisemitic comments of some — especially among those from outside our community — stirred fear and discomfort. While civil disobedience aims to disrupt, the bounds of peaceful protest were crossed with the forceful takeover of a campus building.

Robert McFadden:

In 1961, Ms. Colvin, a middle-aged, college-educated Syracuse homemaker and mother of two, was appalled to discover that the recent census had counted 11,055 residents of Onondaga County, N.Y., who could not read or write. She had no experience teaching, but felt passionately that she had to do something about it.

It was slow going at first. In 1967, the group, Literacy Volunteers, was chartered by New York State as a nonprofit with 77 tutors, 100 students and Ms. Colvin as its first president. In succeeding decades under her guidance, the organization won federal and private grants, created programs in many states, won national recognition and changed its name to Literacy Volunteers of America.

A year later, after consulting reading specialists and service agencies, she opened an office in her basement, began recruiting volunteers from churches to be tutors, wrote training manuals, and set up a small group to reach out to residents, many of them immigrants, to teach them basic English, offering pathways to jobs, education and rising standards of living.

—-

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?

Carrie Mckean:

Back home in the States, we’re constantly worried about our kids. It’s well-documented and generally accepted that smartphones, social media, and a lack of childhood independenceand free play contribute to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously dubbed an “anxious generation.” But in all this collective handwringing, we tend to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: unchecked, socially normalized parental anxiety and the smothering parenting style it produces.

There’s nothing new under the sun, and I’m sure, to some extent, that’s true of parental worries. Throughout the ages, parents have feared losing their children to sickness, accidents, or violence. Right now, while I worry about volleyball team tryouts and first day of school jitters, mothers around the world worry about bombs and bullets, famine and frontlines.

The problem of the relatively comfortable, like us, seems to be what we do with our worries. Our parenting strategies successfully soothe our own fears, but that doesn’t mean they meet our children’s developmental needs. We disempower our kids instead of helping them grow into competent, confident adults. We rebrand hyper-concern as proof of love and treat our pursuit of safety and ease like whipped cream on hot chocolate: If some is good, surely more will be better.

Wall Street Journal:

A universal credit would have to be refundable, which means the government would write a check even to those who don’t pay income tax. This year the credit is refundable only up to $1,700, but Democrats want total refundability as the start of a universal basic income, whether you work or not. Is Mr. Vance saying he wants his $5,000 fully refundable?

For Americans who owe no income tax, a $5,000 payout would be a large check that could prompt parents to work less or drop out of the labor force. It’d also be one more giant item mucking up the tax code while producing zero of the economic growth that such families need to prosper.

The rough cost of this big new entitlement could be nearly $3 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Foundation. That’s twice the static revenue cost of Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, though those at least had some revenue feedback effect from spurring the economy.

Doug Rohrer and Hal Pashler

Because people forget much of what they
learn, students could benefit from learning strategies that provide long-lasting knowledge. Yet surprisingly little is
known about how long-term retention is most efficiently achieved. Here we examine how retention is affected by two
variables: the duration of a study session and the temporal distribution of study time across multiple sessions. Our results
suggest that a single session devoted to the study of some material should continue long enough to ensure that mastery is achieved but that immediate further study of the same material is an inefficient use of time. Our data also show that the benefit of distributing a fixed amount of study time across two study sessions – the spacing effect – depends jointly on the interval between study sessions and the interval between study and test. We discuss the practical implications of both findings, especially in regard to mathematics learning.

Alec Johnson:

Through the three rounds of ESSER funding, Milwaukee Public Schools received a total of about $786.42 million. As of June 17, the most recent data available, the district had spent about $570.23 million, or 72%, of those funds, according to information from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.

Douglas Belkin:

Running a high-profile university during a war in the Middle East where students, faculty and alumni are at odds has turned into one of the toughest jobs in America to keep.

The presidents at five Ivy League universities have stepped down since the Israel-Gaza war began last fall. Four of those schools have named interim presidents. Leaders elsewhere spent the summer enacting stricter rules to stave off a repeat of the spring, when colleges across the country were beset by protest, encampments and arrests.

Intense pressures remain.

Alumni want protesters to stop diminishing the brand of their alma maters. Faculty want an end to the disruption of classes. Parents want safety for their children. And there is always the potential for Congress to call more school leaders before a committee to ask why their campuses are so chaotic.

Presidents who have held their jobs are quick to acknowledge they have benefited from variables beyond their control. But several presidents, former presidents and advisers point to strategies that have helped leaders navigate recent storms.

Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier described his North Star as an unwillingness to appease one side or the other through intense protests, arrests and student expulsions on his campus.

Laura Kipnis:

Rebind would first record a handful of short videos of me chatting about the play, any aspect that interested me—these would be embedded in various places throughout the text. And then I and an interlocutor (probably Clancy), known in-house as a “Ghostbinder,” would record 12 (or more!) hours of conversation—these would be used as the basis for AI-Laura’s commentaries. The conversation could be about Romeo and Julietbut also related subjects: Is love at first sight trustworthy? Is 13 too young to get married? The content was entirely up to me: My job wasn’t to be a Shakespeare expert, it was to be interesting. As Rebind users read the play, chat windows would open in which they’d write journal-type responses, to which AI-Laura would respond, drawing on and remixing the recordings I had made.

Justin Skycak:

Here’s a 4-stage roadmap.

I’ll start by briefly describing all the stages – and then I’ll go back to each stage for a deep dive where I fully explain the rationale and point you to resources that you can use to guide your learning.

• Stage 1: Foundational Math. All the high school and university-level math that underpins machine learning. All of algebra, a lot of single-variable calculus / linear algebra / probability / statistics, and a bit of multivariable calculus.
• Stage 2: Classical Machine Learning. Coding up streamlined versions of basic regression and classification models, all the way from linear regression to small multi-layer neural networks.
• Stage 3: Deep Learning. Multi-layer neural networks with many parameters, where the architecture of the network is tailored to the specific kind of task you’re trying to get the model to perform.
• Stage 4: Cutting-Edge Machine Learning. Transformers, LLMs, diffusion models, and all the crazy stuff that’s coming out now, that captured your interest to begin with.

Note that I’ve spent the past 5+ years working on resources to support learners in stages 1-2, and there is a general lack of serious yet friendly resources in those stages, so I’m going to be including my own resources there (along with some others).

Mark Lisheron;

But however cautious and deliberative the committee is, it will be difficult to avoid the evidence that has been piling up like a jackknifed train for the last two years. With all of the alternatives available — the expansion of liberal arts programs at technical colleges and more access to four-year colleges — it’s fair to ask why we need the two-year schools at all.

Students and their parents are answering that question. The number of two-year campuses has shrunk by six — there are now seven of them — in half a year, and two more could be closed if enrollments don’t immediately improve.

Overall enrollment in the schools is down by more than 64%, from 9,959 in 2010 to 3,556 in 2023, according to a UW-Milwaukee report.Enrollment dropped by more than half since 2018 alone, when the two-year schools came under the authority of four-year schools, according to Rothman’s branch campus briefing in October 2023.

Glenn Minnis

Illinois now ranks as the least affordable state for housing in the Midwest, with 1 in 3 households paying more than 30% of their income for housing as property taxes continue to rise.

——

Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has a huge fall referendum on the November ballot….

John Lucas:

The audio file is a recording of a June 6 telephonic interview that Jessica did with Nick Tartaglione, Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center. Tartaglione was recounting some of his conversations with Epstein.

As Tartaglione tells it, Epstein returned to their shared cell after a meeting with the federal prosecutors. He told his cellmate that the prosecutors were fishing for a plea deal with him if he would provide damaging information about Trump that would support his impeachment. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not. 

Tartaglione asked whether Epstein knew Trump. Epstein acknowledged that although he did know Trump, they didn’t like each other. When Tartaglione asked why, Epstein described how Trump had kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago because he, Epstein, was there with an under-aged girl. Here is Tartaglione’s description of the conversation:

[Epstein]: They told me they will let me plead out to something small and I will do just a couple of years in a camp if I can give them something on Trump [and] get him impeached. And, uh, I said, ‘Well, do you know Trump?’ He [Epstein] says, ‘I know him, I met him, but we don’t like each other.’ I laughed. I said, ‘Why?”. He said, ‘Trump threw me out of a party at his place in Florida. I said, ‘Why did he throw you out?’ ‘He got mad. I was talking to some girl….’

Epstein went on to tacitly acknowledge that the “some girl” was under-aged. He also told the prosecutors that he could not “give them something on Trump” because he did not know anything that would incriminate Trump. That did not deter them; they pressed on. 

Epstein explained how the prosecutors tried to get him to give testimony to support Trump’s impeachment, even if it wasn’t true. Here is Tartaglione’s description of their conversation:

——-

Carrie Johnson:

An extraordinary special investigation by a federal judge has concluded that two Justice Department prosecutors intentionally hid evidence in the case against Sen. Ted Stevens, one of the biggest political corruption cases in recent history.

A blistering report released Thursday found that the government team concealed documents that would have helped the late Stevens, a longtime Republican senator from Alaska, defend himself against false-statements charges in 2008. Stevens lost his Senate seat as the scandal played out, and he died in a plane crash two years later.

Soumitra Shukla

How do socioeconomically unequal screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might reduce inequality? Using personnel data from elite U.S. and European multinational corporations recruiting from an elite Indian college, I show that caste disparities in hiring do not arise in many job search stages, including: applications, application reading, written aptitude tests, large group debates that assess socio-emotional skills, and job choices. Rather, disparities arise in the final round, comprising non-technical personal interviews that screen on family background, neighborhood, and “cultural fit.” These characteristics are plausibly weakly correlated with productivity (at the interview round) but strongly correlated with caste. Employer willingness to pay for an advantaged caste is as large as that for a full standard deviation increase in college GPA. A hiring subsidy that eliminates the caste penalty would be more cost-effective in diversifying elite hiring than equalizing the caste distribution of pre-college test scores or enforcing hiring quotas.

More.

Jim Geraghty

When the federal government and state governments keep putting more money in the hands of students, there’s no downward pressure on prices. Colleges and universities can increase the cost of tuition at twice the rate of inflation because beleaguered parents and students will keep finding some way to pay for it, even if it means graduates start out post-college life in deeper and deeper debt.

After all, despite the fact that the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s initial student-debt-relief plan, Biden has still canceled $168 billion in student debt so far this year — transferring those costs from the borrowers to the U.S. taxpayer.

Joanne Jacob’s:

More than 40 percent of middle and high school grades are too high, compared to standardized test scores, and 16 percent are too low, concludes a new study conducted in 2022 and 2023 by the The Equitable Grading Project

“Two out of five transcript grades indicated that students were more competent in the course than they actually were, while nearly one out of six grades was lower than the student’s true understanding of the course content, reports Hechinger’s Jill Barshay.

The Chicago Teachers Union does not want you to see this film.

You better not watch the official trailer for it right here. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/vWa2l4CF2J

— Illinois Policy (@illinoispolicy) October 14, 2022

Illinois Policy

Todd Spangler:

Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s elections director, wrote the West campaign a letter dated Friday saying that the affidavits of identity submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office in June for West and his vice presidential running mate, Melina Abdullah, were not properly notarized.

Nick:

The campaign is adding Marc Elias, one of the party’s top election lawyers, to help Democrats counter what they expect to be a contentious postelection period.

Abbey Machtig:

Rebecca Greco, a librarian who worked at the school when Terrell was hired, said she does not recall any engagement with staff prior to the hiring of Terrell as principal. Greco also served on the site-based leadership team but now works as a librarian in a different school district.

She said the district did not make an effort to seek community feedback through virtual meetings or other formats, either.

“You could have gone to a community in good faith and said, ‘Look, we need a principal in place for the start of the school year. This is how we’re going to proceed. This is our reasoning. These are the ways you can provide input,’” Greco said. “But that’s not the way it happened.”

Greco is among the 24 current and former staff members from Southside Elementary School who filed a complaint against Terrell and the school’s assistant principal, Annabel Torres, this spring.

Parents of students filed a separate complaint in June, saying the current state of affairs at the school is at an “epic level of untenability.”

———

Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has a huge fall referendum on the November ballot….

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?

Rita Ginja, Julie Riise, Barton Willage, Alexander L.P. Willén

We estimate doctor value-added and provide evidence on the distribution of physician quality in an entire country, combining rich population-wide register data with random assignment of patients to general practitioners (GPs). We show that there is substantial variation in the quality of physicians, as measured by patients’ post-assignment mortality, in the primary care sector. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in doctor quality is associated with a 12.2-percentage point decline in a patient’s two-year mortality risk. While we find evidence of observable doctor characteristics and practice styles influencing a GP’s value-added, a standard decomposition exercise reveals that most of the quality variation is driven by unobserved differences across doctors. Finally, we show that patients are unable to identify who the high-quality doctors are, and that patient-generated GP ratings are uncorrelated with GP value-added. Using a lower bound of the predicted value of an additional life year in Norway ($35,000), our results demonstrate that replacing the worst performing GPs (bottom 5 percent of the VA distribution) with GPs of average quality generates a social benefit of $27,417 per patient, $9.05 million per GP, or $934 million in total. At the same time, our results show that higher-quality GPs are associated with a lower per-patient cost.

Richard Hanania:

When I started writing about the problems with civil rights law, few people had any idea what I was talking about, even in right-wing circles. Most understood the Civil Rights Act as the bill that got rid of Jim Crow and banned explicit discrimination. It did in fact do those things, but as I argue in The Origins of Woke, civil rights law has over the years expanded to mandate differential treatment based on race and sex, and institutionalize concepts like affirmative action and disparate impact. 

It seems that I’ve succeeded in changing the conversation around these issues. Now, conservatives know that the whole thing is a con and understand that when someone is a “civil rights advocate” they’re not simply demanding equal treatment for women and minorities, but in favor of policies that lower standards, restrict freedom, and discriminate against whites, men, and Asians. “Diversity” and “DEI” have similarly become politicized terms.

I feel like the conversation around unions within many intellectual spaces is about where the civil rights discourse started. I’ve heard people defend organized labor on freedom of association grounds. Why can’t workers get together and engage in collective bargaining with their employers? Don’t they have a right to do so? This lack of understanding has coincided with people on the right starting to say nice things about labor unions, including JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and the intellectuals around American Compass. It may be that conservatives who have taken on organized labor in the last decades have been too successful, to the point that young people on the right don’t even know what unions are anymor

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high birth rates, Ehrlich predicted: ‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.’ He came up with drastic solutions, including adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilise the population.

Ehrlich, like many others, got it wrong. What he needed to worry about was declining birth rates and population collapse. Nearly 60 years on, many predict the world will soon reproduce at less than the replacement rate.

But by my calculations, we’re already there. Largely unnoticed, last year was a landmark one in history. For the first time, humans aren’t producing enough babies to sustain the population. If you’re 55 or younger, you’re likely to witness something humans haven’t seen for 60,000 years, not during wars or pandemics: a sustained decrease in the world population.

A society’s reproduction level is measured by the fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has. The replacement level is accepted as 2.1: any higher and the population grows; any lower and it falls. Like the R number in epidemiology (which we heard so much about during the pandemic), the replacement level is a critical figure. Either side of it leads to dramatically different outcomes. The replacement level is put at a little over 2 to take account of the slight imbalance in male and female births – slightly more of the former are born. Also, not all girls survive until reproductive age.

Troy Hunt:

I decided to write this post because there’s no concise way to explain the nuances of what’s being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it’s easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through an act of unauthorised access and publish a discrete corpus of information that can be attributed back to that source. But in the case of National Public Data, we’re talking about a data aggregator most people had never heard of where a “threat actor” has published various partial sets of data with no clear way to attribute it back to the source. And they’re already the subject of a class action, to add yet another variable into the mix. I’ve been collating information related to this incident over the last couple of months, so let me talk about what’s known about the incident, what data is circulating and what remains a bit of a mystery.

Let’s start with the easy bit – who is National Public Data (NPD)? They’re what we refer to as a “data aggregator”, that is they provide services based on the large volumes of personal information they hold. From the front page of their website:

Josh Blackman:

What, then, was the disagreement? The Justices fractured on severability. Indeed, severability, along with vacatur and nationwide injunctions, are among the most unresolved areas of the Court. In recent years, Justices Thomas, and later, Justice Gorsuch, have called for a re-examination of severability doctrine. That Justice Gorsuch dissented here likely reflects his nuanced views on severability. He rejects the notion that courts can “vacate” rules, in large part because of standing doctrine. To Justice Gorsuch, if a provision does not injure a person, it cannot be enjoined.

But where is Justice Thomason on this issue?  And Justice Barrett has been very skeptical about granting preliminary relief. She seems to be trending to the position advanced by Sam Bray that there should not be a fixation solely on the likelihood of the merits–or a preview of the merits question. But that is precisely what the per curiam opinion did here.

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago parents have been wondering when Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates was going to address the disastrous reading and math scores in Chicago public schools. Now she has.

In an interview in early August with Chicago radio news station WVON 1690, Ms. Gates was asked to respond to the union’s critics who are concerned that so many of Chicago’s students aren’t reading or doing math at grade level. Her novel answer: The tests are racist so they should be ignored.

“The way in which we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Ms. Gates said. 

“If you have another hour, I can get into why standardized tests are born out of the eugenics movement,” she continued. “And the eugenics movement has always sought to see black people as inferior to those that are non-black. . . . You can’t test black children with an instrument that was born to prove their inferiority.”

——-

More.

Austin Berg:

Yesterday, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates accused Martinez of being “insubordinate” after his team presented numbers showing the union’s demands would effectively bankrupt the school district.

“Every other mayor in this city has told them what to do and they’ve done it,” Davis Gates said of past CPS leaders appointed by Chicago mayors.

“You’ve got to ask Pedro why he doesn’t comply with the [mayoral] transition report that the mayor’s team said yes to…You can ask [Gov.] JB [Pritzker], too. You can ask [Board of Education President] Jianan Shi. You can ask all those boys how they are going to lead this district into the transformation that these children deserve.”

More.

John Kass:

But the vacancy rate for downtown Chicago has reached 30 percent, not due to Covid, but to the Black Lives Matter riots and subsequent smash and grab sprees of theft. This puts increased strain on taxpayers.

The vacant storefronts of downtown Chicago grin at the city like a mouthful of broken teeth.

You won’t hear much about that either.

Putting Harris and Foxx and Soros and anarchy into one column would make the “civilized” turn up their noses. It’s rather like forcing them to sniff ammonia.

But Soros has busily been about promoting anarchy in the West by electing permissive prosecutors that I call “Soros prosecutors.” They don’t prosecute crime; their political slogans racialize this because they don’t want to put minorities in jail.

Paris Schutz

The Chicago Teachers Union Foundation is seeking to significantly reduce the property tax bill for its West Loop headquarters, according to documents from the Cook County Assessor’s Office obtained by FOX 32 Chicago.

The Assessor recently reappraised the value of the CTU’s building, estimating its fair market value at $19 million. However, the CTU is appealing this assessment and has hired a private appraiser who argues that the building’s value should be reduced by more than half, to $9.2 million.

Based on the county’s appraisal, the CTU would owe approximately $1 million in property taxes. According to the Cook County Clerk’s office, 55% of Chicago’s property tax revenue is allocated to the Chicago Board of Education. This means about $550,000 of the CTU’s tax bill would fund Chicago Public Schools. If the CTU’s appeal is successful, it would cut that contribution by more than half, depriving the school district of approximately $275,000.

——-

Rethinking city governance and cost:

A massive part of Trump’s 2nd-term agenda is to charter TEN new mega-futuristic cities in various states on federally-owned lands

“Almost one-third of the landmass of the United States is owned by the federal government, with just a very, very small portion of that land… we should hold a contest to charter up to ten new cities and award them to the best proposals for development. In other words, we’ll actually build new cities in our country again.”

Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has a huge fall referendum on the November ballot….

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?

Matt Lamb

The Chicago Teachers Union president has a convenient excuse for low test scores in the public school system: The exams are “rooted in white supremacy.”

“The way in which, you know, we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Stacy Davis Gates said last week in a radio interview.

She also said teachers’ low pay is due to sexism: “This society has never wanted to pay women [their] worth, and as you know, our union is 80% female.”

Gates made the comments when asked by the black radio station WVON 1690 to respond to criticism about asking for pay raises despite low student achievement. The union wants a 9% annual raise and money for solar panels, abortions, and transgender drugs and surgeries as part of its contract negotiation.

Playing the race card makes sense from Gates’s point of view, since only “31% of elementary school students in Chicago Public Schools were proficient in reading,” according to Chalkbeat Chicago. 

“In math, 19% of Chicago third through eighth graders were proficient,” based on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness test.

——

A majority of the taxpayer financed Madison school board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School.

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?

John Otis:

In Venezuela, government supermarkets sell price-controlled food, making them far cheaper than private stores. But Valero explains that people are allowed in state-run supermarkets just two days per week, based on their ID card numbers. The system is designed to prevent shoppers from buying more than they need and then reselling goods on the black market at a huge markup.

Venezuela is rich in oil, but now poor in just about everything else. Economic mismanagement combined with low oil prices and high inflation has created one of the world’s most troubled economies. The government has stopped giving regular economic statistics, but many independent economists say inflation is now north of 100 percent annually.

Rising anger over food shortages — plus byzantine rules about when and where people can buy things — have made grocery shopping in Venezuela a nightmare.

Valero says goodbye to her 7- and 9-year-old daughters. They will skip school and stay home alone in a Caracas slum, with the door locked. That’s because Valero sometimes spends all day standing in line at grocery stores and can’t pick up the girls after class.

Brandon Dupré

Northern Illinois University reported a $31.8 million deficit for fiscal year 2024 and now faculty and staff brace for what’s next as the school year approaches.

Beverly Pekala:

Northern #Illinois Univ facing $31.8 million deficit.
Enrollment ⬇️ to 15,504 from 25,313 in 2006.
‘The union has been told there will not be any layoffs.’
IL taxpayers give public univs/colleges $2.6 billion yr,

Clark Ross:

In a recent Boston Globe column, correspondent Kara Miller wrote that our colleges and universities now “embrac[e] the status quo,” preventing them from responding to new challenges. Her article draws heavily on a 2023 book by Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Both Miller and Rosenberg write of the difficulty of fostering meaningful change in our colleges and universities. Private businesses in the United States demonstrating such inflexibility would quickly endanger their viability and existence.

In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education means risking irrelevance.In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education is risking exactly that irrelevance. In prior years, the status quo filtered down from elite universities and helped “ground” post-secondary education with some positive moorings. Today is different. American post-secondary education confronts a bevy of challenges that threaten its stability. Adherence to the status quo has become an “anchor” preventing meaningful change.

Let’s review briefly a few of these challenges: financial, demographic, ideological, pedagogical, and political.

Labor-intensive in their financial model, higher-ed institutions are confronting financial challenges. Rising costs, for everything from health-care insurance to student services, threaten financial stability. This challenge is occurring just as families, particularly middle-income ones, are less able to respond to higher tuition and fees. Just look at the scores of small private schools that have failed in recent years, in all sections of the country. Possible remedies, such as shortened semesters and larger classes with smaller discussion sections, are promptly vetoed, with little study or discussion, by faculty groups.

A second challenge is the so-called demographic cliff, an expectation that a peak number of high-school graduates, perhaps 3.5 million, will be present in 2025, followed by annual declines of nearly 1.5 percent for the next five to 10 years. With many schools already heavily under-enrolled, how will U.S. higher education confront this challenge? There are really only two ways: Try to increase the number of domestic college students, or turn to an increased number of international students. Yet cost increases, curricular challenges, and (to an extent) xenophobia are preventing higher education from increasing its draw.

Ling Huang:

The glaring mistakes in Jo Boaler’s new book “Math-ish” reveal her unsolid and erroneous conceptual understanding of fractions and simple multiplication. If anything, the mistakes suggest weak procedural fluency and vague conceptual understanding reinforce each other.

Joe Pompliano:

Amazon is releasing a new docuseries that follows LSU athletes as they started to make money through NIL.

Daniel Buck:

These new laws are no more “bans” than a bonfire in my backyard is arson—only alike superficially. As Mark Twain famously observed, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” There’s quite a difference between a federal government black-bagging dissidents for sharing censored content, a major seller such as Barnes and Noble refusing to carry a book, a public or school library choosing not to shelve a book, and a teacher replacing one with another on a curriculum. To call routine library and curricular curation a “ban” is really a rather large categorical error.

Only a few thousand books can fit into a school library, and a handful onto school curriculum. It is the duty of school personnel to select the best books with the most educative potential to include in those small selections and the duty of our lawmakers to establish clear expectations for the personnel in and policies guiding our public institutions. Thankfully, just the other week, I strolled past a “banned books” display at my local bookstore where I could bravely buy many of these supposedly censored titles for $29.95 each. It may be false advertising, but it sure is effective.

Kris Holt:

Several months after a hacking group claimed to be selling nearly 3 billion records stolen from a prominent data broker, much of the information appears to have been leaked on a forum. According to Bleeping Computer, the data dump includes 2.7 billion records of personal info for people in the US, such as names, Social Security Numbers, potential aliases and all physical addresses they are known to have lived at.

The data, which is unencrypted, is believed to have been obtained from a broker called National Public Data. It’s said that the business assembles profiles for individuals by scraping information from public sources and then sells the data for the likes of background checks and looking up criminal records. (A proposed class-action suit was filedagainst National Public Data over the breach earlier this month.)

Carolyn Steyn:

The $374 million campus includes eight tennis courts, a weight room with 10 new rowing machines, and a student union with sky-high ceilings. Once construction is completed in 2026, it will have a 600-seat performing arts center, a swimming pool and two academic towers. 

Liz Wolfe:

Prices are signals, ways of communicating how much of a good is needed by consumers and how much ought to be produced. Interfering with these signals will create terrible shortages. Giving the government the power to meddle in the economy in this way will not drive prices down, it will force some firms to go out of business and some consumers to experience shortages of goods they would have otherwise been able to purchase. The scale at which this devastation happens is contingent on the scale at which the government chooses to meddle.

In a speech tomorrow, Harris will detail her economic agenda to an even greater degree. Expect more of the same strategy: blaming big corporations for the fact that Americans’ grocery bills are substantially more expensive now than before the pandemic. But this wholly ignores the main driver of this spike in costs: inflation, which was driven in large part by pandemic-era government spending, including stimulus checks.

Christopher Rufo:

We’ve seen a similar playbook in Latin American regimes: Flood the market with inflation. Shift the blame to the “capitalists.” Promise to crack down on “price gouging.” When that fails, on to the next step: expropriation.

Vivek:

Kamala Harris is set to announce a federal price control protections in the food & grocery industries. This is a god-awful idea. But it’s an open question whether Republicans will have the spine to criticize her for it, because this would require abandoning other ideas that some Republicans have favored in recent years – like capping interest rates on credit cards, expanding FTC regulations, and raising the federal minimum wage.

The Big Cheat: the so-called “defenders of democracy” aren’t who you think they are 👇 pic.twitter.com/8e1mVs0mOQ

— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) August 15, 2024

Abbey Machtig:

The school also would focus on building literacy and math skills through “boot camps” in the first year of enrollment. Beyond this bootcamp, students would get grade-level English instruction through the Odell High School Literacy Program, according to the proposal.

——-

A majority of the taxpayer financed Madison school board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School.

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?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

When familiarity leads to false assumptions

One of the most famous illustrations of the curse of knowledge is a 1990 experiment which was conducted at Stanford by a graduate student named Elizabeth Newton. In this study, she asked a group of participants to “tap out” famous songs with their fingers, while another group tried to name the melodies.

When the “tappers” were asked to predict how many of the songs would be recognised by the listeners, they would always overestimate. The “tappers” were so familiar with what they were tapping, they assumed listeners would easily recognize the melody.

These findings have interesting implications. For example, research suggests that sales people who are better informed about their product may be at a disadvantage compared to less-informed sales people.

Austin Berg:

Martinez recently pushed back on pressure from the mayor and the union to take out a $300M payday loan that would have cost the district a total of $700M+ over the next 20 years.

Hannah Schmid, Jon Josko

Nearly 31% of public school teachers in Chicago send at least one of their children to private school, according to federal data.

The leader of the Chicago Teachers Union sends her oldest child to a private school, too.

The fact that so many public schools teachers are choosing private schools for their children is according to an original analysis of data from the 2018-2022 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

What does it mean for a city if 3-in-10 of its public school teachers choose to pay for private school rather than send their child to a public school like where they teach? It could mean these children need something different from the public school model. It could also mean teachers in the system know firsthand the school system is failing its students, and they want better for their own children.

The stats show why so many of Chicago’s public school teachers have put their children in private schools: just 1-in-4 Chicago Public Schools students in third through eighth grade could read at grade level in 2023; by 11th grade even fewer students could meet grade-level reading standards.

Scott Bauer:

A member of the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to remove the Green Party’s presidential candidate from the ballot in Wisconsin, arguing that the party is ineligible. 

It’s the latest move by the DNC to block third-party candidates from the ballot. Democrats are also seeking to stop independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in several states.

The Green Party’s appearance on the presidential ballot could make a difference in swing state Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by between 5,700 votes and about 23,000 votes. Jill Stein is expected to officially become the Green Party’s presidential nominee at its national convention, which begins Thursday. 

The Associated Press left email messages with the Green Party and Stein’s campaign Wednesday afternoon.

Amber Duke:

We have a long cultural tradition of free speech in this country that is an unwritten but near-universally understood extension from the First Amendment protection of speech from the government. Our Founders and other enlightened thinkers from the time reasoned that “bad speech” is best countered with more speech. Censoring “bad” ideas would drive them underground and allow them to fester, which promotes unhealthy conflict resolution and national disunity. In addition, the majority “right” or “good” idea can be wrong, so being open to new ideas and minority opinions is vital for societal progress and determining truth.

This philosophy requires a belief in democratic principles. That is, you have to trust the populace to be able to ascertain for themselves what is true versus false or good versus bad and make good decisions based on the speech they hear. It would seem obvious that America believes in that idea; after all, we allow nearly everyone to vote for their elected officials. We trust them enough to choose the government, so we must trust them enough to consume information without censorship.

Unfortunately, the news media in this country has increasingly isolated itself from most of this country which has allowed an elitist attitude to emerge within the industry. It became more prevalent during the Trump era. We know Trump is crazy and dangerous, but the people are too stupid to figure it out on their own, so we need to do everything possible to help defeat him, even if it means shielding the public from what he has to say. Journalists repeatedly lobbied social media companies to remove Trump from their platforms — with many of them finally acquiescing post-January 6 — and encouraged corporate advertisers to pull paid ads from conservative or Trump-related content on social media and television. Many stopped carrying his speeches and events live so that viewers could not see for themselves what he had to say. All of his words were filtered through a biased media that wanted to present him in the most unfavorable light possible. Private persons who chose to support Trump anonymously online were harassed and “canceled” by news organizations, a warning that ideological dissent to the regime would not be tolerated. 

Few of these journalists have ever stopped during this process to consider that their opinion of Trump might be wrong — or wonder why their strategy to silence him hasn’t meaningfully diminished his support. Instead, they have doubled down.

Chancellor Mark A. Mone

Today, I recommended to Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman that the Board of Regents discontinue the program of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s (UWM) College of General Studies (CGS) and its three academic departments: Arts & Humanities, Math & Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences & Business, pursuant to Regent Policy Document (RPD) 20-24. Read a PDF of the recommendation letter.

This decision weighs heavily on me, as the impact is profound, affecting 32 dedicated tenured faculty members, their families and communities, as well as many other dedicated CGS staff. This process has been underway in some form for months. Last fall, President Rothman directed the closure of UWM at Washington County, which prompted UWM to examine CGS’s future in a new context. A UWM work team was formed to address the closure, including how to strengthen programming at UWM at Waukesha. This led to findings that there is no viable path for UWM at Waukesha. In March, President Rothman directed the closure of UWM at Waukesha and the College of General Studies, and UWM then announced the program closure to the campus community.  

Alex Tabarrok 

Three months later Helen’s daughter, Barbara, was born. Not long after, Helen began to experience some frightening health problems; her face swelled, and her hair fell out. She then experienced two miscarriages, one of which necessitated 16 blood transfusions (Welsome 1999, p. 220). Baby Barbara experienced her own health problems from early childhood. She suffered from extreme fatigue and developed an autoimmune disorder and eventually skin cancer.

…Unbeknownst to Helen, she and her unborn baby had been subjects in a government-funded experiment. She was one of hundreds of women who received an experimental “cocktail” between 1945 and 1947 during one of their prenatal visits, compliments of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which provided the materials (Wittenstein 2014, p. 39).

Julian Roberts Grmela:

HSHMC’s approach of integrating literacy into content classes is something that researchers are calling for. Jade Wexler, a professor of special education with a focus on secondary literacy at the University of Maryland, said her research suggests that while some students are able to catch up to their peers after interventions — or pull-out sessions in the special education setting — others merely “trudge along and maintain status relative to their typically developing peers.” According to Wexler, a bigger impact may come from embedding reading instruction into other classes, “where these kids spend a majority of their day.”

But very few schools currently integrate effective literacy practices into content classes, according to experts on reading. That said, a handful of states and school districts are starting to explore the approach.

Ted Balaker:

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars so your children can spend four to seven years under the tutelage of the world’s worst therapist. 

Too often that comes pretty close to describing the modern college experience. Universities routinely toss out wisdom that’s been accumulated over centuries and backed up by modern psychology in favor of fashionable claptrap that makes students miserable. 

Psychologists have long known that people who believe they have a good deal of control over their life outcomes are more likely to be happy. But colleges teach students, especially those from minority groups, that systemic “isms” will undermine their hard work. 

Our minds are threat-generating marvels, but those who embrace Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) learn how to separate the countless fake threats from the relatively few real ones. Too bad universities fill students’ heads with microaggression dogma, which trains them to interpret benign, everyday interactions as threats. 

And that’s just the beginning. Universities whip up tribalism, encourage fragility, and leave students with broken moral compasses. 

But as frustrating as college can be, it’s important to avoid myopia.

Chris Edwards:

First Solar became perhaps the biggest beneficiary from $1 trillion in environmental spending enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022 after it cleared Congress solely with Democratic votes. Since then, First Solar’s stock price has doubled and its profits have soared thanks to new federal subsidies that could be worth up to $10 billion over a decade. The success has delivered a massive windfall to a small group of Democratic donors who invested heavily in the company.

… First Solar offers an example of how that legislation, shaped by lobbyists and potentially influenced by a flood of campaign cash, can yield mammoth returns to the well-connected.

… Company officials cultivated a constituency with Democrats during President Barack Obama’s administration, which in turn subsidized them through billions of dollars in government-backed loans. When the Biden administration started writing rules to implement the Democrats’ new law, First Solar executives and lobbyists met at least four times in late 2022 and 2023 with administration officials, including John Podesta, who oversaw the measure’s environmental provisions.

… The company will benefit from billions of dollars in lucrative tax credits for domestic clean energy manufacturers … Last December, First Solar agreed to sell roughly $650 million of these credits to a tech company — providing a massive influx of cash, courtesy of the US government.

More:

First Solar spent $4.3 million on lobbying, won $10 BILLION in US subsidies, & “delivered a massive windfall to a small group of Democratic donors” along the way.

Heckuva business model:

The Economist on fiscal indulgences:

“As the campaign contributions jingle into the campaign funds, the tax revenues fly out”, he adds. As a result, “we have categories within categories within subgroups, all at different prices, deductions or exemptions that release some elites from the published tax rates.”

Bryce Hill:

Population loss in Chicago – and Illinois in general – can be attributed to one cause: people moving out. More people are moving out of the city than are moving in. While international migration continues to be a boon to population counts and births still outpace deaths, Chicago’s population decline is because Chicagoans are leaving.

The latest data from the Census Bureau confirms Illinois’ outmigration and population crises are ongoing and continue to plague the state and Chicago. While politicians have disputed the numbers, Illinois’ population loss and outmigration crises have been continuously affirmed by data from the U.S. Census Bureau, IRS, as well as U-Haul, United Van Lines and Allied Van Lines moving companies.

While the new city-level data does not break down population change by components such as domestic and international migration, births and deaths, Illinois’ population declines during the past decade have been solely attributable to domestic outmigration. The same is very likely true for Chicago – the city’s population is declining because residents are fleeing.

When taxes were not a response option, surveys of those who have left the state showed the major reasons were for better housing and employment opportunities. The Chicago metro area’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nationamong large metropolitan areas and Illinois unemployment remains well above the U.S. average.

Both housing and employment opportunities have been damaged by poor public policy in Illinois.

Kimberly Wethal

UW-Stevens Point leadership is warning that its two branch campuses in Marshfield and Wausau can’t survive unless enrollment increases.

The campuses’ enrollment has dropped nearly 70% in the last 13 years. UW-Stevens Point Chancellor Thomas Gibson said in a viability report to Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman this spring that other revenue strategies, such as renting space to community groups and other UW system organizations, won’t stop both of the campuses from collectively hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The Marshfield and Wausau campuses were projected to have $1.59 million in debt at the end of 2024. Marshfield is expected to fall an additional $190,000 short in 2025, and Wausau alone will fall nearly $1 million short.

UW-Stevens Point uses a quarter of the space available at the branch campuses, according to the report, only a handful of classrooms are used more than half of the day and most are empty two-thirds or more of the day.

Becky Jacobs:

At a Thursday hearing in the state Capitol, members of a legislative study committeepeppered Rothman with questions about the finances of Wisconsin’s 13 state universities as part of their work to develop a list of policy recommendations for lawmakers next year.

James Langdon, one committee member who previously served as vice president for administration of the UW system, asked Rothman how he would spend an $800 million increase in state aid as proposed this summerby the governor.

“Are you going to reduce tuition substantially to use those funds or have you got some other plan for them?” Langdon asked.

Without specific dollar amounts, Rothman launched into a variety of budget goals. He said he would prioritize more funding for academic advising, career-readiness programs and expanding the Wisconsin Tuition Promiseprogram, which aims to help lower-income students pay to attend state universities.

Rothman also said the money would allow the UW system to pay employees higher salaries, evaluate where it could “invest in innovation,” such as artificial intelligence, and better address the mental health needs of students.

“We know we have a serious mental health challenge in our state,” Rothman said.

Jonathan Butcher & Lindsey M. Burke:

The department is playing fast and loose with taxpayer money and federal law. But that is about to change. Last week, the Supreme Court held in Loper Bright v. Raimondo that administrative agencies (like the Department of Education) no longer deserve deference from the courts when there is ambiguity in federal law. Known as Chevron deference, this practice gave outsized influence to unelected bureaucrats in federal departments to interpret the law. For instance, consider that the Biden administration’s attempt to rewrite Title IX comes in a 423-page regulation based on just 37 words in the original statue. That’s exactly the kind of overreach the Supreme Court just rejected.

The administration’s future plans to shift the burden of student loan repayments to taxpayers face an uphill battle in the wake of Loper. Based on a few vague words in the Higher Education Act, the Department of Education’s Savings on Valuable Education plan rewards upper-income earners and penalizes responsible borrowers who repaid their own loans. Fortunately for taxpayers, the Loper decision will make it harder for the agency to force taxpayers to pay for college loans.

Overturning Chevron should help wind down a department that Jimmy Carter created after making promises to teacher unions. The Education Department has clearly failed to live up to its promises to American children. It would be a victory for families and students to end the agency’s losing streak by closing it down.

Patrick McDonald:

A judicial council recently declared that a group of federal judges who refuse to hire graduates from Columbia University as law clerks did not violate judicial ethical regulations. 

The judges’ refusal was related to the disruptive anti-Israel protests that gripped Columbia this spring. 

A complaint was filed against the judges, arguing that their opposition to hiring Columbia graduates could mean they would discriminate in the future against defendants on the basis of their political beliefs. 

Fifth Circuit Court chief judge Priscilla Richman dismissed the complaint in June, claiming it “does not support a finding of misconduct,” and the Judicial Council for the Fifth Court upheldJudge Richman’s decision on Aug. 2. 

Joe Lonsdale:

Throughout American history, the federal government has tended to expand dramatically during periods of war and crisis. About a generation after each crisis subsided, there tended to be a reset, an attempt to claw back the cronyism and dysfunction that results from large growth in budget, personnel, and authority. We’re in desperate need of such a clawback today. 

President Lincoln used war powers to create new departments during the Civil War, and levied a small income tax in contravention of the norm that the federal government could not collect direct taxes (that tax was later ruled unconstitutional). For most of the 19th century, a “Spoils System” existed, in which the parties awarded professional government positions to friends. Incompetent “Spoils” appointees bloated the government, and created a mess. The Pendleton Act of 1883 ended the spoils system and created a robust system of merit-based tests for the civil service.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Congress and States adopted the 16th Amendment, allowing a federal income tax. The rest is history: the crisis of the Great Depression led to the New Deal, the biggest expansion of federal power to that point. The Second World War and its aftermath was another period of major expansion, when bureaucratic authority began to meld with military and industrial power. The clawback attempt came again: President Eisenhower, who fought the war in Europe, warned of the “military-industrial complex” growing out of control. And in the 1970s, when the U.S. economy faltered significantly for the first time since the Great Depression, the country was so anxious and fed up that even President Jimmy Carter felt the political need to campaign on reducing and streamlining bureaucracy. 

——-

Commentary. More.

Andrew Bahl

Five of the six elections commissioners and four of the six ethics commissioners have donated to candidates or political parties in 2024. The most any one individual gave was Thomsen, who contributed over $14,000, primarily to Democratic candidates for state and local office in the Milwaukee area.

The Cap Times reached out to all 12 Ethics and Elections commission members for this story. Just two — Thomsen and Jacobs — returned phone calls or emails.

Nearly half of the 72 county clerks across the state have made donations. Most of the clerks who donated sent the money to their local county Republican or Democratic party. The most active is Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who has given $600 so far this year to local Democratic candidates for the state Assembly, as well as the campaign arm for state Senate Democrats.

McDonell did not return a message seeking an interview.

Abbey Machtig:

The district administered a survey and held a series of input meetings earlier this year, which indicated mixed opinions from the public on referendums for this fall. That was before the School Board voted to place the questions on the ballot, and before the district shared the exact dollar amounts of the proposals and the list of schools selected for updates.

The School Board and district have already begun requesting contract proposals from vendors, should the facilities referendum pass.

Those contracts are for architects and engineers, project managers and construction firms.

All contracts must be approved by the School Board.

—-

Commentary on Madison’s tax & $pending increase referendums

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?

Daniel Buck:

Oh, this one’s easy

Teach math, science, history, art, music, or whatever else as the job description outlines.

It’s not our job to preach politics to other people’s children no matter how unprecedented “these times”

Next question

Gad Saad:

This tells you all that you need to know about how intellectuals view the free exchange of ideas. Ideas with which they vehemently disagree are “dangerous,” “far-right,” “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” Most intellectuals are enemies of liberty.

Ann Althouse Summary:

We want safe and clean cities. We want secure borders. We want sensible government spending. We want to restore both the perception and the reality of respect in the judicial system, just, you know, stop the lawfare. And I think that’s like, and how are those even right-wing positions? I think those are just, that’s just common sense….

“What media bias?” pic.twitter.com/80u5iFQRoT

— Sophie Louise Delquié (@SophieDelquie) August 12, 2024

Joshua Trevino:

The circumstance is quite different in America’s British — or more specifically, its English — inheritance. The Americans never convulsed themselves in a general social rejection of their British heritage: even the most-radical of the Founders, a handful of Jeffersonian and adjacent thinkers, nevertheless conceived of themselves as restoring Anglo-Saxon (which is to say, pre-Norman) liberties. We care about Britain because we see it as a font, and so it is — although it is really Englandthat is the font. We can understand American history as an extended re-litigation of the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, and there is no comparable template in Scottish, and still less in Welsh or Irish, history. America is rooted in England, we feel Aristotelian philia for it — that civic friendship, united in a noble and common purpose, that is the indispensable prerequisite of nationhood — and so England becomes surpassingly important for us. We do not understand ourselves without understanding it. We also do not understand the universality underlying American propositionalism without grasping England and its achievements. I reflected upon this as I told my son, time after time, across London: this is a memorial to men who saved the world. This is Elizabeth: she defeated the Habsburg imperium. This is Drake: he turned back the Spanish at sea. This is Nelson: he confined Napoleon to Europe. This is Churchill: he waged the twilight fight against Hitler. London defied the Blitz, alone. Twice we encountered memorials related to the 1982 Falklands War, and I told him: even here a principle was at stake, and had Britain not defended it, the whole world would have suffered. 

——-

There is a regime narrative undergirding this iron fixation. You see it in the outlets for elite-approved materials at their expositions of history and its interpretations. The regime functionaries administering the British Museum, for example — arguably the single greatest museum of any kind in the world, with only Madrid’s extraordinary El Prado standing in real rivalry — make known their interpretive preferences in the capacious gift shop. There we find shelves upon shelves of books on offer detailing the evils that England has inflicted upon the world. There is Shashi Tharoor on the harm done by Britain to India. (Take that, Chaudhuri.) There is David Veevers on how the world fought Britain’s predations. There is Kris Manjapra on how British emancipation — the world’s first consequential mass emancipation in the entire history of mankind — was bad, actually. There is Barnaby Phillips with a helpful tome describing Museum holdings as “loot.” Over and over and over. The median visitor gets the message: about his country, about his ancestors, about himself. The National Maritime Museum, a comparatively unheralded but excellent expository space on British seafaring adventure and exploration — it has Nelson’s jacket with the fatal bullet hole, which spurred real emotion upon encounter — also in its shop foregrounds works by which the visitor is to understand that what he has just seen and admired is in fact deeply wrong and immoral. It is a total inversion of the scale of values and virtues to which every society across all history has adhered, and this is a regime choice. 

Andrew Crocker:

In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet.

The new Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Smith, involved an armed robbery and assault of a US Postal Service worker at a post office in Mississippi in 2018. After several months of investigation, police had no identifiable suspects, so they obtained a geofence warrant covering a large geographic area around the post office for the hour surrounding the crime. Google responded to the warrant with information on several devices, ultimately leading police to the two defendants.

On appeal, the Fifth Circuit reached several important holdings.

First, it determined that under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Carpenter v. United States, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data implicated by geofence warrants. As a result, the court broke from the Fourth Circuit’s deeply flawed decision last month in United States v. Chatrie, noting that although geofence warrants can be more “limited temporally” than the data sought in Carpenter, geofence location data is still highly invasive because it can expose sensitive information about a person’s associations and allow police to “follow” them into private spaces.

Liam Beran:

In an interview after the meeting, Soglin said that he was opposed to the referendum. “It’s unnecessary,” he said. Soglin believes that the city should close this year’s budget gap using its rainy day fund and lobby the state Legislature next year for sales tax authority and increased payments for municipal services for state properties in Madison.

Patrick Andriesen:

Illinois law now forbids employers from discussing ‘religious or political matters’ with employees. The Illinois Policy Institute is suing because that restriction on its free speech threatens its ability to operate.

The Illinois Policy Institute is suing in federal court over a new state law that denies its First Amendment right to communicate with its employees.

The lawsuit states Senate Bill 3649, or the “Worker Freedom of Speech Act,” would effectively revokeemployers’ right to free speech across the state by criminalizing discussions of political or religious matters during meetings. The law takes effect Jan. 1.

“Illinois has enacted a law that prohibits speech based solely on its content, political or religious,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing the institute. “The Supreme Court has held that such content-based prohibitions are presumptively invalid. For that reason, SB 3649 should be held unconstitutional.”

Jill Barshay:

Inflated grades were more common than depressed grades. In this analysis, over 40 percent of the 33,000 grades analyzed – more than 13,000 transcript grades – were higher than they should have been, while only 16 percent or 5,300 grades were lower than they should have been.  In other words, two out of five transcript grades indicated that students were more competent in the course than they actually were, while nearly one out of six grades was lower than the student’s true understanding of the course content.

Garrett Shanley:

Sasse’s consulting contracts have been kept largely under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees. The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers.

The university said Sasse’s budget expansion went through the “appropriate approval process” but did not answer questions about how Sasse bankrolled his splurges, where the funds originated or who authorized the spending. 

Keeping friends close

Amid protests over his conservative track record as a Nebraska Republican senator, Sasse promised during his ascension to the UF presidency in Fall 2022 that he would divorce himself from partisan politics under what he called a vow of “political celibacy.”

But the senator-turned-university president quietly broke that promise in his 17-month term at the university’s helm, hiring six ex-Senate staffers and two former Republican officials to high-paying, remote jobs at the university. 

Ben Sasse responds:

So, what reforms and upgrades do I think are needed? And therefore, what new initiatives did we begin investing in from the president’s office at UF? As everyone who’s listened to me speak has heard over and over and over again, I think:

**We need to experiment with launching new institutions and campuses. For UF, this is the new UF-Jacksonville campus, where we want to sync up educational programming more tightly with the AI revolution, and with the rapidly-changing needs of industry. This initiative was launched and run out of the president’s office – and no, planning for a new campus isn’t cheap.

**We need to utilize for the first time a 20-year-old Florida statute that enables UF to authorize innovative K-12 charters all across the state, via rapid new school launch.

**We need to set public goals – and be held accountable regarding – at least ten academic disciplines where UF will become an undisputed national leader within a decade (the “10x10x10 initiative”).

Danielle Wallace:

Kamala Harris panned for requiring ID to enter Arizona rally after previously painting voter ID laws as racist. Harris rallygoers outside Phoenix were required to present IDs upon entry.

Vice President Harris was mocked online for requiring campaign rallygoers to present a government-issued ID upon entry, despite the Democratic presidential nominee opposing voter ID laws. 

Natasha Singer:

Cellphones have become a school scourge. More than 70 percent of high school teachers say student phone distraction is a “major problem,” according to a survey this year by Pew Research.

That’s why states are mounting a bipartisan effort to crack down on rampant student cellphone use. So far this year, at least eight states have passed laws, issued orders or adopted rules to curb phone use among students during school hours.

The issue isn’t simply that some children and teenagers compulsively use apps like Snap, TikTok and Instagram during lessons, distracting themselves and their classmates. In many schools, students have also used their phones to bully, sexually exploit and share videos of physical attacks on their peers.

Michael Barrett:

Danish criminal groups have hired teenagers from Sweden to commit crimes on Danish territory on some 25 occasions in the last four months, according to Denmark’s Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard.

Three shootings – two in Copenhagen and one in Kolding – have been linked with Swedish teenagers in the last two weeks, with Hummelgaard now releasing a figure covering a significant number of other incidents.

The minister has previously said Danish authorities take the trend “very, very seriously”and are working with Swedish counterparts to stamp out the apparent use of hired Swedish youths to commit crimes.

He commented on the broader number of incidents after meeting with police special crime unit NSK and the chief of the National Police on Thursday.

“Criminal groups in Denmark have hired Swedish child soldiers – that’s what I call them – to commit criminal acts,” he told broadcaster DR.

Holly Korbey

In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. “Teachers don’t actually need someone to connect the dots, many just needed someone to explain to them some basic things about how people learn to read, and then they said, ‘Oh, my God, why have I been doing it this other way?’”

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws pertaining to teaching children to read according to the “science of reading” since 2019—and about 15, according to Hanford’s count, are directly in response to her reporting. In 2022, Lucy Calkins, creator of the Units of Study reading curriculum investigated in Sold a Story and used by nearly a quarter of all U.S. elementary schools, revised her curricula to include more phonics. Meanwhile, sales at Heinemann, one of the biggest publishers of reading curricula, including Fountas & Pinnell, declined 75 percent in 2023, according to APM Reports, as schools opt to invest in more evidence-aligned approaches.

We spoke with Hanford about the tectonic shifts created by Sold a Story, her take on the criticism of her work, and what she thinks lies ahead after the dust settles. 

Holly Korbey: Your thesis that students are being taught to read using disproven methods hit a nerve—Sold a Story has been downloaded millions of times. What are some of the measurable, concrete outcomes in response to the podcast that you’ve been able to track? 

Emily Hanford: The outcomes that mean the most to me are the thousands of emails and social media posts I got from teachers—overwhelmingly, these have been positive. Not positive like: ‘we’re so happy about this.’ It’s more like: ‘Oh, wow, this is really important stuff that I needed to know. Thank you for putting this out there.’ Those notes are often full of emotion, but many are also characterized with, ‘We can do this, I’m psyched. I want to learn more about this.’

At our last count, about 15 pieces of legislation had actually passed. I have mixed feelings about the legislation; obviously, it’s a way to show the impact of journalism, and I hear from teachers that legislative changes are needed, so there’s a role for policy here. 

But one of the problems with policies is they have lots of different impacts. For example, they make it possible to galvanize a certain kind of resistance, they give critics something to shoot at. I don’t disagree with some of the points being made, like the criticism of bans on three-cueing. I think policies like the three-cueing bans give detractors an opening to say, ‘all of this science of reading stuff, we just need to move on.’ And I think that’s disingenuous at best.

———

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?

Thierry Breton:

A timely and useful thread.

Linda Yaccarino:

This is an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US. It also patronizes European citizens, suggesting they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.

The Free Press:

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what Nadhim Zahawi—who fled Saddam’s death squads as a boy only to become Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote last week in our pages. 

Elbridge Colby:

Europe needs American military support, I’m told.

Does threatening Americans’ exercise of our most important and cherished right support or undermine that?

and Garcia-Martinez

Robert F Kennedy, Jr.

The elites who want to decide what is permissible to read and watch justify their censorship by labeling dissenting opinions as “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “far right,” or “extremist.” During the lockdowns, MI-6 designated me and other health freedom activists as potential “terrorists.” But the label applies more closely to themselves, as they try to scare us into submission again with bird flu hoaxes, debt-fueled financial collapse, and ever more dangerous imperial wars of choice.

Bezos Washington Post Reporter:

What role does the White House or the President have any sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of inter — intervening in that. Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but you know it’s a wider thing, right?” More.

Ro Khanna;

In America, we value free speech, including conversations like the one @elonmusk is having tonight with ideas and opinions people may dislike or even find offensive. We don’t censor. Ironic, this used to be a European idea advocated by someone named John Stuart Mill.

Andrea White:

Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to cure the long-ailing Houston Independent School District. He is arguably the most influential and certainly the most controversial educator in the nation’s second-largest state. He’s 67, and he roams the maze of desks with the agility of an athlete, peering over the shoulders of 25 or so of the more than 180,000 students in the state’s largest school district. They are enrolled at 1 of the 85 schools that adopted his custom cocktail of education reforms last year; 45 more will join this academic year. 

The buzzer goes off. The teacher presses the reset button and claps her hands. After the timed segment, she picks one of a handful of Miles-approved strategies to engage her students. The teacher opts for T&T (Turn and Talk); others include Whip Around (the entire class stands and the instructor asks every student a question) and Oral Choral (students call out responses to questions in unison). The children stand up, turn toward their neighbors, and discuss a short passage from the lesson.

The teacher circles the desks and listens to her students. At the end of the class, she will keep some of the children in the classroom for additional instruction, while sending others to the “team center”—what students would have called the library just a year ago—to complete a more challenging assignment to reinforce their mastery of the material covered. But for now, the teacher clicks a remote, and a new passage displays on the whiteboard. The students settle into their chairs, and their eyes turn to the screen. The timer again begins its countdown: 3:59, 3:58, 3:57. . . 

Miles and his entourage, which includes the principal and a district supervisor, file out of the classroom and regroup in the quiet hallway. He asks principal Eileen Puente what she thought of the class. The superintendent’s voice is soft, his manner relaxed. But Puente, a woman with a warm smile who’s led the school for five years, stands at attention. She knows it’s now her turn to be evaluated. She answers that student engagement seemed high, but that she is worried the teacher’s pace was too slow because the lesson reviewed material that had already been covered. Miles agrees, checking the silver dial on his black Movado watch. Then he is off to observe another classroom. 

——

Houston spends about $2,600,000,000 for 180,000 students – about $14,444.44 per student. Far, far less than Madison’s 22 to 29k/student – depending on the figures supplied……

Good Reason Houston

Scott Johnson:

Some observers outside Minnesota may reasonably ask, if Governor Tim Walz is so bad (and, as I say, worse than bad), why he has done so well politically. The reasons are many. One reason is the subservience of the Star Tribune to the needs of the Democratic Party. After the 2018 election I talked about this at some length to the Minnesota Rough Riders in “The role of the Star Tribune.”

The work of the Star Tribune in Walz’s service provides a current case study. See, for example, Rochelle Olson’s treatment of the current controversy regarding Walz’s departure from the Minnesota National Guard before it was to deploy to Iraq in this classic “Fact check: Walz’s National Guard records show that Vance’s claim of ‘stolen valor’ is false.”Subhead: “GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance claims that the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate bailed as his unit headed to Iraq, but Walz retired before his unit was called up.” The Star Tribune featured Olson’s story on page one yesterday. (Dustin Grage has stepped up to serve as a one-man Walz truth squad.)

Lenore Skenazy and Jon Haidt:

At last, a journalist has done the proper test, and the results are thrilling. Decca Aitkenhead, who writes for The Sunday Times (UK), recruited her two sons (ages 13 and 14), along with six of their male friends, plus two teen girls with whom some of the boys were acquainted. They agreed to go for a month using basic phones with no internet access (although they got access to their smartphones for one hour each evening). In other words, Decca did a study with teens, for a long enough period, in a group. 

She then did something harder and more amazing: she added a mega-dose of independence. She sent them on an unsupervised two-day camping trip––a chance to experience independence, risk, and problem-solving in the real world, together, just as kids had always done before the 1990s. 

The camping trip confirmed everything that Lenore Skenazy has been saying since her 2009 book Free Range Kids (updated in 2021): Young people are starved for independence in the real world. Given some, they flourish. 

Decca’s group was incompetent at first, but the kids developed competence as the experiment went on. They took risks (some, admittedly, dumb). They tried new things. And without smartphones glued to their hands, they connected. Yesterday, I heard Decca’s son Jake on a radio program, talking about how much he loved the month-long project. He said, of the camping trip, that it gave him “one of the best nights of my year, maybe of my life.”

Preston Cooper:

Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which could have cost taxpayers $475 billion. Additional loan-cancelation initiatives—also certain to face legal challenges—are in the works.

But the high drama of loan cancelation has drawn attention away from a more pressing issue in the student-loan system. After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called on-ramp is set to expire at the end of September—yet tens of millions of borrowers have not yet made a payment.

The Looming Student-Loan Nonpayment Crisis

During the payment pause, no federal student-loan borrower had to make a payment, and interest rates were set at zero. During the on-ramp, payments are due and interest accrues once again. But borrowers who don’t pay their loans can avoid the worst consequences of failing to do so: Delinquencies will not appear on their credit records, nor will loans be placed in default or sent to collections.

Since most student borrowers had not made a payment on their loans for over three years, the logic of a one-year on-ramp was to allow borrowers time to make financial arrangements to recommence payment. Missing a payment or two would be no big deal. After a year, the logic ran, most borrowers should be comfortably paying their loans every month.

That ideal couldn’t be farther from reality. At the end of 2019, prior to the payment pause, 3.1 million borrowers were more than 30 days behind on their loan payments. As of March 2024—the latest month for which data are available—the number of delinquent borrowers had reached 7.3 million.

Ilya Somin:

On Wednesday, in Darby Development Co. v. United States, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which reviews takings claims against the federal government ruled that a takings lawsuit against the 2020-21 federal eviction moratorium can proceed. In so doing, it overruled a trial court decision by the Court of Claims, which I criticized here. The decision could well end up setting an important takings precedent.

In September 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the Trump Administration Centers for Disease Control (CDC) imposed a nationwide eviction moratorium, claiming that it would reduce the spread of the disease. The Biden Administration extended the moratorium multiple times. In August 2021, the eviction moratorium was invalidated by the Supreme Court because the CDC lacked proper statutory authority to institute it. But, in the meantime, numerous landlords suffered financial losses, because they could not evict tenants who weren’t paying rent.

Some of the property owners filed a lawsuit arguing that the eviction moratorium violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires the government to pay “just compensation” whenever it takes private property. As I explained at the time, their position was backed by the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which held that even temporary physical occupations of property qualify as “per se” (automatic) takings requiring compensation.

Marguerite Roza and Team:

Special Ed is consuming a growing share of public school budgets. With new data emerging, Edunomics Lab is taking a fresh look at Special Ed spending to better understand the extent to which rising identification rates and staffing increases deliver value for students.

State-by-state comparisons make it clear that systems are making different choices when it comes to serving students with disabilities and those choices are delivering wildly different results for students. In this 30-minute webinar we share our findings. They may surprise you; they certainly did us.

Beth Hawkins:

Higher Special Education Funding Not Tied to Better Outcomes
Early look at state-by-state spending on special ed reveals scattershot efforts, suggests evidence-backed reading instruction for all kids is crucial.

Bill Ackman:

If people question whether there is bias in media, you should watch this clip. When the answers given by the subject of the interview do not match the narrative which the network would like to advance, the anchor terminates the interview using as an excuse that the subject’s time is valuable and the connection is choppy. Watch to the end and see for yourself whether these reasons are a pretext or whether this is good journalism and fairness in media.

Samir Jeraj:

The Birmingham example also highlights another problem. Public-sector organisations have legacy systems and old data, which make any new system a challenge to implement. The underlying problem is that digital technology moves and develops quickly, whereas large organisations tend to move at a slower pace using bureaucratic processes. So, from the start there is a mismatch, according to Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy in Index (Initiative for the Digital Economy) at the University of Exeter.

“These large technology projects are often conceived to last for two, three, four years,” explains Thompson. Buying in technology, however, tends to contract on a ten-year cycle. The first three years work well, as the contractor invests in the technology and engages in improving services, but the following seven years are lacklustre. When the needs of the organisation change, the contractor will argue that any change to the systems are outside of the scope and will cost more.

Wilfred Reilly:

We need to talk about today’s critical mass of unimpressive “experts.”

Just a week or so back, at the end of July, Columbia and UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw — the founder of “intersectional” theory — took to Twitter/X to argue a point. As she passionately put it: “Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey. #SayHerName.” This post, so far, has received 1,800 likes and has been shared 1,200 times.

Rebel Educator

This is an 8th grade graduation exam from 1912.

8th graders then were better prepared for life in the real world than 12th graders are today.

And.

Phil Pennington

third speed bump came just last week, when NZTA deferred using number-plate spotting cameras on a highway (see below).

The march is mostly one way, though – including to the bank for the tech-makers and marketers, who are known to protest at the media calling their products “surveillance”.

Such sensitivities have not put off governments spending on public-private hybrid systems.

New Zealand has its own, used by powerful state agencies, the police and Immigration.

Many of the camera systems could run facial recognition (FR). Sometimes you are just asked to trust the FR function is not switched on.

NS Lyons:

Last month, the US Supreme Court considered arguments in a landmark case on the legality of America’s metastasising censorship-industrial complex. The case, Murthy vs Missouri, rests on whether White House requests that Twitter and Facebook take down alleged Covid misinformation constituted illegal censorship that violated the First Amendment right to free speech.

Given the ample evidence of the Biden administration’s sweeping censorship efforts in recent years, many legal observers assumed the case was a done deal. And yet, during the hearing, it quickly became apparent that a majority of the court’s justices were sympathetic to a counter-argument that, actually, it’s the Government who’s the real victim in this case — because what “free speech” really means is that the Government has a right to tell Facebook that you need to shut up.

The court’s newest and most innovative justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, stole the headlines with comments about how she was “really worried” about “the First Amendment hamstringing the Government in significant ways in the most important time periods” — i.e. elections involving Donald Trump. But even some of the court’s allegedly more “conservative” justices such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett appeared openly sympathetic to the idea that it’s more important to preserve the national security state’s uninhibited power to bully platforms into silencing information they consider “harmful” than it is to preserve fundamental individual rights. In short, although a ruling on the issue won’t be released until this summer, as of now the Supreme Court seems poised to effectively enshrine the legality of mass state censorship and deliver what could be a mortal blow to America’s tradition of free speech.