The EconEd Instructor Award celebrates innovation in the teaching of Principles of Economics. Innovations can range from the use of technology and project-based learning to gamification, community engagement, personalized learning, and innovative assessment methods. A list of potential innovation ‘ideas’ can be found HERE. The instructor recipient will be awarded a $2500 grant and will also be granted an expense-paid trip to EconEd 2024.
However, the pamphlet does not present these claims as springboards for discussion, but as facts to be learned in the mandatory training. The pamphlet entitled “Common Racist Attitudes and Behaviors that Indicate a Detour or Wrong Turn into White Guilt, Denial or Defensiveness,” lists 28 potential hazards for well-meaning white people on their redemptive journey.
If they’re threatening “continuing efforts,” and they’re asserting that the DEI practices are “cancerous,” you would think the school would take care to produce high quality, genuinely educational training sessions that would impress the public at large and win support in the larger political debate. Perhaps the cocoon is so isolating that the handout seemed truly wholesome and not cancerous at all. As I said in my first blog post about it, “I thought the handout was generally well done.” But you have to think about how it looks to other people. And yet, if your view really is that those other people are racist, then you won’t want to appease them.
Posted by Ann Al
It is fashionable to be gloomy about the costs and benefits of a degree. In America a majority of people now tell pollsters that they think going to university is not worth it. For the average undergraduate that is far from the truth. In rich countries people who hold a bachelor’s degree earn over 40% more than those who do not. This premium has remained lofty, even as the number of university-goers has soared: some 33m people are studying undergraduate degrees across the rich world today.
Yet those average figures hide queasily large differences. For a shocking share of students, the returns from attending university are puny. About 25% of men and 15% of women graduates in England would have been better off financially had they not bothered. In total, student debt has reached $1.6trn in America, 60% more than is owed on credit cards. Low earnings help explain why about a fifth of America’s student borrowers were in default before the pandemic.
In December, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT went before Congress to address antisemitism on campus. Their studiedhypocrisy on the issue of free speech triggered a bipartisan avalanche of criticism, ultimately leading to the ousters of Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay.
The fallout has made the college campus the momentary front line in our polarized culture clashes. This is a good moment to step back and ensure that our principles don’t get sacrificed in the name of point-scoring.
Professors insisting that plagiarism isn’t always “plagiarism” (at least not when it involves right-wingers criticizing the president of Harvard) have risked lasting damage to the principle of academic integrity. So, too, do we risk undermining campus free speech if we’re not clear about what it’s for and why it matters.
Oddly absent of late has been any evident recognition that the historic rationale for campus speech is not to provide protesters with bucolic backdrops, but to enable scholars to challenge received wisdom, students to ask uncomfortable questions, and classrooms to serve as places of genuine learning.
When we last visited the lively, ever-evolving world of shady scientific publishing, we saw publication brokers offering journal editors kickbacks to push their papers into print, and here’s plenty more about it in a new article here at Science. I particularly enjoy the parts where some of these sleazeballs wake up to the fact that they are not talking to customers, but rather to a reporter, and suddenly their entire demeanour changes.
Those customers are both on the author side and the editorial side. You too can be a co-author if you just pony up, and if you’re an editor, well, you can earn extra cash by slotting these papers into the journal. An especially good route to that has been the “Special Issue” racket, where a group of themed papers are rounded up by a guest editor. People have caught on over the years that being one of these guest editors, especially in an open-access journal where money has to change hands, is a quick way to make spending money. And the paper mills have meshed right into the process – it’s like Philip Larkin’s poem where he imagines his money admonishing him: “I am all you never had of goods and sex. You could get them still by writing a few cheques” These folks are willing to write them, and everyone walks away satisfied, right?
Linda Brown, who trained hundreds of charter leaders as leader of (Building Excellent Schools (ES), has died at the age of 81. Many of the charters schools her BES fellows launched are now among the best in the country, writes Steven Wilson of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
“Linda knew that the first step in building great schools was to stop making excuses,” writes Wilson. “No longer would educators shift the blame for their failure to educate by invoking poverty, racism, or resources.” She demanded that adults “do whatever it takes to ensure every child succeeds.”
Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.
Researchers have long known that any single antidepressant drug is little more effective than a placebo in the majority of trials, shown to be less effective than a placebo in some studies, and generally found to be “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission, while often resulting in severe adverse effects; for example, resulting in a higher percentage of sexual dysfunction than depression remission. However, for nearly twenty years, psychiatry and Big Pharma have told us that while one antidepressant may not work for the majority of patients, in the “real world,” doctors provide patients who have been failed by their initial antidepressant with another antidepressant, and if that fails, still another; and that this real-world treatment is successful for nearly 70% of patients. This narrative has been repeatedly reported by the mainstream media, including the New York Times in 2022.
“We worked to address relevant questions in a timely, fair, and diligent manner. We understand and acknowledge that many viewed our efforts as insufficiently transparent, raising questions regarding our process and standard of review,” the school told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, according to a copy of the material reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Claudine Gay, a political scientist who served as Harvard’s president until earlier this month, was accused in late October of plagiarizing a number of passages in published academic articles over the course of decades. Additional allegations were made in subsequent weeks. The firestorm over her research ignited around the same time she was being criticized for how she handled concerns about antisemitism on campus.
The House committee, before which Gay testified in early December on the antisemitism issue, launched an investigation into how the school was addressing antisemitism, as well as the plagiarism allegations. The narrative submitted Friday was accompanied by other documents responsive to the committee’s request, a school spokesman said.
APPROVED FOR DPI & LEGISLATURE Amplify: Core Knowledge Great Minds: Wit And Wisdom AND Really Great Reading
NOT APPROVED, WILL BE DISCUSSED MORE Benchmark: Advance Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Into McGraw Hill: Wonders
REJECTED Savvas: MyView Zaner-Bloser: Superkids
——
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
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?
For most of the 20th century, mass media worked in generally the same way. You had large daily newspapers that covered local, and sometimes national and international, news. And you had magazines, which were weekly or monthly publications that covered usually a specific topic or general area of interest. There were other bits—wire services that covered basically everything and contributed content that the newspapers and sometimes the magazines would all use, and of course TV news, which became its own insane thing that I’m mostly going to ignore for this particular blog—but that’s generally how people got information about the world for like a hundred years.
Then the internet happened. All these physical publications and even the broadcasting ones had to have websites. For a decade or two this was pretty much fine, too; there were boom and bust cycles as publishers figured out they could get ad money when a lot of people clicked their stuff and then watched as Google and Facebook stepped in and took all that ad money away for themselves. After this nobody really had any idea what to do and publications started to die. A lot of the online ones died first; now the print ones are going extinct too.
There are many aspects to this—private equity strip-mining previously profitable local chains, evil right-wing conglomerates consolidating publications and using that as an excuse to do the same kind of strip-mining the private equity guys are doing, et cetera. I’ve written literally dozens of blogs about all this stuff over my career and will probably keep writing them for the next decade or more.
Researchers at the Amazon Web Services AI lab found that over half of the sentences on the web have been translated into two or more languages, often with increasingly worse quality due to poor machine translation (MT), which they said raised “serious concerns” about the training of large language models
A retired teacher has had her pension payments stopped four times because her pension provider repeatedly refuses to accept that she is not dead.
Eileen McGrath, 85, was left without income over Christmas when Teachers’ Pensions, which administers payments on behalf of the UK government, wrongly matched her with a deceased stranger.
“In November I had received two letters from Teachers’ Pensions asking me euphemistically if I was dead,” she said. “I immediately called to make it clear that I was very much alive. Nevertheless, a week later two more letters arrived asking the same thing, so I wrote back to reiterate that I had still not died.”
Four days before Christmas, McGrath discovered that her pension had not been paid. Despite a further call to Teachers’ Pensions the widow’s pension payment she also receives from the scheme was also stopped. Both payments were eventually made on 2 January after she complained.
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) just released its newest report, Behind the Lines: Investigating the Efficiency Gap in Redistricting. The report provides insight into the so-called Efficiency Gap, which left-leaning groups rely on to redraw legislative maps in courtrooms in Wisconsin and across America.
What is the Efficiency Gap? The efficiency gap tries to quantify how “efficiently” one party’s votes are spread over their winning districts. It often identifies high numbers of so called “wasted votes” in densely populated urban areas. If a map has a bad efficiency gap, oftentimes Left-leaning groups say that the map is gerrymandered when it reflects voter choices on where to live. Our report further explains this statistical measure and its limitations.
The Quote: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated “The efficiency gap has become a manipulation effort by the Left to allege legislative districts as gerrymandered and overturn them for political gain. The efficiency gap is insufficient and can’t fully consider common factors in legislative races, such as uncontested campaigns and political geography.”
The panel, however, concluded that nine of 25 allegations found by the Post were “of principal concern” and featured “paraphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources.” It also found one instance where “fragments of duplicative language and paraphrasing” by Gay could be interpreted as her taking credit for another academic’s work, though there isn’t any evidence that was her aim.
It also found that a third paper, written by Gay during her first year in graduate school, contained “identical language to that previously published by others.”
Those findings prompted a broader review of her work by a Harvard subcommittee, which eventually led Gay to make corrections to the 2012 article as well as a 2001 article that surfaced in the broader review. The subcommittee presented its findings Dec. 9 to the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing board, concluding that Gay’s “conduct was not reckless nor intentional and, therefore, did not constitute research misconduct.”
Would calls for the genocide of Jews be a violation of the University of Florida’s bullying and harassment policy?
“Yes,” says Ben Sasse, UF’s president.
Three university heads equivocated when lawmakers asked that question in a congressional hearing last month. So far two of them, the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, have been demoted to the faculty. Mr. Sasse—who came to Florida a year ago after eight years as a U.S. senator from his native Nebraska—is a deft enough politician to parry a gotcha question.
Yet when I follow up by raising the issue of free speech, he acknowledges the answer isn’t so simple. Regarding the First Amendment, he says, “I’m a pretty libertarian zealot.” He emphasizes that the Constitution “draws a deep, deep line at speech and action,” that “threats are the front edge of action,” and that “orchestrated plans, or getting to a definable way of targeting specific people, is when speech ceases to be deliberation.”
Which isn’t that different from Ms. Gay’s testimony last month: “We are deeply committed to free expression. But when speech crosses over into conduct that violates our policies—policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation—we do take action.”
Personal information and over 160,000 University of Wisconsin System records were stolen during a cyberattack that affected the National Student Clearinghouse, according to emails obtained by The Daily Cardinal.
It’s part of a massive global cyberattack affecting governments, businesses and educational institutions that tech reporters at The Verge called the “biggest data theft” of 2023.
And while many affected institutions — Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Illinois, for example — quickly issued student- and public-facing statements on the breach, pointing to lengthy time periods for victim identification, the UW System didn’t follow suit.
UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch told the Cardinal the UW System was “entirely dependent upon the NSC” for information about the breach and chose not to make an immediate public announcement.
“Rather than prematurely announcing that we were affected and unnecessarily alarming tens of thousands of students, we waited to make decisions based on facts as we always do,” Pitsch said in an email. ”It took several weeks for NSC to provide all of the details, and at no point in the process did we believe the incident reached a level to merit a widespread breach notification message.”
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Sadly, today; journalism is a rare exception to pablum.
Spelman College, the women’s school in Atlanta, announced on Thursday that it had received a $100 million donation, which its officials called the largest-ever single gift to a historically Black college.
The gift comes from Ronda E. Stryker, a trustee of Spelman, and her husband, William D. Johnston, chairman of the wealth management company Greenleaf Trust. Ms. Stryker serves as director of the medical equipment company Stryker Corporation, which was founded by her grandfather.
Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen,as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from small startup to biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter loss last year of $3.6 billion.
In a September call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s then–chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna’s numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. “Despite some misinformation,” Garay said, COVID-19 still drove significant hospitalizations. “It really is a vaccine that’s relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.
To get past the “misinformation” and convince the public to take continual booster shots, Garay briefly noted that Moderna was “delving down” on ways to partner “across the ecosystem to make sure consumers are educated on the need for the vaccine.”
/1🚨LITIGATION BOMBSHELL — we sued the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the censorship arm of DHS.
Our lawsuit unearthed new docs showing that the deep state knew the risks of mass mail voting in 2020 but censored these criticisms as “disinformation.”
THREAD: pic.twitter.com/iJ8SNxil82
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) January 22, 2024
Even as the ruling class has become a preoccupation of the right, it remains a concern on the left. Senator Bernie Sanders had such an abundant audience for his latest book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” that his royalties nearly matched his salary for representing Vermont. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who entered Congress denouncing the “tippy-top of the one per cent,” has become a target of activists further to the left, who accuse her of turning into an “Establishment liberal.” Critiques of the élite now emanate from so many angles that it’s difficult to know who remains to be critiqued.
Nobody in American public life has a more unsettled relationship to status than Donald Trump. For years, as he elbowed his way into Manhattan and Palm Beach, he touted the exclusivity of his golf courses (“the most elite in the country”) and hotels (“the city’s most elite property”), and he promoted Trump University with the message “I want you to become part of an elite wealth building team that works under my direction.” (He later agreed to a twenty-five-million-dollar settlement with former students who described Trump U. as a scam.) None of his élite talk endeared him to what he called “the tastemakers,” who dismissed him as a boorish trespasser. Even after he turned his Mar-a-Lago estate into a private club, he still resented those who had sniffed at him, telling an interviewer, in a tone rarely employed after the age of twelve, “I have a better club than them.”
When Trump ran for President, he adopted the expected criticism of “media élites,” “political élites,” and “élites who only want to raise more money for global corporations.” But, after he took office, he didn’t seem to want to do away with the idea of an élite; he just wanted his own people to be on top. During a 2017 speech in Arizona, he told the crowd, “You know what? I think we’re the élites.”
“Now, let’s get out there and walk really fast to places we don’t want to be.”Cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst
The term is now invoked so ubiquitously that it can seem to crumble through our fingers. As George Orwell wrote, about a frequent accusation of the nineteen-forties, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” But, if our élites are undesirable, what would a better élite look like? What, exactly, are élites for?
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, living as a wealthy recluse in Switzerland, was at work on some of the earliest statistical research into what we now call income inequality. By his count, twenty per cent of the population of Italy owned about eighty per cent of the land. He found a similar ratio in another, more eccentric area: twenty per cent of the pea pods in his garden yielded eighty per cent of the peas. Pareto took to describing these imbalances as a “natural law,” known as the “80/20 rule.”
Pareto wanted a pithy term for his concept, but “ruling class” was out—it had been popularized by his archrival, the scholar Gaetano Mosca. Instead, he adopted élite, a French word derived from the Latin eligere, which means “to choose.” Pareto intended it to be neither a pejorative nor a compliment; he believed that there were élite scholars, élite shoe shiners, and élite thieves. Under capitalism, they would tend to be plutocrats; under socialism, they would be bureaucrats.
His formulation suggests several varieties of élite influence. There is the cultural power wielded by scholars, think tanks, and talkers; the administrative power radiating from the White House and the politburo; the coercive power resident in the police and the military. (Security forces constitute the strongest branch of élites in much of the world but the weakest in America.) Looming over them is economic power, which has occupied a fluctuating position in the West—worshipped, except when it is scorned.
In ancient Athens, wealthy citizens supported choruses, schools, and temples, on pain of being sentenced to exile or death. From the late Middle Ages, philosophers proposed that, instead of banishing the rich, society should exploit their bounty. The Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini argued, in “On Avarice,” that in times of public need the prosperous élite could be made to serve as a “private barn of money.”
Have we reached peak DEI? The unraveling of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebook
and others cutting DEI staff; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—well before Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.
Author Christopher Rufo, echoing 1960s student activists, called the rise of DEI a “long march through the institutions”—a 50-plus-year ideology infiltration into universities, K-12 schools, government, media and corporations with the goal of telling us all how to live. That’s why I enjoy that the word “rot” is back in style to describe what is happening inside the walls of academia.
Like everything based on the writings of Karl Marx—seeing oppressors and colonial struggles everywhere—DEI was doomed to fail. The uniformity of thought known as intersectionality, fostered by DEI, meant all oppressed people must support all others who are oppressed. But that idea burst on Oct. 7 when Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis. Many liberals, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t support genocidal “colonized” terrorists. Pop! The long march is in retreat.
By the way, ESG, or investing based on “environmental, social and governance” principles, peaked last June, when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would stop using “the word ESG anymore, because it’s been entirely weaponized.” Never mind that performance of ESG funds has been sketchy and that BlackRock had been adding the label “sustainable” or “ESG” to funds and charging up to five times as much. Then a study published in December by Boston University’s Andrew King found “no reliable evidence for the proposed link between sustainability and financial performance.” Pop!
Deeper Dive.
It comes three years too late. But Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, has finally admitted that the COVID-19 lockdowns caused a massive amount of harm — harm to which he and other government public-health experts, such as Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were oblivious because they were obsessed with doing things their way.
Google is making some changes to how its products, including search, will work in Europe.
The reason? It is preparing for the new Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules scheduled to come into play in March. Under the DMA, Google is a classified as a “Gatekeeper,” meaning it holds “considerable market power.”
Changes to search results will be the most visible alteration for the majority of users. Where Google might show a link to several businesses – for example, hotels – it will add a space for comparison sites and a way for users to refine their searches to include comparison sites.
The company said: “For categories like hotels, we will also start testing a dedicated space for comparison sites and direct suppliers to show more detailed individual results including images, star ratings and more.”
The result is that some other services, such as its own third party booking service, Google Flights, will be cut from search pages.
Many taxpayer funded k-12 systems use Google, including Madison.
“Doing your own research is a good way to end up being wrong,” is the headline on a Washington Post story by Philip Bump. In an age of declining trust in the producers of media products, it’s essentially an attack on the consumers. The message seems to be that average citizens are ill-equipped to separate truth from fiction when investigating controversial topics. Should they trust the Post to do it for them?
There is an outsize appetite for derogatory, counterintuitive or anti-institutional assessments of the world around us. This is in part because alleged scandals are interesting and in part because Americans like to view themselves as independent analysts of the world around us.
Are there countries where people prefer to view themselves as incurious sheep? The Postie continues:
More than 50 papers, including four co-authored by CEO and President Dr. Laurie Glimcher, are part of an ongoing review, according to Dr. Barrett Rollins, the cancer institute’s research integrity officer. Some requests for retractions and corrections have already been sent to journals, he said. Others are being prepared. The institute has yet to determine whether misconduct occurred.
Also under investigation are papers co-authored by Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn; Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial; and Dr. Kenneth Anderson, program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center.
All four researchers have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, making it the latest tranche of misconduct allegations leveled at Harvard researchers. Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president early this year, facing allegations of plagiarism. Last year, Harvard Business School placed professor Francesca Gino on administrative leave after accusations that her work contained falsified data.
Glimcher and the other researchers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dana-Farber’s disclosure about its probe arrived after a data sleuth pointed to irregularities in the researchers’ papers.
In early January, molecular biologist Sholto David published a blog post describing what he said were signs of image manipulation in papers by the Dana-Farber researchers. David contacted Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School with his concerns, submitting a list of papers he said contained problems.
The most serious, he said, had to do with images of experimental results that had signs of copy-and-pasting by software such as Adobe Photoshop. “Those are pixel-perfect matches for the same area, but it’s supposed to be a different sample,” he said.
Well, the level of data forgery is pathetically amateurish and excessive
It’s an unfortunate reality that demographic factors historically play a large role in student performance; any honest assessment of how schools and school sectors are performing must take those factors into account. Much of the reporting on school performance, though, ignores this reality. This report endeavors to incorporate these factors through rigorous statistical modeling that controls for, and assesses the impact of, several student characteristics. This report has been updated to include data from the 2022-23 report cards.
Among the key findings:
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
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?
The 1619 Project K-12 curriculum makes some interesting word usage to obscure the fact that Mansa Musa, the 14th century king of Mali, was a mass-enslaver.
Imagine Nikole Hannah-Jones's outrage if a history textbook only described Thomas Jefferson's slaves as "servants." pic.twitter.com/KxpudOSZp7
— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) January 21, 2024
The nation’s ruling class holds deeply authoritarian opinions widely divorced from the rest of the American electorate, finds a survey out this week. It found nearly 60 percent of American “elites” think there is too much individual freedom in America. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of registered voters have the exact opposite opinion, reporting the United States has too much top-down control, limiting liberty.
The study, titled “Them Vs. U.S,” defined the American “elite” as “having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile.” Such people account for about 1 percent of Americans. The study also examined a sub-sample of the 1 percent who graduated from Ivy League schools or other name-brand institutions such as Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.
The study from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found ruling class opinions on climate policies were particularly harsh and despotic. More than two-thirds of the 1 percent support rationing vital energy and food sources in an attempt to control the globe’s weather. That number jumped to nearly 90 percent among the Ivy Leaguers. Around two-thirds of normal registered voters, however, oppose rationing vital resources.
What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
On Thursday two Catholic schools in Chicago’s western suburbs announced they are shutting down. St. Frances of Rome School in Cicero and St. Odilo School in Berwyn said that the 164 Invest in Kids scholarship students between them represented more than half of the schools’ enrollment. Without them, the schools no longer have enough students to keep their doors open.
In a statement on Thursday, the Archdiocese of Chicago said Catholic schools in the Windy City are facing a “financial cliff” after the loss of Invest in Kids. “We are doing all that we can to keep our schools open,” Catholic schools superintendent Greg Richmond said, but “these may not be the last closures in our archdiocese.”
On Friday Notre Dame Academy in Belleville announced that it’s closing, despite “devoted labor” aimed at boosting enrollment and raising funds. The school cited the financial hardships of aging buildings and the fact that the state discontinued Invest in Kids “that benefitted our school, especially those with financial need.”
Schools like these are often the best chance for low-income families to escape rotten union schools. At Berwyn North, the neighborhood where St. Odilo school is located, 30.8% of students in third through eighth grade are proficient in reading and 18.5% in math. In the Cicero school district, 18.1% of third through eighth graders are proficient in reading and 9.8% in math. Parents will now have to send children back to these failure factories. (This data comes from the Illinois Assessment of Readiness via the Illinois Policy Institute.)
Large numbers of UK universities are at risk of falling into financial deficit due to a sharp decline in international students after hostile rhetoric by Rishi Sunak’s government, the head of the sector’s main lobby group has warned.
Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, which represents more than 140 universities, said the sector was facing the prospect of a “serious overcorrection” thanks to immigration policies that deterred international students from coming to study in Britain.
“If they want to cool things down, that’s one thing, but it seems to me that through a combination of rhetoric, which is off-putting, and policy changes . . .[they have] really turned a whole bunch of people off that would otherwise have come to the UK,” Stern told the Financial Times.
Stern’s plea came as it emerged that some top universities including York, which is a member of the elite Russell Group, were being forced to soften their entry requirements in order to maintain numbers of overseas students.
1. Uncontrollable U.S. Debt: The U.S. Debt Clock displays the inevitability of American decline — a “ticking time bomb” of data and financial evidence — especially the following three.
The U.S. government’s total unfunded liabilities — the combined amount of payments promised without funds to recipients of Social Security, Medicare, federal employee pensions, veterans’ benefits and federal debt held by the public — stand at $212 trillion, and are rapidly increasing. For context, that number was just $122 trillion as recently as 2019 and is projected by the Debt Clock to reach $288.9 trillion by 2028.
That is an unimaginable amount of money — more than a quarter of a quadrillion dollars. When or if the government is forced to reduce payments, pensions or services to hold things together, or to default on its debt, the consequences will be brutal.
The second ticking bomb is the U.S. debt. At $34 trillion, it has increased more than six-fold from $5.6 trillion in 2000. Of that $34 trillion, $731 billion has been accumulated through interest payments — the fourth-highest annual U.S. budget item. (If you are keeping score, the third-highest is $851 billion for Defense, exceeded by Social Security at $1.39 trillion and topped by Medicare-Medicaid at $1.72 trillion.)
Like an irresponsible credit card user, the federal government is perpetually borrowing more money to make the interest payments as they come due. And the interest payments on the newly refinanced debt will be much higher due to recent and significant rate-hikes.
Finally, the $34 trillion national debt, as a percentage of the nation’s $27.8 trillion economy entails a debt-to-GDP ratio of 122.30 percent, headed to 150 percent by 2028. That’s up from 56 percent in 2000 and 36 percent in 1980. Don’t expect any meaningful discussions or solutions from either party about these three “bombs” as their timers tick away.
2. Low student achievement: If our nation is to dig itself out of that harrowing debt trap, it will need successive generations of superstar students, armed with skills and creativity. Someday, they will invent and harness technologies to manufacture state-of-the-art products and related services, fueling an economic boom that boosts the GDP.
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Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
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?
The Brookings Institute conducted a large social study to determine the root causes of poverty in America. What they found should make you proud of our country. There are only three things you must do if you want to be successful as an American:
I recently passed 100 days of practicing math every single day 💯
I’ve wanted to beef up my math chops for a while, but I needed a good reason that would justify the time investment. Plus, it’s always easier to learn when you have a clear goal and something meaningful to apply it to.
So, it never reached the top of my priority list. But then a couple things happened recently that gave me 1) sufficient motivation and 2) a clear path.
I’ve worked on various AI products over the last year and like understanding the technical aspects of the products I build.
But as I dug in to learn more about how large language models (LLMs) and transformers worked…I was lost. It was humbling.
Radical DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) ideology has overtaken elite universities and, increasingly, American public life. Few reporters have followed the “woke” takeover of American universities and the corrosion of its institutions more closely than our guest.
Our guest Aaron Sibarium, a Yale University alum, now reports on elite institutions that he is the very product of and investigates the pervasive influence of “woke” bureaucracy and ideals in higher education. His extensive and in-depth reporting helped lead to the uncovering of a plagiarism scandal and subsequent resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.
Aaron Sibarium is a staff reporter for the Washington Free Beacon and one of the reporters whose work contributed to the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay. He was recently dubbed the “Gen Z Investigative Reporter… Rocking Conservative Media” by Politico Magazine.
I did not look forward to my visit to Utah Valley University in the fall of 2023. Facing the start of a new quarter of teaching, I felt that the trip would probably bring me little exhilaration. Bad news about cuts to the humanities kept rolling in from all sides, most recently from West Virginia University, which has cut more than 30 degree programs entirely, most in the humanities and liberal arts. I had been invited to lecture to students in the philosophy course that is required of all undergraduates at this huge (more than 43,000 students), open-enrollment public university. Although I had confidence in the skill and good judgment of Michael Shaw, the professor who had invited me, I had to wonder how likely it was that a public university in our benighted time would continue to support such a vast and ambitious undertaking at a level to make it really work.
Anthony Fauci has never struggled to speak his mind. But now that he has left government, he is finally speaking at least some of the truth about government policies and Covid. For instance, the six-feet rule for social distancing “sort of just appeared” without a solid scientific basis. That’s one of the admissions that Members of Congress say the former National Institutes of Health potentate made this week in two days of closed-door testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Officials nonetheless promoted the arbitrary rule because they didn’t trust Americans to understand scientific nuance or, for that matter, anything. Businesses, churches and schools that weren’t forced to close had to spend money reconfiguring their operations to comply with these government guidelines.
It’s nice of Dr. Fauci to acknowledge now that the rule lacked a scientific basis. But at the time he and other officials didn’t want to acknowledge this lest the public question other Covid nostrums. Dr. Fauci had already undermined public trust by confessing that his advice not to wear a mask early in the pandemic was guided by political expedience.
For a number of years now pleasant young women (or persons identifying as women, or with female-sounding names) have been contacting me from the university’s diversity office, inviting me to attend sessions to discuss our DEI policies. Harvard has to be different, so we use the acronym EDIB, for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (our previous president Drew Faust, as her contribution to the collective wisdom, added the “Belonging”). These sessions are never described as compulsory, but the pleasant young women don’t take “no” for an answer. In former times, I was able to avoid these sessions by pleading that I had a subsequent engagement. During the pandemic, however, there was no escape. There was no obvious way to evade a Zoom EDIB “training” session that one could take at one’s leisure. So I took the “training.” I was afraid that the interactive videos would demand that I agree with the policies, in which case I would not be able to check the appropriate boxes, with what tedious and time-consuming consequences I knew not. But fortunately, that didn’t happen. Professors, then, were still exempt from taking loyalty oaths.
This was changed by getting the Legislative Council to amend its governing ordinance, reducing the proportion of staff and increasing the proportion of outsiders, most of whom are government appointees. A similar change was reported last week in the ordinance governing the Baptist University. This was explained as providing “accountability to the public”, as if the public were going to appoint anyone to anything.
Defenders of the government will say that this does not amount to government intervention. The change to the Chinese U constitution was proposed by three members of the University Council. This will not wash. The three members are also members of the parties acceptable to the government: one DAB, one FTU, one Liberal.
Still, from a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE suedthe California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.
In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”
Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”
Anna-Lena Schubert, Christoph Löffler, Clara Wiebel, Florian Kaulhausen and Tanja Gabriele Baudson
Highlights
We evaluated a three-minute speeded reasoning test as a screening of general cognitive abilities.
The test showed an excellent reliability.
Test performance was substantially related (r = 0.57) to general cognitive abilities.
The association of test performance and g was explained by working memory capacity.
The paper- and computer-based versions demonstrated scalar measurement invariance.
Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.
By searching student names or entering a search query related to graduate program applications in search engines, users could access, view and download hundreds of letters of recommendation for applicants to UW-Madison graduate programs.
Though the issue appears fixed on Google as of Thursday evening, searching the same queries in search engine DuckDuckGo shows personal email addresses and other sensitive information about students.
Clicking on the page links to recommendation letters now shows UW-Madison’s online recommendation application is “down for a critical patch.”
It’s unclear how long the security flaw has been in place and the extent of letters affected. Searches conducted by The Daily Cardinal indicate there were accessible letters for applicants across nearly all UW-Madison graduate programs.
Ariell Rose Bertrand, Melissa Arnold Lyon, Rebecca Jacobsen
Narrative storytelling surrounds us. Narratives are especially salient in politics, as policy problems do not simply exist, but are actively created through the stories policy actors tell. Scholars introduced the narrative policy framework (NPF) to create a generalized framework for studying how policy actors use storytelling strategically to influence policy. We use the NPF to examine the recent rise of critical race theory (CRT) in policy debates. We demonstrate that increasing exposure to the ban-CRT narrative plots led to greater support for a ban on CRT, particularly for White and Republican individuals. Finally, we introduce and test the concept of narrative spillover, which provides a new way of thinking about how micro, meso, and macro policy narratives interact to influence-related political beliefs and macrolevel beliefs about institutions and culture.
One of the key features of so-called “progressivism” is the constant erasure and redefinition of objective truth. The Internet has made that so much easier, as change can happen without record or notice. If one relies only upon the Internet, one will believe the word “woman” is defined as “someone who feels like a woman” and one will be unable to find record of continuous Democrat systemic racism throughout all of US history.
Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria
One question that routinely comes up in genealogy research: why is the family’s surname different from its (presumed) original form? Most people have heard one explanation: those names were “changed at Ellis Island,” altered either maliciously or ignorantly by port officials when the immigrant passed through. The charge against immigration officials, however, is provably false: no names were written down at Ellis Island, and thus no names were changed there. The names of arriving passengers were already written down on manifests required by the federal government, lists which crossed the ocean with the passengers. Records kept by the government demonstrate conclusively that immigrants left Ellis Island with the same surnames they had arrived with. The idea that names were changed at the point of entry is a myth, an urban legend promoted by a popular film. Changes were made later, by the immigrants themselves, usually during the naturalization process.
Claudine Gay herself best stated the issue of her brief presidency of Harvard. When her appointment was announced, she declared that “the idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia.” We must be a “part” of society, not outside it. What is the difference she invokes?
The Ivory Tower is often used to dismiss academia, and the metaphor is rarely examined for its virtue. Ivory is a natural substance that is rare, precious and pure. It’s also fragile: An ivory tower probably wouldn’t stand without a mix of steel and concrete. It signifies a university that is indeed in society but towers above it because it seeks to find truth out of what society takes for granted. A university doesn’t possess truth as much as it honors it. Society’s interest above all is justice—the Declaration of Independence states “self-evident” truths that serve justice—and society surely wants its justice to be true, but it doesn’t honor truth as Harvard does by having “Veritas”as its motto.
Honoring anything implies inequality and isn’t very democratic. Honor can best be understood as doing good in a way that is against your interest. Honoring truth as a professor isn’t lucrative, though our prosperous society keeps academics out of penury. Nor is questioning popular belief the avenue to popularity. But living a life of honoring truth offers a peculiar satisfaction that does you no worldly good. You realize that you could have sought money or acclaim but doing so would have a cost that can be appreciated only from the Ivory Tower. Still, thanks to good-hearted Americans, you won’t have to suffer the fate of Socrates. They will honor you as a professor even though they wouldn’t vote for you as dogcatcher.
The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.
This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”
It’s also illegal. According to Do No Harm, a group that describes its mission as “eliminating racial discrimination in healthcare,” the practice violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a letter to the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, Do No Harm wrote this week that the school’s racial caucusing groups “illegally segregate and separate its first year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin” in violation of Title VI.
Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.”
The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.
The pandemic significantly affected the projects.
Not only did it exacerbate inflation and supply chain delays, but it also altered the scope of work by bringing new needs to attention — such as improving HVAC systems and ventilation and getting rid of environmental hazards such as asbestos in the old school buildings.
These expenses meant the district had to scrounge up $28 million beyond the $317 million voters authorized in the 2020 referendum, bringing total spending to $345 million.
High inflation accounted for $11 million of that, additional electrical and mechanical work accounted for $9 million, and environmental work accounted for another $8 million, according to school board materials.
Some of those extra dollars came from the district’s general education fund and from money the district saved from staff vacancies and reduced energy usage in buildings during the pandemic. Fundraising gave the district extra money to work with as well.
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Madison school district spending over the decades, now at least $25k/student.
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Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
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?
Arizona State University is slated to become the first higher education institution to partner with the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which will give ASU students and faculty access to its most advanced iteration of ChatGPT.
OpenAI announced the partnership Thursday. The deal, for an undisclosed sum, aims to bolster research and coursework at ASU through the use of ChatGPT Enterprise, which focuses on larger entities instead of individual use.
“ASU recognizes that augmented and artificial intelligence systems are here to stay, and we are optimistic about their ability to become incredible tools that help students to learn, learn more quickly and understand subjects more thoroughly,” ASU president Michael Crow said in a statement. “Our collaboration with OpenAI reflects our philosophy and our commitment to participating directly [in] the responsible evolution of AI learning technologies.”
I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
During the promotion of my recent book on testosterone and sex differences, I appeared on “Fox and Friends,” a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological. In response, the director of my department’s Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force (a graduate student) accused me on Twitter of transphobia and harming undergraduates, and I responded.
The tweets went viral, receiving international news coverage. The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard’s stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.
Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan
While hypothesis testing is a highly formalized activity, hypothesis generation remains largely informal.
We propose a systematic procedure to generate novel hypotheses about human behavior, which uses the capacity of machine learning algorithms to notice patterns people might not. We illustrate the procedure with a concrete application: judge decisions about who to jail. We begin with a striking fact: The defendant’s face alone matters greatly for the judge’s jailing decision. In fact, an algorithm given only the pixels in the defendant’s mug shot accounts for up to half of the predictable variation. We develop a procedure that allows human subjects to interact with this black-box algorithm to produce hypotheses about what in the face influences judge decisions. The procedure generates hypotheses that are both interpretable and novel: They are not explained by demographics (e.g. race) or existing psychology research; nor are they already known (even if tacitly) to people or even experts. Though these results are specific, our procedure is general. It provides a way to produce novel, interpretable hypotheses from any high-dimensional dataset (e.g. cell phones, satellites, online behavior, news headlines, corporate filings, and high-frequency time series). A central tenet of our paper is that hypothesis generation is in and of itself a valuable activity, and hope this encourages future work in this largely “prescientific” stage of science.
Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.
Blackburn and Presswood are two Black mothers in the middle of an intensifying debate about school choice, the system that allows Chicago parents to send their children to charters, magnets and selective enrollment schools, rather than be tethered to the school in their attendance boundary.
The Chicago Board of Education wants to undo that system. Leaders said it is built on a foundation of structural racism and makes inequality worse. But changing a system that some parents see as creating the only viable options for their children will be difficult and complicated. This is especially true in the Black community. CPS data shows that a third of Black students go to charter, selective enrollment or magnet schools — more than any other racial or ethnic group in the district.
Middle-class and upper-middle-class Black families in most urban cities, including Chicago, live in low-income neighborhoods far more often than white and Asian families of the same economic status, according to a Stanford study. School choice has provided a way for these Black families to escape the neighborhood schools that have historically suffered from disinvestment.
Some city leaders and school board members, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, know this conundrum well. They are among the many that trek across the city to take their children to either selective enrollment or magnet schools.
The stories of Blackburn and Presswood illuminate this complicated issue. It is not only about how money is allocated, they say, but also about how parents and students are treated and feel about their schools.
Two kinds of AI-driven education are likely to take off, and they will have very different effects. Both approaches have real promise, but neither will make everyone happy.
The first category will resemble learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Duolingo, GPT-4, and many other services. Over time, these sources will become more multimedia, quicker in response, deeper in their answers, and better at in creating quizzes, exercises and other feedback. For those with a highly individualized learning style — preferring videos to text, say, or wanting lessons slower or faster — the AIs will oblige. The price will be relatively low; Khan Academy currently is free and GPT-4 costs $20 a month, and those markets will become more competitive.
For those who want it, they will be able to access a kind of universal tutor as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age. But how many people will really want to go this route? My guess is that it will be a clear minority of the population, well below 50%, whether at younger or older age groups…
Chatbots will probably make education more fun, but for most people there is a limit to just how fun instruction can be.
In this talk, Derron Wallace will explore the structural, cultural and historical factors that shape the educational experiences of Black youth in London and New York City. Based on his new ethnography, The Culture Trap, Wallace argues that the overemphasis on culture as the secret to Black (and racially minoritized) students’ success or failure in schools is not only tricky; it is a trap.
We now know the federal government flagged terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP,” to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms.
What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.
WILL:
In preparation for the session, law students are asked to study a description of “racist” behaviors, including the false claim that non-discrimination is “racist” and a collection of other assertions about “whites” and “people of color” that actually are racist. It would be one thing if the law school proposed an academic debate about such matters. But no one believes for one moment that’s what this session is about. This “DEI training” is a form of indoctrination and demeans law students based on their race. WILL strongly condemns this meeting’s proposed subject matter and demands that any racially discriminatory instruction be removed. By pushing racist ideology on law students, the University is defying federal law, creating a racially hostile environment, and harming individual student dignity.
The Quotes: Rick Esenberg, WILL President and General Counsel, stated, “The student body is being subject to nonsense that ignores the rule of law and true equality in favor of a racialized way of seeing the world. The United State Supreme Court has stated clearly that justice is colorblind and race-based discrimination is against our human dignity. It is distressing to see our state’s only public law school requiring students to be ‘trained’ in a set of concepts which shreds the rejection of racial discrimination that so many fought so hard to make the law of the land. We are asking the University of Wisconsin-Madison to take a serious look at the materials they just distributed to the student body and decide if this is accomplishing its core goals and mission. To us, the answer is obvious.”
Skylar Croy, WILL Associate Counsel, and a former UW Law Student, stated, “There was nothing like this at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I received my law degree from them in 2019. To see this happen to a university I love is so disappointing and for the sake of true education, we hope they reconsider discussing this subject matter during this mandatory meeting.”
A UW law school student who wanted to remain anonymous stated, “Programs like these make me feel as if I cannot speak openly in my classes, nor with my peers. I do not feel that this culture promotes intellectual diversity, but rather a singular way of thinking. I should not feel ashamed that I do not choose my friends by the color of their skin. I should not feel ashamed that I believe in diversity in thought, rather than diversity in appearance. It is disheartening that this institution does not agree.”
The leadership of U of Wisconsin Law School is delusional. And in treating white students as categorially racist, it’s violating the Civil Rights Act. Wisconsin’s taxpayers should not be funding such divisive, tribal, and prejudiced educational practices.
Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.
Vital to the usefulness of the study was the age of the participants – a three-year period that is “critical in reading development” – since fourth grade is when a crucial shift occurs from what another researcher describes as “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.
Froud and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: “We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices … in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print.”
NCTQ:
State education leaders across the country are rightly prioritizing efforts to improve elementary student reading outcomes. However, too often these initiatives do not focus enough on the key component to strong implementation and long-term sustainability: effective teachers. Only when state leaders implement a literacy strategy that prioritizes teacher effectiveness will states achieve a teacher workforce that can strengthen student literacy year after year. This report outlines five policy actions states can take to ensure a well-prepared teacher workforce that can implement and sustain the science of reading in classrooms across the country.
The Challenge
There are 1.3 million children who enter fourth grade each year unable to read at a basic level—that’s nearly 40% of all fourth graders across the country.1 These students may not be able to identify details from a text, sequence events from a story, and—in some cases—may not be able to read the words themselves.2 The rate of students who cannot read at a basic level by fourth grade climbs even higher for students of color, those with learning differences, and those who grow up in low-income households, perpetuating disparate life outcomes.3
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Wisconsin Recommendations:
Recommendations for Wisconsin
Teacher prep standards:
- Create specific, detailed standards for teacher preparation programs for the five components of reading aligned with the science of reading, including what they should not teach.
- Revise teacher prep reading standards to include the knowledge and skills teachers need to support struggling students, including students with dyslexia, in learning how to read.
- Revise teacher prep reading standards to include the knowledge and skills teachers need to support English Learners in learning how to read.
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
JUST OUT: New "Chart of the Century" with data through December 2023. Increases in College Tuition and Fees continue to far outpace increases in Average Wages and the Overall CPI. If College Tuition had increased at the rate of the Overall CPI since 2000, it would be 28% LESS… pic.twitter.com/kWlo1nP7I6
— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) January 18, 2024
Best way to listen to the Milei speech in English, rendered using HeyGen, in his own voice. pic.twitter.com/eYsSPLeukc
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) January 18, 2024
A mind-boggling achievement in a classic video game reveals wider lessons about the extreme limits of human performance, says cognitive scientist Tom Stafford.
For decades, it was a feat that was considered impossible.
In the dying days of 2023, US teenager Willis Gibson – online handle “Blue Scuti” – “beat” the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the video game Tetris, which was first released in 1989.
The original Tetris designers thought it couldn’t be done – the game is designed to play endlessly. The pieces fall faster and faster until a player is overwhelmed. To beat the game, a player has to achieve scores so high that the game’s memory banks overload and it crashes. Victory is achieved because the computer simply cannot continue.
If a person doesn’t know fundamentals of a given field, and particularly if a larger group doesn’t, teach those fundamentals.[2] I’ve taught commas and semicolons to students almost every semester I’ve taught in college, and it’s neither time consuming nor hard. A lot of the students appreciate it and say no one has ever stopped to do so.
Usually I ask, when the first or second draft of their paper is due for peer editing, that students write down four major comma rules and a sample sentence showcasing each. I’m looking for something like: connecting two independent clauses (aka complete sentences) with a coordinating conjunction (like “and” or “or”), offsetting a dependent word, clause, or phase (“When John picked up the knife, …”), as a parenthetical (sometimes called “appositives” for reasons not obvious to me but probably having something to do with Latin), and lists. Students often know about lists (“John went to the store and bought mango, avocado, and shrimp”), but the other three elude them.
It was ultimately determined that neither Ms. Young nor her residence had any connection to the target of the search warrant. The incident, which was captured on video by the officers’ body-worn cameras (“BWC”), led to a Civilian Office of Police Accountability (“COPA”) investigation and a lawsuit between Ms. Young and the City of Chicago.
In January 2022, Defendant Newsweek Digital, LLC published an article regarding the search and the resulting settlement that Ms. Young received from the City. In the article, Newsweek cited COPA’s recommendation that Wolinski be suspended for a year with the possibility of “separation from the department.” The article also purported to describe the BWC footage of the incident, stating:
Body camera footage from that night shows police breaking down Young’s door while she was in the middle of undressing. She is seen handcuffed naked for about 17 minutes and is heard repeatedly telling officers they were at the wrong address.
Elsewhere, university trustees and regents have played a pivotal role in reform efforts. Four years ago, UNC–Chapel Hill was fully committed to the DEI agenda. The UNC School of Medicine even created and adopted a “Task Force to Integrate Social Justice into the Curriculum.” Its recommendations included requiring that the faculty agree that “specific organs and cells do not belong to specific genders.”
But by early 2023, the UNC Board of Governors banned compelled speech across the entire state’s university system, effectively ending the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring.
In some cases, the simple act of exposure has created serious change. In early 2023, I acquired documents through a public records request showing how Texas Tech’s biology department relied on the DEI statements of their candidates as a major criterion for hiring. I wrote the story for The Wall Street Journal, showing, for example, that one candidate was penalized for not properly explaining the difference between equality and equity. The response was instantaneous.
Texas Tech announced that it was jettisoning diversity statements in hiring. A day later, Governor Greg Abbott released a memo declaring the practice unlawful. Soon, other university systems in Texas followed suit and publicly scrapped the use of diversity statements.
These statements have also been banned throughout the University of Missouri system. And now Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, and Georgia have seen the practice banned either by law or by university trustees and regents.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
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But few prominent institutions or analysts have explored what Americans actually believe and why. Or perhaps they prefer not to have the answer. Survey data published this week by American Compass helps to fill that gap. It depicts a public that has made nuanced and reasonable judgments that simply conflict with the preferences of their leaders.
The survey, conducted in partnership with YouGov, asked 1,000 American adults whether “you, personally,” had “benefited” or “suffered” from America’s embrace of globalisation and China. Overall, 41 per cent reported benefiting while 28 per cent reported suffering. The share benefiting was higher across classes and regions. Yet as the frame of reference expanded, the sentiment turned more negative. The margin in favour of “benefited” was only +7 per cent when the question was about “your family and friends”, fell to zero for “the community where you live”, and reached -13 per cent for “the nation as a whole”. Rather than nursing resentment, Americans appear simultaneously to appreciate the personal benefits of globalisation while worrying about its broader effects.
Likewise, actual attitudes bear little resemblance to Americans’ hypothesised xenophobia. While half of respondents were asked about the effects of “America’s embrace of globalisation”, the other half saw a question about “America’s embrace of China”. Rather than cause people’s blood to boil, mention of America’s main geopolitical adversary triggered a more positive response. Across classes, Americans were more likely to see the embrace of China than the embrace of globalisation as benefiting them personally. What two groups reacted far more negatively to mention of China? Those in the upper class or living in coastal cities.
Two Harvard Crimson articles, one from 2006 and the other from 2023, describing the legendary Math 55 class showcase how much college has changed in less than a generation.
’06: “This is probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country,” reads a page on the Mathematics Department Web site.
’23: “Our slogan is, if you’re reasonably good at math, you love it, and you have lots of time to devote to it, then Math 55 is completely fine for you.” — article published by the math dept titled, “Demystifying Math 55.”
’06: Regardless of the course’s name brand value, Math 55 students face a single fact: It’s hard. Really hard.
’23: Zoe Shleifer ’26, another current Math 55 student, also doesn’t get the hype. “It’s fun,” she says. “It’s just like any other class. You know, we go to lecture, and then we leave lecture, and then we do the problem set.”
Parents are more concerned than ever about their kids’ social media habits, worried about everything from oversharing and cyberbullying to anxiety, depression, sleep and study time.
Recent surveys of young people show that parents’ concerns may be justified: More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on these apps. Girls, who are particularly vulnerable, spend an average of nearly an hour more on them per day than boys. Many parents are searching for support.
Perhaps more than anyone, Carla Engelbrecht and Devorah Heitner are qualified to offer it. They’ve spent years puzzling over how families can help understand media from the inside out, and how schools both help and hurt kids’ ability to cope.
Engelbrecht is a longtime children’s media developer. A veteran of Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids Interactive, she spent seven years at Netflix, most recently as its director of product innovation. Engelbrecht was one of the minds behind the network’s Black Mirror “Bandersnatch” episode in 2018, which allowed viewers to choose among five possible endings.
Jenna Starr stuck a blue Post-it Note to her monitor a few months after getting her M.B.A. from Yale University last May. “Get yourself the job,” it read.
It wasn’t until last week—when she received a long-awaited offer—that she could finally take it down.
Did you know the focus in education is about to change again? It is. While we’ve rightly been focused on fighting CRT, Queer Theory, SEL, DEI, and all manner of issues in the schools to protect our kids, a big shift has been being prepared and is likely to be about to launch. Schools in the coming year or two are very likely to lurch into direct instruction into activism to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030. The documentation from entities like the WEF and UNESCO already makes this clear, but in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay goes through a document from the NEA Foundation, the charitable arm of the largest national teachers union, to show that they not only have these plans but have adopted well-developed curriculum guides to start distributing to teachers and school administrators, right down to detailed lessons on topics like hunger and starvation in kindergarten. These plans will, of course, be UN and World Economic Forum compliant, as they tell us themselves. Join James in this episode to get a preview of the next big fight in education.
The American K-12 school system is expansive, with millions of students attending thousands of schools. And one of the great frustrations of education policy research is that while many interventions appear to be highly effective at small scale, they almost all flop when implemented at the scale that would actually move the needle for the country as a whole. The very existence of this scaling problem suggests that one promising avenue for change is to look at things we are already doing that don’t seem to work, because we could simply stop doing those things.
Suppose America hired only right-handed teachers, but then it turned out that lefties teach just as well.
Repealing the ban on left-handed teachers would be a large-scale intervention that works. Not an intervention that revolutionizes education, but one that makes it a bit easier for principals around the country to fill vacancies without compromising on quality.
Of course, in reality, the United States doesn’t do anything as blatantly stupid as banning left-handed people from teaching in public schools. But emergency measures adopted in many states to recruit additional teachers during the pandemic provide further evidence for something many analysts have long believed: Many of the current teacher training and licensing requirements have no real benefits, and getting rid of a lot of them would save time and money for various stakeholders andexpand the potential supply of teachers, without reducing quality. That doesn’t on its own make schools better, but it does make it easier to do basically anything else, including raising teacher quality, cutting class size, or reallocating money to other priorities like climate control, air quality, and school meals.
Summary
To address objections that modern worries about misinformation are a moral panic, researchers have broadened their focus to include true but misleading content. However, there can’t be a science of misleading content. It is too amorphous, too widespread, and judgements of misleadingness are too subjective.
The emergence of misinformation studies
According to a popular narrative, democratic societies are plagued by misinformation, which is driving the public to accept falsehoods about election fraud, conspiracies, climate change, vaccines, and more. Given the dangers associated with such falsehoods, misinformation threatens democracy, social harmony, the environment, and public health. As Joe Biden declared recently, it is literally “killing people.”
This narrative first gained popularity in 2016 after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and it gave birth to the field of modern misinformation studies, which researches the nature and causes of misinformation and designs interventions to limit its harms.
The field has been extremely influential, both scientifically and politically. It attracts big grants. It has fuelled a steady stream of publications in elite scientific journals. And its researchers are consulted by governments, international organisations, and corporations (Google, Meta, etc.) in their efforts to combat misinformation.
The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as “ultralow.”
The worsening demographic gloom has taken on increasing urgency for Beijing. The country hit a historic turning point in 2022, marking the first year the population shrank since the starvation years in the early 1960s.
Over the past year, China’s population dropped by 2.08 million, more than twice the drop in 2022. China ended 2023 with 1.410 billion people, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday, down from 1.412 billion in 2022.
Economic headwinds didn’t help the situation. Another possible factor was China’s sudden abandonment of Covid-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, which might have led to a sharp rise in deaths early last year.
The statistics bureau, which doesn’t break out deaths by month, said the number of deaths increased to 11.10 million in 2023 from 10.41 million in 2022.
There was some internal discussion at the endowment about whether the university could lose its spot in future venture funds. Several people familiar with Harvard’s tour said it wasn’t driven by worries about Harvard losing allocations but by a desire to partner with its managers and answer questions about what was happening at the university.
Harvard executives in meetings last week said that the endowment wasn’t political and didn’t play a role in choosing Harvard’s president, said people familiar with the matter.
Executives also addressed frustration among some managers that Gay’s initial statement responding to the Hamas attacks had been too weak. That statement didn’t explicitly condemn Hamas or distance Harvard from a statement by student groups laying blame for Hamas’s violence on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians over decades. A follow-up statement condemned “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and said student groups don’t speak for Harvard. Finnegan said that Gay had sought input from the deans of Harvard’s various schools and that the process had weakened the statement, signed by Gay and the school’s leadership.
“I’m here to tell you that the western world is in danger and it is endangered because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inextricably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”
Hunter Biden’s laptop is not only real; it’s also a manifestation of the largest government censorship enterprise in United States history.
We’re headed to the United States Supreme Court to halt that censorship operation. https://t.co/sNcoT0mgVx
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 17, 2024
Related: “We will let you know if there is any news made in that speech, if there is anything noteworthy, something substantive and important.”
Students with the common disability can learn to read with the right instruction, but many Massachusetts schools don’t, or won’t, provide it
The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to New York’s JFK. My plan was to get the last bus upstate that evening, so I could be in my own bed a little after midnight. But it would only work if the flight landed on time — and if passport control took under an hour and a half.
The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.
“Simply put, Wisconsin’s teacher pipeline is leaking everywhere. Too few people want to become teachers. Too few varieties of people want to become teachers. Too few people who enter a teaching degree program end up becoming teachers. Too many teachers who do make it quit right away,” IRG’s Quinton Klabon said. “The result is obviously bad for schools. Rural and urban districts leave jobs unfilled. Suburban districts have five candidates per job instead of 20. And when you don’t have a lot to pick from, that lowers the quality of teaching that your child is getting. In fact, 13% of teachers are in their first or second years in Wisconsin, when all research shows teachers are still figuring it out. A real factor in Wisconsin’s low test scores may be that 1 in 10 kids has a rookie teacher.”
IRG is pushing for legislation that would allow teacher apprenticeships. Currently, 28 other states allow for apprenticeships.
IRG’s plan would give new or want-to-be teachers two years learning how to teach their subject and manage a classroom, then two years of student teaching under a master teacher.
“Student teaching is like the mini-version of apprenticeships. A senior gets 1 semester of practice in a real school under the mentorship of a senior teacher … except instead of getting paid, they pay thousands in tuition to do it. Apprenticeships could help get college students paid for around 2 years of student teaching while receiving the benefits of Wisconsin’s incredibly strong apprentice program. Our major employers have helped us make electricians and nurses the best they can be, and they can help do the same for educators,” Klabon added.
I study the efficacy of test-based meritocracy in college admissions by evaluating the impact of a grade-based “top percent” policy implemented by the University of California. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) provided large admission advantages to the top four percent of 20012011 graduates from each California high school. Estimates from a regression discontinuity design show that ELC led over 10 percent of barely-eligible applicants from low-opportunity high schools to enroll at selective UC campuses instead of less selective public colleges and universities. Half of those participants came from lower-income families, and their average SAT scores were at the 14 th percentile of their UC peers. Despite this mismatch, ELC participants overperformed in their college grades, and more-selective enrollment led participants to graduate earlier and earn higher late-20s wages by over $1,000 per percentage point change in their enrollment institution’s graduation rate. These returns appear to exceed the average return to university selectivity among higher-testing students in this setting, implying that university admission policies targeting low-testing students can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses.
French President Emmanuel Macron promised on Tuesday to overhaul parental leave so it pays better after France saw the lowest number of births since World War Two last year, in a blow to its traditionally strong demographic profile.
France registered 678,000 births last year, representing a decrease of 7% from 2022 and down 20% since peaking in 2020, INSEE said in its annual census report.
The country has for decades been an outlier compared to other European countries, avoiding a collapse in birth rates as seen in Germany, Italy and Spain.
That said, even as real teacher pay fell from 2012 to 2022, real per-pupil spending increasedby 16 percent. And that’s not just a matter of COVID spending: In 2019, even before all the federal pandemic aid, U.S. schools were spending $16,743 per student (in 2021 dollars). New York City spent $38,000 per student last year, or more than $850,000 per class of 23 students. You don’t have to be especially good at math to imagine that we can raise pay within existing budgets.
So, for me, the question isn’t “Why won’t taxpayers pony up more dollars?” It’s “Why aren’t more dollars translating to more pay?” I’ve got thoughts on this. But, first, I’m curious to hear your take on this count.
A high-powered Democratic law firm is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reconsider the state’s congressional map ahead of the 2024 election, arguing a redistricting decision last month calls into question the battleground state’s current district lines.
Elias Law Group, chaired by Marc Elias, who has led previous voting access lawsuits in Wisconsin and across the country, filed the motion to revisit Wisconsin’s congressional district lines on Tuesday. The group aims to have a new map in place for the 2024 election, though those plans likely face a tight deadline with under 11 months to go before the November election.
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North Carolina lawfare.
More.
I actually follow Justice Holmes in recognizing the potential benefits of speech restrictions. Among other things, while it’s hard to estimate the likely consequences of any particular statement going forward, looking backward we can see that virtually every ideological crime (whether committed by a solo offender, a group, or a government) stemmed in part from some sort of political or religious speech. If only we could prevent that, without causing all sorts of other problems ….
My view, though, is that on balance attempts to restrict the expression of bad views generally do more harm than good; and the quote in the title expresses well one of the many forms of such harm. (The earliest use of the quote I found is from 2018, by Robert Graboyes, though I noticed it because of this more recent post of his.)
Vanderbilt University employs more than one full-time administrator for every two students, a College Fix analysis found.
During the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent for which data are available, the private Nashville university employed 3,516 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
Administrators and support staff include management, student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, legal, and other non-academic departments.
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging − one with higher subjective well-being for men.
JEL Classification:
Join us TONIGHT: The UW NOW Livestream will feature CROWE co-director Ananth Seshadri, and Eric Wilcots, dean of the UW–Madison College of Letters & Science, discussing data on the value of a college degree. Watch beginning at 7 pm tonight, January 16: https://t.co/BlBxY3zQtm
— CROWE (@CROWE_UW) January 16, 2024
Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent research.
“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Deepali Gershan, an addiction psychiatrist at Compass Health Center in Northbrook, Ill. Up to 20% of her caseload is patients for whom she suspects cannabis use triggered a psychotic episode.
Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019, healthcare-analytics company Truveta said this week. The trend is contributing to the broader burden of caring for people who developed mental health and addiction problems during the pandemic.
Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent research.
“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Deepali Gershan, an addiction psychiatrist at Compass Health Center in Northbrook, Ill. Up to 20% of her caseload is patients for whom she suspects cannabis use triggered a psychotic episode.
Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019, healthcare-analytics company Truveta said this week. The trend is contributing to the broader burden of caring for people who developed mental health and addiction problems during the pandemic.
Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?
In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.
Alex Mancilla graduated last month from Marquette University, an electrical engineering degree in hand and a job lined up at GE HealthCare.
Behind the educational milestone is the story of a young south side Milwaukee man whose parents immigrated from Mexico and were unable to help him financially. College wasn’t even on Mancilla’s radar until his seventh-grade English teacher pulled him out of class and asked about his plans.
“Was college the dream?” Mancilla asked “I don’t think so. The teachers that we had in elementary school had good intentions but college wasn’t something talked about. They would tell us to go to college but didn’t say how. There was no robust path to get there.”
Paving a path for Mancilla, 22, and hundreds of others was All-In Milwaukee, a nonprofit supporting diverse, low-income Milwaukee students through college and into their careers. Corporate and individual donors cover their college costs, so most graduate without any debt. Equally important is the advising support students receive throughout their time on campus.
Marcia Herman-Giddens first realized something was changing in young girls in the late 1980s, while she was serving as the director for the child abuse team at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. During evaluations of girls who had been abused, Dr. Herman-Giddens noticed that many of them had started developing breasts at ages as young as 6 or 7.
“That did not seem right,” said Dr. Herman-Giddens, who is now an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. She wondered whether girls with early breast development were more likely to be sexually abused, but she could not find any data keeping track of puberty onset in girls in the United States. So she decided to collect it herself.
A decade later, she published a study of more than 17,000 girlswho underwent physical examinations at pediatricians’ offices across the country. The numbers revealed that, on average, girls in the mid-1990s had started to develop breasts — typically the first sign of puberty — around age 10, more than a year earlier than previously recorded. The decline was even more striking in Black girls, who had begun developing breasts, on average, at age 9.
The medical community was shocked by the findings, and many were doubtful about a dramatic new trend spotted by an unknown physician assistant, Dr. Herman-Giddens recalled. “They were blindsided,” she said.
Today is Martin Luther King Day. One of King’s most important legacies was his advocacy of civil disobedience as a strategy for resisting injustice. In 2022, I wrote a Martin Luther King Day post addressing some common misperceptions about King’s views on this topic. I built, in part, on a piece on King by Georgetown Prof. Jason Brennan, author of an important book on the morality of resistance to government power.
Contrary to popular perception, King did not categorically oppose all violent resistance to injustice. His views also don’t imply that practitioners of civil disobedience have a categorical obligation to accept punishment. In the case of the US civil rights movement, he advocated both nonviolence and acceptance of punishment for primarily tactical reasons. But the reasons for doing so don’t always hold true in other cases. On the other hand, King did strongly oppose rioting, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. And his reasoning does imply a strong presumption against violence, even if not a categorical bar.
A few excerpts from the 2022 post:
Very well: We want not DEI but MNO — that is, Merit, Nondiscrimination, and Openness.
It seems obvious that our institutions should strive for merit rather than a predetermined demographic mix of any sort (the Left’s definition of “diversity”). And it can be added that, if you don’t think that the current standards result in the best-qualified individuals being selected, then by all means improve them. So if it really doesn’t make sense to require a college diploma for this job, or if the legacy preference at that school is a bad idea, or if physical fitness can be better measured this way rather than that way, fine. Let’s have an honest discussion.
Green Bay School District senior leaders have created a “dynamic of distrust and antagonism” leaving employees “frustrated,” according to an internal report on district administration.
The report details a district whose senior administration undermines its employees, whose members are tethered to their desks and have turf wars among colleagues.
The 34-page report, obtained by the Press-Gazette through an open records request, comes on the heels of 275 employee resignations since August 2022. These resignations include teachers, principals and district administrators.
Burns/Van Fleet, the educational consulting firm hired by the district, conducted 60 interviews with district employees throughout June and July. The firm uncovered a “a lack of genuine engagement” on the ground in schools, saying that the greatest need lies with the habits of senior administrators themselves.
Superintendent Claude Tiller, who is in his first year leading the district, said in a written statement about the report that the district has its challenges and opportunities for improvement.
Welcome to “The Ben & Marc Show”, featuring a16z co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. In this latest episode, Marc and Ben tackle the university system – a hot topic that’s been dominating the news over the past few months.
As Marc states at the top of the episode, universities matter tremendously to our world, but they’re currently in a state of crisis. In this one-on-one conversation, Ben and Marc take a “structural” look at higher education, delving deep into the twelve functions of the modern university. They also unpack the numerous challenges that universities face today – the student debt and the replication crisis, among them.
Professor Angus Dalgleish, physician, oncologist, pathologist, medical researcher: I fear for the university system, I fear for the education system, I fear for the research system. It really has entered the new dark age. And part of this course is this so-called wokeism, is the political correctness.Political correctness is anti-scientific, ’cause it’s already decided what you can say and what you can’t say and how you should observe the scenario and how you should react to it…