Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

James Pethokoukis:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast: 

So I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 — I’m not talking about the United States, I’m not talking about North America, I’m not talking about the advanced economies, I’m talking about the planet — is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s]. Of course, this depends on how people will react over the next few decades, how mortality will evolve. But what I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.  … My argument is the United Nations is underestimating how fast fertility is falling. Instead of 2084, I’m pushing this to 2060, let’s say. And instead of 9.7, I will say that we will peak around 9.2, 9.1, and then we are going to start falling.

Gavin Escott:

The search is underway for a new dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education after Diana Hess stepped down as the head of one of the nation’s highest-ranked education schools. 

Hess, who served as the dean of the School of Education since 2015, announced in October she would be leaving her leadership position and returning to a faculty role in summer of 2024. During her tenure, Hess oversaw new programs to support students and solidified the education school’s status as No. 3 in the nation, according to U.S. News.

——-

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?

By Veronica H. Paulus and Akshaya Ravi

Top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data and plagiarized images across 21 papers, data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik said.

In an analysis shared with The Crimson, Bik alleged that Shah, the vice chair of research in the department of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented images from other scientists’ research as his own original experimental data.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Shah is the latest prominent scientist to have his research face scrutiny by Bik, who has emerged as a leading figure among scientists concerned with research integrity.

She contributed to data falsification allegationsagainst four top scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — leading to the retraction of six and correction of 31 papers — and independently reviewed research misconduct allegations reported by the Stanford Daily against former Stanford president Marc T. Tessier-Lavigne, which played a part in his resignation last summer.

——

Commentary.

———

By Nidhi Subbaraman

“Most of the problems in this set of 28 could be explained by honest error,” Bik said, for example if a researcher mislabeled their images and pasted in the wrong ones. She added that looking at published data alone makes it difficult to distinguish an error from misconduct. “There are a couple of papers that stand out that suggest an intention to mislead.”

“The sheer number of examples justify some concern,” said Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and researcher at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who outside his work at the institution reviewed Bik’s assessment. Schrag said he agreed with Bik’s observations in almost all cases and believed the issues warranted an institutional review. 

Bik on Tuesday posted her observations on PubPeer, an online forum that scientists use to question details in published studies. On Wednesday, she emailed her allegations to Harvard Medical School’s Office for Academic and Research Integrity and Mass General Brigham’s Anderson, and several journals.

One anomaly in the group is a 2022 paper in the journal Nature Communications which has images similar to those in nearly a dozen other sources, including papers published earlier, according to Bik. “I’ve never seen this,” she said.

Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

———

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?

Ethan Blevins:

School segregation has risen from the grave—disguised under a different name.

An increasing number of school districts are offering “affinity classes” that cater to specific racial groups. Schools have long offered racially segregated options for electives such as African American history or mentorship programs. But the idea has begun to expand to the wider K-12 curriculum: One school district in Evanston, Illinois, has drawn the media’s eyes recently for expanding affinity course options, now offering segregated courses in the core curriculum, like math and English. Technically, anyone can join, but each class is expressly designed for—and targeted at—a particular racial group.

In reality, “affinity” is just a newfangled term for “segregation.” Schools that support such racial sorting insist these classes are opt-in, benign programs that don’t violate anti-discrimination laws or the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. They’re wrong.

The supporters of affinity groups and classes claim that they give students a comfortable, safe and inviting environment that improves learning outcomes. One Evanston school official who backs affinity classes told The Wall Street Journal that too often “Black students are expected to conform to a white standard” and that in affinity classes, “you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness.” The notion that culture and character are pinned to skin pigment undergirds the philosophy behind affinity programs—that races are so different from one another that they should not even learn together.

Ben Hunt:

I’ve never met Claudine Gay, but I know Claudine Gay. 

We both went to grad school at Harvard in the government department (what they call political science pretty much everywhere else), me from 1986-1991 and Gay from 1992-1998. We both got a masters degree and Ph.D. there. We both had the same dissertation advisor, famed statistical methodologist and all around nice guy Gary King, yet neither of us were statistical methodologists at heart. We both used regressions and econometrics as a toolkit to help us answer questions that we wanted to explore, Gay in American politics and me in international relations, and we were perfectly proficient with the tools, but we didn’t really care about the tools. We cared about the questions. I didn’t overlap with Claudine Gay chronologically at Harvard, but I overlapped 100% with the classes and the places and the people and the life.

After graduation we both did the tenure track publish-or-perish thing, but here the close similarities stop. Gay had a significantly more successful academic career than I did. I had a good start at NYU but ended up with tenure at SMU, which is pretty much a dead end in prestige academic terms. Looking back now, I can see how impatient I was with the game of academia and how poorly I played it. Gay started at Stanford and ended up with tenure at Stanford, which is anything but a dead end. Harvard brought her back with a full professorship within two years of that. Gay was patient, and she played the game extremely well.

Interestingly, we both stopped teaching a few years after getting tenure. Me to co-found a software company, which required leaving academia completely, Gay to go into university administration as a dean, which locked her into academia for life. There but for the grace of God … I am SO lucky that I got out when I did.

Dell Cameron:

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts.

Fortune:

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he explained, per Bloomberg. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Currently the American national debt stands at $34.14 trillion—about $100,000 for every person in the U.S.—with the debt ceiling currently suspended until 2025 courtesy of a deal passed in the summer of 2023.

ZACH RAUSCH, THOMAS POTREBNY, AND JON HAIDT

Here at After Babel, we have systematically documented substantial increases in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide since 2010. We first showed extensive increases in the U.S., and then across the Anglosphere (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). We showed similar rises in the five Nordic nations(Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland). We have also examined changes in suicide rates across nations. In the five Anglosphere countries, rates of adolescent female suicide were relatively steady before 2010.1 Afterward, their rates began to rise, reaching levels higher than those of any previous generation when they were young. Today, we look at all of Europe.

There are still researchers who are skeptical that an international youth mental health crisis broke out in the early 2010s. In a previous post, Zach showed that one reason for this disagreement lies in a widely used international database—the Global Burden of Disease—which tries to estimate rates of mental illness in all countries, including countries that do not collect mental health data. He showed that the GBD systematically underestimates rates of youth mental illness in countries that have robust national mental health data. In fact, it almost entirely misses the spike in countries where a clear spike is found in their own datasets.

William Jacobson:

DEI is a religion at Cornell. People don’t give up their religion easily.

In the least surprising development in the history of least surprising developments, the Cornell University Board of Trustees at its meeting this weekend rejected the call by Alumnus and Donor Jon Lindseth for President Martha Pollack to resign, issuing this statement:

Unanimous Vote in Support of President Martha E. Pollack

Cornell University Board of Trustees

Jan. 27, 2024

Cornell was founded on the principle that ‘any person can find instruction in any study.’ Under President Martha E. Pollack’s leadership, the university has remained faithful to this principle and to the core values that unite our institution. Today, the Board of Trustees of Cornell University met and voted unanimously in support of her leadership of the university.

We believe the pursuit of knowledge is dependent on robust discourse that acknowledges differences while exploring shared values. Cornell proudly embraced diversity in its inaugural student body over 150 years ago and will continue to do so for the next 150 years.

By Jessica Marie Otis

Steam engine entrepreneur James Watt, as responsible as anybody for upgrading the world from poor to rich, left a notebook of his work. Squiggly symbols such as “5” and “2” mark the pages. Without these little glyphs, borrowed by Europeans from medieval Arabs, Watt would not have been able to determine cylinder volumes, pressure forces, and heat-transfer rates. Isaac Newton would’ve struggled to find that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of a planet’s distance from the sun. Calculations for Antoine Lavoisier’s chemistry, Abraham de Moivre’s probability tables, and the Bank of England’s bookkeeping would have been difficult or impossible.

But before Hindu-Arabic numerals could fuel the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, society had to start to think quantitatively. Jessica Marie Otis’ By the Numbers is about scribes starting to write 7 instead of VII, parish clerks counting plague deaths rather than guessing, and gamblers calculating instead of hoping and praying.

Why did some countries become wealthy after 1800? Historians argue about the relative influences of religion, climate, geography, slavery, colonialism, legal systems, and natural resources. But the key, famously shown by economist Robert Solow, who died in December, is technological innovation enabling more and more goods and services to be produced per worker and unit of capital. Innovation needs research, development, and engineering. All those require numbers and numeracy.

By Caitlin Moscatello

For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.

Christopher Rim makes himself hard to get to. First, there’s the email to register as a guest at the Aman Club, where members pay an initiation fee of $200,000 to perch themselves above the crowds on Fifth Avenue and where Rim sometimes holds his client meetings. Then there’s the check-in at the front desk to get access to the elevator, which leads to another reception area on the 14th floor. From there, a man in a suit guides me into the main room (fireplace, lots of couches, mostly empty), then through a door that blends into a wall, past a bar (one guy drinking water; it’s only noon), and up a narrow flight of stairs. It’s there that I meet Rim in a small room decorated with bottles of Macallan 18 and coffee-table books about art.

His look is quiet luxury, though everything about this meeting appears designed to scream money. On his wrist: a $55,000 Patek Philippe watch. On his back: a Loro Piana cashmere sweater. Rim tells me that sometimes he runs into his clients here and they pretend not to know him. But he can imagine what they’re thinking: What is the tutor doing at the same club where Bill Gates lunched when he was in town?

For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in.

Quinton Klabon:

This was interesting. I calculated Wisconsin!

least paying off student debt: Herzing, Mount Mary, Alverno, UW-Superior

most: MKE Engineering, WI Lutheran, Lawrence, UW-Platteville

I think parent help affects this. WLC produces teachers/pastors, MKE Catholics serve low-income

Alex MacGillis

The program was the first in the nation to provide public money for tuition at religious schools, and by 2000, virtually all Cleveland voucher recipients were using them at a religious private school (mostly Catholic) rather than secular ones. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected a challenge to the Cleveland vouchers; the court ruled that because the vouchers could be used for religious or nonreligious schools, they did not violate the constitutional prohibition against a state favoring religion. In the years that followed, vouchers spread to more districts around the state, taking on the name EdChoice. Initially, they were targeted at families in other districts deemed to be failing, but a decade ago, the state legislature — whose Republican majorities are buttressed by highly gerrymandered districts — made them available to lower-income students across the state.

Then came last year’s big expansion, eliminating income limits and raising the value of the vouchers. It offers major benefits even to many solidly middle-class families: A family of four at 451% of the poverty level, or $135,300 in household income, will receive $5,200 per year for a K-8 student and $7,050 per year for a high school student.

In the 2022-23 school year, before the expansion, EdChoice cost $354 million, on top of the $46 million for the Cleveland program, according to the state education department. That was already more than quadruple what EdChoice had cost a decade earlier.

——

Ohio per student K-12 per student $pending.

NAEP results.

Kayla Huynh:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has named two former education administrators and one current administrator as finalists to be the next superintendent.

Two of the finalists left their former jobs after facing criticism for their performance.

The finalists are Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland Department of Education; Joe Gothard, a Madison native who is superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota; and Yvonne Stokes, the former superintendent at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. 

The Madison School Board began interviews with candidates in closed meetings last month and selected the three candidates from nearly 60 applicants, according to district officials.

——

David Blaska:

——-

Dave Cieslewicz:

There’s some process left, with three or four sets of interviews ahead, and the board isn’t expected to make a decision until the end of February. At least on paper, Gothard is clearly the strongest candidate while Choudhury seems like a guy you’d want to stay away from. But I would give the edge to Stokes. I’m not sure this board will be able to resist the chance to hire the first Black woman superintendent.

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?

Nader Issa & Sarah Karp:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says he supports ending the controversial Chicago Public Schools program that puts uniformed police officers in dozens of high schools.

The mayor said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ on Tuesday that he will give the Board of Education the green light to end its $10.3 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. CPS officials told principals in early January to prepare for the possible removal of police officers by next fall.

“The Board of Education is moving in the direction that I do support,” the mayor said in his conference room on City Hall’s fifth floor. “There is an intergovernmental agreement between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department. To end that agreement, there’s no qualms from me there.”

There have been years-long calls to remove police from public schools to stem what research has shown to be a disproportionate policing of Black students and children with disabilities that often lands kids in the criminal justice system for in-school disciplinary situations.

Sonali Basak:

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage. 

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Jim Piwowarczyk

The document lists “behaviors” that “are examples of white privilege and fragility in action,” citing “physically leaving” or “emotionally withdrawing,” “focusing on intentions,” “denying” and “seeking absolution.

The screenshots were shared this month on X by the page “End Wokeness,” which has 2.2 million followers.

“EXCLUSIVE: UW Health employee sent this from their mandatory DEI training,” the site wrote. “White employees are required to check off examples of their white privilege & white fragility. Whites are also instructed to take steps like yielding positions of power to non-whites in order to atone for their natural racism.”

UW Health denies the trainings are mandatory but did not contest their authenticity in an email response to Wisconsin Right Now.

The page noted, “They are also directed to take courses to unlearn the systemic racism they were inherently born

Steven Pinker:

Harvard admissions should be more meritocratic.

By “merit” I don’t mean cosmic merit — moral deservingness, a judgment by the almighty at the gates of heaven. I mean the traits that enable a student to profit from an elite university education, including cognitive aptitude, conscientiousness, and a thirst for knowledge.

What’s the opposite of meritocracy? Historically, positions were distributed by hereditary privilege, family ties, patronage to cronies, or sale to the highest bidder.

These are not far from the system we have here. It’s conventional wisdom that Harvard accepts just a fraction of its students by academic merit alone. The rest are chosen by “holistic admissions,” the mystery-shrouded process that considers athletics, the arts, charity, activism, and travel — together with donations, legacy status, and until this year, race.

The Harvard fundraising office once fixed me up for a dinner with a wealthy alumnus, who was perhaps more candid than they might have liked. He said, “I want to donate just enough to Harvard so they’ll admit my son.” His son was admitted.

Why should Harvard select students on the basis of merit instead? Because it serves the interests of Harvard and the country.

Janet Lorin:

Ken Griffin, one of the largest donors to Harvard University, said he won’t support the school financially unless it makes significant changes and accused elite US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future leaders. 

“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Griffin said of Harvard at the MFA Network conference in Miami on Tuesday. The billionaire said the university must make clear that it will “resume its role educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers.”

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has responded to a new effort to overturn Wisconsin’s congressional maps, six months before an election. The case is brought by Marc Elias, a notorious left-wing attorney who pursues political objectives through legal action. WILL has also filed a joint request with the Wisconsin Legislature calling on Justice Protasiewicz to recuse herself from any ruling that revisits Johnson v. WEC. 

The Quote: Lucas Vebber WILL Deputy Counsel, stated, “Wisconsin’s current congressional map was proposed by Governor Evers and adopted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. Any attempt to revisit this ruling and once again alter Wisconsin’s Congressional districts, is both procedurally improper and legally wrong.”

Julia Carpenter:

About 59% of parents said they helped their young adult children financially in the past year, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center that focused on adults under age 35. (This question hadn’t been asked in prior surveys.) More young adults are also living with their parents. Among adults under age 25, 57% live with their parents, up from 53% in 1993.

Parental support is continuing later in life because younger people now take longer to reach many adult milestones—and getting there is more expensive than it has been for past generations, economists and researchers said. There is also a larger wealth gap between older Americans and younger ones, giving some parents more means and reason to help. In short, adulthood no longer means moving off the parental payroll.

“That transition has gotten later and later, for a lot of different reasons. Now it’s age 25, 30, 35, 40,” said Sarah Behr, founder of Simplify Financial Planning in San Francisco.

Kami Loukipoudis, a 39-year-old director of design, and husband Adam Stojanik, a 39-year-old high-school teacher, knew they would need parental assistance to buy in New York’s expensive home market.

Andrew S. Hanks, Shengjun Jiang, Xuechao Qian, Bo Wang & Bruce A. Weinberg

We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more pronounced when the two majors are more distantly related, highlighting the importance of diverse skill sets. Additional analyses demonstrate that double majors are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge and are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors.

Steve Beynon;

The Army is tossing its mandate for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist in the service, in one of the most dramatic moves yet in the escalating recruiting crisis hitting the entire Defense Department.

On Thursday, the service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.

Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit’s academic ability.

A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service. Combat arms jobs such as infantrymen and cavalry scouts need only minimal scores to serve, while admin work such as a human resources specialist or public affairs require scores of 100 or higher.

Quinton Klabon:

9.0% of all district students attend school outside their home district. That makes it the BIGGEST school choice program.

73,280 transfers occurred. (+1,791 from 2022)

Who gained and lost the most students? Click through!

And:

This is enrollment lost since 2020 versus open enrollment applications rejected. Those kids are all public school kids. No schools closed. So, does anyone know the reasons so many were rejected for “space?”

More:

Wisconsin’s open enrollment program continues to grow. With more than 72,000 participating students, it is the largest #SchoolChoice program in the state. (1/2)

MATT TAIBBI

In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important phone conference.

Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it distorts the entire election.”

Now, Amato’s candidate was set to talk with Democratic National Committee chairman (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe. A high-energy, Clintonesque schmoozer in public, McAuliffe in private was curt and to the point: he didn’t mind Nader running in noncompetitive places, but had an “issue” with 19 states where “a vote for you is a vote for [George] Bush.” He shifted with impressive nonchalance to offer a bribe. 

“If you stay out of my 19 states,” he said, “I will help with resources in 31 states.” McAuliffe then made a show of pretending to ask an assistant about other ballot challenges against Nader, saying he “supported them” but wasn’t funding them, a statement ultimately contradicted in court testimony by Maine’s State Democratic Party chair. This was just one of countless instances in which Democrats hurled billable hours at anyone deemed a “threat” to votes they considered theirs.

Tracing Woodgrains:

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control.

Aaron Sibarium

It’s not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Ben Raab

Jackson School of Global Affairs fellow Robert Malley ’84, who is currently on leave from his position as the United States’ special envoy to Iran while under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified documents, will teach a course called “Contending with Israel-Palestine” this semester. 

According to the syllabus, the seminar will take “an in-depth look at important questions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Malley told the News he had been planning to teach the course since last September.

“In the wake of Oct. 7, I questioned whether it still made sense or whether it would be best to wait,” he said. “Ultimately, I concluded, in coordination with the School, that it had become even more important to try to create an environment where students could learn more about this topic and engage with others in thoughtful, respectful conversations.”

The course, which is open to graduate and undergraduate students and capped at 18, consists of 13 weekly discussions and assigned readings. It begins with a discussion on “Competing Narratives” — which features primary source excerpts from figures such as Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat — and moves through other topics such as negotiation efforts, the American role in mediation attempts, coverage of the conflict in media, a look at Israeli and Palestinian “voices and politics” and the conflict’s debate in the United States before concluding with a class titled “Israel-Palestine Today & Tomorrow (3) – Imagining the Future.”

Frank Jacobs:

America’s most significant enlargement since the 1867 Alaska Purchase was reported by the U.S. State Department in a terse communiqué, saying it had defined “the outer limits of the U.S. continental shelf in areas beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast, known as the extended continental shelf (ECS),” which the department noted is an “extension of a country’s land territory under the sea.”

Carla Johnson:

Allegations of research fakery at a leading cancer center have turned a spotlight on scientific integrity and the amateur sleuths uncovering image manipulation in published research.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, announced Jan. 22 it’s requesting retractions and corrections of scientific papers after a British blogger flagged problems in early January.

The blogger, 32-year-old Sholto David, of Pontypridd, Wales, is a scientist-sleuth who detects cut-and-paste image manipulation in published scientific papers.

He’s not the only hobbyist poking through pixels. Other champions of scientific integrity are keeping researchers and science journals on their toes. They use special software, oversize computer monitors and their eagle eyes to find flipped, duplicated and stretched images, along with potential plagiarism.

A look at the situation at Dana-Farber and the sleuths hunting sloppy errors and outright fabrications:

Tom Kertscher:

In the April election in Presque Isle, 100 miles north of Wausau, 76% of the town’s 649 registered voters cast ballots — the highest percentage of any town in the county.

In August, Vilas County Circuit Judge MarthaMilanowski threw out the result and ordered a do-over election after finding that two absentee ballots were cast illegally. One was by a voter in Illinois who had voted in the past in Wisconsin but hadn’t registered in Wisconsin for the spring election. The proper procedure wasn’t followed for the other: Walters had sent that voter a ballot before receiving his request by mail.

Walters said she didn’t realize the part-time Illinois resident wasn’t properly registered. She said she sent the other voter an absentee ballot because she had been in contact with him and didn’t realize she should not have sent it before receiving his official request by mail.

Milanowski also found that three absentee ballot envelopes didn’t include witness addresses, including one Walters had signed in her role as town clerk, and that the town’s Board of Canvassers didn’t follow the correct procedure for the recount, which requires reviewing absentee ballot envelopes.

Jordan Connell:

The U.S. Navy said it will allow people without a high school diploma or GED to enlist as it struggles to meet its recruitment goals.

This announcement marks the second time in a year that the service has lowered its requirements. Navy officials said those trying to enlist without a diploma will have to score a 50 or higher on the Armed Services Qualification Test.

This announcement comes as the armed forces have struggled to meet their recruitment goals. The Navy, Army and Air Force all failed to meet their recruitment goals last fiscal year. The Navy fell short of its enlistment goal by nearly 6,000.

The last time the Navy took recruits without education credentials was in 2000.

By Riley Rourke

“Striking Newton educators of the Newton Teachers Association (NTA) bargaining team put forth a modified proposal containing significant compromises. This proposal would have opened schools Monday. However, the Newton School Committee rejected even significant compromise proposals, countered only with a document that reiterated its unwillingness to fully fund schools, and left negotiations at 9:30 p.m.,” the NTA said in a statement.

Both sides are also accusing the other of putting self-interest over the students as this is the seventh day kids have not been in school.

The union is currently facing $425,000 in fines as teachers strikes are illegal in Massachusetts, but they show no sign of stopping as they continued to strike on Monday.

Harrington Shaw:

The journey through higher education ought to be one in which students face novel and exceptional cognitive challenges to master learning and critical thinking. However, while academic rigor yields capable graduates, it is not in the nature of most people—especially Gen Z students fresh out of high school—to select willingly a difficult path through their college years. The path of least resistance is the most trodden one.

Recent survey results indicating a strong preference toward online education are thus predictable. These data, from Champlain College Online, show that the perception of online education is improving, with respondents suggesting that online higher ed is a reasonable substitute for on-campus learning.

The surveyor’s vested interest in validating its own business model notwithstanding, the data make online higher education appear promising. Respondents praise the convenience of online coursework, and 84 percent of them believe employers have become more accepting of online degrees. Furthermore, 73 percent of surveyed adults said that online education is “the same or better at meeting the needs of traditional students.”

These glowing results warrant a significant degree of skepticism. Responses to overbroad questions showing more positive “perceptions” of online learning (whether among students or employers) may not be an indication of actual academic quality.

Serious institutions must weigh the convenience of online programs against their shortcomings in rigor.While the Champlain survey results paint a rosy picture from the outside looking in, one ought to examine online students’ experiences at a more granular level. After all, we have available for study a cohort of students who have experienced both in-person and online education thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic response. A study of 366 college students of all grade levels at the University of West Attica (Greece) found that students are “more time concentrated, understand better, are more engaged with learning, and communicate more effectively with the teacher during in-person classes.” Researchers concluded that “socialization is not just a feature of education but a prerequisite for successful learning.”

Daniel Trotta

Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.

Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels – generally considered to be third grade and above.

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Experts say learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits. Some educators also find value in teaching children to read historic documents and family letters from generations past.

At Orangethorpe Elementary School in Fullerton, about 30 miles (50 km) southeast of Los Angeles, fourth- to sixth-grade teacher Pamela Keller said she was already teaching cursive before the law took effect Jan. 1.

Philip Mousavizadeh:

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges. 

According to eight members of the Yale faculty, this administration size imposes unnecessary costs, interferes with students’ lives and faculty’s teaching, spreads the burden of leadership and adds excessive regulation. By contrast, administrators noted much of this increase can be attributed to growing numbers of medical staff, and that the University has proportionally increased its faculty size.

“I had remarked to President Salovey on his inauguration that I thought the best thing he could do for Yale would be to abolish one deanship or vice presidency every year of what I hoped would be a long tenure in that position,” professor of English Leslie Brisman wrote in an email to the News. “Instead, it has seemed to me that he has created one upper level administrative position a month.”

Kayla Huynh:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has named two former education administrators and one current administrator as finalists to be the next superintendent.

Two of the finalists left their former jobs after facing criticism for their performance.

The finalists are Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland Department of Education; Joe Gothard, a Madison native who is superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota; and Yvonne Stokes, the former superintendent at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. 

The Madison School Board began interviews with candidates in closed meetings last month and selected the three candidates from nearly 60 applicants, according to district officials. 

The finalists will participate in a final round of in-person interviews next week with the board as well as over 100 nominated community members and staff who were selected through a lottery process. 

On Feb. 6, two of the interviews will be recorded and live-streamed online, including one interview with a student panel from noon to 1:30 p.m. and another with parents and caregivers from 6:30 p.m. to 8:55 p.m. 

The board expects to select MMSD’s next leader in late February, replacing former Superintendent Carlton Jenkins, who retired last summer after three years at the helm. Formerly retired educator Lisa Kvistad is serving as interim superintendent for the current school year.

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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?

Right to Read:

Schools all over the country are changing how reading is taught and they face two big questions: 

• What curriculum will we use? 
• How will we implement it?

Decisions about what will be taught, when, and for how many minutes will determine the daily experience of students, and how much they’ll learn in school. Instructional time is limited, so building classroom schedules requires a series of choices that ultimately reflect our values.

Looking back at my old schedules, I can see how my understanding of effective reading instruction has evolved. I see similar change unfolding across the country, and this makes me feel excited but also deeply worried.

WILL:

WILL Client, Kristi Koschkee, stated, “Act 10 is pro-taxpayer and pro-freedom. This legislation provides public employees like me the freedom to not participate in unionization, or be compelled to finance or support political speech I do not agree with. It’s critical that we stand up for this law and not undo the years of positive results produced for Wisconsin.”

Our Client: WILL Client and Defendant, Kristi Koschkee, faces significant harm if Act 10 were to be somehow repealed or scaled back. Ms. Koschkee is a public-school district employee who values the benefits the Legislature provided her via Act 10.

Koschkee does not want her local union interfering with her relationship with her employer by bargaining on subjects beyond those permitted by Act 10 or entering agreements that last longer than a year. She supports requiring unions to rectify annually, does not want to have her decision to abstain from a union certification vote work in the union’s favor, and does not want to be pressured into participating in recertification elections. Ms. Koschkee also opposes allowing unions to access employee wages directly through payroll deductions.

——

Notes and links on Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

——

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?

Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen:

“I think most Americans know that prices are not likely to fall.” pic.twitter.com/enWtrtDvGM

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 29, 2024

Bill Ackman:

When I voted a little more than a week ago, I clicked a link and arrived at a landing page which explained how to vote for petitioning candidates.

Now it has become a labyrinth of complexity:

You start here with descriptions and bios of Harvard’s preferred candidates:

Lolita Baldor

The U.S. Navy is starting to enlist individuals who didn’t graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has opened the door to lower-performing recruits as it struggles to meet enlistment goals.

The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test. Both are fairly rare steps that the other military services largely avoid or limit, even though they are all finding it increasingly difficult to attract the dwindling number of young people who can meet the military’s physical, mental and moral standards.

Under the new plan, Navy recruits without an education credential will be able to join as long as they score 50 or above on the qualification test, which is out of 99. The last time the service took individuals without education credentials was in 2000.

“We get thousands of people into our recruiting stations every year that want to join the Navy but do not have an education credential. And we just turn them away,” said Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the Navy’s chief of personnel, in an interview Friday with The Associated Press.

The Economist

In 1975 a young senator named Joe Biden heard of a lecture that Hannah Arendt had recently given at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on America’s need for a reckoning after the Vietnam war, now that the “big lie” about the extent of the country’s powers had been exposed by a humiliating defeat. He wrote to her saying that, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he would be most keen to receive a copy of her paper. Such interest says something about the future president’s curiosity—and a lot about the then 68-year-old Arendt’s formidable reputation as a public intellectual.

Arendt was said to be someone you could actually see thinking. Lyndsey Stonebridge, in an absorbing new biography, conjures up the image of Arendt forming her body “into a single question-mark incarnate”. And the questions she asked were big ones: why did the great evil of the 20th century come about; how could totalitarianism have happened; how can freedom and plurality be protected?

Mike:

A reformed system must also be logical and singularly focused on funding K-12 education. The current system contains numerous illogical attributes. First, the use of 1994 as the base year for revenue limit increases assumes that district-level funding decisions made over 25 years ago should be a primary determinant of per-pupil funding levels today. Though scheduled increases to the minimal revenue limit per-pupil will no doubt make many district administrators happy, it is a Band-Aid that does not address the real problem. Further, the state funding formula has two conflicting purposes, funding education and providing tax relief. This value conflict obfuscates the true level of funding schools receive, poisons the public debate over proper school funding levels, and gives the public the perception that increases in school aids means increases in resources for students. Tax relief is an important issue, but it must be separated from education funding in any logical effective system.

Finally, an effective system must be understandable. The average Wisconsin citizen, and more than a few lawmakers and civic leaders, cannot decipher how our current funding system works. This is unacceptable. The state spends more on education than any other core service, and it is impossible for there to be true accountability, performance measurement, or even well-informed political debate regarding K-12 education funding when the formula driving resource allocation is not broadly understood.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported k-12 systems, now at least 22 to 29k per student, depending on the district numbers used.

Prepared by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity Staff

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American’s.

An analysis of their thinking, conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, finds that on a variety of economic, social, and political issues, there exists a wide gap between how the top 1% – the Elites – think things should be and how the rest of America looks at them.

Elite thinking, as it’s termed, is under attack – and rightly so – for being out of step with the rest of the country. Below, we highlight some of the profound attitudinal differences between elites and average Americans:

• In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past versus 20% of all Americans.
• Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
• More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of vital energy and food sources to combat the threat of climate change.
• In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
• Two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
• Somewhere between half and two-thirds favor banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
• About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.
• President Joe Biden enjoys an 84% job approval rating from this group – roughly twice as high as the general public.

Jason Crawford:

That was the thought at the top of my mind coming out of a working group on “Accelerating Science” hosted by the Santa Fe Institute a few months ago. (The thoughts in this essay were inspired by many of the participants, but I take responsibility for any opinions expressed here. My thinking on this was also influenced by a talk given by James Phillips at a previous metascience conference. My own talk at the workshop was written up here earlier.)

What should we do instead of the PI model? Funding should go in a single block to a relatively large research organization of, say, hundreds of scientists. This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. It has been referred to as the “block funding” model.

Here’s why I think this model works:

TaxProf:

Only around three dozen law clerks work for the justices during each one-year term, which means these lawyers — and their unparalleled knowledge of the court — are in incredibly high demand. Jones Day, the leader in the race to recruit and hire as many clerks as possible, announced last month that it snagged 8 law clerks, all of whom worked for conservative justices during the term that began in October 2022.

But they don’t come cheap.

During the courting process, the city’s top law firms treat this elite group of lawyers to perks like an expensive dinner at the Wharf or Penn Quarter or a trip to a baseball game or spa. The recruitment is so competitive that signing bonuses for Supreme Court law clerks have reached a new high — $500,000, according to a spokeswoman for law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Such a sum far exceeds the salaries paid to the justices — the clerks’ former bosses — who are paid slightly less than $300,000 a year.

Max Kozlov:

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged this week that it would seek retractions for 6 papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January.

In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found images from western blots — a common test for detecting proteins in biological samples — in which bands seemed to be spliced, stretched and copied and pasted. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)

It was not the first time that some of these irregularities had been noted; some were flagged years ago on PubPeer, a website where researchers comment on and critique scientific papers. The student newspaper The Harvard Crimsonreported on David’s findings on 12 January.

Gina Kolata

Aissam Dam, an 11-year-old boy, grew up in a world of profound silence. He was born deaf and had never heard anything. While living in a poor community in Morocco, he expressed himself with a sign language he invented and had no schooling.

Last year, after moving to Spain, his family took him to a hearing specialist, who made a surprising suggestion: Aissam might be eligible for a clinical trial using gene therapy.

On Oct. 4, Aissam was treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, becoming the first person to get gene therapy in the United States for congenital deafness. The goal was to provide him with hearing, but the researchers had no idea if the treatment would work or, if it did, how much he would hear.

The treatment was a success, introducing a child who had known nothing of sound to a new world.

Roland Li:

It was the inspiration for Emeryville-based Pixar’s hit movie “Toy Story.” 

“After 75 years of gratefully serving the San Francisco community, the store will be closing next month. The store has been struggling for a number of years, due to the perils and violence of the downtown environment, inflation, the decrease in consumer spending and the demise of retail across the world. The family is saddened it has come to this and we’ve explored all other options to try and keep the business going. The leadership of the City of San Francisco and the Downtown Association have their work cut out for them on how to revitalize what was once a vibrant and fun downtown experience,” said Ken Sterling of Sterling Venture Law, attorney for the family. “We are working through this complex situation with the landlords and creditors and at this time, I’ve advised my clients to not be interviewed by the press.”

San Francisco Business Times first reported the closure.

Elizabeth Nickson:

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh,he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats. With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN. The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the police which proceeds to investigate.

The astroturfed outfit accused a podcaster of being a “white supremacist” and an “accelerationist.” The RCMP then provided CAHN’s “evidence” to legislators who then fed it to the subsidized media. Like a very, very good little girl, Canadian senator Paula Simons said he (the podcaster) wanted to “accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate,” during a debate in the house. None of this was found in any of the hundreds of hours of said podcast. Nevertheless, it was reported widely across the media as cold hard fact.

Related: Taxpayer Funded Dane County Madison Public Health lockdown mandates.

Brian Fung:

The National Security Agency has been buying Americans’ web browsing data from commercial data brokers without warrants, intelligence officials disclosed in documents made public by a US senator Thursday.

The purchases include information about the websites Americans visit and the apps that they use, said Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, releasing newly unclassified letters he received from the Pentagon in recent weeks confirming the sales.

The disclosures are the latest evidence that government agencies routinely buy sensitive information about Americans from commercial marketplaces that they would otherwise be required to obtain via court order.

Jacqueline Munis & Ella McCarthy:

The episode that got her in trouble happened elsewhere in Texas, at Athens High School, where her debate team was competing last February. Iglesias went into a bathroom to vape. Later that day, her coach told her she had been caught. 

“I decided to partake in something that I’m not proud of, but I did it,” Iglesias said, adding that her senior year was a stressful time and a close relative of hers was about to come out of jail. “I had had a lot of personal stuff building up outside.” 

She immediately was pulled from the debate tournament and her coach told her she could face charges because she was 18. She was sent to her district’s alternative school for 30 days, which was the minimum punishment for students caught vaping under Tyler schools’ zero-tolerance policy. 

Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.

Nicholas Wade:

The day is growing ever closer when Washington may have to add to its agenda with Beijing a nettlesome item it has long sought to avoid: the increasingly likely fact that China let the SARS2 virus escape from the Wuhan lab where it was concocted, setting off the Covid-19 pandemic that killed some 7 million people globally and wrought untold economic havoc.

New documents may explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats, from which it might have jumped to people. The reason would be that the virus has never existed in the natural world. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA designed to be a consensus sequence—the genetically most infectious form—of viruses related to SARS1, the bat virus that caused the minor epidemic of 2002. The probative weight of the recipe is that prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure.

The documents unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, and analyzed by its reporter Emily Kopp, include drafts and planning materials for the already-known DEFUSE proposal, an application to DARPA, a Pentagon research agency, for a $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses.

The new recipe is in striking accord with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way. Three researchers—Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen—noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with a pair of agents known as restriction enzymes and so had probably been synthesized and assembled in this way.

—-

Related: Taxpayer Funded Dane County Madison Public Health lockdown mandates.

Ken Shirriff:

Recently Craig Venter (who decoded the human genome) created a synthetic bacterium. The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) took a bacterium’s DNA sequence as a computer file, modified it, made physical DNA from this sequence, and stuck this DNA into a cell, which then reproduced under control of the new DNA to create a new bacterium. This is a really cool result, since it shows you can create the DNA of an organism entirely from scratch. (I wouldn’t exactly call it synthetic life though, since it does require an existing cell to get going.) Although this project took 10 years to complete, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before you will be able to send a data file to some company and get the resulting cells sent back to you.

One interesting feature of this synthetic bacterium is it includes four “watermarks”, special sequences of DNA that prove this bacterium was created from the data file, and is not natural. However, they didn’t reveal how the watermarks were encoded. The DNA sequences were published (GTTCGAATATTT and so on), but how to get the meaning out of this was left a puzzle. For detailed background on the watermarks, see Singularity Hub. I broke the code (as I described earlier) and found the names of the authors, some quotations, and the following hidden web page. This seems like science fiction, but it’s true. There’s actually a new bacterium that has a web page encoded in its DNA:

By Russell Samora & Amber Thoma

Remember NBA great Donnell Harvey? Neither do we. Despite being the #1 high school recruit in 2000—something that you think would indicate future NBA stardom—he put together a meager career in the league, averaging around 5 points per game over 5 years. On the flip side is LeBron James—the #1 high school recruit just a few years later—and we all know what he’s been up to.

This disparity got us thinking, are these top 100 recruit lists any indication of making it to the NBA, let alone becoming a star?

It must be really hard to assess top talent when the pool is so large in high school. Now that we’ve entered the YouTube era, hype surrounding players can inflate in an instant. Sure, LeBron paved the way with some nationally televised games, but now millions of people are watching Zion Williamsonthrow down dunks in warm ups, or Lamelo Ball hit threes from half court in eight grade.

Andrew Joseph:

The blog post that has shaken the leadership of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s preeminent cancer research centers, was written some 3,000 miles away, in a bare-walled, sparsely decorated flat, save for a stack of statistics books and a collection of Rubik’s Cubes.

It’s here that Sholto David, an unemployed scientist with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, spends his time poring over research papers looking for images with clues that they’ve been manipulated in some way to portray misleading findings — perhaps duplicated, spliced or cropped, or partially obscured.

As he’s toiled away over the past three years, often long past midnight, he’s flagged issues on more than 2,000 papers on a site called PubPeer, where researchers can critique and discuss published studies. His comments are sometimes met by a study’s author dodging the questions raised, and sometimes result in a correction or retraction. Often though, they’re met with no response.

Balaji

Biden made unlawful demands of Texas.
Texas denied those demands.
Now Texas is making some demands of its own.
And they have 25 states behind them.

and:

“The fundamental problem is that anyone can claim asylum with zero proof, which means all of Earth can come to America.”

Esther Dyson:

People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans.

We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children.

We should know enough to manipulate ourselves and to resist manipulation by others.

Front-line trainers are crucial to raising healthy, resilient, curious children who will grow into adults capable of loving others and overcoming challenges. There’s no formal curriculum for front-line trainers. Rather, it’s about training kids—and the parents who raise them—to do two fundamental things.

First, ensure that they develop the emotional security to think long term rather than grasp at short-term solutions through drugs, food, social media, gambling or other harmful palliatives. (Perhaps the best working definition of addiction is “doing something now for short-term relief that you know you will regret later.”)

Second, kids need to understand themselves and understand the motivations of the people, institutions and social media they interact with. That’s how to combat fake news—or the distrust of real news. It is less about traditional media literacy and more about understanding: “Why am I seeing this news? Are they trying to get me angry—or just using me to sell ads?”

Unfortunately, many children today are exposed to bad training as the result of having divorced or missing parents or experiencing abuse, hunger, exposure to addiction, mental illness, racism or bullying. These children complete less school, commit more crime and suffer from more instances of addiction, obesity and poor health than their peers with loving relatives and helpful neighbors. Affected children then often pass these vulnerabilities to those around them, including their own children when they become adults. Everyone suffers (including future taxpayers).

Expecting and new parents are the ideal place to begin such training. They are generally eager for help and guidance, which used to come from their own parents and relatives, from schools and from religious leaders. Now such guidance is scarce.

——-

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?

William Pesek:

The past 12 months were rough on Tokyo, Beijing, Taipei, and New Delhi, which, along with the other biggest Asian financiers, hold nearly $2.9 trillion of Treasury market securities. America’s Asian bankers confronted runaway inflation, Federal Reserve tightening, a Fitch Ratings downgrade, and Moody’s Investors Service threatening to yank away Washington’s final AAA rating.

Now, as 2024 opens, add sticker shock to the mix as the U.S. national debt tops $34 trillion. The U.S. may sell $2 trillion of securities in 2024, with the tacit expectation that Japan, China, and others will dutifully hoover them up.

There are signs that Asia might not go along the way Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s staff seems to believe. That could shoulder-check global debt markets in the year ahead.

—-

In December, the Global Times warned that America’s surging national debt “may trigger another financial system crisis soon.” As such, “it is a precautionary and also prudent decision for China and other countries to trim their U.S. Treasury holdings, given the deteriorating fiscal crunch faced by the Biden administration.”

Sabrina Escobar:

“To attract Gen Zers, Chipotle is rolling out a plan that helps workers pay off student loans while saving for retirement, a debit card to help them build credit, and broader access to mental-health resources and financial education. Chipotle noted that Gen-Zers “are experiencing notable financial challenges,” from credit-card debt to “not feel[ing] confident managing their money.”

——-

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?

Stanley K. Ridgley

If nothing else, the barbarous attacks on Israel by the terror group Hamas exposed the morally vacuous viscera of much of American higher education. By now, we have all we need to know about the “decolonization” folks due to their brutish antics in our streets and on the campuses. In the Middle East, such people are the enemies of civilization. On the campuses, they are the friends of barbarism everywhere.

How did primitivism make such a comeback in the face of logic, reason, science, progress, and humane values? Who are these people who exalt a barbaric anti-science, anti-progress, anti-civilization ethos that leads them to embrace murder, mutilation, rape, torture, and infanticide?

The answer is that they are followers of a bizarre quasi-religious mash-up of critical theory, neo-Marxist pedagogy, Fanonian chaos, and primitive racialism. They call this concoction “social justice.” On their lips, “decolonization” is recited alongside something called “indigeneity” and “indigenous knowledge” to drum up support for the inclusion of Neolithic “ways of knowing” in university curricula. Such terms provide easy labels to identify villains and victims, both in the university and, odd as it seems, in the “oppressor” state of Israel.

You find few supporters of humane Enlightenment values in the university bureaucracy.The doctrine is depraved to an inhuman extent. It is a tangible expression of the descent of a large part of humanity into an orgy of violence. “Decolonization” is civilizational regression, aided and abetted by mediocre bureaucrats and observed in silence by fearful and emasculated faculty.

Issues and insights:

There is not a single word of disparagement toward anyone, including Biden, and we defy anyone to find anything in this editorial that even comes close to Google’s “dangerous and derogatory” label.

Among the “dangerous and derogatory” material that Google prohibits is any content that challenges the accepted wisdom around COVID, or as the tech giant puts it, content that “relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative, scientific consensus.”

——

Many taxpayer funded school districts use Google services.

Transcript of a meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange.

In q tel and Google.

Joseph Cox:

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary apps, including popular ones such as 9gag, Kik, and a series of caller ID apps, are part of a global surveillance capability that starts with ads inside each app, and ends with the apps’ users being swept up into a powerful mass monitoring tool advertised to national security agencies that can track the physical location, hobbies, and family members of people to build billions of profiles, according to a 404 Media investigation.

404 Media’s investigation, based on now deleted marketing materials and videos, technical forensic analysis, and research from privacy activists, provides one of the clearest examinations yet of how advertisements in ordinary mobile apps can ultimately lead to surveillance by spy firms and their government clients through the real time bidding data supply chain. The pipeline involves smaller, obscure advertising firms and advertising industry giants like Google. In response to queries from 404 Media, Google and PubMatic, another ad firm, have already cut-off a company linked to the surveillance firm.

“The pervasive surveillance machine that has been developed for digital advertising now directly enables government mass surveillance. Many businesses, from app publishers to advertisers to big tech, are acting completely irresponsibly. This must end,” Wolfie Christl, the principal of Cracked Labs, an Austrian research institute and co-author of a paper published last year that researched the surveillance tool, told 404 Media.

Emily Mullin:

Born deaf, the 1-year-old boy had never responded to sound or speech before. But after receiving an experimental treatment injected into one of his ears, he started turning his head when his parents called his name. Five months later, he spoke his first words.

The boy is one of six children with a type of hereditary deafness who are part of a gene therapy trial in China. Five of the children can now hear, according to results reported today in the scientific journal The Lancet. The news follows an announcement this week that yet another child born with profound deafness can hear after receiving a similar treatment developed by US drugmaker Eli Lilly.

“It’s remarkable,” says Lawrence Lustig, a hearing loss expert at Columbia University who was not involved in the trials. “We’ve never had a therapy that restores even partial hearing for someone who’s totally deaf other than a cochlear implant.”

Video: The Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University/The Lancet

The children were all born with a mutation in a gene that makes a protein needed for hearing called otoferlin. We hear things when sound waves in the air cause the thousands of sensory hair cells in our inner ears to vibrate and release a chemical that relays that information to the brain. Otoferlin is necessary for the release of this chemical messenger. Without it, the ear can’t communicate with the brain.

Greg Lukianoff:

ACLU National Legal Director David Cole has a review of my and Rikki Schlott’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” coming out in the February 8 edition of the New York Review of Books. Overall I thought it was quite positive, but Cole made some arguments — which we actually hear quite often — that I think need addressing.

Before I do that, though, I want to stress that I both like and greatly respect David Cole. I also appreciate that the New York Review of Books found such a serious thinker on the topic of freedom of speech to review our book, as opposed to the many First Amendment skeptics these days who seem to think that simply employing a more advanced insult technology against those they disagree with is the same as refuting them (cough, cough — “The Lost Cause of Free Speech”).

I always welcome good-faith pushback — especially when it gives me an opportunity to go into more depth on why Rikki and I are so concerned about the current situation in higher education. All that said, here are some quotes from Cole’s review that I’d like to respond to:

Michael Rubinkham:

A Pennsylvania law that makes it a crime to release information about teacher disciplinary complaints is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge has ruled. The judge sided with a school board member who sought to publicize a misconduct allegation against his son’s school psychologist — and criticize the state’s dismissal of it — without fear of being prosecuted for the disclosure.

The unusual case involves the Educator Discipline Act, a state law that controls how the Pennsylvania Department of Education investigates and prosecutes misconduct complaints against teachers and other school staff. The law’s confidentiality provision makes it a misdemeanor to disclose the existence of a state complaint or any information about it unless and until discipline is imposed.

Prem Thakker:

Administrators at Columbia University responded to reports of students being injured by a chemical attack against an on-campus rally for Gaza by chiding students for holding protests without official authorization. Meanwhile, students told The Intercept that even as the school’s public safety department has said it is investigating the incident, school administrators themselves have yet to contact the victims — some of whom have had to seek medical care for their injuries. 

During a rally on Friday, according to attendees, two individuals sprayed a hazardous chemical that released an odious smell. Dozens of students have reported an array of symptoms, such as burning eyes, nausea, headaches, abdominal and chest pain, and vomiting.

The campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized the incident on Saturday morning, identifying the substance as “skunk,” a chemical weapon used by the Israel Defense Forces against Palestinians and one that U.S. police departments have reportedly acquired in the past. SJP also alleged that the assailants have ties to the Israel Defense Forces, a claim that The Intercept could not independently confirm.

James Pethokoukis

But there’s another kind of Peak Human, a moment whose occurrence and timing are far more foreseeable. If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo sapiens. While the most recent UN forecast sees a possible population peak of nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s, plenty of other experts see our species’ numbers cresting at a far lower level — and much earlier:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast:

Choose life.

Stephen:

I have served happily as a professor at Yale for most of my adult life, but in my four-plus decades at the mast, I have never seen campuses roiled as they’re roiling today. On the one hand are gleeful activists on the right, taking victory laps over the tragic tumble from grace of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. On the other is a campus left that has spent years crafting byzantine and vague rules on hate speech that it suddenly finds turned back on its allies. For those of us who love the academy, these are unhappy times. 

The controversy began with criticisms of some universities, Harvard included, for soft-pedaling their responses to the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and for then ignoring the overheated rhetoric of many pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. It has since spiraled into a full-bore battle in the never-ending culture wars.

There’s something sad but deeply American about the way that the current crisis stems not from the terror attacks but from a subsequent congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave such cautious responses that it was hard to understand their positions. It was all very embarrassing; and, in its way, very McCarthyist.

Still, some good may yet come of the debacle. I have in mind not, as the left might think, a fresh rallying of the angry troops; nor, as the right might think, an eager readiness for the next battle. Rather, the controversy provides us with an opportunity to engage in a serious debate about what higher education is for.

Macmillan:

Macmillan Learning EconEd Student Excellence Award Contest. No purchase is necessary. Open only to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States and the District of Columbia who, at the time of entry, meet the eligibility requirements set forth in the full Official Rules. Must enter by 11:59pm ET on April 1, 2024. There is a limit of one entry per person. Void where prohibited. For full Official Rules, visit

Macmillan:

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.

Jonathan Turley:

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.

Ann Althouse:

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

The Economist:

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.

Frederick Hess:

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.

Derek Lowe:

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?

Joanne Jacobs:

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.”

Bruce Levine:

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.

Melissa Korn:

“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.

Quinton Klabon:

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?

Jack Crosbie

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.

Jules Roscoe:

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

Anna Tims:

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.

WILL:

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.”

Michael Casey:

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.”

James Taranto:

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.”

Liam Beran

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.

Stephanie Saul:

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.

Lee Fang:

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

Evan Osnos:

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.”

Andy Kessler:

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.

Jeff Jacoby:

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.

Richard Speed:

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.

James Freeman:

“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:

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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

Will Flanders:

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:

• Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were about 8.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 7.0% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee.
• Charter school students in Milwaukee continue to outperform their public school peers. District charters saw 6.9% and 6.6% higher proficiency in ELA and math respectively than traditional public schools.
• Statewide, choice students outperform their public school peers in ELA. Proficiency rates were about 5.4% higher in ELA for students participating in school choice statewide than traditional public school students. No difference was found in math performance.
• Wisconsin continues to struggle with its achievement gaps. Statewide, a school with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency rates 40.6% lower in ELA and 44.0% lower in math compared to a hypothetical school with zero low-income students. For African American students, that gap is 17.8% in ELA and 20.3% in math. Hispanic students have an achievement gap of approximately 6.3% in math, but no significant gap was found in ELA.
• Choice and charter schools are more efficient with taxpayer money. Once the demographics of students in the schools are taken into account, choice and charter schools earn more proficiency per $1,000 of spending than traditional public schools in both Milwaukee and the state as a whole.
• Choice schools offer more value added. 12 of the top 20 schools in the state where student performance exceeds expectations based on demographics are in the state’s choice programs.
• Rural schools perform worse than schools in any other type of geography. On average, proficiency in Wisconsin’s rural schools is significantly lower in both ELA and math than urban, suburban, or town schools.

Commentary.

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