The last event in Educational Policy Studies at UW's 2022-2023 lecture series is coming up! Join the author of "The Culture Trap," Dr. Derron Wallace of @BrandeisU on Friday, January 26th at 11:00AM. Register for the talk here: https://t.co/8xKAY1ulFg pic.twitter.com/V2f05zuaUt
— IRIS NRC @ UW-Madison (@uw_iris) December 27, 2023
The Milwaukee Public Schools budget is over a BILlION dollars. $87M referendum was supported by voters in 2020. Fmr Board Pres, Bob Peterson was deposed in Oct 2023. Folaron v MPS. https://t.co/lufJzV8zB5 @ShaunGalNews @SamKraemerTV @AdamRifeReports @DanODonnellShow @DanielBice pic.twitter.com/B8mKFllVpR
— Debbie Kuether (@debkueth) December 27, 2023
The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy on campus has proliferated in recent years, but there are signs it’s finally meeting resistance. The latest good news is from Wisconsin, where public universities will pare back some DEI programs and freeze them going forward.
Under a deal shaped by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state approved $800 million in pay raises for university staff and for plans to build a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. In exchange, the university will freeze all DEI hiring, eliminate a third of DEI positions on campus, and create an endowed chair to teach “conservative political thought, classical economic theory or classical liberalism” at UW Madison. At least now there will be one conservative
The Hamas terror attacks of October 7 and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza caused disruptions on many university campuses that moved concerns about campus speech from a limited constituency to front page news, exposing it to new audiences. The grilling of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn by a Congressional committee on the topic of campus antisemitism generated intense coverage, and a near unanimous conclusion—by actors across the political spectrum—that the presidents did a poor job of explaining campus turmoil, how antisemitic speech and conduct were handled under prevailing campus policies, and what they might have done differently to protect their students. Public uproar, the resignation of both the UPenn president and board chair and a narrow escape from that fate by the Harvard president ensure that campus speech won’t soon recede back into the shadows. But the ability to create a campus environment in which students can express their views free of harassment depends on understanding the role of free speech and academic freedom in higher education.
Bradley A. Smith and Eric Wang:
A federal judge on Monday will consider a Minnesota law that surreptitiously attempts to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that corporations have a constitutional right to speak independently about politics.
While Citizens United and other judicial decisions have loosened restrictions on corporate political speech, courts have upheld longstanding bans on political speech by foreign nationals. Therefore, Minnesota and other opponents of corporate speech now seek to redefine large swaths of American businesses as “foreign influenced” to stop their political engagement. Seattle, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Alaska have joined Minnesota in passing laws banning political speech by so-called foreign-influenced corporations. Lawmakers in numerous other states and Congress have introduced similar bills.
The Minnesota law is typical of these measures, making Monday’s hearing an early test of their constitutionality. The law defines “foreign-influenced corporations” as including any U.S. company in which a single foreign investor has “direct or indirect beneficial ownership” of as little as 1% of total equity. This status also may be triggered if hundreds or even thousands of foreign stockholders collectively own 5% of shares. It doesn’t require these stockholders to be of the same nationality or to collude to influence so much as the corporate cafeteria menu.
In 2023 alone, more than half a dozen states passed universal school-choice bills with even more expanding on former laws. School-choicelegislation is going gangbusters. But is school choice itself growing?
How much competition do public schools actually face? How many alternative-schooling options exist in each locality? We’d hardly consider it a win if a child were given their choice of meals, but the only options were Wendy’s or McDonalds.
A new report from my Fordham Institute colleagues seeks to answer this question by comparing the total enrollment in the nation’s 125 largest districts to enrollment at nearby charter, private, and homeschools. …
Political science professor Dr. Carol Swain is one of the academics whom Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, plagiarized. Swain has called for Gay’s firing and a “return to sanity” by Harvard University. Here, she explains how the insanity has spread across higher education — with a philosophy labeled DEI.
A few months ago, I was invited to apply for a visiting professorship at a major university out west. As part of the application, I had to submit a mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement.
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It was difficult to write because I believe that all DEI programs should be abolished and that we can achieve diversity without discrimination. As I argued in my co-authored book, “The Adversity of Diversity,” DEI programs are divisive, and many, if not all, of the programs violate our civil rights laws, as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Therefore, I argued that diversity programs should share the same fate as race-based college admissions, which the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional last June.
Below are some of the main thoughts I offered in my required DEI statement:
Douglas Belkin and Melissa Korn
Allegations that Gay plagiarized some of her work has weakened some of the initial support Gay enjoyed from the faculty following calls by conservative lawmakers to sanction her.
One faculty member has even suggested pulling a lever buried deep in the Massachusetts constitution to appoint a state member to the board.
The Harvard Corporation, the 12-member governing body, is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere, according to its website. Its current members include a former U.S. commerce secretary, a former CEO of American Expressand the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Its stewardship over the centuries has led Harvard to become one of the world’s greatest and wealthiest research universities, with an endowment in excess of $50 billion.
If money weren’t a problem, a majority of Pennsylvania parents would pull their kids out of public schools. That was the finding of a new poll from the Commonwealth Foundation.
The survey of 800 Keystone State voters found that 55 percent said, financial considerations aside, they would rather their kids attend a private school. Fewer than one in five (18 percent) picked public school as their first option.
More parents preferred sending their kids to a non-religious private school (33 percent) than a religious private school (22 percent). Charter schools and home schools were the choice of seven percent of respondents.
Foundation Executive Vice President Jennifer Stefano said the poll’s most disturbing finding was the poor grade most Pennsylvanians gave the public school system. “[W]hen asked to grade the K through 12 system, the respondents gave schools twice as many F’s as they did A’s.”
Why would former President Barack Obamaspend his time and political capital defending a protector of genocidal Jew-haters — “depending on the context” — later exposed to be a serial plagiarist?
That became a live question with Jewish Insider’s revelation Obama had “privately lobbied” for Harvard President Claudine Gay to keep her job amid calls for her head following the mealymouthed and morally bankrupt testimony she delivered before Congress — testimony illustrating exactly why Jew-hatred had erupted and been allowed to fester on campuses following Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack.
She showed that Harvard, like its elite peers, had become a “safe space” for one group above all others — Hamasniks and their bigoted intersectional allies — putting Jewish students under threat of not only harassment but bodily harm in the name of an absolute commitment to free speech afforded to virtually no one else on the heavily censorious campus.
One explanation for Obama backing Gay is he shares her tolerance for the pro-Palestinian Israel-haters and their woke comrades on the radical left, with whom he may well feel a kinship.
If Claudine Gay were to fall, it could topple the entire house of cards the left, led by Barack Obama, helped build.
To fire her would be to acknowledge the evil hatred of the West at DEI’s core; admit DEI elevates politics over merit, given Gay has proven to be something of an academic fraud; and therefore delegitimize the movement as a whole given Gay’s and Harvard’s symbolic and substantive prominence in it.
I think that is right, and I would add more regarding Harvard’s interests specifically. If you read Gay’s writings and transcripts of her speeches, she has made her purpose plain. Her mission, as she sees it, is to transform Harvard from an intellectual institution into an activist organization. She means for Harvard to be retooled as an explicit engine of left-wing change. And the Harvard Corporation is on board with this change. In fact, it is the very reason why Gay was hired as president.
CNN caught red-handed lying about Robert Kennedy’s record by selectively editing a clip.
RFK Jr.’s campaign put out this video showing the full context of his statement next to the version CNN aired, which mischaracterises part of his speech to mean something he didn’t say.
Next to paying tuition bills, parents of college-age students dread few things more than completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, aka FAFSA. So it would seem to be good news that the Education Department this month is rolling out a new and supposedly simpler form. But government makes nothing free or simple.
Rather than pass legislation after hearings with a floor vote, Congress slipped a FAFSA redesign into the December 2020 omnibus spending bill. But the legislation doesn’t merely streamline the form. It also expands Pell grant eligibility and changes rules in ways that will harm middle-class students while encouraging families to game the system.
The new FAFSA reduces the number of questions to about three dozen in part by pulling information from student and parent tax returns at the Internal Revenue Service. This information will be plugged into a new formula to calculate a “student aid index,” which determines how much families could afford to contribute to a child’s college education.
According to the Education Department, 1.5 million more students will be able to access the maximum Pell award, which is $7,395 this year. But the new formula will also result in many middle-class families paying much more for college.
Field Middle School allows students to use iPads for some classwork, but the devices can’t be used during passing periods or lunch. From left to right: Thomas Wongsmith, Izayah Keller-Coleman, Spencer Handelman and Nathaniel Tseng.
Some of them are. A number of all-boys middle schools—public, charter and private—have begun opening in recent years to meet boys’ needs. Inside the walls of these schools, boys get lots of hands-on learning, frequent breaks and plenty of movement. Some coed schools are also addressing the problem, dividing up boys and girls for certain classes. And they’re having success.“Instead of making guys change the way we behave,” Tyler says, “maybe schools should change the way they’re structured.”
College coaches rate as the highest-paid public officials in 43 states.
To rein in this excess, we could take the lead in the growing movement to curb excessive CEO pay at corporations. One reform proposal now before Congress would levy a new excise tax on corporations with CEOs who make more than 50 times their typical worker pay. Another proposal would help deny government contracts to firms with wide pay gaps between top executives and workers.
We could adapt either of these approaches to college sports. Does your university want to keep getting federal aid? Then, don’t make your coaches super-rich at the expense of your staff and students.
We can do something about inequality in this country. And it would make for better football,
Arthur Herman and Alex Pollock:
While the nation is rightly worried about the proliferation of antisemitism on its college campuses, another higher education abuse also needs prompt attention.
On Dec. 6 – St. Nicholas Day – President Biden handed student loan defaulters another $5 billion gift in debt forgiveness. The administration’s eagerness to win the votes of student loan borrowers by shifting the cost of student debt from borrowers to taxpayers now adds up to $132 billion of student loans those borrowers will not have to pay — even though the Supreme Court ruled a related scheme unconstitutional last June.
But if borrowers don’t pay the debts they incurred and default on their debts, someone else has to pay. Right now, that someone else is American taxpayers. Now it’s time that the cost of nonpayment of student loans be shared by those who have benefitted the most directly from federal student loans: namely, the colleges and universities themselves.
The EL PAÍS investigation in 2019 revealed that UC Global was paid by the CIA to spy on Assange’s conversations with his lawyers and associates when they were preparing to fight an extradition request so he could face charges in the U.S. for revealing secret information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few weeks after our report, Spanish police arrested UC Global’s owner and director, David Morales. The ex-soldier was released on bail shortly thereafter and is under investigation in Spain for alleged crimes related to privacy, attorney-client communication secrecy, misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
“I continue to believe that having ‘we the people’ decide the profound moral issue of abortion is the only way to find a reasonable consensus that most people will accept,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. “One of the benefits of a one-time, single-issue referendum would be the education and discussion that would occur leading up to it. Unfortunately, with an active court case and resistance in the Legislature, a referendum in 2024 is highly unlikely.”
Choose life. Notes and links on abortion,
I finished my first full year coaching youth sports, and while I enjoyed it, I’ve made a decision: I am assistant coach material. That is my niche: responsible enough to show up, but not responsible enough for significant decision-making power. I prefer to hide in the background, make sure everyone’s shoes get tied, and let the head coach take the blame if things go south.
Other things I learned:
1. The vast, vast majority of youth sports parents are not bonkers. Don’t believe what you read about parents fighting each other with battle axes in the parking lot after games. I only saw that twice. OK three times. Alright I am kidding, I saw no battle ax fights. Most parents want the same things, which is A) for their kids to get some exercise and B) to be able to drop their child off for an hour and have someone else yell at them while they can run an errand and look at their phone. If the child can also learn to catch, that’s a bonus.
2. I was the assistant coach of my daughter’s soccer team and assistant coach of my son’s Little League team. These were recreational league teams, which are low-key organizations for parents who like to sleep in and do other stuff on the weekends, and not travel teams, which are for parents who enjoy rest stop coffee and stockpiling Hampton Inn points.
Shannon Najmabadi and Jon Kamp:
The city’s efforts—which have been particularly wide-ranging—demonstrate the difficulties communities face trying to make a dent in reducing homelessness. The number of homeless people counted in Grand Rapids increased more quickly than the nation as a whole this year.
The number of homeless people counted in the U.S. increased 12% between 2022 and 2023, the biggest increase since the U.S. first published comparable data in 2007. A majority of places reported an increase in people sleeping outside, a finding described as startling by federal officials.
Officials and advocates for those experiencing homelessness attribute the recent rise to the end of pandemic-era protections, an influx of migrants, wide scale housing shortages—stemming in part from underbuilding after the 2008 recession—and lack of help for those experiencing mental-health problems or drug addictions.
Could it be that progressive leftists are running out of other people’s money? Perhaps not yet on a number of famous campuses, but wokesters without gargantuan endowments seem to be having an increasingly hard time funding radical politics in a world of competing priorities.
Rich Kremer reports for Wisconsin Public Radio, which is staffed by employees of the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
NEWS: @BaltCitySchools has a $1.7B budget. It spends more than $22k per student. Yet, nearly TWO-THIRDS of all city schools received the LOWEST possible ratings from the state this year. School CEO, who’s entering her 8th year, says she’s “working on it”. https://t.co/u1W5lGYKO7
— Chris Papst (@chrispapst) December 19, 2023
In her new position, she personally led the search committee that named Gay as president last December, praising her in an announcement at the time as “a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence.”
Notwithstanding her initial enthusiasm, Pritzker has in recent weeks avoided personally defending the newly installed president, who has faced calls to resign, instead joining a statement signed by the 11 members of Harvard’s top board, which has been criticized for a lack of transparency.
In their unanimous decision to back Gay last week, the board members affirmed their “confidence” in the university president, dismissing the plagiarism charges and accepting her apology for widely criticized comments at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism earlier this month, where she equivocated on whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct.
Before the Harvard Corporation had released its statement, however, Pritzker had dodged repeated questions from a reporter for the school’s student newspaper on whether she would ask the president to step down, even as Gay had claimed to have her support.
Jessica McBride & Jim Piwowarczyk
“The majority’s outcome-focused decision-making in this case will delight many. A whole cottage industry of lawyers, academics, and public policy groups searching for some way to police partisan gerrymandering will celebrate. My colleagues will be saluted by the media, honored by the professoriate, and cheered by political activists. But after the merriment subsides, the sober reality will set in.
Without legislative resolution, Wisconsin Supreme Court races will be a perpetual contest between political forces in search of political power, who now know that four members of this court have assumed the authority to bestow it. A court that has long been accused of partisanship will now be enmeshed in it, with no end in sight. Rather than keep our role in redistricting narrow and circumspect, the majority seizes vast new powers for itself.”
WILL:
Redistricting: Although the issues surrounding decennial redistricting were resolved by the Wisconsin Supreme Court just a year and a half ago, Petitioners sought to re-litigate that case. They asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare the current maps unconstitutional, draw new maps from scratch. The court has now agreed to do just that.
“If this thought sits a bit uneasily, blame the lawfaring leftists who engineered the sandbagging of the nation’s top jurists…. Embittered by electoral losses, unwilling to trust the will of voters, the left now routinely turns to extraordinary legal action in hopes of pressing the courts to impose its political objectives by judicial fiat. Every party to these high-stakes, highly speculative cases knew exactly where this would end. And not one cares a whit for the consequences for the high court…. The biggest question now is whether the three liberal justices understand the grave risks of this lawfaring agenda… Do they sign up for the campaign with opinions that justify novel legal theories and the judicial usurpation of elections — in the process inviting more special counsels, more rogue court decisions, more litigation? Or do they recognize this game for what it is, acknowledge the sound legal reasons for why no one has attempted such reckless prosecutions and lawsuits before, and send a message it needs to stop?”
Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.
I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.
The Harvard houses are modified versions of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They are residences but not dormitories. Associated with each house was a group of faculty and visiting fellows who regularly dined and spoke there, and who helped constitute each house’s Senior Common Room. There was a staff of resident tutors, mainly graduate students, who taught sections of major courses and advised students in a variety of ways. And then there were the master and the senior tutor, also resident. The former presided over the collective life of the house; the latter was responsible for the students as individuals.
The knives are out for home schooling. How else to interpret the sudden spate of critical articles? Not everything is a conspiracy of aligned special interests. But when a big-time national newspaper starts hammering hard on a rarely covered topic, you can be sure something’s up.
The lockdowns and lockouts of 2020 dealt a reputational blow to the education blob—that quasipublic syndicate of teachers unions, government bureaucracies, brand-name credentialing institutions and their media allies whose mission is to keep taxpayer money flowing to public schools. Most of that money is linked to students, many of whom left during the plague year and haven’t returned. Now the crisis is over and the blob wants its monopoly back.
The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.
But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.
Recent events have “made enormously plain how nearly impossible it is to effectively govern and lead universities,” said Richard Chait, a higher education professor at Harvard.
Private universities are governed by boards of trustees, often composed of dozens of prominent alumni and donors appointed by other trustees or, in some cases, elected by graduates or current students. These boards meet a few times a year, set a broad vision for the university, and appoint and review the president.
At Penn, critics said insufficient oversight has been part of the school’s problem.
“Trustees, including myself, failed to do our job,” Marc Rowan, a former member of Penn’s board of trustees who led the charge to oust Magill and Bok, wrote in a letter to the board Tuesday. “We, like Faculty, have distinct responsibilities and have simply abdicated those responsibilities for the last two decades.”
He said the board failed to ask crucial questions about the university’s strategic direction.
Under a new law, HEA 1558, the state of Indiana is mandating instruction and curriculum that aligns with the science of reading; use of Reading Recovery must be phased out by fall of 2024.
Science of reading is a methodology that uses direct, systematic use of five elements in literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
It is based on research about how brains actually learn to read.
The law says schools may not adopt curriculum based on the “three-cueing” model, which uses context, pictures or syntax clues for literacy instruction.
Teresa Stuckey, VCSC executive director of elementary education, says that Reading Recovery is considered three-cueing under the changes.
“The research is showing (three-cueing) doesn’t fit with the way children’s minds work, the way the brain processes,” she said.
The district has 24 Title 1 reading teachers, or interventionists, who use Reading Recovery part of the day.
———
Madison has long used Reading Recovery, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.
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?
Meta has engaged in a “systemic and global” censorship of pro-Palestinian content since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war on 7 October, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
In a scathing 51-page report, the organization documented and reviewed more than a thousand reported instances of Meta removing content and suspending or permanently banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram. The company exhibited “six key patterns of undue censorship” of content in support of Palestine and Palestinians, including the taking down of posts, stories and comments; disabling accounts; restricting users’ ability to interact with others’ posts; and “shadow banning”, where the visibility and reach of a person’s material is significantly reduced, according to HRW.
Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said.
Consider Harvard President Claudine Gay, who evinced no ability to think on her feet or even adjust wording undoubtedly scripted for her by lawyers. Yet despite her brilliant display of dullness, Ms. Gay grinned as though she were the cleverest in the room.
This was, perhaps, understandable. Ms. Gay is, after all, president of Harvard University. Typically, you get to be president of Harvardonly if everyone knows that you are very, very smart. After her shameful performance, however, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Gay rose to this post despite a shockingly unimpressive scholarly record.
Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest.
And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.
The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages.
Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.
Like many of my fellow liberals, I would love to live in a country where Americans had never elected Mr. Trump — let alone sided with him by the millions in his claims that he won an election he lost, and that he did nothing wrong afterward. But nobody lives in that America. For all the power the institution has arrogated, the Supreme Court cannot bring that fantasy into being. To bar Mr. Trump from the ballot now would be the wrong way to show him to the exits of the political system, after all these years of strife.
Employer pension costs are now over $2,000 per pupil (12.4% of expenditures).
Chart via Bob Costrell @Ed_Reform: https://t.co/RgE3SSaxCv pic.twitter.com/HRNIJUk5MB
— Chad Aldeman (@ChadAldeman) December 22, 2023
Private citizen Jack Smith lacks standing to petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari before judgement in United States v. Trump for the same reason I do. Jack Smith is in the eyes of the Supreme Court a private citizen not an officer of the United States. Standing issues need not be raised by the parties to a case nor can they be waived. The Supreme Court justices must address them sua sponte.
The Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon overlooked Leo Jaworski’s lack of standing because, if one consults the briefs in that case, one will find that no party ever raised the issue. The Court cursorily assumed Jaworski was legally appointed without ever examining the issue raised by me, former Attorney General Ed Meese, and Professor Gary Lawson. We discuss this issue at length in Steven G. Calabresi & Gary Lawson, Why Robert Mueller’s Appointment as Special Counsel Was Unlawful, 95 Notre Dame Law Review 87, at pp. 118-125 (2019). The D.C. Circuit and District Courts have declined to readdress this issue because of erroneous precedent in the D.C. Circuit, which does not bind the Supreme Court, and in which the standing issue was never raised. See id., at 125-127.
A more recent D.C. Circuit and District Court affirmed the legality of Robert Muller’s appointment without a sustained response to our argument that none of the statutes cited by the Justice Department in support of the legality of Robert Mueller’s appointment. Jack Smith’s case is a new case.
The average number of children per family in the United States has fallen dramatically, from seven in 1800 to fewer than two in 2018. That’s good news for kids’ cognitive development, suggests a recently published study.
Over the past few decades, scientific research has shown that children in larger families perform worse in school, score lower on cognitive tests, and attain fewer years of education than kids in smaller families. Researchers theorize that additional children stretch parental resources thin, leaving parents with less time, energy, and money to devote to their kids’ development. For example, parents might read to children less, not have the time to ensure school attendance, or lack the savings to pay for tutors or after-school programs.
State lawmakers are funneling $1.2 billion from the state education budget into their districts for special projects. Here is where the money is going. #nced #ncpol #ncga pic.twitter.com/xa6iabATM0
— John Locke Foundation (@JohnLockeNC) December 21, 2023
That universities take race into account to fill job openings might be the worst-kept secret in academia. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria put it recently, a “white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today.” Hiring for new faculty positions, particularly in humanities departments, “now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups.”
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court scolded Harvard for using racial preferences to admit students. Why wouldn’t it have been doing the same thing to hire faculty, staff and administrators? On campus, that appears to be the assumption. After Ms. Gay landed the top job last year, the school newspaper hailed the appointment of “the first Black president and president of color in the history of the University” and editorialized that it “feels as though it heralds the start of a more progressive era at Harvard, one that understands representation, diversity, and inclusion as essential to creating the kind of vibrant intellectual community that can in turn create a better world.”
Early in the fall, a far-left PAC filed a lawsuit, charging that Wisconsin’s school-choice program somehow violates the state’s constitution — hoping that our state’s supreme court, which flipped to a progressive majority last election, would whack their political lob and smack down vouchers in our state. Thankfully, on December 13 the state supreme court unanimously voted to reject the lawsuit.
School choice survives in Wisconsin, at least for now. But it remains under pressure in other jurisdictions. Last month, Illinois allowed a tuition program serving almost 10,000 students to die. Ohio and South Carolina also have lawsuits in the works seeking to strike down voucher legislation. And such lawsuits have succeeded before in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Nevada. Chicago’s Board of Education approved new district goals that include a movement away from school choice.
Even as choice will continue in Wisconsin, it’s useful to consider the counterfactual. What would have happened if the lawsuit had succeeded? What would it be like from a student’s and teacher’s perspective?
Consider a former student of mine. We’ll call him Zack. Zack’s mother works the late shift to make rent, but never misses a parent–teacher conference. Last year, our school went on lockdown several times, because local gangs threatened violence, and the Autozone across from us had police tape up after a murder the week before school began. Nonetheless, Zack outperformed students in our state’s most affluent districts, earning a place at a premier private high school.
I make two points connected to Mr. Zakaria’s larger statement. He emphasized the decreasing number of Americans who have confidence in our elite universities. I have been reading Edmund Wilson’s 1940 classic, “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” It famously offers a portrait of the groundbreaking French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), a father of modern historiography. The whole section reads like a tribute to the idea of learning, of understanding, of telling. It is not too much to say it is a kind of paean to the idea of the university.
What a scholar Michelet was, what a searcher for truth. His early life, in Wilson’s words, was “sad, poor and hard.” Natural brilliance drove him to and through the academy. He received honors, tutored princesses, but he was really a historian. He longed to know the facts of the past and to understand them. Appointed to the civil service, he was put in the Record Office. He was in charge of the archives of all of France. Wilson: “No one had really explored the French archives before; the histories had mostly been written from other histories” and by hired hands. Over the coming decades Michelet would write the first serious, documented, comprehensive history of France from its beginning through the 1789 revolution.
Michelet said there came to him in the archives “the whispers of the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past.” His approach was rational and realistic, not romantic, though there was plenty of color and sweep in his work. The story of Joan of Arc interested him because her story was fully documented—“incontestable”—and because he saw her as the first modern hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.”
Defendants Andrew Ritter and other members of the North Carolina Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors (collectively, the “Board”) disavow the notion that the Board has targeted or will target expert testimony under the Act. Rather, the Board seeks a counter- declaration that Nutt’ s expert reports submitted on behalf of a group of plaintiffs in a state lawsuit violates the Act’ s prohibition against the unlicensed practice of engineering. Whereas Nutt seeks to protect engineering speech, the Board seeks to prohibit the work underlying that speech. For the following reasons, the court grants in part and denies in part Nutt’s motion and denies in toto the Board’s motion.
Some mighty good IMPORTANT news.
— William M Briggs – Statistician to the Stars! (@FamedCelebrity) December 21, 2023
North Carolina tried to shut up a man named Nutt who was criticizing flaws in public works – using math.
Nutt didn't have an Expert "license", so the state threatened to arrest him.
Now Nutt was a trained engineer, but without the blessing. pic.twitter.com/Ll4PCQ0VCt
Most of the decline is due to fewer young men pursuing college. About 1 million fewer young men are in college but only 0.2 million fewer young women. As a result, men make up 44% of young college students today, down from 47% in 2011, according to newly released U.S. Census Bureau data.
This shift is driven entirely by the falling share of men who are students at four-year colleges. Today, men represent only 42% of students ages 18 to 24 at four-year schools, down from 47% in 2011.
At two-year colleges, which are largely community colleges, the drop in enrollment has been similar for men and women, so the gender balance has not changed much. Men represent 49% of students ages 18 to 24, up slightly from 48% in 2011.
It's just kinda crazy to me how obviously and self evidently partisan some of these "misinformation reporters" are, in ways that cause tangible harm to journalism. https://t.co/cZcJ7qYfDS
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 22, 2023
Penn’s board has 48 voting participants, and a further 36 longstanding emeritus members who have reached the retirement age of 70 but are still allowed to attend and speak at meetings. MIT has 74 board members, Cornell 64. Harvard has a “corporation” of 12, and then 32 overseers. Of course that is done in part to keep donors involved and perhaps also reward them. It does not lead to good governance or a strong ability to make substantive decisions.
I very much enjoyed this FT article on these themes. Faculty members are upset that their governing boards want to govern.
I almost split my gut over this part: “…said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and former head of Mount Holyoke College. “Often people from the corporate world don’t understand the culture of collegiality, transparency and shared governance.”
Boston Public Schools legally admitted students to the city’s three exam schools two years ago under a temporary admissions policy that aimed to increase diversity by distributing seats by grades and ZIP codes, according to a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
“There is nothing constitutionally impermissible about a school district including racial diversity as a consideration and goal in the enactment of a facially neutral plan,” the justices wrote in their decision Tuesday.
A group of Asian American and white parents known as the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence filed the lawsuit two years ago, arguing that the one-year temporary policy discriminated against Asian American and white students seeking admission to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the O’Bryant School of Math and Science.The parents’ group sought to have five students admitted who had been rejected under the temporary policy, arguing that the students would have secured seats under a policy used before the pandemic that admitted students citywide based on grades and test scores. But the justices disagreed.
Javier Milei assured: “This is only the first step, in the coming days we will call extraordinary sessions of the National Congress and we will send a package of laws asking Congress for collaboration to advance in this process of change that society chose in a context of crisis that requires immediate action.
Javier Milei announces "shock plan" to stabilize the Argentinian financial system and root out the Communists. pic.twitter.com/PUEA9CwNCQ
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 21, 2023
NEW: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave a $4 Million grant to NPR last month, making it largest amount BMGF has ever given NPR. The grant’s stated purpose:
“to support NPR’s coverage of Global Health & Development issues” (1/2) pic.twitter.com/TWloqQfeCH
— Te𝕏asLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) December 20, 2023
Melissa KornFollow and Shane Shifflett:
Arizona State University students will pay more than $9,600 this year to live in a shared bedroom at Manzanita Hall, a 15-story dorm on the edge of campus with an exterior that looks like a honeycomb.
About a decade ago, a private developer took over Manzanita and gave it a $50 million refresh, including new lounges, an upgraded lobby and community kitchens. Then the cost of living there shot up.
Now, after multiple increases, ASU students pay about 80% more than what Sun Devils paid to live in the building about 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
Housing is one of the biggest drivers of rising college prices in the U.S., fueling the $1.6 trillion federal student loan crisis, a Wall Street Journal investigation found. Though school administrators often boast of keeping tuition in check as a sign they’re sensitive to students’ financial concerns, they rarely rein in costs for living on campus.
The Journal examined the price of residence halls going back roughly two decades at 12 public universities around the country. The least expensive bed increased by a median of 70% in today’s dollars.
Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant, a change we’ve been askingGoogle to implement for years.
Geofence warrants require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located within a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement. These warrants violate the Fourth Amendment because they are not targeted to a particular individual or device, like a typical warrant for digital communications. The only “evidence” supporting a geofence warrant is that a crime occurred in a particular area, and the perpetrator likely carried a cell phone that shared location data with Google. For this reason, they inevitably sweep up potentially hundreds of people who have no connection to the crime under investigation—and could turn each of those people into a suspect.
Geofence warrants have been possible because Google collects and stores specific user location data (which Google calls “Location History” data) altogether in a massive database called “Sensorvault.” Google reported several years ago that geofence warrants make up 25% of all warrants it receives each year.
On a winter Monday morning at Audubon High School in Milwaukee, three ninth-graders huddled and fussed over an egg named Billy Bob.
Amber Sengsourisack used a marker to draw the egg’s anxious facial expression. Her childhood friend, Sophia Duong, and a new friend, Nathaly Alvarado, scrunched scraps of paper and cotton balls into a plastic cup, which would be the egg’s nest for a 3-foot drop.
Billy Bob cracked on the first drop. The students memorialized him: “R.I.P. Billy Bob. A very chill cowboy and princess.”
The egg drop wasn’t for science, but for something that can be a greater achievement in a high school classroom: building relationships, and ultimately a sense of safety.
In a class called “Restorative Practices,” the activity came minutes after the students were asked to write in a journal about what makes relationships healthy or unhealthy, and just before they watched a video about the process of forgiveness.
More.
I've been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants.
I'm afraid the former is damn near as woke as the latter. This must be a consequence of its training corpus, since I think we can rely on @elonmusk (unlike OpenAI) not to lay an overlay of virtue-signaling…
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 21, 2023
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
For example, the guidance clarifies that F and M students must have a foreign residence that they do not intend to abandon, but that such students may be the beneficiary of a permanent labor certification application or immigrant visa petition and may still be able to demonstrate their intention to depart after a temporary period of stay.
In addition, the guidance specifies how F students seeking an extension of optional practical training (OPT) based on their degree in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field may be employed by startup companies, as long as the employer adheres to the training plan requirements, remains in good standing with E-Verify, and provides compensation commensurate to that provided to similarly situated U.S. workers, among other requirements.
The nonimmigrant academic student (F-1) classification allows a noncitizen to enter the United States as a full-time student at a college, university, seminary, conservatory, academic high school, elementary school, or other academic institution, or in a language training program. The nonimmigrant vocational student (M-1) classification includes students in established vocational or other recognized nonacademic programs, other than language training programs.
In December 2023, Reuters, TechCrunch, 404 Media, and others reported on the surveillance of Apple and Google users through push notifications. We were involved in the original investigation by netzpolitik.org. These findings have been confused in various places with an older privacy issue. In this blog post, we want to examine the problem and address potential misconceptions.
Push notifications are a mechanism through which applications can send and display notifications to users of smartphones. Such notifications can include receiving a new email or a message from a messaging app. The user interface of push notifications is well known to any smartphone user – the infrastructure that drives them in the background is, however, a complex mechanism and not without privacy issues.
Push notifications are delivered via Apple Push Notification service (APNs) on Apple devices, or via Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)or Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) on Android devices. To use these push notifications, applications must register a push token with the respective platform. The tokens are an identifier that references the installation of an application on a specific device. They are used as an identifier to route messaging from the internet to a device.
Push notifications come with two distinct privacy problems:
A few weeks ago, I sat beside Andy Matuschak to record how he reads a textbook.
Even though my own job is to learn things, I was shocked with how much more intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was.
So I asked if we could record a conversation about how he learns and a bunch of other topics:
Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles:
“If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” Foxx wrote in the letter.
University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on the investigation.
The committee initially opened a probe into antisemitism at Harvard on Dec. 7 following Gay’s testimony before the committee two days earlier. In an interview with The Crimson the same day, Gay said the University would “comply with whatever information is called for.”
Foxx requested Harvard produce “all documents and communications” related to the plagiarism allegations or related to the review by members of the Corporation.
The committee also warned that Harvard could lose federal funding if it is found to not have taken the claims of widespread plagiarism against Gay seriously.
The tipping point is here. It'd really be good if Claudine Gay resigned now. The mere 11 papers was unseemly, but just maybe a university president doesn't need to be a top-class scholar. But the sheer volume of the plagiarism ON TOP OF THIS is a really bad look.
— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) December 21, 2023
In her 2023 State of Education Address, the head of the Department of Public Instruction said schools are undergoing significant change. We speak with Superintendent Jill Underly on issues facing Wisconsin’s schools in the past year and look ahead to 2024.
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?
Grades are up and tests are out. “More states could abandon high school exit exams as a graduation requirement, writes Libby Stanford in Education Week.
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a lawsuit against the State Bar of Wisconsin for promoting discriminatory DEI practices including its “Diversity Clerkship Program,” which offers premier internship opportunities based primarily on race.
WILL’s client must pay mandatory and annual State Bar dues, which not only fund this internship program, but also other programs and communications that discriminate against him and thousands of other Wisconsin attorneys.
The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Skylar Croy, stated, “When the government discriminates based on race, it sows more division in our country and violates the Constitution in the process. WILL is standing up against discrimination and holding the State Bar accountable to the rights of its due-paying members.”
Wisconsin employers using state DEI internship program to "engage in illegal affirmative action," new lawsuit alleges. Prominent participants in State Bar program include @Fiserv, @GEHealthCare, @NM_Financial, @Kohler, @Froedtert.
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) December 20, 2023
More here: https://t.co/MiZxRIZ1pC
In March 2021, a study was published in BMJ Open claiming that the UK sugar tax had led to a 10 per cent reduction in the amount of sugar consumed in soft drinks. Although one of its authors admitted that a decline of this magnitude “might sound modest”, it was presented as a win for public health. The preposterous pressure group Action on Sugar called for the tax to be “extended to other categories” and the 10 per cent figure soon found its way into the National Food Strategy and several World Health Organisation reports.
Last week the study was retracted, along with an editorial titled “UK sugar tax hits the sweet spot” that had been published in the British Medical Journalclaiming that the tax was “working exactly as intended”.
It turns out that tax has not been not working exactly as intended. In a new version of the study, the authors estimate that the decline in sugar consumption from soft drinks was just 2.7 per cent, barely a quarter of the original figure, and that in contrast to the original study, which claimed that there had been no change in soft drink sales, the volume of soft drinks rose by 2.6 per cent.
Jessica Harris’s 15-year-old daughter was walking to her school bus in London, Ky., last month when a classmate offered her a piece of red candy.
The square-shaped sweet seemed harmless at the time to Harris’s daughter. But it turned out it contained a form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating ingredient in cannabis plants, and it sent her to the hospital.
An explosion of products containing THC and similar chemicals—some of them in kid-enticing forms such as candy or gummy bears—is sending children to emergency rooms across the country and has federal and state regulators grappling with how to contain it. Many of these products face little to no restrictions, because their creators obtain their intoxicating compounds not from marijuana but from hemp, which Congress legalized in 2018.
Calls to poison-control centers concerning these newly popular hemp-derived cannabinoids boomed over the past several years, from four in January 2021 to hundreds every month of 2022 and 2023 for which there is data, according to America’s Poison Centers. More than half of those calls concerned children. Reports of adverse events from these products to the Food and Drug Administration have also increased.
The school choice and charter movement spreading across the country had its beginning more than three decades ago in Wisconsin.
Opponents of choice and charter schools asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to end these successful programs. Fortunately, the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously denied the request to directly take the case. But the threat to end these education reforms isn’t over, because the lawsuit could still be filed in circuit court.
In 1990 as governor, I had the privilege to design and sign into law the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. It was the first program to empower parents by having public funding follow the student. By the decade’s end, I signed additional measures creating charter schools and allowing parents to enroll their children in public schools outside of districts where they lived.
Dequoy’s cri de coeur resonated across Quebec, where language remains a hot button. Although French is the official language of Quebec’s government, education, courts and commerce, provincial authorities are alarmed by what they see as the waning of French in workplaces and homes.
A particular concern is the creep of “Franglais,” the mixing of French with English slang. In an ad campaign launched earlier this year, on TV and social media, authorities warned of the pernicious spread of lingo such as “cool” and “chill”—even “email.”
A provincial ad parodying Franglais also threw in the English words “sick,” “insane” and “sketch.”
Longtime Montreal residents readily cop to committing Franglais. Kristian Gravenor, a 60-year-old journalist, peppers his French with bilingual flourishes such as “field trip,” to indicate an outing.
“People find it spicy and delightful,” said Gravenor, who takes a Darwinian attitude toward the matter. “It’s survival of the best words, as far as I’m concerned.”
iMessage Contact Key Verification provides additional security by helping to detect sophisticated threats against iMessage servers and allowing you to verify that you’re only messaging the people you intend to.
In a time when elite schools appear uniquely removed from reality, amid a political moment defined by elite failure, the irony is profound. Trump campaigns on “saving America” from elites seeking to thwart the will of the people. Those elites, in turn, respond by confirming Trump’s worst allegations.
Third, the consequences:
What is extraordinary today will be precedent tomorrow; past exceptions become today’s rule. Bending the law and loosening interpretations to force Trump’s accountability for January 6 into the legal realm will be far more damaging in the long term than whatever Trump’s opponents think they might prevent.
Broadening the Fourteenth Amendment understanding of insurrection from the horrendous bloodshed of a civil war or equivalent catastrophe will open the floodgates to tit-for-tat challenges. If Trump’s rhetorical culpability for January 6 qualifies, similar lawsuits against Democratic politicians who encouraged BLM rioters will swiftly follow. Was Kamala Harris giving “aid or comfort” when she fundraised bail money for rioters? You can imagine where this could go.
Political chaos is guaranteed if the Colorado ruling stands. That the Supreme Court will undoubtedly vote to overturn is cold comfort now that a state Supreme Court has sanctioned such corrosive folly.
You will be hard-pressed to find someone less disposed toward Trump than me.
I was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach him following January 6. I stand by that vote, despite the fact that it cost me reelection in Michigan after Democrats boosted my Trump-endorsed primary challenger. (Really.)
What predicts Colorado Supreme Court justices’ vote on Trump disqualification? Not party—all are Democratic appointees—but law school. All Ivy League grads voted to disqualify. All Denver Law grads voted not to disqualify. pic.twitter.com/AokZMOf2bm
— Jason Willick (@jawillick) December 20, 2023
The problem with elite universities goes so much deeper than denying Jewish and white students safetyism. The Ivies represent the elite’s belief that they should have absolute rule over the masses, who they have just endless contempt for. And that’s how Trump was banned in CO: https://t.co/k1pOrtBFfq
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) December 20, 2023
1/ One thing we’ve gotten with several years of Lawfare v Trump is a bunch of civics lessons on obscure constitutional issues. This is one. It makes sense that if a foreigner or underage or fictional person tries to get on the presidential ballot, a State can say no. But … pic.twitter.com/n0HpqZqvTP
— FoiaFan🇮🇱 (@15poundstogo) December 20, 2023
The most compelling and – in my view – correct decision was the dissent from Justice Samour.
Justice Samour reached holdings that none of the other four groups did.
He examined the issues with the depth and close examination of the case law that is most like how SCOTUS does…
— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) December 20, 2023
Some personal opinions from my conversation with @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/19R1rC8Yxl
— Sandy Munro (@teardowntitan) December 18, 2023
Harvard University on Tuesday received a complaint outlining over 40 allegations of plagiarism against its embattled president, Claudine Gay. The document paints a picture of a pattern of misconduct more extensive than has been previously reported and puts the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body—which said it initiated an “independent review” of Gay’s scholarship and issued a statement of support for her leadership—back in the spotlight.
The new allegations, which were submitted to Harvard’s research integrity officer, Stacey Springs, include the examples reported by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets, as well as dozens of additional cases in which Gay quoted or paraphrased authors without proper attribution, according to a copy of the complaint reviewed by the Free Beacon. They range from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim.
The full list of examples spans seven of Gay’s publications—two more than previously reported—which comprise almost half of her scholarly output. Though the Harvard Corporation said earlier this month that it initiated an independent review Gay’s work in October and found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” that probe focused on just three papers.
Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to a text-to-image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image.
You enter the prompt: “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead. You try again but this time, the generator shows an image of a watermelon.
What’s going on?
The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”.
Text-to-image generators work by being trained on large datasets that include millions or billions of images. Some generators, like those offered by Adobe or Getty, are only trained with images the generator’s maker owns or has a licence to use.
But other generators have been trained by indiscriminately scraping online images, many of which may be under copyright. This has led to a slew of copyright infringement cases where artists have accused big tech companies of stealing and profiting from their work.
Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau
The Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS) is statutorily responsible for ensuring the safe and competent practice of credentialed professionals in Wisconsin. In August 2023, DSPS administered more than 200 types of credentials for individuals who work in healthcare professions, business professions, and the trades.
DSPS is funded primarily by program revenue, including from the fees individuals pay when applying for initial credentials and renewing their credentials. In fiscal year (FY) 2022-23, DSPS spent $11.2 million on credentialing activities.
The University of Wisconsin – La Crosse will not require the Young Americans for Freedom chapter to include an “inclusivity statement” in order to be recognized on campus.
The school announced the policy change Friday morning after being threatened with a lawsuit by YAF, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.
“[The] referenced statement is not a condition for YAF’s recognition as a student organization, effective immediately,” Quinn Williams, the counsel for the UW system, stated on Friday. The UW-La Crosse Student Association required the statement’s use.
“This is a massive victory for free speech and our constitutionally protected rights, and we look forward to promoting YAF across the campus next semester,” campus YAF Chairman Ryan Kitzan told the national organization’s New Guard publication.
Exactly right
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2023
Earlier, she had made her philosophy for educating kids clear: “Our work of decolonizing education begins in preschool. It is very much already a political practice.”
Ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protests have swept U.S. colleges, leading to charges of Jew-hatred and a disastrous congressional hearing where three college presidents failed to offer a clear moral condemnation of rising antisemitism.
But the ideology fueling these demonstrations isn’t limited to the college campus. It now begins in public high schools and even elementary schools as early as pre-K, according to more than 30 public school teachers, administrators, and parents across four states who spoke to The Free Press.
American youths aren’t just encountering the views on TikTok; they’re learning them from teachers and, in some cases, from the mandatory public school curriculum itself. Take California, where a 10th grade history course, approved by the Santa Ana Unified School District, includes readings that call Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and accuses the country of “ethnic cleansing.” Or the Jefferson Union High School District near San Francisco, which teaches about the “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.”
Rich countries are raising more money from taxpayers than they have in decades to finance a burst of state spending as surging interest ratesmake borrowing less attractive.
Tax revenues have risen to record levels as a share of economic output in a number of major economies, including France, Japan and South Korea, according to data published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of mainly rich countries.
The increases are worth hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenue for governments that are navigating an array of new spending needs, from military priorities to industrial policy.
They underline a trend toward big government, amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic and fueled by national-security concerns in a world of geopolitical divisions, the need to care for aging populations and the fight against climate change.
San Francisco’s first-ever Office of Reparations is among the programs gutted by Mayor London Breed’s budget cuts.
Funding for the office, which was set to launch this year, was erased as part of Breed’s $75 million cuts to the The City budget in preparation for a major deficit in 2024.
There was a moment in the semi-final of the Microsoft Excel world championship when Andrew “the Annihilator” Ngai thought he had been eliminated.
With the clock ticking and the Las Vegas audience on the edge of their seats, the two-time spreadsheet world champion started “furiously checking” his answers. Had he made a rounding error? Were his decimal places off?
Stressed and doubting himself, Ngai decided it wasn’t his night. Michael “the Jarman Army” Jarman from the UK or Peter Sharl – no nickname – from the US looked set to win. But Ngai had no reason to worry.
“For some unknown reason there was a mismatch between the scoresheet and the live stream,” he tells Guardian Australia from the US. “No one really knows why but it got out of sync.”
The glitch was fixed, the scoreboard corrected and the 36-year-old from Sydney stormed to victory on Saturday night, becoming the triple world champion in data processing.
That advice, more popularly known as the “success sequence,” is often credited to research done by Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, though others have made similar observations. In his recent book, “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the message “has attracted many admirers because of the simplicity of the three steps that young people, even if born into disadvantaged circumstances or raised by a young single parent, can themselves control and take in their lives.”
The effort nevertheless faced significant backlash from detractors who accused then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of stigmatizing teen pregnancy and pushing a “moralistic, conservative agenda to revitalize marriage,” Mr. Rowe writes. Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, ultimately abandoned the effort. Public moralizing has since fallen further out of favor and been replaced by a kind of self-congratulatory nonjudgmentalism. In today’s New York, you’re likely to see ads for free syringes and directions to “safe” injections sites for junkies, even as drug overdoses have reached record levels.
We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”
During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social workers, students are given a glossarywith “100+ common terms you may see or hear used in class, during discussions and at your field placements.”
Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).
The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”
These aren’t the definitions you’d find in Webster’s dictionary, and until recently they would not have been much help in getting a master’s in social work at an Ivy League university. They reflect a shift not just at Columbia but in the field of social work, in which the social justice framework that has pervaded much of academia has affected the approach of top schools and the practice of social work itself.
1/ Some were surprised yesterday that an African American Judge, Rossie Alston Jr. was the person to temporarily save the Confederate Memorial, dedicated to reconciliation between North and South, in Arlington National Cemetery.
But they shouldn't be.
A 🧵: pic.twitter.com/1DYf4nb8mt
— Jeremy Carl (@jeremycarl4) December 19, 2023
The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.
I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.
Congressional inquiries are often televised ambushes, and as Gay walked into the line of fire she had been rendered defenseless by decades of rot in campus policies. In the exchange that went viral, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked Gay whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment.”
We link geospatial data on 3G coverage over time with 2.3 million student-level PISA records from 82 countries.
PISA urbanicity data + pop. density data + 3G coverage shapefiles = within-country variation in 3G coverage over time. Here’s how this linkage looks in Czech Repub. pic.twitter.com/5RCqNfj414
— Sam Stemper (@samstemper) December 19, 2023
Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.
Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.
While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendationsthe following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.
In 2022, Gay implemented an initiative at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “denaming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration. According to the report, commissioned by then-president Lawrence Bacow, these decisions would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values.” In other words, Harvard would use the standards of present-day social-justice activism to pass judgment on men who lived hundreds of years prior—at best, an ahistorical and deeply ambiguous method. As part of this project, Gay sent an email to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community soliciting “requests for denaming,” promising to address the situation “through the lens of reckoning.” Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president.
The IRS approved Musk’s funding application in March
Elon Musk plans to launch a STEM-focused primary and secondary school and a new university in Austin and has allocated $100 million to the effort.
The tech billionaire and owner of X filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to establish an elementary and high school dedicated to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and, ultimately, a university in the Texas capital, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
The IRS application, obtained by Bloomberg, was filed in October 2022 and approved in March.
The application states that Musk’s new “[f]oundation…is in the process of creating an independent primary and secondary school,” and “The School intends ultimately to expand its operations to create a university dedicated to education at the highest levels.”
On Thursday, Parents Defending Education reported that students attending the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) orchestrated a protest and walkout on Dec. 8 demanding harsh punishments for individuals who have “bias incident reports” filed against them. According to the academy’s website, anyone from IMSA students to alumni and visitors can file on-the-record or anonymous reports alleging incidents of “bias” committed by other IMSA community members. The reports are then investigated by school staff such as the chief human resources/equity officer and/or the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
IMSA students who participated in the Dec. 8 demonstration, however, are demanding the high school take its leftist policies even further. Included in their list of demands are requests for the school to publicize a list of “possible consequences for students following a bias incident report,” including “detentions, removal from leadership positions, suspensions, expulsions, and notification to parents.”
But the students who chanted “Silence is complacence!” and “Why are our pronouns not used?” during the Dec. 8 demonstration didn’t stop there. They also want the university to notify any “potential future colleges” that offending students may consider transferring to or attending in the future, after they are presumably expelled for their supposed transgressions. In essence, the demonstrators want to destroy possible offenders’ future educational and career prospects based on potentially-anonymous reporting of “incidents” like not using a person’s preferred pronouns.
Today I’m joined by the author of a terrific new book on this subject, Joe Nocera, a journalist whose work I’ve admired for decades in magazines and books. Joe is a longtime op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He’s now a columnist for The Free Press, and he’s the co-author of the new book, The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. Joe and his co-author, Bethany McLean, are both veteran financial journalists and the co-authors of a previous bestseller, a history of the 2008 financial crisis titled All the Devils Are Here.
Now they’ve applied their impressive reporting skills to provide an insider’s view of how things went so wrong during the pandemic. Many of these mistakes will be familiar to readers of City Journal. We’ve been criticizing the lockdowns and school closures and mask mandates for three years now. These mistakes are not so familiar to people who’ve been getting their news from left-leaning media, and that’s one reason I think this book is so valuable. Joe, you and Bethany can hardly be accused of being conservatives. You both write for liberal publications, or you have written for them, and you share some of the perspective.
Mandates and the taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health Department.
At a November event for College Board, Art Coleman, EducationCounsel’s co-founder and managing partner, explained that if the mission of a college or university is to advance diversity and equity, then applicants whose identities align with this mission should be given preference. Under Coleman’s understanding of merit, presumably, a black student who writes his application essay about overcoming “systemic racism” might be considered more intelligent and prepared for higher education than, say, a Korean-American student who gets a perfect score on the SAT.
Even organizations outside of higher education have subscribed to EducationCounsel’s redefinition of merit. In its response to the Court’s decision, the New York State Bar Association referenced the firm’s July guidance letter six times and advised law schools in the Empire State to “consider reevaluating the criteria for assessing merit, including standardized test scores.” It warned law firms that “overreliance on a student’s GPA might not be appropriate or determinative of a student’s career outcome and is often at the expense of evaluating a prospect’s qualities and abilities more holistically.”
EducationCounsel has been trying to redefine the concept of merit for some time. In 2019, College Board published a playbook for “advancing higher education diversity goals” that was co-authored by Coleman. It explains that “adhering to principles of holistic review that consider multiple measures of preparedness and merit (i.e., a student’s academic, nonacademic, and contextual backgrounds) is critical to making the kinds of nuanced and individualized judgements called for to achieve robust student diversity.” It instructs colleges and universities to create “admissions materials that allow students to represent academic preparedness in multiple ways, in addition to or in lieu of test scores.”
A tenured history professor at Bakersfield College in California who founded a controversial, conservative-leaning faculty group received notice earlier this month that the Kern Community College District Board had voted to fire him. The professor, Matthew Garrett, says administrators are penalizing him for exercising his free speech. College leaders say the decision has nothing to do with his conservative views and have charged him with a litany of offenses.
The Kern Community College District Board of Trustees voted to end Garrett’s employment in a closed session at a board meeting on April 13, according to a notice provided to Garrett the following day. At the meeting, the board listened to public remarks from Garrett and other faculty members before discussing the matter and ultimately deferred making a public announcement on its decision. The termination notice, however, was leaked to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy organization. It gives Garrett the option to appeal the decision within 30 days, which he has done.
Garrett has been a polarizing figure on campus as co-founder of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, which describes itself as a faculty coalition “dedicated to the free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets.” Members of the group say it’s intended to foster diversity of thought and good-faith debate. Critics say some members have contributed to a hostile campus environment by making inflammatory posts on the group’s social media page and stalling diversity initiatives by repeatedly questioning and criticizing them in committee meetings.
Oklahoma colleges will be required to review their DEI programs to “eliminate and dismiss non-critical personnel” per a new executive order from Governor Kevin Sitt.
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt announced the mandate Wednesday, citing a need to spend more money on preparing young Oklahomans for the workforce, and less on “six-figure salaries to DEI staff.”
“We want to make sure we don’t lie to the next generation. You’re gonna have to work hard, life is not always fair,” said Stitt. “With my executive order we’re gonna take politics out of education and let’s just go help kids.”
“Great job, Madam President. You absolutely knocked it out of the park. Really exposed those fascist Republicans for the patriarchal white supremacists they are. Thank God we don’t have any of them on the faculty.
“There’s just one small thing. We know this is going to seem petty and annoying after all the magnificent things you said, but some people seem to think you might want to have another go at that moment when you couldn’t say whether calling on campus for the eradication of Jewish people might represent a form of harassment against Jews on campus. We’ve done some brainstorming and we’ve come up with something we think you should say to help you keep your job.”
The damage limitation didn’t work for Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned on Saturday. It shouldn’t work either for Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The affinity model that had been in use at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire was premised on the idea that for a student to be well served, they needed to be assigned a coordinator of the same ethnic background and that a white person could not adequately support a student of color,” the lawsuit claims.
Hoffman’s suit claims comments and concerns from some faculty about the “optics” of a white woman replacing former DEI leaders who were Asian and Black created a hostile work environment that led to Hoffman being told she had to move into her current role. It also alleges she was stripped from a teaching role and faced retaliation after filing a complaint with the university.
Hoffman referred a WPR request for comment to her attorneys with Fox and Fox S. C. in Monona. They were unavailable for comment Friday. A spokesperson for UW-Eau Claire told WPR Schmidt and O’Halloran were unavailable as well and said the university would not comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for the Universities of Wisconsin administration office did not respond to a request for comment.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is pledging to cover the full cost of a college degree for students from Wisconsin Indian tribes under a new program announced Monday.
Dubbed the Wisconsin Tribal Educational Promise, the program launches next fall. Incoming students are eligible, as well as current students who meet the program criteria. Unlike the university’s other tuition promise program, this one isn’t based on financial need. All enrolled members of Wisconsin tribes qualify.
Here’s what to know:
Normally, if there’s a question about paying for something that’s phrased in the passive voice, it’s eliding the true question, which is more accurately phrased as “How should you pay for my..?” But education is a special case: it’s extremely expensive, with direct costs totaling $702bn in 2020-21 (as in, that figure does not include the opportunity cost of students’ time, teachers’ talents, and the fixed assets schools occupy). It’s also a case with positive externalities, both from practical work—a country without any civil engineers can’t build or mantain bridges&dmash;and more abstract ones. And, critically for the who-pays-how question, the people attending college do not personally have the resources to drop five figures per annum on a degree, but, because of their age, will be benefiting from that education over a longer period than someone who works for a while to save up enough to pay for college in cash.
So higher education must be paid for through some combination of students’ earnings, parents’ savings, school subsidies, government subsidies, loans, and special deals with employers. Unfortunately, all of these lead to problems one way or another. For example, if we’re requiring everyone to fund their own education upfront, either directly through they’re own earnings or indirectly through their parents’, then we’re setting up a system with an education shortage among people who didn’t choose the right parents, or among people whose post-graduation incomes will be higher than their pre-graduation incomes.[1]Conversely, if everyone’s education were free, then there wouldn’t be a good way to determine a) which specific programs ought to have different prices because of the supply and demand for that kind of credential, b) whether particular people might be better-served by spending their time in different ways, or c) when we’re allocating too much of society’s resources to education, in the aggregate.
The possibility of spending “too much” on education is itself mostly missing from debates over how, and how much, to fund it. But it ought to be a genuine concern. Not just because college graduates have higher incomes, and student loan borrowers’ spending patterns do not indicate much financial distress on average, but because it’s possible for overall education spending to be too high (even aside from the question of whether higher education spending is redistribution towards the highest earners). There are a few failure modes here: obviously it’s a problem if people are literally starving or freezing because they’re too busy studying. But there are more subtle issues:
Under Willner, a former Meta Platforms content moderation executive, the trust and safety team sometimes ran into conflicts with other executives at OpenAI. Developers working on apps built on OpenAI’s technology had complained, for instance, that the team’s vetting procedures took too long. That caused executives to overrule Willner on how the app review process worked.
The shift to the new team follows a debate over how much of OpenAI’s content moderation can be handled via automation. It’s part of a broader discussion about whether OpenAI should keep its staff small and nimble or scale up as usage of its products takes off.
The debate about how to handle content moderation echoes similar conversations at Facebook and other social media platforms in recent years. Facebook, for example, was reluctantto hire large numbers of content moderators for much of its history, before it reversed course in 2017.
The looming U.S. presidential elections pose a test for OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms. A Wired report from last week found that Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-4, consistently responds to questions about elections with conspiracy theories and incorrect information.
I don’t want to get in the way of the decent idea finally and begrudgingly approved by the Board of Regents as part of the DEI deal — approximately doubling the number of conservatives on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus faculty and adding one more.
But I do hope whoever writes up the job posting is honest.
Wanted: A really smart person to join the faculty at the OG of progressivism: UW-Madison. We don’t care about the color of your skin (just this once!) but unusual thickness is an absolute must. Epidermis should be approximately as thick as, say, a good border wall. Candidates with lesser thickness should have willingness to wear Kevlar.
I think it might be helpful to also explicitly require a good sense of humor, but that need is going be pretty apparent once the posting gets out and progressives accuse the university of both discriminating against illegal immigrants and making light of gun violence.
There’s nothing wrong with adding one more conservative — if they can find the right one. But the truth is that adding one more is peanuts.
“While happy to see the university is recognizing this as a deficiency,” one of the few admittedly conservative professors at the university, UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ryan Owens, says, “this effort needs to be much more significant and institutionalized.”
No doubt.
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Higher education across the nation, already over-priced and over-sold, is in disrepute. Add trigger warnings, cancel culture, and general all around pecksniffery and you have a system that is Out Of Touch. Stir in the “Depends on the Context” of campus anti-semitism and you have a crisis of confidence — one that legislative Republicans are addressing and Democrats are pooh poohing.
Harvard, Penn, and MIT may be entitled to their contextual equivocations, being privately endowed universities. The Universities of Wisconsin are taxpayer-supported. We are paying for this university system! But accountability violates the essence of progressivism: rule by expert. They decide, the rest of us shut up and fork over.
What is undeniable (if you want to play that game) is that the race and sex commissars discourage sifting and winnowing through a regimen of shaming, intimidation, denial of tenure, refusal to hire. Submit your DEI statement along with your doctoral thesis.
Black educator and NY Times columnist John McWhorterremarks that this week’s congressional hearings “point up how low expectations are for black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.”
The Universities of Wisconsin expelled a 42-ton boulder deposited on the Madison campus 12,000 years ago by the last glacier. Someone, almost as long ago, referred to it with a racist term. The Abraham Lincoln statue is rumored to be next on the flatbed truck. Or beheaded, like the statue in front of the state Capitol of the slavery abolitionist who died fighting the Confederacy. Republicans didn’t do that; ISIS-inspired progressives did.
Professor McWhorter’s Bottom Line: “If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?”
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The documentary covers the relationship between identity studies, student activists, and the DEI administration of a college in Olympia, Washington
DURING a stay in Venice a few years ago, I spent time in the Correr Museum, soaking up the city’s history. Located in Saint Mark’s Square, the museum displays imposing statues, paintings of sea battles and ancient weapons. But as I passed through the last room of exhibits, another artefact hanging alone in an alcove caught my eye. It was a map of the world – a “mappa mundi” in Latin – but it was unlike any I had encountered before.
Framed in gold and 2.4 metres in diameter, the world pictured here was a combination of rolling blue seas with cresting waves and off-white landmasses, all covered with handwritten notes. It was one of the most beautiful, and beautifully complex, things that I had ever seen.
Created by a monk called Fra Mauro 550 years ago, the map had been largely overlooked for centuries, a lamentable state of affairs considering it displays a level of accuracy absent in earlier maps. Turn it upside down – Mauro placed south at the top – and it is recognisable as a map of Africa and Eurasia.
Following my visit to Venice, I decided to find out more about this map, a project that culminated in my book Here Begins the Dark Sea. I spent more than a year delving into the literature on world maps, poring over Fra Mauro’s creation and trying to understand what he intended it to say. It turns out that it was part of the inflection point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance because it was the…
🤖 No bullshit, watch this clip. @VivekGRamaswamy is talking about AI. 💯Everything he says and how he says it. We'd be lucky to have him as Prez pic.twitter.com/1hcqph9Asr
— Adam Townsend (@adamscrabble) December 17, 2023
Ursina Schaede and Ville Mankki
We evaluate equity-efficiency trade-offs from admissions quotas by examining effects on output once beneficiaries start producing in the relevant industry. In particular, we document the impact of abolishing a 40% quota for male primary school teachers on their pupils’ long-run outcomes. The quota had advantaged academically lower-scoring male university applicants, and its removal cut the share of men among new teachers by half. We combine this reform with the timing of union-mandated teacher retirements to isolate quasi-random variation in the local share of male quota teachers. Using comprehensive register data, we find that pupils exposed to a higher share of male quota teachers during primary school transition more smoothly to post-compulsory education and have higher educational attainment and labor force attachment at age 25. Pupils of both genders benefit similarly from exposure to male quota teachers. Evidence suggests that the quota improved the allocation of talent by mending imperfections in the unconstrained selection process.
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that it would reinstate a lawsuit alleging the West Point School Board unlawfully fired a teacher for violating West Point schools’ anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.
Peter Vlaming, who taught French at West Point High School before he was fired in December 2018, has said he could not in good conscience use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns because he said it would have violated his religious beliefs. He said his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns for a student he saw as female.
Vlaming agreed to use the student’s new, male name. But he tried to avoid using any pronouns — he or him, and she or her — when referring to the student. The student said that made him feel uncomfortable and singled out.
School administrators sided with the student, telling Vlaming he could not treat the transgender pupil differently than he treats others.
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:
The Jehovah’s Witnesses have long preached that going to college is a waste of time because the world as we know it is going to end soon. “No doubt, school counselors sincerely believe that it is in your best interests to pursue higher education,” advised the faith’s official publication a few years ago. “Yet, their confidence lies in a social and financial system that has no lasting future.”
It would be interesting to know how soon Americans actually think the world is going to end. A growing number of secular progressives have begun echoing the apocalyptic rhetoric of religious sects. Their views aren’t driven solely by fear of imminent environmental doomsday. They believe the whole “system” is broken and don’t want to bring children into a world plagued by structural racism, sexism and irreversible oppression. It is one reason campus protests are so common, with some spilling over into violence. According to this worldview, there’s no time for considered political persuasion.
But the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a point. If one thinks the world will run out of time to save itself from climate catastrophe in 2030, as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2018, then there isn’t much point in going to college or planning for the future.
