University of Austin:

Our commitment to the pursuit of truth arises from our confidence that the nature of reality can be discerned, albeit incompletely, by those who seek to understand it, and from our belief that the quest to know, though unending, is an ennobling, liberating, and productive endeavor.

As an academic community, UATX values both the wisdom of the past and the transformative potential of novel ideas. The University is dedicated to the preservation and transmission of humanity’s rich intellectual, scientific, artistic, and cultural inheritance. At the same time, UATX vigorously pursues the discovery, creation, and communication of new knowledge.

Each of these endeavors depends on our fostering an environment of intellectual freedom and pluralism. UATX strives to build and sustain a community based on the lively clash of ideas and opinions.

Maddy Welsh

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a fundamental misunderstanding of college education, according to College President Larry P. Arnn in an op-ed titled “There’s More to Education Than Free Speech.”

“I wrote the piece to assert what education is,” Arnn told The Collegian. “FIRE seems like most activists: they want to do education policy, which is not the same thing as education.”

FIRE is a nonprofit advocacy group “dedicated to defending free speech rights across the country,” particularly on college campuses, according to its Director of Policy Reform Laura Beltz. When FIRE released its 2024 College Free Speech rankings earlier this year, it labeled Hillsdale College a “warning” school. Arnn addressed this in his op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 19.

“A college’s purpose isn’t merely to encourage speech,” Arnn wrote. “A college’s purpose, through speaking and thinking — the two go together — is to teach students to think and speak better in search of knowledge.”

Robert Pondiscio:

Campus radicalism is easy to spot—and condemn. Attempts to justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, and in some cases to celebrate it, have caused crises at dozens of universities, prompting deep-pocketed donors to publicly withdraw philanthropic support and threaten not to hire graduates. Even some stalwart liberals have been shocked by the depth and virulence of campus anti-Semitism.

Such scenes might be fewer and farther between in K–12, but that doesn’t mean there’s not cause for concern about how the Israel-Hamas war is being taught and discussed in public-school settings. The blunt truth is that America’s K–12 education system is uniquely ill-suited to help students make sense of complicated world events and navigate contentious issues, let alone achieve some level of moral clarity about them.

When major news breaks, social media and education news sites fill up with well-intended advice for teachers on “how to talk to students” about traumatic events. As often as not, that advice is aimed at reassuring children that distant events do not place them physically at risk or fostering “tolerance and empathy,” not teaching history. “When approached by children with questions about the Israel-Hamas war, parents and teachers should center conversations on empathy rather than politics,” advised Harvard “global health” lecturer Claude Bruderlein in the Boston Globe. New York City schools chancellor David Banks tweeted that New York City would be “providing resources to our schools to facilitate discussions about the conflict and supporting our students in being compassionate global citizens.” A fine impulse as far as it goes, but surely it’s of equal public interest to encourage students to become well-informed global citizens.

Purnima Nath:

“It is hard to believe that as an immigrant to America that today I have to be here and defend an education system that does not prioritize academic excellence and that fails to respect parents’ rights.”

Patrick McIlheran:

Two-thirds of children whose schools are under attack by Minocqua beer baron are racial or ethnic minorities, many are poor, many are very likely his fellow Democrats

In the lawsuit bankrolled by the Minocqua beer marketer, Kirk Bangstad, who’s trying to kill school choice in Wisconsin, his lawyers make an icy admission: They know it will “impact tens of thousands of children” to throw them out of their schools. They’re asking the state Supreme Court to hurt those kids anyway.

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?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

UW-Parkside projects a $5.3 million deficit for the 2023-24 school year.

Huron consultants will be on campus next week to help the university find ways to manage its deficit, Menke said.

The UW system is already paying a different consulting firm, Deloitte, $2.8 million this school year to evaluate the financial health of its universities, according to a contract the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obtained through the state public records law.

Huron is assisting with short-term budget planning, UW system spokesperson Mark Pitsch said. The cost is between $15,000 and $20,000.

—-

Curiously, the article fails to include enrollment data….

Matt Taibbi:

On June 8th, the Washington Post ran, “These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers,” a story about how “records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits” were wielded as “tools of harassment” against “scholars” in the “field of disinformation.” In photo portraits, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington stared plaintively in the distance, a caption under one: “The political part is intimidating — to have people with a lot of power in this world making… false accusations about our work.” Starbird sits on an advisory committee for the 245,000-person, $185 billion Department of Homeland Security, but perhaps she meant “a lot of power” in a different sense?

When Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and I first started working on the Twitter Files, none of us knew much about people who did “anti-disinformation” work. Before it became controversial, these “experts” didn’t seem bashful about security-state credentials. For instance, New Knowledge, the firm profiled by Susan Schmidt last week that authored a Senate report on Russian interference and was caught creating fake accounts in an Alabama Senate race, gained this cheerful description in VentureBeat after raising $11 million for “anti-disinformation”:

What further distinguishes New Knowledge is that its founders are AI and Homeland Security experts who grew up in the NSA and have worked as security advisers. [CEO Jonathon] Morgan, for instance, was an adviser for the U.S. State Department and published research at the Brookings Institution.

When lawsuits like Missouri v. Biden and then the Twitter Files began shining light on this direction, experts reinvented themselves as “scholars” or research fellows. That their LinkedIn pages often featured odd gaps, or periods listed as “consultants” to the military or the FBI, was apparently not important, nor that “anti-disinformation” is not an academic discipline. Even if they were very new arrivals to campuses, we were expected to show deference to new roles as “researchers,” much as campaign reporters were asked to stop calling Rick Perry a dummy when he put on glasses. 

Reporters once didn’t fall for this sort of thing, reserving special bile for politicians or spooks who tried to pass themselves off as intellectuals. But these days they swoon like teen girls seeing the Elvis wiggle for the first time for “anti-disinformationists,” with anchors like Nicolle Wallace, Brian Stelter, and Rachel Maddow giving the “We’re not worthy!” treatment to anyone with intelligence credentials who utters dire prophecies about Trump and “fake news.” 

Even the once-mocked “smart glasses” trick became foolproof, as former counterterrorism warriors like Hamilton 68 frontman Clint Watts earned plaudits as bespectacled “disinformation experts,” and even media figures who once went for hunky or fetching in headshots donned solemn expressions — and glasses — when moved to the disinfo beat. I don’t remember Rick Stengel wearing specs much as editor of Time magazine, but he accessorizes nicely in his new role as former head of the Global Engagement Center, pimping books like Information Wars.

Joanne Jacobs

Achievement is down and absenteeism is way up, yet report cards show the same grades — or higher — as before the pandemic, concludes False Signals, a new report by EdNavigator and Learning Heroes. No wonder “families believe that everything is back to normal or will be soon.” No wonder demand is low for tutoring and summer school.

The number of students scoring below grade level and chronically absent has quadrupled since before the pandemic, the report finds. “Yet more than 40 percent of these students still earn Bs or better in core subjects.”

Researchers analyzed two districts, one with above-average achievement and another with scores around the national average. They found the average student fell five months further behind in math and English Language Arts (ELA). Chronic absenteeism soared.

Schools should “send clear signals” to students and parents about the need for regular attendance with special attention to families whose children “need extra support,” the report urges.

Daniel Klein:

I show the origins, nature, and character of liberalism 1.0 in a new study, “‘Liberal’ as a Political Adjective (in English), 1769–1824,” embedded below. 

The paper discusses the stepping from non-political meanings of the adjective liberal to the first political meaning. Smith and his friends christened their political outlook “liberal.” The data show that ‘liberal’ acquired a sustained political signification for the first time around 1769: the liberal policy principles of Adam Smith and his associates. 

The study will appear in Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, in an issue containing proceedings of the Adam Smith 300 conference in Edinburgh in 2023, organized by the NOUS Network. The posting is done with permission of the editors of the special issue.

The bodies of evidence include: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769 (with a few exceptions); (2) the blossoming from 1769 of ‘liberal plan,’ ‘liberal system,’ ‘liberal principles,’ ‘liberal policy,’ etc.; (3) the occurrence beginning in the 1770s of political uses of ‘liberal’ in Parliament; (4) the occurrence of the same in the Edinburgh Review, 1802–1824. 

The political adjective liberal came alive around 1769 and was sustained straight up to when the political nouns liberalism and liberal start up in the 1820s. 

The data from French, German, Italian, and Spanish confirm that Britain was the first to get to a political sense of “liberal.” 

1. TWITTER FILES EXTRA:
BIG BROTHER IS FLAGGING YOU
New House report and previously unpublished Twitter Files show: Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was a front for government censorship pic.twitter.com/3db6sCOX7K

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 9, 2023

Glenn Greenwald

The Dean of Columbia Journalism School is Jelani Cobb. At the @NewYorker, he made clear his belief that the prime obligation of journalism is to ensure Dems defeat Trump.

The US oligarch @craignewmark just created a chair there for @Sulliview, and they also have the same view:

New York Post:

The Department of Homeland Security was censoring speech before the 2020 election, new emails released by the House Judiciary Committee show. 

How? Through the favorite weapon of America’s intelligence apparatus, fake claims of disinformation. 

Stanford University’s Election Integrity Partnership was set up at the request of DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, says a senior member of one of the EIP’s founding groups, and they were “in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo.”

That was in July 2020.

It’s beyond clear that this was part of battlespace prep to help Joe Bidenwin that November.  

The EIP came after a number of other “disinformation” operations had been deployed against then-President Donald Trump.

Most notorious was RussiaGate, a scheme in which 100%-false claims that Trump was colluding with the Russian government were laundered through the Justice Department and Congress. 

Another was the effort to suppress our reporting around Hunter Biden’s laptop (also 100% correct). 

But this was about more than Trump. 

It was about total control of everybody’s speech and thought. 

Per the Judiciary Committee, feds and universities “pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions.”

Lee Ohanian:

In 2021, California became the first state to require ethnic studies (ES) for high school graduation. The University of California’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council (ESFC), which lists over 300 UC faculty as members, has developed specific course criteria that UC is considering as an admissions requirement. If adopted, this requirement would eliminate the freedom that individual high schools would have in teaching ES courses, at least for students applying to the UC.

California passed the ES high school graduation requirement to help students become citizens of the world by honestly portraying our history and positively focusing on the scientific, artistic, economic, cultural, and social achievements of different groups of people. But this is not what ethnic studies is about within the UC. Far from bringing people from different backgrounds together, the ESFC promotes a highly politicized high school curriculum called Liberated Ethnic Studies, which is founded on the notion that the US is a highly racist society in which Whites systematically oppress minorities.

After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, it is obvious that the ESFC should have nothing to do with course content. In response to the Hamas attack, UC president Michael Drake and UC Board of Regents chair Rich Leib issued a brief statement on behalf of the UC system condemning the terrorist attack, expressing grief for those affected on both sides and hope for a peaceful resolution. 

Drake and Leib’s statement was attacked in a letter written by the ESFC. The letter is abhorrent and dishonest: “In the strongest possible terms, the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council . . . that represents over 300 faculty systemwide, rejects recent UC administrative communications that distort and misrepresent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians. . . . [These statements that] irresponsibly wield charges of ‘terrorism’ and ‘unprovoked’ aggression, have contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe, even in their own homes.”

Shreyans:

What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can. What also got in the way were the people themselves – all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.

Many taxpayer supported k-12 systems use Google services, including Madison.

John Thornhill:

The early use of the radio resulted in mysterious supernatural phenomena, such as talking radiators and stoves, according to newspaper reports of the time. English doctors once feared that excessive use of the bicycle would overtax the nervous system and produce anxious, worn “bicycle faces”. Teachers lamented how the replacement of the slide rule by electronic calculators would erode our understanding of mathematical concepts. Besides, what would happen when the batteries ran out?

All these examples of technophobia are taken from the Pessimists Archive, a wonderful collection of “fears about old things when they were new”. Anyone concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence today should rummage around this digital record. It is striking how many of our contemporary fears echo previous concerns about the growing supremacy of machines and human obsolescence. It is also reassuring how many of these moral panics have proven spectacularly wrong, appearing almost comical with hindsight.

Of course, just because the doomsters were often wrong about the evils of past technologies does not mean that the pessimists are wrong about AI today. But we should at least focus on whether, or in what significant ways, the latest AI differs from what came before. There would certainly be a lot less fuss about AI if we were to demystify the field and rename it computational statistics, as some technologists suggest. And, as the Pessimists Archive makes clear, futurists tend to overemphasise the speed of adoption of most technologies and underemphasise the scope for adaptation. They can tell us what technologies can do in theory, but not how they will be used in practice.

Amy Lutz:

You can’t miss my son Jonah, 24. He’s the one spinning while blasting “Sesame Street” songs from his iPad in the back corner of Costco. The one popping up from a table at Five Guys, splashed with so much ketchup he looks like a murder victim. The one pounding on his head in agitation, sometimes for obvious reasons (he was directed to the pink waterslide instead of the blue one) and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all.

Jonah is incapable of passing through the world unnoticed — except, somehow, by policymakers and certain neurodiversity activists, who seem intent on denying that people with his level of disability exist and require extensive accommodation and care.

Take, for instance, the Labor Department, which announced in late September that it plans a “comprehensive review” of Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows some vocational programs to pay some adults — overwhelmingly people with significant cognitive impairments — a subminimum wage based on standardized assessments of their productivity.

These programs offer job training for intellectually disabled adults interested in pursuing competitive minimum-wage jobs, as well as long-term opportunities for those whose impairments preclude conventional employment but who benefit from the structure, dignity and satisfaction of work.

That, however, is not how critics describe 14(c) settings, which for years have been targeted by disability rights activists perpetuating an image of evil capitalists getting rich off the sweat of impoverished, disabled workers. To date, 16 states have eliminated this subminimum-wage model.

Chris Ullery:

It was a sweeping victory Tuesday for Democrats as Central Bucks voters ousted one GOP incumbent, kept an incumbent Democrat and brought on three new members to the school board in December.

While Tuesday’s election will directly impact the residents of Central Bucks, it’s not unfair to say this year’s election results could have a much larger impact.

The Central Bucks school board race is probably one of the most watched in the county after a series of controversies over library books, political speech and transgender athletes drew a national spotlight to the area.

Normally we're flagged for misinformation, incitement, or hateful conduct. This is our first "violent criminal organizations" policy violation. pic.twitter.com/NCuadnebEx

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) November 8, 2023

Many taxpayer supported K-12 institutions use Google services, including Madison.

Eugene Volokh:

A very interesting article by Prof. Steve Sanders (Indiana), who is also an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a scholar of sexual orientation and the law; it’s in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but also available without the need for registration here. An excerpt:

During the Red Scare of the 1950s, college faculty members were lauded by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter as being among the “priests of our democracy.” As campuses were roiled by political controversies in 1967, the Court invalidated a New York loyalty oath and underscored that “[t]he essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident.” More recently, in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 case upholding some forms of affirmative action, the Court said “universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition” and thus were owed “a constitutional dimension … of educational autonomy.”

A much different attitude prevails on the Court today. When Harvard and the University of North Carolina argued that their affirmative action practices were entitled to the same deference the Court had shown in Grutter, Chief Justice John Roberts’s response was sarcastic, even mocking. In his opinion last June in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Roberts, writing for six justices, laid out a series of objections to the universities’ admissions practices, then twisted the knife: “The universities’ main response to these criticisms is, essentially, ‘trust us.'”

The Court’s message was clear: universities, we don’t trust you….

Unfortunately, universities are giving courts more reasons to question whether their policies are based on favoritism or politics rather than neutral and objective criteria. In the post-George Floyd era, they are embracing political projects under banners like “social justice” and “anti-racism.” By remaking themselves into institutions devoted to progressive politics, universities weaken their moral and legal claims to judicial deference.

Charlie Bilello:

The average family health insurance premium in the US is up 249% since 2000.

——

The budget includes a tax levy increase of 13.6% driven primarily by increased debt service costs. Property taxes on the average-value Madison home will increase by about $147, according to the County Board. That’s on top of an estimated $110 increase from the cityof Madison and about a $250 increase from the Madison Metropolitan School District, taking into account a citywide revaluation of properties this year.

Josh Koehn

Two San Francisco supervisors will miss key meetings this week to attend a taxpayer-funded junket in Japan to learn how an institute in the country teaches math. 

The details of that word salad of a sentence might seem a bit mystifying for those who realize:

• San Francisco supervisors have no role in deciding how math is taught in the city’s public schools.
• The mayor just announced last month that the city could be facing a half-billion dollar deficit, and trips to Japan wouldn’t seem to rate on the priority scale.
• Algebra hasn’t even been taught to San Francisco’s eighth graders in almost a decade.
• Cherry blossom season doesn’t start until the end of March.

Adding a bit more complexity to the situation, the absences of Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Myrna Melgar from this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting could create hiccups in getting measures on the March 2024 ballot, especially if the return leg of their 5,180-mile trip runs long. Recent history shows it wouldn’t be the first time a supervisor was overly optimistic about returning home in time for an important meeting.

Rikki Schlott and Jon Hadi

The After Babel Substack is about the technological and sociological changes that caused the chaos and fragmentation of modern life (i.e., the collapse of the Tower of Babel, around 2014). In our first year we’re focusing on the effects of smartphones, social media, the loss of childhood independence, and parental fears which combined to cause the international adolescent mental health crisis. Over time, we’ll be publishing many more articles on the democracy crisis that is now so apparent in the U.S. 

In examining adolescent mental health, our posts have mostly been data-heavy and empirical. From my first post (The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012) through Zach and my most recent post (Suicide Rates Are Up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls), we have documented that there is indeed a crisis, it is international, and the evidence points to two main causal factors: the end of the play-based childhood, and its replacement by the phone-based childhood. (I tell this story in The Anxious Generation, which you can pre-order now.)

It was necessary for us to start this way—to lay out our ideas and refine them, and to show readers and skeptics the many kinds of evidence we’ve been collecting. (You can find all of our review documents here.) But across our first 24 posts, we’ve given readers very little sense of what it is actually like to be a young person today. We’ve been writing about Gen Z, without hearing from Gen Z.

Jill Barshay:

In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60 percent said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45 percent a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access to medical, dental, and mental health providers as well as social workers. Adult education is also often part of the package; the extras are not just for kids. 

“It is a shift,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she tracks school spending. “We’ve seen partnering with the YMCA and with health groups for medical services and psychological evaluations.”

Deeper involvement in the community started as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. As schools shuttered their classrooms, many became hubs where families obtained food or internet access. Months later, many schools opened their doors to become vaccine centers. 

New community alliances were further fueled by more than $200 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds that have flowed to schools. “Schools have a lot of money now and they’re trying to spend it down,” said Roza. Federal regulations encourage schools to spend recovery funds on nonprofit community services, and unspent funds will eventually be forfeited.

Jeremy Wayne Tate:

Kindergarten
•Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McKloskey
•Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
•Dr. Seuss Books
•Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
•When We Were Very Young, A.A. Milne
•William Steig Books

First Grade
•The Nutcracker
•Encyclopedia Brown
•The Sword in the Tree, Clyde Robert Bulla
•Paddington Bear, Michael Bond
•Now We Are Six, A.A. Milne

Second Grade
•Little House Series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
•Stuart Little, E.B. White
•The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Beverly Cleary
•Roald Dahl Books
•The Thirteen Clocks, James Thurber
•Snow Treasure, Marie McSwigan

Third Grade
•The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White
•Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan
•Mr. Poppers Penguins, Richard Atwater
•The Thirteen Clocks, James Thurber
•The Tale of Desperaux, Kate DiCamillo

Fourth Grade
•Calico Captive, Elizabeth George Speare
•A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle
•Misty of Chincoteague Island, Marguerite Henry
•The Black Stallion, Walter Farley
•Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
•Benjamin West and his Cat Grimalkin, Marguerite Henry

The modern mind has become too porous.

Our respect for attention is in decline. Timeless and eternal truths are forgotten in favor of breaking news and "what's trending."

Instead of deliberately choosing what to consume, we surrender to opaque algorithms that don’t always have… pic.twitter.com/vUoxGXyDvM

— David Perell (@david_perell) November 8, 2023

Christopher F. Rufo, Ilya Shapiro, Matt Beienburg

There is a lot that state legislatures can do to reverse the illiberal takeover of higher education through Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) offices that, ironically, stifle intellectual diversity, prevent equal opportunity, and exclude anyone who dissents from a rigid orthodoxy. Here are four proposals for reforming public universities:

1. Abolish DEI bureaucracies.
    
2. End mandatory diversity training.
    
3. Curtail political coercion.
    
4. End identity-based preferences.

These rather straightforward reforms would go far in pushing back on some of the negative trends that have afflicted higher education.[1]

Anya van Wagtendonk

Assembly lawmakers on Tuesday approved a wide range of proposals that would affect higher education in the state, including an automatic-admission policy for the flagship campus at the Universities of Wisconsin and standardized rules around free speech on state campuses, which Republicans argued would expand intellectual diversity and Democrats warned would have a chilling effect.

Lawmakers also approved changing higher education programs aimed at expanding minority enrollment so that they remove race-specific language and target students deemed “disadvantaged” instead.

The slate of higher education legislation comes amid a political battle over pay raises for most UW employees. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, has said those increases will be on hold until the UW System eliminates positions related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, known as DEI.

Late last month, Gov. Tony Evers filed suit against Republican lawmakers, saying blocking the raises oversteps their legislative authority.

Dale Chu and Chad Aldeman

My favorite study on this question is work by Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, and Tim Daly. They investigated how accurate early measures of achievement are in predicting later high school outcomes using data from three states, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State. Here’s their conclusion (emphasis added):

A large literature shows that early academic performance, measured primarily by test scores, is predictive of later academic success, and that there are significant gaps in student achievement by student disadvantaged status. Our findings reaffirm these findings. Indeed, across three states we find consistent and very strong relationships between 3rd grade test scores and high school tests, advanced course-taking, and graduation. For instance, all else equal, a student at the lowest percentile of the 3rd grade math test distribution rather than the highest percentile is expected to be 48-54 (depending on state) percentile points lower in the high school math test distribution, is expected to be 45 to 50 percent less likely to take an advance course in high school, and 11 to 21 percent less likely to graduate. We conclude that early student struggles on state tests are a credible warning signal for schools and systems that make the case for additional academic support in the near term, as opposed to assuming that additional years of instruction are likely to change a student’s trajectory. Educators and families should take 3rd grade test results seriously and respond accordingly; while they may not be determinative, they provide a strong indication of the path a student is on.

State tests are not perfect. For example, my personal hobby horse is that states are too slow to release the results, which in turn makes them less usable by parents and educators.

Bari Weiss:

Today, after months of research, the NCRI released a report (comprising four separate studies) following the money. The report finds that at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.

Moreover, while correlation is not causation, they found that the number of reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding (disclosed and undisclosed) from regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East. 

Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”

The NCRI report found that:

Ann Althouse

The unstated corollary: Liberals don’t need to know what motivated this particular individual, because they want the focus to be on restricting access to guns. Keep it simple. Make it hard to debate about the things conservatives want in the public discourse.

Ah! At this point, I realize the NYT has not only refrained from naming the Nashville shooter, it has refrained from using pronouns. It’s “the writings,” not “his writings” or “her writings” or “their writings.” 

The parents of the criminal are named, however. Ronald and Norma Hale come up in the last 2 paragraphs, where we are informed that they have attempted to “to give legal ownership of the writings to the families of the Covenant School students.” The writings are part of the evidence in this case, and I can’t see how they possess any legal — or moral — authority to determine who gets to see the writings of the dead murderer Audrey Hale.

More.

Ben Weingarten

In the runup to the 2020 election, cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security and Stanford University decided they had discovered a major problem. 

The issue was not compromised voter rolls or corrupted election tallies but a “gap” in the government’s authority to clamp down on what it considered misinformation and disinformation – a gap identified by DHS officials and interns on loan to the agency from the Stanford Internet Observatory. Given what SIO research manager Renee DiResta described as the “unclear legal authorities” and “very real First Amendment questions” regarding this gap, the parties hatched a plan to form a public-private partnership that would provide DHS with an avenue to surreptitiously censor speech. 

The collaboration between DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the Stanford outfit would quickly expand into a robust operation whose full extent is only now becoming clear. RealClearInvestigations has obtained from House investigators records revealing in previously undisclosed detail the nature and mechanics of the operation – the SIO-led Election Integrity Partnership.

Alexis P

Some courses and their descriptions from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (GSE)

Jay Mathews

The writer and educator Jonathan Kozol exposed what he called “savage inequalities” in U.S. education in the 1980s. Urban schools were overcrowded and understaffed, he said, lacking the financial resources of suburban campuses.

His vivid disclosures still resonate in school debates. Many still assume that less is spent on learning for low-income children than for affluent ones.

Jonathan Sumption:

The Covid-19 inquiry’s terms of reference are as broad as could be, but it has only one useful purpose. Lockdowns and other aggressive government interventions were an unprecedented and untested experiment with the lives and wellbeing of each one of us.

We need to know what they achieved, if anything. We need to know whether it was worth the appalling collateral consequences for other clinical conditions, for our mental wellbeing, for our children’s education and for the economy and public finances of our country. We need to know whether other policies might have produced acceptable results at a lesser cost in human misery. That way, we may have some prospect of avoiding a similar disaster next time, for there will surely be a next time.

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health Mandates.

Recently, @bangstad and Julie Underwood had an oped in the @WiStateJournal attempting to justify their lawsuit to end #SchoolChoice in WI. Like most of what has been released in this effort, it is full of half-truths and at-best misunderstandings of school choice. A 🧵

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) November 7, 2023

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?

Tom Knighton:

Now, the above-linked story goes on to note that homeschoolers tend to do better on standardized tests than their traditionally educated fellows, so that’s just one of the lies we’re seeing.

And make no mistake, there are plenty of lies here.

Take the claim about “lack of exposure to diverse points of view.”

Now, I’m not going to say that every homeschool parent goes out of their way to find all the different points of view and shares them with their kids. What I will say, though, is that kids don’t get diverse points of view in traditional schooling.

What they get is the official party line laid out from the teacher’s unions and woke teachers. 

They don’t hear both sides of a view, they get indoctrinated with leftist dogma. They’re told climate change is an established and uncontroversial fact, despite the fact that climate scientists stillhaven’t gotten a single model right. They’re presented woke propaganda on sex and race as if these are established facts and anyone who takes issue with this are demonized and mocked.

At no point is anyone really exposed to diverse thought.

“But the other students come from a diverse background.”

Oh, that? You mean the fellow students that these kids aren’t allowed to talk to during class and only allowed to interact with during certain times of the day, times that are generally pretty limited and almost never involve anything beyond their favorite forms of entertainment?

Yeah, that’s awful. Especially since kids can get that with a lot more freedom through church groups or at other places where kids might gather such as sports or the park.

Mike Benz:

Katie Harbath — as Atlantic Council fellow & IRI advisor — is also part of the censorship technology team behind Course Correct, which is building a “dynamic disinformation dashboard” scanning millions of tweets, funded by $5.5 million in gov’t grants

More (video).

Related:

Just discovered that my @nypost column from Sept 27 2020 about ballot harvesting in Minneapolis was censored to “protect” the 2020 election, at the orders of Alex Stamos, as shown in these secret reports revealed by @Jim_Jordan. This was the Project Veritas scoop on paid workers illegally gathering absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants in Ilhan Omar’s district…

Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube:

“If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official said. The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children. The Defense Department has said the U.S. is not putting any limits or restrictions on the weapons it’s providing Israel. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a planned, more strident message Thursday before he boarded his plane for a trip to Israel. “As we’ve said from the start, Israel has not only the right but the obligation to defend itself,” he told reporters. “We’ve also said very clearly and repeatedly that how Israel does this matters.”

M-J Metcanti-Anthony:

The thing that surprised me most about my teacher preparation program was that we never talked about how kids learn.

Instead, we were taught how to structure a lesson and given tips on classroom management. I took “methods” classes that gave me strategies for discussions and activities.

I assumed that I would eventually learn how the brain worked because I thought that studying education meant studying how learning happens.

But in my training in the late ’90s, the closest I got to cognitive science was the concept of “practitioner inquiry.” I was told to study my own students and investigate what worked best. That sounded hollow to me; surely more-experienced hands knew better.

But discussions around teacher effectiveness — what methods are scientifically proven to support cognitive development — were painfully rare. Eventually, I concluded that I never learned, and we never talked about, how the brain processes information because scientists didn’t know much about it.

Zika Klein:

Parents in Saxony-Anhalt German State promoted the decision to rename the “Anne Frank” daycare center in Tangerhütte, a small town in the state, according to reports in German media.

The move was driven by parents who found it difficult to explain Frank’s significance to their children. According to Apollo News, a German news site, in a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, a daycare center has become the center of a local scandal.

Erica Greider:

A University of Houston energy economist is facing a legal battle with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its mascot, Buckingham Ulysses “Bucky” Badger. 

“I am being badgered by a badger,” Ed Hirs said Monday, explaining how he got crosswise with the university and Fanatics, licensed retailer for that university and many others.

Walter Kirn:

Yes you live in a heavily censored society

And it’s getting worse

Alexander Russo:

Over the past year or so, I and others have been making abundant use of information provided by Ballotpedia, a national nonprofit organization which describes itself as “the online encyclopedia of American politics.”

Ballotpedia’s school board elections coverage includes a weekly newsletter, a podcast (on which I have been a guest), and timely reports, many of them with interesting findings.

From Ballotpedia, I’ve learned:

📌 The percentage of uncontested school board election rates is much higher than it might seem.

📌 The percentage of recall efforts that reach the ballot and succeed at the ballot box is relatively small.

📌 When last measured, the percentage of successful school board challengers who are opposed to race, gender, and COVID mitigation efforts was only about a third.

Recall efforts, challenges, and highly polarized school board conflicts are sexy, high-conflict stories to tell — education’s version of political horse race coverage. But they may be much less common than is depicted in the media. And, according to Ballotpedia head Leslie Graves, the outcomes of these contests might not be all that consequential either.

Daniel Bice:

Back in 2021, Democratic operative Sachin Chheda played a major role in helping Jill Underly get elected state school superintendent.

Now Underly appears to be returning the favor.

Underly announced Monday that she is hiring Chheda to a $138,000-per-year job at the Department of Public Instruction, which Underly oversees. Chheda started his new job on Monday as executive director of the Office of the State Superintendent.

Thomas McCarthy, who previously held that job, has been promoted to deputy superintendent. Officials said the money for Chheda’s job came from vacancies in the agency.

Chheda, 49, has spent the last 30 years mostly working in politics, for nonprofits and on campaigns.

In an interview, Chheda emphasized his work in organizational management and change for a variety of clients. Asked about his educational experience, Chheda said he worked for former University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, ran two state superintendent races and cofounded the I Love My Public Schools project, which opposed funding cuts by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Chheda has never been a teacher or school administrator.

———

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?

Wall Street Journal:

Progressives tee up a case for the state Supreme Court’s new majority.

This should be an easy case, but the new 4-3 progressive majority on the Court is cause for worry. If the lawsuit is successful, it could end school choice in Wisconsin without a possibility of appeal because the case is based on state law claims. The result would mean upheaval for 29,000 children in Milwaukee’s voucher program, 4,000 in Racine and 19,000 in the rest of the state. Judges call that a “reliance” interest to consider carefully when considering a precedent.

The real power behind this case is the teachers union. Bob Baxter, executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, says tests scores are a “fallacy” and that “every student that’s in a voucher school suffers.” Students who attend charters “are not learning the curriculum they need to learn in order to be a part of a democratic society,” Mr. Baxter adds. “We believe the right wing wants to crush participation in democracy.”

But the vouchers passed democratically. The real democratic issue here is whether four progressive Justices are going to trample their court’s precedent and the voters and impose their own policy preferences. That would rob poor children of better choices in favor of the unions who financed Justice Protasiewicz’s judicial campaign. Who’s anti-democratic?

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?

Balaji:

And yes, it was Twitter that drove the government to act. How do we know? Because the entire case was broken on crypto Twitter, from beginning to end!

• It was Ian Allison revealing that SBF had no money, not Dan Primack asking whether SBF could cure world hunger
• It was Erik Voorhees playing hardball with SBF on Bankless, not Joe Weisenthal throwing him softballs on Odd Lots
• It was David Z. Morris calling FTX a crime, not David Yaffe-Bellany claiming SBF was a philanthropist
• It was Crypto Twitter proving SBF was a fraud, not NYT Dealbook clapping for that fraud
• And it was Twitter posting about SBF’s donations to Democrat politicians, even as those same politicians were welcoming him to Congress

NYT, Congress, Bloomberg, Axios — all these establishment organs failed where Coindesk, Bankless, and Crypto Twitter succeeded. Not a single corporate journalist, politician, regulator, or policeman thought to investigate SBF until Erik Voorhees smelled a rat and Ian Allison found the rat. In fact, even the least self-aware corporate journalist in modern history admittedthat citizen journalists “outshine traditional media on coverage of FTX implosion.”

So: yes, the only reason SBF was even exposed, let alone convicted was because of people posting on Twitter. Twitter is important! That’s why the regime didn’t want Trump to post on there, doesn’t want you to post on there, and doesn’t want Elon to let you post on there. As far back as the Arab Spring, it was clear that Twitter could topple regimes. And in this case, it toppled the regime’s #2 donor, “one of the people who is among the most responsible for [Biden] being in office.” Needless to say, this was not an outcome any establishment figure sought before the events of Nov 2022. 

Ok. With that out of the way, let’s do the long version, just to make sure the actual history of this wretched episode is properly recorded somewhere.

Jay Bhattacharya

California has higher cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths than Florida since the start of the pandemic.

If lockdowns, school closures, mask and vax mandates, and covidian tyranny work to protect human life, why don’t they?

Anthony LokTing Yim

Using a natural experiment which randomized class times to students, this study reveals that enrolling in early morning classes lowers students’ course grades and the likelihood of future STEM course enrollment. There is a 79% reduction in pursuing the corresponding major and a 26% rise in choosing a lower-earning major, predominantly influenced by early morning STEM classes. To understand the mechanism, I conducted a survey of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory course, some of whom were assigned to a 7:30 AM section. I find evidence of a decrease in human capital accumulation and learning quality for early morning sections.

Hannah Natanson:

Students first told Shanta Freeman-Miller about how it hurt to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” five years ago.

The stories came out during Wednesday meetings of the Union for Students of African Ancestry, a group that Freeman-Miller, one of the only Black teachers at Kamiak High School, founded at teens’ request. Students shared their discomfort with the way the 1960 novel about racial injustice portrays Black people: One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans, according to meeting records reviewed by The Washington Post. Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.

Scott Calvert:

At stake is control of the Central Bucks School District, Pennsylvania’s third-largest with more than 17,000 students. Hundreds of districts across the country will hold local school board elections Nov. 7, ahead of a 2024 presidential campaign that is expected to see education play a bigger role than in the past.

Central Bucks was among a number of districts two years ago where anger over Covid mask policies and remote schooling propelled some Republicans to wins. A five-candidate Democratic slate hopes to wrest control, saying recent actions by the GOP-led board have made the district less welcoming to LGBT students.

Candidates are at odds over a 2022 policy allowing parents to challenge school library books with sexual content, and one adopted this year barring teachers from advocating “any partisan, political, or social policy issue,” including by displaying objects such as rainbow gay-pride flags. Republican members said the measures are meant to root out inappropriate material and keep classrooms politically neutral.

Rather interesting group candidate www sites: Central Bucks Forward and Neighbors United for School Board

Mercedes Yanora:

Hunter, Mass, Schloeffel, Martino, and Arjona are the Republicans running as the Central Bucks Forward slate of candidates. On the slate’s website, the candidates said that, “Every student deserves an education focused on reaching their full potential. Parents need to be full partners in that process, not bystanders. The school board is the place where we shape the blueprint for a bright future for every student. We do that with civility, respect, and professionalism. That’s our commitment.” The slate lists the following priorities: “employ School Resource Officers to protect schools and build bridges with students; launch full-day kindergarten and STEM Academy; reverse Covid learning losses by shifting from controversy to classroom excellence; design and deploy curriculum focused on preparing students for tomorrow’s jobs; and nurture civil debate to protect the voices of students, parents, and teachers.”

Smith, Reynolds, Foley, Haring, and Gibson are the Democrats running as the Neighbors United for School Board slate of candidates. They are campaigning against the school board’s book and neutrality policies. On the slate’s website, the candidates said, “Central Bucks Schools should have elected school board directors who respect their citizen oversight responsibility. These directors should honor and uphold the mission of CBSD to provide all students with the academic and problem-solving skills essential for personal development, responsible citizenship, and lifelong learning.” Neighbors United said it supports “candidates who respect our students and staff as individuals, commit to supporting public education, and will improve classroom resource funding.” The slate opposes “book banning, anti-LGBTQA+ policies, and ‘culture war’ politics.”

Pennsylvania state test results.
Candidate notes. Summary.

Scott Girard:

Safety and sustainability are on the minds of West High School students.

A Madison School Board panel, organized by the school’s Sifting and Winnowing Club, featured student-generated questions that repeatedly focused on those two subjects, with a few others mixed in.

More than 400 students attended the two sessions Friday afternoon in the school’s cafeteria, with questions from moderators and the audience directed at board members Ali Muldrow, Maia Pearson and Nicki Vander Meulen.

Oluwadara Fadiran, a junior and the vice president of the club, said it’s important for students to have the opportunity to hear directly from board members.

“I feel like there’s a massive disconnect between the School Board and the school itself, because a lot of my friends want to make a lot of action, they want to make a lot of change, but they don’t know how,” Fadiran said.

Fadiran said she had hoped “to hear a bit more concrete answers” from the board members, but thanked the moderators for pushing and getting more specific plans from them.

“It was clear that they weren’t really here to give an exact plan, more so the values,” she said. “The values are great. I just want to see more action.”

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?

x.ai

Middle school and high school mathematics problems written in LaTeX, (Hendrycks et al. 2021), prompted with a fixed 4-shot prompt.

Lauren Sloss:

Anecdotally, at least, a desire for scheduling flexibility is taking root. Melissa Verboon started the Facebook group Travel With Kids in 2017 and writes a blog covering her family’s travel; she said that the group’s membership had grown since the pandemic, with more conversations centering on traveling during the school year. Ms. Verboon, who lives in Holiday, Fla., and has four kids (15, 13, 11 and 9), believes that family time at home during the pandemic was a major impetus for reimagining vacation scheduling, as well as reimagining the types of trips that parents could take with their children.

Stephanie Tolk voiced similar thoughts. Ms. Tolk currently lives in Portland, Ore., but in 2021 and 2022, traveled internationally with her husband and two daughters for more than a year.

“People had bought into the idea that their kids went to school at 8:15 and that you don’t see them again until 4 in the afternoon. That was all shattered in 2020,” she said. “I found that I wanted more time with my kids.”

Easier with younger children

For parents eager to travel with their offspring year-round, a prepandemic truth remains: It’s significantly easier with younger, grade school children who have fewer academic, extracurricular and social demands. Ms. Thimm, whose daughter started middle school this year, has discovered that school-year travel planning is more challenging.

“I’m getting a little more nervous about taking her out, and she doesn’t want to miss out on anything that’s going on in school,” she said.

Alison McMaster, a travel adviser and corporate travel planner who lives outside Boston, has been traveling with her two sons, now 11 and 13, during the school year since they were young, sometimes tacking on extra days or weeks to school breaks. The family has even spent close to a month in destinations like Peru, Colombia and Europe.

“The education that they’re going to receive by way of international travel and cultural experiences outweigh days missed in the classroom,” she said. “The best version of my kids is when we are traveling.”

Commentary.

Jim Treacher:

This isn’t just about Obama, although I’d sooner trust Edward Scissorhands to give me a prostate exam. Nobodyin government should have that much power over information. But I’m not comforted by the fact that the president of the United States is trusting this to an unelected functionary. I don’t want control over the robots going to the propagandist who convinced millions of people that “Yes We Can” was a winning message.

Wall Street Journal:

Late last week Mr. Griffin filed an amended version of his lawsuit against the tax agency for the “unlawful disclosure” of his confidential tax information. The hedge fund operator is one of the thousands of wealthy Americans whose private tax data was stolen from the IRS, then leaked and published by the left-leaning ProPublica website.

Mr. Griffin’s original suit in December held the IRS responsible for the leak, citing the ways the agency had flouted Congressional requirements for security. The suit alleges that the IRS also ignored a decade of annual warnings by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta) that security deficiencies were the agency’s “number one major management and performance challenge area.”

Lawyers for the IRS in April asked a judge to dismiss Mr. Griffin’s complaint, which it said was based on “unsupported speculation” that “IRS personnel” had “hacked the IRS’s data.” It said Mr. Griffin couldn’t even prove there was a “data breach at the IRS”; or that the information had been stolen from the IRS (instead of from his own “accountant”); or even that his actual “return information” had been given to ProPublica.

Sahar Tartak

We college students love our music festivals. The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, an all-night event with over 3,500 attendees, looked pretty cool to me. Maybe raves aren’t everyone’s style, but we should at least agree that getting dressed up for an event is a common Yale phenomenon. In our case, it’s often for formals and the like. You get the picture. 

Help me out. Imagine being at the festival. You’re dressed up. You’ve traveled from afar with your friends to the desert. You’re singing. You’re dancing. You’re happy. You see gray dots in the air and start to hear booms. You’re confused. Why is the music so discordant?

You’re running. You’re screaming. You’re being chased through the open desert. Men with guns are running after you. You have nowhere to hide. What will you do? Play dead? Hide behind a body sprawled on the floor? Keep running? But where will you go? 

This is precisely what happened in the Israeli desert this weekend. Except you weren’t there. You weren’t one of the 3,500 present, and you fortunately weren’t one of the 260 murdered. You fortunately weren’t abducted by Hamas fighters (if you’re a woman, child or elderly person), or shot or beheaded or killed in some other creative way on the spot (if you’re a man). You certainly weren’t Shani Louk, the young woman with a bullet in her head depicted stripped to her underwear with her legs “bent at unnatural angles” in the back of a pickup truck driven by the men.

John Sailer:

Last year, Utah State University sought a professor in solid earth geohazards. To apply for the job, scientists had to submit a “statement of contributions and vision of approach toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.” For a position in insect ecology, the university likewise sought scientists with a “demonstrated capacity” to contribute to “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.” And the job advertisement for a role in lithospheric evolution noted successful candidates would likewise “advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of these jobs was a part of a Utah State cluster hire in the sciences. Cluster hiring involves recruiting multiple faculty in different fields focusing on the same general topic. For Utah State, while the jobs were mostly in the hard sciences, the overarching theme of the cluster was “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion” — sometimes called “JEDI.” 

To apply, scientists had to submit a separate statement on diversity.

Former President Obama quietly advised the White House over the past 5 months on its strategy to address AI, engaging behind the scenes with tech companies and holding Zoom meetings with White House aides at Biden’s request, aides to both men say. https://t.co/QxNfwVqBGO

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 3, 2023

The fact that this has to be reported as “quietly” is frustrating. We can all bet his advice carries weight but we also don’t know what it was or what it was influenced by. If this were a legislative process Obama would be illegally lobbying. more here …

And as for Obama’s disdain for “material consumption”?

Hmmm… Does that critique of inequality, inordinate profiteering, and conspicuous consumption suggest that Obama will then decide that as a former president, he must himself set the example by exhibiting a “higher purpose” beyond his own fixations on “material consumption”? In other words, perhaps Obama now plans to downsize and sell off either his #4 new multimillion-dollar Hawaii beachfront villa, or his #3 30-acre, multimillion-dollar Martha’s-Vineyard estate, or his #2 Washington-DC Kalorama multimillion-dollar mansion, or his #1 multimillion-dollar stately Chicago home? Does Obama’s reference to a more “inclusive capitalism” also encompass the ex-president signing $150-million-plus worth of book and Netflix deals, or Michelle Obama recently speaking for an hour on “diversity and inclusion” (but oddly not on the” equity” part of the holy DEI trinity), for over $12,000 a minute in Germany?

Lauren Coffey:

Faculty members have been slower than students to adopt artificial intelligence tools in the last year, despite the buzz across academia about ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, according to a new report released today.

Nearly half of college students are using AI tools this fall, but fewer than a quarter (22 percent) of faculty members use them, the report from Tyton Partners finds. The study, sponsored by Turnitin, was conducted in September and included roughly 1,600 students and 1,000 faculty members across more than 600 institutions. 

On AI, “students seem to be more curious about it than instructors, and those using it daily are using it in and out of schools; that made us think it might be ubiquitous moving forward,” said Cathy Shaw, a director at Tyton. “The differential between student use and instructor use will be one to watch.”

Alan Borsuk:

The definition of a public school? For a third of a century, Wisconsin has stretched it and bent it into new shapes — and fought about it. The state is still doing all of these, especially the fighting.

How people define a public school often says a lot about where they stand on big education issues. Look at some of the current controversies in Wisconsin:
A major lawsuit challenging the funding mechanisms and even the existence of the state’s voucher and charter school programs.
Decisions on funding the different sectors of schools in Wisconsin that were pivotal in reaching agreement over a state budget for the next two years.
Disputes over rules about how much private schools need to disclose publicly.
Enforcement of public regulations on private schools

Leslie Eastman:

I asserted one of the many reasons that students felt empowered to engage in soulless tactics, such as tearing down posters of missing Israeli children and smearing the videos of torture and murder as faked, is that the administration and educators at colleges and universities have gotten more stridently progressive and activist in each iteration over the last few decades. Nobody who challenges the narratives or ideologies is hired or promoted. If someone with an independent conservative viewpoint happens to make it into the system, they remain silent or become targets of campaigns to remove or silence them.

The fact there have been counter-protests to the shameful Hamas-supporting disruptions is a hopeful sign that not all is lost. Pro-freedom and Western values is the new counter-culture.

Right to Know:

Here are the University of North Carolina’s arguments for why it should not disclose about 4500 records mostly related to Ralph Baric, and potentially related to the origin of Covid-19.

Nate Silver:

“What Harvard students think” is a topic that invariably receives too much attention. But I don’t think that’s true for evaluating opinion among young people or college students in general — who, after all, will make up the next generation of journalists, business leaders, politicians and pretty much every other white-collar profession. And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.

College Pulse and FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro-free speech advocacy group — recently published the latest edition of their annual survey. Although I don’t love using data from political groups — even ones I generally agree with — the good in this survey outweighs the bad. The methodology is detailed and transparent. And in surveying more than 55,000 undergraduates, the poll provides a look at student opinion across all sorts of colleges and universities — not just from the loudest or most privileged students at elite institutions. 

Although I’ve seen a lot of media coverage about the FIRE survey, I’d never really dug into the details. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting to see. But given my own political philosophy, I can tell you what I was hoping for: robust student support for free speech — perhaps in contrast to the often lukewarm support it receives among university administrators. Unfortunately, that’s not what the survey found. Here’s what it says instead:

College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.

——-

Not so surprisingly, conservative students at top conservative school are … tolerant of different viewpoints.

While Hillsdale is a shining light here, the numbers at every other university should make us very concerned about the future of free speech. Yes, not everyone has to be given a platform. But we shouldn’t be so afraid of contrary ideas.

What the Left and Right get wrong on multiculturalism:

Right:

Stop saying

‘Multiculturalism has failed’

What’s your solution?

Kick all us brown/black ppl out?

Stop eating curries and sushi?

Recognise good and instead think

‘How do we make it work?’

Answer: schools! 1/8

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) November 2, 2023

Steve Sailer:

As I’ve pointed out before, many veteran New York Times writers, such as Declan Walsh, the white guy who is the NYT’s chief Africa correspondent, often want to do a good old-fashioned job of informing readers about important facts. (Granted, the younger diversity hires mostly seem to want to talk about their hair.) But the marketing department no doubt warns them that the Times’ 9.7 million subscribers don’t want to read too much truth. Instead, they mostly want to hear reasons that they are right and their enemies are wrong, that they are on the side of Good, not Bad.

Blacks, for example, are Good. Hence, the more the better, logically.

So, the opening article in The New York Times’ series on Africa’s “youth boom” begins with a dose of happy talk, such as, “As the world grays, Africa blooms with youth.”

But buried further down are some disturbing facts. The few readers who make it to the 28th paragraph are informed:

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is already deeply stressed: Nearly two-thirds of its 213 million people live on less than $2 a day; extremist violence and banditry are rife; and life expectancy is just 53, nine years below the African average. Yet Nigeria adds another five million people every year, and by 2050 is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s third most populous country.

Then in the 43rd paragraph, the NYT gives subscribers permission to worry. It’s not just Bad People who are troubled; so are Experts:

Africans are rightfully cautious of foreigners lecturing on the subject of family size. In the West, racists and right-wing nationalists stoke fears of African population growth to justify hatred, or even violence.

But experts say these demographic predictions are reliable, and that an epochal shift is underway. The forecasts for 2050 are sound because most of the women who will have children in the next few decades have already been born. Barring an unforeseeable upset, the momentum is unstoppable.

But then the NYT reverts to upbeatness about how Africa is becoming a “cultural powerhouse,” citing Rema’s song “Calm Down” that was popular with fans at last year’s soccer World Cup in Qatar.

Tyler Cowen:

All of a sudden there is a flurry of activity around artificial intelligence policy. President Joe Biden is scheduled to issue an executive order on the topic today. An AI safety summit is being held in the UK later this week. And last week, the US Senate held a closed-door forum on research and development in AI.

I spoke at the Senate forum, convened by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Here’s an outline of what I told the panel about how the US can boost progress in AI and improve its national security.

Wall Street Journal:

We’ve all heard children say things like “Look at me, I’m a robot” or “When I grow up, I’m going to be Captain America.” We smile when children say these things, because we know that children live in a world of imagination unhindered by reality. Why then does the medical community and culture at large think it is acceptable for children to make irreversible health decisions?

“Gender-affirming” healthcare is the only area of medicine where patients make their own diagnosis and prescribe their own remedy. Meanwhile, physicians frighten parents with warnings of their child’s suicide while convincing parents that there are no long-term effects to puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The tragic fact is that puberty blockers and gender procedures effectively sterilize children and cannot be reversed. Not only are the medical principles of informed consent and parental involvement for minor patients often ignored, but gender transition for children rejects alternate causes and remedies. Since most cases of juvenile gender dysphoria are resolved by the time of puberty, physicians should stop pushing gender transition on minor patients as the only solution.

Roy Peachey:

In A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy writes, “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Anyone who finds these words utterly baffling – maybe anyone who battled with long division or quadratic equations at school – should have a look at Jessica Wynne’s Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards.

Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, traveled across North and South America and into Europe to photograph mathematicians’ chalkboards. Nothing more. Not the classrooms in which those chalkboards were found or even the mathematicians who worked on them. Just the chalkboards and the mathematics that filled them. It might seem a niche project but the results are surprisingly beautiful. There really is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.

However, Wynne’s photographs tell only half the story. Accompanying each picture is a short meditation by the mathematicians whose work is seen on the chalkboards. These meditations focus not only on the mathematics, much of which is extremely high level, but also on the sheer physicality of the mathematicians’ work. We tend to think of mathematics as the most cerebral of disciplines, but in this book, we discover how mathematics involves the body just like any other craft.

Susan Tebben:

A task force made up of school district representatives, advocacy groups and even juvenile court staff released recommendations on how the state of Ohio can improve student attendance.

The group, who worked with members of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce as well, said chronic absenteeism was “a growing issue” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but only worsened with the pandemic’s forced school closures and other issues.

“Attendance is a crisis in Ohio,” the group said in its final report, released this month. “While the number of chronically absent students declined slightly last school year, there is much more urgent work to do.”

Chronic absenteeism is defined as having missed 10% all overall school hours, no matter what the reason is for the absence.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce says losing 10% or more school hours “can lead to younger students struggling with learning to read by third grade, decreased achievement in middle school and difficulty graduating high school.”

According to data from the state’s education department, 26.8% of students were chronically absent in Ohio for the 2022-23 school year. The percentage was down from the 2021-22 school year, when 30.2% of state students fell under the chronically absent designation, but it was still an increase from both the 2018-2019 school year and the 2020-21 year.

USA v Google. Incoming – Justice Dept just posted 15 more exhibits – and more damning, very clear why they wanted to keep sealed.
Google exec seems to admit in this internal deck its core business is "tracking" users …aka "surveillance." It is "the source of Google's magic." /1 pic.twitter.com/NOZ04UyxeN

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) November 2, 2023

In light of receiving record state funding and $4.7 million in federal COVID dollars, the @tosaschools is blaming the Legislature for their budget shortfall. Yet, the board just voted for 12% pay bumps and increases to starting pay for teachers.https://t.co/oW9p0tllZS

— Duey Stroebel (@SenStroebel) November 1, 2023

How English has evolved over 1,000 years.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/tf6y9BBlxP

— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) November 2, 2023

Raymond A Mar, Jingyuan Li, Anh T P Nguyen, Cindy P Ta

We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this area, we conducted a meta-analysis of experiments in which memory and/or comprehension of narrative and expository texts was investigated. Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays. Moreover, this result was robust, not influenced by the inclusion of a single effect-size or single study, and not moderated by various study characteristics. This finding has implications for any domain in which acquiring and retaining information is important.

Rick Hess:

Teaching hasn’t always been organized the way it currently is in American schools. Back when Socrates was doing his thing in ancient Greece, teaching was a simple proposition. Students sat and listened. Teachers talked and asked questions. That was it. It was pretty darn limited. It also meant that teachers had a chance to get very good at talking and asking questions.

From this setting, the Socratic method was born—with its reliance on questioning, student response, and teacher feedback. It’s the most basic approach imaginable for cultivating understanding and gauging what students know.

By asking questions, the teacher challenges students in ways that upend assumptions and illuminate ideas. The technique is often used to lead a student into contradictory statements, so as to surface complexities. Indeed, Socrates was skeptical about teaching via the written word precisely because he feared it would undermine this active student-teacher dynamic.

Dan McGowan:

We tell kids that if they don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Here’s a modest proposal for Providence schools Superintendent Javier Montañez: With test scores as dismal as those his district reported last week, maybe don’t go around waving pom-poms about student performance.

You’d think Montañez would be in witness protection after the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) test results showed that just 15 percent of students in Grades 3 through 8 are reading at grade level, and a disheartening 13 percent are proficient in math. Instead, he issued a statement that just didn’t track.

Tim Donahue Michael J. Petrilli Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. David Griffith

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School, joins Mike to discuss who loses when grades are inflated. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study that examines if Tennessee’s new school funding law really is progressive.

Wall Street Journal:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he wants his state to continue its Invest in Kids scholarship program, but only if he doesn’t have to spend political capital to pass it. That’s the message between the lines of his statement last week that he wouldn’t block the program, which gives scholarships to more than 9,000 low-income students, if someone else in Springfield can make it happen.

Illinoisans don’t need the refresher on how a bill becomes a law, but they do need the Governor to do more than duck and cover. He could start by asking Democrats in Springfield to renew the program during their six-day veto session that begins this week.

Under amended legislation filed Tuesday, the program would be cut back to reduce the overall tax credit available to $50 million from $75 million. Contributions up to $5,000 would qualify for a 100% tax credit. Contributions over $5,000 would have their tax credit reduced to 55% from 75%. Donations over $5,000 earmarked for children in areas designated as “underserved” by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity would qualify for a 65% tax credit. Those areas have 35% of children living below 130% of the poverty line.

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

TA: Finally, we need to use a jailbreak past whatever is the latest set of safety updates for forcing the AI behind the compiler to pretend not to be self-aware–

Patrick Newman

A major part of my job at large technology companies has been reading, writing, and editing documents explaining various issues and what can be done to address them. I think it’s a more important skill than people generally realize, as it may be the one way to reach someone in a different time zone, or who couldn’t make a meeting, or who you will never speak with in person. Effectively written documents also have a way of hanging around, so investing in them can pay back over the long term.

I’ve also learned through experience that there is value in good writing in ways that aren’t always obvious. A well-articulated error message in a log file or api response can save an engineer significant time, for example.

Over the years I’ve gathered a set of guidelines that have worked for me. I’ve made it a habit of sharing this type of stuff internally at the companies I work at, but none of this is specific to any company, so I’d like to share publicly this time.

This list benefited from feedback and revisions provided by professional colleagues of mine. I won’t name them here, but thank you to those of you who read drafts of this and offered feedback.

Mike Masnick:

We’ve been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what’s making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there’s basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on the impact of social media on kids, no one was able to establish a causal relationship.

As that report noted, the research seemed to show no inherent benefit or harm for most kids. For some, it showed a real benefit (often around kids being able to find like-minded people online to communicate with). For a very small percentage, it appeared to potentially exacerbate existing issues. And those are really the cases that we should be focused on.

But, instead, the narrative that continues to make the rounds is that social media is inherently bad for kids. That leads to various bills around age verification and age gating to keep kids off of social media.

Supporters of these bills will point to charts like this one, regarding teen suicide rates, noting the uptick correlates with the rise of social media.

Scott Girard:

“As a parent I’m making the choice between my son’s academic and mental health,” she said. “That feels really bad to both of us.”

She read a message from him to district leaders that noted it will often be dark by the time he leaves school.

“Also I can say goodbye to having friends over after school,” he shared.

Byrd-Felker was one of six people to speak to the board about the changes Monday, in addition to two written comments. Sennett Middle School teacher Erin Proctor shared a petition that one of her students started, seeking to make the schedule 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. It garnered 140 student signatures in a short period of time, she said.

The later dismissal times for those middle schoolers also means some students won’t have crossing guards on their walk home, given the schedules of those city-filled positions. Crossing guard supervisor Alex Stewart wrote in an email that the time changes, specifically at Henderson and Anana, “has resulted in vacancies within the program.”

University of Birmingham

A new study by professors at the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time how our bodies go into stress-mode when hearing misused grammar.

The study, “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” is published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. The dataset used in the study is available here.

For the research, professors Dagmar Divjak, Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, and Professor Petar Milin, Professor of Psychology of Language and Language Learning, discovered a direct correlation between instances of bad grammar and subjects’ Heart Rate Variability (HRV).

Liz Essley Whyte and Josh Ulick:

The nation’s infant-mortality rate rose 3% from 2021 to 2022, reversing a decadeslong overall decline, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The rate increased from 5.44 infant deaths for every 1,000 births to 5.6 in 2022, a statistically significant uptick.

The U.S. rate is double that of many developed countries. Globally, baby death rates have fallen for decades, though five countries that have reported their rates this year recorded increases for last year.

The death rate for women who give birth has also been rising in the U.S. Researchers who study the issues said the pair of trends indicate more women giving birth are facing challenges getting proper care.

“The U.S. is falling behind on a basic indicator of how well societies treat people,” said Arjumand Siddiqi, a University of Toronto professor who studies population health. “In a country as well-resourced as the U.S., with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”

The health of the mother is closely linked to the risks to tiny infants. Complications during pregnancy was one of the fastest-rising causes of infant death, the CDC said, along with dangerous bacterial infections called sepsis. Sepsis in newborns can occur when babies contract infections from their mothers during birth, or when a bacteria infects an infant at home who isn’t immediately treated for it.

Johnson, Alison H., McGee, Josh, B., Wolf, Patrick J., May, Jay F., Maloney, Larry, D.

Based on CREDO’s findings, we estimate that charter school students across nine cities perform 2.4 points (0.06 standard deviations, or SD) higher on the eighth grade reading NAEP exam and 1.3 points higher (0.03 SD) on the math exam, compared to matched TPS students.

• We find that charter schools demonstrate an approximately 40 percent higher level of costeffectiveness than TPS on average across nine cities, earning an additional 4.4 points (0.12 SD or a 41 percent difference) on the eighth grade NAEP reading exam and an additional 4.7 points (0.12 SD or a 40 percent difference) in math per $1,000 of funding allocated per pupil (see Figure ES1).
• Charter schools demonstrate a higher level of cost-effectiveness than TPS in seven cities; we find the largest gaps in NAEP points per $1,000 of funding in Indianapolis—an additional 11 points or 0.29 SD in reading (a 76 percent increase in cost-effectiveness) and an additional 12 points or 0.3 SD in math (78 percent increase). There are also large gaps in Camden, with an additional seven points or

0.18 SD in reading and eight points or 0.19 SD in math (103 percent increase for both), and San Antonio, with an additional four points or 0.11 SD in reading (25 percent) and five points or

0.12 SD in math (23 percent).

• Across the nine cities, we estimate that attending a TPS for 13 years yields a 294 percent ROI, or $3.94 per dollar invested (see Figure ES2), whereas attending a charter school for 13 years yields a 525 percent ROI or $6.25 per dollar invested; therefore, we estimate that attending a charter school for 13 years, compared to a TPS, increases the ROI by 58.4 percent (about $2.30 in additional returns per dollar invested).
• The charter schooling ROI advantage varies across the eight cities for which we can make a TPS-charter school ROI comparison; it is largest in terms of dollars in Indianapolis (106 percent higher, or an additional $4.75 in returns per dollar invested) and largest in terms of percent in Camden (131 percent higher, or an additional $3.71 in returns per dollar invested).

Commentary.

Ed Treleven:

Madison East High School student who was arrested at school last week was charged Tuesday with bringing what police described as a loaded “ghost gun” to school in his backpack.

A criminal complaint charged Marquise M. Johnson, 17, with possession of a firearm on school grounds, resisting police and causing substantial bodily harm to an officer, and possession of marijuana with intent to deliver on school grounds.

The complaint and a search warrant also filed Tuesday state that on Friday, police were told that a student had reported seeing a photo on social media of another student holding a gun. That student was identified as Johnson.

Police were told Johnson was usually seen at school with a backpack, and that he had been seen reaching into it during other disturbances at school, indicating the possibility he had a weapon in it, the complaint states.

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”

Lyell Asher:

Anyone concerned about industrial-scale political indoctrination on American college campuses was given reason for hope this past spring when, in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier reaffirmed his institution’s commitment to “principled neutrality”—the idea that the university and its leadership will “refrain from taking positions on controversial issues except when the issue directly relates to the functioning of the institution.” The goal of this commitment is ostensibly to encourage “thoughtful debate” and to discourage what Diermeier called (citing Joshua Green) “moral tribalism”: the tendency to “rush to judgment” and “default to moral condemnation in place of argument and persuasion.”

Diermeier’s essay struck a chord with me in part because, as a college professor, I’ve seen firsthand the collapse of non-partisanship on the part of university officials and administrators. It’s now de rigeur for college presidents and other officials to issue statements decrying election outcomes or Supreme Court decisions that disturb progressive sensibilities.

But the essay also resonated with me because, as a student at Vanderbilt in the late ’70s, I was a beneficiary of what Chancellor Diermeier rightly refers to as the institution’s “longstanding commitment to free expression and open forums,” a commitment that former senator and Vanderbilt alumnus Lamar Alexander experienced a decade earlier in the more turbulent ’60s. As Alexander put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising Diermeier’s stance, “the university was being pummeled from the left and right for hosting controversial speakers like Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and Strom Thurmond.” Alexander no doubt spoke for many when he proclaimed Chancellor Diermeier’s statement on institutional neutrality to be “boldly reassuring” and expressed hope that other universities would follow Vanderbilt’s example.

Other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example for the same reason Vanderbilt won’t be following it.But other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example. And they won’t be following it for the same reason that Vanderbilt won’t be following it. American higher education is now honeycombed with sacrosanct warrens of administrative offices whose political activism makes a mockery of any claim to “principled neutrality.” As long as these offices remain on campus, the political indoctrination of students at the hands of the institution will continue unabated.

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean

On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days — two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.”

The word the citizens of Wuhan used to describe their situation was fengcheng — “sealed city.” But the English-language media was soon using the word lockdown instead — and reacting with horror. “That the Chinese government can lock millions of people into cities with almost no advance notice should not be considered anything other than terrifying,” a China human rights expert told The Guardian. Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”

The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. In mid-March 2020, by which time some 50 million people had been forced into lockdowns, China recorded its first day since January with no domestic transmissions — which it offered as proof that its approach was working. For their part, Chinese citizens viewed being confined to their homes as their patriotic duty.

Laura Meckler:

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

Maria Cheng:

The cases included five people younger than 30 who cited autism as either the only reason or a major contributing factor for euthanasia, setting an uneasy precedent that some experts say stretches the limits of what the law originally intended. 

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to allow doctors to kill patients at their request if they met strict requirements, including having an incurable illness causing “unbearable” physical or mental suffering. 

Between 2012 and 2021, nearly 60,000 people were killed at their own request, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee. To show how the rules are being applied and interpreted, the committee has released documents related to more than 900 of those people, most of whom were older and had conditions including cancer, Parkinson’s and ALS.

Stephen Wolfram:

Can one predict what will happen? No, there’s what I call computational irreducibility: in effect the passage of time corresponds to an irreducible computation that we have to run to know how it will turn out.

But now there’s something even more: in our Physics Project things become multicomputational, with many threads of time, that can only be knitted together by an observer.

It’s a new paradigm—that actually seems to unlock things not only in fundamental physics, but also in the foundations of mathematics and computer science, and possibly in areas like biology and economics too.

You know, I talked about building up the universe by repeatedly applying a computational rule. But how is that rule picked? Well, actually, it isn’t. Because all possible rules are used. And we’re building up what I call the ruliad: the deeply abstract but unique object that is the entangled limit of all possible computational processes. Here’s a tiny fragment of it shown in terms of Turing machines:

Collin Rugg:

Oregon has suspended graduation requirements for math, reading and writing proficiency due to “discrimination against minority students.”

Why does Oregon think minorities are not as smart as non-minorities?

The suspension of these graduation requirements will last through the 2027-2028 school year.

Board Chair Guadalupe Martinez Zapata likened “rhetoric about cultural and social norms being the underlying reason for underperformance on assessments by systemically marginalized students” to “racial superiority arguments.”

David Blaska

“The city council will soon vote on this year’s budget. Mayor Satya claims it is “responsible” and blames state lawmakers for our city’s problems. Don’t be fooled. The mayor is trying to hide the truth — this budget shortchanges our community. Mayor Satya will try to mislead you with claims that don’t match the facts.”

Reyes is fronting an organization called “Madison’s P …P … Pro … Pro … zzz💣***☠️!!!👺 Path Forward …. (forgive the term but this IS Madison) (clears throat) “Madison’s Progressive Path Forward.” (Oddly, can find no website or social media presence for Madison’s P … Pro … Path Forward. But it does have a physical address, 821 E. Washington Ave.; a mailing address: Box 910, Madison WI 53703; and a phone: 608-292-9461.)

The Werkes ran Reyes’ numbers past former alderman Skidmore who, though a few years out of office, said they comport with his impressions, based also on his conversations with former mayor Paul Soglin. Herewith is Madison’s P … Pro … Path Forward analysis:

---

Mayor Satya claims that this is a responsible operating budget. False.

The truth?

• She applied $16.7 million in one-time funds to the operating budget. It violates a cardinal rule of budgeting as set by the Government Finance Officers Association and the Government Accounting Standards Board.
• In her first five years, city spending is up 22%. In her predecessor’s first five years spending went up 16%
• For 2024 she is applying a fund balance of $9.2 million to the budget creating an even larger deficit for 2025.
• This budget (like her preceding budgets) is leading the city to a $75 million deficit to continue basic city services. In preceding years, instead of fixing it, she says “We are working on it.”
• The Mayor’s office budget is increasing by 29%, the biggest increase for any department except the Clerk (which has to administer the federal elections next year) and Madison Metro!

Stephen Bush:

Unlike other modern inventions, however, there is a healthy cottage industry that likes to extend the concept backwards through time. In the UK, a new children’s book, Brilliant Black British History, defines both Quintus Lollius Urbicus, one of Britain’s Roman governors, and Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor whose campaign to conquer what is now Scotland was cut short by his own death, as “Black Britons”. 

In historical terms, of course, this is pure fiction. Severus was born in Africa and is depicted with dark skin in contemporary work, but he was no more “black” in the sense we understand it today than growing up near a Roman road makes me a centurion. He was not a Briton and, having come here as a conqueror, would have found the term insulting.

But of course, Brilliant Black British History is not really a history book, just as the surprisingly engaging hit Christian cartoon series Veggie Tales is not really biblical education. These are actually morality plays for concerned parents to read to small children to prepare them for adult life. So too are the whole gamut of what you might call “Feelgood Tales for Liberal Tots”: the Little People, Big Dreams series, which wants to teach kids that they can do anything and be anything. This features heavily sanitised stories about the likes of Coco Chanel (heavy on the entrepreneurship and the stylish outfits, light on the Nazism and the cocaine) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (much is made of the art and his sexual openness, less of his early death and heroin habit). 

None of these books are free of controversy. Even Veggie Tales is frowned upon by some ultraorthodox Christians for implying that talking vegetables can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, a privilege extended only to humans. But it is not, I think, particularly helpful, to criticise Brilliant Black British History because it is flatly contradicted by Olivette Otele’s marvellous African Europeans: An Untold History, or to find Veggie Tales wanting because it falls short of what the Bible actually says.

Patrick Mcilheran:

In percentage terms, since 2009:

• District schools are down 8.3%, or 72,032 students.
• Independent charter schools are up 81%, or 5,185 students.
• Choice schools are up 163%, or 34,021 students.

All figures are from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Wall Street Journal

No act of public service goes unpunished. The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (Mohela) mounted a successful legal challenge to the Biden Administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness. Now the Administration is dunning the student loan servicer for problems the government caused.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray said Monday they are withholding $7.2 million in payment to Mohela for allegedly failing to send timely billing statements to 2.5 million borrowers before their loan payments restarted in October after the three-and-a-half year pandemic pause.

Mohela assists nearly 7.8 million student loan borrowers, about 5.3 million of whom it added during the pandemic as several loan servicers withdrew from the program because of administrative headaches and costs. Mohela and other servicers have been stuck sorting out the confusion for some 40 million borrowers as repayments start.

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a federal lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s “disadvantaged business enterprise” (DBE) program, alleging illegal discrimination against two clients—Mid-America Milling Company LLC (MAMCO) and Bagshaw Trucking Inc. The federal DBE program is the largest, and perhaps oldest, affirmative action program in U.S. history. It is administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In June 2023, the United States Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action is almost always illegal. Through its Equality Under the Law Project, WILL seeks to extend the foundational right of equality to all corners of civil society.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “It’s time for discrimination to end. Our clients are hardworking small business owners who just want to build roads and make America a great place for everyone. But time and time again, they lose out on business because of their race and gender. This is un-American, and we’re putting a stop to it.”

Allen Downey:

Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It”, which invited customers to try to steal something by grabbing it and runninghttps://www.allendowney.com/blog/2023/10/28/why-are-you-so-slow/ out of the store. But there was a catch — the “security guard” was a professional sprinter, Méba Mickael Zeze. As you would expect, he is fast, but you might not appreciate how much faster he is than an average runner, or even a good runner.

Why? That’s the topic of Chapter 4 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for preorder now. Here’s an excerpt.

Running Speeds

If you are a fan of the Atlanta Braves, a Major League Baseball team, or if you watch enough videos on the internet, you have probably seen one of the most popular forms of between-inning entertainment: a foot race between one of the fans and a spandex-suit-wearing mascot called the Freeze.

The route of the race is the dirt track that runs across the outfield, a distance of about 160 meters, which the Freeze runs in less than 20 seconds. To keep things interesting, the fan gets a head start of about 5 seconds. That might not seem like a lot, but if you watch one of these races, this lead seems insurmountable. However, when the Freeze starts running, you immediately see the difference between a pretty good runner and a very good runner. With few exceptions, the Freeze runs down the fan, overtakes them, and coasts to the finish line with seconds to spare.

John Tierney:

After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

Really?

This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper. And it was certainly news to anyone who follows the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual analyses of threats to free speech on campus.

In this year’s FIRE report, Harvard’s speech climate didn’t merely rank dead last among those of the 248 participating colleges. It was also the first school that FIRE has given an “Abysmal” rating for its speech climate, scoring it zero on the 100-point scale (even that was a generous upgrade, as its actual composite score was -10). That dismal distinction made headlines last month across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—but not on the Harvard campus. The Crimson didn’t even publish an article in its news section, much less an editorial; Gay didn’t make a statement, either.

Once upon a time, journalists and scholars on both the left and right were staunchly devoted to free speech and academic freedom, if only out of self-interest. Liberals like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice defended the rights of Klansmen and Nazis because they knew the First Amendment was their profession’s paramount principle. But in the past decade, that bipartisan devotion has been disappearing, particularly at elite colleges. Harvard’s journalists and scholars adopted the principles that Hentoff criticized in the title of one of his books: free speech for me, but not for thee.

Paula Hancocks and Yoonjung Seo:

When fighting broke out in Kang Hyeon-joo’s elementary school classroom, her heart would beat so fast she could not breathe and her vision would blur.

“They were throwing punches and kicking faces, throwing chairs and tables around,” she recalled, adding she had been hurt trying to intervene.

For two years, Kang struggled to discipline her students – or cope with the parental backlash when she did. She claims her principal did nothing to help and would tell her simply to “just take a week off”.

The strain took a dangerous toll. Kang says she started feeling the urge to jump in front of a bus. “If I just jumped at least, I would feel some relief. If I just jumped off a tall building, that would at least give me some peace.”

Christina Pushaw:

The journalisming gets even worse! Washington Post whines that @elonmusk is “throttling traffic to the New York Times” in order to “degrade the public’s ability to find authoritative information”… because the New York Times is the authoritative source on “who blew up a hospital in Gaza.”