Matt Taibbi:

A brief story sums up my theory of journalism: 

In 1991 I was trying to work as a freelance reporter in newly ex-communist St. Petersburg, Russia. I heard a hot rumor. After decades of deprivation, gorillas at the city zoo were to be given bananas.

I thought Western editors would go crazy. I’d been rejected for more negative stories about the arrival of heroin, or gun violence. Bananas were positive! 

I went to the zoo, and interviewed a zookeeper. Then I did what journalists do: I hovered around the gorilla cage looking creepy before mustering the courage to ask a few strangers in broken Russian what they thought about gorillas and bananas. (The newly ex-Soviet Russians had funny answers, like, “How come nobody’s given me bananas?”) When this man on the street portion was done, I stood wondering what to do next. I remember having the thought, “Well, I can’t interview the gorilla.”

I shrugged, went home, wrote it up, and got rejected, but that’s not the point. The point is, journalism isn’t rocket science. You show up, talk to a few people, give your best guess at what you’re looking at, and when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on.

Thirty years later — at the end of last year — I was in San Francisco looking at content moderation requests sent to Twitter by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Obviously, the degree of difficulty had gone up a bit, but the job was more or less the same: “Tech Company Gets Unpleasant Bananas.”

US vs Twitter; X Corp motion for relief

This motion asks the Court to rein in an investigation that has spiraled out of control and become tainted by bias, and to terminate a misfit consent order that no longer can serve any proper equitable purpose. As detailed below, the FTC has engaged in conduct so irregular and improper that Ernst & Young (“EY”)—the independent assessor designated under a consent order between Twitter and the FTC to evaluate the company’s privacy, data protection, and information security program—“felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started.” Recent sworn testimony details how the FTC, through a series of interactions with EY immediately after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, attempted to co-opt EY’s independent assessment in order to generate evidence of “deficiencies in Twitter’s privacy and information security program.” These efforts included dictating to EY “very specific types of procedures that they expected” EY to perform and “[conveying] expectations … about what th[e] results should be before [EY] had even begun any procedures.” The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “[t]he FTC [would] take[] exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create[] ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”

A private litigant who engaged in such conduct might well be facing charges of witness tampering. As the Plaintiff in this civil enforcement action, the FTC should not receive preferential treatment. There simply is no way to square the striking record of bias recounted above—along with other evidence described in this motion—with any semblance of the impartiality, due process, or equitable conduct that the law requires from administrative agencies like the FTC when they act pursuant to court-authorized and -supervised consent orders. This Court should intervene to stop the FTC’s ongoing improper conduct.

William Jacobson

Parlaying that into the topic at hand, which is the biggest professional networking platform out there. LinkedIn, another social media application in its own right, is now being accused or found to have manipulated candidate pools for jobs that are available on the website based on race and other EEOC protected categories. And I think this is not, again, not a surprise. We’ve seen another big ruling that just came out reversing affirmative action. And I think things like this will continue where you still, you strike things down, but you’re gonna have admissions policies or LinkedIn, algorithms that are still gonna hold true to what they believe.

WAJ:

Well, this is something that we raised at Equal Protection Project, which is their diversity in recruiting program at LinkedIn. And what it is, they have tweaked their algorithms. Nobody sees it, nobody really knows what’s going on, but they do it, admit it. They tweak their algorithms so that when they present pools of potential employees, candidates, potential hires, job seekers to employers, they manipulate those pools to give a diverse pool.

So if you’re an engineer and you’re applying for a job, their algorithms don’t just look at your grades in college or your job experience, or where you worked or what your specialty is. It will also consider, if you’ve consented, which probably most people do, they check the box that LinkedIn can use your demographic information, they will then tweak that pool and take into account other things. So they’re basically discriminating against people on the base of race and other factors as part of this Diversity In Recruiting program. And that’s how they’re manipulating it.

And getting to your point about what the Supreme Court just decided, this is how the Supreme Court’s admonition that you can’t use race as a factor in admission and by implication other ways is going to be evaded. They’ll plug it into their algorithms, they’ll plug it into their artificial intelligence, they’ll plug it into their [computer] program, and you will never know. And that’s why I think what’s happening at LinkedIn is so important.

***

… It’s not even clear how much the employers know about what’s going on. LinkedIn has not been forthcoming with that information.

Richard Adams and Aubrey Allegretti

Rishi Sunak will force universities to limit the number of students taking “low-value” degrees in England, a measure which is most likely to hit working class and black, Asian and minority ethnic applicants.

Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday.

But vice-chancellors say the measures will act as a “red flag to students”, who will be turned off the idea of entering a capped course as they feel it will damage their life chances, at considerable cost to institutions.

The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.

Here are the two versions of Fauci's highly incriminating email, the FOIA version versus what GOP released today.

(btw why hasn't any presidential candidate committed to completely tear down the entire FOIA bureaucracy and replacing it with honest and accountable structures?) pic.twitter.com/2C4dat07Os

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) July 14, 2023

Mary Rice Hasson:

Wake up, friends. America’s stubborn commitment to progressive-controlled government education has already abandoned “the vast majority” of our children “to the progressive cause” for well over a decade. The results have been disastrous.

For starters, schools have failed abysmally in their fundamental task — teaching basic academic skills — despite spending staggering sums. In 2019, annual expenditures for K–12 public schools totaled almost $800 billion, but, according to the Nation’s Report Card, barely one-third of public school students were “proficient” in math and reading pre-COVID, a dismal track record that worsened significantly post-COVID. Nationally, just 26 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math, with 31 percent proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 3 percent of fourth graders are mathematically proficient, while twenty-three Baltimore public schools reported exactly zero math-proficient students. Government schools, which enroll almost nine out of ten American children, repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises but are rewarded with big budgets and near-monopolistic power.

The most troubling aspect of our government school system, however, is not what it has failed to teach but what it has succeeded in teaching.

As cultural revolutionaries have long known, it is far easier to capture and mold the beliefs of children than to change the minds of adults. The evidence is in: the cultural revolutionaries are winning. A recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found disturbing gaps in the values embraced by Americans under thirty compared to those espoused by older adults. While majorities of older Americans say patriotism, religion, and having children are “very important,” shockingly few young people agree. Among Americans under thirty, just 23 percent consider patriotism and having children to be very important, while only 31 percent say the same of religion. The shift in the values and beliefs of younger Americans is dramatic but hardly surprising, as it tracks the leftward swing of our public education — indoctrination — system.

Ashley Belanger:

Yesterday, Congress members revealed the results of a seven-month investigation into tax-filing companies. Lawmakers found that H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer “recklessly shared” potentially hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ sensitive personal and financial data with Google and Meta “for years” in apparent violation of laws prohibiting tax preparers from sharing tax return information without customers’ consent.

In a press release provided to Ars from the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), lawmakers alleged a “massive, likely illegal breach of taxpayer privacy.” Insisting upon urgent redress, lawmakers are now calling upon the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Federal Trade Commission, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to “fully investigate this matter and prosecute any company or individuals who violated the law.”

The Congress members’ report said that “any tax return preparer who ‘knowingly or recklessly discloses'” tax return information “is subject to a fine up to $1,000 per violation, and a prison term of up to one year.”

Ari Kaufman:

Conservatives and common-sense Americans cheered last month when the Supreme Court correctly ruled that Joe Biden’s abominable attempt to “forgive” $430 billion in college debt for over 25 million borrowers was unlawful.

The White House plan was purely unconstitutional and insulting to Americans. Legislation that Congress designed for a small number of military members in the wake of 9/11 should not be applied to a large portion of the population two decades later.

It was also regressive, robbing blue-collar workers who saved their money and giving to wealthier doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Biden engaged in left-wing class warfare on behalf of the affluent. Or, as Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said, a way for Biden to “pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families.”

Knowing that transferring college debt can lure ignorant young voters in 2024, Team Biden attempted a political scam to transform attending college from bettering your future prospects through learning to partisan political allegiance. The effort was appalling.

Student debt doled out by schools, and the government is indeed abusive; however, the problem with Biden’s plan is that, like many callous liberal ideas, it does nothingto stop the problem and instead sets a precedent that presidents can erase large portions of student debt.

Robert Pondiscio:

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 

Will Flanders

As private school choice programs expand at a rapid pace across the nation, a common complaint is that they will harm public schools. In Wisconsin, where a large increase in private school choice funding was recently passed, a state senator claimed that public schools would be “defunded,” despite $1 billion in public school increases being passed at the same time. In Iowa, where a ground-breaking Education Savings Account was passed earlier this year, the director of Iowa’s School Board Association complained that the funding “can be better spent serving the 485,000 students in public schools, given the needs that they have.” With school choice options growing across the nation, it is important for policymakers to know whether these complaints are valid. Fortunately, new research is able to answer this question.  

We analyzed data from Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s oldest school choice programs began in Milwaukee in 1990. In addition to the Milwaukee program, Wisconsin has been home to a statewide school choice program since 2013, providing a lengthy time frame to study. We compared public school proficiency outcomes across districts as enrollment in school choice increased. Contrary to the doom-and-gloom predictions of some choice opponents, we found that there was no impact on math outcomes, and a positive relationship to reading outcomes—as choice enrollment in a district increased, so did public school test scores. In other words, the growth of school choice did not harm public schools and may have even helped them.

Matt Taibbi:

I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but since I’m persona non grata on Twitter these days and this material needs to get out in the wake of the ruling in the Missouri v. Biden internet censorship case, I’m invoking a political necessity exception to post #TwitterFiles emails that may be germane to the suit.

College Fix:

Nearly 400 Pennsylvania State University professors have signed a letter that defends antiracism teaching and administrative practices targeted in a lawsuit objecting to giving black students inflated grades.

The four-paragraph “Letter in Support of Antiracist Faculty at Penn State” denigrates a recent lawsuit filed against the university by Zack De Piero, who taught English at the school’s Abingdon campus and has since filed a lawsuit that alleges he was discriminated against because of his race. He is white.

The 36-page lawsuit details a June 2020 exercise in which white faculty were told they are privileged because they can “breathe” while George Floyd could not.

Leah Platt Boustan, Christine Cai, and Tammy Tseng:

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

Commentary

Andrew Jack:

In the days since the US Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in higher education, Adam Nguyen has been emailing warnings to the Asian clients that he advises on US elite college admissions.

“There’s a perception now that it’s easier for them to get in. That’s false,” he said. “They still have to distinguish themselves on subjective measures. I don’t want my clients to be lulled into complacency.”

America’s highest court last month ruled that it was unconstitutional for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) to use race as a basis for admissions. The decision was cheered by some who claimed that affirmative action discriminated against Asian students.

Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.

Commentary

NEW GALLUP POLL shows confidence in public schools at ALL-TIME LOW.

Only 26% of Americans now report "great deal/fair amount of confidence" in the public schools. pic.twitter.com/3extqKENmc

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 12, 2023

One of the very few House Democrats to do her job and actually question the FBI Director the way Congress is required to do was @RepJayapal, who grilled Wray about the FBI's purchase of sweeping dossiers on US citizens. We reported on that program here:https://t.co/zq8gxDfrZY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 12, 2023

John Rigolizzo

A Los Angeles Times article comparing outcomes at community colleges and elite universities garnered a colorful response in the letters page.

The original piece, written June 21, compared the financial outcomes of college graduates at state vs private schools; and in STEM fields and vocational training vs humanities and social sciences. The data showed that graduates of the hard sciences and even the trades vastly outearn some graduates of California’s elite universities.

The original article began with a story of a young man who took a one-year-long training course at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College to become a power lineman. Upon completion, he is set to make about $105,000 a year, and $165,000, not including overtime, as a journeyman in 3-4 years. In the same amount of time, a graduate of Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in political science will earn a median income of $75,500; a graduate of UC Berkeley with a sociology degree earns about $64,000; a UCLA graduate in history will make about $47,900.

Jeremy Howard:

Proposals for stringent AI model licensing and surveillance will likely be ineffective or counterproductive, concentrating power in unsustainable ways, and potentially rolling back the societal gains of the Enlightenment. The balance between defending society and empowering society to defend itself is delicate. We should advocate for openness, humility and broad consultation to develop better responses aligned with our principles and values — responses that can evolve as we learn more about this technology with the potential to transform society for good or ill.

Kyle Morris:

Democrats have ‘gotten away with using and abusing the black community,’ Mesha Mainor told Fox News Digital

FIRST ON FOX: A Peach State lawmaker who angered her Democratic colleagues in the Georgia state House of Representatives over her support for a recent school choice bill is expected to announce that she is officially switching parties.

Mesha Mainor – a Democrat who has represented District 56 in the Georgia state House since January 2021 – will announce shortly before noon Tuesday that she will switch her party registration to Republican.

“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”

Anthony LoCoco

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, the flagship of the UW system, proudly operates the so-called Target of Opportunity Program (TOP). It allows academic departments to obtain waivers from the requirement to post job positions publicly and instead hire “diverse” candidates directly. The university provides the irresistible incentive of salary funding for approved hires. Public records of internal TOP requests obtained by my group, the Institute for Reforming Government, show blatant, widespread and pernicious racial classification of faculty applicants that is difficult to reconcile with the Supreme Court’s recent decision. 

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Similar to Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions policies, the actions of several UW departments approximated racial balancing, which the court called “patently unconstitutional.” The university’s business school supported its proposal for TOP funding with a helpful chart showing faculty race by percentage with categories such as “Asian,” “White,” and “African American” and expressed a desire that faculty and student racial diversification proceed “at the same rate.” The school of medicine and public health argued that a targeted hire was necessary in part because “there are only 4.2% of dermatologists of Hispanic origin compared with 16.3% in the general American population.” 

“As recently as five years ago,” boasted the department of gender and women’s studies in another TOP proposal, “our department had only one faculty member who identified as a person of color. Through targeted recruiting and lucky opportunities, roughly 30 percent of our faculty now so identify.” Perhaps those recruits whose race unlocked a separate hiring track felt lucky. It’s doubtful the rest of the applicants did.

Alex Tabarrok:

Maxim Massenkoff asks a very good question. If pollution reduces birth weight as much as the micro studies on pollution suggest, why aren’t birth weights very low in very polluted cities and countries? Figure 1, for example, shows birth weights in a variety of highly polluted world cities. The yellow dashed and blue lines show “predicted” birth weights extrapolated from the well-known Alexander and Schwandt “Volkswagen study” which looked at the effects of increased pollution in the United States. Despite the fact that every one of the highly-polluted cities is much more polluted than the most polluted US city, birth weight is not tremendously lower in these cities. Indeed, there is no obvious correlation between birth weight and pollution at all.

AP:

A federal judge has blocked a Wisconsin school district from requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth while a lawsuit plays out against the school.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said Thursday that the Mukwonago Area School District must allow a transgender student to use facilities that align with their gender identity, temporarily blocking a policy approved last month by the school board, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The order comes in a lawsuit brought anonymously by an 11-year-old transgender student and her mother. The judge ruled that the school’s policy was causing emotional and mental harm to the student, who was described as a boy at birth but has identified as a girl since she was 3 years old.

Zukunft-der-sub

Saving Göttingen State and University Library as an interface between research and infrastructure

Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen) is one of the most prominent and powerful academic libraries in Germany with a wide range of offers and services far beyond Göttingen. It is valued worldwide for its appeal as a location for unique holdings and as a node for innovative developments in research and information infrastructures within an international network and ecosystem.

We need and support the SUB Göttingen as an established and excellent partner, whose supra-regionally significant role should not be limited by a local process of administrative optimization. After all, a modern, high-performance information infrastructure can only function through an international network of cooperating institutions.

Baby Vinick:

Wisconsin schools that had a longer period of virtual or hybrid learning during the pandemic saw graduation rates rise among wealthier students and fall among those at an economic disadvantage, a new study found.

The study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the journal Educational Researcher, analyzed data from 429 public high schools in the state during the 2020-21 school year and two years before then.

It found that between September 2020 to May 2021, a full school year, virtual or hybrid learning increased the socioeconomic gaps in high school graduation rates by nearly 5 percent. Students are considered economically disadvantaged if they are from a household eligible for free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Program. 

Ran Liu, a UW-Madison education professor and author of the study, called the finding that affluent students’ graduation rates increased surprising. But she said disparities in access to resources is likely part of the explanation. And it’s possible that future events – not just a pandemic – could cause new disruptions.  

“We need to understand that in-person schooling may have merits that cannot be replaced by virtual and hybrid learning mode,” Liu said.

Dane County Madison Public Health mandate summary.

“Dance studio complaint”

“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?

Change in the under-5 population at the state level since the start of the pandemic.

New York, Chicago, Illinois, Hawaii… pic.twitter.com/63KqFd17ea

— Connor O’Brien (@cojobrien) July 11, 2023

Michael Bailey:

I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns. 

My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth. 

But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.

On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

The retracted article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). 

ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.

Richard Hanania

The first thing to point out about public education is that it involves an extreme restriction of liberty beyond anything we usually accept. How common is it for government to force you to be in a certain place at a certain time? What I call “time-place” mandates are rare. Sometimes you have to go to the DMV, but even then you spend a short amount of time there, and can generally choose when to go. Sometimes people have to respond to subpoenas or jury duty, but those are uncommon events in most people’s lives. Government says to do your taxes, though you only have a deadline and can fill out the paperwork whenever and under whatever conditions you want.

The only substantial populations of individuals who have their lives structured according to time-place mandates in a free society like ours are prisoners, members of the military, and children. The mandates for children have gotten less strict over the years now that all states allow homeschooling, but opponents of school choice for all practical purposes want to do what they can to shape the incentive structures of parents so that they all use public schools (liberal reformers tend to like vouchers that can be used at charter schools, but not ESAs, which give parents complete control). Of course, children don’t have the freedom of adults, and so others are by default in control of how they spend most of their time. But it’s usually parents, not the government, that we trust in this role. Given the unusual degree to which public education infringes on individual liberty and family autonomy, the burden of proof has to be on those in favor of maintaining such an extreme institution.

Commentary

Jeff Eiden:

But there’s a major problem undercutting our progress. We don’t have nearly enough skilled workers to get this job done at the speed required. It’s estimated that we’re going to need 1 million more electricians and 400 thousand new HVAC technicians in the next ten years. 

Tradespeople are the true lifeblood of the clean energy transition — they do the critical on-the-ground work to rewire homes, upgrade electrical panels, and put solar panels up onto roofs. Without enough of them, we risk falling short of our climate goals, while frustrating the very early adopting customers we need to kickstart the transition to fully electrified buildings.

“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?

Arman Madani:

The resulting $1.78T of debt includes $1.65T that is federally owned (93%). 45M Americans have federal student loan debt. Roughly half of all the debt belongs to individuals with graduate degrees while the other half belongs to individuals with undergraduate degrees; though it’s worth noting that there are fewer graduate students overall so the debt held per student is higher for graduates:

Dave Huber:

A constitutional law professor at Georgia State University recently said it’s “unfortunate” that the Michigan “pronouns” bill making its way through the state legislature is likely unconstitutional.

Georgia State College of Law Professor Eric Segall told Newsweek this was his “personal view” regarding House Bill 4474, which would criminalize sparking “frightened” feelings in someone in a protected class such as sexual orientation or gender identity.

The proposal “is probably in trouble under American law. I also think that’s unfortunate because my personal view is the law should be constitutional, but I think it’s likely not,” he said.

“In a sane world, which is most free countries on Earth, you just outlaw all threats,” said Segall (pictured). “And if you threaten somebody, you go to jail. It’s much more complicated in America. Guns and free speech. America is crazy about both.”

But the author of “Originalism as Faith and Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court is not a Court and its Justices are not Judges” emphasized what makes the U.S. rather unique regarding free speech.

Mitchell Schmidt:

The parent, only identified in the ruling as Jane Doe 4, was the last of 14 parents who initially sued the district in 2020 over a policy that’s part of a guidance document on student gender identity. The policy covered topics that include communication with the families of transgender and nonbinary students about their identities.

The issue of whether the 14 parents who initially sued in 2020 could do so anonymously went to the state Supreme Court, which ruled 4-3 last summer that the parents’ identities must be disclosed to attorneys involved in the case, but not to the public. All but one parent ultimately dropped out of the case.

Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington in November ruled that the parent cannot sue the district because she had not identified any harm she’s suffered or was likely to suffer as a result of the policy.

“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?

Corinne Hess:

Wisconsin schools reported nearly 6,000 instances of seclusion and nearly 7,000 occurrences of physical restraint during the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Among those instances, 1,920 students at 32 percent of Wisconsin’s schools were secluded and 2,856 students at 44 percent of the state’s schools were physically restrained, DPI data shows. The data does not indicate whether these incidents occurred simultaneously.

Students with individualized education programs, or IEPs, comprised 79 percent of all seclusion incidents and 76 percent of all physical restraint incidents reported for the 2021-22 school year, according to DPI. 

Children in elementary schools were also involved in a higher percentage of instances of seclusion and/or physical restraint than other levels of school.

“Reading this report and seeing these numbers can be difficult, but that is nothing in comparison with the emotional difficulty these numbers represent in the lived experiences of students and staff,” State Superintendent Dr. Jill Underly said in a written statement.

Justice Department

A deputy U.S. Marshal pleaded guilty today to misusing a law enforcement service to obtain cell phone location information for personal use.

According to court documents, Adrian Pena, 49, of Del Rio, Texas, used a law enforcement service to locate individuals with whom Pena had personal relationships and their spouses. Pena obtained the cell phone data by uploading blank and random documents to a system operated by Securus Technologies exclusively for authorized law enforcement purposes. Pena falsely certified that those documents were official and that they granted Pena permission to obtain the individuals’ data.

Ann Althouse:

Umaretiya’s observation is based on what he saw colleges and applicants doing before the Supreme Court’s new decision came out. After the decision, there will be even more emphasis on the applicant’s personal essay, and what can students do but tell the best story of their life as a victim of society?

Even before the decision, [Umaretiya] had seen anxious classmates at his selective high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., making up stories about facing racial injustice.

What’s the difference between framing your life story in terms of victimhood and making up stories? Umaretiya says he saw — how did he see? — his own classmates making up stories. That’s the NYT paraphrase. Who knows? Maybe every applicant is honest or no more dishonest than to pick a tale of woe out of context and describe it colorfully. But the heavy reliance on the personal essay as the new way to pursue racial diversity creates far too much temptation and strikes me as quite unfair to those who are scrupulously honest. But who cares? Honest people are all alike. You want diversity.

Carey Wright:

Former State Superintendent of Education Dr. Carey Wright rebuts a recent column in the L.A. Times claiming Mississippi “gamed its national reading test scores.”

Like educators in Mississippi and across the nation, I was shocked by the deeply cynical column in the Los Angeles Times about Mississippi’s well documented achievements in education over the past decade.

While the author acknowledges Mississippi’s historic, and sustained, gains in fourth-grade reading, he attempts to negate this achievement with a critique of unrelated social and health policies in the state. 

Mississippi’s achievements in fourth-grade reading include student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rising from the bottom nationally to ranking to 21st in the nation. In addition, Mississippi students living in poverty scored higher than their peers nationally. This achievement holds steady across all the state’s major racial and ethnic groups: Black, white and Hispanic students from low-income homes in Mississippi achieved higher scores than their peers nationally.

The author takes issue with the fact that some political leaders and journalists call these achievements the “Mississippi Miracle” because the state has more work to do to improve educational outcomes for all students.  

Educators do not call these achievements a “miracle” because we know Mississippi’s progress in education is the result of strong policies, the effective implementation of a comprehensive statewide strategy and years of hard work from the state to the classroom level. We also know Mississippi has more work to do to improve student achievement in all grades, especially among Black and Hispanic students and students living in poverty. Though every state struggles to close achievement gaps, particularly among racial groups, Mississippi ranks No. 2 in the nation for closing the fourth-grade reading achievement gap between students in low-income families and their wealthier peers.

“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?

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%). In addition to the 17% of U.S. adults who have “a great deal” and 19% “quite a lot” of confidence, 40% have “some” and 22% “very little” confidence.

The latest decline in the public’s trust in higher education is from a June 1-22 Gallup poll that also found confidence in 16 other institutionshas been waning in recent years. Many of these entities, which are tracked more often than higher education, are now also at or near their lowest points in confidence. Although diminished, higher education ranks fourth in confidence among the 17 institutions measured, with small business, the military and the police in the top three spots. This was also the case in 2018, the last time higher education was included in the list of institutions.

Hayden Dublois

But in 2022, a Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) review of more than 6,400 hospitals found that nearly two-thirds were not complying with price transparency requirements.³ More recent records suggest that most hospitals are still not compliant today.⁴Other organizations have suggested as many as 75 percent of hospitals are ignoring the price transparency rule.⁵ The Biden administration has come under fire from lawmakers for failing to enforce the rule with publicly accessible information, with one member of Congress noting that, “we can get more information about a local restaurant from Yelp than you can get about your local hospital from CMS.”⁶

Thousands of pages of new records obtained by FGA have shined a light on precisely why so few hospitals are compliant with price transparency requirements. These CMS records—which include detailed warnings, notices of violations, corrective action plan requests, and monetary penalties—span more than 250 hospitals in 46 states and Washington, D.C. The conclusion drawn from the records is clear: CMS simply does not take price transparency seriously.

CMS is providing substantial deference to hospitals on price transparency requirements

Despite the price transparency rule taking effect in January 2021, the Biden administration waited four months before CMS began taking any action, with the first batch of warnings issued in mid-April 2021.⁷ Even so, only a handful of hospitals received warnings in this first month of action—a lackluster start to price transparency enforcement.

Healthcare costs have long been an issue in K-12 budgets.

Chris Hedges:

The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous. 

The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.  

The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks.

Imagine this getting printed todayhttps://t.co/INJY6D7f8W

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 10, 2023

"But while content moderation can limit the distribution … it doesn't go far enough… these big platforms need to subject to… regulation."

– Obama, hosted by Stanford Internet Observatory, praising virality circuit-breakers & European-style "disinformation" speech laws pic.twitter.com/jeAJAW3CIX

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 10, 2023

Joanne Jacobs:

Requiring would-be professors to swear allegiance to a political ideology is a free-speech violation, charges a lawsuit filed in May. John D. Haltigan applied to teach psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He had to submit a “diversity, equity and inclusion ” (DEI) statement, which the suit compares to loyalty oaths required of faculty members during the Red Scare of the ’50s.

Haltigan posted his DEI statement online. It started:

I am committed to colorblind inclusivity, viewpoint diversity, merit-based evaluation, and value outreach to underrepresented groups in higher education. Across all of my teaching and mentorship, I have endeavored to treat students and mentees equally, without regard to identity-based characteristics.

Amanda Geduld:

When high school teacher Rachel King welcomed a new cohort of 10th graders to her classroom in the fall of 2021, she made a discovery: a number of her students had never completed their coursework from the previous year. 

At the time, the 36-year-old taught English at The Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in downtown Brooklyn. It was her 13th year teaching and her third at the all-girls middle and high school, which serves predominantly Black and Latino children from low-income households.

When schools first shifted to remote learning in March 2020, it quickly became clear that students were struggling to log on to their classes and complete assignments. Thousands lacked access to devices, WiFi, or a quiet place to work. As worry spread that many could get left behind, education department officials announced new academic guidelines. Attendance and testing requirements would be waived for the remainder of the year. No student would fail a course.

NCLA:

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is challenging the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) in federal court for coordinating with Google to automatically install spyware on the smartphones of more than one million Commonwealth residents, without their knowledge or consent, in a misguided effort to combat Covid-19. A newly-released video details how DPH’s actions have violated fundamental constitutional rights.

Tyler O’Neil

Moms for Liberty has received countless death threats, but the messages spiked after the Southern Poverty Law Center put the parental rights group on its “hate map,” its cofounders say. 

“It gave people permission to treat us as subhuman,” Tiffany Justice, one of the group’s cofounders, told The Daily Signal. She accused Moms for Liberty’s critics of trying “to whip people up into such a frenzy that they end up sending death threats to me and to the members and our children.”

“Designating us as a hate group gives people permission to dehumanize us, and the SPLC knows it,” Justice added.

The SPLC brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In June, it added a slew of parental rights organizations to that “hate map” for 2022 and labeled them “antigovernment groups,” part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.” 

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced multiple scandals and defamation lawsuits. In 2019, after the SPLC fired its cofounder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the hate accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

Allysia Finley:

When the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused her colleagues of having “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.” Her assessment of the case is as confused as the metaphor. It is Harvard and other elite schools that have been behaving like snooty royalty. Now they will no longer be able to have their cake and eat it too.

Abbie VanSickle and Steve Eder

But he is hardly alone among his colleagues in accepting benefits from rich friends and sympathetic organizations.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg disclosed more trips than any other justice in 2018. During a trip to Israel, she was a guest of the Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn; the year before, the court had given his company a victory by declining to take up a case.”

More.

Mike LaChance

“As a community, we can strive to remove language that may hurt those who have experienced violence from our everyday use”

Why do so many colleges think it’s their job to police speech? This happens all the time.

Bezos Washington Post:

The coronavirus pandemic kept kids home from school for months. Many of them still haven’t really come back — at least not full time.

Chronic absenteeism isn’t a new problem in the United States: The number of students who miss 10 percent or more of the academic year (the amount that most experts agree puts them at risk of falling dangerously behind) was high before 2020. But the situation was improving until covid disrupted good attendance habits that had developed over years of hard work.

By last year, the estimated 8 million students who were chronically absent pre-pandemic had doubled to an estimated 16 million, or about 33 percent of students nationwide. In D.C., according to a recent report, an astonishing 48 percent of kids reached that 10 percent mark — up from 29 percent three years earlier. Obviously, covid’s diminished impact on everyday life hasn’t reversed the patternsdeveloped at the disease’s peak.

The causes of chronic absenteeism, which includes both excused and unexcused absences, can be opaque. The results, however, are as clear as they are concerning.

‘memba how I keep saying Microsoft is way more central in the censorship industry than ppl know…

I just found out Clint Watts is now Director of Microsoft’s Digital Threat Analysis Center…

That is too perfect. Watts was 1 of CISA’s top “disinformation” keynoters & partners pic.twitter.com/qlefngIHM3

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 10, 2023

"The greatest concern is that the delegitimization narratives are going to be believed."

– Renee DiResta, one week b4 the 2020 vote

DiResta used DHS-funded 'domestic disinfo switchboard' to coordinate takedowns of all narratives that could 'delegitimize' a future Biden victory pic.twitter.com/SASvGjU1yI

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 10, 2023

Alex’s Phillips:

An Indigenous tribe descended from the Native American nation that originally controlled the land in Vermont the Ben & Jerry’s headquarters is located on would be interested in taking it back, its chief has said, after the company publicly called for “stolen” lands to be returned.

Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation—one of four descended from the Abenaki that are recognized in Vermont—told Newsweek it was “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands,” but that the company had yet to approach them.

It comes after the ice cream company was questioned as to when it would give up its Burlington, Vermont, headquarters—which sits on a vast swathe of U.S. territory that was under the auspices of the Abenaki people before colonization.

“The U.S. was founded on stolen Indigenous land,” the company said in a statement ahead of Independence Day. “This year, let’s commit to returning it.”

NEW: Letter @ChuckGrassley to US Attorney Weiss obtained @CBSNews detailing Oct. 2020 briefing on alleged bribery scheme involving then-VP Biden + Hunter Biden. IRS agents excluded. Further questions alleged blocks by Weiss deputy.”Did AUSA Wolf take similar proactive measures to… pic.twitter.com/OgxXjohA0C

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) July 9, 2023

A “MUST-PASS” DEFENSE bill wending its way through the United States House of Representatives may be amended to abolish the government practice of buying information on Americans that the country’s highest court has said police need a warrant to seize. Though it’s far too early to assess the odds of the legislation surviving the coming months of debate, it’s currently one of the relatively few amendments to garner support from both Republican and Democratic members. 

Elle Purnell:

In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users’ protected speech in the name of eliminating “misinformation.”

Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell’s hypothetical “Ministry of Truth.” But Orwell’s satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes “truth” is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of “misinformation.”

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of “truth” as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.

Truth, Discerned in Nature by Reason

For most of Western history, philosophers and laymen alike have agreed upon the existence of “truth,” as a factual concept but also as a moral one.

Noah Smith:

In an old Saturday Night Live skit, Chevy Chase, portraying Gerald Ford, says “It was my understanding that there would be no math.” Half a century later, it seems like this has become America’s national motto. Even as high-tech manufacturing has migrated relentlessly to China, plenty of Americans seem to think that they — or anyone — should be able to flourish in a modern economy without a functional understanding of mathematics. U.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average, and our country is utterly dependent on a continuous inflow of foreign talent for a number of critical STEM fields. Math, out of all subjects, seems to hold a special terror for Americans, who often seem to view the subject as a test of innate intelligence rather than a skill that can be acquired and honed through hard work. 

In response to lagging math scores, educators in California have been trying to water down math education — banning students from taking algebra in 8th grade, replacing advanced algebra classes with “data science” courses that don’t even teach the algebra required to understand basic statistics, and so on. I see this as an extremely wrongheaded move, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. But data analyst Armand Domalewski, a friend of mine, has been following the issue far more closely than I have, and has been outspoken about it on social media, so I thought I would ask him to take a crack at saying what needs to be said.

One of the strangest things about California is that it is simultaneously one of the technology capitals of the world and has some of the worst math scores for children in the entire United States. In practice, California has relied on a combination of pockets of home grown math excellence and imported math whizzes from around the globe to bridge the gap between the math skills it needs and the math skills it has. It works, somewhat—but we can and should do better by all of the kids in our state.

Anthony Lonetree:

Difficult decisions to close and merge St. Paul schools ahead of the 2022-23 school year came with a tantalizing goal: Deliver a well-rounded education to elementary students that would include the arts, science and other subjects taught by specialist teachers.

It didn’t turn out that way — not in the first year, at least.

Only about half of 40 elementary schools in the state’s second-largest district provided or were on track to provide a well-rounded education in 2022-23, according to a review by a district official tasked with helping principals reach that goal.

Expectations around the delivery of arts programs, in particular, have dimmed. State law requires districts to offer courses in two of four areas — visual arts, music, dance or theater — and to expose elementary students to a third, under St. Paul’s interpretation.

Gail L. Heriot Alison Somin

It is a not-so-well-kept secret that many colleges and universities discriminate against women in admissions. Believing that there are “too many” qualified women seeking admission, these schools resort to holding female applicants to higher academic standards than they hold male applicants. Title IX prohibits federally-funded public institutions as well as federally-funded private graduate schools and private professional schools from engaging in such discrimination. On the other hand, private undergraduate schools (regardless of whether they accept federal funding), are exempt from Title IX’s core prohibition on sex discrimination when it comes to admissions. In either case, however, this practice is certainly troubling. Why does it get so little attention?

Jo Ellison:

In a brilliant take on the late novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died this month, the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton describes The Road as being the best parenting book of all time.

It’s an unlikely angle and one that might at first seem facetious. The Road, McCarthy’s odyssey about a father and son walking across a post-apocalyptic landscape in the wake of an unspecified disaster, is more generally celebrated for its spare prose and vivid expression than as a viable alternative to nap-training manifestos and toddler-taming manuals.

But for Jezer-Morton, who was caught up in the infrastructural collapse of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the novel’s brilliance (and its most valuable lessons) is found in its immortal “relevance”. As she writes: “It eschews the typical narrative terrain about heroic American ingenuity in the face of adversity and, instead, focuses almost exclusively on the emotional work of being loving and brave while fearing for your life.”

I have never been caught up in an infrastructural collapse, and read The Road while lying on a comfortable bed. But, as with Jezer-Morton, it stirred in me an almost primal fear. As I reached the book’s conclusion, I put it down, crept into my then five-year-old daughter’s bedroom, picked up her sleeping body and put her in my bed. McCarthy’s novel of dystopian survival had been so terrifying, the only comfort I could think of was to hear my daughter breathe.

Every day I’m grateful for that privilege. The most fundamental hope for any parent is to see their children thrive. As parents we are all on the metaphorical road, trudging towards some distant “safe place” in which we can dispense with all the worry associated with taking care of other human beings. And if we’re lucky we will never reach it, because the very act of worry is an indicator that — right now — everything is basically OK. One hopes the hazards on our road will be small, innocuous dangers especially when for so many others, escaping warzones or natural disasters, the road can be a fact of daily life.

Louise Radnofsky:

When Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian was released from Iran after 544 days of imprisonment, he said his welcome home came with bills of $20,000 for unpaid taxes, late payment penalties and interest.

Rezaian had given his brother power of attorney to manage his affairs while he was abroad—but that power didn’t allow his brother to submit tax returns on his behalf. “There was no pause button for wrongful detention,” Rezaian said. “I was a hostage…Why do I have to pay taxes on that?”

Families of wrongfully detained U.S. citizens struggle to maintain detainees’ financial lives in their absence, even as they also wage daily battles to secure their loved one’s freedom. Their bureaucratic battles have spurred government officials, advocacy groups and lawmakers to search for ways to help them cut through the red tape.

Gabrielle Eitzell:

On Tuesday night, progressive commentators Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian from the leftist outlet The Young Turks (TYT) condemned the violent protest and alleged assault against NCAA champion Riley Gaines that occurred at San Francisco State University (SFSU).

Campus Reform has extensively covered the events that transpired at the SFSU event on April 6, during which trans rights activists attacked and trapped Gaines on the California public school’s campus for three hours until San Francisco city police threatened criminal charges against those who did not disperse.

Although the university has called the protest peaceful, the event has been widely criticized, including by members of Congress.

Wall Street Journal

So much for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s gutsy support for school choice. After backing a Senate proposal for school vouchers for K-12 students—one of his 2022 campaign promises—the Democratic Governor caved this week to his party and the unions and will nix the scholarships from the state budget.

OpenAI has been charged with copyright infringement, accusing them of using the comedian’s copyrighted books as training material for GPT. https://t.co/4S9YvnnBff

— @mikko (@mikko) July 9, 2023

Office of Equity and Human Rights:

Language is fluid. Some individuals within groups disagree about terminology, which can discourage some from participating in discussions about identity because they don’t want to “get it wrong” or offend someone. If we avoid difficult conversations, we are not helping to build an inclusive environment.

As our understanding of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability evolves, we must make informed choices about language and adopt a continuous improvement approach— striking a balance between following the lead of the individuals most affected, while using resources developed by experts to avoid overburdening those most affected.

Culturally conscious writers stay up to date on inclusive and equitable language, observing and learning how people and groups self- identify. This guide is a City- wide collaboration and will be updated as terms and language evolve, and the Office of Equity welcomes ongoing input and feedback from all City staff.

Express News:

In a significant development that sets the ball rolling for IIT Madras’ global campus to start operations this year, India signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Tanzania on Thursday to establish the first IIT branch abroad, in Tanzania.

The IIT Tanzania campus is expected to open in October 2023, welcoming 50 undergraduate and 20 master’s students in its first batch. The agreement on Thursday was signed between India’s Ministry of Education, IIT Madras and Tanzania’s Ministry of Education and Vocational Training Zanzibar. In a tweet on Thursday, External Affairs Minister of India Dr. S. Jaishankar thanked President of Zanzibar Dr. Hussein Ali Mwinyi for being present during the MOU signing that, he said, reflects “India’s commitment to the Global South.”

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan tweeted, “The initiative is an embodiment of PM @narendramodi’s commitment to strengthen South-South cooperation as well as forge stronger people-to-people ties with Africa.”

Last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent adopted this law firm’s racial argument that was submitted in an amicus brief. Today, the lawyer who drafted the brief wrote a letter to the court “to clarify” that it was a misstatement. pic.twitter.com/Cg7dax5ahC

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) July 8, 2023

Christopher Rufo

Following the French Revolution, the British philosopher Edmund Burke signaled a note of caution, warning that the desire for progress, uninhibited by convention, can lead to disaster. Revolutions in the name of lofty ideals—liberty, equality, science—can yield their opposites. A revolution in our time merits similar consideration: the transformation of human sexuality and, in particular, the rise of so-called transgender medicine.

The gender surgery program at Oregon Health & Science University, a public teaching hospital in downtown Portland, provides a productive tableau for analysis. The program is led by Blair Peters, a self-described “queer surgeon” who sports neon-pink hair, uses “he/they” pronouns, and specializes in vaginoplasty (the creation of an artificial vagina), phalloplasty (the creation of an artificial penis), and “non-binary” surgeries, which nullify the genitals altogether. Peters and his colleagues have pioneered the use of a vaginoplasty robot, which helps efficiently castrate male patients and turn their flesh into a “neo-vagina.”

Business is booming. According to Peters, OHSU’s gender surgery clinic has “the highest volume on the West Coast,” and his robot-assisted vaginoplasty program can accommodate two patients per day. His colleague Jens Berli, who specializes in phalloplasty, boasts a 12- to-18-month waiting list for a consultation and an additional three- to six-month waiting list for a surgical appointment.

This openness marks a revolution in manners and morals. In the past, transgender theorists acknowledged that their surgical transformations were disturbing and anti-normative. “I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” wrote the male-to-female transgender theorist Susan Stryker in 1994. “I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.”

Timothy Lee:

When ChatGPT was released last fall, a lot of white-collar workers had a chilling thought: “Could this technology do my job?” A May survey by CNBC and SurveyMonkey found that almost a quarter of workers fear losing their jobs to AI in the next few years, including 51% of workers in advertising and marketing and 46% of those in business support and logistics.

But for one white-collar profession — translators — this stopped being a theoretical question years ago. ChatGPT is based on a neural network architecture called the transformer that was first used by Google for machine translation in 2017. So competition from AI has been an everyday reality for human translators for more than five years.

Marc Eybert-Guillon started his career as a translator in 2017. In 2020, he founded From the Void, a firm that helps video game makers localize their games for foreign markets.

John Tierney

Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.

Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.

“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States—a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.

Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).

Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly
Government and social-media companies colluded to stifle dissenters who turned out to be right.

“COVID censorship proved to be deadly. Government and social-media companies colluded to stifle dissenters who turned out to be right… Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the COVID orthodoxy.”https://t.co/0xtIBoYT9Z

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) July 8, 2023

Dane County Madison Public Health mandate summary.

“Dance studio complaint”

Skunk Ledger

Lots of people are arguing about whether college is good, or whether it should be the default, or whether it should look different than it looks now, or whether it’s even a worthwhile institution in the first place. This is no doubt a worthy and important line of inquiry, and yet I am sometimes tempted to bonk such people in the face with the juicy, swollen, succulent, painfully ripe fruit hanging much lower right in front of them: high school.

As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead. Unlike college, which trades off against starting your career immediately, you have to go to high school (or the homeschool equivalent) regardless. And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could; don’t have to support yourself with a salary; and have access to a space with lots of peers and shared materials for free. This is absolutely tantalizing, and yet the default model of high school is something we sleepwalked into and thus are utterly wasting.

John Sailer:

In January, University of Toronto psychologist Yoel Inbar interviewed for a role at UCLA. His girlfriend had received a job offer from the psychology department, and like many universities, UCLA has a dual career program designed to facilitate partner appointments. The interview went well, and as Inbar notes in a recent podcast, he thought that an offer was likely.

A few days after the interview, he received not an offer but, rather, news that a group of more than fifty students signed a letter demanding that he not be hired. Shortly thereafter, he was told that the ad hoc committee to whom the letter was addressed declined to recommend him for a full-department vote. He wasn’t getting the job.

Put simply, Inbar said the wrong things about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which provoked the ire of students. To be clear, Inbar is no critic of DEI. He’s certainly not a conservative. In this respect, the letter is remarkable. It doesn’t just call for what is likely illegal viewpoint discrimination, but it takes issues with opinions that are, at most, only modestly controversial. It’s thus remarkable for a second reason: it perfectly illustrates growing concerns about the effects of far-reaching university DEI policies.

Here are the main points of the letter, which the National Association of Scholars has posted on its website:

Miranda Dunlap:

More than 500 positions will be cut from Houston ISD’s central office staff, the first round of staff downsizing that will further clear the way for new Superintendent Mike Miles’ plan to overhaul campuses across the district.

Miles has been vocal about trimming a central office he described as “bloated” and “amorphous” upon his appointment last month to run HISD by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath. But Friday’s announcement offered the first glimpse into which departments will be impacted by his plans. 

Miles said about 500 to 600 positions will be cut from academics-related departments, along with 40 from human resources. More departments will be affected in the coming weeks, he said.

Miles estimated the cuts from academic departments total 30 percent of current positions, about 3 percent of which were already vacant.

Louisa Clarence-Smith

Parents at a Haringey primary school have been told that schools will fund the lessons for children from black and black heritage families

Basma El Atti:

Against what many Algerians hoped, Algeria resumed what’s quickly becoming an annual ritual of blocking the internet nationwide to thwart a mass epidemic of cheating by students during final exams.

On Sunday, high school seniors in the North African state began their first day of baccalaureate exams, whose results widely shape a student’s academic future.

At 8:30 am, as exam centres opened their doors, the internet went off. Access to social networks and instant messaging, key platforms which reportedly cheating students use to exchange answers to the exams, stopped working. 

Internet was temporarily restored Sunday between 12:30 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. before being cut again around 2:00 p.m. until 4:30 p.m.

“It’s immature what they are doing. I could not get any work done today which will definitely cost me much,” Ahmed, an Algerian freelancer graphic designer, told The New Arab on Sunday.

Many like Ahmed, missed deadlines for their projects or received a scolding frombosses overseas who did not believe that a country can shut down the internet over a high school exam.

BREAKING: Missouri v. Biden:

The government has filed a motion to stay the temporary injunction as it is appealed stating "grave harm" to our democracy if they can't continue to censor Americans. The order permits everything they would need to do to "protect" us…… pic.twitter.com/GUSFmLCdsl

— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) July 7, 2023

Margot Cleveland

Anyone who bothered to wade through the entirety of the opinion should be left shocked and outraged by what our federal overseers did: They targeted Americans and their speech and demanded censorship based on the content and viewpoints expressed — ones that contradicted the official government position.

Sure, the speech censored was overwhelmingly conservative — a fact the court highlighted — but that should not matter. After all, as Judge Doughty stressed, “the right to free speech is not a member of any political party and does not hold any political ideology. It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail…”

Apparently, it did matter, however, for the outrage from the left centered not on the government’s conduct, but on the judge’s injunction. And left-wing sentiments seemed unaffected by our government seeking censorship of supposed “medical misinformation.” 

As The Washington Post’s editorial board reasoned, if communicating threats to “the public safety or security of the United States” to social media is permissible, why not also “other threats?” Why not warn social media companies about “medical misinformation during a public health emergency?” 

The answer is simple, and Judge Doughty put it simply: The Government “does not have the right to determine the truth.”

Yet that is precisely the role our government took on during the Covid-19 pandemic, assuming “a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Doughty said.

Stephen Caruso, Kate Huangpu, Katie Meyer:

This story has been updated to reflect a statement from Gov. Josh Shapiro that confirmed earlier reporting by Spotlight PA.

HARRISBURG — Gov. Josh Shapiro says he plans to scrap his push for private school vouchers in Pennsylvania’s state budget in order to close a deal with the commonwealth’s divided legislature five days after the deadline.

The Democrat issued a statement Wednesday acknowledging that talks had deadlocked over a $100 million voucher program, which he had supported and which state Senate Republicans passed as part of their budget proposal last week. Pennsylvania House Democratic leaders oppose vouchers and had refused to act on the Senate’s bill.

Shapiro’s solution, he said, was to promise state House Democrats that if they pass the Senate’s budget, he will then line-item veto the vouchers from the $45.5 billion spending plan.

“Our Commonwealth should not be plunged into a painful, protracted budget impasse while our communities wait for the help and resources this commonsense budget will deliver,” Shapiro said in a statement.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro promises to veto his own campaign promise: "I will line-item veto the full $100 million [school choice] appropriation." pic.twitter.com/Zx8RzkSMkJ

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 6, 2023

This is an absolutely extraordinary passage in a NYT article from yesterday about the court ruling against the govt's right to suppress speech on social media

It cites a correct statement as evidence of a judge referring to a "debunked claim"https://t.co/DgDiCEFEPT pic.twitter.com/mfWVD6n2yb

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) July 6, 2023

William Jacobson:

Here’s the portion of the segment when I addressed the planned evasion:

(09:39): Anybody who thinks that affirmative [is going away], you see a lot of headlines – ‘Supreme Court ends affirmative action’ ‘ Affirmative action is dead’ etcetera – us kidding themselves. These universities are completely addicted to racial preferences. It is part of their core philosophy on life. It is part of their core being. It’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion has become a religion on campuses. They are not going to give this up.

Harvard, immediately after the decision, sent out a statement that indicates how they’re going do it. So the court drew a distinction. You cannot consider the race of an individual in admissions, but you can consider that person’s personal experiences with racism. And that was something that all the parties had said. You cannot stereotype students. You cannot say all black students get treated the same. All white students get treated the same. But you can, if somebody personally has overcome racism in their lives, you can consider that.

And that is the loophole through which Harvard and other universities are going try to drive a truck. Harvard was very smug about it. They quoted that sentence from the Supreme Court and then they say, of course we will comply with the court’s ruling, meaning that’s how they’re going do it. Of course, they didn’t quote the next sentence in the opinion, which says, these essays and these personal experiences can’t be used as a device to evade our ruling. But that’s exactly what they’re going do.

Anybody who thinks racial preferences are over is kidding themselves. The schools will do a workaround almost universally.

Ted Frank:

Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”

Noah Smith

Over at Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias writes that if Ivies really wanted to promote social justice, they would let in more poor kids instead of fiddling with the name of the English department. Of course, he’s right. Elite schools let in mostly rich kids, because they have every incentive to do so. These schools all give out need-based financial aid, which means that rich kids are a profit center (they pay full price), while poor kids are a cost center (they get a free ride). Even a nonprofit business likes to maximize profit centers and minimize cost centers, so of course the Ivies try their hardest to let in rich kids. Also, given America’s low economic mobility, rich kids are highly likely to become rich adults, and rich adults give big gifts to their alma maters — another important source of income for top schools. So of course these schools aren’t trying to educate the poor. What incentive do they have to do so?

But on a more fundamental level, how much does any of this really matter? How central are the Ivies and other elite private schools to our educational system in the U.S.? And how much would it change our country if they changed their admissions policies?

Josh Blackman

For nearly five decades, affirmative action was sustained on the opinion of Justice Louis Powell. The key vote in Bakke thought that a diverse student body could improve learning on campus. Ultimately, Grutter adopted Justice Powell’s rationale, and held that universities have a compelling interest to pursue the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body. That simple premise spawned an entire institution around “diversity.” Universities were forced to frame every decision they took in terms of using “diversity” as a way to help students learn. Of course, the real justification for affirmation action could be found in Justice Marshall’s Bakke opinion. He grounded racial preferences for black students (and not other races) in the centuries of oppression, slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Indeed, the “educational benefits” approach tokenized minority students as curiosities for white students to learn from. Advocates for affirmative action had to grit their teeth to stay in the good graces of old white folk like Justices Powell and O’Connor.

Fast forward to Students for Fair Admissions. The majority opinion did not formally reverse Grutter–though I agree with Justice Thomas that the precedent is all but overruled. Still, the “educational benefits” rationale seems to have been nullified. Harvard identify several specific educational benefits it was pursuing:

Respondents have fallen short of satisfying that burden. First, the interests they view as compelling cannot be subjected to meaningful judicial review. Harvard identifies the following educational benefits that it is pursuing: (1) “training future leaders in the public and private sectors”; (2) preparing graduates to “adapt to an increasingly pluralistic society”; (3) “better educating its students through diversity”; and (4) “producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks.”

The Court easily found those rationales were not sufficient:

Although these are commendable goals, they are not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny. At the outset, it is unclear how courts are supposed to measure any of these goals. How is a court to know whether leaders have been adequately “train[ed]”; whether the exchange of ideas is “robust”; or whether “new knowledge” is being developed?

Of course, the shortcomings of the “diversity rationale” were apparent in Fisher II, and Grutter. Nothing has changed. The voluminous trial record was irrelevant. But the earlier Courts, stocked with “brave” judges of “wisdom,” did not ask the hard questions. They blindly deferred to the universities.

Collin Binkley

A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.

The practice of giving priority to the children of alumni has faced growing pushback in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in higher education. The NAACP added its weight behind the effort on Monday, asking more than 1,500 colleges and universities to even the playing field in admissions, including by ending legacy admissions.

The civil rights complaint was filed Monday by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.

More on Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Burris, 33, was born in Taycheedah women’s prison on June 19 — Juneteenth. Her great-grandmother, Alline Atkins, became her caregiver when she was three days old.

An elementary school teacher told Burris about the historical importance of her birthday, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. Burris liked how her birthday equated to freedom.

“I think because of that I always was a bit of a rebel,” she said.

Around age 6, Burris said, she was “snatched out of school and taken to some strange building and basically told I’m never going home again.” She’s still, to this day, unsure why she was placed into the foster care system.

Burris reunited with her mom at age 13 but was kicked out of the house a couple of years later. She dropped out of high school after sophomore year.

Dan Lennington and Will Flanders

Encouraging high-school graduation is a policy that garners broad support, as it paves the way for higher wages and a better quality of life. In 2015, bipartisan majorities passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, a law aimed at reducing dropout rates. Since then, dropout rates have declined about 13%. But now a new twist: education bureaucrats in Wisconsin are taking a misguided approach by injecting race into dropout calculations. This new policy wrongly assumes that a student’s race is a dropout risk factor, perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

To identify students at-risk of dropping out, most school districts employ something called an “Early Warning System.” This tool is a relatively simple computer program that takes risk factors, weighs them, and then labels some students at-risk, which triggers personalized intervention strategies to help them graduate.

So, what is a dropout risk factor? It’s common sense: attendance, behavior, academic performance, and personal obstacles (homelessness and number of address changes, for example). Students ranking low in two or three of these are identified for extra support.

Simple enough. But commonsense isn’t enough for some schools. Wisconsin is adding another risk factor: race.

Wisconsin’s Dropout Early Warning System, or DEWS, uses race to predict how likely Wisconsin students are to graduate from high school. So if a student is Black, that’s a dropout risk in the same way as a student who is frequently absent.

In practice, however, adding race doesn’t really work. According to a recent investigation by Chalkbeat and The Markup, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organizations, DEWS generated highly inaccurate data, predicting many more Black and Hispanic students would drop out than actually did.

Wisconsin’s own internal validation test showed that the system was wrong almost 75% of the time. This leads to several negative consequences. Decades of education researchprove that students perceived as likely to be low achieving by teachers, even at random, learn less than students for whom expectations are higher. Moreover, distributing resources based on these wrong assumptions will invariably take those resources away from other students who actually do need the help.

Apart from wondering why Wisconsin would use a factor that led to inaccurate results, you may also wonder whether using race to predict drop-out risk is, well, a bit racist.

When asked about that, Wisconsin’s education spokeswoman Abigail Swetz explained, “The reality is that we live in a white supremacist society, and the education system is systemically racist.” 

By artificially injecting “race” as a predictor, Wisconsin education officials are not actually measuring dropout risks. They are making a political statement about their belief in the theory of systemic racism. Adherents to this hold that all racial disparities are caused by racism. Therefore, if more Blacks than whites are dropping out of school, then the cause must be racism. So it makes perfect sense to add race as a dropout factor, since race is the real reason why kids are dropping out.

Taxpayer funded DPI:

“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?

Liam Knox:

When Duke University opened its campus in Kunshan, China, almost a decade ago, it was following on the heels of a movement of institutions eager to establish beachheads in the country during the political and economic détente of the mid-2010s.

But at a meeting with faculty and staff in November, Duke president Vincent Price said the institution’s leaders would “have to be clear-eyed” when considering whether to continue their contract with local partner institution Wuhan University when it comes up for renewal in 2027. 

Price said he was proud of Duke Kunshan and happy that Duke could be a “lifeboat” for students who wanted to come to America. But between rising geopolitical tensions and the gauntlet of managing a Chinese presence through the pandemic, operating the campus had become an undeniably tall order. 

“The world is conspiring to make that kind of a project really hard these days,” he said.

NYT claims court injunction against gov censorship will impede the work of "disinfo" researchers. The first expert quoted runs the UNC think tank that helped produce a report claiming Asian American opposition to affirmative action is a form of "disinfo"🙄https://t.co/bVmRSZT3rx

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 6, 2023

Glenn Reynolds:

In recent months, we’ve seen a lot of public-health folks quietly rowing back their once-apocalyptic COVID advice and asking for forgiveness for the mistakes they made.

Well, to make mistakes is human, and to forgive them is divine. 

But it’s easier to forgive human mistakes that aren’t pronounced using the Voice of God.

And deliberate misrepresentations don’t count as mistakes. Those count as lies, because that’s what they are.

In the early days of COVID, Anthony Fauci told the public that masks didn’t work.

It turned out that wasn’t based on the science of masks and COVID (there wasn’t any) but rather on a desire to preserve mask supplies for health workers.

Sarah Karp

Mayor Brandon Johnson is replacing all but one member of the Chicago Board of Education, bringing on advocates with experience in grassroots organizing and nonprofit organizations. 

The changes are among the new mayor’s most pivotal decisions to date as he looks to transform education in the city. Johnson spent most of his career in education and with the Chicago Teachers Union, which helped catapult him from political outsider to City Hall.

The new board will have a different feel than in past years when consultants, lawyers and bankers filled many of the seven seats. Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed more educators and Chicago Public Schools parents than her predecessors, and Johnson is moving further in that direction by appointing several activists to his new board. Only one of his appointees is a lawyer, and she runs a legal aid organization, while another new member works in philanthropy at a bank.

John McWhorter:

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program….

Mark Judge;

The Supreme Court ended its season by exploding punitive liberalism.

The phrase “punitive liberalism” was coined by James Piereson in his remarkable 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. Simply put, punitive liberalism means liberalism that exists to punish the United States for all the world’s problems. From foreign policy to racism to personal psychological ills, America is the world’s great Satan.

In its recent landmark rulings, the Supreme Court has blown the doors off punitive liberalism. It has ruled that:

• Racism is bad no matter who does it.
• You can’t punish someone for being a Christian and speaking freely. And, in shooting down President Biden’s loan-forgiveness scam,
• That other people won’t pay your debts.

With the Dobbs decision last year, it ruled that it’s bad to kill innocent babies.

Marcella Moon:

Google has updated its privacy policy to state that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models. The tech giant has changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched “AI models” for “language models.” It also stated that it could use publicly available information to build not just features, but full products like “Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.” By updating its policy, it’s letting people know and making it clear that anything they publicly post online could be used to train Bard, its future versions and any other generative AI product Google develops.

The tech giant has highlighted the changes to its privacy policy on its archive, but here’s a copy of the pertinent part:

Conor Friedersdorf

John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants. “To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric,” the complaint alleges, “an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable.” Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired…. 

What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”… 

Commentary

Erica Werner:

A tax on mansion sales in Los Angeles was intended to raise millions to fight homelessness. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Instead, wealthy Angelenos rebelled, putting the brakes on sales of homes priced at $5 million and above — those targeted by the initiative — with the result that the tax has raised far less money than expected since taking effect April 1.

The money is intended for eviction prevention, tenant outreach, emergency assistance, affordable housing acquisition and more. Backers of the tax, which passed via a ballot initiative with 58 percent of the vote last year, say they expect sales to pick up once the real estate market adjusts to the change. But taxpayer rights groups and landlord organizations have filed suit to stop the tax, and until the litigation is resolved, some owners will hold off selling, and city officials will proceed cautiously on spending money they might end up giving back.

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Meantime, debate over the legislation has laid bare the vast gap between the rich and the poorthat’s come to characterize life in Los Angeles, and much of the country, in recent years. The city’s homelessness crisis, with more than 40,000 people living on the street, is related to a shortage of affordable housing so severe that even some with jobs cannot afford to rent property, much less buy it — problems that the so-called “mansion tax” is intended to address.

The homeless population increased by 32 percent from 2018 to 2020, but has grown more slowly in the years since, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Los Angeles has long been a land of extremes, but homelessness may be the ultimate test of whether the liberal dream factory that makes entertainment for the globe can resolve a crisis of humanity in its own backyard.

Opponents argue that a $5 million home can hardly be called a mansion in Los Angeles these days, when the super-rich reside in properties with price tags of $20 million and above.

Moving the Limit

There’s a strange subpopulation of Ivy League undergraduate students. They’re accomplished, driven, and capable. Yet they’re deathly averse to genuine effort. In fact, they actively sabotage their own goals.

In college, as the years passed and the stakes rose higher (from intro classes to job hunting) I noticed some of my friends spent increasing time consuming reality TV, experimenting with drugs, or partying. They drowned themselves in pleasure and mindlessness rather than send an application or crack open a textbook. Although they talked about how badly they wanted to achieve, it seemed that their real goal was to guarantee failure.

“Maybe they got sloppy, maybe they lacked drive, or maybe they couldn’t discipline themselves.” Maybe. But in my late-night talks with them, I found that it ran deeper than apathy, laziness, or an inability to self-manage. After a lifetime of habitual success, my friends weren’t suddenly struggling with the familiar road to achievement; instead, they were actively sprinting in the opposite direction.

Why? Why were these overachievers suddenly sabotaging their own goals?

Isolde Raftery and Ashley Hiruko

The gun is a Glock 32 that was manufactured in 2017. It is easy to control because it is light, with the feel of a two-pound weight when its 13 bullets are in the magazine. 

It is all black, no frills, and moves through the recoil quickly. That means the shooter barely feels it when it discharges, allowing him to take aim again, and shoot again, even if he is a child. It is valued at $491.

The gun’s owner is a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, a 39-year-old man named Mark who lives in Lynnwood, Washington, a suburb north of Seattle, in an apartment complex with his wife and children – and until last fall, the Glock, which he kept in a black belt bag in his bedroom closet.

***

Last October, a few days before Halloween, Mark called 911. The Glock was gone. He told police that he asked his wife and 14-year-old son if they’d seen it, and they said they had not. We are not including Mark’s last name because he has not been charged with a crime, nor is there talk that he might be, even though there could: Washington state requires that you lock up your gun if you live with children.

Mark’s son admitted later that he had lied and had, in fact, taken the gun. 

It was 5 p.m. on a late summer day, or maybe early fall; accounts differ. He took the belt bag from his dad’s closet and walked down three flights of stairs to a secluded spot behind his apartment building, a narrow area with a railing that oversees a lush ravine. There, he opened the bag so his friends could see the gun.

Joseph Menn, Will Oremus, Cat Zakrzewski and Naomi Nix:

Issued on the Fourth of July, the order found that the Biden administration probably violated the First Amendment in applying pressure to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media firms to restrict the viral spread of posts that stoked fears about coronavirus vaccines or fueled false claims related to U.S. elections.

Leading U.S. social media companies began coordinating regularly with the federal government in 2017, following revelations of a Russian campaign to sow discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Partnerships between Silicon Valley and Washington on what the tech companies call “content moderation” deepened and broadened during the pandemic, when platforms such as Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram became hotbeds for conspiracy theories about the virus and opposition to public health guidance.

The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a host of other plaintiffs, sued Biden and a bevy of government agencies and officials in 2022, alleging that they had cajoled and coerced the tech firms into removing or suppressing speech that is protected under the First Amendment. The Biden administration has argued that it did not violate the First Amendment, but rather used its bully pulpit to promote accurate information in the face of a public health crisis and foreign interference in U.S. elections.

Govenor Evers veto has put state and property tax payers on the hook for more than $57 Billion in new K12 costs over the next 20 years assuming current enrollment trends continue. By 2043, we’d be on the hook for nearly $5 billion per year. pic.twitter.com/C6k2RnTu42

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) July 5, 2023

Analysis.

Wisconsin got $1.49 BILLION to help students after the pandemic broke them.

With just 1 YEAR LEFT TO USE ESSER III, $492 MILLION is unallocated. What the heck happened with the money?!

Green Bay: $33 MILLION left
Beloit: $18 MILLION
Oshkosh: $11 MILLION
Superior: $5 MILLION pic.twitter.com/lem8kG4tKP

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) July 5, 2023

Edward Luce:

If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities. Last week the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in US higher education — a ruling mourned by the heads of each of the eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth even offered counselling to traumatised students. An ancient Roman might have thought something radical had changed. Little could be further from the truth.

Of the 31mn Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools undergraduates — about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or Hispanic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago’s South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. That is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. It is an optical illusion. In that respect the Supreme Court has done America a favour. Any disruption to this status quo is a plus.

But it is unlikely to trigger the soul-searching America needs. The US debate remains stubbornly monopolised by the ethnic breakdown of the tiny number of students who win the Ivy League lottery. The 19mn or so of those 31mn young Americans who do not progress beyond high school, and the roughly 12mn who go to less elite colleges, barely feature. Whatever tweaks the Ivy League has to make to keep its diversity ratios after last week’s ruling are thus largely irrelevant to the 99.8 per cent that will never get there.

The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained. The key to the Ivy League is exclusivity; a big expansion in intake would dilute that premium. We are thus likely to continue with a situation in which universities such as Harvard, with a $53bn endowment, or Princeton with $36bn, continue to get richer. Each of these fortunes could revolutionise financial aid at dozens of public universities.

The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white.

The second, legacy students, are the close relatives of alumni — the very definition of elite reproduction. Again, these are mostly white. The third, dean’s List, is a euphemism for the children of people who have donated a lot of money. An example of this is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose father, Charles, gave $2.5mn to Harvard. Finally, there are the children of faculty members and staff. Taken together, the Ivy League could as easily be construed as an affirmative action plan for wealthy white people, which is very far from the progressive brand it has cultivated.

Its chief victims are Asian. The historic irony is rich. Affirmative action was conceived in the 1960s as a form of reparation for the descendants of slaves. It quickly morphed into a system of race-based gaming for many ethnicities. The group that has lost out the most, Asian-Americans, are immigrants from countries that had nothing to do with US slavery. The chief beneficiaries have been elite whites, rather than African-Americans. The latter supply window dressing for a system that remains substantially unchanged.

1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year

Abbey Machtig

This rural patch on Madison’s West Side is one of more than 35 school gardens around the Madison School District, including Lapham, Midvale and Crestwood Elementary schools, Badger Rock Middle School and East and West High Schools. 

Although school is out for the summer, the gardens are far from empty. A network of volunteers and employees help with garden maintenance, and summer camps give students a chance to get outside. The summer camp at Spring Harbor Middle School, currently in session, hosts more than 80 students between the ages of 10 and 14 over the summer. 

Getting your hands dirty 

School gardens aren’t just a place for students to burn off excess energy. By getting their hands dirty outside, students are developing critical learning skills, said Dave Ropa, a science teacher at Spring Harbor and the school’s greenhouse and garden coordinator.

“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?

Ann Althouse

From the article: 

In a 155-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana barred White House officials and multiple federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from censorship. 

The judge’s injunction came in a lawsuit led by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana who alleged that the Biden administration fostered a “federal censorship enterprise” in its effort to stamp out what it viewed as rampant disinformation circulating on social media. The government, the lawsuit claimed, pressured social-media platforms to scrub away disfavored views about Covid-19 health policies, the origins of the pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop story, election security and other divisive topics…. 

Some legal scholars have been skeptical that the government can be held responsible for content-moderation decisions ultimately made by private companies or that courts could intervene without chilling legitimate government speech about controversial matters of public interest…. 

Matt Taibbi:

The country today is run by politicians who spend all their time telling us freedom is dangerous, and the press won’t go near the word unless it can wedge it into an act of self-flagellation, à la the Washington Post headline today: “How an enslaved genius saved the Capitol dome’s ‘Freedom’ statue.” The one thing this country doesn’t need to be ashamed of is its unifying idea, and our cultural and political leaders have somehow managed to turn even that into a source of division.