Anna Stokke

Imagine hiring a piano teacher who can’t play the piano or a swimming instructor who’s terrified of water. While it’s clear that these examples are absurd, the Manitoba government seems to have missed the obvious: teachers can’t teach what they don’t know.

Last week, Manitoba quietly announced significant changes to teacher certification. Manitobans should be deeply concerned.

For example, previously K-8 teachers were required to complete two courses in each of math, science, English and history. These requirements — and others — have been removed entirely. There are now no mandated core subject requirements for teachers in training at any level.

Acting education minister Tracy Schmidt, made the remarkable claim that this will “help support students.” It’s unclear if the politicians endorsing these regulations fully understand the consequences. The changes, billed as “removing barriers,” instead strip away critical requirements for foundational knowledge that teachers need to be effective in their jobs.

The government claims this will “align Manitoba with other Canadian jurisdictions,” but this is misleading. Most provinces require K-8 teachers to take at least one, and often two, math courses at the university level. Quebec mandates five courses for middle school math teachers, and Ontario recently introduced a math proficiency test for all teachers.

University of Manitoba’s dean of education Jan Stewart supported the lowered standards, claiming there is little research to suggest someone with an extensive background in a teachable subject is more effective in the classroom. Common sense tells us that you can’t teach what you don’t understand, and it’s challenging to help students in a subject you struggle with.

——-

Our govt’s decision to remove all subject area requirementsfor teachers will make things worse.

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?

Joseph Cox:

The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant.IMAGE: 404 MEDIA.

This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media.

Bill Ackman:

A recent study at Harvard found that roughly 50% of the students and professors wouldn’t discuss “uncomfortable” topics. An essential life skill is the ability to change your mind. She won’t learn that at any Ivy league school. Their reputations are still so strong that their faculty, staff and graduates all possess the arrogant certainty of religious fanatics.

I am sorry to disappoint you. I wish her the best in her search for a school,

WILL:

The News: As K-12 education leaders across the country face an increasingly complex Title IX regulatory regime, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI), and the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) released today a crucial resource guide. Titled “Protecting Title IX: A Resource Guide for School Boards,” this guide aims to empower school boards with the legal insights needed to understand and respond to the complex Title IX requirements of the federal government. A national webinar will take place on November 20, 2024, at 1 p.m. ET.

The Quotes: WILL Education Counsel Cory Brewer stated, “School board members need complete and accurate information—not intimidation. Our Title IX Resource Guide provides an in-depth analysis with essential legal citations to help both new and experienced board members make informed decisions as they adopt policies for their local communities. It also explains how the recent changes to Title IX conflict with its original purpose of protecting women and girls from discrimination. We believe this will serve as an invaluable resource nationwide.”

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The state’s recently projected $23 billion in deficits over the next five years should come as a big surprise for Illinoisans given how well the Pritzker administration says it has managed the state’s finances in recent years. Illinois has “balanced its budgets,” “paid down its unpaid bills,” and “created a rainy day fund,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker has repeated often.

Despite all that, Illinois is right back to the multi-billion dollar deficits it had right before covid. A look at the state’s budget forecasts, done by the governor’s OMB, reveals why. Pritzker wants to continue the pandemic-era spending he’s put together since coming into office in 2019. If the governor has his way, the state’s budget will have grown by a whopping $23 billion by 2030 – a near 60% increase in little more than a decade.

More..

The Virginia teachers union sent this email to members after Trump won

Eigen

incidentally six of seven major accreditation institutions as of last year had a DEI standard that they apparently impose on schools during accreditation

Steve Hsu:

Students can graduate from most US colleges, even “elite” colleges, without the ability to solve quadratic equations or graph simple functions.

There is no possible way that we can compete in technology vs PRC with our degraded higher education system.

I was a senior administrator at a Big Ten university – I know exactly what has gone on in our system for the past few decades.

“Data science” teams analyzed enrollments and found courses which were difficult (i.e., had high failure rates) for students admitted based on affirmative action. Algebra 2 was one of them. It was eliminated in favor of easier “math for real life” courses with higher pass rates.

This has been going on for decades.

——

Harvard Launches New Intro Math Course to Address Pandemic Learning Loss

Stephen L. Miller

In the final month of the 2024 election, the national media existed in another solar system from the country for whom is tasked at reporting accurate, unbiased and truthful information. The final month started with Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic attempting to regurgitate their anonymously sourced “suckers and losers” hit against Trump from 2020. With the help of CNN and others, they resurfaced General John Kelly. Then they went and got their full Reich on by comparing Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 Nazi rally there. At said rally a comedian known for celebrity roasts made a crass joke about Puerto Rico, which blanketed the whole of national media outlets for four days. 

When the October jobs report was released on the final Friday of October, showing an anemic growth of only 12,000 jobs, the national media focused all of their attention on comments Trump made about former representative Liz Cheney, who had become a Kamala Harris campaign surrogate, regarding sending her off to fight the wars her family and in particular her father had endorsed. 

The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC created an echo chamber of thought bubbles that only they were listening to. The country had completely tuned them out. None of these stories actually mattered to voting audiences and the election result, with almost every major voting demographic moving toward Donald Trump in an electoral blowout. 

Kyle Koenen:

Jill Underly’s proposed DPI budget would eat up 65% of the state’s budget surplus, all while allowing property taxes to continue to go up. We fund students at approximately $20k per student on average. When is it enough?

Abbey Machtig:

State Superintendent Jill Underly is proposing more than $4 billion in new spending for Wisconsin public schools to increase special education funding and to allow school districts’ spending limits to match the rate of inflation.

The Department of Public Instruction’s 2025-27 budget request also proposes free school meals for all Wisconsin students, and more mental health and early literacy programming, along with a $10,000 stipend for student teachers.

The new spending would decrease the number of school districts turning to local taxpayers for more money through referendums, Underly said. In 2024, nearly half of Wisconsin’s more than 400 school districts asked voters to approve increases in local funding.

Quinton Klabon:

But here is what NCES says: 2022 special education state revenue for districts divided by IDEA students.

We are middling, not top nor bottom.

——-

Our govt’s decision to remove all subject area requirementsfor teachers will make things worse.

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?

NCTQ:

NCTQ regularly convenes reading experts — researchers, teacher educators, and experienced elementary educators — to review both textbooks and educational resources, such as journal articles or instructional videos, used by teacher preparation programs in their required reading coursework. These experts examine how well each material aligns with scientifically based reading instruction, a science rooted in 60+ years of research on what makes for the most effective methods to teach young students to read.

Our govt’s decision to remove all subject area requirementsfor teachers will make things worse.

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?

Nearly one year later, when I visited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office on behalf of an organization I was working for, I found a packet of crumpled-up American flag stickers in the trash can. I pulled them out quietly, not wanting her staff to see me, and put them in my backpack. I felt sad but thought I would take them to my brother’s kids when I saw them again. I knew they would appreciate them. 

I was never happier about a Democratic victory than when Obama won in 2008. Blacks, whites, young and old, women and men rejoiced together, dancing in the streets to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” everyone feeling joy, and more importantly, hope. The same was true of my family—I can still remember how excited my mom was to vote for him. After eight years of George W. Bush, of the Iraq War, of repeated job losses, and growing income inequality leading to the financial crisis of 2007, we all thought Obama would return the country’s priorities to jobs for the middle and working class.  

But it didn’t turn out that way. As much as anything, he was a Democratic technocrat. Still, in 2016, when Trump ran against Clinton, I was one of those people who laid in bed for three days when the Democrats lost. By then, however, I was an outlier in my family, who had already made the shift to Trump—as had millions of others in Missouri, a former bellwether state that grew redder with every election. For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why.

In 2019, I decided to move to San Francisco, a place where you’re unlikely to hear anything good said about Trump. After that, I got married to a man who worked in the Bay Area, and my circle of acquaintances was virtually all Democrats.

Angus Deaton:

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists.

Kevin Klein:

The Wab Kinew Manitoba NDP government has made a shocking decision that should concern every parent, grandparent, and guardian in this province: it has lowered the standards for teachers.

Without public notice or meaningful consultation, they’ve quietly removed the requirement for teachers to study basic subjects such as English, math, and science before teaching them to our children in K-8 classrooms. This decision is a clear signal that the quality of education in Manitoba is not the priority it should be. Instead, the NDP appears to be catering to special interests rather than focusing on what is best for our children’s future.

This is not about politics, it’s about the fundamental right of every child in Manitoba to receive a strong, well-rounded education. Lowering standards for teachers is not just a misguided policy decision — it’s an affront to the very principles of education.

It’s a betrayal of the trust parents place in our schools to provide a solid foundation in essential subjects. With one of the highest-paid teaching professions in the country, Manitoba should be striving for excellence in education, not lowering the bar to make it easier for underqualified individuals to enter the classroom.

Aaron Sibarium:

The day after Hillary Clinton was nominated by the Democratic National Committee in 2016,  Yale Law School congratulated Clinton, class of 1973, “on her historic nomination for President of the United States.” Eight years later, it is refusing to congratulate J.D. Vance on his actual election.

The school has made no statement about the vice president-elect, who graduated from Yale Law in 2013, since he and Donald Trump scored a landslide victory on Tuesday. And according to Debra Kroszner, the law school’s chief of staff, it doesn’t plan to.

Kroszner told the Washington Free Beacon that the school would include “this news” in the next issue of its alumni magazine—which is only published twice a year—but would not congratulate Vance publicly, citing a new policy against issuing institutional statements.

Timor Kuran:

US academics live in fear of the thought police. They can’t teach freely or ask questions that might generate unwoke conclusions. Meanwhile, the AAUP, rather than trying to protect academic freedoms, is working hard to politicize universities and make them even more illiberal.

Nate Tenhundfeld:

In a prior post for Free the Inquiry, I showed regional differences in requiring submission of DEI statements by applicants as part of the hiring process. The analysis showed a notable relationship between the politics of a state and whether job ads for full-time professorships in that state requested a DEI statement as part of their application process.

As a follow-up, I wanted to see what emerges if we expand the dataset to include all faculty positions, not just full-time professorships. Would including job ads for non-tenure-track positions (e.g., lecturers or adjunct professors) change the picture?

I gathered job ads from HigherEdJobs.com for relevant jobs in the U.S. posted during August 2024. In total, there were 5,005 jobs from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., covering 966 institutions. Of those, 1,907 were for full-time professorship positions (used in the original analysis) and 3,098 were for non-tenure track positions.

More.

Matthew Syed:

Apparently it’s all Donald Trump’s fault that Europe is feeling suddenly vulnerable, Ukraine may be sold down the swanny and the world might implode with the end of Nato. If only the orange fella had not gone into politics, had not ridden down the golden escalator, Europe could have continued marching towards utopia, untroubled by populists, fascists and the other troublemakers who keep interfering with our dreams of a compassionate, enlightened, welfare-provisioned nirvana.

Delusional, sadly, doesn’t do justice to much of the commentary in the days since the world view of what Dominic Cummings calls the “insider class” crumpled in the time it took for the first exit poll to detonate through the airwaves. Only Orwell, or perhaps Swift, could adequately satirise the cognitive dissonance

SNL 2016

Chris Murphy:

2/ The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us.

James Lewis:

Heard a joke on NPR: The #Democrats started as the party of farmers, became the party of the factories, and are now the party of the faculty club. A better explanation of electoral outcomes than foreign interference.

And why do the same people who demanded vaccine IDs for you to do anything, are the same ones who say ‘No ID for voting!’

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Why is the MSM dangerous?
Explicit State Propaganda does not work (e.g. Soviet Pravda) because it is too visible. MSM gives us the illusion of free info: lobbies bully professionally fragile journalists who can be black/greylisted hence unemployable & create a monoculture.

Scott McNeally;

This needs to be eliminated immediately. The parents need the money, not the Feds. Cut Fed taxes, let the States educate their children. The DoEdu has not made a dent in test scores ever.

238,400,000,000 2024 US Department of Education Budget…

Vitalik:

One of the Ethereum applications that has always excited me the most are prediction markets. I wrote about futarchy, a model of prediction-based governance conceived by Robin Hanson, in 2014. I was an active user and supporter of Augur back in 2015 (look, mommy, my name is in the Wikipedia article!). I earned $58,000 betting on the election in 2020. And this year, I have been a close supporter and follower of Polymarket.

To many people, prediction markets are about betting on elections, and betting on elections is gambling – nice if it helps people enjoy themselves, but fundamentally not more interesting than buying random coins on pump.fun. From this perspective, my interest in prediction markets may seem confusing. And so in this post I aim to explain what it is about the concept that excites me. In short, I believe that (i) prediction markets even as they exist today are a very useful tool for the world, but furthermore (ii) prediction markets are only one example of a much larger incredibly powerful category, with potential to create better implementations of social media, science, news, governance, and other fields. I shall label this category “info finance“

Make debate great again.

More.

No other country in the world treats their citizens living abroad this way.

Olivia Reingold:

And yet, in the Democratic city of Chicago, asylum seekers—meaning those who have applied for asylum but are not even likely to get it—were eligible for up to $15,000 in rental support.

Many were left wondering how it is that a party that prides itself on taking care of the vulnerable doesn’t seem to care about them. Worse, party brass seemed to think they were “deplorables.”

Mark Halperin:

At its heart, the IOP works to encourage students to examine critically and think creatively about politics and public issues – all politics and all public issues. It cannot effectively do that when only one side is represented. We would be doing a disservice to our students — and to our country — with anything less.

Alan Blinder:

For more than a century, professors have regularly had vast influence over instruction, personnel and other hallmarks of campus life, sharing sway with presidents and trustees in decisions shaping many parts of campus life — an authority that is unfathomable in many workplaces.

But this year has shown how fraught and fragile that practice, known as shared governance, has become at public and private universities alike.

Arizona lawmakers sought to do away with legal guarantees of faculty power at public universities, their ambitions thwarted only by the governor’s veto. At the University of Kentucky, trustees dissolved the University Senate and made professorial influence only advisory. Amid protests at Columbia University, the school’s then-president provoked fury when she defied a University Senate committee and called in the police.

A coast-to-coast wipeout of faculty influence is not imminent, despite years of swelling suspicions of higher education and repeated attacks on tenure protections. But in recent months, professors have warned of an erosion of their power that they fear could undermine university culture. Some see efforts to diminish shared governance as part of a campaign to curb faculty participation in events, like campus protests over the war in Gaza, that have left universities vulnerable to criticism. …

Anna Stokke:

Part of an excellent comment left on LinkedIn. “Education is a great equalizer…our children, especially those who one day hope to lift themselves out of poverty, deserve nothing less than their teachers being held to a high standard.”

Tyler Cowen:

There are a lot of numbers, but here is the comparison I find most impressive: Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this school year. That is a 40% decline from a decade ago…

As might be expected, the trajectory for student debt is down as well. About half of last year’s graduates had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics — if something cannot go on forever, it will stop — is basically true. Due to changes in the formula, aid for Pell Grants is up, which helps to limit both student debt and the expenses of college.

More.

Will Fitzhugh:

There has been no better eulogy for Churchill than that given by Leo Strauss, a German Jew who left Germany in time to escape the death camps. One of his teachers was Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of note and a Nazi, who provided some of the impulse for Strauss to return to the classics and begin the recovery of political philosophy as a quest for the truth. Churchill died on January 24, 1965. When Strauss came into class and was informed of Churchill’s death, he said:

“The death of Churchill is a healthy reminder to students of political science of their limitations, the limitations of their craft.

“The tyrant stood at the pinnacle of his power. The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant—this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.

“No less enlightening is the lesson conveyed by Churchill’s failure, which is too great to be called tragedy. I mean the fact that Churchill’s heroic action on behalf of human freedom against Hitler only contributed, through no fault of Churchill’s, to increase the threat to freedom which is posed by Stalin or his successors. Churchill did the utmost that a man could do to counter that threat—publicly and most visibly in Greece and in Fulton, Missouri.

Miles Kruppa:

Most companies are starting to figure out how artificial intelligence will change the way they do business. Chegg CHGG 0.00% is trying to avoid becoming its first major victim.

The online education company was for many years the go-to source for students who wanted help with their homework, or a potential tool for plagiarism. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs.

Marc Andreessen:

Every participant in the orchestrated government-university-nonprofit-company censorship machine of the last decade can be charged criminally under one or both of these federal laws.

More.

Grace Hagerman:

What is the potential problem with focusing on the Science of Reading alone? Some educators say it places too much emphasis on a one-size-fits-all model of explicit, systematic, intensive phonics instruction for all students.  

Ground zero for the Science of Reading movement was an article by education reporter Emily Hanford for APM Reports.Published in 2018, Hanford’s article said the reason students are struggling with reading is because educators do not know the science of reading or choose to resist it. Students are not “wired to read” but need explicit phonics instruction, she wrote.   

After her article became popular, Hanford created a podcast series, Sold a Story, which went into greater detail about the Science of Reading movement. Hanford’s article and podcast inspired frustration in Thomas and he was moved to speak against her claims. “[The podcast] is very compelling for the public, but it’s just not based in real evidence,” Thomas said.   

Yet, because the Science of Reading movement seems to cover multiple universes, it is difficult to assign one absolute meaning. Elena Aydarova, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points to this ambiguity in a FreshEd podcast.  

——-

More.

Our govt’s decision to remove all subject area requirements for teachers will make things worse.

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?

Palantir:

“The Palantir degree is the best degree, bar none.” -CEO Alex Karp

We launched the Semester at Palantir program this year for students looking to accelerate their career and learn by doing — working on meaningful problems in the real world rather than the classroom, especially at universities where teaching has strayed.

Kieran Smith and Amy Borrett:

Forty-two per cent of students enrolled in independent schools received extra time in the 2023-24 academic year, compared with 26 per cent of pupils in non-selective state schools, according to data published by Ofqual on Thursday.

The gap of 16 percentage points is the largest since England’s exam regulator began collecting data in 2018-19, when 26 per cent of private school students and 17 per cent of state school students claimed extra time for GCSEs and A-levels. 

The system of access arrangements for exams, which is overseen by Ofqual, allows candidates to receive 25 per cent more time if they have a condition such as dyslexia or ADHD. 

In a 60-minute exam, a student claiming extra time would have 75 minutes, for example. Students can receive more than 25 per cent extra time in extenuating circumstances. 

Jon Andrews, head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute think-tank, said the data reflected how private schools had more resources than state counterparts to support students.

More.

Baldur Bjarnason

The “algorithm” seems to have become a black box even Google engineers can’t figure out

The fact that over a year ago ML experts at Google (El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi at least, if I recall correctly) who have since left warned that LLMs should be avoided because they made products chaotic and hard to control seems relevant.

As is the fact that around the same time others also warned that one common consequence of mass layoffs is they tend to turn internal systems into black boxes because everybody with a deep understanding of them has left.

Timothy Lee:

Fei-Fei Li wasn’t thinking about either neural networks or GPUs as she began a new job as a computer science professor at Princeton in January of 2007. While earning her PhD at Caltech, she had built a dataset called Caltech 101 that had 9,000 images across 101 categories.

That experience had taught her that computer vision algorithms tended to perform better with larger and more diverse training datasets. Not only had Li found her own algorithms performed better when trained on Caltech 101, other researchers started training their models using Li’s dataset and comparing their performance to one another. This turned Caltech 101 into a benchmark for the field of computer vision.

Austin Berg:

BREAKING: 29 of 50 Chicago aldermen have called a special meeting to vote down Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed property tax hike. The meeting will take place next Wednesday, Nov. 13.

More:

Government handouts at the national and state level enable illegals who come here to have a standard of living that is better than half of Earth.

This creates a forcing function for half of Earth to move here.

They will do so, unless the border is secure.

QED.

Charles Cooke:

“Illinois remains a place of stability and competent governance” is a sentence that has never before been uttered in the English language.

Paul Vallas:

Illinois is reeling. State ranks first in tax burden, near last in job growth, last in equity. After spending most of $54 billion in COVID money it received and despite raising taxes during COVID, state, city, schools and CTA face massive deficits. Expect more taxes to come.

•State facing $3 billion deficit next year.

•Chicago facing almost $1 billion deficit this year

•Chicago Public Schools facing almost $1 billion deficit next year

•CTA facing $567 million deficit

Don’t expect change. No one in Illinois has the right to lecture anyone about Democracy. Not with the most gerrymandered legislative maps in the country virtually guaranteeing Democrats Supermajorities despite Trump getting 47% of the vote.

Ashley Rindsberg:

The 1,300-word NYT article devotes just 11 words to the shattering of this “glass ceiling.”

Despite the “firsts” the media has celebrated over even the most minor political appointments by Democrats, there is 0 exploration of what Wiles’ appointment means for women.

Veracity.

The legacy media lied to you

Commentary:

Brilliant comment from @NYTimes reader.
“The very best thing that the Democrats can do for themselves is not ideological. It is to make the deep Blue cities and states where they have a supermajority into American paradises. Los Angeles, New York, California, Baltimore, Chicago, etc. Show us that you can got her an effectively. Low crime, great schools, moderate taxes, excellent mass transit, etc. Then the rest of the country will come to believe that your way is the right way. Because it is not what we have seen.”

www

The National Popular Vote bill will take effect when enacted into law by states possessing 270 electoral votes (a majority of the 538 electoral votes). The bill will take effect when enacted by states possessing an additional 61 electoral votes. 

The National Popular Vote bill has also passed at least one legislative chamber in 7 states possessing 74 electoral votes (Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, Virginia).  The bill has passed both houses of the Nevada legislature at various times. The National Popular Vote bill has been introduced all 50 states at various times.  Overall, the National Popular Vote bill has now passed a total of 43 state legislative chambers in 24 states.

On the map below, each square represents one electoral vote (out of 538). 

The Economist:

Without iodine, the thyroid gland cannot produce hormones that enable the human body and the brain to develop properly. The visible consequences of iodine deficiency, such as goitres (swellings in the neck), are bad enough. The invisible ones are much worse: it can cause a 15-point drop in IQ.

Such afflictions were once common. A century ago, one in three schoolchildren in Michigan had a visible neck swelling; in Britain goitres were so endemic in some places that the condition was known as Derbyshire neck. Then manufacturers started fortifying certain foods with iodine, dramatically reducing the scourge. The number of countries where iodine levels are insufficient fell from 113 in 1990 to 21 in 2020.

Lacey Robinson:

How often have you heard someone say: “I’m just not a math person?”

People are reluctant to say they are illiterate but proud to share their low math identity.

We tend to think of math as a subject that’s accessible only to certain types of people. But that’s a false assumption, and it’s holding back achievement for far too many students. With the right instructional approach, everyone can learn and do math. There is no special “math gene” that naturally makes some people better at math than others.

Students come into school with differing levels of math preparation. Some have parents or guardians who have introduced them to foundational concepts and skills.

Some have had no exposure. The well-prepared students perform better at the outset of K-12 learning and the underprepared students struggle to keep up. Thus begins the fallacy that some students are “math people” and some are not.

Lucas Robinson:

Residents and property owners will have to pay a monthly “infrastructure special charge” by 2027 to help the city continue balancing its budget if more financial support from the state Legislature doesn’t materialize in budget talks next year.

Even with the referendum’s success, the city is counting on the untested charge to bring in millions in revenue every year by the end of the decade. But similar fees attempted by municipalities have been struck down by the Wisconsin court system.

Andrew Potter:

What is interesting about Phetasy’s piece, in many ways, is just how unremarkable it is — the I-was-abandoned-by-my-divorced-parents has been its own genre of Gen X lit for a while now. For example, in 2011, the journalist Susan Gregory Thomas wrote an essay for the WSJ called “The divorce generation”, where she describes the effects of her own parents’ split, with much of the same fence-sitting between exhilaration and reproach:

Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments every other weekend.

Both Phetasy and Thomas make a direct link between two trends that marked the identities of their generation: skyrocketing divorce rates, and the rise of what became known as “latchkey kids” — children who return home after school and are left unsupervised until a parent comes home from work.  There was widespread concern about the situation at the time, and the received wisdom was that it was on the whole a bad thing. But as one might suspect, the truth is a bit more complicated. 

Marguerite Roza & Maggie Cicco:

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts.

Chicago is the most concerning. The district’s current $300 million budget gap is set to triple next year, which isn’t surprising since enrollment dropped 10% over six years as the district added staff. Now, it won’t close schools, won’t reduce the workforce and is being told by the mayor to give in to union demands for big raises. How would the math work? The mayor wants the district to take out a short-term, high-interest loan. Oh, and the city and district still need to work out how to make this year’s pension payment.

Seattle is a close second. Two years ago, leaders agreed to a costly labor agreement that they admitted would require major cuts. But then they didn’t make those cuts. Instead, leaders exhausted all reserves and are borrowing money they’ll have to pay back by 2026. What’s the plan for the $100 million budget deficit? None yet.

Why are financial crises suddenly common among large urban districts? Federal relief funds are part of the issue. Despite warnings that the money was temporary, many city districts used those one-time funds for salary raises and new staff hires.

Balaji:

It would be impossible for a devout woke to pass such an exam. They’d have to acknowledge that no, men cannot get pregnant anymore than virgins can get pregnant.

Thus, anyone with this new Florida USMLE credential would demonstrably (a) have general medical knowledge and (b) not be psychopathically woke on matters of basic biology.

This could restore faith in the medical profession.

Note that the proposed exam wouldn’t need to be mandatory. Any doctor could take it at any time to get a new certification and prove to their patients that they weren’t woke quacks. Those who chose not to do so could continue down the path of pseudoscience, and perhaps eventually take up residence in a blue state.

And that would be a win/win for everyone.

By Frederick M. Hess

Massachusetts residents voted Tuesday to scrap the requirement that high schoolers pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests in math, science, and English in order to receive a high school diploma. Instead, the new law will allow students to demonstrate proficiency in these core subjects by “complet[ing] coursework certified by the student’s district.” The measure passed 59 percent to 41 percent after the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent $10 million to support the initiative, double the amount spent by its opponents.

In ditching the MCAS requirement, voters abandoned the cornerstone of the bipartisan 1993 Education Reform Act that fueled three decades of education gains in Massachusetts. Dating from 2001 through 2018 (the MCAS graduation requirement took effect in 2003), the share of students proficient in math grew by 33 percent and in English Language Arts by 40 percent. In 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to have its students lead the nation in all four major categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress: fourth-grade reading and math as well as eighth-grade reading and math. The state has dominated the leaderboard ever since. In 2007 and 2011, international exams found that Massachusetts students were performing neck-and-neck with peers in high-performing nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Michael J. Petrilli and Devon Nir

States across the country have enacted new private-school choice programs in recent years, inevitably raising questions about accountability for participating institutions.

Though it is true—as our friends in the school choice movement argue—that choice itself is a form of accountability because of the agency it provides to parents and the power of the marketplace, we don’t think that “customer satisfaction” is enough. When tax dollars are in play, the public has a right to know that participating students are gaining essential skills. After all, we pitch in to pay for public education because everyone benefits when all children can access the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in life, ultimately ensuring the prosperity of the larger society and a healthy democracy. Education, particularly in the K–12 years, is both a private benefit and a public good.

Still, we recognize that getting accountability right requires a balancing act. If accountability provisions are too heavy-handed, private schools may choose not to participate—limiting choices for families. Or perhaps only those most desperate for students will sign up, driving down quality. Under pressure to raise test scores, private schools might also lose their distinctive character and shift toward uniformity with public schools, undermining the diversity of options that private-school choice seeks to provide.

——-

Meanwhile:

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?

Mike Stobbe:

The long-awaited report released Wednesday comes from the National Toxicology Program, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It summarizes a review of studies, conducted in Canada, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Mexico, that concludes that drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter is consistently associated with lower IQs in kids. 

The report did not try to quantify exactly how many IQ points might be lost at different levels of fluoride exposure. But some of the studies reviewed in the report suggested IQ was 2 to 5 points lower in children who’d had higher exposures.

Since 2015, federal health officials have recommended a fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter of water, and for five decades before the recommended upper range was 1.2. The World Health Organization has set a safe limit for fluoride in drinking water of 1.5.

More.

Nasser Lubega, Abigail Anderson, Nicole C. Nelson:

High rates of irreproducibility and of poor mental health in graduate students have been reported in the biomedical sciences in the past ten years, but to date, little research has investigated whether these two trends interact. In this study, we ask whether the experience of failing to replicate an expected finding impacts graduate students’ mental health. Using an online survey paired with semi-structured qualitative interviews, we examined how often biomedical science doctoral students at a large American public university experienced events that could be interpreted as failures to replicate and how they responded to these experiences. We found that almost all participants had experience with irreproducibility: 84% had failed to replicate their own results, 70% had failed to replicate a colleague’s finding, and 58% had failed to replicate a result from the published literature. Participants reported feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and depression while experiencing irreproducibility, and in 24% of cases, these emotional responses were strong enough to interfere with participants’ eating, sleeping, or ability to work. A majority (82%) of participants initially believed that the anomalous results could be attributed to their own error. However, after further experimentation, most participants concluded that the original result was wrong (38%), that there was a key difference between the original experiment and their own (17%), or that there was a problem with the protocol (17%). These results suggest that biomedical science graduate students may be biased towards initially interpreting failures to replicate as indicative of a lack of skill, which may trigger or perpetuate feelings of anxiety, depression, or impostorism.

Kenjiro Takahashi:

The number of births of Japanese children in the first half of 2024 has continued its alarming downward trend, with only 329,998 babies born between January and June.

If this pace continues, the country’s annual birth count will fall below 700,000 for the first time since 1947, when comparative statistics became available. 

On Nov. 5, the welfare ministry released preliminary population statistics, revealing a decrease of 22,242 births, a 6.3 percent drop, compared to the same period last year.

Choose life.

Corrinne Hess

Voters in 137 school districts were asked to approve increased funding for schools. A preliminary analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found 107 referendum questions passed, while 30 failed. 

Ari Brown, a researcher with the Policy Forum, said the outcome is better than expected, but shows that overtime school district have gotten better at choosing when to put referendums on the ballot and how to word the questions.

Notes and links on Madison’s 2024 referendums.

Balaji:

Remember, federal agencies evolved over decades to obfuscate their internals to nosy humans. But they have no natural resistance to AI. Indeed, no agency can withstand this kind of AI interrogation.

So, this is how a small group of Elon-directed engineers can carve a path through DC, without the aid of a single corrupt bureaucrat or journalist. All they need is AI to ask the questions and X to distribute the answers.

It’s the Twitter Files, but for the entire federal government, and enabled by AI. And that’s how the digital network defangs the deep state.

Frederick Hess:

Massachusetts residents voted Tuesday to scrap the requirement that high schoolers pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests in math, science, and English in order to receive a high school diploma. Instead, the new law will allow students to demonstrate proficiency in these core subjects by “complet[ing] coursework certified by the student’s district.” The measure passed58.9% to 41.1% after the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent $10 million to support the initiative, double the amount spent by its opponents.

In ditching the MCAS requirement, voters abandoned the cornerstone of the bipartisan 1993 Education Reform Act that fueled three decades of education gains in Massachusetts. Dating from 2001 through 2018 (the MCAS graduation requirement took effect in 2003), the share of students proficient in math grew by 33% and in English Language Arts by 40%. In 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to have its students lead the nation in all four major categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress: fourth-grade reading and math as well as eighth-grade reading and math. The state has dominated the leaderboard ever since. In 2007 and 2011, international exams found that Massachusetts students were performing neck-and-neck with peers in high-performing nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Bill Ackman:

When the story of this election is written, I expect it will be as much about how half of America woke up to the reality that they have been manipulated by the media. This should lead to an abandonment by many of the MSM as their primary source of information. It will push more people to @X, to podcasts and other empirical sources, and it will lead to a more informed public.

Mark Cuban:

Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square.

Congrats to @elonmusk as well.

Sophie:

the average offline person lives a life so full of bliss that most of us can’t even fathom

Dan Lurie:

Now we must show how the government can deliver:

• Clean and safe streets for all.
• Tackling our drug and behavioral health crisis.
• Shaking up the corrupt and ineffective bureaucracy.
• Building enough housing to turn around our affordability crisis.
• Breathing life back into our downtown, and ensuring our small businesses are thriving.

Here’s the truth: Turning around this city is not going to happen overnight. No matter who wins this election, we have extremely difficult challenges ahead.

David French:

It’s all the big stuff — defeat in Afghanistan, a porous border, inflation, and (yes, this really matters) Biden’s refusal to acknowledge reality and step aside in time for Democrats to have a real primary.

Bari Weiss:

Winners: Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Josh Shapiro, X, prediction markets, Peanut (RIP).

Losers: Randi Weingarten, ayatollahs, cable news, pollsters, Obama.

Austin Rief:

So it turns out that gaslighting the US people about the health of the President, not running a primary, campaigning on fear of your opponent vs the strength of your policies, and failing to separate yourself from a very unpopular President didn’t work out.

And:

Joe Biden at the EV Summit where he didn’t invite Tesla and he told GM and Mary that they led the EV revolution

Commentary:

God works in mysterious ways.

Timur Kuran:

Among the evening’s most meaningful results: California’s Proposition 36, which raises punishments for theft and drug-related crimes, is passing overwhelmingly. Voters blue and red are fed up with woke approaches to law and order.

Tyler Cowen:

Clearly it has happened, and it has been accelerated and publicized by the Biden failings and the attempted Trump assassination.  But it was already underway.  If you need a single, unambiguous sign of it, I would cite MSNBC pulling off Morning Joe for a morning, for fear they would say something nasty about Trump.

Chicago:

Votes are still being counted in Chicago’s historic school board race, but it appears six Chicago Teachers Union candidates are poised to lose their races to pro-school choice/independent opponents.

David Bahnsen:

I believe the biggest message may be in two states that Harris actually won – New Jersey and Illinois. Harris only winning two deep blue states by 4 or 5 points that Biden won by 17 points is a screaming message about progressive culture war failures. From crime to police to migrants to school board issues, etc. – even blue states become pragmatic when progressive ideology runs amok. This is not a political failure, it is a cultural one. Critical theory and its insidious ideological cousins are failures – and politics follows culture.

Mark Halperin:

The Lincoln Project leaders will do even less soul searching than the newsroom denizens of the Washington Post and New York Times.

The stories of how Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the pasts of Harris and Doug Emhoff, the coverup of Joe Biden’s loss of mental acuity, and how the attempts to keep Trump off the ballot, lawfare, and other anti-democratic efforts aimed at stopping Trump ironically backfired will only be told if the right people get the right book deals.

Eli Lake:

The reasons were clear if you were willing to tune out cable news.

For starters, their president, Joe Biden, had misinterpreted a narrow victory in 2020 as a mandate to make sweeping policy changes to everything from the border—some 10 million people crossed over illegally during Biden’s administration—to the national debt, which is more than $35 trillion. All the while, his Democratic Party advanced outlandish and radical social policies, such as support for biological men to compete in women’s sports, taxing unrealized capital gains, and colluding with social media companies to ban alleged health misinformation. He also insisted for most of his presidency that the very real inflation consumers experienced was fleeting and not serious. 

Glenn Greenwald:

Maybe the Democrats should try to a have a free and fair primary election to determine their next presidential nominee: one that extends beyond just Barack Obama Nancy Pelosi, Reid Hoffman and Alex Soros.

James Qually and Connor Sheets:

A tumultuous first term in office for Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón ended in a failed reelection bid, with challenger Nathan Hochman defeating him by a wide margin.

Gascón swept into office in 2020 on a promise of reform and restorative justice, but Hochman — a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney — has spent months painting the incumbent as responsible for increases in crime and homelessness around L.A. 

Kenneth Vogel:

Dem atty @MarcEElias’s firm convinced the @FEC to allow campaigns & super PACs to coordinate GOTV.

It was intended to help @ColinAllredTX benefit from a @GeorgeSoros-funded PAC.

It backfired.
Allred lost.
And @ElonMusk’s PAC seized on it to help Trump.

Mike Bloomberg:

Democrats, for their part, might ask themselves how exactly they lost to Trump, an ailing 78-year-old who much of the country despises. It probably wasn’t great to cover up President Joe Biden’s infirmities until they became undeniable on live TV. It wasn’t ideal that party elders replaced him with Harris, a nominee who had received no electoral votes and had failed decisively in a previous presidential run.

Mark Penn:

Voters don’t listen to Hollywood celebrities when it comes to voting. Most voters see Hollywood as great for entertaining but as far removed from their concerns when it comes to voting.

The working class and middle America voters are done being disrespected by college elites. They want real, merit-based opportunities not government subsidies.

Seth Dillon:

Harris had 83 billionaires backing her.

Claire Lehman:

What I learned about Trump’s landslide victory from one night in New York City.

Notes on the polls:

In 2016, 2020, and 2024 polls were systematically biased against Donald Trump, i.e. they systematically underestimated his performance. In the changes that were made to the 538 Pollster Rating methodology in 2024, pollsters were given a bonus for systematic bias.

Zack Stentz:

Each time someone had to ask the Walgreen’s clerk to unlock the deodorant was a Republican campaign ad.

The woke mind virus and legacy media.

Censorship.

Baldwin left her brief event without taking questions.

David Sirota:

A fundamental problem in the Democratic Party is that it now has vanishingly few politicians who can articulate this kind of point as cogently as the Republican VP candidate did here.

Glenn Greenwald:

This is precisely why there are few more important causes than keeping the internet free and destroying attempts to centralize censorship power in the hands of Western elites.

Blueprint2024:

Today, Blueprint released the first data-based report about why voters cast their vote the way they did with a new poll conducted in the days after Election Day and weighted to the 2024 election results. 

Barry Lynn:

This position as all-seeing middleman does indeed allow Google to collect vast tranches of information about you. The corporation can gather and store every word you say on or near your phone, and everything you do online—every time you break the speed limit, every massage parlor and weekend fling, even, with increasing accuracy, every cigarette, beer, and Twinkie you consume.

The existence of an all-seeing middleman is not, in and of itself, new. The postal system a century ago, AT&T fifty years ago, the internet itself twenty-five years ago—each of these old-school platforms also stood between us and the people with whom we wanted to speak and deal. And hence each of these platforms had access to enormous amounts of intimate information. But back then, the law required such entities to provide the same service on the same terms to everyone. Which meant they had few ways to profit from your private information, hence little interest in paying to collect and store it.

What makes Google and its peers unlike any corporation we’ve faced before is our failure to impose similar constraints on them. Unlike AT&T, we have failed at enforcing the laws that would prevent them from treating you differently from your neighbor.

Jim Shelton:

Sam Raskin has wrapped his head around a math problem so complex it took five academic studies — and more than 900 pages — to solve.

The results are a sweeping, game-changing math proof that was decades in the making. Working with Dennis Gaitsgory of the Max Planck Institute and a team of seven other mathematicians, Raskin has solved a segment of the Langlands Conjectures, long considered a “Rosetta Stone” of mathematics.

The Langlands Conjectures, named after Canadian mathematician (and former Yale professor) Robert Langlands, suggested in the 1960s that deep, unproven connections exist between number theory, harmonic analysis, and geometry — three areas of math long considered distinctly separate. Proving these connections, mathematicians say, could suggest ways to translate certain areas of math that had seemed dissimilar.

Raskin, the James E. English Professor of Mathematics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Gaitsgory led a team that solved the geometry portion of Langlands.

Jill Barshay:

In the fall of 2019, four high schools in a San Francisco Bay Area district shook up many of their ninth grade math classes. Students had traditionally been separated into more than five math courses by achievement level, from remedial to very advanced, and the district wanted to test what would happen if they combined their bottom three levels into one. Half of the students in those levels were randomly assigned to learn together, and half remained in their traditional tracks so that researchers could compare the difference. 

Students in the lowest level who were part of the experiment skipped remedial math and were able to learn algebra with the majority of ninth graders. The experiment also meant that average, grade-level students were learning alongside peers who lacked foundational math skills. 

It was risky. Students sometimes end up with lower math scores when they’re pushed to do work that is too advanced for them; that’s why California ended an eighth grade “algebra for all” initiative a decade ago. Grade-level students can also be harmed if teachers try to accommodate weaker students by making the material easier.

Collin Anderson:

Over the past three months, an avowed left-wing organization has spent more than $9 million on Facebook ads boosting Vice President Kamala Harris and attacking former president Donald Trump. The spots have reached scores of swing state voters using a Facebook feature that allows advertisers to submit their own data—for political groups, that is, data they’ve compiled on voters—to reach a precise audience.

The practice is considered standard operating procedure for campaigns and PACs. But the group behind the $9 million digital ad blitz is neither a campaign nor a PAC—at least not on paper. Instead, it’s Courier Newsroom, liberal operative Tara McGowan’s organization that pushes Democratic talking points under the guise of local “news” outlets.

Courier’s Facebook ad spending—and its targeting tactics—reflect the extent to which Democrats rely on McGowan’s media project to reach voters online.

More.

Steven Bellovin:

Netnews, sometimes called Usenet, was arguably the first social network. Quarterman describes it as “one of the oldest cooperative networks”. It had a profound influence on online socializing, including helping to give to the world the current slang meanings of words such as “spam” , “troll”, and “flame”. It was where many technologies we now take for granted were first announced, including Linux, the World Wide Web, and the graphical web browser. But its design was a function of both its design goals and the technological context of the time. I describe those and a variety of other early design decisions, those which were right, those which were wrong, and those which were inevitable.

Maggie Macintosh

Among them, the province is no longer requiring teachers to specialize in an approved list of major or minor subject areas to get certified.

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?

Nidhi Subbaraman:

A study trumpeting the value of applying rigorous standards to scientific research was retracted, in part because the authors didn’t follow their own advice.

In the sprawling project, scientists in four labs designed and tested experiments and then tried to replicate one another’s work. The intention, according to the study, was to test methods aimed at ensuring the integrity of published research. But the group neglected to fully document key aspects of the project ahead of running the experiments, one of the practices the study was looking to test, leading to the retraction.

The authors—who include two of the most prominent voices advocating for research reforms—dispute some of the criticisms and said any errors they made were inadvertent.

“It wasn’t because we were trying to fool someone, but it is because we were incompetent,” said Leif Nelson, one of the authors, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nelson helps write the Data Colada blog, a website known for discussing research methods and debunking studies built on faulty or fraudulent data. Recently, the blog gained attention for its blistering critique of a star Harvard Business School professor’s work, alleging that her research contained falsified data.

Will Fitzhugh:

There has recently emerged a refreshed concern over the fact that almost no American high school students read one complete history book while they are in school. This habit has been obscured by other concerns, over poor performances in math and basic reading, while Social Studies (including History) has faded from the views of EduPundits and school leaders of various kinds.

The near total absence of history books in the high schools has several unfortunate consequences. Students, even at some Ivy League colleges, have been found reluctant to attempt to read an assigned nonfiction book, because they have never read one before. In addition, the knowledge that could have been acquired from reading one or more history books in high school is not available to help students make connections with what they are hearing in lectures.

Some secondary students, not knowing any better, are reading history anyway. Since 1987, I have published 1,562 serious (average 9,000 words) history research papers by students from 47 states and 48 other countries in 142 issues of The Concord Review. As time has gone by, more and more of these papers are submitted as Independent Studies, suggesting that they are being done quite outside the expectations of their school Social Studies (or English) Departments.

One author, a Korean student at a highly selective private school in Massachusetts, wrote a 14,000-word paper (in his second language) on John Law, which we published. I had lunch with him when he went to Harvard and I asked why he had not offered the name of a teacher he had worked with. He said that no one at the school knew he was writing that paper. There was a Korean listserve, on which he had heard about the journal, and he decided to write the paper on his own. An autodidact. This sort of self-starting scholarship has characterized more and more of our authors as time has gone by.

Schools still do not assign history books or history term papers, but numbers of secondary students have discovered that if they spend a lot of time on them and do a lot of reading, there is a chance for their history essays to be published in a very well-established quarterly journal dedicated to the work of secondary students of history.

The journal only publishes 5-6% of the papers submitted, so that means that many students do not see their work in print. Nevertheless, what we hear, over and over, is that the effort to meet very high academic standards has enabled them to learn a good deal of history and greatly improved their nonfiction expository writing abilities. Even without getting published, they are proud of their effort and they feel they have gained a lot from the work.

Colleges seem to appreciate students doing serious work in history at the secondary level, and about 50% of our authors have gone to the Ivy League, Chicago, or Stanford. Others have gone to MIT, Wellesley, Amherst, Berkeley, Oxford, Caltech, Cambridge, and so on.

Colleges naturally look for students ready to do college work, and our authors, who have read extensively for their long serious history papers, have clearly gained and demonstrated that readiness.

In the wider world, as well, the ability to read nonfiction and write well are valued highly. Engineers and scientists, among others, also need to be able to read and write. The Pentagon recently complained about the problems they are having with maintenance crews who cannot read the manuals for the equipment they are assigned to take care of.

Fine literature is, of course, of fundamental value in a secondary education, but there is no excuse for allowing it to push aside any effort to have students read history books and work on history term papers.

Will Fitzhugh was born in Boston in 1936, and has a vague memory of Pearl Harbor. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard, and started The Concord Review in March 1987, while on a sabbatical from teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts. (tcr.org)

Apple Lamps:

Leaving both rallies, he found himself with a more nuanced understanding of American political dynamics. The passionate energy and openness he encountered, particularly at the Trump rally, left him questioning some of his preconceived ideas, providing him with a unique perspective on the motivations and unity that drive each side.

Video.

“Our ruling class is disgusting.”

I don’t know why Joe Biden did not use his presidency to bring us together by working to make the voting process as transparent and squeaky clean. He knew half (or at least a third) of the country had doubts. Why didn’t he work to dispel those doubts? Did he want all this discord? Was he hiding malfeasance? 

Just one of many opportunities squandered by Democrats, I’ll say. And by the way, we are down to the last few hours for making statements in the category I’ve been calling pre-postmortem.

Quinton Klabon:

ACT 20 READING UPDATE
• 440 schools ignored DPI about reading retraining progress. Below describes those who responded.

• The large number may be due to teachers who previously completed a program or who chose a shorter retraining than LETRS. I welcome correction.

University of Wisconsin System Faculty or Academic Staff
2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27 (2) also requires professional development training for University of Wisconsin System faculty or academic staff member
who teach a course that includes curriculum in reading instruction designed for an individual who intends to apply for a license issued by the DPI to teach a grade from kindergarten to 3, to be a principal, or to be a reading specialist has received the professional. The training must be complete by July 1, 2025.

The University of Wisconsin System provided the following statement for this
report:

We are in process of complying with the requirements of Act 20 so the
Board of Regents can “ensure that, by July 1, 2025, any faculty or
academic staff member of the University of Wisconsin System who
teaches a course that includes curriculum in reading instruction
designed for an individual who intends to apply for a license issued by
the department of public instruction to teach a grade from kindergarten
to 3, to be a principal, or to be a reading specialist has received the
professional development training specified in par. (a) 1. and 2.”.

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?

Debra Tisler:

yet only 31% of 8th graders in the U.S. are proficient in reading. This gap reveals how critical it is for parents to have a clear view of their child’s academic progress.

Under IDEA (34 CFR § 300.613), parents of children with disabilities have the right to promptly access educational records to make informed decisions about special education and placement. Similarly, FERPA grants all parents the right to inspect their child’s records within 45 days of a request.

Joanne Jacobs:

American teenagers no longer think the USA is the “best in the world,” writes Jean Twenge, a San Diego State psychology professor, in The Atlantic.

In the early 1980s, 67 percent of high school seniors agreed that “Despite its many faults, our system of doing things is still the best in the world,” Twenge writes. That fell to 27 percent by 2022.

Ann Althouse:

“Civics & Free Speech: “The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history”

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

It should be considered one of Illinois’ most egregious failures. School officials announced last week that in 2024 the state graduated high school students at a record 88 percent rate, even though the same data release showed that nearly 70% of graduating students can’t read or do math proficiently.

Take black students statewide. 81% of them graduated in 2024 though just 11% of those graduates were proficient in reading on the SAT as juniors the year before. Just 7% of the graduates were proficient in math. The student outcome data comes straight from the Illinois Report Card.

It’s not much better for Hispanics – an 85% graduation rate, with only 18% of them able to read and 14% able to do math proficiently on the SAT.

Overall, 88% of students statewide graduated despite SAT proficiency rates of just 32% and 27% in reading and math, respectively. State SAT results remained virtually unchanged between 2023 and 2024. 

What that disparity shows is just how willing the educational establishment is to cover up its failures.

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?

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

On Tuesday’s Nov. 5 ballot there’s a nonbinding referendum that asks voters if they want the state to tax millionaires a 3% surcharge on the money they make over and above $1 million. In exchange for agreeing to target millionaires, Illinois voters can expect property tax relief, the referendum reads, though the referendum is noncommittal as to how much relief, if any, it would actually provide. The state says the 3% surcharge on millionaires will give the government about $4.5 billion in new revenues.

For the state to provide property tax relief, however, it would have to actually take some of those new tax revenues and commit them to property tax relief. And that’s where Illinoisans should be highly skeptical, we warned a week ago: “Given the upcoming budget deficits…there won’t be any money left over for tax relief.” 

Sure enough, it only took a few days for Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his budget office to announce that billion-dollar deficits are on their way.

Pritzker’s team on Friday released its five-year budget forecast and said it expects a whopping $3.2 billion deficit for next fiscal year (2025-2026), a $4.3 billion deficit for the following year, and $5 billion-plus deficits in each of the years 2028 through 2030.

More.

Curiously, Illinois Governor Pritzker has appeared and funded a number of Wisconsin political events and programs.

Olivia Reingold:

When Houston Porter, a 28-year-old law student at Pace University, first walked into the college auditorium last month, he was surprised to see a packed house for the “Saving Women’s Sports” panel he was co-moderating. 

“Our events normally don’t get that kind of turnout,” says Porter, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that sponsored the panel at Pace’s law school in White Plains, New York. “So it was exciting.”

But not long after, Porter’s world started “crumbling down”—with at least one professor shouting at panelists and another allegedly rushing the stage, followed by a Title IX investigation that accuses him of having “aggressively pointed” at a transgender student and misgendering her. Now Porter faces the possibility of suspension, expulsion, and even being barred from practicing law.

About two dozen students, plus two faculty members, attended the October 15 panel against Proposition 1, a New York ballot measurethat promises to codify gender identity and gender expression as protected classes in the state constitution. Porter said most attendees showed up wearing trans pride pins, but he didn’t think anything of it. In fact, he says, his LBGTQ peers were “the exact type of people” he hoped would join the discussion.

George Leef:

Academics who cherish free speech have been pushed into a corner by the rapid rise of anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric and action on our campuses. The concept of free speech covers speech we abhor and regard as not merely false but dangerous. As Justice Louis Brandeis said, the proper remedy for bad speech is more speech—to argue against that with which you disagree. That is a splendid concept, but what if that freedom of speech is abused by partisans who spread hatred and intimidate anyone who dares to respond to them?

University of Illinois professor Cary Nelson addresses that question in his book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles. As Nelson begins, “Antisemitism is on the rise worldwide and academia plays an important role in rationalizing its character and application, indeed in applauding and promoting antisemitism’s culture and political strategies.” Nelson surveys the stunning resurgence of antisemitism (usually presented as the merely political “anti-Zionism,” though, he argues, the two are hardly distinguishable) at American colleges and universities and ponders the correct response to it. Can we protect academic freedom without letting loose the vicious hatreds that caused so much misery in the last century?

Shannon Watkins:

The UNC-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media finds itself in a precarious position. It’s impossible to serve two masters, yet, in this calendar year alone, the school has attempted to satisfy the contradicting demands of two authoritative entities. The first is the programmatic accreditor for journalism schools, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC). The second is the University of North Carolina System, which creates and enforces policies for its member institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill.

The history of Hussman’s trouble with these dual masters started with a planned ACEJMC site visit in October 2021. The visit came on the heels of the botched hiring of New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. ACEJMC found the school to be “out of compliance” with a Diversity and Inclusion accreditation standard. The site team noted a climate of low morale among faculty and staff, particularly in the aftermath of the Hannah-Jones upset. Many reported feeling “undervalued and not heard/understood.”

In this calendar year alone, Hussman has attempted to satisfy the contradicting demands of two authoritative entities.For the accreditor, the school’s overt efforts to bolster diversity and inclusion by embedding them in syllabi, activities, research, and strategic goals were not sufficient. Such efforts, according to students and faculty, were superficial and represented merely “going through the motions.”

Carl Hendrick:

This paper asks a basic question: are some people simply born more creative, regardless of the subject or field and if so, what does this mean for education? this idea, known as the “domain-general hypothesis”, suggests that a person with a high level of general creativity could excel in any creative task they pursue.
The article questions whether we should be testing for this general creative ability, if we should teach it and whether “general creativity” is even a thing.

Balaji:

Because anyone or anything can vote, multiple times, without any verification. This is what’s called a Sybil attack in computer science.