Juma Sei:

The easiest way to describe it is you kind of just let a kid figure things out by giving them context clues for the words they see, like pictures. But…

JOHNSON: Our reading data was terrible. We didn’t have the data to back up what we were doing.

SEI: So today, the teachers at Burruss use a method called structured literacy or the science of reading.

JOHNSON: Structured literacy is explicit instruction. Like, no, let’s teach them the code, teach them what the letters mean and how the letters represent sounds. And how the sounds come together to make words and, like, explicit instruction.

SEI: With national K-12 reading scores lower than they’ve been in decades, schools across the country are making the same transition to structured literacy. And those changes are being enshrined in legislation. Last year, 17 states passed new laws or implemented new policies encouraging schools to adopt the science of reading. That’s according to an analysis by Education Week. Georgia was one of those states.

RAMONA BROWN: Words are stored in memory through blank and blank.

—-

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?

Christopher Rufo:

On the morning in June 2023 that Haim was to graduate from Texas Children Hospital’s residency program, federal agents knocked on his door. They had identified him as a potential “leaker,” presumably through forensic examination of the hospital’s computer systems. Shortly thereafter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari began threatening Haim with prosecution.

Now, Ansari has made good on those threats. Earlier this week, U.S. marshals appeared at Haim’s home and summoned him to court to face an indictment on four felony counts of violating HIPAA. His initial appearance is next Monday, where he will learn more about the charges against him.

According to one of Haim’s attorneys, Marcella Burke, he is anxious to get to trial to get his side of the story told; she is confident that this will result in the correct decision being made. (For my own part, I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted.) Nonetheless, the prosecutor has pressed forward, hoping, at the least, to intimidate other medical professionals who would consider blowing the whistle on the barbarism of “transgender medicine.”

Despite the threat to his livelihood and freedom, Haim is undeterred. He plans to mount a vigorous defense in court and is soliciting public support.

JW:

That’s why @EMPOWR_us filed this FOIA request with DOJ the day of that hearing for DOJ communications with one staffer for Ranking Member Nadler: empowr.us/wp-content/upl….

It looks like the problem was worse than we thought.

Let’s walk through the timeline of how this played out… 🧵

Sen. John Jagler:

My office has obtained the “plan” MPS submitted to DPI to try to fix their financial reporting crisis. It’s pretty obvious why this wasn’t sufficient to stop DPI from withholding funds.
There’s no urgency on finding immediate solutions.

Stephanie Lee:

Joan Donovan, one of the world’s leading experts in misinformation, was dying to set the record straight. On a brisk November night, she told me a story about why she’d left Harvard University. It was captured, she claimed, by a corporation she had loudly criticized, one with far too much power over our democracy: Meta.

Donovan had been preparing for months to air this accusation in public, and I’d flown to Boston to interview her before the big day. At the moment, she had just heard through her lawyer that Harvard wanted to talk. “What are they going to offer me, $5 million?” she mused as we sat in a cafe. She wore a leather jacket over head-to-toe black, and a whistle dangled from her neck. “How am I going to feel about that money if I don’t tell the truth?”

Jonathan Turley:

So Garland’s moment of truth has arrived. He will either have to meet it or shrink from it. Either way, the Attorney General is about to give the full measure of himself and his office.

Background links.

Kimberly Wethal

The percentage of UW system freshmen from Adams County, for example, dropped by 62.5% between fall 2003 and fall 2023, from 40 students to 15, while the county population — albeit aging — grew by 5%, according to U.S. Census data. The percentage coming from Richland and Wood counties plummeted by nearly 58% and 66%, respectively. In other rural counties, the college participation level has stagnated or dipped slightly.

Conversely, the representation from places like Madison, Eau Claire and the greater Milwaukee area on UW campuses is growing.

About half of Wisconsin has just a single technical college campus nearby or no higher education options within a person’s “commuting zone” — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a cluster of counties that support one another’s economic activity — according to research by Nicholas Hillman, a UW-Madison professor in the School of Education and director of the Student Success Through Applied Research Lab.

Tom Pappert:

The Tennessee Star has obtained the FBI memo sent to the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) on May 11, 2023 from a source familiar with the Covenant killer investigation.

The letterhead and heading used for the memo indicate it originated at the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group in Quantico, Virginia. The opening paragraphs reveal it was sent by the FBI’s Behavioral Threat Assessment Center (BTAC), the home of the FBI’s Behavorial Analysis Unit (BAU-1). The memo was not signed.

The memo does not specifically mention Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who fatally shot three 9-year-old students and three faculty members in the devastating March 27, 2023 attack at the Covenant School in Nashville.

It was, however, sent two days after Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns The Tennessee Star, and the company’s CEO, Michael Patrick Leahy, filed a lawsuit against the FBI in federal court to compel the release of Hale’s written documents, including those sometimes called a manifesto, and one day after Star News Digital Media, Inc. and Leahy filed a lawsuit against Metro Nashville Davidson County Government in state court for the same purpose.

The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit has been involved in the MNPD’s investigation into the Covenant killings since the very first day, sources familiar with the investigation have told The Star. MNPD Public Affairs Director Don Aaron confirmed the FBI’s involvement in the investigation to The Star when asked about the FBI memo on Tuesday, though he did not specify the date at which that involvement began.

“As has been publicly acknowledged, the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit has assisted in this Homicide investigation,” Aaron told The Star.

——-

More.

By Paul Caron

According to the letter’s signatories, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) “changed the constitutional landscape when it comes to the consideration of race in higher education,” which, the letter asserts, “requires significant adjustments to your current Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools.”

Along with Tennessee, attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia signed the letter.

The letter highlighted concerns with ABA Standard 206, which governs diversity and inclusion within law schools, saying the current standard “seemingly asks law schools to defy the Court’s clear directive” and “all but compels law schools to consider race in both the admissions and employment contexts.”

Douglas Carnine:

To fill this void, our 84 volunteer experts are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of evidence-based resources. These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional well-being, could become the basis for specific education policies, programs, and practices. They will be accessible on our website, distributed through collaborating partner organizations and promulgated through convenings with education agencies.

Just as the maritime safety standards improved safety and saved lives, the EAC is committed to constraining the use of non-evidence-based programs that cause waste and even harm. For example, Reading Recovery, an  intervention targeted to lowest-achieving first graders, has been used with 2.4 million students at an estimated cost of $10,271 per child, which has resulted in total expenditures of $2.5 billion. But, as noted in the Hechinger Report, “Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by fourth grade were far worse readers than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a [December 2022] follow-up study. The tutoring seemed to harm them.”

 Even the much-touted reading initiative that moved Mississippi from the lowest-performing state on fourth-grade NAEP reading scores to 21st in the nation, may have serious flaws. EAC co-founder Kelly Butler, CEO of Mississippi’s Barksdale Reading Institute, worries that not all components of the state’s education system are being held to the same level of accountability, which can undermine sustainability.

——

More.

Ty Babinski:

As president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families, I am committed to working with any lawmaker, from any party and region of the state, who will champion the causes of our students. But you have to earn my support. 

Similarly, you’ll have to earn the support of all of our members, and the other voters you court as well.

Our coalition members will be asking you your positions on four issues. Do your homework. Be prepared.

1. Allow remote test taking of state standardized tests.
States across the country are realizing the foolishness of prohibiting the remote proctoring of standardized tests. Online charter schools and their students shouldn’t be forced to travel great distances at great expense to take the Forward Exam and other standardized tests.

2. Let the kids play.
Students who attend virtual charter schools should have the same opportunities as homeschooled students to participate in the extracurricular activities of their “home” districts. Our tax dollars help finance these facilities, our kids deserve access.
Students at private schools have access to these services. But only online public charter school students are now expressly prohibited from participating in sports and other clubs offered by the “local or home” district. 

Campus Reform:

A group of University of Oklahoma students initiated a class action lawsuit against the school on May 15, claiming the institution granted financial aid improperly based on students’ race. 

“[R]acial preferences continue to exist at the University of Oklahoma. Rather than determining who to admit based on their race, the University of Oklahoma determines how much financial aid it gives to students based on their race. That is unlawful,” the lawsuit, which was shared online by Fox News, states. 

Zompist

The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi— Chinese characters. How should we go about it?

Japanese style

One way would be to use hanzi directly, asthe Japanese do. For instance, we’d write “work” as , and “ruler” as . Chinese and Japanese borrowings could be written using the original hanzi, e.g. “gung-ho” would be , and “tycoon” as . 

You can already see that this is going to be tricky. We’ve just given  two readings, for instance– /wrk/ and /gûng/– and  two as well– /rulr/ and /kun/. 

Proper names will be a problem as well. Again, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names already have hanzi forms– e.g.  for the name of the bodaciously cute singer Faye Wong— but for English names we’d have no better recourse than to spell things out using the nearest Chinese syllables. For instance, Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.

Mike Damiano

Less than five years ago, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences followed a trend that was then sweeping across American higher education. It instituted a requirement that professors who wished to work at Harvard submit an essay explaining how they would advance “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” in their work.

On Monday, the university’s largest division announced it had reversed course, eliminating the requirement after receiving “feedback from numerous faculty members” who were concerned about the mandatory statements.

A seemingly routine part of academic hiring, diversity statements have become the focus of intense scrutiny as universities grapple with the question of whether well-intentioned efforts to diversify the elite ranks of American institutions have sometimes collided with other core values of academia.

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) strongly condemns the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) for changing the terminology regarding student performance as well as once again considering changing the cut points for proficiency on the state’s Forward Exam. This represents a blatant effort to conceal lackluster academic performance for Wisconsin students. WILL believes these changes will cloud parent’s ability to best understand their child’s academic performance and allow schools to avoid accountability for their failures.  

The Quotes: WILL Research Director Will Flanders urges, “Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem. Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, tomorrow, and long into the future. DPI should prioritize addressing more pressing issues, such as implementing reading reforms which will raise student outcomes and helping to resolve the mess in Milwaukee Public Schools.”  

The Changes from DPI:  DPI announced they would be changing the terminology of student performance categories to as follows:  

• “Below Basic” will now change to “Developing.”
• “Basic” will now change to “Approaching.”
• “Proficient” will now change to “Meeting.”
• “Advanced” will remain the same.  

These labels are not designed to spare the feelings of the students who are not performing as expected, as DPI has alluded. Rather, they intend to prevent families from recognizing the ineptitude of the schools that fail to help students reach the standards required for the workforce or college. 

——

DPI Superintendent Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test

Wisconsin’s low bar WKCE expedition. (DPI)

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

The New England Primer.

Quinton Klabon:

Dean Haddix will oversee science of reading rollout at UW-Madison. Her literacy research focused elsewhere, but the group of which she was president wrote a nuanced defense of balanced literacy and called out UW’s Mark Seidenberg. How does she feel?

—-

DPI Superintendent Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test

Wisconsin’s low bar WKCE expedition. (DPI)

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

The New England Primer.

Quinton Klabon:

Good news! DPI fixed Milwaukee Public Schools!

No, I don’t mean MPS’ finance crisis.

The Forward Exam categories were OFFENSIVE.
YUCKY: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced
HAPPY: Developing, Approaching, Meeting, Advanced

So, 68% of Black students are Developing. ✨

Will Flanders

Changing terms for student performance on the Forward Exam will only serve to cloud parent’s ability to know how their child is doing in school. It’s great if a child in the lowest category is developing skills, but those skills may never actually develop in a failing school.

The use of politically correct terms for students that aren’t meeting expectations can be seen as little more than an attempt to mask failure. DPI should spend less time worrying about what to call levels of proficiency and more time fixing schools that aren’t meeting them.

Libby Sobic

Why is the @WisconsinDPI doing this? Changing the cut scores (again) only makes it harder to see trends over time on student proficiency. AND don’t forget all of this

Lucas Vebber:

DPI is organizing a meeting next week “to establish cut scores for the Wisconsin Forward Exam in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics.”

Attendees are required to “sign a Security and Non-Disclosure Agreement” — is this meeting open to the public? How is this funded

DPI Superintendent Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test

Wisconsin’s low bar WKCE expedition. (DPI)

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

The New England Primer.

By: Jenna Wells 

“Talk to the people who are paying for the referendum,” Spiker said.

He also wants to see a 25% reduction in their $252 million referendum.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce is calling for a full suspension.

“The Milwaukee Public School Board needs to immediately announce that they are not moving forward with this referendum,” said Dale Kooyenga, president of MMAC. “The referendum gives them the ability to raise property taxes, it doesn’t require them to raise property taxes.”

Kooyenga said he believes the MPS board’s financial mishandlings eroded the trust of taxpayers.

“The first step when you actually go to pass a budget is to know what your starting point is. They don’t even know what their starting point is,” he said.

——

Notes on changing Milwaukee k-12 Governance.

—-

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed legislationthat would break up the taxpayer funded Milwaukee school district into four smaller districts. Mulligans are worth a look.

Kaushikee Nayudu, Emma Talley and Jessica Zhu

Two members of The Daily were arrested early this morning in connection with an attempted pro-Palestine occupation of the president and provost’s office in Main Quad. One was present to report on the protest for The Daily and was detained in violation of his First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights. We are appalled at this threat to the freedom of the press. 

The second Daily member who was arrested was there in her personal capacity, not to report for The Daily. 

Protesters entered the building at 5:30 a.m. and barricaded themselves inside, blocking doors and windows. The Daily’s reporter remained inside, with a press pass and wearing Stanford Daily attire, to cover the protest and potential arrests. He remained in communication with another reporter, who was outside the building, and with editors in The Daily’s newsroom. 

Christopher Rufo:

The curriculum, co-published by the Portland teachers union, is called “Teach Palestine!” The union promotes the curriculum to its 4,500 and provides them legal justification to include it in the classroom—beginning with children as young as four and five years old.

Victor Davis Hanson

their entire attitude toward immigration. 

Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts.

Weaponized ‘justice’

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts and government agencies.

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, to surveil parents at school board meetings and to conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Joe Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American US jurisprudence itself.

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchan and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

The same politicization has nearly discredited the Pentagon. 

Its investigations of “white” rage and white supremacy found no such organized cabals in the ranks.

But these unicorn hunts likely helped cause a 45,000-recruitment shortfall among precisely the demographic that died at twice their numbers in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan.

—

The trust barometer.

Public trust in the federal government, which has been low for decades, has returned to near record lows following a modest uptick in 2020 and 2021.

Peachy Keenan

Rule 7: Teach your children from an early age the simple truths that people are rapidly being forced to forget: there are just two genders, and God assigns yours at conception. A trip to the zoo will quickly dispel any lingering doubts on the number of genders in the animal kingdom.

Rule 8: Don’t cheat. And I don’t just mean don’t be unfaithful to spouses or significant others. I mean don’t take shortcuts that you know are damaging. Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t screw people over. Do the right thing whenever you can and you’ll almost always be better off. And of course, don’t cheat on someone you love. It’s cruel and shortsighted, and will cause enormous pain and suffering, and not just to the person you wrong. This is karma you don’t want to reap.

Rule 9: Stay away from motorcycles, parachutes, small planes, and helicopters, even if you are an adrenaline junkie. This is my most longhoused opinion, sorry.

Rule 10: In the eighties and nineties, you could “experiment” with drugs. A lot of people did, and I don’t recommend it, but they mostly turned out okay. Today, you can’t. Cannabis is like 100 times more powerful than the weed the hippies smoked. It causes schizophrenia. And all the “powder” based drugs, the pills, cocaine, etc. are tainted with fentanyl, which will kill you stone dead. Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but just say no. 

Jack Posibiec

In 2020, Twitter disclosed to the FEC they were warned of ‘a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden’ by federal law enforcement that led them to censor the laptop story

The disclosure was signed by Yoel Roth

The FBI just admitted the laptop is real.

Glenn Greenwald:

Amazing and infuriating:

To prosecute Hunter Biden, FBI has to say — and has testified — that his laptop and every document on it is authentic and unaltered.

Not one media outlet who spread the CIA’s bullshit “Russian disinformation” lie has retracted it or apologized:

A congressman inadvertently describes the Total State.

Robert Greenwalt:

First, Jeffco got $68M in ESSER III funds to supposedly mitigate the academic impacts of Covid. If Dorland & her team can’t figure out a way to improve results with that generational funding opportunity, things aren’t going to improve next year when that money isn’t available.

Next, given these results, how can anyone in their right minds “reward” teachers with a 5% COLA increase, a 2% one-time “bonus” along with standard step and lane increases? Here is how Jeffco teachers have done against inflation over the past few years.

JD Tuccille:

Among those who think the United States is an unseemly cesspool of unrestrained opinions voiced by those people, Europe is often touted as an alternative for speech regulation. European Union law, following in the footsteps of national legislation, imposes enforceable duties on private platforms to purge “hate speech” and “disinformation”—or else. But free speech advocates warn that these laws are clumsy and dangerous tools that threaten to muzzle expression far beyond the bounds of their nominal targets. They’re right, and they now have receipts.

India counts votes from a mega-election seen as a referendum on Modi

The Rattler is a weekly newsletter from J.D. Tuccille. If you care about government overreach and tangible threats to everyday liberty, this is for you.

Sheera Frankel

Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.

The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.

The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.

Liz Collin:

At the meeting, she pointed to a section of the document which states that parents will be provided with “information about whether [their] child is transgender” only if they request it.

“So how would a parent know to request such information if they aren’t aware that their child is struggling with gender dysphoria? How would a parent be able to care for and support their student if the school never reached out to them?” Barton said.

Barton, who said she’s willing to stand up for the truth “even if it comes at a cost,” shared her story https://alphanews.org/rochester-counselor-blows-whistle-on-trans-guidelines-that-district-was-trying-to-hide/this week on Liz Collin Reports.

She has been a school counselor at an elementary school in the district for the last few years, but what happened at a staff meeting earlier this school year didn’t sit well with her.

“On Feb. 14 of this year, we had a staff meeting, as we do every month. We had a staff member present about a topic that was very controversial entitled ‘pronouns.’ She asked that we prayerfully consider using them in the classroom and students expressing themselves with those pronouns and asked us to watch a video about pronouns where a nonbinary lady basically educated us on what pronouns were and different types of pronouns and why they’re really important to use in gender-affirming care,” Barton explained.

Zach Kessel:

Book publisher Scholastic announced a “Read with Pride” campaign, providing educators a list of “LGBTQIA+ stories” for “kids and teens” and vowed to use company resources to fight efforts by local school districts and parents to determine what content is appropriate for students.

In its section on “why it’s essential to support LGBTQIA+ youth,” Scholastic states that almost 10 percent of teens in the United States are “lesbian, gay, bi, or trans,” that “about half (52%)” of all Americans who fall under the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are “people of color,” and that a quarter of children and teens who fit that description …

Kate Roberson:

An academic journal has reversed course and rejected an article about abortion that it initially accepted, citing concerns about the author being a “white” “male,” according to an email from the editor obtained by The College Fix.

The article “Abortion Restrictions are Good for Black Women” by philosopher Perry Hendricks initially was accepted for publication earlier this year in The New Bioethics. However, the journal’s editors put it on hold after an abstract received criticism on social media.

Now, Hendricks told The Fix the journal has rejected it.

Editor Matthew James told Hendricks in a May 23 email that the journal rescinded its decision to publish his piece after a second peer review process, according to screenshots of the email Hendricks shared with The Fix.

Due to a publisher’s technical error, James told Hendricks he did not read the article before it was accepted, as is the standard process. He apologized on behalf of the publisher.

After reviewing the paper, James wrote he has “significant concerns” about its “academic quality and rigour” that revisions could not fix.

Fin Moorhouse

Here’s a puzzle:

Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth’s surface.

You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country.

The question is: what is the first country you hit?

The image below shows your starting point, and the white arrow shows your starting direction (not path) immediately after leaving Seattle.

Drew Gilpin Faust

What is a university? We have been taking its existence and its essence for granted, even as attacks on its character and purposes have over several decades steadily, if gradually, mounted. I spoke about rising criticism of universities more than a decade and a half ago in my inaugural address as president in 2007. But the acceleration of these attacks is no longer slow.  It is deliberate and it is determined, and it is now enlisting many whom we had come to think of as staunch allies.  The upheavals of this past academic year arising from the tragic situation in the Middle East have provided the occasion for those already hostile to the culture of American higher education to escalate their criticisms.  The polarizations of race, religion, and politics that grip our country have in recent months focused unceasingly on universities.  One might even suggest that universities have become a primary symbol for these larger divisions, as well as the theatre in which they are being acted out.    But this is not just theatre; it represents a genuine and existential threat to the foundational assumptions that have long governed American higher education.   

We should from the outset understand what is at stake. American higher education has since at least the 1940s been preeminent in the world.  It has often been described as our country’s most successful “industry.”  In the 2024 [London]Times Higher Education World University Rankings, seven out of the top ten institutions named were in the United States; thirteen out of the top twenty. University research discoveries have been central to American prosperity; its graduates have led the most important institutions of our government, economy, society and culture.  At this moment we are sitting in the center of the biotech capital of the world—a place that will bring health and longer lives to people across the planet.  It is here because universities are here.  Why are people working so hard to denigrate and destroy them? 

Will Flanders:

The person put in charge of implementing the Science of Reading in Wisconsin apparently wrote positively about Lucy Calkins.

More.

Quinton Klabon:

GENUINE QUESTION: She was the 2017 president of the Wisconsin State Reading Association, which lobbied against Act 20 in 2023!

Many know her, so can someone explain?

DPI Superintendent Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test

Wisconsin’s low bar WKCE expedition. (DPI)

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

———

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?

Key to solving MPS's financial mess will be reducing bureaucratic bloat. MPS has a smaller share of teachers to total staff relative to many large districts in the state. pic.twitter.com/B9jTBS2Oyy

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 5, 2024

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it is hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I hear the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demandsfor a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe.

How did it happen?

Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages, a diagram of which I have provided. These are, in order: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing. 

Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.

The ultimate intended outcome is that the afflicted willingly embrace self-destructive behaviors and ideas. Thus, all moral constraints can be eschewed in the pursuit of “just” and “virtuous” causes.

In America in 2019, 14 unarmed black men were shot by police—most, apparently, in self-defense. And yet, when polled, most Americans who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated the number at 1,000 or more. A fifth thought 10,000 or more. Were the BLM riots, then, any surprise?

To be sure, this isn’t just a progressive problem. Republicans also demonized the Justice Department, the FBI, and members of the judiciary when it suited them. Conservatives are also losing their confidence in law enforcement, in part because of what they see as the lax enforcement of the law as applied toward groups like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Hamas demonstrators. 

—-

As far as I can tell, we are on our way to being considerably demoralized. If you look at the last few years, standards have declined, and subversive content, like Fanon’s, fills the media and our children’s curricula from K–12 to college and beyond. By beyond I mean even the Girl Scouts: here’s a St. Louis chapter learning to cheer for “the intifada.”

Do most elementary school teachers really want to racially stratify fourth graders? No. I think they dislike the racism of the past and want to do what they can to fix it. Since their betters in college told them that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the way to go, well, so be it. Likewise, I don’t think your local high school history teacher wants to bring about a Bolshevik revolution. He has simply been told to replace the focus on 1776 with something from The 1619 Project. So he gets with the times. And on and on and on.

We have also come to a place where it is difficult for anyone to dissent for fear of incurring the wrath of the adherents—witting or not—of subversion. So people go along, keep their heads down, and try not to make a fuss.

The widespread acquisition of useless, aggressively ideological degrees in gender and race, or the claims of the possibility of an unlimited number of genders, or the total racialization and “decolonization” of our political discourse, or the demands to defund the police, the toppling of statues, the defacing of art, the “spontaneous” protests to dismantle our structures, and much else, I now understand as acts of subversion rather than mere expressions of discontent or youthful energy run amok.

Chris Rickert:

Staff at Madison’s La Follette High School have on at least two occasions objected to police arresting at least one La Follette student who brought a gun to school, including one case in which two staffers lied about being two students’ legal guardians, according to police reports.

Kyshawn M. Bankston, 18, was charged May 9 with possession of a firearm on school grounds and carrying a concealed weapon after being arrested at the school two days earlier. Police had been called to the school about an unrelated robbery, but while there they were informed by staff that Bankston might have a gun and were asked for help searching his backpack.

Police found a handgun, two magazines with rounds in them, a scale and an empty plastic bag that had contained marijuana, and as they moved to arrest Bankston, he lunged for the gun and had to be restrained, according to police.

Madison police denied a State Journal request under the state’s public records law for the full report of the May 7 incident, saying the investigation into the incident was still open, but did release two other reports regarding Bankston in response to the records request.

More in this PDF

——

Commentary:

——

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?

Abbey Machtig:

Both groups have similar demands and say the school’s principal, Candace Terrell, and assistant principal, Annabel Torres, are “unfit” to lead Southside or any school.

“With Candace Terrell and Annabel Torres at the helm, Southside will continue to run afoul and eventually sink into the abyss,” the complaint from parents reads. “For this reason, we will no longer allow or tolerate our opinions and voices to be suppressed.”

The parent complaint also alleges there are high levels of unsafe and disruptive behaviors at the school, both physical and psychological. They say physical fights and bullying among students are common, with no adult intervention.

“Ms. Terrell and Ms. Torres are not following up with parents after bullying or physical violence happens. There is concern that the administration is not following up with families, and is not officially reporting serious incidents,” the complaint says.

—-

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?

Jake Offenhartz

Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and upholding an apartheid regime.

When the editors refused the request and published the piece Monday morning, the board — made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school — shut down the law review’s website entirely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain “is under maintenance.”

The episode at one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious legal journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate about academic speech that has deeply divided students, staff and college administrators since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical, which is run by students at Columbia Law School. The board of directors oversees the nonprofit’s finances but has historically played no role in selecting pieces.

——

The article is available here.

More.

Steve Karnowski

Federal authorities in Minnesota have confiscated cellphones and taken all seven defendants into custody as investigators try to determine who attempted to bribe a juror with a bag of cash containing $120,000 to get her to acquit them on charges of stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic.

The case went to the jury late Monday afternoon, after the juror, who promptly reported the attempted bribe to police, was dismissed and replaced with an alternate. The incident had further ripple effects before deliberations resumed Tuesday — when another juror was replaced after a family member asked about the the attempted bribe.

The seven were the first of 70 defendants to go on trial in what federal prosecutors have called one of the largest COVID-19-related fraud cases in the country. They’ve described it as a massive scheme to exploit lax rules during the pandemic and steal from a program that was meant to provide meals to children in Minnesota.

Prosecutors have said the seven collectively stole over $40 million in a conspiracy that cost taxpayers $250 million. At the center of the alleged plot was a group called Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors say just a fraction of the money went to feed low-income kids, and that the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property. Federal authorities say they have recovered about $50 million.

By: A.J. Bayatpour

Less than 24 hours after Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) board members negotiated a resignation agreement with former Superintendent Keith Posley, a state lawmaker called for a federal investigation into the district’s finances.

State Rep. LaKeshia Myers (D-Milwaukee) said Tuesday she wanted the U.S. Department of Education to look into how MPS has handled past funding in light of the revelation MPS is more than eight months overdue on turning audited 2023 financial data over to the state.

“To look at all of the federal funding that we get, to see if there was any mismanagement of those funds,” Myers said.

Myers said she did not take issue with Posley receiving $160,000 in severance pay, reasoning Posley likely would have sued had the board fired him, kicking off a potentially costly legal battle.

——

Notes on changing Milwaukee k-12 Governance.

—-

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed legislationthat would break up the taxpayer funded Milwaukee school district into four smaller districts. Mulligans are worth a look.

Kyle Cheney:

X Corp. is asking the justices to consider whether social media services can be forced to share data about their users with government investigators while being barred from informing those users about the requests.

Trump’s material, the company noted, might have been subject to claims of executive privilege. But other users might have their own privileges to invoke, from attorneys to journalists to spouses.

In the case of Trump’s account, a federal district judge in Washington D.C., Beryl Howell, rejected X Corp.’s protestations and endorsed a so-called “nondisclosure order” that barred the company from informing Trump about Smith’s subpoena. She reasoned that prosecutors had presented evidence that informing Trump could endanger the information and cause risks to Smith’s probe.

📣 Want more POLITICO? Download our mobile app to save stories, get notifications and more. In iOS or Android.

In February 2023, Howell held the company, which Musk had recently purchased, in contempt for dragging its feet on producing the material. The judge fined the company $350,000. And she wondered aloud whether Musk was impeding Smith’s investigation to ingratiate himself to the former president.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals supported Howell’s decision, but the court’s four conservatives wrote a blistering opinioncriticizing the ruling for permitting prosecutors to evade a potential executive privilege fight.

X Corp., represented by prominent attorneys from WilmerHale, contended that the D.C. courts’ decisions failed to protect the company’s First Amendment right to communicate with its customers.

James Lynch:

“Did you see any studies that supported 6 feet?” a subcommittee staffer followed up.

“I was not aware of studies that — in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do,” Fauci conceded.

Upon further questioning, Fauci said six feet was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”

The six-foot directive was given by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and supported by Fauci, the face of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and other public-health officials such as then–National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins.

Collins testified earlier this year and similarly admitted that there was no evidence to support six feet apart, as National Review first reported.

During the second day of his testimony, Fauci made a similar concession about the lack of scientific evidence to support masking children to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

——

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”.

Victor Davis Hanson:

For perceived cheap political advantage, the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border, most recently allowing in nearly 10 million unaudited illegal aliens. With the disappearance of our national sovereignty, so too was lost the once-cherished idea of a melting pot of legal immigrants arriving in America longing to assimilate, to integrate in self-reliant fashion, and to show gratitude for the chance of something far better than what they left.

The country’s major cities are increasingly medieval, with a million homeless camped on fetid streets. Criminals terrorize the law-abiding. They assume their violence will be contextualized away by vacuous “critical legal” or “critical race” or “critical penal” theories. This generation releases violent felons to prey on the weak and sheds hardly a tear as police officers are shot unnoticed at the rate of nearly one a day.

America’s once great universities—such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT—are now into their fourth year of abolishing much of their prior standards. The youth who sought to wreck them from the outside in the 1960s now succeed in finishing the job as elders on the inside. These bankrupt campuses now adjudicate admissions and hiring by race, tribe and gender and then wonder why their students are entitled, ignorant, and arrogant yet unable to meet the very standards that the universities once insisted were critical to ensuring their preeminence.

Dale Kooyenga:

An unreported story is that the infamous MPS Referendum results in $48M in WI Taxpayer money being redirected from non-MPS districts to MPS. Here are some of the revenue reductions these districts will realize: Appleton$1.6M, Madison $2.3M, Racine $2M, @ElmbrookSchools $673k,

Commentary.

——

Much more on the “infamous 2024 Milwaukee K-12 tax & spending increase referendum”, here.

——

Lucas Vebber:

Legislature creates the OSPP to help improve schools in a school district rated as “failing” on state report cards (at the time, MPS)
☑️ DPI then changes report card system so that MPS is no longer listed as “failing”
☑️ County Executive refuses to appoint anyone to run OSPP

Quinton Klabon

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, former Lesley University education professor/Matt Damon’s mom from that 1 Reason video: “I could barely stand [Sold A Story]…full of false information, misconceptions, and distortions of 3-cueing. She didn’t even understand it.”

We’re concerned about equity in education. You will never achieve equity by spending the few resources that you have, money, on tests. Tests don’t produce equity. They just show you that you have inequities. RF: Magic wand, testing is gone. We take the resources from that, put it in your control and do what with it to address these problems? TS: The first thing is to make sure that every kid coming to school has access to the best children’s literature available. Nothing is a better predictor of being able to learn to read when you get to school as having books in the house. So not one more dime under my leadership goes to testing companies. We’ve literally spent across the entire United States, some economists say, probably $1 trillion in tests and data systems. I guarantee you that half of that money could have been spent on reducing issues — so books, food for kids, adequate after school care and adequate health care. Then whatever is leftover goes back to the classroom for teachers, who as the teachers of those kids know what those kids need. And please not one more dime on professional development, sponsored usually by one of the testing companies that comes in and tries to tell the teachers they don’t know what they’re doing, do it our way and this will fix everything.

I strongly support the elimination of any high stakes standardized test as a gatekeeper to the teaching profession. That means PRAXIS, Core, and FoRT (Foundations of Reading Test). Each of these imposed gates has been detrimental to actually preparing the teachers our children deserve.

Is there a way to avoid that horrible Foundations of Reading Test? Yes.

Jessica McBride & Jim Piwowarczyk

State School Superintendent Jill Underly’s executive director, the powerful leftist ex=campaign operative Sachin Chheda, donated to the committee working to push through a $252 million Milwaukee Public Schools referendum at the same time DPI was failing to tell the public that the district had not turned in key financial data as far back as September.

DPI finally came clean with the public in a May 24 scathing letter to Milwaukee Public Schools that outlined a series of missing financial documents, including its annual report and certified budget data, a problem dating back months. The School Board, which was not told by DPI about the missing financial data until May 24, along with the public, met on June 3 to consider the fate of Superintendent Keith Posley, who is, correctly, absorbing a lot of the outrage. Posley ended up resigning.

According to DPI’s letter, MPS “continues to fail to provide key required financial data.” As of May 24, MPS had not submitted required financial reports, “some of which are now more than eight months overdue.”

The fiscal meltdown has significant impact. “Continuing to wait for MPS to submit its missing financial data jeopardizes the timing of the aid reports, negatively impacting every Wisconsin school district,” DPI wrote MPS in the May letter – conveniently about two months after the referendum.

Who knew what and when?

Who knew what and when? Why didn’t those people tell Milwaukee taxpayers before they voted on a $252 million referendum for MPS in April? Was there an active effort to cover up the problems before the referendum?

The state Department of Public Instruction, run by leftist Schools Superintendent Underly, knew for months before the April referendum election that MPS had failed to submit key financial data. We know this from the DPI’s own letter, which admits it.

——

Lucas Vebber:

Last year, MPS had 11.1% proficiency in math and 17.3% in English language arts. Yet b/c DPI changed the report card in a way that helps MPS schools avoid being held accountable for their failure to educate kids, MPS is in the “meets expectations” category. Totally ridiculous

WILL:

Last night’s Milwaukee Public Schools board meeting highlighted that what previously seemed to be a silent majority, the parents and teachers of MPS, are no longer staying silent. The district’s recent failures to properly report financial datato DPI and its incompetence in running the Headstart program could cost the district hundreds of millions of dollars, which has broken the trust between the district and the community. This breakdown in trust comes despite the district’s successful effort in securing a $252 million referendum in the April election. The resignation of Superintendent Posley last night could represent a chance for meaningful change in the district, but it could also simply represent an easy scapegoat for a flailing school board.

With many calling for recalling the board members, highlighting past reform attempts, some that are still in state law, may provide an avenue of hope for families in the district desperate for reform.  

Lucas Robinson:

West Side residents who have been most opposed to the plan worry about elements that call for up to 16-story apartment buildings along Mineral Point Road and near the Hilldale Shopping Center. They also complain that the plan now doesn’t have enough medium-density housing, some of which was removed in response to previous resident feedback. That medium-density housing still exists in other parts of the plan, such as on Gammon Road.

West Side resident Janet Hirsch said she thinks the West Side already has taken on its fair share of housing density, evidenced by Hilldale and the ongoing Madison Yards redevelopment, but doesn’t get in return the cultural amenities and entertainment seen Downtown or on the East Side.

“If you want to have more housing over here then fine, give us some of the other services,” Hirsch said. “But with some of the big apartment buildings we’re going to lose that sense of community.”

——

Letter to the editor:

Forced-rezoning fans keep their self-righteousness greased up with crass stereotypes. They sneer at us decadent West Siders in Madison, lounging around in our opulent mansions.

I walk through the rooms of my very small home, unimproved for 35 years, because we have to watch our money carefully — and I wonder who they’re scolding. Many seniors are in our situation.

The main pants-on-fire lie is that Madison will, inevitably, have 40,000 new citizens in a few years, and we have to greet them with open arms and a ton of new housing units. No, we don’t.

The more arrogant people in favor of rezoning command us whiny chumps to shut up and let them get on with their holy task of stacking 40,000 people up really high. They say this is our moral duty. False. Many of these new units would not be affordable. And Madison doesn’t have to be boomtown.

Commentary.

——

Looming substantial Madison tax and $pending increases.

—-

Yet:

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 $pending. Dive in, here.

Yet:

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?

John Gittings:

Friday’s graduation ceremony came during a particularly fraught time in the district. A large group of residents, including a former district teacher who worked in the district prior to Briggs’ tenure, have voiced numerous frustrations with Briggs and other administrators, as well as with the School Board.

The group is currently attempting to recall Vodak and has until July 14 to submit more than 2,500 signatures to force a recall election. If the campaign is successful, Vodak said the election would be in late August or early September at the earliest. Vodak is up for re-election next spring.

Critics have accused Vodak of favoritism toward the administration, providing inadequate pay and administrative support for teachers, and unfairly firing former Jack Young Middle School Principal Abby Alt and former school resource officer Amanda Sabol, among others.

Many of those grievances have been shared through social media, including the Baraboo Community Conversations and Baraboo SD WI Parents’ Rights in EducationFacebook pages.

AJ Bayatpour

Superintendent Keith Posley has resigned.

Rory Linnane:

“We can’t keep things the way they are now, and that includes leadership,” Leonard said. “We need to make some significant changes. It’s time to clean things up.”

Board member Missy Zombor was absent but had attended the closed session meeting virtually before having trouble connecting to the virtual platform. She told the Journal Sentinel she supported the board’s decision to accept Posley’s resignation.

——

More. And. Thread.

——

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed legislationthat would break up the taxpayer funded Milwaukee school district into four smaller districts. Mulligans are worth a look.

——

Deeper dive: Henry Tyson’s recent Madison talk.

Joe Gabriel Simonson

Whenever I read stories about journalists attacking their new bosses, who point out that no one reads their work and the publication is losing money, I’m reminded of a meeting I sat in as an intern for a major publisher.

Christopher Rufo:

We will see if losing half your audience and $77 million a year gives executives enough incentive to finally say “no” to Longhouse-style hysteria, hypochondria, and manipulation.

Charlotte Klein;

“We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

“Don’t we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis replied, “You haven’t done it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”

“The fact that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Postleadership implies that he finds everyone lacking, and I think that’s kind of the most disturbing thing,” a second staffer told me.

—-

Peachy Keenan:

Hilarious NPR report on swing voter focus groups. All the voters say the economy is terrible, they can’t afford food or medicine, and that Trump will be better on the economy. In the follow up, the reported tells Steve Inskeep that people are desperate and are talking like it’s 1934. Inskeep says “I know we have to listen to these people, but how much of their feelings about the economy is due to them being deceived by misinformation?”

Ann Althouse:

You haven’t done it…. you don’t “get it”… Lewis had to take control, because “the game” was up. What does “it” mean? What was “the game”? Maybe you had to be there to understand. Maybe “it” just means: We’re a business and we need readers, readers who will pay. But what was “the game”? The “game” of doing journalism without paying attention to the numbers? Or was it a “game” of putting DEI concerns ahead of the numbers?

Inquirer

Temple and Drexel have offered a seamless transition, while students lament the loss of invested time and money.

It would have taken $40M to save University of the Arts, a trustee says, as students protest the unprecedented closure

It would have taken roughly $40 million to stave off the catastrophic financial crisis that ultimately forced University of the Arts officials to announce the school will close June 7, one trustee said Monday.

The news came as hundreds of students, faculty, parents, and supporters protested the stunning closure outside the university’s administrative building on South Broad Street in a lively memorial and performance.

“Our administration has failed us,” said Sarah MacLeod, a rising junior from Northwest Philly and a fine arts major who helped organize the demonstration.

Around her, students chalked the sidewalk, performed choreographed dances, blew bubbles, and painted signs. Passing cars beeped in support.

James Causey:

Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Keith Posley should be terminated over the district’s failure to submit financial reports to the state, but the repercussions should not end there. MPS needs more than a new superintendent, it urgently needs a mayoral takeover.

For far too long, the school system has been a breeding ground for failure, with countless students falling through the cracks. It has some of the widest reading gaps between black and white students. Historically, it has suspended more students of color, on average, compared to some of the country’s largest and most challenging school districts.

Furthermore, it appears that the district is having difficulty managing its finances.

Twice in the last four years, it has turned to taxpayers asking for help. Both times, taxpayers have stepped up because we know that if the state’s largest school system fails, we all fail. Despite both referendums passing, we learned that Posley and his team failed to provide critical financial reports to the state, some of which were due over eight months ago. And when paperwork has been turned in, it is often incomplete.

Joseph Cox:

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media.

Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people’s lives.

The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally. These include issues with Google’s own products or data collection practices; vulnerabilities in third party vendors that Google uses; or mistakes made by Google staff, contractors, or other people that have impacted Google systems or data. The incidents include everything from a single errant email containing some PII, through to substantial leaks of data, right up to impending raids on Google offices. When reporting an incident, employees give the incident a priority rating, P0 being the highest, P1 being a step below that. The database contains thousands of reports over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2018.

Jill Barshay:

This week I challenged my editor to face off against a machine. Barbara Kantrowitz gamely accepted, under one condition: “You have to file early.”  Ever since ChatGPT arrived in 2022, many journalists have made a public stunt out of asking the new generation of artificial intelligence to write their stories. Those AI stories were often bland and sprinkled with errors. I wanted to understand how well ChatGPT handled a different aspect of writing: giving feedback.

My curiosity was piqued by a new study, published in the June 2024 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, that evaluated the quality of ChatGPT’s feedback on students’ writing. A team of researchers compared AI with human feedback on 200 history essays written by students in grades 6 through 12 and they determined that human feedback was generally a bit better. Humans had a particular advantage in advising students on something to work on that would be appropriate for where they are in their development as a writer. 

But ChatGPT came close. On a five-point scale that the researchers used to rate feedback quality, with a 5 being the highest quality feedback, ChatGPT averaged a 3.6 compared with a 4.0 average from a team of 16 expert human evaluators. It was a tough challenge. Most of these humans had taught writing for more than 15 years or they had considerable experience in writing instruction. All received three hours of training for this exercise plus extra pay for providing the feedback. 

ChatGPT even beat these experts in one aspect; it was slightly better at giving feedback on students’ reasoning, argumentation and use of evidence from source materials – the features that the researchers had wanted the writing evaluators to focus on.

Holly Korbey:

Meanwhile, data reveals that only 28.5% of students across MNPS—and only 19.6% of Black students—are.”

——

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”

Allison Garfield:

 If the property tax increase covered the projected $27 million deficit, it would cost the average household an additional $284 annually, or roughly $24 a month.

If approved by voters, the increase would add to a revenue stream Madison already relies heavily upon to fund its services, with over 70% of the city’s money coming from property taxes. The city’s rapidly growing population has added to the demand for services, and while a property tax hike is one of only a few options available for the 2025 budget, the City Council is also considering what steps can be taken to address future deficits down the line.

——

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 $pending. Dive in, here.

Yet:

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?

Brian Fraley:

“How bad are things that MPS? Only 40% of MPS sophomores are proficient at reading and less than 30% are proficient at math. And the graduation rate and MPS is abysmal. Obviously what MPS has been doing is not working. So why has DPI ignored the problems of MPS? Why can’t the Superintendent and her deputies take a leadership role?”

More than 15 years ago, Rose Fernandez, then a candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, tried in vain to rally the education community to address the dysfunction and dereliction to duty on full display at Milwaukee Public Schools.  In the decade and a half since her campaign, things at MPS have gone from bad to worse as the ‘leaders’ at DPI and Milwaukee’s public schools have failed hundreds of thousands of Milwaukee students. 

The bureaucrats at the state Department of Public Instruction have threatened to hold up some state aid targeted to Milwaukee Public Schools because the district keeps failing to file fiscal reports with the state. This could impact more than $215 million in general and special education aid payments. This has been going on since September, but DPI made the political decision to withhold this information from the public until late May.

This crisis comes on top of news that MPS may no longer be able to run the city’s Head Start program because of systemic failure there.

Adam Andrzejewski

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by NIH. My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions.

We had to sue a second time, with Judicial Watch as our counsel, to pry open this new release.

Payments skyrocketed during the pandemic era: those years saw more than double the amount of cash flow to NIH from the private sector, compared to the prior twelve combined. All told, it’s $1.036 billion.

It’s unclear if any of the Covid vaccine royalties from Pfizer and Moderna, the latter of which settled with NIH by agreeing to pay $400 million, is even included in these new numbers. NIH isn’t saying.

Citizen Free Press

Dr. Robert Redfield was CDC director under Trump.

He was known to be a covid Vaccine truthteller, even back then.

This is a fantastic clip with Chris Cuomo.

——

2021.

Deeper dive.

Nicholas Kristof:

In retrospect, many of us in the journalistic and public health worlds were too dismissive of that possibility when she and others were making the argument in 2020.

NIH omertà – Debbie Dingel.

Judge Glock:

An ever-mounting debt burden is the greatest threat to the city’s survival. As that problem worsens, more residents will question whether they want to stay in a windswept city paying down someone else’s pension—or decamp for places that don’t place such a millstone around their citizens’ necks.

According to the group Truth in Accounting, Chicago continues to live up to its moniker “Second City” in at least one respect: it has the second-worst debt load of any big city in America—about $43,000 per taxpayer, or almost $40 billion in total. The first is New York City, but Chicago residents also have to deal with Illinois’ debts, which total $42,000 per taxpayer, third worst in the nation. Thus, a family moving to Chicago suddenly becomes the inheritor of almost $85,000 in liabilities. By this metric, Chicago is no longer second but has by far the worst debt burden of any major city.

Chicago’s accumulating debt might be bearable if the city had low taxes and therefore room to raise them and pay down some of the liabilities. But taxes in the Windy City already rank among the nation’s harshest. According to a national study, Chicago’s combined city and state taxes would eat up over 12 percent of a U.S. median family income. The only large cities with higher proportionate taxes are Rust Belt towns with much smaller populations, such as Detroit and Newark. Chicago imposes the highest sales tax of any major city (10.25 percent) and punishing property taxes, too.

Chicago’s taxation is also brutal on businesses. A recent study of 53 cities found that Chicago’s tax on industrial properties was nearly double the average of other cities. Chicago’s commercial property-tax rate, at more than 4 percent per year, was by far the worst of any major city and more than twice the average.

High debt and taxes might be manageable if the city’s economic fundamentals were strong. They’re not. Chicago relied for years on commercial properties, especially downtown offices in the Loop, to power its economy and fund the city’s excesses. But those jobs are fleeing. Downtown Chicago’s office vacancy rate recently approached 24 percent, a record high. Boeing has moved its headquarters from the Loop to Northern Virginia. These white-collar firms will not pay the city’s higher taxes in the future; they won’t even pay their existing leases.

Arjun Neil Alim and Michael O’Dwyer

The number of UK graduates going into professional services careers rather than manufacturing represents a “failure” of industrial policy, former Royal Dutch Shell chief Peter Voser has said.

Voser, who now chairs Swiss engineering group ABB, said that British university graduates had been let down by the country’s education system and successive governments that neglected its manufacturing sector.

“I think the UK forgot how important certain sectors are,” he said. “It’s a failure . . . [that so many graduates go into consulting]. There should be more in, for example, advanced manufacturing.”

Professional services firms such as consultancies have expanded rapidly, helped by demand from companies short on staff and desperate to make their operations digital after the pandemic. The need for advice on compliance with regulations and the adoption of climate impact targets has also driven demand for advisers.

KW:

College enrollment is in “crisis.” According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “Between fall 2010 and fall 2021, total undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions decreased by 15 percent (from 18.1 million to 15.4 million students).” After a small spike in 2022, freshman enrollment declined again in 2023, with “the plunge in enrollment the worst ever recorded.”

Low birth rates are part of the story behind this “enrollment cliff.” But, they are only part. Just as important is the growing disinterest that many high school students have in graduating from college. According to data from Monitoring the Future, a long-running survey of American 12^thgraders, the percentage of high school seniors reporting no interest in graduating from a four-year college rose from 18% to 28% between 2011 and 2022 (Figure 1).

Julia James:

This growth can be attributed to several factors, but chief among them is a 2013 state law that created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark.

But this national test also measures students again in eighth grade. The gap between the national average and Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading score has gotten smaller over the last decade, but it hasn’t closed at the rate of fourth-grade reading. 

State leaders are paying attention. 

“Some of our challenge points are eighth-grade reading,” Interim State Superintendent Ray Morgigno said when presenting an annual report at the Jan. 18 State Board of Education meeting.

Morgigno then pointed to the pilot programs underway around the state to expand Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading strategies up to the middle school level. One is being operated by the Mississippi Department of Education in conjunction with a regional arm of the U.S. Department of Education. 

—

Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality

——-

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?

Nate Hochman:

A once great American city has become something short of a dystopia, where shop owners sleep with shotguns and citizens must act as police.

For seven months, Dylan Carrico Rogers slept in his bike shop with a shotgun. TriTech Bikes, located in the Montavilla neighborhood of northeast Portland, Ore., where Rogers grew up, had been battered by three break-ins, two nearby shootings, and countless instances of vandalism. Portland’s serially understaffed police force was nowhere to be found. And in the face of $25,000 of stolen bike parts, TriTech’s insurance company was ready to jump ship. “They said, ‘if you claim another one, we’re just gonna drop you,’” Rogers told National Review. “So I’m paying $1,200 every three months to be told that I have …

—-

“All will now be released into Oregon’s communities”.

Chuck Ross:

The kicker is that it looks like these loans, handled by MOHELA, are through the public service forgiveness program, which long predated Biden

Charles Benson:

West Bend and Germantwn have an option of $60,000 for West Bend and Germantown to count absentee ballots at polling places instead of a central count location. 

Municipalities will have the option of $40,000 to expand early voting hours and hire more poll workers.

There is $15,000 available for a post-county-wide audit of results in the presidential and us senate races.

An additional $6,700 is available for random voluntary audits on election night.

The remaining funds will be divided to cover additional expenses. 

Why the audits?

“We have heard concerns from our constituents about our voting equipment and we want to reiterate they are functioning properly and restore that confidence for those individuals,” said Reichert.

Prodigal:

“The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague.

In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals.

Mia Sato:

A collection of 2,500 leaked internal documents from Google filled with details about data the company collects is authentic, the company confirmed today. Until now, Google had refused to comment on the materials.

The documents in question detail data that Google is keeping track of, some of which may be used in its closely guarded search ranking algorithm. The documents offer an unprecedented — though still murky — look under the hood of one of the most consequential systems shaping the web.

“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” Google spokesperson Davis Thompson told The Verge in an email. “We’ve shared extensive information about how Search works and the types of factors that our systems weigh, while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”

Maxwell Zeff:

Google Search is often referred to as the doorstep to the internet—it’s the first stop on most people’s journey to information online. However, Google doesn’t say much about how it organizes the internet, making Search a giant black box that dictates what we know and what we don’t. This week, a 2,500-page leak, first reported by search engine optimization (SEO) veteran Rand Fishkin, gave the world an insight into the 26-year-old mystery of Google Search.

“I think the biggest takeaway is that what Google’s public representatives say and what Google search engine does are two different things,” Fishkin said in an emailed statement to Gizmodo.

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee School Board members could fire Superintendent Keith Posley or take other disciplinary action against him at a meeting Monday night, according to a meeting noticeupdated Friday evening, days after board members found out MPS had failed to submit key financial reports to state officials.

According to the meeting notice, board members could discuss Posley’s employment in a closed door meeting, before possibly returning to a public meeting to take action.

At the meeting, board members may consider “dismissal, demotion, licensing or discipline” of the superintendent. They may also discuss Posley’s compensation and performance evaluation data, and confer with legal counsel, according to the meeting notice.

The meeting, at 5:30 p.m. Monday at MPS’ Central Office, will also include a public hearing on the district’s budget and financial situation. Board members delayed voting this week on a district budget for the 2024-25 school year to get more information about where the district’s finances stand.

Also at the meeting on Monday, board members plan to announce the hiring of an outside financial consultant that will help the district get its financial reports in order.

Greg Lukianoff and Andrea Lan

In their 2015 article and 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg and Jonathan Haidt argue that cognitive distortions (practices like catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning) and overprotecting children results in an external locus of control, helplessness and despair, and both the mental health crisis and the rampant culture of illiberalism on campus that we’re seeing today.

Certainly, the two major concerns from the 2015 article have borne out, with academic freedom and free speech on campus being threatened at an unprecedented scale since 2014 — but especially since 2017 — and mental health of young people tanking to a degree even greater than even Greg and Jon ever predicted. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has reported consistent and rapid increases in the rates of suicide and depression in teens (12-17) and young adults (18-25) since at least 2012. Just last year, nearly 20% of teens (12-17) and a similar number of young adults (18-25) reported experiencing a major depressive episode. This is compared to just 7% in adults older than 25 last year, and just 9% of teens and young adults back in 2012.

Something is clearly happening, but what’s the cause? The recent documentary film “The Coddling of the American Mind,” directed by Ted Balaker, showcases how the adoption of what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism” (a.k.a.  “Wokeness” — a term we don’t love) and its associated catastrophizing spirals led three of the film’s protagonists, Kimi, Lucy, and Saeed, into feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Arnold Kling:

“At the extremes, 57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of poor mental health at least half the time, compared to just 34% of very conservative students”

…Only 41% of very liberal males report feelings of poor mental health more than half the time, compared to 60% of very liberal females, and a whopping 70% of very liberal non-binary students.

She writes as if the causality runs from social justice extremism to emotional fragility. But I am inclined to think that it is the other way around. If you are mentally fragile, you are likely to be attracted to an extreme ideology that gives you an external source to blame for your discomfort.

Ted Gioia proposes a reading list for a course on stupidity. Among the essay questions he proposes for a final exam are these:

——

Commentary.

Chris Reed:

Given how many kids struggle with reading proficiency, it’s stunning that the ‘whole language’ approach is still used in so many elementary schools

Who are the most dangerous cultists — adherents of a belief system regarded as unorthodox or spurious, to use a common definition — in the United States? Some will point to religions perceived as out of the mainstream, others will cite extreme political movements and still others might take a potshot at devotees of Red Sox Nation.

But in a country built on the idea that free, competent public education is the bedrock to the success of individuals and society in general, the most dangerous cult is the one that promotes unscientific methods of teaching reading. Despite massive evidence that the “phonics” approach is far more effective, the “whole language” approach is still a part of the reading instruction curricula used by 72 percent of elementary school teachers, according to a 2019 Education Week Research Center survey. Education researchers routinely note that lesson plans with no history of working well are ubiquitous in U.S. schools.

Language education experts say this is a big reason why nearly two-thirds of fourth- and eighth-graders in the U.S. in 2019 — before the pandemic disruption hurt scores even more — were not proficient readers. The stats were similar but slightly worse in California. The implications are grim. Poor reading skills correlate with dropping out of school, a lack of career success and even a much shorter life expectancy.

—-

Reed is deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section….

Meanwhile, Madison’s legacy newspaper opinion folks supported a successful candidate – Jill Underly – for the Wisconsin department of public instruction who sought (and continues) to get rid of our only early literacy teacher knowledge exam. More.

—-

More, here.

—-

Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality

——-

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?

Sophie Carson & David Clarey

A 10-year-old Milwaukee girl was shot and killed while sleeping in her bed early Friday morning when an upstairs neighbor accidentally fired a bullet through her ceiling, striking her in the chest, her 14-year-old sister said.

The girl’s sister identified her as Isdennyeliz Ortiz, a student of Milwaukee’s Kagel School who was born in Puerto Rico, played volleyball and loved making YouTube videos.

“She was very happy. She was smiley. She loved the color purple. She wanted to be a YouTuber. She loved animals with all her heart,” said Brandy Ortiz, 14, who spoke on behalf of her mother Friday morning outside their home on the 2100 block of West Orchard Street on Milwaukee’s south side.

The family moved from Puerto Rico seven years ago, Brandy said.

Alex Tabarrok:

When interest rates rise, the price of long-term assets falls. Consequently, when the Fed began raising interest rates in 2022, the value of bonds and mortgages dropped, causing significant accounting losses for banks heavily invested in these assets. Silicon Valley Bank went bust, for example, because depositors fled upon realizing it was holding lots of Treasury bonds.

Interest rates remain high and many banks have large unrealized losses on their books.  According to the latest FDIC data (see below) unrealized losses currently total $516.5 billion, far exceeding levels seen during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Price risk is not the same as default risk and if the banks can hold onto their assets until maturity then they will be solvent. The real danger, as with SVB, is if unrealized losses are combined with a deposit run. So far that doesn’t seem to be happening but it’s well within the realm of possibility.

John Lucas:

One of my former law partners, a world class trial lawyer, when faced with an adversary who wanted to engage in unprofessional “hardball” litigation tactics would say, “I can play the game; just tell me the rules.” The Democrats have made the rules, and their opponents will have little choice but to play the game.  

This is not a game that can or will be played by one side only. The rules are now set. When Republicans have the chance, they will play the game. Many, perhaps most, will think that a response is mandatory and that “taking the high road” is no longer an option. Instead, it would be regarded by the “progressive” left — that is to say those now in charge of the Democratic party — as weakness if they roll over and fail to respond. This is an existential threat to the stability of our political system and nation. That risk makes this the most dangerous day in the history of the Country, at least in our lifetimes. 

Henceforth, weaponization of the justice system against a political opponent will be the norm. Political grudges will be resolved by political opponents in cherry-picked courtrooms where conviction is most likely. All this confirms that when controlled by scoundrels, our judicial system is becoming more like what we expect in places like China, Cuba or Venezuela, where political opponents are routinely imprisoned or worse. 

Regardless of what you think of former President Trump – and I have criticized him sharply in the past both privately and in public – you, too, should fear for our Country.

John Kang:

This Article explores the religious origins of the right to alter or abolish government. I show in Part I that the right was widely accepted among the American colonies as expressed through their constitutions and, later, the federal constitution. In Part II, I usher the reader back in time and across the continent to seventeenth century England. There, I introduce two men who would have abhorred everything about American constitutional democracy – King James I and the philosopher Sir Robert Filmer. Both men, prominent in their respective domains of authority, devoted themselves to the governing axiom that kings were bequeathed a right by God to absolute rule. Part III sketches the seventeenth century arguments of two other Englishmen, also prominent–the philosophers John Locke and Algernon Sidney – who challenged James and Filmer. Locke and Sidney argued that God had never sanctioned the divine right of kings and instead had justified the people’s right to overthrow tyrants. 

The arguments of Locke and Sidney will, as I show in subsequent sections, influence the American clergy who supported war against Britain and the right of revolution in general. Indeed, the development of this connection will occupy me for the remainder of the Article, but, in Part IV, I take a brief respite to summarize the historical circumstances that severely hampered governmental control over religion in colonial America and thus provided partially autonomous spaces for people to reflect on religion, including in ways that would inform their right to alter or abolish government. I illustrate in Part V how several prominent American clergymen, following Locke and Sidney, rejected as impossible the divine and supposedly infallible status of rulers. God, the clergy insisted, was the only one who could claim such infallibility; the clergy warned that rulers would do well to devote themselves to the people’s well being, not the former’s aggrandizement. In Part VI, I argue that, again echoing Locke and Sidney, a prominent group of American clergymen insisted that, contrary to the anti-democratic jeers of monarchists, God had given people the capacity for reason which enabled them to make meaningful decisions about their political future. I conclude in Part VII by illustrating how the federal and state constitutions following the American Revolution sought to protect conditions for the faithful to contemplate the religious meaning of the right to alter or abolish government.

Nick Minock:

After Loudoun County’s previous superintendent was fired and indicted, the Loudoun County School Board hired Aaron Spence as superintendent to make a difference for the embattled school district.

7News has learned through public records requests that Loudoun County Superintendent Spence has missed a month of the school year. And this is Spence’s first academic year on the job in Loudoun County.

This year, Spence attended the Consortium for School Networking (COSN) in Miami. Here’s the marketing video on the conference’s website. The video advertising the conference looks like a party for educators, showcasing Miami’s water activities and beach scene, nightlife, entertainment, yoga and more.

Bryce Nichols:

@COVIDSelect uncovered that NIH official Greg Folkers tried to avoid FOIA by intentionally misspelling Kristian Andersen’s name as Anders$n. To commemorate this, I created special “FOIA proof” slack chat images.
(1/n)

Moltar:

Simply upload any document, URL, or Youtube video and Moltar will analyze the content, offering instant responses and insights to all your questions.
Try it out for free below! 👇

FreedomHK:

Today, the Hong Kong courts convicted 14 pro-democracy activists in the city’s largest national security trial.  The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation unequivocally condemns these sentences and calls for the immediate release of the 47 and all other political prisoners currently being held in Hong Kong prisons.

The sentences come after the trial of 47 pro-democracy figures, 31 of which have already pleaded guilty. Of the 16 who pleaded not guilty, 14 individuals were found guilty of ‘conspiracy to subvert state power.’ The ‘Hong Kong 47’ were arrested in February 2021 for participating in primary elections. Their trial began in February 2023. Prosecutors alleged that the activists held primary elections to ‘overthrow the government.’ The convicted activists will be sentenced at a later date, together with the 31 who entered a guilty plea.

Sofia Tosello:

Queen’s University will cut costs this year as it grapples with ongoing budgetary issues.

The University is projecting a $35.7 million operating budget deficit, confirmed in the Final Operating Budget Report to the Board of Trustees on May 10. To mitigate the impact of the deficit, the University will uphold the hiring freeze initiated in May 2023 and put into action Voluntary Retirement Initiatives currently ongoing in the Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS).

READ MORE: Buyout begin as ArtSci gives staff incentive to leave

In addition to increased costs and inflation, the budget deficit was blamed on provincial tuition cuts and freeze for in-province students and decreased international and graduate student enrollment.

Katherine Bindley:

To try to make that happen, workers are attempting to bridge the gap between what they know and what they need to know, adding skills and knowledge to pivot into this game-changing technology. Tech companies, meanwhile, are refashioning themselves as AI companies and trying to remold their workforces to be more AI proficient.

“I’ve been leading with an AI-tailored resume for the last two to three months,” says Asif Dhanani, 31 years old, of Irvine, Calif., who was laid off from his job as a technical product manager at Amazon in March.

Dhanani has landed plenty of interviews for AI product manager roles, but he hasn’t received any offers. He has worked with large language models but not since 2016; the technology has changed significantly since then. He also isn’t entirely convinced that companies know what they are looking for. On top of that, two different hiring managers told him they were sifting through hundreds of applicants.

His next step is a two-week online AI boot camp from Deep Atlas costing $6,800. “The skills building for me is a worthwhile investment,” he says, even if it doesn’t help land him a job.

NEA

NEA Research collects, maintains, and analyzes data on issues and trends affecting the nation’s public education systems, their employees, and students.

This report, Rankings of the States 2023 and Estimates of School Statistics 2024, contains data primarily based on information from state departments of education.

MMAC

The school district’s non-compliance with federal and state statutes should have been disclosed to the Milwaukee taxpayers, the majority of whom are working families, before they were asked to increase the district’s budget by more than a quarter-billion dollars annually in April. It would have changed the narrative and forced the electorate to think twice about entrusting this amount of funding to a body who seemingly can’t manage it.  MPS has a transparency problem, and the state and federal governments are holding it accountable.  

We now ask the Milwaukee Public School Board to investigate the matter and hold those responsible fully accountable.  A deep, independent performance audit of the district must be conducted, and the results made public.  

Our students are told to complete their work and turn it in on time. MPS administration needs to be held to that same standard.    

——

“I asked @WisconsinDPI why they didn’t inform the public months ago about MPS’s failure to disclose financial data…..”

——-

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee School Board members could fire Superintendent Keith Posley or take other disciplinary action against him at a meeting Monday night, according to a meeting noticeupdated Friday evening, days after board members found out MPS had failed to submit key financial reports to state officials.

According to the meeting notice, board members could discuss Posley’s employment in a closed door meeting, before possibly returning to a public meeting to take action.

At the meeting, board members may consider “dismissal, demotion, licensing or discipline” of the superintendent. They may also discuss Posley’s compensation and performance evaluation data, and confer with legal counsel, according to the meeting notice.

The meeting, at 5:30 p.m. Monday at MPS’ Central Office, will also include a public hearing on the district’s budget and financial situation. Board members delayed voting this week on a district budget for the 2024-25 school year to get more information about where the district’s finances stand.

Also at the meeting on Monday, board members plan to announce the hiring of an outside financial consultant that will help the district get its financial reports in order.

Some community members have called for Posley to resign, or for school board members to fire him, since news broke this week that the district has failed to submit financial reports to the state Department of Public Instruction, some of which were due more than eight months ago. DPI warned that it could suspend funding to MPS if the reports are not filed promptly.

MPS has not granted the Journal Sentinel an interview with Posley.

Quinton Klabon:

Good gracious! Alderman Westmoreland “disgusted and embarrassed” by MPS situation.

“Change at MPS is imperative to prevent a fate as disastrous as the Titanic’s.”

“[MPS] must excel in every area they can control. There is absolutely no room for error.”

Madison’s chamber involvement in the schools…?

Select Subcommittee:

SOCIAL DISTANCING: The “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation forced on Americans by federal health officials was arbitrary and not based on science.

Dr. Fauci testified that this guidance “sort of just appeared.”

MASKING: Dr. Fauci testified that he did not recall any supporting evidence for masking children.

Mask-wearing has been associated with severe learning loss and speech development issues in America’s children.

——-

Related: Taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Public Health lockdowns….

By Elie Honig:

But that doesn’t mean that every structural infirmity around the Manhattan district attorney’s case has evaporated. Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.

The following are all undeniable facts.

The judge donated money — a tiny amount, $35, but in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind — to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the judge earmarked for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to “Re-elect Donald Trump, MAGA forever!”? Absolutely not.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office in an overwhelmingly Democratic county by toutinghis Trump-hunting prowess. He bizarrely (and falsely) boasted on the campaign trail, “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times.” (Disclosure: Both Bragg and Trump’s lead counsel, Todd Blanche, are friends and former colleagues of mine at the Southern District of New York.)

Most importantly, the DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process. That’s not on the jury. That’s on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did.

The district attorney’s press office and its flaks often proclaim that falsification of business records charges are “commonplace” and, indeed, the office’s “bread and butter.” That’s true only if you draw definitional lines so broad as to render them meaningless. Of course the DA charges falsification quite frequently; virtually any fraud case involves some sort of fake documentation.

But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.

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Guy Benson:

Ultimately, the judge in the case — who donated to his defendant’s political opponent in their last election match-up — told the Manhattan jury that they could select from a menu of three options that could be considered the critical, felony-creating ‘other crime.’  These options were not adjudicated at trial, let alone proven. They weren’t spelled out in the indictment.  The defense was not able to defend against them.  Attempts at educating the jury on the most likely of the options were barred by the Biden donor judge.  A top expert’s highly-relevant testimony was preemptively disallowed, and therefore never heard.  One of the prosecutors in the courtroom joined Bragg’s legal team from President Biden’s Justice Department, where he’d been serving as the third highest-ranking official.  He quit and became an assistant in a local DA’s office, which is unheard of.  This man, who was paid thousands of dollars for political consulting by the Democratic National Committee during Trump’s presidency, clearly had a very specific objective in mind.  Days before Trump’s conviction, his electoral opponent’s team held a campaign event at the courthouse.  These facts — in isolation, and especially taken together — are breathtaking.

More.

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And:

I’ve been so impressed with @eliehonig’s coverage of the Trump trial @CNN. His intelligent, impartial analysis was brave and patriotic, exposing CNN viewers to his skepticism about the trial. His piece on the unprecedented and unconstitutional nature of the trial is a must read:

AJ Bayatpour:

Here’s a taste of tonight’s wild MPS board meeting.

Plus, this exchange with board VP Jilly Gokalgandhi…

Gokalgandhi: DPI sent the communication on Friday.

——

“I asked @WisconsinDPI why they didn’t inform the public months ago about MPS’s failure to disclose financial data…..”

Luona Lin:

About a third of high school teachers (35%) say these tools do more harm than good. Roughly a quarter of middle school teachers (24%) and 19% of elementary school teachers say the same.

Fewer than one-in-ten teachers at all levels say these tools do more good than harm.

Some 47% of elementary school teachers say they aren’t sure about the impact of AI tools in K-12 education. That is much larger than the shares of middle and high school teachers who say this.

Teens’ experiences with and views of ChatGPT

In a separate survey, we asked U.S. teens about their experience with and views of ChatGPT, a generative AI tool, in their schoolwork.

Joanne Jacobs:

Learning is not the priority of most Harvard students, writes Aden Barton in Harvard Magazine. Going to class and doing classwork as “simply another item on their to-do list.” Earning good grades is easy. Resume polishing requires more effort.

“Harvard has increasingly become a place in Cambridge for bright students to gather — that happens to offer lectures on the side,” he writes.

Students will do whatever it takes to earn an A, writes Barton. But they know professors’ expectations are low.

He took a seminar with three friends. “Although we knew hundreds of pages of readings would be assigned each week, we were excited about the prospect of engaging with the material. As time went on, the percentage of readings each of us did went from nearly 100 to nearly 0.” All received A’s.

James Clayton:

“Within less than a minute, I’m approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, ‘You’re a thief, you need to leave the store’.”

Sara – who wants to remain anonymous – was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch. 

She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology. 

“I was just crying and crying the entire journey home… I thought, ‘Oh, will my life be the same? I’m going to be looked at as a shoplifter when I’ve never stolen’.”

Jon Kamp and Alicia A. Caldwell:

Adding the 90 shelter students has cost Stoughton, which teaches a total of 3,740 students, at least $500,000 for increased staff and busing costs. The state said it has reimbursed nearly all of that money. But the lag time and uncertainty about how much would be paid back has challenged the district’s ability to plan, said Joseph Baeta, Stoughton’s superintendent.

The most immediate upfront costs this year were hiring five new staff members, including two teachers, and contracting for a bus to shuttle students to and from the hotel shelters, Baeta said. The district has gone from seven to 17 English-as-a-second-language teachers in the past five years.

Massachusetts is legally mandated to offer shelter to any family that seeks it. Migrant families recently comprised about half of the 7,477 homeless families recently living in state shelters, which are at capacity. The state since October 2022 has spent roughly $26 million to reimburse school districts for costs associated with students living in shelters.

JR Ross Thread:

“Deputy State Superintendent John Johnson wrote MPS will likely see a “significant” reduction in state general aid payments for the 2024-25 school year due to errors the district reported for 2022-23 shared costs”

Two of the reports were due eight months ago, and the district is in danger of missing out on a $15.7 million special education aid payment next month, as well as a $200 million general aid payment.

Wispolitics:

Johnson wrote not only were many reports “incredibly late,” but the district had “demonstrated a pattern of submitting incomplete data” and requesting changes without the required documentation to support it. 

He added DPI staff had been meeting quarterly with MPS since April 2023, then monthly as of February, weekly starting in mid-March and now daily during May. 

Johnson added MPS’s failure to submit the financial data hinders DPI’s ability to complete its statutorily-required July 1 general school aids estimate. That impacts every district in the state.

Emilee Fannon:

I asked @WisconsinDPI why they didn’t inform the public months ago about MPS’s failure to disclose financial data when they began meeting in 2023 (months before a referendum asked residents for $252 million for the school district).

Duey Stroebel:

MPS can’t get their finances in order and more than 80% of their kids can’t read at grade level. There’s no accountability.

This is why we need to fund students, not systems. If a choice school fails to submit their financial reports, they’re kicked out of the program.

WTMJ:

The biggest question voters had when a $252 million MPS referendum passed in April, was “Where is this money going?”

This week we’re learning it’s apparently a question the state is also asking.

AJ Bayatpour:

Folks, we’ve got even more @MilwaukeeMPS issues. The Dept. of Public Instruction is now threatening to withhold money from the district because it’s fallen more than eight months behind on providing financial data to the state…

More from AJ:

Here’s a taste of tonight’s wild MPS board meeting.

Plus, this exchange with board VP Jilly Gokalgandhi…

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed legislation that would break up the taxpayer funded Milwaukee school district into four smaller districts. Mulligans are worth a look.

Jon Hartley:

A very technical economics heavy speech covering econ history, growth, general vs. partial equilibrium; dangers of models.

Shelby Talcott:

Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor.

The sour mood points to potential trouble for Joe Biden, who is struggling with Gen Z and younger Millennials in polls compared with 2020, and needs to convince them he can be relied on to improve their lives.

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

——

Commentary.

Yet, an optimist, the opportunities all around us are unprecedented. Plenty to do in all directions.

Boston Globe:

1 ⁱⁿ 4 failed to get a bachelor’s degree within six years.

Nearly a quarter. aspired to be doctors……but none has earned a medical degree.

Daniel Buck:

Tolerance tops the list. Actual facts about history is at the bottom

Only half care about respecting authority, following rules, the Bill of rights, basic economics, the Founding, or the Civil War

Frederick Hess:

Some issues are so tough to explain to amateurs.

“Look,” I said, “schools are trying to be inclusive and ensure there’s LGBTQ+ representation in libraries and reading lists . . .”

“That’s fine,” she said. “But I’m guessing there are books about gay kids that are more like Harry Potter or Snow White and less like some adult website. Why don’t they put those books in my daughter’s middle school?”

She wasn’t getting it. “In our schools,” I explained, “we don’t believe librarians should censor what students read.”

“But school libraries don’t stock Penthouse or Playboy,” she said. “There are millions and millions of books, and I’ve heard that something like 99.99 percent of them aren’t in school libraries. I also heard that the author of that Gender Queer book even said it wasn’t written for kids. So why is the school so focused on having that book instead of something that was intended for kids?”

I shook my head. “The American Library Association put it powerfully: ‘When we ban books, we’re closing off readers to people, places, and perspectives. But when we stand up for stories, we unleash the power that lies inside every book.’” I sat back. I figured that must clear things up.

“Maybe I’m not smart enough to get that,” she said, “but that just sounds like a word salad.”

I sat there reflecting on just how frustrating it can be to try and enlighten the unenlightened.

She continued. “I heard on the radio that, during the pandemic, President Biden’s people told Amazon it should stop selling books that said the vaccines were bad. Where were your librarians then? That sounds like the kind of censorship they should be yelling about.”

“Well, I’m sure they’ve been very busy,” I said.

Paul Caron

Have the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings become irrelevant? The ostensible purpose of the US News law school rankings is to give prospective law students convenient and reliable information about the relative quality of law schools and help them decide which law school to attend. Law schools care about the US News rankings because prospective law students care about the US News rankings. A ranking increase means more prestige and better credentialed students, while a ranking decrease means less prestige and students with worse credentials. Accordingly, law schools are jealous of their US News ranking.

Do prospective law students actually care about the US News rankings anymore? We compared changes in law school US News rankings to changes in prospective law student preferences the following year. Those variables should be strongly positively correlated. If a school’s US News ranking increases, prospective law students should prefer it more the following year, and if it decreases, they should prefer it less. But in fact, they were at best very weakly positively correlated, and often they are weakly negatively correlated. In other words, prospective law students appear to be largely indifferent to changes in a school’s US News ranking.

by Jonathan Ireland

Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be. As a consequence of the benefit of the doubt provided to nonprofits, there is rarely enough oversight to guarantee that they are doing what we pay them to do. In some cities, upwards of a billion dollars of public funds are paid to nonprofit organizations every year with glaringly insufficient safeguards to ensure that the money is used in a manner likely to serve the public interest.

This money is then spent in ways that would shock the taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars are being effectively stolen from them. Non­profits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding; nonprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies while receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts; and the executives of nonprofits, the very people in charge of institutions whose stated purpose is not to make money, earn millions of dollars while catastrophically failing to deliver the public services we are paying them to provide.

And as all of that is going on, the nonprofits in question receive tax breaks from the IRS, ensuring that the incompetent organizations wors­ening your city’s homelessness crisis exert their corrupting influence all the way to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

Wall Street Journal:

Fortunate? The encampments were illegal and protesters’ conduct included multiple violations of university policy as Mr. Schill defined it during the hearing. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) noted reports that Jewish students at Northwestern were assaulted and spat on. Mr. Schill says no students have been suspended or expelled, so presumably the perpetrators are still on campus.

An antisemitism task force might help, but Northwestern’s version disbanded recently after seven Jewish students resigned to protest the university’s agreement to end the encampment. Others on the antisemitism task force had previously supported anti-Israel boycotts and the call to free Palestine “from the river to the sea.”