Two Chicago public schools.

Northside: Selective, 94% of black students reading proficient.

Douglas: $68,000 per pupil per year, 0% black students reading proficient.

Guess which one the "antiracist" school system wants to close for "equity" reasons?https://t.co/Z7hHSpu5zk

— i/o (@eyeslasho) February 7, 2024

Lance Morrow:

impulse to dial everything, immediately, up to 10. Cancel. Take no prisoners. Nullification has become the national fashion—civics as road rage. Brisk currents of stupidity ride the air, mingling with occasional whiffs of insanity. Nullification is the policy of people who think, if they think at all, in crude cartoons.

Nanna Inie, Jonathan Stray, Leon Derczynski

Engaging in the deliberate generation of abnormal outputs from large language models (LLMs) by attacking them is a novel human activity. This paper presents a thorough exposition of how and why people perform such attacks. Using a formal qualitative methodology, we interviewed dozens of practitioners from a broad range of backgrounds, all contributors to this novel work of attempting to cause LLMs to fail. We relate and connect this activity between its practitioners’ motivations and goals; the strategies and techniques they deploy; and the crucial role the community plays. As a result, this paper presents a grounded theory of how and why people attack large language models: LLM red teaming in the wild.

Frederick Hess:

Recently, I offered a not-so-sophisticated explanation for the histrionics we’ve seen at elite colleges: too many students are simply aimless, lonely, and bored. Well-meaning concern about the mental and emotional state of college students today has fueled a lot of affirmation and hand-holding. But much of this may ultimately be counterproductive, exacerbating fragility rather than supporting well-being.

After all, on the merits, it’s hard to look at elite college students and conclude they’re overworked or overstressed. As I note:

Philip Mousavizadeh:

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges. 

Nilanjana Roy

On October 29 last year, the British Library in London posted on X saying that the institution was struggling with “technical issues”. As these continued day after day, it became clearer to the library’s readers and thousands of scholars what had actually happened: the BL had fallen prey to a massive cyber attack, carried out by a criminal group that has become notorious for such things. 

The BL holds something like 170mn items; essential digital archives, entire collections of texts and images and access to online learning resources were severely disrupted. Librarians and readers could no longer retrieve books, and after the BL declined to pay the ransom that had been demanded, the attackers dumped enormous quantities of employees’ personal data on to the dark web. 

Six weeks later, the BL’s chief executive Roly Keating wrote in a blog post: “The people responsible for this cyber attack stand against everything that libraries represent: openness, empowerment, and access to knowledge.”

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.”

But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient.

Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago. 

Ethan Mollick:

I always thought reading science fiction would prepare us for the future, but fantasy novels might be better suited to understanding our suddenly AI-haunted world.

There are now advanced and useful systems whose exact operations remain mysterious, even to those who built them. While one can understand the technical aspects of building Large Language Models like ChatGPT, the precise capabilities and limitations of these AIs are often only uncovered through trial and error. And having both conducted academic studies and developed magic spells for fictional fantasy games, working with ChatGPT often feels more like the latter.

Consider that ChatGPT outputs are created by prompts invoking webs of tenuous connections, basically programs in prose form. And since the way that the AI makes these connections are not always clear, creating good prompts requires exploring the AI with language (here are some hints to get started in your explorations). Once discovered, new invocations are often kept secret to gain an advantage in a job, or else shared online through secretive chat groups. But the magic analogy goes beyond secret knowledge and esoteric schools: There are certain words that ChatGPT cannot seem to remember or understand (ask it what Skydragon means). There are glyphs that other AIs cannot see. Still other AIs seem to have invented their own languages by which you can invoke them. You can bind autonomous vehicles in circles of salt. As science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Neetu Arnold:

These cuts were a long time coming—higher education is facing anenrollment cliff, even as it continues to spend on administration and student services like there’s no tomorrow. Pandemic-era emergency funding could only hold off the reckoning for so long. As university administrators rush to blame their state governments for providing insufficient funds, state legislators should remain staunch in enforcing fiscal discipline on universities. There’s still a long way to go to make higher education cost-effective.

Though university administrators and faculty consider these budget cuts to be nothing short of catastrophic for university operations, some of the cuts appear quite reasonable. For instance, Penn State plans to scale back branch campus operations and cut duplicate programs. This is a necessary step in the right direction—Pennsylvania is known as the “state with too many campuses,” and steep enrollment declines at branch campuses justify reducing their operations.

But even when making the right decisions, universities are too trepidatious. UNH, for example, will cut certain programs at its Aulbani J. Beauregard Center for Equity, Justice, and Freedom. Yet they have not indicated whether only staff or the entire department would be cut. This is not nearly far enough: Not only are diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) administrative units like the Beauregard Center unnecessary and expensive, but they are also harmful to the campus environment. DEI initiatives have led universities to monitor what students and faculty say through bias reporting systems and filtered faculty hiring based on race and political views. Budget cuts should not be needed to cut down on these departments—they should never have been created in the first place.

The Amazon Files:

Never-before-released internal emails subpoenaed by @JudiciaryGOP reveal that the Biden White House pressured Amazon to censor books that expressed views the White House did not approve of.

Emma Camp:

More than anything, Heather Lowe didn’t want her children to grow up in poverty.

The 27-year-old had already had more interactions with social services than most ever will. As a child, she had been in and out of foster care and witnessed her parents’ struggle with drug addiction. She had her first child at 19. She soon found herself bouncing between homeless shelters with her infant son. She even did a stint at a domestic violence shelter.

“I needed to do better for my kids. I needed to do better even for myself,” she says. “A lot of people were very much like, ‘All you’ll ever be is a single parent. And you’ll be an uneducated person for the rest of your life.'”

When her son was 2 years old, she went back to school, finishing several associate degrees and then completing a bachelor’s in psychology from California Lutheran University. But even then she struggled to find work that paid enough

Alex Greenberger

This past weekend, Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist whose gallery delayed his show after he tweeted about the war in Gaza, compared censorship in the West to forms of political oppression he experienced in China under Mao Zedong, describing the situation as “sometimes even worse” that what he faced growing up.

“Today I see so many people by giving their basic opinions, they get fired, they get censored,” he told Sky News. “This has become very common.”

By way of example, he spoke about the case of two New York University professors who were fired after making Gaza-related comments. The situation is “a cultural revolution, which is really trying to destroy anybody who have different attitudes, not even a clear opinion,” Ai said. “So I think that this is such a pity, that it happened in the West, so broadly in universities, in media, in every location.”

Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

SUMMARY
“Our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to . . . push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company . . . by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”

– Speaker’s notes from the University of Michigan’s first pitch to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about its NSF-funded, AI-powered WiseDex tool.1

This interim report details the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) funding of AI- powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.
In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams. The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)- powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.

Jill Tucker

A Bay Area attorney is demanding that San Francisco school officials make the seismic shift from citywide board elections to smaller district races by November or face a massive and expensive legal battle that could result in paying millions of dollars in legal fees.

In a testament to the power of a landmark state voting law, the seven-member school board is expected to accede to the lawyer’s demands — approving a hurried adoption of individual district elections based on legal advice and the likelihood of losing a court fight, the Chronicle learned Tuesday.

The district is also expected to pay up to $40,000 to the attorney who pointed out possible violations of the California Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 2002 and was intended to give minority voters in the state better representation by redrawing election maps. 

Jeffrey Gottfried:

Social media platforms faced a range of controversies in recent years, including concerns over misinformationand data privacy. Even so, U.S. adults use a wide range of sites and apps, especially YouTube and Facebook. And TikTok – which some Congress members previously called to ban – saw growth in its user base.

These findings come from a Pew Research Center survey of 5,733 U.S. adults conducted May 19-Sept. 5, 2023.

Megan T. Stevenson

This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another.

This has a variety of implications. It suggests that a dominant perspective on social change—one that forms a pervasive background for academic research and policymaking—is at least partially a myth. Understanding this shifts how we should think about social change and raises important questions about the process of knowledge generation.

helen dale

We live in a world of mutually assured cancellation. Piled-on abuse and career destruction are now standard when dealing with political or intellectual opponents.

I wrote about this on my personal Substack last month. There, I drew on the escalating—and global—war of words and deeds over Israel-Palestine. Finally, conservatives and dissenting liberals had found a way to wound the woke and radical left, and they were proceeding to dish it out in spades. Many lefties, who’d never had to mind their Ps & Qs before, fell to bits quite badly in public. Alternatively—as this activist complains—others simply “refused to speak about Palestine” at all.

Well, that’s what happens if you suspect articulating your views will get you sacked. Welcome to the party, pal (with apologies to Bruce Willis).

However, I need not have drawn upon the hour’s global conflict (Ukraine was unceremoniously sidelined last October). I could have used what was—and in some ways still is—going on at Substack to illustrate the world in which we now live. I watched that controversy as it unfolded.

The contretemps started in November last year with this Atlantic article and then made the rounds of the houses on Substack itself and in other outlets. The essence was this: there are Nazi newsletters on Substack. If the company didn’t at least demonetise them, then multiple writers—some of them popular, bearing Substack’s in-house “bestseller” ticks—would leave. Whether anyone has left yet is unclear, although some people have turned off paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions are, of course, how Substack makes its money.

Dominic Anthony Walsh:

At Love Elementary in the Heights area of Houston’s Northside, parents filled the cafeteria on Thursday, Jan. 25 to hear administrators pitch the New Education System (NES). Love is among 24 Houston ISD campuses that would have performed poorly on the Texas Education Agency’s revamped accountability system and now have the option to apply for the NES reform program — but most folks at Love weren’t very interested in the pitch. 

“It was very clear that 99.9% of the parents wanted to keep this school the way that it is,” said Pablo Lambea, parent of a Love Elementary first grader, arguing that “NES is eliminating basically any human element from the classroom and only teaching towards the test results.”

Several parents invited Houston Public Media to a second NES information meeting on Feb. 1, but the district denied access. A Houston ISD spokesperson wrote that “these are meetings for the school community and are not open to the press.” The first meeting at Love Elementary was recorded and can be viewed at this link.

City Forward Collective:

Milwaukee’s vitality hinges on a robust K-12 school ecosystem — and that includes a thriving Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). However, recent announcements from the School Board paint a daunting picture — a projected budget shortfall exceeding $1.2 billion over the next five years, including a staggering $200 million gap looming for the upcoming school year.

In response, the School Board is urgently seeking voter approval on April 2nd for over a quarter-billion dollars in permanent, new revenues through a property tax increase to address these financial challenges. However, Milwaukee’s students, families, and taxpayers rightfully expect more than an expensive band-aid to our school district’s fiscal and academic crises.

CFC’s Bottom Line

1. The Milwaukee Board of School Directors must go beyond just seeking more funds from Milwaukee families, residents, and taxpayers, and present a well-defined and comprehensive plan for addressing its academic and financial challenges.
2. MPS should outline precisely how the proposed new revenues will be used to directly and dramatically improve academic outcomes for all Milwaukee students.

Cassandra Willyardarchive

Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be  trained on massive data sets that contain millions or even a trillion words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways.

A team of researchers at New York University wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set—the sights and sounds experienced by a single child learning to talk?

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A lot, it turns out.  The AI model managed to match words to the objects they represent.  “There’s enough data even in this blip of the child’s experience that it can do genuine word learning,” says Brenden Lake, a computational cognitive scientist at New York University and an author of the study. This work, published in Science today, not only provides insights into how babies learn but could also lead to better AI models.

Sofia Tosolo

An immediate cap on international student visas has been imposed by the Federal Government.

Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugee, and citizenship, announced on Jan. 22 there will be no further growth in the number of international students in Canada over the next two years. This announcement comes as the Government is looking to address burdens on health care and housing services nationwide.

Provost Matthew Evans stressed the importance of increasing international student enrollment to alleviate the University’s $48 million deficit. The University aims to return to pre-COVID-19 levels of international student enrollment.

International student intake in Ontario will be slashed by as much as 50 per cent according to a report from The Globe and Mail.

Alex Berenson:

In September, a jury in Washington, D.C. convicted Peter Navarro, a former advisor to Donald Trump, of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 protests and attack on the Capitol. A judge has sentenced Navarro to four months in jail. Trump aide Steve Bannon has also been convicted for failing to testify to the Jan. 6 committee. 

But the Biden Administration has already told Slavitt he need not fear similar charges. It claims the subpoena is not legally valid and cannot be enforced.

In a letter to Slavitt’s attorneys, Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer, said the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice will not prosecute Slavitt – or even bring a civil case against him.

“The Department has advised me of its position that Mr. Slavitt cannot be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, punished through the use of any inherent congressional contempt authority, or held liable in a civil enforcement action for failing to appear at his scheduled deposition,” Sauber wrote.

Anna Fazackerly:

Ofsted inspectors have been forced to “make up” evidence because the computer system they use to record inspections sometimes crashes, ­wiping all the data, an Observer ­investigation has found.

Since 2018, inspectors have made live notes on laptops or tablets as they interview staff and observe ­lessons after Ofsted invested in a new ­electronic evidence gathering (EEG) digital platform. However, our investigation has discovered the technology has had serious issues from the beginning, sometimes crashing unexpectedly and losing all notes from interviews, or even whole days of evidence, so that inspectors have to replace those notes from memory without telling the school.

The Observer spoke to several current or recent inspectors on condition of anonymity who said such problems had been “common” for years, and that senior leaders within Ofsted were aware of this, but “there has been a lot of covering up”.

After this story was initially published a spokesperson for Ofsted told The Observer that chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver “is initiating a rapid review to satisfy himself that the EEG and the guidance to inspectors is robust”. The spokesperson added that if schools or inspectors have concerns “we would want to hear about them directly, so we can respond appropriately”.

Admissions:

When Dartmouth suspended its standardized testing requirement for undergraduate applicants in June 2020, it was a pragmatic pause taken by most colleges and universities in response to an unprecedented global pandemic. At the time, we imagined the resulting “test-optional” policy as a short-term practice rather than an informed commentary on the role of testing in our holistic evaluation process. Nearly four years later, having studied the role of testing in our admissions process as well as its value as a predictor of student success at Dartmouth, we are removing the extended pause and reactivating the standardized testing requirement for undergraduate admission, effective with the Class of 2029. For Dartmouth, the evidence supporting our reactivation of a required testing policy is clear. Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve—not detract from—our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus.

Florian Sohnke:

The Innovations shooting should raise questions about where charter schools are located

In the early afternoon of January 26, 2024, two Innovations High School students were slain after being ambushed by masked gunmen. A reader who was a witness to the incident as it unfolded, submitted his account and his views on the Loop location of Innovations.

On Friday, I had lunch at Oasis Café — an excellent Middle Eastern restaurant on North Wabash Avenue. Oasis is located in the back of a tiny mall where vendors sell jewelry and wristwatches. Lingering to examine a Seiko on my way out, I heard loud percussive sounds that I initially assumed were construction noise. Moments later, I realized a shooting had occurred directly outside. I could see at least one person dead or dying on the sidewalk across the street. I would learn later there were two shooting victims. It was a deeply jarring and upsetting experience.

For a few moments, I stood looking out the window — waiting for police to arrive; waiting to see if there would be more shots. A wristwatch vendor and a jewelry vendor stood beside me.

“Are those students at the school?” one of the vendors asked.

I looked across the street, where carnage, chaos, and wailing now covered the sidewalk. I could see buildings and stores and what looked like the entrances to offices or apartments. What I could not see, however, was anything that resembled a school.

BGSU:

Original reports summarizing and analyzing nationally representative data with the goal to provide the latest analysis of U.S. families. These profiles examine topics related to the NCFMR’s core research themes.

Heritage Oversight:

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, and Border Security and Immigration Center, today released new information documenting the scope not just of the Biden border crisis, but the role of non-governmental organizations in facilitating and continuing it.    

In a new memo titled, “Tracking Movement of Illegal Aliens from NGOs to Interior of USA”, the Oversight Project unveiled new data showing the massive numbers of illegal aliens who have made their way to NGO facilities physically located along the border and in border states, and subsequently traveled throughout the United States.  

As part of the Oversight Project’s work to document NGO involvement in the border crisis, the Project launched an investigation which ultimately obtained a sampling of approximately 30,000 unique and anonymized mobile devices that were geofenced to a number of these NGOs along the border. These locations were chosen based on human source information, as well as open-source intelligence, that they may be involved in helping illegal aliens travel from the border to various parts of the interior. Device pings were captured throughout the month of January 2022, in four different phases:

“MPS is deprived of funding.”

MILWAUKEE RANKS -15TH- NATIONALLY in per-student spending, adjusted for the cost of living, of America’s 100 biggest districts.

Of 25 poor peer cities, we are 10th. We spend like Chicago and Baltimore, more than Los Angeles, Memphis, and Houston! https://t.co/ZglhdqVRKu pic.twitter.com/eRXy006eR4

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) February 5, 2024

More on Taxpayer funded $pending growth.

Rob Manning:

In case you hadn’t noticed, teacher strikes are back. 

This past fall, Portland teachers went out on a strike that canceled 11 school days and stretched the capacity, knowledge, and patience of my team in unprecedented ways.

The Newton, Mass. teachers were the latest — the fifth recent strike in the state. 

As an education editor, teachers strikes are something you may be called on to cover. 

As with anything, there are better and worse ways to go about it. 

——

Related: Act 10

WEAC: $1.57M for four state senators.

WiSJ:

Madison police last week unveiled its 2023 crime numbers, which showed that violent crimes like robberies declined from the previous year. But some crimes, including homicides, went up. 

So it safer in Madison than it was a decade ago? Here are the numbers since 2013, broken down by crime.

Homicides in Madison

There were four more homicides last year than in 2022. Four of those homicides were related to a domestic violence situation. Police have cleared 8 of the 10 cases. Wisconsin reached a 22-year high in domestic violence cases in 2022.

——-

Related: police calls-Madison High Schools 1996-2006.

More.

Gangs and school violence forum.

Abbey Machtig:

The community will be able to hear from the three finalists for Madison School District superintendent in a series of public interviews this week.

Yvonne Stokes, Mohammed Choudhury and Joe Gothard will be interviewed in person by two panels on Tuesday. The public can watch the interviews through a livestream. The livestream can be found via go.madison.com/finalists. The district said one panel will be made up of students and the other will be made up of parents and caregivers. Public feedback is welcome.

——

More:

——

More:

Choudhury did not respond to an interview request from the Cap Times. He told the Post, however, that he had “inherited a dysfunctional department with a workforce accustomed to inefficiency — and that his detractors are unwilling to embrace the change he is determined to bring to Maryland.”

——

Yet:

——-

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported k-12 systems, now at least 22 to 29k per student, depending on the district numbers used.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Janet Lorin:

One would hit Harvard and 10 other private colleges that have more than $1 billion in assets.

Bryan Caplan:

On the growth of higher ed expenditures, for years, I bought into the lagging productivity view as forwarded by Richard Vedder and others. In fact, William Poole, while still president of the St. Louis Fed, delivered a speech on this topic to a small luncheon group at WKU with our university president sitting right there. It was fairly humorous seeing our president’s reaction. However, I realized that in assessing productivity, Vedder, Poole, and others (like myself) routinely treated education as the sole product/service.  Yes, we had always acknowledged a “consumption” component to student demand, but we treated that as a nuisance element, not as an integral feature of the market. That was probably not a bad assumption back in the mid-20^th century and earlier.  Over the last 50ish years, the consumption element has become increasingly important but remains ignored as merely a nuisance factor. Even the educational part itself has taken on more of a consumption aspect as students have opted into degrees that are more about avocation than serious academic study or vocation.

For all my grousing about the lack of student interest and “why are they even here,” the puzzle existed only because of my underlying, single-product assumption. There is a large demand for the consumption aspects of the higher ed “experience.” The U.S. is a rich society, and students (and their families through intra-household economics) want to consume the college product/service bundle – the “college experience” as even this verbiage began to reflect the shift toward non-educational, “summer camp”/ consumption. It is related to what we have observed at lower levels of education where the reason there isn’t more learning has little to do with teaching methods or school systems but the lack of interest by students and their parents in the educational component. For many parents, school is mainly about cheap day care. That’s a point that I make in my 1999 Spoiled Rotten: Affluence, Anxiety, and Social Decay in America.

Yes, $1.5+ trillion in student loan guarantees helps bolster this demand, but $1.5 trillion in loan guarantees is not the same as handing out $1.5 trillion in direct subsidies (grants), at least not yet. During most of this growth period in demand, the majority of students/parents expected to repay these loans. That may have changed more recently.

Geoffrey Cowan:

More than five decades ago, I had a role in drafting important aspects of the process that, with some adjustments, still governs how both parties choose their presidential nominees. The goal of the reform commission led the Democratic Party to eliminate the “smoke-filled rooms” that had enabled party leaders (or “bosses”) to pick the presidential nominee without input from voters. The new rules, adopted in a close vote by the delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, said that nominees should be chosen by convention delegates and that “all delegates … must be selected through a process open to full public participation in the calendar year of the convention.” The rule had two aims: to create an open process such as a primary or caucus, and also make sure that the selection took place in the calendar year of the election.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Whether to offer Algebra I to eighth graders has been a point of contention for years within the San Francisco school district.

In 2014, the Board of Education voted to not offer Algebra I until high school to delay the tracking of students into different academic levels and to boost the enrollment of Black, Latino and low-income students in higher-level math classes. Despite these good intentions, however, the change has had little to no impact on improving pass rates, proficiency or enrollment in higher math classes by underrepresented students, according to a Stanford University study.

Many parents have been clamoring for the district to reinstate eighth-grade algebra because it allows students to take calculus by the time they are seniors without having to double up on math classes or go outside the district. Parents with the means can send their kids to private classes for algebra, giving them a leg up on families who can’t afford such a luxury.

Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of Aaron Babbitt, the late Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt’s husband, and Ashli Babbitt’s estate against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for all FBI files on Ashli Babbitt (Estate of Ashli Babbitt and Aaron Babbitt et al. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 24-cv-0119)). Ashli Babbitt, a U.S. Air Force veteran, was shot and killed inside the U.S. Capitol by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on January 6, 2021.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California to compel production of the FBI files on Ashli Babbitt and Aaron Babbitt after the FBI denied two February 27, 2023, FOIA requests to the FBI and subsequently failed to respond to an appeal of the denial for:

Katie Clancy:

What the CTU seeks is complete and unchallenged domination over education

It has never been a secret that the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) actively work against the families they pretend to serve. 

And with their chosen candidate, Mayor Brandon Johnson, at the helm, and a weak governor, J.B. Pritzker, desperate for progressive adoration, the CTU only became more empowered and more determined to eliminate all choices for Chicago families.

First, CTU successfully lobbied against and eventually helped kill the Invest in Kids Act, which, since its inception in 2017, has uplifted over 40,000 students across the state and allowed families to send their kids to a school that better fit their educational needs. In the 2023-24 school year alone, over 9,000 families benefited from a scholarship through the Invest in Kids Act and left 25,000 families, desperate for better educational choices, on the waiting list. 

Despite the majority of Illinois voters supporting this lifeline for families, Governor Pritzker and the General Assembly obeyed the teachers unions and declined to extend the program. Now, the union’s latest strategy for complete domination over the education system is the elimination of the selective enrollment process in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This latest stunt is once again out of touch with 82 percent of Chicago voters who are in support of the current school choice system in CPS.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles

Four veteran alumni endorsed by Ackman — one of the University’s most vocal online critics — staged a public petition campaign under the moniker “Renew Harvard” centered around campus antisemitism and free speech issues. The slate included A. Zoe Bedell, Alec D. Williams, Julia I. Pollak ’09, and Logan Leslie ’15.

Samuel W. Lessin ’05 staged a separate petition bidwhich attracted attention after he was endorsed by Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta and a Harvard dropout. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, run by Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan ’07, pledged to donate $500 million to Harvard over the next 15 years to support the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard.

Harvey A. Silverglate — co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — and Federal Judge Harris Hartz also staged unsuccessful campaigns for the governing board. Silverglate ran for the board in 2009 and 2022, but was unsuccessful both years.

Lessin received 2901 petitions, Pollak received 2732 petitions, Leslie received 2301 petitions, Bedell received 2277 petitions, and Silverglate received 457 petitions.

Austin Browne:

Massachusetts will no longer require a college degree for a large majority of government jobs due to a new state executive order intended to make the commonwealth more “inclusive.”

Governor Maura Healey signed the order, titled “Instituting Skill-Based Hiring Practices,” on Jan 25. The document asserts that “skills-based hiring practices will strengthen the Commonwealth’s workforce, increase access to quality jobs for nontraditional candidates with varied backgrounds and work experiences, and reduce structural barriers that result in inequities in pay and access to employment.”

It also contends that such practices will build a “workforce that is representative of the diversity of the state.”

The guideline directs hiring managers to “consider the full set of competencies that candidates bring to the job beyond traditional education.”

—-

Related: Teacher Content Knowledge Requirements.

And the “Foundations of Reading” elementary teacher content knowledge exam.

This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses @jk_rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skilfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions.

He teaches not what to think, but how to think critically.

Watch until the end.
You see the epiphany in real-time. pic.twitter.com/x00gWdOugc

— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) February 3, 2024

By Christopher Huffaker

Newton’s teachers and School Committee reached a tentative deal late Friday to end the district’s 11-day strike, returning students to classrooms Monday morning.

In addition to an agreement on the teachers’ next contract, the two sides had to reach an accord on the transition back to school — including on how much the union will pay the district for costs associated with the strike, like police details at rallies.

The contract agreement still needs to be ratified by the union, but the School Committee met Saturday morning to approve memorandums of understanding for both deals (the deal still must be officially ratified by the union and the School Committee must publicly vote on it). Here’s what they are:

Nick Bumgardner

Her program’s principal investigator was able to move funds to give Conley six weeks of paid leave, but she considers herself “privileged” and sees her experience as the “best-case scenario.”

“I’ve spoken with so many parents who have not had the experience I have had,” Conley said. “[They] have been put in a very difficult situation, and their families and have lost health insurance, [they] have lost their place in their academic program, have lost funding,” Conley said.

Volunteers from WISPO have also been key organizers in the TAA’s diaper distribution program. Volunteers give 100 free diapers, per child, per month, to graduate student families in need, according to Denne and Conley. 

“The program needed a lot more support, and so we partnered with [the TAA] to kind of revitalize that program and get it to a much more sustainable place,” Conley said. “I am proud to say that that program is doing really well today and actually is growing literally exponentially every month.”

Katy’s Hoyer:

Similarly, when East Germans joined the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, they expected to live in the democracy they had pushed for – a system where they, the people, wouldn’t be ignored, looked down upon and viewed with suspicion by a political class that considered itself morally superior to them. For some, this hope was disappointed. They feel that the main political parties take no interest in their concerns, and that this fact doesn’t change no matter which of them they vote for. 

Many West Germans feel like this, too, as indeed do many people in other parliamentary democracies around the world. A survey in Britain last year showed that six out of ten people here felt politically homeless, and the same proportion of Americans said in a poll in 2016 that neither of the political parties represented their views.

What makes East Germans different isn’t a special aversion to the political offering – they share that with millions of people in the West – but an unwillingness to accept the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy. Their ‘dictatorship experience’ hasn’t blinded them to democracy but rather sharpened their sensitivity for its failings. In 1989, they had enacted democracy – the rule of the people – in a way other than voting: through street protest, grassroots-level organisations and by complaining loudly to their bosses, local politicians, police officers and state officials. But many now feel that the change they had helped bring about didn’t seem to gift them more agency. In a way, some say, there was more of a feeling of participation then than there is now in a democracy with formal voting. The AfD is very good at exploiting this feeling, using slogans like ‘The East rises up’, ‘Complete the Peaceful Revolution,’ or ‘We are the people’ (which was used by protesters in 1989).

Bill Osmulski:

The latest plagiarism scandal at Harvard University has implicated one current and two former diversity officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

LaVar Charleston is UW-Madison’s current Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer. He is married to Sherri Ann Charleston, who is Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Sherri Ann had also previously worked as a diversity official at UW-Madison before getting the job at Harvard in 2020. This week, she was accused of committing plagiarism throughout her academic career. Her husband, LaVar, allegedly helped her to commit fraud at least one of those times in a 2014 study.

Another former diversity official from UW-Madison, Jerlando Jackson was also listed as a co-author of the study in question. Jackson was UW-Madison‘s Director & Chief Research Scientist, Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory. He was hired as the Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University in 2022.

All three individuals were with UW-Madison at the time the article was published.

Abbey Machtig:

The candidates will be interviewed again Wednesday, but those discussions will not be livestreamed, recorded or open to the public. The interviews will involve teachers, district leaders, students and selected community members.

Eric Murphy:

Choudhury is one of three finalists for superintendent in Madison, along with Joe Gothard, the superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools and a former Madison principal, and Yvonne Stokes, a former superintendent of Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. Stokes also resigned under pressure from conservative school board members who took issue with her diversity and inclusion efforts as superintendent. All three will be interviewed by various panels Feb. 6-7. 

When asked for comment on the allegations against Choudhury by Cornelius and others, school district leaders said they were happy with their final three options for superintendent. “Our board has done exhaustive work in selecting our finalists, and we remain confident with the process and the selection of our finalists,” the district said in an unsigned email to Isthmus sent by communications staffer Ellie Herman. 

The email pointed to a previous statement from school board president Nichelle Nichols: “We are extremely pleased with the pool of candidates for this position. They each reflect the diverse needs of our community and the competencies that we agreed upon in November. Our three finalists have exceeded our expectations, and we’re excited for the community to meet them….”

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Chris Rickert:

About three times as often, according to this analysis: mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/4…

Tim Harford:

In the case of Flight 447, the challenge was a storm that blocked the airspeed instruments with ice. The system correctly concluded it was flying on unreliable data and, as programmed, handed full control to the pilot. Alas, the young pilot was not used to flying in thin, turbulent air without the computer’s supervision and began to make mistakes. As the plane wobbled alarmingly, he climbed out of instinct and stalled the plane — something that would have been impossible if the assistive fly-by-wire had been operating normally. The other pilots became so confused and distrustful of the plane’s instruments, that they were unable to diagnose the easily remedied problem until it was too late.

This problem is sometimes termed “the paradox of automation”. An automated system can assist humans or even replace human judgment. But this means that humans may forget their skills or simply stop paying attention. When the computer needs human intervention, the humans may no longer be up to the job. Better automated systems mean these cases become rare and stranger, and humans even less likely to cope with them.

Chloe Berger:

Before the days of the punch buggies and the Toyotathon, Americans were stuck with the objectively slower, more austere transportation options of horses and sail boats. With the passage of time, minivans with bumper stickers and HyundaiSonatas eclipsed trusty ole steeds. But a funny thing happened along the way, as wealthy hobbyists turned dressage and rowing into status symbols of a life of leisure spent mastering the old ways. Could the world of work be the same?

In 2020, remote work was every bit as revolutionary as the technologies of the horse or the boat, and in an accelerated version of the transportation revolution, it’s rapidly shaping up as a commodity that the wealthy save for themselves. 

Just a few years after most knowledge workers shifted to remote work, it’s now mostly wealthy, college-educated employees who are still being allowed to work from home, according to a newly released poll from Ipsos Consumer Tracker. The survey of 1,110 adults, conducted in mid-January, further supports a conclusion that the labor market has split into separate groups, based on one’s sector, pay, and location.

Michele Catanzaro:

Cliques of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work, according to an unpublished analysis seen by Sciencenone. As a result, their universities—some of which do not appear to have math departments—now produce a greater number of highly cited math papers each year than schools with a strong track record in the field, such as Stanford and Princeton universities.

These so-called “citation cartels” appear to be trying to improve their universities’ rankings, according to experts in publication practices. “The stakes are high—movements in the rankings can cost or make universities tens of millions of dollars,” says Cameron Neylon, a professor of research communication at Curtin University. “It is inevitable that people will bend and break the rules to improve their standing.” In response to such practices, the publishing analytics company Clarivate has excluded the entire field of math from the most recent edition of its influential list of authors of highly cited papers, released in November 2023.

Grace Reilly:

Rhode Island’s North Kingstown School Department is under fire following a board member’s statement of desire to “never” inform parents if a child changes his or her so-called gender expression during school hours and activities. She expressed this belief during a Jan. 25 board meeting, during which transgender and non-binary policy was discussed. 

The board member explained, “[M]y point would be that we never notify a parent with these issues.” She then doubled down, saying, “I don’t think we should notify parents on many issues that we notify them on.”

“I don’t think parents should be notified, simply because society assumes that every child has a well-meaning family culture that is accepting of this,” she stated. “Sometimes the worst thing you can do is involve a parent in some of these issues, based on their own beliefs and their own culture. And that would cause that student to commit suicide.”

Jill Tucker:

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement. 

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.

Jessie Guy-Ryan:

In fact, the government has actually won this fight before—secretly. 

Throughout 2015, U.S. politicians and law enforcement officials such as FBI director James Comey have publicly lobbied for the insertion of cryptographic “backdoors” into software and hardware to allow law enforcement agencies to bypass authentication and access a suspect’s data surreptitiously. Cybersecurity experts have unanimously condemned the idea, pointing out that such backdoors would fundamentally undermine encryption and could exploited by criminals, among other issues. While a legal mandate or public agreement would be needed to allow evidence obtained via backdoors to be admissible in court, the NSA has long attempted—and occasionally succeeded—in placing backdoors for covert activities.

One of the most important developments in cryptography was the Enigma machine, famously used to encode Nazi communications during World War II. For years, rumors have persisted that the NSA (then SSA) and their British counterparts in the Government Communications Headquarters collaborated with the Enigma’s manufacturer, Crypto AG, to place backdoors into Enigma machines provided to certain countries after World War II. Crypto AG has repeatedly denied the allegations, and in 2015 the BBC sifted through 52,000 pages of declassified NSA documents to find the truth. 

The investigation revealed that while no backdoors were placed in the machines, there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” that Crypto AG would keep American and British intelligence appraised of “the technical specifications of different machines and which countries were buying which ones,” allowing analysts to decrypt messages much more quickly. Consider it a security “doggy-door.”

Erin Geary:

For school choice to be realized, parents must create a mass movement

When trying to find the best restaurant in an area, people tend to turn to the internet, look for a list of eateries in the area, and visit their website. The more diligent may search out Yelp for reviews. If at least seven out of 10 comments are positive, you are likely to feel good about your choice. If only three of 10 found the restaurant appealing, however, most would avoid that restaurant and it would eventually close its doors.

Now, let us apply that same logic toward Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Parents live in a neighborhood, send their kids to schools that their tax dollars pay for and discover that, overall, 30 percent of students are unable to read and 17 percent are unable to complete basic math problems. Yet, instead of being able to choose a higher performing school, their kids are stuck in failing schools because of politics and unions.

On Thursday, January 25, the Chicago Board of Education voted to renew charter schools’ contracts but for only three or four years as opposed to prior agreements that allowed for renewal up to ten years. Additionally, charter schools will be under the microscope with more vigor — especially in how they deal with English language learners and those students with disabilities. Other preconditions imposed by the renewal include teacher licensing and financial issues.

Jeff Myers

Public education in Oregon, and around the country, has become both an important and divisive topic. COVID-19 lockdowns, classroom disruptions and violence, shifts in instructional content and approaches, and ongoing declines in student achievement brought many new faces into school board meetings. Education has become highly partisan as well, turning school board races into highly-funded, hotly contested events. Why is this all happening? And why now?

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you the guy behind the declines in our public education system was Colt Gill, the former Director of the Oregon Department of Education (ODE). As ODE’s leader, he was the very public face of the agency. When parents, including me, got increasingly upset with the direction of Oregon’s public schools, it was Colt Gill we spoke out against. While he took all the heat, there was someone on his executive leadership team who flew under the radar until now: Scott Nine.

The Economist:

A year ago New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, the publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter schools to open in New York City, where they already attract about 15% of public-school students and where thousands of families languish on waiting lists. But the governor’s plan drew fervent protests from fellow Democrats, including state legislators aligned with teachers’ unions. After a bruising fight, the governor had to settle last autumn for a small increase.

The row reflected a discouraging change in the politics of charter schools. Once a topic of unusual bipartisan enthusiasm, the schools have become divisive, particularly among Democrats. Barack Obama campaigned on charter-school expansion in 2008, but Joe Biden declared in 2020 that he was not enamoured of them. (His administration has nonetheless maintained federal funding for charters.) Republicans are more favourably inclined overall, and Donald Trump increased support during his presidency. But Republican priorities have shifted since George W. Bush, as president, and his brother Jeb, as governor of Florida, championed charters as beacons of racial equity. These days Republicans prioritise vouchers that allow parents to use taxpayer funds to enroll children in religious schools.

Jacob Light:

In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.

Commentary.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Notice what’s missing? There’s nothing in there about a track record of actually improving, you know, education. Nothing about a record of improving test scores.

That’s concerning because MMSD’s record in that regard is not good. This morning the New York Times ran a story that allowed readers to check on how their district was performing with regard to math test scores. Here’s the chart for Madison:

We have been below the national average for at least seven years while Wisconsin as a state performs above the average. We came close in 2019 and then dipped again during COVID. Our recovery since then has been anemic, running below both the national and state average.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Alex Tabarrok:

Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century. His use of historical data informed by evolutionary theory and genetics is a unique contribution to social science with important and challenging results.

Clark’s latest paper (with Neil Cummins) makes a simple but striking point. If the primary systematic determinant of social outcomes is genetic then we expect the father and the mother to contribute equally (each giving half their genes). If, on the other hand, the primary determinant is social then we expect widely different mother-father contributions in different societies and at different times and for different characteristics. Fathers ought to matter more in patriarchies, for example, and mothers more in matriarchies and gender-egalitarian societies. Similarly, if social factors are determinative, we would surely see a rising contribution of mothers to child outcomes as the social power of women rises (you can’t use your mother’s contacts in the legal profession to get a job, for example, if your mother was never a lawyer.) Similarly, if social factors are determinative we would expect mothers to be more important perhaps for characteristics determined early and fathers for characteristics determined late.

As Clark and Cummins write:

Eugene Volokh:

The post (at Balkinization) is here; as I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t studied the issues in this case closely enough to speak to this myself, but Prof. Lederman is a leading constitutional expert, and his thoughts struck me as much worth passing along:

1. Colorado Is Not “Enforcing” or “Implementing” Section 3.

The briefs of all four of the parties in the Supreme Court (and those of many amici, as well) proceed on the assumption, articulated repeatedly in their briefs, that if Colorado were to omit Donald Trump’s name from its presidential primary ballot—something that, as I explain in this post, Colorado has not in fact done and is unlikely to do—the state would acting to “enforce” or “implement” Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, some of the parties’ arguments take this as a jumping-off point, and depend upon it.

Frank Jacobs:

Since the early 1920s, more than 330 climbers have died on Mount Everest. 200 bodies remain on the mountain, the most famous one being “Green Boots”. These maps provide some surprising insights into Everest’s morbid geography.

For almost 20 years, “Green Boots” was a creepy landmark near the summit of Mount Everest. Mountaineers ascending via the north face would invariably pass by this frozen body, huddled into a limestone alcove some 1,150 feet (350 m) below the top. To the live climbers who passed the body, the corpse, still clothed in brightly colored climbing apparel, must have seemed a grim exemplar of the saying that “every corpse on Everest was once a highly motivated individual.”

Thomas Lin:

Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind.

Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing number theorist begins to recount her story in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Gradually, she breaks form and smiles, her eyes light up and lift upward, and she grows ever more animated while summoning memories from the past.

The earliest memory is of walking with her grandmother as a 3-year-old from her family’s utilitarian Khrushchyovka apartment building (named after the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) down a wide boulevard to a monument of the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, where her grandmother lifted her up and tossed her into the air. The late 1980s were a difficult time in the Soviet Union, said Viazovska, now 37. “It took people many, many hours to buy even basic things.” When a shop was low on goods like butter or meat, her mother felt bad about taking more for her three children and worried that others waiting in the long line would get angry at her. Her family didn’t have much, because there wasn’t much to have, but her parents made sure she and her sisters never went hungry or without heat. No stores carried nice clothes, but workers were sometimes offered a chance to win a stylish pair of shoes made in Czechoslovakia as an incentive for doing good work. The shoes might not fit, her mother explained to her, but if you won a pair, you could trade with someone who had won a pair in your size.

James Bosco:

How new laws will affect children and parenting

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…Suggestions from the State!,” Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932.

‍

Brave New World opens inside the Central London Hatchery where babies are not born, but rather “decanted.” We are told by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning how hypnopedia, or the repetition of recorded phrases every night is used to condition children in their sleep. Such conditioning shapes the minds and desires of human beings in the World State. These repeated phrases determine how the child behaves for the rest of his or her life, guiding their decisions and behaviors. Naturally, all the programming comes from the state.

In Huxley’s dystopian future, there are no parents. No mothers or fathers. No brothers or sisters. There are no families and there are no marriages. No one is a son or a daughter. Whereas the population appears to be sterile, sex is trivial. There are no relationships, and despite there being five castes, everyone is considered to be equal. No matter who you are, everyone has an important role to play in service to the World State.

“Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one,” Brave New World.

Now it appears that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), being prodded on by a radical leftist arm of the Chicago Teachers Union, the CORE caucus, has taken Huxley’s warning as an instruction manual. In CORE’s dystopian future — which is now — your children do not belong to you; every child is a ward of the state.

James Marriott:

The website of Eton College promises that “Eton believes in equal opportunity for everyone irrespective of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, belief, disability or social demographic background”. Before you dispatch your progeny to claim their free first-class education at this socialist paradise by the Thames, it is worth checking the “fees” section of the same website, which takes a rather less egalitarian line on the issue of “social and demographic background”.

The nice words were not really meant. Vacuous moral self-congratulation is simply the default mood of the modern public school. Harrow runs an equity, diversity and inclusion group. Marlborough offers lessons in “implicit bias, stereotype threat, oppression, power structures and racial profiling”.
Naturally, one supposes these earnestly progressive institutions are united in passionate support

——-

Commentary.

Please watch this Q&A with @bhorowitz and me on the travails of the universities and the future of higher ed. Our last of 3 videos on this topic. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/HZCSLQ1xiN

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) February 2, 2024

George Leef:

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard.

The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor Erec Smith of York College. He teaches rhetoric and composition and has written a book challenging the belief that minority (especially black) students are somehow harmed by teaching them to use standard English. Smith argues in his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition, that standard English empowers those students by giving them another tool to accomplish their objectives.

Much as woke professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.As Smith sees things, professors in his field, eager to display their “anti-racist” zeal, have adopted the trendy idea that “whiteness” is the enemy of progress for blacks. They’re passionate and sincere, but they have allowed their emotions to trample over reason in evaluating the pros and cons of their pedagogy. Smith writes that “feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia.” Much as those professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

That way entails an exclusive focus on the racial identity of students. Black students are assumed to be victims of white, racist social forces against which they are helpless. Therefore, they must band together in group solidarity to be empowered against “whiteness.” The trouble with that, Smith shows, is that it actually disempowers them. It leads to fallacious interpretations of texts and situations (seeing racism everywhere) and an inability to communicate and persuade. Instead of enabling black students to succeed, it infantilizes them. They’re trapped in an identity of victimhood, always looking for excuses and villains.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Daniel Nuccio:

For example, he said while most of his students took some sort of calculus class their senior year of high school, “at least a third of them test into a class that’s lower than calculus because what happens is the schools will push people through the pipeline.”

“Even if someone hasn’t mastered algebra, they’ll get some sort of generous grade in their prerequisite math classes and then be put into calculus their senior year,” he said.

Similar trends concerning the inability of college students to do high school math have been reported nationally post-COVID, with educators lamenting how incoming freshmen no longer can be expected to know how to add fractions or subtract a positive number from a negative number.

Yi-Zen Chu, an associate professor of physics at the National Central University in Taiwan, who was educated in the U.S. and has been a harsh critic of DEI, stated in a recent email to The Fix that he believes practices such as “grade inflation and lowering the bar” contribute to the lack of preparation exhibited by American college students.

James Pethokoukis:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast: 

So I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 — I’m not talking about the United States, I’m not talking about North America, I’m not talking about the advanced economies, I’m talking about the planet — is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s]. Of course, this depends on how people will react over the next few decades, how mortality will evolve. But what I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.  … My argument is the United Nations is underestimating how fast fertility is falling. Instead of 2084, I’m pushing this to 2060, let’s say. And instead of 9.7, I will say that we will peak around 9.2, 9.1, and then we are going to start falling.

WILL:

Wisconsin Statute § 118.019 governs human growth and development (HGD) instruction. This is
essentially the sex education curriculum in Wisconsin. Public school districts are not required to adopt an HGD curriculum, but once they do, certain requirements are triggered.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE ROLE AND REQUIREMENTS
The advisory committee MUST be made up of parents, teachers, school administrators, pupils, health care professionals, members of the clergy, and other residents of the school district. Id.

No one category of member shall constitute more than one fifth of the membership of the committee,
except that parents may comprise more than one-fifth the membership of the committee. No more than one quarter of the members of the committee may be made up of employees of the school district or their spouses, or members of the school board or their spouses. Id.

The committee MUST review the HGD curriculum for the district. Id.

The committee MUST advise the school board on the implementation

By Carrie Spector

A new report by researchers at Stanford and Harvard shows that U.S. students achieved historic gains in math and reading during the 2022-23 school year, the first full year of recovery from the pandemic.

The report, which measures the pace of academic recovery during the 2022-23 school year for school districts in 30 states, finds that students recovered about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. These gains significantly exceed what students would be expected to learn in a typical year, based on past trends. 

Students in one state, Alabama, returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, while students in three states reached 2019 levels in reading. But students in a majority of the states in the study remain more than a third of a grade level behind pre-pandemic levels in math, and students in almost half of the states are that far behind in reading.

Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

Maureen Brakke:

Since 1856, Western Oregon University has been committed to the region, to serving the people of Oregon, and to the core values of student success. As an innovative public liberal arts institution historically serving first-generation college students from all four corners of the state, Western is announcing the implementation of a strength-based grade approach that recognizes, embraces, and focuses on student competencies and achievements.

Beginning this fall term, the institutional academic grading regulation will reflect a grade range of A through D; the letter grades of D- and F will be replaced with No Credit (NC) for undergraduate students. The grade of NC will be used in instances where the student does not meet the course learning objectives. The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs.

Gavin Escott:

The search is underway for a new dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education after Diana Hess stepped down as the head of one of the nation’s highest-ranked education schools. 

Hess, who served as the dean of the School of Education since 2015, announced in October she would be leaving her leadership position and returning to a faculty role in summer of 2024. During her tenure, Hess oversaw new programs to support students and solidified the education school’s status as No. 3 in the nation, according to U.S. News.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

By Veronica H. Paulus and Akshaya Ravi

Top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data and plagiarized images across 21 papers, data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik said.

In an analysis shared with The Crimson, Bik alleged that Shah, the vice chair of research in the department of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented images from other scientists’ research as his own original experimental data.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Shah is the latest prominent scientist to have his research face scrutiny by Bik, who has emerged as a leading figure among scientists concerned with research integrity.

She contributed to data falsification allegationsagainst four top scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — leading to the retraction of six and correction of 31 papers — and independently reviewed research misconduct allegations reported by the Stanford Daily against former Stanford president Marc T. Tessier-Lavigne, which played a part in his resignation last summer.

——

Commentary.

———

By Nidhi Subbaraman

“Most of the problems in this set of 28 could be explained by honest error,” Bik said, for example if a researcher mislabeled their images and pasted in the wrong ones. She added that looking at published data alone makes it difficult to distinguish an error from misconduct. “There are a couple of papers that stand out that suggest an intention to mislead.”

“The sheer number of examples justify some concern,” said Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and researcher at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who outside his work at the institution reviewed Bik’s assessment. Schrag said he agreed with Bik’s observations in almost all cases and believed the issues warranted an institutional review. 

Bik on Tuesday posted her observations on PubPeer, an online forum that scientists use to question details in published studies. On Wednesday, she emailed her allegations to Harvard Medical School’s Office for Academic and Research Integrity and Mass General Brigham’s Anderson, and several journals.

One anomaly in the group is a 2022 paper in the journal Nature Communications which has images similar to those in nearly a dozen other sources, including papers published earlier, according to Bik. “I’ve never seen this,” she said.

Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

———

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ethan Blevins:

School segregation has risen from the grave—disguised under a different name.

An increasing number of school districts are offering “affinity classes” that cater to specific racial groups. Schools have long offered racially segregated options for electives such as African American history or mentorship programs. But the idea has begun to expand to the wider K-12 curriculum: One school district in Evanston, Illinois, has drawn the media’s eyes recently for expanding affinity course options, now offering segregated courses in the core curriculum, like math and English. Technically, anyone can join, but each class is expressly designed for—and targeted at—a particular racial group.

In reality, “affinity” is just a newfangled term for “segregation.” Schools that support such racial sorting insist these classes are opt-in, benign programs that don’t violate anti-discrimination laws or the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. They’re wrong.

The supporters of affinity groups and classes claim that they give students a comfortable, safe and inviting environment that improves learning outcomes. One Evanston school official who backs affinity classes told The Wall Street Journal that too often “Black students are expected to conform to a white standard” and that in affinity classes, “you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness.” The notion that culture and character are pinned to skin pigment undergirds the philosophy behind affinity programs—that races are so different from one another that they should not even learn together.

Ben Hunt:

I’ve never met Claudine Gay, but I know Claudine Gay. 

We both went to grad school at Harvard in the government department (what they call political science pretty much everywhere else), me from 1986-1991 and Gay from 1992-1998. We both got a masters degree and Ph.D. there. We both had the same dissertation advisor, famed statistical methodologist and all around nice guy Gary King, yet neither of us were statistical methodologists at heart. We both used regressions and econometrics as a toolkit to help us answer questions that we wanted to explore, Gay in American politics and me in international relations, and we were perfectly proficient with the tools, but we didn’t really care about the tools. We cared about the questions. I didn’t overlap with Claudine Gay chronologically at Harvard, but I overlapped 100% with the classes and the places and the people and the life.

After graduation we both did the tenure track publish-or-perish thing, but here the close similarities stop. Gay had a significantly more successful academic career than I did. I had a good start at NYU but ended up with tenure at SMU, which is pretty much a dead end in prestige academic terms. Looking back now, I can see how impatient I was with the game of academia and how poorly I played it. Gay started at Stanford and ended up with tenure at Stanford, which is anything but a dead end. Harvard brought her back with a full professorship within two years of that. Gay was patient, and she played the game extremely well.

Interestingly, we both stopped teaching a few years after getting tenure. Me to co-found a software company, which required leaving academia completely, Gay to go into university administration as a dean, which locked her into academia for life. There but for the grace of God … I am SO lucky that I got out when I did.

Fortune:

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he explained, per Bloomberg. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Currently the American national debt stands at $34.14 trillion—about $100,000 for every person in the U.S.—with the debt ceiling currently suspended until 2025 courtesy of a deal passed in the summer of 2023.

Dell Cameron:

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts.

By Jessica Marie Otis

Steam engine entrepreneur James Watt, as responsible as anybody for upgrading the world from poor to rich, left a notebook of his work. Squiggly symbols such as “5” and “2” mark the pages. Without these little glyphs, borrowed by Europeans from medieval Arabs, Watt would not have been able to determine cylinder volumes, pressure forces, and heat-transfer rates. Isaac Newton would’ve struggled to find that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of a planet’s distance from the sun. Calculations for Antoine Lavoisier’s chemistry, Abraham de Moivre’s probability tables, and the Bank of England’s bookkeeping would have been difficult or impossible.

But before Hindu-Arabic numerals could fuel the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, society had to start to think quantitatively. Jessica Marie Otis’ By the Numbers is about scribes starting to write 7 instead of VII, parish clerks counting plague deaths rather than guessing, and gamblers calculating instead of hoping and praying.

Why did some countries become wealthy after 1800? Historians argue about the relative influences of religion, climate, geography, slavery, colonialism, legal systems, and natural resources. But the key, famously shown by economist Robert Solow, who died in December, is technological innovation enabling more and more goods and services to be produced per worker and unit of capital. Innovation needs research, development, and engineering. All those require numbers and numeracy.

ZACH RAUSCH, THOMAS POTREBNY, AND JON HAIDT

Here at After Babel, we have systematically documented substantial increases in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide since 2010. We first showed extensive increases in the U.S., and then across the Anglosphere (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). We showed similar rises in the five Nordic nations(Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland). We have also examined changes in suicide rates across nations. In the five Anglosphere countries, rates of adolescent female suicide were relatively steady before 2010.1 Afterward, their rates began to rise, reaching levels higher than those of any previous generation when they were young. Today, we look at all of Europe.

There are still researchers who are skeptical that an international youth mental health crisis broke out in the early 2010s. In a previous post, Zach showed that one reason for this disagreement lies in a widely used international database—the Global Burden of Disease—which tries to estimate rates of mental illness in all countries, including countries that do not collect mental health data. He showed that the GBD systematically underestimates rates of youth mental illness in countries that have robust national mental health data. In fact, it almost entirely misses the spike in countries where a clear spike is found in their own datasets.

William Jacobson:

DEI is a religion at Cornell. People don’t give up their religion easily.

In the least surprising development in the history of least surprising developments, the Cornell University Board of Trustees at its meeting this weekend rejected the call by Alumnus and Donor Jon Lindseth for President Martha Pollack to resign, issuing this statement:

Unanimous Vote in Support of President Martha E. Pollack

Cornell University Board of Trustees

Jan. 27, 2024

Cornell was founded on the principle that ‘any person can find instruction in any study.’ Under President Martha E. Pollack’s leadership, the university has remained faithful to this principle and to the core values that unite our institution. Today, the Board of Trustees of Cornell University met and voted unanimously in support of her leadership of the university.

We believe the pursuit of knowledge is dependent on robust discourse that acknowledges differences while exploring shared values. Cornell proudly embraced diversity in its inaugural student body over 150 years ago and will continue to do so for the next 150 years.

By Caitlin Moscatello

For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.

Christopher Rim makes himself hard to get to. First, there’s the email to register as a guest at the Aman Club, where members pay an initiation fee of $200,000 to perch themselves above the crowds on Fifth Avenue and where Rim sometimes holds his client meetings. Then there’s the check-in at the front desk to get access to the elevator, which leads to another reception area on the 14th floor. From there, a man in a suit guides me into the main room (fireplace, lots of couches, mostly empty), then through a door that blends into a wall, past a bar (one guy drinking water; it’s only noon), and up a narrow flight of stairs. It’s there that I meet Rim in a small room decorated with bottles of Macallan 18 and coffee-table books about art.

His look is quiet luxury, though everything about this meeting appears designed to scream money. On his wrist: a $55,000 Patek Philippe watch. On his back: a Loro Piana cashmere sweater. Rim tells me that sometimes he runs into his clients here and they pretend not to know him. But he can imagine what they’re thinking: What is the tutor doing at the same club where Bill Gates lunched when he was in town?

For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in.

Quinton Klabon:

This was interesting. I calculated Wisconsin!

least paying off student debt: Herzing, Mount Mary, Alverno, UW-Superior

most: MKE Engineering, WI Lutheran, Lawrence, UW-Platteville

I think parent help affects this. WLC produces teachers/pastors, MKE Catholics serve low-income

Alex MacGillis

The program was the first in the nation to provide public money for tuition at religious schools, and by 2000, virtually all Cleveland voucher recipients were using them at a religious private school (mostly Catholic) rather than secular ones. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected a challenge to the Cleveland vouchers; the court ruled that because the vouchers could be used for religious or nonreligious schools, they did not violate the constitutional prohibition against a state favoring religion. In the years that followed, vouchers spread to more districts around the state, taking on the name EdChoice. Initially, they were targeted at families in other districts deemed to be failing, but a decade ago, the state legislature — whose Republican majorities are buttressed by highly gerrymandered districts — made them available to lower-income students across the state.

Then came last year’s big expansion, eliminating income limits and raising the value of the vouchers. It offers major benefits even to many solidly middle-class families: A family of four at 451% of the poverty level, or $135,300 in household income, will receive $5,200 per year for a K-8 student and $7,050 per year for a high school student.

In the 2022-23 school year, before the expansion, EdChoice cost $354 million, on top of the $46 million for the Cleveland program, according to the state education department. That was already more than quadruple what EdChoice had cost a decade earlier.

——

Ohio per student K-12 per student $pending.

NAEP results.

Kayla Huynh:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has named two former education administrators and one current administrator as finalists to be the next superintendent.

Two of the finalists left their former jobs after facing criticism for their performance.

The finalists are Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland Department of Education; Joe Gothard, a Madison native who is superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota; and Yvonne Stokes, the former superintendent at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. 

The Madison School Board began interviews with candidates in closed meetings last month and selected the three candidates from nearly 60 applicants, according to district officials.

——

David Blaska:

——-

Dave Cieslewicz:

There’s some process left, with three or four sets of interviews ahead, and the board isn’t expected to make a decision until the end of February. At least on paper, Gothard is clearly the strongest candidate while Choudhury seems like a guy you’d want to stay away from. But I would give the edge to Stokes. I’m not sure this board will be able to resist the chance to hire the first Black woman superintendent.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has responded to a new effort to overturn Wisconsin’s congressional maps, six months before an election. The case is brought by Marc Elias, a notorious left-wing attorney who pursues political objectives through legal action. WILL has also filed a joint request with the Wisconsin Legislature calling on Justice Protasiewicz to recuse herself from any ruling that revisits Johnson v. WEC. 

The Quote: Lucas Vebber WILL Deputy Counsel, stated, “Wisconsin’s current congressional map was proposed by Governor Evers and adopted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. Any attempt to revisit this ruling and once again alter Wisconsin’s Congressional districts, is both procedurally improper and legally wrong.”

Janet Lorin:

Ken Griffin, one of the largest donors to Harvard University, said he won’t support the school financially unless it makes significant changes and accused elite US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future leaders. 

“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Griffin said of Harvard at the MFA Network conference in Miami on Tuesday. The billionaire said the university must make clear that it will “resume its role educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers.”

Steven Pinker:

Harvard admissions should be more meritocratic.

By “merit” I don’t mean cosmic merit — moral deservingness, a judgment by the almighty at the gates of heaven. I mean the traits that enable a student to profit from an elite university education, including cognitive aptitude, conscientiousness, and a thirst for knowledge.

What’s the opposite of meritocracy? Historically, positions were distributed by hereditary privilege, family ties, patronage to cronies, or sale to the highest bidder.

These are not far from the system we have here. It’s conventional wisdom that Harvard accepts just a fraction of its students by academic merit alone. The rest are chosen by “holistic admissions,” the mystery-shrouded process that considers athletics, the arts, charity, activism, and travel — together with donations, legacy status, and until this year, race.

The Harvard fundraising office once fixed me up for a dinner with a wealthy alumnus, who was perhaps more candid than they might have liked. He said, “I want to donate just enough to Harvard so they’ll admit my son.” His son was admitted.

Why should Harvard select students on the basis of merit instead? Because it serves the interests of Harvard and the country.

Jim Piwowarczyk

The document lists “behaviors” that “are examples of white privilege and fragility in action,” citing “physically leaving” or “emotionally withdrawing,” “focusing on intentions,” “denying” and “seeking absolution.

The screenshots were shared this month on X by the page “End Wokeness,” which has 2.2 million followers.

“EXCLUSIVE: UW Health employee sent this from their mandatory DEI training,” the site wrote. “White employees are required to check off examples of their white privilege & white fragility. Whites are also instructed to take steps like yielding positions of power to non-whites in order to atone for their natural racism.”

UW Health denies the trainings are mandatory but did not contest their authenticity in an email response to Wisconsin Right Now.

The page noted, “They are also directed to take courses to unlearn the systemic racism they were inherently born

Andrew S. Hanks, Shengjun Jiang, Xuechao Qian, Bo Wang & Bruce A. Weinberg

We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more pronounced when the two majors are more distantly related, highlighting the importance of diverse skill sets. Additional analyses demonstrate that double majors are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge and are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors.

Sonali Basak:

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage. 

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Nader Issa & Sarah Karp:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says he supports ending the controversial Chicago Public Schools program that puts uniformed police officers in dozens of high schools.

The mayor said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ on Tuesday that he will give the Board of Education the green light to end its $10.3 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. CPS officials told principals in early January to prepare for the possible removal of police officers by next fall.

“The Board of Education is moving in the direction that I do support,” the mayor said in his conference room on City Hall’s fifth floor. “There is an intergovernmental agreement between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department. To end that agreement, there’s no qualms from me there.”

There have been years-long calls to remove police from public schools to stem what research has shown to be a disproportionate policing of Black students and children with disabilities that often lands kids in the criminal justice system for in-school disciplinary situations.

Julia Carpenter:

About 59% of parents said they helped their young adult children financially in the past year, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center that focused on adults under age 35. (This question hadn’t been asked in prior surveys.) More young adults are also living with their parents. Among adults under age 25, 57% live with their parents, up from 53% in 1993.

Parental support is continuing later in life because younger people now take longer to reach many adult milestones—and getting there is more expensive than it has been for past generations, economists and researchers said. There is also a larger wealth gap between older Americans and younger ones, giving some parents more means and reason to help. In short, adulthood no longer means moving off the parental payroll.

“That transition has gotten later and later, for a lot of different reasons. Now it’s age 25, 30, 35, 40,” said Sarah Behr, founder of Simplify Financial Planning in San Francisco.

Kami Loukipoudis, a 39-year-old director of design, and husband Adam Stojanik, a 39-year-old high-school teacher, knew they would need parental assistance to buy in New York’s expensive home market.

Steve Beynon;

The Army is tossing its mandate for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist in the service, in one of the most dramatic moves yet in the escalating recruiting crisis hitting the entire Defense Department.

On Thursday, the service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.

Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit’s academic ability.

A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service. Combat arms jobs such as infantrymen and cavalry scouts need only minimal scores to serve, while admin work such as a human resources specialist or public affairs require scores of 100 or higher.

Quinton Klabon:

9.0% of all district students attend school outside their home district. That makes it the BIGGEST school choice program.

73,280 transfers occurred. (+1,791 from 2022)

Who gained and lost the most students? Click through!

And:

This is enrollment lost since 2020 versus open enrollment applications rejected. Those kids are all public school kids. No schools closed. So, does anyone know the reasons so many were rejected for “space?”

More:

Wisconsin’s open enrollment program continues to grow. With more than 72,000 participating students, it is the largest #SchoolChoice program in the state. (1/2)

MATT TAIBBI

In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important phone conference.

Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it distorts the entire election.”

Now, Amato’s candidate was set to talk with Democratic National Committee chairman (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe. A high-energy, Clintonesque schmoozer in public, McAuliffe in private was curt and to the point: he didn’t mind Nader running in noncompetitive places, but had an “issue” with 19 states where “a vote for you is a vote for [George] Bush.” He shifted with impressive nonchalance to offer a bribe. 

“If you stay out of my 19 states,” he said, “I will help with resources in 31 states.” McAuliffe then made a show of pretending to ask an assistant about other ballot challenges against Nader, saying he “supported them” but wasn’t funding them, a statement ultimately contradicted in court testimony by Maine’s State Democratic Party chair. This was just one of countless instances in which Democrats hurled billable hours at anyone deemed a “threat” to votes they considered theirs.

Tracing Woodgrains:

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control.

Aaron Sibarium

It’s not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Ben Raab

Jackson School of Global Affairs fellow Robert Malley ’84, who is currently on leave from his position as the United States’ special envoy to Iran while under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified documents, will teach a course called “Contending with Israel-Palestine” this semester. 

According to the syllabus, the seminar will take “an in-depth look at important questions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Malley told the News he had been planning to teach the course since last September.

“In the wake of Oct. 7, I questioned whether it still made sense or whether it would be best to wait,” he said. “Ultimately, I concluded, in coordination with the School, that it had become even more important to try to create an environment where students could learn more about this topic and engage with others in thoughtful, respectful conversations.”

The course, which is open to graduate and undergraduate students and capped at 18, consists of 13 weekly discussions and assigned readings. It begins with a discussion on “Competing Narratives” — which features primary source excerpts from figures such as Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat — and moves through other topics such as negotiation efforts, the American role in mediation attempts, coverage of the conflict in media, a look at Israeli and Palestinian “voices and politics” and the conflict’s debate in the United States before concluding with a class titled “Israel-Palestine Today & Tomorrow (3) – Imagining the Future.”

Frank Jacobs:

America’s most significant enlargement since the 1867 Alaska Purchase was reported by the U.S. State Department in a terse communiqué, saying it had defined “the outer limits of the U.S. continental shelf in areas beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast, known as the extended continental shelf (ECS),” which the department noted is an “extension of a country’s land territory under the sea.”