Lee Brown:

The woke recommendation was made in a new $2 million report commissioned by the Corps from the University of Pittsburgh.

The exhaustive, 738-page study that the Marines first commissioned in 2020 said traditional ways of addressing superiors were holding back gender integration.

“Employing gender-neutral identifiers eliminates the possibility of misgendering drill instructors, which can unintentionally offend or cause discord,” the study said.

“By teaching recruits to use gender-neutral identifiers for their drill instructors, Services underscore the importance of respecting authoritative figures regardless of gender.”

Josh Barro:

I personally have also developed a more negative view of colleges and universities over the last decade, and my reason is simple: I increasingly find these institutions to be dishonest. A lot of the research coming out of them does not aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons. The social justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They lie about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices. And sometimes, especially at the graduate level, they confer degrees whose value they know will not justify the time and money that students invest to get them.

The most recent debacle at Harvard, in which large swathes of academia seem to have conveniently forgotten what the term “plagiarism” means so they don’t have to admit that Claudine Gay engaged in it, is only the latest example of the lying that is endemic on campus.

Norm Coleman and Matthew Brooks

As Americans and as Jews, we are grateful to the Republican elected officials across this country who are standing firm against the neo-Marxist DEI policies that have increased racial strife, shut down free expression on college campuses, and endangered American Jews. In all the states where people are fighting back against DEI, it has been Republicans leading the charge. It’s time for decent Democrats to join the effort and ensure that this divisive, un-American, antisemitic ideology will not be promoted in our schools and other critical institutions.

Kevin Chong:

Now that I live with my mom, my preferred mode of communication with her is by text. We’re in each other’s faces enough these days. Her first messages come in the morning, before sunrise, when she hears my heavy tread from her suite downstairs in our Vancouver Special, a mainstay structure in the city’s residential areas. Once deemed boxy and cookie cutter, the architectural equivalent of a Honda Element, Vancouver Specials are now touted for their ability to accommodate two households, one on each floor. I’m in the kitchen, making my eight-year-old’s school lunch, when my phone buzzes and my mother puts in her breakfast request.

Until she started dialysis at the end of 2022, my widowed, then seventy-one-year-old mother managed to be both active and sedentary, gamely driving in her SUV to a slate of appointments, school pickups for my daughter, and mahjong nights. The arrangement had served us well since we all moved in together in 2021, a decision made with my wife’s approval. My mom had been on her own since my brother married and moved out, right before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Melissa Korn:

Harvard University is looking for a new leader. So is the University of Pennsylvania. And Yale University. And Stanford University.

While plenty of college presidents retire or resign every year, it’s rare for so many prestigious research universities to be simultaneously hunting for replacements. And leading these schools is not the same job it was a generation ago. Bill Funk, founder of higher-education executive search firm R. William Funk & Associates, likened the position to being a professional fundraiser and public relations executive combined with the mayor of a city.

Today, Funk says, university presidents are also “carrying the flag for higher education” at a sensitive moment. Conservative activists and politicians are taking credit for ousting the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in the past month, and have called for a broader overhaul of colleges nationwide. Elite schools are lambasted for hoarding multibillion-dollar endowments, as well as for fixating on diversity and moving so far to the left that they shut out conservative voices. Meanwhile, many Americans have begun to doubt whether a college degree is still a good investment.

Taxpayer funded National Park Service:

The National Park Service proposes to rehabilitate Welcome Park to provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors. Welcome Park was designed by the internationally acclaimed design firm Venturi & Scott Brown Associates. The park is located on the site of William Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, and is named for the ship, Welcome, which transported Penn to Philadelphia. The design and construction of Welcome Park was funded by the Independence Historical Trust and was completed in 1982.

Commentary.

William Penn:

English Quaker leader and advocate of religious freedom, who oversaw the founding of the American Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities of Europe.

No Cross, No Crownstands alongside the letters of St. Paul, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as one of the world’s finest examples of prison literature. Penn was released from the Tower in 1669.

For their refusal the jurymen were fined and imprisoned, but they were vindicated when Sir John Vaughan, the lord chief justice, enunciated the principle that a judge “may try to open the eyes of the jurors, but not to lead them by the nose.”

John Burn-Murdoch:

The industrial revolution was one of the most important events in human history. Over a handful of decades, technological breakthroughs kicked economic output off its centuries-long low plateau and sent populations, living standards and life expectancy soaring.

Yet for all its vital importance, there is still disagreement over why all this took off when and where it did.

One of the most compelling arguments comes from US economic historian Robert Allen, who argues that Britain’s successes in commerce in the 16th and 17th centuries pushed wages up and energy costs down, creating strong incentives to substitute energy and capital for labour and to mechanise manufacturing processes. Others place greater emphasis on the role of UK institutions, while some argue that innovative ideas emerged as a result of increasing interactions among growing and densifying populations.

Another interesting theory is that of economic historian Joel Mokyr, who argues in his 2016 book A Culture of Growth that it was broader cultural change that laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Prominent British thinkers including Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton championed a progress-oriented view of the world, centred on the idea that science and experimentation were key to increasing human wellbeing.

Wall Street Journal:

Public figures these days, no matter their race, are too often targets of invective and lies. Yet Ms. Gay brushed past the substantive criticism of her leadership and failure to punish antisemitism on campus. So did her bosses at the Harvard Corporation, which issued a statement Tuesday lauding her “insight, decisiveness, and empathy.” Jewish students at Harvard might disagree. (See nearby.)

Ms. Gay was correct in one respect: “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.” Her equivocation before Congress about whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct made her a symbol of the progressive group-think infecting higher education and American institutions more broadly.

Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet wrote in the Economist last month that his former newspaper “is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.” The same is true of other once-respected institutions.

Ms. Gay writes that the campaign against her “was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society” and that “trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations—will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

She blames “opportunists” for “driving cynicism about our institutions.” But elite institutions—from the press to public-health agencies to social media and big business—have undermined their own credibility and fueled public cynicism.

David Leonhardt:

Now, though, a growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch has been a mistake. Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years.

Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students do not score as high on average as students from affluent communities or white and Asian students. But a solid score for a student from a less privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential.

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?

Debra Tisler:

Fairfax County Public Schools SB released its strategic plan on 11/9/23. It reports that 54% of students with disabilities can’t read on grade level with a 3.5 Billion dollar budget. Take a look into the window of one of the nation’s largest govt. school systems go.boarddocs.com/vsba/fairfax/B…

DEI divisions at large state universities are often huge. At Michigan, for example, DEI is so big that if its payroll were converted to a scholarship fund for in-state students, nearly 900 people could attend Michigan tuition-free. pic.twitter.com/NIENQFuDn2

— i/o (@eyeslasho) January 4, 2024

Joseph Cox:

The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim’s data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record.

Matthew Archer:

The highly intelligent child must learn to suffer fools gladly — not sneeringly, not angrily, not despairingly, not weepingly — but gladly if personal development is to proceed successfully in the world as it is.

— Leta Hollingworth, 1942 [emphasis added]

London, September 2018.

It’s the start of a new school year. A thirteen-year-old boy with an ill-fitting blazer and a fuzzy top lip shuffles into my first philosophy class of the term. He has messy black hair and big, dark eyes. He’s by far the shortest in the class. Eyes down, he makes his way to a front desk without any attempt at human interaction. A nervous air hangs over him. Teenagers quickly pick up on oddballs, and I wonder, as he glides through like a ghost, if they already intuit that this boy is strange. Under his arm is a tattered book, the size catches my eye. This isn’t an academically selective school — my expectation is smartphones, not tomes. He takes a seat and places the book face down on the desk. I twist my neck to see its spine, then I begin with the usual question: what is philosophy? His hand shoots up: “The etymology is from the Greek philos, meaning love, and sophos, meaning wisdom, so love of wisdom.” In this first lesson, the boy will — literally squeaking with enthusiasm — raise his hand for every question. He does that thing eager kids do where they hover slightly above their chair, almost hyperextend their arm, and stare at you until you either relent or ask someone else. The boy’s name is Georgios. A few weeks later, he will have locked himself in the bathroom. He will be crying and unable to say why.

Emily Whitford:

With Americans again struggling to repay $1.6 trillion in student debt (second only to mortgage debt), high school seniors (and their parents) are becoming increasingly price sensitive in their college search. For private colleges that have long relied on a combination of high sticker prices, offset by big financial aid packages, this could be a problem.

In a new survey of current high school seniors registered on the Niche.com college search and review site, 89% said a school’s published price would affect the likelihood they’ll apply or inquire about that school, up from 76% of last year’s seniors who said this. (While the survey is a self-selected sample, it’s a large one, with 24,000 teens completing the survey this year.)

Even more dramatic: 59% of the 89% who described themselves as price sensitive—in other words, 53% of all seniors—said they flat out wouldn’t consider a school that costs more than $40,000 per year in total. Private colleges, on average, charged $41,540 in tuition alone for the 2023-24 academic year, up 4% from the year before, per the latest numbers from the College Board. Concern about prices goes along with growing doubts among Niche users that they’ll be able to pay for college—fewer than a quarter now say they’re confident they can afford college.

Eye on Surveillance

Although we’ve just publicly launched the beta version of Sawt, a select group of local residents have been testing it since the summer. To date, 319 questions have been asked by New Orleanians. They have also provided feedback on 201 responses generated by the system.

Retention

Despite targeted outreach, we’ve noticed that community members are not returning to use the tool after their initial interaction. There has been minimal engagement apart from a spike during a mid-November focus group. This indicates that Sawt is not helpful enough yet for people to want to come back.

Gregg Easterbrook:

Whatever did or didn’t happen in the brief freehold of Claudine Gay at the pinnacle of academia, her resignation letter is an epitome of contemporary self-pity – so much so that it made me think of someone else.

Gay did not apologize for harming the institution she was supposed to protect. Gay took no responsibility for her choices, shifting blame to others. Malevolent outside forces, not her own failing, brought her undoing.

The failing was not extemporaneous comments to Congress under political pressure, rather, was plagiarism: which she knew was wrong, had a long time to think about and correct.

So self-absorbed she had to write about herself twice in two days, Gay in the New York Times once again blamed others — a “coordinated” intrigue against her by conveniently unnamed shadowy figures. (Bad people did bad things? Name them!) Gay did not own up to plagiarism: in her articles “material duplicated other scholars’ language without proper attribution,” weirdly passive phrasing that suggests “material,” not stolen work, magically appeared.

Ling Xin:

After more than a decade of research and teaching in the United States, Chinese-born maths star Sun Song has joined a university in eastern China as a full-time professor.

The 36-year-old geometer started his role as a permanent faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (IASM) at Zhejiang University earlier this month, according to the university’s official WeChat account.

Gary King, John M. Bruce and Michael Gilligan,

First, for students on the margin of being admitted, Harvard accepts those who have resources to attend, even if the admissions committee ranks them below impecunious students we reject. Second, all minorities receive our maximum financial aid package regardless of need.5 These policies affect roughly 3-10 students from our primary list and all minorities every year. In all of our analyses, below, we consider an applicant “admitted” if the admissions committee ranked the candidate on the primary or Affirmative Action lists. Because of our financial aid policy, some of those we consider “admitted” for the purposes of this paper actually do get rejected from the program. About 707 of students who are admitted eventually attend, although we usually receive all or almost all of our top choices and Affirmative Action admittees.

—

And.

It’s un-American when they do it to Republicans & it’s un-American when they do it to Democrats. @Deanbphillips should push back hard in court. https://t.co/pQdw5ZzKzG

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 6, 2024

Related: Marc Elias and kicking candidates off ballots.

BY MONICA ANDERSON, MICHELLE FAVERIO AND JEFFREY GOTTFRIED

YouTube continues to dominate. Roughly nine-in-ten teens say they use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform measured in our survey.

TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram remain popular among teens: Majorities of teens ages 13 to 17 say they use TikTok (63%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%). For older teens ages 15 to 17, these shares are about seven-in-ten.

Teens are less likely to be using Facebook and Twitter (recently renamed X) than they were a decade ago: Facebook once dominated the social media landscape among America’s youth, but the share of teens who use the site has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today. Twitter, which was renamed X in July 2023, has also seen its teen user base shrink during the past decade – albeit at a less steep decline than Facebook.

Teens’ site and app usage has changed little in the past year. The share of teens using these platforms has remained relatively stable since spring 2022, when the Center last surveyed on these topics. For example, the percentage of teens who use TikTok is statistically unchanged since last year.

And for the first time, we asked teens about using BeReal: 13% report using this app.

——

Notes on YouTube (Google) censorship practices.

By Ava Menkes and Ella Gletty-Syoen:

The Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) Secretary Cheryll Olson-Collins said in a November webinar over 700,000 students are loan borrowers in Wisconsin, totaling $23.2 billion in overall debt. 

The DFI and Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection developed an online service called Savi to couple with Biden’s income-driven repayment plan, the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, to provide a free service to all Wisconsin residents striving to pay off their debt.

“The idea that somebody’s going to be a grandfather, and 60 years old, and still paying off their debt, that’s insanity. We have to find a better way,” Evers said.

Income-driven repayment plans adjust monthly payments on all federal student loans based on a borrower’s income and family size, with the promise of loan forgiveness after an extended period of time.

In Wisconsin, the amount of debt forgiven from an income-driven repayment plan is considered gross income and is taxed. But at a federal level, the amount of debt forgiven is not taxable as modified by the American Rescue Plan Act, according to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

W Blaine Dowler:

A logarithm can be defined as follows: if bx = y, then x = logb y. In other words, the logarithm of y to base b is the exponent we must raise b to in order to get y as the result. Exponentiation will “undo” a logarithm, and vice versa: blogb x = logb (bx) = x. The logarithm inherits certain useful properties directly from exponents.

There’s a reason anti-#SchoolChoice people use the numbers since 1990: because failures have been exceedingly rare for decades. Besides that, I’d rather a school that isn’t meeting the needs of families close rather than be rewarded with more $, as usually happens with publics. https://t.co/xU6zStHYNI

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) December 18, 2023

We looked at this awhile ago. Failing choice schools close because families abandon them. That's what accountability looks like. It's harder to do in the public sector because there is political resistance to accountability. https://t.co/l9yQskhAcz

— Rick Esenberg (@RickEsenberg) December 18, 2023

Christopher Rufo:

This essay will introduce the basic principles of this activism: where it begins, how it might work, and what it must do in order to win. It is not “conservative” in the traditional sense. The world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism is gone, and conservatives must grapple with the world as it is — a status quo that requires not conservation, but reform, and even revolt.

We don’t need to abandon the principles of natural right, limited government, and individual liberty, but we need to make those principles meaningful in the world of today. The older conservative establishment, assembling in ballrooms and clubhouses, has marginal influence over public orthodoxy because it lacks the hunger and grit to contest it. The energy is with a new generation which no longer accepts tired platitudes, and demands a new set of strategies geared toward truly overcoming the regime — the opaque and coercive set of psychological, cultural, and institutional patterns that has largely replaced the old constitutional way of life.

This movement is in its youth, and it has the virtue of aspiring to something more than the drab, euphemistic world of “diversity and inclusion”; it has the ambition of re-establishing a political vision that goes beyond procedural values and points toward higher principles.

***

The first step is to admit what hasn’t worked. For fifty years, establishment conservatives have been retreating from the great political tradition of the West — republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing — in favor of half-measures and cheap substitutes.

The first of these substitutes is the self-serving myth of neutrality. Following a libertarian line, the conservative establishment has argued that government, state universities, and public schools should be “neutral” in their approach to political ideals. But no institution can be neutral — and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology. In reality, public universities, public schools, and other cultural institutions have long been dominated by the Left. Conservative ideas and values have been suppressed, conservative thinkers have been persecuted, and the conservative establishment has deluded itself with impotent appeals to neutrality.

The popular slogan that “facts don’t care about your feelings” betrays similar problems. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is the slave of the passions. Political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith — on irrational, or at least subrational, feelings that can be channeled, but never destroyed by reason. As sociologist Max Weber demonstrated more than a century ago, politics does not, and cannot, operate on facts alone. Politics depends on values and requires judgment; political life is not a utilitarian equation — and nor should we want it to be.

Gregg Easterbrook:

Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people’s lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a super-selective college or university has never been greater. Parents’ expectations that their children will attend top schools have “risen substantially” in the past decade, says Jim Conroy, the head of college counseling at New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois. He adds, “Parents regularly tell me, ‘I want whatever is highest-ranked.'” Shirley Levin, of Rockville, Maryland, who has worked as a college-admissions consultant for twenty-three years, concurs: “Never have stress levels for high school students been so high about where they get in, or about the idea that if you don’t get into a glamour college, your life is somehow ruined.”

Honor rocket builder man @elonmusk see tweet and agree I become Maverick basketball professional. @mcuban , please send contract. I'm ready go on court only begin in April. That's when exam over for me. If you pay $15 million salary, I maybe can start in February. Must discuss… pic.twitter.com/rc0BmzEM2M

— Wei Wu 吴伟 (@WuWei113) January 5, 2024

Barak Richman:

The long-term consequences are grave. If university leaders cannot speak for and defend academics because they are overwhelmed by the economic realities of running a hospital, and if the university’s research arm and scholarly community are quieted or ignored by its industrial arm, we get bad public policy, demoralized scholars and unhealthy learning environments for all. Worse, failing to preserve the integrity of academic inquiry — the curiosity, scientific rigor and intellectual freedom that made American universities the envy of the world — degenerates what fuels our economy and inspires our imagination. 

This past month and this past year have made us crave forceful leadership in higher education, but recovering what we’re losing will require more than just new appointees.

Frederick Hess:

I’ve had a peculiar perspective on the whole thing, having started my academic career alongside Gay three decades ago. In 1992, Gay, her now-husband, my then-roommate, and I constituted the “American Government” doctoral cohort in the Harvard Government Department’s Ph.D. program. Over the next five years (I finished my Ph.D. in 1997, she completed hers a year later), I probably spent more than 150 hours in seminars, methods classes, and talks with Gay. I didn’t know her well and haven’t spoken to her in the past quarter century, but I’ve known of her and observed her academic journey as an old classmate.

I’m disinclined to revisit the plagiarism charges or the Harvard Corporation’s efforts to bury the whole thing. I’ll just say that it seems clear that Gay’s scholarly issues were a reasonable cause for termination, Harvard’s conduct has been horrendous, and this whole thing will one day be a textbook case of crisis mismanagement. What I want to do here is offer three reflections that I’ve found myself repeatedly sharing of late.

First, as much as Gay has been depicted as a DEI crusader, I don’t recall her being one at the start of her career. I was pretty sensitive to such things and frequently annoyed by the progressivism and pioneering critical race theory that held sway at Harvard. But I don’t recall Gay saying anything that stuck in my craw. Even her much-discussed dissertation on black representation, as I remember, was less an ideological endeavor than an exhausted grad student’s attempt to use some econometric gee-whizzery to get the degree. Maybe Gay was a discreet radical but I tend to suspect that, like so many others, Gay embraced higher ed’s DEI groupthink mostly as a means of personal advancement. Gay has spent most of her time at Harvard as a bureaucrat, not a scholar. I mean, in 2022, when charged with implementing a Faculty of Arts and Sciences anti-racism initiative, Gay sent an email to the faculty seeking “requests for denaming” of campus buildings or programs. I wonder whether she just saw herself as an effective bureaucrat. Did she even appreciate how Orwellian it all sounded? I’ve found many of these fights turn out to be less about ideologues than, with apologies to Hannah Arendt, the banality of campus illiberalism.

Anyone hoping for improvement in Madison’s public schools will need to keep waiting. Incumbent school board members Savion Castro and Maia Pearson will be reelected by default in April as no challengers showed up before the filing deadline yesterday. Sincere congratulations to Castro and Pearson. They’ve stepped up. They put their names on the line. I strongly disagree with their views, but I have to respect the fact that they’ve put themselves in the arena. It’s ironic that the story of their de facto reelection appeared on the same day as a story about how MMSD is moving away from letter grades. Failing a class? Heading for a “D”? Turns out you’re not failing at all. You’re “emerging.” It wasn’t at all clear what MMSD is trying to accomplish by moving away from letter grades. They admit that it will create more work for already over-burdened teachers and they’ll need to translate “emerging” into a “D” at some point so that high school students can have a GPA for their transcripts when applying for college. I guess it spares a kid’s feelings in the short-run, maybe. Also, attendance and behavior won’t be taken into account with the new non-grading system either. In fact, this board seems to view good behavior as some sort of privileged cultural hegemony. I see it as just good behavior. It’s being respectful of your fellow students and teachers. Maybe I just don’t get it. I guess you’d have to say that when it comes to my grasp of MMSD policies my work is emerging. This is precisely the kind of stuff about this school board that drove me to encourage challengers to the incumbents. When this board, or any group of leaders, sees every issue in terms of race and gender they’re pretty much guaranteed not to solve the problem because they’ve misdefined it from the start. The problem is not a racial achievement gap. The problem is that there are some kids, of every race, who aren’t learning. To cover that up with words like “emerging” is just moving us further away from solutions rather than confronting the problem. We’ve got a school system where more than 60% of students are consistently performing below grade level in English and math, where behavioral problems are going unaddressed thanks to an ill-conceived “Behavior Education Plan,” and where parents have been voting with their feet for over a decade. And now we’re going to continue down that same road by phasing out the accountability (and yes, the pressure — it’s a good thing) that comes with real grades.

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?

David Zweig:

Late last month, without fanfare, and zero media coverage, a striking document that suggests the federal government should be able to censor the speech of Americans—in violation of the First Amendment—was authored by several of our nation’s top medical associations. 

The document—by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and three other medical organizations—came in the form of a legal brief filed in relation to Missouri v Biden, a free speech case that will be heard by the Supreme Court this spring. The case centers on a suit by three doctors and two other citizens who have thus far successfully argued in lower courts that the federal government coerced social media platforms to censor them, in violation of their first amendment rights, because they attempted to post content that was disfavored by the authorities. In advance of the court date, numerous amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs—among them the one from the medical associations—have been submitted to the court by various groups, advocating for one interest or another relevant to the case, hoping to inform and influence the justices.

More.

Bob Uttl, Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson

Background. According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to 130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M = 100, SD =15). We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in 1940s and 1950s when university education was the privilege of a few. Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s. Method. We conducted a meta-analysis of the mean IQ scores of college and university students samples tested with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale between 1939 and 2022. Results. The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year. The students’ IQ also varies substantially across universities and is correlated with the selectivity of universities (measured by average SAT scores of admitted students). Discussion. These findings have wide-ranging implications. First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees.

more:

Our findings reveal a consistent decline in the correlation over time. These findings question the assumed shift towards meritocracy in educational systems and highlight a more complex relationship between cognitive ability and educational attainment.

Commentary:

Bluegrass Institute:

Among the report’s key findings:

· Per-pupil funding, adjusted for inflation, rose by 122% – from $7,793 in 1990, when the General Assembly passed the Kentucky Education Reform Act, to $17,337 in 2022.

· Both state and national test scores indicate that a majority of Kentucky’s students are not proficient in grades 4 and 8 math and reading. State K-PREP 2022 results indicate over three-fourths of Black students are not proficient in any of these areas in either grade.

· From 1990 to 2020, non-teaching staff has grown by 55%, compared to only a 5% increase in the number of students; Kentucky’s teaching corps has grown by 21%.

· Comparing 2022 to 1990, per-pupil funding rose more than 10 times faster than teachers’ salaries.

· While SEEK funding has not kept pace with inflation, contributions for pension and health benefits have risen sharply. More than $1 billion is contributed annually to the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System from the state’s General Fund.

Molly Beck:

Gov. Tony Evers says he opposes abolishing the state’s oldest school voucher program through a lawsuit filed by some of the governor’s strongest supporters.

Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, said eliminating the taxpayer-funded voucher system in Milwaukee could have “traumatic” effects on the nearly 30,000 students who attend more than 100 private schools with the subsidies.

“It wasn’t just created yesterday. It was created decades ago, and I think ending it in such a way is going to be traumatic to a whole bunch of families and kids,” Evers said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.

“It’s not that I think I’m a huge supporter of the vouchers but I also understand that uprooting the lives of a whole bunch of kids is not the way to address it. I’m not sure what the way to address it is right now, but just saying ‘Boom — it’s over,’ that’s going to be a problem.”

Evers also said it would likely be difficult for Milwaukee Public Schools to absorb tens of thousands of students quickly.

—-

More.

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?

Balaji:

It can be done by anyone online.
It pits academics against each other.
It can bring even Harvard to heel.
And it can be scaled up with code.

So, now the people can cancel the professors.

Christopher Rufo:

They are free to make the argument that Harvard Extension School is not as prestigious as the other graduate programs—that’s fine. They are also free to make the argument that Harvard Extension School should not grant degrees at all—that’s something they can take up with Harvard president C̶l̶a̶u̶d̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶G̶a̶y̶ Alan Garber.

But the facts are indisputable. From the HES website: “We are a fully accredited Harvard school. Our degrees and certificates are adorned with the Harvard University insignia. They carry the weight of that lineage. Our graduates walk at University Commencement and become members of the Harvard Alumni Association. As one of 12 degree-granting institutions at Harvard University, we teach to the largest and most eclectic student body.”

At root, what’s happening is that the people who populate the left-wing managerial class live for status and prestige. Their credentials are their whole world. They are the kind of people who ask “where did you go to college” at parties, well into middle age. They always manage to name-drop this person or that school, sizing up how useful you might be to them.

Commentary.

Jonathan Zimmerman:

It’s about Carole Hooven.

Never heard of her? I didn’t think so. But Hooven’s story speaks volumes about the real problem at Harvard, and in American universities more broadly: the lack of academic freedom for diverse perspectives.

We’ve heard the word diverse a lot since Gay stepped down because she was Harvard’s first African American president. I don’t know if she was targeted by her right-wing critics because of her race, as her defenders alleged. Nor do I know if her record of lifting unattributed passages from other scholars should have disqualified her for the presidency.

Here’s what I do know: Harvard talks a good game about diverse views, but it doesn’t actually protect them. And that’s very bad news for higher education.

Hooven had to learn this lesson the hard way. She was a lecturer in the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard when she went on Fox News in 2021 to promote her new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. During the interview, she said that there are just two biological sexes: male and female.

Hooven made a point of distinguishing sex from gender, which can assume many different forms. “We can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” she said, repeating the term respect three times.

No matter. The director of her department’s diversity and inclusion task force took to Twitter (now X) to denounce Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments. “This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people,” the director added. “It directly opposes our Task Force work that aims to create a safe space for scholars of ALL gender identities and races.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise, was, to quote Talleyrand, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.

Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Philips academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.

And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed leftwing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.

Bill McCoshen:

The bottom line is the liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court majority decided this case way before briefs were filed. The fix was in. Three liberal justices had to overlook 50+ years of precedent regarding contiguity and then reverse their implied approval of non-contiguous maps submitted by Governor Evers to get here. They just needed a fourth vote to make it happen and they got that when Janet Protasiewicz took the unprecedented step of promising liberal activists how she would rule on the maps during her campaign. Moreover, recent statewide polling shows voters don’t want the current maps to be redrawn. The best way to win more legislative seats is to recruit candidates who reflect the voters in a particular district and who focus on issues most important to their voters, not the issues most important to voters in Dane and Milwaukee Counties. It’s a simple, proven formula for success, but it’s not as easy as having the court draw more favorable maps.

Heather Mac Donald:

For decades, progressives have attributed black students’ low academic skills to school underfunding. Attend any graduate education program or sit in on any legislative hearing, and you will hear that stingy white taxpayers deny majority-black schools the financial resources necessary to close the academic achievement gap. Americans are to imagine cash-starved inner-city classrooms that would make a prairie schoolhouse look luxurious—teachers forced to ration textbooks, students lacking pencils and paper, harried principals drowning in administrative duties due to the lack of staff.

A recently announced initiative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the public school system in Los Angeles County, is a good place to test the underfunding theory. February 5, 2024, will mark the start of a district-wide “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” (Previous LAUSD “weeks of action” have included a week in October 2023 organized around “National Coming Out Day.”) The district has distributed a teacher “toolkit” of suggestions for conducting the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, compiled, as the toolkit notes, by the district’s “SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE.”

Here is our first clue for assessing the underfunding theory: any bureaucracy that slaps acronyms on its component parts is not a bare-bones organization. The names of its innumerable departmental byways must be abbreviated, lest they take up too much space in print or in speech.

“SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE” stand for the district’s School Mental Health bureaucracy, its Black Student Achievement Plan bureaucracy, and its Human Rights, Diversity and Equity bureaucracy. The HRDE bureaucracy is itself part of the Student Health and Human Services bureaucracy. Possessors of these sinecures are hidden from sight, far from the classroom. Funding such offices requires princely sums; the BSAP just received an additional $26 million in 2023, on top of its existing budget. The BSAP bankrolls counselors, climate advocates, and psychiatric social workers to work with black students in “high priority” schools. It doles out “Innovation Capacity-Building” grants of up to $100,000 to entities that promise to improve black achievement.

Paul Mirengoff:

Princeton has offered admission to its class of 2025 to 1,498 applicants. According to numbers provided by the University, around fourteen percent of them are white American males. 

14 percent of the admitted applicants identify as international students. 68 percent of the admitted applicants from the U.S. identify as “persons of color.” 52 percent are female. 48 percent are male. 

Putting these numbers together, we see that only around 28 percent of admittees are white Americans. Less than half of that relatively small group are male. 

Whites make up much more than one-third of American students. Thus, whites are severely underrepresented in the group of American students Princeton has admitted to the class of 2025. Princeton’s class of domestic students won’t “look like America,” as the saying goes.

In its announcement, Princeton lumps Asian-American together with Blacks and other minority group members as “persons of color.” Thus, we don’t yet know what percentage of those offered admission belong to which minority group.

Julie Kelly:

In the years since the election, the national press has given little attention to the case since the initial arrests, even though court documents have recast the episode as something more sinister. Instead of a heroic effort by the FBI to safeguard the country from domestic terrorists, it now appears to have been a broad conspiracy by law enforcement to entrap American citizens who held unpopular political views.

The FBI’s tactics were first exposed by BuzzFeed in July 2021, when reporters Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison disclosedstartling details based on court filings as the matter headed to trial. They found that the number of FBI confidential human sources involved in the scheme was equal to the number of defendants.

“An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported,” they wrote. “Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”

Ruy Teixeira:

Claudine Gay is out as president of Harvard. It’s tempting for Democrats to simply ascribe her fall to the nefarious activities of the right and, of course, to racism as Gay herself alleges in her resignation letter. If so, no rethinking of Democratic positions is necessary, just a ringing affirmation of the party’s noble commitment to, well, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

That would be a mistake. In truth, Gay owed her position to her race, gender and, importantly, her role as a DEI enforcer par excellence. Her body of academic work is thin, undistinguished and, as we now know, riddled with instances of plagiarism. As the dean of arts and sciences at Harvard, her position prior to becoming president, Gay presided over a DEI regime where dissenters from the reigning orthodoxy were enthusiastically punished, including the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven for publicly asserting that there were only two biological sexes and, most egregiously, the brilliant young economist Roland Fryer.

Fryer, like Gay, is black. But unlike Gay, who grew up in a comfortable middle-class household headed by two professionals and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Fryer came from a broken home, living on and off with his alcoholic father and crack-dealing relatives and was involved in gang life. But he overcame all that to become a profoundly original economist who won the John Bates Clark award for best economist under 40, with innumerable pathbreaking papers to his name. As Glenn Loury observed:

Owen Girard:

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice challenged American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to a televised debate on the topic of the “failing education system” in New York City.

“I will be in New York City on January 18th and I will be happy to debate Randi Weingarten at any national news station of her choice – even her favorite MSNBC,” Justice said in a press release.

She added that it is time for Weingarten to “take responsibility for the damage done” to children’s education

New Discourses:

We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we’re not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it’s a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is “Sustainability.” In this New Discourses Podcast series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through a 2022 UNESCO book, Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability, that calls upon all “higher education institutions” to transform themselves so that they align, promote, and help complete the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a part of the 2030 Agenda.

Ross Douthat:

Throughout the weeks that Harvard spent resisting, unsuccessfully, the calls for Claudine Gay’s resignation, a common line of defense of the embattled Ivy League president was that it’s essential not to hand any kind of victory, under any circumstances, to conservative critics of higher education.

For instance, a Harvard Law professor, Charles Fried, said that he might give “credence” to the evidence that Gay was a serial plagiarist “if it came from some other quarter.” But not, he averred, when it’s being put forward as “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”

Such right-wing attacks, argued Issac Bailey, an assistant professor of communications at Davidson College, ultimately have nothing to do with the particulars of any given academic scandal: “Right-wingers believe awful things about liberals and colleges because they want to believe awful things about liberals and colleges, and they will always refuse to believe anything else, no matter what liberals and colleges say or do.”

Now that Gay has departed, now that the work of conservative activists and journalists has overcome institutional resistance, it’s worth examining right-of-center beliefs about higher education a bit more closely. The right’s writers and activists have indeed spent generations, from Christopher Rufo in the present day going back to William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, critiquing the liberal tilt of academia. And the consistency of that critique could understandably persuade academics that it doesn’t really matter where they stand, what they teach or, for that matter, how tough they are on plagiarism. The right will always be against them — and bent on destruction, not reform.

Alexander Riley

One of the seldom discussed aspects of the ongoing revolution in contemporary higher education is the problem institutions are having filling courses that are designed to impart the DEI message to students.

In the mediasphere, the conversation on DEI in higher ed is mostly about, e.g., the fear that conservative “politicization” will drive enrollments down. Students, it is claimed, just won’t stand for conservative reforms of the type instituted by Florida’s Ron DeSantis. This, of course, overlooks all the workthat higher-education institutions have been doing for decades to politicize curricula and drive enrollments downward via their own politicized mechanisms.

Colleges have little incentive in the post-George Floyd Revolution days to linger over questions of enrollment.On occasion, there has been modest press reflection on the fact of under-enrollment in “Studies” and other highly politicized courses. Almost a decade ago, the Chicago Tribune ran a story noting that African-American Studies programs were facing defunding in Illinois state schools due to low enrollments. But colleges have little incentive in the post-George Floyd Revolution days to linger over questions of enrollment or even to report on the situation.

It is not easy to get data on this and other aspects of the consequences of DEI expansion on campuses, because institutions are interested in hiding inconvenient details. Yet those of us on college faculties are aware, for example, of how faculty recruitment has been altered in recent years to skew decisionmaking away from scholarly productivity and promise and toward candidates’ identities and DEI politics.

Dr Kevin Roberts:

Twenty years ago, when I was hiring teachers for the private K-12 school I founded, I knew better than to recruit certified teachers. That’s right—I didn’t want to hire certified teachers. Why?

Because from my previous work as a college history professor, I knew that the people least prepared to teach a subject were education majors. Requiring an embarrassingly low minimum of credit hours to be certified to teach a subject — just four courses in some states! — education majors encounter the least substance and rigor, but the maximum of racialist theory and left-wing ideology in their program.

——

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?

Abbey Machtig:

“You have to manage the expectations, the emotions, the fears of ‘is my child making the right progress’ — that is the question I think we hear families ask the most,” she said. 

Students and parents also may worry that grades won’t translate on applications to colleges, jobs or other opportunities after high school. However, students at East High will still receive a letter grade for each class at the end of the semester and maintain a GPA throughout high school, Schaefer said.

The grades translate as Advanced = A; Proficient = B; Developing = C; Emerging = D, according to the East handbook. 

Schaefer said the transition to this system will bring extra work for teachers, who have to change how they assign grades and learn a new system for entering them into the online gradebook. Schaefer recommends instructors focus on between three and eight priority standards for each course.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results despite spending far more than most taxpayer funded k-12 systems.

Commentary.

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:

It should be noted that while childhood sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has received extensive media coverage, childhood sexual abuse by teachers and others is also a serious problem. Charol Shakeshaft, who has done extensive research on the problem of sexual abuse of students by teachers, recognizes the difficulty of collecting solid data on sexual abuse; but using available studies, she estimates that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than one hundred times the abuse by priests.”

According to Shakeshaft’s research, even when abuse was reported to school officials the offenders were not reported to the police. In her study of 225 cases in New York, “none of the abusers were reported to authorities and only 1 percent lost their license to teach.” A recent article in The New York Times documented abuse-including sexual abuse—of the developmentally disabled in group homes. Even when abuse was uncovered, perpetrators were allowed to continue working at other facilities.”

Ted talk.

More.

Wall Street Journal

Auburn piled millions more each year into paying down the debt it borrowed for campus upgrades, including an $84 million basketball arena. It hired hundreds of administrators and professional staff. Spending on the president’s office and other administrative departments often increased far faster than that on many academic subjects.

To help pay for its transformation, the school has raised tuition and fees again and again. By one measure, students’ costs have grown faster than at almost any other major public U.S. university. Auburn’s net price, the average amount in-state freshmen pay after grants and scholarships—covering tuition, fees, room, board and other costs—topped $25,000 annually in 2021-22, according to Education Department data. That’s a 60% increase from 15 years prior, adjusted to today’s dollars.

Nationally, schools don’t consistently disclose the details of how they spend their money, making it nearly impossible to compare how they divide up dollars. To determine how one school’s priorities evolved, The Wall Street Journal chose Auburn as a case study, examining hundreds of pages of budget documents. The data help answer a question facing families across the nation: With college prices sharply higher than they were a generation ago, where does all the money go?

The Journal tallied how Auburn’s spending changed across roughly 125 of the largest budget categories between fiscal 2002 and 2016, adjusting all the numbers for inflation to today’s dollars. Comparisons after 2016 weren’t possible because of accounting changes and because Auburn stopped publishing granular spending figures.

Don Lee:

Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left.

Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed. New state-to-state migration data show that for several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in.

The reversal, largely in response to the state’s high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California’s overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments.

Claudine Gay’s rise to Harvard President was no doubt in part the result of affirmative action, but the more interesting dimension is how it reflects the rise of *bureaucrats* over intellectuals at top universities. Over two decades, Gay published just 10 articles & zero books.…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 3, 2024

So strange. We finally got this nonsense out of Virginia’s history standards *in 2023* and yet all these people were struck mute about it….in fact, the Northam draft that was waved around like a bloody shirt was muddled on this point. https://t.co/jah3rX9Yuz

— Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) January 3, 2024

Ralph Notham notes and links.

Kevin Jon Williams:

They sold America, the greatest nation on Earth, for next to nothing because that’s what they believe it’s worth.

The Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Mr. Hunter Biden up to a million dollars a year! Wow! It seems like a lot of money.

But what were the Bidens selling? Not Hunter’s expertise in, say, energy, economics, international law, Ukrainian culture, or actually anything that he could do on his own. They were paying him because of his proximity to his father, President Joseph Robinette Biden.

The Bidens were selling the greatest country on Earth.

And this is, to me, perhaps the most troubling part of the story. The Biden crime family so undervalued my country that they sold it for chump change—not merely disloyal, but deeply dismissive and disrespectful.

What should it cost to sell America? I’d start at 50 trillion dollars—that’s 5 followed by 13 zeros. Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated to be around 200 billion dollars—that’s two followed by 11 zeros. In other words, I’d demand 250 times the net worth of the planet’s richest man. And then I’d walk away.

But not the Bidens.

Let’s assume for a moment that every accusation is true. My guess is that at least 90 percent of them are true because many major concerns about the Bidens have been confirmed from Hunter’s laptop. Moreover, we have finally been permitted to know that the laptop was really his—and not some Russian hoax, as President Biden and his leftist operatives in the foreign policy establishment and the legacy media had falsely alleged.

Parents Defending Education:

Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request seeking invoices that Armstrong School District has with companies that provide Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curricula and that promote DEI initiatives. The school district provided PDE with five invoices that totaled over $1.5 million. The largest of the invoices is dated March 27, 2023, and is from the organization Amplify Education. This invoice is for $699,176.40. This invoice includes costs for curricula from kindergarten through the fifth grade and professional development for teachers.

Another invoice from Amplify Education was dated January 30, 2023, and was for $696,917.40. This invoice also included costs for curricula from kindergarten through the fifth grade and professional development for teachers. Additional invoices with Amplify Education included a cost of $27,176.26 on July 12, 2022, and a cost of $12,740.76 on May 11, 2023.

The school district also has an invoice with CharacterStrong for $80,183.60 that is dated January 3, 2023. This invoice was for SEL curricula and professional development.

Rasmussen Nielsen:

When it comes to the most serious misinformation, the calls tend to come from inside the house. Technology will not change that, so let’s stop gaslighting the public and admit clearly as we head into a big election year that misinformation often comes from the top.

Ugh, @AP, times three. https://t.co/ZnDCwKkzKJ

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) January 3, 2024

Jeff Fuhrer:

From America’s founding — and before — false narratives about post-racism and meritocracy have been at play in our national identity. By the early 19th century, there was a general expectation that white men should, and could successfully, strive for self-mastery and improvement: that a hard-working, right-living youth could become a prosperous self-made man. Implicit disapproval of the poor has an even longer history, rooted in debates over colonial poor laws. As a nation, we have absorbed and employed these narratives for generations.

In tracing the roots of these narratives, two caveats are in order. First, what the average person thought about individual achievement and opportunity at the beginning of the 19th century is difficult to say. What exists are the accounts of those who succeeded, those wealthy enough to have had political power and thus be included in the historical record. Second, this topic is much too broad to cover adequately here. Many have written about the nation’s evolving sense of itself in the wake of independence and during the years in which the republic solidified. I will borrow from their insights and heavily summarize the import of their work for this discussion of the origins of The Myth, as I call it in my book.

Dave Huber:

A recent report from The Federalist details how professors at Maine’s Bates College are hesitant to challenge students for fear of being reported to the school’s DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — office.

Recent Bates graduate Roy Matthews corresponded with several professors from the institution and found its DEI office is being used to intimidate instructors into compliance with its progressive ideology.

Keith Taylor, a geology professor, was subjected to a “mock hearing” led by Dean of Faculty Malcolm Hill due to challenging a student to “provide evidence that […] Bates is anti-black and based in white supremacy” after alleging just that.

According to Matthews, “activist students [at the hearing] voiced their accusations of racism and silenced other students, who wanted Taylor to finish his class because of upcoming final exams.”

Ann Althouse:

I’m reading “How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia” by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.

Dr. Gay’s defenders… warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)…

What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on “poorly” goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We’re told the “speech climate” is “abysmal.”

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom. Note that the FIRE analysis is looking at “student free speech and open inquiry,” while the NYT article has Gay’s defenders concerned about “academic freedom,” which connotes the interests of faculty. 

Back to the NYT article:

———

Rifts dividing students, faculty and donors have widened

👀
SCOOPLET + 🧵

Danielle Allen, a highly respected Harvard poli sci prof, interviewed for the presidency in 2022.

She didn't get past an early round.

Worth asking why Gay got the job while Allen didn't come close.

I'm not saying I know. But it sure wasn't scholarship…

1/ pic.twitter.com/JtfKJsjysV

— Alice (@AliceFromQueens) January 3, 2024

Ronald Sullivan deleted this one word post written in response to former Harvard president Claudine Gay's resignation: "Karma".

As Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science, Gay refused to defend Sullivan's right to provide legal counsel to an unpopular client and played a key role… pic.twitter.com/WCPTG42I5G

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) January 3, 2024

Mara Gay — a member of the NYT editorial board and one of America's most infamous diversity hires — is perhaps best known for claiming on live TV that $500 million divided among 327 million people would give each person $1 million. https://t.co/P8uOwaQBSs

— i/o (@eyeslasho) January 3, 2024

You’d think nothing in the article could top the headline, but then you see @AP’s definition of scalping. https://t.co/BaC9cJaBjs pic.twitter.com/WORZ2IqISp

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) January 3, 2024

As much as I would like to blame Claudine Gay for her shenanigans, I think most of the fault lies with "us," the people who designed, supported and/or tolerated the current systems of affirmative action, diversity, equity, inclusion and all the other nonsense for the past 50… pic.twitter.com/Ud8kNxKwxA

— Thomas Sowell, The Genius of… (@AlanWolan) January 3, 2024

And:

Bill Ackman:

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. More.

Christopher Rufo:

I don’t like playing the racism tabulation game, but, given that Claudine Gay’s defense has amounted to smearing her opponents as racist, let’s put it to the test, comparing Claudine Gay’s racism to that of her critics.

Evidence that Gay is racist:

–Oversaw a discriminatory admissions program ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
–Led a discriminatory DEI bureaucracy that sought, among other things, to reduce the visual presence of “white men” on campus
–Minimized antisemitism and the call for the violent “decolonization” of Jews
–Supported policies that reduce individuals to racial categories and judge them on the basis of ancestry, rather than individual merit

Evidence that Claudine Gay’s critics are racist:

–Claudine Gay claiming, but providing no hard evidence, that some unknown person or persons sent her mean emails

Timar Kuran

Preference falsification has been central to the trajectory of DEI. People who abhor DEI principles and methods came to favor these publicly through a preference cascade. Every instance of preference falsification induced others to pretend they consider DEI just, efficient, beneficial to marginalized groups, etc. In time, a false consensus effectively displaced the search for truth as the university’s core mission, replacing it with DEI. Most professors watched in concealed horror the transfer of enormous powers from themselves to rapidly growing DEI bureaucracies.

——

Private Truths, Public Lies
The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification

Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.

In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.

Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system.

Ryan Quinn:

A University of Florida spokeswoman wrote in an email that UF’s faculty turnover rate is still below the 10.57 percent national average. (The source she cited, CUPA-HR, said on its website that in 2022–23, overall turnover for full-time faculty was 7 percent for those on the tenure track and 11 percent for non–tenure track.) And in posts on X criticizing the New York Times story, UF president Ben Sasse—a former Republican U.S. senator—wrote, “Over the last seven years, with the exception of one year during COVID, UF has annually hired far more faculty than have left.” 

A Florida State University spokeswoman wrote in an email that “we’ve seen a slight, but not dramatic, rise in faculty departures, and perhaps not greater than expected in these post-pandemic times. However, the university’s number of new hires is well above the number of replacements for those who have departed.” She added that FSU has found “that faculty leave for multiple and complex reasons rather than a single issue. We do not have a breakdown of their reasons.” 

A UNC system spokesman wrote in an email that faculty turnover in that system—counting “voluntary separation” but not retirements and other kinds of departures—was 3.9 percent in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023. He said the system doesn’t have data on why faculty members left or where they went. 

Experts say it’s simply too soon to know how relatively recent state politics—such as Ron DeSantis’s reign as Florida’s governor and laws passed in 2023—are influencing faculty members’ decisions to leave or stay, or whether professors are leaving for universities in bluer states or quitting academe entirely. 

“Faculty members are not tagged like migrating geese,” said Brendan Cantwell, a Michigan State University professor of higher, adult and lifelong education.

🇺🇸 https://t.co/JKUE7x9AYA

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024

Charles Murray & Helmuth Nyborg

Two giants of the field discuss the past, present, and future of intelligence research and much, much more…

Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy and Jared Rubin

Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.

Commentary.

Lily Hay Newman:

With the releases of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura in 2022, Apple debuted its Lockdown Mode for people at particular risk of being targeted by mercenary spyware. The feature is essentially a set of configurations for iOS and macOS that limit or block niceties like link previews in Messages and shared albums in Photos. Lockdown Mode also restricts your device’s ability to accept unsolicited communications like FaceTime calls from phone numbers and accounts you’ve never called before. And this year, in iOS 17, Apple added additional improvements, meaning more safety-focused limitations. The company has consistently emphasized that Lockdown Mode is not meant for mainstream use by most people—but in a week of testing, it’s surprisingly tolerable.

Ah yes, the one where GOP is blamed for decisions by Dem-dominated school board. I can’t imagine why local news is suffering when it consistently caters to one half of the political divide. 🙄 https://t.co/OYSxNjHaPO

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) January 2, 2024

Mark Lisheron:

State Sen. Eric Wimberger, one of the co-sponsors of the bill that had a public hearing Thursday, told the Badger Institute, the legislation presents an opportunity to right a longstanding wrong and repudiate “an antiquated world view whose time has come and gone.”

The notion that tax support for education be apportioned based on skin color “is antithetical to what I and other conservatives in Wisconsin believe,” Wimberger, R-Green Bay, said.

“Eliminating race as a factor in admissions and aid programs aligns with the principles of equality and fairness,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said about the bill in an email to the Badger Institute. “Instead of focusing on race, the UW should look at the applicant’s access to resources and opportunities, for example, a rural student or veteran, to truly bring diversity and inclusion to campus.”

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles:

Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University’s history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.

University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 will serve as Harvard’s interim president during a search for Gay’s permanent successor, the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — announced in an email on Tuesday.

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on Gay’s decision to step down.

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

Gay is expected to announced her decision to step down to Harvard affiliates in an email later today. The Corporation is also expected to make a statement about the decision.

Good riddance. https://t.co/3F88NeAKvW

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024

Notes and links on Claudine Gay and Harvard.

More.

New Year, Same Discrimination. State of Wisconsin has 262 new job openings for "diversity internships."
Run by Gov. Tony Ever's "Bureau of Equity and Inclusion." pic.twitter.com/9T87btrsHE

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) January 2, 2024

Peachy Keenan video:

Japan Times:

The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday.

The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is estimated to bear in her lifetime — fall to a record-low 1.26, later matched by that of 2022.

In Japan, the age of adulthood was lowered from 20 to 18 in April 2022 in a bid to encourage active social participation by youth.

Choose life..

CJ Szafir:

Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom.

Families and school leaders were more engaged. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s brief against the lawsuit represented 22 clients, including parents and private-school leaders. Parents and students spoke out. “The new Supreme Court case will be devastating to all families . . . because it would take away opportunities from children who can’t support their education through a public school system,” Sherlean Roberts, a senior at Marquette University, told us. She attended a charter school in Milwaukee and will be the first in her family with a college degree.

Wisconsin began its experiment with school choice in 1990 with a bipartisan voucher program, enrolling 341 in secular private schools in Milwaukee. The state expanded the program to include religious schools in 1998, private schools outside Milwaukee in 2011 and 2013, and special-needs students in 2016.

Ben Dauphinee:

The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of you having an actual surveyed and monumented boundary line are very low. Which also means the odds of the online boundaries being correct isn’t great either. This post is a dump of all the experiences I’ve had over the past 3 months, on my quest for accurate mapping.

Washington Examiner

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in higher education was deceptively sold as a set of policies designed to promote “the fair treatment and full participation of all people,” particularly groups that “have historically been underrepresented.” But DEI offices have proved to be epicenters of division and ideological conformity, stirring hostilities and imposing an intolerant monoculture.

Fortunately, 2023 saw more than a dozen states start to take action against the DEI hydra, with six achieving concrete steps that other states should follow.

MB Matthews

As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left.

The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else.  We on the right can reliably depend on being prosecuted for “misgendering,” contributing to conservative causes, being a Christian or a Jew, speaking out against the barbaric transing of children, defending ourselves with a firearm, and not being a Democrat.  We can depend upon getting arrested for protesting peacefully as the corrupt “Justice” Department singles us out for jail, bankruptcy, or keeping us off election ballots, while really destructive rioters go free.

Medical research has been corrupted by the deliberate downgrading of meritorious research that just so happens to be at odds with the latest leftist perversion du jour.  For example, there are research grants for hamster fights.

Elections have been corrupted. Mail-in ballots, demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to fraudulent inflation of Democrat votes, are ready for the next fraud. Dead people vote; people vote multiple times; non-residents vote in other states; and phony ballots are printed and signed with the same handwriting, then run through counting machines multiple times. Computer problems pop up so as to skew the vote.

Anna Krylov:

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor, has published several pieces on how left/woke ideology is undermining science. Here's her latest.

She gives examples of four main issues:

1. Policing of language.

Ever longer list of forbidden words like "healthy weight". pic.twitter.com/eJyfiapYOZ

— Whyvert (@whyvert) January 1, 2024

Aaron Sibarium:

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50. 

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.  

That article, “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,” includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.

Dan Luu:

In this case, search engines return various kinds of hallucinated results. In the snow forecast example, we got deliberately fabricated results, one intended to drive ad revenue through shady ads on a fake forecast site, and another intended to trick the user into thinking that the forecast indicates a cold, snowy, winter (the opposite of the actual forecast), seemingly in order to get the user to sign up for unnecessary snow removal services. Other deliberately fabricated results include a site that’s intended to look like an objective review site that’s actually a fake site designed to funnel you into installing a specific ad blocker, where the ad blocker they funnel you to appears to be a scammy one that tries to get you to pay for ad blocking and doesn’t let you unsubscribe, a fake “organic” blog post trying to get you to install a chrome extension that exposes all of your shopping to some service (in many cases, it’s not possible to tell if a blog post is a fake or shill post, but in this case, they hosted the fake blog post on the domain for the product and, although it’s designed to look like there’s an entire blog on the topic, there isn’t — it’s just this one fake blog post), etc.

Michaela Bourgeois:

Multnomah County is urging residents to practice good hygiene amid an uptick in shigella cases in Old Town Portland.

Shigella — a bacteria that is spread through fecal matter — can cause fever, stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea, which can last three to 10 days, and can include blood, health officials warn.

“Shigella spreads when one person’s infected poop gets into another person’s mouth through food or water, from objects or surfaces with shigella bacteria on them, or during sex,” Multnomah County said. “Shigella spreads very easily. Even a very small amount is enough to make someone sick.”

Nate Gilbert:

Moments after what turned out to be his final Crosstown Rivalry game had concluded, Lakeside head coach Paul Bauer went out of his way to find Lake Mills standout outside linebacker Matthew Stenbroten and wished him well.

Stenbroten, a Division 1 recruit and the kind of player who gives opposing offenses fits, had suffered what looked to be a nasty lower-body injury late in the game. The pair had a brief conversation before shaking hands (Stenbroten returned from what turned out to be a high-ankle sprain in time for the playoffs).

David Wahlberg

Ava, Charlotte and Emma were popular baby names for girls in the Madison area this year. Henry, Jack and Theodore were among the biggest for boys.

At UnityPoint Health-Meriter, the largest birthing hospital in Madison, Emma was the top girl’s name, followed by Eleanor, Evelyn, Charlotte and Ava. SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital, Madison’s other birthing hospital, had a five-way tie for first place: Ava, Avery, Charlotte, Elizabeth and Nora.

Josh Cowen:

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores. 

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Emma Freire

Other neighborhoods across Baltimore had hired private security firms to patrol their streets. Why shouldn’t Federal Hill do the same? From there, Neuman, Anderson, and several others got to work. They consulted local government officials and police officers, who told Neuman they appreciated more eyes on the street. I called the Baltimore Police Department to verify their support, but they declined to comment.

Neuman and the others eventually set up a corporation, Federal Hill Neighborhood Patrol Inc. Next, they needed money. They hoped to raise $18,000 to fund the patrol for a three-month trial. But their neighbors nearly tripled that: About 90 households in Federal Hill contributed $50,000. In May 2021, the first patrol hit the streets.

More than 1 million people work as security guards in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that number has doubled in the past 20 years. Since 2020, neighborhoods like Federal Hill have started hiring private security services. In Minnesota, for example, the number of licenses approved for new private security firms rose from 14 in 2019 to 27 in 2021, according to the state’s Board of Private Detective and Protective Agent Services. In Oregon, 1,635 private security guards had a license to carry a gun in September 2019. Today, that number has grown to 2,268.

Anonymous via the Crimson:

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.

A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.

Joanne Jacobs:

Humanities professors, under heavy pressure to prove their discipline is “useful,” have gone political, writes Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. The pitch is that “studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy.” Someone’s got to bend that arc of justice.

Joanne Jacobs:

Cognitive ability no longer is linked strongly to years of education, concludes a Norwegian study published in published in Scientific Reports, reports Vladimir Hedrih in PsyPost. Expanding access to education could have helped talented people rise above their social class, making Norway more meritocratic, researchers speculated. But it didn’t work that way.

Researchers looked at cognitive tests of males born between 1950 to 1991 and their educational attainment by age 30. The men, who were evaluated as military draftees, were tested on “a range of mental skills and capabilities, including problem-solving, memory, reasoning, and critical thinking,” Hedrih writes.

During the period, as Norway significantly improved access to high school and college education, the correlation between cognitive ability and educational attainment declined, the study found. The hypothesis that “educational attainment increasingly aligns with individual level ability as educational opportunities are broadened” did not hold up, researchers wrote. The “potentially more plausible explanation” is that education has become “substantially less selective.” Higher education — or, at least, years of schooling — no longer is a strong signal of intelligence.

Charles Murray:

It has to be messing with the heads of AI programmers everwhere. An AI app that has unfiltered access to all scientific knowledge is going to give answers that are sexist, racist, and classist by Progressive standards. So how do you make an AI program that is accurate about everything except a few forbidden conclusions?

Unwritten rules? MPS has many.“Any employee who violates any district policy procedure rule or regulation whether written or unwritten shall be subject to disciplinary actions.”🧵1/3@MacIverWisc @CityofMKE @compujeramey @ShaunGalNews @SamKraemerTV @RoryLinnane @DanODonnellShow pic.twitter.com/c3gIbekFE5

— Debbie Kuether (@debkueth) December 31, 2023

Years ago, I asked each of the 3 Madison Superintendent candidates if they supported hiring the the best teachers and letting them do their thing or a top down approach…

Ongoing substantial k-12 $pending growth vs classroom teacher comp provides another look at our predicament.

“Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.“

By Brooks B. Anderson and Joshua A. Kaplan

University President Claudine Gay should resign.

It has been less than half a year since Gay assumed one of the most prestigious posts in all of academia. Since then, scandal after scandal has plagued our beloved university.

The president of Harvard must be a formidable leader, capable of managing thousands of the brightest minds on the planet, a widely revered international brand, and a multi-billion-dollar bureaucratic behemoth. Further, by way of its field-leading eminences, Harvard exerts influence — and encounters controversy — at the highest levels of politics and policymaking, which often presents challenges for its leader and public face.

In other words, Harvard’s presidency is no mere empty honor; it is a deeply challenging managerial job with deeply challenging duties, not least of which is navigating national outcry.

“we made the decision to grant this author anonymity”

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.

A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.

Kyle Morris:

The decision to avoid a second trial charging Sam Bankman-Fried with a conspiracy to make unlawful political donations and bribery of foreign officials has many conservatives up in arms.

Federal prosecutors said Friday that they do not plan to proceed with a second trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, citing public interest in a speedy resolution of the case that has seemingly irritated those who were hoping to see the disgraced FTX founder prosecuted to the fullest extent.

BREAKING: Campaign finance charges on Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX have been dropped, in addition to six other charges.

This is unusual.

He gave millions to politicians.

Who exactly?

Nearly everyone.

See the list here: https://t.co/uK8CTsLugJ pic.twitter.com/5HLUb7FjA8

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 30, 2023

There's another reason States might consider prosecuting SBF.

There's some risk Pres. Biden will pardon SBF on the Federal conviction on his way out the door if he's not re-elected.

That might sound far-fetched.
But only if you're not paying attention.👇https://t.co/B0cbhQnow2

— MetaLawMan (@MetaLawMan) December 31, 2023

Aaron Brown:

The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but also, less famously, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

I was thinking of both quotes as I read a recent paper comparing the wildly different causes given for the Great Depression between college American history and economics textbooks (Jeremy Horpedahl, Phillip Magness, and Marcus Witcher, “Teaching the Causes of Great Depression to College Students: Evidence from History, Economics, and Economic History Textbooks,” Journal of Economics and Finance Education).

Joy Mayer:

We’ve worked with partner newsrooms to create and refine a tool for journalists — a checklist designed to make room in the editing process for journalists to be intentional about:

• examining how their story might be perceived by people with different values and experiences
• identifying what they are communicating to their audience intentionally or unintentionally about how they see an issue
• considering including enhanced transparency about their goals and process

What this guide is not

The goal of the checklist is NOT to make all content palatable to all people. That’s not possible or desirable. Some people will not find your coverage fair no matter what you do. And some are seeking confirmation bias to such an extent that anything that does not confirm THEIR worldview feels biased, not neutral.

Remarkable….

A thread of threads.

It’s been an interesting year. My writing primarily focused on institutional capture in higher ed. Put simply, DEI.

Now more than ever, the issue is front and center.

So consider this both a highlight reel and list of (self) recommended pieces.

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) December 30, 2023

zwischenzugs.com

I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:

• No peeking at the original essay, and 
• No reading any of the suggested material, except to find references.

The experience turned out to be radically different with AI assistance in some ways, and similar in others.

If you’re not interested in my life story and the gory detail, skip to the end for what I learned.

Yngve Hoiseth

Even though I take pride in my ability to adjust my opinions in the face of new evidence, it can really hurt, and it sure did this time. Now what should I believe? And what fragments of false belief were left behind in my mind? On top of that, I had to notify the people I gave the book to. When there are that many errors in a single chapter, who knows how many there might be in the rest of the book? It was clear to me that the book could not be trusted. 

I reached out to Penguin, UC Berkeley and the Norwegian publisher Press (which published the Norwegian translation).

The worst reaction was from Press — they didn’t respond at all. Penguin said that the editorial team would take a look, but I never heard back from them. UC Berkeley responded promptly but concluded that they would not conduct a formal investigation.

Below, I’m publishing my email exchange with UC Berkeley so that others can see it rather than it just gathering dust in my email archive. In a way, it’s unfair to pillory UC Berkeley, considering that they actually have a process for dealing with research misconduct and at least responded to my complaint. Compare that to the publishers, who neither have a process nor responded. Nevertheless, I expect more from a renowned research institution like UC Berkeley, so I still believe I’m right to publish our correspondence.

Matthew Hennessey:

The lockdowns and lockouts of 2020 dealt a reputational blow to the education blob—that quasipublic syndicate of teachers unions, government bureaucracies, brand-name credentialing institutions and their media allies whose mission is to keep taxpayer money flowing to public schools. Most of that money is linked to students, many of whom left during the plague year and haven’t returned. Now the crisis is over and the blob wants its monopoly back.

The pandemic scrambled Americans’ attitudes toward education. With entire families stuck at home, parents got a chance to examine in detail what their kids were doing all day. Many didn’t like what they saw. Wasted time, woke-infused curricula and poor instruction convinced these parents they could do better. They decided they liked the freedom and convenience of home schooling. It worked for them and for their kids. They kept at it after the lockdowns ended.

Somebody somewhere has decided this experiment in liberty has gone on long enough. An Oct. 31 piece in the Washington Post sounded the alarm about the stubborn popularity of “a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.” The education blob is a closed shop. Teachers and the unions that represent them are married to the idea that only properly trained professionals can handle a classroom. It’s a cult of expertise. Pedagogical science isn’t for amateurs, never mind that the idea of mass public education is no more than 200 years old. Also never mind that most credentialed teachers aren’t subject-matter experts.

Peter Jamison writing in the Bezos Washington Post

When Melanie Elsey stepped up to the lectern at the Ohio Statehouse in April, it looked like a triumphant season for home-schoolers.

Lawmakers would soon roll back what little oversight the state exercised over its booming population of home educators. Now they were discussing what should have been an equally welcome policy. As part of an expansive school-choice bill, Republican legislators wanted to offer home-schoolers thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding each year.

D Breunig:

Last February, curious about how LLMs might comply with privacy regulations like CCPA and GDPR when it comes to their training data sets, I filed a CCPA request with OpenAI. Over 101 days, we went back and forth. They never really settled the original request, but the exchange illuminated their approach to privacy and training data (or lack thereof) and raised more questions than answers.

Below is the complete thread. I’ve redacted the names of OpenAI’s support staff.

By Mike Damiano

Just before winter break, four prominent Harvard faculty members met for a private dinner with two of the university’s most powerful leaders.

Landing the dinner meeting was something of a coup for the faculty members who are co-leaders of a campaign, launched last spring, to reverse what they see as a rising culture of self-censorship, decreasing tolerance for dissenting views, and a tendency for the university to take official positions on the issues of the day.

When it was launched in March, the campaign might have seemed quixotic, even contrarian. But in the midst of campus tumult in recent months with bitter debates over antisemitism, pro-Palestinian speech, and the future of the school’s president, Claudine Gay, their dinner engagement with Tracy Palandjian and Paul Finnegan, members of Harvard’s insular governing board known as the Corporation, was a sign that their views have taken on new relevance. It was a marker that such efforts are being discussed at the highest levels of academia as possible guidelines that schools could adopt.During the Dec. 19 dinner at Bar Enza in The Charles Hotel, the four faculty members — Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School; Steven Pinker, a psychology professor; Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor; and Flynn Cratty, associate director of a Harvard research program — made the case for their platform.

Benjamin Weingarten:

Why would former President Barack Obama spend his time and political capital defending a protector of genocidal Jew-haters — “depending on the context” — later exposed to be a serial plagiarist?

That became a live question with Jewish Insider’s revelation Obama had “privately lobbied” for Harvard President Claudine Gay to keep her job amid calls for her head following the mealymouthed and morally bankrupt testimony she delivered before Congress — testimony illustrating exactly why Jew-hatred had erupted and been allowed to fester on campuses following Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack.

She showed that Harvard, like its elite peers, had become a “safe space” for one group above all others — Hamasniks and their bigoted intersectional allies — putting Jewish students under threat of not only harassment but bodily harm in the name of an absolute commitment to free speech afforded to virtually no one else on the heavily censorious campus.

In the New York Post, I explain why Obama interceded on Gay’s behalf to defend an indefensible presidency.

As I wite in part: