Patrick Andriesen:

Illinois law now forbids employers from discussing ‘religious or political matters’ with employees. The Illinois Policy Institute is suing because that restriction on its free speech threatens its ability to operate.

The Illinois Policy Institute is suing in federal court over a new state law that denies its First Amendment right to communicate with its employees.

The lawsuit states Senate Bill 3649, or the “Worker Freedom of Speech Act,” would effectively revokeemployers’ right to free speech across the state by criminalizing discussions of political or religious matters during meetings. The law takes effect Jan. 1.

“Illinois has enacted a law that prohibits speech based solely on its content, political or religious,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing the institute. “The Supreme Court has held that such content-based prohibitions are presumptively invalid. For that reason, SB 3649 should be held unconstitutional.”

Natasha Singer:

Cellphones have become a school scourge. More than 70 percent of high school teachers say student phone distraction is a “major problem,” according to a survey this year by Pew Research.

That’s why states are mounting a bipartisan effort to crack down on rampant student cellphone use. So far this year, at least eight states have passed laws, issued orders or adopted rules to curb phone use among students during school hours.

The issue isn’t simply that some children and teenagers compulsively use apps like Snap, TikTok and Instagram during lessons, distracting themselves and their classmates. In many schools, students have also used their phones to bully, sexually exploit and share videos of physical attacks on their peers.

Liam Beran:

In an interview after the meeting, Soglin said that he was opposed to the referendum. “It’s unnecessary,” he said. Soglin believes that the city should close this year’s budget gap using its rainy day fund and lobby the state Legislature next year for sales tax authority and increased payments for municipal services for state properties in Madison.

Andrew Crocker:

In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet.

The new Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Smith, involved an armed robbery and assault of a US Postal Service worker at a post office in Mississippi in 2018. After several months of investigation, police had no identifiable suspects, so they obtained a geofence warrant covering a large geographic area around the post office for the hour surrounding the crime. Google responded to the warrant with information on several devices, ultimately leading police to the two defendants.

On appeal, the Fifth Circuit reached several important holdings.

First, it determined that under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Carpenter v. United States, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data implicated by geofence warrants. As a result, the court broke from the Fourth Circuit’s deeply flawed decision last month in United States v. Chatrie, noting that although geofence warrants can be more “limited temporally” than the data sought in Carpenter, geofence location data is still highly invasive because it can expose sensitive information about a person’s associations and allow police to “follow” them into private spaces.

Danielle Wallace:

Kamala Harris panned for requiring ID to enter Arizona rally after previously painting voter ID laws as racist. Harris rallygoers outside Phoenix were required to present IDs upon entry.

Vice President Harris was mocked online for requiring campaign rallygoers to present a government-issued ID upon entry, despite the Democratic presidential nominee opposing voter ID laws. 

Michael Barrett:

Danish criminal groups have hired teenagers from Sweden to commit crimes on Danish territory on some 25 occasions in the last four months, according to Denmark’s Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard.

Three shootings – two in Copenhagen and one in Kolding – have been linked with Swedish teenagers in the last two weeks, with Hummelgaard now releasing a figure covering a significant number of other incidents.

The minister has previously said Danish authorities take the trend “very, very seriously”and are working with Swedish counterparts to stamp out the apparent use of hired Swedish youths to commit crimes.

He commented on the broader number of incidents after meeting with police special crime unit NSK and the chief of the National Police on Thursday.

“Criminal groups in Denmark have hired Swedish child soldiers – that’s what I call them – to commit criminal acts,” he told broadcaster DR.

Holly Korbey

In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. “Teachers don’t actually need someone to connect the dots, many just needed someone to explain to them some basic things about how people learn to read, and then they said, ‘Oh, my God, why have I been doing it this other way?’”

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws pertaining to teaching children to read according to the “science of reading” since 2019—and about 15, according to Hanford’s count, are directly in response to her reporting. In 2022, Lucy Calkins, creator of the Units of Study reading curriculum investigated in Sold a Story and used by nearly a quarter of all U.S. elementary schools, revised her curricula to include more phonics. Meanwhile, sales at Heinemann, one of the biggest publishers of reading curricula, including Fountas & Pinnell, declined 75 percent in 2023, according to APM Reports, as schools opt to invest in more evidence-aligned approaches.

We spoke with Hanford about the tectonic shifts created by Sold a Story, her take on the criticism of her work, and what she thinks lies ahead after the dust settles. 

Holly Korbey: Your thesis that students are being taught to read using disproven methods hit a nerve—Sold a Story has been downloaded millions of times. What are some of the measurable, concrete outcomes in response to the podcast that you’ve been able to track? 

Emily Hanford: The outcomes that mean the most to me are the thousands of emails and social media posts I got from teachers—overwhelmingly, these have been positive. Not positive like: ‘we’re so happy about this.’ It’s more like: ‘Oh, wow, this is really important stuff that I needed to know. Thank you for putting this out there.’ Those notes are often full of emotion, but many are also characterized with, ‘We can do this, I’m psyched. I want to learn more about this.’

At our last count, about 15 pieces of legislation had actually passed. I have mixed feelings about the legislation; obviously, it’s a way to show the impact of journalism, and I hear from teachers that legislative changes are needed, so there’s a role for policy here. 

But one of the problems with policies is they have lots of different impacts. For example, they make it possible to galvanize a certain kind of resistance, they give critics something to shoot at. I don’t disagree with some of the points being made, like the criticism of bans on three-cueing. I think policies like the three-cueing bans give detractors an opening to say, ‘all of this science of reading stuff, we just need to move on.’ And I think that’s disingenuous at best.

———

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Thierry Breton:

A timely and useful thread.

Linda Yaccarino:

This is an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US. It also patronizes European citizens, suggesting they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.

The Free Press:

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what Nadhim Zahawi—who fled Saddam’s death squads as a boy only to become Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote last week in our pages. 

Elbridge Colby:

Europe needs American military support, I’m told.

Does threatening Americans’ exercise of our most important and cherished right support or undermine that?

and Garcia-Martinez

Robert F Kennedy, Jr.

The elites who want to decide what is permissible to read and watch justify their censorship by labeling dissenting opinions as “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “far right,” or “extremist.” During the lockdowns, MI-6 designated me and other health freedom activists as potential “terrorists.” But the label applies more closely to themselves, as they try to scare us into submission again with bird flu hoaxes, debt-fueled financial collapse, and ever more dangerous imperial wars of choice.

Bezos Washington Post Reporter:

What role does the White House or the President have any sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of inter — intervening in that. Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but you know it’s a wider thing, right?” More.

Ro Khanna;

In America, we value free speech, including conversations like the one @elonmusk is having tonight with ideas and opinions people may dislike or even find offensive. We don’t censor. Ironic, this used to be a European idea advocated by someone named John Stuart Mill.

Andrea White:

Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to cure the long-ailing Houston Independent School District. He is arguably the most influential and certainly the most controversial educator in the nation’s second-largest state. He’s 67, and he roams the maze of desks with the agility of an athlete, peering over the shoulders of 25 or so of the more than 180,000 students in the state’s largest school district. They are enrolled at 1 of the 85 schools that adopted his custom cocktail of education reforms last year; 45 more will join this academic year. 

The buzzer goes off. The teacher presses the reset button and claps her hands. After the timed segment, she picks one of a handful of Miles-approved strategies to engage her students. The teacher opts for T&T (Turn and Talk); others include Whip Around (the entire class stands and the instructor asks every student a question) and Oral Choral (students call out responses to questions in unison). The children stand up, turn toward their neighbors, and discuss a short passage from the lesson.

The teacher circles the desks and listens to her students. At the end of the class, she will keep some of the children in the classroom for additional instruction, while sending others to the “team center”—what students would have called the library just a year ago—to complete a more challenging assignment to reinforce their mastery of the material covered. But for now, the teacher clicks a remote, and a new passage displays on the whiteboard. The students settle into their chairs, and their eyes turn to the screen. The timer again begins its countdown: 3:59, 3:58, 3:57. . . 

Miles and his entourage, which includes the principal and a district supervisor, file out of the classroom and regroup in the quiet hallway. He asks principal Eileen Puente what she thought of the class. The superintendent’s voice is soft, his manner relaxed. But Puente, a woman with a warm smile who’s led the school for five years, stands at attention. She knows it’s now her turn to be evaluated. She answers that student engagement seemed high, but that she is worried the teacher’s pace was too slow because the lesson reviewed material that had already been covered. Miles agrees, checking the silver dial on his black Movado watch. Then he is off to observe another classroom. 

——

Houston spends about $2,600,000,000 for 180,000 students – about $14,444.44 per student. Far, far less than Madison’s 22 to 29k/student – depending on the figures supplied……

Good Reason Houston

Scott Johnson:

Some observers outside Minnesota may reasonably ask, if Governor Tim Walz is so bad (and, as I say, worse than bad), why he has done so well politically. The reasons are many. One reason is the subservience of the Star Tribune to the needs of the Democratic Party. After the 2018 election I talked about this at some length to the Minnesota Rough Riders in “The role of the Star Tribune.”

The work of the Star Tribune in Walz’s service provides a current case study. See, for example, Rochelle Olson’s treatment of the current controversy regarding Walz’s departure from the Minnesota National Guard before it was to deploy to Iraq in this classic “Fact check: Walz’s National Guard records show that Vance’s claim of ‘stolen valor’ is false.”Subhead: “GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance claims that the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate bailed as his unit headed to Iraq, but Walz retired before his unit was called up.” The Star Tribune featured Olson’s story on page one yesterday. (Dustin Grage has stepped up to serve as a one-man Walz truth squad.)

Lenore Skenazy and Jon Haidt:

At last, a journalist has done the proper test, and the results are thrilling. Decca Aitkenhead, who writes for The Sunday Times (UK), recruited her two sons (ages 13 and 14), along with six of their male friends, plus two teen girls with whom some of the boys were acquainted. They agreed to go for a month using basic phones with no internet access (although they got access to their smartphones for one hour each evening). In other words, Decca did a study with teens, for a long enough period, in a group. 

She then did something harder and more amazing: she added a mega-dose of independence. She sent them on an unsupervised two-day camping trip––a chance to experience independence, risk, and problem-solving in the real world, together, just as kids had always done before the 1990s. 

The camping trip confirmed everything that Lenore Skenazy has been saying since her 2009 book Free Range Kids (updated in 2021): Young people are starved for independence in the real world. Given some, they flourish. 

Decca’s group was incompetent at first, but the kids developed competence as the experiment went on. They took risks (some, admittedly, dumb). They tried new things. And without smartphones glued to their hands, they connected. Yesterday, I heard Decca’s son Jake on a radio program, talking about how much he loved the month-long project. He said, of the camping trip, that it gave him “one of the best nights of my year, maybe of my life.”

Wilfred Reilly:

We need to talk about today’s critical mass of unimpressive “experts.”

Just a week or so back, at the end of July, Columbia and UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw — the founder of “intersectional” theory — took to Twitter/X to argue a point. As she passionately put it: “Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey. #SayHerName.” This post, so far, has received 1,800 likes and has been shared 1,200 times.

Samir Jeraj:

The Birmingham example also highlights another problem. Public-sector organisations have legacy systems and old data, which make any new system a challenge to implement. The underlying problem is that digital technology moves and develops quickly, whereas large organisations tend to move at a slower pace using bureaucratic processes. So, from the start there is a mismatch, according to Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy in Index (Initiative for the Digital Economy) at the University of Exeter.

“These large technology projects are often conceived to last for two, three, four years,” explains Thompson. Buying in technology, however, tends to contract on a ten-year cycle. The first three years work well, as the contractor invests in the technology and engages in improving services, but the following seven years are lacklustre. When the needs of the organisation change, the contractor will argue that any change to the systems are outside of the scope and will cost more.

Marguerite Roza and Team:

Special Ed is consuming a growing share of public school budgets. With new data emerging, Edunomics Lab is taking a fresh look at Special Ed spending to better understand the extent to which rising identification rates and staffing increases deliver value for students.

State-by-state comparisons make it clear that systems are making different choices when it comes to serving students with disabilities and those choices are delivering wildly different results for students. In this 30-minute webinar we share our findings. They may surprise you; they certainly did us.

Beth Hawkins:

Higher Special Education Funding Not Tied to Better Outcomes
Early look at state-by-state spending on special ed reveals scattershot efforts, suggests evidence-backed reading instruction for all kids is crucial.

Ilya Somin:

On Wednesday, in Darby Development Co. v. United States, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which reviews takings claims against the federal government ruled that a takings lawsuit against the 2020-21 federal eviction moratorium can proceed. In so doing, it overruled a trial court decision by the Court of Claims, which I criticized here. The decision could well end up setting an important takings precedent.

In September 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the Trump Administration Centers for Disease Control (CDC) imposed a nationwide eviction moratorium, claiming that it would reduce the spread of the disease. The Biden Administration extended the moratorium multiple times. In August 2021, the eviction moratorium was invalidated by the Supreme Court because the CDC lacked proper statutory authority to institute it. But, in the meantime, numerous landlords suffered financial losses, because they could not evict tenants who weren’t paying rent.

Some of the property owners filed a lawsuit arguing that the eviction moratorium violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires the government to pay “just compensation” whenever it takes private property. As I explained at the time, their position was backed by the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which held that even temporary physical occupations of property qualify as “per se” (automatic) takings requiring compensation.

Preston Cooper:

Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which could have cost taxpayers $475 billion. Additional loan-cancelation initiatives—also certain to face legal challenges—are in the works.

But the high drama of loan cancelation has drawn attention away from a more pressing issue in the student-loan system. After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called on-ramp is set to expire at the end of September—yet tens of millions of borrowers have not yet made a payment.

The Looming Student-Loan Nonpayment Crisis

During the payment pause, no federal student-loan borrower had to make a payment, and interest rates were set at zero. During the on-ramp, payments are due and interest accrues once again. But borrowers who don’t pay their loans can avoid the worst consequences of failing to do so: Delinquencies will not appear on their credit records, nor will loans be placed in default or sent to collections.

Since most student borrowers had not made a payment on their loans for over three years, the logic of a one-year on-ramp was to allow borrowers time to make financial arrangements to recommence payment. Missing a payment or two would be no big deal. After a year, the logic ran, most borrowers should be comfortably paying their loans every month.

That ideal couldn’t be farther from reality. At the end of 2019, prior to the payment pause, 3.1 million borrowers were more than 30 days behind on their loan payments. As of March 2024—the latest month for which data are available—the number of delinquent borrowers had reached 7.3 million.

Bill Ackman:

If people question whether there is bias in media, you should watch this clip. When the answers given by the subject of the interview do not match the narrative which the network would like to advance, the anchor terminates the interview using as an excuse that the subject’s time is valuable and the connection is choppy. Watch to the end and see for yourself whether these reasons are a pretext or whether this is good journalism and fairness in media.

Rebel Educator

This is an 8th grade graduation exam from 1912.

8th graders then were better prepared for life in the real world than 12th graders are today.

And.

Peter May:

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children’s opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Anjali Huynh

Massachusetts collected $40.8 billion in overall tax revenue for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, with $2.2 billion coming from the state’s so-called “millionaires tax,” state finance officials said Friday.

The total haul was $967 million more than projected, much of which came from the millionaire’s tax — funds that can only be spent on education and transportation.

While the millionaire’s tax revenue was more than double the $1 billion that Governor Maura Healey and other legislators had allocated to spend, the windfall won’t leave state coffers flush with cash.

NS Lyons:

Last month, the US Supreme Court considered arguments in a landmark case on the legality of America’s metastasising censorship-industrial complex. The case, Murthy vs Missouri, rests on whether White House requests that Twitter and Facebook take down alleged Covid misinformation constituted illegal censorship that violated the First Amendment right to free speech.

Given the ample evidence of the Biden administration’s sweeping censorship efforts in recent years, many legal observers assumed the case was a done deal. And yet, during the hearing, it quickly became apparent that a majority of the court’s justices were sympathetic to a counter-argument that, actually, it’s the Government who’s the real victim in this case — because what “free speech” really means is that the Government has a right to tell Facebook that you need to shut up.

The court’s newest and most innovative justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, stole the headlines with comments about how she was “really worried” about “the First Amendment hamstringing the Government in significant ways in the most important time periods” — i.e. elections involving Donald Trump. But even some of the court’s allegedly more “conservative” justices such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett appeared openly sympathetic to the idea that it’s more important to preserve the national security state’s uninhibited power to bully platforms into silencing information they consider “harmful” than it is to preserve fundamental individual rights. In short, although a ruling on the issue won’t be released until this summer, as of now the Supreme Court seems poised to effectively enshrine the legality of mass state censorship and deliver what could be a mortal blow to America’s tradition of free speech.

Paul Craig Roberts:

Journalism as an occupation no longer exists. Today the struggle is not to get at the heart of an issue, but to have one’s agenda prevail.

In 2013 I returned to the issue of offshoring production for the home market in my book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalsim. In the decade since Schumer and I had published our article, the US had lost 54,000 factories. The number of factories employing 1,000 or more declined by 40%. Those employing 500-1,000 declined by 44%. Those employing 250-500 declined by 37%. Factories employing 100-250 declined by 30%. The losses are net of new start ups. The US manufacturing work force shrank by 5,000,000 employees.

In the first decade of the 21st century the population of Detroit, Michigan, declined by 25%. Gary, Indiana, lost 22% of its population. Flint, Michigan lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio, lost 17%. St Louis, Missouri, lost 20%. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, South Bend Indiana, and Rochester New York also lost population. These cities were once the home of American manufacturing and industrial might.

Wherever the alleged “gains of trade” might have occurred, it wasn’t in these cities.

The Democrats’ open borders policy might be replenishing these cities’ populations, but the jobs are not there to support them.

There is another reason jobs offshoring did not produce for Americans any gains from trade. When the goods and services produced abroad are brought back into the US to be marketed, they come in as imports. Thus the trade deficit widens, which means the US incurs more foreign debt. Is the growth in debt caused by jobs offshoring covered by gains from trade?

Phil Pennington

third speed bump came just last week, when NZTA deferred using number-plate spotting cameras on a highway (see below).

The march is mostly one way, though – including to the bank for the tech-makers and marketers, who are known to protest at the media calling their products “surveillance”.

Such sensitivities have not put off governments spending on public-private hybrid systems.

New Zealand has its own, used by powerful state agencies, the police and Immigration.

Many of the camera systems could run facial recognition (FR). Sometimes you are just asked to trust the FR function is not switched on.

John Sexton

It turns out that putting Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi in charge of the nation’s collective HR programs hasn’t gone smoothly in all cases. Who would have guessed?

Today the Washington Post has a story about the legal backlash that ubiquitous anti-racism training has created. There are at least 59 current lawsuits brought against these training programs by people who say they felt discriminated against.

The Splintered Mind

Method

* Only authors born 1900 or later are included.

* Each author is only counted once per headline entry (subentries are excluded). In 2010, I found that this generated more plausible results than counting authors multiple times per entry.

* As in 2019, but unlike 2014 and 2010, I include co-authors. Due to the unsystematic formatting of SEP references, this was a somewhat noisy process. To capture last authors, I searched for “and” or “&” in each bibliographic line, if appearing before a “19”, “20”, “forthcoming”, or “in press”, then pulled the text immediately after. To capture second authors that were not last authors, I searched for a second comma before such a date-preceding “and” or “&”, then pulled the text after that. I omitted co-authors in position three or higher unless they were last author. Fortunately for the analysis, co-authorship is relatively uncommon in philosophy compared to the sciences, constituting by my estimate less than 10% of the bibliographic lines.

* Also as in 2019 but unlike 2014, I included editors, but only if their name appears before the date in the bibliographical line. Putting the editor at the front of the bibliographical line highlights the editor’s role or the edited collection as a whole.

* After computerized search and sort, I hand-coded the data, in some cases correcting misspellings and merging authors (e.g., Ruth Barcan = Ruth Marcus), more often separating authors with similar names (e.g., various A. Goldmans and J. Cohens), in a process that involved some guesswork and pattern recognition. Inconsistent syntax and imperfect redundancy removal procedures also created some error, though nothing large or systematic that I noticed. Bear in mind that with about 208,000 bibliographic entries, perfection is not possible! I estimate coding error of up to about +/- 2 entries.

Richard Dawkins:

“My entire Facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics.

Of course, my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?”

Nataliya Vasilyeva:

Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.

As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin’s interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn’t immediately comment on the issue.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russia increased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.

James Cirrone:

‘The problem is California is going broke,’ he wrote on X. ‘California will begin raising taxes and cutting subsidies to the poor, to prisons, environmental problems, and teachers unions. That means crime will spread as police will be cut.’

He believes even Americans who don’t live in the Golden State should care about its prospects because it’s a bell weather for the rest of the country.

‘Since California is a Bell Weather state and is going broke, which states will follow?’ he asked. 

So, is California actually going broke?

Jonathan Amos

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

Jon Levine, Deirdre Bardolf and Matthew Sedacca

• Reading proficiency among Minnesota students fellto 49.9% in 2023, down from 59.2% in 2019, according to the state Department of Education. Math comprehension similarly sank, from 55% in 2019 to 45.5% last year. 
• Thirty percent of all Minnesotan students were chronically absent, or missed more than 10% of school days, during the 2021-22 school year. That’s more than double from just 14% during the 2019 school year, according to the American Enterprise Institute. 

Cremieux

I’m delighted to see my charts have been posted in response to this multiple times.

If you look at American PISA performance, you see a consistent picture: Americans utterly dominate once you split them by race.

@visualcapitalist

Three out of four members of Team USA played at the collegiate level.

Stanford University has the most Olympic athletes of any college in the Games, including U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky, who has won nine Olympic gold medals, the most in history for a female swimmer.

Following Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has 17 athletes, and the University of Southern California (USC) has 16.

Jessica Costescu:

Since Tim Walz became governor, Minnesota has faced an exodus of residents fleeing the state, taking nearly $5 billion of household income with them, according to data reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

On net, nearly 46,000 Minnesotans left between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2023, according to the most recently available Census data, with many fleeing Walz’s major tax increases for the income tax-free states of Florida and Texas. The Land of 10,000 Lakes lost more than 19,000 in 2022 alone, the biggest drop in at least 30 years.

It’s not clear what led to the exodus, but in addition to tax surges, spending increases, and other progressive initiatives, Minnesota, under Walz’s watch, has faced a spike in violent crime and a drop in academic achievement. The downward domestic migration trend became apparent soon after Walz—who was recently tapped as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate—became governor.

Mike Benz:

A complicated legacy. She helped build YouTube, the greatest font of knowledge & freedom in my generation’s upbringing, but then she utterly destroyed it, leaving half my generation bitter & resentful. She helped build Google, which opened worlds of wisdom, then oversaw its end to its Don’t Be Evil promise. RIP to an old foe, undoubtably a formidable figure, one whose legacy — whether in the grand scheme of things she was a force for good or ill — is now very much up to an unwritten history to decide.

Many taxpayer funded K-12 systems use Google services, including Madison.

A thread. Another.

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah:

Harvard will not remove the Sackler name from one of three University art museums and another campus building, ending a yearslong campaign by student activists for Harvard to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.

A committee tasked with reviewing a request to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from the two buildings announced in a report on Wednesday that it did not recommend denaming. The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s recommendation last month.

Sackler’s family, which owned the company that became Purdue Pharma, has been considered by some activists to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin — a drug credited with fueling the opioid crisis.

Joanne Jacobs:

Walz increased education funding by $2.2 billion, but new state mandates are eating up half the money, reports Beth Hawkins on The 74. “District leaders statewide are scrambling to explain to their communities that, in fact, they are facing massive cuts.” Enrollment is declining. “In many places, balancing the budget will mean layoffs or school closures.”

There are “as many as 65 new mandates, ranging from free meals for all students to menstrual products in school restrooms,” she writes. The bill has added costly benefits for seasonal workers — such as unemployment insurance for substitutes. 

School districts must divert some of the “new” money to make up shortfalls in other funding, such as “$750 million just to fill the special education funding gap,” writes Hawkins. 

Mark Perry:

Since 1970 these are the increases:
Students: 8.9%
Teachers: 60.1%
Non-Teaching Staff: 165.3%
Real Spending per Student: 177.3%

Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken:

We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of $17,843 per pupil, which was 13.4% above the statewide average of $15,734 and ranked 120th among the 421 districts in Wisconsin.

Declining enrollment and the latest referendum will send those amounts higher for MPS starting in 2025. MPS also ranks relatively high in total revenue per student compared to other large districts nationally. The NCES data show MPS with 2020 revenues of $17,520 per student, 3.7% more than the average funding of $16,894 per student and 25th-highest among the 120 largest districts in the country. As noted earlier, however, there are reasons for higher funding levels given that the poverty rate for school-age children in Milwaukee is among the highest for these districts and is relatively high for districts in Wisconsin as well

Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most other Districts in the US and around the globe, with a massive tax & $pending increase referendum planned for this fall.

Madison’s K-12 tax & spending summary over the years:

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Additional background on the Milwaukee Report (Madison’s business community has been dormant for decades on our challenged and well funded K-12 system).

In the 1990s, Milwaukee was widely seen as the epicenter of “education reform” in the country,earning both praise from proponents and scorn from detractors. In the face of poor studentoutcomes and societal trends such as increasing segregation and poverty, multiple interests hadconverged to establish the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the country’s first initiativeto offer publicly funded tuition vouchers for students to attend private schools. Independently operated public charter schools opened a few years later, further expanding the options available tofamilies.

Democratic State Representative Annette “Polly” Williams advocated for the choice programs as ameans of empowerment for low-income city residents, particularly aiming to increase Black families’control over their children’s education. Republican Governor Tommy Thompson publicly expressedhope of encouraging better quality by increasing competition between schools in Milwaukee,following the arguments of free market economists like Milton Friedman. The views of these andother elected officials – supported by a coalition of parent and community organizers, businessinterests, and private philanthropy – rested on the belief that students were not sufficiently orequitably served by the current education system, and that families would take more school optionsif given them.

Opponents, however, characterized the shift of students and funds away from Milwaukee PublicSchools (MPS) as privatization efforts that undermined the traditional public school system and itsobligations under the state constitution. They feared that the resulting dispersion of students wouldexacerbate inequality, fail to offer public accountability and transparency, and divert resources fromMPS, threatening its ability to provide an adequately and equitably resourced system of publicschools to its residents. The stakes were high for Milwaukee students, whose levels of poverty standout on both a statewide and national scale, as well as for the city’s wellbeing and for the state’sworkforce and economy.

The Forum took stock of the resulting educational landscape 20 years later in a 2014 series of reports: “What is the Milwaukee K-12 School System?” and “The K-12 School System in Milwaukee:How has it changed and how does it measure up to peers?” Our research provided a broad overviewof the types of schools operating in Milwaukee, admissions processes, academic quality, student demographics, and education funding. It further analyzed recent changes in the landscape andcompared them to the experiences of national peers.

In the fall of 2023, we took up these questions again, equipped with nearly a decade of additionaldata. We did so in the context of recovery from a global pandemic and a recently passed statebudget and related legislation that, among other provisions, provided K-12 funds and – separately –helped stabilize the finances of both the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. With localgovernment now on firmer ground, the time appeared ripe to return civic attention to the quality ofeducation in the city. Our specific research questions included the following:

● What does the educational ecosystem look like in Milwaukee right now?

● What trends were found in regard to enrollment, demographics, and finances across thedifferent sectors of schools in Milwaukee?

● What trends are identifiable in regard to outcomes for students on the whole in Milwaukee, using both local and national benchmarks?

Corrinne Hess: (more)

Milwaukee Public Schools operated 143 schools in 2023 with a total of 59,899 students. That represented about half of the students served in the city. From 2006 to 2024, enrollment in MPS plummeted by one third. 

Meanwhile, charter school enrollments more than doubled during that same time period from  7,323 in 2006 to 15,695 in 2024. 

Enrollment in Milwaukee’s private choice schools increased nearly 90 percent since 2006 from 15,864 to 30,103 last school year, according to the report. 

Besides parents moving their children from public to private schools, there are fewer children being born (abortion data).

Quinton Klabon:

I hate to see quotations printed uncritically when the report directly contradicts them.

Here is hoping the city focuses on solutions and not the same dull, unhelpful conversations…and soon. School starts for some students next week, everybody in 3 weeks!

Will Flanders:

A new @policyforum report paints a relatively fair picture of the education landscape in MKE. But articles like this zeroing in on the role of school choice are unfair (1/3)

After 30 years of reforms, report examines state of Milwaukee schools (jsonline.com)

Related: Where have all the students gone?

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

University of Tennessee news:

The Institute of American Civics, housed in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, conducted a statewide survey this spring examining civic knowledge and participation by Tennesseans.

The survey report says its results lead to two obvious conclusions: “It is crucial that Tennesseans develop a higher level of civic knowledge, and the process will not be easy. Strong efforts will need to be made at the K-12 level, in universities, and in the general public across the state.”

Key findings include:

• Only about half of respondents knew that Tennessee has a state constitution.
• Fewer than half of respondents said they know who their state legislators are, and only around one-third said they knew their county commissioner or city council member.
• Nearly half of respondents said they were somewhat or extremely worried about their reputation being harmed by a political opinion they post on social media or say at work, and a third said they were less likely to discuss politics with friends and family than 10 years ago.

Sky News

We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests.’

More.

Shaping flow.

Biden/Harris digital director Rob Flaherty says the DNC created a program to detect, track, and censor what it deemed “misinformation” (like Biden’s mental decline). He calls it “critical” and “one of the more important decisions” made by the party in recent years. /2

America First Legal

Our lawsuit just exposed that the FBI implemented extensive nationwide social media monitoring ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

The FBI’s National Election Command Post received lists of “multiple Twitter accounts posting misinformation.” 🧵

Anthony Watts

 Why the difference? Apparently the WaPo reporter can’t convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit correctly, due to an attempt to “Americanize” the story, she wanted to display the temperature in Fahrenheit, used in the United States.

If you don’t know the formula, you can use Google to do it, which is what she likely did. With Google 0.5°C converts to 32.9°F.

But that’s clearly wrong, because Blakemore is assuming that 0.5°C is an absolute temperature, rather than a difference in temperature due to the cooling effect between rural and city areas. If what she said were true, a pleasant city temperature of 65°F would be impossibly cooled down to 32.1°F (nearly freezing) by the effect of nearby rural areas. How embarrassing.

Despite this laughable failure of grade-school science, the WaPo story does point out the mechanism for how rural areas help keep cities cooler. The study, done in China says that heat is transported from the cities to the rural areas through a meteorological mechanism. The reason is a matter of physics, they write:

Pipeline:

It’s difficult to describe how awful modern journalism has become. It is preening, biased, ignorant, vainglorious, arrogant, unfair, corrupt, vindictive, smug, anti-science, and stupid beyond measure. It hasn’t always been this way. Vintage news hawks reveled in their role as a yellow rabble of ill-educated, over-intoxicated, ink-stained wretches. Today’s reporters, inconceivably, consider themselves our betters.

Their pretension to status is puzzling. Perhaps, they could have been lawyers but lacked the intelligence or study skills. Or politicians, but they’re too socially awkward. Engineering is out of the question; they don’t know math. Science, too, as it requires critical thinking. Not good-looking enough to be Hollywood celebrities, not entrepreneurial enough to create businesses, not courageous enough to be out-of-the closet activists, let alone out-of-the-box artists. The only requirement for modern journalism is a rudimentary ability to stitch sentences together at forty words per minute. For on-camera talent, not even that. Contrary to recruitment pitches from the Columbia School of Journalism, reporting is a trade, not a profession.

Larry Kummer

Summary: The effects of debt are among the most widely misunderstood factors of macroeconomics. The almost delusional writings of perma-bears and conservatives have demonized debt, while economists often regard high debt levels with complacency. Yet economists have learned much about dynamics of debt. This post looks at this cutting edge of economic theory, very relevant to us today — because the debt supercycle is the story of modern America, and it’s over.  First of 2 posts today.

“In final examinations {this economics} professor always posed the same questions. When he was asked how his students could possibly fail the test, he replied simply ‘Well it is true that the questions do not change, but the answers do.’
— From a speech by Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr., 19 October 1955.

Gurwinder:

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders —  narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are associated with heavy social media use, most likely because impulsive and dramatic cluster-B behaviors, such as playing the victim and catastrophizing, excel at getting attention on such platforms.

The ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama. Many activists on both the Left and Right now hope to bring about their ideal world the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year old.

It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification, activism for the attention-deficit generation. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.

Glenn Reynolds:

Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.

The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA  speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example.  (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.

The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

“Facts & Trends”

In December 2022, the Board of Regents approved a five-year Strategic Plan for the Universities of Wisconsin for 2023-28. The broad objectives of the plan include enhancing the student experience and social mobility; fostering civic engagement and serving the public good; creating and disseminating knowledge that contributes to innovation and a better understanding of the human condition; and advancing economic prosperity.

• Link: wisconsin.edu/president/strategic-plan/

The Strategic Plan informs and guides the priorities and actions of the Universities of Wisconsin.

Among its goals, the plan aims:

• To graduate nearly 41,000 students annually across our universities by 2028, or a 10% increase
• To close the opportunity gap between historically underserved students (including first-generation students and those from lower socio-economic populations) and other students
• To recruit, develop, and retain a diverse, high-quality faculty and staff
• To enhance the position of our two Research I (R1) universities – UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee – by increasing UW-Madison’s position in research dollars and its national ranking and to maintain UW-Milwaukee’s R1 status and increase its research dollars
• To serve as national leaders in teaching critical thinking and the principles of civil discourse, as well as the preservation of academic freedom
• To meet pressing workforce talent needs, serving as the educational provider of choice to employers, and driving the economic vibrancy of Wisconsin through innovation and entrepreneurial activity

As a university system, we have identified three core values to guide us:

1. We are purpose-driven
2. We are people-focused
3. We are stewards of our resources, including those allocated to us by the State of Wisconsin

Jay Rothman:

Today, we published our latest Facts and Trends data book, filled w/key statistics affecting WI’s 13 public UWs including info on state funding trends, talent development, degrees, enrollment, participation rates, affordability/tuition, & infrastructure. A thread:

A summary.

Leo Lewis in Tokyo and Wang Xueqiao and Thomas Hale in Shanghai

In the US, which is by far the world’s largest pet market, there are more pets than children of any age. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there were 84mn-89mn dogs and 60mn-62mn cats in 2020. Government data shows there were 73mn children of all ages in the same year. Chinese pet ownership also came into focus under the country’s strict lockdowns between 2020 and 2022. A survey by UBS of 1,500 pet owners found 80 per cent maintained or increased pet-related spending “after the pandemic versus before the pandemic”.

Analysts at the Swiss bank said this was “evidence of the pet market’s strong resilience in the face of macro headwinds”. It attributed resilience during the pandemic to “the significant role that pets can play in households”.

—-1

Choose life.

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah:

Harvard will not remove the Sackler name from one of three University art museums and another campus building, ending a yearslong campaign by student activists for Harvard to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.

A committee tasked with reviewing a request to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from the two buildings announced in a report on Wednesday that it did not recommend denaming. The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s recommendation last month.

Sackler’s family, which owned the company that became Purdue Pharma, has been considered by some activists to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin — a drug credited with fueling the opioid crisis.

Wall Street Journal:

Massachusetts students are currently required to take an assessment during their sophomore year and meet thresholds for proficiency in math, English and science. Students who meet the minimum requirement are cleared for graduation. Those who don’t are assigned extra help and an “educational proficiency” plan to make sure they catch up by senior year.

The point is to make sure students don’t fall through the cracks, and it works. Massachusetts ranks at the top in student achievement among states. In 2022 the state tied for first for eighth grade student achievement in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Most states envy that performance, but the Massachusetts Teachers Association wants to end it. At a 2022 state Board of Education meeting, president Max Page explained the union’s thinking: “The focus on income, on college and career readiness speaks to a system tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.”

Wow. In their hostility to measuring student achievement, the union is now hostile to upward economic mobility. What’s the goal: Keep kids on the dole all their lives?

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test isn’t a barrier to success: Some 80% of black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged children still pass it on the first try. For those who don’t, the graduation requirement commits resources to helping close the achievement gap. Students are given five chances to pass the test. Of the roughly 70,000 students in each graduating class, some 700 don’t receive a diploma because of failure on the state test.

Dr. Mindle

Before we examine the origin of the reverse diversity problem, let’s define a few terms:

• American Elites. The powerful, the rich, the establishment who control policies, corporations and institutions.
• American Majority. The majority of American population who are not or not yet elites. 
• Model minority. Asian Americans were characterized as a “model” minorityamid the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

It all started with Outsourcing which as a term originated no later than 1981 and it took four decades in the making:

1. American elites outsourced manufacturing to China.
2. American elites outsourced IT to India.
3. American majority value finance and management jobs over manufacturing, IT and STEM.
4. American model minorities occupy domestic IT and STEM positions.
5. All-model-minority teams emerge across IT and STEM industries. 

Matt Taibbi:

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes. 

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter. 

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

Abbey Machtig:

The two referendums total $607 million, making them the second-largest request of voters by a school district in state history. It comes in behind Racine’s $1 billion school referendum, which passed in 2020 by only five votes

Lucas Robinson and Gayle Worland

“Residents in Madison are likely looking at a higher cost of living across the board, whether you’re a renter or an owner,” said Adam Nelson, who noted two other Madison School District referendums that voters will decide in November. “If you’re in the middle or lower-income bracket, if you’re cost-burdened in housing, this could be a harder pill to swallow.”

The School District’s two referendums would add $1,370 to the property tax bill of the average home by 2028.

More.

——

Meanwhile:

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Marguerite Roza:

In our next 30-min webinar, we’ll cover:

The “Big Hire” in MA schools.

A typical high poverty school got > 11 new staff:
2.5 new teachers
2.5 new specialists
6 new aides

Is it working?

CTUP:

The Democrats are mighty nervous about Trump’s latest idea to stop the unfair taxation of Social Security benefits. Why? Because it turns out the policy is popular with voters over the age of 65.

Unleash Prosperity’s lead piece in Fox Business this weekend notes that seniors who continue to work after they’re eligible for Social Security face marginal tax rates that can easily rise above 50 to 60%. In other words, for every dollar they earn, the federal government takes away more than 50 cents.

John Goodman of the Goodman Institute finds the rates can be above 70%.

—-

Meanwhile, large tax & $pending referendums will be on the fall ballot:

Jacob Sullum:

In a “specification of charges” filed with the D.C. Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility last month, Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III alleges that Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, who is now a federal prosecutor in Utah but previously worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, violated six rules of professional conduct while trying to convict “DisruptJ20” protesters, including many who had not participated in vandalism or violence. Muyskens “knew that most defendants did not commit violent acts themselves,” Fox notes, but “she argued that these defendants were still liable for felony rioting and felony property destruction because they joined a criminal conspiracy to use the protest march to further the violence and destruction that occurred.”

To support that theory, Muyskens presented video of a DisruptJ20 planning meeting that had been clandestinely recorded by an “operative” from Project Veritas, a conservative group that frequently has been accused of using misleadingly edited videos to portray progressive and leftist organizations in a negative light. Although Muyskens “understood Project Veritas had a reputation for editing videos in a misleading way,” Fox says, she initially concealed the source of the video, saying in court that “who provided it is irrelevant.” And although Muyskens “knew that Project Veritas had omitted and edited some of its videos” before releasing them, Fox adds, she “did not request or obtain Project Veritas’s missing videos or unedited footage.”

Katha Pollitt:

KP: What is “left”? You criticize “progressives” for what you see as an excessive focus on victimhood and identity politics, in which people are lumped together according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on, with massive assumptions made about what they want and need. You want universalist values. But isn’t a major feature of today’s left that people are demanding the right to speak up for themselves about their own issues and problems?

SN: Traditionally, the left was concerned with universal justice, which included the right to speak up about each group’s own problems but was never confined to it. Thanks to a combination of ideologies that took hold at the end of the 20th century, including neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, we have come to normalize the idea that self-interest is the only thing that motivates us to action. That’s actually a right-wing philosophical assumption.

KP: You support universalism over what you call tribalism, but where does that leave women and minorities? Universal programs, such as national health insurance, are important and help everybody, but it takes a lot more to give disadvantaged people equal access to good care. Countries that have universal programs, like the United Kingdom, still have big problems with racism and sexism in medical care. Doesn’t universalism use white men as the (unconscious) norm?

Sequoyah Sudler:

Avila would only find out about this new language when she was nineteen years old. She was at home when she received a knock at the door from a man who she had never met before. Strangely, the man was American. He had a long, thin face, adorned with wiry metal glasses perched above a graying goatee. His name was James Shepard-Kegl, and he had helped establish a boarding school for deaf children in Bluefields, a city in southeastern Nicaragua. He had a proposition for Avila.

Shepard-Kegl offered Avila the chance to study at the boarding school, where Nicaraguan Sign Language was the standard language for all students and faculty. However, she would have to leave behind her family and the small town that she had known her entire life, only to be immersed in a language that was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The transition would be difficult, but Avila agreed. In 1999, she packed up her bags and boarded a plane to Bluefields.

It was a decision that would change her life forever.

Chris Rickert:

The first half of Rhodes-Conway’s signature initiative, a Bus Rapid Transit system, is also expected to launch this fall, and while the federal government is picking up from 75% to 80% of the costs to build it, that still leaves the city on the hook for at least $70 million. City officials say the borrowing needed to cover that amount will not be significant, and the system will not cost more to operate than the traditional bus system it replaces.

Madison’s population has grown by 13.3% over the last five years, the city’s Finance Department reports, and the consumer price index, also known as inflation, is up 23% in that time.

Voters are already sure to see two referendums from the Madison School District on the Nov. 5 ballot. They would raise annual property taxes $1,370 by 2028.

———

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Micaiah Bilger:

A Penn State University trustee who ran on a fiscal responsibility platform says he has been denied access to financial records about its $5 billion endowment.

Now, after facing a “runaround” for years, Trustee Barry Fenchak said he is suing the university in an attempt to gain access to the documents.

“For raising issues, requesting information I am legally entitled to, and trying to engage my fellow trustees in honest deliberation I have been stripped of committee assignments, issued a Letter of Censure from the Executive Committee, and had my social privileges revoked,” Fenchak wrote Wednesday in his personal newsletter, shared with The College Fix.

TJ Harker:

For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” were used to advance the Left’s racist social policies, first on the pretense that they remedied prior discrimination, next in alignment with the theory that diversity was good for the nation, and most recently to deal with the pretend phenomena known as “systemic racism” and “white privilege.”

More Americans are fighting back against the Left’s racist admissions policies, scholarship criteria, and related practices.Such racist, utopian scheming used to be called “affirmative action,” an innocuous term designed to conceal blatantly racist and unlawful discrimination. But despite the anodyne packaging, discrimination against whites and Asians violates the plain meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and amendments thereto) and the Fourteenth Amendment. It always has. Today, more Americans, including more white and Asian-American students, are fighting back against the Left’s racist university-admissions policies, scholarship eligibility criteria, and related practices.

These changes are happening around the nation, including in North Carolina’s leading institutions, with Duke walking back a race-based scholarship program on the heels of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling against the University of North Carolina and Harvard College in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions.

Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today.

And that’s just the average. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran more than 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.

April Rubin:

The class of 2023 had the worst ACT performance in more than three decades, according to newly released data from the nonprofit that administers the college admissions test.

Why it matters: The scores are the latest indication of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education, with academic performance and test scores declining at all levels. The 2023 cohort was in its first year of high school when the pandemic began.

By the numbers: The 2023 composite score, an average of the scores for the English, math, reading and science sections, was 19.5 out of 36.

Derek Thompson:

But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.

First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new analysis of Census databy Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

——

Meanwhile, Madison, amidst excess space, seeks additional taxpayer funds to replace schools with excess space, rather than address boundaries.

Justin;

If you depend on a massive base of learners, most of whom are unserious, that puts hard constraints on how you teach. You have to employ ineffective learning strategies that do not repel unserious students.

When I tell people I work in math edtech, it’s initially kind of embarrassing.

They think of edutainment videos or arithmetic games where dinosaurs dance in front of you for answering 2+2 correctly.

Now, I’m fortunate enough to work on a learning system that’s pretty hardcore. Every decision we make is based on the science of optimizing student learning. It’s like quantitative finance but instead of optimizing return in the stock market, we’re optimizing learning efficiency in students’ brains. We go all the way up from 4th grade to university-level math (like, serious math major math, well beyond calculus).

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The power of tuition promise programs like Ripon’s is in the simple message it sends.

Students may not understand the college’s posted sticker price of more than $50,000 isn’t what they will actually pay. The Ripon Commitment is aimed at cutting through the confusing financial aid system, which can be particularly challenging for low-income students who rely on multiple sources of aid.

Other Wisconsin colleges offer tuition promise programs

College Promise, a nonprofit that advocates making the first two or more years of college free, identified at least 19 other promise programs in Wisconsin.

Most state technical colleges offer programs, including Milwaukee Area Technical College. So do a few other private institutions, including Lakeland College and Carthage College.

Among public universities, UW-Madison covers tuition for students whose families earn $65,000 or less. The program launched in 2018 and is funded through a mix of private money and institutional resources, not taxpayer money.

Kelly Meyerhofer and Sophie Carson:

At UW-Madison, Mnookin made the call for police to break up the encampment May 1. She texted the dean of students just before 7 a.m. to make clear protesters could walk away instead of facing arrest. She would later say using law enforcement against the campus community is “the last thing” a chancellor ever wants to do.

UW-Madison’s action raised the temperature in Milwaukee. Some began to call out UWM for what they saw as inaction, including UWM donors Jodi and Karen Peck. The university’s Peck School of the Arts is named after their family.

“We believe that you are ‘passing the buck’, burying your head in the sand and not actively dealing with this serious issue,” they emailed Mone on May 1. “Your communications have been weak and an affront to the Jewish community.”

That same day, Joel Berkowitz, director of UWM’s Center for Jewish Studies, reached out to Mone and the UWM police chief, urging them to stand down.

“I’m finding it literally painful to see so many campuses getting this moment very wrong,” Berkowitz emailed. “I hope we can continue to get it right.”

Mone thanked Berkowitz for the encouragement, then asked him for help.

Madison Lammert :

If you ask Wisconsin families about their child care situation, you’re bound to hear some startling anecdotes.

Often, child care is one of the biggest expenses in a household’s budget, sometimes surpassing mortgage payments. In dual-income households, one parent may decide it’s more economical to quit their job than pay for care each month.

Chances are by now you’ve also seen headlines about child care costing more than college.

How much does child care cost in Wisconsin, and how do costs fluctuate from county to county? The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families’ newly-released market-rate survey, which examines the cost of licensed full-time care for different age groups in most counties, shines light on these questions.

How much does child care cost in Wisconsin?

Child care prices fluctuate depending on a child’s age, the type of care they receive and where the child care is located.

Madison Lammert:

Child care prices in Wisconsin are increasing, yet they are often less than what it costs to provide care for children. At the same time, teachers are making less than what’s recommended.

These are all findings from Wisconsin’s latest Child Care Market Survey Results, which the state Department of Children and Families released Wednesday. The report, which is required to receive federal funding for the state’s child care subsidy program, draws on multiple data points from 2023 to better understand the state’s child care landscape.

Here are some key insights:

DCF’s Market Rate Survey breaks down care costs by location, type of care and children’s ages. The department surveys two types of child care providers: licensed family child care providers, who typically run their child care businesses out of their homes and can care for up to 8 children, and licensed group, or center-based, providers. These centers can care for more children than family providers.

Ben Landau-Taylor:

That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer review” processes of Nature and six other academic journals undetected, before eventually being uncovered by unrelated channels.

Schrag’s investigation that uncovered the fraudulent papers began as a tangent from his work uncovering doctored images used in studies supporting simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease. The suspicion would prove vindicated when in June 2024 Hoau-Yan Wang, a paid adviser to simufilam’s developer, was indicted by a federal grand juryfor fabricating data and images in simufilam studies for which he obtained $16 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, following a 2021 petition to the Food and Drug Administration, a method of reporting research fraud which is highly unusual if not unique.

Follow-up to evidence of Lesné’s fraud was slow. Schrag’s discovery kicked off two years of wrangling, eventually leading all of Lesné’s coauthors—but not Lesné himself—to agree to retract the 2006 Nature paper. As Sciencereported in 2022, “The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled ‘amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s’ has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and [his coauthor] Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.”

Scientists must now untangle the strands of fraud woven through decades of arguments stretching across a billion dollars worth of research. The paper’s contribution to the allocation of this billion dollars might also be a reason why such a widely-cited paper, presumably read by thousands of experts where some must have spotted the fraud, wasn’t reported earlier. Whether the amyloid hypothesis survives or not, this fraud has likely delayed the arrival of life-saving medication for tens of millions of people, perhaps by many years. If so, it is a humanitarian disaster larger than most wars.

No Consequences for Fraud 

Lee Smith:

But without a primary, without a popular referendum, without even the open convention that Obama was rumored to favor, how did the people make their will known, and strongly? Was it social media influencers? Mass rallies across the country? Media chronicling the excitement surrounding a Harris candidacy? No, it was nothing like that. Obama is the people. The people are Obama.

The endorsement was more than five years in the making. Obama had long wanted her in that spot. Their families are old friends. Like him, Harris is progressive, multiracial, physically attractive, nominally hip, a child of academics—in other words, according to Obama-friendly media, she’s a “female Barack Obama.” He directed donors to support her 2020 presidential campaign, Capitol Hill sources told me at the time. More billionaires, 47, backed her campaign than any other candidate’s—with Obama strongholds in Hollywood (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and Big Tech (Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Craig Newmark, etc.) leading the way.

Obama got her the vice presidential nod even when she was forced to drop out of the primary race after hitting just 3 percent in the polls. Jill Biden objected—Harris had called her husband a racist! The First Lady’s reported recent tantrums show that even after four years, she never fully grasped the arrangement the party had made with her husband. Biden was just an imperfect placeholder for Obama, and it was only a matter of time before the superior avatar would be slotted in.

The question is when, exactly, did it become clear to Obama that it was time for Harris to finally replace Biden? Was it after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump? After the attempted assassination of Trump? No, it seems the countdown officially began Oct. 7. The Palestinians’ murderous assault on communities in southern Israel exposed Biden’s limited ability to represent the interests of the party he was tapped to temporarily preside over. It didn’t require an especially refined moral sensibility to be appalled and terrified by the carnivalesque depravity of Oct. 7—but to give Biden credit, he evidently was. And that was the signal his time was up.

He‘s no John Fetterman. Biden is not a particularly courageous friend of the Jewish state, nor does he appear to much value the strategic importance of an ally that lessens America’s burden in a region vital to U.S. interests. When it comes to Israel, the 81-year-old president is just a normal late-20th-century Democrat who likes the country well enough, recognizes Jews as an important albeit small voting bloc and a crucial source of campaign funds, and performs ritualistic contempt for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But last Wednesday’s pro-Hamas riots in Washington, D.C.—in which domestic left-wing extremists linked arms with Middle East terror supporters and other foreigners to burn the American flag, deface monuments, and brawl with police, all in the name of protesting Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress—was only the latest evidence that the crux of Biden’s Oct. 7 problem was not that Michigan and Minnesota’s voter rolls are swollen with advocates of Muslim and Arab terror. The issue was not a party constituency at all, but rather the party itself and its leader. Barack Obama fundamentally reshaped the party when he struck the 2015 deal legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Hamas’ sponsor, Iran. By legitimizing the apocalyptic foreign policy aims of the world power that embodies Jew hatred, Obama sidelined the Jews and other centrists and made the progressive, anti-Israel faction the party’s new center of gravity.

The media did yeoman’s work obscuring the details and purpose of the agreement, but the fact is, by putting Iran’s bomb under a protective American umbrella, Obama was arming an American adversary to make it his own ally. The Iran deal was the first clear sign that Obama was not a normal U.S. commander in chief. When Biden extended even half-hearted, halting support to Israel’s response to Oct. 7, he crossed the only real red line Obama has ever had. Harris—who, unlike Biden, has no foreign policy beliefs or instincts of her own—never will.

Kyle Peterson:

How did it come to this? “That is the question of the book, and I don’t have a complete answer for you,” Justice Gorsuch says. But it involves a shift “both up and across in our separation of powers.” By “up” he means a movement of responsibilities from states and localities to Washington. By “across” he means a flow of authority from Congress to the D.C. agency apparatus.

Take the latter problem first, since it might be more tractable, as well as easier to follow through history, leading to Woodrow Wilson. “Part of the intellectual patrimony of our current predicament really traces, I think, back to Wilson,” Justice Gorsuch says. “He thought that the tripartite system of government was antiquated.” Wilson signed a bill in 1914 that created the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency whose members can’t be replaced at will—meaning controlled—by the president.

“The FTC was supposed to be experts,” Justice Gorsuch says. Instead, “it’s either aspiring or former politicians who often get those jobs.” President Calvin Coolidge named former Rep. William Humphrey to the FTC in 1925, and Herbert Hoover gave him another term in 1931. Two years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to fire him. Justice Gorsuch channels FDR’s thinking: “He’s not one of my pols. If we’re going to have pols, I want mine.” The Supreme Court ruled against FDR’s view in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (1935), upholding independent federal agencies.

Yet much of Justice Gorsuch’s lament has a later vintage: “Some people think this story is a New Deal story,” but “the number of federal crimes has probably doubled in my lifetime.” (He was born in 1967.) “Today the federal government funds about a third of all state activities,” he says. “That’s new again, in my lifetime.” The book quotes then-Gov. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in 1995 about doing his first state budget: “I honestly wondered if I was actually elected governor or just branch manager of the state of Nebraska for the federal government.”

What has driven the change? “I’m no social scientist. I’m no psychologist. But I think it has something to do with trust,” Justice Gorsuch says. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how Americans solved problems in their communities. “We trusted one another, and we worked with one another, and we debated and we talked with one another,” the justice says. If people no longer trust their neighbors, much less folks across the town or the state, where do they turn?

Jeffrey Jones:

A review of the historical trends shows that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the U.S. population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. Americans who lack confidence in higher education today say their concerns lie in colleges pushing political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and being overly expensive.

A separate article in the Gallup-Lumina series will report that Americans are significantly more confident in two-year colleges than four-year colleges when evaluating the two types of institutions separately.

More.

University of Chicago

Chicago Quantum Exchange partner PsiQuantum joins Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park

Palo Alto-based startup PsiQuantum is coming to Chicago to build and operate quantum computers—bringing as many as 150 jobs in the next five years and anchoring a massive quantum campus to be built at the former U.S. Steel South Works plant on Chicago’s South Side, the company announced July 25.

PsiQuantum is aiming to build the first U.S.-based, utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer; it will construct a 300,000-square-foot Quantum Computer Operations Center on the long-empty industrial site near the mouth of the Calumet River. That campus, known as the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, will also include the multimillion-dollar Illinois-DARPA Quantum Proving Ground that was announced July 16.

PsiQuantum is a corporate partner of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a hub that connects leading universities, national labs, and industry partners to advance quantum technology and is based at the University of Chicago.

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Jordan Cernek, a former teacher in the Argyle School District, for violating Mr. Cernek’s Title VII rights, as well as his First Amendment right to Free Exercise of his religion under the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 18 of the Wisconsin Constitution.

Argyle School District required staff members to use the preferred names and pronouns of transgender students; however, after voicing his religious objection to this rule, Mr. Cernek’s contract was not renewed, effectively firing him from his job.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, said, “WILL is proud to fight for individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law. There is no room for religious discrimination in our communities. It’s critical that we defend those across the country seeking to exercise their religion freely in America.”

WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “Freedom of religion is a core liberty that our nation and our state was founded on. Winning this case is critical, not just for our client, but for everyday Americans across the country.” 

Rand Paul:

KOSA only leads to silencing free speech

KOSA supporters will tell you that they have no desire to regulate content. But the requirement that platforms mitigate undefined harms belies the bill’s effect to regulate online content. Imposing a “duty of care” on online platforms to mitigate harms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: The silencing of constitutionally protected speech.

The bill empowers the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the duty of care requirement to prevent mental health disorders, yet KOSA does not explicitly define the term “mental health disorder.” Instead, it references the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders . . . or “the most current successor edition.” That mean the scope of the bill could change overnight without any action from America’s elected representatives.

Roy H. Perlis, Katherine Ognyanova and Ata Uslu:

Findings  In every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443 455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the US, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024. Individuals with lower levels of trust were less likely to have been vaccinated or received boosters for COVID-19.

Meaning  This study suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a continuing decrease in trust in physicians and hospitals, which may necessitate strategies to rebuild that trust to achieve public health priorities.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

 “how are you criticise the EU/Federal government” and the promotion of cancellation against those who go against the established narrative on issues such as the speed/scope/direction of Net Zero, stand up for women’s rights against the trans ideology or who critique the current model of immigration/integration.

The cosmopolitan liberals are on a hiding to nothing with all of these issues. And why? Because they as a political wing represent the status quo, and what we are seeing now is the beginning of the end for the dominant post 1945 social democratic settlement. 2020-21 I would argue, with the twin pillars of massive state control through the excuse of COVID and the cultural dominance of the BLM/Woke movement,  was Western social democracy at its apex and the longer that model to hold the more it will corrode and wither into either a Robespierre-esque focus on equity, or else a degeneration into deep green anti growth nihilism, either of which will kill it as a force anyway. This is why Emmanuel Macron now seems out of his depth, why Trudeau keeps failing, and why the European Union continues to stagnate – they are the status quo establishment and they’ve run out of ideas.

So what then do I think will take its place. Well inevitably one wing of politics seeks to preserve the status quo and one wing seeks to overturn it and looking at the ideas floating around the populist/rightist/nationalist camp we can already see trends emerging. Now I will caveat that it will take a while for these to develop as intellectually there is no fertile “home” for this wing (being excluded from academia and more generally all sympathetic intellectual figures being shunned/condemned/cancelled but substack seems to be developing into a way “rightist” intellectuals can work and be paid to be intellectuals. And those intellectuals will not be drinking from a barren pool and when we look at the expected intellectual influencers it gets hard for classical liberals/libertarians to pretend they have no sympathy with this movement.

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Improving state capacity through slewing the deadwood of the bureaucratic state with a burn it down/drain the swamp mentality.

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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Paul Thacker:

Leg Affairs Adrienne Hallett explains how NIH will not answer questions from Congress and then “run out the clock”

Francis Collins: “Sounds like a good plan.”

Brendan Bartanen, Aliza N. Husain and Laura K. Rogers:

Despite increasing recognition of the importance of high-quality school leadership, we know remarkably little about principal skill development. Using administrative data from Tennessee, Oregon, and New York City, we estimate the returns to principal experience as measured by student outcomes, teacher hiring and retention patterns, and teacher and supervisor ratings of principals. The typical principal leads a school for only 3 to 5 years and leaves the principalship after 6 to 7 years. We find little evidence that school performance improves as principals gain experience, despite substantial improvement in supervisor ratings. Our results suggest that strategies intended to increase principal retention are unlikely to improve school outcomes absent more comprehensive efforts to strengthen the link between principal skill development and student and school outcomes.

Corinne Hess:

One of Wisconsin’s private colleges will offer free tuition to in-state students whose families earn $75,000 or less. 

Ripon College in Fond du Lac County is the latest higher education institution in the state to make pricing more affordable for middle and lower income families. 

Wisconsin students whose families earn more than $75,000 can attend Ripon College for the same cost as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s tuition in 2025, $11,606.

House judiciary

including boycotts of disfavored social
media platforms, podcasts, and news outlets.3 Accordingly, to inform the Committee’s oversight
and potential legislative remedies, we write to ask Adidas Group to preserve documents and
provide information.

Beginning as an initiative of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), GARM was
founded to “create a more sustainable and responsible digital environment that protects
consumers, the media industry, and society as a result.”4 Additionally, GARM claims to utilize its
cross-industry “uncommon collaboration” to “effectively reduce the availability and monetization of harmful content.”5 However, the Committee’s oversight has shown that GARM
has deviated far from its original intent, and has collectively used its immense market power to
demonetize voices and viewpoints the group disagrees with—even intervening in situations that
do not have a so-called “brand safety” concern.6 A copy of the Committee’s report detailing this
collusion is attached for your reference.

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More.

America First Legal:

We sued the Department of Education for failing to investigate a NJ school district for forcing children as young as 8 to take DEI surveys without parental consent.

Following our lawsuit, the gov’t concluded that the school district DID violate parental rights.

Danielle DuClos:

Child care in Wisconsin can cost more than college and eat up 18% to 36% of a family’s median household income, according to a report last year by the nonpartisan research group Forward Analytics. Statewide, providers are struggling with staffing after losing a quarter of workers in the last decade as demand for care remains high

Matt Taibbi:

The “Border Czar” insanity has hit new depths. In the last 48 hours we’ve raced from denial to paradox, with head-scratching stops in between. In the first stage, “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Border Czar” became “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Bad Border Czar.” This is from the new Reuters piece, “Republicans call Harris a failed border czar. The facts tell a different story”:

Tasked to deal with the root causes of migration… [Vice President Harris] immediately ran into the enormity of the mission… The region is riddled with corrupt government officials, the drivers of migration are deeply rooted in economic inequality and social factors… “She was given a very hard, difficult, convoluted portfolio,” said U.S. Senator Chris Murphy.

As we say in Boston, the job was wicked hahd. Not only that, she didn’t even have it! “Harris was never given the portfolio of border czar,” is how Reuters put it, adding, “Instead, Biden asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty, violence and corruption in Central America’s Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as engage with Mexico.” Of course, Reuters used different language in 2021:

Wall Street Journal:

From tech to tractors, companies are dialing back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, a DEI alternative endorsed by Elon Musk could alter the fate of your next job application.

It’s known as MEI, short for merit, excellence and intelligence. As described by Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, who helped popularize the term, MEI means hiring the best candidates for open roles without considering demographics. 

“A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas,” he wroteon his company’s website last month, adding that casting a wide recruiting net was important. “We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on.” …

Whether diversity does, in fact, happen naturally in what Wang and others deem merit-based systems is hotly contested a year after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions.

More.

adastraschool.org

Ad Astra’s mission is to foster curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking in the next generation of problem solvers and builders.

Ad Astra’s approach to education is centered around hands-on, project-based learning, where children are encouraged to explore, experiment, and discover solutions to real-world problems. Ad Astra offers a progressive learning environment that emphasizes the integration of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) into its curriculum.

Currently open to all children ages 3 – 9.

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More.

Brian Riedl:

Paradoxically, the faster government debt escalates toward an inevitable debt crisis, the less politicians and voters seem to care. In the 1980s and 1990s, more modest deficits dominated economic policy debates and prompted six major deficit reduction deals that balanced the budget from 1998 through 2001. That era is long gone. In the past eight years, President Donald Trump and then Biden enacted $12 trillion in deficit-expanding legislation even as Social Security and Medicare shortfalls drove baseline deficits higher. When even liberal economists warned politicians that the post-pandemic economy faced a modest degree of rising inflation and interest rates—and that a federal spending spree would pour gasoline on that fire—lawmakers responded by enacting the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. When inflation and mortgage rates resultantly surged to 9.1 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively, lawmakers brazenly continued the inflationary spending spree.

Susan Goldsmith

The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

When these depressing statistics were published in a high school newspaper in mid-1997, black parents were troubled by the news and upset that the newspaper had exposed the problem in such a public way. Seeking guidance, one parent called a prominent authority on minority academic achievement.

Will Flanders:

Non-white students are more likely to feel unsafe in school. This suggests, once again, that discipline policies more concerned with racial quotas than safety harm the students they are supposedly trying to help. We’ve written about this several times:

Rich Kremer:

The Universities of Wisconsin is suspending work on required changes to campus Title IX sex discrimination rules after a federal judge in Kansas blocked President Joe Biden’s administration from expanding the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity. 

Attorneys and Title IX coordinators with the Universities of Wisconsin administration office have been working since April to bring Wisconsin’s campuses into compliance with federal changes to Title IX regulations that were announced by Biden’s U.S. Department of Education that month.

One of the most contentious changes to the federal rules is an expansion of Title IX protections against discrimination of students and employees who are pregnant, gay or transgender. When it was announced, the change was supported by LGBTQ groups like GLAAD, which called it “a huge step forward to ensure all young people can thrive at school” in a social media post. The organization also said there was still more to do, noting the new regulations did not address transgender athletes.

“Trans students who want to play sports should have the same opportunities to do so as all students,” the post said. “GLAAD will continue advocating for fairness and equal access for all, including trans youth.”

Elizabeth Rosenthal:

One owns a for-profit insurer, a venture capitalcompany, and for-profit hospitals in Italy and Kazakhstan; it has just acquired its fourth for-profit hospital in Ireland. Another owns one of the largest for-profit hospitals in London, is partnering to build a massive training facility for a professional basketball team, and has launched and financed 80 for-profit start-ups. Another partners with a wellness spa where rooms cost $4,000 a night and co-invests with “leading private equity firms.”

Do these sound like charities?

These diversified businesses are, in fact, some of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital systems. And they have somehow managed to keep myriad for-profit enterprises under their nonprofit umbrella — a status that means they pay little or no taxes, float bonds at preferred rates, and gain numerous other financial advantages.

Through legal maneuvering, regulatory neglect, and a large dollop of lobbying, they have remained tax-exempt charities, classified as 501(c)(3)s.

“Hospitals are some of the biggest businesses in the U.S. — nonprofit in name only,” said Martin Gaynor, an economics and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “They realized they could own for-profit businesses and keep their not-for-profit status. So the parking lot is for-profit; the laundry service is for-profit; they open up for-profit entities in other countries that are expressly for making money. Great work if you can get it.”

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“The nonprofit industrial complex”

Vivek:

greater risk to our future than, say, climate change – yet most politicians are too scared to talk about it & now it’s apparently taboo. But here are the facts: our nation’s birth rate is now down to 1.62 births per woman, the lowest in history and well below replacement rate.

It’s not even that people don’t want kids. In fact, American women on average have fewer children than they say they’d hoped for.

The “graying” of America means an overloaded healthcare system & eventually higher taxes for all. Today, there are only about 3 workers for every retiree. By 2060, that number will be down to 2. This is staggering & unlike any other period in our history.

An aging labor force also means lower rates of business formation and slower economic growth. Every 10% increase in the proportion of individuals over 60 is estimated to reduce GDP per capita by 5.7%.

Alexander Russo:

The education-related coverage is also an expression of her interest in broadening journalism’s definition of expert sources to include more so-called “real people,” including students, parents, and community members.

“I think there’s this tendency in journalism to narrow down who we consider experts,” Fernandes told me. “But if we just expanded the person who has the problem into the person who might have solutions to the problem, it would change the frame of how we reported education.”

“I think there’s this tendency in journalism to narrow down who we consider experts.”

Daniel Buck:

Surveying American institutions, one searches in earnest for even a few organizations or systems that progressives have been unable to control. News story after news story confirms that indeed that one, that one, and, yes, that one too have all succumbed to ideological capture.

Naïfs like myself once held out hope for science and mathematics. How could geometry be racist or gravitational waves foster systemic oppression? Sadly, we were wrong. The latest institution to go is medical education.

“Health equity” pushes doctors beyond surgeries or appointments to perform advocacy against systems of oppression.A recent essay at Inside Higher Ed bravely declares that all prospective doctors must be trained not to become skilled surgeons or perceptive dermatologists. Rather, their training must direct them towards “health equity.” This shift pushes doctors beyond surgeries or appointments to perform advocacy against systems of oppression and various “-isms.” Many medical schools have already adopted such advocacy-focused instruction.

For example, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has an entire center dedicated to health-equity research, the stated goal of which is to dismantle systems of oppression, systemic racism, and other internalized oppressions. Among its recommended resources are the 1619 Project’s podcast, Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, and Becoming an Anti-Racist Church. What any of these resources has to do with medical education is left to the imagination.

Steve Hsu:

Syd Hersh broke the story (we had actual reporters in those days), and won a real Pullitzer Prize (we don’t really have those anymore).

Calley (the fall guy) was initially sentenced to life in prison, but ultimately served almost no jail time.

Calley was only made an officer bc the Army was desperate for manpower. They relaxed intelligence testing standards, for which they have special legal dispensation from Congress. There are important reasons to protect meritocracy in all institutions.

WILL:

On July 30th and 31st, the Wisconsin Public Education Network (WPEN) will hold its annual conference in Madison.  While the name of the Network sounds harmless, it belies an organization with a far-left agenda that is contrary to what most parents in the state want for their kids. The worst part? Wisconsin taxpayers are going to foot some of the bill.  According to records obtained by WILL, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is contributing $5,000 towards the conference, while the Department of Children and Family Services (DCF) is also contributing $1,000.  DPI’s donation was enough to get them listed as a “Blue Ribbon”-level sponsor.  Below, we catalogue just some of the questionable panels that are part of the conference agenda.  

The Politics of Literacy and Its Impact on Wisconsin’s Public Education. Last year, Wisconsin’s Act 20 was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Evers. The notion that education should move away from so-called “three-cuing” in teaching reading back to more traditional methods of teaching reading like phonics is broadly supported in the educational literature. But this panel appears to be focused on undermining the notion that the science of reading is good for most every student and may somehow reduce “equity.”  In a state where only 10.5% of African American students are proficient in reading, one questions how effective an equity-based approach has been. 

Becky Jacobs:

Employees of the Wisconsin Technical College System moved into a new space this summer near the Hilldale Shopping Center. From President Morna Foy’s new fifth-floor office, the view outside features a green tree canopy and the blue waters of Lake Mendota.

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Is there anything you’re particularly proud of or something you wish you were able to do?

There’s always more stuff that you would want to do. If I was going to be perfectly honest, I would have liked to have seen us make a little bit more progress on attracting more students into different professions.

For example, our apprenticeship programs are still dominated by white males in this state. We’re just now exploring different professions, and in partnership with the Department of Workforce Development, thinking about apprenticeship more as a learning method, as opposed to an alternative to college. So, that process of getting more men into health care, more women into the trades, more folks from rural areas into some high tech fields.

One of the great pleasures of my time with this system is learning about all the different ways a person can support themselves. We often have pretty narrow options that we think of, that have to do with our parents and communities we live in. Not everybody wanted to be a pro-athlete like me, but whether that was realistic or not isn’t really a part of your thinking when you’re a kid. There just are so many cool things to do in life.

The district is asking voters for the money as funding from federal pandemic aid and a 2020 referendum are set to expire. If voters also approve of the district’s other referendum on the November ballot — a $100 million request to help fund day-to-day expenses — district officials estimate the owner of an average-value home in Madison would see a $1,376 increase on property tax bills by 2028.

For the larger referendum to rebuild or fix 10 schools, Soldner said the district selected schools partially based on a promise from the 2020 referendum. The School Board pledged future upgrades would target the district’s remaining alternative high school and focus on middle schools. The 2020 referendum had funded fixes at four comprehensive high schools and a new building for Southside Elementary School.

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The School Board has yet to finalize plans for which buildings should be entirely replaced, if any. District leaders are recommending five new buildings and the cost of each would be:

• $70.6 million for Cherokee Heights Middle School
• $89 million for Sennett Middle School
• $84.2 million for Black Hawk Middle School and Gompers Elementary School
• $90.8 million for Toki Middle School and Orchard Ridge Elementary School
• $108.3 million for Sherman Middle School and Shabazz City High School

Soldner said some of the original buildings would remain open during construction to avoid displacing students. The buildings could also be used for other students whose schools must be renovated or entirely rebuilt. New schools could be built on existing green space adjacent to old schools, he told the School Board in June.

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As school district leaders ask voters to raise property taxes, demographers are anticipating future declines in enrollment. While district-wide enrollment is expected to remain flat this fall, the student population is likely to trend downward for at least the next five years, according to projections by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

Four of the five middle schools on the referendum are also being used at 60% capacity, according to a June analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The school district typically targets a 90% use rate.

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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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 E Bernstein

I examine and critique three influential propositions regarding race promoted by some academic theorists and pundits.

Part I discusses and rejects the notion that differences in socioeconomic status among different American subgroups are best explained by the power relationships groups have with the dominant white majority.

Part II considers the claim that racial categories define collective actors who inevitably have common interests and outlooks. This Part concludes that this idea is flawed and perhaps incoherent.

Part III addresses the proposition that white Americans should be encouraged to cultivate a “white racial consciousness” so that whites will recognize their privilege and become “antiracists.” Part III concludes that such encouragement is both wrongheaded and dangerous.

Those who promote the ideas discussed and critiqued in this essay share several premises: pessimism about the US overcoming its racist history; what I consider a naïve belief in an identitarianism shaped by antiracist ideology as the best way to mitigate racism; and a concomitant belief that preserving the salience of existing socially (and legally) constructed racial categories is both inevitable and mostly desirable.

These premises, in turn, are ultimately based on a skepticism of or hostility to the ability of liberalism to overcome racism. In other words, they represent a rejection of the optimistic racial liberalism prevalent among civil rights activists when Brown was decided.

Corrinne Hess:

One of the main drivers of the MPS School Board Recall Collaborative’s campaign is criticism over what recall members said is a lack of transparency by Milwaukee Public Schools. 

But since the group was launched last month to unseat four MPS board members, there have been questions about how the collaborative’s efforts are being funded. 

The group says they have anonymous donors, whose names they are not disclosing. That’s led the MPS teachers’ union to file an ethics complaint with the state. 

During a press conference last week, members of the media questioned the group about who is paying canvassers for positions they advertised. 

Recall organizers did not list expenses and the contributions to fund the canvassers on their July 15 campaign finance reports.

The group announced last week they’ve collected more than 37,000 signatures so far to recall school board president Marva Herndon, vice president Jilly Gokalgandhi, school board member at large Missy Zombor and board member Erika Siemsen.

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More. And.