JR Ross Thread:

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

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

Wispolitics:

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

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

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

Emilee Fannon:

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

Duey Stroebel:

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

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

WTMJ:

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

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

AJ Bayatpour:

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

More from AJ:

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

Plus, this exchange with board VP Jilly Gokalgandhi…

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

Jon Hartley:

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

Shelby Talcott:

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

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

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

——

Commentary.

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

Daniel Buck:

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

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

Boston Globe:

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

by Jonathan Ireland

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

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

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

Paul Caron

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

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

Frederick Hess:

Some issues are so tough to explain to amateurs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Laffin:

Twice during the call, Fauci prodded Dr. Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist, to lead the effort. 

In a subsequent email obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Collins urged the swift production of the paper. In his view, the absence of a strong case for a “natural origins” theory of COVID-19 would allow ”the voices of conspiracy to quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

…..

And according to a growing number of experts and institutions, its conclusions were dead wrong. 

——

Glenn Greenwald:

The now amply documented lies fed to the public about COVID have — for dumb reasons — turned into a liberal v. conservative culture war issue, where no liberal can or will admit how deliberately deceitful Fauci was. It’s bizarre: like a religion.

Yet new proof keeps emerging:

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

Abbey Machtig:

Two eighth-grade students will represent Wisconsin this week in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Nethraa Muthupandiyaraja and Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya, both 13, will compete Tuesday in the preliminary round of the bee hosted in National Harbor, Maryland. Both have been putting in long hours wielding prep books, vocabulary apps and posters of Latin and Greek roots in an effort to memorize as many words as they can.

Aiden won the Badger State Spelling Bee, which the Wisconsin State Journal sponsors, March 16. Nethraa was runner-up.

Noah Smith:

But that is not what got Twitter — or X, as it’s now officially known — in a tizzy today. Instead, it was Walsh’s declaration that his failure to get a tenure-track academic job is due, at least in part, to the fact that he is a White man:

When a (nonwhite, female) history professor disputed this assertion, he accused her of “punching down” on him from her position of power. 

This angered absolutely everyone on Twitter, from progressives who decried Walsh as just one more mediocre White man who assumes he’s more qualified than women and people of color, to conservatives who derided Walsh as someone who brought this upon himself by supporting the rise of an unfair DEI regime. The only thing the various sides could agree on was that they all despised Walsh. A day-long battle royale ensued. Walsh issued a stumbling apology, but it’s pretty clear that he does in fact believe that he was more qualified than the people who got the jobs he applied for:

——

The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

Richard Hanania:

Academia appears to have evolved these norms because if papers could be as long as blog posts, how would anyone distinguish the scholars from the hobbyists? Journal papers in the social sciences are longer than blog posts on the same subjects less because academics have more to say than the fact that professors need to justify their positions as credentialed experts rather than amateurs. A lot of smart people can write decent blogs, but no one has the time to track down all the citations you need to be published in the American Political Science Review unless they’re working full-time as a professor. On the surface, more words and more citations signal “I know more about this,” but in reality they just show that one has devoted more time to it, in the hopes that observers can’t tell the difference.

Academia has made a specialty of bad kinds of signalling, but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t good kinds. When you read my articles, I want you to know that I am a smart person who has thought carefully about the issues I write about, and I have some of the basic skills and training necessary to make sense of the world. There are legitimate choices here to be made regarding tone, writing style, and word choice, and other things to consider besides broad accessibility.

Shannon Najmabadi:

Last summer, a rural hospital on the Kansas plains began filing dozens of lawsuits against patients who hadn’t paid their medical bills.

In July and August 2023, four of every five sheriff-delivered court summonses in Pratt County were from Pratt Regional Medical Center. In September, 95% of civil cases set to be heard in Magistrate Judge Ronald Sylvester’s Pratt courtroom were brought by the hospital. By December, it had sued some 400 people in a county of 9,000—more than it had in the past five years combined.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Cynthia Mehlhorn recalls an officer telling her when she got her court summons for $5,619 in outstanding hospital bills last year, “you’re not the only one.”

The debt-collection spree is an example of how some hospitals in recent years have become more aggressive in recouping bills from the estimated more than 15 million Americans who have medical debt. The issue can be particularly acute in rural areas like Pratt, where residents are more likely to be older and uninsured, and hospitals are under financial stress.

Andrew Atterberry

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling.

Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.

The emphasis on these programs has been central to DeSantis’ goals of remaking the Florida education system, and they are poised for another year of growth. DeSantis’ school policies are already influencing other GOP-leaning states, many of which have pursued similar voucher programs. But Florida has served as a conservative laboratory for a suite of other policies, ranging from attacking public- and private-sector diversity programs to fighting the Biden administration on immigration.

“We need some big changes throughout the country,” DeSantis said Thursday evening at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee. “Florida has shown a blueprint, and we really can be an engine for that as other states work to adopt a lot of the policies that we’ve done.”

Education officials in some of the state’s largest counties are looking to scale back costs by repurposing or outright closing campuses — including in Broward, Duval and Miami-Dade counties. Even as some communities rally to try to save their local public schools, traditional public schools are left with empty seats and budget crunches.

——

Commentary.

Change.org

What if I told you that Congressmen settled over 250 sexual harassment lawsuits using taxpayer money, and there was no way to find out who these Congressmen were? Would you believe me? 

The truth is that the situation is as described in the question. For decades members of Congress would use your taxpayer dollars to buy their way out of bad publicity. (Read, She Said A Powerful Congressman Harassed Her. Here’s Why You Didn’t Hear Her Story.)

When a member of Congress was accused of sexual harassment, the case went to a secret courtknown as the Office of Compliance. Hidden from public view, Congress’s Office of Compliance paid out over $17 million for 264 settlements involving misconduct and sexual harassment.  (Read, Over the past 20 Years, Congress has paid out $17.2 million in settlements.)

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

New Trier Township HS District 203’s Superintendent Paul Sally is set to retire next year and he can count on lifetime pension benefits of nearly $8 million. When he does retire, he’ll join the ranks of the Teachers Retirement System’s top pensioners.

We’ve written for years that Illinois’ pension systems are out-of-whack with what taxpayers can afford. It’s a two-class system where those in government get guaranteed lifetime pensions and other protected benefits while those in the private sector, who get no such guarantees and protections, are forced to pay for them. 

But it’s the superintendent pensions that help bring attention to just how problematic public pensions are. Sally has done nothing wrong, of course. He’s simply benefitting from the system that’s been put in place by lawmakers. The true blame falls on the politicians who created the pension system, those who continuously sweetened benefits over the decades, and today’s lawmakers who refuse reforms.

With no reforms expected in the near term, all we can do is highlight the results of Illinois’ two-class system.

——

Commentary.

Global History:

On 9 June 2020, more than a thousand people gathered in central Oxford demanding that Oriel College remove the statue of imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes. Congregating in defiance of the Covid-19 pandemic, protesters drew renewed attention to the long-standing struggle to decolonise
education and tackle institutional racism at British and South African universities. They also knelt with
fists raised for over nine minutes in tribute to George Floyd, a man whose recent murder at the hands of
Minneapolis police marked only the latest atrocity in a long history of racialised violence in the United
States. Amid the local and global reckonings over race and racism taking place in the wake of Covid-19
and Floyd’s murder, the 2020 Rhodes Must Fall protest marked the latest iteration in a fight to remove
Rhodes from campuses that began over five years earlier.1

In 2014, after completing his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa,
Ntokozo Qwabe won a Rhodes scholarship to study a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) degree at Keble
College, University of Oxford. Qwabe arrived in Oxford amid growing calls for the removal of the
statue of Rhodes back home. UCT students argued that Rhodes’s monument embodied the pervasive
white privilege at the university, and that tackling those problems required removing his oppressive
figure from campus. On 9 March 2015, students accelerated their demands for change. Political science student Chumani Maxwele hurled excrement at Rhodes’s statue. Others occupied UCT offices and posted

Jill Barshay:

Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy.

One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called outcomes-based contracting and is a way of sharing risk between buyer (the school) and seller (the vendor). Outcomes-based contracting is most common in healthcare. For example, a health insurer might pay a pharmaceutical company more for a drug if it actually improves people’s health, and less if it doesn’t. 

Although the idea is relatively new in education, many schools tried a different version of it – evaluating and paying teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improved – in the 2010s. Teachers didn’t like it, and enthusiasm for these teacher accountability schemes waned. Then, in 2020, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research announced that it was going to test the feasibility of paying tutoring companies by how much students’ test scores improved. 

Noah Smith:

I was raised in an age of liberal triumphalism. Liberal democracy won the 20th century — imperialism, fascism, and communism all collapsed, and by the end of the century the U.S. and its democratic allies in Asia and Europe were both economically and militarily ascendant. Even China, which remained an autocracy, liberalized its economy and parts of its society during this time. Even scholars who turned up their noses at Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” were generally favorable to arguments that capitalism and/or liberal democracy fostered peace, happiness, and prosperity. There was an overwhelming sense that freedom — the freedom to speak your mind, to live as you liked, to buy and sell what you wished — was the thing that won. 

Just two decades later, that idea is deeply in doubt. The wave of democratization and social liberalization went into reverse. The U.S. has been riven by social and political chaos, and its weaknesses in manufacturing and homebuilding have been starkly exposed. Meanwhile China, the ascendant superpower of the early 21st century, has moved back toward a more dirigiste economy and a more totalitarian society under Xi Jinping.

Mitchell Schmidt:

The lawsuit was filed late last year by teachers and other public workers and argues Act 10’s exemption of some police, firefighters and other public safety workers from the bargaining restrictions violates the Wisconsin Constitution. Plaintiffs also note in court filings that those exempted from the restrictions endorsed Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial election, while those subject to the restrictions did not.

People are also reading…

Attorneys for the Legislature have argued for the case to be dismissed because previous legal challenges against Act 10 have failed. They’ve also said union officials waited too long to bring the latest legal challenge.

The lawsuit is the first to come after the Wisconsin Supreme Court flipped to a liberal majority last year with Justice Janet Protasiewicz joining the court.

While filed in Dane County Circuit Court, the lawsuit is expected to eventually reach the state’s high court, which rejected a similar lawsuit in 2014, when conservatives held the majority.

—-

Much more on Act 10, here.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Milwaukee pension scandal trial primer.

—-

Meanwhile: Illinois.

Jeremy Noonan:

It is also a major reason why teachers are fleeing public schools. The public school accountability system, by relying solely on quantitative metrics like graduation rates to gauge educational quality and to evaluate administrators, frustrates teachers’ ability to truly teach and care for their students and look out for their long-term well-being. 

The first shock to me was the “make-up work” policy. My school let students skip assignments and miss deadlines until the end of the semester, then let them do the work at the last minute to avoid a failing grade. When I objected, stressing the importance of personal responsibility, the assistant principal replied, “Is it your job to teach chemistry or to teach responsibility?” She didn’t care to hear my answer: “Both.”

Next came the “curving” practice, which dictated that I convert a raw score on a test by multiplying the square root of it by ten. Hence, a score of forty-nine, an F, would be “curved” to seventy, a C minus. When I refused to curve grades, the principal had my department chair make the changes covertly. When I found out, I objected once again, and the principal rebuked me for “denying these children the opportunities all of us had.”

These were both cases of what Michael Polanyi calls “moral inversion”: a presumed moral duty to do immoral actions. This tacit duty to the immoral means that teachers who exercise integrity by refusing to go along with these policies are perceived as the bad guys. Never would an administrator acknowledge the bureaucratic purpose of these policies, which was to keep the wheels turning and money flowing. A failing student is a wrench in the system. He lowers the graduation rate, and the school looks bad. The bureaucracy rationalizes that the students will be better off with a diploma. But if they aren’t learning, their futures are being compromised.  

My next moral conflict with administrators put me in a position to blow the whistle on a practice called “online credit recovery” (OCR). I was teaching the two-year Theory of Knowledge course in the International Baccalaureate program, a kind of honors school-within-a-school. Top students in the school could enroll, and so could students from nearby schools who wanted vigorous college prep. 

——

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

——-

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

——-

Arnold Kling:

One theme is that non-profits take advantage of the intention heuristic. The other trope of mine is that nonprofits evade the accountability that is inherent in profit-seeking business.

Steven F. Hayward writes,

Add up all of these macro-and-micro funding sluices across the full spectrum of leftist causes and we arrive at a point where the supposedly ancillary “non-profit sector” has become a key instrument on par with the permanent bureaucracy of the administrative state, and a menace to democratic self-government.

He is drawing attention to the way that the left takes advantage of non-profit status. But my criticisms apply as much to the right-wing non-profit sector as the left-wing non-profit sector.

People assume that because non-profits do not seek profits, their intentions are good. And good intentions are sufficient to make them morally superior to profit-seeking enterprises. The intention heuristic ignores the possibility that the outcomes of profit-seeking businesses can be—and often are—more socially beneficial than the outcomes of nonprofits. We should evaluate enterprises based on outcomes, not on intentions.

Then there is the issue of accountability. A profit-seeking business is ultimately accountable to customers, who are in the best position to gauge the value of what the business provides. If customers do not pay more than the cost of what the firm provides, the firm loses money and goes out of business. In contrast, a nonprofit only has to keep its donors happy. If the services it provides are not worth the cost, it can continue to operate by maintaining good relationships between the executives of the nonprofit and the providers of funding.

The problems with nonprofits are particularly acute when the funding comes from government. Ireland writes,

Paul Thacker:

True to form, Science Magazine downplayed some of the hearing’s most explosive findings, in an article whose title misinformed readers by stating that Morens’ evasion of federal record laws had only “allegedly” happened: “House panel takes Fauci adviser to task for allegedly evading public records laws.”

This headline was belied by several of Morens’ very own emails where he described deleting emails, such as a June 2020 email that he sent to Daszak and Keusch.

—-

At the NIH, a Scandal Grows Around an Official’s Evasion of Public Records Law

The FOIA scandal first came to light last summer. In June 2023, I broke the news in The Interceptthat Dr. David Morens, a long-time senior advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci, had engaged in efforts to evade the Freedom of information Act. In a September 2021 email to a group of high-profile critics of the so-called lab leak theory, Morens wrote: “As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.”

“Don’t worry,” he added, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

Fauci’s chief-of-staff Folkers misspelled Andersen name in emails as “Anders$n” to evade FOIA searches on “Andersen.”

—-

More.

Chad Aldeman:

When It Spends $1.3B

This macabre joke is all-too real for San Francisco Unified, where this spring a state oversight panel took control of all budget decisions until the district balances its spending. After reviewing the district’s budget, the oversight panel decreed that the locally elected school board no longer has full authority over, “any action that is determined to be inconsistent with the ability of [the district] to meet its obligations for the current or subsequent fiscal year.” 

According to an independent fiscal analysis, the district has a number of budgetary problems: 

• It paid for employee positions using one-time federal relief funds and will need to lay them off or find other revenues or savings;
• It has not adjusted student enrollment projections to account for continued declines;
• It does not track monthly attendance data and, as a result, overstates average daily attendance in projecting future revenues; and
• Its budget office is understaffed, leading to inadequate control over its  payroll system and problems tracking employee overtime costs. 

Some parts of this story make San Francisco unique. For example, it spent $40 million in a failed effort to fix its payroll processing system. And, to avert a strike last fall, the district agreed to large salary increases — 19% over two years for teachers and 16% for service workers. 

California is also unusual in that it has a powerful oversight agency. The Department of Education’s Fiscal Crisis Team reviews district budgets to ensure they are financially solvent, and it can take over budgeting decisions if the need arises. 

Martin Hackworth:

Try working with NASA, the EPA, the NIH, or any other government science agency to understand why.

Colin Wright’s excellent Substack, Reality’s Last Stand.

Celia Walden:

She cites drug legalisation as one example: “I was so pro-legalisation, but then you start to see things in the world, you learn things and you think: ‘I might have been wrong about this or that.’ And it’s not like I need to disavow me at 25. It’s just that now that I’m 36, I’m seeing that certain things aren’t a good idea.”

I’m pretty sure there’s a term for that: life experience? Although in a recent review of Bowles’ new book, Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side of History – a book in which she chronicles that arc – The Washington Post preferred to liken the author’s political awakening to geriatric decline: “If Leftism is a hazard of adolescence, conservatism is all too often an unfortunate symptom of ageing, not unlike senility.”

“Not that I’d even identify as a conservative,” Bowles protests, once we’ve both stopped laughing at the quote – one of a few zingers her collection of biographical essays has predictably received from the Left-leaning media. “I’m just…” she searches for the word. “Maybe softer.”

On Zoom, the San Francisco-born writer certainly looks softer than the severe portraits of her in heavy-rimmed spectacles I found online. Luminous-skinned and full-mouthed, dressed in denim dungarees and a white T-shirt, she seems too wholesome to be a political provocateur. “But progressives want to say that anyone who is not the furthest to the Left isn’t with them,” she goes on. “They can’t allow there to be a moderate, middle, messy faction.”

David Card,  Leah Clark, Ciprian Domnisoru  & Lowell Taylor

A school finance equalization program established in Mississippi in 1920 failed to help many of the state’s Black students – an outcome that was typical in the segregated U.S. South (Horace Mann Bond, 1934). In majority-Black school districts, local decision-makers overwhelmingly favored white schools when allotting funds from the state’s preexisting per capita fund, and the resulting high expenditures on white students rendered these districts ineligible for the equalization program. Thus, while Black students residing in majority-white districts benefited from increased spending and standards for Black schools, those in majority-Black districts continued to experience extremely low – and even worsening – school funding. We model the processes that led the so-called equalization policy to create disparities in schooling resources for Black students, and estimate effects on Black children using both a neighboring-counties design and an IV strategy. We find that local educational spending had large impacts on Black enrollment rates, as reported in the 1940 census, with Black educational attainment increasing in marginal spending. Finally, we link the 1940 and 2000 censuses to show that Black children exposed to higher levels of school expenditures had significantly more completed schooling and higher income late in life.

——

Much more on Mississippi, here.

James Clayton:

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

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

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

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

Jack Murtaugh:

The Guinness brewery has been known for innovative methods ever since founder Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease in Dublin for £45 a year. For example, a mathematician-turned-brewer invented a chemical technique there after four years of tinkering that gives the brewery’s namesake stout its velvety head. The method, which involves adding nitrogen gas to kegs and to little balls inside cans of Guinness, led to today’s hugely popular “nitro” brews for beer and coffee.

But the most influential innovation to come out of the brewery by far has nothing to do with beer. It was the birthplace of the t-test, one of the most important statistical techniques in all of science. When scientists declare their findings “statistically significant,” they very often use a t-test to make that determination. How does this work, and why did it originate in beer brewing, of all places?

Near the start of the 20th century, Guinness had been in operation for almost 150 years and towered over its competitors as the world’s largest brewery. Until then, quality control on its products consisted of rough eyeballing and smell tests. But the demands of global expansion motivated Guinness leaders to revamp their approach to target consistency and industrial-grade rigor. The company hired a team of brainiacs and gave them latitude to pursue research questions in service of the perfect brew. The brewery became a hub of experimentation to answer an array of questions: Where do the best barley varieties grow? What is the ideal saccharine level in malt extract? How much did the latest ad campaign increase sales?

Peter Wilogren

Dollar Tree, which owns Family Dollar, recently said it will close nearly 1,000 stores. That’s after Dollar Tree raised prices in the past couple of years for the first time in decades.

Others, like Dollar General, say they continue to grow, even if it’s been a rocky road. Dollar General recently opened its 20,000th store and plans to open even more this year.

Its CEO once said, “We do very good in good times, and we do fabulous in bad times.”

Bigger retailers offering discounted prices have already felt the sting. JC Penney, Sears, and others (the stores we grew up with) are vanishing fast.

Allysia Finley:

Subpoenaed private emails from Dr. Fauci’s senior adviser, David Morens, now show how NIH officials and EcoHealth President Peter Daszak sought to conceal their lapses. After the Trump administration in April 2020 suspended funding for EcoHealth, Dr. Morens rallied to Mr. Daszak’s defense.

“There are things I can’t say except Tony [Fauci] is aware and I have learned there are ongoing efforts within NIH to steer through this with minimal damage to you, Peter, and colleagues, and to nih and niaid,” Dr. Morens wrote to Mr. Daszak on April 26, 2020. “I have reason to believe that there are already efforts going on to protect you.” (NIAID is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci directed from 1984 through 2022.)

Dr. Morens led the Daszak protection program. His subpoenaed emails show that he helped edit EcoHealth’s press releases and worked to get its funding restored. He also sought to thwart Freedom of Information Act requests by outside groups regarding the EcoHealth grant.

On Feb. 24, 2021, Dr. Morens wrote to Boston University scientist Gerald Keusch: “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am fioa’d [sic] but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe. Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Safe from what? Public scrutiny?

More.

and:

“[E]vidence suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH…to avoid public tranpsarency…[T]his is an…attack on public trust that must be met with… swift enforcement and consequences for those involved.”

Alyssa Lukpat:

New graduates need to earn at least $50,000 a year, on average, in their first decade off campus for the degree to pay off, according to new research from Strada Education Foundation, a nonprofit that analyzed federal education and earnings data. If they can land that salary, or make $500,000 before taxes over 10 years, state school graduates across sectors will find the investment worth it and should be able to pay off their loans, Strada says.

At a time when many Americans are questioning the value of a college degree—and some teens and 20-somethings are forgoing higher education for trade work like plumbing, welding and construction—four-year state universities are a bargain compared with their private counterparts and still often provide a path to financial security.

“As long as you’re above that $50,000, even in the most expensive states, you’ll still have that positive return on investment,” said Nichole Torpey-Saboe, Strada’s vice president of research.

James Maiden, 32 years old, dropped out of the University of Missouri-Kansas City about a decade ago because he needed to make money. He held various jobs, including at a shoe store, before landing one as a marketing manager for a nonprofit theater in Kansas City, Mo., where he earned less than $50,000. It was tough to envision a career path.

Wall Street Journal:

Forget about starting a meeting with a prayer. Nor could employers talk about the costs of unions or state policies. Criticizing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and advocating an expansion of state tax-credit school scholarships would be off-limits. The bill could be construed to prohibit employers from criticizing anti-Israel protesters.

Driving the bill are unions, which accuse employers of holding “captive audience” meetings to persuade workers against joining. But the federal National Labor Relations Act explicitly permits employers to express “any views, argument, or opinion” about unions as long as their “expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.”

Democrats claim their bill doesn’t forbid employers from expressing their political or religious views, but merely prohibits them from penalizing workers who don’t attend meetings where such matters are discussed. This is a distinction without a practical difference.

Angel Au-Yeung:

The most recent index of consumer prices showed the annual inflation rate slowed slightly in April, to 3.4%. But inflation was routinely below 2% in the years before the pandemic—and anyway, what matters to people is the price of things, not the level of price changes.

“They do care, and they’ve always cared,” said James Hines, an economist at the University of Michigan.

We trod through the streets in San Francisco to ask people how much they make, whether it feels like enough and their plans for the future. Their answers have been edited for clarity and length. Income is monthly, after taxes.

J Mitchell Sances:

Their reality is so different from the rest of the world’s, and it has been for a long time

What do you do when your passion and career trajectory have been infected with amorality? This is the question I was forced to ask myself after over a decade of working toward what I thought was to be my goal: ensconcing myself in academia as a prolific researcher and respected professor.

It was no secret that education in America was in a downward spiral for much of the 1990s and early 2000s—data from the National Assessment of Education Progress shows only about 30% of students in the U.S. were and are proficient in basic educational fundamentals.

Educators have placed the blame on many factors including the implementing of No Child Left Behind—what some in the business unaffectionately called No Child Gets Ahead. The wildly unpopular George W. Bush program has been criticized for focusing on the students with lower proficiencies and ignoring the needs of higher performing students allowing them to slip through the cracks in true collectivist fashion.

To me, someone who was privileged enough to receive stellar Catholic private education all my life, these battles were fightable and winnable. As part of the system, I could aim to affect change from within, and with my zeal, passion, and ambition I was poised to do so. Alas, a wave of postmodern thought had other plans—the type of thought in which there is no such thing as objective truth and anything majoritarian is evil.

—-

And:

Academic who researches the right realizes he can’t get a job because he’s a white male.

Richard Hannania

Academia is obviously different. The standards are soft, and hiring committees don’t personally go broke if they hire only incompetents. Along with the ideological capture of the universities, it’s become extremely hard for white men to get jobs.

In the hard sciences there are standards, many people just can’t do the work.

But the number of people who can do something that looks like “social science” or history is vast, and departments can go completely off of ideology and identity.

Adam Looney & Constantine Yannelis:

At a time when the returns to college and graduate school are at historic highs, why do so many students struggle with their student loans? The increase in aggregate student debt and the struggles of today’s student loan borrowers can be traced to changes in federal policies intended to broaden access to federal aid and educational opportunities, and which increased enrollment and borrowing in higher-risk circumstances. Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program. The crisis illustrates the important role that educational institutions play in access to postsecondary education and student outcomes, and difficulty of using broadly-available loans to subsidize investments in education when there is so much heterogeneity in outcomes across institutions and programs and in the ability to repay of students.

——

Commentary.

Scott Alexander

In a 1999 poll, only 66% of Americans age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country). About 47% of Americans can name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). 37% know the closest planet to the sun (Mercury). 58% know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide). 44%know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp. Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.

These results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population. But there’s a great survey of university students. Keeping in mind that this is a highly selected, extra-smart population, here are some data points:

• 85% know who wrote Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
• 56% know the biggest planet (Jupiter)
• 44% know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)
• 33% know what organ produces insulin (pancreas)
• 31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
• 30% know who discovered the Theory of Relativity (Einstein)
• 19% know what mountain range contains Mt. Everest (Himalayas)
• 19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell)
• 16% know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”)
• 10% know the captain’s name in Moby Dick(Ahab)
• 7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)
• 4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)
• <1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)

Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.

——

Commentary.

Richard Speed:

The Windows 11 feature is supposed to eventually expand to allow users to pull up anything that happened recently on their Copilot+ PC and interact with or use it again, as the system logs all app activity, communications, and so on, as well as by-the-second screenshots, to local storage for search and retrieval.

Microsoft, which was just scolded by the US government for lax security, said: “Recall will also enable you to open the snapshot in the original application in which it was created, and, as Recall is refined over time, it will open the actual source document, website, or email in a screenshot. This functionality will be improved during Recall’s preview phase.”

Improvements will certainly be needed, particularly in how the function deals with privacy.

David Mikics

Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution is a grand tour through the craziness that followed the killing of George Floyd and continues to this day, despite the majority of Americans shaking their heads in bewilderment. Bowles, a former Timesreporter, started out as a progressive seeker, curious and hopeful about the new thinking, and she is still seeking solutions to racism, income inequality, and attacks on women’s rights. But she also sees the absurdity of much of what passed for progressivism, yet was actually narcissistic, neo-racialist, and aggressively inhumane.

At the Times, Bowles was hounded by an anti-disinformation editor, who was there to remind writers that the lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory and also that conservatives were very bad people. The real danger was Trump, she was told, and anything questionable that the left did had to be passed over in silence, lest the enemy gain succor. When she said she wanted to go to Seattle to check out the new anarchist collective that had abolished the police, she was asked, she says, “Why do you care? No, but seriously why do you care?”

Bowles wrote several significant stories for the Times, including one on antifa in 2020, before leaving the paper along with her wife, Bari Weiss, who founded the now-indispensable Free Press. (Bowles was told by a Times editor that her new romantic partner, Weiss, was “a Nazi,” as their colleagues nodded in agreement.) Bowles wrote a mordantly funny weekly column, TGIF, for the Free Press, where she has covered many stories not fit to print in the Times and The Washington Post.

John Sailer:

Yale University’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry requires all job applicants to submit a DEI statement.

Here’s the evaluation rubric, which shows the exhaustive DEI criteria for assessing any scientist hoping to work in the Yale department.

——

More.

Ann Althouse:

The question is whether they do more insidious things that bias the entire platform! I think they do. What makes Musk different here is that he participates in the way that anyone can participate on X and he takes individual responsibility for his personal statements. But maybe he’s also involved in the kind of hidden manipulations we’ve seen on platforms run by leaders who pose as neutral. 

Oliver Wiseman:

A study of eight developed countries found that U.S. students were dead last in math skills but number one in confidence in math skills, even though they suck at it. Yes, we’re number one in thinking we’re number one.

The idea that kids have too little self-esteem is antiquated. It’s a Zombie Lie, one of those ideas that perhaps was true in the past but now is not, and yet people keep saying it. Kids now have too much self-esteem, and it’s turning them into angry, screaming grievance collectors.

All of that childhood tolerance is resulting in grown-up tyrants. It’s no wonder that by the time they get to college, just having to listen to an opinion they don’t agree with is considered an act of “violence.” This is what happens when no one ever loses and everyone gets a prize. You can run the wrong way on the field and score five goals for the other team, and you’re still a winner. Even though you’re actually a big fucking loser. No wonder today’s NBA players give each other high fives when they miss a foul shot.

We tell our children they don’t have to fix their flaws, because it’s the world’s job to accept everything about them and love it. Like they say on reality shows, the most important thing is just “you doing you.” But what if “you” is a big asshole?

Cara McGoogan:

Internal documents from American pharmaceutical companies show they knew a “wonder drug” made from human plasma could transmit HIV to patients, but they sold it regardless.

Some 1,250 people in the UK contracted HIV in the 70s and 80s from Factor VIII, a treatment for the bleeding disorder haemophilia. Up to 5,000 more also contracted hepatitis C.

The Infected Blood Inquiry will report later this month on mistakes that allowed Factor VIII contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C to be imported into the UK and prescribed to patients on the NHS.

Survivors who have been seeking justice for 40 years expect the final report on May 20 to be critical of Factor VIII manufacturers, successive governments, and doctors. The report will also explain how as many as 26,800 people contracted hepatitis C from blood transfusions.

by Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.

By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools. 

Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students. You can see these findings in the chart below.

r/Artificialintelligence

For all those interested, and for those interested in the more complex and technical side of machine learning/AI…

Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack this reading list of approx 30 research papers and said, ‘If you really learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters today.’

Lancet:

Authors say if the world does not prioritize action on AMR now, we will see a steady increase in the global death toll—currently 4.95 million per year from infections linked to AMR—with young infants, elderly people, and people with chronic illnesses or requiring surgical procedures at the highest risk.

Improving and expanding existing methods to prevent infections, such as hand hygiene, regular cleaning and sterilization of equipment in health care facilities, availability of safe drinking water, effective sanitation and use of pediatric vaccines, could prevent over 750,000 deaths associated with AMR every year in
low- or middle-income countries (LMICs), estimates a new modeling analysis as part of a new four paper Series published in The Lancet.

Each year, an estimated 7.7 million deaths globally are caused by bacterial infections—1 in 8 of all global deaths, making bacterial infections the second largest cause of death globally. Out of these bacterial infection deaths, almost 5 million are associated with bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics. Authors of the new Lancet Series on antimicrobial resistance call for support for sustainable access to antibiotics to be central to ambitious and actionable targets on tackling AMR introduced at the High-Level Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024.

Christopher Rufo:

The images of the recent protests at Columbia University have grabbed the attention of the American public: students chanting for a Palestinian state, “from the river to the sea”; activists setting up a mass tent encampment on the campus lawn; masked occupiers seizing control of Hamilton Hall. For some, it was a sign that ancient anti-Semitism had established itself in the heart of the Ivy League. For others, it was déjà vu of 1968, when mass demonstrations last roiled campus.

After weeks of rising tensions, Columbia president Minouche Shafik resolved the immediate conflict by summoning the New York City Police Department, which swiftly disbanded anti-Israel student encampments, removed the occupiers of Hamilton Hall, and arrested more than 100 students, who were subsequently suspended.

President Shafik feigned surprise. In a statement to students, she expressed “deep sadness” about the campus chaos. But to anyone who has observed Columbia in recent decades, the upheaval should not come as a surprise. Behind the images of campus protests lies a deeper, more troubling story: the ideological capture of the university, which inexorably drove Columbia toward this moment. Columbia for decades has cultivated the precise conditions that allowed the pro-Hamas protests to flourish. The university built massive departments to advance “postcolonialism,” spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and glorified New Left–style student activism as the telos of university life.

By Madeleine A. Hung and Joyce E. Kim, Crimson:

Here and around the world, students, faculty, alumni organize, mobilize resistance movements to fight our own institution’s facilitation of the dehumanization of the Filastin people,” m’Cheaux added.

m’Cheaux’s remarks come days after the Harvard College Administrative Board suspended five undergraduates and placed at least 20 others on probation for their participation in the 20-day pro-Palestine encampment of Harvard Yard, which ended last week.

Though the sanctions barred 13 seniors from graduating at Commencement on Thursday, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to add them back to the list of degrees recommended for conferral on Monday.

As of Tuesday evening, the status of their degrees remains uncertain.

——

Commentary.

Andrew Orlowski:

Google is currently erecting a wall between the searcher and the information they seek, using Generative AI, which the company believes creates more useful results such as summaries. This barrier, consisting of what Google’s former research director Meredith Whittaker calls “derivative content paste”, causes problems: what’s generated may or may not resemble the original, thanks to additional errors and “hallucinations”. The new barrier also removes the creators of original material from the value chain. The world was never as exciting as we were promised by the web utopians; now, it will be blander than ever.

By Shannon Whitworth

It’s been a rough cultural transition back to schools since the lockdowns, and we are starting to see the price that will be paid for keeping our kids out of the nation’s schools for as long as we did. We are fighting to reclaim our schools for the sake of the children we serve. Some schools, like mine, have been up to the task, but many others have not recovered.

I am the Director of the Free Enterprise Academy at Milwaukee Lutheran High School.  Milwaukee Lutheran is a school of approximately 860 students, most of whom are inner-city, economically disadvantaged, black kids who attend using a school choice voucher.  Like most schools during the closures, Milwaukee Lutheran went to virtual learning, with varying levels of success.  When we returned to in-person instruction, little did we know the problems were only just beginning.

Many people have written about the drops in proficiency and attendance since our return from the lockdowns. One of the most important aspects often not considered is the damage done to a school’s culture. Anti-social behavior, insubordination, fighting, and tardiness seemed to be the norm.

Quiver Quantative

We used our data on politicians’ stock portfoliosto calculate live net worth estimates for members of Congress.

Aaron Sibarium:

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.

So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received.

When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued,  because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

More:

How does this relate to the Free Beacon article that speaks to *admissions (you’re talking about exams taken by second-year students. This is the data people are asking for.

And:

They have not “released” those results. They didn’t give me the more positive data when I reached out for comment or include them in a subsequent press release.

Plus:

This is the problem with saying: “well, they still have to pass all their licensing exams, so who cares if they fail their shelf exams?”

Alex Ruoff:

NIH has a “foia lady” who instead of responding to records requests advises colleagues on circumventing the law, according to emails released by Oversight today.

——

It borders on contempt for @atfhq Director Dettelbach to refuse to answer Congress’s questions about the pipe bombs discovered on January 6th.

WILL

WILL filed this appeal because Ms. Johnson’s posts are protected by the First Amendment. She should not have to endure a costly, pointless, and incoherent jury trial. 

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “The case against Ms. Johnson should have been promptly dismissed. She was expressing her opinion, and the First Amendment gives her the right to do so. We hope the Court of Appeals allows her to appeal to avoid a misguided trial.”   

Scarlet Johnson, stated, “We have a right to free speech in this country and no one should be treated differently under the law because of their political beliefs. I am hopeful that we can establish what is a clear protection of the 1stAmendment.”  

Additional Background: The lawsuit involves a defamation claim for run-of-the-mill social media posts on X and Facebook. The posts in question criticized a school district for having a “social justice coordinator,” and described people who hold such positions as “woke,” “white savior[s]” with a “god complex,” “woke lunatics,” and “bullies.” Statements like these are pervasive on social media; indeed, they were more restrained than a lot of online speech. Nevertheless, the Plaintiff, who previously held the position, chose to respond with a defamation lawsuit.  

——

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004-

——

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

——-

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Daisy Christodoulou

In England, the national curriculum has been in the news after the Shadow Education minister, Bridget Phillipson, reminded everyone that a future Labour government plans to review it. 

I have written a lot about the curriculum and I think it’s an important part of education. But I also think that the national curriculum in England – and many other countries – is not as important as is sometimes assumed. This is not just because some schools in England are exempt from following the national curriculum. Even if it were compulsory for every school, it would still not be a significant lever for change. Four other parts of the education system make a bigger difference to what students learn. 

Thank you for reading No More Marking. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

1. Lesson resources

When most non-educationalists think about “the curriculum”, I think they have something like this in mind: the curriculum basically tells teachers what to teach each lesson. That is a reasonable assumption, but in England it is not the case. The national curriculum provides nothing like this level of detail, even our current 2014 version which is more specific and detailed than its predecessors. The entire primary and secondary curriculum for every subject is about 300 pages long. A huge amount of work has to be done to turn what you see in this curriculum document into actual living and breathing lessons.

Who does this work? Individual teachers, textbook writers, digital resource creators, central teams at multi-academy trusts…it varies. 

Zoe Williams:

Korsgaard states this plainly: “We were so used to this idea of ourselves as a nation: we were Christian, we were white, we were equal, we spoke Danish.” The whole of this century has been racked by questions of inclusion and integration, and many Danes will frame the ghetto policy as a question of perspective: from one angle, no question, it looks unbelievably racist; from another, it’s trying to eradicate pockets of deprivation. The other criteria for a ghetto are above average jobless and crime rates and lower than average educational attainment. No one has ended up homeless as a result of this regeneration.

Does a commitment to equality have to mean an in-group and an out-group? “One should absolutely acknowledge the question mark over the next decades of Denmark’s evolution of trust,” Shapins says, “as you continue to have an evolution of migration and belonging.” Denmark has had, Korsgaard says, “a painful time in recent history, where we had to renegotiate, ‘OK, you can be part of this community, even though you’re not white, even though your birth language is not Danish,’ and luckily, I think that is more or less settled.”

gwern.net

Scientific and statistical research must be read with a critical eye to understand how credible the claims are. The Reproducibility Crisis and the growth of meta-science have demonstrated that much research is of low quality and often false.

But there are so many possible things any given study could be criticized for, falling short of an unobtainable ideal, that it becomes unclear which possible criticism is important, and they may degenerate into mere rhetoric. How do we separate fatal flaws from unfortunate caveats from specious quibbling?

I offer a pragmatic criterion: what makes a criticism important is how much it could change a result if corrected and how much that would then change our decisions or actions: to what extent it is a “difference which makes a difference”.

This is why issues of research fraud, causal inference, or biases yielding overestimates are universally important: because a ‘causal’ effect turning out to be zero effect or grossly overestimated will change almost all decisions based on such research; while on the other hand, other issues like measurement error or distributional assumptions, which are equally common, are often not important: because they typically yield much smaller changes in conclusions, and hence decisions.

If we regularly ask whether a criticism would make this kind of difference, it will be clearer which ones are important criticisms, and which ones risk being rhetorical distractions and obstructing meaningful evaluation of research.

Tauhid Zaman

In a new study, Yale SOM’s Tauhid Zaman and Yen-Shao Chen show how a social media platform can shift users’ positions or increase overall polarization by selectively muting and amplifying posts in ways that appear neutral to an outside observer. Zaman says that the dangers of such “shadow banning” are much more immediate than the concerns that led Congress to force a sale of TikTok.

More clandestine than a straightforward ban from a platform, shadow banning limits the broader visibility of a user’s content without their knowledge. A Facebook or Instagram post that’s been subjected to shadow banning would remain on the original poster’s profile page, but it would appear less, or not at all, in the timelines of other users.

In a new paper co-authored with Yale SOM PhD student Yen-Shao Chen, Zaman takes up this phenomenon—not to determine whether it’s currently happening but instead to lay out exactly how it can be done and how powerful it can be.

For the study, the researchers built a simulation of a real social network, and then succeeded in using shadow banning to shift simulated users’ opinions as well as increasing and decreasing polarization. Even when the goal was to use shadow banning to move collective sentiment to the right or left, Zaman says, the content moderation policy appeared neutral from an outside perspective. That’s because it’s possible, he discovered, to shift opinions by turning down the volume on accounts on both sides of a debate at the same time.

“It’s like a frog sitting in a pot of water; the frog’s relaxing, and suddenly, he’s cooked,” Zaman said. “A network could, in fact, be driving people towards one point of view, but if someone tries to call them out on it—like a regulatory body—they’re going to see the network censoring both sides equally,” Zaman says. “It looks like there’s nothing untoward happening, so they leave the network alone—and suddenly everybody thinks the earth’s flat. That’s what we find you could do with our technique, which is a little scary.”

Katl Stack:

The dossier thoroughly documents numerous additional instances of theft of figures, exaggerated claims of novelty, misappropriation of a previous researcher’s device, plagiarism, citation fraud, similarities to past winning ISEF projects, and potential scientific inaccuracies. It’s a brutal takedown. I find this evidence highly compelling; however, I am not including it all in my article to save space. 

I strongly encourage you to read the dossier yourself:

Sally Weale

“This is mega!” said Daisy Greenwell from the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign. “We are absolutely thrilled and we believe it’s going to have a domino effect.”

She was reacting to news that St Albans in Hertfordshire is attempting to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for all children under 14.

Before St Albans, it was Greystones in Irelandlast year, where parents banded together to collectively tell their children they could not have a smartphone until secondary school. Greenwell believes others will now take similar steps.

“People are going to feel emboldened to follow suit,” said Greenwell, whose local WhatsApp group on the issue “exploded”, attracting 100,000 supporters in a matter of months. “The groundswell of support we have seen has been completely mindblowing.”

Headteachers in 30-plus primaries across St Albans got together to draw up a joint letter to send to families, in which they declared their schools smartphone-free and urged parents to delay giving their children a smartphone until at least year 9 of secondary school.

Michael S. Garet, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Daniel Hubbard, Joanne Carminucci and Barbara Goodson:

Boosting literacy among school-age children remains a national priority. Nearly one third of students in the United States have not developed the foundational reading skills needed to succeed academically, with students living in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners especially at risk. Starting in 2010, Congress invested more than $1 billion for state literacy improvement efforts through the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy (SRCL) program. SRCL was intended to focus funding on disadvantaged schools, encourage schools to use evidence-based practices, and support schools and teachers in providing comprehensive literacy instruction. These efforts were expected to lead to improved literacy outcomes for students. This study assesses how well SRCL implementation was aligned with these goals, using information collected from states, districts, and schools in all 11 states awarded grants in 2017.

Key Findings

• Uneven targeting of resources to disadvantaged schools, according to the study’s definition of disadvantage, suggests that SRCL’s funding objectives were not realized in every state, though limited data availability and variation in states’ definitions of disadvantage make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Not all states consistently funded the most disadvantaged schools in their states in terms of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, students with disabilities, students who are English learners, or average student English language arts scores.
• Literacy programs supported by rigorous research evidence were not a focus, according to independent reviews of the quality of the research. Few districts used SRCL funds to purchase such programs and few teachers in SRCL schools reported using such programs.
• The kinds of comprehensive literacy instruction consistent with research and emphasized by SRCL were less widely used by teachers than intended. Consistent with this finding, there was no difference in English language arts student achievement between SRCL schools and comparable non-SRCL schools.

Gillian Tett:

Back in 2020, when then US president Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok because of alleged Chinese influence, Microsoft tried and failed to buy the app’s US operation — a move that chief executive Satya Nadella later dubbed “the strangest thing” he had ever done.

Now events are becoming even stranger. Last month President Joe Biden signed a bill demanding that ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based owner, sell its US operations by January 2025, or face a ban. ByteDance is now fighting this through the US courts. Meanwhile, Trump himself has apparently flipped and seems to oppose a ban, probably because Jeff Yass, one of several major US ByteDance investors, is also a big Trump supporter. 

But stranger still, some of Trump’s key allies, such as Robert Lighthizer, hate China’s alleged influence over TikTok, while Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury secretary, seems eager to buy it.

And this week Frank McCourt, the real estate mogul and fierce critic of Big Tech, launched a putative “people’s bid”, via Guggenheim investment bank. This is backed by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, and Jonathan Haidt, the influential social psychologist whose new book, The Anxious Generation, decries social media.

In reality, this public gambit seems quixotic, if not publicity-grabbing. McCourt claims he has an edge in any contest, since he does not want to buy the recommendation algorithm. This is considered to be TikTok’s secret sauce, which many in Washington allege is tightly controlled by Beijing and thus key to US national security concerns. “We will likely be the only bidder who will not be interested in the algorithm,” McCourt tells me, insisting that removing it is the only way to build a healthier platform.

Allison Garfield:

The 2024 operating budget — which mostly goes toward staff salaries and benefits — totaled $405.4 million. Adding on to that seems like reckless spending to Randy Bruegman, a former fire chief in California who moved to Madison in 2018.

The city’s focus “should be on identifying areas where cuts can be made,” Bruegman said, which means reevaluating the cost-to-continue budgeting approach. Rather than working with the budget from the previous year and adding on, Bruegman and other west side residents are proposing the city start from scratch each year.

While the cost-to-continue method may be the simplest to implement, it is also the most flawed,” Bruegman said. “(It) assumes that the program or unit is appropriately staffed, is high performing, meets all objectives, has no redundancies or inefficiencies, and delivers the best possible services. … (It) enables and even encourages the mayor to overspend, and stifles innovation.”

Stein, from the Policy Forum, said it’s always worth looking at how government spending can be controlled — but that there isn’t enough information available yet to judge if there’s more the city could be considering. 

Schmiedicke said he will brief the City Council’s Finance Committee on June 10 on the outcome of his team’s agency-by-agency budget review and provide the updated number on the projected deficit for 2025, as well as projections for the budgets for the following four years. 

Corrinne Hess:

Starting Tuesday, the federal government will suspend funding to Milwaukee Public Schools’ Head Start program — a health and nutrition program for low-income children — after the district failed to comply with the program.

The 30-day suspension is the result of three “deficiencies” the Administration of Children and Families, or ACF, found between June 2022 and May 2024, said MPS spokesperson Nicole Armendariz. 

Those deficiencies were related to following practices that “ensure children had appropriate supervision at all times; and ensuring all staff and volunteers abide by the program’s standards of conduct,” Armendariz said.

—-

More.

Rachel Wolfe:

Business owners say fees are needed to cover costs and show customers where their money is going. But retail analysts and advocates like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) say secondary fees diminish people’s ability to shop around. CFPB data also show fees cause people to pay more overall because businesses can charge more than what the market will let them get away with in the sticker price.

“People don’t shop based on fees. They shop based on the price of the product,” a CFPB spokesman says.

So widespread is the tactic that President Biden is making a fee crackdown one of his administrative priorities. His administration estimates that Americans pay more than a collective $90 billion in what the president has dubbed “junk fees” each year, including those for credit cards, food delivery, bank overdrafts and event tickets.

Congress introduced a bill last April to “limit and eliminate excessive, hidden, and unnecessary fees imposed on consumers,” while similar measures have recently passed the New York and Illinois state senates. California, too, added restaurants to the list of industries covered under its existing hidden-fee ban.

Charles Murray:

Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson:

Howard Endelman was busy running his own private-equity firm when he got offered the job he couldn’t refuse: assistant tennis coach at an Ivy League school.

The gig wasn’t glamorous. It involved traipsing back and forth between Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights and the university’s courts at the northern tip of Manhattan. It also required him to spend his time selling high school tennis stars on a college better known for sending graduates to the Supreme Court than to Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

But Endelman couldn’t say no to his alma mater. And more than a decade later, that decision has never looked better. Endelman, now the head coach of the men’s team, has led Columbia to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight for the first time in school history and a showdown with No. 1 seed Ohio State.

In a tumultuous semester on the university’s campus, roiled by tensions over Israel and Palestine, his tennis team has delivered an unexpected moment of levity.

“Could we beat Michigan or Alabama in football? Impossible,” Endelman says. “In tennis, it’s possible.”

Bezos Washington Post

As the United States reckoned with racial inequality during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, many saw Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as a way to address the issues in higher education. As part of the trend, many schools began requiring candidates for teaching positions to submit DEI statements. In these statements, potential hires explain how they would advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their teaching and research activities. One 2021 study found that about one-third of job postings at elite universities required them.

Now, however, some in academia are starting to express second thoughts about this practice. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy urged abolition of DEI statements, arguing that they amount to “compulsion” and “ideological litmus tests.” Not long after Mr. Kennedy’s article appeared, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first top university to voluntarily end their use. The decision came after extensive consultations among all six of the school’s academic deans. MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, explained: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

In doing away with DEI statements, MIT was not abandoning the goals of greater diversity, equity and inclusion, which remain not only valid but also vital. DEI programs can have an important place. They should not be abolished or undermined — as red states such as Florida and Texas have done, by forbidding the use of state funds for DEI in public universities. Reshaping universities via such a heavy-handed use of state power could set a dangerous precedent for academic freedom more generally.

ATHENA CHAPEKIS, SAMUEL BESTVATER, EMMA REMY AND GONZALO RIVERO

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

William Galston:

As graduation ceremonies end and summer break begins, college and university presidents have an opportunity to reconsider their campus policies on speech and action. What begins in higher-education institutions rarely ends there. We all have a stake in what they decide.

Americans may believe the First Amendment applies across the board to these institutions. It doesn’t. Public schools are fully subject to this constitutional cornerstone, but private ones enjoy substantial freedom—limited by federal civil-rights laws and legislation in a handful of states—to craft codes of conduct that are inconsistent with it.

Whatever their motives, the members of Congress who grilled the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania (all private institutions) were right to focus on the universities’ codes rather than the Constitution. The presidents’ legalistic responses weren’t merely tin-eared; they revealed a failure to connect speech and action to the broader purposes of the academic enterprise.

Treating speech and conduct as political problems to be managed in the interest of keeping the peace on campus is a recipe for failure. Leaders who adopt this course ensure inconsistencies that damage their institutions and open them to charges of hypocrisy that are difficult to rebut. Look no further than the Jewish students who have been exposed to abuse and harassment that wouldn’t have been permitted against other minority groups.

Jason Riley:

When the Supreme Court delivered its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling 70 years ago on May 17, the goal was to produce better academic outcomes for black children. It’s been clear for decades that racially mixed classrooms aren’t essential to meeting that objective, yet policymakers continue to insist that black pupils must be seated next to white pupils to learn.

The Brown decision effectively overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared that “separate but equal” facilities were permissible and became the legal basis for racial segregation for more than 50 years. The Brown ruling, to its credit, aimed to end that era. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court that state-imposed racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional because sorting children by race denied black students “equal education opportunities” and thus deprived them of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

How a court reaches a decision can be as important as the decision itself, and the problem we’re still grappling with seven decades later is the reasoning the justices used in Brown. Instead of declaring that Plessy was an incorrect reading of the Constitution, Warren invoked “modern authority,” or social-science research not available when Plessy was decided, to argue that segregated schools were inherently unequal in academic outcomes. In other words, the prior decision was wrong owing to new developments.

Mike Kerrigan:

C.S. Lewis made the case for moral absolutes in his 1946 essay “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.” “A better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code,” he observed. “One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to.”

The insight is as true for comparisons of feeling as of fact. Lewis argued that emotions must be trained. In “The Abolition of Man,” he wrote that the head rules the belly through the chest. The heart mediates between will and appetite and directs human action toward goodness.

Last winter I saw how even the most personal feelings function best when ordered to reality. It happened in my kitchen, during a mother’s attempt to deploy that most subjective of therapeutic tools: the pain scale.

My son Jack, then 12, had returned from basketball practice complaining of pain in his chest. Trying to discern whether it was run-of-the-mill or more serious, Devin, my wife, asked him to quantify the pain: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is it? Is it a 6?”

Jack was incredulous. “No, it’s nothing like that. More like a 1½.” Devin shrugged her shoulders but then thought to ask a critical follow-up question: “Just so I know, what’s a 6 to you?”

Joseph Epstein:

President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 Americans this month. I wish he had cut the list down to two or three. Perusing the list of winners I note, along with a preponderance of Democratic politicians, the heavy hand of diversity at work, making certain that among the winners are included a sufficient number of women, African-Americans, Hispanics and even a Republican (Elizabeth Dole).

The result of so many medal winners is to diminish, if not altogether destroy, the cachet the honor once held. Another once-vaunted prize bites the dust.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom joins the Nobel Prize for Literature, which long ago lost its luster. When it went to Bob Dylan in 2016, what prestige remained was all but blown away. His songs have nothing to do with literature, and most, in any case, are derived from Woody Guthrie. I await the day the Swedish Academy decides to recognize that notable speed typist Joyce Carol Oates, which ought to finish the prize off completely.

The Pulitzer Prizes in the arts haven’t done much better. Some years ago in the London Times Literary Supplement, I noted that these awards seem to go to two kinds of people: those who don’t need it and those who don’t deserve it. In 1998, when Katharine Graham won a Pulitzer for her autobiography, Hilton Kramer noted that she qualified on both grounds. The prize’s prestige has also all but evaporated.

Paul Rice:

The three Rs are taking a back seat to climate change in New Jersey schools.

As one of the lead state partners for the Next Generation Science Standards developed by the National Research Council, New Jersey has been integrating climate change into its K-12 science curriculum for the past decade. The Garden State has upped the ante in recent years by becoming the first state to incorporate climate change into all school subjects, not only science.

In 2020, the state board of education adopted a new set of climate-focused student learning standards. Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife, Tammy, was the primary cheerleader for these standards, which were implemented in the 2022-23 school year after a pandemic-related delay. Under those standards, all public school districts across the state are required to teach and test students in every grade about climate change. The requirement covers core content areas including science, computer technology, social studies, world languages, visual and performing arts, health and physical education, and life and career planning. Districts are encouraged to incorporate climate change into English language arts and mathematics instruction.

Climate education resources distributed by Trenton’s first-in-the-nation Office of Climate Change Education provide sample lesson plans to illustrate how teachers can highlight climate change in class while constantly reminding students that New Jersey is suffering “the worst impacts of global warming.” When learning about U.S. and world history, students are required to explain how natural resources such as fossil fuels remain a source of conflict, both at home and abroad. When mastering a foreign language, students are asked to discuss “the impact of climate change on the target language region of the world.” And in school performances, students are encouraged to use climate change to “inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles and varied cultural perspectives.”

Minouche Shafik:

Strengthening the bond between universities and society through a recommitment to academia’s contribution to the common good. The horrors of the Hamas attack three days later, the ensuing war with Israel and the tragic loss of civilian lives in Gaza have tested that bond in unimaginable ways. I have seen the campus engulfed in tensions and divisions deepened by powerful external forces. 

The wave of protests, encampments, and building takeovers has since spread across the US and around the world. Whatever one thinks of the response of university leaders — denouncing hurtful rhetoric, enforcing rules and discipline, and summoning police to restore order — these are actions, not solutions. All of us who believe in higher education must now engage in serious soul searching about why this is happening. Only then can universities recover and begin to realise their potential to heal and unify.

Oren Cass:

In America today, there are three interlocking crises that may finally collapse “Big Ed”, the nation’s dysfunctional higher education cartel. The latest headlines focus on moral collapse, as campuses that aggressively policed so-called microaggressions now host students screaming “intifada”. Recent years have also been marked by an intellectual collapse. Quantitative fields from genetics to finance to psychology have been exposed for suffering severe “replication crises”. Qualitative fields from literature to sociology to gender studies often produce faddish, politicised nonsense.

But the third crisis, and the one that strikes closest to home for most, is the utter failure of the US “college-for-all” model to prepare young people for successful lives. Educators and policymakers converted American secondary schools into college preparatory academies and ploughed hundreds billions of dollars of subsidies into colleges while encouraging students to take on yet more debt. Yet fewer than one in five students moves smoothly from high school to college to career. Even among those who earn a college degree, close to half then take a job that doesn’t require it.

The current administration’s effort to simply cancel student debt is on pace to cost more than $1tn, retroactively doubling the federal government’s extraordinary financial commitment in recent decades to a failed system. But while the cancellation marks an admission of that failure, it comes with no attempt at reform.

By James Vaznis and Suchita Nayar

For nearly two decades, Laurie Garcia had been an active member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Then the union began wading into the Israel-Hamas war.

In December, the MTA’s board of directors approved a cease-fire statement that equated Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s military actions against Hamas to a “genocidal war” against Palestinians.

Wall Street Journal:

Payday lenders challenged the CFPB’s power under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to draw its funds from the Federal Reserve up to $734 million, adjusted for inflation. They argued this self-funding scheme violates the Constitution’s command that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

The Court’s majority construed this to mean that executive agencies simply cannot tap the Treasury without Congress’s approval—not a constraint on Congress from funding agencies by a variety of means. “Specifying the source and purpose [of funds for an agency] is all the control the Appropriations Clause requires,” Justice Clarence Thomas writes for the majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Thomas harks back to the struggles between the British Parliament and the King for control over the purse, noting some laws “gave the Crown broad discretion regarding how much to spend within an appropriated sum.” What’s more, “appropriations of ‘sums not exceeding’ a certain amount were commonplace immediately after the founding.”

Local examples of the Administrative State, including teacher mulligans.

—-

Will Rosignol:

Early in his first term, Gov. Tony Evers tried committing Wisconsin to rejecting all fossil fuels as a source of electricity by 2050, an aim the Legislature rejected, but one that the governor has since pursued with executive orders. As context, Wisconsin still obtains the majority of its electricity from such conventional types of fuel. Which fossil fuels predominate, however, has changed in recent years.

Wall Street Journal:

Universities shouldn’t indulge protesters who have no regard for the law. Unfortunately, we have already seen numerous colleges meet some or all of the anti-Israel demonstrators’ demands.

The encampment I’m most familiar with, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was allowed to stand for nearly two weeks. It persisted even after multiple antisemitic incidents, including a man reportedly raising a Nazi salute toward Jewish students. Despite acknowledging that the encampment was illegal, university administrators negotiated with and caved in to the organizers. Contrast this with how the university has tried to prevent conservative events from being held on campus. Earlier this year, the university attempted to charge a right-wing student organization more than $4,000 in security fees to host Michael Knowles. It backed down only after it was threatened with legal action.

The University of Florida, which cleared its encampments quickly, set the model for its peers. Rather than legitimize an illegal demonstration, the university sent the message that its rules would be enforced.

Lauren Coffey:

Amid the swirl of concern about generative artificial intelligence in the classroom, a Nevada university is trying a different tactic by having students compete against ChatGPT in writing assignments.

Students in two courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, are going head-to-head with ChatGPT by answering the same prompts as the AI and aiming to get a higher grade.

“ChatGPT comes out and everyone is using it, talking about it, whether or not we’d like them to,” said Leping Liu, professor of information technology and statistics at the University of Nevada at Reno. “We have to deal with it, so we [wanted to] find a way to augment our teaching and learning and not just focus on cheating [concerns].”

Glenn Reynolds:

Over the past 50+ years, traditional ideas, like Butker’s, about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles have been marginalized, in favor of those the put much less emphasis on, well, marriage, child-rearing, and traditional views about gender roles. 

And now we’re facing a global baby bust, or as some are calling it, a “demographic winter” due to plunging birth rates worldwide.  “Fertility rates have fallen way below replacement level throughout the entire industrialized world, and this is starting to cause major problems all over the globe.  Aging populations are counting on younger generations to take care of them as they get older, but younger generations are not nearly large enough to accomplish that task.  Meanwhile, there aren’t enough qualified young workers in many fields to replace the expertise of older workers that are now retiring.  Sadly, this is just the beginning.”

Back in the 1960s we started to worry about a “population explosion,” and Paul Ehrlich’s highly influential bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” set the tone:  Fewer people being born was better.  All sorts of policies were driven by this concern, on topics ranging from sex, birth-control, and abortion, to the desirability of smaller, two-earner families, all the way to China’s disastrous one-child policy.

But it turns out that Ehrlich was criminally wrong, and now the chickens are coming home to roost, as we face what Brink Lindsey calls a global fertility collapse.

Countries all over the world are trying, with limited success at best, to boost birth rates.   Subsidies are nice, but the costs of raising children – in terms of not just money, but time and emotional effort – are too high for almost any imaginable subsidy to overcome.

——

Harrison Butker:

I say all of this not from a place of anger, as we get the leaders we deserve. But this does make me reflect on staying in my lane and focusing on my own vocation and how I can be a better father and husband and live in the world but not be of it. Focusing on my vocation while praying and fasting for these men will do more for the Church than me complaining about her leaders.

Because there seems to be so much confusion coming from our leaders, there needs to be concrete examples for people to look to in places like Benedictine, a little Kansas college built high on a bluff above the Missouri River, are showing the world how an ordered, Christ-centered existence is the recipe for success. You need to look no further than the examples all around this campus, where over the past 20 years, enrollment has doubled, construction and revitalization are a constant part of life, and people, the students, the faculty and staff, are thriving. This didn’t happen by chance. In a deliberate movement to embrace traditional Catholic values, Benedictine has gone from just another liberal arts school with nothing to set it apart to a thriving beacon of light and a reminder to us all that when you embrace tradition, success — worldly and spiritual — will follow.

Noah Diekemper:

A recent case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court threatened to replace the state’s legislative maps with new maps drawn by partisans and picked by the court. The case was ultimately mooted, but the bad social science advanced by the experts retained by the court deserves comment.

As background, the court had previously determined that existing maps conflicted with the Wisconsin Constitution’s requirement that legislative districts “consist of contiguous territory” (Art. IV § 4) and ordered new maps drawn—not merely rectified to address that complaint, but drawn from scratch. To do so, they invited map submissions from the different parties involved, including the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a 501(c)3 public interest law firm (and the author’s employer). Furthermore, the court retained two social scientists who have published together on redistricting in the past, Bernard Grofman and Jonathan Cervas, and asked them to analyze the submissions.

Crucially, the court noted that by virtue of their role in the judiciary, “this court must remain politically neutral.” Therefore, they reasoned, in addition to ensuring that new maps would comply with the constitution’s requirements, they could not “enact maps that privilege one political party over another.” This was the pretext that allowed the court’s experts to argue for a partisan gerrymander.

The experts start off their report by reviewing all of the offered maps. Here, they not only acknowledge that the assembly and state senate maps championed in court by WILL comply with “traditional good government criteria,” but their tabulations show that WILL’s maps contain the fewest splits of county and municipality borders of any of the maps—this being an explicit requirement of the Wisconsin Constitution.

Much more on Henry Tyson, here.

I invited a number of Madison people to this event, including Zach Brandon, Satya Rhodes-Conway, Joe Gothard along with The Simpson Street Free Press, Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal.

Quinton Klabon:

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin’s kids need help learning to read, so let’s see more cooperation and an end to power maneuvers and partisanship.

Enough. Enough.  

I’m fed up with partisanship, polarization and power maneuvers in the state Capitol that put adults and politics first and kids last. 

There have been many episodes of this unfortunate soap opera over the years. And now we have one of the most aggravating because it involves something that has both urgency and broad agreement, yet is at a standstill.   

Wisconsin has a reading crisis. Milwaukee and some other areas where poverty is high especially have a reading crisis, but the problem goes beyond income, race and where a child lives. There are just too few children who are becoming capable readers by the end of third grade, which a wide range of educators would tell you is an important point in determining whether a kid is on the road to doing well in school and, in many cases, in life beyond school.  

In state standardized tests a year ago (the most recent results available), 37% of all third-graders in Wisconsin were rated as proficient or better in English language arts, which generally means they’re reading well. Another 36% were rated as “basic,” which I interpret as “kind of OK.” And 25% were rated as “below basic,” which I rephrase as “not really on the playing field.” Overall, that means about 60% of the kids are rated below proficient — or, to put it more gently, a quarter are not doing well at all. That is a lot of kids.  

Education and the Administrative State

CJ Safir:

The “why can’t we all get along?” narrative doesn’t apply here.

➡️DPI worked WITH legislators to craft literacy legislation copying the best states.

➡️Now, as my team has shown, DPI has tried to override the law every step of the way.

J-S

In 1964, 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a coalition set up a one-day boycott of Milwaukee Public Schools to protest school segregation.

——

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004-

——

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

——-

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

George Leef:

[Editor’s note: On April 17, the Biden administration unveiled its latest plan to transfer outstanding student-loan debt to American taxpayers. The essay that follows is a slightly expanded version of the Martin Center’s “comment” on the plan, submitted to the Department of Education during its public-comment period.]

The Martin Center opposes the Biden administration’s new loan-forgiveness rules for two basic reasons: They are outside of the Department of Education’s authority, and they will have adverse consequences.

Legal Authority

Economists often refer to special-interest legislation—bills passed to favor some politically influential group with benefits extracted from society in general. The nation’s Founders were well aware of that prospect and sought to prevent it in their writing of the Constitution. In Federalist 10, James Madison wrote about the evils that arise when “factions” can use governmental power to enrich themselves at the expense of others. The Constitution’s limitations on and division of federal authority were adopted to head off that problem.

The proposed loan-forgiveness “rules” clearly amount to the making of new law by unelected bureaucrats.In the Department’s proposed student-loan regulations, we have something even worse than special interest legislation, namely special interest regulation. We say this is worse because, with legislation, it is at least possible to vote out of office those who passed the odious bill and replace them with representatives more committed to the general welfare. With regulations decreed by unelected bureaucrats, that possibility does not exist.

The Founders sought to minimize the chances for special-interest legislation by drawing a line between the legislative and executive branches. Only the former was authorized to make laws, and then only within strictly defined boundaries. The executive branch was given the authority to enforce duly enacted laws. The proposed rules, however, clearly amount to the making of new law. Even if it were within the purview of Congress to pass a law relieving certain individuals of their obligation to repay debts owed to the government, it is not permissible for an agency of the executive branch to do so. (We say “even if” because the Constitution confers no authority on any branch of the federal government to lend money. While Article II covers the power to spend in detail, the Constitution is silent as to any power to lend. Had the Founders wanted to include such power, they would have said so and set forth rules for it. They did not.)

Amy Schwabe:

Katie Berg is the statewide coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s Supporting Neurodiverse Students Professional Learning System.

“When I first started in the field of special education, we looked at compliance as key, and we were driven by trying to fit kids into the mold of a typical student,” she said. “Now we’ve switched to working to recognize, understand and honor everyone’s differences.

“Our mindset now is that kids aren’t broken. They don’t need to be fixed. We need to accommodate and support them as best as possible.”

UPI:

Babies born by C-section are unlikely to receive protection from a single dose of measles vaccine, a new study finds.

A single measles jab is up to 2.6 times more likely to be completely ineffective in C-section babies, compared to those born vaginally. Their immune systems fail to produce antibodies to fight against measles infection.

However, a second follow-up jab does induce robust immunity against measles, researchers report Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Heather Mac Donald:

Jus­tice So­nia So­tomayor had harsh words for her col­leagues who voted last month to bar the use of race in col­lege ad­mis­sions. She al­leged in her dis­sent­ing opin­ion that the six-jus­tice ma­jor­ity in Stu­dents for Fair Ad­mis­sions v. Har­vard had sub­verted the Con­sti­tu-tion’s guar­an­tee of equal pro­tec­tion un­der the law, not up­held it, by “fur­ther en­trench-ing racial in­equal­ity in ed­u­ca-tion.” Chief Jus­tice John Roberts’s ma­jor­ity opin­ion slammed shut the door of op­por­tu­nity to un­der­rep­re-sented mi­nori­ties, es­pe­cially black stu­dents, who still fight against a so­ci­ety that is “in­her­. un­equal,” she wrote.

Many in acad­e­mia agreed with Jus­tice So­tomayor. In­com­ing Har­vard pres­i­dent Clau­dine Gay warned in a video state­ment that the de­ci­sion “means the real pos­si­bil­ity that op­por­tu­ni­ties will be fore-closed.” David A. Thomas, pres­i­dent of his­tor­i­cally black More­house Col­lege, as­serted that in the ab­sence of racial pref­er­ences, black stu­dents will rightly con­clude that they are “not wanted.” Stu­dents “of color” may not feel that they “mat­ter,” ac­cord­ing to An­gel B. Pérez, chief ex­ec­u­tive of the Na­tional As­so­ci­a­tion for Col­lege Ad­mis­sion Coun­sel­ing.

The charge that col­or­blind ad­mis­sions will fore­close ed­u­ca­tional op­por­tu­ni­ties for blacks rests on a breath­tak-ingly elit­ist view of ed­u­ca­tion. And the idea that mi­nor­ity stu­dents should now con­clude that they aren’t “wanted” on col­lege cam­puses de­fies re­al­ity. Black stu­dents will at­tend col­lege in the same num­bers af­ter af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion as they did be­fore, if they so choose. Col­leges will be as ea­ger to have them. The only dif­fer­ence, as­sum­ing com­pli­ance with the rul­ing (a big if), is that such stu­dents will at­tend col­lege on the same foot­ing as most stu­dents from un­pre­ferred racial groups: ad­mit­ted to schools for which their aca­d­e-mic skills qual­ify them.

Victor Davis Hanson:

So how does Biden become renominated and reelected, as polls show he is behind in almost every critical swing state on nearly every issue?

Answer: not by campaigning, not by championing his record, and especially not by doubling down on his neo-socialist and now unpopular agendas.

Instead, his campaign is focused on four other strategies to beat Donald Trump.

—-

For elite college students and graduates, there are now billions of dollars in student-loan cancellations, despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring such targeted contractual amnesties illegal.

Stewart Baker:

More than two-thirds of Americans think the Supreme Court was right to hold Harvard’s race-based admissions policy unlawful. But the minority who disagree have no doubt about their own moral authority, and there’s every reason to believe that they intend to undo the Court’s decision at the earliest opportunity.

Which could be as soon as this year. In fact, undoing the Harvard admissions decision is the least of it. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have embraced a precooked “privacy” bill that will impose race and gender quotas not just on academic admissions but on practically every private and public decision that matters to ordinary Americans. The provision could be adopted without scrutiny in a matter of weeks; that’s because it is packaged as part of a bipartisan bill setting federal privacy standards—something that has been out of reach in Washington for decades. And it looks as though the bill breaks the deadlock by giving Republicans some of the federal preemption their business allies want while it gives Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups a provision that will quietly overrule the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision and impose identity-based quotas on a wide swath of American life.

Jeremy Scahill:

Famed historian Ilan Pappe says he was detained Monday at Detroit airport, questioned by federal agents and had his phone copied. “am I a Hamas supporter? do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? what is the solution to the “conflict” (seriously this what they asked!)”

Virginia Annable

In 2022, a grandmother in Catawba County, North Carolina, asked the county’s school board to remove 24 books from the district’s libraries. Her request was part of a wave of book challenges across the country.

Michelle Teague said she wanted the books removed for explicit content to which she felt children should not be exposed. Four months after instigating the book challenges and an ensuing debate, Teague filed for election to the Catawba County School Board. By the end of the year, she was sitting on the board that would vote on whether the school should ban the very books she challenged — or change the process by which those books were reviewed.

In 2022, concerned community member Michelle Teague asked that the Catawba County School Board remove 24 books from the district’s libraries. She said these books contained explicit content that children should not be exposed to. Now these books as well as many more are being challenged in libraries across the country.

She is one example of book banning advocates seeking seats of power on North Carolina school boards as the fever pitch for banning books grows nationwide, a Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team investigation shows.

Charles Murray:

Cancelling a panel on the ideological subversion of biology for ideological reasons should be hilarious. And at the center of all this is intellectuals’ support for Hamas, whose members hate everything that makes intellectual life possible. A bizarro world.

Sarah Karp:

Frustrated with the lack of programs at the public school down her block, Candace Lampkin could be a prime candidate for sending her children to a magnet or charter school. Instead, the Chicago mom questions why there are so many options and wishes all the resources could be funneled into her neighborhood school.

“When you let people choose, it has been proven that they will go to select schools that will get all this funding and all the rest because it is supposed to be this new, hip school,” the South Side mom said. “But what happens to the quality of the education of the children at the other facilities? Don’t all of the schools deserve the same thing?”

Sun Times:

There’s a lot to unpack in a just-released Public Agenda poll on Chicago Public Schools, but the most troubling finding — the takeaway that should be uppermost in the minds of adults — is that most Chicagoans give CPS low marks on its most vital assignment: Teaching kids.

Asked to select their top three from among a list of problems affecting the district, most respondents, including parents, put “students not learning enough academically” at the top of the list. When asked to grade the district, 54% gave CPS a “C.” The next most common grade was “D.” Parents were only slightly more likely than Chicagoans overall to give the district a “B.”

Chalk some of this up to the lingering bad reputation CPS has struggled with for decades, despite progress the district has made in recent years, as WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reports in her story on the poll. Graduation rates have increased, achievement is accelerating at a faster clip here than in other big cities, and CPS deserves kudos for emphasizing intensive “high dosage” tutoring to help students recover from pandemic learning loss.

www

The world’s first linear algebra book with fully interactive figures.

Philip Greenspun:

I’ve been talking to Canadian and American friends after this latest round of college admissions and they have one message in common: Don’t let kids take honors and AP classes in high school. College admissions these days are mostly about GPA, which means that a B in AP physics is toxic compared to an A in basket-weaving. It’s also important to send kids to a high school where grading is relatively easy. From a Maskachusetts friend:

I found out that even though you need just 60% to score a 5/5 on AP Physics C, our [rich suburb public] school still applies the scale where 92+ is an A. So [my son] is scoring 80+ on the tests consistently and will end up with a B+ or even a B- and obviously will get a 5. I asked around and most schools apply the 60+ = A scale to APs. People in 3 private schools said that 70+ on AP Calc BC in their school is an A.

I’m not sure how this would work in Florida where high school kids are entitled to take college courses in actual colleges (for free and the state also pays for their textbooks). Does the college class grade end up being rolled into their high school GPA? This FAQsuggests that dual enrollment grades are weighted into a GPA the same as an AP course grade.

By Mandy McLaren

Most Massachusetts parents think the Bay State should require scientifically-based reading instruction in schools, according to a new statewide poll of roughly 1,500 parents released Monday.

The poll, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group between April 8 and May 2, found a combined 84 percent of parents believe schools definitely or probably should be required to use “evidence-based” reading curriculum, or teaching materials supported by a vast amount of scientific research. That research, often referred to as the “science of reading,” shows most students will need explicit instruction in phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension, to become successful readers.

The results come as a bill to require evidence-based reading instruction sits idle in the Massachusetts Legislature, even as a growing number of states have passed similar laws. Currently, curriculum decisions in Massachusetts schools are left to local districts. A 2023 Globe investigation found nearly half of all districts in the state were using a curriculum the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education considers low quality for promoting discredited teaching practices.

Freddie DeBoer:

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built. With far fewer beds for a growing patient population it should not have surprised anyone that the streets gradually filled with the severely ill. But somehow, we were surprised. The state governments were mostly just grateful to save money that had once gone to mental healthcare. The passage of Medicaid two years later deepened the problem. Medicaid’s funding structure presented states with an opportunity to further offload costs, this time onto the federal government. Unfortunately, the private institutions that filled with Medicaid patients were no better than the state facilities that had been closed; often they were worse. And maintaining access to Medicaid funding for such care, in practice, was more complicated and less certain than staying in a state institution. In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide. In 1990 the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act further empowered treatment-resistant patients and created legal incentives that led hospitals to release severely ill people rather than face the burden of litigation. Various state reforms in recent decades have almost uniformly pushed the severely ill out of treatment rather than into it, under the banner of “autonomy.” For sixty years we’ve done everything in our power to make it harder to treat people who badly need care. And here we are.