Will Flanders:

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

Rich Kremer:

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

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

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

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

Lee Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Buck:

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

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

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

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

Alexander Russo:

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

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

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

Vivek:

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Rosenthal:

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

Do these sound like charities?

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

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

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

——

“The nonprofit industrial complex”

Steve Hsu:

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

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

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

WILL:

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

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

Becky Jacobs:

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

—-

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

—-

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

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

——-

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David E Bernstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

More. And.

Ann Althouse:

Is it not abnormal for a person to serve as U.S. Senator for 36 years, then to go on to be Vice President for 8 years, and still have time left to serve as President, and even to run for reelection as President when he is 81, and then to drop the nomination after excluding competitors and winning it in the primaries, handing the nomination to a person who never won any votes in any bid for the presidency? Is it not abnormal for a President to oversee the criminal prosecution of his predecessor, his rival, and then, after dropping out, to seek to rearrange the Supreme Court to enhance the likelihood that his rival will suffer real criminal punishment?

Marguerite Roza and Ash Dhammani:

Spending choices must prioritize students without angering communities.

Talk about a thankless job. In Washington state, school district budgeting has suddenly become much more difficult.

After more than a decade of strong revenue growth, districts are facing deficits. In 2013, the average expenditure per student in Washington was $9,600. Since then, the Legislature has steadily increased funding for schools. Then came federal pandemic relief funds. In this last school year, Washington schools averaged over $18,000 per student. That’s an 89% increase (far outpacing inflation at 32%).

Flush with cash, districts could bring on new staff. Our state’s schools now employ over 20,000 more people than they did a decade ago (a jump of 20% even as enrollment grew only by 3%). Leaders could make employees happy by giving out pay raises: Washington’s average teacher pay is currently $86,804—the 4th highest in the nation.

But the era of big year-over-year spending increases has ended. Federal relief funds disappear in September. Enrollments are projected to drop 7% by the end of the decade. Even when state funds rise with inflation, fewer students mean fewer dollars; in the coming years many Washington districts will have no choice but to shrink programs, reduce staffing, and close schools.

Understandably, most leaders would rather avoid this part of the job. And many do, kicking the can down the road for others to deal with. But delaying only makes it worse.

Jonathan Turley:

The rating of sites is arguably the most effective way of silencing or marginalizing opposing views. I previously wrote about other sites supported by the Biden administration that performed a similar function, including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

GDI then released a list of the 10 most dangerous sites, all of which are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers that they were accepting “reputational and brand risk” by “financially supporting disinformation online.” The blacklisted sites included Reason, a respected libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. However, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation. 

When NewsGuard came looking for Res Ipsa, the questions sounded like they came directly from CGI.

I was first asked for information on the financial or revenue sources used to support my blog, on which I republish my opinion pieces from various newspapers and publish original blog columns.

Given NewsGuard’s reputation, the email would ordinarily trigger panic on many sites. But I pay not to have advertising, and the closest I come to financial support would be my wife, since we live in a community property state. If NewsGuard wants to blacklist me with my wife, it is a bit late. Trust me, she knows.

JOSH GERSTEIN and KYLE CHENEY

Strzok and Page have denied those allegations, saying their private political opinions did not influence their work on FBI matters, and many comments quoted by GOP lawmakers and the press were misconstrued.

During a House hearing in 2018, Strzok said the message about stopping Trump “was written late at night, off-the-cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States.”

Justice Department officials shared the messages with journalists on the evening of Dec. 12, 2017, as copies of them were being delivered to Congress in response to requests from committees there.

Depositions taken during the litigation indicated the release was approved by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who said he hoped sharing the messages with reporters would avoid the most inflammatory messages being taken out of context by lawmakers. Top career officials confirmed they approved the release.

Matthew Petti:

The Fourth Amendment still applies at the border, despite the feds’ insistence that it doesn’t. 

For years, courts have ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine, warrantless searches for contraband at the border. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has taken advantage of that loophole in the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures to force travelers to hand over data from their phones and laptops.

But on Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison in the Eastern District of New York ruled that cellphone searches are a “nonroutine” search, more akin to a strip search than scanning a suitcase or passing a traveler through a metal detector.

Mario Nawfal:

The Olympics and NBC are taking down videos of the controversial Olympics opening ceremony, citing copyright infringement, instead of addressing the criticism.

Lenore Skenazy

“One time when I went to pick up Sean from wrestling, I wanted to figure out which door he’d be coming out of at the high school,” my friend Nancy McDermott told me when I asked whether the phone had changed her as a mom. “We had Find My iPhone and he popped up like two blocks away, and I went, ’Oh My God—what is he doing there?’ I sort of went to this place in my brain like, ‘He’s being held in a basement!’ And then, of course, what had happened was he had turned off his phone when he was running and it showed the last place he’d been. And I knew he wasn’t being held in a basement, but in my head, it was, ‘What if he is?’”

Nancy is the author of The Problem with Parenting, so she thinks a lot about the parenting zeitgeist. Unfortunately, she concluded, “Even those of us who try to be normal cannot be normal when we have the technology.” 

Parents have always worried, of course. But until about 15 years ago, we had no option but to learn to live with it. When my mom let me walk to school as a kindergartener—I know, call the cops—she could see me until I turned the corner. After that, she had to wait till about 3 o’clock before she would see me again. In between, she had no contact. No tracking. No alerts from the school. She didn’t even pack a note in my lunch, because during school, I was sort of off her radar, and she was sort of off mine. That didn’t mean she loved me less. But it did mean that she assumed I was fine without her watching or contacting me.

Raul Castro Fernandez, Aaron J. Elmore, Michael J. Franklin, Sanjay Krishnan and Chenhao Tan

language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, are revolutionizing software’s ability to understand, process, and synthesize language. The authors of this paper believe that this advance in technology is significant enough to prompt introspection in the data management community, similar to previous technological disruptions such as the advents of the world wide web, cloud computing, and statisti- cal machine learning. We argue that the disruptive influence that LLMs will have on data management will come from two angles. (1) A number of hard database problems, namely, entity resolution, schema matching, data discovery, and query synthesis, hit a ceiling of automation because the system does not fully understand the semantics of the underlying data. Based on large training corpora of natural language, structured data, and code, LLMs have an unprece- dented ability to ground database tuples, schemas, and queries in real-world concepts. We will provide examples of how LLMs may completely change our approaches to these problems. (2) LLMs blur the line between predictive models and information retrieval systems with their ability to answer questions. We will present examples showing how large databases and information retrieval systems have complementary functionality.
PVLDB Reference Format:
Raul Castro Fernandez, Aaron J. Elmore, Michael J. Frankl

Mina Stopar:

But what about his life? Let’s consider the following paragraph from the book: “I spent hours and hours doing math problems without a teacher forcing me. Whole books of algebra problems – I did them one after another. I was only seven or eight, but I always wanted mathematics.”

That might be something you’d find in many biographies of world-renowned mathematicians, right? However, Carol Parikh notes: “Although Zariski was by all accounts an exceptionally quick and eager math student, the full extent of his gifts became apparent relatively late in life. He was almost twenty-five before he published his first paper and almost fifty when he did his great work on holomorphic functions…”

In fact, Zariski remained active and productive even into his eighties.

But how did Zariski’s story begin? It seems his older brother Moses played a significant role in shaping young Oscar. He taught him elementary algebra, and even when Oscar began surpassing him, he never resented it. While Oscar was in gymnasium, Moses would buy math and philosophy books for him during his business trips to Moscow and Petrograd. Oscar was especially interested in Hegel and Marx.

Justin Lahart:

For all our divisions, Americans have been united by a singular obsession: How can we have a better life? Economists call this economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder and make it to a higher rung than your parents.

Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has spent more than a decade working to understand what makes mobility possible, and why in some places the children of poor parents have been more able to move up than in others.

Caitlin Cassidy:

The New South Wales curriculum has had its biggest shakeup in five decades with better connections between subjects, more detailed concepts and skills, and a move away from the student-led approach to learning towards “explicit instruction”.

On Wednesday, new K-6 syllabuses for health, creative arts, human society and its environment, and science were released to teachers, with updated maths and English syllabuses in classrooms from this year.

The NSW education minister, Prue Car, said the curriculum reform would “reshape education” for decades to come.

“For the first time, primary school teachers have a set of syllabuses that make sense together and will ensure students have a strong foundation upon which to build their knowledge,” she said.

Human society and its environment will replace the separate subjects of history and geography, including compulsory content on democracy and citizenship and ancient civilisations, while new health content will include the healthy use of digital devices and age-appropriate consent from kindergarten.

In science, students will study the human body for the first time, as well as the earth and solar systems, climate, energy, food chains and electricity.

Matt Egan:

Nearly four in ten (39%) of US adults say they worry most or all of the time that their family’s income won’t be enough to meet expenses, according to a new CNN poll. That’s up from 28% who expressed those concerns in December 2021, and it’s similar to the numbers seen during the Great Recession (37%).

To cope, significant shares of Americans said they are adding side jobs, cutting down on driving and putting more expenses on credit cards.

Even higher percentages of Latino (52%) and Black (46%) Americans said they’re worried most or all of the time about making ends meet, according to the poll.

More than half (55%) of those making less than $50,000 a year similarly worry about having enough money to meet expenses.

The findings underscore how, despite national statistics that show unemployment is low and inflation is cooling, millions of Americans are hurting from years of rising prices.

Locally, the taxpayer funded Madison School district is planning a large tax & $pending increase referendum this fall

Claire Fox:

Less than a week before the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 was to come into force – over a year since it was given royal assent in May last year after passing through two houses of parliament – the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced her “decision to stop further commencement … in order to consider options, including its repeal…

Notes by Kevin Fulton:

I always like is when you see surprising endorsements. Here, Richard C. Anderson endorsed the book. He is a brilliant researcher (see link) who I would say generally writes from a different perspective than Hirsch but found his work meaningful. 2/

Michael Lind:

In reality, the global trade system has already disintegrated, thanks precisely to the policy of appeasing Chinese mercantilism that The Economistadvocates. Electric vehicles (EVs) are the perfect example. Using tariffs, subsidies, and other tools of industrial policy, state-supported Chinese firms have exploited access to American innovations and now seek to flood the American market with underpriced exports. Other than the obnoxiously anonymous lead writers at The Economist and a few libertarian dead-enders, who really believes that China’s crushing of the American EV industry would be a “free market” outcome that enhances American prosperity?

The market utopianism that The Economist shares with—and helped teach to—the neoliberal establishment has collided headlong with the market realism that long governed the international economy and American trade policy, and is now returning to its rightful place. Realizing this, savvier defenders of neoliberal globalism are changing the subject from the alleged benefits of cheap imports to the argument that tariffs are “taxes on consumers” and “regressive” ones at that.

The attack on tariffs as regressive taxes unites two of the themes of early twenty-first-century neoliberalism.

The attack on tariffs as regressive taxes unites two of the themes of early twenty-first-century neoliberalism. One is the left-neoliberal dogma that each individual tax—not government policy or the economy as a whole—must be progressive in its effects. The other is the right-neoliberal dogma that deregulating trade and immigration to reduce wages for workers and thus reduce prices for consumers is the “efficient” and thus best policy, as long as the “winners” compensate the “losers”—preferably in the form of redistribution through the tax code.

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard:

The American Worker Project from EIG compares the U.S. worker of today against the U.S. worker of the past. My aim is to add a new dimension, comparing U.S. workers to their counterparts in the rest of the world.

Specifically, I look at the abundance of jobs in the U.S. and abroad, trends in wage growth, and the distribution of worker pay.

Jobs have been abundant in the United States and other advanced economies.

BWorkers in the United States have experienced dramatic events in recent years, ranging from the global Covid-19 pandemic to the enormous fiscal response to lockdowns and related threats to

Americans’ income security.

Price inflation and real wage declines returned across advanced economies for the first time in over a generation, triggered in the United States partly by the scale of fiscal stimulus.

Real wage levels, however, have held up far better for American workers than for European workers in recent years.1 The strong recovery in U.S. job creation pushed down the unemployment rate to below 4 percent for an unprecedented period of more than two years, and it has restored employment-to- population ratios to their pre-Covid ranges.
But at the same time, Figure 1 illustrates that in the United States the recovery in the employment-to- population ratio for the 15–64 year old working age population—arguably the most relevant metric for broad labor market health—actually lags behind the recoveries in the EU27 and Japan, even though the U.S. has outpaced them in GDP growth and enacted a much larger fiscal stimulus

Sara Randazzo:

The nonprofit behind the tests, College Board, says it updated the scoring by replacing its panel of experts with a large-scale data analysis to better reflect the skills students learn in the courses. Some skeptical teachers, test-prep companies and college administrators see the recent changes as another form of grade inflation, and a way to boost the organization’s business by making AP courses seem more attractive.

“It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment at Oregon State University. “But I think it’s a business move.”

The number of students cheering their higher AP scores could rise again next year. The College Board said it is still recalibrating several other subjects, including its most popular course, AP English Language, which attracts more than half a million test takers.

Trevor Packer, the head of College Board’s AP program, said the changes aren’t motivated by a desire to sign up more students. The organization, which also makes the SAT, has touted its tests as an antidote to grade inflation in schools.

Quinton Klabon:

DPI EXPLAINS THEIR WRONG READING OF THE LETRS RETRAINING DEADLINE
Calls it “strange.” “WE CAN SEE THERE IS AN INTENTION IN THE LAW TO COMPLETE BY JULY 1, 2025,” but says language is not plain to hold up in court. OH, BROTHER.

DPI says districts should create trackers locally.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Courtney Everett:

Rob Ferrett: What does Act 20 say?

Caroline Pate-Hefty: Wisconsin Act 20 has changed the landscape of what’s going to be required in literacy. Act 20 is a really exciting thing for educators, but it has some really intense deadlines and mandatory requirements around literacy. The intention of this state law is to bring us up because our reading levels are unacceptable. 

Act 20 affects kindergarten through third grade. Last year, we focused on kindergarten through fifth grade at Whitewater. All of our teachers were trained in the science of reading and its implementation. Our principals were trained on coaching on the implementation.

We started with 26 percent of our students being on target in the Forward Examassessment. We closed the first year of intense implementation with 55 percent of our students being on target for utilizing the science of reading. That’s really what Act 20 is going to require.

RF: What is the science of reading approach?

CPH: I always say the science of reading isn’t an ideology. It’s not a philosophy. It’s certainly not a political agenda. It’s really a consensus among educators. In education, we based the science of reading on thousands of meta analyses on how kids read.

The Economist:

A new study by Raj Chetty, of Harvard University, and colleagues provides fresh data on how America’s landscape of opportunity has shifted sharply over the past decades. Although at the national level there have been only small declines in mobility, the places and groups that have become more (or less) likely to enable children to rise up have changed a lot. The most striking finding is that, compared with the past, a child’s race is now less relevant for predicting their future and their socioeconomic class more so.

The greatest drops in mobility have been not in the places evoked in song, but on the coasts and the Great Plains, which historically provided pathways up (see maps). “Fifteen years ago, the American Dream was alive and well for white children born to low-income parents in much of the North-east and West Coast,” says Benjamin Goldman of Cornell University, one of the co-authors. “Now those areas have outcomes on par with Appalachia, the rustbelt and parts of the South-east.”

The fact that white children have become more likely to remain in poverty than before, whereas for black children the reverse is true, raises many questions. The finding comes from tracing the trajectories of 57m children born in America between 1978 and 1992 and looking at their outcomes by the age of 27. “This is really the first look with modern big data into how opportunity can change within a place over time,” says Mr Goldman. For children born into high-income families, household income increased for all races between birth cohorts. Yet among those from low-income families, earnings rose for black children and fell for white children.

David Blaska:

Like hobo stew, the cost of living has many ingredients. Pumping increasingly worthless dollars into the economy is one of them. Democrats in Washington injected billions into America’s economic bloodstream in the name of Covid relief. Yet another casualty of the pandemic panic, along with closing schools and wearing masks on the bike path!

The National Bureau of Economic Research identifies the CARES Act and the National Rescue Plan as a prime contributor to inflationthat peaked at 9% in June 2022. 

The federal government showered $350 billion on state and local governments. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, spent most of the $5.7 billion federal largesse at his sole discretion.

 City will pay you to sue it

The City of Madison spent one-time money to paper overoperational expenses and to avoid hard decisions, such as deep sixing the $1.1 million Police Civilian* Oversight Board, which is now advertising for attorneys willing to be paid up to $15,000 for each anti-cop lawsuit they bring against the city. That’s right — the City of Madison will pay you to sue itself! ( * which the bid document misnames “Citizen” Oversight Board.)

Glenn Reynolds

They want to include everyone — except the people they don’t like.

For a while we were told that DEI was good for business, and good for encouraging people to get along. 

But in fact there’s no evidence that corporate DEI efforts help the bottom line: The chief support for that notion was a McKinsey study that was, well, questionable. 

Moreover, there’s considerable evidence on college campuses that DEI efforts increase racial division and prejudice, rather than reducing it. 

Shockingly, calling attention to people’s differences, and handing out goodies based on those differences, doesn’t promote fellow-feeling.

Jean M. Twenge, Heejung Park

The social and historical contexts may influence the speed of development. In seven large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adolescents 1976–2016 (N =8.44 million, ages 13–19), fewer adolescents in recent years engaged in adult activities such as having sex, dating, drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without their parents, and driving, suggesting a slow life strategy. Adult activities were less common when median income, life expectancy, college enrollment, and age at first birth were higher and family size and pathogen prevalence were lower, consistent with life history theory. The trends are unlikely to be due to homework and extracurricular time, which stayed steady or declined, and may or may not be linked to increased Internet use.

Patrick Brown:

Child care in Canada is starting to look a lot like health care in Canada – nominally universal, but with long waiting lines acting as the implicit form of rationing, particularly for low-income parents

Rachel Wolfe:

Americans aren’t just waiting longer to have kids and having fewer once they start—they’re less likely to have any at all.

The shift means that childlessness may be emerging as the main driver of the country’s record-low birthrate.

Women without children, rather than those having fewer, are responsible for most of the decline in average births among 35- to 44-year-olds during their lifetimes so far, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data by University of Texas demographer Dean Spears for The Wall Street Journal. Childlessness accounted for over two-thirds of the 6.5% drop in average births between 2012 to 2022.

While more people are becoming parents later in life, 80% of the babies born in 2022 were to women under 35, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics data.

“Some may still have children, but whether it’ll be enough to compensate for the delays that are driving down fertility overall seems unlikely,” says Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

By Kayla Huynh

But the school failed to ensure the teacher had the proper licensing to teach a portion of the students’ instruction.

The error meant Steffen’s son, Theodore, and his son’s six classmates would need to redo thousands of minutes of instruction to stay on track with other students.

“I don’t think the problem was on the employee,” Steffen said. “(The school district) hired her, they put her in the position for the job she was going to do, so it seems like a district issue to me.” 

The Madison Metropolitan School District realized the problem when another parent filed a complaint with the state Department of Public Instruction, which credentials teachers, according to a district employee. The staff member requested anonymity because they were not authorized by the district to speak on the matter.

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?

Steven Sinofsky and Peter Savodnik:

Politics reporter Stef W. Kight informed us that the vice president would be “addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border” and that Harris would “lead efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) to manage the flow of unaccompanied children and migrant families arriving at the border in numbers not seen since a surge in 2019.”

Lest anyone wonder whether this was a big job with a great deal of responsibility, a White House official told reporters: “President Biden said during the transition, whatever the most urgent need, he would turn to the vice president, and today he is turning to the vice president.”

Today—July 24, 2024—the same reporter at the same outlet has a story headlined“Harris Border Confusion Haunts Her New Campaign.” 

Kight now reports: “In early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue.” (Emphasis mine.)

We are told that there is “confusion around the VP’s exact role” and that “early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent. And it has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.” The story also quotes former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson: “She is not the border czar.” 

Just to make sure readers understand that Axios, in 2021, in no way intended to provide Republicans, in 2024, with a talking point that might help Donald Trump, Axioshas added an editor’s note at the bottom of the new piece: “This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.” 

——

More.

And:

In April 2021, Axios itself published multiple articles referring to Harris as Biden’s “border czar”.

John Dvorak:

Here is the White House memo putting Kamala Harris in charge of the Border.

James Lynch:

Wikipedia completely scrubbed Kamala from its executive branch czar page. The Axios article is no longer even listed in the citations.

Matthew Continetti:

Keeping up with the changing party line is exhausting. Not long ago, remember, it was considered a slur to suggest that Joe Biden was too old and infirm to be reelected president.

FIRE:

This opens the door to insidious government regulation of speech of both minors and adults, which the bill enables by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to define how social media platforms can operate.

KOSA also threatens everyone’s right to speak anonymously, a time-honored tradition in the United States. Because the bill requires treating minors’ accounts differently, and websites cannot discern users’ ages without confirming their identity, platforms will inevitably face pressure to avoid regulatory risk by verifying each account holder. This would force all Americans, including adults, to reveal their identity in order to express themselves online.

Timothy K. Minella

Near the end of this academic year, two elite universities announced the elimination of one of the most prominent symbols of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) apparatus on campus: the dreaded “diversity statement” for academic positions.

If you were an academic on the job market during the past decade, you couldn’t escape this ubiquitous requirement. It seemed nearly every job opening, from assistant professor of history to dean of an engineering college, asked applicants to write a statement discussing their experience with DEI and their commitment to advancing it. In some cases, hiring committees reviewed the diversity statement first, before even considering a candidate’s scholarship and teaching. At UC Berkeley, up to 75 percent of applicants were eliminated from consideration based on their diversity statements alone.

Why the backlash against diversity statements now, especially from the liberal bastions of elite academia?The first half of 2024 saw a cascade of diversity-statement cancelations. The trend started with state legislatures that acted to ban the requirement in state universities. Legislators in Idaho, Utah, Alabama, Kansas, and Indiana all passed measures to end the practice in hiring and admissions. These states followed the lead of Florida, Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, which had adopted similar policies.

Then, in May, MIT became the first elite private university to end the practice in question. Less than a month later, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences also announced that applications for tenure-track positions would no longer require diversity statements.

Peterson Foundation

America is on a dangerously unsustainable fiscal path, which threatens our economic future.

The Peterson Foundation asked experts from seven leading organizations — the American Action Forum, the American Enterprise Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Progressive Policy Institute — to develop specific policy proposals and recommendations to address our fiscal situation and meet their policy priorities over the next 30 years. 

All seven organizations — through a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases — successfully put our debt on a sustainable path.

Pierre Bienaime:

For die-hard fans of the Rubik’s Cube, it isn’t about whether you can crack the iconic puzzle. It’s about how fast.

In a bustling hotel ballroom in Queens, some 90 competitors are practicing or locked in a speed-cubing showdown, racing to match all sides of the three-dimensional puzzle.

Over a loudspeaker, event organizers summon participants to join one of six tables for a round. When the scrambled cube appears, players have 15 seconds to scrutinize it, turning it this way and that to plot out a flurry of rotations. The fastest solve took teen whiz Jerry Yao just 5.5 seconds.

After a ceremony honoring the winners, Yao playfully boasted in response to questions from a reporter. “If my friends are listening, I’m like, I’m a lot better than all of them,” he said. “And I want to like, keep it that way.”

Paul Buchheit:

The Biden situation is a good example of why single-party states are dangerous — the incentives always favor party loyalty over truth. If it weren’t for the disastrous debate and upcoming elections, experts and insiders would still be insisting that Biden is “sharp as a tack”, and that all evidence to the contrary are “cheapfakes” and dangerous misinformation.

Our two-party system isn’t always great, but it’s far preferable to one in which a single party gains total control. I believe this is also a significant factor in the California/SF dysfunction. Without a viable opposition party, party leaders can get away with just about anything, and corruption and incompetence grows unchecked.

—-

Madison has had many uncontested elections in recent years….

Yet:

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

City Forward Collective:

Key finding #1: Milwaukee residents remain deeply dissatisfied with the state of affairs at MPS, and believe more must be done to address the district’s academic and financial shortcomings (2/6)

Key finding #2: Milwaukee residents believe MPS School Board members should be held accountable for the district’s issues. 2 out of 3 respondents support the recall of MPS School Board members. (3/6)

Key Finding #3: Milwaukee residents remain concerned by the financial impact of MPS’ incompetence and financial mismanagement on their own pocketbooks. (4/6)

——

More.

And.

Neal McCluskey

Much worse than K‑12 has been higher education, where the Department of Education has essentially run almost the entire student loan industry. In 2022, the GAO reported that twenty-five years’ worth of federal student loans would cost taxpayers nearly $200 billion due to forgiveness plans and other non-repayment. There is, though, difficulty in making estimates, in part because the Department has failed in its basic operations, including tracking borrower repayments, as documented in another 2022 GAO report. And while the Biden administration focused on unconstitutional mass student debt cancelation, the Department failed at another basic job: simplifying the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

The FAFSA is the gateway to student aid that is, unfortunately, baked into the price of collegeand, hence, necessary for many people to attend college. Of course, the necessity of aid is another major reason to end fed ed: it is a hugely negative, unintended consequence of federal “help” that is almost certainly a disease worse than the cure.

And do not think the feds have historically been essential for education. A major federal funding role only began in the mid-1960s; the Department has only existed since 1980. This is in large part because the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern education (alas, a point neglected in the Project 2025 chapter) and for most of our history few people would have imagined a major federal role.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Several European countries are betting on open-source software. In the United States, eh, not so much. In the latest news from across the Atlantic, Switzerland has taken a major step forward with its “Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks” (EMBAG). This groundbreaking legislation mandates using open-source software (OSS) in the public sector.

This new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it. This “public money, public code” approach aims to enhance government operations’ transparency, security, and efficiency.

Jeremy Scahill:

A few weeks ago, Meta removed Instagram videos of me discussing my interviews with Hamas officials. Now Facebook is immediately removing my latest article about Kamala Harris’s record on Israel when people post it.

Victor Davis Hanson:

2) So, primaries and delegates won by popular vote now mean zilch. They are erasable at the whim of the back-roomers in the darkness. Will Democratic primaries cease to exist? If not, why would anyone take the time to vote in them?

3) Remember the same coup plotters today in 2020 engineered the sudden abdications of all of Biden’s socialist primary rivals to ensure that he would be a suitable veneer for their own extremist agendas. In that now infamous Faustian bargain, Joe and Jill got the ceremonial White House spotlight. In exchange, the team of Barack and Michelle ran things stealthily. So did Joe live by the coup, and then die by the coup?

4) The donors and politico grandees (did anyone vote for these people?) determine who runs and who doesn’t—not the people who vote in the primaries.

5) The convention will be as rigged as was the coup to depose Biden.

Chad Aldeman:

Last fall, I wrote a piece for The 74 Million titled, “The 50 Very Different States of American Public Education.” In that piece, I chronicled how public education looks very different depending on where you happen to live. From spending and staffing levels to the types of teachers they employ, what might look weird to a New Yorker is now common in Florida, and vice versa. 

For example, schools in New York and Washington, D.C. now spend about three times what schools in Utah and Idaho spend. These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, but they are operating very different schools. A typical school in New York pays its staff a lot higher salaries and can still afford to employ almost twice the number of people (per student) than a school in Utah or Arizona can. 

There are similarly large differences when it comes to who those employees are. Do teachers have to go through traditional, university-based preparation programs, or are they coming from alternative routes? Do most teachers have Master’s degrees or not? These answers vary tremendously across the states. For instance, only about one-third of public school teachers in Oklahoma have a Master’s degree, compared to nearly all of them in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. 

Joe Pinker:

U.S. workers paid more than $1 trillion into Social Security last year. Younger ones doubt they will get a dime when they retire.

The idea of Social Security disappearing is one of the country’s longer-running neuroses and shows few signs of abating. Some 47% of U.S. nonretirees believe Social Security won’t be able to pay them benefits when they retire, according to a 2023 Gallup survey, a level that has been mostly steady over more than three decades of polling.

Confidence today is lowest among those who are mid-career, ages 30 to 49.

Policy analysts say Social Security isn’t going away. Workers say their frustrations aren’t just about having little faith that the government will address a possible funding shortfall. They are also annoyed because they see older people enjoying benefits they don’t expect to receive.

Some of these younger workers are increasing their savings rates or subtracting Social Security from their retirement planning completely. Others say they are bitter, frustrated and uneasy about their long-term future.

WILL

Lost amongst the news of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released data on school district spending and enrollment around Wisconsin. The spending data is already significantly outdated—covering the 2022-23 school year that ended more than a year ago. Nonetheless, it does represent our best window into the current state of education in the state.

Among the key points:

• In the past five years, public school enrollment has declined by 4.79%, while choice enrollment is up 26.7%.
• Inflation-adjusted spending per student is down from 2 years ago, but up nearly $1,000 per student from 2010.
• Facilities spending accounts for a large share of the jump in spending—up 71% from 2010.

Enrollment Trends

More.

Corrinne Hess:

During the July 11 Waukesha School Board meeting, members had a lengthy discussion about the district’s membership with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, before ultimately voting 8-1 to quit.

Board members said the organization no longer represents the values evolving school boards have.

Some of those “values” have to do with controversial legislative bills that were debated during the last session. 

The Wisconsin Association of School Boards opposed a bill that would have excluded trans women and girls from playing sports. The group also opposed bills related to “curriculum transparency,” competitive bidding for school districts and allowing paraprofessionals to become teachers.

School Board member Eric Brooks said the association supports bills that are easy to get behind, like Act 20, the statewide reading initiative.

“When it comes to the issues that I think a lot of people deeply care about and that are maybe a little bit more contentious in nature, they seem to more often than not go against what many people in this community value,” said Brooks, who also works for Republican State Sen. Duey Stroebel.

In 2021, COVID-era frustrations led to big gains for Republican-backed candidates on Wisconsin school boards, especially in the Milwaukee suburbs. 

By Rick Hess

As for the specifics of Project 2025? There’s a good chance that it doesn’t say what you think it does. For instance, one graphic that’s been widely circulated (which The Dispatch reportshas racked up millions of views across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, and X) lists 31 policies supposedly found in Project 2025. These falsehoods include raising the retirement age, teaching Christian religious beliefs in public schools, banning books and curriculum about slavery, ending birthright citizenship, and eliminating the FDA and EPA. Project 2025 mentions none of these.

In fact, as Libby Stanford has capably reportedfor Education Week, most of what Project 2025 actually proposes for education is neither surprising nor all that new. The 44 pages devoted to the Department of Education call for shuttering the Department, block-granting Title I funding and then phasing it out, turning IDEA into a block grant, adopting a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights, spotlighting the extent of DEI efforts and then working to curtail them, requiring the office of civil rights to work through the courts rather than rely on “Dear Colleague” letters, and so forth. Anyone surprised by this kind of conservative wish list needs to get out more.

For what it’s worth, I mostly like what Project 2025 has to say on education. Block-granting is reasonable given the morass of regulation that’s made these programs intrusive and counterproductive. Curtailing the office of civil rights’ use of extrajudicial pressure tactics is overdue. Miguel Cardona’s politicized, legally dubious, inept tenure as secretary of education has powerfully made the case for dismantling the department. People of goodwill can disagree about all of this, but there’s nothing especially scary, theocratic, or fascist about it.

Rachel Wolf and Justin Lahore:

More women than ever have entered the American workforce.

Heady demand for employees combined with more opportunities for remote work and a surge in female entrepreneurs are sending a flood of women into the labor market. Women now hold a record 79 million jobs, and the share of women in their prime working years who are employed or seeking work now stands at 77.9%, up from 75.8% five years ago.

But it’s not time for a victory lap just yet.

The same work-from-home opportunities that have enabled many moms in particular to enter or rejoin the workforce are also shackling them with fresh responsibilities. Many say they are effectively working two full-time jobs: managing their households and their careers.

Sarika Paralkar left her job in tech after giving birth to twin girls almost 10 years ago to focus on raising them. She recently started a full-time fellowship with her Oakland, Calif., city government focused on furthering local climate initiatives.

Tom Dotan::

The blue screen of death has been a dreaded symbol of technological failure since Microsoft’s Windows became the world’s dominant operating system in the 1990s.

On Friday, it showed up on millions of computers around the world at once, highlighting both Microsoft’s continued ubiquity in workplaces and decades-old design choices that allowed the actions of a little-known software company to disable millions of Windows machines. Some security professionals also say Microsoft MSFT -0.74%decrease; red down pointing triangle hasn’t taken the vulnerability of its software seriously enough.

Microsoft said in a blog post Saturday that 8.5 million Windows machines were hit, or less than 1% of its global footprint. That number was enough to bring down the operations of major businesses across industries including healthcare, media and restaurants.

The effects continued to reverberate in airports Saturday, as U.S. carriers canceled close to 2,000 flights, compared with 3,400 Friday. Delta, which accounted for more than half the canceled flights Saturday, has been trying to make sure it has crews to cover flights and told pilots at hub airports to depart when planes are fully boarded and ready to safely go, no matter the scheduled departure time.

Friday’s outage was caused by a buggy update sent to corporate clients by CrowdStrike CRWD -11.10%decrease; red down pointing triangle, one of hundreds of cybersecurity firms that have built a business promising to make Windows more secure. Microsoft has its own competing product, called Windows Defender.

Anil Ananthaswamy

A study of the concepts that power AI.

In this demanding but rewarding book, Ananthaswamy, author of The Man Who Wasn’t There, “explains the elegant mathematics and algorithms [behind]…machine learning, a type of AI that involves building machines that can learn to discern patterns in data without being explicitly programmed to do so.” With astute reference to principles from the disciplines of math, computer science, physics, and neuroscience, the author guides readers through the conceptual frameworks involved in the creation of AI. While it would be helpful to come to the book with a strong background in math (especially statistics and calculus), clear and detailed illustrations help make it accessible to anyone willing to immerse themselves in the material. Ananthaswamy makes the power of AI obvious, and his engaging case studies explore its emerging abilities in the generation of new media—text, images, video, and music—and contributions to discoveries in areas such as drug development and the dynamics of gene expression. The author also provides a vivid picture of how AI will continue to transform everyday activities and, very soon, revolutionize our social and economic lives. Ananthaswamy demonstrates how a profound merging of human activities with machine processes is already far along and will soon accelerate strikingly. 

Aimee Picchi:

While 55% of Americans are “cost secure,” meaning they can afford care and medicine, that’s a decline from 61% who fell into that category in 2022, the study found. 

Americans spend an average of $12,555 per person annually on health care, according to the Peterson-KFF Health Care Tracker. By comparison, typical health care spending across other developed nations is about $6,651, their analysis found. 

“What we found as we string together the trend of data points is really quite concerning,” Lash said. “It’s that health care affordability has been getting worse — it shines a light on the number of families that can’t afford things like prescription drugs.”

Rising insurance costs

The average family insurance deductible in the U.S. stood at about $3,800 in 2022, up from $2,500 in 2013, according to KFF. The IRS considers insurance for families with deductibles of $3,200 or more to be high deductible plans.

David Brady, Regina S. Baker and Ryan Finnigan

Many claim a high prevalence of single motherhood plays a significant role in America’s high child poverty. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, we compare the “prevalences and penalties” for child poverty across 30 rich democracies and within the United States over time (1979–2019). Several descriptive patterns contradict the importance of single motherhood. The U.S. prevalence of single motherhood is cross-nationally moderate and typical and is historically stable. Also, child poverty and the prevalence of single motherhood have trended in opposite directions in recent decades in the United States. More important than the prevalence of single motherhood, the United States stands out for having the highest penalty across 30 rich democracies. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that reducing single motherhood would not substantially reduce child poverty. Even if there was zero single motherhood, (1) the United States would not change from having the fourth-highest child poverty rate, (2) the 41-year trend in child poverty would be very similar, and (3) the extreme racial inequalities in child poverty would not decline. Rather than the prevalence of single motherhood, the high penalty for single motherhood and extremely high Black and Latino child poverty rates, which exist regardless of single motherhood, are far more important to America’s high child poverty.

The Economist:

Pepple are much cleverer than they were in previous generations. A study of 72 countries found that average IQs rose by 2.2 points a decade between 1948 and 2020. This stunning change is known as the “Flynn effect” after James Flynn, the scientist who first noticed it. Flynn was initially baffled by his discovery. 

The Economist:

That the pandemic messed up schooling is well known. Between 2018 and 2022 an average teenager in a rich country fell some six months behind their expected progress in reading and nine months behind in maths, according to the oecd. What is less widely understood is that the trouble began long before covid-19 struck. A typical pupil in an oecd country was no more literate or numerate when the coronavirus first ran amok than children tested 15 years earlier. As our special report argues, education in the rich world is stagnating. This should worry parents and policymakers alike.

In America long-running tests of maths and reading find that attainment peaked in the early 2010s. Since then, average performance there has gone sideways or backwards. In Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, among other places, scores in some international tests have been falling for years. What has gone wrong?

Deedy:

International Math Olympiad (IMO) is the hardest math test for high schoolers.
—USA beat the favorite China with a mostly Chinese-American team
—India came 4th, 1pt short of Korea
—Haojia Shi [China] got a perfect score 2x in a row, the 7th to ever do that

6 questions, NINE hrs!

Alden Jones:

Colleges made it so much worse during Covid by lifting the consequences of not showing up/not doing the work. My institution has yet to bring back attendance policies and students are used to calling the shots now. Once students asked me for permission to miss a class;

Austin Berg:

NEW: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is rejecting Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s calls for a state bailout to pay for the Chicago Teachers Union’s contract demands.

This is one of the most consequential public embarrassments yet for the mayor and his largest campaign backer.

Here’s what it means.

Victor Davis Hanson

Yet here we are in mid-July 2024 and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, is alive and leads incumbent Biden—either because of, or despite, the crude efforts to destroy him.

After nearly a decade of utter madness, can we finally order the FBI, DOJ, and CIA to butt out of our elections?

Can a bankrupt media cease whipping up hysterias about a supposed Nazi-like takeover?

Can the left stop relying on washed-up British spies, corrupt ex-spooks, and teams of clownish partisan prosecutors?

Instead, why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president?

Robin Catalano:

Two hundred years ago, it helped spread people, ideas and goods across the US. Now, it’s become a paddler’s paradise with more than 700 miles of continuous, navigable waterways.

Inside Lock 11 on the Erie Canal in Amsterdam, New York, the metal-on-metal grinding of gears signalled the closing of the gate behind us. With our teal kayaks lined up along the walls of the lock – an aquatic “lift” that raises or lowers boats on sections of the canal where water levels are unequal – we looked like a befuddled shiver of sharks. “Is it too late to go back?” the paddler behind me whispered, hands gripping the rope hanging along the wall beside her, as the water began to drain.

Ten women and men had come out on a sunny June morning to take part in On the Canals, a state-funded recreational programme along the Erie: the US’ most important manmade waterway, which celebrates its bicentennial in 2025.

Katherine Johnson Martinko:

Plus, it’s a basic math problem. There are limited hours in a day, and every hour spent scrolling on social media or watching YouTube videos takes time away from what I see as more valuable activities, even if it is just sitting alone with one’s thoughts.

Instead, the emphasis in our family is on creative play, physical exploration, and face-to-face interactions. Childhood is seen as a time to develop practical life skills and get plenty of sleep and exercise. It’s a chance to get comfortable with boredom, while learning when and how to focus on important tasks. By the end of it, I hope my sons have a rich repository of childhood memories that will someday make them smile, laugh, and possibly even cringe.

I’m not anti-tech. My entire career as a writer and editor has been enabled by the Internet, and I wouldn’t want to go back to a time without it. But great tools don’t automatically make great toys, and I want my kids to learn the difference. Nor is my goal to shelter them. My kids are not naïve; we talk regularly about fraught, complicated topics that would likely surprise many families.

Being a digital minimalist parent can feel lonely, and there are times when I feel badly that my kids are the ones who get singled out for my unorthodox approach. “Conformity is overrated,” I tell them jokingly, but that is small consolation when you are the only kid going into tenth grade without a smartphone. My oldest son wants a phone badly because everyone else has one, but that’s not a compelling enough reason to buy him one. I stand firm, reiterating that he won’t get one before 16 (and then will have to pay for it himself). This recommendation comes from Dr. Jean Twenge, who puts smartphone ownership on par with having a driver’s license, an analogy I love and cite far more often than my son would like to hear. 

Ashley Smart

To this day, the story of how and why RP11 came to be the centerpiece of one of biology’s crowning achievements has largely escaped public scrutiny. Even the scientists who helped orchestrate it disagree about the particulars.

To piece the story together, Undark reviewed more than 100 emails, letters, and other digital documents housed within the History of Genomics Archive at the National Human Genome Research Institute. The documents, provided to Undark through an institutional research collaboration agreement, reveal that the project’s sourcing of human genetic material was more ethically fraught than official publications portrayed it to be, and included DNA harvested from a cadaver, and from one of the project’s own scientists. The records, along with interviews with many of the project’s central figures and with experts in law and bioethics, paint a picture in which high-ranking project officials — constrained by their own experimental protocols and accelerated timelines — veered from their guiding principles and pushed the boundaries of informed consent.

“We were panicking,” recalled Aristides Patrinos, who led the Department of Energy’s efforts in the Human Genome Project and, along with National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis Collins, helped steer the project to completion. “So a lot of these issues were not front and center. That’s no excuse, but it was a reason. We were under a lot of pressure to make sure we finished by the time we finished.”

Steven Cslabresi:

Judge Cannon’s opinion shows that each Section of the U.S. Code, which Smith relied on, neither delegates to the Attorney General the power two create inferior offices, nor does it create the office of the Special Counsel. Her argument is irrefutable. I have yet to read a response to her opinion that is remotely as persuasive as the opinion itself.

Judge Cannon also discusses, but does not decide whether an office like the office of Special Counsel, if it existed, would be a Principle or Inferior Office for Appointments Clause purposes. Her discussion of that issue is good as any judicial opinion since one written by Justice David Souter concurring in Edmond v. United States, 520 U.S. 651 (1997).

In addition, Judge Cannon discusses what I think is a very serious Appropriations Power issue in the case. She quite rightly concludes that the Justice Department should lose on both grounds, but she correctly relies only on the Inferior Office Appointments Clause and the statutory arguments before her as deciding the case.

Arash Abizadeh

If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.

The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.

Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn’t subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.

The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d had enough, and resigned en masse.

Mistral:

Today, we are excited to release Mistral NeMo, a 12B model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Mistral NeMo offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. Its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category. As it relies on standard architecture, Mistral NeMo is easy to use and a drop-in replacement in any system using Mistral 7B.

We have released pre-trained base and instruction-tuned checkpoints checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license to promote adoption for researchers and enterprises. Mistral NeMo was trained with quantisation awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss.

Zack Whittaker:

The U.S. Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, TechCrunch has found.

On Wednesday, the USPS said it addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming that it was “unaware” of it.

TechCrunch found USPS was sharing customers’ information by way of hidden data-collecting code (also known as tracking pixels) used across its website. Tech and advertising companies create this kind of code to collect information about the user — such as which pages they visit — every time a webpage containing the code loads in the customer’s browser. 

In the case of USPS, some of that collected data included the postal addresses of logged-in USPS Informed Delivery customers, who use the service to see photos of their incoming mail before it arrives.

Arthur Turrell:

There have been a series of sometimes jaw-dropping developments in data science in the last few years, with large language models by far the most prominent (and with good reason). But another story has been the huge explosion in time series packages.

Were you really a tech firm circa 2020–2023 if you didn’t release your own time series package? Looking at what’s available and from who, maybe not: Facebook/Meta got the ball rolling with Prophet, but since then we’ve seen ones from Uber, LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, and Meta again. And it’s not hard to see why time series forecasting might be so valuable at these digital-first, data-rich firms. Just as with data orchestration tools, everyone else is seeing some benefit from their labours.

In the rest of this post, we’ll look at the new(ish) time series packages that are around, who built them, and what they might be good for.

Benjamin Q. Huynh, PhD; Elizabeth T. Chin, PhD; Mathew V. Kiang, ScD

Question  What is the extent and impact of lead-contaminated drinking water in Chicago, Illinois?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study, an estimated 68% of children younger than 6 years in Chicago are exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water, with 19% of affected children using unfiltered tap water as their primary drinking water source. Predominantly Black and Hispanic blocks were disproportionately less likely to be tested for lead yet disproportionately exposed to contaminated drinking water.

Meaning  Childhood lead exposure from drinking water is widespread in Chicago, with racial inequities in both testing rates and exposure levels.

Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng, Katie Van Koevering

In this paper, we study the highly competitive arena of baby naming. Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a name based solely on its uniquness), we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world. We then extend our investigation with numerical experiments, as well as analysis of large language model tools. We conclude by discussing avenues for future research.

The Economist:

On paper, Mercia School in the north of England is a forbidding and unfashionable place. Teachers focus unrelentingly on “the acquisition of knowledge”, if its intimidating website is any guide. Lessons are “didactic”, delivered to pupils sitting in orderly rows. Youngsters form lines in the playground before processing silently into class. Failure to bring a pen can earn a demerit. Chatting in the corridors is banned.

Yet on a cloudy morning in May the secondary school in Sheffield is a far cheerier place than its pen portrait suggests. In its airy dinner hall 12-year-olds in PE kit prepare to tackle an orienteering course set across school grounds. During a noisy breaktime, two youngsters explain how they won the badges that hang in thick bunches from their lapels (for good attendance, speaking up in class and the like). The school is oversubscribed, absence rates are low and expulsions rare, says Dean Webster, its headteacher. Last year it ranked third in England for how much progress children make between the ages of 11 and 16. For boosting disadvantaged youngsters, it came top.

Andrej Karpathy:

How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects,

eurekalabs.ai

Our first product will be the world’s obviously best AI course, LLM101n. This is an undergraduate-level class that guides the student through training their own AI, very similar to a smaller version of the AI Teaching Assistant itself. The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together.

Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential. What would you like to learn?

Martin Gurri:

Thanks to a few very big, very lucky breaks, this human weathervane eventually found himself in the White House. Just a few years later, however, President Biden’s luck looks to be running out. A disastrous performance in last month’s presidential debate pulled back the curtain, in the style of The Wizard of Oz, to reveal the president as the sad, confused old man most of us already knew him to be. Then the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and the former president’s courageous reaction in the moments following the incident, cast Biden’s shortcomings and infirmities in an even more glaring contrast. Biden is now increasingly alone, abandoned by the very establishment that created him. For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived. 

Lucas Robinson:

At a crossroads in the struggle to balance Madison’s budget, the city will either rely on $22 million from a property tax referendum or $6 million in cuts to city services, according to two versions of a five-year budget unveiled by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.

Rhodes-Conway is touting the referendum plan as a long-term fix to the city’s budget, which has faced a mismatch between revenue and spending for over decade amid declining support from the state and limits in state law on how it can raise money.

Both versions of the five-year budget count on raising millions from new charges billed to residents every month to further close the budget gap. Twenty-five million dollars from the city’s reserves, or so-called “rainy day fund,” will be spent by 2030 under the plans, though a referendum could reduce the need to dip into that fund. Ongoing budget efficiency measures will make up what’s left of the gap in both versions of the budget.

Lucas Robinson:

At a crossroads in the struggle to balance Madison’s budget, the city will either rely on $22 million from a property tax referendum or $6 million in cuts to city services, according to two versions of a five-year budget unveiled by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.

Rhodes-Conway is touting the referendum plan as a long-term fix to the city’s budget, which has faced a mismatch between revenue and spending for over decade amid declining support from the state and limits in state law on how it can raise money.

Both versions of the five-year budget count on raising millions from new charges billed to residents every month to further close the budget gap. Twenty-five million dollars from the city’s reserves, or so-called “rainy day fund,” will be spent by 2030 under the plans, though a referendum could reduce the need to dip into that fund. Ongoing budget efficiency measures will make up what’s left of the gap in both versions of the budget.

Tyler Cowen:

Clearly it has happened, and it has been accelerated and publicized by the Biden failings and the attempted Trump assassination.  But it was already underway.  If you need a single, unambiguous sign of it, I would cite MSNBC pulling off Morning Joe for a morning, for fear they would say something nasty about Trump.

Another way to put it is that Trump was a highly vulnerable, defeated President, facing numerous legal charges and indeed an actual felony conviction.  Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next election.  In conceptual terms, how exactly did that happen?

I had been thinking  it would be a good cognitive test to ask people why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intelligence, insight, and intellectual honesty.

For instance, I used to read people arguing “Trump is popular because of racism,” but now that view is pretty clearly refuted, even if you think (as I do) that racism has some marginal impact on his support.  Or other people have attributed the development to “polarization.”  Whether or not you agree with the polarization thesis, it begs the question here, as we could be polarized with Trump as a big underdog.

In any case, thought I should start this process by offering my answers.  Here they are, in a series of bullet points:

By Frederick M. Hess | Michael Brickman

In 2022, Cardona’s team broke with more than two decades of careful efforts to keep the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at arm’s length from politics, using the NAEP release as a chance to let political appointees tout Biden’s spending proposals and distribute administration talking points. He has pushed to cut funding for charter schools while denouncing Republican efforts to expand school choice as an effort to “attack our schools” and “privatize education.”

You might think that Cardona, responsible for the disastrous failure to execute the Congressionally-mandated revamp of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), would focus on quietly cleaning up that mess. At a minimum, you might think that a man who oversaw the biggest debacle in his Department’s history would be leery of impugning those who argue his Department should do only what Congress has actually empowered it to do. You’d be wrong. 

Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, put it well, telling us:

Andy Welch:

Of course, free-range parenting does rather fit in with perceptions outsiders often have about Scandinavian people. Look at them all, with their hygge, and their sky-high living standards, low crime rates, enviable maternity and paternity rights and exceptional aesthetics. Norway is indeed seventh on the World Happiness Report. It also has the world’s 10th highest GDP, along with the world’s largest wealth fund and one of the world’s lowest crime rates. But this is a philosophy that runs deeper than Norway’s pockets, and it’s been around far longer than the country’s well-funded public services have.

There’s evidence that Viking children as far back as the ninth century were raised in a relatively similar way: treated as adults and expected to chip in with whatever work needed to be done. It’s a way of life, deeply ingrained to the point that most Norwegians I’ve spoken to can’t understand either the fascination with their method, or why anyone would do it differently.

This more nuanced modern take – more conversations about feelings, less pillaging – rose to prominence in the aftermath of the second world war, says Willy-Tore Mørch, emeritus professor in children’s mental health at the University of Tromsø. Much of the country’s infrastructure had been devastated by the years of Nazi occupation. Rising to the challenge, the newly formed Labour government believed that all Norwegians should contribute to the rebuilding – children included.

“The children had to be strong and hardened, and trained to be independent and loyal,” says Mørch. “Perhaps most parents today are not aware of this history, but building trust between parents and children remains a basic relational quality in modern Norwegian child-raising.”

Lonni Besançon, Guillaume Cabanac and Thierry Viéville

A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology articleby our team of academic sleuths – which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician – has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.

Hidden manipulation

People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented. 

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article’s text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI – a unique identifier for each scientific publication. 

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science. 

However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles’ metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

Matt Taibbi:

So instead of if you search for let’s just say Trotskyism. Instead of getting the world’s leading Trotskyist website, which is the World Socialist Website, you will get it like a New York Times story about Trotskyism instead.

They want to push you towards the “authoritative” source. But that’s subjective and again it’s hierarchical and it’s away from the spirit of how we would like to ingest information which is just let’s see all of it and make our own decision.”

Sasha Laundy:

I’m going to define “technical” skills and then make the case that they’re everywhere and severely underrated. Handwaving over them allows us to dismiss the work of wide swaths of the population. And noticing them will light up your life and unlock new worlds. 

❧

The specific moment that forever changed how I saw this came right at the end of the movie Free Solo. It’s about the first person to climb up El Capitan without any kind of rope or safety device. As the credits rolled, my friend Sam said something offhand like “it was so cool to see the technical details.”

Mila Koumpilova:

But in a $9.9 billion proposed budget for next year released this week, Chicago Public Schools has avoided this approach. The district increased funding at charter schools by about 2.5% — even as some charters with shrinking enrollments are in line for steep cuts in the new budget blueprint.

This year, CPS overhauled budgeting for traditional campuses to deemphasize enrollment size and prioritize student needs. But for now, the district is sticking with so-called student-based budgeting for charters, which is more closely tied to enrollment; CPS says state requirements make it trickier to change budgeting for charter campuses. Yet as the district prepares a strategic plan to revitalize neighborhood schools, anxiety about how that vision will impact charters persists.

With roughly 55,000 students, charters serve about a fifth of Chicago’s public school student population. State law requires districts to provide charter schools money proportionate to what it spends at district-run campuses.

On a per-pupil basis, proposed funding for Chicago charters in the budget released this week grew less than 1% over last year, with average spending at about $16,200 per pupil, according to a Chalkbeat analysis.

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ confidence in the police increased eight percentage points over the past year to 51%, the largest year-over-year change in public perceptions of 17 major U.S. institutions measured in Gallup’s annual update. The slim majority of U.S. adults who express confidence in the police includes 25% who say they have “a great deal” and 26% “quite a lot.”

Gallup first measured confidence in the police in 1993. Between then and 2019, a majority of Americans expressed high confidence in the institution, including a record high of 64% in 2004. Faith in the police fell in 2020 to 48%after George Floyd was murdered while in police custody. After increasing to 51% in 2021, confidence in the police dropped again in 2022 and dipped further last year, to a record low of 43%.

Over the past year, confidence in the police has risen among most major demographic subgroups of Americans, particularly three that previously expressed lower levels of confidence in the police: those aged 18 to 34, people of color and political independents.

Leopoldoff

This article examines a case of intelligence testing conducted in the mid-1920s, while considering the broader political and scientific context of Soviet life. Guided by questions about the status and influence of mental measurement in Russian society, previously and after the revolution, as well as asking about the main actors in the fields linked to testing, such as psychology, pedagogy, and pedology, during this tumultuous period. To answer these questions, journals and difficult-to-access archival sources were used, which provided evidence regarding the enthusiasm psychological testing had on scholars in the 1920s and the institutional support they received for their surveys. The article offers some hints concerning why this was so and why this situation changed completely a decade later.

Siobhan Merlo

Australian students’ results on international tests of mathematics (TIMMS) and numeracy (PISA) lag behind many comparable countries and have stagnated or declined compared to previous years. Around two-thirds of Australian Years 4 and 8 school students achieved the TIMMS 2019 National Proficient Standard — compared to 92-96% of students from highest ranking countries including Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan (Thomson et al, 2020). Australian 15-year-olds scored around three years behind Singapore on the PISA test in 2022, with around half achieving the national proficiency standard (OECD 2022).

Low mathematics achievement in standardised testing has real consequences for what students know and can do. For instance, one respondent in the 2021 Knowledge and Skills Gap survey of 164 Years 7-10 teachers reported the following:

“Students are coming from primary school without fundamentals such as knowing their multiplication tables. They have no concept of number and reasonableness of results. They do not predict answers through estimation to understand the reasonableness of ‘calculator’ answers.” (Walker, 2021 p.5)

Policy responses to address disappointing educational outcomes have enjoyed limited overall success. For instance, strategies ordained by the landmark Gonski Review, such as increasing teacher-to-student ratios and channelling funding towards disadvantaged groups, are not currently yielding intended outcomes (Australian Financial Review, September 14, 2022 p.2).

Jessie Van Berkel:

Investigators are examining potential Medicaid fraud among Minnesota autism services, and state lawmakers say they will consider licensing the providers, whose numbers have increased dramatically across the state.

The Minnesota Department of Human Services has 15 active investigations into organizations or individuals providing certain autism services and has closed 10 other cases, the agency told the Star Tribune. The investigations were first reported by the the Reformer,which wrote last month that the FBI is looking into fraud by autism service providers.

Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday that he’s “not aware” of an FBI investigation, but is concerned about the allegations of fraud.

Officials with DHS were not available for an interview Wednesday, but the department issued a statement saying: “Early identification and access to services are life-changing for people with autism — especially children. That’s why it’s so important to make sure every dollar spent on services is accounted for.”

Paul Sutter:

To makes matters worse, many of the software codes used in science are not publicly available. I’ll say this again because it’s kind of wild to even contemplate: there are millions of papers published every year that rely on computer software to make the results happen, and that software is not available for other scientists to scrutinize to see if it’s legit or not. We simply have to trust it, but the word “trust” is very near the bottom of the scientist’s priority list.

Why don’t scientists make their code available? It boils down to the same reason that scientists don’t do many things that would improve the process of science: there’s no incentive. In this case, you don’t get any h-index points for releasing your code on a website. You only get them for publishing papers.

This infinitely agitates me when I peer-review papers. How am I supposed to judge the correctness of an article if I can’t see the entire process? What’s the point of searching for fraud when the computer code that’s sitting behind the published result can be shaped and molded to give any result you want, and nobody will be the wiser?

Steven Nelson:

A damning new congressional report shows how a little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending supported efforts to defund news outlets and platforms including The Post — at points urging members to use a blacklist compiled by a shadowy government-funded group that purports to guard news consumers against “misinformation.”

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which reps 150 of the world’s top companies — including ExxonMobil, GM, General Mills, McDonald’s, Visa, SC Johnson and Walmart — and 60 ad associations sought to squelch online free speech through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, the House Judiciary Committee found in an interim report released Wednesday.

“The extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms,” the Republican-led panel said in its 39-page report based on internal organizational records.

John Kass:

Obama, The Silky himself, the Mozart of the American Deep State, the guy who cut his political teeth backstabbing rivals in the political sewers of Chicago.

He orchestrated both of these coups. And now he’s pushing Biden off the board in plain view.

It started with the  coup hatched in the Oval Office against Republican President-elect Donald J. Trump. It was it was “by the book.” Have you forgotten?

On Jan. 5, 2017,with Obama World in panic after Trump shocked the political establishment by defeating Hillary Clinton for the presidency, Obama convened a White House meeting of his Deep State  commanders.  They had to stop Trump. John Brennan of Obama’s CIA was at that meeting, and then Vice President Biden. James Comey, then of the FBI, was there, as were national security adviser Susan Rice (who lied for the Obama White House about the Benghazi disaster) and other intelligence bosses.

What followed?

Rachel Louise Snyder:

On that day in 1985, I became one in a population of children who are still far less acknowledged than their brilliant counterparts, those who garner headlines for their perfect G.P.A.s, their athletic prowess, their unflagging service to the community. Kids like me don’t get headlines unless they are part of the crime blotter or they take their own lives. The number of young high school dropouts has been slowly falling with time, but there are still around two million out there. I think I know some of what they’re going through: That day in 1985, I felt unseen, forgotten before I’d even begun to beanything at all.

Christopher Rufo:

Journalism, in part, is the work of turning up stones. Sometimes a reporter finds nothing underneath. Other times, he uncovers shock, scandal, or corruption.

An entire twentieth-century lore, beginning with The Jungle and culminating in the Watergate reporting, portrays the reporter as a man who stands against the corruption of institutions. But as the Left, which invented muckraking, has consolidated its power over those same institutions, the story has been recast.

Now, reporters for prestige publications defend, rather than interrogate, the organs of power. They seek to propagate official narratives and to discredit those who would question them. The establishment’s watchdogs have become its guard dogs.

I have observed this dynamic in recent months regarding academic plagiarism. I have been one of a handful of reporters, including Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, and Luke Rosiak, who flipped the rock in academia and discovered widespread fraud, plagiarism, and dishonesty. We exposed the president of Harvard, several DEI administrators, and professors in the grievance disciplines.

——-

It’s true: by failing to plagiarize, Harvard’s white African-American studies professor, @Jenniferhochsc2, is contributing to racial disparities in plagiarism. She is the new face of white supremacy.

Sara Randazzo:

Generative artificial intelligence is spilling into the classroom—and not just from students looking for shortcuts.

Teachers are embracing new AI grading tools, saying the programs let them give students faster feedback and more chances to practice. Used properly, teachers say, AI helpers can provide consistency and remove bias from assessments of student work—although not everyone trusts AI to give out grades.

Education-focused AI startups tend to offer grading in writing-heavy disciplines like English and history, along with some in math and science. These bots generate a numeric score and offer up critiques on topic sentences, persuasive arguments and other elements. Teachers can choose to use the AI feedback as a guide, or pass the feedback directly to students. They say they typically tell parents and students when they use the programs.

Khaleda Rahman

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has almost doubled its spending per student over the past decade, but test scores are dropping.

The district is spending $29,028 per student in the current school year—a 97 percent increase since 2012, according to a recent analysis by Illinois Policy.

The analysis, using data from the Illinois State Board of Education about the 2022-23 school year, found proficiency in math has dropped by 78 percent since then, while proficiency in reading has declined by 63 percent.

It comes as students across the country are struggling to make up for COVID-19 losses. Nationally, they have recovered one-third of what they lost in math and one-quarter of the losses in reading, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard, an analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.

Georgia Howe

Since I began covering the spread of critical race theory into public school curriculum, I’ve received one question more than any other: what concrete actions should we be taking to get this stuff out of kids’ classrooms? 

This morning, I spoke to Vicki Manning, school board member with the Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS). Vickie has been on the frontlines of the battle against CRT in her district for the past 7 months. Here’s her advice: 

Show Up

First and foremost, Vickie urges parents (and concerned citizens) to attend local school board meetings. “Show up, speak up, and write to the board”, Vickie suggests. Showing up in person is best (or via zoom when necessary), but letters and emails go a long way. In terms of swaying the school board, there is power in numbers. 

According to Vickie there is reason to be hopeful. In her experience, many parents in her purple district are concerned and willing to get involved. She believes the wave of parent resistance to critical race theory is poised to grow in other districts as well. 

An easy first step is contacting your local school board to ask their stance on critical race theory and what policies, if any, are in place to ensure students are protected from ideological indoctrination at school.