Wall Street Journal:

Should parents be held criminally liable if a child goes on a shooting spree with a gun from the home? That question is now in sharp public relief with the indictments this week after 14-year-old Colt Gray murdered two students and two adults at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga.

The U.S. has been mired for decades in a partisan gun debate that has stymied practical answers for school shootings. The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, and gun control has become a political and practical dead end.

But Americans are understandably frustrated, angry and searching for other ways to prevent mass murder, especially against children in schools. Holding parents criminally responsible for abuses by their children may make sense when the facts of a case demonstrate negligence or aiding or abetting the child’s commission of a crime.

Georgia authorities clearly feel they have enough facts to warrant a charge against Colin Gray. Colt and his father were interviewed by police in 2023 after the FBI received anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting” on the social-media platform Discord.

Clare Ansberry:

There are still plenty of grandparents—about 67 million Americans as of 2021. But the percentage of older parents without grandchildren is accelerating, says Krista Westrick-Payne, assistant director at the Bowling Green center. Of American parents between the ages of 50 and 90, some 35% don’t have grandkids. In 2018, that share was 30%.

Fewer babies were born in the U.S. in 2023 than any year since 1979, according to federal data. Reasons vary. Some young adults, juggling housing costs and student debt, don’t see how they can afford child care, or don’t see kids as compatible with their career aims. Others simply don’t want children, or are spooked by political divisiveness, climate change and rising expectations of parenthood.

Anna Stokke:

Unfortunately, illiteracy remains largely hidden and its impact on our society largely underappreciated. I agree that more needs to be done to support adult education.

But we should also ask ourselves how so many adults, who were once children, did not learn to read at elementary or middle school in Manitoba.

Without understanding these factors, we risk dumping more funds into ineffective approaches, programs and training, as well as contributing to the likely growing number of adults requiring literacy education.

There is currently a Manitoba Human Rights inquiry being conducted into reading instruction in Manitoba public schools.

Like similar investigations in Saskatchewan and Ontario, it will likely find schools do not use evidence-based approaches to teaching children to read.

Unfortunately, Manitoba Education has already indicated it does not accept the Ontario report, as outlined by Maggie Macintosh (Gaps in province’s literacy education probed, Feb. 23, 2023).

Somewhat comically, the Ontario report indicated bureaucrats would resist change.

Jim Silver cites that 192,000 Manitoba adults have literacy levels that are so low they are unable to participate in society. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding!

Dr. Natalie Riediger

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

The Economist:

nqts’ salaries were raised to £30,000 ($39,400) last year, and will increase by 5.5% this month. But teachers will still be paid less in real terms than in 2010 (see chart) and less than many of their peers in other rich countries. On average teachers work six hours longer each week than other graduates during term time, although holiday and pension benefits are more generous. Teachers have had to tackle a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour after covid-19 lockdowns: suspensions have doubled compared with the pre-pandemic average. And flexible working, one of the principal benefits of the pandemic, has passed teachers by: schooling children remains an in-person job.

Robert Pondiscio

US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona this week embarked on a five-state bus tour to “fight for public education.” His campaign, amplified on social media, is ostensibly to rally support for traditional public schools. However, this “fight” is built on two flawed assumptions that, when scrutinized, reveal both the limitations of Cardona’s vision and an overtly political agenda. What Cardona is really fighting for is Kamala Harris’ White House bid (three of the five states on the tour are swing states critical to Democrats’ chances in November) and to enshrine in voters’ minds a narrow and impoverished view of public education strictly limited to traditional, district-run schools—a view that is already becoming an anachronism as new models and mechanisms for educating America’s children continue to gain traction post-Covid.

Cardona, who was Connecticut’s education commissioner before he was plucked from obscurity and named Education Secretary by President Biden, tweeted earlier this week that public schools are a “powerful engine driving the American Dream.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? This homily suggests that public schools are an equalizing force, particularly for low-income students and students of color. The reality has never matched the rhetoric: Despite decades of reform efforts, substantial public investment, and increased staffing levels, outcomes in public schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities, have barely budged in half a century, leaving many students ill-prepared for college or the workforce.

David Blaska:

As the Chief of Police in Madison, I am deeply concerned about the safety of our students in the wake of the most recent school shooting in Georgia. It is a tragic reminder of the harsh reality that we live in a world where school shootings have become all too common. 

Yesterday’s tragic incident marks over 40 school shootings nationwide in just over one month of education. We cannot afford to be complacent, nor can we allow our biases or political beliefs to oppose good common sense when it comes to the safety of our children.

Quinton Klabon:

NEW WISCONSIN STATE TEST SCORE STANDARDS
“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT.

Yes, parents across Wisconsin will hear their children are “Meeting Standards,” only to have multiple UW schools reject them in senior year.

Let’s support educators and kids striving for better.

Related: “Median number of years of business experience are ZERO”

More:

If WI DPI would like to improve mental health perhaps they should get serious about literacy! Most WI schools have used 3 cueing which has been outlawed for the harm it does- but DPI continues to cite resources using 3 cueing in guidance documents for the weakest readers.

AJ Bayatpour

Wisconsin is changing its standardized test: Cut scores are lower, and the terminology is different.

We asked former state supt. @GovEvers about the changes.

“I don’t think we should be lowering them, but the fact of the matter is that’s a DPI issue, not a governor’s issue”

Will Flanders:

Even Gov Evers disagrees with DPI changing the cut points for the Forward Exam/ACT. The legislature must rein in this unilateral DPI power next session.

And.

Dave Zweifel:

I remember writing a column a couple of years after the pool opened chiding a group of Madison alders who, during budget deliberations, were upset that the pool’s admission charges didn’t cover 100% of its annual costs. My column declared that a city that had just been given a first-class swimming pool for a paltry $500,000 of taxpayer money could afford to subsidize a few pennies of the kids’ admission fees.

The Goodman brothers called me the next day to say thanks. That was their sentiments, exactly.

If Madison has any respect for the two brothers who have contributed so mightily to better all our lives, it will stop using the pool as a pawn in its budget crisis.

It’s closed for the season now, but thousands of children learned how to swim, how to compete or just had fun or had something to do during the long, hot summer. If we can’t afford that, levy limits or not, we should be ashamed.

The strings program was used in this way over the years, as well.

Notes and links on the well funded Madison School District’s $607,000,000 November tax & $pending increase referendum along with the City of Madison’s vote on the same.

Joshua Cowen:

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

Christina Buttons

Progressives have labeled Tim Walz a “champion of children,” citing policies he enacted as governor of Minnesota. Those policies, however, have endangered some of the state’s most vulnerable kids.

In May, Walz signed into law the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, the most radical child-welfare-reform bill in the country. Inspired by activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system, the new law makes it harder to remove black or other “disproportionately represented” children from homes where they may have been neglected or abused. While supporters have argued that the law supports children’s welfare, in reality, it keeps black and minority kids in unsafe environments in the name of racial equity.

Activists seeking to reform Minnesota’s child-welfare system had long cited its racial disparities. Black children (including those of mixed race) make up 26.9 percent of the state’s child-protection cases (blacks constitute 11 percent of the state’s population overall); white children account for slightly less than half of all cases, though whites account for nearly 75 percent of the population. Reformers present these imbalances as evidence of racial bias, but black children nationally are three times more likely to die of suspected abuse or neglect than are white children.

Even before the passage of the law, Minnesota child-welfare professionals were more likely to leave black children in dangerous environments. According to a report by Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota, black children made up 26.1 percent of all child-maltreatment deaths between January 2015 and April 2022, well outpacing blacks’ share of the state population. The report’s authors note that “counties may have left Black children in high risk settings more frequently and for longer periods than children of other races and ethnicities.”

YLE:

Use of air purifiers at two daycare centres in Helsinki led to a reduction in illnesses and absences among children and staff, according to preliminary findings of a new study led by E3 Pandemic Response.

Air purifiers of various sizes and types were placed in two of the city’s daycare centres during cold and flu seasons.

The initial results from the first year of research are promising, according to researcher Enni Sanmark, from HUS Helsinki University Hospital.

“Children were clearly less sick in daycare centres where air purification devices were used — down by around 30 percent,” Sanmark explained.

The air purifiers were changed at two daycare centres serving as a control in the experiment, in order to rule out the effect that possible epidemic fluctuations could have on the results. The study’s next phase will continue until April.

Zvi:

1. What makes someone a better parent? Haidt says right wingers and religious folks make better parents, citing that they are increasingly happier and more rooted in communities, liberal kids are more depressed and more vulnerable to phones. But while we should and do care a lot about it, being a good parent is not primarily about whether your kids are happy now. There are realistic margins where it is highly correct to make kids less happy now to give them better futures, and instill in them better skills, values and habits.
2. (0:01:20) Tyler says then, why not be a right winger, isn’t this the most important thing? Haidt says no, values do not work that way, you don’t get to simply adapt the ones with better outcomes. He is right. Haidt will note later he is now a centrist, seeing both extremes as too illiberal, which he largely attributes to social media. Also being sufficiently conscious of the need for community and the dangers of phones and dangers of identitarianism (which he discusses later) can plausibly screen off the related mechanisms.
3. (0:02:00) Tyler asks who Haidt has met who is most wise, Haidt names two and finds many role models for wisdom. I notice that I find the opposite. I know plenty of very high intelligence (INT) people but find it hard to name very high wisdom (WIS) people I have met. Who is the wise man among us? Perhaps my standards are wrong.
4. (03:15) Asked about Covid reactions, Haidt attributes the right-wing reaction to concerns about government control rather than purity, notes purity can also be high on the left with spirituality and yoga. I notice he does not mention wokeness or cancel culture as having a strong purity component, despite describing what is happening on campus as psychologically akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
5. (07:30) Haidt values the Bible because of the need of every culture to have shared stories and reference points, comparing it to Homer and the Greek myths for ancient Greece and Rome. I agree that we need these shared reference points, and I increasingly worry about the fragmentation there, not only away from the Bible but also away from sharing popular culture stories as well, if we also increasingly don’t watch the same TV shows or movies or even play similar video games. If the AI is making up stories and games for you, then they will be different from someone else’s stories and games. Haidt says Babel is the Bible story he gets the most from, whereas he doesn’t get Job. I can guess what he draws from Babel but I think I got those bits from elsewhere.
6. (09:00) Haidt opposes identitarianism in the sense of putting identity first as an analytical lens, and especially orienting others in this way, often in a mandatory way. He also warns of monomania, a focus on one thing, and notices that it seems rather terrible to teach young people that life is centrally about ranking people according to how good the various races are, no matter which races are put on top.
7. (11:00) Tyler asks about ‘the disability concept,’ notes that people with say Tourette Syndrome do not obviously have worse outcomes, so do we ‘need some kind of identitarian movement’ to avoid this being called inferior, as ‘both the left and the right go along with this’? Should we be outraged? That… doesn’t seem like what is going on at all, to me? I would ask, don’t we already have such a movement, and isn’t its core strategy to label those who disagree with them or fail to ensure equality of their outcomes as exhibiting ableism? And is not this strategy sufficiently effective that one could reasonably worry about the consequences of saying various things in response? Haidt instead responds that identitarian political movements organizing for politics is fine, it just doesn’t belong in a classroom, citing past rights movements. And he asks, does turning up your identity in the sense of ‘I am a person with ADHD’ lead to better outcomes? He says we don’t know, but that it is ancient wisdom that it is our interpretation of things that upsets us, that such thinking is probably bad for you but he could be wrong. Haidt strikes me as someone who feels unable to speak their mind on this, who is choosing his words carefully and out of fear.
8. (13:10) Tyler asks, why won’t AI soon solve the screen time problem? The AI agent will process the information and then talk to you. Skipping ahead first to his next question, he asks (in a clearly actually curious tone) “Screen time seems super inefficient. You spend all this time — why not just deal with the digest? Maybe in two, three years, AI cuts your screen time by 2X or 3X. Why is that so implausible?”
9. Haidt absolutely nails the response, pointing out that Tyler is plausibly the fastest and most prolific processor of information on the planet, and he is modeling screen time as someone attempting to efficiently process incoming information to complete a fixed series of tasks. If AI can process information and help you complete those tasks twice as fast, then you could finish your screen tasks in half the time.
10. For Tyler specifically, I buy that this is a lot of what he does with screens, although even then I would ask whether he would want an AI to speed up his watching of movies or NBA games. But let’s exclude those cases from the analysis, since the concern is about phones, and say that mundane AI doubles Tyler’s productivity in using screens to process information and complete tasks. What will happen to Tyler? Well, obviously, he will follow the supply and demand curves, and respond to decreased cost of information by increasing his consumption of information and resulting completion of tasks. It is entirely non-obvious that we should expect this to involve less time on screens, especially if we should effectively include ‘talking to an AI to complete tasks and seek information’ as part of screen time.
11. When thinking about my own consumption, and wow do I have a lot of screen time, I would first strongly say that I think all my interactions with AI should effectively count as screen time. I almost never talk to the AI with voice rather than text, better tech does not seem like it would change that so much, and if I did it would not be functionally different. I also notice that over time, as the efficiency of screens has gone up, my time allocation to screens as responded by rising, not by falling. The ability to use LLMs has definitely net increased my screen time so far. I can imagine ways to reverse this trend, using AI to arrange to be more social and interact more with the world, but at minimum that seems like it requires an active effort, and it does not seem like the way to bet.
12. Tyler later emphasizes once again converting to spoken word. That’s worse, you do get how that’s worse? Why would we want to lower the bandwidth, even if you like voice interactions? Even if it wasn’t worse, why the repeated emphasis on earbuds and voice? That is all still ‘screen time’ for all practical purposes, and one could see that as being even more of a steady stream of interruption.
13. For an average person, or an average child, the picture here looks gloomier still, to me. Time spent on television or watching videos or playing games will be made more addictive and to involve better selection via AI, and improve in quality in various senses, but that should tend to increase rather than decrease consumption. A better AI for TikTok that finds better matches to what you want is not going to reduce time on TikTok. Yes, we can get the same level of informed or handle the same number of emails in less time in that future, but our requirements and usage will expand to match. Historical parallels suggest the same, as screens improve we consume more screen time not less. So the question here is whether the new uses are transformative of our ‘screen time’ experience such that they are positive uses of time, especially for children?
14. Returning back to the first question here, Haidt says the primary problem with screens is opportunity cost of time, that they are experience blockers, and half his book is about the importance of play. Kids used to play for hours a day, even though that involved ‘real danger,’ and now they do not do that. Yet we refuse to let kids be kids, do not permit them to go play unsupervised, often this is even illegal. I see this as the best counter-argument against ‘the phones did it,’ if the kids wouldn’t be allowed to play anyway then of course they will be on their phones and computers and televisions. He also points out a bit later that video games used to be scarce and physical enough to encourage playing with friends and being somewhat social, and now you play alone or online (online can still be socially valuable, but is even at its best missing key elements.) AI, Haidt says, is not going to return children to a play-based childhood, it is not going to get you to spend time with friends.
15. Could AI instead be implemented in ways that simulate true play, that involve physical activity, that gives you virtual people to interact with that challenge you and train your social skills and other talents? That is definitely technologically feasible if we want it enough. But will the market give that to us, in practice? Will we choose to consume it? What we have seen so far should make us highly skeptical.
16. Haidt agrees with that prediction: “In theory, I’m sure you’re going to say, “Well, why can’t we just train an AI friend to be like a real friend and get in fights with you sometimes?” Maybe in theory that’s possible, but that’s not what it’s going to be. It’s going to be market-driven. It’s going to be friends and lovers who are incredibly great for you. You never have to adjust to them. You never have to learn how to deal with difficult people, and it’s going to be a complete disaster for human development.”
17. (17:00) Tyler then responds with a statement that I think generalizes a lot of his perspective on so many things: “Complete disaster strikes me as too strong a term for something that hasn’t happened yet. I think you’re much too confident about that.”
18. I do actually think Haidt is overconfident here, if we confine to the kind of mundane AI (e.g. GPT-5-style) that is under discussion here, with an otherwise untransformed world. But I see the bolded sentence and paraphrases of it often used, by Tyler and by others, to dismiss concerns about future outcomes, in various ways, and especially to dismiss existential risks. If it has not happened yet, this reasoning goes, then how do you know what the consequences would be? How would you even dare to say such a thing is a plausible outcome requiring us to pay real costs to try and prevent it? And my answer is, again and again, that sometimes and in some ways you should be highly uncertain about future outcomes, especially when you lack parallels, but that one still has to use reason and consider how things might work and form probability estimates and not make excuses to look away.
19. There are indeed many things that have not happened yet, that I am confident would be ‘a complete disaster’ if they did happen, or that were clearly highly predictable ‘complete disasters’ before they happened. A large asteroid impact. A widescale global thermonuclear war and many other wars too. A pandemic, consider Covid predictions in January 2020. Various political proposals, especially for redistributions of wealth or widescale political violence. Getting rid of gifted and talented education programs and magnet schools, or not teaching kids advanced skills in the name of ‘equity,’ or many other educational reform proposals. Having the As play three years in a minor league ballpark in Sacramento. The correct response to a large percentage of movie previews. Etc.
20. (17:30) Haidt then responds a different way: “What do you mean it hasn’t happened yet?” And Tyler clarifies the real question, which is: If screens are making children so miserable, why won’t they use new AI innovations to fix that? Why are they so ‘failing to maximize’? To which the obvious retort is, it is not like there are no alternatives or innovations available now, yet the kids remain miserable. They are not maximizing now. The ‘market’ here has failed us. Children, even more than adults, do not optimize their consumption basket taking into account all dynamics and long term effects, mostly they (as per our experiments, this is not speculation) end up using apps with Skinner boxes and delayed variable rewards and minimal active thinking and applications of various forms of social pressure and so on, in ways that have network effects and punish non-participants, in ways that in practice make people miserable. If you think ‘AI innovations’ will break us out of that, why do you think that? What would that look like?
21. (18:00) Hadit responds by highlighting the collective action aspect, pointing out the Leonardo Bursztyn paper that many kids would love if everyone else would quit too but otherwise they can’t afford to, even TikTok has strong network effects from shared cultural knowledge.
22. (20:15) Tyler challenges the importance of face-to-face interaction by noticing that the pandemic didn’t damage well-being for kids too much. Haidt points out that time spent with friends was dramatically down already by 2019, starting in 2012 with smartphones. Tyler counters that time in school is time with people and friends, so the decline in 2020 must have been dramatic, yet well-being problems did not change much.
23. I note that I would be prepared to defy the data (if I need to do that) that mental well-being did not decline a lot for kids, or for everyone else, in 2020 and 2021? I mean, what? Alternatively, we actually have an explanation for this, which is that schools are very bad for children’s mental health, as you would expect given what physically takes place there and how they treat children in most schools. So in 2020, yes we had less social interaction which was bad, but also we had less de facto torture of children via school, which was good, and it roughly cancelled out.
24. (22:15) Haidt points out time use studies don’t count school as time with friends, that we are talking time out of school. He also points out that time within school is now largely spent with phones, not interacting with friends or those physically next to you, most students check their texts during class. So to the extent that time used to count, now it mostly doesn’t. After 2012, academic achievement goes down, loneliness in school goes up.
25. I would say: You can sort of count time when you are forcibly imprisoned next to arbitrary other people as social time, but that stops working if you instead have the option to ignore them and be on your phone. Also we should totally ban phones in schools, as I’ll discuss later, how is this even a question if teachers are otherwise losing the fight on texting during class, if you don’t think we should ban the phones then at that point we should instead dismantle the schools, what is the point.
26. (24:15) Tyler reiterates that this was a rather strong natural experiment via shutting down schools. I agree, and I do think Tyler has a good point that school time is more social than time spent isolating in a pandemic even with ubiquitous phone use. My response to that is noted above: That the schools are toxic and depressing. Which Haidt points out. As he says, it’s not a clean experiment.
27. (25:30) Tyler asks why around 1900 European culture became more neurotic, depressive, negative and hostile, and then 1700s weirdness, and asks aren’t big shifts in mood often happening for small reasons, why attribute it to the phones? Why not simply say that big mood shifts we can’t explain are the norm?
28. But this isn’t history. It is now, and we can observe it in real time, and we indeed have a very good explanation of what happened. It is fine to say we do not today know what caused some previous shifts but why should we then feign ignorance over this one? Yes, in theory it could have been something else that happened at the same time, but so what? And even if it was, shouldn’t we assume that this something that changed was related to the change from phones or social media anyway? What changes in the early 2010s culture weren’t related to that?
29. Tyler keeps pounding on this later, so I want to say clearly: If there was an ‘exogenous mood shift’ in the 2010s, then all plausible candidates for it, including the rise of both wokeness and Trump and the loss of credibility of elites, are causally heavily intertwined with phones and social media. I also want to note that if everyone else is on their phones all the time, your social activities are already crippled by negative network effects, so you might be in a no-win situation, where not using phones would also cripple your social life.
30. (27:15) Haidt responds also that this happened very quickly, in a single year, what is an example of those that we can’t explain? Tyler says, they kill the British king, the French Revolution. But of course such events are usually a long time coming, and also it is not like we lack an explanation. We know many things that helped cause the French Revolution, this is not a mystery, and it is no mystery why we saw rapid changes once it started. I looked up English kings that got killed to see which ones would count here, which leaves Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Charles I. In three cases, it seems like clear reaction to a perception of tyrannical actions by the King, and in the fourth by a dynastic civil war? Is any of that a mystery?
31. (29:00) Tyler says there are two pieces of evidence that don’t seem to support Haidt’s story out of sample. First, he says, the impact is mostly the Anglosphere and Nordics, so why shouldn’t we say this is a ‘negative mood for reasons we mostly don’t understand’?
32. (30:00) Both agree girls are more mimetic, and this is one cause of them being impacted more by whatever is happening.
33. (30:30) Haidt says within the last two months he has learned that conservatives and religious people are protected, and that there is a huge religious impact here: “But that hides the fact that in Eastern Europe, which is getting more religious, the kids are actually healthier now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Whereas in Catholic Europe, they’re a little worse, and in Protestant Europe, they’re muchworse… It’s rather, everyone in the developed world, even in Eastern Europe, everyone — their kids are on phones, but the penetration, the intensity, was faster in the richest countries, the Anglos and the Scandinavians. That’s where people had the most independence and individualism, which was pretty conducive to happiness before the smartphone. But it now meant that these are the kids who get washed away when you get that rapid conversion to the phone-based childhood around 2012. What’s wrong with that explanation?”
34. It seems important to be precise here. What this is saying is that it is the combination of smartphones and individualism that causes the issue. It seems reasonable to have the problems arrive and have biggest impact in the Anglosphere first, where we are richer and most individualistic, and the internet is in our language and we adapt such things faster and have freer societies and more free market attitudes, and already had less emphasis on socialization in various forms including declines in religiosity. (I wrote most of that before hearing Haidt’s explanation, then moved it later.)
35. I do agree that this is still the strongest argument against attributing too much of this to phones alone, but similar concerns are being raised around the world, and I generally don’t see this point as being that strong at this point.
36. (31:40) Tyler notes that old Americans also seem grumpier. I would say that this is also plausibly downwind of phones and social media. Even if they are not using the devices directly, they see the impact in a rapidly changing culture, in transformed politics and the widespread assertiveness of wokeness, even if you think wokeness is correct and vital you know that putting it in the faces of old people is going to make them grumpier, whether you consider that a cost or a benefit is up to you.
37. (31:45) Tyler also notes that phone usage explains only a small part of variance in happiness outcomes. Haidt agrees that the overall correlation coefficient is only something like 0.04, but if you focus on social media and girls the correlation coefficient gets up to something like 0.17, that even the skeptics are at between 0.1 and 0.15 without splitting by gender. As noted above, a lot of the impacts here are cultural shifts and network effects, so the coefficient could easily fail to capture a lot of the impact here. We also have to ask what directions causation goes to what extent. It is plausible that being depressed causes you to spend either more time or less time on social media, I can think of mechanisms for both.
38. (34:10) Tyler asks, why no talk in your book about the extremely large benefits of social media? Which certainly sounds to me like ‘but you will be so much more cool if you smoke and drink with us cool kids,’ but yes, fair, and Haidt says tell me about it, especially for 11-13 year olds.
39. Tyler makes a pretty bold claim here: “At Emergent Ventures, we support many teenagers, young women. Many of them not 13 years old, but very often 16 to 19 years old. They’re doing science. They’re remarkably smart. They get in touch with their collaborations and with each other using social media. They exchange information. They’re doing phenomenally well. They’re an incredible generation, smarter, more dynamic, probably more productive than any other scientific generation ever, and that’s because of social media.”
40. I can totally buy that there are a lot of very smart teenagers out there, that those that are bold and talented and ambitious benefit from using social media to find collaborations. But… the most dynamic and scientifically productive generation? Oh my is citation needed here, I do not believe this, I do not see evidence of this. What seems more likely here is that Tyler gets to see the success stories, the most extraordinary people who make the tech work for them, and does not see others that do not? And of course it is not clear how much of that, even if true, would be due to social media. Yes, it makes it easier to find collaborations, but it also destroys rival means of finding such collaborations, and so on. With earlier tech there were already plenty of places to find like-minded people, and indeed it was in many ways easier to focus on that without distractions, because you were going to dedicated places, both real and virtual.
41. (35:00) Haidt says he does have a section on benefits, which (matching Tyler’s statement) is almost always for older teenagers, he can see the collaboration story for them, but for 11-13 year olds they have different needs. And Haidt points out that the rival methods social media is crowding out, even on the internet, were superior especially for that group, that the overall non-social-media internet is great.
42. (36:30) Tyler clarifies that Twitter is how these kids meet, and Haidt confirms Twitter is social media. I am not as sure about that. I see Twitter as a hybrid, that can be used in any mix of both, and as much less of the bad thing than other social media, but of course I am biased, it is vital for my work. I would be happy for a compromise that said kids get Twitter at 13 outside of school hours, say, but other ‘purer’ social media only at 18. Or even better, as per later discussions, you can get only the non-algorithmic ‘following’ version of Twitter at 13.
43. (36:45) Tyler once again: “It could be the case, maybe only 5 percent of teenagers benefit from this Twitter function, but that could, by far, outweigh the costs, right?” This seems to be a common pattern in Tyler’s thinking that is behind many of his weirdest takes, where he finds things he thinks are massively oversized in their benefits because in a small minority they promote the kinds of talent development or inspiration or capital formation (or what not) that he thinks is most important, and he is willing to throw the rest of life under the bus to get it – see for example discussions over congestion pricing in New York City. It is of course possible that the benefits outweigh the costs even when benefits are concentrated like this, but (aside from not being confident that the
44. In this case, one easy response is to say that this is the kind of child who should have special technical chops and determination and be impossible to stop, and who would rise to the challenge if we tried to stop them, the way hacker kids got around restrictions in the 1980s. If they’re all that do you think you can keep them off Twitter? So the correct solution would be to not let kids have social media, and then be fine when they got onto Twitter anyway. Or of course you could soon have an AI check their usage to confirm they were using it For Science.
45. (37:10) Tyler agrees that girls 12-14 are likely worse off because of Instagram. He dodges the question of TikTok, but it seems like his objection at that age is entirely about Twitter? Haidt says that we must talk price, the question is whether the age threshold should be 14 or 16, and he thinks that algorithmic feeds should be gated to age 16.
46. (37:45) Tyler says these kids start doing their online science thing at 13 even if he only sees them at 16, alternatives would be much harder. Haidt points out they could meet in other ways, says it would only be a little harder.
47. (38:25) Tyler asserts they ‘all make this decision’ to switch Twitter to a non-algorithmic feed. So the common ground seems very obvious here?
48. (38:45) Haidt claims Gen-Z spends a huge portion of their time and attention managing their network connections, it is the first and last thing they do every day. If true (and I think it is) this seems horrible, they are paying very high maintenance costs and not getting much in social benefits in return, in a way that makes it very costly to opt out. He literally estimates 5-10 hours a day for these activities plus consuming content to keep up. One way to look at this is that we have raised social signaling costs that people can pay and made such payments highly visible, with the opportunities to do this becoming available at random times, and one can see why this would be bad, the worst kind of anxiety-infused life-consuming Skinner box. Haidt refers to Collision noticing no major person in software is under 30, that Gen-Z aren’t starting companies and doing things. What young people are impacting the world?
49. (40:10) Tyler says young people are doing well where we can measure success, such as at chess. But chess is almost a failure mode for our brightest minds, in many senses, and also illustrates how much current generations are drawn to obsessing over improving legible numbers in various ways that don’t depend on learning through child-style play. Tyler says that these people aren’t founding companies because you need all these synthetic abilities and the nature of production has changed. But one might also say it is the path to developing those styles of abilities that has been effectively blocked by time on phones. Haidt points out that GenZ talent tends to disappear into the prestige economy of social media itself, to likes and followers.
50. (41:30) Tyler says many at OpenAI and Anthropic are ‘extremely young’ and doing amazing things, that is historically common in software so hard to know how this compares. He again points to Emergent Ventures and says they’re so much smarter and more productive and attentive and disciplined than kids in his day. But how would one know that? I would argue that instead those kids have been better selected. Haidt agrees that this sounds like selection.
51. (42:45) Tyler once again goes back to, whatever problems there are, why not just think we’ll adjust to them? We adjusted to agriculture and fire and cities, that often the early ride is bumpy but it turns out fine. Sounds a lot like what he says about AI, this super strong prior that people adjust to things and then we’ll be better off. One response would be yes, we adjust, but taking social media away from kids like we took away leaded gasoline is exactly the kind of way in which we adjust.
52. (43:30) Haidt learns not to trifle with Cowen in adjustment trivia by asking about scurvy. I wonder how the British Navy forgetting why their cure worked and reintroducing scurvy fits into this, but they did rediscover the issue eventually, but it does seem like a poor example, because there are various ways to efficiently fix the issue, the issue is very clear when it is happening, and people have heavy incentive to find an answer. The obvious current lack of adjustment question would likely be fertility, if AI proves somehow not to be transformational. Are we going to adjust? How fast, and how?
53. (45:00) Tyler says, this 5-10 hour flow of message, the AI will do that for you, and you’ll have a lot more time again. Alas, I think Tyler misunderstands the purpose of that flow of messages. The reason it is a 5-10 hour flow of messages is that this is costly signaling. If everyone hands their message flow to the AI, then the response will be, oh if she cared about me she wouldn’t let the AI handle the messages, or she would but then she would spend time customizing her replies, the replies are either too fast and the AI is doing them without her in the loop or too slow and she is not giving me attention, which means she does not care enough about me.
54. And so on. This is not the kind of trap that efficiency gains can solve, the thing will eat any gains, that is exactly why the situation got worse when the tools got better. Similarly, when Tyler says Gemini will ‘give them a digest’ of what is going on in their friend’s lives, so they can keep up for when you meet in person, well guess what? Now the standard is ‘show me you did not only read the digest.’
55. Could you imagine a world in which AI is so good that no one can tell the difference? You can, but then one must ask why we are even still around and what is our purpose in life and our way of producing things and so on. If we are not even handling our own social communications, are we even ourselves anymore? I don’t know. It is weird.
56. This seems like a very particular goldilocks scenario to me, where the AIs are exactly good enough and given exactly enough leeway and authority to free us where we want to be free, but somehow the world remains fully normal and economic normal, and I don’t have reason to think the zone in question exists at all unless we are engineering it very intentionally. It feels like wishcasting even above and beyond the parts where one doesn’t want to look at existential, catastrophic and systemic risks. I’d love to get the AIs to do the work we dislike and for us to live the parts of our lives we like without AI, but… how? What is the plan, in detail? Can we write stories in that world, maybe, and make them make sense? Seems hard.
57. Later Tyler suggests for example people saying “‘I’m going to form like a little polycule but without sex, and my polycule will be based around not doing so much social media.’ Like my friends and I in high school — we didn’t go to parties. We seceded from that.” This was young Tyler’s solution to the collective action problem, a small group took the collective action, nice solution if everyone is fine with that being the entire collective. And yes, some people will always (in normal worlds) be able to form close-knit groups that ignore everyone else, and a small group of friends can do very well on all fronts, but that has always been highly limited as a strategy, most kids and people are incapable of it or won’t do it under the pressure.
58. Yes, as Tyler says, meeting up with your friends is fun, but when he says ‘kids will find ways of doing this,’ they are not currently finding ways of doing this. Time with friends is way down. Most social activities are way down. Relationships, sex and children are way down. That does not mean we will never adjust, but I see no reason to expect adjustments that fix this. There are lots of things that people used to enjoy a lot or benefit from, that we stopped doing at various points in history, and I do not expect most of them to come back.
59. (46:15) Haidt frames this as, there’s going to continue to be a ‘dip’ in terms of mental health impact, but that Tyler might be right, we could get superhuman generations in 30-50 years. Well, yes, we could get a lot of very exceptional things in 30-50 years if AI continues to improve.
60. (47:30) Flagging the huge agreement by all three of us that there is far too much homework, especially in the early grades. My kids school has them do homework with the justification that they need to learn how to do homework, the generalized version of which I would call the worst argument in the world if Scott Alexander hadn’t used that term first for the non-central fallacy. Perhaps instead the worst justification in the world? Which is ‘you need to endure bad thing X now on purpose, so that you get the benefit that it will then be less bad when bad thing X happens to you again later.’ Madness.
61. (48:00) Haidt frames his book as offering four norms that solve collective action problems and that would help get children time and ability to play as they need to, with number one being no smartphone before high school, let them use flip phones. Second, no social media until sixteen. Third is phone-free schools. Fourth is far more childhood independence, a la Free-Range Kids and Lenore Skenazy.
62. I am strongly in favor of all four planks as norms to strive for, especially taken together, and for the laws to at least facilitate all this. We need to stress the fourth one most of all, you can only take away the phones if kids can otherwise use that time.
63. (51:05) Tyler asks the right question on the social media rule, who is enforcing these norms? The government or the parents? For the others it is easier to see. For free range kids it is sufficient that the government allowing and encouraging it. For phones in schools that is clearly on the schools and thus mostly the government.
64. (51:15) Haidt responds that parents cannot enforce this alone without outside help. Quite right, at least once you let them have a phone or computer. So what should we do? Right now, Haidt notes, even the kids below 13, that they are supposed to not allow, do not get kicked out even when it is obvious. Haidt wants to raise the age to 16 and see it enforced as his number one option.
65. (52:00) Tyler makes clear he is totally opposed to the government telling parents they can’t let their kids use social media. He says ‘so the government will stop me from raising my 15-year-old the way I want to. I’m totally against that.’ I don’t see Tyler generalizing this principle enough, if so? Either way, we agree the social media decision needs to be up to the parents, at least at age 15. That you should require very clear opt-in from the parents, but if you have it, then go ahead.
66. The emphasis on ‘sign a contract to hand over data’ is weird. This cannot be the true objection, can it? Shouldn’t we draw the line where we actually care?
67. (53:40) Tyler says, Instagram has parental controls but no one uses them. Haidt points out few people are able to use such controls well. I would add, the implementation matters. The defaults matter a ton. Having something in an options menu sounds like a good libertarian solution but in practice adaptation of that will always be very low. Defaults or GTFO. If you made it such that the parents had to give very clear permission for a kid-friendly account, and then again give very clear permission for a fully unlocked account, and you actually made this hard to spoof or to happen without the parents being aware, then you would have something. You need something like the Certificate of Dumb Investment, where you impose some trivial but real inconveniences in the process.
68. (54:10) Haidt asks the obvious question, what about PornHub? And Tyler says, no, you’re trying to shift it to me, but fundamentally it has to be either up to parents or up to government, and if it is up to parents it will not matter much, and points out Haidt is at least raising the intervention possibility.
69. And I say, no, it is not a binary choice. It is at least a tertiary choice, with a middle third option. If you leave it ‘up to the parents’ as in the parents can in theory tell the child what to do, then that is better than saying the child has a ‘right’ to do it, but in practice we all know that won’t work here. If we say ‘the government bans it’ then that is not good either, although ‘it is banned but parents who want to make it happen anyway by giving them accounts and logins that technically are in the parent’s names can’t actually get stopped or punished in a real way, at most we ever impose a modest fine’ might be a practical response.
70. The third option is that the parents can give the kid an account, but we impose real friction costs of doing so as part of actually enforcing it, in a way that if the kid tries to do it without permission and isn’t unusually savvy, they will definitely get caught. And that the parents have that extra push not to do it, they can’t just go ‘oh fine, it’s easier to let you, sure’ and that’s it. They have to mean it. And have the services actually enforce these rules and procedures often enough that if you don’t go through the hoops, your account might well get deleted.
71. (55:00) Haidt says a lot about how the government is not doing anything to enable safeguards. Tyler points out that any version of this is effectively a ban, that it would bankrupt such companies if they could be sued every time a kid got on without permission. Haidt says he is not saying that the government should decide, but he thinks parents should be able to sue these companies, that we should sue them over things like constant refresh and endless scroll as well, that section 230 should only apply to what people post.
72. Presumably this is one of those ‘either our legal system has rules for liability that work, or it does not’ situations? As in, if parents sue over their child having access without permission, then that should not automatically entitle them to thousands or millions in damages, they should have to demonstrate that the company was negligent in allowing this. And if they sue over the endless scroll, our legal system should say that is a dumb lawsuit, and toss it. When tech companies say they cannot survive ordinary liability law, that implies strongly that either we should change that underlying law for all cases, or there is something deeply wrong with the business. And we should check to see if what the tech company is doing is regulatory arbitrage.
73. Tyler doubles down, says even if Meta was 99% effective, they’d still be sued into oblivion on the other 1%. Whereas Haidt says correctly, that would be incredible, great success, we happily accept a 1% or even 5%-10% failure rate here. And Haidt says, again I believe correctly, that if Meta did have a 95% or 99% success rate, that success rate would be a strong defense in a lawsuit. Or, alternatively, we could perhaps write a safe harbor rule here to ensure this? As in, you are required to ensure that your system is 95% effective, meaning that for every 5 kids that are on your platform, there are 95 that attempted to get on the platform without permission beyond ‘I tried to sign up, told the truth and was told no,’ and failed to do so, or something similar.
74. I think this is actually a lot easier and less tricky than PornHub. With social media the whole point is a persistent identity. It seems reasonable to provide age verification or parental permission once. Whereas with PornHub, as Snoopy once said, there are some times that you prefer not to be recognized. It would be a major imposition and security risk to require providers of pornography to verify identity.
75. I also don’t feel like the full solution space of this problem is being searched. There feel like there should actually be good technical solutions available.

As a bonus, here are two sections that would have been in my next childhood roundup:

Ban Phones in Schools

England to give the power to ban mobile phone use on primary and secondary school grounds, students will have to switch them off or risk confiscation. Reactions like this always confuse me:

However, teachers’ unions said that the crackdown was misguided because most schools already imposed a ban. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, branded the reform a “non-policy for a non-problem” and said ministers should focus on limiting children’s access to social media platforms.

I fail to see why this is an issue? I am pretty sure this is not a ‘non-problem.’

Jay Van Bavel: My kids go to a public middle school in NYC where they lock up their phones for the day. This is what the school observed:

“Overall, the program has been a massive success. We are happy to share that we continue to see the benefits of using Yondr, with increased student engagement in the classroom, less time spent in the bathrooms and hallways, more genuine connections within the community and a decrease in reports of cyberbullying.”

We need some RCTs on removing smartphones from entire schools or classrooms to see the impacts (which are often network effects, rather than on individuals).

Some parents worry this will mean they can’t find their kids in case of an emergency.

Not true.

The kids carry the pouches and parents can still easily track their location (if necessary). In an emergency kids can just break open the pouch. It only costs ~$20 to replace.

Sounds good to me as a way to quiet the concerns. It should not be actually necessary to carry the pouches, and I think psychologically it would be better not to do that so kids are not tempted to break the pouch and don’t have to spend willpower to avoid it.

Phil McRae: SMARTPHONE BAN

In the US, a teacher (Mary Garza) instructed her students to set their phones to loud mode. Each time a notification was received they’d stand up & tally it under a suitable category. This occurred during ONE class period. Each mark is a learning disruption

A story confirmed to not mean anything.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: “I grew up in the City Where Nobody Can Sneak Up On Anybody, forced to wear a little hat that went ‘ding ding’ every 2 seconds anytime I went outside my house. I hated that hat. When I was six years old, enough deaf people had moved into the City that the hat acquired flashing LED lights.

Thankfully when we started to get deaf and blind people they stuck to their own city subsection and we didn’t *all* have to wear the vibrating boots that let people feel us coming through their toes… anyways, I hated that City and I told anyone I met that as soon as I was thirteen and had my own bank account I was moving somewhere, anywhere else; and they’d always nod wisely and say, ‘Valid.’

And then I turned thirteen and moved out and it was awesome. Every city is a quiet city for me now. I decided that I’d make my own kids grow up wearing hats that said ‘ding ding’, just so they could appreciate the quiet when they grew up. And for this, they make me move to the City of Clever Parenting Ideas?”

This story doesn’t mean anything, so please don’t try to decode it.

Did you know that Snapchat+, the $4/month subscription service, offers friend rankings? You can check how often a friend interacts with you relative to how often they interact with others. This often goes exactly the way you would think, with both friend and relationship drama ensuing when someone is not ranked high enough.

Even without Snapchat+, the app can show teens where they stand with friends via emojis. This occurs if two people are on each other’s private eight-person best-friend lists.

A yellow heart indicates “Besties” status—these two have sent the most snaps to each other. If they’re besties for at least two consecutive months, they graduate to “Super BFF,” indicated by two red hearts.

Jonathan Haidt: I have said much less about Snapchat than other apps because I know less. But the more I learn, the worse it looks. It’s not just the streaks, designed to hook kids. Their “solar system” maps are even worse.

Katy Potts: I call it the “anxiety app” in online safety training I run – grim – unbelievable they get away with it.

This is the kind of social information where we benefit from lack of clarity. There is a reason groups strive to avoid a known pecking order outside of the top and bottom ranks. Even if you know you are not so relatively close, you don’t need the details in your face, and real ambiguity is even better. For teens I am confident this is far worse, and also it will lead to people strategically gaming the system to get the outcome they want, and every implementation of that I can imagine only makes the whole thing worse.

Jonathan Haidt went on the Free Press podcast, in addition to the one with Tyler Cowen. On TFP, he laid out the case that smartphones are the primary thing ruining childhood this way.

Suppose a salesman in an electronics store told you he had a new product for your 11-year-old daughter that’s very entertaining—even more so than television—with no harmful side effects of any kind, but also no more than minimal benefits beyond the entertainment value. How much would this product be worth to you?

…

What the smartphone user gives up is time. A huge amount of it.

Around 40 hours a week for preteens like your daughter. For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week. Those numbers—six to eight hours per day—are what teens spend on all screen-based leisure activities.

…

I should note that researchers’ efforts to measure screen time are probably yielding underestimates. When the question is asked differently, Pew Research finds that a third of teens say they are on one of the major social media sites “almost constantly,” and 45 percentof teens report that they use the internet “almost constantly.”

As I said in the main part of the post, if kids are indeed being allowed to spend that kind of time on their phones, that seems obviously deeply unhealthy, and the decision to permit this seems bonkers levels of nuts. No, I do not need a study to see this.

If you are spending that much time on a phone, then unless something is deeply engrossing in a way that for example school almost always isn’t, every minute that you are not on your phone, you are spending part of that minute jonesing for your phone. You are thinking about pulling out your phone. You are using willpower not to.

There aren’t zero useful things to do with phones, but at that point, come on.

There is also this. You can say it isn’t smartphones. It’s obviously largely smartphones.

I do not buy that this can be explained by ‘some unexplained shift in mood.’

Haidt also wrote a book, The Anxious Generation. As I noted earlier I haven’t had opportunity to read it. Candice Odgers reviews it here in Nature. Here is the teaser line of the review.

The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.

Remember The Law of No Evidence: Any claim there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit.

One could add a corollary, The Law of Distracting Us From the Real Issue. Which henceforth is: If someone warns that paying attention to X could distract us from the real issue, that is evidence that X is the real issue.

This is because the phrase in question is an attempt at deep magick, to act as if evidence has been presented or an argument made and social cognition has rendered a verdict, when none of that was otherwise the case.

There are of course many cases where X is indeed a distraction from the real issue Y. What these cases mostly have in common is no one using the phrase ‘could distract us from the real issue.’

One could also point out that phones are themselves a massive distraction and time sink, thus even if something else is ‘at fault’ somehow, getting rid of the phones would be a first step to addressing it. Candice doesn’t even have any real objections to Haidt’s actual proposals, calling them mostly reasonable, or objecting to them on the grounds that they would be insufficient because teens would work around them. Which is not exactly making me want to instead do nothing.

Candice does of course pull out the no evidence card as well, saying studies fail to find effects and so on. Yeah, I don’t care. The studies are asking the wrong questions, this is dumb. Then of course she says ‘there are, unfortunately, no simple answers,’ so I am confused what we are even at risk of being distracted from. What does she offer?

Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.

The idea that kids today have more contact with guns, violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse than they did in the past is obviously backwards. Yes, of course those things continue to make the world worse, but they are much better than they used to be, so it can’t explain a new trend.

Economic hardship is complicated, as I’ve discussed in the past, but certainly there has not been a dramatic rise in economic hardship starting in the mid-2010s.

That leaves the opioid epidemic and social isolation, which are indeed getting worse.

Of course, citing ‘social isolation’ while denying that phones are at fault is a pretty rich thing to say. I am pretty sure a new activity soaking up most non-school hours is going to be bad for social isolation.

The opioid epidemic is bad, but this can’t be primary. The fall in child well-being doesn’t map onto the opioid epidemic. The rate of opioid abuse under 18 is relatively low, only about 1.6%. Even if you include parents, the numbers don’t add up, and the maps don’t match.

Yes, there is narrative among the youth that all these things are worse than ever. And that narrative is bad for mental health. But do you know what is a prime driver of that? Social media and everyone constantly being on their phones. And you know what else? Articles and academics like this one, pushing a narrative that is patently false, except where it is self-fulfilling.

There is an alternative hypothesis that does make sense. One could say that kids are on their phones this much exactly because we do not let kids be kids. If kids are not allowed to go off and do things, then of course they will end up on their phones and computers. We give them no other options.

So yes, we should cover that base as well. Let kids be kids.

The contrast between this and Tyler Cowen’s must better challenges is very clear.

Let Kids be Kids

People have gone completely insane. Do not put up with this insanity.

I mean, this would be insane at any age, but thirteen? At thirteen I do not even feel entitled to know which friend’s house my children are going to.

Hannah Posts: It would never occur to me that this would be unexpected or inappropriate. If I’m at Mary Ann’s house playing dolls, ofc her mother’s dearest old friend Miss Margaret would be in the kitchen chatting.

Can you imagine getting that call? Your kid is over at a friend’s house and their mom calls you to ask if her sister can stop by for a coffee

Andrew Rettek: parents like this don’t just stiffle their own kids, they mess with your kids, calling the ~cops if you give your kids “too much” autonomy. And they teach childless people, including their own kids, that this is reasonable behavior and anything less is negligent.

We used to let kids babysit other kids. I remember having at least one sitter, a neighbor from upstairs, who was only twelve or so. As opposed to now, when someone is terrified their 13-year-old is in a house with a friend, their mom and an uncleared third adult. We still use the term ‘babysitter’ but it means paying an adult at least $25 an hour, rather than letting kids learn some responsibility and earn some cash. It is all so insane. I would of course happily let a normal (non-adult) babysitter take the job for my kids, if I could find them and was confident no one would call the cops.

Also, let your kids pay cash or have their own debit card?

Patrick McKenzie: An anecdotally common user behavior I wouldn’t have guessed: many children old enough to go out with friends but not old enough to have independent purchasing power (or payment methods) now order in restaurants via a text message to Mom, who places order through app and pays.

At minimum this requires Mom to be by the phone willing to respond. That is not always an option. What do you do when she is busy?

Also you should not be tracking your kids and their spending like this. If you are old enough to go out with friends, and it is worth spending money to go to a place to eat, then give the kid the money. Don’t scrutinize their food orders. The responses seem confused by this as well.

In reasons you don’t need to devote crazy amounts of attention to your kids news:

Robert Wiblin: If incremental parenting effort for infants had large benefits you’d expect second and third children to do worse than they in fact do, seeing as how they have to share their parents’ attention with siblings while firstborns do not.

They do [a bit worse] but the effect is pretty modest given the reduction in parental effort is presumably large (20%, 30%, maybe more). (Though I guess one could argue it’s offset by learning effects.)

Daniel Eth: Unless there was a similar-sized effect in the opposite direction from better parenting due to learning.

Another hypothesis is that having older siblings is actively helpful, and this makes up for some of the difference. I generally am inclined to believe this.

Mike Masnick:

Dear California Governor Newsom and Attorney General Bonta: you really don’t have to be the opposite end of the extremists in Florida and Texas. You don’t have to lie to your constituents and pretend losses are wins. Really. Trust me.

You may recall that the Attorneys General of Texas and Florida have taken to lying to the public when they lose big court cases. There was the time when Texas AG Ken Paxton claimed “a win” when the Supreme Court did exactly the opposite of what he had asked it to do.

Or the time when Florida AG Ashley Moody declared victory after the Supreme Court made it quite clear that Florida’s social media law was unconstitutional, but sent it back to the lower court to review on procedural grounds.

And now it looks like Newsom and Bonta are doing the same sort of thing, claiming victory out of an obvious loss, just on the basis of some procedural clean-up (ironically, the identical procedural clean-up that Moody declared victory over).

As you’ll recall, we just wrote about the Ninth Circuit rejecting California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) as an obvious First Amendment violation (just as we had warned both Bonta and Newsom, only to be ignored). However, because of the results in the Supreme Court decision in Moody, the Ninth Circuit sent some parts of the law back to the lower court.

The details here are kind of important. In the Moody decision, the Supreme Court said for there to be a “facial challenge” against an entire law (i.e., a lawsuit saying “this whole law is unconstitutional, throw it out”), the lower courts have to consider every part of the law and whether or not every aspect and every possible application is unconstitutional. In the Texas and Florida cases, the Supreme Court noted that the lower courts really only reviewed parts of those laws and how they might impact a few companies, rather than really evaluating whether or not some of the laws were salvageable.

Joshua C. Robertson:

Black voters have repeatedly expressed support for school choice, with nearly 80% endorsing policies like education savings accounts and vouchers, according to Morning Consult. Polling by RealClear Opinion Research also shows that black voters support school choice more than any other race. Clearly, our communities want our children to have the same opportunities as others, regardless of race, geography or socioeconomic status. We need courageous leadership that will equip our students to thrive.

Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are widely courting black voters. They hear, firsthand, from the same people we as pastors and community leaders hear from. But do they listen to these constituents when it comes to education freedom?

The answer has been a resounding no. The Minnesota governor has refused opportunities to work with the Legislature to pass education savings accounts or vouchers. He said in his defense: “We are not going to defund our public schools.” This is a gross misinterpretation of ESAs and vouchers. Black families don’t want to harm our public schools financially. We want properly funded public schools and education freedom at the same time. It’s possible if our leaders don’t play politics.

Carrie Mckean:

Back home in the States, we’re constantly worried about our kids. It’s well-documented and generally accepted that smartphones, social media, and a lack of childhood independenceand free play contribute to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously dubbed an “anxious generation.” But in all this collective handwringing, we tend to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: unchecked, socially normalized parental anxiety and the smothering parenting style it produces.

There’s nothing new under the sun, and I’m sure, to some extent, that’s true of parental worries. Throughout the ages, parents have feared losing their children to sickness, accidents, or violence. Right now, while I worry about volleyball team tryouts and first day of school jitters, mothers around the world worry about bombs and bullets, famine and frontlines.

The problem of the relatively comfortable, like us, seems to be what we do with our worries. Our parenting strategies successfully soothe our own fears, but that doesn’t mean they meet our children’s developmental needs. We disempower our kids instead of helping them grow into competent, confident adults. We rebrand hyper-concern as proof of love and treat our pursuit of safety and ease like whipped cream on hot chocolate: If some is good, surely more will be better.

Douglas Belkin:

Running a high-profile university during a war in the Middle East where students, faculty and alumni are at odds has turned into one of the toughest jobs in America to keep.

The presidents at five Ivy League universities have stepped down since the Israel-Gaza war began last fall. Four of those schools have named interim presidents. Leaders elsewhere spent the summer enacting stricter rules to stave off a repeat of the spring, when colleges across the country were beset by protest, encampments and arrests.

Intense pressures remain.

Alumni want protesters to stop diminishing the brand of their alma maters. Faculty want an end to the disruption of classes. Parents want safety for their children. And there is always the potential for Congress to call more school leaders before a committee to ask why their campuses are so chaotic.

Presidents who have held their jobs are quick to acknowledge they have benefited from variables beyond their control. But several presidents, former presidents and advisers point to strategies that have helped leaders navigate recent storms.

Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier described his North Star as an unwillingness to appease one side or the other through intense protests, arrests and student expulsions on his campus.

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high birth rates, Ehrlich predicted: ‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.’ He came up with drastic solutions, including adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilise the population.

Ehrlich, like many others, got it wrong. What he needed to worry about was declining birth rates and population collapse. Nearly 60 years on, many predict the world will soon reproduce at less than the replacement rate.

But by my calculations, we’re already there. Largely unnoticed, last year was a landmark one in history. For the first time, humans aren’t producing enough babies to sustain the population. If you’re 55 or younger, you’re likely to witness something humans haven’t seen for 60,000 years, not during wars or pandemics: a sustained decrease in the world population.

A society’s reproduction level is measured by the fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has. The replacement level is accepted as 2.1: any higher and the population grows; any lower and it falls. Like the R number in epidemiology (which we heard so much about during the pandemic), the replacement level is a critical figure. Either side of it leads to dramatically different outcomes. The replacement level is put at a little over 2 to take account of the slight imbalance in male and female births – slightly more of the former are born. Also, not all girls survive until reproductive age.

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago parents have been wondering when Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates was going to address the disastrous reading and math scores in Chicago public schools. Now she has.

In an interview in early August with Chicago radio news station WVON 1690, Ms. Gates was asked to respond to the union’s critics who are concerned that so many of Chicago’s students aren’t reading or doing math at grade level. Her novel answer: The tests are racist so they should be ignored.

“The way in which we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Ms. Gates said. 

“If you have another hour, I can get into why standardized tests are born out of the eugenics movement,” she continued. “And the eugenics movement has always sought to see black people as inferior to those that are non-black. . . . You can’t test black children with an instrument that was born to prove their inferiority.”

——-

More.

Ted Balaker:

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars so your children can spend four to seven years under the tutelage of the world’s worst therapist. 

Too often that comes pretty close to describing the modern college experience. Universities routinely toss out wisdom that’s been accumulated over centuries and backed up by modern psychology in favor of fashionable claptrap that makes students miserable. 

Psychologists have long known that people who believe they have a good deal of control over their life outcomes are more likely to be happy. But colleges teach students, especially those from minority groups, that systemic “isms” will undermine their hard work. 

Our minds are threat-generating marvels, but those who embrace Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) learn how to separate the countless fake threats from the relatively few real ones. Too bad universities fill students’ heads with microaggression dogma, which trains them to interpret benign, everyday interactions as threats. 

And that’s just the beginning. Universities whip up tribalism, encourage fragility, and leave students with broken moral compasses. 

But as frustrating as college can be, it’s important to avoid myopia.

Andrea White:

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

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

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

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

——

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

Good Reason Houston

Peter May:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess: (more)

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

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

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

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

Will Flanders:

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

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

Related: Where have all the students gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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%.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.”

Pamela Paul:

“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted.

After the release of Cass’s findings, the British government issued an emergency ban on puberty blockers for people under 18. Medical societies, government officials and legislative panels in Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium have proposed moving away from a medical approach to gender issues, in some cases directly acknowledging the Cass Review. Scandinavian countries have been moving away from the gender-affirming model for the past few years. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, called the review’s recommendations “seminal” and said that policies on gender treatments have “breached fundamental principles” of children’s human rights, with “devastating consequences.”

But in the United States, federal agencies and professional associations that have staunchly supported the gender-affirming care model greeted the Cass Review with silence or utter disregard.

Tracy Alloway and Laura Nahmias

A total of about 800,000 people moved out of large urban counties last year, or twice the pre-pandemic rate, EIG said. Moves out of the city have combined with lower birth rates to drag down the number of young children in big urban counties. Birth rates there have fallen at twice the rate of those in rural areas over the past decade or so, EIG found.

The loss of families with small children is persisting as cities like New York grapple with rising childcare and housing costs, and questions about whether those financial pressures are driving New Yorkers — particularly middle-income families — to leave.

In a separate report released recently, the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute found that households with children under the age of six were 47% more likely than the rest of the population to leave the state of New York post-pandemic.

matija

The net effect of this is that kids have far more extended boundaries set on them (except on their phones!). For example, nowadays, parents expect their children to be free to go and do groceries alone or play outside without adult supervision only at around the age of 10 to 12 (if not even higher). Gen X, in his research, remembers this as having happened for them around ages 6, 7, or 8. On one hand, I feel like this claim rings true; on the other, I’m also wondering if there might be a case of some rosy retrospection or wishful thinking.

Far from stopping there, he mentions other significant societal efforts that are thwarting children’s growth, such as having playgrounds where kids don’t exhibit any risk of harming themselves. Instead of preparing the kids and making them capable of (literally in this case) tackling obstacles, we’re removing obstacles and coddling them.

Kids also become overprotected in other ways, such as not hearing other views or not being able to handle opposing views. No wonder academia is nowadays the exact opposite of free speech and the scientific method.

Wall Street Journal:

Seven library patrons in Llano County, Texas, population 21,000, are litigating the unshelving of 17 books. Amid public complaints, one county commissioner had urged the librarian to “pick her battles.” This was a no-no, says the lead opinion in Little v. Llano County. “If a government decisionmaker removes a book with the substantial motivation to prevent access to particular points of view, he or she violates the First Amendment,” writes Judge Jacques Wiener, a George H.W. Bush appointee.

Libraries cull their stacks regularly. In Judge Wiener’s view, what matters is intent. If the Llano County librarian genuinely changed her mind about the value of Farting Larry, she could trash him. Yet she testified, the judge says, that she “ordered the ‘butt and fart’ books because she thought based on her training that they were age appropriate, and her ‘opinion about the appropriateness of these books as the head librarian never changed.’”

Perhaps Llano County might have hired a librarian who better shares the local sensibility. Still, Judge Wiener’s interpretation enshrines librarians as a priestly class whose opinions on children’s books must be accepted as final. In reality, they’re government employees, hired by taxpayers and voters to do a job. This is not censorship, in a land where virtually any book can be bought online.

Balajj:

Recall that after the Democrat primary ended on June 8, Obama very consciously put Biden on stage, let him stumble and mumble, and then held his hand[10] to usher him off stage.

That was the act of a savvy politician: Obama was ostensibly appearing with Biden to help him, but was really there to help finish him. He intentionally ushered the old man off in that way to visibly (but deniably) show the world how powerless the “most powerful man in the world” was.

That primed his team for an intra-party contest, and foreshadowed what just happened. The Party put Biden on stage for the debate, let him stumble and mumble, and is now very firmly ushering him off stage.

So, as often happens these days, internet “conspiracy theory” anticipated the regime’s now-consensus reality. Solzhenitsyn[11] put it well: we knew that they were lying, they knew that they were lying, they even knew that we knew they were lying…but they were still lying.

It suited the Democrat Party to lie, to keep an aged and infirm man as their nominal head, just as it suited the Communist Party to have Andropov and Chernenko[12] in nominal command towards the end of the Soviet era. With no one man in charge, each Party apparatchik can quietly loot the public blind, while letting the walking corpse take the public blame.

——

In short: Biden is only the nominee because they lied about his senility.

——

The network state.

“We need to be more honest in our reporting on Biden”

Ann Althouse:

Meanwhile, he is the President of the United States, and he will be for 7 more months. That’s the immediate emergency. Beyond that, I want responsibility. Shine a light on those who covered for him and who faked surprise last night. How did Democratic Party characters communicate with CNN and how did the CNN panel hit the ground running, all on the same page, all with such intensity? I want to know. So untrustworthy! More.

Bill Ackman:

And yes, someone needs to take the Democratic leadership behind the woodshed.

The question to ask is:

Who is actually running the country?

No one will call the question because the 25th amendment says that the next in line is the Vice President.

Left wing media have had total and complete access to the president, his staff, and his administration.

They all knew, but they told you otherwise. They outright lied to you.

When Robert Hur, the special counsel who deposed the president, said that the president was not fit to stand trial and therefore chose not to bring charges, the media described him as a tool of the Republican Party and character assassinated him.

Via John Robb:

‘Imagine you were an investor in a company or a board member, and you walk into your board meeting and realize the CEO hasn’t shown up to work in for two years and really just the VPs have been running amok and doing whatever they wanted. You’d know at that point that anything a committee runs is inefficient, wasteful, and almost kleptocratic. So, essentially, you would expect the company to have been looted the entire time.’ @naval

——

That debate was yet another ding to the legitimacy of the government and the media.

They both told us everything was fine with Joe and that social media was lying.

Matt Taibbi:

Whoa. Murder on the CNN Express continued around a table of analysts who’ve been telling us for years that Joe Biden is a fit president. Each now echoed King. “The panic that I am hearing from Democrats is not like anything that I have heard,” concurred Abby Phillip. “They are now seeing a President… they do not necessarily believe can do this for another four years.” Barack Obama’s right hand David Axelrod said: “I can’t argue with either of them about how Democratic leaders are reacting.” Van Jones, playing the schmaltz role, offeredtearfully, “I love Joe Biden,” but “We’re going to want to see him consider taking a different course now.”

On MSNBC, whose brand is more hysteric loyalism, Joy Reid read the same script:

Bari Weiss:

Dean Phillips’s entire campaign was based on the observation that Biden was too old for the job. I texted Phillips and asked him if he wanted to comment on tonight. “Gandhi said to speak only when it improves upon the silence,” he texted back.

–Two-:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “fake news,” and, most recently, “cheapfakes.”

Chris Arnade:

Legacy media went out of its way to ignore the issue to the point of reputation ruining absurdity. Including outright lying.

Now look where that got them. Complete utter idiots. That’s what they are.

Axios:

Former First Lady Michelle Obama privately has expressed frustration over how the Biden family largely exiled her close friend Kathleen Buhle after Buhle’s messy divorce from Hunter Biden, two people familiar with the relationship told Axios.

Why it matters: The family tensions — and the former first lady’s disdain for partisan politics — are partly why one of the Democrats’ most popular voices hasn’t campaigned for President Biden‘s re-election, the sources said, even as former President Obama has been a willing surrogate.

Via Glenn Greenwald:

Paul Krugman, NYT, 2/12/24 (l.):

Biden “is in full possession of his faculties — completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail.” Just has a “stutter.”

Krugman, today (r.):

Biden should “step aside in favor of Harris.”

How do these people not puke looking at a mirror?

Darren Beattie:

This is not to say that there under no circumstances will be an effort to replace Biden. There could very well be, and it is more likely now than it was a week ago, though the likelihood of them actually replacing him is far less than people imagine even now. All of the steps and hurdles involved in replacing him would be uncertain and have their own risks, and give the public the impression of chaos that has to be weighed against the negative public impression of Biden’s cognitive condition.

——-

But instead, such allies are missing. That’s no surprise, because he’s not the one who controls the Rules Committee.

Vivek:

Ask yourself this too: who is actually running this country? Do you honestly believe Joe Biden is in charge? Is the “deep state” a conspiracy theory, or is it a reality hiding in plain sight?

Orwell

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.”

George Orwell

Teddy:

Joe Biden’s next three fundraising events during a critical 48-hour period for this campaign.

As she says, you can’t just invent new laws to punish those you hate most, as was done here:

This was always a weird and creepy photograph, not to mention her boastful tweet.

Gaslighting the American people. Suddenly the media is complaining that the Biden WH covered-up, gaslit and lied about Biden’s cognitive incapacity.

Ann Althouse quoting Maureen Dowd:

“Jill Biden, lacking the detachment of a Melania and enjoying the role of first lady more, has been pushing — and shielding — her husband…”
“… beyond a reasonable point. After Thursday’s embarrassing debate performance, she exhorted the crowd and played teacher to a prized student: ‘You did a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!’ This, to the guy who controls the nuclear codes…. The Democratic strategist Paul Begala… explained on CNN: ‘The first Democratic politician to call on Biden to step down, it’s going to end their career… None of them are going to say, ‘Hey, let me step forward and knife Julius Caesar.’ Biden is a beloved man in the Democratic Party.’… James Carville… told me Biden should call former Presidents Clinton and Obama to the White House and decide on five Democratic stars to address their convention in August…. Carville said the president should give a July 4 speech announcing he will let the next generation of Democratic leaders bloom…. And what if Joe and Jill cling on? In reply, Carville quoted… That which can’t continue, won’t.”

More history:

n 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke. Immediately thereafter, his wife Edith took control

David Remnick:

For the President to insist on remaining the Democratic candidate would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment.

Finally. Too.

Mike Masnick

Warning: Reading this article may cause you to question the Surgeon General’s reliance on feelings over science.

In 1982, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop said video games could be hazardous to children and warned of kids becoming “addicted” to them, causing problems for their “body and soul.”

This warning was not based on any actual science or evidence, but it kicked off decades of moral panic and fearmongering over the supposed risks of video games and children. This culminated in the Supreme Court rejecting a California law to require labeling of video games and restrict kids’ access to them, deeming it unconstitutional.

Studies have repeatedly debunked the claim that video games make kids more violent. Indeed, a recent Stanford meta-study of dozens of previous studies on kids and video games found no evidence of a connection between video games and violence. The researchers noted that if there was any correlation, it seemed to come from the public believing the unproven claims of a connection because politicians kept insisting it must be there.

Daniel Buck:

Everyone benefits from exemplars. We all need models to mimic and follow. In the policy realm that means states, legislatures and governors who pass policies and reforms that materially improve the lives of their residents.

We also need cautionary tales, clear examples of mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. On education, California has stepped into that role. Any aspiring policymaker looking for guidance on sensible education reform should take a glance at Sacramento over the past half-decade and do exactly the opposite.

Most recently, under pressure from teachers unions, the Legislature killed a bill introduced by Democratic Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio that would have mandated the teaching of phonics. The bill had the support of both the state-level parent-teacher association and the NAACP—and rightly so. A mountain of research going back to the 1950s vindicates phonics as the best way to teach young children to read.

The nation’s schools have had something of a reckoning in the past few years: Millions of children struggled to read because schools followed pseudoscientific theories about early literacy. Now at least a generation more will suffer the same fate in California.

In an open letter to Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, the California teachers union bristled at the “top down, statewide mandate” approach of this bill. But the teachers unions are happy to see California impose curricular, instructional and ideological mandates in other realms.

The state’s top-down sex education framework clocks in at 746 pages of material, curricula, assessments, grading recommendations and instructional requirements. The state compels teachers to tell kindergartners that children in “kindergarten and even younger have identified as transgender” and that biological sex is completely divorced from “gender identity.”

“Mildred & Hands”:

He certainly has his work cut out for him. Gothard is being thrust into a likely $600 million referendum campaign this fall that won’t be easy to pass. Inflation and soaring housing costs have soured many voters on tax hikes. Advocates will need to show taxpayers in a clear and specific way what they are getting for their money. How will outcomes for children improve?

The district must retrain elementary teachers in reading instruction that emphasizes phonics. State officials have mandated the strategy, based on research showing better results. But they aren’t giving Gothard’s district additional resources for the considerable effort (?).

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Enrollment notes.

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?

Patrick Mcilheran:

In Madison, where the possibility of school choice arrived 23 years after Milwaukee, there are six private schools in the choice program that Smith calls “vouchers,” and those six schools enrolled 655 choice students in the school year just ended. The Madison Metropolitan School District, in comparison, has about 25,000 students.

Big ask

Perhaps Madison families will see some of the growth common elsewhere. Independent private schools in the city of Milwaukee educated about 29,000 children using choice grants last year, and those in Racine educated about 4,000. Nearly 19,000 kids throughout the rest of Wisconsin used choice grants.

Several more Madison schools have been cleared by state regulators to join the choice program in fall, including a second one to offer high school grades. This likely will be a blessing to Madison families looking for an alternative to a school district where, by the state’s most recent figures, only 41% of the students had been taught to read at grade level or better. By contrast, Madison’s largest private school in the choice program, Abundant Life Christian School, got 73% of its students to grade level or better in reading. 

Why Senator Smith regards this as “failing” is baffling.

When families take their children to Abundant Life or other independent options, $10,237 of state aid will follow each one, or $12,731 if they’re high schoolers — the entirety of taxpayers’ outlay. 

By contrast, in the most recent state figures, Madison Metropolitan School District spent a total of $17,944 per child in taxpayer money.

What’s more, the district may ask voters in November for another $600 million in spending, overriding the taxpayer-protecting limits set in law. The proposal would add $1,378 to the property taxes of a typical Madison home. The district says its budget is in dire straits because it used temporary pandemic aid for permanent expenses. It could have to cut its $589 million budget by about $2 million, or 0.4%.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Enrollment notes.

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?

Annalise Gilbert:

Miranda Stovall’s lawsuit against her local Kentucky school board in June transformed a national debate over parental access to education into a copyright dispute when the district invoked the rights of a Pearson PLCsubsidiary to reject her request for a copy of a mental health survey administered to students.

Stovall learned that her child and others in grades 6 to 12 would receive a ‘Mental Health Screener,’ so in January 2023 she submitted a public records request for a copy of the survey, according to her complaint. But the board denied the request, only offering her to inspect the survey in person. Not because of student confidentiality or health privacy, but due to the copyright protections of education giant Pearson.

School boards have been increasingly thrust into public view as they respond to parents seeking to control the content their children are exposed to at school. A Missouri school district in May was sued by two parents who claimed it thwarted their public record requests for a “Hook-Up Topical Survey” emailed to students by a staff member. The case followed legislationintroduced by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in January “protecting the right of parents” by acknowledging parents’ rights to “direct” the education of their children.

Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum:

More American children than ever are qualifying for special education, but schools are struggling to find enough teachers to meet their needs.

A record 7.5 million students accessed special-education services in U.S. schools as of 2022-2023, including children with autism, speech impairments and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. That is 15.2% of the public-school student population, up from less than 13% a decade earlier, the most recent federal data shows.

Several factors are driving the increase. Pandemic disruptions left kids with lingering learning and behavioral challenges. Parents have become more assertive about asking for services, as the stigma around special education has lessened. Autism diagnoses have also risen in recent decades, and the state of Texas has seen a boom in special education after changing an approach that had limited access.

Students with disabilities benefit from services like speech therapy, specialized reading lessons or personal classroom aides. Yet many schools report being understaffed in special education. And now, districts face growing pressure on their budgets as federal Covid relief aid is set to expire this fall.

“We are in a situation right now that is not sustainable,” said Kevin Rubenstein, who oversees special education for an 8,000-student suburban Chicago district. “We continue to struggle to make sure that we have enough teachers in place.”

Georgia parent Joshua Caines appreciated the special-education services his local public elementary school provided for his now 12-year-old son, whose autism and ADHD affect his attention and ability to hand-write, among other things.

CBO:

2034, that annual amount is projected to reach $3.5 trillion (or 8.5 percent of gross domestic product). Over the 2025–2034 period, subsidies are projected to total $27.5 trillion—with Medicare accounting for 46 percent; Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), 25 percent; employment-based coverage, 21 percent; subsidies for coverage obtained through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces or the Basic Health Program, 5 percent; and other subsidies, 2 percent.

By CBO’s estimates, the share of people without health insurance reached an all-time low of 7.2 percent in 2023. The rate in 2034 is projected to be 8.9 percent—higher than it was during the 2021–2023 period but lower than the rate of 10.0 percent in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic. CBO attributes much of the increase over the next 10 years to the end of Medicaid’s continuous eligibility provisions in 2023 and 2024 and the expiration of enhanced marketplace subsidies after 2025. (Both of those policies were put in place during the pandemic.) The surge in immigration that began in 2021 (and that CBO projects will continue through 2026) will contribute to the increase as well, as those newly arrived immigrants will, the agency expects, be substantially less likely to have health insurance coverage than the overall population. The largest increase in the uninsured population between 2024 and 2034 will be among adults who are 19 to 44 years old.

Jon Haidt & Zach Rausch

1. The adolescent mental health crisis is real

From the 1990s through the mid-2000s, there was little sign of any youth mental health problem in the U.S. in any of the long-running nationally representative datasets. But by 2015, adolescent mental health was a 5 alarm fire, with steeply risingrates of loneliness, anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. 

The trends are not plausibly explainable by changing diagnostic criteria or by a greater willingness of Gen Z to report mental illness as the stigma around it declined. No explanation has been given as to why de-stigmatization proceeded suddenly and rapidly around 2012 onward and affected only the young,and no evidence of such rapid de-stigmatization has been provided. If there has been de-stigmatization, it seems likely it’s been going on for decades. Yet teen depressive symptoms barely budged between 1991 and 2011 and then suddenly shot upward. Behavioral data also show significant rises in ER admissionsand hospitalizations for self-harm episodes among adolescent girls, as well as a rise in actual suicidesfor both boys and girls since 2010.

2. The crisis is international, happening across most of the developed world

We have done an extensive study of 10 nations (Anglo and Nordic) and found rates of depression, anxiety, and other measures of ill-being have been rising since 2010 in all of them. We have also published a study of Europe using the Health Behavior in School-Age Children Survey, which found that high psychological distress is rising across nearly all Western European nations (with the exception of Spain), and many Eastern European nations. (Note that we have worked to address where and why cultural variation exists, including some Eastern European nations and within more religious communities in the United States).

—-

More.

Dave Zweifel

Many educators complained at the time that the entire voucher program would serve as a foot in the door to eventually undermine the public school system — a system that had served the country since colonial days and was credited with representing the true melting pot among children from different cultures, races and incomes. Besides, experiments comparing public and private schools in other places hadn’t resulted in any significant improvements in student outcomes.

The ACLU filed suit against the religious school expansion and in 1998, the State Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. But, three years later the U.S. Supreme Court okayed the concept, agreeing with voucher proponents that taxpayer money actually went to parents who then could use the money as they saw fit for their children’s education. Therefore, states weren’t directly sending funds to religious schools, the court found.

From those beginnings here in Wisconsin, that seemingly modest little program has blossomed into a colossus that is rapidly creating a complete second school system funded by the American taxpayer.

“Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades,” a report in the Washington Post read earlier this month.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Enrollment notes.

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?

Christopher Rufo:

The practice made Sivadge recoil. “In the cardiac clinic, we were taking sick kids and making them better,” she says. “In the transgender clinic, it was the opposite. We were harming these kids.”

Then, the following year, she breathed a sigh of relief. Under pressure from the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, Texas Children’s CEO Mark Wallace said that he was shutting down the child gender clinic. But it wasn’t true. Mere days later, it had secretly reopened for business.

And business was booming. Doctors, including Roberts, Paul, and Kristy Rialon, were managing dozens of pediatric sex-change cases, performing surgeries, blocking puberty, implanting hormone devices, and making specialty referrals. They were motivated not only by ideology, but by hope for prestige: they were saviors of the oppressed, the vanguard of gender medicine.

Sivadge soon had seen enough. She read my investigative report exposing Texas Children’s sex-change program, which relied on testimony from Haim, and reached out to share her own observations.

“I work very closely with this provider, Dr. Richard Roberts. I’ve been in the room with him when he speaks with these patients,” she told me in an interview. “Dr. Roberts is extremely encouraging of their transition and will essentially do whatever he can to make sure that they are happy, at least externally happy. Because I am absolutely certain that they are not internally happy. He is very accommodating. He does whatever they want. Essentially, there is no critical analysis of the process.”

In Sivadge’s view, Roberts and other providers were manipulating patients into accepting “gender-affirming care.” When parents objected, the doctors bulldozed them, she claims. Some families, she believed, feared that the hospital would call Child Protective Services if they dissented.

Then, two months after I spoke with her for that story, Sivadge called me in a panic. The FBI had sent two special agents, Paul Nixon and David McBride, to her home. The agents knocked on the door, asked her about “some of the things that have been going on at [her] work lately,” and then asked to enter her home. She was terrified. (The FBI declined to comment.)

The agents told Sivadge that she was a “person of interest” in an investigation targeting the whistleblower who had exposed the child sex-change program. They told her that the whistleblower had broken federal privacy laws. “They threatened me,” Sivadge said. “They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker. They said I was ‘not safe’ at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.”

The authorities—the FBI, the hospital, and, as Sivadge would later discover, federal prosecutors—were all circling the story. Both the Department of Justice and the hospital leadership were ideologically committed to “transgender medicine.” They had been embarrassed by the investigation that had exposed their actions, and they were looking for revenge.

Things went quiet for a while afterward. Sivadge resumed her work as a nurse, and the FBI did not reappear.

——

Commentary.

Kaleem Caire

One City Preschool continues to attract far more children than we can enroll, and is ready to grow and expand. Our two public charter schools, One City Elementary School and One City Preparatory Academy, are making notable progress as well:

• Our benchmark assessments show our Scholars growing academically across grade levels.
• Our Scholars are earning recognition for modeling our 5 Habits of Character (compassion, integrity, persistence, risk, and self-respect) at home, at school, and in the community.
• 97% of our 456 seats in grades 4K to 8 are already filled for the 2024-25 school year, with 94% of our current Scholars returning in the fall.
• 95 of our 98 staff members said they want to return next year: a 97% retention rate.
• Our staff and Parent Council are doing a beautiful job of engaging families in our schools, and our volunteers and partners are helping our children reach for their North Star and grow. Nearly 600 family members attended our first Winter Wonderland Family Ball and trained volunteers are tutoring our Scholars in reading.
• Our advocacy efforts helped inspire, facilitate, and secure the largest increase in state spending on K-12 education ($1.3B) in Wisconsin history.

In July 2025, we will host our 10th anniversary celebration and first 8th grade graduation. This will be just the second time we have hosted a large community gathering to promote and support our Scholars and schools: the first time was our coming out event that TruStage Foundation (formerly CUNA Mutual Foundation) hosted at its headquarters in Madison in March 2015.

——-

Kaleem Caire and One City.

Timothy Walker

Since I first moved to Finland in 2013, I have witnessed an ever-deepening societal problem that has devastated student learning. Childhood has become dominated by digital devices. This is a global trend, but it disproportionately affects Finnish children.

Finland’s teenagers, formerly the world’s highest achievers, still perform above average on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, but they turned in their lowest-ever average scores in math, science and reading in the latest study, and those numbers have been going down for years.

In December, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture described the predicament as “extremely disconcerting.”

As a U.S. teacher and parent living in Finland, I understand the concern. American schools can learn valuable lessons from Finnish education, both positive and negative.

In 2016, despite research showing that students who used computers more often at school performed much worse on reading and math PISA tests, the Finnish government announced it would spend millions of euros on ramping up digital learning.

Members of Milwaukee Communities

In light of recent revelations concerning MPS’ gross financial mismanagement, irresponsible and unresponsive leadership, and inadequate governance by the elected MPS School Board Directors, the members of Milwaukee communities are taking decisive action and will be holding a press conference tomorrow, Wednesday, June 12th, at 5:30 PM, at Milwaukee City Hall located at 200 East Wells Street, to announce their efforts to initiate recall efforts against select elected MPS School Board of Directors.“As representatives of communities throughout the City of Milwaukee, we feel deceived, bamboozled, misled, and most importantly, robbed of quality elected leaders who are committed to leading with truth, transparency, accountability, equity, and equality. This sentiment stems from the recent yet longstanding history of MPS’ gross mismanagement of taxpayers’ investments and the ongoing failures of our public school system. We’ve sent countless letters to the Office of Board Governance attempting to reach our elected Board Members. We’ve provided written and verbal testimonies to share our concerns and ask difficult questions. We’ve attended districtwide events and have even filed ethics and criminal complaints to local authorities, sharing evidence of unethical and criminal activities. Yet and still, we continue to be disregarded, ignored and dismissed, lied to and deceived, ostracized and silenced. We’ve followed policies and procedures time and time again, and every time, they’ve been met with no urgency, attention, or concern shown by the MPS School Board. Our children deserve better, and we, as taxpayers, parents, professionals, and voters, deserve better. With no return on our investment and the attack on our community, our fight has officially shifted, and we are now committed to replacing the current Board with a new one. One who will work with us, listen to us, lead with integrity, accountability and transparency, and do the necessary work to improve our public schools and communities.”

——-

Milwaukee pension scandal primer.

More.

Peter Gray:

Many parents strive mightily to get their children into high achieving high schools. A high achieving school (or HAS) is defined as one where students score high on standardized tests and a high percentage go on to selective colleges. Such striving occurs through various means. Some move to a wealthy suburban community and pay a premium on housing because the schools there are highly rated. Some pay high tuition to send their child to a high achieving private school. Some hire tutors to help their kids get test scores that will permit admission to an academically selective public school. All these cost money, so, to a considerable extent, the striving is concentrated among parents with higher-than-median wealth.

What these parents don’t know is that they may be setting their kids up for failure. Not academic failure but life failure. If parents knew the facts and behaved reasonably, they would deliberately avoid an HAS for their kids. They would move out of that high-achievement school district. They would use the money otherwise spent on tutoring or tuitions for more enjoyable family pursuits. Here I present some of those facts, as documented by many research studies, especially studies conducted over the past two decades by Suniya Luthar and her colleagues. [Sadly, Professor Luthar passed away in March 2023, at a too-young age.]

The Disagreement

Today’s disagreement is about the “math wars.”
The “math wars” is a debate happening in K-12 education about the best way to teach math. Broadly speaking, there are two camps that have conflicting pedagogical approaches:

Explicit instruction focuses on procedural fluency, guided practice, and repetition.
Inquiry-based instruction focuses on conceptual understanding, open-ended problems, and productive struggle.

This is an incredibly high-stakes debate — especially if you have children or loved ones that are currently receiving K-12 math instruction. To explore its contours, we’ve brought on two math education experts

——

Commentary.

Math Forum audio/video.

Jay Caspian Kang

A new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, “What Are Children For?,” is an engaging, literary investigation into why so many highly educated, financially comfortable women in the United States are ambivalent about having children, and how we should actually think about that decision. (I recently interviewed the authors on a podcast that I co-host.) To understand the reasoning of their contemporaries, Berg and Wiseman distributed surveys and conducted interviews with “dozens of Zoomers, millennials, and Gen Xers.” More than ninety per cent of their respondents had a college degree, they note, and nearly seventy per cent had a graduate degree. This focus on the middle and upper middle class might feel limiting, especially for a book with such an ambitious title, but the public conversation about the relative morality of having children has been shaped, to a great degree, by this demographic.

Within this larger discourse, Berg and Wiseman see a landscape of beleaguered people who have leaned a bit too far into their political and cultural beliefs, trading in the joys of life for an overly determinative belief that children will suffer inescapable misery. The thought of having children, in these mostly progressive circles, is often weighed against rising existential risk, whether stemming from climate change, the emergence of the far right, or even artificial intelligence. This, the authors point out, is a weird way to talk about kids. And they envision a near future in which that conversation becomes further polarized, with the anti-abortion right on one side and an increasingly anti-natalist left on the other. This outcome, they think, would be disastrous. “Simply put,” Wiseman writes, in the book’s introduction, “the question of whether or not to have a family is too important to allow it to be a casualty of the culture war.”

Patrick Brown:

At times, it may feel like we’re living in P. D. James’s The Children of Men, but the Right Honorable Baroness might have gotten one thing wrong. Her story of a global epidemic of infertility finds the world caught in paroxysms of terrorism, xenophobia, and violent authoritarianism. But the soundtrack of a world without a future may turn out to be less the explosion of a pipe bomb in downtown London than the cool hiss of a suicide pod.

The rest of this century will feature every major nation seeking to manage population decline—a recipe for aversion to wasting precious warm bodies on the field of battle. Revolution and violence have a certain appeal to the young and dispossessed, but an older society with money in the bank has more to lose. Aging comfortably, rather than exerting power, will be the order of the day. And the back half of the twenty-first century may resemble less a rage against the dying of the light than an emotionless flip of the switch.

Many of the familiar, worrying demographic trends—shrinking birth rates, decliningmarriage, disaffiliation from religion, rising numbers of the elderly with fewer hands to care for them—are a result not of economic dislocation, but of affluence. More of our material needs are met, and surpassed, by the power of global commerce and the undeniable consumer benefits of modern-day capitalism. But this prosperity means we have fewer needs to be filled by the Tocquevillian institutions of civil society, the solace of religion, or the meaning of parenthood. The result? Decadence.

This poses new challenges for the approaches and institutions of the Right, broadly speaking. For millennia, the task for many religious leaders and institutions was to provide succor to those eking out a living from the soil, keeping their eyes fixed on heaven and the promise of eternal rest after toiling in this vale of tears. Now, the biggest task in front of them is figuring out how to speak compellingly about values beyond what the market can appraise.

Ira Wells:

Over the past few years, the debate over how to manage cellphones in schools has offered a reprise of many of these arguments. Kids are going to use their devices anyway, so what’s the point of punishing them or tasking overworked teachers with policing usage? Do teachers have the right to confiscate students’ phones? And even if they are banned in classrooms, what’s to stop middle-school influencers from Snapping up a storm in the bathrooms or elsewhere on school grounds? 

In Ontario, the conversation around kids’ use of cellphones recently reached an inflection point. In March, the Toronto District School Board and three other counterparts launched lawsuits against social media companies (including the owners of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok) for marketing intentionally addictive products to children and for “rewiring” the way children “think, act, behave and learn.” The boards allege that students’ compulsive social media use is causing “significant attention, focus and mental health concerns” and that the resulting behavioural dynamics have necessitated “massive shifts and resource demands.” Then, on April 28, education minister Stephen Lecce announced that, starting September 2024, the province was banning cellphones in elementary schools for the entire day and during class time for middle and high school students. (It was, Lecce said, “the toughest policy in Canada” on cellphones in schools.) The move follows Quebec’s efforts last December to ban cellphones from elementary and secondary classrooms.

Lawrence Person:

Both Texas Scorecard and The Texan have done good work highlighting a disturbing reality: Numerous public school teachers of all grade levels have been arrested for sex offenses, many involving children. 

I’ve been running several of these in LinkSwarms, but Texas Scorecard has featured a number over the last week: “Former Texas Teacher Gets 30 Years in Prison for Producing Child Porn.”

Douglas Carnine:

To fill this void, our 84 volunteer experts are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of evidence-based resources. These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional well-being, could become the basis for specific education policies, programs, and practices. They will be accessible on our website, distributed through collaborating partner organizations and promulgated through convenings with education agencies.

Just as the maritime safety standards improved safety and saved lives, the EAC is committed to constraining the use of non-evidence-based programs that cause waste and even harm. For example, Reading Recovery, an  intervention targeted to lowest-achieving first graders, has been used with 2.4 million students at an estimated cost of $10,271 per child, which has resulted in total expenditures of $2.5 billion. But, as noted in the Hechinger Report, “Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by fourth grade were far worse readers than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a [December 2022] follow-up study. The tutoring seemed to harm them.”

 Even the much-touted reading initiative that moved Mississippi from the lowest-performing state on fourth-grade NAEP reading scores to 21st in the nation, may have serious flaws. EAC co-founder Kelly Butler, CEO of Mississippi’s Barksdale Reading Institute, worries that not all components of the state’s education system are being held to the same level of accountability, which can undermine sustainability.

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More.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it is hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I hear the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demandsfor a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe.

How did it happen?

Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages, a diagram of which I have provided. These are, in order: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing. 

Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.

The ultimate intended outcome is that the afflicted willingly embrace self-destructive behaviors and ideas. Thus, all moral constraints can be eschewed in the pursuit of “just” and “virtuous” causes.

In America in 2019, 14 unarmed black men were shot by police—most, apparently, in self-defense. And yet, when polled, most Americans who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated the number at 1,000 or more. A fifth thought 10,000 or more. Were the BLM riots, then, any surprise?

To be sure, this isn’t just a progressive problem. Republicans also demonized the Justice Department, the FBI, and members of the judiciary when it suited them. Conservatives are also losing their confidence in law enforcement, in part because of what they see as the lax enforcement of the law as applied toward groups like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Hamas demonstrators. 

—-

As far as I can tell, we are on our way to being considerably demoralized. If you look at the last few years, standards have declined, and subversive content, like Fanon’s, fills the media and our children’s curricula from K–12 to college and beyond. By beyond I mean even the Girl Scouts: here’s a St. Louis chapter learning to cheer for “the intifada.”

Do most elementary school teachers really want to racially stratify fourth graders? No. I think they dislike the racism of the past and want to do what they can to fix it. Since their betters in college told them that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the way to go, well, so be it. Likewise, I don’t think your local high school history teacher wants to bring about a Bolshevik revolution. He has simply been told to replace the focus on 1776 with something from The 1619 Project. So he gets with the times. And on and on and on.

We have also come to a place where it is difficult for anyone to dissent for fear of incurring the wrath of the adherents—witting or not—of subversion. So people go along, keep their heads down, and try not to make a fuss.

The widespread acquisition of useless, aggressively ideological degrees in gender and race, or the claims of the possibility of an unlimited number of genders, or the total racialization and “decolonization” of our political discourse, or the demands to defund the police, the toppling of statues, the defacing of art, the “spontaneous” protests to dismantle our structures, and much else, I now understand as acts of subversion rather than mere expressions of discontent or youthful energy run amok.

Steve Karnowski

Federal authorities in Minnesota have confiscated cellphones and taken all seven defendants into custody as investigators try to determine who attempted to bribe a juror with a bag of cash containing $120,000 to get her to acquit them on charges of stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic.

The case went to the jury late Monday afternoon, after the juror, who promptly reported the attempted bribe to police, was dismissed and replaced with an alternate. The incident had further ripple effects before deliberations resumed Tuesday — when another juror was replaced after a family member asked about the the attempted bribe.

The seven were the first of 70 defendants to go on trial in what federal prosecutors have called one of the largest COVID-19-related fraud cases in the country. They’ve described it as a massive scheme to exploit lax rules during the pandemic and steal from a program that was meant to provide meals to children in Minnesota.

Prosecutors have said the seven collectively stole over $40 million in a conspiracy that cost taxpayers $250 million. At the center of the alleged plot was a group called Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors say just a fraction of the money went to feed low-income kids, and that the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property. Federal authorities say they have recovered about $50 million.

Quinton Klabon

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, former Lesley University education professor/Matt Damon’s mom from that 1 Reason video: “I could barely stand [Sold A Story]…full of false information, misconceptions, and distortions of 3-cueing. She didn’t even understand it.”

We’re concerned about equity in education. You will never achieve equity by spending the few resources that you have, money, on tests. Tests don’t produce equity. They just show you that you have inequities. RF: Magic wand, testing is gone. We take the resources from that, put it in your control and do what with it to address these problems? TS: The first thing is to make sure that every kid coming to school has access to the best children’s literature available. Nothing is a better predictor of being able to learn to read when you get to school as having books in the house. So not one more dime under my leadership goes to testing companies. We’ve literally spent across the entire United States, some economists say, probably $1 trillion in tests and data systems. I guarantee you that half of that money could have been spent on reducing issues — so books, food for kids, adequate after school care and adequate health care. Then whatever is leftover goes back to the classroom for teachers, who as the teachers of those kids know what those kids need. And please not one more dime on professional development, sponsored usually by one of the testing companies that comes in and tries to tell the teachers they don’t know what they’re doing, do it our way and this will fix everything.

I strongly support the elimination of any high stakes standardized test as a gatekeeper to the teaching profession. That means PRAXIS, Core, and FoRT (Foundations of Reading Test). Each of these imposed gates has been detrimental to actually preparing the teachers our children deserve.

Is there a way to avoid that horrible Foundations of Reading Test? Yes.

Joseph Cox:

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media.

Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people’s lives.

The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally. These include issues with Google’s own products or data collection practices; vulnerabilities in third party vendors that Google uses; or mistakes made by Google staff, contractors, or other people that have impacted Google systems or data. The incidents include everything from a single errant email containing some PII, through to substantial leaks of data, right up to impending raids on Google offices. When reporting an incident, employees give the incident a priority rating, P0 being the highest, P1 being a step below that. The database contains thousands of reports over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2018.

Greg Lukianoff and Andrea Lan

In their 2015 article and 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg and Jonathan Haidt argue that cognitive distortions (practices like catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning) and overprotecting children results in an external locus of control, helplessness and despair, and both the mental health crisis and the rampant culture of illiberalism on campus that we’re seeing today.

Certainly, the two major concerns from the 2015 article have borne out, with academic freedom and free speech on campus being threatened at an unprecedented scale since 2014 — but especially since 2017 — and mental health of young people tanking to a degree even greater than even Greg and Jon ever predicted. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has reported consistent and rapid increases in the rates of suicide and depression in teens (12-17) and young adults (18-25) since at least 2012. Just last year, nearly 20% of teens (12-17) and a similar number of young adults (18-25) reported experiencing a major depressive episode. This is compared to just 7% in adults older than 25 last year, and just 9% of teens and young adults back in 2012.

Something is clearly happening, but what’s the cause? The recent documentary film “The Coddling of the American Mind,” directed by Ted Balaker, showcases how the adoption of what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism” (a.k.a.  “Wokeness” — a term we don’t love) and its associated catastrophizing spirals led three of the film’s protagonists, Kimi, Lucy, and Saeed, into feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Arnold Kling:

“At the extremes, 57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of poor mental health at least half the time, compared to just 34% of very conservative students”

…Only 41% of very liberal males report feelings of poor mental health more than half the time, compared to 60% of very liberal females, and a whopping 70% of very liberal non-binary students.

She writes as if the causality runs from social justice extremism to emotional fragility. But I am inclined to think that it is the other way around. If you are mentally fragile, you are likely to be attracted to an extreme ideology that gives you an external source to blame for your discomfort.

Ted Gioia proposes a reading list for a course on stupidity. Among the essay questions he proposes for a final exam are these:

——

Commentary.

Andrew Atterberry

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

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

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

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

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

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Commentary.

By Shannon Whitworth

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

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

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

Sally Weale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Findings

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

Glenn Reynolds:

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

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

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

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

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

——

Harrison Butker:

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

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

Quinn Clark and Natalie Eilbert

The details — an eighth-grade boy, his death, a pellet gun, a small tight-knit community — reveal a complex, tangled web that complicates any theory into why the tragic incident happened in the first place. The events have also left many with tricky questions over what exactly transpired, the boy’s intentions and whether his death could have been prevented.

“We are in this time where we often see cops shooting people in unjustified ways, which is definitely a big social problem right now,” said Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But this wasn’t a cop doing a cold call warrant on an adult who was caught off guard. This was somebody in a defensive act protecting children.”

By Maria Godoy

If you’re a parent struggling to get your kids’ off their devices and outdoors to play, here’s another reason to keep trying: Spending at least two hours outside each day is one of the most important things your kids can do to protect their eyesight.

“We think that outdoor time is the best form of prevention for nearsightedness,” says Dr. Noha Ekdawi, a pediatric ophthalmologist in Wheaton, Ill. 

And that’s important, because the number of kids with nearsightedness – or myopia – has been growing rapidly in the U.S., and in many other parts of the world. 

In the U.S., 42% of people are now myopic – up from 25% back in the 1970s. In some East Asian countries, as many as 90% of people are myopic by the time they’re young adults.

It’s a trend Ekdawi has seen among her own young patients. When she started practicing 15 years ago, one or two of the children she saw had myopia. But these days, “about 50% of my patients have myopia, which is an incredibly high number.” Ekdawi calls the increase astronomical.

Corrinne Hess:

Other findings include: 

Family Unity: Percentage of births to unmarried women, women currently married, and children with a single parent. Wisconsin ranks 16th. 

Family interaction: Percentage of children who are read to every day in the past week, children who watched four or more hours of television in the past week, and children who spent four or more hours on an electronic device in the past week. Wisconsin ranks 9th. 

Social Support: Percentage of people who get emotional support sometimes, rarely or never, neighbors who do favors at least once a month, people who trust most or all their neighbors, and the average number of close friends. Wisconsin ranks 3rd. 

Community Health: Percentage of people who attended a meeting which discussed politics in the last year, participated in a demonstration, volunteered for a group, attended a public meeting, worked with neighbors to fix something, served on a committee or as a group officer, and the number of organizations per 1,000 people. Wisconsin ranks 7th. 

Institutional Health: Percentage of people with some or great confidence in corporations to do the right thing, some or great confidence in media, some or great confidence in public schools, the census response rate and voting rate in presidential elections. Wisconsin ranks 2nd.  

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WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released a new report assessing the impact declining levels of social capital (the collection of interpersonal relationships that unite a heterogeneous society) has on Wisconsin communities. Fraying Connections: Exploring Social Capital and Its Societal Implications is the first of three reports that focuses on social capital and compares how Wisconsin’s communities stack up to other states.  

The Quote: Miranda Spindt, WILL Policy Associate, stated, “Loneliness and mental health issues have radically increased in American society and declining social capital is a root cause. WILL is doing a deep dive into why social capital is so important to advance a pluralistic society, what Wisconsin is doing right, but also what needs to change. It’s critical that we advance this discussion and debate for the betterment of communities in Wisconsin and across America.”  

What is Social Capital? Though the concept of social capital has many definitions, for this work we define it as the collection of interpersonal relationships that unite a heterogeneous society toward shared goals. Having a strong bond with family members serves as a foundation for how we build relationships with others. The relationships that individuals have with their family, friends, communities, and institutions have changed significantly.