- This presumption poses a challenge to those who dispute evidence produced by a computer system. Frequently the challenge is insurmount-able, particularly where a substantial institutionoperates the system.
- The Post Office Horizon scandal clearly ex-poses the problem and the harm that may result. From 1999, the Post Office prosecuted hundreds of postmasters and Post Office employees for theft and fraud based on evidence produced by the Horizon computer system showing short-falls in their branch accounts. In those prosecu-
tions, the Post Office relied on the presumption that computers were operating correctly.
professors discuss declining trust in higher education, institutional neutrality
By Michael Austin and Jazper Lu
Rose began the panel by citing a decline in trust in higher education in the U.S., referencing a Gallup poll that found the portion of Americans with “a great deal or quite a lot of trust” in universities declined from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2023.
“The university now is an institution not that seeks the truth, but that claims that it knows the truth and sees its core mission as making others see the light,” Kuran said.
He cited reservations of inviting conservative and moderate speakers among faculty, who fear “broach[ing] certain subjects” out of a fear of cancellation. Due to this fear, Kuran says the “self-regulation that the university had in the past no longer exists.”
Kuran pointed to other factors which he viewed as emblematic of the shift in the role of higher education.
“Nothing symbolizes this shift in the mission of universities as the … DEI statements that they now require of employees and applicants,” Kuran said. “This signals to everyone inside and outside the university that certain ideas [and] certain values are promoted … and they’re not to be challenged.”
Schanzer attributed the decline to the rise of populism on the political right that casts universities as part of the “establishment organization,” making them more of a target than before.
Curious censorship at taxpayer funded NPR
NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.
Berliner’s five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.
Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner’s essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network’s coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.
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NPR is now claiming that I am “targeting” its CEO by highlighting her own tweets. Katherine Maher is a standard-issue affluent, white female liberal, who is now discovering that her inner monologue is wildly out of touch with the public that, in part, pays her salary.
Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications
AJ ALVERO, SONIA GIEBEL AND BENJAMIN W. DOMINGUE
There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.
Civics: US House Warrantless Spying vote
“Every student group performs better in Mississippi than in Virginia”
The only reason Virginia might look better overall is because of the composition of our schools –>
The next time someone tells you not to worry, Virginia is not some state like Mississippi, this is all a made up crisis…we don’t need an accountability system…well…
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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 student/teacher ratio in Wisconsin is lower than in 2000 due to declining enrollment”
If there are fewer teaching candidates, it’s not showing up here.
(Madison) Teachers also delivered a petition with 2,000 signatures to the board that calls for increased staff allocations and smaller class sizes. They presented the signatures on pieces of paper representing each school, receiving applause and cheers from the teachers filling the seats and aisles of the building’s auditorium.
In June, the School Board also will decide whether to add referendum questions to the November ballot to help remedy its budget hole. If the district moves forward with referendums and voters approve the measures, local property taxes will increase beyond the levy limits set by the state.
In 2023, MTI and employees agreed to an 8% wage increase. The district initially offered 3.5%. The district gave employees a 3% base wage increase in 2022. Actual raises vary depending on level of education and years of experience.
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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 $pending.
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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?
Civics: “But the feeling of walking into San Francisco’s magical Narnia closet”
That celebration is a long way from Oct. 19, 2022, when Heather Knight’s Chronicle column, headlined “S.F. is spending $1.7 million on one public toilet,” started a conversation about wastefulness in public spending.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes Noe Valley, remembers both his reaction to the breaking story (“Oh, s—!”) and his sorrow that San Francisco would endure another mockery-filled news cycle, over a problem that’s by no means exclusive to Noe Valley.
“It captured something that I think people feel (about government waste) in a very tangible way,” Mandelman said.
Civics: NPR chief Katherine Maher
Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, was a minor character in the Twitter Files. She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and “Industry meetings” with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal triumverate of being member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Labs.
She took a job heading NPR in January, shortly before senior editor Uri Berliner set off a nuclear newsroom stink-bomb by publishing a tell-all article at The Free Press about station failures on stories like Russiagate. Berliner’s piece triggered a frenzy of anti-NPR Schadenfreude, which led to a furious examinations of Maher’s sitting-duck tweet history. Maher’s timeline reads so much like the Titania McGrath site spoofing overeducated nonsense-babbling white ladies that it’s difficult to believe she’s real — she even looks like the fictional McGrath, if Titania had more money to spend on personal upkeep.
Maher’s commentary dating back to the early Obama years is a gold mine of unintentional comedy. She’s gotten the most heat for using phrases like “As someone with cis white mobility privilege,” and “Sure, looting is counterproductive, but…” She also made an impressive Usain Bolt-like surge past Hillary Clinton in the Intersectional Gibberish Olympics:
“tax code and the regulations now total 35 million words”
Committee to unleash prosperity:
The firm Cover & Rossiter (certified public accountants) has estimated that the tax code and the regulations now total 35 million words. That’s more than 6 times as many words as War and Peace, the Bible, the entire Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Les Miserables, the Hunger Games series, Atlas Shrugged, the Twilight series, Gone with the Wind, and The Brothers Karamazov – combined.
And those were interesting readings. Can we PLEASE get a flat tax?
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More.
Interesting take by Will Flanders of WILL on WISN this morn: DPI head Jill Underly could have easily (and more honestly) spun the new study as ‘WI is doing better in retaining teachers than other states’.
Instead, she spun out an attack on ACT 10 and underfunded schools.
“private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling.”
M. Danish Shakeel, Patrick J. Wolf, Alison Heape Johnson, Mattie A. Harris & Sarah R. Morris:
Since Plato and Aristotle, political theorists have discussed the important role of education in forming democratic citizens. They disagree, however, over whether public or private schools are more effective at nurturing citizenship. We conduct a statistical meta-analysis to identify the average association between private schooling and measures of four central civic outcomes: political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, and voluntarism and social capital. Our search identifies 13,301 initial target studies, ultimately yielding 531 effects from 57 qualified studies drawing from 40 different databases. Using Robust Variance Estimation, we determine that, on average, private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling. Religious private schooling, particularly, is strongly associated with positive civic outcomes. The evidence is especially strong that private schooling is correlated with higher levels of political tolerance and political knowledge and skills. We discuss heterogeneities, robustness checks, and implications.
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“Ivy League academics are the best and the brightest, we were told. Trust their research, we were told. If you don’t, you’re anti-science, we were told”
Embattled Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino was accused of multiple counts of plagiarism in an analysis published in Science Magazine on Tuesday, claims that compound existing allegations of data misconduct against her.
According to Science, Gino “borrowed text” from dozens of academic sources. The plagiarism allegations add to a growing number of academic fraud accusations against Gino, as well as recent scrutiny on the integrity of scholarly work produced by Harvard professors and affiliates.
An initial investigation conducted by Erinn L. Acland, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, and Science Magazine found that a book chapter co-authored by Gino may contain plagiarized text.
The investigation found that the chapter, titled “Dishonesty Explained: What Leads Moral People to Act Immorally,” borrowed extensively from 10 other works, including academic papers and student theses.
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More.
The “Hate Speech” Road to Tyranny
We like to think we have freedom of speech. Doesn’t the First Amendment guarantee this to us? But some states have “hate speech” laws on the books. New York is considering a law, already passed in California that requires social media companies to report “hate speech.” This is the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” and has been passed by the State’s Assembly. Here is an account of the measure from Vince Chang, who favors it:
“Under pressure from the ADL [Ant-Defamation League] and other groups, internet platforms have voluntarily adopted measures to regulate hate speech. The ADL described some of the measures that have been taken:
Facebook prohibited Holocaust denial content, hired a vice president of civil rights, changed parts of its advertising platform to prohibit various forms of discrimination; expanded policies against content that undermined the legitimacy of the election; and built a team to study and eliminate bias in artificial intelligence. Due to pressure from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Twitter banned linked content, URL links to content outside the platform that promotes violence and hateful conduct. Reddit added its first global hate policy, providing for the removal of subreddits and users that “promote hate based on identity or vulnerability.”[12]
Journalism in the Digital Age
CS181 by Danny Crichton, Ben Christel, Aaditya Shidham, Alex Valderrama, Jeremy Karmel
This website analyses the trends that are taking place today in journalism. We begin by looking at what the Fourth Estate is, and what it means for the practice of journalism. Next, we present a lengthy history of print journalism in America, to provide the context needed to understand the changes underway in the digital age. Third, we include an analysis of the economics of journalism, followed by an exploration of the effects of how journalism has been affected by the internet. Finally, we have conducted five interviews with journalists that are confronting the digital age themselves to give a real look at how the internet is changing the practice of journalism today.
Most Teachers in America Don’t Get Maternity Leave. Some States Want to Fix That.
Elementary art teacher Kathryn Vaughn wasn’t nearly ready to return to her rural Tennessee classroom three weeks after giving birth to her son in 2021.
But Vaughn’s school district, like most in the U.S., offered no paid maternity leave. As her family’s sole wage earner, she felt she had little choice but to go back to work, where she sneaked glances midday of a video feed of her son at home with her husband.
“It’s the sad reality,” she said of the parental-leave policies of her profession, one largely dominated by women and tasked with caring for other people’s children.
Only 18% of the nation’s largest school districts offer some form of paid parental leave, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. Those that do typically offer less than six weeks—often only partially paid—or require teachers to exhaust their sick time first. Many teachers are forced to use workarounds such as stockpiling sick leave and trying to time pregnancies for summer births.
Some states are trying to change that. Tennessee, Oklahoma and South Carolina enacted laws last year giving teachers six weeks paid maternity leave, joining around half a dozen other states with policies. A proposed California law would require school districts and community colleges to provide 14 weeks of paid maternity leave.
‘Ideological bias’ training mandate, other provisions were taken out of UW System deal
Republican lawmakers and University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman reached an agreement in December to restructure diversity, equity and inclusion positions, but records show other systemwide plans were taken out at the last minute.
A Music Hall restoration, a mandate to have UW System employees complete a module to address “ideological bias” and a four-year diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) cap were previously on the table but removed shortly before the deal’s passage.
In some cases, those removals came less than a week before the UW Board of Regents approved a controversial deal that exchanged building funds and employee pay raises for a cap on UW System DEI positions. UW leaders also agreed to restructure a third of those positions to focus on general student success.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin texted Rothman on Dec. 3 that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, wanted a deal within the week.
Word of the deal’s details reached media outlets by Dec. 7, and the first vote by the Board of Regents, which initially struck down the deal, came on Dec. 9.
Taxpayer Funded Wisconsin DPI Report on Teacher Shortage Misses the Mark
Wisconsin Institute for law of liberty:
Recently, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction released a report on the teacher shortage in the state. The report claims that nearly 40% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, and blames declines in teacher compensation over the past decade for the shift. While the problems identified in the report are legitimate, the causes and solutions offered are more representative of traditional liberal talking points than an honest effort to make improvements for the teaching workforce in the state. In this explainer, we identify a number of issues with DPI’s report.
Consistent with National Patterns
Despite attempts to blame Act 10 for the decline in teacher retention, in reality this is a problem around the county. Indeed, based on the numbers reported by DPI, Wisconsin may actually be better than average. A 2018 study estimated that 44% of teachers nationwide leave the profession within five years And this data was pre-COVID–there is extensive evidence that turnover has increased since then. To illustrate this, consider a recent Chalkbeat analysis looked at teachers leaving the profession across four states. Each of these states saw an annual turnover rate of more than 10% during the 2022 school year. A figure from that report is reproduced below.
Figure 1. Annual Teacher Turnover in Four States (Chalkbeat)
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I have supported getting more teachers in the classroom, but several of our efforts (including my bill with Sen. Knodl, SB 608) have been vetoed. Let’s hope we can work together in more constructive ways next session.
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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?
JK Rowling and the Cass report reckoning
Boyish girls, climb the nearest tree and give a Tarzan whoop of victory – girly boys, fashion a floral crown and caper copiously. Thanks to the Cass Report, failing to follow sexist stereotypes (which decree that girls play with dolls and boys play with themselves) will no longer get you marched off to the sex-correction clinic. You’ll no longer be stuffed like a five-bird roast with the best that Big Pharma can tout and later shuttled off to the abattoir to have your perfectly healthy sexual organs hacked off. For the Great Trans Con has been bust as wide open as the space between India Willoughby’s ears.
Why did so many people who should have known better give their support to the incompetence verging on evil which the Cass Report has exposed?
Was ever a ‘liberation’ movement ever so risible from the start? Did any other allegedly oppressed group’s bid for equality include seeking to rob another oppressed group of their rights? Did any other oppressed group claim their freedom by dressing up as another oppressed group? And, crucially, did any allegedly oppressed group ever carry out such a comprehensive and conclusive capture of the most conservative and capitalist corporations and institutions? No, they didn’t – because previously, oppressed groups weren’t mostly composed of white middle-class men, as the trans-lobby are.
Like the Mitchell and Webb Nazis, the signs that the trans-mob weren’t the good guys – though they were definitely guys – were there all along. The threats of violence, rape and death while calling women who sought to preserve women’s spaces the hateful ones. The snitching to the police – such rebels! – who reacted true to form by siding with the blokes and arresting women for being impolite to men, joined by the judges who made raped women call their attackers ‘she’ out of ‘respect’. They stand revealed as a bunch of liars, fantasists and bullies, the whole rotten lot of them.
Citizens and K-12 open records requests
A citizen criticizes the government.
The government gets mad, and wants to shut the citizen up. So they sue him. And the district trial court says “that’s just fine.”
I kid you not.
America’s Bonds Are Getting Harder to Sell
At the same time, the government is poised to sell another $386 billion or so of bonds in May—an onslaught that Wall Street expects to continue no matter who wins November’s presidential election. While few fear a failed auction—an unlikely scenario that analysts said could potentially trigger prolonged turmoil—some worry that a glut of Treasurys will rattle other parts of the markets, raise the cost of government borrowing and hurt the economy.
“There’s been a big shift in the market narrative. The CPI [consumer-price index] report changed everybody’s view of where Fed policy is headed,” said James St. Aubin, chief investment officer at Sierra Mutual Funds.
Executive Order 6102 under FDR that led to widespread gold confiscation in the United States.
Ninety-one years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pulled off the greatest heist in American history.
Unlike most robberies, this one was entirely legal. No safe-cracking was required; no ski masks, guns, or getaway cars. Just a pen and some White House letterhead.
On April 5 1933, FDR issued Executive Order 6102, making it illegal for anyone in the United States to own gold. By penalty of up to a $10,000 fine or 10 years in prison, everyone in the country was ordered to turn in their gold to the government, by the end of the month.1
America’s Crisis in Civic Virtue
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
That was Benjamin Franklin’s famous response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” as he left the just-concluded Constitutional Convention on 17 September 1787.1 We have been trying to keep it ever since. For Alexis de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century, democracy was the nation’s defining characteristic, giving him the title of his most famous book, Democracy in America. U.S. leaders have promoted democratic values at home and around the world as superior to all others for almost 250 years through diplomacy, development, and military action as well as cultural and intellectual institutions — including this very journal.
And yet, it seems that millions of Americans have lost confidence in this traditional American “brand.” According to a June 2023 survey, almost half of Americans say they believe that our democracy is working “not too well” or “not at all.”2 The year before, 62 percent had agreed with the proposition that “American democracy is currently under threat.”3
What is provoking this identity crisis? Predictably during a time of extreme political polarization, many say, “the other party.” Indeed, in that same June 2023 poll, about half (47 percent) said the Democrats were doing a “somewhat bad” or “very bad” job upholding democracy, while 56 percent said this about the Republicans. In 2021, a huge majority (85 percent) of Americans surveyed said they believed that their nation’s political system “needs to be completely reformed” or “needs major changes.”4
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The office district is emptyK-12 Tax & Spending Climate:
The Railway Exchange Building was the heart of downtown St. Louis for a century. Every day, locals crowded into the sprawling, ornate 21-story office building to go to work, shop at the department store that filled its lower floors or dine on the famous French onion soup at its restaurant.
Today, the building sits empty, with many of its windows boarded up. A fire broke out last year, which authorities suspect was the work of copper thieves. Police and firefighters send in occasional raids to search for missing people or to roust squatters. A search dog died during one of the raids last year when it fell through an open window.
“It’s a very dangerous place,” said Dennis Jenkerson, the St. Louis Fire Department chief.
It anchors a neighborhood with deserted sidewalks sprinkled with broken glass and tiny pieces of copper pipes left behind by scavengers. Signs suggest visitors should “park in well-lit areas.” Nearby, the city’s largest office building—the 44-story AT&T Tower, now empty—recently sold for around $3.5 million.
K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Summers: Inflation Reached 18% In 2022 Using The Government’s Previous Formula
Numerous commentators—especially those defending President Biden’s economic record—have puzzled over why Americans are sour about the state of the U.S. economy. Unemployment rates have returned to pre-pandemic lows, commentators correctly point out, and the official rate of inflation is declining. So why are Americans ignoring the view of many experts that the economy is doing well?
According to a striking new paper by a group of economists from Harvard and the International Monetary Fund, headlined by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, the answer is that Americans have figured out something that the experts have ignored: that rising interest rates are as much a part of inflation as the rising price of ordinary goods. “Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels” since the early 1980s, they write. “Alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs” account for most of the gap between the experts’ rosy pictures and Americans’ skeptical assessment.
Fertility Decline: Proof of Culture Drift
The clearest proof of biologically maladaptive culture drift is fertility. Children per woman per lifetime has been declining worldwide for centuries, and is now below replacement levels almost everywhere. Earth passed peak births in 2016, and in a few decades, we’ll pass peak population. Absent huge AI advances, innovation rates will then fall even faster than the population, causing a many-centuries-long innovation pause, and then less liberal governance, perhaps including even the return of slavery.
This fertility fall is driven by many strong and beloved cultural trends, including more gender equality, more intensive parenting, longer inflexible career paths, less religion, more urbanity, capstone replacing cornerstone marriage, and less grandparent involvement. On the whole, these look more like non-adaptive value drifts than adaptive learning or context-dependence. And having fertility fall below replacement during times of plenty seems clearly maladaptive. While policy solutions exist, like big payouts to parents, they seem unlikely to be adopted, as they need us to care enough, and to allow the reversal of beloved trends.
How exactly did culture drift to hurt fertility? Maybe many independent trends just added up to that. But another possibility is that high-status folks had wealth to invest in kids and widespread status markers that could be improved by wealth. Then our general cultural habit of copying high-status behavior could have combined with a selection effect: having fewer kids causes each to have higher status. This pattern was widely reported in history, at least among elites.
Just as our cultural drift story predicts, the main fertility exceptions we see are in fragmented, very insular cultures like Mennonites, Amish, and Haredim. By doubling every two decades, they look on track to replace our mainline civilization in a few centuries, just as Christians once took over Romewith similar growth rates over a similar timescale. And just as Christians discarded many things they didn’t like about Roman civilization, these new groups may discard many aspects of our liberal civilization that we now treasure.
In fact, many ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome plausibly fell due to low fertility. And humanity may repeat this pattern: innovation causing wealth causing fewer richer cultures, which drift, fall, and fragment. Culture selection then heals drifts, letting civilizations rise again.
Is There a Fix?
Eventually, when our descendants spread across the stars, long communication delays will ensure cultural fragmentation, and thus more selection. (Fast or easily copied minds might also work, as in my book Age of Em.) Before then, I see only three fixes: conservative, totalitarian, and multicultural. And none seems likely to work (though we should try).
The conservative fix is to revert culture back to a point when cultural selection was strong, and then stop it from changing. If these cultural values are shallow, this would forgo gains from adapting deep values to changing conditions since then. But agreeing on deeper underlying conservative values seems hard.
Notes on rural k-12 tax base
“There’s not a tax base,” she said. “When you don’t have a stoplight in your town, you might have one gas station. That doesn’t provide you a lot of tax money from your communities.”
How Much Has Faculty Pay Changed Over Time?
This page collects the most recently available federal salary data for faculty at institutions of higher education. Data is available for 3,500 institutions and is broken down by gender and academic rank.
KPMG Fined $25 Million Over Alleged Netherlands Exam Cheating
The firm engaged in widespread answer sharing from 2017 to 2022 and involved hundreds of professionals, including partners and senior firm leaders such as now-former head of assurance, Marc Hogeboom, the PCAOB said. The firm repeatedly misrepresented its knowledge of the misconduct to the PCAOB, the regulator said. Hogeboom agreed to pay $150,000 and is permanently barred from associating with a registered accounting firm. Neither KPMG nor Hogeboom admitted or denied the PCAOB’s claims.
The $25 million fine far eclipsed the previous largest PCAOB penalty against an auditing firm, an $8 million levy against Deloitte’s Brazil unit in 2016 for alleged wrongdoing including issuing false audit reports and attempting to cover up audit violations.
Civics: “Berliner really did speak truth to power”
And even if power won’t listen, those of us who hear what Berliner hears appreciate his courage for saying it out loud.
As a service to YSDA readers who might not take the time to read the entire lengthy piece, here are some of our favorite excerpts.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population...
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America...
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR)...
Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None...
Inappropriate answer: “A school’s good vibes help students read.”
Host: You won. How will the MPS referendum improve reading?
Superintendent: Art, music, gym, all of those work with writing and reading. We educate the whole child.
I was at orchestra, and students had vocabulary, pronunciation, reading skills, contextual clues.
Me: Nope! No.
“It should be illegal for a president to buy votes by transferring funds from certain citizens to others he believes are more likely to support him in an election”
Student loan forgiveness sounds great for borrowers overburdened with high interest rate debts they cannot repay. The problem is that the subsidy appears to go principally to more affluent families at the cost of burdening those who didn’t attend college or whose parents saved to send their kids to school.
Biden’s new student loan plan will cost taxpayers another $84B, bringing total to $559B.
The biggest winners are 750,000 people with 20 years in repayment.
Their average debt relief is $25,500+ and average household income is $312,000+.
750,000 people making avg of $312k/year getting the bulk of the $$ relief
Earned wage access
Gov. Tony Evers in March signed into law a bill creating some oversight for platforms like DailyPay, MoneyLion or Payactiv in Wisconsin, planting the state’s flag on how to handle a rapidly growing industry making inroads across the country.
Earned wage access platforms effectively allow workers to tap into wages they already earned before their next scheduled paycheck. Sometimes this option is offered through an employer and, in other cases, people will use an app marketed directly to consumers.
Proponents of earned wage access, or EWA, have argued it is a tool that helps adapt the byzantine world of payroll to the lives of modern workers, effectively allowing people to get their money sooner.
There is some evidence that people who use EWA platforms are less likely to rely on payday loans and similar products.
Are We Watching The Internet Die?
The Reddit IPO is one of the biggest swindles in corporate history, where millions of unpaid contributors made billions of posts so that CEO Steve Huffman could make $193 million in 2023while laying off 90 people and effectively pushing third party apps off of the platform by charging exorbitant rates for API access, which in turn prompted several prolonged “strikes” by users, with some of the most popular subreddits going silent for a short period of time. Reddit, in turn, effectively “couped” these subreddits, replacing their longstanding moderators with ones of its own choosing — people who would happily toe the party line and reopen them to the public.
None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit’s public listing, but Sam Altman will make hundreds of millions of dollars for his $50 million investment from 2014. Reddit also announced that it had cut a $60 million deal to allow Google to train its models on Reddit’s posts, once again offering users nothing in return for their hard work.
Huffman’s letter to investors waxes poetic about Redditors’ “deep sense of ownership over the communities they create,” and justifies taking the company public by claiming that he wants “this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership” as he offers them a chance to buy non-voting stock in a company that they helped enrich. Huffman ends his letter by saying that Reddit is “one of the internet’s largest corpuses of authentic and constantly updated human-generated experience” before referring to it as the company’s “data advantage and intellectual property,” describing Redditors’ posts as “data [that] constantly grows and regenerates as users converse.”
World University Rankings by Subject 2024
Discover which universities around the world are the best for your chosen subject with the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024.
The 2024 edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject features 55 individual subjects across five broad subject areas. 1,559 institutions have been ra …
The 2024 U.S. News Rankings
Yesterday, U.S. News published its 2024 Best Law School rankings. For the 2023 rankings, the magazine radically overhauled its methodology, leading to a lot of movement. For the 2024 rankings, it largely adhered to last year’s approach, which explains why there was more stability this time around.
A school’s ranking is now based on the following components, weighted as follows (with a few minor adjustments from 2023, per Staci Zaretsky at Above the Law):
- Employment: 33% (newly averaged between the two most recent graduating class years)
- First-Time Bar Passage: 18% (newly averaged between the two most recent graduating class years)
- Ultimate Bar Passage: 7% (newly averaged between the two most recent graduating class years)
- Peer Assessment: 12.5% (slightly tweaked)
- Lawyer/Judge Assessment: 12.5% (slightly tweaked)
- LSAT/GRE: 5%
- UGPA: 4%
- Acceptance Rate: 1%
- Student-Faculty Ratio: 5%
- Library Resources: 2%
Averaging employment and bar-passage stats between the two most recent class years makes sense to me, as a way of reducing the influence of a single aberrant class. It will also tend to reduce variability over the years, which again probably offers a more accurate picture of how law schools fare in terms of finding jobs for their graduates and helping them pass the bar.
Now, on to the rankings. Here are the top 14 aka “T14” law schools—or actually the top 15, because of a two-way tie for #14—with changes from last year noted parenthetically:
Hot Market for Pencils Help Kids Turn Lead Into Gold
Every kid wants a pencil—especially a carefully carved stub of a pencil called a mini.
Sasha Portnoy, a 9-year-old from Hamden, Conn., is among those playing the market. “One or two mini-pencils for a box of Nerds. Or maybe two or three for an Airhead,” said Sasha, explaining the pencil-to-candy conversion rate.
She says she spends an hour a night sharpening pencils until they are small enough to trade for candy or slime, the gelatinous goop some children knead. She sometimes cuts the pencils in half, doubling her investment.
With smartphones common, pencils are the novelty. Teachers can’t hold on to them. Parents can’t get rid of them. Elementary school students can’t get enough of them.
“They’re a status symbol,” said Nora Rodriguez, an eighth-grader in Peachtree City, Ga. She has grown out of the mini-pencil fad—Because, why? she said with an older-kid attitude. Yet she still has favorites and keeps them in a pencil pouch with her eyelash curler, lip gloss, mirror and brush.
Nora’s friend Olivia—She is always losing her pencil, Nora said—tried to steal a cherished purple pencil during first-period Spanish. “What are you doing?” Nora recalled saying and took it back.
After a nearly five-hour school board meeting, the decision was made to move forward with layoffs
Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education voted 4-3 Thursday night to approve teacher layoffs.
The decision was made in order to help make up for a $25 million budget shortfall the district recently found, including a $14 million accounting error the school district is still investigating.
The district must make up for the shortfall by the end of the school year to avoid state takeover.
Hundreds of Ann Arbor Public Schools educators chanted “We are teachers. We are not the problem,” carrying signs outside the school administration building before the school board meeting began.
The protesters then moved into the meeting, continuing to chant. Over 140 people signed up for public comment. The comments had a common theme: find another way to make up for the budget shortfall without letting go educators.
The school district says the $25 million deficit stems from a loss of student enrollment over the past few years, an increase in staff and an increase in staffing costs for employees. The clerical error is what has many educators frustrated and concerned about the future of the district.
“I regret not doing more to support and defend Brendan then”
“I was working in New York’s “Silicon Alley” when it happened, and I immediately recognized it as a major escalation in the culture war. It was a warning that the Leviathan of technocracy did not care how well I did, how hard I worked, or how well I treated others. Ideological conformity to the top-down, programmatic transformation of the country that was rapidly taking place was all that mattered. If I was unwilling to affirm the current thing dictated according to the whims of “progress,” I was an enemy of humanity and an enemy of America. And my beliefs, no matter how ancient, innocent, and valid, must bow to the will of Leviathan, or the digital swarm would descend upon me. In fact, the higher I rose, the harder opponents would hunt for an excuse to throw me, like Belteshazzar, to the lions.”
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More.
President Biden on Warrantless domestic spying
White House Memo, via Jordan Carney:
THE BIGGS AMENDMENT IS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY
The Biggs amendment would eviscerate the value of Section 702
This extreme amendment would impose dangerous limits on the ability to review critical intelligence on key threats, including terrorist threats to the Homeland, fentanyl supply chains bringing deadly drugs into American communities, Russian war crimes, and hostile governments’ recruitment of spies.
The amendment bars U.S. officials from querying lawfully-collected Section 702 data to find communications of an American, except in extraordinarily limited and unworkable exceptions.
While Section 702 is focused exclusively on foreigners overseas, this prohibition would block the IC to identifying vital intelligence it has already collected where foreign 702 targets communicate with, or about, an American.
This will prevent U.S. offficials from quickly examining critical communications already in the government’s lawful possession, raising the unacceptable risk that the government might not respond to a developing threat until it is too late, or at all.
Queries of Section 702-including U.S. person queries are essential to identify and disrupt threats to our national security and to protect victims. The FBI’s ability to quickly query Section 702 information has enabled investigators to:
Prevent a potentially imminent strike by a terrorist in the Homeland, who had the means to conduct an attack and had researched and identified specific sites.
Disrupt an ongoing assassination and kidnapping plot targeting a dissident in the U.S.
Mitigate a cyber breach by China-based hackers against U.S. critical infrastructure.
Under the Biggs amendment, the FBI would have been unable to gain access to the critical information necessary to take these actions in time to protect the country.
The exceptions to the amendment’s query ban are alarmingly narrow and unworkable.
The “warrant” exception allows a query if, beforehand, the executive branch has obtained a court order based on probable cause. But the executive branch almost never can meet that standard at the earliest stages of an investigation when queries are most critical.
The “exigent circumstances” exception for imminent threats of death and serious bodily harm would almost never be satisfied, even in the face of a terrorist threat. Queries are often run to determine if an emergency exists in the first place. Without viewing the results of a query, an analyst would not know whether the threat meets the statutory exception.
The “consent” exception is not practical in national security investigations. It is often impossible to know in advance whether a person is a victim or perpetrator of malicious activity and there is often not sufficient time to obtain consent from a private party.
This would be a reckless policy choice that is contrary to the key lessons of 9/11 and not grounded in any constitutional requirement or statute.
![](https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/img_5180-1-250x300.jpg)
Students Don’t Have a Right to Use Public University Social Events for Their Own Political Orations,
A couple of people, both of whom I respect a great deal, asked me for a First Amendment analysis of the students’ trying to orate about the Israel-Palestine conflict at the class party at Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. Happy to oblige!
[1.] Some people have argued that the party was a public law school function, and thus not just a private event. I’m not sure that’s right—but I don’t think it matters.
Even if Berkeley law school put on a party for its students in a law school classroom, students still couldn’t try to hijack that for their own political orations. Rather, much government property is a “nonpublic forum”—a place where some members of the public are invited, but which is “‘… not by tradition or designation a forum for public communication'” (Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), quoting a leading 1983 case).
In a nonpublic forum, the government acting as proprietor may impose restrictions so long as they are “reasonable and viewpoint-neutral.” (The restrictions need not be content-neutral, by the way, so long as they are viewpoint-neutral; and I expect that Dean Chemerinsky wouldn’t have tolerated this sort of political speechmaking at their dinner by anyone.)
This is because the government has the “power to preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated.” If the place is a room opened up to students for listening to a lecture, or if it’s open for dinner or lunch or a party, people have no First Amendment right to bring microphones and take the event over for their own political diatribes.
External review raises alarms about financial future at multiple UW campuses
A newly released third-party analysis raises concerns about the financial future of multiple state universities.
Last year, a forecast from the Universities of Wisconsin projected structural deficits at 10 of Wisconsin’s public universities ranging from millions to tens of millions of dollars.
Only three campuses — Madison, LaCrosse and Stout — were projected to generate enough revenue to meet expenses.
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On Thursday, the UW system released updates from an external review into the finances at seven of the universities with projected deficits.
The reports completed by the firm Deloitte point to fiscal headwinds, including falling enrollment, struggles to retain students, and the end of federal COVID-19 aid.
And, as Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman noted, Wisconsin ranks 42nd in the nation when it comes to state funding for public universities.
“While we will do our part on the expense side of the ledger, it is ultimately up to the state to decide whether it wants and can afford a weakened universities of Wisconsin,” said during a news conference on Thursday.
Former Webster teacher reunites with 100 past students to watch eclipse
Patrick Moriarty sat expectantly in a plastic chair in his Brighton driveway at 3:20 p.m. on Monday as the sky darkened, the moon slipping in front of the sun behind a blanket of clouds.
“How do you guys like this?!” he said to the crowd surrounding him, who weren’t neighbors or coworkers but about 100 former students of his from decades ago. A chorus of oh’s and ah’s arose from the group, one commenting on the 360 sunset effect still visible even in the dark while another tried quickly to turn off their brightened cell phone screen.
It was a pinnacle moment for the former Webster science teacher, who’d spent over a decade sharing his passion for all things celestial with 14- and 15-year olds, and telling them to meet him in 2024 for the total solar eclipse bound for Rochester.
Moriarty, now 68, never thought a bunch of them would actually show up at his Brighton home for the occasion.
Notes on college dropout data
But most Americans aren’t completing college, according to a new report by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Federal researchers tracked federal more than 20,000 students who started ninth grade in 2009, reports Sarah D. Sparks on Education Week. Eight years after they should have finished high school, two-thirds had not completed a vocational certificate or college degree.
Twenty-six percent of students who started ninth grade in 2009 didn’t go on to enroll in college, and another 40 percent enrolled but didn’t finish a certificate or degree within eight years, the longitudinal study found.
Of those who ever enrolled in college, 60 percent completed a certificate or degree.
Not surprisingly, students from affluent families were more likely to enroll in college and complete degrees.
Christopher Rufo & Curtis Yarvin debate the American Revolution, Power, Strategy, and more
The conservatives, when they feel the bumps under their seats and realize the train is not on rails, feel each bump as a problem to be solved. DEI is a problem to be solved. Mass migration is a problem to be solved. The fentanyl epidemic is a problem to be solved.
Yet not only are the conservatives’ solutions wildly, fantastically disproportionate – by orders of magnitude – to these problems, they are not the real problems. They are only symptoms of the real problem – that our country is lost in history. There are no rails. There never were any.
But your quixotic, but energetically and even brilliantly conducted, fight against just one of these symptoms, in which even when your sword goes home and sinks to the hilt, you only demonstrate what a pinprick it is to this Brobdignagian monster, serves a different purpose. You are not defeating the enemy. You are only revealing it – showing everyone that the monster is real, and brave and capable men can fight it. Let us learn to fight it well – and let us learn to make it show its face. I complain, but I do not know of – for now – a better way.
Rufo: Let’s begin by clearing up some misconceptions. First, we have different objectives. Your goal seems to be accelerating the cycle of regimes from democracy to monarchy. My goal is to halt and reverse political decomposition and return to the beginnings of the republic — counter-revolution.
We also have a deep disagreement over the nature of history. You argue that there are no rails, no destiny, no divinity, and nothing beyond human contingency. This nihilistic argument creates considerable problems for you because it eliminates all possibility of making normative judgments. What is the ground of your convictions? What is the telos of your political system? And, if America is ordinary, contingent, and accidental, why care about its future at all?
My conviction is that there is a logical structure to human nature and, consequently, a structure of political order. The American founders were not ordinary politicians, but men of extraordinary vision and virtue who solved the core political problem posed by classical political philosophy and thereby created the most secure, free, and virtuous republic in history, with unprecedented innovations in commerce, technology, and the arts. You ridicule the category of “problems to be solved,” but pragmatism is the Anglo-American political spirit.
I see in your pessimism an excuse for inaction. I am grateful that you recognize that my work is valuable in “revealing the enemy” and that “brave and capable men can fight it.” This is enough. I have no illusion that my work alone will topple the regime. But I am doing what I can to contribute to that possibility in the future. Small victories yield new insights and open up new lines of action. Politics is not an abstraction; real-world fights generate greater practical knowledge than idle fantasies.
Remaining test free at UW schools ‘denying reality’
There is pushback to the University of Wisconsin’s decision to make the SAT and ACT optional for students for the next few years.
State Sen. Duey Striebel, R-Cedarburg, on Tuesday said the plan to accept students’ high school grades only is short-sighted and politically motivated.
“Proponents of test-optional policies claim that standardized tests are biased, and that making them optional will help improve diversity on college campuses while addressing ‘systemic inequities’ in the world of higher education. This theory continues to be disproven, with numerous scholars noting that required testing can actually help identify disadvantaged students who have the potential to succeed in higher education,” Stroebel said.
UW regents approved an extension of the test-option policy. The university will not require the SAT or the ACT until at least the fall of 2027.
Is K-12’s #MeToo moment finally here — & will journalism help play a role?
Is 2024 finally the year that journalists dig deep into the pervasive problem of serial sexual predators in schools — and that school systems tighten up their incredibly lax procedures?
If so, Business Insider’s Matt Drange will have had lots to do with it.
Two years ago, Drange published a scathing story about a beloved teacher who had been an active sexual predator at Drange’s own high school while he was a student.
Then last fall, Drange produced a follow-up story about a cluster of sexual predators who had been active at the same school over decades. And late last year, Drange came out with a third, national-level piece that described a widespread problem with serial sexual predators in schools — enabled by lax state laws, feeble district enforcement, and the use of Hollywood-style nondisclosure agreements that kept things hush-hush.
Since then, Drange has been recruiting interested state and local reporters to deepen and spread the story. He’s been named an Education Writers Association finalist for his work, An Epidemic of Sexual Abuse in Schools: Shoddy Investigations, Quiet Resignations, and a Culture of Secrecy Have Protected Predators, Not Students. And there’s a possible podcast or documentary in the works.
Commentary on Madison’s latest K-12 Superintendent
In his first news conference in Madison since being named the public schools’ new superintendent, Joe Gothard vowed to be an engaged leader and said he wasn’t afraid to make changes.
“I think that we’ve got to be very deliberate. I think we’ve got to be very open with our community around where our challenges are, report frequently about progress that we’re making and not be afraid at all to say, ‘You know what, we’re not making a mark here; we need to make a change here,'” he said.
Gothard shared his top priorities for the district with administrators and Madison School Board members during a news conference Thursday at Thoreau Elementary School on Madison’s Near West Side. Gothard, who is the outgoing superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota, has been in Madison since Monday visiting schools and meeting staff.
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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?
“and one side with a “less competitive” version to appeal to Gen Z gamers”
The flip side of the classic game, called Scrabble Together, will include helper cards, use a simpler scoring system, be quicker to play and allow people to play in teams.
“The makers of Scrabble found that younger people, Gen Z people, don’t quite like the competitive nature of Scrabble,” Gyles Brandreth, who co-hosts the language podcast Something Rhymes With Purple, told BBC Radio 4 Today. “They want a game where you can simply enjoy language, words, being together and having fun creating words.”
If not to teacher salaries, where is this money going?
Will Flanders and Corrinne Hess:
It is true that total teacher compensation has declined since 2010, but more nuance is needed.
1) A significant portion of that decline is in fringe benefits, which Act 10 mandated teachers contribute to as most all private sector employees must. (1/2)
This is true, but here are my 4 quick analyses.
- Teacher supply has gone up, which pushes pay down. We have 1,805 more teachers than 2010 but 48,458 fewer students. The same ratio as “the good, old days” would free up funds to give every teacher a $5,368 raise.
K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Skyrocketing home ownership costs, including property taxes
Property taxes and home-maintenance costs are climbing in much of the country. Non-mortgage costs including property taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance make up more than half of homeowners’ overall costs, according to a 2022 analysis by Fannie Mae economists.
FAFSA Tracker
Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science
Contemporary Islam is not known for its engagement in the modern scientific project. But it is heir to a legendary “Golden Age” of Arabic science frequently invoked by commentators hoping to make Muslims and Westerners more respectful and understanding of each other. President Obama, for instance, in his June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo, praised Muslims for their historical scientific and intellectual contributions to civilization:
It was Islam that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.
Such tributes to the Arab world’s era of scientific achievement are generally made in service of a broader political point, as they usually precede discussion of the region’s contemporary problems. They serve as an implicit exhortation: the great age of Arab science demonstrates that there is no categorical or congenital barrier to tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and advancement in the Islamic Middle East.
So when will places like Madison and Milwaukee apologize? K-12 Lockdowns:
“The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind,” the Times’ authors wrote.
Take, for instance, Madison, which reopened in-person learning in spring 2021, one of the two last districts in Wisconsin to do so, and nearby Verona, open from the start of the school year. From 2019 to 2022, researchers found, Madison kids lost more than half a grade level in math. Verona kids gained a quarter grade. In the year since, from 2022 to 2023, Madison’s children have begun to recover, but Verona’s have pulled ahead at about five times Madison’s pace.
Districts vary according to many factors, researchers and the Times caution, but the pattern now is clear. The paper quoted an infectious disease specialist who helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidance on reopening schools: “We probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” he said.
And for what? The Times signals it’s now safe to wonder that, too, quoting an eminent Covid response doctor at a prominent hospital as saying that a consensus of respectable doctors has “generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid.”
Smartphones are not the source of all social ills: Phones and social media are easy scapegoats for our all too human follies
The argument against smartphones and social media is familiar and repetitive: they steal our time, harvest our attention, farm our data. Tech companies are called attention merchants and algorithmic exploiters; we are all supposed to be hooked on dopamine which is immiserating us. And now the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is promoting the idea that smartphones and social media have “rewired” the brains of a generation of children, which makes them depressed and anxious. The recent rise in rates of suicide and self-harm among young people are beng blamed on phones and social media.
But Haidt’s claims are not uncontroversial. And more broadly, we need to account for the many benefits of smartphones. New technology is never a simple good. The idea that technology brings disruption is a cliche for good reason. People in the past were hostile to all sorts of mundane technology, like bicycles and water drainage. The question is not whether phones and social media are good or bad, but what the net effects are, who gains and loses, and how we ought to manage them.
Do we really believe that the effects of this new technology are so different to, say, the arrival of landline phones and cars?
First, let’s review the case that smartphones and social media have created a miserable generation. The evidence is less certain than it appears. Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie pointed out on their podcast that rates of suicide in Norway, Denmark, and the UK have not increased. If phones and Instagram are harming teenage girls in the USA, why are they not doing so in other countries? Amy Orben argues you can only explain 0.36% of the variation in teenage girls’ depression with phones and social media. When Orben looked at more recent data, she found even smaller effects — so small as to be irrelevant. Another recent paper suggests that the rise in suicide rates in the USA may be due to changes in the way data is collected.
Psychologist Chris Ferguson has a forthcoming meta-study of the work in this area. Many studies about the negative effects of social media ask participants to reduce their social usage, which means those participants likely know what the study is about, biassing their response. Those who don’t want to reduce social use may drop out. Data from these studies is not widely shared, either. And while the studies find some relationship, the effect size is statistically insignificant: if social media does make you depressed, the effect is so small it’s almost impossible to measure. Aaron Brown has shown that Haidt over-states his case relative to the findings of the studies he relies on. On her YouTube channel the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has summarised the evidence that social media makes you depressed is weak.
Civics: An investigation into Federal Reserve governor Lisa D. Cook’s academic record raises questions.
Christopher F. Rufo, Luke Rosiak
We will review several examples which, taken together, establish a pattern of careless scholarship at best or, at worst, academic misconduct.
In a 2021 paper titled “The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names,” Cook copied-and-pasted verbatim language from Charles Calomiris and Jonathan Pritchett, without using quotation marks when describing their findings, as required. Here is the original passage from Calomiris and Pritchett:
During this time, New Orleans was the largest city in the South and the site of its largest slave market. Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated slaves like real estate, and slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806, section 10). Today, the records of many of these slave sales may be found in the New Orleans Notarial Archives and the New Orleans Conveyance Office. Because of the availability of these records and the size of the market, New Orleans is the best source for data on slave sales within the United States.
Here is Cook’s paper, which, though it cites Calomiris and Pritchett, lifts their language verbatim, which we have marked in italics, substituting only the word “slaves” with the politically correct phrase “the enslaved”:
Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated the enslaved like real estate, and slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806 section 10). Today the records of many of these slave sales may be found in the New Orleans Notarial Archives and the New Orleans Conveyance Office. Because of the availability of these records and the size of the market, New Orleans is the best source for data on slave sales within the United States. [ . . . ]
During this time New Orleans was the largest city in the South and the site of its largest slave market.
She does something similar in her October 2021 paper,“Closing the Innovation Gap In Pink and Black,” which, despite significant government subsidies and years spent on it by Cook, summarized the work of researchers Charles Becker, Cecilia Elena Rouse, and Mingyu Chenby copying roughly 70 words without quotes.
This appears to be a violation of the standards in Michigan State University’s guidebook, which states that authors must paraphrase or add direct quotations to verbatim passages. “It is your responsibility to make certain that you understand the difference between quoting and paraphrasing, as well as the proper way to cite and delineate quoted material,” the guidebook reads.
In multiple papers, Cook also appears to have copied language from her own prior papers, or those of coauthors, without proper attribution.
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And:
I agree with Sheryl Sandberg’s niece, Maya Bodnick, that Harvard should conduct a systematic review of all scholars, then break down the results by field, race, and sex, so we can have a comprehensive picture of any disparities. This is a great suggestion from The Crimson.
More.
Student Discipline at Vanderbilt
For years, we have discussed the failure of universities to take actions against faculty and students shutting down events or acting unlawfully, including faculty guilty of criminal assault. Now, Vanderbilt has expelled three students after anti-Israel protests, including Jack Petocz, a political activist recognized by the White House and featured prominently in the New York Times and other news outlets.
According to the Vanderbilt Hustler and The College Fix, the students were arrested for allegedly assaulting a security guard amid raucous anti-Israel protests inside an Administration building late last month.
A security video shows a security officer overwhelmed as he tried to keep protesters out of Kirkland Hall.
Caitlin Clark Leaves a Lasting Legacy in NCAA History
Caitlin Clark is the face of the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team. She is known for breaking NCAA records in 2022 as a junior and 2023 as a senior. She has come a long way since she was a kid reaching for and achieving her basketball dreams.
From the young age of five, Caitlin Clark has always been gifted. Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, she played against her older cousins. At first, it was challenging for her, but she quickly began to outplay her cousins. “It’s just marvelous to remember that she’s wired special. Sometimes, there are special athletes that God created, and Caitlin Clark is one of those,” said her grandpa who was also her coach when she was little. By the time she was a senior at West Des Moines Catholic, Caitlin had multiple offers, establishing her as one of the top seniors in her graduation class. During her senior year, Caitlin had offers from top schools such as Texas, Oregon, Florida, and the University of Iowa. She ended up committing to Iowa where she has been doing unbelievable things as their star player. The Iowa Hawkeyes made it to the championship in 2022 but were sadly defeated by the LSU Tigers 102-85.
Caitlin has already become a legend in NCAA basketball. She had the first-ever 40-point triple-double in NCAA history, including men’s basketball. The Iowa Hawkeyes’ season had not even started when Caitlin Clark and her team broke a record. In the summer of 2023 during their pre-season game against DePaul, Caitlin Clark’s Hawkeyes broke the attendance record for Women’s NCAA basketball. The Hawkeyes exhibition game almost doubled the attendance record with 55,646 people, with the old record being 29,619 people in 2002. She broke 3,000 career points against Iowa State on December 6th, making her the 15th female in Division 1 basketball to achieve this goal. She now holds the all-time scoring record for Iowa.
Millions Of Teens Are Using A Homework App From TikTok’s Chinese Parent Company
Unlike TikTok, Gauth is an educational app, designed specifically to help users with their homework. To use it, you take a photo of a homework assignment — like a sheet of math problems, for example — and watch as AI solves the problems for you. Upon downloading the app, the first prompt you receive is a request for permission to use the camera. The app appears similar to a China-based ByteDance app known as “Hippo Learning.”
In addition to AI help, Gauth also offers a paid “Plus” version, which connects students with tutors in a given subject area. “We have fifty thousands of experts and dedicated experts ready to help you 24/7 with multiple subjects,” says the app description in the Apple app store. Gauth solicits tutors through a website, gauthexpert.com, where it offers payment of up to $1500 per month for tutors with expertise in math, chemistry, physics, or biology. ByteDance spokesperson Mike Hughes told Forbes that tutors are based in the United States, India, the Philippines and portions of Africa.
Gauth also offers a set of homework timers and reminders and other fun features, including an animated “Personal AI Study Buddy” and a selection of lofi beat soundtracks. There is also a system of “points” that can be used for in-app purchases; you can buy points with cash or accrue them by watching ads. There is a “targeted ads” toggle in your settings, which is auto-set to “off.”
Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets: Student test scores rise in flexible-pay districts. So does a gender gap for teacher compensation.
Using employment records on all public-school teachers in Wisconsin linked to individual student information on achievement and demographics from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, I first document how teacher salaries changed in flexible-pay and seniority-pay districts in the aftermath of the reform. After the expiration of districts’ collective bargaining agreements, salary differences among teachers with similar seniority and credentials emerged in flexible-pay districts, but not in seniority-pay districts. Before the passage of Act 10, such teachers would have been paid the same. These newly emerging differences are related to teachers’ effectiveness: Teachers with higher value-added (individual contributions to the growth in student achievement, as measured by standardized test scores) started earning more in flexible-pay districts. This finding is striking considering that school districts in Wisconsin neither calculate value-added nor use it to make any human-resources decisions. School and district administrators appear to be able to identify an effective teacher when they see one.
Does Flexible Pay Attract Better Teachers?
Changes in teachers’ pay arrangements after the expiration of the collective bargaining agreements changed teachers’ incentives to stay in their district or to move, depending on the teachers’ effectiveness and the pay plan in place in their district of origin. Because flexible-pay districts compensate teachers for their effectiveness and seniority-pay districts only reward them for seniority and academic credentials, teachers with higher effectiveness should want to move to flexible-pay districts, whereas teachers with lower effectiveness and higher seniority should want to move to seniority-pay districts.
The data confirm these hypotheses. The rate of cross-district movement more than doubled after Act 10, with most moves occurring across districts of different type (flexible-pay vs. seniority-pay). Teachers who moved to a flexible-pay district after a collective bargaining agreement expired were more than a standard deviation more effective, on average, than teachers who moved to the same districts before the expiration; these teachers also had lower seniority and academic credentials and enjoyed a significant pay increase upon moving. The effectiveness of teachers moving to seniority-pay districts, on the other hand, did not change. and these teachers did not experience any change in pay.
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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
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The late 1990’s Milwaukee pension scandal is worth a deep dive as well.
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
“those who never went to college or who dutifully paid back their loans — pick up $144 billion in college debt”
I hate student loan forgiveness because to me it’s a fundamental question of values. I believe in hard work, personal responsibility, sacrifice, individualism and even some stoicism. Paying off loans is about getting something for nothing and it rewards the savers and the spendthrifts, the careful planners and the careless, alike. It treats people as members of groups instead of as people with individual circumstances. And nobody who is demanding this will say “thank you” if they get it. For some reason they seem to think it’s owed to them.
Stanford’s Faculty Senate Condemned Scott Atlas’s Covid Views. Now They Might Take It Back.
Stanford University’s Faculty Senate will weigh dueling motions this week about whether to rescind its 2020 condemnation of Scott W. Atlas, a Hoover Institution senior fellow who was an adviser to former President Donald Trump about Covid-19.
At the height of the pandemic, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution criticizing Atlas for promoting “a view of Covid-19 that contradicts medical science.” It cited his remarks that discouraged mask-wearing and that encouraged Michiganders to “rise up” against their governor in response to public-health measures, among others. The November 2020 resolution, which was approved by 85 percent of the senate membership and drew national attention, characterized Atlas’s behavior as “anathema to our community, our values, and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.”
Notes on Tax & $pending k-12 Referendums
Wisconsin voters were asked to approve more than 100 school district referendums in February and April.
But with an approval rate of only 60 percent, voter fatigue appears to have set in.
Voter approval rates of school district referendums hovered around 50 percent for most of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Starting in 2012, however, voters approved referenda in greater numbers, with the passage rate peaking at about 90 percent in 2018, according to a recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
“Over the past several years, approval rates have trended downward,” the report says. “After slight declines in both 2020 and 2022, the 60.2 percent passage rate for 2024 school district referenda so far is the lowest in a midterm or presidential year since 2010.”
The Milwaukee Public Schools referendum got the most attention this spring. The district asked for $252 million, which was narrowly approved by just over 1,700 votes.
That’s a far cry from four years ago when the MPS referendum passed by nearly 80 percent.
The Mukwonago Area School District asked voters to approve $102 million. The money would have been used to build a new middle school and add K-4 classrooms.
In a video posted before the election, Park View Middle School Principal Luke Spielman described congested hallways and classrooms. And showed videos of aging pipes and outdated music and physical education spaces.
40 Years After ‘A Nation At Risk,’
A simple fact about education in the United States trumps all others, yet has been largely overlooked in the education reform era and contributed to its disappointing underperformance: it takes nearly four million women and men to staff America’s K–12 classrooms. A number that large, by definition, means that teachers will be people of average abilities and sentience—not saints, not superstars, and, more pertinently, not the cognitive elite, who do not exist in sufficient numbers to staff more than a fraction of America’s classrooms. At the same time, it is not an overstatement to say that the ever-increasing demands placed on the average teacher make the job nearly impossible to do well, consistently, or sustainably. The reluctance even to cite, let alone address, this mismatch of expectations and abilities contributes to the mediocre performance of education in the United States, which has not changed significantly or satisfactorily since A Nation at Risk warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
If teacher capacity is unlikely to change, then what must change is the teacher’s job. If the education reform movement is to regain its momentum and moral authority, becoming not merely a disruptive force but an effective one, it must reinvent itself as a practice-based movement that is clear-eyed and candid about human capital and system capacity, committed not to transforming the teacher workforce but to making teaching doable by the existing workforce and those likely to enter the profession in the future.
At the same time, candor requires acknowledging that this transformation can’t be speedily or satisfactorily addressed, even if taken up with urgency. Education policy is a weak lever to change classroom practice. Enduring change requires shifts in the culture of teaching, which is notoriously slow to evolve, resistant to change, and skeptical—even cynical—about reform. For a 2017 study published by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, Wartburg College professor Richard Snyder interviewed a series of teachers with more than twenty years in the field to understand their perspectives on reforms and change. One teacher, who was aggravated with changes to class schedules, often ignored new directives from administrators. “In fact, Mr. Booker—a social studies teacher with over 30 years of experience—acknowledged giving ‘lip service’ to numerous initiatives, then returning to his own classroom intent on accomplishing intellectual discourse through interactive lecture.” Other teachers criticized increased top-down control, whether it be from Common Core State Standards or area education agency (AEA) consultants. Concerned about her loss of autonomy, Mrs. Rittmeyer stated:
Whitnall School Board members have allegedly been conducting business in private Facebook group
Four members of the Whitnall School Board are being investigated for allegedly violating Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law.
LuAnn Bird, a Hales Corner resident, filed the complaint last month with the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office.
The complaint alleges school board President Jason Craig, Vice President Cassie Rainer, Clerk Rachel Scherrer and Treasurer Karen Mikolainis conducted board business on the private Facebook group “Whitnall Watchdog” starting in April 2023.
Civics: Politucs and Money
The conservative sites allege that the group spent “only about $263,000 on its stated mission of electing candidates from Generation Z to office combined with donations to other Democrat Party committees and groups—and instead spent more than $1.4 million on disbursements to themselves for payroll and to political consulting firms and legal fees, in addition to travel and entertainment expenses like hotels, flights, and meals.”
However, it spent reportedly spent more than $1,314,000 on travel and related expenses while giving $80,000 to the Elias Law Group.
Previously, when allegations of self-dealing and accounting improprieties were raised with regard to Black Lives Matter, the group’s attorney, Elias, immediately stood out for many. Elias resigned from his “key role” with BLM as the scandal exploded.
Ethics and “ai” grading services
Some teachers are leaning on software called Writable that uses ChatGPT to help grade papers but is “tokenized,” so essays do not include any personal information, and it’s not shared directly with the system.
Teachers upload essays to the platform, which was recently acquired by education company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which then provides suggested feedback for students.
Other educators are using platforms such as Turnitin that boast plagiarism detection tools to help teachers identify when assignments are written by ChatGPT and other AI. But these types of detection tools are far from foolproof; OpenAI shut down its own AI-detection tool last year due to what the company called a “low rate of accuracy.”
Setting standards
Some schools are actively working on policies for both teachers and students. Alan Reid, a research associate in the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University, said he recently spent time working with K-12 educators who use GPT tools to create end-of-quarter personalized comments on report cards.
But like Layne, he acknowledged the technology’s ability to write insightful feedback remains “limited.”
This Philly high school is getting $20 million to train thousands of students to get jobs at CHOP
For years, the Mastery Charter Network built its reputation as a college-for-all system of schools in Philadelphia and Camden.
Now, thanks to nearly $20 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies and a partnership with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Mastery is about to turn one of its schools, Mastery Hardy Williams High School in Southwest Philadelphia, into a workforce development hub. It’s part of a $250 million investment that Bloomberg is making to create 10 such high schools nationwide.
Beginning in 2025, Hardy Williams High students will be prepared for careers at CHOP — from patient-facing roles such as medical assistants to operations jobs such as information technology workers, and hospital administration positions — then walk right into full-time jobs in the hospital system as soon as they graduate.
Along the way, they’ll have access to hands-on CHOP resources and paid internships, and will have career supports once they graduate.
The partnership matches with the revised mission of Mastery, the Philadelphia-based network of 14,000 students in 24 schools.
“There are multiple entry points that students and families can choose on the pathway to a family-sustaining wage, a career,” said Saliyah Cruz, Mastery’s chief equity officer.
What is Madison’s response towards the Milwaukee K-12 referendum passing?
WTMJ:
@WTMJSteve was joined by @SenStroebel and @JacobJCurtis and they discussed the response.
Listen to the full Political Power Hour: wtmj.com/political-powe…
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More.
“The last thing we’re going to do,” she replied with a chuckle, “is get wrapped up in curriculum battles.”
Piercing the Fog: Shedding Light on School District Referenda in Wisconsin
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released its latest report, Piercing the Fog: Shedding Light on School District Referenda in Wisconsin, which uncovers various transparency problems with Wisconsin’s referendum process that costs taxpayers millions of dollars every single year. The report also calls for significant reform to Wisconsin’s referendum process to give voters more complete information when deciding.
The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Using referendums to fund school districts is not going away, but for voters to make smart decisions, they must be armed with all necessary information. Our report highlights the grave transparency concerns that exist in Wisconsin’s current process while outlining policy changes to ensure voters are fully informed. Ultimately, with the changes we proposed, referenda can be an important tool for direct democracy when used properly.”
Additional Background: More than 90 school districts around Wisconsin went to referendum in the 2024 spring elections, with 58.8% passing. The role of referenda in funding Wisconsin schools has been the subject of debate for many years. Some argue that referenda are necessary for school districts to keep their doors open, while others make the case that they are examples of wasteful spending that take advantage of voter sentiments in favor of funding education.
WILL’s report provides an overview of how referenda have been used historically around the state, and then highlights three ways that school districts around Wisconsin are “gaming the system.” We then make suggestions for what policy makers can do about it.
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Student Loan Nationalization outcomes
It’s almost as if Maddow doesn’t know that all these billions are owed to the U.S. Treasury & not to banks . . . as if she doesn’t know that Democrats cut the banks out during the Obama years in order to “protect borrowers.”
Civics: “The State Bar . . . literally demanded we take down the story last night.”
The First Amendment demands much more. If we are to have a free press, as guaranteed by the Constitution, then State Bar employees may not bully and intimidate reporters, as they have here.
The tree of debt must stop growing
Thus, long-term real interest rates might remain high persistently, partly because of perceptions of inflation risk, partly because of quantitative tightening and partly because the fiscal deficits of many countries are expected to remain large. All this threatens to create a vicious circle in which high perceptions of risk raise interest rates above likely growth rates, thereby making fiscal positions less sustainable and keeping risk premia high. Elevated fiscal debt also worsens the threat of a “bank-sovereign nexus”, in which weak banks cause concern about the ability of sovereigns to rescue them and vice versa.
Arguably, the situation of the US is the most significant of all. In The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office notes that “debt held by the public rises each year in relation to the size of the economy, reaching 116 per cent of GDP in 2034 — an amount greater than at any point in the nation’s history. From 2024 to 2034, increases in mandatory spending and interest costs outpace declines in discretionary spending and growth in revenues and the economy, driving up debt. That trend persists, pushing federal debt to 172 per cent of GDP in 2054.”
Only a brave economist could insist that this can continue forever. At some point, surely, Stein’s law would bite: investor resistance to further rises in debt would jump and then monetisation, inflation, financial repression and a global monetary mess would ensue.
Here are three relevant facts for the US: first, by 2034, mandatory federal spending is forecast to reach 15.1 per cent of GDP against total federal revenue of a mere 17.9 per cent; second, federal revenue was just 73 per cent of outlays in 2023; and, third, the primary balance has been in consistent deficit since the early 2000s. All this shows how immensely difficult it will be to bring overall deficits under control.
Civics: I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
Chicago’s new school funding formula
All Chicago Public Schools will get teacher positions based on a set formula that favors high-poverty schools and eliminates extra money historically given to magnet and selective enrollment programs and schools.
But CPS CEO Pedro Martinez emphasized that overall magnet and selective enrollment schools will not be hurt. “What we are seeing is that there is no disproportionate impact on any one set of schools,” he said.
Principals received their school budgets for next year on Monday. The school district has yet to release the school budgets to the press and, at this point, does not plan to until later in the process. This breaks from tradition.
These are the first school budgets under a new funding formula that shifts to focusing on the needs of schools, rather than enrollment.
Plant Root System Drawings
Opportunity cost and fertility
Birth rates in the developed world are below replacement levels and global fertility is not far behind. Sub-replacement fertility leads to exponentially decreasing population. Our best models of economic growth suggest that a shrinking population causes economic growth and technological progress to stop and humanity to stagnate into extinction.
One theory of fertility decline says it’s all about opportunity costs, especially for women. Rising labor productivity and expanded career opportunities for potential parents make each hour of their time and each forgone career path much more valuable. Higher income potential also makes it cheaper for parents to gain utility by using financial resources to improve their children’s quality of life compared to investing time in having more kids. Simultaneously, economic growth raises the returns to these financial investments in quality (e.g education).
In addition to higher incomes, people today have more diverse and exciting options for leisure. DINKs can go to Trader Joes and workout classes on the weekend, play video games, watch Netflix, and go on international vacations.
Collection of early Christian texts from North Africa, containing the oldest complete versions of two books of the Bible, is due to be sold in June
Most bibliophiles would agree to this maxim: the older the book, the better. If so, a forthcoming lot at Christie’s offers the chance of a lifetime as the auctioneer is selling the oldest tome you are ever likely to see.
The oldest known book in private hands is one of two lots at the auction that can be said to be among the most important texts in the history of early Christianity.
Eugenio Donadoni, a senior specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s, said the texts were of “huge international significance”, adding: “They are really important touchstones in charting early Christianity.”
The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of ResearchArticle in Review of Educational Research
Jean Stockard, Timothy W. Wood, Cristy Coughlin, Caitlin Rasplica Khoury:
The importance of explicit and systematic instruction has become a central element of discussions of effective instruction (e.g., National Reading Panel, 2000). Direct Instruction (DI), developed by Siegfried Engelmann and his collaborators beginning in the 1960s, is often cited as an example. Over the past half century the corpus of DI curricular materials has grown as has the literature evaluating its effectiveness. This article presents a quantitative analysis of this effectiveness literature. Although the term direct instruction (lower case and sometimes referred to as “little di”) has been used to refer to a broad set of educational programs that incorporate elements of systematic or explicit instruction, our focus is only on Direct Instruction (capitalized) in the Engelmann–Becker tradition (Engelmann & Colvin, 2006).
The number of colleges and universities was unsustainable
For decades, nobody in Wisconsin’s Capitol dared to say it out loud: Wisconsin had an unsustainable number of institutions of higher learning.
The 2015-16 Blue Book, for example, listed 66 of them: 13 University of Wisconsin System four-year campuses, 13 two-year UW colleges, 16 technical colleges, 18 private colleges and universities, and six technical and professional institutions.
That total didn’t include three theological seminaries and two tribal colleges.
Nobody knows what the number will be in 2025, because one of the most important trends of the last few years is the downsizing of Wisconsin’s public and private universities and colleges.
Consider recent news stories:
“The author’s efforts to place responsibility for Ohio’s reading struggles into my lap, however, are unwarranted”
The author’s efforts to place responsibility for Ohio’s reading struggles into my lap, however, are unwarranted. He writes, “A recent survey from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce found that two of the most popular curricula statewide are Fountas and Pinnell’s Classroom and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study,” and he goes on to denigrate both.
The truth is, however, that the same survey showed that just 6% of Ohio’s schools identify Units of Study as their curriculum. Eight times that number of schools — 395 districts — cite Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness Curriculum, six times that number, Fundations, and three times the number use the basal textbook “Reading Wonders.” How can a curriculum used by only 6% of Ohio’s schools be responsible for the state’s literacy woes?
My curriculum has been continually developed and refined for 40 years, informed by classroom-based research, by rich assessments of children and by scholarship, results that have been verified through a careful study by the American Institute of Research. The data overwhelmingly indicate that schools partnering with us demonstrate meaningful improvements in student performance and that improvements deepen over time.
And this is also true for Ohio schools that use Units of Study. Many that report using the curriculum far outperform the state average. In fact, if you average the results obtained by all 48 schools that reported using Units of Study, third-grade reading proficiency in those schools outperforms Ohio’s 2022-2023 state average by 7.44%.
Contrary to the author’s assertion, I have never bypassed phonics. It is ludicrous to suggest that I want children to open a book and guess wildly at the words. I’d be happy to walk anyone through the newest edition of Units of Study in K-2 Reading to show how it incorporates the instructional practices promoted by the science of reading. The same cannot be said of many of the curricula, per an in-depth analysis from University of Connecticut Professor Rachael Gabriel, on that state’s short list of approved curricula, which share much overlap with Ohio’s curricula list.
In a fit of absurd safetyism, schools are canceling class on April 8 because they’re scared pupils will look at the sun.
On Monday, April 8, hundreds of schools across North America, from Texas to Ontario, are closing in order to protect pupils from sustaining lifelong injuries—from the sun.
Just after 11 a.m. local time, a complete solar eclipse will begin over the Pacific coast of Mexico. Its “path of totality”—the areas where the sun will be entirely blotted out—will pass through 13 U.S. states, before ending off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In these regions, schools face a dilemma: Is the eclipse a learning opportunity for kids—or a threat?
“The solar eclipse offers a rare educational occasion,” Natalie Jameson, an educator in Canada’s Prince Edward Island, admitted last month. “But prioritizing safety is crucial.”
And so, classes in her district will end two hours early to ensure “students will be home safely” before the start of the eclipse.
The decision, her department added, was made “out of an abundance of caution.”
“The current society is coasting on fumes”
^ Why are interest payments suddenly spiking? Because the bill for QE is coming due. Either die by high inflation or high rates. Or both.
Why is the country issuing debt at emergency levels, without acknowledging it’s an emergency? Because that’s the only thing that can keep this fake economy afloat through the 2024 election.
^ Why is China the world’s #1 trade partner on just about every physical good? Because the US only exports (a) printed money and (b) technology. Anyway, I could keep going, with literally dozens of graphs like this. But X only allows four per post.
3) On the topic of whether it’s a country with a “turbulent history of…violence”, the level of drug addiction, violent crime, homeless encampments, squatters, road blockages, and massive BLM/Hamas mobs swarming the streets has obviously spiked in recent years.
2020 didn’t represent a one-off, it’s a preview of what is to come, particularly in Blue America. Crime statistics are systematically faked — in San Francisco, you can actually see some dashboards where things like car ticketing have gone to zero — so we don’t have an accurate picture.
Until you see undeniable things like stores closing and people moving out of blue states. And then blue politicians yell at those companies, and try to stop them from moving out. This is systematic: blues always disable the warning lights that tell you we’re crashing into the ground, just like the mortgages labeled AAA in 2008, just as a mosquito anesthetizes you before drinking your blood, just as a snake evolves to employ camouflage before it strikes. Alongside lawfare, faking the stats is a core competency of both communist reds and woke blues.
From the Baltimore bridge collapse to chaos at Boeing, what look like discrete problems are in fact part of a wider dysfunction. The case in point here is Boeing, which was allowed to purchase the only other US domestic producer of commercial aircraft, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. As United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby recently noted, innovation and quality have been on the decline ever since. Research and development budgets have gone down relative to Airbus, while share buybacks have gone up. Massive outsourcing resulted in highly complex and vulnerable supply chains. Workforce training languished, as labour was tallied as a cost not an asset.
Meanwhile, as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan pointed out in a March speech warning against the dangers associated with promoting national champions, concentration and financialisation in the airline industry have not only led to safety issues — they have also cost US taxpayers a bundle, and created economic vulnerability rather than stability or security. One could say the same thing about America’s inability to build its own ships, or figure out how to work with allies to do so. Likewise the failure to understand all the domestic and foreign policy levers that must be pulled in order to accomplish the clean energy transition.
“The sickest thing of all, we had a key guy on the Trade Commission leave and go to the other side in the middle of negotiation. He knew the plans, the strategy, the details. As far as I’m concerned, that’s economic treason.”
Civics: A two-decade pursuit of vanity projects has left many local authorities in China in a deep morass of debt
A two-decade pursuit of vanity projects has left many local authorities in China in a deep morass of debt, with their status as “the largest local defaulters” not only having a knock-on effect on private businesses, but also adding to a grass-roots governance crisis, an academic has warned.
Feng Chuan, an associate professor at Wuhan University’s School of Political Science and Public Administration, called for greater efforts to rebuild social trust and business confidence after finding that officials, residents, local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), contractors and banks had been caught in the debt limbo.
“Credit overdraw systematically occurs … tearing apart the fundamental trust system that upholds social governance order,” he wrote in an article published last month on news portal NetEase.
“Birmingham-Southern had no prince at court,”
When Birmingham-Southern College announced in March it was closing permanently on May 31, few supporters of the esteemed liberal arts college were surprised.
Alumni and ardent supporters of the private, Methodist-affiliated college watched a long, slow roller coaster ride that seemed to have more deep dives than upward climbs over 50 years.
“Birmingham-Southern was always a fragile institution since it lost the backing of the big industrial Stockham family,” said former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, a BSC graduate and author of the novel “Whiskey Man” and the Civil War history “Silent Cavalry.”
Birmingham-Southern College’s string of bad fortune dates to the 1970s and includes the murder of a student that prompted the building of a fence around campus, a national scandal after church arsons committed by three former students in 2006 that detoured fundraising efforts to rebuild burned churches, and extensive financial mismanagement that caused multi-million-dollar budget shortfalls and plunged the college deep in debt, draining its endowment.
Civics: Judge calls out blatant double standard when it comes to Biden’s Justice Department and Hunter
It appears that confusion expressed by many of us is shared by Judge Reyes.
Judge Reyes noted the obvious: “There’s a person in jail right now because you all brought a criminal lawsuit against him because he did not appear for a House subpoena.” The DOJ demanded six months in prison. Navarro is now serving a four-month sentence.
Civics: “Lula has massively increased government funding of the mainstream news media, most of which are encouraging increased censorship”
What Lula and de Moraes are doing is an outrageous violation of Brazil’s constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
At this moment, Brazil is not yet a dictatorship. It still has elections and the Brazilian people have other means at their disposal to confront authoritarianism.
But the Federal Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court are directly interfere in those elections through censorship.
Three days ago I published the Twitter Files for Brazil. They show that Moraes has violated the Brazilian Constitution. Moraes illegally demanded that Twitter reveal private information about Twitter users who used hashtags he considered inappropriate. He demanded access to Twitter’s internal data, violating the platform’s policy. He censored, on his own initiative and without any respect for due process, posts on Twitter by parliamentarians from the Brazilian Congress. And Moraes tried to turn Twitter’s content moderation policies into a weapon against supporters of then-president Jair Bolsonaro.
How I fell out of love with academia
Sabine Hossenfelder today posted a new video on youtube which everyone in theoretical physics should watch and think seriously about. She tells honestly in detail the story of her career and experiences in academia, explaining very clearly exactly what the problems are with the conventional system for funding research and for training postdocs.
After a string of postdocs requiring moving and living far from her husband, she decided she needed to move back to Germany and applied for a grant to fund her research (I believe for this project). This is how she describes the situation:
At this point I’d figured out what you need to put into a grant proposal to get the money. And that’s what I did. I applied for grants on research projects because it was a way to make money, not because I thought it would leave an impact in the history of science. It’s not that was I did was somehow wrong. It was, and still is, totally state of the art. I did what I said I’d do in the proposal, I did the calculation, I wrote the paper, I wrote my reports, and the reports were approved. Normal academic procedure.
But I knew it was bullshit just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself. Of course, I’d try to tell myself and anyone who was willing to listen that at least unofficially on the side I would do the research that I thought was worth my time but that I couldn’t get money for because it was too far off the mainstream. But that research never got done because I had to do the other stuff that I actually got paid for.
27 more academic scandals
In February, Hindenburg Research, the most famous short-selling fund in the world, put out a research report titled: Renovaro BioSciences: A Worthless AI Shell Game With A Murderous Magician Past
Renovaro, previously known as Enochian BioSciences, is a biotech firm focusing on cancer and infectious diseases, recently merged with AI company GEDi Cube, valuing Renovaro at approximately $567 million.
The most scandalous thing here is that the co-founder of this biotech firm hired a hitman:
CEO Mark Dybul, who has worked with Anthony Fauci and held significant positions in global health, joined the company in 2017. The company’s co-founder, Serhat Gumrukcu, was praised for his innovative work but was charged in 2022 for hiring a hitman in a scam-related murder.
But he also fabricated his academic history,
A week after the indictment, on June 1st, 2022, we released a report showing how “Doctor” Gumrukcu had faked his entire academic history, including forging his Russian medical degrees. In reality, Gumrukcu was a Turkish magician who had fled Turkish authorities after being charged over allegations that he faked being a doctor to steal money from a terminally ill cancer patient.
These fabricated credentials might be enough for an academic scandal in its own right, but that is not the focus of this scandal for our purposes.
I am including this story because a reader sent me a note saying:
- ‘‘I am bringing it to your attention because of their CEO, Mark Dybul. Given the history in the article, I am STUNNED to see that he is STILL a professor at Georgetown University’’
So I will oblige and highlight the professor in question:
Notes on taxpayer double payment on student loans
I have a few questions for Pres. Biden about his student loan forgiveness program… pic.twitter.com/PpwAQOZc90
— Eric Hovde (@EricHovde) April 7, 2024
K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Total Single-Family Taxes Levied Nationwide in 2023 Rise Twice as Fast as in 2022
The highest effective rates among metro areas with a population of at least 1 million in 2023 were in Chicago, IL (1.84 percent); Rochester, NY (1.77 percent); Hartford, CT (1.76 percent); Cleveland, OH(1.66 percent) and Columbus, OH (1.45 percent).
The lowest effective rates in 2023 were in Daphne-Fairhope, AL (0.27 percent); Salisbury, MD (0.30 percent); Honolulu, HI (0.31 percent); Knoxville, TN(0.32 percent) and Tuscaloosa, AL (0.32 percent).
Aside from Honolulu, the lowest rates among metro areas with a population of at least 1 million in 2023 were in Phoenix, AZ (0.38 percent); Nashville, TN (0.45 percent); Las Vegas, NV (0.48 percent) and Salt Lake City, UT (0.49 percent).
“Cardona’s secret master plan”
We needed to bypass obstacles like Congress, law-making, and budgets. Over the next few weeks, a three-step plan took shape.
Step one: My team found a couple sentences in the 20-year-old HEROES law, written to give military personnel a break on student loans when they were deployed post-9/11. Well, we took those phrases, pretended they applied to the pandemic (which was still, totally, completely raging), and said borrowers wouldn’t have to repay $500 billion in student loans. MAGA Republicans sued, the MAGA Supreme Court had to stop us, and the game was afoot.
Step two: Once we’d planted the idea that we could give out free money, we set out on two parallel paths. We started “forgiving” borrowers on a piecemeal basis. A few billion dollars here and there didn’t seem all that newsworthy compared to our HEROES ploy, but it let the president keep sending emails to borrowers telling them he was giving them free money. (That made the president very happy.) Meanwhile, we rewrote Income-Driven Repayment to quietly turn student lending into a vast new entitlement, one that would eventually let us give away trillions of dollars without worrying about Congress or budgets.
What is an ‘A’ student?
A few years ago, officials at Palo Alto Unified noticed that one district high school was giving out far fewer D’s and F’s than previously, instead giving students a “no mark,” which allowed additional time to complete assignments or take exams.
But teachers there weren’t giving all students that second chance for a better grade. They were disproportionately giving it to white and Asian American students. Black and brown students were still getting D’s and F’s.
“It was glaring,” said Superintendent Don Austin. “That really spoke to who was getting the opportunity for more time and second chances.”
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MCAT data notes
Based on data from the @AAMCtoday, the MCAT of the average black medical student (505.7/66th percentile) is one standard deviation below the average Asian (514.3/88th percentile) and white student (512.4/83rd percentile). Also, the GPA of the average black student (3.59) is below the average GPA of Asians (3.83) and whites (3.80) at an extremely statistically significant level.
official investigation reveals how superconductivity physicist faked blockbuster results
Ranga Dias, the physicist at the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, according to a investigation commissioned by his university. Nature’s news team discovered the bombshell investigation report in court documents.
The 10-month investigation, which concluded on 8 February, was carried out by an independent group of scientists recruited by the University of Rochester in New York. They examined 16 allegations against Dias and concluded that it was more likely than not that in each case, the physicist had committed scientific misconduct. The university is now attempting to fire Dias, who is a tenure-track faculty member at Rochester, before his contract expires at the end of the 2024–25 academic year.
The investigation report (see Supplementary information) and numerous other documents came to light as the result of a lawsuit that Dias filed against the university in December last year. Dias submitted a grievance to Rochester over its decision to remove his students last August, but the university refused to hear the grievance on the grounds that it did “not relate to academic freedom”. The physicist’s lawsuit claims that this response was unreasonable. A university spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of ongoing litigation and personnel matters, but emphasized that Rochester is “vigorously defending its course of action”.
W.H. Auden’s 1941 reading list
Are you hardcore enough to handle W.H. Auden’s reading list for 1941 University of Michigan undergrads?
Over 6,000 pages of material. One semester.
Including the complete texts of:
- Brothers Karamazov
- Moby Dick
- The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso)
- Faust
Once you get through those, you can enjoy the 8 books of recommended critical commentaries.
How many students today do you think could get through this?
UW tenure hysteria was unwarranted
BY MIKE NICHOLS & MARK LISHERON
The number of tenured faculty in the University of Wisconsin System has fallen roughly in line with the decrease in student enrollment since 2015 — the year a legislative decision to take tenure guarantees out of state statute unleashed a torrent of blowback from professors who called the move by Republican legislators “destructive” and “remarkably chilling” and like “a death in the family.”
A look back at what has happened to tenured faculty since then uncovered no deaths.
Or even much use of the replacement policy that was passed by the Board of Regents.
The numbers of tenured professors in the System decreased approximately 8% — from 4,561 to 4,209, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau — between the 2016-17 school year and 2021-22. Student enrollment was down 9% over the same time period.
Evidence in retrospect shows that the much-derided change in tenure protection — which took place in stages, first in the Legislature and then at the Board of Regents, in 2015 and 2016 — has had very little impact at all in the eight or nine years since then.
The changes were relatively simple.
Fake identity
Keirans used Woods’ identity “in every aspect of his life,” including obtaining employment, insurance and official documents, and even paying taxes under the name, according to a plea agreement signed by Keirans.
In 1990, Keirans obtained a fraudulent Colorado identification card with Woods’ name and birthday. He used the ID to get a job at a fast-food restaurant and to get a Colorado bank account. He bought a car for $600 in 1991, using Wood’s name, with two $300 checks that bounced.
He drove the stolen car to Idaho, where it broke down and he abandoned it. He withdrew all his money from the Colorado bank using an ATM in Idaho and left the state. An arrest warrant was issued for Woods in Colorado because of the stolen car, though documents don’t indicate whether Woods was arrested at that time.
It wasn’t the first time Keirans had stolen a car. When he was 16, he stole a car after running away from his adoptive parents’ home in San Francisco. He was arrested at the time in Oregon, under his own name, but never appeared in court, according to court documents.
Tale of Daniel
Daniel has been a top 5 baby name twice since 2000. There are over 1.5 million Daniels in the United States (and almost 100,000 last-name Danielses). There are who knows how many Dans, Dannies, and Daniellas out there. “Daniel” is, by any way you slice it, a very modern name.
It may be the oldest attested name in common use.