Jill Tucker

The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle.

Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.

They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.

Nicolas James Marks Ford

A few years ago, before finishing graduate school, I embarked on a quest to understand quantum field theory and the standard model of particle physics. My first project for this blog is going to be about the physics I learned along the way. My training is as a mathematician, and these articles are written with an audience in mind that’s a lot like me when I first started trying to learn this stuff. In particular, this means that I’m going to be assuming familiarity with some mathematical machinery that isn’t always part of the standard presentation of these ideas.

The point of this isn’t to exclude people (although sadly it probably will) but because I’m trying to fill a gap that I saw when I was trying to absorb this material from physics books. A lot of explanations of the “mathier” parts of physics are, despite their mathiness, written with an audience of physicists in mind, and so naturally emphasize the aspects of the situation which are relevant to solving physical problems. If your goal is to solve physical problems — as it should be for most of the people who learn physics — then this is the right thing to do. But for the reader who understands the mathematical machinery from a more general context, reading these sorts of explanations can be a bit of a slog, and it can often be unclear which parts of the text are “just math” and which parts are “doing physics.” My aim is to present these ideas in a way that makes that distinction clear.

Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane

When the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand was asked for his thoughts on the Bourbon royal family in exile, he replied, “Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.” They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. The Bourbons hadn’t learned the lessons of the French Revolution or grasped what it revealed about their nation. Worse, they carried an enduring grudge for all that the Jacobins had done. It was the worst possible combination, a recipe for disaster.

Too often, as we note in our new book Getting Education Right, Talleyrand’s Bourbons have served as the role model for the right when it comes to education reform. Since the Reagan era, the right’s education reformers have repeatedly fallen victim to the siren songs of compromise, swallowing their principles and endorsing heavy-handed government schemes in the service of not-so-bipartisan bipartisanship. Meanwhile, populists have kept the receipts, fueling frustration and justifiable distrust.

Dalmeet Singh Chawla

Previous efforts to detect the products of paper mills have tended to focus on analysing the content of the manuscripts. One online tool, for example, searches papers for tortured phrases — strange alternative turns of phrase for existing terminology produced by software designed to avoid plagiarism detection. Another tool, being piloted by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), flags when identical manuscripts are submitted to several journals or publishers at the same time.

An approach that instead analyses the relationships between authors could be valuable as paper mills become better at producing convincing text, says Hylke Koers, chief information officer at the STM, who is based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. “This is the kind of signal that is much more difficult to work around or outcompete by clever use of generative AI.”

Pete:

The problem of collapsing world-wide birth-rates is a complex topic but I will state my thesis baldly at the beginning: there is a large overlap between the things that underpin long-standing worldwide birth-rate declines and the things that underpin our prosperity. As the biologist John Aitken has put it:- ‘The fundamental cause of human fertility decline is prosperity.’ Therefore, birth-rate declines are hard to undo and reverse because to unpick low-fertility risks also unpicking our prosperity too. Therefore, pronatalists face an uphill battle, to put it mildly. Pronatalism (a term used to describe advocates for policies geared towards increasing fertility rates) is nothing new but has gained greater salience in recent years due to rapidly rising old age dependency ratios across the OECD countries in particular. The Economist reports that the share of countries with pro-natalist policies has grown from 20% in 2005 to 28% in 2019. In any analysis of the merits or demerits of pronatalism it is important to differentiate between liberal and illiberal forms of pronatalism. In its illiberal guise, pronatalism can be motivated by an ugly ethno-nationalist undercurrent which views pronatalism as a means of avoiding what it perceives to be the evils of mass-immigration, which is seen in catastrophic terms as tantamount to ethnic replacement and racial/civilisational suicide. But this form of pronatalism is, at best, a fringe view in this country and I’m not going to waste my time critiquing a set of views which are not held by anyone with any real influence or power. 

My critique is aimed at the less sinister and more liberal form of pronatalism which holds sway over a greater swathe of policy-makers. There are bad-faith criticswho will try to collapse the two forms of pronatalism into one and pretend that all forms of pronatalism are inherently morally suspect, but this is not a view I subscribe to. My critique of liberal pronatalism is not that it is inherently morally problematic to utilise various policies to try to encourage more people to have children.  Pronatalism, in its liberal form, is a perfectly legitimate set of policy aims. My argument is pragmatic, not moralistic. My argument is that liberal pronatalism is simply not going to work. As the authors of Empty Planet’ explain:- ‘the “low-fertility trap” ensures that, once having one or two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfilment. And they are quickly fulfilled.’

James Fishback

You can’t make this up. The National Speech & Debate Assoc. ELIMINATED a high school debate topic about civil disobedience because it “was putting new students in a position to argue or listen to arguments that are not aligned with their own beliefs about issues of social equity and justice…”

Luis Rodriguez

Dr. Rodriguez will share findings from a study that sheds light on the often-overlooked role of school support staff in mitigating the prevalence of and racial disparities in exclusionary discipline in public middle and high schools in New York City. Findings from the study underscore the importance of expanding the presence of support staff within schools and emphasize the necessity for greater diversity among school personnel.

Natasha Hicks:

A Canvas program allowing University of Wisconsin Athletics advisors to monitor the educational progress of student athletes is raising concerns about surveillance and privacy in UW-Madison classrooms.

Dorothea Salo, a UW-Madison School of Information professor, recently got an email from UW-Madison Vice Provost John Zumbrunnen about a “Canvas Observer Role” in one of her courses. She said the role allows learning specialists from UW Athletics to directly monitor student athletes’ progress in Canvas.

Observers are able to access class assignments, calendars, discussions — including posts from the entire class — and more. Other students in the course aren’t notified there’s an observer in it.

Salo said it’s not the first time she has received this email. This, alongside her past Canvas-related research, has her worried about the student athlete observer role and Canvas’ lack of data transparency as a whole. 

Lauren Gilbert:

In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.

This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.

—-

Commentary

This is part of why I think modernity was born out of the Reformation and the response thereto. Education is always in danger of falling afoul of the state – either banned for any appreciable number of folks or for being required to emphasize the propaganda and justifications of the state. China, for instance, had everything needed for mass literacy – printing, a large scholar class, and even some reverence for written words. But instead the state used education largely to staff the bureaucracy on the basis of who could make Confucian piety sound the best and who had memorized the most Legalistic commentary. 

The Protestant Reformation, most notably in Scotland, has this radical idea that even the poor dirt farmers of society need to be literate and educated enough to understand holy scriptures to grasp Reformed doctrine. And that understanding had to be enough to end with a “credible profession of faith” the evidenced understanding and (at least in theory), not just vain repetitions. 

And this is part of why I think the West achieved so much, there really was an ideology of learning for a higher purpose and enough teachers bought that they were dealing with the immortal souls of their pupils that the fundamentals could not be short changed merely to maintain discipline or orthodoxy.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

The Economist:

In practice, however, the great expansion of higher education has coincided with a productivity slowdown. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s workers’ output per hour across the rich world rose by 4% a year, in the decade before the covid-19 pandemic 1% a year was the norm. Even with the wave of innovation in artificial intelligence (ai), productivity growth remains weak—less than 1% a year, on a rough estimate—which is bad news for economic growth. A new paper by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Larisa C. Cioaca, Lia Sheer and Hansen Zhang, five economists, suggests that universities’ blistering growth and the rich world’s stagnant productivity could be two sides of the same coin.

Gavin Escott and  Liam Beran

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin unveiled a faculty hiring initiative in areas of “global challenge” in a Thursday afternoon UW Board of Regents meeting.

The Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) initiative will hire between 120 and 150 new faculty over the next three to five years, increasing regular hiring by around 40%.

“Over the next three-to-five years, RISE will accelerate the growth of UW-Madison’s network of AI innovators, adding up to 50 new faculty positions,” a UW-Madison press release read. 

Artificial intelligence will be the first RISE initiative, according to the press release. RISE will ultimately comprise of three to five areas of focus, with future initiatives determined through a collaborative cross-campus process. 

Luz Collin:

A longtime educator said his faith and morals left with him little choice but to leave Minnesota at the end of this school year. He’ll start a new teaching job in North Dakota this fall.

Carl Williams, a teacher of 22 years who has spent the last 11 in the Belgrade-Brooten-Elrosa district, joined Liz Collin Reports this week.

“I just love teaching. I have a passion for teaching, and I just love my students,” Williams said.

Williams said he has observed a “push away from scientific knowledge and more towards ideological knowledge” in Minnesota’s schools.

Selena Simmons-Duffin

How did scientists get the idea that the appendix was useless?

There had been a lot of discussion about what the appendix might do as a function, whether it served a function, prior to [Charles] Darwin’s time. The [fact] that we can live without it does provide some support for the idea that it’s vestigial and it doesn’t really do anything. And so Darwin’s interpretation of it as a vestige was reasonable at the time, given the information that he had. 

But now with modern technology, we can see things like the microanatomy and the biofilms in the appendix, and we have a better understanding of what it is and what it’s doing.

How has the appendix evolved over time? 

If you map the distribution of appendices across a phylogeny — a tree of mammal life — you can interpret that the appendix has actually evolved independently. It has appeared independently multiple times throughout mammalian evolution. So that is evidence that it must serve some adaptive function. It’s unlikely that the same type of structure would keep appearing if it wasn’t serving some beneficial role.

Paul Caron:

Law schools will now be asked to explicitly protect free speech rights for faculty, students and staff as part of the ABA accreditation process. … The ABA House of Delegates on Monday voted [Resolution 300] in favor of the creation of the law school standards regarding academic freedom and freedom of expression at its midyear meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. …

The proposal follows protests that disrupted conservative speakers at Stanford Law School and Yale Law School and continuing tensions on campuses since Hamas attacked Israel last fall. Standard 208, however, forbids disruptive activities that hinder free expression or impede law school activities.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Kulkarni and her colleagues also used information networks to compare Bach’s music with listeners’ perception of it. They started with an existing computer model based on experiments in which participants reacted to a sequence of images on a screen. The researchers then measured how surprising an element of the sequence was. They adapted information networks based on this model to the music, with the links between each node representing how probable a listener thought it would be for two connected notes to play successively – or how surprised they would be if that happened. Because humans do not learn information perfectly, networks showing people’s presumed note changes for a composition rarely line up exactly with the network based directly on that composition. Researchers can then quantify that mismatch.

In this case, the mismatch was low, suggesting Bach’s pieces convey information rather effectively. However, Kulkarni hopes to fine-tune the computer model of human perception to better match real brain scans of people listening to the music.

Quinton Klabon:

The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered.

After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track.

The goal? Do whatever it takes to catch kids up by September 2024.

The problem? No one knows how schools have directed it or not directed it…until now.

The Privacy Dad:

This week saw a conclusion on the Danish Chromebook case. The result, long-awaited by father and privacy activist Jesper Graugaard, shows that the Danish Data Protection Authority has issued an injunction regarding the tracking of children’s personal data via Chromebook and Google platforms in schools.

From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students’ personal data for processing. Each municipality will need to give an indication of how they will comply to this injunction by 1 March 2024.

For activist Graugaard, the decision comes as a relief. He began his crusade against Chromebooks in school in his home town Elsinor over four years ago. While this week’s report makes no reference to Jesper’s initiatives, it is clear that this injunction could not have been issued without his tireless and sometimes solitary activism.

Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, Jacquelyn Schneider

Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making, especially with the emergence of advanced generative AI models like GPT-4. Our work aims to scrutinize the behavior of multiple AI agents in simulated wargames, specifically focusing on their predilection to take escalatory actions that may exacerbate multilateral conflicts. Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models’ reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics. Given the high stakes of military and foreign-policy contexts, we recommend further examination and cautious consideration before deploying autonomous language model agents for strategic military or diplomatic decision-making.

Eugene Volokh:

This apparently just happened; here’s the full American Bar Association standard (and see this ABA Journal article):

Standard 208: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression

[a] A law school shall adopt, publish, and adhere to written policies that protect academic freedom. A law school’s academic freedom policies shall:

[1]​ Apply to all full and part-time faculty, as well as to all others teaching in law school courses;

[2] Apply to conducting research, publishing scholarship, engaging in law school governance, participating in law related public service activities, curating library collections and providing information services, and exercising teaching responsibilities, including those related to client representation in clinical programs; and

Eugene Volokh:

From the Complaint filed today in Armenta v. G/O Media Inc. (Del. Super. Ct.):

Nine-year-old H.A. loves the Kansas City Chiefs—and he loves his family’s Chumash-Indian heritage. On November 26, 2023, H.A. displayed that love by attending the Chiefs-Raiders NFL football game wearing a Chiefs jersey and necklace, his face painted half-red and half-black, and a costume headdress— just as Chiefs fans and other avid sports fans have done for decades.

During the CBS television broadcast, H.A. was shown for three seconds, where the audience can clearly see his red-and-black face paint. Immediately thereafter, CBS panned to a Raiders fan in black-and-white face paint. Together, they represented fervent fans with their faces painted for game-day battle, each wearing their team’s respective colors and costume garb ….

Those few seconds provided just the opportunity for Deadspin Senior Writer Carron Phillips to, on behalf of himself and his employer Deadspin, maliciously and wantonly attack a nine-year-old boy and his parents for Phillips’ own race-drenched political agenda. By selectively capturing from the CBS broadcast an image of H.A. showing only the one side of his face with black paint on it—an effort that took laser-focused precision to accomplish given how quickly the boy appeared on screen—Phillips and Deadspin deliberately omitted the half of H.A.’s face with red paint on it.

Paolo Martellini, Todd Schoellman, and Jason Sockin.

We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.

Commentary.

old.math

Tsunami swept over the Russian mathematical community in 1999 after publication of the complete shorthand notes of the meetings of the notorious Emergency Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on the case of Academician Luzin [1]. Soon the article [2] appeared in the USA which revealed the personal testimony of G. G. Lorentz (1910–2006) about the mathematical life of that time in the USSR.¹The Commission for the “hearing of the case of Ac[ademician] Luzin” was convened by the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR after the article “Enemies under the Mask of a Soviet Citizen” in the Pravda newspaper on July 3, 1936.Luzin was accused of all theoretically possible instances of misconduct in science and depicted as an enemy that combined “moral unscrupulousness and scientific dishonesty with deeply concealed enmity and hatred to every bit of the Soviet life.” It was alleged that he publishes “would-be scientific papers,” “feels no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements,” and stands close to the ideology of the “black hundred,” orthodoxy, and monarchy “fascist-type modernized but slightly.” The closing of the lampoon read:

WILL:

Decoupling public school funding from choice funding is a win-win from the perspective of both public-school districts and choice/charter schools. School districts will no longer face the uncertainty of voucher enrollment numbers when crafting their budgets for the upcoming school year. In an era of declining enrollment across Wisconsin, this additional stability is important. In most cases, school districts will have access to more state aid than they did before—essentially offering a modest budget boost at a time when many districts are worried about their fiscal reality. And a recent memo from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau confirms that no school district will be left with less funding under this legislation.

Because school districts have the ability to raise property taxes to make up for lost revenue from school choice, this legislation will also result in property tax cuts for most Wisconsin families.

Two Chicago public schools.

Northside: Selective, 94% of black students reading proficient.

Douglas: $68,000 per pupil per year, 0% black students reading proficient.

Guess which one the "antiracist" school system wants to close for "equity" reasons?https://t.co/Z7hHSpu5zk

— i/o (@eyeslasho) February 7, 2024

Lance Morrow:

impulse to dial everything, immediately, up to 10. Cancel. Take no prisoners. Nullification has become the national fashion—civics as road rage. Brisk currents of stupidity ride the air, mingling with occasional whiffs of insanity. Nullification is the policy of people who think, if they think at all, in crude cartoons.

Nanna Inie, Jonathan Stray, Leon Derczynski

Engaging in the deliberate generation of abnormal outputs from large language models (LLMs) by attacking them is a novel human activity. This paper presents a thorough exposition of how and why people perform such attacks. Using a formal qualitative methodology, we interviewed dozens of practitioners from a broad range of backgrounds, all contributors to this novel work of attempting to cause LLMs to fail. We relate and connect this activity between its practitioners’ motivations and goals; the strategies and techniques they deploy; and the crucial role the community plays. As a result, this paper presents a grounded theory of how and why people attack large language models: LLM red teaming in the wild.

Frederick Hess:

Recently, I offered a not-so-sophisticated explanation for the histrionics we’ve seen at elite colleges: too many students are simply aimless, lonely, and bored. Well-meaning concern about the mental and emotional state of college students today has fueled a lot of affirmation and hand-holding. But much of this may ultimately be counterproductive, exacerbating fragility rather than supporting well-being.

After all, on the merits, it’s hard to look at elite college students and conclude they’re overworked or overstressed. As I note:

Philip Mousavizadeh:

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges. 

Nilanjana Roy

On October 29 last year, the British Library in London posted on X saying that the institution was struggling with “technical issues”. As these continued day after day, it became clearer to the library’s readers and thousands of scholars what had actually happened: the BL had fallen prey to a massive cyber attack, carried out by a criminal group that has become notorious for such things. 

The BL holds something like 170mn items; essential digital archives, entire collections of texts and images and access to online learning resources were severely disrupted. Librarians and readers could no longer retrieve books, and after the BL declined to pay the ransom that had been demanded, the attackers dumped enormous quantities of employees’ personal data on to the dark web. 

Six weeks later, the BL’s chief executive Roly Keating wrote in a blog post: “The people responsible for this cyber attack stand against everything that libraries represent: openness, empowerment, and access to knowledge.”

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.”

But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient.

Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago. 

Jill Tucker

A Bay Area attorney is demanding that San Francisco school officials make the seismic shift from citywide board elections to smaller district races by November or face a massive and expensive legal battle that could result in paying millions of dollars in legal fees.

In a testament to the power of a landmark state voting law, the seven-member school board is expected to accede to the lawyer’s demands — approving a hurried adoption of individual district elections based on legal advice and the likelihood of losing a court fight, the Chronicle learned Tuesday.

The district is also expected to pay up to $40,000 to the attorney who pointed out possible violations of the California Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 2002 and was intended to give minority voters in the state better representation by redrawing election maps. 

Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

SUMMARY
“Our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to . . . push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company . . . by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”

– Speaker’s notes from the University of Michigan’s first pitch to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about its NSF-funded, AI-powered WiseDex tool.1

This interim report details the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) funding of AI- powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.
In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams. The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)- powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.

Emma Camp:

More than anything, Heather Lowe didn’t want her children to grow up in poverty.

The 27-year-old had already had more interactions with social services than most ever will. As a child, she had been in and out of foster care and witnessed her parents’ struggle with drug addiction. She had her first child at 19. She soon found herself bouncing between homeless shelters with her infant son. She even did a stint at a domestic violence shelter.

“I needed to do better for my kids. I needed to do better even for myself,” she says. “A lot of people were very much like, ‘All you’ll ever be is a single parent. And you’ll be an uneducated person for the rest of your life.'”

When her son was 2 years old, she went back to school, finishing several associate degrees and then completing a bachelor’s in psychology from California Lutheran University. But even then she struggled to find work that paid enough

The Amazon Files:

Never-before-released internal emails subpoenaed by @JudiciaryGOP reveal that the Biden White House pressured Amazon to censor books that expressed views the White House did not approve of.

Ethan Mollick:

I always thought reading science fiction would prepare us for the future, but fantasy novels might be better suited to understanding our suddenly AI-haunted world.

There are now advanced and useful systems whose exact operations remain mysterious, even to those who built them. While one can understand the technical aspects of building Large Language Models like ChatGPT, the precise capabilities and limitations of these AIs are often only uncovered through trial and error. And having both conducted academic studies and developed magic spells for fictional fantasy games, working with ChatGPT often feels more like the latter.

Consider that ChatGPT outputs are created by prompts invoking webs of tenuous connections, basically programs in prose form. And since the way that the AI makes these connections are not always clear, creating good prompts requires exploring the AI with language (here are some hints to get started in your explorations). Once discovered, new invocations are often kept secret to gain an advantage in a job, or else shared online through secretive chat groups. But the magic analogy goes beyond secret knowledge and esoteric schools: There are certain words that ChatGPT cannot seem to remember or understand (ask it what Skydragon means). There are glyphs that other AIs cannot see. Still other AIs seem to have invented their own languages by which you can invoke them. You can bind autonomous vehicles in circles of salt. As science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

helen dale

We live in a world of mutually assured cancellation. Piled-on abuse and career destruction are now standard when dealing with political or intellectual opponents.

I wrote about this on my personal Substack last month. There, I drew on the escalating—and global—war of words and deeds over Israel-Palestine. Finally, conservatives and dissenting liberals had found a way to wound the woke and radical left, and they were proceeding to dish it out in spades. Many lefties, who’d never had to mind their Ps & Qs before, fell to bits quite badly in public. Alternatively—as this activist complains—others simply “refused to speak about Palestine” at all.

Well, that’s what happens if you suspect articulating your views will get you sacked. Welcome to the party, pal (with apologies to Bruce Willis).

However, I need not have drawn upon the hour’s global conflict (Ukraine was unceremoniously sidelined last October). I could have used what was—and in some ways still is—going on at Substack to illustrate the world in which we now live. I watched that controversy as it unfolded.

The contretemps started in November last year with this Atlantic article and then made the rounds of the houses on Substack itself and in other outlets. The essence was this: there are Nazi newsletters on Substack. If the company didn’t at least demonetise them, then multiple writers—some of them popular, bearing Substack’s in-house “bestseller” ticks—would leave. Whether anyone has left yet is unclear, although some people have turned off paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions are, of course, how Substack makes its money.

Megan T. Stevenson

This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another.

This has a variety of implications. It suggests that a dominant perspective on social change—one that forms a pervasive background for academic research and policymaking—is at least partially a myth. Understanding this shifts how we should think about social change and raises important questions about the process of knowledge generation.

Jeffrey Gottfried:

Social media platforms faced a range of controversies in recent years, including concerns over misinformationand data privacy. Even so, U.S. adults use a wide range of sites and apps, especially YouTube and Facebook. And TikTok – which some Congress members previously called to ban – saw growth in its user base.

These findings come from a Pew Research Center survey of 5,733 U.S. adults conducted May 19-Sept. 5, 2023.

Alex Greenberger

This past weekend, Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist whose gallery delayed his show after he tweeted about the war in Gaza, compared censorship in the West to forms of political oppression he experienced in China under Mao Zedong, describing the situation as “sometimes even worse” that what he faced growing up.

“Today I see so many people by giving their basic opinions, they get fired, they get censored,” he told Sky News. “This has become very common.”

By way of example, he spoke about the case of two New York University professors who were fired after making Gaza-related comments. The situation is “a cultural revolution, which is really trying to destroy anybody who have different attitudes, not even a clear opinion,” Ai said. “So I think that this is such a pity, that it happened in the West, so broadly in universities, in media, in every location.”

Neetu Arnold:

These cuts were a long time coming—higher education is facing anenrollment cliff, even as it continues to spend on administration and student services like there’s no tomorrow. Pandemic-era emergency funding could only hold off the reckoning for so long. As university administrators rush to blame their state governments for providing insufficient funds, state legislators should remain staunch in enforcing fiscal discipline on universities. There’s still a long way to go to make higher education cost-effective.

Though university administrators and faculty consider these budget cuts to be nothing short of catastrophic for university operations, some of the cuts appear quite reasonable. For instance, Penn State plans to scale back branch campus operations and cut duplicate programs. This is a necessary step in the right direction—Pennsylvania is known as the “state with too many campuses,” and steep enrollment declines at branch campuses justify reducing their operations.

But even when making the right decisions, universities are too trepidatious. UNH, for example, will cut certain programs at its Aulbani J. Beauregard Center for Equity, Justice, and Freedom. Yet they have not indicated whether only staff or the entire department would be cut. This is not nearly far enough: Not only are diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) administrative units like the Beauregard Center unnecessary and expensive, but they are also harmful to the campus environment. DEI initiatives have led universities to monitor what students and faculty say through bias reporting systems and filtered faculty hiring based on race and political views. Budget cuts should not be needed to cut down on these departments—they should never have been created in the first place.

Dominic Anthony Walsh:

At Love Elementary in the Heights area of Houston’s Northside, parents filled the cafeteria on Thursday, Jan. 25 to hear administrators pitch the New Education System (NES). Love is among 24 Houston ISD campuses that would have performed poorly on the Texas Education Agency’s revamped accountability system and now have the option to apply for the NES reform program — but most folks at Love weren’t very interested in the pitch. 

“It was very clear that 99.9% of the parents wanted to keep this school the way that it is,” said Pablo Lambea, parent of a Love Elementary first grader, arguing that “NES is eliminating basically any human element from the classroom and only teaching towards the test results.”

Several parents invited Houston Public Media to a second NES information meeting on Feb. 1, but the district denied access. A Houston ISD spokesperson wrote that “these are meetings for the school community and are not open to the press.” The first meeting at Love Elementary was recorded and can be viewed at this link.

City Forward Collective:

Milwaukee’s vitality hinges on a robust K-12 school ecosystem — and that includes a thriving Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). However, recent announcements from the School Board paint a daunting picture — a projected budget shortfall exceeding $1.2 billion over the next five years, including a staggering $200 million gap looming for the upcoming school year.

In response, the School Board is urgently seeking voter approval on April 2nd for over a quarter-billion dollars in permanent, new revenues through a property tax increase to address these financial challenges. However, Milwaukee’s students, families, and taxpayers rightfully expect more than an expensive band-aid to our school district’s fiscal and academic crises.

CFC’s Bottom Line

1. The Milwaukee Board of School Directors must go beyond just seeking more funds from Milwaukee families, residents, and taxpayers, and present a well-defined and comprehensive plan for addressing its academic and financial challenges.
2. MPS should outline precisely how the proposed new revenues will be used to directly and dramatically improve academic outcomes for all Milwaukee students.

Cassandra Willyardarchive

Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be  trained on massive data sets that contain millions or even a trillion words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways.

A team of researchers at New York University wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set—the sights and sounds experienced by a single child learning to talk?

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A lot, it turns out.  The AI model managed to match words to the objects they represent.  “There’s enough data even in this blip of the child’s experience that it can do genuine word learning,” says Brenden Lake, a computational cognitive scientist at New York University and an author of the study. This work, published in Science today, not only provides insights into how babies learn but could also lead to better AI models.

Admissions:

When Dartmouth suspended its standardized testing requirement for undergraduate applicants in June 2020, it was a pragmatic pause taken by most colleges and universities in response to an unprecedented global pandemic. At the time, we imagined the resulting “test-optional” policy as a short-term practice rather than an informed commentary on the role of testing in our holistic evaluation process. Nearly four years later, having studied the role of testing in our admissions process as well as its value as a predictor of student success at Dartmouth, we are removing the extended pause and reactivating the standardized testing requirement for undergraduate admission, effective with the Class of 2029. For Dartmouth, the evidence supporting our reactivation of a required testing policy is clear. Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve—not detract from—our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus.

Alex Berenson:

In September, a jury in Washington, D.C. convicted Peter Navarro, a former advisor to Donald Trump, of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 protests and attack on the Capitol. A judge has sentenced Navarro to four months in jail. Trump aide Steve Bannon has also been convicted for failing to testify to the Jan. 6 committee. 

But the Biden Administration has already told Slavitt he need not fear similar charges. It claims the subpoena is not legally valid and cannot be enforced.

In a letter to Slavitt’s attorneys, Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer, said the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice will not prosecute Slavitt – or even bring a civil case against him.

“The Department has advised me of its position that Mr. Slavitt cannot be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, punished through the use of any inherent congressional contempt authority, or held liable in a civil enforcement action for failing to appear at his scheduled deposition,” Sauber wrote.

Heritage Oversight:

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, and Border Security and Immigration Center, today released new information documenting the scope not just of the Biden border crisis, but the role of non-governmental organizations in facilitating and continuing it.    

In a new memo titled, “Tracking Movement of Illegal Aliens from NGOs to Interior of USA”, the Oversight Project unveiled new data showing the massive numbers of illegal aliens who have made their way to NGO facilities physically located along the border and in border states, and subsequently traveled throughout the United States.  

As part of the Oversight Project’s work to document NGO involvement in the border crisis, the Project launched an investigation which ultimately obtained a sampling of approximately 30,000 unique and anonymized mobile devices that were geofenced to a number of these NGOs along the border. These locations were chosen based on human source information, as well as open-source intelligence, that they may be involved in helping illegal aliens travel from the border to various parts of the interior. Device pings were captured throughout the month of January 2022, in four different phases:

Anna Fazackerly:

Ofsted inspectors have been forced to “make up” evidence because the computer system they use to record inspections sometimes crashes, ­wiping all the data, an Observer ­investigation has found.

Since 2018, inspectors have made live notes on laptops or tablets as they interview staff and observe ­lessons after Ofsted invested in a new ­electronic evidence gathering (EEG) digital platform. However, our investigation has discovered the technology has had serious issues from the beginning, sometimes crashing unexpectedly and losing all notes from interviews, or even whole days of evidence, so that inspectors have to replace those notes from memory without telling the school.

The Observer spoke to several current or recent inspectors on condition of anonymity who said such problems had been “common” for years, and that senior leaders within Ofsted were aware of this, but “there has been a lot of covering up”.

After this story was initially published a spokesperson for Ofsted told The Observer that chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver “is initiating a rapid review to satisfy himself that the EEG and the guidance to inspectors is robust”. The spokesperson added that if schools or inspectors have concerns “we would want to hear about them directly, so we can respond appropriately”.

Florian Sohnke:

The Innovations shooting should raise questions about where charter schools are located

In the early afternoon of January 26, 2024, two Innovations High School students were slain after being ambushed by masked gunmen. A reader who was a witness to the incident as it unfolded, submitted his account and his views on the Loop location of Innovations.

On Friday, I had lunch at Oasis Café — an excellent Middle Eastern restaurant on North Wabash Avenue. Oasis is located in the back of a tiny mall where vendors sell jewelry and wristwatches. Lingering to examine a Seiko on my way out, I heard loud percussive sounds that I initially assumed were construction noise. Moments later, I realized a shooting had occurred directly outside. I could see at least one person dead or dying on the sidewalk across the street. I would learn later there were two shooting victims. It was a deeply jarring and upsetting experience.

For a few moments, I stood looking out the window — waiting for police to arrive; waiting to see if there would be more shots. A wristwatch vendor and a jewelry vendor stood beside me.

“Are those students at the school?” one of the vendors asked.

I looked across the street, where carnage, chaos, and wailing now covered the sidewalk. I could see buildings and stores and what looked like the entrances to offices or apartments. What I could not see, however, was anything that resembled a school.

Sofia Tosolo

An immediate cap on international student visas has been imposed by the Federal Government.

Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugee, and citizenship, announced on Jan. 22 there will be no further growth in the number of international students in Canada over the next two years. This announcement comes as the Government is looking to address burdens on health care and housing services nationwide.

Provost Matthew Evans stressed the importance of increasing international student enrollment to alleviate the University’s $48 million deficit. The University aims to return to pre-COVID-19 levels of international student enrollment.

International student intake in Ontario will be slashed by as much as 50 per cent according to a report from The Globe and Mail.

BGSU:

Original reports summarizing and analyzing nationally representative data with the goal to provide the latest analysis of U.S. families. These profiles examine topics related to the NCFMR’s core research themes.

“MPS is deprived of funding.”

MILWAUKEE RANKS -15TH- NATIONALLY in per-student spending, adjusted for the cost of living, of America’s 100 biggest districts.

Of 25 poor peer cities, we are 10th. We spend like Chicago and Baltimore, more than Los Angeles, Memphis, and Houston! https://t.co/ZglhdqVRKu pic.twitter.com/eRXy006eR4

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) February 5, 2024

More on Taxpayer funded $pending growth.

Rob Manning:

In case you hadn’t noticed, teacher strikes are back. 

This past fall, Portland teachers went out on a strike that canceled 11 school days and stretched the capacity, knowledge, and patience of my team in unprecedented ways.

The Newton, Mass. teachers were the latest — the fifth recent strike in the state. 

As an education editor, teachers strikes are something you may be called on to cover. 

As with anything, there are better and worse ways to go about it. 

——

Related: Act 10

WEAC: $1.57M for four state senators.

WiSJ:

Madison police last week unveiled its 2023 crime numbers, which showed that violent crimes like robberies declined from the previous year. But some crimes, including homicides, went up. 

So it safer in Madison than it was a decade ago? Here are the numbers since 2013, broken down by crime.

Homicides in Madison

There were four more homicides last year than in 2022. Four of those homicides were related to a domestic violence situation. Police have cleared 8 of the 10 cases. Wisconsin reached a 22-year high in domestic violence cases in 2022.

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Related: police calls-Madison High Schools 1996-2006.

More.

Gangs and school violence forum.

Abbey Machtig:

The community will be able to hear from the three finalists for Madison School District superintendent in a series of public interviews this week.

Yvonne Stokes, Mohammed Choudhury and Joe Gothard will be interviewed in person by two panels on Tuesday. The public can watch the interviews through a livestream. The livestream can be found via go.madison.com/finalists. The district said one panel will be made up of students and the other will be made up of parents and caregivers. Public feedback is welcome.

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More:

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More:

Choudhury did not respond to an interview request from the Cap Times. He told the Post, however, that he had “inherited a dysfunctional department with a workforce accustomed to inefficiency — and that his detractors are unwilling to embrace the change he is determined to bring to Maryland.”

——

Yet:

——-

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported k-12 systems, now at least 22 to 29k per student, depending on the district numbers used.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Janet Lorin:

One would hit Harvard and 10 other private colleges that have more than $1 billion in assets.

Bryan Caplan:

On the growth of higher ed expenditures, for years, I bought into the lagging productivity view as forwarded by Richard Vedder and others. In fact, William Poole, while still president of the St. Louis Fed, delivered a speech on this topic to a small luncheon group at WKU with our university president sitting right there. It was fairly humorous seeing our president’s reaction. However, I realized that in assessing productivity, Vedder, Poole, and others (like myself) routinely treated education as the sole product/service.  Yes, we had always acknowledged a “consumption” component to student demand, but we treated that as a nuisance element, not as an integral feature of the market. That was probably not a bad assumption back in the mid-20^th century and earlier.  Over the last 50ish years, the consumption element has become increasingly important but remains ignored as merely a nuisance factor. Even the educational part itself has taken on more of a consumption aspect as students have opted into degrees that are more about avocation than serious academic study or vocation.

For all my grousing about the lack of student interest and “why are they even here,” the puzzle existed only because of my underlying, single-product assumption. There is a large demand for the consumption aspects of the higher ed “experience.” The U.S. is a rich society, and students (and their families through intra-household economics) want to consume the college product/service bundle – the “college experience” as even this verbiage began to reflect the shift toward non-educational, “summer camp”/ consumption. It is related to what we have observed at lower levels of education where the reason there isn’t more learning has little to do with teaching methods or school systems but the lack of interest by students and their parents in the educational component. For many parents, school is mainly about cheap day care. That’s a point that I make in my 1999 Spoiled Rotten: Affluence, Anxiety, and Social Decay in America.

Yes, $1.5+ trillion in student loan guarantees helps bolster this demand, but $1.5 trillion in loan guarantees is not the same as handing out $1.5 trillion in direct subsidies (grants), at least not yet. During most of this growth period in demand, the majority of students/parents expected to repay these loans. That may have changed more recently.

Geoffrey Cowan:

More than five decades ago, I had a role in drafting important aspects of the process that, with some adjustments, still governs how both parties choose their presidential nominees. The goal of the reform commission led the Democratic Party to eliminate the “smoke-filled rooms” that had enabled party leaders (or “bosses”) to pick the presidential nominee without input from voters. The new rules, adopted in a close vote by the delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, said that nominees should be chosen by convention delegates and that “all delegates … must be selected through a process open to full public participation in the calendar year of the convention.” The rule had two aims: to create an open process such as a primary or caucus, and also make sure that the selection took place in the calendar year of the election.

By Christopher Huffaker

Newton’s teachers and School Committee reached a tentative deal late Friday to end the district’s 11-day strike, returning students to classrooms Monday morning.

In addition to an agreement on the teachers’ next contract, the two sides had to reach an accord on the transition back to school — including on how much the union will pay the district for costs associated with the strike, like police details at rallies.

The contract agreement still needs to be ratified by the union, but the School Committee met Saturday morning to approve memorandums of understanding for both deals (the deal still must be officially ratified by the union and the School Committee must publicly vote on it). Here’s what they are:

This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses @jk_rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skilfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions.

He teaches not what to think, but how to think critically.

Watch until the end.
You see the epiphany in real-time. pic.twitter.com/x00gWdOugc

— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) February 3, 2024

Austin Browne:

Massachusetts will no longer require a college degree for a large majority of government jobs due to a new state executive order intended to make the commonwealth more “inclusive.”

Governor Maura Healey signed the order, titled “Instituting Skill-Based Hiring Practices,” on Jan 25. The document asserts that “skills-based hiring practices will strengthen the Commonwealth’s workforce, increase access to quality jobs for nontraditional candidates with varied backgrounds and work experiences, and reduce structural barriers that result in inequities in pay and access to employment.”

It also contends that such practices will build a “workforce that is representative of the diversity of the state.”

The guideline directs hiring managers to “consider the full set of competencies that candidates bring to the job beyond traditional education.”

—-

Related: Teacher Content Knowledge Requirements.

And the “Foundations of Reading” elementary teacher content knowledge exam.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles

Four veteran alumni endorsed by Ackman — one of the University’s most vocal online critics — staged a public petition campaign under the moniker “Renew Harvard” centered around campus antisemitism and free speech issues. The slate included A. Zoe Bedell, Alec D. Williams, Julia I. Pollak ’09, and Logan Leslie ’15.

Samuel W. Lessin ’05 staged a separate petition bidwhich attracted attention after he was endorsed by Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta and a Harvard dropout. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, run by Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan ’07, pledged to donate $500 million to Harvard over the next 15 years to support the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard.

Harvey A. Silverglate — co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — and Federal Judge Harris Hartz also staged unsuccessful campaigns for the governing board. Silverglate ran for the board in 2009 and 2022, but was unsuccessful both years.

Lessin received 2901 petitions, Pollak received 2732 petitions, Leslie received 2301 petitions, Bedell received 2277 petitions, and Silverglate received 457 petitions.

Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of Aaron Babbitt, the late Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt’s husband, and Ashli Babbitt’s estate against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for all FBI files on Ashli Babbitt (Estate of Ashli Babbitt and Aaron Babbitt et al. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 24-cv-0119)). Ashli Babbitt, a U.S. Air Force veteran, was shot and killed inside the U.S. Capitol by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on January 6, 2021.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California to compel production of the FBI files on Ashli Babbitt and Aaron Babbitt after the FBI denied two February 27, 2023, FOIA requests to the FBI and subsequently failed to respond to an appeal of the denial for:

San Francisco Chronicle:

Whether to offer Algebra I to eighth graders has been a point of contention for years within the San Francisco school district.

In 2014, the Board of Education voted to not offer Algebra I until high school to delay the tracking of students into different academic levels and to boost the enrollment of Black, Latino and low-income students in higher-level math classes. Despite these good intentions, however, the change has had little to no impact on improving pass rates, proficiency or enrollment in higher math classes by underrepresented students, according to a Stanford University study.

Many parents have been clamoring for the district to reinstate eighth-grade algebra because it allows students to take calculus by the time they are seniors without having to double up on math classes or go outside the district. Parents with the means can send their kids to private classes for algebra, giving them a leg up on families who can’t afford such a luxury.

Nick Bumgardner

Her program’s principal investigator was able to move funds to give Conley six weeks of paid leave, but she considers herself “privileged” and sees her experience as the “best-case scenario.”

“I’ve spoken with so many parents who have not had the experience I have had,” Conley said. “[They] have been put in a very difficult situation, and their families and have lost health insurance, [they] have lost their place in their academic program, have lost funding,” Conley said.

Volunteers from WISPO have also been key organizers in the TAA’s diaper distribution program. Volunteers give 100 free diapers, per child, per month, to graduate student families in need, according to Denne and Conley. 

“The program needed a lot more support, and so we partnered with [the TAA] to kind of revitalize that program and get it to a much more sustainable place,” Conley said. “I am proud to say that that program is doing really well today and actually is growing literally exponentially every month.”

Katie Clancy:

What the CTU seeks is complete and unchallenged domination over education

It has never been a secret that the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) actively work against the families they pretend to serve. 

And with their chosen candidate, Mayor Brandon Johnson, at the helm, and a weak governor, J.B. Pritzker, desperate for progressive adoration, the CTU only became more empowered and more determined to eliminate all choices for Chicago families.

First, CTU successfully lobbied against and eventually helped kill the Invest in Kids Act, which, since its inception in 2017, has uplifted over 40,000 students across the state and allowed families to send their kids to a school that better fit their educational needs. In the 2023-24 school year alone, over 9,000 families benefited from a scholarship through the Invest in Kids Act and left 25,000 families, desperate for better educational choices, on the waiting list. 

Despite the majority of Illinois voters supporting this lifeline for families, Governor Pritzker and the General Assembly obeyed the teachers unions and declined to extend the program. Now, the union’s latest strategy for complete domination over the education system is the elimination of the selective enrollment process in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This latest stunt is once again out of touch with 82 percent of Chicago voters who are in support of the current school choice system in CPS.

Katy’s Hoyer:

Similarly, when East Germans joined the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, they expected to live in the democracy they had pushed for – a system where they, the people, wouldn’t be ignored, looked down upon and viewed with suspicion by a political class that considered itself morally superior to them. For some, this hope was disappointed. They feel that the main political parties take no interest in their concerns, and that this fact doesn’t change no matter which of them they vote for. 

Many West Germans feel like this, too, as indeed do many people in other parliamentary democracies around the world. A survey in Britain last year showed that six out of ten people here felt politically homeless, and the same proportion of Americans said in a poll in 2016 that neither of the political parties represented their views.

What makes East Germans different isn’t a special aversion to the political offering – they share that with millions of people in the West – but an unwillingness to accept the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy. Their ‘dictatorship experience’ hasn’t blinded them to democracy but rather sharpened their sensitivity for its failings. In 1989, they had enacted democracy – the rule of the people – in a way other than voting: through street protest, grassroots-level organisations and by complaining loudly to their bosses, local politicians, police officers and state officials. But many now feel that the change they had helped bring about didn’t seem to gift them more agency. In a way, some say, there was more of a feeling of participation then than there is now in a democracy with formal voting. The AfD is very good at exploiting this feeling, using slogans like ‘The East rises up’, ‘Complete the Peaceful Revolution,’ or ‘We are the people’ (which was used by protesters in 1989).

Bill Osmulski:

The latest plagiarism scandal at Harvard University has implicated one current and two former diversity officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

LaVar Charleston is UW-Madison’s current Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer. He is married to Sherri Ann Charleston, who is Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Sherri Ann had also previously worked as a diversity official at UW-Madison before getting the job at Harvard in 2020. This week, she was accused of committing plagiarism throughout her academic career. Her husband, LaVar, allegedly helped her to commit fraud at least one of those times in a 2014 study.

Another former diversity official from UW-Madison, Jerlando Jackson was also listed as a co-author of the study in question. Jackson was UW-Madison‘s Director & Chief Research Scientist, Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory. He was hired as the Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University in 2022.

All three individuals were with UW-Madison at the time the article was published.

Abbey Machtig:

The candidates will be interviewed again Wednesday, but those discussions will not be livestreamed, recorded or open to the public. The interviews will involve teachers, district leaders, students and selected community members.

Eric Murphy:

Choudhury is one of three finalists for superintendent in Madison, along with Joe Gothard, the superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools and a former Madison principal, and Yvonne Stokes, a former superintendent of Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. Stokes also resigned under pressure from conservative school board members who took issue with her diversity and inclusion efforts as superintendent. All three will be interviewed by various panels Feb. 6-7. 

When asked for comment on the allegations against Choudhury by Cornelius and others, school district leaders said they were happy with their final three options for superintendent. “Our board has done exhaustive work in selecting our finalists, and we remain confident with the process and the selection of our finalists,” the district said in an unsigned email to Isthmus sent by communications staffer Ellie Herman. 

The email pointed to a previous statement from school board president Nichelle Nichols: “We are extremely pleased with the pool of candidates for this position. They each reflect the diverse needs of our community and the competencies that we agreed upon in November. Our three finalists have exceeded our expectations, and we’re excited for the community to meet them….”

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Chris Rickert:

About three times as often, according to this analysis: mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/4…

Tim Harford:

In the case of Flight 447, the challenge was a storm that blocked the airspeed instruments with ice. The system correctly concluded it was flying on unreliable data and, as programmed, handed full control to the pilot. Alas, the young pilot was not used to flying in thin, turbulent air without the computer’s supervision and began to make mistakes. As the plane wobbled alarmingly, he climbed out of instinct and stalled the plane — something that would have been impossible if the assistive fly-by-wire had been operating normally. The other pilots became so confused and distrustful of the plane’s instruments, that they were unable to diagnose the easily remedied problem until it was too late.

This problem is sometimes termed “the paradox of automation”. An automated system can assist humans or even replace human judgment. But this means that humans may forget their skills or simply stop paying attention. When the computer needs human intervention, the humans may no longer be up to the job. Better automated systems mean these cases become rare and stranger, and humans even less likely to cope with them.

Jessie Guy-Ryan:

In fact, the government has actually won this fight before—secretly. 

Throughout 2015, U.S. politicians and law enforcement officials such as FBI director James Comey have publicly lobbied for the insertion of cryptographic “backdoors” into software and hardware to allow law enforcement agencies to bypass authentication and access a suspect’s data surreptitiously. Cybersecurity experts have unanimously condemned the idea, pointing out that such backdoors would fundamentally undermine encryption and could exploited by criminals, among other issues. While a legal mandate or public agreement would be needed to allow evidence obtained via backdoors to be admissible in court, the NSA has long attempted—and occasionally succeeded—in placing backdoors for covert activities.

One of the most important developments in cryptography was the Enigma machine, famously used to encode Nazi communications during World War II. For years, rumors have persisted that the NSA (then SSA) and their British counterparts in the Government Communications Headquarters collaborated with the Enigma’s manufacturer, Crypto AG, to place backdoors into Enigma machines provided to certain countries after World War II. Crypto AG has repeatedly denied the allegations, and in 2015 the BBC sifted through 52,000 pages of declassified NSA documents to find the truth. 

The investigation revealed that while no backdoors were placed in the machines, there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” that Crypto AG would keep American and British intelligence appraised of “the technical specifications of different machines and which countries were buying which ones,” allowing analysts to decrypt messages much more quickly. Consider it a security “doggy-door.”

Jill Tucker:

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement. 

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.

Grace Reilly:

Rhode Island’s North Kingstown School Department is under fire following a board member’s statement of desire to “never” inform parents if a child changes his or her so-called gender expression during school hours and activities. She expressed this belief during a Jan. 25 board meeting, during which transgender and non-binary policy was discussed. 

The board member explained, “[M]y point would be that we never notify a parent with these issues.” She then doubled down, saying, “I don’t think we should notify parents on many issues that we notify them on.”

“I don’t think parents should be notified, simply because society assumes that every child has a well-meaning family culture that is accepting of this,” she stated. “Sometimes the worst thing you can do is involve a parent in some of these issues, based on their own beliefs and their own culture. And that would cause that student to commit suicide.”

Erin Geary:

For school choice to be realized, parents must create a mass movement

When trying to find the best restaurant in an area, people tend to turn to the internet, look for a list of eateries in the area, and visit their website. The more diligent may search out Yelp for reviews. If at least seven out of 10 comments are positive, you are likely to feel good about your choice. If only three of 10 found the restaurant appealing, however, most would avoid that restaurant and it would eventually close its doors.

Now, let us apply that same logic toward Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Parents live in a neighborhood, send their kids to schools that their tax dollars pay for and discover that, overall, 30 percent of students are unable to read and 17 percent are unable to complete basic math problems. Yet, instead of being able to choose a higher performing school, their kids are stuck in failing schools because of politics and unions.

On Thursday, January 25, the Chicago Board of Education voted to renew charter schools’ contracts but for only three or four years as opposed to prior agreements that allowed for renewal up to ten years. Additionally, charter schools will be under the microscope with more vigor — especially in how they deal with English language learners and those students with disabilities. Other preconditions imposed by the renewal include teacher licensing and financial issues.

Jeff Myers

Public education in Oregon, and around the country, has become both an important and divisive topic. COVID-19 lockdowns, classroom disruptions and violence, shifts in instructional content and approaches, and ongoing declines in student achievement brought many new faces into school board meetings. Education has become highly partisan as well, turning school board races into highly-funded, hotly contested events. Why is this all happening? And why now?

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you the guy behind the declines in our public education system was Colt Gill, the former Director of the Oregon Department of Education (ODE). As ODE’s leader, he was the very public face of the agency. When parents, including me, got increasingly upset with the direction of Oregon’s public schools, it was Colt Gill we spoke out against. While he took all the heat, there was someone on his executive leadership team who flew under the radar until now: Scott Nine.

Michele Catanzaro:

Cliques of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work, according to an unpublished analysis seen by Sciencenone. As a result, their universities—some of which do not appear to have math departments—now produce a greater number of highly cited math papers each year than schools with a strong track record in the field, such as Stanford and Princeton universities.

These so-called “citation cartels” appear to be trying to improve their universities’ rankings, according to experts in publication practices. “The stakes are high—movements in the rankings can cost or make universities tens of millions of dollars,” says Cameron Neylon, a professor of research communication at Curtin University. “It is inevitable that people will bend and break the rules to improve their standing.” In response to such practices, the publishing analytics company Clarivate has excluded the entire field of math from the most recent edition of its influential list of authors of highly cited papers, released in November 2023.

Chloe Berger:

Before the days of the punch buggies and the Toyotathon, Americans were stuck with the objectively slower, more austere transportation options of horses and sail boats. With the passage of time, minivans with bumper stickers and HyundaiSonatas eclipsed trusty ole steeds. But a funny thing happened along the way, as wealthy hobbyists turned dressage and rowing into status symbols of a life of leisure spent mastering the old ways. Could the world of work be the same?

In 2020, remote work was every bit as revolutionary as the technologies of the horse or the boat, and in an accelerated version of the transportation revolution, it’s rapidly shaping up as a commodity that the wealthy save for themselves. 

Just a few years after most knowledge workers shifted to remote work, it’s now mostly wealthy, college-educated employees who are still being allowed to work from home, according to a newly released poll from Ipsos Consumer Tracker. The survey of 1,110 adults, conducted in mid-January, further supports a conclusion that the labor market has split into separate groups, based on one’s sector, pay, and location.

The Economist:

A year ago New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, the publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter schools to open in New York City, where they already attract about 15% of public-school students and where thousands of families languish on waiting lists. But the governor’s plan drew fervent protests from fellow Democrats, including state legislators aligned with teachers’ unions. After a bruising fight, the governor had to settle last autumn for a small increase.

The row reflected a discouraging change in the politics of charter schools. Once a topic of unusual bipartisan enthusiasm, the schools have become divisive, particularly among Democrats. Barack Obama campaigned on charter-school expansion in 2008, but Joe Biden declared in 2020 that he was not enamoured of them. (His administration has nonetheless maintained federal funding for charters.) Republicans are more favourably inclined overall, and Donald Trump increased support during his presidency. But Republican priorities have shifted since George W. Bush, as president, and his brother Jeb, as governor of Florida, championed charters as beacons of racial equity. These days Republicans prioritise vouchers that allow parents to use taxpayer funds to enroll children in religious schools.

Jacob Light:

In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.

Commentary.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Notice what’s missing? There’s nothing in there about a track record of actually improving, you know, education. Nothing about a record of improving test scores.

That’s concerning because MMSD’s record in that regard is not good. This morning the New York Times ran a story that allowed readers to check on how their district was performing with regard to math test scores. Here’s the chart for Madison:

We have been below the national average for at least seven years while Wisconsin as a state performs above the average. We came close in 2019 and then dipped again during COVID. Our recovery since then has been anemic, running below both the national and state average.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Eugene Volokh:

The post (at Balkinization) is here; as I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t studied the issues in this case closely enough to speak to this myself, but Prof. Lederman is a leading constitutional expert, and his thoughts struck me as much worth passing along:

1. Colorado Is Not “Enforcing” or “Implementing” Section 3.

The briefs of all four of the parties in the Supreme Court (and those of many amici, as well) proceed on the assumption, articulated repeatedly in their briefs, that if Colorado were to omit Donald Trump’s name from its presidential primary ballot—something that, as I explain in this post, Colorado has not in fact done and is unlikely to do—the state would acting to “enforce” or “implement” Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, some of the parties’ arguments take this as a jumping-off point, and depend upon it.

Frank Jacobs:

Since the early 1920s, more than 330 climbers have died on Mount Everest. 200 bodies remain on the mountain, the most famous one being “Green Boots”. These maps provide some surprising insights into Everest’s morbid geography.

For almost 20 years, “Green Boots” was a creepy landmark near the summit of Mount Everest. Mountaineers ascending via the north face would invariably pass by this frozen body, huddled into a limestone alcove some 1,150 feet (350 m) below the top. To the live climbers who passed the body, the corpse, still clothed in brightly colored climbing apparel, must have seemed a grim exemplar of the saying that “every corpse on Everest was once a highly motivated individual.”

Alex Tabarrok:

Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century. His use of historical data informed by evolutionary theory and genetics is a unique contribution to social science with important and challenging results.

Clark’s latest paper (with Neil Cummins) makes a simple but striking point. If the primary systematic determinant of social outcomes is genetic then we expect the father and the mother to contribute equally (each giving half their genes). If, on the other hand, the primary determinant is social then we expect widely different mother-father contributions in different societies and at different times and for different characteristics. Fathers ought to matter more in patriarchies, for example, and mothers more in matriarchies and gender-egalitarian societies. Similarly, if social factors are determinative, we would surely see a rising contribution of mothers to child outcomes as the social power of women rises (you can’t use your mother’s contacts in the legal profession to get a job, for example, if your mother was never a lawyer.) Similarly, if social factors are determinative we would expect mothers to be more important perhaps for characteristics determined early and fathers for characteristics determined late.

As Clark and Cummins write:

Thomas Lin:

Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind.

Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing number theorist begins to recount her story in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Gradually, she breaks form and smiles, her eyes light up and lift upward, and she grows ever more animated while summoning memories from the past.

The earliest memory is of walking with her grandmother as a 3-year-old from her family’s utilitarian Khrushchyovka apartment building (named after the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) down a wide boulevard to a monument of the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, where her grandmother lifted her up and tossed her into the air. The late 1980s were a difficult time in the Soviet Union, said Viazovska, now 37. “It took people many, many hours to buy even basic things.” When a shop was low on goods like butter or meat, her mother felt bad about taking more for her three children and worried that others waiting in the long line would get angry at her. Her family didn’t have much, because there wasn’t much to have, but her parents made sure she and her sisters never went hungry or without heat. No stores carried nice clothes, but workers were sometimes offered a chance to win a stylish pair of shoes made in Czechoslovakia as an incentive for doing good work. The shoes might not fit, her mother explained to her, but if you won a pair, you could trade with someone who had won a pair in your size.

James Bosco:

How new laws will affect children and parenting

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…Suggestions from the State!,” Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932.

‍

Brave New World opens inside the Central London Hatchery where babies are not born, but rather “decanted.” We are told by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning how hypnopedia, or the repetition of recorded phrases every night is used to condition children in their sleep. Such conditioning shapes the minds and desires of human beings in the World State. These repeated phrases determine how the child behaves for the rest of his or her life, guiding their decisions and behaviors. Naturally, all the programming comes from the state.

In Huxley’s dystopian future, there are no parents. No mothers or fathers. No brothers or sisters. There are no families and there are no marriages. No one is a son or a daughter. Whereas the population appears to be sterile, sex is trivial. There are no relationships, and despite there being five castes, everyone is considered to be equal. No matter who you are, everyone has an important role to play in service to the World State.

“Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one,” Brave New World.

Now it appears that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), being prodded on by a radical leftist arm of the Chicago Teachers Union, the CORE caucus, has taken Huxley’s warning as an instruction manual. In CORE’s dystopian future — which is now — your children do not belong to you; every child is a ward of the state.

James Marriott:

The website of Eton College promises that “Eton believes in equal opportunity for everyone irrespective of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, belief, disability or social demographic background”. Before you dispatch your progeny to claim their free first-class education at this socialist paradise by the Thames, it is worth checking the “fees” section of the same website, which takes a rather less egalitarian line on the issue of “social and demographic background”.

The nice words were not really meant. Vacuous moral self-congratulation is simply the default mood of the modern public school. Harrow runs an equity, diversity and inclusion group. Marlborough offers lessons in “implicit bias, stereotype threat, oppression, power structures and racial profiling”.
Naturally, one supposes these earnestly progressive institutions are united in passionate support

——-

Commentary.

Please watch this Q&A with @bhorowitz and me on the travails of the universities and the future of higher ed. Our last of 3 videos on this topic. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/HZCSLQ1xiN

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) February 2, 2024

George Leef:

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard.

The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor Erec Smith of York College. He teaches rhetoric and composition and has written a book challenging the belief that minority (especially black) students are somehow harmed by teaching them to use standard English. Smith argues in his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition, that standard English empowers those students by giving them another tool to accomplish their objectives.

Much as woke professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.As Smith sees things, professors in his field, eager to display their “anti-racist” zeal, have adopted the trendy idea that “whiteness” is the enemy of progress for blacks. They’re passionate and sincere, but they have allowed their emotions to trample over reason in evaluating the pros and cons of their pedagogy. Smith writes that “feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia.” Much as those professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

That way entails an exclusive focus on the racial identity of students. Black students are assumed to be victims of white, racist social forces against which they are helpless. Therefore, they must band together in group solidarity to be empowered against “whiteness.” The trouble with that, Smith shows, is that it actually disempowers them. It leads to fallacious interpretations of texts and situations (seeing racism everywhere) and an inability to communicate and persuade. Instead of enabling black students to succeed, it infantilizes them. They’re trapped in an identity of victimhood, always looking for excuses and villains.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Daniel Nuccio:

For example, he said while most of his students took some sort of calculus class their senior year of high school, “at least a third of them test into a class that’s lower than calculus because what happens is the schools will push people through the pipeline.”

“Even if someone hasn’t mastered algebra, they’ll get some sort of generous grade in their prerequisite math classes and then be put into calculus their senior year,” he said.

Similar trends concerning the inability of college students to do high school math have been reported nationally post-COVID, with educators lamenting how incoming freshmen no longer can be expected to know how to add fractions or subtract a positive number from a negative number.

Yi-Zen Chu, an associate professor of physics at the National Central University in Taiwan, who was educated in the U.S. and has been a harsh critic of DEI, stated in a recent email to The Fix that he believes practices such as “grade inflation and lowering the bar” contribute to the lack of preparation exhibited by American college students.

By Carrie Spector

A new report by researchers at Stanford and Harvard shows that U.S. students achieved historic gains in math and reading during the 2022-23 school year, the first full year of recovery from the pandemic.

The report, which measures the pace of academic recovery during the 2022-23 school year for school districts in 30 states, finds that students recovered about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. These gains significantly exceed what students would be expected to learn in a typical year, based on past trends. 

Students in one state, Alabama, returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, while students in three states reached 2019 levels in reading. But students in a majority of the states in the study remain more than a third of a grade level behind pre-pandemic levels in math, and students in almost half of the states are that far behind in reading.

WILL:

Wisconsin Statute § 118.019 governs human growth and development (HGD) instruction. This is
essentially the sex education curriculum in Wisconsin. Public school districts are not required to adopt an HGD curriculum, but once they do, certain requirements are triggered.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE ROLE AND REQUIREMENTS
The advisory committee MUST be made up of parents, teachers, school administrators, pupils, health care professionals, members of the clergy, and other residents of the school district. Id.

No one category of member shall constitute more than one fifth of the membership of the committee,
except that parents may comprise more than one-fifth the membership of the committee. No more than one quarter of the members of the committee may be made up of employees of the school district or their spouses, or members of the school board or their spouses. Id.

The committee MUST review the HGD curriculum for the district. Id.

The committee MUST advise the school board on the implementation

Maureen Brakke:

Since 1856, Western Oregon University has been committed to the region, to serving the people of Oregon, and to the core values of student success. As an innovative public liberal arts institution historically serving first-generation college students from all four corners of the state, Western is announcing the implementation of a strength-based grade approach that recognizes, embraces, and focuses on student competencies and achievements.

Beginning this fall term, the institutional academic grading regulation will reflect a grade range of A through D; the letter grades of D- and F will be replaced with No Credit (NC) for undergraduate students. The grade of NC will be used in instances where the student does not meet the course learning objectives. The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs.

Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

James Pethokoukis:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast: 

So I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 — I’m not talking about the United States, I’m not talking about North America, I’m not talking about the advanced economies, I’m talking about the planet — is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s]. Of course, this depends on how people will react over the next few decades, how mortality will evolve. But what I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.  … My argument is the United Nations is underestimating how fast fertility is falling. Instead of 2084, I’m pushing this to 2060, let’s say. And instead of 9.7, I will say that we will peak around 9.2, 9.1, and then we are going to start falling.

Gavin Escott:

The search is underway for a new dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education after Diana Hess stepped down as the head of one of the nation’s highest-ranked education schools. 

Hess, who served as the dean of the School of Education since 2015, announced in October she would be leaving her leadership position and returning to a faculty role in summer of 2024. During her tenure, Hess oversaw new programs to support students and solidified the education school’s status as No. 3 in the nation, according to U.S. News.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

By Veronica H. Paulus and Akshaya Ravi

Top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data and plagiarized images across 21 papers, data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik said.

In an analysis shared with The Crimson, Bik alleged that Shah, the vice chair of research in the department of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented images from other scientists’ research as his own original experimental data.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Shah is the latest prominent scientist to have his research face scrutiny by Bik, who has emerged as a leading figure among scientists concerned with research integrity.

She contributed to data falsification allegationsagainst four top scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — leading to the retraction of six and correction of 31 papers — and independently reviewed research misconduct allegations reported by the Stanford Daily against former Stanford president Marc T. Tessier-Lavigne, which played a part in his resignation last summer.

——

Commentary.

———

By Nidhi Subbaraman

“Most of the problems in this set of 28 could be explained by honest error,” Bik said, for example if a researcher mislabeled their images and pasted in the wrong ones. She added that looking at published data alone makes it difficult to distinguish an error from misconduct. “There are a couple of papers that stand out that suggest an intention to mislead.”

“The sheer number of examples justify some concern,” said Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and researcher at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who outside his work at the institution reviewed Bik’s assessment. Schrag said he agreed with Bik’s observations in almost all cases and believed the issues warranted an institutional review. 

Bik on Tuesday posted her observations on PubPeer, an online forum that scientists use to question details in published studies. On Wednesday, she emailed her allegations to Harvard Medical School’s Office for Academic and Research Integrity and Mass General Brigham’s Anderson, and several journals.

One anomaly in the group is a 2022 paper in the journal Nature Communications which has images similar to those in nearly a dozen other sources, including papers published earlier, according to Bik. “I’ve never seen this,” she said.

Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

———

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Ethan Blevins:

School segregation has risen from the grave—disguised under a different name.

An increasing number of school districts are offering “affinity classes” that cater to specific racial groups. Schools have long offered racially segregated options for electives such as African American history or mentorship programs. But the idea has begun to expand to the wider K-12 curriculum: One school district in Evanston, Illinois, has drawn the media’s eyes recently for expanding affinity course options, now offering segregated courses in the core curriculum, like math and English. Technically, anyone can join, but each class is expressly designed for—and targeted at—a particular racial group.

In reality, “affinity” is just a newfangled term for “segregation.” Schools that support such racial sorting insist these classes are opt-in, benign programs that don’t violate anti-discrimination laws or the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. They’re wrong.

The supporters of affinity groups and classes claim that they give students a comfortable, safe and inviting environment that improves learning outcomes. One Evanston school official who backs affinity classes told The Wall Street Journal that too often “Black students are expected to conform to a white standard” and that in affinity classes, “you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness.” The notion that culture and character are pinned to skin pigment undergirds the philosophy behind affinity programs—that races are so different from one another that they should not even learn together.

Ben Hunt:

I’ve never met Claudine Gay, but I know Claudine Gay. 

We both went to grad school at Harvard in the government department (what they call political science pretty much everywhere else), me from 1986-1991 and Gay from 1992-1998. We both got a masters degree and Ph.D. there. We both had the same dissertation advisor, famed statistical methodologist and all around nice guy Gary King, yet neither of us were statistical methodologists at heart. We both used regressions and econometrics as a toolkit to help us answer questions that we wanted to explore, Gay in American politics and me in international relations, and we were perfectly proficient with the tools, but we didn’t really care about the tools. We cared about the questions. I didn’t overlap with Claudine Gay chronologically at Harvard, but I overlapped 100% with the classes and the places and the people and the life.

After graduation we both did the tenure track publish-or-perish thing, but here the close similarities stop. Gay had a significantly more successful academic career than I did. I had a good start at NYU but ended up with tenure at SMU, which is pretty much a dead end in prestige academic terms. Looking back now, I can see how impatient I was with the game of academia and how poorly I played it. Gay started at Stanford and ended up with tenure at Stanford, which is anything but a dead end. Harvard brought her back with a full professorship within two years of that. Gay was patient, and she played the game extremely well.

Interestingly, we both stopped teaching a few years after getting tenure. Me to co-found a software company, which required leaving academia completely, Gay to go into university administration as a dean, which locked her into academia for life. There but for the grace of God … I am SO lucky that I got out when I did.

Dell Cameron:

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts.