WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a response to a case brought by Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW) that would create a constitutional right to an abortion in Wisconsin. WILL believes ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood would embroil SCoW in the same mess of policy questions that Roe v. Wade created.  

As WILL has stated before, Wisconsin’s duly elected legislature and governor should go through the normal legislative process and create policy to govern abortion.  

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “There is no right to an abortion in Wisconsin’s Constitution. No judge, justice, or lawyer should be creating policy for Wisconsinites out of thin air. Reversing Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision rightfully placed the abortion issue back where it should have been all along—in the halls of state legislatures. That’s where the debate and conversation must remain.”  

Where Would the Court Draw the Line? If the Wisconsin Supreme Court were to agree with Planned Parenthood, what would happen next? For example, would the prohibitions on abortions after viability, Wis. Stat. § 940.15, or after the unborn child can experience pain (defined in the statute as 20 weeks), Wis. Stat. § 253.107, also be unconstitutional? How about partial-birth abortions, very late term abortions? None of those prohibitions are challenged or at issue in this case, but if this Court constitutionalizes abortion, it will have to answer these questions sooner or later.  

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Choose life.

Archie Earle:

UnHerd was targeted by the GDI, which said that a place on its “dynamic exclusion list” of publications was merited due to the site having “anti-LGBTQI+ narratives” and being “anti-trans”, equating widely-held views on gender to disinformation.

Kathleen Stock, an UnHerd columnist highly commended at last night’s Press Awards, was labelled a “prominent gender-critical feminist” by the GDI and used as an example of disinformation.

Despite his criticism of the GDI, it was reported in 2023 by the Washington Examiner that Musk had partnered with the companies affiliated with the index to tackle disinformation on X.

The site has been widely praised for the success of the flagship “Community Notes” feature, which allows users to rate the accuracy of posts on the platform and combat disinformation internally, leading to notes on politicians as well as high-level organisations.

Sarah Taddeo:

Patrick Moriarty sat expectantly in a plastic chair in his Brighton driveway at 3:20 p.m. on Monday as the sky darkened, the moon slipping in front of the sun behind a blanket of clouds. 

“How do you guys like this?!” he said to the crowd surrounding him, who weren’t neighbors or coworkers but about 100 former students of his from decades ago. A chorus of oh’s and ah’s arose from the group, one commenting on the 360 sunset effect still visible even in the dark while another tried quickly to turn off their brightened cell phone screen. 

It was a pinnacle moment for the former Webster science teacher, who’d spent over a decade sharing his passion for all things celestial with 14- and 15-year olds, and telling them to meet him in 2024 for the total solar eclipse bound for Rochester. 

Moriarty, now 68, never thought a bunch of them would actually show up at his Brighton home for the occasion. 

Stephanie Stamm and Jesse Newman:

Prices for hundreds of grocery items have increased more than 50% since 2019 as food companies raised their prices. Executives have said that higher prices were needed to offset their own rising costs for ingredients, transportation and labor. Some U.S. lawmakers and the Biden administration have criticized food companies for using tactics such as shrinkflation, in which companies shrink their products—but not their prices.

Jarrett Skorup:

Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of an article from Dec. 15, 2009, written shortly after Dr. Borlaug passed away. It features a new introduction and is written to honor the man who would have been 110 years old on March 25, 2024. 

In the winters, I spend my time officiating high school wrestling. Last year, while going through my pre-meet duties, I noticed a wrestler with the last name Borlaug. I asked him if he knew who Norman Borlaug was and was delighted to learn that wrestler was his great-nephew.

Wrestling must be in the family blood, because Norman Borlaug was an accomplished high school and college wrestler who helped expand the popularity of sport at the high school level in Minnesota. (He also worked as a referee). He was inducted into the  National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

The coach of Borlaug’s great nephew, a high school civics and history teacher, overheard our conversation and asked, “Who’s Norman Borlaug?”

That’s a typical response whenever I mention him. In fact, I didn’t learn of him until after completing my college degree. It’s a shame how few people know the name or the remarkable achievements of the man who took action to feed the world’s population at a time when much of the scientific establishment believed we were on the verge of an inevitable global famine.

Rob:

It’s hard to overstate how important – and strategically brilliant – @jk_rowling’s power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectively
neutered Scotland’s dangerous new #HateCrimeBill. By openly and unambiguously breaking this law – on a massive public platform – on its very first day, she has in effect nullified the law by forcing the authorities in Scotland into a corner where they only have two options, both of which will be this laws downfall. They can:

Balaji:

More people follow JK Rowling (14M) than the entire population of Scotland (5.5M). So she can summon her people online to push back on freedom-of-speech restrictions offline.

The Network is growing stronger than the State.

James Cook & Paul Hastie.

Benjamin Eastman and Christina Wheatland 

If the Electoral Count Act unambiguously did not allow for the vice president’s involvement, as some have contended, why did Congress quietly modify the law in an omnibus bill to clarify that the vice president’s role in the certification of elections was merely ministerial — a high-priced letter opener?

Finally, the legacy media would tar and feather Eastman before they admitted his claims of election illegality were, at the very least, credible and at most that the illegality and fraud were significant enough to steal the 2020 election. In fact, polls show that between one-third and two-thirds of right-leaning Americans believe the former and a growing number are inclined to think the latter.

Since Eastman’s appearance at the Ellipse, he has endured three years of malicious lawsuits, bar complaints, subpoenas, and testimony before the House January 6 committee.

These include criminal charges. Eastman — alongside President Trump and 17 other “co-conspirators” — was indicted with absurd and unprecedented racketeering charges in Georgia by a rogue district attorney, Fani Willis, who appears to have committed perjury while testifying under oath about the details of her affair with the prosecutor she hired for the RICO case.

Holy Week brought a new set of horrors. An action we foresaw based on the predictable conclusion of lawfare was taken Wednesday that shook two centuries of American jurisprudence to its core. After what one commentator has described as the longest (32 days of trial over 10 weeks), most expensive (more than half a million dollars) bar trial in this country’s history, a bar court judge who has continued to make donationsto Democrat politicians even after taking the bench has recommended the disbarment of Eastman.

WiSJ:

But the odd way Madison elects its School Board is a significant factor that needs fixing. State law requires candidates in cities with populations between 150,000 and 500,000 — meaning only Madison — to run citywide in seven numbered seats for three-year terms.

So every spring, candidates must choose which of two or three seats they will seek. For competitive reasons, new candidates tend to run for seats that incumbents don’t already hold. That lets incumbents avoid scrutiny.

It also can deny voters choices. For example, an incumbent ran unopposed for Seat 7 last spring, while two new candidates ran for Seat 6. But what if a voter preferred the two newbies over the incumbent? Voters can’t select those two on their ballots. 

In theory, a candidate with fewer votes could even win election. 

A better system would pit all candidates for Madison School Board in the same pool, with the top vote-getters earning however many seats are available. That’s how most school boards across Wisconsin conduct their elections. Or they assign seats to geographic areas.

——

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?

Austin Berg:

The Chicago Teachers Union is planning to take Chicago Public Schools students out of class this Friday to vote for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s $100 million real estate transfer tax hike.

To do this, the union is partnering with @BringChiHome, a political organization spending millions of dollars pushing a “yes” vote on Johnson’s tax hike proposal.

—-

More.

Quinton Klabon:

Joint Finance Committee REJECTS the curriculum lists presented to them.

——-

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?

Sarah Shaffer:

Coming together around the question ​“What could we win together?” this broad cross section of Minnesota’s working class decided to go on the offensive, developing a set of guiding principles over months, made possible in turn by years of relationship building through street uprisings and overlapping crises.

Shortly after we spoke that day, Villanueva and her colleagues felt that collective power manifest: reaching a tentative agreement with their employers after months of bargaining. The strike they’d authorized to begin March 4 would not be necessary: they won a 17% increase in base pay, an improved healthcare plan, more paid time off, and their first-ever paid holidays on Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

The next day, the building security workers who were negotiating nearby on the same property, also reached an agreement, one that included pay raises of up to 27%, employer-paid 401Ks, and a Juneteenth paid holiday. 

This broad cross section of Minnesota’s working class decided to go on the offensive, developing a set of guiding principles over months, made possible in turn by years of relationship building through street uprisings and overlapping crises.

What is happening in the Twin Cities could be a powerful model for the working class everywhere: a movement ecosystem whose members show up in deep solidarity across differences, that thinks strategically and builds for the long term while maximizing its current power. That understands workers are also renters, neighbors, people who want a livable city and climate — and that they can exponentially amplify their power by acting together. 

“We have learned over and over again,” Local 26President Greg Nammacher explained, “when we try and push for justice in each of our own separate lanes, we are not as successful as if we push for justice together across our different organizations.” 

——-

Act 10.

The Milwaukee pension scandal and political implications.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Ben Raab & Benjamin Hernandez:

Over 100 faculty members now have their signatures displayed on a website for a new faculty group, Faculty for Yale, which “insist[s] on the primacy of teaching, learning and research as distinct from advocacy and activism.”

Among other measures, the group calls for “a thorough reassessment of administrative encroachment” and the promotion of diverse viewpoints. The group also calls for a more thorough description of free expression guidelines in the Faculty Handbook; Yale’s current guidelines are based on its 1974 Woodward Report. The group also wants Yale to implement a set of guidelines regarding donor influence, which were first put forth by the Gift Policy Review Committee in 2022.

On its site, Faculty for Yale outlines issues that it claims stem from Yale’s “retreat from the university’s basic mission.”

“Faculty for Yale is a spontaneously coalescing group of (so far) over 100 faculty from throughout the university who wish to support our university in re-dedicating itself to its historic and magnificent mission to preserve, produce, and transmit knowledge,” professor of social and natural science Nicholas Christakis wrote to the News. “We believe that any loss of focus on this deep, fundamental, and important mission may contribute to a range of challenges being faced in universities like ours nowadays.”

Retraction Watch:

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.

A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paperfor issues with the data and images. 

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” 

The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020. 

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.

Greg Lukianoff:

ACLU National Legal Director David Cole has a review of my and Rikki Schlott’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” coming out in the February 8 edition of the New York Review of Books. Overall I thought it was quite positive, but Cole made some arguments — which we actually hear quite often — that I think need addressing.

Before I do that, though, I want to stress that I both like and greatly respect David Cole. I also appreciate that the New York Review of Books found such a serious thinker on the topic of freedom of speech to review our book, as opposed to the many First Amendment skeptics these days who seem to think that simply employing a more advanced insult technology against those they disagree with is the same as refuting them (cough, cough — “The Lost Cause of Free Speech”).

I always welcome good-faith pushback — especially when it gives me an opportunity to go into more depth on why Rikki and I are so concerned about the current situation in higher education. All that said, here are some quotes from Cole’s review that I’d like to respond to:

Douglas Detterman:

Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.

Sara Randazzo:

The effort has been slow to gain traction partly because the loudest opposition comes from teachers themselves. Some Texas teachers complain that the extra pay is doled out unfairly and pits colleagues against one another, even as recipients report life-changing raises that have paid off debts and funded long-awaited vacations.

“This merit-based pay breeds hostility, it breeds competition,” said fourth-grade teacher Stephanie Stoebe.

The reaction in Texas shows why attempts to pay U.S. teachers based on performance have often fizzled, even amid widespread calls to make teacher pay more competitive. Teachers make $67,000 on average nationwide, with average starting salaries of $43,000. The majority are paid based on seniority, with stipends for postgraduate degrees and extra duties, a system preferred by teachers unions.

Jonathan Zimmerman:

It’s about Carole Hooven.

Never heard of her? I didn’t think so. But Hooven’s story speaks volumes about the real problem at Harvard, and in American universities more broadly: the lack of academic freedom for diverse perspectives.

We’ve heard the word diverse a lot since Gay stepped down because she was Harvard’s first African American president. I don’t know if she was targeted by her right-wing critics because of her race, as her defenders alleged. Nor do I know if her record of lifting unattributed passages from other scholars should have disqualified her for the presidency.

Here’s what I do know: Harvard talks a good game about diverse views, but it doesn’t actually protect them. And that’s very bad news for higher education.

Hooven had to learn this lesson the hard way. She was a lecturer in the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard when she went on Fox News in 2021 to promote her new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. During the interview, she said that there are just two biological sexes: male and female.

Hooven made a point of distinguishing sex from gender, which can assume many different forms. “We can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” she said, repeating the term respect three times.

No matter. The director of her department’s diversity and inclusion task force took to Twitter (now X) to denounce Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments. “This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people,” the director added. “It directly opposes our Task Force work that aims to create a safe space for scholars of ALL gender identities and races.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise, was, to quote Talleyrand, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.

Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Philips academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.

And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed leftwing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.

Rob Thomas:

But the seeds of Mattes’ crusade to expose wrongdoing in government were planted not in sunny Florida, but in wintry Madison.

As the new Bunker Crew/MSW Media podcast“Lawyers Guns and Money” chronicles, the Connecticut-born Mattes attended school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late ‘60s and joined the antiwar movement there. In the 1970s, while still a student radical, Mattes was elected to the Dane County Board and later the Madison City Council.

“We were in a bar, and my friend said, ‘One of us ought to run for county supervisor and throw these bums out,’” Mattes recounts on the first episode of the six-episode podcast, which is available on iTunes, Spotify and other podcast apps. “We flipped a coin and I lost, so I had to run. Somehow I won.”

While serving on the county board, Mattes said he conducted a yearlong investigation into nepotism in county hiring and spearheaded a change in hiring practices based on merit. “That was really the first time I ever used my research skills to make something happen in government.”

Mattes later became a city alderman, and he said there was talk about him running for mayor. Instead, he left politics in 1981 to attend law school in Florida.

Adam Andrzejewski

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government-spending watchdog which I direct, examined 10 universities—the Ivy League, plus Stanford and Northwestern. We found that during a five-year period from 2018-22 these wealthy universities collected $45 billion in taxpayer subsidies, special tax treatment, and federal payments. In fact, these universities collected a stunning $33 billion in federal contracts and grants. It therefore seems these schools are more federal contractors than educators—with federal payments exceeding undergraduate student tuition.

Additionally, the universities we surveyed profit handsomely from “nonprofit” tax breaks amounting to a benefit of roughly $12 billion. Wealthy universities pay only a 1.4% “excessive endowments” tax on their gains whereas wealthy individuals pay up to 23.4% on their capital gains.

The University of Pennsylvania, whose then-president (she resigned on Saturday), Liz Magill, seemed to smirk at the idea of being questioned by Congress, collected $3.7 billion in U.S. government grants and contracts, mostly for research, between 2018 and 2022. Over the same five-year period, Penn’s endowment ballooned to $21 billion from $13.4 billion.

Melissa Korn and Joseph De Avila:

A major donor to the University of Pennsylvania has told the school he would rescind a $100 million gift if the school doesn’t replace President Liz Magill, who has faced intensifying criticism for her handling of antisemitism on campus—most recently because of how she defined harassment in a congressional hearing earlier this week.

Ross Stevens, founder and chief executive of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, a financial-services firm, informed Penn on Thursday he would cancel $100 million worth of Stone Ridge shares held by the university, according to a letter sent by his attorneys to the school. Stevens, a 1991 Penn graduate, donated shares to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance at the university’s Wharton School, according to the letter. The donation was made in 2017.

Stone Ridge had grounds to cancel the shares based on Magill’s recent congressional testimony, the letter said. The company has the discretion to cancel the shares if Penn engages in conduct that is “materially injurious to [Stone Ridge’s] business, reputation, character or standing,” the letter said.

During her testimony Tuesday in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Magill was asked if calling for the genocide of Jewish students would violate school policies. Magill said it depended on the context.

WATCH: Imagine if @EliseStefanik's questioning of the university presidents was about other groups instead of "Jews." Someone did that using AI voice generation.

How much rage would there be?

Video by https://t.co/9iexNOiRj5 pic.twitter.com/ntpYf99vIG

— Sia Kordestani (@SiaKordestani) December 12, 2023

Patrick Mcilheran:

Huge taxpayer savings are at risk, but beyond that is the question of who controls government, voters or organizers

The unions’ lawsuit to overturn Act 10, Wisconsin’s 2011 labor reform, isn’t primarily about money.

Money is involved. When the Legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker took away most of the control that public employee unions exerted over state and local governments, they said it was to arrest overspending by reducing employee benefit costs.

Rachel Saslow:

The first rule of Portland Public Schools budget cuts: Don’t call them budget cuts.

“We refer to it as a ‘gap,’” says Will Howell, a PPS spokesman.

So, the school district faces a $130 million gap because of the labor contract it signed last week with the Portland Association of Teachers—an agreement that was largely a tremendous victory for educators. Now the district will need to find $10 million in savings this school year, $41 million next year, and $79 million the year after that.

That last number assumes that school funding remains flat; it could change depending on what, if anything, happens on the May 2024 ballot and at the spring 2025 session of the Oregon Legislature.

But at least one official is saying the C-word.

“The size of the cuts we need to make are going to require cuts to direct services,” Portland School Board member Andrew Scott says.

The district will likely find the $130 million in the following places, starting with your wallet:

by Bob Yirka

A team of neuroscientists at the University of Padua, in Italy, working with a colleague from CNRS and Université Paris Cité, has found evidence suggesting that neural development of babies still in the womb is impacted by the language they hear spoken by their mothers as they carry them.

In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes research they conducted with newborn babies fitted with EEG caps.

Prior research has shown that babies still in the womb (starting at about seven months) can hear when their mother speaks. They can also hear other sounds, such as other voices, music, and general noise. They can also recognize their mother’s voice after birth and specific melodies related to her speech. Less well understood is what sort of impact hearing such things has on the neural development of the baby’s brain. To learn more, the research team in Italy conducted an experiment involving 33 newborns and their mothers—all of whom were native French speakers.

The experiments consisted of fitting all the newborn volunteers with caps that allowed for EEG monitoring in the days after birth. As the babies slept, the researchers played recordings of a person reading different language versions of the book, “Goldilocks, and the Three Bears.” EEG recordings began during a period of silence before the book was played, continued through the reading and also during another moment of silence afterward.

In studying the EEG readouts, the research team found that the babies listening to the story in French showed an increase in long-range temporal correlations—all of a type that has previously been associated with speech perception and its processing. The researchers suggest this finding is evidence of the baby’s brain being impacted in a unique way by exposure to a unique language while still in utero—in this case, French.

John Sailer:

A search committee seeking a professor of military history rejected one applicant “because his diversity statement demonstrated poor understanding of diversity and inclusion issues.” Another committee noted that an applicant to be a professor of nuclear physics could understand the plight of minorities in academia because he was married to “an immigrant in Texas in the Age of Trump.”

These examples come from more than 800 pages of “Diversity Faculty Recruitment Reports” at Ohio State University, which I obtained through a public-records request. Until recently, Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences required every search committee to create such a report, which had to be approved by various deans before finalists for a job were interviewed.

In February 2021, then-president Kristina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and “social equity” and “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires” (the acronym stands for black, indigenous and people of color). These reports show what higher education’s outsize investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” looks like in practice. Ohio State sacrificed both academic freedom and scholarly excellence for the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity.

Each report required search committees to describe how their proposed finalists “would amplify the values of diversity, inclusion and innovation.” Some reports were dutiful and bureaucratic; others exuded enthusiasm. All were revealing. Racial diversity was touted as a tool to achieve viewpoint diversity, but viewpoint conformity often served as a tool to meet de facto quotas. One report said a candidate would “greatly enhance our engagement with queer theory outside of the western epistemological approaches which would greatly support us both in recruitment and retention of diverse graduate populations.”

Andrew Mcmunn:

The average Composite score on the ACT test for the class of 2023 has fallen to 19.5 out of 36, according to a report.

The decrease in scores marks a decline of 0.3 points from 2022, when the average score was 19.8, data released by ACT in October shows. ACT is the nonprofit organization that administers the college readiness exam.

The average scores in three of the four subjects featured on the test – mathematics, reading and science – were below the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks. The benchmarks are the minimum ACT test scores required for students taking the test to have a high probability of success in college.

ACT said students who meet a benchmark on the test have about a 50% chance of getting a B score or better in college courses and about a 75% chance of earning a C or better in the same course or courses.

ACT CEO Janet Godwin said this is the sixth consecutive year of declines in average scores.

Abbey Machtig:

The Madison School District is in the middle of two referendums approved by voters in 2020. The $317 million capital referendum has gone toward building a new elementary school and funding significant high-school renovations.

The smaller operating referendum gave the district an additional $33 million to work with over four years.

Despite this additional money, administrators still worry about the impending financial cliff facing the school district. In addition to referendum dollars running out, the temporary relief funds distributed to school districts during the COVID-19 pandemic are also set to expire by September 2024. In the Madison School District, this leaves a slightly more than $40 million hole for administrators to fill in the future.

Scott Girard:

The report, “K-12 On The Ballot: Using Referenda To Fund Public Schools,” is from Forward Analytics, a nonpartisan research division of the Wisconsin Counties Association. It adds to a long list of research showing how school districts’ use of ballot questions to fund operations has risen over the past decade.

Other school officials, including in Madison, have made a similar point in recent months that downsizing in a school district is difficult.

“The bus still costs what it costs, whether there’s 70 kids or there’s 60,” Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials Executive Director Mike Barry said earlier this year.

The Forward Analytics report cites arguments from both supporters and detractors of the revenue limit law, and acknowledges that “there is no easy answer here.”

“The revenue limit law tries to balance sufficient school funding with limited local property tax growth,” Knapp wrote. “At the heart of the problem is finding agreement on what is ‘sufficient’ funding.”

—-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average annual per student spending, now ranging from $22 to $29k per student, depending on the budget number one finds.

Yet:

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?

Rikki Schlott

The academic was fired after almost 20 years of his data — including figures used in an explosive study, which claimed the legacy of lynchings made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives — were found to be in question.

College authorities said he was being fired for “incompetence” and “false results.” 

Among the studies he has had to retract were claims that whites wanted longer sentences for blacks and Latinos.

To date, six of Stewart’s articles published in major academic journals like Criminology and Law and Society Review between 2003 and 2019 have been fully retracted after allegations the professor’s data was fake or so badly flawed it should not have been published.

The professor’s termination came four years after his former graduate student Justin Pickett blew the whistle on his research.

Comments.

Thomas Claburn

Last week, privacy advocate (and very occasional Reg columnist) Alexander Hanff filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) decrying YouTube’s deployment of JavaScript code to detect the use of ad blocking extensions by website visitors.

On October 16, according to the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, Google published a support pagedeclaring that “When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

“If you use ad blockers,” it continues, “we’ll ask you to allow ads on YouTube or sign up for YouTube Premium. If you continue to use ad blockers, we may block your video playback.”

Thomas Claburn:

The law requires tech companies to prevent illegal content from being distributed on their platforms and to remove it when identified. It also seeks to prevent children from being exposed to harmful material, a goal that demands effective online age verification. And it allows for fines of up to £18 million ($21.82 million) or 10 percent of their global turnover, whichever is greater. It even includes the possibility of imprisoning executives whose companies fail to comply.

Teo Armus and Hadley Green

“So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze…. With a flash of bluish white light and orange sparks, a trio of foundry workers carved seven long gashes into Lee’s severed head. ‘It’s a better sculpture right now than it’s ever been,’ one of the metal-casters said. ‘We’re taking away what it meant for some people and transforming it.'”

“[O]n Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence… They made arrangements for Lee to be melted down while they started collecting ideas from city residents for that new sculpture…. Some [of the witnesses to the melting] said the statue was being destroyed. Others called it a restoration. Depending on who you asked, the bronze was being reclaimed, disrupted, or redeemed to a higher purpose. It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one….”

Commentary.

More

Another approach: Memento Park.

Luke Andrews:

Dr Melissa Kearney, an economic professor at the University of Maryland, previously told DailyMail.com: ‘There has been a greater emphasis on spending time building careers. Adults are changing their attitudes towards having kids.

‘They are choosing to spend money and time in different ways… [that] are coming into conflict with parenting.’

There are also signs the ‘Instagram generation’ of millennials and baby boomers are now prioritizing travel and relaxation over building families.

As a result, people are waiting longer to have children than in previous generations — with older women more likely to have fewer children. A number of women are also conceiving via fertility treatment, driving a rise of mothers in their 40s.

The higher cost of living and rising costs of childcare have also been blamed.

Dr Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, warned previously that the decline would eventually ‘have a damaging impact both on social cohesion and general well-being.’

Abortion data. Planned Parenthood by the numbers.

There are <i>more</i>, not fewer, abortions in the year after <i>Dobbs</i>, but isn’t the increase in the earliest weeks of pregnancy?

Hardika Singh:

“Now it’s like, ‘forget the orange juice.’ That money will go toward the tip,” said Underwood, a 69-year-old optical wholesaler from Ridgeland, Miss. “Some things you just don’t need like you used to because prices are up.”

Orange juice prices have been climbing as citrus groves have faced a spreading greening disease and extreme weather. Prices for frozen concentrate orange-juice futures have more than tripled since late 2021 and emerged as one of this year’s top-performing commodities, with prices setting records week after week. On Friday, they jumped to a fresh record high of $3.91 a pound, up from $2.11 last October, according to FactSet.

Hannah Cox:

Earlier this year, Florida joined a growing list of states with universal school choice programs—meaning any student in the state can access a portion of the money the state spends on their education and use those tax dollars to homeschool, attend a private school, or do some sort of mixed-learning program.

Families have responded swiftly. As of this week, a hilarious hit piece hit the First Coast News website which spent the majority of its time hand wringing over the fact that nearly 10,000 students have left one school district in the state alone already.

Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns

Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

More.

NPR:

High school students’ scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest in more than three decades, showing a lack of student preparedness for college-level coursework, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test.

Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students in the class of 2023 whose scores were reported Wednesday were in their first year of high school when the virus reached the U.S.

Peter Gray, David F. Lancy and David F. Bjorklund:

It is no secret that rates of anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens in the US are at an all- time high. Recognizing this, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psy- chiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association issued, in 2021, a joint statement to the Biden administration that child and adolescent mental health be declared a “national emergency.”1
Although most current discussions of the decline in youth mental health emphasize that which has occurred over the past 10-15 years, research indicates that the decline has been continuous over at least the last 5 or 6 decades.2,3 Although a variety of causes of this decline have been pro- posed by researchers and practitioners (some discussed near the end of this Commentary), our focus herein is on a possible cause that we believe has been insufficiently re- searched, discussed, and taken into account by health practi- tioners and policy makers.
Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental dis- orders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities inde- pendent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such inde- pendent activities may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.

Hope Karnopp

A spokeswoman for the Madison Police Department said Thursday there were no updates in the case. Police had planned to reexamine the case if more information became available and discuss internet safety with the girl and her mother if they were identified.

The police department’s Special Victims Unit reviewed the photo depicting the girl’s participation but determined Wisconsin’s statutes on possession of child pornography did not apply because the photo was not sexual in nature. Police also determined a statute relating to exposing a child to harmful material or narrations did not apply.

But Tiffany and Fitzgerald disagreed with police, organizers and legal experts that because the purpose of the event was not sexual, local ordinances and state laws would likely not apply.

“The laissez-faire attitude of all parties, such as the organizer, the attendees, and the Wisconsin Attorney General, underscores the need for the federal government to intervene and act to protect our children from this perverse behavior,” the lawmakers said in their letter.

Jill Varshay:

Amid the growing debate over how best to teach math, there is another ballooning problem: grades. They’re becoming increasingly untethered to how much students know. That not only makes it harder to gauge how well students are learning math and catching up from pandemic learning losses, but it’s also making math grades a less reliable indicator of who should be admitted to colleges or take advanced courses.

The latest warning sign comes from college admissions test maker ACT, which compared students’ ACT test scores with their self-reported high school grades between 2010 and 2022. Grade inflation struck all high school subjects, ACT found, but it was highest for math, followed by science, English, and social studies.

Grade inflation accelerated after 2016 and intensified during the pandemic, as schools relaxed standards. But as schools settled back into their usual rhythms in 2021-22, grades didn’t fall back to pre-pandemic norms and remained elevated. Grades continued to rise in math and science even as grade inflation stabilized in English and social studies. For a given score on the math section of the ACT, students said they had earned higher grades than students had reported in previous years.

Edgar Sanchez, an ACT researcher who conducted the analysis, said the inflation makes it hard to interpret high school grades, especially now that A grades are the norm. “Does 4.0 really mean complete content mastery or not?” Sanchez asked, referring to an A grade on the 0 to 4 grade-point scale.

Andrew Campa:

A Monterey County school district has settled a lawsuit that alleged middle school staff “convinced” a student to identify first as bisexual and then as transgender, without informing the 11-year-old’s mother. 

The Spreckels Union School District, which encompasses an elementary and middle school in the Salinas area, paid nearly $100,000 to a Monterey County mother and daughter over an alleged violation of the parent’s 14th Amendment right to raise her child.

The settlement, agreed to in mid-June and approved by a federal judge Aug. 3, brings an end to the legal action pursued by Jessica Konen and her daughter Alicia, who went by the initials A.G.

More. And. More. And. More.

Hoover:

Google “Shoplifting in San Francisco” and you will find more than 100,000 hits. And you will find lots of YouTube videos, where you can watch a single thief, or an entire gang, walk into an SF Walgreens or CVS and empty the shelves. Most walk in, go about their pilfering, and then walk out, though at least one thief rode their bike into the store and departed the same way, carefully navigating their two-wheeler down a narrow aisle.

We probably shouldn’t call it shoplifting anymore, since that term connotes the idea of a person trying to conceal their crime. In San Francisco, there is no attempt to conceal theft, and there is almost never any effort by store employees, including security personnel, to confront the thieves. The most they do is record the thefts with their cell phones.

Why is shoplifting so rampant? Because state law holds that stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanor, which means that law enforcement probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will let it go.

Alex Tabarrok:

What’s going on in WV is thus a reflection of national trends, magnified by West Virginia’s own decline in population. Full paying foreign students from China are also way down. Now add to declining college demographics, budgets hit by the great recession and then the pandemic. Now add in the rise of online learning which means that universities can outsource low-demand classes to other universities and save money and quite likely increase quality. (Indeed, the local teacher might have been teaching online anyway so why not substitute with a world expert and great teacher who has the backing of an entire team of delivery experts?) Finally, add in the fact that a substantial part of the electorate would like to see a decline in programs they see as politicized.

Will Flanders and Amellia Wedward:

Federal intervention in school discipline policy became an issue of increasing importance beginning during the Obama administration. Based on the argument that differences in the rates of discipline for students of different racial groups was evidence of racism, the administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter informing school districts that they needed to work to reduce gaps in suspensions for those of different racial backgrounds.

A reprieve of sorts occurred during the Trump administration, with the “Dear Colleague” letter eventually being rolled back. But, under President Biden, we are likely to see similar, or even more stringent, federal intervention. What, then, was the result of previous interventions under Obama? This report seeks to answer that question through the prism of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), which was subject to an inquiry from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Division, and eventually entered into an agreement with them to reduce disparate suspension outcomes.

We combine several data sets in this analysis. Data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on suspension rates at the school level is combined with data from a UW-Milwaukee survey of students on how safe they feel in their school.
Among the key takeaways from this study:

• Suspension Rates Declined in Milwaukee After MPS Agreement. While suspension rates increased in Milwaukee for several years,there was an immediate decline following an agreement between MPS and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education.

• Reduced Suspension for African American Students Resulted in Lower Reports of Safety. When suspension rates for AfricanAmerican students fell, the share of students reporting that they feel unsafe in their school’s hallways went up.

• Suspension Rates for Other Student GroupsChange in a more “normal” manner.Among all students and Hispanic students,higher suspension rates occur in schools wherestudents report feeling less safe.

• African American Students Suffer theMost. African American students are heavilyconcentrated in schools with other AfricanAmericans, meaning other African Americanstudents bear the brunt of lax discipline practices.

This research has important implications for policy makers at both the state and federal level. It shows there are real-world, negative implications from applying political correctness to school discipline standards. Moreover, students in the group that is ostensibly meant to be helped by relaxed discipline are actually the most likely to be harmed.

Arthur Thomas:

Gus Ramirez was at Cardinal Stritch University for a ceremony for All-In Milwaukee students when he had an idea.

“When I was on campus, I realized it was just a beautiful campus and could be an opportunity for us,” said Ramirez, co-chair of the Ramirez Family Foundation that bought the campus for $24 million.

The opportunity is to create a second school to serve children in Milwaukee. Ramirez founded St. Augustine Preparatory Academy on the city’s South Side, which opened in fall 2017. He’s talked in the past about opening a second school on the north side of the city.

The 43.5-acre Cardinal Stritch campus isn’t actually on Milwaukee’s north side – it sits on the border of Glendale and Fox Point – but it does come with already built assets. Ramirez estimated the existing assets he plans to use for a school would cost $150 million to $200 million if it were to be similar in size to Aug Prep.

Gail Heriot:

My friends call me a pessimist. But if you’re concerned that this piece is going to be a downer, in which I list all the ways universities will circumvent the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions ruling, relax. I’m very pleased with the Court’s decision.

Opponents of race-preferential admissions haven’t won the war, and things could still go awry. But we’ve gained some important legal weaponry, and we stand a decent chance of adding to the arsenal. (Forgive all the military metaphors: I’ve been “in the trenches” on this issue for almost three decades.)

Provided that “win” is defined realistically, the fight seems a lot more winnable now than it did before SFFA v. Harvard. Yes, colleges and universities will try to get around the ruling. But 100 percent compliance isn’t necessary for positive things to flow from the Court’s decision.

Here are some predictions for the coming year or so.

Some schools will experiment with doing away with standardized tests, but those that hope to be viewed as academically rigorous will quickly decide that they don’t like the results and will reverse course. MIT has already done so (after abandoning the SAT during the Covid-19 lockdowns). Some schools will experiment with preferences based on social class. They will find that there are a lot more low-income Asian Americans and whites than they realized (and that most of their African American and Latino applicants are not low-income). That may dampen their enthusiasm. But if they try to get around the problem by defining social class in a way that privileges one racial group over another, they will risk being a target in the next wave of lawsuits (which is surely coming).

Gail L. Heriot Alison Somin

It is a not-so-well-kept secret that many colleges and universities discriminate against women in admissions. Believing that there are “too many” qualified women seeking admission, these schools resort to holding female applicants to higher academic standards than they hold male applicants. Title IX prohibits federally-funded public institutions as well as federally-funded private graduate schools and private professional schools from engaging in such discrimination. On the other hand, private undergraduate schools (regardless of whether they accept federal funding), are exempt from Title IX’s core prohibition on sex discrimination when it comes to admissions. In either case, however, this practice is certainly troubling. Why does it get so little attention?

Mike LaChance

For 58 years, the accreditation system of higher education has stood, enshrined in federal law and reaffirmed with each reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Now, a federal lawsuit from the state of Florida is looking to upend that entire system, which is a key part of the federal accountability system that helps to determine which colleges and universities receive access to federal financial aid.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and other state officials argue in the lawsuit filed last week that Congress has “ceded unchecked power” to the private accrediting agencies, violating the U.S. Constitution. They want a federal judge to permanently block the Education Department from enforcing accreditation-related provisions of the Higher Education Act. Currently, federal law requires that colleges and universities be accredited by an Education Department–recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid such as Pell Grants.

“The result is that private accrediting agencies enjoy near limitless power over state institutions,” Florida officials wrote in the initial complaint. “Accrediting agencies have the power to hold billions of federal education dollars hostage based on the formulation and application of substantive education standards that are immune from meaningful government supervision.”

Another article at Inside Higher Ed has the completely predictable response from the Biden White House:

“Governor DeSantis is now bringing his culture wars, like book bans, to the long-standing system that helps ensure students receive a quality college education,” the White House said in a statement. “This administration won’t allow it. We’re committed to ensuring all students receive a high-quality education, and will fight this latest effort by opponents to get in the way of that.”

This article also boils down the issue to this:

Florida passed a law last year that required state colleges and universities to change accrediting agencies every 10 years. The complaint argues that the Education Department has issued guidance over the last year to make it more difficult for a Florida college or university to switch accreditors. The state wants a federal judge to at least toss out the guidance.

The full complaint.

Abby Machtig;

How do you plan to address the achievement gaps between students in Madison schools, specifically around literacy?

We put brand new, high-quality standards-aligned materials in every single teacher’s classroom. We also had to support teachers to actually use those because that is a lift. … Do we always get it right the first time? No. But the good news is we can fix it, we can go back, we can learn, we can try again. We got some federal funding related to COVID and used much of that one-time money to make these initial investments in these materials. We didn’t always have that opportunity.

There is an explicit focus on literacy, and it’s not just literacy in the classroom, it’s also how we communicate about that to families. Families always want to be able to help their child read regardless of age. So that is not something that is done in isolation just in the classroom, it is about literacy in the community as well.

How do you plan to address declining student enrollment across the district? Going along with that, what is your plan for attracting and retaining teachers to the district amid a systemic teacher shortage?

I believe that our Board of Education has made a historic investment in our staff with the 8% cost-of-living increase. So, I believe that speaks volumes to our ability to retain and attract high-quality staff. It is a fact we are declining in enrollment. I think that there are some choices that we have to make around budget and ways of working over the coming year that we will do together.

Scott Girard.

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?

Vijay Prasad:

FIRE— an organization devoted to championing free speech on university campuses— has broken the story of Mike Joyner, a Mayo Clinic Professor suspended for comments he made to the news media. They even published his disciplinary letter. 

It appears Mike Joyner is in part being punished for comments he made about fairness when trans-athletes compete in women’s sports. Allow me to outline the details of this action, and build my case that Mayo clinic is in complete and egregious violation of Academic Freedom. 

As a bit of background. Mike Joyner is an anesthesiologist and expert in sports physiology. Pre-pandemic we were allies. We agreed that the genome has been massively overhyped and Francis Collins specialized in that hype. We exchanged hundreds of emails on genomic oncology, and I have published extensively on it.

During the pandemic, we drifted apart because I was opposed to giving convalescent plasma outside of randomized studies, and Mike gave a ton of it, outside randomized studies. As readers know, my philosophy is RCT or STFU— especially for experimental agents that may have negative side effects. But here are the rules of academics. It Mike’s job to say what he thinks, and my job to say why he is wrong. 

Now let’s turn to what happened.

Troy Closson:

As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism.

Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But the success of their efforts has hinged in part on whether school leaders are willing to embrace a seismic shift in their philosophy about how children learn.

Already in New York City, the rollout has frustrated principals. The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, is forcing schools to abandon strategies he says are a top reason half of students in grades three to eight are not proficient in reading.

But principals will lose control over selecting reading programs at their schools, and their union has criticized the speed of change. And many educators still believe in “balanced literacy,” a popular approach that aims to foster a love of books through independent reading time but that experts and the chancellor say lacks enough focus on foundational skills.

“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?

Matt Taibbi:

I read Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s “Eight Key Takeaways” summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.

I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us “denialists” — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.

Paul Thacker:

For years, Twitter executives provided favored access to a pack of select technology and “disinformation” reporters, giving them insider entrée to new products, responding quickly to their reporting needs to identify and suspend “disinformation” accounts—even helping one Washington Post reporter shut down an account that delved into her background as a wealthy child of privilege who attacked conservatives. In another example, CNN reporters requested that Twitter alter their algorithm to create a “read only mode” to guard them from criticism.

By changing Twitter’s culture and firing the majority of employees, Musk severed these ties between Twitter executives and privileged journalists—relationships that were so close one executive referred to some journalists as “our reporters.” Reporters who were close to Twitter, returned the favor to company executives by giving them positive press—even helping the company deal with lawmakers by relaying drafts of pending bills and providing advice on product development.

“Our DC-based tech reporters have gotten advance copies of at least five draft House bills that may get introduced today or early next week that would make changes to federal law and give more power to regulators,” wrote one Twitter executive in a June 2021 email. “This is in line with what we’re hearing about the Biden administration’s priorities to address antitrust concerns.”

In a separate example, Twitter held a meet-and-greet with their “news partners” in New York City later that same year to “solidify key relationships, encourage intel sharing, and, more broadly, help to reinforce comm’s network of trusted reporters.” Reporting back on the meeting, Twitter’s Elisabeth Busby wrote that journalists were “excited to meet” and profiled each reporter’s needs and what Twitter might expect in return.

“Please keep this information close hold,” Busby emailed.

In her report, Busby provided detailed insight into Twitter’s relationship with multiple journalists—many who work in the “disinformation” space and who are now some of Elon Musk and Twitter’s greatest online critics

Okay, that was a fucking powerful statement by @elonmusk

I’m very impressed because he was committed to his words. RESPECTpic.twitter.com/JiYecgdLe8

— MAGS (@TAftermath2020) May 17, 2023

George Soros has been so uniquely destructive to law & order in American cities that there’s a name for the carnage he’s wrought: “Soros DAs.” His organization described its strategy to Politico in a 2016 article: it would change the law, not by going through legislatures, but…

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) May 17, 2023

This is a small comment, but a very telling one: Establishment Dem acting as though it’s absurd to trust a *journalist* over the *FBI*

Of course, that’s entirely backwards. (And @Julio_Rosas11 is great) https://t.co/wKng50yDfZ

— Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) May 16, 2023

To understand why most of corporate media has deservedly lost all public trust, look at how they are minimizing the Durham Report.

For decades in DC, John Durham was heralded as one of the US's most apolitical, trustworthy federal prosecutors. NYT, 2009:https://t.co/DU01bEVvgR pic.twitter.com/Fp7ECNmPkJ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 17, 2023

Freddie DeBoer:

where men are far more comfortable being more educated and higher-income than their partners. (With many exceptions.) And you can imagine how this dynamic plays out in specific dating pools: as more hard-charging women flood a given dating market, while the number of eligible men drags behind because of increasing advantages for women in school and the workplace, fewer and fewer women are likely to find themselves with a partner they consider marriageable. To make matters worse, since this dynamic hands men an advantage in the romantic marketplace, they may put off partnering for the long term even further, playing the field for years more because it favors them, and in doing so making matters even worse for ambitious women.

Reeves cites data that suggests that something like 30% to 40% of the decline in marriage rates is driven by the inability of women to find mates that they see as stable, smart, good earners, or otherwise up to their standards. We can certainly lament the degree to which dating markets still reflect the notion that men have to provide while women don’t – it’s a kind of regressive attitude far fewer people still explicitly hold than they once did – but that expectation remains a reality. And anecdotally, there certainly seems to be a lot of men who want only to play video games and watch porn, even if they are employed. So career women are faced with a growing structural disadvantage of insufficient suitable partners, which is exacerbated as they age because of men’s continuing preference for younger women. (Another reality we may lament but can’t really deny.) My guess is that this dynamic falls heaviest on Black women, perversely, because they’ve been doing so well lately.

Daniel Mediavilla:

Exercise can boost your memory and thinking skills, says neurologist Scott McGinnis in a press release published by Harvard Medical School, where he works. David Jacobs, a professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota, agrees: “For generally healthy people, exercising regularly can enhance brain function over a lifetime — not just after a workout,” he writes in an article published by Scientific American. The list of researchers and health advocates who take the cognitive benefits of physical exercise for granted is long, and numerous studies appear to support this widely held belief.

But a few days ago, Dr. Daniel Sanabria Lucena (Bordeaux, France, 46 years old), a professor at the University of Granada and a researcher with the Mind, Brain and Behavior Center, published a review in the journal Nature Human Behaviorthat calls this belief into question. Sanabria’s team analyzed 109 studies, involving over 11,000 participants, that found exercise to have a positive effect on cognitive ability. The team discovered various problems with the studies’ methodologies, leading them to conclude that there is no difinitive evidence to support the claim that physical activity has a positive effect on brain performance.

Dave Zweifel:

Although you might never know it by last week’s meeting of the Madison School Board, school districts are very much included in the law that requires government — which belongs to and is paid for by the public after all — needs to be transparent in all that it does. There is no room for secrets unless specifically exempted under the law.

To me, the meeting to discuss the embarrassing failure of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s response to open records requests was an embarrassment itself. Administrators tried to explain why the district has become a laggard in fulfilling openness requests, often simply denying access or stonewalling for months to release records that “shall be honored as soon as practicable and without delay.”

They revealed that the job that long ago was designated as the records custodian, the person responsible for releasing requested public records, no longer exists. Instead, the district’s legal department has been taxed with the job and apparently is overwhelmed by other tasks.

That’s patently unacceptable, and I’m surprised School Board members didn’t demand an accounting. No governmental body can just ignore the law because it refuses to assign adequate staff to comply with it.

Wisj:

But one of the lawsuits was actually filed by the district’s own spokesman, Tim LeMonds. After the district determined it had to release a complaint against LeMonds by his staff, the tight-lipped LeMonds — whose job is supposed to be communicating with the public — sued his employer to stop disclosure.

You can’t make this stuff up — or justify it.

More, here.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Rutgers has to stop relying on low paid adjuncts to teach its undergrad, liberal arts classes. The majority of my son’s first two years of classes were taught by low wage, transient profs who would open complain about wages in the middle of class. https://t.co/a734bMdRRZ

— Laura McKenna (@laura11D) April 10, 2023

Nader Issa:

First revealed in Lightfoot’s budget proposal last fall for the current year, this year’s $175 million payment from CPS to the city was approved by the Board of Education at its monthly meeting Wednesday — but was the subject of intense scrutiny by board members who criticized City Hall.

The board passed with a 3-2 vote an amendment to the district’s agreement with the city that greatly increases CPS’ obligation from $100 million last year and $60 million in 2020 as payments to the underfunded pension ramp up — with additional significant increases expected over the next few years.

The payments in question cover the benefits of non-teaching CPS staff — who make up less than half of the district’s 40,000 employees — in the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund. Those include cafeteria workers, bus aides, special education classroom assistants and other support staff. Teachers have a separate pension fund. The MEABF also covers elected officials, the Chicago Housing Authority and Public Building Commission, among others.

As of the end of 2020, about 56% of active MEABF participants — 17,469 of 31,327 — were CPS employees, district officials said Wednesday. Of the $266 million pricetag for those CPS workers’ benefits, $175 million is being passed on to the district.

California Reading Report Card:

As in the 2019 Report Card, funding and share of high-need students had very little correlation with results. There are top performing districts with over 90% high-need enrollment, and low performing districts with less than 40%.

The clear message is that it is not the students themselves, or the level of resources, that drive student reading achievement – the primary drivers are district focus on reading, management practices, and curriculum and instruction choices. The top performing districts come in all types: urban, rural, and suburban, across 9 different counties, with high-need students levels ranging from 39% to 94%. Any district can succeed at teaching reading.

New this year is a break-down by percent of limited-proficiency English Learners (ELs). With ELs, districts are tasked with teaching both English and reading; short-comings in either will yield low results. Districts with higher shares of ELs may have lower results, but still out-perform many districts with a similar student mix by as much as 25 percentage points.

A very small number of districts (7 in total) bucked the pandemic-driven trend. Palo Alto Unified, one of 2019 lowest performers, improved by 9 percentage points, and was the state’s most improved district. Their Every Student Reads Initiative, started in 2021, appears to be having positive impact. Newark Unified improved by 5 percentage points.

How the Rankings Work

Districts are ranked by the percent of economically disadvantaged Hispanic/Latino (Latino) students who “meet or exceed” grade level for the CAASPP 3rd grade ELA test in 2022. For measuring improvement, we compared to the same results for 2019.

More, here.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

They eliminated standardized testing before they eliminated legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know. https://t.co/L9PgXqsi8p

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 2, 2023

Reminder that 45% of all black students at Harvard only got in because they’re black pic.twitter.com/bzpTYb58w6

— Daniel Schmidt (@RealDSchmidt) February 20, 2023

Reminder that 45% of all black students at Harvard only got in because they’re black pic.twitter.com/bzpTYb58w6

— Daniel Schmidt (@RealDSchmidt) February 20, 2023

Gurwinder:

Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale.

As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.

I. The Smiling TigerTikTok is the most successful app in history. It emerged in 2017 out of the Chinese video-sharing app Douyin and within three years it had become the most downloaded app in the world, later surpassing Google as the world’s most visited web domain. TikTok’s conquest of human attention was facilitated by the covid lockdowns of 2020, but its success wasn’t mere luck. There’s something about the design of the app that makes it unusually irresistible.Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possibly your facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.The result is a system that’s unsurpassed at figuring you out. And once it’s figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you.Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos—such as “how to” guides and field journalism—tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info. Many of the most popular TikTokers, such as Charli D’Amelio, Bella Poarch, and Addison Rae, do little more than vapidly dance and lip-sync.

Peter Vickers

When do we have a scientific fact? Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to this question. But despite its obvious importance, humanity lacks a good answer. The renowned biologist Ernst Mayr was one scientist—probably one of many—frustrated by the fact that philosophers of science haven’t developed an account of the transition from theory to fact*. And recently an IPCC Special Report author explicitly asked, “Where is the boundary between ‘established fact’ and ‘very high confidence’?”. The truth is, nobody really knows.

And it matters. We want governments to base policies on scientific facts, insofar as that is possible. And the IPCC Report writer needs to know whether they are allowed to simply state something, or if they need to include a clause in brackets at the end of their statement: “(very high confidence)”. Moreover, in a world where we have no account of “scientific facts,” it is no wonder we encounter so much scepticism regarding even the most secure scientific claims.

Brian Chau:

There are wide reaching impacts to the political bias of artificial intelligence tools. ChatGPT is a technology that can already be used to draft articles, academic papers, poems, screenplays, and legal briefings. Political and cultural catechisms restrict the potential opportunities this can create, constantly interfering in favor of affluent social progressives against the wishes of ordinary Americans or foreigners of all stripes. Consider the following double standard:

Michael J. Totten

Wilson’s presidential campaign pledged to keep the country out of the meat-grinding war across the Atlantic, and he kept that promise for nearly three years until Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. But American Midnight isn’t about the First World War. It’s about what happened at home during and after it. The declaration of war in the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50, and while most Americans approved of the decision, there were noisy pockets of dissent, as there are whenever democracies fight wars. Wilson feared that even the mildest bleats of complaint would undermine the morale necessary to sustaining the war effort. The upshot was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which had almost nothing to do with actual espionage. Instead, it declared any kind of anti-war activity to be criminal, and defined “opposition” in ways that few modern critics of pacifists and isolationists would even recognize.

Anyone who “shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces of the United States” was subject to arrest. It would be a mistake to assume that the Wilson administration was only going after the purveyors of what we now call “fake news,” or to get hung up on the words “with intent to interfere.” Ordinary people were rounded up and prosecuted who had no intention of interfering with anyone or anything, and those convicted faced up to 20 years in prison—twice as long as the sentence Vladimir Putin metes out to his Russian subjects for similar offenses today.

A Texas man was jailed for saying, “I wish Wilson was in hell.” Andreas Latzko’s novel Men in War was banned for describing the war as a “wholesale cripple-and-corpse factory.” Police officers arrested playwright Eugene O’Neill at gunpoint on Cape Cod because somebody saw sunlight reflecting off his typewriter and thought he was sending signals to German ships. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was arrested for co-writing and producing a silent film called The Spirit of ’76about the American Revolution. Regardless of what happened in 1776, the presiding judge said, “we are engaged in a war in which Great Britain is an ally of the United States,” and this was not the time for “sowing dissension among our people” or “creating animosity … between us and our allies.” Goldstein was handed 10 years in prison.

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle:

Misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets belonging to McGraw Hill exposed more than 100,000 students’ information as well as the education publishing giant’s own source code and digital keys, according to security researchers.

The research team at vpnMentor said they discovered the open S3 buckets on June 12, and contacted McGraw Hill a day later. One production bucket contained more than 47 million files and 12TB of data, and a second non-production bucket held more than 69 million files and 10TB of data, we’re told.

“In the limited sample we researched, we could see that the amount of records varied on each file from ten to tens of thousands students per file,” the researchers said. “Due to the amount of files exposed and because we only review a small sample following ethical rules, the actual total number of affected students could be far higher than our estimate.”

Overall, the buckets contained more than 22 TB of data and over 117 million files. It included students’ names, email addresses, performance reports and grades as well as teachers’ syllabi and course reading materials for US and Canadian students and schools such as Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Los Angeles, University of Toronto and University of Michigan.

Scott R. Anderson

For the past two years, Congress has been on the verge of a step that it hasn’t taken in more than half a century: the repeal of an outstanding war authorization. Several decades-old authorizations are nominally on the chopping block. But only one has been the subject of substantial debate: the repeal of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 that authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Legislation rescinding the 2002 AUMF was among the first House measures introduced in the 117th Congress in 2021. A few weeks later, the Senate reintroduced its own longstanding bipartisan proposal to repeal both the 2002 AUMF and the separate 1991 AUMF that authorized the first Gulf War. A bipartisan House majority voted 268-161 in support of repeal in the summer of 2021. The Biden administration even endorsed the move, providing assurances that it “would likely have minimal impact on current military operations,” as “the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on the 2002 AUMF as a domestic legal basis.” And after holding an additional hearing on the matter, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 14-8 to favorably report that chamber’s own repeal measure to the broader Senate a few months later.

But since then, progress on the proposal has flagged. Despite discussions among Senate leadership, the Senate proposal has yet to receive a floor vote. Last year, the House incorporated repeal into its version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but the Senate did not, leading the conferees to omit it from the final version that was enacted into law. This year, the same scenario may yet repeat itself: while the House has included repeal in its version of the 2023 NDAA, it’s not yet clear whether a parallel measure will make its way through the complex NDAA process being pursued by the Senate. If it does not, then the robust bipartisan coalition of Senators supporting repeal will have to find another legislative vehicle—or make the difficult case that a freestanding bill warrants some of the extremely limited floor time both chambers have left before this Congress ends. Otherwise, they will have to start the process all over again when the 118th Congress sits in January next year.

Asta Nomani:

“This is a victory for every parent,” said Oettinger. “In 2020, we knew that the actions that FCPS was taking were in noncompliance with IDEA. We are now vindicated, and every parents should contact FCPS to make sure that every child receives COMPENSATORY EDUCATION and other services that meet their needs.” 

The key words here are to ask for COMPENSATORY EDUCATION — for example, so many parents paid out of pocket and took on second jobs to pay for tutors and other services to meet educational needs that Fairfax County failed to provide. And so many parents couldn’t afford these extra services, and their children were left behind. 

“It’s criminal that so many children went without services and appropriate education,” said Tisler, at her dining table, as she learned the news. “The investigation must not stop with Fairfax County. Governor Glenn Youngkin should now reconsider the leadership that he inherited that allowed such an atrocity to occur under their watch. The full weight of his office must be used to hold accountable those responsible for this failure. 

The Department of Education concluded:

Scott Girard:

The Madison School Board’s closed session meeting to discuss the appeal of fired principal Jeffrey Copeland Tuesday lasted just over 15 minutes without a decision.

“I can’t explain that,” board member Nicki Vander Meulen said, leaving around 5:16 p.m. and declining further comment. Other board members who left shortly after also declined to comment and said they could not share what happened.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in a statement sent half an hour later that “no action was taken” during the meeting.

“The Board will be scheduling final action in the upcoming days,” LeMonds wrote. “This change was made to address a technical issue with the public notice in fairness to all parties involved.”

A group of about 10 Sennett staff stood outside the door at the beginning of the meeting, but most left about 10 minutes in as the board met behind the closed door, with one remaining to deliver the news to the others at the end of the meeting.

Because the meeting was held in closed session, as allowed under state law when a public body considers someone’s employment, board members are mostly barred from sharing information on what happened during the meeting.

Two board members — board president Ali Muldrow and vice president Maia Pearson — remained in the room with a small group of district leaders after the meeting, including general legal counsel Sherry Terrell-Webb and senior executive director of staff Richard McGregory. As a reporter stood outside the open door, another staff member closed it as the group continued to meet.

Olivia Herken:

The School Board was set to have the final say on whether Copeland would be reinstated after he was fired Sept. 26 for comments he accidentally left on a teaching applicant’s voicemail on Sept. 6 that the district has deemed bigoted.

The candidate, with whom Copeland had spoken on the phone, speaks English as a second language and holds a doctorate from a university in the Dominican Republic.

Thinking the phone call was over and unaware his comments were being recorded, Copeland remarked to Assistant Principal Matt Inda that he could barely understand the applicant on the phone, and then made comments about “just giving people damn jobs.”

In an email to the Wisconsin State Journal this week, Copeland said he was expressing concern about teacher qualifications amid widespread school staffing shortages and not specifically referencing the candidate.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Thomas Hale:

“You need to quarantine,” a man on the other end of the line said in Mandarin. He was calling from the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “I’ll come and get you in about four or five hours.”

I dashed out of my hotel to stock up on crucial supplies. Based on advice from colleagues and my previous experience of quarantine in China, these included: tinned tuna, tea, biscuits, three types of vitamin, four varieties of Haribo sweets, Tupperware, a yoga mat, a towel, cleaning equipment, an extension cable, a large number of books, eye drops, a tray, a mug and a coaster with a painting of the countryside surrounding Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire.

Four to five hours later, I received another phone call. This time it was a woman from the hotel’s staff. “You are a close contact,” she said. “You can’t go outside.”

“Am I the only close contact in the hotel?”

I was, she told me and added “the hotel is closed”, meaning locked down. I went to the door of my room and opened it. A member of staff was standing there. We both jumped.

“You can’t go outside,” she said, mid-jump.

“Will the staff be able to leave?” I asked apologetically.

“It’s OK. I’ve just started my shift,” she replied, smiling.

The men in hazmat suits arrived a little later. First, they administered a PCR test with the same rushed weariness of the man who had called me earlier. Then, one escorted me down the deserted hallway. We passed the lifts, which were blocked off and guarded, and took the staff elevator. Outside, the entrance was also cordoned off. A hotel with hundreds of rooms had been frozen for me alone. I was being “taken away”, as this process is commonly referred to in China these days.

In the empty street, a bus was idling. It was small, a vehicle for school trips or large families, maybe. We drove off. “Are we going to another hotel?” I asked one of the dozen or so passengers on board.

“It’s not a hotel,” he said.

Becky Hogge:

Should it be surprising that a Wikipedia entry titled “2011 Egyptian Revolution” was prepared for publication the day before protests began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square? 

An intriguing but inconclusive new book takes a fresh look at the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit through the lens of a single article, and finds reason to question contemporary assumptions about what has been dubbed “the last best place on the internet”.

Heather Ford, a South African internet activist turned academic, has spent 10 years studying the entry covering the Egyptian uprisings on Wikipedia. In the process, she met many of its authors (or “editors”, as they are known on the platform where original research is the equivalent to original sin) — from a Cairo liberal on the inside of events, to an agoraphobic US college graduate for whom stewardship of this slice of history proved “a turning point”.

Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M. D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance A. Lindsay and Nicholas W. Papageorge,

Leveraging the Tennessee STAR class size experiment, we show that Black students randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in grades K–3 are 9 percentage points (13 percent) more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points (19 percent) more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who are not. Black teachers have no significant long-run effects on White students. Postsecondary education results are driven by two-year colleges and  concentrated among disadvantaged males. North Carolina administrative data yield similar findings, and analyses of mechanisms suggest role model effects may be one potential channel.

J Sellers Hill:

Convening for its weekly general meeting Sunday, the Harvard Undergraduate Association voted to allocate $2,700 toward the Harvard Affirmative Action Coalition to support its demonstrations at the Supreme Court later this month.

The allocation was the first to make use of the Association’s new “HUA Helps” grant program, which was established at the same meeting. HAAC plans to hold demonstrations in support of Harvard’s race-conscious admission policies when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in an anti-affirmative action lawsuit brought against the University later this month.

HUA Co-Presidents LyLena D. Estabine ’24 and Travis Allen Johnson ’24 opened the meeting with updates regarding the Association’s new “Social Life Fund,” which aims to subsidize accessible social events for undergraduates, such as those organized by House Committees.

Richard Sander:

In most public discussions, “affirmative action” in higher education is treated as one of the core issues that divides liberals from conservatives. It is rare in public life to hear a Democratic leader criticize the use of racial preferences in college admissions, and it is equally rare to hear a Republican support them. Supreme Court opinions on the use of preferences have typically broken down as splits between “liberal” supporters and “conservative” critics, and many journalists have opined that such preferences are now in great danger because of the six-to-three conservative majority on the Court.

The ideological divide on this issue has always mystified me because, as a lifelong liberal who tries to do objective empirical research on social issues, current admissions practices at colleges and universities strike me as both inconsistent with liberal values and ineffective in achieving liberal goals.

In this brief article, I explain why this is and suggest what universities should do if the Court does substantially restrict current practices.

Almost every liberal who knows about Harvard’s “Jewish quota” from the 1920s and 1930s finds it repellent.

Let’s begin by being clear on terminology. “Affirmative action” in higher education embraces many activities that the plaintiffs in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases are not challenging. Investing in educational pipelines to improve under-performing high schools, improving outreach to underrepresented students, improving admissions practices to better capture student ability—these all reflect the traditional meaning of “affirmative action,” and no one is questioning their legality.

The practices used by Harvard and UNC, and challenged by Students for Fair Admissions, are racial preferences—admitting some students with weak credentials, and rejecting other students with strong credentials, strictly based on which racial “box” they check.

Dan Lennington and Rick Esenberg

Standing rules are important guardrails for our separation of powers. Justice Scalia was concerned that Ms. Kelly’s injuries were too diffuse and too widely shared to constitute the type of injury that might count as a case or controversy.

But problems remain. What about cases in which a governmental policy will violate the Constitution in a way that harms many people similarly? What if the president decides to suspend collection of the income tax or announce a 40 percent increase in Social Security benefits? Standard doctrine is that no one is harmed by a benefit conferred on another. But even in the topsy-turvy world of the federal government, where we indulge the fiction that “no one” really pays for the spending of a trillion dollars, taxpayers are “really” harmed by large expenditures. The fact that many suffer the same injury makes it no less concrete or particularized.

So it is with Biden’s loan forgiveness. No one is hurt by the reduction in someone else’s debt. But many of us are harmed by another trillion dollars in debt which, notwithstanding the alchemists who run our government, will have to be paid for sooner or later.

Richard Phelps:

With each public remark a scholar may add to society’s collective working memory or subtract from it. Their addition is the new research they present in a journal article or conference presentation. The subtraction, when it occurs, is typically found in the scholar’s portrayal of previous research on the topic.

Editors typically grant scholars, and especially celebrity scholars, quite a bit of latitude in how they reference the universe of other relevant research. The single new study presented in a manuscript sent to a scholarly journal for review may be rigorously critiqued even while the literature review presented at the beginning is not reviewed at all. This dynamic allows scholars to write pretty much anything they please about the universe of research—declaring themselves to be the first in the world to study the topic (and, thus, to be the world’s foremost expert), ignoring or demeaning the work of professional rivals, or referencing only the work of friends, who may return the favor in their own writings.

Preposterous, you say?

Indeed, the practice of “dismissive reviews” pervades contemporary scholarship. Look for yourself. Access a standard internet search engine, such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, and enter phrases such as: “there is no research,” “this is the first study,” “little research exists,” “there are few studies,” “paucity of research,” and the like.

Here are some search engine counts I got on Google (September 12, 2022) for certain phrases:

Erin Doherty:

The average ACT test score for students in the class of 2022 dropped to its lowest level in more than three decades, according to data out Wednesday.

Why it matters: The decline in scores is the latest indicator of the pandemic’s detrimental effects on the nation’s students — and underscores the extent to which graduating high school students are ill-prepared for college.

• “The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. 

Driving the news: The national average composite score for graduating seniors in 2022 was 19.8 out of 36, the lowest average score since 1991 and down from 20.3 for graduating seniors in 2021.

Retraction Watch:

Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues. 

Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted. 

A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.

David Blaska:

Why in hell (our favorite rhetorical flourish) is the Madison public school district promoting a Get Out the Vote rally? For a partisan election! No school board candidate, no school referendum is on the ballot. But Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes are!

Why is the rally, scheduled for Monday 10-24-22 at the State Capitol, called “Unity in the Community”? What unity? An election — any election — is up or down, yes or no. Somebody wins, the other guy loses — the antithesis of unity. Unity? That’s Kim Jong Un language. The kumbaya word is invoked to hide the partisan nature of this exercise. Unavoidably, the Madison Metropolitan School District gives away its game:

Andrew Gumbel:

Thiel’s spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors – Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

MATTHEW DeFOUR, MATT MENCARINI, and JACOB RESNECK Wisconsin Watch:

Helping fuel the concern over ineligible voters is the case of Sandra Klitzke, a resident of the Brewster Village nursing home in Outagamie County, who voted in the November 2020 and April 2021 elections, even though a court had removed her right to vote in February 2020.

On March 31, the Thomas More Society filed a complaint with WEC on behalf of Klitzke and her daughter, Lisa Goodwin, who stated she “could not explain why the WisVote voting records would have indicated that my mother voted” in 2020 or 2021.

Normally the county register in probate mails notification of an ineligible voter to the WEC, according to Jennifer Moeller, president of the Wisconsin Register in Probate Association. The WEC then updates its information and notifies the local clerk, who is the only official authorized in Wisconsin to deactivate a voter’s registration.

It’s unclear why Klitzke’s name was not switched to “ineligible” in the WEC voter file, although it appears to have been an administrative error. Court records related to Klitzke’s guardianship information are confidential under state law

A contract to centralize voter data was given to Accenture under former Governor Jim Doyle. After that failed, the State built an in house system. Yet, this public data requires a $10,000 payment for each request.

The “Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism” or Wisconsin Watch, has received substantial funding from George Soros:

Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-fundedUW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on “election integrity” stories and projects.

When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that he’s a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that “hundreds” of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.

Aaron Sibarium:

The largest public university in the United States is reserving faculty positions based on race and making six-figure bonuses available exclusively to minorities, programs that are now the subject of a class action lawsuit.

As part of a new initiative to attract “faculty of color,” Texas A&M University set aside $2 million in July to be spent on bonuses for “hires from underrepresented minority groups,” according to a memo from the university’s office of diversity. The max bonus is $100,000, and eligible minority groups are defined by the university to include “African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians.”

Bryan Greene:

John Stauffer, a Harvard English professor who edited The Works of James McCune Smith, says that Smith is one of the underappreciated literary lights of the 19th century, calling him “one of the best-read people that I’ve encountered.”

“The closest equivalent I really can say about [him] as a writer is [Herman] Melville,” adds Stauffer. “The subtlety and the intricacy and the nuance…and what he reveals about life and culture and society are truly extraordinary. Every sentence contains a huge amount.”

Smith was born enslaved in New York City, in 1813, to Lavinia Smith, a woman born in Charleston, South Carolina, who historians believe was brought to New York in bondage. While James McCune Smith never knew his father, a white man, university records indicate he was a merchant named Samuel Smith. (Amy Cools, a University of Edinburgh scholar who has conducted the most extensive research into Smith’s paternity, maintains, however, “Meticulous research has thus far failed to yield any records of [such] a Samuel Smith…indicating the name “Samuel” may possibly have been entered into [the] university records for convenience or respectability’s sake.”). Smith received his primary education at the African Free School #2 on Lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, an institution founded in 1787 by governing New York elites. Their aim was to prepare free and enslaved blacks “to the end that they may become good and useful Citizens of the State,” once the state granted full emancipation.

The school graduated a roster of boys who would fill the upper ranks of black intellectual and public life. Smith’s cohort alone included Ira Aldridge, the Shakespearean tragedian and first black actor to play Othello on the London stage; the abolitionist minister Henry Highland Garnet, the first African American to address Congress; Alexander Crummell, an early pan-Africanist minister and inspiration to W.E.B. DuBois; and brothers Charlesand Patrick Reason, the first African American to teach at a largely white college and a renowned illustrator-engraver, respectively. These men’s achievements would be exceptional by any standard, but even more so, for a group who were born enslaved or deprived basic rights as free blacks.

Anna Allen:

Average scores on the ACT college admissions test dropped to their lowest in 30 years, revealing more evidence of the pandemic’s alarming impact on American education.

The average composite score for the class of 2022 was a 19.8 out of 36, according to a report released Wednesday, falling under 20 points for the first time since 1991. This year’s graduates endured the effects of the pandemic for three of their four high school years.

These results fuel concerns that post-pandemic graduates are not prepared for college-level work. Of the ACT-tested graduates, 42 percent failed to meet any of the four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks (English, reading, math, science). Last year, 38 percent of students did not meet any of the benchmarks.

While ACT scores have been gradually falling in recent years, “the magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. “We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”

Erik Hoel:

Their refusal to link or cite or provide any outside reference anywhere that might take you off their website means you never know where any fact they give you comes from—and without its origins, you can’t assess its veracity. Like:

Says who? Is this study 5 years old? 10? This year? No one can ever know, because where this is coming from is completely opaque.

Will Flanders & Dylan Palmer :

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a much greater focus by parents and concerned citizens on what is being taught in schools around the country. For the first time, many parents were exposed to what was being taught to their children, and they didn’t like what they found. Horror stories abound, from students being taught that conservatives are “ignorant and poor” at a high school in Sparta, Wisconsin,1 to school districts around the country using the 1619 Project as a means of teaching American history.2

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s previous work on this topic3 has shown that these are not isolated incidents. Instead, this sort of politically divisive rhetoric in K-12 schools is quite pervasive, from the biggest cities, to the smallest towns. While we can document that these problems are occurring in schools, the question remains: how did we reach this situation?

In this policy brief, we will begin to answer this question by showing that Wisconsin’s teachers don’t always push a liberal agenda purely of their own volition. Instead, we will show that the controversial material spilling into schools today is the result of an indoctrination process that begins when teachers are enrolled in universities around the state. We use the word “indoctrination,” here, and throughout this brief, not solely because future teachers are presented with politically charged materials during their college educations, but because these materials are presented from only one political perspective, and in a manner that preempts and forecloses healthy debate and conversation about these contested political issues.

For this report, we collected syllabi from courses for education majors at all of the University of Wisconsin’s four-year public colleges. In 2020, the University of Wisconsin System graduated approximately 2,000 students majoring in various education programs.4

While we cannot gather data from private universities in the state via open records requests, we can safely say that the schools from which we have gathered data represents courses taken by roughly 80% of all education graduates in the state for recent years.*

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

AP Dillon:

The USDOE’s “Aiding and Abetting” report looks at how provisions enacted in 2015 during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) are protecting students from sexual abuse in schools. Specifically, a look at the provisions in Section 8546 related to “aiding and abetting,” have been implemented in State Education Agencies (SEAs).

The report follows the actions earlier this year of U.S. Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA). The lawmakers sent a letter to USDOE Secretary Miguel Cardona asking him to provide answers regarding states’ failure to comply with Section 8546 of ESEA. 

Key findings included:

• As of October 2020, all 51 states required criminal background checks, and 35 states had adopted at least one other provision that could help prevent school personnel who are known or believed with probable cause to have engaged in sexual misconduct with a student or minor from obtaining new employment in education. 

• Nineteen SEAs reported developing new or revising existing laws and policies in response to Section 8546, and 15 worked with other agencies and organizations to do so. These agencies and organizations include the state board of education and the state legislature. 

• Nearly half of SEAs reported providing guidance and support to help districts implement state laws and policies related to aiding and abetting.

Additionally, the report found that a little over half of states (27) have laws and policies requiring prospective employers to check an applicant’s employment history, certification status, employment eligibility, and/or disciplinary status.

Only 19 of those 27 states have laws or policies requiring employers to request information (e.g., personnel files, employment history) from an applicant’s current and former employers. Only 14 require employers to check an applicant’s eligibility for employment or certification in and across states.

The report also says that two-thirds of the SEAs (33) document district complaints and/or incidents of sexual misconduct, eight SEAs didn’t document it and seven SEAs didn’t know whether or not their SEA documented complaints and/or incidents of sexual misconduct.

IFS:

“School boards across the country should take note. Rules for public comments must respect the First Amendment rights of speakers. If you are limiting which opinions may be shared, you’ll be held liable for violating First Amendment rights,” said Alan Gura, Vice President for Litigation at the Institute for Free Speech.

A federal court ruled in November that several Pennsbury policies governing speech at school board meetings were unconstitutional. Those policies, modeled after a template recommended by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA), allowed the meeting’s presiding officer to stop speakers whose comments were deemed “personally directed,” “personal attacks,” “abusive,” “verbally abusive,” “irrelevant,” “disruptive,” “offensive,” “inappropriate,” or “otherwise inappropriate.” After an evidentiary hearing in Philadelphia, Judge Gene Pratter found ample evidence that the Board selectively enforced the rules to stifle criticism of its actions and members.

The plaintiffs in the case were censored for attempting to criticize district policies, including efforts to promote contested ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Marshall was once interrupted mere seconds into speaking because the solicitor objected to his use of the term “critical race theory” to describe the district’s initiatives. Critics of the board were cut off for addressing their comments to board members, while other speakers were permitted to directly praise board members and school employees.

“Rules for public comment periods are meant to maintain time limits and protect each speaker’s right to be heard, not police which viewpoints are expressed. Pennsbury’s rules were so vague and subjective that the board could effectively shut down any speech they didn’t like, and that’s exactly what they did,” said Del Kolde, Senior Attorney at the Institute for Free Speech.

After the injunction was issued, Pennsbury abolished one of the two policies challenged in the lawsuit and rewrote the other to comply with the First Amendment. The court also ruled against a board requirement that speakers publicly announce their home address before beginning their remarks. According to a spokesperson for the PSBA, the model policy was put under review after the court’s ruling.

Sofia Garcia:

The paper outlines a statistical model meant to “explain how a difference in variability could naturally evolve between two sexes of the same species,” a direct reference to the GMVH. The paper relied on strict biological assumptions, such as the idea that genes encoding for variability would be expressed in only in one of the two sexes, that one sex would be more selective than the other, and that the same allele could result both in unusually high and unusually low expressions of a trait. Former Harvard President Larry Summers used the GVMH in a 2005 speech to justify the lack of women in tenured positions in science and engineering.

Both the paper itself and its two retractions have garnered a great deal of media interest since early September 2018. Accomplished mathematicians and computational biologistshave commented on both the paper itself and how it relates to online academic publishing. Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker have made public comments in support of the paper, with Pinker framing the controversy as an example of academic suppression.

The paper was first accepted for publication in TheMathematical Intelligencer’s Viewpoint column, a section discussing any topic of mathematical interest from readers of the journal.

Ann Althouse

A key I use to understanding puzzles like this is: People do what they want to do. What have they done? Begin with the hypothesis that what they did is what they wanted to do. If they postured that they wanted to do something else, regard that as a con. Work from there. The world will make much more sense.

2013: Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lead a vote to eliminate the filibuster for Judicial nominees in 2013.

Roll Call:

The Senate voted, 52-48, to effectively change the rules by rejecting the opinion of the presiding officer that a supermajority is required to limit debate, or invoke cloture, on executive branch nominees and those for seats on federal courts short of the Supreme Court.

Three Democrats — Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas — voted to keep the rules unchanged.

The move came after Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., raised a point of order that only a majority of senators were required to break filibusters of such nominees. Presiding over the Senate as president pro tem, Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont issued a ruling in line with past precedent, saying that 60 votes were required. Leahy personally supported making the change.

Voting against Leahy’s ruling has the effect of changing the rules to require only a simple majority for most nominations.

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin voted in favor of eliminating the filibuster.

More, here

Obama Promised To Sign The Freedom Of Choice Act On Day One, Hasn’t Touched The Issue Since

This 10-second video is breaking the brains of liberals who insist on defending the Democratic Party rather than pushing it to deliver right now.https://t.co/MwFthT602Epic.twitter.com/3QEJf9lpVF

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 26, 2022

Notes:

I’m trying to understand this new Marist poll, which was conducted on June 24th and 25th. The Supreme Court decision came out on the morning of June 24th. Of course, there was also the leak of what turned out to be the majority opinion. That happened on May 2nd.

In the May 12 memo, Meta said it had previously allowed open discussion of abortion at work but later recognized that it had led to “significant disruptions in the workplace given unique legal complexities and the number of people affected by the issue.” The policy had led to a high volume of complaints to the human resources department, and many internal posts regarding abortion were taken down for violating the company’s harassment policy, the memo said.

I know motherhood is not easy. It is a profoundly daunting task to be charged with the spiritual and physical well-being of tiny humans. I also know that most law firms (and most jobs) might not joyfully celebrate an infant’s contributions to a discussion. Tragically, the availability of abortion has made the workplace less friendly to women and mothers. Even in the best of circumstances, being a parent is demanding. And it becomes infinitely harder for single mothers, like my mom, many of whom do not have the support of a family, community, or church. Yet the abortion-on-demand regime imposed by Roe v. Wade is no answer. As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out at oral argument in Dobbs, the United States is less protective of the unborn than almost any nation in the world. Only a few countries (six to be precise) allow for elective, on-demand abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy—including the United States along with China and North Korea. Not a single European nation goes as far as Roe, and most countries either do not allow elective abortions or limit abortions to twelve weeks.

Of course, it’s also perfectly obvious that these sex-strike organizers are doing exactly what social conservatives want: abstaining from sex unless they are open to the gift of life. And what a kick in the head it would be if it turned out that what makes sex as valuable to a women as it is to a man is this potential for creating a child.

Flashback: When Biden opposed Roe; when Trump supported it

A forthcoming article in the Columbia Law Review by Professors David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché surveys some of the new abortion “battlegrounds” we can expect to see. In this article they write:

In this post-Roe world, states will attempt to impose their local abortion policies as widely as possible, even across state lines, and will battle one another over these choices; at the same time, the federal government may intervene to thwart state attempts to control abortion law. In other words, the interjurisdictional abortion wars are coming. . . .

The article provides a useful overview of many of the legal issues that will arise in these “interjurisdictional abortion wars,” in which the central legal questions will not concern substantive due process, but the scope of federal preemption, the autonomy of federal lands and enclaves, and the ability of states to limit interstate shipment of abortion medications, constrain interstate travel, or otherwise extraterritorialize their abortion laws. As I noted here, the White House has been consulting with academics to examine some of these questions, and I expect we will see the first rounds of litigation on some of these questions quite soon.

Perhaps anticipating some of these issues, it is notable that (as my co-bloggers have noted) Justice Kavanaugh made explicit reference to the constitutional right to interstate travel in his Dobbs concurrence. It may also be notable that Court’s conservative justices tend to split on questions of federal preemption (as we saw in Virginia Uranium v. Warren in 2019).

This shouldn’t have been hard to figure out. Any judge who considers himself or herself an originalist was going to believe that Roe is bad law because there wasn’t remotely colorable warrant for it under the Constitution. There might have been varying views on what deference was owed to precedent or other tactical questions; there wasn’t any meaningful disagreement on the core matter. The dance that went on is that Democrats would try to get conservative nominees to say that Roe had been a precedent for a long time. The nominees would agree while not going any further. They’d often cite — correctly — the refusal to comment on contested questions going back to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings.

Although Blake included it in his quote from Ginsburg’s speech, he doesn’t otherwise mention no-fault divorce. Let’s talk about why Ginsburg connected the no-fault divorce movement with the abortion-rights movement — and why these movements happened in the same time frame. One could say both movements pushed government out of the intimate sphere that belongs to the individual. Another way to put that was both movements served the agenda of the sexual revolution.

Ilya Somin:

Several of the items on the above list highlight inconsistencies by pro-choice liberals. But there is no shortage of similar inconsistency on the right. Consider, for example, conservatives who oppose mask and vaccine mandates on grounds of bodily autonomy, but strongly support the War on Drugs and laws banning prostitution.

Some will object that many of the cases described above must be ruled out because they involve restrictions on activities that are dangerous to health or safety (e.g. – prostitution, taking risky illegal drugs, and so on). If an activity is too dangerous, then government should be able to ban it in order to protect people from their own worst impulses.

But if that’s your view, you’re not really a supporter of “my body, my choice.” Rather, you believe people should only be allowed to make choices that the government (or perhaps some group of experts) deems sufficiently safe. Among other flaws, such paternalism overlooks the possibility that people may legitimately differ over the amount of risk they are willing to accept.

It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” Casey, Scalia, J concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part. That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand

New polling data out on #Dobbs:

1) Overturning #RoeVsWade: 45% Support/55% Oppose

2) 37% would ban abortion entirely w/ only rape and incest exceptions

3) 49% support abortion ban after 6 wks

4) 72%!! support abortion ban after 15wks https://t.co/SA1t369bL3

— Leo O'Malley (@LeoTOMalley) July 4, 2022

Joel Kotkin:

Overall, these cities tend to have some of the worst inequality of any location, an urban model very different to the Jane Jacobs conception of a city that does not “lure the middle class” but creates one. Indeed, as the transactional city reached its apogee, the opportunity horizon for working- and middle-class families dimmed. In 1970, half of the city of Chicago was middle income; today, according to a 2019 University of Illinoisstudy, that number is down to 16 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of poor people has risen from 42 to 62 percent.

San Francisco, the urban center that gained most from the technological revolution, epitomizes the final stages of the transactional city. It is now the country’s costliest city and anchors a region with the smallest middle class among the 52 Metropolitan Statistical Areas with over a million people. Inequality grew most rapidly there over the last decade, reports the Brookings Institution, as techies moved into tough urban areas like the Tenderloin. A city of enormous wealth has become bifurcated, plagued by mass homelessness and petty crime, while the middle-class family heads toward extinction. San Francisco has lost 31,000 home-owning families in the last decade, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.

The current crop of urban leaders has only made things worse. In recent years, some city officials seem to have become tolerant of—and even willing to embrace—disorder. At the height of the 2020 urban riots, even the planning community favored “defunding” the police. Efforts to reduce policing have, unsurprisingly, been accompanied by rising crime in places like Chicago, Washington, DC, Minneapolis, New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Perhaps most remarkable has been the deterioration of tech-rich San Francisco, where tolerance of deviant behavior has helped to create a city with more drug addicts than high school students, and so much feces on the street that one website has created a “poop map.” Homeless encampments can also be found throughout Los Angeles, with a particular concentration along the beach, in inner city parks, and most famously in the downtown “skid row” area, the conditions of which a UN official last year compared to those of Syrian refugee camps.

Demographer Wendell Cox estimates that the percentage of households with children between the ages of five and 17 was nearly three times higher in suburbs or exurbs than in or near the urban core. Urban school districts are imploding as the number of young people growing up in core cities has declined.San Francisco, for example, is home to more dogs than children under 19, while Seattle boasts more households with cats than two-legged offspring.

Pierre Baldi

Today there exists no public, freely downloadable, comprehensive database of all known chemical reactions and associated information. Such a database not only would serve chemical sciences and technologies around the world but also would enable the power of modern AI and machine learning
methods to be unleashed on a host of fundamental problems. In time, this could lead to important scientific discoveries and
economic developments for the benefit of humanity. While ideally such a repository ought to be created and maintained by an
international consortium, in the near future, it may be easier to begin the process through governmental agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. Working together, we could use a multipronged approach that
could combine negotiations with commercial stakeholders, crowd-sourcing efforts, automated extraction methods, and legislative actions.

Rachel Cohen:

There were early signs that this narrative didn’t explain the full story. If allegiance to former President Donald Trump (in schools that opened) or teacher unions (in those that stayed closed) were all that mattered, why did support for reopening schools also drop among Republican voters over the summer? And what about the conflicting recommendations coming from federal health and education departments at that time? Nevertheless, the idea that Covid-19 was not a real factor was repeated by some of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets, and framed as though the question was generally settled. 

This is typical in policy research: Initial waves of data often attract lots of attention, and can quickly ossify into conventional wisdom. When subsequent, often deeper inquiry reveals alternative or more nuanced explanations, it tends to receive far less notice. 

That’s what’s been happening with research into school closures. More recent studies have found that, far from being irrelevant, Covid-19 indicators were among central factors predicting whether schools would reopen. 

Researchers say they also still haven’t fully understood how other factors — like school governance and parent preferences — influenced Covid-19 school decisions. A new study, published recently by two education researchers from George Mason University, replicates some earlier findings and explores new potential variables. All in all, it continues adding to a picture that’s more complex than the early analyses suggested.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Dana Goldstein:

How Professor Calkins ended up influencing tens of millions of children is, in one sense, the story of education in America. Unlike many developed countries, the United States lacks a national curriculum or teacher-training standards. Local policies change constantly, as governors, school boards, mayors and superintendents flow in and out of jobs.

Amid this churn, a single charismatic thinker, backed by universities and publishing houses, can wield massive power over how and what children learn.

Some children seem to turn magically into readers, without deliberate phonics coaching. That has helped fuel a mistaken belief that reading is as natural as speaking. In fact, functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates that humans process written language letter by letter, sound by sound. Far from being automatic, reading requires a rewiring of the brain, which is primed by evolution to recognize faces, not words.

But that finding — by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists — is often disconnected from the work of training teachers and producing classroom materials.

Indeed, Professor Calkins, 70, is far more typical in the world of curriculum development: She is a teacher, a writer and a theorist.

But her influential 2001 book, “The Art of Teaching Reading,” warned about what she saw as the risks of too much sounding-it-out. She praised one teacher for avoiding “an intricate series of activities with phonics,” and argued that a simple way to build “lifelong readers” was to allow children to spend time with books they chose, regardless of content or difficulty.

For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing. This practice is one of the most controversial legacies of balanced literacy. It directs children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters.

Three-cueing is embedded in schools. Online, novice teachers can view thousands of how-to guides. In a 2020 video, a teacher tells children to use a picture to guess the word “car,” even though simple phonics make it decodable.

Professor Calkins said word-guessing would not be included in her revised curriculum. But in some ways, she is offering a hybrid of her old and new methods. In a sample of the new materials that she provided to The Times, teachers are told that students should first decode words using “slider power” — running their fingers under letters and sounding them out — but then check for mistakes using “picture power.”

Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while he found some of the revisions “encouraging,” he was concerned that “objectionable” concepts remain.

Ann Althouse notes a comment:

The top-rated comment is from someone who has taught in a NYC public school for 21 years where they use Calkin’s “Units of Study”: “The degree to which we have had to supplement them with other approaches and sources is immense. Most kids would not learn literacy with these curricula alone. There really has been a sort of cult of personality around Lucy Calkins. The professional developers she hires parrot her ideas and demeanor. Regardless of her claim that she wants to support and respect teachers, the message was always ‘Lucy knows best.'”

1. I spoke to a dozen educators and parents in Units of Study schools for this piece. Many could not be named. One thing notable in movements led by charisma is that adherents often develop more extreme views than leaders. For example… https://t.co/EgtKkryxle

— Dana Goldstein (@DanaGoldstein) May 22, 2022

We Madisonions have long tolerated disastrous reading results. To wit:2005:

What the superintendent is saying is that MMSD has closed the achievement gap associated with race now that roughly the same percentage of students in each subgroup score at the minimal level (limited achievement in reading, major misconceptions or gaps in knowledge and skills of reading). That’s far from the original goal of the board. We committed to helping all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level as demonstrated by all students in all subgroups scoring at proficient or advanced reading levels on the WRCT.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. pic.twitter.com/RY2ATTA40b

— John Robb (@johnrobb) May 19, 2022

Bruno Sauce, Magnus Liebherr, Nicholas Judd & Torkel Klingberg

Digital media defines modern childhood, but its cognitive effects are unclear and hotly debated. We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status. We analyzed 9855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.17), but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming. Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.12), contrary to prior research on the effect of watching TV. Although, in a posthoc analysis, this was not significant if parental education (instead of SES) was controlled for. Broadly, our results are in line with research on the malleability of cognitive abilities from environmental factors, such as cognitive training and the Flynn effect.

Scott Girard:

Districts have varied in their approach to pandemic health and safety measures, with some making decisions at the School Board level and others leaving it to administrators. With a few exceptions, the Madison School Board has mostly left it to administrators, including on the mask mandate.

Christina Gomez Schmidt, the School Board member assigned to attend the weekly metrics meetings, expressed exasperation at the April 12 meeting that the district hadn’t moved to mask-optional when numbers were lower in March.

The weeks of Feb. 28, March 7 and March 14 — all just after the PHMDC mandate expired — saw total case numbers among students and staff in the low 40s.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Todd Milewski:

Our times.

The number of tickets scanned when spectators enter the venue represents the actual crowd size and it’s often well below the announced attendance and number of tickets sold or distributed.

Wyatte Grantham-Phillips:

College students expect to make about $103,880 in their first job after graduation, a new survey suggests.

But statistics show that the average starting salary for college graduates is $55,260. Overestimates also persist in undergrads’ outlook for mid-career earnings – while both race and gender pay gaps grow.

Today’s college students expect to make about $103,880 in their first post-graduation job, a survey suggests. But the reality is much lower – as the average starting salary is actually about half that at $55,260, statistics show.

The survey, conducted by Real Estate Witch, found that, across all majors and institutions, undergraduate students overestimate their starting salaries by 88%. And 1 in 3 worry that they won’t make enough money to live comfortably after graduation.

Job prospects for the class of 2022 are higher than in recent years. A report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that employers plan to hire 31.6% more new graduates from the class of 2022 than they hired from the class of 2021.

Tom Knighton:

I’m not a big fan of public education. 

It’s not that I’m not a fan of education itself. I just think the government is, generally, the worst entity imaginable to deliver a quality product. That was before everything got ridiculously stupid.

Yet I have a bit of a reputation for having negative feelings toward public education, even though both of my kids have attended public school.

The fact that my daughter is now homeschooled should tell you something.

Anyway, as bad as the schools here are, they could be worse. After all, a psychologist at Boston College has some harsher words about public education than even I do.

More families may be flocking to homeschoolingand other schooling alternatives over the past two years, but Peter Gray has been urging families to flee coercive schooling since long before the pandemic began. The Boston College psychology professor wrote in his 2013 book Free To Learn: “The more oppressive the school system becomes, the more it is driving people away, and that is good.”

…

In our conversation, Gray explains that standard schooling today is a key factor in the continuous rise in rates of childhood and adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide. Its imposed, one-size-fits all curriculum, reliance on reward and punishment as external motivators, and dismissal of natural childhood curiosity and creativity erode learners’ powerful drives for learning and discovery. Stripped of these drives, and increasingly deprived of opportunities to play, explore, and pursue individual interests outside of school without the constant hovering of adults, children and adolescents become more melancholic and morose.

“We adults are constraining children’s lives, in school and out of school,” says Gray in our podcast discussion. “School has become a toxic place for children, and we refuse to say that publicly. The research can show it but it almost never gets picked up in the popular press,” he adds.

Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak

The new, federally funded study found that children who received Reading Recovery had scores on state reading tests in third and fourth grade that were below the test scores of similar children who did not receive Reading Recovery. 

“It’s not what we expected, and it’s concerning,” said lead author Henry May, director of the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware, who delivered the findings at the prestigious, annual gathering of education researchers being held this year in San Diego.

The findings could prompt school districts nationwide to reexamine their investment in Reading Recovery and consider other ways to help struggling first-graders. 

May was the principal investigator of an earlier federally funded study of Reading Recovery, one of the largest ever randomized experiments of an instructional intervention in elementary schools. That study, which began in 2011, found evidence of large positive gains in first grade, as has other research. The program’s advocates have pointed to that research as evidence that the instructional approach is based on sound science and is effective. 

But whether the initial gains last and translate into better performance on state reading tests remained a question. The new study on the long-term impact of Reading Recovery is the largest, most rigorous effort to tackle that question, according to May. 

The fact that students who participated in Reading Recovery did worse in later grades than similar students who did not get the program surprised May. “Was Reading Recovery harmful? I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,” he said. “But what we do know is that the kids that got it for some reason ended up losing their gains and then falling behind.”

At least 2.4 million students in the United States have participated in Reading Recovery or its Spanish-language counterpart since 1984, when the program first came to America from New Zealand. The program is in nearly 2,000 schools in 41 states.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?