Susannah Luthi:

California governor Gavin Newsom (D.), who just last month signed a law requiring media literacy courses for public schools to counter “online misinformation,” on Thursday took to X, formerly Twitter, to advance a false narrative accusing a small Tennessee city of imposing a ban on “being gay in public.”

“A city in Tennessee has banned being gay in public. This is just the beginning,” Newsom wrote Thursday on X, linking to a New Republic story that claims the city council of Murfreesboro, Tenn., “passed [an] ordinance essentially prohibiting homosexuality in public to try to ban library books.”

Murfreesboro’s ordinance sets decency standards for the city’s public spaces, barring indecent exposure, lewd behavior, nudity, and sexual conduct, as well as “indecent materials and events.” While the city is using the law to cull explicit kids’ books from the public library, the ordinance does not mention homosexuality but cross-references a statute about sexual conduct that did up until October. Local lawmakers in November updated that statute to strike the term “homosexuality” after a local LGBT group and the ACLU sued the city and secured a court ban on its enforcement.

Newsom’s tweet came just a month after he signed a law requiring K-12 students in California to take internet media literacy courses on the grounds that “online misinformation has posed risks to international peace, interfered with democratic decisionmaking, and threatened public health.”

Thomas Shults

Portland Public Schools teachers have now been on strike for three weeks. Some older students are beginning to worry that missed class time could leave them unprepared for intensive final exams. 

Students in AP (advancement placement) classes are scheduled to take final exams in early May. The date of those tests, which are taken by high schoolers nationwide, cannot be changed.

CTUP:

The “Own America Accounts” would constitute 1) the largest debt reduction plan in history; 2) the biggest tax cut for workers in American history (because workers now get to keep in a personal account what they currently pay into the Social Security black hole); and 3) the greatest wealth accumulation opportunity for every income and racial group ever invented.

It almost makes too much sense.

AN17:

Southeastern Louisiana University’s undergraduate teacher preparation program has been recognized by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The program received a grade of ‘A’ in NCTQ’s new report “Teacher Prep Review: Strengthening Elementary Reading Instruction” for its rigorous preparation of future teachers in how to teach reading.

Southeastern’s program is among just 23 percent nationwide to earn an ‘A’ for meeting standards set by literacy experts for coverage of the most effective methods of reading instruction – often called the “science of reading.”

In order to earn an ‘A,” programs needed to meet a standard of adequate coverage, determined in consultation with literacy experts, for all five core components of scientifically based reading instruction – phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, and teach fewer than four practices that have been found to inhibit students’ reading progress.

Dave Cieslewicz

Rothman could help by taking meaningful actions, not just renaming the Titanic. For example, he could compromise on DEI, a concept that I have problems with myself. Instead of just absorbing the $30 million cut and refusing to touch DEI positions, he could call for a Legislative Audit Bureau study. DEI is a diverse and complicated animal. Let’s understand how it is really being implemented before we get going slashing away at it. But let’s also admit that if it encompasses the “anti-racist” theories of Ibram X. Kendi or critical race theory, those are unpopular concepts well out of the mainstream and so that’s a problem that should be addressed. 

Rothman could also come down hard in favor of free speech while condemning (but not banning) actions that the broader public finds repulsive, like the pro-Hamas rally on Library Mall where the demonstrators chanted, “Glory to the martyrs.” The damage to the UW done by that incident alone is incalculable. You can’t and shouldn’t stop it, but you can denounce it in the strongest terms and you can do some soul-searching to try to understand how an institution that is supposed to be committed to classical liberal values can produce students who would do something like that. 

Finally, the UW could adopt the Chicago Principles, a simple and strong restatement of dedication to classical liberal ideas, including free speech, reason, merit and respectful and productive disagreement. 

And we can start by just being honest with ourselves. While I strongly disagree with Republican populists defunding and attacking the state’s most powerful economic engine and my own beloved alma mater, they’re not wrong when they see it as a place where leftist views are strong and conservative ideas are, at best, unwelcome. Rothman should do everything he can to promote a true diversity of opinion on his campuses, whether that’s creating a hiring process that doesn’t self-select for liberals or promoting a speaker program that features conservative ideas.

Pretty incredible seeing this in The NY Times, a fear mongering paper that supported the most repressive, long-term Covid restrictions that caused learning loss. pic.twitter.com/e68vyaMNVi

— Eli Klein (@TheEliKlein) November 18, 2023

Robin Hanson:

Re fertility decline, yes, as the main change in the last half century is the number of women who become moms, not the number of kids per mom, all we need is a larger fraction of women having kids. Yes, as that used to happen, it must still be feasible. Yes, a big enough subsidy per kid would work, and we could make the new kids pay for that via government debt. And yes, as we’ve seen fertility rise at some times and places, there’s historical variation that we could plausibly mine to find factors to promote fertility.

However, it takes voters who want more kids to vote in politicians who promote them. After all, the cultural ask re higher fertility is huge, plausibly even larger than to cut carbon emissions. The trends to be opposed are in both cases deeply embedded in existing culture, and in ways that most of us treasure. Societies in history that have loudly lamented fertility declines, and tried to reverse them, either among elites or more widely, have consistently failed. This includes recent versions of our societies. Our world’s fertility decline has been pretty consistent for ~2.5 centuries, and local deviations have so far always been temporary. 

Thirteen years ago I guessed fertility to be our biggest problem, but didn’t let it distract me much. Two years ago I guessed that insular fertile subcultures is how fertility decline will end, but still didn’t let the topic distract me. A few months I realized that innovation would grind to a halt during a declining economy, and since have read and talked much on the topic.

Alas this has confirmed my worse fears. I’m not sure quite how best to persuade you all of this, but world population will soon fall fast, and then unless we achieve full AGI or end aging by then, our total world economic capacity will also fall, with scale economies and innovation rates both falling roughly in proportion. Actually innovation will fall faster due to diminishing returns, populations getting older, and lower-than-Western African innovation quality.

Choose life.

Raluca Budiu, Feifei Liu, Emma Cionca, and Amy Zhang’s:

Through analyzing 425 interactions with generative-AI bots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard, we’ve discovered that conversations could involve many vague, underspecified prompts or few, razor-sharp ones. Why does this matter? First, different conversation types serve distinct information needs and demand varied UI designs. Second, there is no one optimal conversation length — both short and long conversations can be helpful, as they might support different user goals.

By Rikki Schlott and Greg Lukianoff

The First Amendment wasn’t created to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. After all, the moneyed and influential have historically been protected by their wealth and power. And the United States didn’t need a special right to protect the will of a majority—that’s what democratic votes are for.

In the end, the First Amendment is primarily needed to protect minority views, unpopular opinions, and the expression of those who clash with the ruling elite.

But on campus today, you’re likely to hear this argument turned entirely on its head—as if championing free speech is somehow doing the bidding of the powerful. But that’s only because academia doesn’t like to admit that it actually is extremely wealthy and influential itself, or that those who defend the status quo are defending an extraordinarily powerful American industry.

Just for some perspective, the market size of the U.S. higher education industry is just over $1 trillion. That’s more than three times larger than the U.S. food and beverage industry and over two times the size of the U.S. electricity industry. For more context, Canada’s GDP in 2021 was $1.9 trillion, Mexico’s $1.3 trillion, and the global pharmaceuticals industry rang in around $1.4 trillion in that same year.

Meanwhile, the collective endowment of U.S. public and private nonprofit universities—which represents just one element of their total assets—sits at $932 billion, according to their 2021 reports. That’s nearly as much as all of Apple’s, Microsoft’s, and Amazon’s total assets. (Plus, you can add in higher education’s $711 billion in tangible assets.)

My mom cried during the SpaceX launch. She’s a math teacher.

“So many people in the education world want to get rid of advanced math for equity. I’m sick of it. Without math, this [launch] can’t happen.

Kids need to be allowed to dream.”

Spot on, mom 🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/LsGvs9WM5O

— Max Meyer (@mualphaxi) November 18, 2023

The less we teach CPS kids math, the more math they have to discover on their individual journeys of learning!

— Mayor Brandon Johnson (Power to the Parody!) (@maybemayorbj) November 21, 2023

Eliminating 8th grade algebra in the name of equity.

Harrison Bergeron

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Protecting the freedom of speech could not be more urgent and important. Now, more than ever! https://t.co/bhZk6cNrNY

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) November 18, 2023

In a move that will surprise nobody, the content moderation grifter has become an AI safety grifter. https://t.co/Ar1mphzSnI

— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) November 18, 2023

This guy is with Google Trust & Safety (aka the disinformation squad). Though what he is saying is ridiculous, people need to take this issue seriously because the totalitarians will not stop until critical thinkers who don’t tow the technocrat line are re-educated. pic.twitter.com/frN94krUAj

— The Researcher (@listen_2learn) February 14, 2023

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.

Financial self-reliance is a key check against the concentration of powers, surveillance & censorship in the financial system, in a tradition dating back to Jefferson and Jackson. Self-hosted wallets deliver this independence in the digital age & must not be banned nor… pic.twitter.com/6Po9k5rR0k

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 17, 2023

Eugene Volokh

The revised version is what appears to be the result of pruning all the AI-hallucinated citations. Or so theorizes the respondent’s brief, which says, “Appellants likely used artificial intelligence to draft the opening brief, which is known to invent legal citations out of whole cloth.” This is the 11th such case I found this year (cf. this federal case, and the state cases discussed here, here, and here—all involving documents filed by lawyers—plus the six federal self-represented litigant cases discussed here.)

Hamas reportedly nearing deal with Israel to free some hostages

The appellant’s motion to strike (filed well before the Respondent’s Brief) doesn’t mention AI or otherwise explain the reason for the fake citations:

Andrew Bahl:

In June, the Madison School Board rescinded the district’s staff COVID-19 vaccine mandate 21 months after it was first put in place. The Madison Metropolitan School District’s medical experts said the wording of the original mandate left it out of date given boosters, and employees had expressed concerns about the cost and staff time to enforce the mandate given the end of the national emergency declaration.

J.D. Capelouto and Louise Matsakis

TikTok says it’s “aggressively removing” videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which explained why he orchestrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The platform has also blocked the hashtag #LettertoAmerica, meaning users won’t be able to search for it, a TikTok spokesperson told Semafor.

Several videos from creators encouraging others to read the letter or sympathizing with bin Laden’s views on Israel and the U.S. racked up tens of thousands of views on TikTok and other platforms in recent days. Google Trends data indicates that searches for the document began spiking around a week ago.

Critics argued the videos showed that TikTok was spreading harmful information to young people, who make up a large bulk of its user base. But the platform said in a statement on X that the number of videos about the letter “is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.” The statement added: “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

Tyler Cowen:

This is not the kind of argument many on the political left find appealing. In tax policy, for example, such reasoning — the idea that short-run inequality can bring longer-run benefits — is often derided as “trickle-down economics.” And yet virtually any fan of the Ivies has to embrace this idea. The best defense of the admissions policies of America’s most prestigious universities is a right-leaning argument that they are deeply uncomfortable with.

So instead they tie themselves into knots to give the impression that they are open and egalitarian. To boost their image, minimize lawsuits and perhaps assuage their own feelings of institutional guilt, America’s top schools adopt what are known as DEI policies, to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

The “inclusion” part of that equation is hardest for them to defend. Top-tier universities accept only a small percentage of applicants — below 4% at Stanford last year, for example. How inclusive can such institutions be? Everyone knows that these schools are elitist at heart, and that they (either directly or indirectly) encourage their students and faculty to take pride at belonging to such a selective institution. Most of all, the paying parents are encouraged to be proud as well. Who exactly is being fooled here?

Commentary.

Elizabeth Findell:

The word spread parent-to-parent during a Little Dribblers basketball game in the school gymnasium. The superintendent had sent emails—several—warning that school-choice efforts under way wouldn’t be good for their East Texas school district of 554 students.

The target of Superintendent Brandon Enos’s advocacy was a special session of the Texas Legislature called by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to pass a measure to allow Texas children to receive state funding to attend private schools. Superintendents statewide have feared the measure would drain money from the state’s already lean public-education funding.

“I don’t think it’s very fair,” said Melissa Williamson, a staunch Republican and stay-at-home mother of three, after another mom described the issue to her in the gym. “If a parent wants their child to go to private school, they should have to pay for it or apply for scholarships,” she said. “Because public schools have to take everybody.”

While similar school-voucher bills have passed in several Republican-led states in recent years, the issue has remained stalled over several legislative sessions in Texas because of opposition of Republicans in rural parts of the state, where schools are often the pride and center of small communities. The legislators who represent Cushing, state Sen. Robert Nichols and state Rep. Travis Clardy, have been among the holdouts.

Jay Caspian Kang

Of all the signs of the death of free speech—whether the raft of anti-protest legislation that passed in state houses across the country after the summer of 2020, or the much-cited polls that show that free expression is not a primary concern to young people—none should be as concerning as the relative silence around the legitimate free-speech crisis that has unfolded over the past month.

Nearly every corner of American life has felt the chill. On Tuesday night, the House of Representatives voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, for her statements on the war in Gaza, including amplifying the phrase “from the river to the sea.” In the corporate world, there has been a bizarre multi-industry campaign to either reprimand current employees or refuse to hire people for participating in a protest or signing their names in support of Palestine.

The media business has seen numerous firings, resignations, and hastily implemented new policies on employees making political statements. These include the firing of Mike Eisen, the editor-in-chief of the biomedical-science journal eLife, after he retweeted a satirical article from the Onion; the firing of David Velasco, the editor-in-chief of Artforum, after he signed and published a letter that expressed solidarity with the cause of Palestinian liberation and called for an immediate ceasefire; and the resignation of the Times staff writer Jazmine Hughes after she signed, in violation of a newsroom policy, a different Palestine solidarity statement, which several New Yorker writers also signed. (The board of eLife said in a statement that it had had broader concerns about Eisen’s social-media use, among other things.) Hearst Magazinesalso made a truly draconian move to crack down on any political speech expressed by its employees on social media, including “liking” other people’s posts.

Bo Malmberg & Hannes Malmberg

There is an intellectual thread that runs through all of these advances: measurement and calculation. Geometric calculations led to breakthroughs in painting, astronomy, cartography, surveying, and physics. The introduction of mathematics in human affairs led to advancements in accounting, finance, fiscal affairs, demography, and economics – a kind of social mathematics. All reflect an underlying ‘calculating paradigm’ – the idea that measurement, calculation, and mathematics can be successfully applied to virtually every domain. This paradigm spread across Europe through education, which we can observe by the proliferation of mathematics textbooks and schools. It was this paradigm, more than science itself, that drove progress. It was this mathematical revolution that created modernity.

The geometric innovations

Advances in geometry began with the rediscovery of Euclid. The earliest known Medieval Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements was completed in manuscript by Adelard of Bath around 1120 using an Arabic source from Muslim Spain. A Latin printed version was published in 1482. After the mathematician Tartaglia translated Euclid’s work into Italian in 1543, translations into other vernacular languages quickly followed: German in 1558, French in 1564, English in 1570, Spanish in 1576, and Dutch in 1606. 

Beyond Euclid, the German mathematician Regiomontanus penned the first European trigonometry textbook, De Triangulis Omnimodis (On Triangles of All Kinds), in 1464. In the sixteenth century, François Viètehelped replace the verbal method of doing algebra with the modern symbolism in which unknown variables are denoted by symbols like x, y, and z. René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat built on Viète’s innovations to develop analytic geometry, where curves and surfaces are described by algebraic equations. In the late seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz extended the methods of analytic geometry to the study of motion and change through the development of calculus.

Ann Althouse:

A few of the things the Kamala-but-Not-Joe voters said: “her skin color is like my skin color,” “I just think she has a lot more to offer than the standard straight old white dude,” “I like the idea of a female lawyer,” “just to see a female, a woman in power, being that I was raised mostly by females,” “I feel like she would probably do more for us, because I feel like there’s not enough being done for Black people.”

I read the top comment and decided to blog it before I read those quotes. Now, I feel unsettled that so many NYT readers voted for it. It’s too close to regretting that black people have the right to vote. 

The headline doesn’t mention the support shown for Trump:

Chronicle:

An interview about politics, academic freedom, and “ideological odor.”

Stanley Fish is in the last phase of his storied career as a Renaissance scholar, law professor, and college administrator. “I’m still here,” he told me. “And as of yesterday, still playing basketball.” He’s also still teaching — a course on Milton, his early area of scholarly expertise, and a course on “How to Write a Sentence.” He’s especially excited about the course on Milton, whom he hasn’t taught in twenty years.

Both courses will be at the New College of Florida, the small public liberal arts college at the center of right-wing activist Chris Rufo and Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative overhaul — or takeover — of the state’s college system. Rufo, who has been appointed to New College’s board of trustees, described his infiltration of the institution this way: “We are over the walls, and ready to transform higher education from within.”

The Economist:

Which are the best properties to buy when playing Monopoly, and how many houses should you build on them? Which continent should you aim to take over first in Risk? And what is the best strategy when using the doubling cube in backgammon? These are some of the questions considered and answered by Marcus du Sautoy, a British mathematician and Oxford professor, in his sprightly, light-hearted history of games and gaming.

The narrative is organised geographically as a trip around the world, starting with ancient games from the Middle East—backgammon, the Royal Game of Ur, the Egyptian game of senet—and ending up in Europe with modern games such as Pandemic and Dobble. Along the way the author considers many old favourites (Cluedo, Scrabble, Risk), recent arrivals (Wordle, Settlers of Catan) and less familiar games from a wide range of cultures and historical periods, such as the African game of mancala and the Indian card game of ganjifa, whose rules change at night.

Megan Fox

Last year, I covered a board meeting at the Wauwatosa School Board in Wisconsin. The board was implementing pornographic content in its elementary school program that was so graphic that local news wouldn’t show it on television. Parents, activists, and protesters streamed to the meeting to let their voices be heard against the sexualization of children.

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A thread to explain the hilarious yet necessary lawsuit that I’m going to file against the Wauwatosa School Board and why I need your help. On October 25th I live streamed the Wauwatosa WI meeting. Many parents came out to protest the graphic sexual grooming in the curriculum. pic.twitter.com/ZsHE2aCpEU— Megan Fox (@MeganFoxWriter) December 15, 2022

Among them was Jaimee Michell, the head of Gays Against Groomers. When it came time for public comment, the board began to intimidate the crowd, including Michell, demanding that she dox herself on camera and give her address before she could speak. 

The board also shut down any speech that was critical toward members, chastising members of the crowd for using their first names, even though they are elected officials. Though I was there to cover the event for my YouTube channel and only planned to stream it without comment, I couldn’t help myself after watching all the violations of rights in which the board gleefully engaged.

Ed Treleven:

The parents of a Verona elementary school student filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the district and the school’s principal alleging that their son, while experiencing separation anxiety, was injured by the principal when he was physically grabbed and pulled away from his mother earlier this year.

The lawsuit, filed by Stephanie Conway and Mark Adelhoch of Fitchburg, alleges that Country View Elementary School principal Jessica Beem grabbed the 7-year-old boy by the arm during morning drop-off at the school on Feb. 17 and pulled him away from his mother.

Attorney Paul Kinne, representing the boy’s parents, said the boy sustained “mostly emotional” injuries but also had some bruising on his arm as a result of the incident.

Joscha Block:

One possible future: internet search is nearly useless, people use AI to read instagenerated content taylored to their needs according to the demands of the fact checkers and appointed good opinion havers, and reading human generated content is discouraged due to alignment risk.

Nihal Crishan

“Broad regulatory measures in Biden’s AI red tape wishlist will result in stifling new companies and competitors from entering the marketplace and significantly expanding the power of the federal government over American innovation,” Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel at NetChoice, an advocacy group that represents major AI companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta, said in a statement.

“This order puts any investment in AI at risk of being shut down at the whims of government bureaucrats,” he continued. “That is dangerous for our global standing as the leading technological innovators, and this is the wrong approach to govern AI.”

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Eugene Volokh:

Unsurprisingly, lawyers aren’t the only ones to use AI programs (such as ChatGPT) to write portions of briefs, and thus end up filing briefs that contain AI-generated fake cases or fake quotations (cf. this federal case, and the state cases discussed here, here, and here). From an Oct. 23 opinion by Chief Judge William P. Johnson (D.N.M.) in Morgan v. Community Against Violence:

Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure states that, for every pleading, filing, or motion submitted to the Court, an attorney or unrepresented party certifies that it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation,” that all claims or “legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law,” and that factual contentions have evidentiary support….

Plaintiff cited to several fake or nonexistent opinions. This appears to be only the second time a federal court has dealt with a pleading involving “non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations.” Quite obviously, many harms flow from such deception—including wasting the opposing party’s time and money, the Court’s time and resources, and reputational harms to the legal system (to name a few).

The foregoing should provide Plaintiff with enough constructive and cautionary guidance to allow her to proceed pro se in this case. But, her pro se status will not be tolerated by the Court as an excuse for failing to adhere to this Court’s rules; nor will the Court look kindly upon any filings that unnecessarily and mischievously clutter the docket.

Thus, Plaintiff is hereby advised that she will comply with this Court’s local rules, the Court’s Guide for Pro Se Litigants, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Any future filings with citations to nonexistent cases may result in sanctions such as the pleading being stricken, filing restrictions imposed, or the case being dismissed. See Aimee Furness & Sam Mallick, Evaluating the Legal Ethics of a ChatGPT-Authored Motion, LAW360 (Jan. 23, 2023, 5:36 PM), https://www.law360.com/articles/1567985/evaluating-the-legal-ethics-of-a-chatgpt-authored-motion.

Zusha Elinson:

Soon after Oregon became the first state to decriminalize all drugs, Officer Jose Alvarez stopped arresting people for possession and began giving out tickets with the number for a rehab helpline.

Most of the people smoking fentanyl or meth on this city’s streets balled them up and tossed them onto the ground.

“Those tickets frankly seemed like a waste of time,” said Alvarez, who stopped issuing them a few months after the law went into effect.

Nearly three years into an experiment that proponents hoped would spark a nationwide relaxation of drug laws, many in Oregon have turned against the decriminalization initiative known as Measure 110, which passed with 58% support in 2020.

People sprawled on sidewalks and using fentanyl with no fear of consequence have become a common sight in cities such as Eugene and Portland. Business owners and local leaders are upset, but so are liberal voters who hoped decriminalization would lead to more people getting help. In reality, few drug users are taking advantage of new state-funded rehabilitation programs.

Corrinne Hess:

Big Foot’s homecoming football game and the two games leading up to it were canceled. The school only has six seniors on its football team, and key players got hurt. 

District administrator Doug Parker said ideally, each class would have about 15 football players. But over the last several seasons, fewer kids are playing. It made canceling the game feel like the only safe option.  

“If we had JV kids eligible to play, we would — but we’re not going to put a 5-foot-1, 110-pound freshman on a varsity football field, just to play a varsity game,” Parker said.  

Big Foot is not alone. Across Wisconsin, high school football teams have had to forfeit games this season.  Participation in the sport has declined for the last decade – and this year, some schools are finding they no longer have enough back-up players to finish out their season.  

Wisconsin saw a nearly 25 percent decrease in participation in 11-player football from 2009 to 2019, which is the most recent data available from the National Federation of State High School Associations. The state has seen the biggest decline in high school football participation in the country, according to the association.

—-

JR Radcliffe:

Using the WPR’s starting point, the NFHS documented 30,823 athletes playing 11-player football in 2008-09 in Wisconsin. Compared to the 23,154 in 2018-19, that’s a plummet of 24.9%.

Yet, the addition of 646 athletes in the reduced-player format for 2018-19 only softens the decline (2008-09 season to 2018-19) to 23%. If we used the NFHS number from the 2022-23 season (23,371), it’s a drop of 24% since 2008-09; though, making a comparison with more current data means we’re operating with the new variable of impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schools in Wisconsin — one of 26 states to support a level of reduced-player football — began fielding eight-player teams in 2013 as a means of maintaining programs in rural areas and among schools with declining enrollment and participation. In 2022, there were 57 schools supporting eight-player football in Wisconsin. This year, there are 65. Naturally, that means some schools are flipping from 11-player participation. In 2022, there were 366 schools supporting 11-

—-

More.

Scott Girard

The Madison Metropolitan School District once again “met expectations” for student learning in 2022-23 and six of its schools received the highest possible rating, according to state report cards released Tuesday.

Two MMSD schools failed to meet expectations, the lowest rating.

The district’s score of 68.3 was a slight increase over last year’s 67.5, though it remains below the “exceeds expectations” designation MMSD reached in 2020-21.

Tuesday’s release from the state Department of Public Instruction was the third set of annual report cards since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as none were given following the 2019-20 school year. That also makes it the first set of report cards that no longer includes achievement data from assessments taken prior to the pandemic, as the report cards use the most recent three years of data.

Meanwhile:

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?

Allison Garfield:

Surrounded by accusations of fiscal irresponsibility, the Madison City Council overwhelmingly passed budgets Tuesday night while tweaking how the city spends taxpayers’ money on staffing and major projects.

The council deliberated for hours into the late evening, ultimately ending with a capital budget totaling $273.1 million — a $6.6 million increase from Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway’s originally proposed budget — and an operating budget just over $405 million, which is about $592,000 more than the initial spending plan.

Julius Koschnick

While economic factors in directed technical and scientific change have been widely studied, the role of teacher-directed scientific change has received less attention. This paper studies teacher-directed scientific change for one of the largest changes in the direction of research, the Scientific Revolution. Specifically, the paper considers the case of the English Scientific Revolution at the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It argues that exposure to different teachers shaped students’ direction of research and can partly account for the successful trajectory of English science. For this, the paper introduces a novel dataset on the universe of all 111,242 students at English universities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century and matches them to their publications. Using machine learning, the paper is able to quantify personal interest in different research topics. To derive causal estimates of teacher-student effects, the paper exploits a natural experiment based on the expulsion of fellows following the English Civil War and uses an instrumental variable design that predicts students’ choice of college based on their home regions. The paper finds strong empirical evidence of teacher-directed change in the English Scientific Revolution. These results illustrate how teacher-directed change can contribute to paradigm change.

Bahar Ostadon:

But as the NYPD looks to use drones in new ways, some civil liberties activists say they see it as an undemocratic violation of privacy. They, along with a tech policy expert interviewed by Gothamist, point out that no agency outside the NYPD oversees or regulates how the department uses information gathered by drones.

Annie Ma:

Nearly nine out of 10 parents believe their child is performing at grade level despite standardized tests showing far fewer students are on track, according to a poll released Wednesday by Gallup and the nonprofit Learning Heroes. 

Report cards, which many parents rely on for a sense of their children’s progress, might be missing the whole picture, researchers say. Without that knowledge, parents may not seek opportunities for extra support for their children.

“Grades are the holy grail,” said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes. “They’re the number one indicator that parents turn to to understand that their child is on grade level, yet a grade does not equal grade-level mastery. But nobody’s told parents that.”

In the Gallup survey, 88% of parents say their child is on grade level in reading, and 89% of parents believe their child is on grade level in math. But in a federal survey, school officials said half of all U.S. students started last school year behind grade level in at least one subject.

Other news

In a report examining grade point averages and test scores in the state of Washington over the past decade, researchers found grades jumped during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many districts had eased their grading policies to account for the chaos and hardship students were experiencing.

Adam:

Incredibly, it’s a $45 billion largess during the most recent five-year period.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com quantified the federal payments on contracts and grants and special tax treatment of their endowments into the eight schools of the Ivy League plus Stanford University and Northwestern University.
Since 2018, $33 billion of federal contracts and grants flowed to these ten colleges – averaging $6.6 billion annually.

Today, these “educational” non-profits are more federal contractor than they are educator. Their $33 billion in federal contracts and grants outpaced their collection of undergraduate student tuition.
Furthermore, these schools reaped another $12 billion in special tax treatment benefits on the growth of their massive endowment gains (2018-2022). Endowments totaled $237 billion in 2022, up almost $65 billion from $172 billion in 2018.

Since 2017, these colleges are only subject to a 1.4-percent excessive endowments tax and not the 20-percent capital gains tax levied on wealthy Americans.

Megan Brenan:

The latest decline in the public’s trust in higher education is from a June 1-22 Gallup poll that also found confidence in 16 other institutions has been waning in recent years. Many of these entities, which are tracked more often than higher education, are now also at or near their lowest points in confidence. Although diminished, higher education ranks fourth in confidence among the 17 institutions measured, with small business, the military and the police in the top three spots. This was also the case in 2018, the last time higher education was included in the list of institutions.

All Major Subgroups, Led by Republicans, Less Confident in Higher Ed

In 2015, majorities of Americans in all key subgroups expressed confidence in higher education, with one exception — independents (48%). By 2018, though, confidence had fallen across all groups, with the largest drop, 17 percentage points, among Republicans. In the latest measure, confidence once again fell across the board, but Republicans’ sank the most — 20 points to 19%, the lowest of any group. Confidence among adults without a college degree and those aged 55 and older dropped nearly as much as Republicans’ since 2018.

Even though all subgroups show declining confidence in higher education, significant gaps persist among political, educational, gender and age subgroups. Notably, the only key subgroup with majority-level confidence in higher education is Democrats (59%).

Sheon Han

Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars. A notable example of such a legendary doctoral advisor is the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler. A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Hugh Everett (who proposed the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics), and a host of others who could collectively staff a top-tier physics department. In ecology, there is Bob Paine, who discovered that certain “keystone species” have an outsize impact on the environment and started a lineage of influential ecologists. And in journalism, there is John McPhee, who has taught generations of accomplished journalists at Princeton since 1975. 

Computer science has its own such figure: Manuel Blum, who won the 1995 Turing Award—the Nobel Prize of computer science. Blum’s métier is theoretical computer science, a field that often escapes the general public’s radar. But you certainly have come across one of Blum’s creations: the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” better known as the
captcha—a test designed to distinguish humans from bots online.

Matt Taibbi:

The Guardian editorial Krugman linked to explains: Americans continue to believe the economy sucks, even though they’ve been told over and over it doesn’t! Why won’t they listen?

Dell Cameron:

The federal law authorizing a vast amount of the United States government’s foreign intelligence collection is set to expire in two months, a deadline that threatens to mothball a notoriously extensive surveillance program currently eavesdropping on the phone calls, text messages, and emails of no fewer than a quarter million people overseas.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) relies heavily on the program, known as Section 702, to compel the cooperation of communications giants that oversee huge swaths of the internet’s traffic. The total number of communications intercepted under the 702 program each year, while likely beyond tally, ostensibly reaches into the high hundreds of millions, according to scraps of reportage declassified by the intelligence community over the past decade, and the secret surveillance court whose macroscopic oversight—even when brought to full bear against the program—scarcely takes issue with any quotidian abuses of its power.

As of now, members of Congress have introduced exactly zero bills to prevent 702 from sunsetting on January 1, 2024, even though many—perhaps a majority—view this intelligence “crown jewel” as fundamental to the national defense, a flawed but fixable law. The Democrats, who control the Senate, are not blameless in stalling the reauthorization, with more than a handful vying to ensure its renewal is contingent on forcing the government to obtain warrants before using 702 data to investigate its own citizens. Nevertheless, the internal conflict roiling the Republican Party—many of whose members share in the desire to rein in the government’s far-reaching domestic surveillance capabilities—deserves the lion’s share of the credit right now for neutralizing any hope of a consolatory agreement.

The Governor of New York, @KathyHochul, has launched a new online surveillance program – including monitoring citizens' social media postings to "counter" their "hatred"– by claiming there now is a crisis of anti-Semitism in the US and New York: https://t.co/N6Fgwi1Snq

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 14, 2023

Eugene Volokh

One reason I broadly oppose governmental restrictions on the expression of ideas—even obviously bad, dangerous, and offensive ideas—is the phenomenon I call “censorship envy”: The common reaction that, “If my neighbor gets to ban speech he reviles, why shouldn’t I get to do the same?”

[1.] To offer one example, say a public university bans speech that expresses support for Hamas attack on civilians, and a court upholds that (perhaps on the theory that this supposedly creates a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish or Israeli students).

Annalisa Merelli:

At least partially as a consequence of over 1 million Covid-19 deaths, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined significantly over the past few years, falling from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 in 2020 and 76.1 in 2022 — undoing over two decades of progress. This puts the country far behind its wealthy peers: Countries such as Japan, Korea, Portugal, the U.K., and Italy all enjoy a life expectancy of 80 years or more. Countries such as Turkey (78.6) and China (78.2) also fare better. This falloff has become a key issue for the Food and Drug Administration.

The picture is especially concerning for men, whose life expectancy is now 73.2 years, compared with women’s 79.1. This 5.9 year gap is the widest between the two genders since 1996.

“Across the world, women tend to live longer than men,” said Brandon Yan, a resident physician at the UCSF School of Medicine and a research collaborator at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who is the lead author of the study. (Both institutions collaborated in the research.)

David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more preprogram private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes.

Commentary:

Miranda Bryant:

Sweden has declared a “system failure” in the country’s free schools, pledging the biggest shake-up in 30 years and calling into question a model in which profit-making companies run state education.

Sweden’s friskolor – privately run schools funded by public money – have attracted international acclaim, including from Britain, with the former education secretary Michael Gove using them as a model for hundreds of new British free schools opened under David Cameron’s government.

But in recent years, a drop in Swedish educational standards, rising inequality and growing discontent among teachers and parents has helped fuel political momentum for change.

A report by Sweden’s biggest teachers’ union, Sveriges Lärare, warned in June of the negative consequences of having become one of the world’s most marketised school systems, including the viewing of pupils and students as customers and a lack of resources resulting in increased dissatisfaction.

The Conversation:

Access to the “digital fief” comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% “on all their revenues”, while Amazon charges its sellers “35% of revenues”. This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs’ produce because he owns the estate and everything within it.

This is not extracting profit through the production or provision of goods and services, as these platforms are not a “service” in the sense in which the term is used in economics. They are extracting rents in the form of the huge cuts they take from the capitalists on their platforms.

There is “no disinterested invisible hand of the market” here. The Big Tech platforms are exempted from free-market competition. Their owners – “cloudalists” – increase their wealth and power at a dizzying pace with each click, exploiting a new form of rent-seeking made possible by the new algorithmically structured digital platforms. Parasitic on capitalist production, they are now dominating it.

Matthew Cuariglia:

The program was intended to collect communications of people outside of the United States, but because we live in an increasingly globalized world, the government retains a massive trove of communications between Americans and people overseas. Increasingly, it’s this U.S. side of digital conversations that domestic law enforcement agencies trawl through—all without a warrant.

This is not how the government should work. Lawmakers should not take an unpopular, contested, and dangerous piece of legislation and slip it into a massive bill that, if opposed, would shut down the entire government. No one should have to choose between funding the government and renewing a dangerous mass surveillance program that even the federal government admits is in need of reform.  

EFF has signed onto a letter with a dozen organizations opposing even a short-term reauthorization of a program as dangerous as 702 in a piece of vital legislation. The letter says

Arthur Levitt:

Americans who are rightfully appalled by the pusillanimous response to anti-Semitism on college campuses have been pulling their donations and calling for restrictions on anti-Israel student groups. Maybe those tactics will work. But in my experience, if you want real change in large and unwieldy organizations, you need to focus on fixing governance and assigning personal accountability. You need to regulate.

After the accounting scandals of the dot-com and Enron era, Congress passed laws requiring auditors to tighten their operations, establish clear boundaries between their consulting and audit businesses, and assume far more accountability than they had before.

Directors, too, were informed that they bore a personal interest in preventing fraud. One rule made it clear that if a company passed fraudulent numbers off to investors, the person who signed the filing—usually the chairman—would be personally liable.

Lawmakers have also tightened anti-money-laundering statutes, requiring banks to review their customers closely and to ensure they aren’t unwittingly providing services to organized crime, terror entities, tax evaders or other bad actors. The rules are difficult to enforce and require a lot of work. But they come with real penalties for failure: Bank officers can go to prison if they fail to prevent money laundering, and several have.

Judd Legum:

Last month, Baggett submitted a form seeking to remove The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold from a Santa Rosa school library, alleging the book was pornographic. On October 25, the librarian from Milton High School reached out to Baggett and said the first step in the challenge process was to have a meeting at the school to discuss her concerns. Baggett responded that she would not participate in a meeting and warned the librarian of “the legalities that could arise if this book remains accessible to minors.”

—-

Another view:

Even before the Southern Poverty Law Center, the discredited far-left smear factory, put the parental rights group Moms for Liberty on its “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, left-leaning outlets had repeated claims that the parental rights group’s leaders had harassed school board members or other moms who disagreed with them. 

The Daily Signal has examined many of these claims and found them baseless. In many cases, the Moms for Liberty leaders themselves appear to have suffered harassment in situations where outlets such as Media Matters and activist groups such as GLAAD portray them as the villains.

Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich repeatedly have condemned threats and harassment. They have insisted there is no evidence that Moms for Liberty leaders encouraged or engaged in school board threats.

“These are not our people, we denounce it,” Descovich told ABC affiliate WFTS-TV in Tampa Bay, Florida, back in 2021. 

The list below mostly focuses on the incidents highlighted by Media Matters in April. It doesn’t address a Moms for Liberty chapter that took heat for quoting Adolf Hitler, because that chapter clearly quoted Hitler sardonically to illustrate a point, not as an endorsement.

——

Meanwhile:

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?

Corrinne Hess:

The proposed bill, authored by Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and state Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, extends that exception to applicants for all licenses that require the FORT exam.  

Felzkowski and Mursau did not respond to requests for comment. 

Lawmakers, DPI and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say the change is necessary to help alleviate the state’s teacher shortage. For years, the FORT test has had dismal results. Only 54 percent of first-time test takers passed for the 2020-21 school year. That’s down from 66 percent in 2014-15.   

“Passing the FORT examination can be a costly and time-consuming process, with a relatively high failure rate, especially among teacher license applicants of color and applicants whose first language is not English,” according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. “There is also little credible evidence that passing the FORT exam, by itself, improves teacher performance or produces any positive impact on students’ literacy skills or reading achievement.”  

But some reading advocates and teachers say the onus should be on colleges and universities to better prepare their education students to teach, rather than throw away the test.  

Curtis Kadow is a third grade teacher at Kosciuszko Elementary School in Cudahy. Kadow did not have to take the FORT test — he became a teacher before the test was implemented 11 years ago.

Still, Kadow sees value in the test.  

“I believe it’s our only check to make sure that our universities are helping our pre-service teachers understand the science of reading and those foundational skills that they need in order to be successful coming into the workforce,” Kadow said. “I think it’s kind of interesting that our Legislature passed this really big reading bill focused on the science of reading, but now we’re trying to get rid of a test that checks for that.” 

The Cudahy School District, which serves a suburb on Milwaukee’s south shore, shifted to the phonics-based science of reading three years ago and test scores show it’s beginning to pay off.

Kadow understands the argument by lawmakers and DPI that low pass rates on the FORT exam are making it more difficult to hire staff, but to him, that means universities should change how they’re teaching.  

“If we think about the Forward exam, lots of kids don’t pass that, and we’re not getting rid of it,” he said. “Why? Because it’s a check to make sure that schools are doing what they need to do.”

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?

Corrine Hess:

The state report cards include data on multiple indicators for multiple school years across four priority areas: achievement, growth, target group outcomes, and on-track to graduation.  

A district or school’s overall accountability score places it in one of five overall accountability ratings: Significantly Exceeds Expectations (five stars), Exceeds Expectations (four stars), Meets Expectations (three stars), Meets Few Expectations (two stars), and Fails to Meet Expectations (one star).  

Report cards use data from up to three school years, including achievement data from 2020-21, 2021-22, and 2022-23. This is the first report card that does not include achievement data from assessments measured prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Conservatives from the Institute for Reforming Government and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty questioned how 94 percent of public school districts could achieve three stars or above and not one school district in the state received a failing score. 

“On national standardized tests, Wisconsin schools get average reading results for White and Hispanic students and bottom-dwelling scores for Black students,” said IRG Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon. “It seems DPI has set those expectations too low. While every child may not be in a 5-star school, every child deserves one.”

Will Flanders, research director with WILL said the report card needs to change so it can be reflective of what is happening across the state. 

“While DPI may tout there has been an increase across the board, we still have districts like Milwaukee where proficiency rates are less than 20 percent and somehow that seems to be meeting expectations,” Flanders said.

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?

Will Flanders:

WILL Research Director Will Flanders’s new policy brief, Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents, provides an important explanation of how Wisconsin’s school report cards work and how the various inputs work towards a school’s score. Specifically, Flanders highlights:

• School report card scores vary widely based on student demographics. In schools with fewer low-income students, overall performance is given more weight. In schools with more low-income students, growth is given more weight.
• Wisconsin’s report card can make some bad schools look good. Some schools with less than 5% proficiency in math and English are rated as “Meets” or “Exceeds” expectations on the current report card. This severely limits the ability of families to make use of the report card as a metric for school quality.
• The report card harms private schools in the choice program due to a mismeasurement of disability & economic status. Disability status affects growth scores and the economic status of students effects the weight of growth in the report card score. Both of these factors are often measured inaccurately in choice schools, harming their overall scores.
• Private school systems cannot get school-level report cards. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has made it so that private school systems must choose between byzantine enrollment and auditing systems or getting individual school report cards for their schools. Without individual school report cards, it is more difficult for schools to determine how each school in their system is doing.

The Report (PDF).

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?

Bari Weiss:

Tonight, I’d like to talk about the war of ideas and of conviction and of will that faces us as Americans. I want to talk about the stakes of that war. About how we must wage it—fearlessly and relentlessly—if we seek to build a world fit for our children, and if we want to save America itself.

It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.

It was twenty years ago when I began to encounter the ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters. It was twenty years ago, when I was a college student, that I started writing about a nameless, then-niche worldview that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

At first, things like postmodernism and postcolonialism and postnationalism seemed like wordplay and intellectual games—little puzzles to see how you could “deconstruct” just about anything. What I came to see over time was that it wasn’t going to remain an academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our civilization from within. 

It seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.

It replaces basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues.

—-

Second: we—you—must enforce the law.

The wave of elected so-called “progressive prosecutors” has proven to be an immensely terrible thing for law and order in cities across America. It turns out that choosing not to enforce the law doesn’t reduce crime. It promotes it.

Third: no more double standards on speech.

Public universities are constitutionally forbidden from imposing content-based restrictions on free speech. And yet, that’s precisely what they’ve been doing. 

Ask any conservative—and I now know a few—who’s tried to speak at a public university and had a “security fee” imposed on them or had their speeches quietly moved off campus and into small, restrictive venues whether there aren’t brazen content-based restrictions on their speech imposed by public universities.

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?

Ann Althouse

If you’re not seeing the replies there — I know I’m not — then read “Randi Weingarten gets educated about exactly who is to blame for the rise in homeschooling/The American Federation of Teachers union boss shared an article on ‘What’s behind the increase in homeschooling'”

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?

James Somers

But how do you actually learn to hack? My family had settled in New Jersey by the time I was in fifth grade, and when I was in high school I went to the Borders bookstore in the Short Hills mall and bought “Beginning Visual C++,” by Ivor Horton. It ran to twelve hundred pages—my first grimoire. Like many tutorials, it was easy at first and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Medieval students called the moment at which casual learners fail the pons asinorum, or “bridge of asses.” The term was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclid’s Elements I, the first truly difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to master geometry; those who didn’t would remain dabblers. Section 4.3 of “Beginning Visual C++,” on “Dynamic Memory Allocation,” was my bridge of asses. I did not cross.

Wall Street Journal:

In San Francisco Monday morning, there’s going to be a demonstration on the steps of City Hall. That may not be surprising, given the protests breaking out all over the country. But the topic is, believe it or not, algebra.

A grassroots alliance of parents, teachers and concerned citizens known as the SF Guardians is gathering to support a ballot measure launched by Supervisor Joel Engardio. The initiative aims to restore eighth-grade algebra in the city’s public schools. Monday’s Rally for Algebra comes on the heels of a victory at the state level.

This victory was the State Board of Education’s new version of the California Mathematics Framework. The key change is that the board dropped what a Berkeley professor called “the last remaining text advocating against 8th grade Algebra I.” This was a line recommending that all students take the same math courses from kindergarten through eighth grade.

The San Francisco Unified School District stopped offering eighth-grade algebra in 2014 in the name of—what else?—equity. The theory was that by making every student study the same curriculum, the minority achievement gap would close.

Paul Caron:

Wall Street Journal Editorial, Biden Regulators Fine a Christian College:

The liberal press frets with some cause that Donald Trump will target his political opponents if he wins the White House in 2024, but why aren’t they bothered by the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government? Consider the Education Department’s record fine last week against Grand Canyon University (GCU).

The Education Department dunned GCU, the nation’s largest Christian college, $37.7 million for allegedly deceiving prospective students about the cost of its doctoral programs. Its specific beef is that GCU charged students for taking courses while they complete their dissertation, and that these costs weren’t included in a table estimating the degree’s total cost.

But the number of continuation courses varies. Its disclosures make clear that doctoral degree earners require continuation courses—9.5 on average for psychology, which cost $2,175 per course. The department claims this disclosure is buried in “fine print.” GCU’s disclosure is in full-size, red type above its Degree Program Calculator.

Paul Caron:

We are now 25% of the way through Fall 2024 law school admissions season. The number of law school applicants reported by LSAC is down -3.3% compared to last year at this time:

Chad Aldeman:

At the national level, public schools spent an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per student. 

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, school spending nationally is 6% higher than it was a decade ago, and it’s up 28% over the last two decades. The gap between states is also growing over time. Over the last 20 years, the 10 lowest-spending states have increased their school funding by 16%, while the top-spending states have boosted theirs by 48%. 

These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and it is clearly cheaper to live in Boise than in New York City. But other decisions are driving these spending differences as well.

—-

Locally, Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average per student spending; now more than $25,000 annually.

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?

Alexander Russo

“Our opponents did a good job in misinformation campaigns, telling the public that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and other classics were being removed, when in fact, only books that had graphic depictions of sex acts or books suggesting porn sites were removed,” she said.”

With an assist from the national media.

:

“When I look at what happened at Richland, what happened now with Washington County, our county, the fact is that they’ve never even bothered to say, ‘Hey, county executive, come on down to Madison — we want to have a discussion with you,’” Kaufman said. “Give us an opportunity to address the issue directly with them and at least let us have some say in that conversation.”

Wall Street Journal:

Gov. Pritzker is a billionaire, and his Pritzker Family Foundation could help. According to Crain’s Chicago Business Journal, the foundation has donated $8.3 million to Milton Academy, the Massachusetts boarding school Mr. Pritzker attended. It has donated $2.5 million to Duke University, according to Carolina Journal, and $100 million to Northwestern Law School, which has renamed itself in his honor. Invest in Kids is a bargain by comparison, requiring about $71 million for the coming year.

Illinois is now the first state to kill a major school-choice program. The scandal reflects the bloody-mindedness of the unions that want to snuff out even minor competition to retain their monopoly. And it reveals how little most Democrats care about the children they imprison in these failure facto

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats want to abolish Invest in Kids because it embarrasses the teachers unions. The wait list for scholarships runs to more than 20,000 children. Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates sends her son to a private school. She can afford it, but two-thirds of Invest in Kids scholarships go to families with incomes below 185% of the federal poverty level.

This is the kind of hypocrisy that normally Democrats would love to call out, except that their party is fueled by the teachers unions. Ms. Schakowsky also has more personal ties. Her husband, Robert Creamer, runs the Strategic Consulting Group, which gets business from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the national affiliate of the Chicago Teachers Union. According to the Illinois Policy Institute and the union’s financial filings, called LM-2s, AFT has paid Strategic Consulting more than $90,000 since 2020.

Invest in Kids is at risk of sunsetting at the end of 2023, and Gov. J.B. Pritzker has made clear he won’t spend political capital to save it, so Ms. Schakowsky’s intervention is a gift to the teachers unions.

The other Democrats who joined her statement were Illinois Reps. Nikki Budzinski, Sean Casten, Danny Davis, Jonathan Jackson, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Delia Ramirez. Yet a recent public survey says 59% of the state’s Democrats support Invest in Kids, so let’s hope voters remember those names.

Inspired following an amazing Gala last evening St Marcus Lutheran School- a Milwaukee Choice Program changing lives every day. Read and internalize the quote 👇- this is why @MMAC_Chamber and our partners will fight the lawsuit seeking to dismantle Choice and Charter Schools pic.twitter.com/6P0r08C6MS

— Dale Kooyenga (@DaleKooyenga) November 12, 2023

John Hindraker:

Some of the worst anti-Semitic campus outbursts of recent weeks have been at MIT. Pro-genocide activists physically prevented Jewish students from attending classes, and refused to disperse when ordered to do so by university officials. Normally you would assume that a student who engaged in such barbaric conduct would be expelled. Yet MIT has treated its anti-Semites with kid gloves. Why?

MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth has now made a statement that apparently explains MIT’s inaction:

“After exhausting all other avenues for de-escalating the situation, we informed all protesters that they must leave the lobby area within a set time, or they would be subject to suspension,” wrote Kornbluth.

“Many chose to leave, and I appreciate their cooperation. Some did not. Members of my team have been in dialogue with students all day.

Anyone who uses the formula “in dialogue with” should be fired for abusing the English language.

Because we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues, we have decided, as an interim action, that the students who remained after the deadline will be suspended from non-academic campus activities. The students will remain enrolled at MIT and will be able to attend academic classes and 

Wayne Shockley:

Kirk Bangstad and Julie Underwood attempted to make a case against private school vouchers in their column on Wednesday, “Why we’re fighting against private school vouchers.” 

While they do make a couple of good points in their arguments, such as the need for greater accountability, most of their points are not valid. One of their points is particularly reprehensible. They attempt to smear all non-public schools with the history of “segregation academies” in the south after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision against segregated schools.

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?

Anthony Esolen:

In 1985, I began to teach college students for the first time — English composition. We were given a free hand to teach the courses as we thought best, the students (UNC-Chapel Hill) were personable and bright, and the books we used were solid.

Still the essays were pretty bad.

Donna St George:

Families argue that schools have a legal obligation to keep children safe, and many political leaders agree: Fifty states have enacted laws to combat school bullying. But in day-to-day school life, some policies are not robust, and others are not enforced. And advocates say that a belief persists in some communities that bullying is part of childhood and that “kids will be kids.”

Efforts to curtail bullying are not a priority for many schools across the nation, especially after the pandemic left schools with even greater needs than before, said Dorothy Espelage, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the issue for three decades. “It’s not just North Carolina,” she said. “It’s all over this country.”

The National School Boards Association declined an interview for this story. Several school systems with recent cases have defended their actions, saying they handle bullying properly, and many say they are committed to safe schools. Some districts did not respond to inquiries from The Post.

Experts point out that bullying does not “cause” suicide, which typically happens for a complex set of reasons. A student who is being bullied may also struggle with mental illness, early childhood trauma, family conflict, sexual or gender identity issues, or many other challenges.

Matt Barnum:

Oregon’s decision to pause its proficiency requirement through 2028 is part of a growing national trend that started a decade ago.

In 2012, 25 states required students to pass an exam to graduate, encompassing nearly 70% of American public school students. By the time the class of 2023 graduated last spring, just eight states had graduation tests in place, according to an analysis by FairTest, a nonprofit that opposes graduation testing.

At least three more are now considering similar moves.

States have dropped or scaled back these tests, commonly known as exit exams, for a number of reasons.

Many began adopting the Common Core—guidelines for what students should know in math and reading—in 2010 and found their graduation exams were no longer aligned with the new, tougher criteria.

“With that collision of higher standards, higher expectations…you saw a lot of states then walking away from their graduation assessment requirement,” said Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, a nonprofit that seeks to improve high-school graduates’ college and career readiness.

Paul Bedard:

In the interview, Miyares challenged Soros to debate prosecutorial policies and their dueling agendas. “I would love to debate [Soros] in an urban setting or in an environment that’s been particularly hit hard by the prosecutors, and let’s debate. Let’s have this discussion. Let’s talk about whose policies are absolutely hurting communities,” Miyares said.

Christodoulou

So, what does cause high levels of mathematical skill, or any other skill? This is the question Simon concerns himself with in the rest of his article. You can read his conclusions in the article, but I will quote briefly.

In every domain that has been explored, considerable knowledgehas been found to be an essential prerequisite to expert skill. Our growing understanding of an expert’s knowledge and the kinds of processes an expert uses when solving problems enables us to begin to explore the learning processes needed to acquire suitable knowledge and problem-solving processes. We have no reason to suppose, however, that one day people will be able to become painlessly and instantly expert. The extent of the knowledge an expert must be able to call upon is demonstrably large, and everything we know about human learning processes suggests that, even at their most efficient, those processes must be long exercised. Although we have a reasonable basis for hope that we may find ways to make learning processes more efficient, we should not expect to produce the miracle of effortless learning.

A quotation from another Simon essay, this time about chess expertise, is also relevant:

More.

Alexander Tan:

But the Brattset Family Farm’s success is not something every family farm experiences.

Jurcek’s farm resides in an agricultural community where there were once dozens of small dairy farms, but in their place remain a scant few holdouts and a new highway. Their town echoes a nationwide trend: that the viability of family farming is waning.

Less than a decade ago, America’s dairyland boasted over 10,000 farms, most of them small family operations. But in recent years, about 40% of dairy farms have gone out of business, according to PBS Wisconsin. For several years, Wisconsin has led the nation in farm bankruptcies.

Simultaneously, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms confining over 1,000 cattle, have risen to dominate the dairy market.

‘Get big or get out’

Campus Reform:

Henry Swieca has resigned from the Board of Columbia Business School. He accuses the Ivy League institution of being “significantly compromised by a moral cowardice that appears beyond repair.” 

Columbia Business Assistant Professor Shai Davidai shared Swieca’s Oct. 30 letter on X. Campus Reform recently interviewed Davidaiabout anti-Semitism at the New York City University. Davidai said that Columbia had done “nothing” to make Jews safe on campus.

Sophie Li:

Abstract: Women had a similar level of schooling to men during the mid-twentieth century United States, but research on the returns to education for women is scarce. Using compulsory schooling laws as instrumental variables, this paper examines the causal effect of education on women’s labor market and marriage market outcomes. I examine both outcomes because women frequently traded off employment and marriage due to marriage bars and gender norms against married women working. I show that an additional year of schooling increases women’s probability of gainful employment by 7.9 pp. and women’s wage earnings by 15 percent, which can be explained by women’s entry into skilled occupations. Given the large returns on earnings, education surprisingly does not increase women’s probability of never marrying, but it does increase the probability of divorce and separation. In addition, women’s education positively affects the husband’s and the household’s labor supply and earnings, conditional on marriage formation and the husband’s education.

Daniel Greenfield:

According to Vimeo, Seth’s discussion about being censored over the ‘Man of the Year’ joke had gotten the David Horowitz Freedom Center banned. A year after Twitter was ridiculed and then taken over for classifying Babylon Bee’s humor as hate speech, Vimeo sent out a letter announcing “Seth Dillon – The Babylon Bee was removed for Hate Speech.“ The letter refused to name anything hateful that had been said or to specify what in the talk triggered the ban.

The focus of Seth’s talk had been about the different forms of censorship that the site faced. He delved into the internal process that led the Babylon Bee to approve the ‘Man of the Year’ joke even knowing that it risked bringing the wrath of Big Tech down on them.

“We were going back and forth when we pitched this joke,” Seth Dillon had told us at the Restoration Weekend. “This by the way is one of the ways that they censor people. They censor you after the fact, but they also censor you before the fact. There’s pre-censorship that happens because people are afraid to make jokes and statements like this knowing they will probably get censored, so they censor themselves. My writers come to me all the time saying, ‘I’ve got a really funny joke, but if we publish this, we might get banned.’”

Gregg Easterbrook:

One reason is the internal illness of academia, which is a topic for some other day. Another reason is that elite colleges and universities are extensively subsidized yet unaccountable — which is a formula for falling out of touch.

Let’s look first at how government bankrolls colleges and universities; then consider proposals for change, including ways to inspire the rich to give to community colleges, HBCUs and colleges for children of modest means, rather than channeling money to well-endowed institutions that mainly serve elites.

Structured as nonprofits, most colleges and universities pay no property taxes or business taxes, while lavishly rewarding their administrative rentier class. The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League member, paid outgoing president Amy Gutmann about $2.5 million per year and is believed to be paying new president Elizabeth Magill about the same.

Penn won’t say for the record – colleges and universities can accumulate money tax-exempt, then spend without disclosure. Penn’s motto Leges sine moribus vanae – “laws without morals are worthless” – apparently does not apply to Penn.

David Foster:

I’ve been writing for years about the rise of toxic ideologies on America’s college campuses – totalitarian, anti-Israel, outright anti-Semitic – but still have been surprised by what has happened in these places since October 7.  We need to discuss the reasons why it’s gotten so bad.

A few days ago, someone republished an essay, written in 2016, by a professor who has taught at several ‘elite’ colleges.  Excerpt:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture. It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

And when someone has devoted the first 18 years of their lives in large part to jumping through hoops in hopes of making a good impression on some future college admissions officers…and then, in many cases, having to get good ratings from professors whose criteria are largely subjective…that someone is unlikely to develop into a person with a strong internal gyroscope. Quite likely, they are likely to be subject to social pressures and mass movements.

Someone at X said that the Cornell student arrested for making threats against Jewish students was probably just trying too hard to fit in and win approval of his peers and took it a step too far. My view is that there’s no just about it…the desire to fit in and win approval is very often the reason why people commit evil acts. I’m reminded of something CS Lewis said: “Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

Paul Fanlund:

The talk is titled “Fiscal Policy Challenges Facing the Next Presidential Administration,” and the speaker will be Mike Murphy, longtime chief of staff for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. His nonpartisan group has fought budget deficits since it was created in the 1980s, those long-gone days of backslapping compromises between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, before politics became a blood sport.

My reaction to a conversation with Murphy is that he makes a tough ask of thoughtful people on the center and left in places like Madison.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 system now spends > $25k per student… far more than most districts.

University of Austin:

Our commitment to the pursuit of truth arises from our confidence that the nature of reality can be discerned, albeit incompletely, by those who seek to understand it, and from our belief that the quest to know, though unending, is an ennobling, liberating, and productive endeavor.

As an academic community, UATX values both the wisdom of the past and the transformative potential of novel ideas. The University is dedicated to the preservation and transmission of humanity’s rich intellectual, scientific, artistic, and cultural inheritance. At the same time, UATX vigorously pursues the discovery, creation, and communication of new knowledge.

Each of these endeavors depends on our fostering an environment of intellectual freedom and pluralism. UATX strives to build and sustain a community based on the lively clash of ideas and opinions.

Maddy Welsh

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a fundamental misunderstanding of college education, according to College President Larry P. Arnn in an op-ed titled “There’s More to Education Than Free Speech.”

“I wrote the piece to assert what education is,” Arnn told The Collegian. “FIRE seems like most activists: they want to do education policy, which is not the same thing as education.”

FIRE is a nonprofit advocacy group “dedicated to defending free speech rights across the country,” particularly on college campuses, according to its Director of Policy Reform Laura Beltz. When FIRE released its 2024 College Free Speech rankings earlier this year, it labeled Hillsdale College a “warning” school. Arnn addressed this in his op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 19.

“A college’s purpose isn’t merely to encourage speech,” Arnn wrote. “A college’s purpose, through speaking and thinking — the two go together — is to teach students to think and speak better in search of knowledge.”

Robert Pondiscio:

Campus radicalism is easy to spot—and condemn. Attempts to justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, and in some cases to celebrate it, have caused crises at dozens of universities, prompting deep-pocketed donors to publicly withdraw philanthropic support and threaten not to hire graduates. Even some stalwart liberals have been shocked by the depth and virulence of campus anti-Semitism.

Such scenes might be fewer and farther between in K–12, but that doesn’t mean there’s not cause for concern about how the Israel-Hamas war is being taught and discussed in public-school settings. The blunt truth is that America’s K–12 education system is uniquely ill-suited to help students make sense of complicated world events and navigate contentious issues, let alone achieve some level of moral clarity about them.

When major news breaks, social media and education news sites fill up with well-intended advice for teachers on “how to talk to students” about traumatic events. As often as not, that advice is aimed at reassuring children that distant events do not place them physically at risk or fostering “tolerance and empathy,” not teaching history. “When approached by children with questions about the Israel-Hamas war, parents and teachers should center conversations on empathy rather than politics,” advised Harvard “global health” lecturer Claude Bruderlein in the Boston Globe. New York City schools chancellor David Banks tweeted that New York City would be “providing resources to our schools to facilitate discussions about the conflict and supporting our students in being compassionate global citizens.” A fine impulse as far as it goes, but surely it’s of equal public interest to encourage students to become well-informed global citizens.

Purnima Nath:

“It is hard to believe that as an immigrant to America that today I have to be here and defend an education system that does not prioritize academic excellence and that fails to respect parents’ rights.”

Patrick McIlheran:

Two-thirds of children whose schools are under attack by Minocqua beer baron are racial or ethnic minorities, many are poor, many are very likely his fellow Democrats

In the lawsuit bankrolled by the Minocqua beer marketer, Kirk Bangstad, who’s trying to kill school choice in Wisconsin, his lawyers make an icy admission: They know it will “impact tens of thousands of children” to throw them out of their schools. They’re asking the state Supreme Court to hurt those kids anyway.

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?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

UW-Parkside projects a $5.3 million deficit for the 2023-24 school year.

Huron consultants will be on campus next week to help the university find ways to manage its deficit, Menke said.

The UW system is already paying a different consulting firm, Deloitte, $2.8 million this school year to evaluate the financial health of its universities, according to a contract the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obtained through the state public records law.

Huron is assisting with short-term budget planning, UW system spokesperson Mark Pitsch said. The cost is between $15,000 and $20,000.

—-

Curiously, the article fails to include enrollment data….

Matt Taibbi:

On June 8th, the Washington Post ran, “These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers,” a story about how “records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits” were wielded as “tools of harassment” against “scholars” in the “field of disinformation.” In photo portraits, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington stared plaintively in the distance, a caption under one: “The political part is intimidating — to have people with a lot of power in this world making… false accusations about our work.” Starbird sits on an advisory committee for the 245,000-person, $185 billion Department of Homeland Security, but perhaps she meant “a lot of power” in a different sense?

When Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and I first started working on the Twitter Files, none of us knew much about people who did “anti-disinformation” work. Before it became controversial, these “experts” didn’t seem bashful about security-state credentials. For instance, New Knowledge, the firm profiled by Susan Schmidt last week that authored a Senate report on Russian interference and was caught creating fake accounts in an Alabama Senate race, gained this cheerful description in VentureBeat after raising $11 million for “anti-disinformation”:

What further distinguishes New Knowledge is that its founders are AI and Homeland Security experts who grew up in the NSA and have worked as security advisers. [CEO Jonathon] Morgan, for instance, was an adviser for the U.S. State Department and published research at the Brookings Institution.

When lawsuits like Missouri v. Biden and then the Twitter Files began shining light on this direction, experts reinvented themselves as “scholars” or research fellows. That their LinkedIn pages often featured odd gaps, or periods listed as “consultants” to the military or the FBI, was apparently not important, nor that “anti-disinformation” is not an academic discipline. Even if they were very new arrivals to campuses, we were expected to show deference to new roles as “researchers,” much as campaign reporters were asked to stop calling Rick Perry a dummy when he put on glasses. 

Reporters once didn’t fall for this sort of thing, reserving special bile for politicians or spooks who tried to pass themselves off as intellectuals. But these days they swoon like teen girls seeing the Elvis wiggle for the first time for “anti-disinformationists,” with anchors like Nicolle Wallace, Brian Stelter, and Rachel Maddow giving the “We’re not worthy!” treatment to anyone with intelligence credentials who utters dire prophecies about Trump and “fake news.” 

Even the once-mocked “smart glasses” trick became foolproof, as former counterterrorism warriors like Hamilton 68 frontman Clint Watts earned plaudits as bespectacled “disinformation experts,” and even media figures who once went for hunky or fetching in headshots donned solemn expressions — and glasses — when moved to the disinfo beat. I don’t remember Rick Stengel wearing specs much as editor of Time magazine, but he accessorizes nicely in his new role as former head of the Global Engagement Center, pimping books like Information Wars.

Joanne Jacobs

Achievement is down and absenteeism is way up, yet report cards show the same grades — or higher — as before the pandemic, concludes False Signals, a new report by EdNavigator and Learning Heroes. No wonder “families believe that everything is back to normal or will be soon.” No wonder demand is low for tutoring and summer school.

The number of students scoring below grade level and chronically absent has quadrupled since before the pandemic, the report finds. “Yet more than 40 percent of these students still earn Bs or better in core subjects.”

Researchers analyzed two districts, one with above-average achievement and another with scores around the national average. They found the average student fell five months further behind in math and English Language Arts (ELA). Chronic absenteeism soared.

Schools should “send clear signals” to students and parents about the need for regular attendance with special attention to families whose children “need extra support,” the report urges.

Daniel Klein:

I show the origins, nature, and character of liberalism 1.0 in a new study, “‘Liberal’ as a Political Adjective (in English), 1769–1824,” embedded below. 

The paper discusses the stepping from non-political meanings of the adjective liberal to the first political meaning. Smith and his friends christened their political outlook “liberal.” The data show that ‘liberal’ acquired a sustained political signification for the first time around 1769: the liberal policy principles of Adam Smith and his associates. 

The study will appear in Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, in an issue containing proceedings of the Adam Smith 300 conference in Edinburgh in 2023, organized by the NOUS Network. The posting is done with permission of the editors of the special issue.

The bodies of evidence include: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769 (with a few exceptions); (2) the blossoming from 1769 of ‘liberal plan,’ ‘liberal system,’ ‘liberal principles,’ ‘liberal policy,’ etc.; (3) the occurrence beginning in the 1770s of political uses of ‘liberal’ in Parliament; (4) the occurrence of the same in the Edinburgh Review, 1802–1824. 

The political adjective liberal came alive around 1769 and was sustained straight up to when the political nouns liberalism and liberal start up in the 1820s. 

The data from French, German, Italian, and Spanish confirm that Britain was the first to get to a political sense of “liberal.” 

1. TWITTER FILES EXTRA:
BIG BROTHER IS FLAGGING YOU
New House report and previously unpublished Twitter Files show: Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was a front for government censorship pic.twitter.com/3db6sCOX7K

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 9, 2023

Glenn Greenwald

The Dean of Columbia Journalism School is Jelani Cobb. At the @NewYorker, he made clear his belief that the prime obligation of journalism is to ensure Dems defeat Trump.

The US oligarch @craignewmark just created a chair there for @Sulliview, and they also have the same view:

New York Post:

The Department of Homeland Security was censoring speech before the 2020 election, new emails released by the House Judiciary Committee show. 

How? Through the favorite weapon of America’s intelligence apparatus, fake claims of disinformation. 

Stanford University’s Election Integrity Partnership was set up at the request of DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, says a senior member of one of the EIP’s founding groups, and they were “in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo.”

That was in July 2020.

It’s beyond clear that this was part of battlespace prep to help Joe Bidenwin that November.  

The EIP came after a number of other “disinformation” operations had been deployed against then-President Donald Trump.

Most notorious was RussiaGate, a scheme in which 100%-false claims that Trump was colluding with the Russian government were laundered through the Justice Department and Congress. 

Another was the effort to suppress our reporting around Hunter Biden’s laptop (also 100% correct). 

But this was about more than Trump. 

It was about total control of everybody’s speech and thought. 

Per the Judiciary Committee, feds and universities “pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions.”

Lee Ohanian:

In 2021, California became the first state to require ethnic studies (ES) for high school graduation. The University of California’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council (ESFC), which lists over 300 UC faculty as members, has developed specific course criteria that UC is considering as an admissions requirement. If adopted, this requirement would eliminate the freedom that individual high schools would have in teaching ES courses, at least for students applying to the UC.

California passed the ES high school graduation requirement to help students become citizens of the world by honestly portraying our history and positively focusing on the scientific, artistic, economic, cultural, and social achievements of different groups of people. But this is not what ethnic studies is about within the UC. Far from bringing people from different backgrounds together, the ESFC promotes a highly politicized high school curriculum called Liberated Ethnic Studies, which is founded on the notion that the US is a highly racist society in which Whites systematically oppress minorities.

After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, it is obvious that the ESFC should have nothing to do with course content. In response to the Hamas attack, UC president Michael Drake and UC Board of Regents chair Rich Leib issued a brief statement on behalf of the UC system condemning the terrorist attack, expressing grief for those affected on both sides and hope for a peaceful resolution. 

Drake and Leib’s statement was attacked in a letter written by the ESFC. The letter is abhorrent and dishonest: “In the strongest possible terms, the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council . . . that represents over 300 faculty systemwide, rejects recent UC administrative communications that distort and misrepresent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians. . . . [These statements that] irresponsibly wield charges of ‘terrorism’ and ‘unprovoked’ aggression, have contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe, even in their own homes.”

Shreyans:

What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can. What also got in the way were the people themselves – all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.

Many taxpayer supported k-12 systems use Google services, including Madison.

John Thornhill:

The early use of the radio resulted in mysterious supernatural phenomena, such as talking radiators and stoves, according to newspaper reports of the time. English doctors once feared that excessive use of the bicycle would overtax the nervous system and produce anxious, worn “bicycle faces”. Teachers lamented how the replacement of the slide rule by electronic calculators would erode our understanding of mathematical concepts. Besides, what would happen when the batteries ran out?

All these examples of technophobia are taken from the Pessimists Archive, a wonderful collection of “fears about old things when they were new”. Anyone concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence today should rummage around this digital record. It is striking how many of our contemporary fears echo previous concerns about the growing supremacy of machines and human obsolescence. It is also reassuring how many of these moral panics have proven spectacularly wrong, appearing almost comical with hindsight.

Of course, just because the doomsters were often wrong about the evils of past technologies does not mean that the pessimists are wrong about AI today. But we should at least focus on whether, or in what significant ways, the latest AI differs from what came before. There would certainly be a lot less fuss about AI if we were to demystify the field and rename it computational statistics, as some technologists suggest. And, as the Pessimists Archive makes clear, futurists tend to overemphasise the speed of adoption of most technologies and underemphasise the scope for adaptation. They can tell us what technologies can do in theory, but not how they will be used in practice.

Amy Lutz:

You can’t miss my son Jonah, 24. He’s the one spinning while blasting “Sesame Street” songs from his iPad in the back corner of Costco. The one popping up from a table at Five Guys, splashed with so much ketchup he looks like a murder victim. The one pounding on his head in agitation, sometimes for obvious reasons (he was directed to the pink waterslide instead of the blue one) and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all.

Jonah is incapable of passing through the world unnoticed — except, somehow, by policymakers and certain neurodiversity activists, who seem intent on denying that people with his level of disability exist and require extensive accommodation and care.

Take, for instance, the Labor Department, which announced in late September that it plans a “comprehensive review” of Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows some vocational programs to pay some adults — overwhelmingly people with significant cognitive impairments — a subminimum wage based on standardized assessments of their productivity.

These programs offer job training for intellectually disabled adults interested in pursuing competitive minimum-wage jobs, as well as long-term opportunities for those whose impairments preclude conventional employment but who benefit from the structure, dignity and satisfaction of work.

That, however, is not how critics describe 14(c) settings, which for years have been targeted by disability rights activists perpetuating an image of evil capitalists getting rich off the sweat of impoverished, disabled workers. To date, 16 states have eliminated this subminimum-wage model.

Chris Ullery:

It was a sweeping victory Tuesday for Democrats as Central Bucks voters ousted one GOP incumbent, kept an incumbent Democrat and brought on three new members to the school board in December.

While Tuesday’s election will directly impact the residents of Central Bucks, it’s not unfair to say this year’s election results could have a much larger impact.

The Central Bucks school board race is probably one of the most watched in the county after a series of controversies over library books, political speech and transgender athletes drew a national spotlight to the area.

Normally we're flagged for misinformation, incitement, or hateful conduct. This is our first "violent criminal organizations" policy violation. pic.twitter.com/NCuadnebEx

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) November 8, 2023

Many taxpayer supported K-12 institutions use Google services, including Madison.

Eugene Volokh:

A very interesting article by Prof. Steve Sanders (Indiana), who is also an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a scholar of sexual orientation and the law; it’s in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but also available without the need for registration here. An excerpt:

During the Red Scare of the 1950s, college faculty members were lauded by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter as being among the “priests of our democracy.” As campuses were roiled by political controversies in 1967, the Court invalidated a New York loyalty oath and underscored that “[t]he essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident.” More recently, in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 case upholding some forms of affirmative action, the Court said “universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition” and thus were owed “a constitutional dimension … of educational autonomy.”

A much different attitude prevails on the Court today. When Harvard and the University of North Carolina argued that their affirmative action practices were entitled to the same deference the Court had shown in Grutter, Chief Justice John Roberts’s response was sarcastic, even mocking. In his opinion last June in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Roberts, writing for six justices, laid out a series of objections to the universities’ admissions practices, then twisted the knife: “The universities’ main response to these criticisms is, essentially, ‘trust us.'”

The Court’s message was clear: universities, we don’t trust you….

Unfortunately, universities are giving courts more reasons to question whether their policies are based on favoritism or politics rather than neutral and objective criteria. In the post-George Floyd era, they are embracing political projects under banners like “social justice” and “anti-racism.” By remaking themselves into institutions devoted to progressive politics, universities weaken their moral and legal claims to judicial deference.

Charlie Bilello:

The average family health insurance premium in the US is up 249% since 2000.

——

The budget includes a tax levy increase of 13.6% driven primarily by increased debt service costs. Property taxes on the average-value Madison home will increase by about $147, according to the County Board. That’s on top of an estimated $110 increase from the cityof Madison and about a $250 increase from the Madison Metropolitan School District, taking into account a citywide revaluation of properties this year.

Josh Koehn

Two San Francisco supervisors will miss key meetings this week to attend a taxpayer-funded junket in Japan to learn how an institute in the country teaches math. 

The details of that word salad of a sentence might seem a bit mystifying for those who realize:

• San Francisco supervisors have no role in deciding how math is taught in the city’s public schools.
• The mayor just announced last month that the city could be facing a half-billion dollar deficit, and trips to Japan wouldn’t seem to rate on the priority scale.
• Algebra hasn’t even been taught to San Francisco’s eighth graders in almost a decade.
• Cherry blossom season doesn’t start until the end of March.

Adding a bit more complexity to the situation, the absences of Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Myrna Melgar from this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting could create hiccups in getting measures on the March 2024 ballot, especially if the return leg of their 5,180-mile trip runs long. Recent history shows it wouldn’t be the first time a supervisor was overly optimistic about returning home in time for an important meeting.

Rikki Schlott and Jon Hadi

The After Babel Substack is about the technological and sociological changes that caused the chaos and fragmentation of modern life (i.e., the collapse of the Tower of Babel, around 2014). In our first year we’re focusing on the effects of smartphones, social media, the loss of childhood independence, and parental fears which combined to cause the international adolescent mental health crisis. Over time, we’ll be publishing many more articles on the democracy crisis that is now so apparent in the U.S. 

In examining adolescent mental health, our posts have mostly been data-heavy and empirical. From my first post (The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012) through Zach and my most recent post (Suicide Rates Are Up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls), we have documented that there is indeed a crisis, it is international, and the evidence points to two main causal factors: the end of the play-based childhood, and its replacement by the phone-based childhood. (I tell this story in The Anxious Generation, which you can pre-order now.)

It was necessary for us to start this way—to lay out our ideas and refine them, and to show readers and skeptics the many kinds of evidence we’ve been collecting. (You can find all of our review documents here.) But across our first 24 posts, we’ve given readers very little sense of what it is actually like to be a young person today. We’ve been writing about Gen Z, without hearing from Gen Z.