SAT scores and poverty

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Where Should Teachers Turn When Marxist Training Leaves Them Unprepared For Real Classrooms?

Daniel Buck:

Walking into a classroom my first year of teaching, I experienced less a transition shock and more a disgraceful-lack-of-preparation shock. It turns out the university lectures on self-care and transgender literacies didn’t quite prepare me for a student calling another student’s mother an indecorous word. Nor did a few sample lesson plans equip me with the grueling task of filling 50 minutes of class time with meaningful activities for several classes a day, 180 weekdays in a row.

My teacher prep gave paltry time to classroom management, curricular construction, or grading, compared to discussions about the horrors of neoliberal policies or inscrutable readings whose sole purpose seemed to be to cite esoteric French critical theorists.

The practical training I did receive wasn’t much better than the ideological posturing. Since John Dewey became something of a patron saint in education in the early 20th century, schools of education have taught his theories as doctrines. The classroom management advice teachers receive prioritizes student-constructed rules and a conversation over a consequence. When mentioned, education professors treat explicit instruction and rote practice with derision. Tests and facts are oppressive. Student choice should dictate everything from science curriculum to reading lists.

Ed Programs Teach Lowbrow, Activist Lit

Reviews of teacher preparation programs offered at major universities do exist, and they validate my critical portrayal not as a caricature but as an unfortunate reality. For example, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty reviewed 14 programs in my own state of Wisconsin.

The programs neglect serious readings. Professors never assigned, for example, practical manuals of instruction or texts on the relationship between cognitive science and learning. Instead, teachers read popular books like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities and watch Hollywood movies like “Freedom Writers.” These programs define education as “social justice.” They instruct teachers to discuss gender with 3-year-old kids and host book clubs about Anti-Racist Baby.

Another notable review comes from the James G. Martin Center. The researcher solicited curricula from three of the most prestigious teacher prep programs in the country and tallied the most common authors.

Conservative or traditionalist authors such as E.D. Hirsch get nary a mention. The programs shamefully lack any engagement with classical education. The core of literature and practice that dictated education for centuries apparently doesn’t deserve a mention. Instead, the most popular authors are John Dewey and Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist who cited the Maoist Cultural Revolution and the Russian Revolution as ideals of his thought in action.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

M. Okkinga, A. J. S. van Gelderen, …P. J. C. Sleegers/

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?

School Choice event

Alan Borsuk:

We had a good conversation with a large audience 10/20 at @mulaw with @Fitz_ly about her new book on the history of school choice, The Death of Public School. Video of the hour-long program may be viewed here.

K-12 and special needs students

Benjamin Yount:

Authors of a study about choice schools and disabled students in Wisconsin admit there is some discrepancy but say things are not nearly as bad a school choice opponents paint them to be.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and School Choice Wisconsin looked at the difference in funding between choice schools and traditional public schools when it comes to dealing with students with disabilities, the number of students with disabilities in each, and it focuses on the claim by many Democratic lawmakers that choice schools in Wisconsin discriminate against students with disabilities.

Expanding IB in the Milwaukee public schools

Corrinne Hess:

Last spring, Marquese Gladney and his MacDowell Montessori IB High School classmates researched domestic violence.

“We learned there are different types of domestic violence — you can be controlled or suffer in silence,” Gladney, 14 said. “And we learned what the signs are.”

The group hung up posters across the school that included information for domestic violence shelters.

Other students ran a clothing drive. Another group held a bake sale for a Milwaukee homeless shelter.

It was all part of an eighth-grade capstone project for MacDowell’s International Baccalaureate, or IB, program.

By the time these middle schoolers are juniors and seniors in high school, they’ll be able to take college-level IB exams, not unlike Advance Placement exams, that could earn them college credit.

Wisconsin is expanding its IB offerings to high school students looking to challenge themselves and earn college credits before graduation.

Why children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

Pallavi Gogoi

The economist Melissa Kearney has been both vilified and praised for her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.

In the book, released last month, Kearney points out a rather obvious fact: Children raised by two parents have a much higher chance of success than those raised by one. Yet she goes even further to argue that whether parents are married or not impacts their children’s success.

Her argument goes against the trend in the U.S.; American children are increasingly being born and raised by single mothers. The U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. Almost a quarter, or 23% of U.S. children under age 18, live with one parent and no other adults.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Prices at the grocery store are up more than 10% from last yearK-12 Tax & Spending Climate:

Hardika Singh:

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

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

Academia is bringing about its own destruction

Rob Jenkins:

Higher education, it seems, is in free-fall. If it were a stock, analysts would be advising investors to sell, rather than buy or hold.

It take no joy in saying that. Having spent my entire adult life in the academy, believing deeply in its traditional role of uplifting society by preparing young people for lives of purpose and prosperity, I find it painful to witness higher ed’s slow-motion implosion.

Yet I don’t think I’m imagining it or being overly dramatic. The signs are all around us, beginning with a precipitous drop in enrollment. Since 2020, the nation’s campuses have lost more than 1.3 million students, and that trend shows no sign of reversing. Indeed, it’s likely to get much worse before it gets better—if it ever does.

Meanwhile, the value of a degree has also been steadily declining. As my colleague Professor Nicholas Giordano wrote for Campus Reform a few weeks ago, several large companies have already stopped requiring degrees for many corporate positions.

That worrisome trend, Giordano says, “represents a failure of our institutions, and…indicates that [they] are not producing graduates with the necessary skills to compete and function in the workplace.”

Civics: Accuracy and the NYT

Jessica Lessin:

and they updated it to ‘led’ … which says something – of course no correction or explanation (yet again back to the fact that they need to be before congress — publicly documenting their editorial practices & held accountable for whatever process they outline)

Is it normal for Nature to highlight a paper and spend more time quoting two people who didn’t do the research, than the authors of the paper? I’ve never noticed this before

Diversity at Harvard

Philip Greenspun:

A friend is an alumni interviewer for Harvard. He sent me the Interviewer Guidebook for 2028.

Let’s keep in mind that Harvard was so passionate about the critical need for diversity that they fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to do what was ultimately found unconstitutional, i.e., select people by skin color. Here’s the team that the diversity experts assembled…

Could a Harvard graduate who questioned school closures, lockdowns, mask orders, and vaccine papers checks be an interviewer? No:

[you must disclose and will be rejected if] Your internet presence might be considered inappropriate, problematic or if other considerations might affect the perception of Harvard’s integrity. Many applicants Google their alumni interviewer in preparation for the interview.

[Advocating the liberation of Palestine by whatever means are necessary, on the other hand, is the kind of “free expression” that Harvard officially supports and, perhaps, the only freedom of expression that is tolerated at Harvard.]

Notes on DIE hiring at Emory

John Sailor:

Note that the first author of this truly terrible paper was recently hired at Emory University.

Here’s Emory’s rubric for assessing faculty candidate’s DEI contributions. Emory has pioneered the heavy use of diversity statements in faculty hiring (i.e. cluster hiring).

Mangled spreadsheets mean government was asleep on the job and should be held to account

Lindsay Clark:

The Royal College of Anaesthetists is to consider whether it has confidence in the UK National Health Service’s recruitment process, following revelations that it made serious mistakes in selecting candidates owing to inappropriate and poorly managed use of Microsoft Excel.

Last week The Register exclusively revealed that the body responsible for recruitment – the Anaesthetic National Recruitment Office (ANRO) – told all candidates for positions in Wales they were “unappointable” despite some of them achieving the highest interview scores.

A subsequent Significant Incident Review showed how seven differently formatted spreadsheets were combined into one using manual processes. An error meant “rank” was confused with the interview score, and the best candidate got a score of one. Since there were only 24 candidates, all were considered below the threshold interview score to be considered appointable.

100 Milwaukee babies die before their first birthday

Jessica Van Egeren:

Of the 10,000 babies, on average, born in the city annually, roughly 100 die before celebrating that milestone, according to the state Department of Health Services, the city and Ascension Wisconsin.

That’s a dire statistic that Julia Means has been working to change for nearly 20 years.

Means, a community health nurse with Ascension Wisconsin, remembers attending a public health conference in Milwaukee in 2004. She recalls hearing a speaker say that a child born in a third world country had a better chance of reaching its first birthday than a child born in Milwaukee.

“I went home and I couldn’t sleep,” said Means, who has worked for Ascension since 1986. “African American babies were dying. I knew we had to put a stop to it.”

That same year, she started the Blanket of Love program.

Censoring History

Theresa Fallon

The fact that a book about an emperor from about 400 years ago is now censored in🇨🇳 speaks volumes about how Chinese Communist Party officials fear the public’s perceptions of Xi Jinping’s policies.

“A Chinese reprint of a book about an emperor who ran his realm into the ground before committing suicide nearly 400 years ago has abruptly disappeared from book shelves in China and searches for it have been censored online.
The Book Chongzhen: the Diligent Emperor of a Failed Dynasty, republished last month, recounts how the last emperor of the 1368-1644 Ming dynasty purged senior officials and mismanaged his kingdom before finally hanging himself on a tree outside the Forbidden City as rebels closed in on Beijing.

Alternative Prep Materials for the American Educator

Daniel Buck:

Walking into the classroom for his first day of teaching, Milwaukee Educator Daniel Buck experienced less a transition shock and more a “disgraceful lack of preparation shock.” He walked away from class that day with the understanding that self-care and transgender literacies didn’t quite prepare him to educate the next generation of students and prepare them for the future.

That is why Daniel partnered with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and their Restoring American Education project to compile resources for educators below. This list is a product of a years-long intellectual journey for which the average teacher has no time. But the conversation is just beginning and together, we plan to Restore American Education across the nation.

Teachers are busy people and we don’t always have time to sit down and read 300 pages of dense educational theory. As such, I start with a handful of essays that can be consumed in one sitting. Some are theoretical, some practical; all are worth your time.

Notes on the Failure of Ivy League Education

Ezekiel Emanuel:

We have failed.

When a coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard can say that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and students at other elite universities blame Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis on Oct. 7 or even praise the massacre, something is deeply wrong at America’s colleges and universities.

Students spouting ideological catchphrases have revealed their moral obliviousness and the deficiency of their educations. But the deeper problem is not them. It is what they are being taught — or, more specifically, what they are not being taught.

More (video).

Notes on legacy media and our literacy disaster

Alexander Russo:

The big education story of the week is the negative effects of inadequate literacy instruction on parental trust — and the lack of sufficient coverage needed to cover the literacy reform effort.

What’s being attempted in NYC and many other parts of the nation is one of the biggest education stories of the decade. “No major metropolitan school district has ever managed to raise reading achievement at scale — or to make higher test scores stick,” writes Robert Pondiscio in a sobering overview of NYC Reads in the outlet Commentary.

Researchers, school systems, and publishers responsible for the prolonged use of discredited methods and materials are — not surprisingly — trying to avoid accountability. Nineteen different Teachers College colleagues declined to comment or didn’t bother to respond, including the discredited former head of the program, according to the Columbia Spectator’s Sabrina Ticer-Wurr. To block Ohio’s efforts to improve literacy, Reading Recovery is suing Ohio, reports EdWeek’s Sarah Schwartz.

And yet parents and the general public still know precious little about how their kids and their schools’ efforts are going, week in and week out. “It’s no accident that Moms for Liberty has embraced the ‘science of reading’ movement,” writes NYC parent and journalist Kendra Hurley in Slate. “Reading instruction drove a wedge between me and my kids’ teachers.”

Censorship: Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads ‘temporarily’ blocks COVID search terms to focus on larger misinformation concerns

Chris Morris:

Threads is leaving the knot tied in COVID-related searches for the foreseeable future.

The social media company has blocked terms including “COVID,” “vaccines,” and “long COVID” as it focuses its resources on fighting misinformation about the war in Israel and Gaza.

The search filters have been in place since mid-September. In a statement on the platform, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, acknowledged them, calling the block “temporary,” but said there was no timeline on when it would reopen searches on those terms. It could be “weeks or months” before that occurs.

“The reality is that we have lots of important work to do. The team is moving fast, but we’re not yet where we want to be,” he wrote.

Does vocabulary knowledge matter in the effectiveness of instructing reading strategies? Differential responses from adolescents with low academic achievement on growth in reading comprehension

Prior studies suggest that teaching reading strategies promotes reading comprehension in adolescents who have difficulties with reading comprehension, yet the results of those studies are mixed. Individual differences in students’ vocabulary knowledge may explain these mixed results. This article examines to what extent vocabulary knowledge influences the effect of a two-year intervention program focused on teaching reading strategies to adolescents with low academic achievement in the Netherlands. We hypothesized that students (N = 310) with different levels of vocabulary knowledge would respond differently to the treatment, given that vocabulary knowledge is an important factor in reading comprehension. Results showed that vocabulary knowledge moderated the effect of the treatment, suggesting that low vocabulary knowledge negatively affected the impact of an intervention focused on reading strategies. Vocabulary knowledge, thus, emerges as a prerequisite for the successful leveraging of a reading strategy intervention. Students with low vocabulary knowledge may experience cognitive overload when attempting to apply newly learned reading strategies while simultaneously trying to find out the meaning of multiple unfamiliar words needed for successful application of reading strategies.

Civics: Free Speech

Collin Rugg:

Citibank has fired 25 year old banker Nozima Husainova for publicly supporting Adolf Hitler’s decision to murder millions of Jews.

While reacting to the Gaza hospital bombing on Instagram, Husainova ‘smiled’ as she voiced her support for murdering Jews.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: ‘Capitalism is dead. The new order is a techno-feudal economy’

Yanis Varoufakis:

Yanis Varoufakis, 62, turns on his laptop and enters the Zoom meeting. He sits in the studio of his home in Athens, Greece. One of the most well-known and influential economists in the world, he offers a kind greeting before beginning his conversation with EL PAÍS.

For the first time in many years (he had promised his wife, Danae) he took a few days of vacation in August, in the Aegean Sea. But, soon after, he was back at work, keeping track of all his appointments (including this one).

Varoufakis studied at a private school, before completing two postgraduate degrees in Mathematics and Economics at the universities of Essex and Birmingham. He has taught in Australia, the United States and, since 2000, has lectured in Economics at the University of Athens. But his life — and his “myth” — is intertwined with politics.

Notes on open source news

Steve Sinofsky

Conversely, these established sources and experts rely on these relationships to spoon out information and views in an effort to shape a narrative. This is a routine/process/game that has only become more institutionalized.

Notes on taxpayer funded Madison K-12 Governance

David Blaska

For all practical purposes, Jennifer Cheatham remains the superintendent of Madison WI public schools. She left four years ago for Harvard University (where 32 student groups announced their support for Hamas terrorism). Her mission: clone more ultra-Woke school chiefs like herself. (“Areas of expertise: diversity, equity, and inclusion.”)

Matters not that teachers hate it, Cheatham’s race-forward Behavior Education Plan continues to undermine Madison classrooms.

To replace whoever succeeded Cheatham as superintendent, the Madison school board contracted with a head-hunting boutique that boasts of its diversity. Don’t worry Madison progressives — it employs not a single cisgendered white male! (Discussed that here.)

2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jennifer Lynch and Andrew Crocker:

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?

“Non-profit” Universities and the local tax base

Johanna Alonso

Nonprofit universities often pay the towns that host them in lieu of property tax. Students say selective institutions with big endowments should do more.

Two Ivy League universities recently renewed agreements to voluntarily pay their surrounding cities sizable sums to help compensate for the fact that, as nonprofits, they don’t pay property taxes.

And while some community members see the payments as generous and beneficial, students are among their harshest critics, arguing that the wealthy universities are capable of paying their host cities much more.

Brown University signed two agreements to pay Providence, R.I., a total of just under $175 million over the next 20 years, more than doubling its contributions under a previous deal. The two agreements run concurrently: in one, Brown alone pays the city $46 million over 10 years. In the other, which spans 20 years, Brown will pay a total of roughly $129 million and the other three private institutions in Providence—Providence College, the Rhode Island School of Design and Johnson & Wales University—will contribute smaller sums totaling about $48 million.

Colorado Supreme Court Upholds Keyword Search Warrant

Today, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant—a digital dragnet tool that allows law enforcement to identify everyone who searched the internet for a specific term or phrase. In a weak and ultimately confusing opinion, the court upheld the warrant, finding the police relied on it in good faith. EFF filed two amicus briefs and was heavily involved in the case.

The case is People v. Seymour, which involved a tragic home arson that killed several people. Police didn’t have a suspect, so they used a keyword warrant to ask Google for identifying information on anyone and everyone who searched for variations on the home’s street address in the two weeks prior to the arson.

Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case, queries by one billion Google users. Police generally have no identified suspects; instead, the sole basis for the warrant is the officer’s hunch that the suspect might have searched for something in some way related to the crime.

Thiel’s Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges

Aaron Brown and Richard Dewey

In 2011, Peter Thiel launched a controversial education program to pay college students $100,000 to drop out. The program was widely criticized with many noting the hypocrisy of Thiel, who holds philosophy and law degrees from Stanford University. Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers said of the fellowship: “I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel’s special program to bribe people to drop out of college.”

Available evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Thiel fellows have achieved shocking success, enough to merit a reconsideration of our current approach to college. A recent book, Paper Belt on Fire, by one of Thiel’s colleagues, fills in the backstory of the fellowship and refines the argument against traditional higher education.

The most notable Thiel fellow to date is Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain. As of this writing, Ethereum has a market capitalization of about $200 billion and has spawned an unprecedented ecosystem of decentralized software development. There are nearly 7,000 Ethereum-based projects, including some of the most innovative and promising ideas today.

Austin Russel, a 2013 Thiel fellow, took Luminar Technologies Inc. public in 2020, valuing the company at $8.5 billion, while Paul Gu helped Upstart go public at a $4.8 billion valuation. Both Russell and Gu were early Thiel fellows and co-founders of their respective companies. Dylan Field agreed to sell Figma Inc., the influential design company he co-founded, to Adobe Inc. last year for roughly $20 billion.

Notes on absenteeism in the taxpayer funded Madison K-12 system

Scott Girard:

In total, nearly 9,000 children in Madison public schools missed more than 10% of the school year, a rate of absenteeism that can indicate broader problems facing children and puts them at risk of a serious, long-term disadvantage in learning.

Grelinda Isom’s four children are among those considered chronically absent. Isom herself has found the system a challenge to navigate as she tries to advocate for her children and their needs, she said, and each additional roadblock further drives a wedge between her family and the schools.

“The way they’re treated, them being heard, them crying out for help from trusted adults that they consider there for them, that they trust — they’re telling them what they need and their needs are still not being met,” she said, detailing Individualized Education Plans and safety plans going unfulfilled. “Mentally, physically it’s messing them up because they feel like no matter what they do, they’re not going to be heard or their needs are not going to be met.”

The chronic absenteeism rate is rising across Wisconsin and the country after the COVID-19 pandemic, with Madison’s fast-rising rates contributing to the trend. Across all Wisconsin schools, 22.7% of students missed enough days to be categorized as chronically absent in 2021-22, up from 12.7% in 2017-18.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

The Westminster Declaration

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

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

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

The law firm Davis Polk said in an internal email to staff members that the letters don’t represent the firm’s values.

Kat Tenbarge:

Top U.S. law firm Davis Polk announced in an internal email that it had rescinded letters of employment for three law students at Harvard and Columbia universities who it believed were tied to organizational statements about Israel, one of the latest responses to open letters from university groups about the Israel-Hamas conflict that have roiled university donors, employers, alumni and students.

“These statements are simply contrary to our firm’s values and we thus concluded that rescinding these offers was appropriate in upholding our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive work environment for all Davis Polk employees,” said the email, signed by Neil Barr.

Free Speech under attack

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

The Fertility Crisis

Zvi Mowshowitz

The world is slowly waking up to the fertility crisis. There is more acknowledgement of the problem, and there is more talk of potential practical solutions. I do not believe the topic is a realistic target for Balsa Policy Institute, but I will continue to keep an eye on the ball and issue periodic roundups like this one.

Abortion.

On a Lack of Ambition

Max Gorynski:

Tyler Cowen and Paul Graham were talking recentlyas part of Cowen’s ongoing Conversations with Tyler series. Graham and especially Cowen are diverse men, who could hold forth with interest on a number of subjects; but both by vocation and apart from it the thing that seems to wind their respective clocks the most is thinking about, identifying, and helping to cultivate talent, in which pursuit they are both very successful. Talent takes up most of the talk, and their conversation crackles with the kind of invigoration you might expect when two people so passionate about the same thing are in one another’s encounter.

Of course, talent is often flagged (and sometimes false-flagged) by ambition; and for every Blaise Pascal, subordinating their astonishing gifts to ulterior interest and hobbling them for posterity, the most outsized talent is frequently, though not always, distinguished by being attached to outsized ambition. The most interesting part of Cowen and Graham’s conversation was when they came to ponder the relationship between talent and ambition, and more particularly the question: “Why is there not more ambition in the developed world?”

LLM’s and Summarization

Sebastian Mellon:

The killer use case for large language models (LLMs) is clearly summarization. At least today, in my limited experience, LLMs are incapable of generating unique insights. While LLMs are good at writing creatively regurgitated text based on certain inputs or writing generally about a topic, they’re unlikely to “think” something unique. However, LLMs appear to be quite good at knowing what they do and don’t know, and this is especially true when they are provided with a clear chunk of information or text to summarize.

Much of the world’s information would benefit from clear summarization. Unfortunately, summarization is not easy work: to summarize, one must read through and understand source material, and then generate a concatenated list of insights based on the source material. This is an expensive endeavor, especially if one is not sure that it is worth it to invest time in comprehending the material. In today’s era of ever more information people yearn for a simple way to find information that is valuable to them and discard information that is not. Fortunately, LLMs are highly capable at summarization, and can effectively condense large volumes of information.

Reading comprehension on handheld devices versus on paper: A narrative review and meta-analysis of the medium effect and its moderators.

Salmerón, Ladislao Altamura, Lidia Delgado, Pablo Karagiorgi, Anastasia Vargas, Cristina

As handheld devices, such as tablets, become a common tool in schools, a critical and urgent question for the research community is to assess their potential impact on educational outcomes. Previous meta-analytic research has evidenced the “screen inferiority effect”: Readers tend to understand texts slightly worse when reading on-screen than when reading the same text in print. Most primary studies from those meta-analyses used computers as on-screen reading devices. Accordingly, the extent to which handheld devices, which provide a reading experience closer to books than computers, are affected by the screen inferiority effect remains an open question. To address this issue, we reviewed relevant literature regarding potential moderating factors for the screen inferiority effect through the lenses of the reading for understanding framework. We then performed two meta-analyses aimed at examining the differences in reading comprehension when reading on handheld devices, as compared to print. Results from the two multilevel random-effect meta-analyses, which included primary studies that used either between-participant (k = 38, g = −0.113) or within-participant (k = 21, g = −0.103) designs, consistently showed a significant small size effect favoring print text comprehension. Moderator analyses helped to partially clarify the results, indicating in some cases a higher screen inferiority effect for undergraduate students (as compared to primary and secondary school students) and for participants who were assessed individually (as opposed to in groups). We discuss the need to continue fostering print reading in schools while developing effective ways to incorporate handheld devices for reading purposes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

A drop in demand for MBA’s?

Lindsay Ellis:

Any drop-off in corporate demand for M.B.A.s is startling for students who applied to graduate school in 2021 and 2022 during a white-collar hiring spree with swelling salaries to match. Since then, the three main sectors that hire M.B.A.s at top schools have hit turbulence. Tech giants made big job cuts, consulting firms put start dates on hold and deal making slowed in finance.

During the fall, M.B.A. candidates normally lock in jobs for postgraduation the following spring, but that is happening less this year, students and career-guidance offices say. Schools are encouraging students to be patient and have a Plan B in mind.

Over 10,000 students exit ONE failing school district after Florida allows this new freedom

Hannah Cox:

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

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

ChatGPT use shows that the grant-application system is broken

Juan Manuel Parrilla

Despite having to do all of this preparation, the brutal truth is that once you start on the research, there is a good chance things won’t proceed as expected. It’s possible that few of the milestones will be met, and some of the projected outcomes might not be achieved. If experiments go wrong, you might not have time to do all of the public-engagement activities you added to the grant application. Nevertheless, when the project is finished, you might well have managed to produce great science, although this could easily differ from that outlined in your original proposal. And that’s OK.

Panel members tasked with deciding who gets a grant also find the process cumbersome. I’ve been on panels myself, and sometimes there just isn’t time to read everything. As a panel member, you are usually asked to focus on three main questions. Does this proposal fit the call brief? Is the proposed science good and novel? And are the candidates experts in the right field? The abstract and a small part of the research proposal answer the first two questions, and, when it comes to the third, I prefer to use Google to learn more about the candidates.

“Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction”

Kendra Hurley:

Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction. In a move that has parents like me cheering, Columbia University’s Teachers College announced last month that it is shuttering its once famous—in some circles, now-infamous—reading organization founded by education guru and entrepreneur Lucy Calkins.

For decades, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was a behemoth in American education. As many as 1 in 4 U.S. elementary schools used Calkins’ signature curriculum. But that number is dwindling as a growing chorus of cognitive scientists, learning experts, and parents—many amplified by education journalist Emily Hanford via her 2022 podcast Sold a Story—argue that the Calkins approach to reading is ineffective at best, actively harmful at worst, and a large part of why more than half of our country’s fourth graders aren’t demonstrating proficiency on reading exams.

It’s common knowledge that never learning to read well damages children’s self-esteem, their life prospects, and our country’s future workforce. What’s less talked about is how, when schools fail to teach reading, it harms the public’s trust in schools. An unspoken contract between public schools and parents is that schools will teach their children to read. In many places, that contract was broken when schools adopted Calkins’ methods, kids didn’t learn to read, and responsibility for teaching reading transferred onto parents and guardians.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

From “At Harvard, a Battle Over What Should Be Said About the Hamas Attacks/After a student group blamed Israel for the violence, Lawrence Summers, a former university president, condemned the leadership for not speaking up” (NYT).

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?

What does friendship look like in America?

Isabel Goddard:

Americans place a lot of importance on friendship. In fact, 61% of U.S. adults say having close friends is extremely or very important for people to live a fulfilling life, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. This is far higher than the shares who say the same about being married (23%), having children (26%) or having a lot of money (24%).

We decided to ask a few more questions to better understand how Americans are experiencing friendship today. Here’s what we found:

Dr. Marty Makary: The Greatest Perpetrator Of Misinformation During Covid Was The U.S. Government

Tim Hains:

Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Marty Makary told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic during its first hearing on Tuesday “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government” and listed multiple examples.

DR. MARTY MAKARY: The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government.

Misinformation that…

– Covid was spread through surface transmission

– That vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity

– That masks were effective. Now we have the definitive Cochrane review. What do you do with that review? Cochrane is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine and has been for decades. Do you just ignore it and not talk about it?

The “case against nice white ladies”

Helen Andrews

The Portland Art Musem abolishes its docent program due to an excess of white ladies, joining the Art Institute of Chicago, the Oakland Museum of California, and several others mentioned in this article that have ended docent programs for equity reasons.

The Snowden Archive

Iamcryptoki

This repository is a complete collection of all documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden that have subsequently been published by news media around the world.

If you notice something is missing or wrong, please file an issue or tweet at @iamcryptoki.

New brain map reveals thousands of cell types

Alison Snyder:

Scientists now have a census of the cells in the human brain — a key step in creating a detailed map of the organ where our thoughts, movements and emotions originate.

Why it matters: Scientists say this parts list — combined with information still to be gleaned about the circuits they form — will help provide much-needed insights into diseases and disorders that affect the brain.

How it works: Researchers studied 100 tissue samples from different regions across the human brain and analyzed the RNA in millions of individual cells to see which genes in the brain were being expressed to make different proteins in the cell.

The Incredibles: Roughly 80 Percent of Grades Given at Harvard are in the A Range

Jonathan Turley:

The Harvard Crimson on Thursday reported that 79 percent of grades given to Harvard students in 2020-21 were in the A range. That is an increase of 20 percent over the last decade. It leaves the question of not how difficult it is to flunk out of Harvard but how difficult it is not to excel. Faculty have apparently solved any equity issues by making everyone a top student. The problem was raised in the movie “The Incredibles,” when the villainous character “Syndrome” reveals a plan to make everyone a superhero. Syndrome’s motive is hardly altruistic: He hated superheroes and “with everyone super, no one will be.”In 2010, 60 percent of Harvard students were given grades in the A range and that was viewed at the time as rather scandalous. Now, to not get an A, is apparently a shocker.Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana reportedly presented the data at the first meeting this year of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Claybaugh admitted that the “report establishes we have a problem — or rather, we have two: the intertwined problems of grade inflation and compression.”She noted that the effort to secure better teaching evaluations may be driving the upward shift. She also noted that it obviously “complicates selection processes for prizes, fellowships, or induction into Phi Beta Kappa, which rely heavily on students’ grade point averages.”In other words, to paraphrase Syndrome: “With everyone an A student, no one will be.”Yet, the suggestions on how to deal with the problem were even more bizarre. Romance languages and literatures Professor Annabel Kim suggested the “abolition of grading” and the institution of “narrative-based” evaluations.It is not clear how employers would be informed of the narrative-based performance of students in school.

Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities
with Open Source Research

EFF:

The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement in communities across the United States.

This includes drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, facial recognition, and more.

This research was compiled by more than 1,000 students and volunteers, and incorporates datasets from a variety of public and non-profit sources.

Curated PhD dissertations

ideophone:

We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

I didn’t even know it was even possible to do a PhD dissertation in graphic novel style. And yet here we are. This is a mindblowing work that (my colleagues can attest) I keep raving about. From the back blurb:

Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points.

“there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions”

Tyler Cowen:

1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms. Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.

2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs. Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents. Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.

3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this. They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives. They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.

3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias. Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction. (What should I call it? The “Democratic Party direction”? That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found. Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?) If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.

Why are Vietnam’s schools so good?

The Economist:

Ho Chi Minh is the founding father of Vietnam, was clear about the route to development. “For the sake of ten years’ benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people,” was a bromide he liked to trot out. Yet despite years of rapid economic growth, the country’s per person is still only $3,760, lower than in its regional peers, Malaysia and Thailand, and barely enough to make the average Vietnamese feel well-nurtured. Still, Ho Chi Minh was alluding to a Chinese proverb extolling the benefits of education, and on that front Vietnam’s people can have few complaints.

Their children go through one of the best schooling systems in the world, a status reflected in outstanding performances in international assessments of reading, maths and science. The latest data from the World Bank show that, on aggregate learning scores, Vietnamese students outperform not only their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand but also those in Britain and Canada, countries more than six times richer. Even in Vietnam itself, student scores do not exhibit the scale of inequality so common elsewhere between the genders and different regions.

Legacy Admissions

Alex Tabarrok:

I admire but do not necessarily approve of the genius at UVA admissions who slyly inserted legacies into the essay prompt, yet shrewdly combined it with race, slavery and history to make the package defensible.

For teenagers, 18 is the new 14

Arnold Kling:

Steven Faerm writes,

they are prolonging adolescence and entering adulthood more slowly (Twenge 2017) by engaging much later in life activities that commonly mark the entry into adulthood. For example, since the mid-1990s, there has been a steady decline of high school seniors who have a driver’s license (down 14%), who go on dates, (down 36%), and who work for pay (down 30%).

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, from his Twitter feed. Faerm was recycling a chart from Jean Twenge and Heejung Park (2019). Not sure why it is news on Twitter now, but I wanted to mark it for future reference.

If we want all kids to become fully literate, we need to get more specific about “knowledge.”

Natalie Wexler:

Journalists are increasingly recognizing that the “science of reading” extends beyond phonics to include building the knowledge that enables comprehension. But they need to get more specific about what that looks like.

Media coverage of the reading crisis has focused on problems with instruction in phonics, as have many literacy advocacy organizations. That has led to a raft of state-level reform efforts that have tried to address those problems without also addressing equally serious flaws in the typical approach to reading comprehension.

What are those flaws? Throughout elementary and sometimes middle school, teachers have students practice comprehension “skills,” like finding the main idea of a text, on random topics deemed to be at their individual reading levels, which could be well below their grade level. The idea isn’t for students to gain any particular knowledge but rather to master the skills.

But cognitive scientists have long known that knowledge of the topic—or academic knowledge and vocabulary in general—are far more important to comprehension than supposedly abstract skills. And yet subjects that could build that knowledge, like social studies and science, have been marginalized or eliminated from the curriculum to make more time for comprehension skills practice. That leaves many students ill-equipped to understand the texts they’re expected to read at higher grade levels—even if they get good phonics instruction, which is also crucial.

That aspect of the reading crisis has gone largely unreported. But this year—and especially in the last few months—there’s evidence that the situation is beginning to change.

Politics and higher education

Ann Althouse notes:

“… a university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.’ But students over the years have frequently and successfully pressed their administrations to take positions on matters like police brutality, global warming and war. Dr. Summers said in an interview that he could understand the case for university neutrality in political disputes, but that Harvard had forfeited that prerogative by speaking out on many other issues. ‘When you fly the Ukrainian flag over Harvard yard, when you issue clear, vivid and strong statements in response to the George Floyd killing,’ he said, ‘you have decided not to pursue a policy of neutrality.’…

A policy of neutrality can be principled, but it’s not principled at all it’s applied on and off and as a matter of convenience. Once the university speaks out some of the time, the question becomes whether this is one of those occasions when the university should take a side. Does the fact that some students spoke out create such an occasion?

Commentary on Wisconsin k-12 enrollment data

Scott Girard

It’s the largest drop in enrollment in recent years other than the change from fall 2019 to fall 2020, the first year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, which saw a drop of 25,742 students.

Public school enrollment was already in decline before the pandemic, with a drop from 2018 to 2019 of 3,788 students. In each of the years since the pandemic began, the drop has been larger, at 3,866 students in 2021 and 6,470 students last year.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns

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

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

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

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zones of Choice

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

More.

Free Speech and the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard too

Aaron Sibarium

A tenured professor at the law school, Wax had sparked outrage earlier that year when she argued, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, that the United States should favor immigrants from countries with similar values to its own. Since those nations “remain mostly white for now,” Wax said, her approach implied that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites”—even though, she stipulated, the policy “doesn’t rely on race at all.”

In audio of the town hall obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Ruger told students that Wax’s comments were “racist” and had caused “harm.” He also suggested they could be grounds to fire her: It “sucks” that Wax “still works here,” Ruger said, adding that the “only way to get rid of a tenured professor” is a “process” that is “gonna take months.”

The town hall set the stage for a protracted battle over academic freedom. Since January 2022, Penn has been trying to sanction Wax—potentially by revoking her tenure and dismissing her—for statements the law school alleges violate its anti-discrimination policies. The case is testing the argument, aired by one of Wax’s colleagues, that a professor’s academic views can be so “offensive” that they “undercut” her ability to teach students and provide a “good case for termination.”

Wax’s views are undeniably controversial. She said in a 2017 interview that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class. She has argued that black poverty is self-inflicted and, in the context of immigration policy, expressed a preference for “fewer Asians,” citing their “indifference to liberty” and “overwhelming” support for Democrats. She even invited Jared Taylor, a self-described “white identity” advocate, to speak to her class on conservative thought, saying his views were “well within the subject matter of the course.”

Harvard:

This is hardly the worst thing about this statement, but I can’t get over the fact that the president of Harvard sounds like a 6th grade teacher. To give a sense of the decline, here is a speech from a Harvard president in 1961 saying roughly the same thing about free speech:

and

Harvard University faculty are world leaders in demanding greater online censorship in the name of “fighting disinformation.” But now, Harvard’s president is spreading disinformation about the university’s own record on free speech.

Politics and Men competing in women’s sports

Dan Lennington:

Rep. Considine would like their parents to know they just need to “work harder” since 435 boys currently have better times than the #1 girl & 691 boys have better times than the #5 girl

More.

University Donors, Close Your Checkbooks

Marc Rowan:

While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it. Do not just take my word for it; read their statements. Across academia, administrators issued statements on behalf of their institutions expressing a repulsive moral equivalence between victims of terror and the perpetrators of that terror. The antisemitic rot in academia is unmistakable.

At the University of Pennsylvania, where I sit on the Wharton School’s Board of Overseers, leaders have for too long allowed this kind of anti-Jewish hate, which sanitizes Hamas’s atrocities, to infect their campuses. There must be consequences.

I call on all UPenn alumni and supporters who believe we are heading in the wrong direction to close their checkbooks until President Liz Magill and Chairman Scott Bok resign.

It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival at the University of Pennsylvania to the barbaric slaughter of innocent civilians in Israel. Foreshadowing Hamas’s massacre, speakers at the gathering—hosted by various university departments and affiliates—advocated ethnic cleansing of Jews, referred to them as “European settlers,” and repeated various blood libels.

UPenn President Elizabeth Magill and Board Chair Scott Bok permitted UPenn to sponsor this conference and failed to condemn its hate-filled calls for violence. This is not a matter of free speech, but University-sponsored hate speech.

Notes on For Profit Colleges

The Education Department recently finalized a 775-page rule that restricts federal financial aid to proprietary colleges that purportedly fail to prepare students for “gainful employment.” The Obama Administration’s first such rule was blocked in federal court, and Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rolled back its redo.

For-profit college enrollment dropped to 777,400 students in 2021 from 1.7 million in 2010 amid an assault by Obama regulators and Democratic state Attorneys General. The Biden rule could shut down most of the survivors for failing arbitrary metrics that many nonprofit and public colleges couldn’t meet.

The rule’s first prong requires graduates’ debt to be equal or less than 20% of their discretionary income, or 8% of total income. The Education Department bases this threshold on a 2006 paper about student debt and mortgage-underwriting standards, which generally limit a household’s total debt payments to 43% of income.

Notes on Lawfare, taxpayer k-12 $pending and the Minocqua Brewing Company

Quinton Qlabon

I feel like when Minocqua Brewing Company turns in homework, it should not have factual errors in it.

Anticlimactic.

Locally, Madison spends > $25k per student.

Corrine Hess:

Wisconsin’s choice program serves over 52,000 students and plays a vital role in Wisconsin’s education system,” Esenberg said in a statement. “Unfortunately, far-left interest groups are uniting behind a Super PAC, to take education options away from low- and middle-income kids and families across the state.”

State Superintendent Jill Underly released a statement, saying she welcomes any opportunity that would strengthen public education.

“Education represents an incredible opportunity to learn, grow, and strengthen our state, but public education represents even more than that. Public education is a constitutional right,” Underly’s statement said. “Wisconsin needs to fulfill its responsibility to effectively, equitably, and robustly fund our public education system. I welcome any opportunity to move Wisconsin in that direction.”

The lawsuit is being funded by the Minocqua Brewing Company’s SuperPAC, which Bangstad has used since 2021 to fund liberal political causes.

The group has purchased billboard ads attacking Republican politicians and marketed beers named after Democratic politicians including an Evers Ale for Gov. Tony Evers and Tammy Shandy for U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

Bangstad first announced his efforts to end Wisconsin’s private school voucher system in August on social media.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

ACT test scores for U.S. students drop to a 30-year low

NPR:

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

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

Wisconsin public school students struggle with reading, math

Benjamin Yount:

Nearly 60% of students in Wisconsin’s Public Schools continue to be unable to read, write or do math at grade level.

The State’s Department of Public Instruction released the latest standardized test scores Tuesday, and they show 39.2% of public school students are proficient or better in reading, while 41.1% are proficient or better in math.

But those are the statewide averages.

Individual schools saw differing results, and the numbers show low-income students did worse across the board.

DPI’s numbers show 22.6% of low-income students are proficient in reading, and 23.1% are proficient in math. The numbers also show 42.2% of low-income students are rated minimal in reading, while 45.9% of low-income students are rated as minimal in math.

Notes on recent SAT results

Cremieux

The College Board has just released the SAT scores for this year!

Because they don’t report common sense effect sizes, I thought I’d put everything in familiar terms and make some plots.

This thread will include lots of pictures!

First up: how did everyone do, nationally?

College Reform

Tyler Cowen:

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the intro:

When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the US system remains very far from a fundamental transformation.

And:

This system [of numerically well-defined courseloads], which has been in place for decades, does not allow for much flexibility. If a professor is a great and prolific mentor, for instance, she receives no explicit credit for that activity. Nor would she if she innovates and discovers a new way to use AI to improve teaching for everyone.

This courseload system, which minimizes conflict and maximizes perceptions of fairness, is fine for static times with little innovation. If the university administration asks you for two classes, and you deliver two classes, everyone is happy.

Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT’s

Kristen Sze:

College admissions decisions disappoint thousands of high-achieving students each year, but one Palo Alto teen’s story is catching the attention of Congress.

Stanley Zhong, 18, is a 2023 graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto.

Despite earning 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT’s and founding his own e-signing startup RabbitSign in sophomore year, he was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to.

Kristen Sze: “I’m just wondering how you felt as each of these letters came in saying ‘no, thank you, Stanley'”?

Civics: “Courts should not insert themselves into partisan controversies.”

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit seeking to overturn Wisconsin’s Legislative Districts. The lawsuit was brought by several Left-leaning attorneys, who are trying to relitigate issues resolved just a year and a half ago.

Overturning the current maps would be unprecedented, and would deny voters their rightful representation. WILL’s intervention will allow voters of Wisconsin to defend their interests in this important case.

The Quotes: Rick Esenberg, WILL President and General Counsel, stated, “Make no mistake, this is a political assault on ‘democracy.’ The petitioners want the Court to ‘discover’ that our Constitution suddenly prohibits longstanding practices, and seeks maps they believe will favor their preferred candidates. Courts should not insert themselves into partisan controversies.”

Luke Berg, WILL Deputy Counsel, stated, “This lawsuit is a transparent attempt to use the new Wisconsin Supreme Court majority to reshape Wisconsin’s political landscape. The claims raised in the lawsuit are meritless. WILL stands ready to defend Wisconsin’s voters from this attack.”

Why We Are Intervening: Although the issues surrounding decennial redistricting were resolved by the Wisconsin Supreme Court just a year and a half ago, Petitioners are attempting to re-litigate that case. They ask the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare the current maps unconstitutional, draw new maps from scratch, and order all sitting state senators – including those with two years left on their terms – to undergo re-election in November 2024. WILL is intervening on behalf of voters from multiple state senate districts who would see their vote disenfranchised if the Court grants the remedy sought by the lawsuit.

One Culprit in Rising College Costs: Administrative Expenses

Lamont Jones, Jr.

As college costs continue their decades-long climb, pushing U.S. student loan debt to nearly $1.8 trillion and counting, rising administrative costs are likely to contribute to higher costs for students.

The central mission of higher education is teaching, but in recent years administration has enlarged as a share of institutional spending. Some observers and researchers who promote greater financial transparency and accountability in higher education are concerned that growth in professional nonteaching positions is generally outstripping faculty hiring, even as student enrollment declines.

Politics & School Choice: Texas Edition

Gabriel T. Rubin and Rosie Ettenheim:

“I am hopeful that we will be able to put together a package that will allow ESAs to get passed in the first special session,” he said on a recent visit to the Journal. If it doesn’t, “I can call another one right after it, which is what my game plan is to do. I can play this game longer than they can play this game.”

By “they” he means Members of the Texas House, chiefly Republicans representing rural districts, who stonewalled efforts to pass ESAs this spring. The state Senate passed a bill to provide ESAs worth $8,000 each to most students, but the House never voted on it.

ESAs still lack enough Republican votes in the 150-Member House. Their contradictory case against ESAs is that rural students won’t benefit from school choice because they have no options beyond district schools. But they also claim that rural district schools will be devastated if students use ESAs and leave for alternative schools that don’t currently exist. If ESAs inspire new school options in the future, then rural students would benefit like those in cities and suburbs.

It’s not as if Texas public schools lack for state funds. Some $5 billion is on the line in funding for district schools if the Legislature passes the ESAs, and a chunk of that is for teacher pay raises.

Why Now Is a Horrible Time to Refinance Student Loans

Borrowers facing down the return of federal student-loan payments might be tempted to refinance their loans in an attempt to save money. For many, that is a terrible idea.

With the Federal Reserve pushing interest rates to a multidecade high and new government programs offering the promise of low payments and possible debt forgiveness, personal-finance experts say refinancing would benefit only a handful of borrowers.

“It doesn’t make any sense to refi that because your costs are going to go up, not down,” said Jack Wallace, director of governmental and lender relations at Yrefy, a private student-loan company, speaking about those with undergraduate loans, the majority of student borrowers.

Starting in October, tens of millions of student-loan borrowers will need to make payments for the first time since the Education Department instituted a pause in March 2020.

Because federal student-loan payments and interest accrual were paused, few borrowers took advantage of the low rates earlier in the pandemic to refinance their loans, as many mortgage holders did. Sofi, a refinancing lender, said its volumes fell 90% when interest rates were set at zero. Now that the pause is ending, the window to refinance at low rates has closed.

Notes on Homeschooling

Ted Balaker:

Traditional schools segregate students by age, and expect them to spend six to seven hours per day in the same location. But it’s tough to learn about the real world when you spend so much time separated from it.

Homeschooling makes it easier to mix ages and environments.

My son regularly mixes with younger kids, kids his age, older kids, Gen Zers, Millennials, Gen Xers and members of the Silent Generation (he’s a little low on Boomers for some reason).

His regular environments include our home, a farm, various friends’ houses and parks (often for homeschooler meetups), jiu jitsu, soccer practice, church, the library, and his grandparents’ house where they take him to lunch and various outings.

Notes, Politics and our long term, disastrous reading results; Madison + State

Quinton Klabon:

1 year and $1 BILLION in federal relief later, it’s still tragic.

•6,000 fewer kids on college track
•101,000 kids below grade level
•Green Bay, Janesville stuck at pandemic low
•Milwaukee Black kids not catching up

Scott Girard:

In the Madison Metropolitan School District, proficiency rates in both subjects are well above the state for white students, but below the state for Black students.

Among the district’s white students, 64.3% scored either proficient or advanced in English language arts; among its Black students, it was just 8%, nearly the same as the 7.9% the year before.

In math, MMSD saw 60.7% of its white students test in the top two categories and 5.7% of its Black students do the same.

Institute for Reforming Government Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon said in a news release on the results that the state took a positive step forward with recent reading legislation, but was critical of how schools have spent their COVID-19 relief funding in recent years. Additional changes beyond the reading legislation will be required to make “Wisconsin’s schools our premier attraction for families once again,” he said.

“Wisconsin is quickly becoming a state where disadvantaged students do not succeed,” Klabon said.

More.

Corrinne Hess

Wisconsin continues to have the largest achievement gap between Black and white students

Fewer than 40 percent of Wisconsin students were proficient in reading and math during the 2022-23 school year. Standardized test scores were better than the previous two years but are still not back to pre-pandemic levels.

Results of the Forward Exam, a statewide test taken by Wisconsin’s 3rd through 8th graders, the PreACT Secure test given in grades 9 and 10 and the ACT given in grade 11 showed 38.9 percent of children were proficient in reading and 37.4 percent were proficient in math last year.

When taken alone, the Forward Exam showed Wisconsin students were 39 percent proficient reading and 41 percent proficient in math.

That’s up from a low of just over 33 percent proficiency in both reading and math during the height of the pandemic during the 2020-21 school year.

Prior to the pandemic in the 2018-19 school year, 41 percent of Wisconsin students scored proficient in reading and 43.4 percent in math.

State Superintendent Jill Underly said she’s proud of this year’s test results and the increased participation rate of nearly 95 percent of students being tested.

“I am also tired of politicians claiming that our children aren’t learning because they aren’t reaching a proficiency score,” Underly said in a statement. “Instead of using test scores as a cudgel, we should all take the time to learn what a high bar proficiency on this test represents, because the truth is that our proficiency cut scores are very high in comparison to every other state in the country.”

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Harvard Law Students, Freedom of Speech, War and outcomes

Chris Bakke:

The law students at Harvard are beginning to really sweat the fact that they might get fired from their first-year associate jobs helping Dow Chemical cover up pesticide spills in small town reservoirs, simply because they supported a terrorist organization in law school

Aaron Sibarium

Winston & Strawn has fired Ryna Workman, the president of the NYU Law Student Bar Association who declared her support for Hamas.

Schools Cut Honors Classes to Address Racial Equity. It Isn’t a Quick Fix.

Sara Randazzo:

Before science teacher Rachel Richards’s Silicon Valley high school eliminated honors classes in her department, teaching the non-honors courses meant you were in for a year of behavioral problems, she recalled.

Now, students from across achievement levels are taught together, and Richards has noticed the teenagers try harder and pay more attention to lessons. “You’re not considered uncool anymore for taking a class seriously,” she said.

Menlo-Atherton High School, where Richards has worked for a decade, is among a number of high schools nationwide that are trying to reduce racial segregation on campuses by eliminating two-tiered systems of honors and regular classes, primarily during freshman year.

The theory goes that starting everyone on equal footing gives more students the confidence and skills needed to enroll in honors and Advanced Placement courses in later years. The changes typically target Black and Latino students, who are underrepresented in advanced courses in most states.

The New Face of Nuclear Energy Is Miss America

Jennifer Hiller:

Does the U.S. need more nuclear power? Miss America thinks so.

So do Oliver Stone, Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Atomic energy is elbowing its way back into the conversation about future energy supplies, with backers in the Biden administration and oil and gas industries alike.

It has also re-entered the American zeitgeist thanks to movies, billionaire backers and a pageant icon.

Supporters of splitting atoms to make electricity as a way to fight climate change include Stone, who just released a documentary about nuclear power; Musk, who frequently calls himself a “believer”; and Altman, the head of the artificial-intelligence startup OpenAI, who plans to take a nuclear power startup public.

Grace Stanke, the reigning Miss America, is on a charm offensive for the industry as part of a year-long publicity tour.

“they set high standards and create a disciplined classroom culture”

David Leonardt

Among the reasons the Defense Department schools do so well:

Consistent with military culture, they set high standards and create a disciplined classroom culture. In 2015, the schools overhauled their curriculum using principles from the Common Core, a national program that many other districts have abandoned after criticism from both the political right and left. But the approach seems to benefit students. “Unlike the Common Core, which was carried out haphazardly across the country, the Defense Department’s plan was orchestrated with, well, military precision,” Sarah writes.
Defense Department schools are racially and economically integrated. Asian, Black, Hispanic and white students attend the same schools. So do the children of Army privates earning $25,000 a year and the children of high-ranking officers earning six-figure salaries.
The schools receive more funding than public schools in many states do. One teacher at an elementary school on Fort Moore in Georgia told The Times that she doubled her salary by switching from a traditional public school in Florida. The supply closets at Defense Department schools tend to be well-stocked, and teachers don’t have to pay for paper, pencils and books out of their own salaries, as is common elsewhere.
During the pandemic, the military’s schools reopened relatively quickly — and it’s clear that extended closures were terrible for children. By December 2020, 85 percent of students at Defense Department schools were learning in person, officials told Sarah. Only a handful of states exceeded that share, according to the Covid-19 School Data Hub. The share was below 10 percent in California, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and several other states.

“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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Weixin Liang1, Yuhui Zhang1, Hancheng Cao1*, Binglu Wang2, Daisy Yi Ding3, Xinyu Yang4, Kailas Vodrahalli5, Siyu He3, Daniel Scott Smith6, Yian Yin4, Daniel A. McFarland6, and James Zou1,3,

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?

Four reasons why 1% of the student population seems to be missing from Wisconsin schools

Rory Linnane

About 1% of Wisconsin’s estimated student population seems to be missing from school headcounts, a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found. The report relied on data from fall 2019 through fall 2022, as enrollment data for the current school year have not yet been released. The lead researchers, Sara Shaw and Ari Brown, found that during that time, public school enrollment fell by about 32,000 students. The total was 854,959 in fall 2019 and 822,804 in fall 2022. Most of that drop was easy to explain: birth rates continued declining, and many students moved into private schools and homeschooling.

Commentary on Trust

M. Anthony Mills:

The pandemic surely played a role, especially controversial policies such as school closures and masking young children. There’s little doubt the conduct of scientific, political and media elites contributed as well — from policy mistakes like the botched rollout of diagnostic tests to mixed and misleading messaging on masking to the dishonesty of politicians who failed to follow their own rules to efforts within government, the media and the scientific community to suppress dissent.

The English sociologist Anthony Giddens once observed that modern societies are uniquely dependent on trust, particularly trust in what he termed “abstract systems.” Members of smaller traditional societies are embedded in face-to-face relationships with neighbors, friends and family members. By contrast, we are dependent on a vast array of interconnected social institutions, especially expert institutions, which involve “faceless commitments” to those we do not (and usually cannot) know personally.

It is characteristic of these abstract systems that we cannot opt out, at least not entirely. Sustaining trust in them therefore becomes a basic requirement for the functioning of modern societies. Essential to this process is what Mr. Giddens calls “access points”: interactions between lay citizens and individual members (or representatives) of abstract systems; think of experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci or even your family physician.

more: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/10/we-are-dependent-on-vast-array-of.html

For Prospective PhD Students

Daniel Gonzalez:

are labs looking for in prospective PhD students? How should you initiate conversations with the PI? What type of research experience are programs looking for? These are some of the main questions on the minds of aspiring PhD students. If you’re applying for programs this cycle, hopefully you’re thinking hard about these topics. This blog is an attempt to give some answers based on my overall approach to recruiting. It’s a window to some of the hidden curriculum behind the process (at least from my point of view). I take a significant amount of inspiration from this perspective piece by Científico Latino, which proposes that one small way that PI’s can increase equity and access to PhD-level education is to be more transparent about their expectations for PhD applicants. Another great resource is this piece by Dr. Talia Lerner at Northwestern University.

In all honesty, I hesitate to write this. What do I know at this point? My lab hasn’t even officially opened and I have so little experience in hiring and recruiting. Yet, for some reason, I sort of just know what I’m looking for. Here are two random things I take comfort in when it comes to sharing my (potentially naïve) opinion on this topic:

Can large language models provide useful feedback on research papers? A large-scale empirical analysis.

Expert feedback lays the foundation of rigorous research. However, the rapid growth of scholarly production and intricate knowledge specialization challenge the conventional scientific feedback mechanisms. High-quality peer reviews are increasingly difficult to obtain. Researchers who are more junior or from under-resourced settings have especially hard times getting timely feedback. With the breakthrough of large language models (LLM) such as GPT-4, there is growing interest in using LLMs to generate scientific feedback on research manuscripts. However, the utility of LLM-generated feedback has not been systematically studied. To address this gap, we created an automated pipeline using GPT-4 to provide comments on the full PDFs of scientific papers. We evaluated the quality of GPT-4’s feedback through two large-scale studies. We first quantitatively compared GPT-4’s generated feedback with human peer reviewer feedback in 15 Nature family journals (3,096 papers in total) and the ICLR machine learning conference (1,709 papers). The overlap in the points raised by GPT-4 and by human reviewers (average overlap 30.85% for Nature journals, 39.23% for ICLR) is comparable to the overlap between two human reviewers (average overlap 28.58% for Nature journals, 35.25% for ICLR). The overlap between GPT-4 and human reviewers is larger for the weaker papers (i.e., rejected ICLR papers; average overlap 43.80%). We then conducted a prospective user study with 308 researchers from 110 US institutions in the field of AI and computational biology to understand how researchers perceive feedback generated by our GPT-4 system on their own papers. Overall, more than half (57.4%) of the users found GPT-4 generated feedback helpful/very helpful and 82.4% found it more beneficial than feedback from at least some human reviewers. While our findings show that LLM-generated feedback can help researchers, we also identify several limitations. For example, GPT-4 tends to focus on certain aspects of scientific feedback (e.g., ‘add experiments on more datasets’), and often struggles to provide in-depth critique of method design. Together our results suggest that LLM and human feedback can complement each other. While human expert review is and should continue to be the foundation of rigorous scientific process, LLM feedback could benefit researchers, especially when timely expert feedback is not available and in earlier stages of manuscript preparation before peer-review.

How Ibram X. Kendi Broke Boston University

David Decosimo:

The debacle that is Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research is about far more than its founder, Ibram X. Kendi. It is about a university, caught up in cultural hysteria, subordinating itself to ideology.

After suddenly laying off over half his employees last week and with his center producing almost nothing since its founding, Mr. Kendi is now facing an investigation and harsh criticism from numerous colleagues complaining of financial mismanagement, dysfunctional leadership, and failure to honor obligations attached to its millions in grant money.

Such an outcome was entirely predictable. In June 2020, the university hired Mr. Kendi, created and endowed his center, and canceled all “classes, meetings, and events” for a quasi-religious “Day of Collective Engagement” on “Racism and Antiracism, Our Realities and Our Roles,” during which Mr. Kendi and his colleagues were treated as sages.

They denounced voter-identification laws as “an expressly antiblack form of state violence,” claimed Ronald Reagan flooded “black communities with crack cocaine,” and declared that every black person was “literally George Floyd.” One speaker said that decades ago “literal uprising and rebellion in the streets” forced the creation of black-studies programs in universities nationwide, and now was the time to revolutionize the “whole institution” and make antiracism central to every discipline and a requirement for all faculty hiring.

Could this be a first step in breaking the SAT and ACT duopoly?

Florida’s state university system will now accept the Classic Learning Test in college admissions, after the board of governors voted this month to approve the CLT as an alternative to the national testing duopoly of the SAT and ACT. Whether the classic test will catch on is anybody’s guess, but credit to its creators, and Florida, for giving it the college try.

The media coverage has been highly amusing. “The College Board, which oversees the SAT, said there is little evidence proving the CLT can adequately assess college preparedness,” NPR reported. Big news: Coke thinks Pepsi doesn’t adequately quench thirst. Colleges will surely figure out how to benchmark the CLT as it comes into use, and its makers will probably adjust after getting more data on student outcomes.

Inside Higher Ed said critics argue the CLT “places too heavy an emphasis on biblical passages and traditional Western thought,” including texts from “largely white men with questionable positions on race, LGBTQ+ rights and multiculturalism.”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: US State Economic Growth Comparison