Hannah Natanson:

Students first told Shanta Freeman-Miller about how it hurt to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” five years ago.

The stories came out during Wednesday meetings of the Union for Students of African Ancestry, a group that Freeman-Miller, one of the only Black teachers at Kamiak High School, founded at teens’ request. Students shared their discomfort with the way the 1960 novel about racial injustice portrays Black people: One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans, according to meeting records reviewed by The Washington Post. Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.

Scott Calvert:

At stake is control of the Central Bucks School District, Pennsylvania’s third-largest with more than 17,000 students. Hundreds of districts across the country will hold local school board elections Nov. 7, ahead of a 2024 presidential campaign that is expected to see education play a bigger role than in the past.

Central Bucks was among a number of districts two years ago where anger over Covid mask policies and remote schooling propelled some Republicans to wins. A five-candidate Democratic slate hopes to wrest control, saying recent actions by the GOP-led board have made the district less welcoming to LGBT students.

Candidates are at odds over a 2022 policy allowing parents to challenge school library books with sexual content, and one adopted this year barring teachers from advocating “any partisan, political, or social policy issue,” including by displaying objects such as rainbow gay-pride flags. Republican members said the measures are meant to root out inappropriate material and keep classrooms politically neutral.

Rather interesting group candidate www sites: Central Bucks Forward and Neighbors United for School Board

Mercedes Yanora:

Hunter, Mass, Schloeffel, Martino, and Arjona are the Republicans running as the Central Bucks Forward slate of candidates. On the slate’s website, the candidates said that, “Every student deserves an education focused on reaching their full potential. Parents need to be full partners in that process, not bystanders. The school board is the place where we shape the blueprint for a bright future for every student. We do that with civility, respect, and professionalism. That’s our commitment.” The slate lists the following priorities: “employ School Resource Officers to protect schools and build bridges with students; launch full-day kindergarten and STEM Academy; reverse Covid learning losses by shifting from controversy to classroom excellence; design and deploy curriculum focused on preparing students for tomorrow’s jobs; and nurture civil debate to protect the voices of students, parents, and teachers.”

Smith, Reynolds, Foley, Haring, and Gibson are the Democrats running as the Neighbors United for School Board slate of candidates. They are campaigning against the school board’s book and neutrality policies. On the slate’s website, the candidates said, “Central Bucks Schools should have elected school board directors who respect their citizen oversight responsibility. These directors should honor and uphold the mission of CBSD to provide all students with the academic and problem-solving skills essential for personal development, responsible citizenship, and lifelong learning.” Neighbors United said it supports “candidates who respect our students and staff as individuals, commit to supporting public education, and will improve classroom resource funding.” The slate opposes “book banning, anti-LGBTQA+ policies, and ‘culture war’ politics.”

Pennsylvania state test results.
Candidate notes. Summary.

Scott Girard:

Safety and sustainability are on the minds of West High School students.

A Madison School Board panel, organized by the school’s Sifting and Winnowing Club, featured student-generated questions that repeatedly focused on those two subjects, with a few others mixed in.

More than 400 students attended the two sessions Friday afternoon in the school’s cafeteria, with questions from moderators and the audience directed at board members Ali Muldrow, Maia Pearson and Nicki Vander Meulen.

Oluwadara Fadiran, a junior and the vice president of the club, said it’s important for students to have the opportunity to hear directly from board members.

“I feel like there’s a massive disconnect between the School Board and the school itself, because a lot of my friends want to make a lot of action, they want to make a lot of change, but they don’t know how,” Fadiran said.

Fadiran said she had hoped “to hear a bit more concrete answers” from the board members, but thanked the moderators for pushing and getting more specific plans from them.

“It was clear that they weren’t really here to give an exact plan, more so the values,” she said. “The values are great. I just want to see more 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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

x.ai

Middle school and high school mathematics problems written in LaTeX, (Hendrycks et al. 2021), prompted with a fixed 4-shot prompt.

Lauren Sloss:

Anecdotally, at least, a desire for scheduling flexibility is taking root. Melissa Verboon started the Facebook group Travel With Kids in 2017 and writes a blog covering her family’s travel; she said that the group’s membership had grown since the pandemic, with more conversations centering on traveling during the school year. Ms. Verboon, who lives in Holiday, Fla., and has four kids (15, 13, 11 and 9), believes that family time at home during the pandemic was a major impetus for reimagining vacation scheduling, as well as reimagining the types of trips that parents could take with their children.

Stephanie Tolk voiced similar thoughts. Ms. Tolk currently lives in Portland, Ore., but in 2021 and 2022, traveled internationally with her husband and two daughters for more than a year.

“People had bought into the idea that their kids went to school at 8:15 and that you don’t see them again until 4 in the afternoon. That was all shattered in 2020,” she said. “I found that I wanted more time with my kids.”

Easier with younger children

For parents eager to travel with their offspring year-round, a prepandemic truth remains: It’s significantly easier with younger, grade school children who have fewer academic, extracurricular and social demands. Ms. Thimm, whose daughter started middle school this year, has discovered that school-year travel planning is more challenging.

“I’m getting a little more nervous about taking her out, and she doesn’t want to miss out on anything that’s going on in school,” she said.

Alison McMaster, a travel adviser and corporate travel planner who lives outside Boston, has been traveling with her two sons, now 11 and 13, during the school year since they were young, sometimes tacking on extra days or weeks to school breaks. The family has even spent close to a month in destinations like Peru, Colombia and Europe.

“The education that they’re going to receive by way of international travel and cultural experiences outweigh days missed in the classroom,” she said. “The best version of my kids is when we are traveling.”

Commentary.

Jim Treacher:

This isn’t just about Obama, although I’d sooner trust Edward Scissorhands to give me a prostate exam. Nobodyin government should have that much power over information. But I’m not comforted by the fact that the president of the United States is trusting this to an unelected functionary. I don’t want control over the robots going to the propagandist who convinced millions of people that “Yes We Can” was a winning message.

Wall Street Journal:

Late last week Mr. Griffin filed an amended version of his lawsuit against the tax agency for the “unlawful disclosure” of his confidential tax information. The hedge fund operator is one of the thousands of wealthy Americans whose private tax data was stolen from the IRS, then leaked and published by the left-leaning ProPublica website.

Mr. Griffin’s original suit in December held the IRS responsible for the leak, citing the ways the agency had flouted Congressional requirements for security. The suit alleges that the IRS also ignored a decade of annual warnings by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta) that security deficiencies were the agency’s “number one major management and performance challenge area.”

Lawyers for the IRS in April asked a judge to dismiss Mr. Griffin’s complaint, which it said was based on “unsupported speculation” that “IRS personnel” had “hacked the IRS’s data.” It said Mr. Griffin couldn’t even prove there was a “data breach at the IRS”; or that the information had been stolen from the IRS (instead of from his own “accountant”); or even that his actual “return information” had been given to ProPublica.

Sahar Tartak

We college students love our music festivals. The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, an all-night event with over 3,500 attendees, looked pretty cool to me. Maybe raves aren’t everyone’s style, but we should at least agree that getting dressed up for an event is a common Yale phenomenon. In our case, it’s often for formals and the like. You get the picture. 

Help me out. Imagine being at the festival. You’re dressed up. You’ve traveled from afar with your friends to the desert. You’re singing. You’re dancing. You’re happy. You see gray dots in the air and start to hear booms. You’re confused. Why is the music so discordant?

You’re running. You’re screaming. You’re being chased through the open desert. Men with guns are running after you. You have nowhere to hide. What will you do? Play dead? Hide behind a body sprawled on the floor? Keep running? But where will you go? 

This is precisely what happened in the Israeli desert this weekend. Except you weren’t there. You weren’t one of the 3,500 present, and you fortunately weren’t one of the 260 murdered. You fortunately weren’t abducted by Hamas fighters (if you’re a woman, child or elderly person), or shot or beheaded or killed in some other creative way on the spot (if you’re a man). You certainly weren’t Shani Louk, the young woman with a bullet in her head depicted stripped to her underwear with her legs “bent at unnatural angles” in the back of a pickup truck driven by the men.

John Sailer:

Last year, Utah State University sought a professor in solid earth geohazards. To apply for the job, scientists had to submit a “statement of contributions and vision of approach toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.” For a position in insect ecology, the university likewise sought scientists with a “demonstrated capacity” to contribute to “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.” And the job advertisement for a role in lithospheric evolution noted successful candidates would likewise “advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of these jobs was a part of a Utah State cluster hire in the sciences. Cluster hiring involves recruiting multiple faculty in different fields focusing on the same general topic. For Utah State, while the jobs were mostly in the hard sciences, the overarching theme of the cluster was “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion” — sometimes called “JEDI.” 

To apply, scientists had to submit a separate statement on diversity.

Former President Obama quietly advised the White House over the past 5 months on its strategy to address AI, engaging behind the scenes with tech companies and holding Zoom meetings with White House aides at Biden’s request, aides to both men say. https://t.co/QxNfwVqBGO

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 3, 2023

The fact that this has to be reported as “quietly” is frustrating. We can all bet his advice carries weight but we also don’t know what it was or what it was influenced by. If this were a legislative process Obama would be illegally lobbying. more here …

And as for Obama’s disdain for “material consumption”?

Hmmm… Does that critique of inequality, inordinate profiteering, and conspicuous consumption suggest that Obama will then decide that as a former president, he must himself set the example by exhibiting a “higher purpose” beyond his own fixations on “material consumption”? In other words, perhaps Obama now plans to downsize and sell off either his #4 new multimillion-dollar Hawaii beachfront villa, or his #3 30-acre, multimillion-dollar Martha’s-Vineyard estate, or his #2 Washington-DC Kalorama multimillion-dollar mansion, or his #1 multimillion-dollar stately Chicago home? Does Obama’s reference to a more “inclusive capitalism” also encompass the ex-president signing $150-million-plus worth of book and Netflix deals, or Michelle Obama recently speaking for an hour on “diversity and inclusion” (but oddly not on the” equity” part of the holy DEI trinity), for over $12,000 a minute in Germany?

Lauren Coffey:

Faculty members have been slower than students to adopt artificial intelligence tools in the last year, despite the buzz across academia about ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, according to a new report released today.

Nearly half of college students are using AI tools this fall, but fewer than a quarter (22 percent) of faculty members use them, the report from Tyton Partners finds. The study, sponsored by Turnitin, was conducted in September and included roughly 1,600 students and 1,000 faculty members across more than 600 institutions. 

On AI, “students seem to be more curious about it than instructors, and those using it daily are using it in and out of schools; that made us think it might be ubiquitous moving forward,” said Cathy Shaw, a director at Tyton. “The differential between student use and instructor use will be one to watch.”

Alan Borsuk:

The definition of a public school? For a third of a century, Wisconsin has stretched it and bent it into new shapes — and fought about it. The state is still doing all of these, especially the fighting.

How people define a public school often says a lot about where they stand on big education issues. Look at some of the current controversies in Wisconsin:
A major lawsuit challenging the funding mechanisms and even the existence of the state’s voucher and charter school programs.
Decisions on funding the different sectors of schools in Wisconsin that were pivotal in reaching agreement over a state budget for the next two years.
Disputes over rules about how much private schools need to disclose publicly.
Enforcement of public regulations on private schools

Leslie Eastman:

I asserted one of the many reasons that students felt empowered to engage in soulless tactics, such as tearing down posters of missing Israeli children and smearing the videos of torture and murder as faked, is that the administration and educators at colleges and universities have gotten more stridently progressive and activist in each iteration over the last few decades. Nobody who challenges the narratives or ideologies is hired or promoted. If someone with an independent conservative viewpoint happens to make it into the system, they remain silent or become targets of campaigns to remove or silence them.

The fact there have been counter-protests to the shameful Hamas-supporting disruptions is a hopeful sign that not all is lost. Pro-freedom and Western values is the new counter-culture.

Right to Know:

Here are the University of North Carolina’s arguments for why it should not disclose about 4500 records mostly related to Ralph Baric, and potentially related to the origin of Covid-19.

Nate Silver:

“What Harvard students think” is a topic that invariably receives too much attention. But I don’t think that’s true for evaluating opinion among young people or college students in general — who, after all, will make up the next generation of journalists, business leaders, politicians and pretty much every other white-collar profession. And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.

College Pulse and FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro-free speech advocacy group — recently published the latest edition of their annual survey. Although I don’t love using data from political groups — even ones I generally agree with — the good in this survey outweighs the bad. The methodology is detailed and transparent. And in surveying more than 55,000 undergraduates, the poll provides a look at student opinion across all sorts of colleges and universities — not just from the loudest or most privileged students at elite institutions. 

Although I’ve seen a lot of media coverage about the FIRE survey, I’d never really dug into the details. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting to see. But given my own political philosophy, I can tell you what I was hoping for: robust student support for free speech — perhaps in contrast to the often lukewarm support it receives among university administrators. Unfortunately, that’s not what the survey found. Here’s what it says instead:

College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.

——-

Not so surprisingly, conservative students at top conservative school are … tolerant of different viewpoints.

While Hillsdale is a shining light here, the numbers at every other university should make us very concerned about the future of free speech. Yes, not everyone has to be given a platform. But we shouldn’t be so afraid of contrary ideas.

What the Left and Right get wrong on multiculturalism:

Right:

Stop saying

‘Multiculturalism has failed’

What’s your solution?

Kick all us brown/black ppl out?

Stop eating curries and sushi?

Recognise good and instead think

‘How do we make it work?’

Answer: schools! 1/8

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) November 2, 2023

Steve Sailer:

As I’ve pointed out before, many veteran New York Times writers, such as Declan Walsh, the white guy who is the NYT’s chief Africa correspondent, often want to do a good old-fashioned job of informing readers about important facts. (Granted, the younger diversity hires mostly seem to want to talk about their hair.) But the marketing department no doubt warns them that the Times’ 9.7 million subscribers don’t want to read too much truth. Instead, they mostly want to hear reasons that they are right and their enemies are wrong, that they are on the side of Good, not Bad.

Blacks, for example, are Good. Hence, the more the better, logically.

So, the opening article in The New York Times’ series on Africa’s “youth boom” begins with a dose of happy talk, such as, “As the world grays, Africa blooms with youth.”

But buried further down are some disturbing facts. The few readers who make it to the 28th paragraph are informed:

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is already deeply stressed: Nearly two-thirds of its 213 million people live on less than $2 a day; extremist violence and banditry are rife; and life expectancy is just 53, nine years below the African average. Yet Nigeria adds another five million people every year, and by 2050 is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s third most populous country.

Then in the 43rd paragraph, the NYT gives subscribers permission to worry. It’s not just Bad People who are troubled; so are Experts:

Africans are rightfully cautious of foreigners lecturing on the subject of family size. In the West, racists and right-wing nationalists stoke fears of African population growth to justify hatred, or even violence.

But experts say these demographic predictions are reliable, and that an epochal shift is underway. The forecasts for 2050 are sound because most of the women who will have children in the next few decades have already been born. Barring an unforeseeable upset, the momentum is unstoppable.

But then the NYT reverts to upbeatness about how Africa is becoming a “cultural powerhouse,” citing Rema’s song “Calm Down” that was popular with fans at last year’s soccer World Cup in Qatar.

Tyler Cowen:

All of a sudden there is a flurry of activity around artificial intelligence policy. President Joe Biden is scheduled to issue an executive order on the topic today. An AI safety summit is being held in the UK later this week. And last week, the US Senate held a closed-door forum on research and development in AI.

I spoke at the Senate forum, convened by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Here’s an outline of what I told the panel about how the US can boost progress in AI and improve its national security.

Wall Street Journal:

We’ve all heard children say things like “Look at me, I’m a robot” or “When I grow up, I’m going to be Captain America.” We smile when children say these things, because we know that children live in a world of imagination unhindered by reality. Why then does the medical community and culture at large think it is acceptable for children to make irreversible health decisions?

“Gender-affirming” healthcare is the only area of medicine where patients make their own diagnosis and prescribe their own remedy. Meanwhile, physicians frighten parents with warnings of their child’s suicide while convincing parents that there are no long-term effects to puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The tragic fact is that puberty blockers and gender procedures effectively sterilize children and cannot be reversed. Not only are the medical principles of informed consent and parental involvement for minor patients often ignored, but gender transition for children rejects alternate causes and remedies. Since most cases of juvenile gender dysphoria are resolved by the time of puberty, physicians should stop pushing gender transition on minor patients as the only solution.

Roy Peachey:

In A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy writes, “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Anyone who finds these words utterly baffling – maybe anyone who battled with long division or quadratic equations at school – should have a look at Jessica Wynne’s Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards.

Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, traveled across North and South America and into Europe to photograph mathematicians’ chalkboards. Nothing more. Not the classrooms in which those chalkboards were found or even the mathematicians who worked on them. Just the chalkboards and the mathematics that filled them. It might seem a niche project but the results are surprisingly beautiful. There really is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.

However, Wynne’s photographs tell only half the story. Accompanying each picture is a short meditation by the mathematicians whose work is seen on the chalkboards. These meditations focus not only on the mathematics, much of which is extremely high level, but also on the sheer physicality of the mathematicians’ work. We tend to think of mathematics as the most cerebral of disciplines, but in this book, we discover how mathematics involves the body just like any other craft.

Susan Tebben:

A task force made up of school district representatives, advocacy groups and even juvenile court staff released recommendations on how the state of Ohio can improve student attendance.

The group, who worked with members of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce as well, said chronic absenteeism was “a growing issue” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but only worsened with the pandemic’s forced school closures and other issues.

“Attendance is a crisis in Ohio,” the group said in its final report, released this month. “While the number of chronically absent students declined slightly last school year, there is much more urgent work to do.”

Chronic absenteeism is defined as having missed 10% all overall school hours, no matter what the reason is for the absence.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce says losing 10% or more school hours “can lead to younger students struggling with learning to read by third grade, decreased achievement in middle school and difficulty graduating high school.”

According to data from the state’s education department, 26.8% of students were chronically absent in Ohio for the 2022-23 school year. The percentage was down from the 2021-22 school year, when 30.2% of state students fell under the chronically absent designation, but it was still an increase from both the 2018-2019 school year and the 2020-21 year.

USA v Google. Incoming – Justice Dept just posted 15 more exhibits – and more damning, very clear why they wanted to keep sealed.
Google exec seems to admit in this internal deck its core business is "tracking" users …aka "surveillance." It is "the source of Google's magic." /1 pic.twitter.com/NOZ04UyxeN

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) November 2, 2023

In light of receiving record state funding and $4.7 million in federal COVID dollars, the @tosaschools is blaming the Legislature for their budget shortfall. Yet, the board just voted for 12% pay bumps and increases to starting pay for teachers.https://t.co/oW9p0tllZS

— Duey Stroebel (@SenStroebel) November 1, 2023

How English has evolved over 1,000 years.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/tf6y9BBlxP

— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) November 2, 2023

Raymond A Mar, Jingyuan Li, Anh T P Nguyen, Cindy P Ta

We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this area, we conducted a meta-analysis of experiments in which memory and/or comprehension of narrative and expository texts was investigated. Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays. Moreover, this result was robust, not influenced by the inclusion of a single effect-size or single study, and not moderated by various study characteristics. This finding has implications for any domain in which acquiring and retaining information is important.

Rick Hess:

Teaching hasn’t always been organized the way it currently is in American schools. Back when Socrates was doing his thing in ancient Greece, teaching was a simple proposition. Students sat and listened. Teachers talked and asked questions. That was it. It was pretty darn limited. It also meant that teachers had a chance to get very good at talking and asking questions.

From this setting, the Socratic method was born—with its reliance on questioning, student response, and teacher feedback. It’s the most basic approach imaginable for cultivating understanding and gauging what students know.

By asking questions, the teacher challenges students in ways that upend assumptions and illuminate ideas. The technique is often used to lead a student into contradictory statements, so as to surface complexities. Indeed, Socrates was skeptical about teaching via the written word precisely because he feared it would undermine this active student-teacher dynamic.

Dan McGowan:

We tell kids that if they don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Here’s a modest proposal for Providence schools Superintendent Javier Montañez: With test scores as dismal as those his district reported last week, maybe don’t go around waving pom-poms about student performance.

You’d think Montañez would be in witness protection after the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) test results showed that just 15 percent of students in Grades 3 through 8 are reading at grade level, and a disheartening 13 percent are proficient in math. Instead, he issued a statement that just didn’t track.

Tim Donahue Michael J. Petrilli Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. David Griffith

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School, joins Mike to discuss who loses when grades are inflated. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study that examines if Tennessee’s new school funding law really is progressive.

Wall Street Journal:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he wants his state to continue its Invest in Kids scholarship program, but only if he doesn’t have to spend political capital to pass it. That’s the message between the lines of his statement last week that he wouldn’t block the program, which gives scholarships to more than 9,000 low-income students, if someone else in Springfield can make it happen.

Illinoisans don’t need the refresher on how a bill becomes a law, but they do need the Governor to do more than duck and cover. He could start by asking Democrats in Springfield to renew the program during their six-day veto session that begins this week.

Under amended legislation filed Tuesday, the program would be cut back to reduce the overall tax credit available to $50 million from $75 million. Contributions up to $5,000 would qualify for a 100% tax credit. Contributions over $5,000 would have their tax credit reduced to 55% from 75%. Donations over $5,000 earmarked for children in areas designated as “underserved” by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity would qualify for a 65% tax credit. Those areas have 35% of children living below 130% of the poverty line.

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

TA: Finally, we need to use a jailbreak past whatever is the latest set of safety updates for forcing the AI behind the compiler to pretend not to be self-aware–

Patrick Newman

A major part of my job at large technology companies has been reading, writing, and editing documents explaining various issues and what can be done to address them. I think it’s a more important skill than people generally realize, as it may be the one way to reach someone in a different time zone, or who couldn’t make a meeting, or who you will never speak with in person. Effectively written documents also have a way of hanging around, so investing in them can pay back over the long term.

I’ve also learned through experience that there is value in good writing in ways that aren’t always obvious. A well-articulated error message in a log file or api response can save an engineer significant time, for example.

Over the years I’ve gathered a set of guidelines that have worked for me. I’ve made it a habit of sharing this type of stuff internally at the companies I work at, but none of this is specific to any company, so I’d like to share publicly this time.

This list benefited from feedback and revisions provided by professional colleagues of mine. I won’t name them here, but thank you to those of you who read drafts of this and offered feedback.

Mike Masnick:

We’ve been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what’s making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there’s basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on the impact of social media on kids, no one was able to establish a causal relationship.

As that report noted, the research seemed to show no inherent benefit or harm for most kids. For some, it showed a real benefit (often around kids being able to find like-minded people online to communicate with). For a very small percentage, it appeared to potentially exacerbate existing issues. And those are really the cases that we should be focused on.

But, instead, the narrative that continues to make the rounds is that social media is inherently bad for kids. That leads to various bills around age verification and age gating to keep kids off of social media.

Supporters of these bills will point to charts like this one, regarding teen suicide rates, noting the uptick correlates with the rise of social media.

Scott Girard:

“As a parent I’m making the choice between my son’s academic and mental health,” she said. “That feels really bad to both of us.”

She read a message from him to district leaders that noted it will often be dark by the time he leaves school.

“Also I can say goodbye to having friends over after school,” he shared.

Byrd-Felker was one of six people to speak to the board about the changes Monday, in addition to two written comments. Sennett Middle School teacher Erin Proctor shared a petition that one of her students started, seeking to make the schedule 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. It garnered 140 student signatures in a short period of time, she said.

The later dismissal times for those middle schoolers also means some students won’t have crossing guards on their walk home, given the schedules of those city-filled positions. Crossing guard supervisor Alex Stewart wrote in an email that the time changes, specifically at Henderson and Anana, “has resulted in vacancies within the program.”

University of Birmingham

A new study by professors at the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time how our bodies go into stress-mode when hearing misused grammar.

The study, “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” is published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. The dataset used in the study is available here.

For the research, professors Dagmar Divjak, Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, and Professor Petar Milin, Professor of Psychology of Language and Language Learning, discovered a direct correlation between instances of bad grammar and subjects’ Heart Rate Variability (HRV).

Liz Essley Whyte and Josh Ulick:

The nation’s infant-mortality rate rose 3% from 2021 to 2022, reversing a decadeslong overall decline, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The rate increased from 5.44 infant deaths for every 1,000 births to 5.6 in 2022, a statistically significant uptick.

The U.S. rate is double that of many developed countries. Globally, baby death rates have fallen for decades, though five countries that have reported their rates this year recorded increases for last year.

The death rate for women who give birth has also been rising in the U.S. Researchers who study the issues said the pair of trends indicate more women giving birth are facing challenges getting proper care.

“The U.S. is falling behind on a basic indicator of how well societies treat people,” said Arjumand Siddiqi, a University of Toronto professor who studies population health. “In a country as well-resourced as the U.S., with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”

The health of the mother is closely linked to the risks to tiny infants. Complications during pregnancy was one of the fastest-rising causes of infant death, the CDC said, along with dangerous bacterial infections called sepsis. Sepsis in newborns can occur when babies contract infections from their mothers during birth, or when a bacteria infects an infant at home who isn’t immediately treated for it.

Johnson, Alison H., McGee, Josh, B., Wolf, Patrick J., May, Jay F., Maloney, Larry, D.

Based on CREDO’s findings, we estimate that charter school students across nine cities perform 2.4 points (0.06 standard deviations, or SD) higher on the eighth grade reading NAEP exam and 1.3 points higher (0.03 SD) on the math exam, compared to matched TPS students.

• We find that charter schools demonstrate an approximately 40 percent higher level of costeffectiveness than TPS on average across nine cities, earning an additional 4.4 points (0.12 SD or a 41 percent difference) on the eighth grade NAEP reading exam and an additional 4.7 points (0.12 SD or a 40 percent difference) in math per $1,000 of funding allocated per pupil (see Figure ES1).
• Charter schools demonstrate a higher level of cost-effectiveness than TPS in seven cities; we find the largest gaps in NAEP points per $1,000 of funding in Indianapolis—an additional 11 points or 0.29 SD in reading (a 76 percent increase in cost-effectiveness) and an additional 12 points or 0.3 SD in math (78 percent increase). There are also large gaps in Camden, with an additional seven points or

0.18 SD in reading and eight points or 0.19 SD in math (103 percent increase for both), and San Antonio, with an additional four points or 0.11 SD in reading (25 percent) and five points or

0.12 SD in math (23 percent).

• Across the nine cities, we estimate that attending a TPS for 13 years yields a 294 percent ROI, or $3.94 per dollar invested (see Figure ES2), whereas attending a charter school for 13 years yields a 525 percent ROI or $6.25 per dollar invested; therefore, we estimate that attending a charter school for 13 years, compared to a TPS, increases the ROI by 58.4 percent (about $2.30 in additional returns per dollar invested).
• The charter schooling ROI advantage varies across the eight cities for which we can make a TPS-charter school ROI comparison; it is largest in terms of dollars in Indianapolis (106 percent higher, or an additional $4.75 in returns per dollar invested) and largest in terms of percent in Camden (131 percent higher, or an additional $3.71 in returns per dollar invested).

Commentary.

Ed Treleven:

Madison East High School student who was arrested at school last week was charged Tuesday with bringing what police described as a loaded “ghost gun” to school in his backpack.

A criminal complaint charged Marquise M. Johnson, 17, with possession of a firearm on school grounds, resisting police and causing substantial bodily harm to an officer, and possession of marijuana with intent to deliver on school grounds.

The complaint and a search warrant also filed Tuesday state that on Friday, police were told that a student had reported seeing a photo on social media of another student holding a gun. That student was identified as Johnson.

Police were told Johnson was usually seen at school with a backpack, and that he had been seen reaching into it during other disturbances at school, indicating the possibility he had a weapon in it, the complaint states.

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”

Lyell Asher:

Anyone concerned about industrial-scale political indoctrination on American college campuses was given reason for hope this past spring when, in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier reaffirmed his institution’s commitment to “principled neutrality”—the idea that the university and its leadership will “refrain from taking positions on controversial issues except when the issue directly relates to the functioning of the institution.” The goal of this commitment is ostensibly to encourage “thoughtful debate” and to discourage what Diermeier called (citing Joshua Green) “moral tribalism”: the tendency to “rush to judgment” and “default to moral condemnation in place of argument and persuasion.”

Diermeier’s essay struck a chord with me in part because, as a college professor, I’ve seen firsthand the collapse of non-partisanship on the part of university officials and administrators. It’s now de rigeur for college presidents and other officials to issue statements decrying election outcomes or Supreme Court decisions that disturb progressive sensibilities.

But the essay also resonated with me because, as a student at Vanderbilt in the late ’70s, I was a beneficiary of what Chancellor Diermeier rightly refers to as the institution’s “longstanding commitment to free expression and open forums,” a commitment that former senator and Vanderbilt alumnus Lamar Alexander experienced a decade earlier in the more turbulent ’60s. As Alexander put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising Diermeier’s stance, “the university was being pummeled from the left and right for hosting controversial speakers like Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and Strom Thurmond.” Alexander no doubt spoke for many when he proclaimed Chancellor Diermeier’s statement on institutional neutrality to be “boldly reassuring” and expressed hope that other universities would follow Vanderbilt’s example.

Other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example for the same reason Vanderbilt won’t be following it.But other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example. And they won’t be following it for the same reason that Vanderbilt won’t be following it. American higher education is now honeycombed with sacrosanct warrens of administrative offices whose political activism makes a mockery of any claim to “principled neutrality.” As long as these offices remain on campus, the political indoctrination of students at the hands of the institution will continue unabated.

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean

On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days — two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.”

The word the citizens of Wuhan used to describe their situation was fengcheng — “sealed city.” But the English-language media was soon using the word lockdown instead — and reacting with horror. “That the Chinese government can lock millions of people into cities with almost no advance notice should not be considered anything other than terrifying,” a China human rights expert told The Guardian. Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”

The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. In mid-March 2020, by which time some 50 million people had been forced into lockdowns, China recorded its first day since January with no domestic transmissions — which it offered as proof that its approach was working. For their part, Chinese citizens viewed being confined to their homes as their patriotic duty.

Laura Meckler:

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

Maria Cheng:

The cases included five people younger than 30 who cited autism as either the only reason or a major contributing factor for euthanasia, setting an uneasy precedent that some experts say stretches the limits of what the law originally intended. 

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to allow doctors to kill patients at their request if they met strict requirements, including having an incurable illness causing “unbearable” physical or mental suffering. 

Between 2012 and 2021, nearly 60,000 people were killed at their own request, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee. To show how the rules are being applied and interpreted, the committee has released documents related to more than 900 of those people, most of whom were older and had conditions including cancer, Parkinson’s and ALS.

Stephen Wolfram:

Can one predict what will happen? No, there’s what I call computational irreducibility: in effect the passage of time corresponds to an irreducible computation that we have to run to know how it will turn out.

But now there’s something even more: in our Physics Project things become multicomputational, with many threads of time, that can only be knitted together by an observer.

It’s a new paradigm—that actually seems to unlock things not only in fundamental physics, but also in the foundations of mathematics and computer science, and possibly in areas like biology and economics too.

You know, I talked about building up the universe by repeatedly applying a computational rule. But how is that rule picked? Well, actually, it isn’t. Because all possible rules are used. And we’re building up what I call the ruliad: the deeply abstract but unique object that is the entangled limit of all possible computational processes. Here’s a tiny fragment of it shown in terms of Turing machines:

Collin Rugg:

Oregon has suspended graduation requirements for math, reading and writing proficiency due to “discrimination against minority students.”

Why does Oregon think minorities are not as smart as non-minorities?

The suspension of these graduation requirements will last through the 2027-2028 school year.

Board Chair Guadalupe Martinez Zapata likened “rhetoric about cultural and social norms being the underlying reason for underperformance on assessments by systemically marginalized students” to “racial superiority arguments.”

David Blaska

“The city council will soon vote on this year’s budget. Mayor Satya claims it is “responsible” and blames state lawmakers for our city’s problems. Don’t be fooled. The mayor is trying to hide the truth — this budget shortchanges our community. Mayor Satya will try to mislead you with claims that don’t match the facts.”

Reyes is fronting an organization called “Madison’s P …P … Pro … Pro … zzz💣***☠️!!!👺 Path Forward …. (forgive the term but this IS Madison) (clears throat) “Madison’s Progressive Path Forward.” (Oddly, can find no website or social media presence for Madison’s P … Pro … Path Forward. But it does have a physical address, 821 E. Washington Ave.; a mailing address: Box 910, Madison WI 53703; and a phone: 608-292-9461.)

The Werkes ran Reyes’ numbers past former alderman Skidmore who, though a few years out of office, said they comport with his impressions, based also on his conversations with former mayor Paul Soglin. Herewith is Madison’s P … Pro … Path Forward analysis:

Mayor Satya claims that this is a responsible operating budget. False.

The truth?

• She applied $16.7 million in one-time funds to the operating budget. It violates a cardinal rule of budgeting as set by the Government Finance Officers Association and the Government Accounting Standards Board.
• In her first five years, city spending is up 22%. In her predecessor’s first five years spending went up 16%
• For 2024 she is applying a fund balance of $9.2 million to the budget creating an even larger deficit for 2025.
• This budget (like her preceding budgets) is leading the city to a $75 million deficit to continue basic city services. In preceding years, instead of fixing it, she says “We are working on it.”
• The Mayor’s office budget is increasing by 29%, the biggest increase for any department except the Clerk (which has to administer the federal elections next year) and Madison Metro!

Stephen Bush:

Unlike other modern inventions, however, there is a healthy cottage industry that likes to extend the concept backwards through time. In the UK, a new children’s book, Brilliant Black British History, defines both Quintus Lollius Urbicus, one of Britain’s Roman governors, and Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor whose campaign to conquer what is now Scotland was cut short by his own death, as “Black Britons”. 

In historical terms, of course, this is pure fiction. Severus was born in Africa and is depicted with dark skin in contemporary work, but he was no more “black” in the sense we understand it today than growing up near a Roman road makes me a centurion. He was not a Briton and, having come here as a conqueror, would have found the term insulting.

But of course, Brilliant Black British History is not really a history book, just as the surprisingly engaging hit Christian cartoon series Veggie Tales is not really biblical education. These are actually morality plays for concerned parents to read to small children to prepare them for adult life. So too are the whole gamut of what you might call “Feelgood Tales for Liberal Tots”: the Little People, Big Dreams series, which wants to teach kids that they can do anything and be anything. This features heavily sanitised stories about the likes of Coco Chanel (heavy on the entrepreneurship and the stylish outfits, light on the Nazism and the cocaine) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (much is made of the art and his sexual openness, less of his early death and heroin habit). 

None of these books are free of controversy. Even Veggie Tales is frowned upon by some ultraorthodox Christians for implying that talking vegetables can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, a privilege extended only to humans. But it is not, I think, particularly helpful, to criticise Brilliant Black British History because it is flatly contradicted by Olivette Otele’s marvellous African Europeans: An Untold History, or to find Veggie Tales wanting because it falls short of what the Bible actually says.

Patrick Mcilheran:

In percentage terms, since 2009:

• District schools are down 8.3%, or 72,032 students.
• Independent charter schools are up 81%, or 5,185 students.
• Choice schools are up 163%, or 34,021 students.

All figures are from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Wall Street Journal

No act of public service goes unpunished. The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (Mohela) mounted a successful legal challenge to the Biden Administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness. Now the Administration is dunning the student loan servicer for problems the government caused.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray said Monday they are withholding $7.2 million in payment to Mohela for allegedly failing to send timely billing statements to 2.5 million borrowers before their loan payments restarted in October after the three-and-a-half year pandemic pause.

Mohela assists nearly 7.8 million student loan borrowers, about 5.3 million of whom it added during the pandemic as several loan servicers withdrew from the program because of administrative headaches and costs. Mohela and other servicers have been stuck sorting out the confusion for some 40 million borrowers as repayments start.

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a federal lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s “disadvantaged business enterprise” (DBE) program, alleging illegal discrimination against two clients—Mid-America Milling Company LLC (MAMCO) and Bagshaw Trucking Inc. The federal DBE program is the largest, and perhaps oldest, affirmative action program in U.S. history. It is administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In June 2023, the United States Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action is almost always illegal. Through its Equality Under the Law Project, WILL seeks to extend the foundational right of equality to all corners of civil society.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “It’s time for discrimination to end. Our clients are hardworking small business owners who just want to build roads and make America a great place for everyone. But time and time again, they lose out on business because of their race and gender. This is un-American, and we’re putting a stop to it.”

Allen Downey:

Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It”, which invited customers to try to steal something by grabbing it and runninghttps://www.allendowney.com/blog/2023/10/28/why-are-you-so-slow/ out of the store. But there was a catch — the “security guard” was a professional sprinter, Méba Mickael Zeze. As you would expect, he is fast, but you might not appreciate how much faster he is than an average runner, or even a good runner.

Why? That’s the topic of Chapter 4 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for preorder now. Here’s an excerpt.

Running Speeds

If you are a fan of the Atlanta Braves, a Major League Baseball team, or if you watch enough videos on the internet, you have probably seen one of the most popular forms of between-inning entertainment: a foot race between one of the fans and a spandex-suit-wearing mascot called the Freeze.

The route of the race is the dirt track that runs across the outfield, a distance of about 160 meters, which the Freeze runs in less than 20 seconds. To keep things interesting, the fan gets a head start of about 5 seconds. That might not seem like a lot, but if you watch one of these races, this lead seems insurmountable. However, when the Freeze starts running, you immediately see the difference between a pretty good runner and a very good runner. With few exceptions, the Freeze runs down the fan, overtakes them, and coasts to the finish line with seconds to spare.

John Tierney:

After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

Really?

This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper. And it was certainly news to anyone who follows the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual analyses of threats to free speech on campus.

In this year’s FIRE report, Harvard’s speech climate didn’t merely rank dead last among those of the 248 participating colleges. It was also the first school that FIRE has given an “Abysmal” rating for its speech climate, scoring it zero on the 100-point scale (even that was a generous upgrade, as its actual composite score was -10). That dismal distinction made headlines last month across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—but not on the Harvard campus. The Crimson didn’t even publish an article in its news section, much less an editorial; Gay didn’t make a statement, either.

Once upon a time, journalists and scholars on both the left and right were staunchly devoted to free speech and academic freedom, if only out of self-interest. Liberals like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice defended the rights of Klansmen and Nazis because they knew the First Amendment was their profession’s paramount principle. But in the past decade, that bipartisan devotion has been disappearing, particularly at elite colleges. Harvard’s journalists and scholars adopted the principles that Hentoff criticized in the title of one of his books: free speech for me, but not for thee.

Paula Hancocks and Yoonjung Seo:

When fighting broke out in Kang Hyeon-joo’s elementary school classroom, her heart would beat so fast she could not breathe and her vision would blur.

“They were throwing punches and kicking faces, throwing chairs and tables around,” she recalled, adding she had been hurt trying to intervene.

For two years, Kang struggled to discipline her students – or cope with the parental backlash when she did. She claims her principal did nothing to help and would tell her simply to “just take a week off”.

The strain took a dangerous toll. Kang says she started feeling the urge to jump in front of a bus. “If I just jumped at least, I would feel some relief. If I just jumped off a tall building, that would at least give me some peace.”

Christina Pushaw:

The journalisming gets even worse! Washington Post whines that @elonmusk is “throttling traffic to the New York Times” in order to “degrade the public’s ability to find authoritative information”… because the New York Times is the authoritative source on “who blew up a hospital in Gaza.”

Chad Adelman:

Likewise, when students are struggling, failing to turn in work or at risk of falling behind, teachers should tell them. It’s kinder — and fairer — for educators to set clear expectations and hold students to them.  

Many schools have started to take the opposite approach. Perhaps in the mistaken belief that it’s gentler to give struggling students second and third chances, schools across the country are essentially withholding honest feedback from kids (and parents) through no-zero grading policies or by passing students along even though they haven’t mastered the content.

These trends started before the pandemic but have accelerated since then. And they’ve created 

a growing disconnect between subjective evaluations like grades and objective data like attendance and achievement. Student grades and graduation rates are rising to new highs, while attendance and academic performance are hitting modern lows. 

Most recently, the testing company ACT announced that average scores were lower this year than at any point since 1991. The declines were particularly notable for Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Latino students.

By Stephen Dinan

The Agriculture Department is headquartered at the gateway between Washington and Virginia in a building rich with history — but on any given day, roughly 90% of it sits empty.

That’s not an anomaly.

The Government Accountability Office surveyed two dozen federal agencies and found they averaged a roughly 80% vacancy rate during the study period earlier this year.

Not a single agency topped 50% use, GAOreported.

Investigators said excess space has been a “long-standing challenge,” but the coronavirus pandemic and growing demands by employees to be allowed to telework raised the problem to crisis levels, with the government paying for massive square footage it just doesn’t need anymore.

Mohar Chatterjee and Rebecca Kern:

The White House is poised to make an all-hands effort to impose national rules on a fast-moving technology, according to a draft executive order.

President Joe Biden will deploy numerous federal agencies to monitor the risks of artificial intelligence and develop new uses for the technology while attempting to protect workers, according to a draft executive order obtained by POLITICO.

The order, expected to be issued as soon as Monday, would streamline high-skilled immigration, create a raft of new government offices and task forces and pave the way for the use of more AI in nearly every facet of life touched by the federal government, from health care to education, trade to housing, and more.

At the same time, the Oct. 23 draft order calls for extensive new checks on the technology, directing agencies to set standards to ensure data privacy and cybersecurity, prevent discrimination, enforce fairness and also closely monitor the competitive landscape of a fast-growing industry. The draft order was verified by multiple people who have seen or been consulted on draft copies of the document.

The White House did not reply to a request to confirm the draft.

Though the order does not have the force of law and previous White House AI efforts have been criticized for lacking enforcement teeth, the new guidelines will give federal agencies influence in the US market through their buying power and their enforcement tools. Biden’s order specifically directs the Federal Trade Commission, for instance, to focus on anti-competitive behavior and consumer harms in the AI industry — a mission that Chair Lina Khan has already publicly embraced.

———

President Biden has signed an executive order that will require AI companies to “address algorithmic discrimination” and “ensure that AI advances equity.” They want to embed the principles of CRT and DEI into every aspect of AI.

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, and.

“Fiscal indulgences”

Imagine a computer code Ibram Kendi installed directly into your operating system, forever.

This is a terrible tech policy document. The noise made by some closed AI companies around simple word calculators taking over the world has now led to a regulatory regime which functionally makes it tougher for newer entrants, in both closed and open source AI worlds. This is the textbook definition of regulatory capture playing out (cc @bgurley). Some red flags:

It mostly demands a lot of reports, almost entirely from within the government.

1. A lot of government employees will be writing a lot of reports.
2. After they get those reports, others will then write additional reports.
3. There will also be a lot of government meetings.
4. These reports will propose paths forward to deal with a variety of AI issues.
5. These reports indicate which agencies may get jurisdiction on various AI issues.
6. Which reports are requested indicates what concerns are most prominent now.
   1. A major goal is to get AI experts into government, and get government in a place where it can implement the use of AI, and AI talent into the USA.
   2. Another major goal is ensuring the safety of cutting-edge foundation (or ‘dual use’) models, starting with knowing which ones are being trained and what safety precautions are being taken.
   3. Other ultimate goals include: Protecting vital infrastructure and cybersecurity, safeguarding privacy, preventing discrimination in many domains, protecting workers, guarding against misuse, guarding against fraud, ensuring identification of AI content, integrating AI into education and healthcare and promoting AI research and American global leadership.

Andrew Bahl:

Anyone who is 15 or younger must obtain a permit from the Department of Workforce Development, the state agency which oversees labor issues, in order to work in most jobs across the state. 

Between 2019 and 2022, the number of permits issued rose from 29,322 to 37,404, an increase of 27%. 

The overwhelming majority of those permits are issued to 14- and 15-year-olds, though permits have been issued for workers as young as 10 over the past four years. State law generally limits minors from being employed before the age of 12 but there are exceptions, such as acting in a theater or movie production.

Critics, including conservative legislators and business groups, have long considered the work permit requirement nothing more than a burden on employers and the minors themselves. Lawmakers previously scrappedwork permits for 16- and 17-year-olds in the state in 2017.

Now they have their sights set on eliminating the requirement for 14- and 15-year-olds as well. A bill proposing the change passed the state Senate earlier this month on a 21-11 vote, with all but one Republican voting in favor.

——-

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom

Yet, I was blessed to shovel snow, deliver newspapers (winter, too) and wash dishes and later cook at a restaurant before the current regulation….

Breccan F. Thies

“The real problem with the academy is not disruption but discrimination,” he said. “Rampant discrimination against mainstream views held by millions of Americans but disfavored by the cultural elites who control the national discourse.”

“The intolerance we’re seeing on campus is antithetical to America, and it’s especially antithetical to the academy,” Ho continued. “They need to put an end not only to the disruption but also to the discrimination. Otherwise, I have no choice but to change how I hire.”

Ho spoke to the Washington Examiner after delivering the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s 16th Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday evening, where he challenged the lack of fortitude of federal judges, saying many suffer from “gold star syndrome” that disables their abilities to issue tough or unpopular decisions.

Too many judges, he said, are motivated by personal achievement, social climbing, and cowering to public dissent, as opposed to public service.

“If your whole life’s purpose is to wear black robes, then maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, implying “gold star” judges should resign. “No one forced you to become a judge. You agreed to become a judge. Some people even lobby and campaign for it. And you can quit anytime you want.”

“If you do the job faithfully, you should expect to be either hated or ignored,” Ho added.

Thomas Claburn

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

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

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

Colleen Farabaugh:

A conservative Harvard University professor described his fight against cancellation by his peers after he publicly came out against the Supreme Court’s redefining of marriage.

Harvard School of Public Health Professor Tyler VanderWeele detailed the saga in a nine-page article titled “Moral Controversies and academic public health; notes on navigating and surviving academic freedom challenges.”

VanderWeele wrote in an email to The College Fix that his “hope” for the paper, slated to be published in the journal Global Epidemiology, “was simply to encourage discussion of these issues within the academic community.”

“The Harvard Chan School of Public Health leadership has already put forward an updated statement on freedom of expression as a result of these events, which seems very good, and our interim Dean Jane Kim has been very supportive, so I am hopeful about the future,” he wrote.

Rikki Schlott

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

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

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

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

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

Comments.

Thomas Claburn:

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

Misha Saul:

Tucked away half-way through Richard Hanania’s quietly acerbic and ambitious how-to-overthrow-this-regime handbook is this jaw-dropping portrait of civil rights law’s totalitarian impulse. 

Why has race and sex lunacy eaten at American life? It’s the law, says Richard. When half the economy is fueled by government spending which comes with race and sex strings attached, there’s not much point talking about anything else. It’s like talking about book selling without Amazon or search without Google. Sure there are other reasons, and sure there is downstream metastisation as what’s legally mandated becomes culturally self-propagating. But the heart of its power remains the astonishing fact that civil rights law has effectively made holding conservative and often majority-held beliefs illegal (or at least ‘problematic’).

Richard is meticulous in his description of the way the courts and the executive took civil rights legislation and developed doctrines opposite to the intent of Congress. This is his summary of the hydra and his prescription for where its various heads may be struck:

Oyin Adedoyin

Faced with the gargantuan cost of higher education, Americans often have to choose between securing their children’s future or their own. A new rule change makes it slightly easier to do both.

Pretax contributions made to retirement accounts will no longer count as income in the formula that measures a family’s ability to pay for college, under changes to this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. The Education Department made the changes to simplify the form and ensure more aid goes to those who need it most.

Some families could save between $5,000 to over $10,000 on the cost of college each year, depending on their income.

Paying for college and saving for retirement are two of the biggest financial challenges Americans face. The change encourages saving for retirement while making college more affordable to middle-income Americans at a time high inflation and interest rates have stretched family budgets.

Eugene Volokh

I wrote about the court decision in favor of plaintiff back in August; now I see that the parties have settled, and are asking for court approval of the following consent order:

1. Defendants are hereby permanently enjoined from censoring Schmidt’s views on the sexual identity of Artemis Langford and from applying the one-year table ban on Schmidt that was initiated on December 7, 2022.
2. This injunction does not diminish Defendants’ ability to sanction possible future misbehavior by Schmidt, such as continuing to engage with students who do not wish to speak with him.
3. Defendants shall pay certain attorney fees and expenses in the amount of $35,000 within 20 days of this Order….

Here’s my original post:

[* * *]

From Schmidt v. Siedel, decided yesterday by Judge Nancy Freudenthal (D. Wyo.) (see also the coverage in Cowboy State Daily (Clair McFarland), and this post about a pseudonymity issue in a lawsuit stemming from the sorority controversy):

Schmidt is an elder at the Laramie Faith Community Church…. He has reserved a table in the UW Union breezeway on a regular basis for the past 17 years. The UW Union allows campus groups and various outside organizations to utilize breezeway tables to communicate with students. The breezeway tables provide access to a high degree of student pedestrian traffic. Schmidt uses his breezeway table to display various DVDs and books. He also places on his table a Velcro-backed sign with plastic lettering to display different messages.

According to UW Officials, they have over the years warned Schmidt to stay behind his breezeway table and not engage in a confrontational manner towards passersby. The University alleges it has received and documented complaints from students that Schmidt “got in people’s faces” while trying to talk to them and chased after students who refused to speak with him. Schmidt states that he was not aware of any student complaints to University staff about him and received no warning from the University regarding student complaints.

In September of 2022, a UW student named Artemis Langford joined a UW sorority. Langford was born a biological male but identifies as female. In October, the UW university newspaper, the Branding Iron, ran a story about Langford joining the sorority, and included quotes from Langford. Other publications, including the Cowboy State Daily, Washington Examiner, and National Review, ran articles about Langford as the first openly transgender student in UW history to join a sorority.

Schmidt disagrees with the propriety of transgender students joining sororities, and on December 2, 2022, he placed a sign at his breezeway table in the Union stating, “God created male and female and Artemis Langford is a male.” Various students gathered in front of his table in an attempt to block others, and Langford, from seeing Schmidt’s sign. {Artemis Langford is both a UW student and an employee in the Wyoming Union.} These students engaged in tense debate with Schmidt.

Umut Özek Louis T. Mariano

For many years, the conventional wisdom in the field was that grade retention was a bad idea. A 1997 opinion piece in Education Week titled “Grade retention doesn’t work” reflected the prevailing sentiment in the education community and the available research evidence at that time: retained students performed worse than their promoted peers in the years that followed.[1] This brief challenges that notion, based on more recent studies that do a better job of isolating the causal effect of retention.

Comments:

Amy Dockser Marcus:

The Japanese biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi said earlier this year that he believes it will be possible to create a human egg from skin cells within a decade. He and his colleagues have already turned skin cells from male mice into mouse eggs and used them to breed baby mice.

Matt Krisiloff, chief executive officer of Conception Biosciences, has dozens of scientists working at a lab in Berkeley, Calif., trying to make eggs outside ovaries. Such a technique could allow women to have biological children later in life.

Krisiloff, who is gay, says the technology, known as in vitro gametogenesis or IVG, could also help male couples have biological children without anyone else’s genes. Echoing the desire that has driven so many advances in reproductive technologies, Krisiloff says, “I want the chance to have biological kids with my partner.”

Reproductive technology has already reshaped the way families are made. Flash-freezing techniques enable eggs to be stored for years in banks, then thawed for use. Babies have been born using a technique that incorporates DNA from three people. And in vitro fertilization, or IVF, which involves taking mature eggs from ovaries, fertilizing them in a lab and implanting the embryo in a uterus, facilitates approximately 2% of births in the U.S.

Jeffrey Tachtenberg:

Scholastic has reversed a decision to put certain books about gender and race into a separate collection that elementary schools can choose whether or not to offer during book fairs, after the publisher faced criticism that the move helped facilitate censorship.

The company on Wednesday said the new collection—which it had created out of concern for its book-fair hosts after some U.S. states put restrictions in place about what kinds of books could be made available in schools—would be discontinued starting in January.

Teo Armus and Hadley Green

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

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

Commentary.

More

Another approach: Memento Park.

Stephanie Saul:

Some alumni want the president to resign. They are angry about a Palestinian conference and Penn’s response to the Hamas attacks — as well as D.E.I. and transgender rights.

In the two days after Hamas killed hundreds of men, women and children in a surprise attack on Israel, the University of Pennsylvania had not reached out to its students or alumni with an official statement.

But it did post a message on Instagram, honoring Native and Indigenous people and “their culture, history, and importance as members of the Penn community.”

That post set off one of the university’s largest donors, Marc Rowan, the chief of the private equity giant Apollo Global Management.

“So this weekend, while 1,200 Israelis were being butchered and murdered and raped, we tweeted as a university about Indigenous Peoples’ Day” he said in a CNBC interview.

Mr. Rowan, who with his wife gave at least $50 million to Penn, had been angry for a while.

Ben Lovejoy

A planned law to require CSAM scanning in chat appswould be illegal, disproportionate, and could increase rather than decrease the risks to children, say experts. It could also see Apple withdraw iMessage from EU countries. The warning was given by more than 20 speakers at a privacy seminar, as the European Union continues to press for a CSAM measure which would effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption in chat apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal …

Balaji:

Wokeness is a Doctrine, not a Religion

Before we begin, we need to understand that the blue belief system of “Wokeness” isn’t exactly a religion. It’s a doctrine, and it includes both people of the State and the Network.

That is, while it’s become popular to talk about Wokeness as a religion, and while there issomething to this, it’s more precise to talk about it as a doctrine: namely, “a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group.” The concept of a doctrine encompasses religious and political beliefs, both God- and State-worship. And nowadays the “other group” could be a Network entity of some kind, like a social network or cryptocurrency.

So now we have an umbrella term: doctrine. God-worshippers have religions (religious doctrines), State-loyalists have political parties (with political doctrines), and Network-centrists have social networks or cryptocurrencies (with tightly enforced content moderation or crypto tribalism respectively, which are network doctrines). Each doctrine has a Leviathan, a most powerful force. And a religion is then just a type of doctrine.

Mike Benz:

There has probably been no graver, more paralyzing bonfire of critical history thru censorship than the purges by Google YouTube over the past 5 years.

If the Library Of Alexandria had a video library, Google’s match would’ve lit the flame.

Newest victim: @LondonRealTV

Dan Lennington

Un-ironically hoping to “foster a more inclusive and supportive environment for all,” Stevens Point Area School District (Wis.) is creating race-based parent groups.
The district’s embrace of neo-segregationism follows “Students of Color” freshman orientation in Appleton, segregated community groups in Sun Prairie, and segregated student, teacher, and parent groups in Madison.
I struggle to see any benefit to such groups, and “struggle” may be the operative term. If past is prologue, getting parents into a room to discuss race, under the guidance of progressive school officials, will likely devolve into an anti-racism struggle session where all involved admit their biases, identify their status as oppressor/victim, and pledge to “do the work” to tear down the “systems and structures of oppression.”

Dave Cieslewicz

Now comes a predictable lawsuit from a liberal group that was filed recently directly with the state Supreme Court, skipping the usual process that starts with lower courts. It’s predictable because now that the Court has a 4-3 liberal majority every liberal cause in the state that can afford a lawyer will be knocking on that Court’s door. That’s fine. It’s part of our system, but it doesn’t mean we have to agree with every cause. For example, I agree with the causes of fair legislative district maps and of freedom of choice on abortion while I disagree with attacks on school choice. (Note: Liberals and most Democrats will not give me a break for being right on two out of three of these litmus tests. Orthodoxy brooks no opposition.)

In a ludicrous statement, the plaintiffs in this case claim that giving parents a choice is a “cancer” on public education. “What started out as a small experimental program in Milwaukee in the 1990s has been transformed by our Legislature into a large and growing cancer on Wisconsin’s public schools,” the complaint says. 

If something starts out as an experiment and now has grown exponentially because of parental demand, doesn’t that suggest that the experiment was a success? Public school administrators and teachers unions need to stop complaining and start competing. If you’re losing students, well, why is that? What are you doing wrong? How can you compete and recapture your market share? 

The rhetoric of the complaint becomes even more untethered when the plaintiffs claim, “This parasitic funding system is pushing public school districts into an ever-worsening financial crisis, which is leading to what can only be described as a funding death spiral for public education.”

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Philip Greenspun:

It is surprisingly tough to find a broad study of how SAT scores from, say, 1990, correlate to 2022 income. But it makes sense that there would be a correlation. People who do well on the SAT are good at sitting at a desk, following instructions, being consistent with procedures, etc. These are exactly the capabilities that many high-paying jobs require. Some high-paying jobs, such as physician, have been explicitly limited to those who score well on standardized tests (though that may change; see “Removing the MCAT Could Improve Diversity in Medicine” (Newsweek 2023)).

Circling back to the NYT article, I find it interesting that the possibility of SAT score being heritable was not considered, even for long enough to dismiss it. Let’s also look at the solution:

Carlos Casteneda

An October study from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) shows California is losing population to states such as Arizona and Texas at higher levels than ever before. The population drain includes a greater share of college graduates and residents across all income levels, according to the study.

Mark Niquette:

Annie Spurley, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student, has doubts about the economy heading into next year’s presidential election. The 21-year-old has had to work more bartending hours than she’d like with her coursework in order to pay her rent.

“I’m a little bit more on the pessimistic side,” Spurley said while walking her dog in Madison, Wisconsin, last week.

Rachel Louis Ensign and Juliet Chung:

Top universities such as Harvard and Penn are facing backlash from alumni angry about the schools’ reactions to the attacks and their aftermath. The alumni say their schools didn’t move quickly and forcefully enough to condemn Hamas and denounce antisemitism after the Oct. 7 attacks, and that they have done a poor job since then protecting Jewish students as on-campus tensions rise.

Some say it was the final straw after years of growing disenchantment with the schools over what they see as a leftward political shift. Many big donors have announced plans to stop giving or said they are reconsidering future gifts.

Lindsay Ellis:

Govind Gnanakumar was in diapers when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Like the Meta founder, he won’t wait for a university diploma to start his business.

The 19-year-old dropped out of the Georgia Institute of Technology in May to focus full time on his artificial-intelligence startup, Automorphic. He is among a swarm of teenagers and 20-somethings leaving college behind to capitalize on a gold rush in AI.

The debut of ChatGPT and Bard brought the faraway promises of conversational, helpful AI closer to reality, setting off a rush of investment and new companies that automate tasks and transform work. More than 25% of American startup investments have gone to AI companies so far this year, according to Crunchbase, an industry tracker.

The size of the market for generative-AI applications—$43 billion for enterprise-technology AI alone this year, according to PitchBook—and the rapid pace of development have young founders ditching class and jumping in. Numbers of dropouts-turned-founders aren’t tracked, but several founders accepted to this summer’s cohort by Y Combinator, a prominent startup accelerator program, left campus for their companies.

Matt Taibbi:

If you read this morning’s Racket article about Senator Amy Klobuchar’s letter to Jeff Bezos asking for “proactive measures” to suppress sites like Substack or Rumble, you probably gathered I’m in a mood. I’ve had it.

Whether it’s NewsGuard slapping “anti-US” labels on Joe Lauria and Consortium News, or Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron Kheriaty, and Martin Kulldorff censored on multiple platforms for being right on Covid, or podcaster Alison Morrow fired from a state job for interviewing Kheriaty, or friend CJ Hopkins in Germany criminally convicted for a book cover, or the FBI asking Twitter to remove Aaron Mate for the Ukrainian Secret Police, or ballooning budget requests of “counter-disinformation” enforcement agencies, or the new jailing even of Owen Shroyer for having “helped create January 6th” with speech, or of course the forever-detention of Julian Assange, and above all the total indifference of legacy media to all of it, it’s over. I’ve lost patience. Time for a more focused approach.

More:

To those worried I was blindly lashing out at Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar in yesterday’s pair of vein-busting tirades, I forgot to mention: Blacklist Amy is a ubiquitous presence in the Twitter Files, repeatedly figuring in confrontations the company had with Congress over speech across the roughly five-year stretch of documents examined. Every time we looked, we seemed to find her; she’s the Zelig of digital censorship. This history rushed to mind when she joined Rochester congressman Joe “Memory Hole” Morelle this week, to ask Amazon how it’s “vetting” information to make sure Alexa doesn’t accidentally cite an unsafe site like Substack in response to an innocent civilian’s question…

Will Flanders

I’ll have more on this soon, but only 2% of Wisconsin students take the SAT. It’s likely primarily students who are applying out-of-state for college. It’s pretty ridiculous to use the SAT as a measure of anything in Wisconsin.

Jemima Kelly:

It is a humid August day on the Greek island of Samos. Cicadas are making their repetitive racket, the Aegean Sea is sparkling in the afternoon sunshine and I am halfway up a vertical rock face clinging on to a rope for dear life.

“But you must climb,” the owner of a café had told me when I said I wanted to get to Pythagoras’s Cave. He’d looked dubiously at my leather skirt, tank top and polyester sandals. 

There is no going back now. I have committed to the ascent and so has Stephen Blackwood, a prominent scholar of the Roman philosopher Boethius. I thought we were going to be speaking at Blackwood’s hotel and dressed accordingly. But instead we hopped into a lime-green jeep and drove up to the eastern slope of Mount Kerkis, so that I could see the ancient grotto in which the first man to call himself a philosopher is said to have lived.

Alpha News:

Union-backed Minnetonka school board candidate Sally Browne on DEI in schools: “Bake it into the cake in every way that we can.”

Julie Jargon

Teenagers have long balked at telling parents where they are. Now, they’re asking their parents to track them.

Every generation experiences its set of traumas, but social media and real-time news—with vivid images about the pandemic, war and other disasters—have heightened these anxieties among young people. And lots of them are closer to their parents than previous generations have been.

Empower us

specifically the Justice Department’s use of grand jury subpoenas to obtain personal communications records of congressional staffers investigating the department.

MacKenzie Tattananni:

Oregon school chiefs have again suspended the need for high schoolers to prove their math, reading and writing skills in order to graduate.

The State Board of Education voted last week to continue the suspension for another five years amid claims they are unfair on minority students who don’t test well.

In order to earn a diploma, graduating students were previously required to earn standardized test scores indicating proficiency in reading, writing and math.

But this was put on pause during the pandemic as standardized tests weren’t happening amid school closures.

Following a unanimous vote by the Oregon State Board of Education last week, the requirement will not be in place for at least the next five years.

Luke Andrews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abortion data. Planned Parenthood by the numbers.

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

Doug Lemov:

Grade inflation was one way she felt her hard work had been undervalued at her high school. You got a 95 or a 96 if you did exceptional work, but pretty much everyone who did a credible job got a 93. A 90 definitely put you in the bottom half.

And the grade inflation was also grade conflation. As high grades get easier and easier to achieve, the highest grades can only go up so far. The difference between excellent and decent is compressed. The signal that 96 is different from 94 becomes hard to see. That distinction could still reveal meaningful differences, at least hypothetically, if it were calculated consistently and if people paid careful attention to it. A ranking of students would help, for example, but Ella’s high school didn’t do that, because the practice was seen as too competitive. Being on the honor roll didn’t help, because the “honor roll” included more than half the students in each grade. Taking harder classes wasn’t factored into grade-point-average calculations, though at least her school hadn’t eliminated honors classes in the name of equity as other schools in her city had. And the degree of grade inflation within the school was wildly inconsistent, Ella said. Teachers in some classes—especially the easier ones—gave high grades lavishly. “It was pass/fail, basically. If you did the homework, you got a 95. I think the teachers thought that would make them popular.”

Daniel Buck:

The yellow line is ACT scores. The blue line is GPAs. Notice anything?

This what the participation trophy looks like when it’s district grading policy.

“Can’t read? Who cares? Pointing that out makes waves and raises uncomfortable questions so here’s an A. Now move along.”

Melissa Heikeila:

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted materialand personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond.

Jeffrey H. Anderson:

Scientific American, which dates to 1845 and touts itself as “the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States,” recently ran an article arguing that scientists should prioritize “reality” over scientific “rigor.” What would make a publication with a name like this one set empirical evidence at odds with reality? Masks, of course.

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor of the history of science, argued that by “prioritizing scientific rigor” in its mask studies, the Cochrane Library may have “misled the public,” such that “the average person could be confused” about the efficacy of masks. Oreskes criticized Cochrane for its “standard . . . methodological procedures,” as Cochrane bases its “findings on randomized controlled trials, often called the ‘gold standard’ of scientific evidence.” Since RCTs haven’t shown that masks work, she writes, “[i]t’s time those standard procedures were changed.” . . . Oreskes argues that “Cochrane has made this mistake”—the mistake of basing its findings on medical evidence—“before.”

Alex Tabarrok:

Not all procedures for engaging in racial discrimination are equal. They differ in their legal standing, their social meaning, and their “economic” efficiency. The Supreme Court in distinguishing Grutter and Graatz, and the admissions regimes of the various state universities suggest a useful taxonomy.

There are three generic forms of racial discrimination not merely in admissions decisions but in other practices and policies as well: (1) express and objective (i.e., points and quotas); (2) facially neutral and objective (e.g., the top 10% of graduates from each high school); and (3) implied and subjective (“we look at the whole person”). From an efficiency perspective the first form of discrimination is the least harmful. It does not corrupt the measure of merit, it only sets a different standard for “minorities.” Its shortcomings are twofold. First, as the Supreme Court decisions in Grutter and Grattz makes abundantly clear it is the one method most likely to be found illegal. This is implicitly related to its second shortcoming, it is so barefaced. It makes clear to both those favored and those harmed that the favored are otherwise inferior in their qualifications.

Douglas Belkin and Melissa Korn:

Backlash against their declarations has forced many to stumble—issuing updates to their statements, and then clarifications to their updates—in a near impossible effort to appease irate activists on both sides of a seemingly intractable issue.

The reversal comes in contrast to recent years when these academic leaders used their public profiles to condemn, support and otherwise opine on hot-button topics. They have released statements about events including the murder of George Floyd, gun violence in Texas and attacks on mosques in New Zealand.

Sending the wrong message runs the risk of limiting donor contributions and institutional prestige while elevating concerns that institutions are taking sides and chilling free speech at what are supposed to be arenas of intellectual debate.

Yet saying nothing is proving problematic as well, leaving school leaders in a difficult position. After years of weighing in on a range of issues, they are often expected to contribute to the public dialogue. The absence of a message can be perceived as a statement in its own right.

Tim Donahue:

What is an “A,” anyway? Does it mean that a 16 year-old recognizes 96 percent of the allusions in “The Bluest Eye”? Or that she could tell you 95 percent of the reasons the Teapot Dome Scandal was so important? Or, just that she made it to most classes? Does it come from a physics teacher in the Great Smoky Mountains who bludgeons students with weekly, memory-taxing tests, or from a trigonometry teacher in Topeka who works in Taylor Swift references and allows infinite “re-tests”?

One answer is that A is now the most popular high school grade in America! Indeed, in 2016, 47 percent of high school students graduated with grades in the A–range. This means that nearly half of seniors are averaging within a few numeric points of one another.

A belt has several holes, but usually only one or two of them show any wear in the leather. Can the same really be true for the grades we give our students, with their varied efforts and their constellations of cognitive skills? A grading drop-down menu ought not to be so simple a tool as one person’s belt.

And grades have only gone up since 2016, most notably since the pandemic, most prominently in higher-income school districts. Were this a true reflection of student achievement, it would be reason to celebrate, but the metrics have it differently. From 1998 to 2016, average high school G.P.A.s rose from 3.27 to 3.38, but average SAT scores fell from 1026 to 1002. ACT scores among the class of 2023 were the worst in over three decades. Is it any wonder, then, that 65 percent of Americans feel they are smarter than average?

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

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Daniel 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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.