Obsessing Over Elite College Admissions Is the Opposite of Progressive



Francisco Toro:

Imagine the entire cohort of U.S. graduating high school students this year as a group of one thousand bright-eyed 18-year-olds: kids of every class and race, spanning the whole spectrum of talent, wealth and oppression. What should the goal of progressive politics be for them? Where should attention be focused?

Let’s look at our thousand more closely. 380 of them—overwhelmingly poorer and disproportionatelyblack, Latino, and male—will stop their school careers here. They’ll go directly into the workforce, where they’ll earn less and live worse than most of the rest of the group.

Another 190 of our original thousand will enroll in a two-year college. Just 55 of them will actually complete a two-year degree within six years. The other 135 will fail to get any qualification, and they will be at a particular disadvantage in the workforce.

You might think the left would focus their energy like a laser beam on the 570 out of every thousand graduating seniors who never enroll in a 4-year university in the first place. Racial minorities dominate this group, and their socio-economic results are terrible. If you’re actually concerned about social and racial justice, this is where you need to look.




16 Fertility Scenarios



Robin Hanson:

World population is widely projected to peak around 2050-90 at roughly 9-11B, with ~40% living in Africa. World population would then decline. But how long, and how far? The median respondent in my Twitter polls expects a population revival ~2150, and only 15% see population falling below 2B. So most expect this to be a mild and temporary problem. But I’m not so sure. In this post, I’ll review some possible scenarios.

First, let’s set some context. Starting in France ~250 years ago, the number of children born to each woman in her lifetime, her “fertility”, consistently fell as incomes rose. Though some say this “demographic transition” is most closely connected to female education and access to contraception/abortion than to income. The most proximate causes I see are the high status of career success requiring high youthful efforts, a preference for fewer higher status kids, and an increasing taste for leisure.




Why fewer university students are studying Mandarin



The Economist:

Ten years ago Mandarin, the mother tongue of most Chinese, was being hyped as the language of the future. In 2015 the administration of Barack Obama called for 1m primary- and secondary-school students in America to learn it by 2020. In 2016 Britain followed suit, encouraging kids to study “one of the most important languages for the ’s future prosperity”. Elsewhere, too, there seemed to be a growing interest in Mandarin, as China’s influence and economic heft increased. So why, a decade later, does Mandarin-learning appear to have declined in many places?

Good numbers are tough to come by in some countries, but the trend is clear among university students in the English-speaking world. In America, for example, the number taking Mandarin courses peaked around 2013. From 2016 to 2020 enrolment in such courses fell by 21%, according to the Modern Language Association, which promotes language study. In Britain the number of students admitted to Chinese-studies programmes dropped by 31% between 2012 and 2021, according to the Higher Education Statistics Association, which counts such things (though it does not count those who take Mandarin as part of other degrees).




How the Student-Loan Payment Pause Hurt Borrowers



Allysia Finley:

Student-loan borrowers have enjoyed a nearly four-year spring break from making payments. They have used their savings to splurge on vacations, home renovations and other personal indulgences. According to a June UBS survey, 62% of student-loan borrowers agreed with the spending philosophy of “live for today because tomorrow is so uncertain.” In fairness to them, it was uncertain whether they’d have to repay their student loans—and most probably won’t.

The payment pause, which President Biden prolonged, enabled college grads to spend beyond their means while his promises of loan forgiveness encouraged them to pile on the debt—not only for expensive advanced degrees but also homes, cars and travel. As a result, borrowers are in a worse position financially than before the pandemic.

A Fidelity survey this month reported that two-thirds of borrowers say they don’t know how they will resume making payments once the pause ends next month. Some in the media call the restart a “student loan cliff.” This is overdramatic, but nobody should be surprised if borrowers, lured by government promises of loan forgiveness, sleepwalk over the proverbial ledge.




The College Board Tells TikTok and Facebook Your SAT Scores



Thomas Germain:

Many students have no choice about working with the College Board, the company that administers the SAT test and Advanced Placement exams. Part of that relationship involves a long history of privacy issues. Tests by Gizmodo found if you use some of the handy tools promoted by College Board’s website, the organization sends details about your SAT scores, GPA, and other data to Facebook, TikTok, and a variety of companies.

Gizmodo observed the College Board’s website sharing data with Facebook and TikTok when a user fills in information about their GPA and SAT scores. When this reporter used the College Board’s search filtering tools to find colleges that might accept a student with a C+ grade-point average and a SAT score of 420 out of 1600, the site let the social media companies know. Whether a student is acing their tests or struggling, Facebook and TikTok get the details.




School bans ‘only 2 genders’ T shirt: There’s only 1 acceptable opinion



Joanne Jacobs:

Liam Morrison, 12, was sent home from Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, was sent home for wearing the “two genders” shirt and again for wearing an altered shirt saying “There are only censored genders.” 

The family has appealed.

“This isn’t about a T-shirt; this is about a public school telling a middle-schooler that he isn’t allowed to express a view that differs from the school’s orthodoxy,” said Logan Spena, council for the Alliance Defending Freedom, in a press release. “Public school officials can’t force Liam to remove a shirt that states his position when the school lets every other student wear clothing that speaks on the same issue.”




The Scott Gerber case at Ohio Northern University is a new low for campus politicization.



Richard Vedder:

Observers of the American collegiate scene are likely well aware of the academic jihad against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and the disgraceful shouting down of federal judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford, led by a woke DEI apparatchik. But in terms of outrageous violations of American norms of academic conduct, due process, and civility, nothing compares with the treatment of Professor Scott Gerber of Ohio Northern University (ONU).

Unlike elite coastal schools like Penn or Stanford, ONU is a Midwestern private school of so-so reputation, not on lists of the 10 best colleges in Ohio, much less the nation. The university is located in the sleepy town of Ada, an hour’s drive from any metropolis, whose 2021 estimated population of 5,256 was lower than in 1970. Its greatest claim to fame is possibly not ONU but the fact that it is the home of the manufacturer of NFL footballs.

Professor Gerber teaches in the ONU law school. U.S. News ranks ONU in the bottom one-third of Ohio’s law schools and as 146th best in the nation (Stanford is #1, Penn #4). The program is a back-up choice for students unable to get into Ohio State, Case Western Reserve, or the University of Cincinnati. It has almost nothing to brag about.

But there is one important legal scholar on the ONU law faculty—Gerber—and he is also a fine teacher. His book First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas is a highly praised assessment of an important Supreme Court justice. He has authored eight other booksand has given presentations at such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia.




A flurry of companies and entrepreneurs aim to fill the demand for mental-health help



Julie Wernau & Andrea Peterson:

A search for “anxiety relief” on Google pulls up links for supplements in the form of pills, patches, gummies and mouth sprays. There are vibrating devices that hang around your neck and “tone your vagus nerve,” weighted stuffed animals, bead-filled stress balls and coloring books that claim to bring calm. Ads for online talk therapy apps pop up on social-media sites.

Americans are anxious—and a flurry of old-line companies, upstarts and opportunistic entrepreneurs aim to fill the demand for relief.

Anxiety has come into focus across the country in part due to the stress of the pandemic, increased awareness about mental health and more screening in schools and at doctors’ offices. In a recent federal survey, 27% of respondents reported they had symptoms of an anxiety disorder. That’s up from 8% in 2019, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Americans looking for help have found that the supply of available and qualified therapists hasn’t kept up with demand. Some can’t afford the fees. That has left a growing industry geared toward anxiety outside the medical and traditional mental-health professions, including supplements, products and mental-health coaches.

The science behind much of the industry is unclear and in some cases questioned by scientists and researchers. The antianxiety claims of most products have no federal or regulatory oversight. The role of the Food and Drug Administration is to ensure that supplements meet safety standards, are well manufactured and accurately labeled, but the agency doesn’t need to approve supplements before they can be sold or marketed. Supplements might interact with other medications.




Commentary on Milwaukee College Prep Programs



Corrine Hess:

Milwaukee’s college prep programs have shown improvement in growing academic achievement for Hispanic children, but not Black students. And access to programs are often too limited to create institutional change across the city.

Those findings are part of a recent report by the Black and Latino Ecosystem and Support Transition, or BLEST, Hub at Marquette University which highlights the Black and brown college student perspective.  

The group began in 2019 as a collaboration of Marquette, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Area Technical College and Milwaukee Public Schools to build a greater understanding of the needs of Black and brown students in Milwaukee. 

As Milwaukee’s Hispanic population has grown over the last 20 years, there have been increasing efforts by many charter and choice high schools and the city’s universities to intentionally interact with Latino students.  

Over the last decade, Cristo Rey, two of the Carmen Schools and St. Augustine Preparatory Academy opened on the city’s south side. During that same time, Hispanic enrollment increased 114 percent at Marquette University and 76 percent at UW-Milwaukee, the report found.  

Walter Lanier, CEO of the African American Leadership Alliance of Milwaukee and one of the founders of the BLEST Hub, said the strides made for Hispanic students are good. But Black students continue to need support.




State school bureaucracy brings in high-profile leftists to teach Wisconsin teachers about ‘equity’



Patrick Mcilheran:

DPI series has history of speakers peddling ‘critical’ view of race in America

As part of a training program, an initiative of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is bringing in high-profile left-wing speakers, including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to speak to potentially thousands of Wisconsin teachers about “educational equity.”

Earlier training sessions in the series, meanwhile, have featured authors such as one who called school reform an example of “white rage” that requires $2 trillion in reparations. 

The series of online talks, run by the DPI under its “Educational Equity Leadership Series” this week announced that Kendi, known for advocating racial discrimination as a form of reparation, will be among the speakers in the upcoming school year.  

The talks carry weight because they are a program of the DPI. That agency not only holds regulatory sway over Wisconsin’s schools, public and private, it controls professional licensing for teachers and school administrators.

Meanwhile: Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004 –




Notes on Censorship and social media



Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison

An aggressive legal battle over claims that the Biden administration pressured social media platforms to silence certain speech has blocked a key path to detecting election interference. (More)

And X CEO Elon Musk has reset industry standards, rolling back strict rules against misinformation on the site formerly known as Twitter. In a sign of Musk’s influence, Meta briefly considered a plan last year to ban all political advertising on Facebook. The company shelved it after Musk announced plans to transform rival Twitter into a haven for free speech, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

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The retrenchment comes just months ahead of the 2024 primaries, as GOP front-runner Donald Trump continues to rally supporters with false claims that election fraud drove his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Multiple investigations into the election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump now faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Still, YouTube, X and Meta have stopped labelingor removing posts that repeat Trump’s claims, even as voters increasingly get their news on social media.

Trump capitalized on those relaxed standards in his recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, hosted by X. The former president punctuated the conversation, which streamed Wednesday night during the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 campaign, with false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the Democrats had “cheated” to elect Biden.

On Thursday night, Trump posted on X for the first time since he was kicked off the site, then known as Twitter, following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Musk reinstated his account in November. The former president posted his mug shot from Fulton County, Ga., where he was booked Thursday on charges connected to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “NEVER SURRENDER!” read the caption.




Civics: Litigation and a small media site



Sarah Lehr:

A nonprofit news site in central Wisconsin is raising money to help cover its legal fees after being sued by a politician. 

Earlier this year, a Marathon County judge dismissed a lawsuit filed in 2021 by Mosinee businessman CoryTomczyk.

Tomczyk, who’s now a Republican state senator representing the 29th District, accused the Wausau Pilot & Review of defamation after it reported that he was overheard using an anti-gay slur against a teenager while in the audience at a Marathon County Executive Committee meeting.

Despite the publication’s victory in circuit court, Pilot & Review Publisher Shereen Siewert said it’s racked up between $150,000 and $200,000 in legal bills. Those expenses were enough to put the small news outlet in danger of shutting down, Siewert said.

“When the judge dismissed the (complaint), his reasoning that was outlined in his ruling was very clear,” said Siewert, “It was very sound reasoning, and we were so relieved. But then we realized that even if we win, we lose.”

Siewert also is employed by Wisconsin Public Radio as part-time host of the regional news and culture talk show, Route 51. WPR staff members who interact regularly with Siewert were not involved with the reporting or editing of this article.




The early history of counting



Keith Houston:

In 1973, while excavating a cave in the Lebombo Mountains, near South Africa’s border with Swaziland, Peter Beaumont found a small, broken bone with twenty-​nine notches carved across it. The so-​called Border Cave had been known to archaeologists since 1934, but the discovery during World War II of skeletal remains dating to the Middle Stone Age heralded a site of rare importance. It was not until Beaumont’s dig in the 1970s, however, that the cave gave up its most significant treasure: the earliest known tally stick, in the form of a notched, three-​inch long baboon fibula.

On the face of it, the numerical instrument known as the tally stick is exceedingly mundane. Used since before recorded history—still used, in fact, by some cultures—to mark the passing days, or to account for goods or monies given or received, most tally sticks are no more than wooden rods incised with notches along their length. They help their users to count, to remember, and to transfer ownership. All of which is reminiscent of writing, except that writing did not arrive until a scant 5,000 years ago—and so, when the Lebombo bone was determined to be some 42,000 years old, it instantly became one of the most intriguing archaeological artifacts ever found. Not only does it put a date on when Homo sapiens started counting, it also marks the point at which we began to delegate our memories to external devices, thereby unburdening our minds so that they might be used for something else instead. Writing in 1776, the German historian Justus Möser knew nothing of the Lebombo bone, but his musings on tally sticks in general are strikingly apposite:




One goal of her South American trip was to learn how to succeed in censorship.



Mary Anastasia O’Grady:

AOC and friends met with leftist politicians to offer their support for collectivist causes in the name of nonintervention. “Extractive” U.S. policies are on AOC’s list of gripes. In Chile this presumably means copper mining, which happens to have been the engine of the country’s economic growth going back decades. If it means lithium mining, perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should have had a word with President Gabriel Boric. He recently nationalized the industry so he could grab more wealth for the state.

A central talking point was the group’s outrage over U.S. Cold War policies, which kept Soviet and Cuban hands off the continent in the 20th century. The defense of the Kremlin’s Western Hemisphere puppets, 50 years after the fact, is a head-scratcher. One wonders why the gaggle of American anticapitalists, spouting facile economics, didn’t instead visit Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia—where communism has taken hold. They would have been greeted as heroes by any of those governments.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s vanity tour underwhelmed the locals. Brazil’s President Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva didn’t make time to meet with them. Press coverage overall was scant, though there was much posing.

Some special interests, such as Chile’s anti-American Communist Party, used the visit to show themselves close to American politicians, which seemed, well, weird. With a huge corruption scandal swirling around Mr. Boric, a meeting with members of the minority party of the U.S. House and some Hill staffers may have been a welcome distraction. For most Chileans the visit was background noise.




Teeny, Tiny Schools



Megan Tagami:

Amanda Ray’s son attended public school from prekindergarten to fifth grade. But when he qualified for West Virginia’s school voucher program for the 2023-24 school year, Ray jumped at the opportunity to enroll her son in Eyes and Brains STEM Center, a small private school serving a total of six students in kindergarten to seventh grade.

Ray’s son had struggled with reading and writing, but the smaller setting allows him to develop a close relationship with his teacher, who is able to tailor lessons to his interests, such as a writing assignment about his favorite characters in the game Dungeons & Dragons.

“It’s the perfect fit for him,” Ray said.

Eyes and Brains STEM Center is one of a fast-growing number of so-called microschools in the U.S., which often serve between five and 25 students and operate as tuition-based private schools or learning centers for home-schoolers. Currently approximately 125,000 microschools exist across the country, reflecting an increase since the pandemic, according to Don Soifer, chief executive of the National Microschooling Center.

Across the U.S., microschools likely serve between one to two million students, said Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an organization advocating for school choice policies.

In some states, new voucher laws that provide more families with state funds for private-school tuition or home schooling and other academic expenses are helping to finance the growth in microschool enrollment. Those opposed to vouchers say the funding siphons money from traditional public schools to private schools that aren’t accountable to rigorous state oversight.




Teachers and Content



Joseph De Avila:

“I really resent being forced into a position where my role as an educator is all of a sudden somebody who is in charge of censorship,” said Cleaver, who teaches at Ferry Pass Middle School. “That’s not my role as an educator.”

Teachers in Florida said a wave of recent educational-policy changes has sown confusion and chaos, creating fresh concerns for educators struggling to navigate through a new academic year. Disputes over new African-American history standards, Advanced Placement Psychology and new restrictions on calling a student by their preferred name also have many teachers on edge.

Many of the issues confronting teachers this academic school year are byproducts of laws passed in 2022. Florida has been at the forefront of a group of conservative-led states that have made sweeping changes to the way teachers can discuss race, gender and sexuality in the classroom.

One change is Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act passed in 2022—called the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation by opponents—which restricts instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. It originally applied to grades kindergarten to third grade with bans in later grades if not age-appropriate. The state Board of Education expanded it in April to apply through the 12th grade.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis championed the Parental Rights in Education Act, saying it gives parents more control over children’s education and prohibits inappropriate classroom instruction.




Penn gave ex-president Amy Gutmann a $3.7 million home loan as she prepared to depart the university



Susan Snyder and Ryan Briggs:

The university’s trustee compensation committee in late 2020 quietly authorized a $3.7 million, 0.38% interest home loan to Gutmann, according to tax records and financial disclosure forms. The loan was to help with her “presidential transition,” said Scott Bok, chairman of Penn’s board of trustees.

Specifically, Gutmann, 73, had lived in the president’s house on campus during her tenure, and she wanted to purchase a home to stay in Philadelphia. She left the presidency in February 2022 to serve as U.S. ambassador to Germany.

“While I won’t be living there while I’m ambassador, we have a place to come back to,” Gutmann said in a 2022 Inquirer interview, noting that she is on unpaid leave from the faculty. “Philly is our home.”




Civics: Truthiness and the legacy media



John Lucas:

Tapper teed up the segment by noting that Zeleny was reporting that anonymous White House staff had leaked that “President Biden might have a blind spot, according to people around him when it comes to his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles.” Zeleny says it is now “verboten” for anyone on the White House or campaign staff to “talk about Hunter Biden.”

Tapper then noted that in the 2020 presidential debates Joe Biden had denied Trump’s allegations that his son had made “a fortune” from China, but that, in fact, Hunter had reported over $4 million in income in 2017 and 2018, “most of which came from Chinese or Ukrainian interests.” The CNN excerpts of the debates showed these exchanges:

Biden: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about what are you talking about, what are you talking about, China.”

Trump: “He made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow –”

Biden angrily denied it: “That is simply not true.”

The video snippets of the debates that Tapper showed are here (beginning at 1:40).

Tapper concluded by saying what Biden and the Democrats in Congress have tried to deny and hide for years: “Trump was right … and Joe Biden was wrong.”




Accountability and the Wisconsin DPI



Corrine Hess

According to DPI, Holy Redeemer did not submit its September 2021 enrollment audit in a timely manner. The school also failed to timely submit its 2021-22 Fiscal & Internal Control Practices Report, which determines if the school has sound fiscal and internal control practices.  

These practices include paying vendors and employees on time, completing employee background checks and other practices required for participation in the choice program.  

Instead of withholding payment, DPI and Holy Redeemer entered into a settlement agreement and the school agreed it would provide all required reports in the future.  

But, in 2022 and in 2023, the school failed to meet due dates and provided incomplete reports, according to DPI.  

Holy Redeemer Christian Academy has participated in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program since the 1998-99 school year.  

In the latest state school district report card for academic year 2021-22, Holy Redeemer failed to meet expectations, receiving an overall score of 28.4 percent.

“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?




“For some parents, it was a reminder that school policies didn’t reflect their values.”



Rachel Hale:

Since it started in January 2021 Moms for Liberty says it has expanded to 285 chapters in 46 states with over 125,000 members. In Wisconsin, chapters in Kenosha, Marathon, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Polk, Rock, St. Croix, Vilas, Washington, Winnebago and Wood County have popped up over the past two years.

It’s hard to pinpoint how many members are active in Wisconsin — the Wood County and Ozaukee County chapters estimated that there are 400 and 6,000 members in their groups, respectively. A national spokesperson said they do not have updated state membership numbers.

“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?




School Choice Expansion in Milwaukee



Rory Linnane

St. Augustine Preparatory Academy unveiled a new $49 million elementary school on Milwaukee’s south side Tuesday, showcasing a major expansion as school leaders also discussed plans for a new north-side branch on the former Cardinal Stritch campus.

About 730 students in kindergarten through fourth grade are expected to start school this week in the new building, which can eventually hold up to 900 students as the school plans to admit more students. Across the street in the older building, about 1,100 students are expected to attend middle and high school.

With the capacity to eventually serve a combined total of about 2,400 students at both buildings on the south side, school leaders said it has become the largest single-campus school in Milwaukee.

“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?




School Discipline Event 24 August



Federalist

During President Obama’s second term, the U.S. Education Department began sharing studies indicating that black students were disciplined at higher rates than their white peers. These data were viewed as evidence of racial bias, and, in 2014, the Education and Justice Departments jointly published a resource package to help American schools “…promote fair and effective disciplinary practices that will make schools safe, supportive, and inclusive for all students,” (DOJ). Supporters applauded these steps from the federal government saying they reduced schools’ racial disparities in disciplinary decisions thereby curtailing the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Critics countered that the guidance misstated federal civil rights law, encouraged racial discrimination in the allocation of school discipline to produce demographic parity, and left classrooms less functional.




Notes on the “science of Reading”



Matt Barnum:

In the long-running reading wars, proponents of phonics have won.

States across the country, both liberal and conservative, are passing laws designed to change the way students are taught to read in a way that is more aligned with the science of reading.

States, schools of education, districts, and — ultimately, the hope is — teachers, are placing a greater emphasis on phonics. Meanwhile, the “three-cueing” method, which encourages students to guess words based on context, has been marginalized. It’s been a striking and swift change.

But there has been much less attention paid to another critical component of reading: background knowledge. A significant body of research suggests students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. This has led some academics, educators, and journalists to call for intentional efforts to build young children’s knowledge in important areas like science and social studies. Some school districts and teachers have begun integrating this into reading instruction.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to this issue, according to a recent review. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement. That suggests that while new reading laws might have real benefits, they may fall short of their potential to improve how children are taught to read. 

“It’s an underutilized component,” said Dan Trujillo, an administrator and former teacher in the San Marcos Unified School District in California. “There’s a lot of research about that: The more a reader brings into a text, the more advanced their comprehension will be.”




The Feds Asked TikTok for Lots of Domestic Spying Features



Mack Degeurin:

US government regulators reportedly tried to come to an agreement with TikTok to prevent banning the app that would have granted the federal government vast powers over the app. That’s according to a draft of a deal between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) obtained by Forbes, a contract that would have given multiple US agencies unprecedented access into the app’s records and operations. Many of the concessions the government asked of TikTok look eerily similar to the surveillance tactics critics have accused Chinese officials of abusing. To allay fears the short-form video app could be used as a Chinese surveillance tool, the federal government nearly transformed it into an American one instead.

Forbes reports that the draft agreement, dated Summer 2022, would have given the US government agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense far more access to TikTok’s operations than that of any other social media company. The agreement would let agencies examine TikTok’s US facilities, records, and servers with minimal prior notice and veto the hiring of any executive involved with leading TikTok US data security organization. It would also let US agencies block changes to the app’s terms of service in the US and order the company to subject itself to various audits, all on TikTok’s dime, per Forbes. In extreme cases, the agreement would allow government organizations to demand TikTok temporarily shut off functioning in the US.




YouTube (Google) is Still Tracking Kids Through its Ads, Study Says



Roger Cheng:

YouTube is still tracking children through ads served to video marked as “made for kids,” according Adalytics, a research firm that looks at ad campaigns for brands. 

The study found that ads from Fortune 500 advertisers and major media agencies are still being attached to children’s content, including popular channels such as Cocomelon Nursery Rhymes & Kids and ChuChu TV Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs. As a result, data brokers and ad tech companies are receiving data from those viewers and could be tracking them, Adalytics said. 

YouTube, its parent Alphabet, and these firms may be violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which requires services to get a parent’s permission before collecting data from users that are younger than 13 for the purposes of ads. In addition, this would be the second time YouTube was caught violating COPPA. In 2019, Alphabet, representing Google and YouTube, had to pay $170 million to settle COPPA violations, and agreed to a consent decree forbidding them from serving ads that tracked children.




New study measures grammatical complexity of 1,314 languages



Max Planck

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning “the dog,” to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum.

This grammatical distinction in the case system, along with many others, sets Icelandic apart from its closely related sister languages. “One prominent hypothesis about why some languages show more complex grammar than others links grammatical complexity to the social environments in which these languages are used,” says first author Olena Shcherbakova from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

For example, Icelandic is primarily learned and used by the local population of over 350,000 people. Such relatively small isolated communities are also called “societies of intimates.” In contrast, the other Scandinavian countries, located in close proximity to their neighbors, have larger populations with substantial proportions of non-native speakers.




Kansas State U Racially-Discriminatory “Multicultural” Scholarship Challenged By Equal Protection Project



William Jacobson:

The Equal Protection Project (EPP)(EqualProtect.org) of the Legal Insurrection Foundation has challenged numerous racially discriminatory programs done in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This discrimination comes in a variety of ways, but the overarching theme is to exclude or diminish some people, and promote others, based on race, color, or ethnicity.

The latest iteration is the “Joey Lee Garmon Undergraduate Multicultural Student Scholarship” at Kansas State University (K-State). To be eligible, applicants “must be of an ethnic group that has been historically and traditionally oppressed in the achievement of academic and leadership endeavors,” with special preference given to “applicants of African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latinx American heritage”.

EPP has filed a Civil Rights Complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. As full copy is at the bottom of this post, and reads in part:




Notes on legacy media and veracity






Without Belief in a God, But Never Without Belief in a Devil



Rob Henderson:

Personally, I saw this when I first arrived at Yale. I recall being stunned at how status anxiety pervaded elite college campuses. Internally, I thought, “You’ve already made it, what are you so stressed out about?” Hoffer, though, would say these students believed they had almost made it. That is why they were so aggravated. The closer they got to realizing their ambitions, the more frustrated they became about not already achieving them.

Hoffer’s conceptions of frustration highlight how if your conditions improve, but not as much or as quickly as you’d like, you will be vulnerable to recruitment by mass movements that promise to make your dreams come true.  

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When inequality is the general law of society, the most blatant inequalities escape notice. When everything is virtually on a level, the slightest variations cause distress. That is why the desire for equality becomes more insatiable as equality extends to all.” For Hoffer, this insatiability cultivates frustration—a nebulous, simmering emotional state that can be harnessed by any ideology.

He describes what has now become known as the “Tocqueville effect”: A revolution is most likely to occur after an improvement in social conditions. As circumstances improve, people raise their expectations. Societal reforms raise reference points to a level that is usually not matched, eliciting rage and frustration.




Which Groups Have Received Racial Preferences in Higher Education Over the Years?



David Bernstein:

(UPDATE: I have been rightly taken to task for not noting the earlier court cases in which either whites or non-black Americans were the group getting preferences. I of course am aware of that phenomenon and its significance. I happen to be working on an article about how courts dealt with (or ignored) the issue of racial classification in affirmative action cases, i.e., whether they addressed whether the classifications themselves were ‘narrowly tailored’ as opposed to other legal and constitutional objections to affirmative action preferences, and my post was created in that context. But my bad for not specifying. Also, to be clear, my point is not to criticize African Americans or any other group that received the preferences. Rather, just to show how the groups deemed entitled to such preferences has changed over time, because I think few people are aware of it and it’s interesting.)

Looking at the underlying facts in major cases in the Supreme Court and circuit court cases, we see that Black Americans have always been eligible, the Mexican American classification expanded into all Hispanics, Asian Americans and subgroups thereof were initially eligible but later were considered “over-represented” and therefore at best ineligible for preferences, if not subject to higher standards than white applicants.




Wisconsin preschoolers are 5 times more likely to be expelled than K-12 students, but why?



Natalie Eilbert
Madison Lammert:

When Rachael Van Domelen answers calls from her son’s child care center, she braces herself for uncomfortable conversations: apologies to another child’s parents, a sit-down with her 4-year-old or both.

One time, her son split open a teacher’s lip with a block. He hits other children or calls them names when he disagrees. His father, Mason Beaudry, called these episodes “explosive” and unpredictable.

“He’s so smart, it hurts. It makes things harder to navigate,” Van Domelen said. “If he’s upset and wants to upset someone else around him, it does not take him very long to figure out how to do that.”




Hope and change outcomes






Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.



Holman Jenkins:

Our steps did not significantly impede its spread even as our efforts miraculously quashed the annual flu. In year two, despite vaccination, as many Americans died as in year one. Yet further healthcare meltdowns were avoided. Vaccines clearly saved lives; if lockdowns and masking mandates contributed by keeping people alive until they could be vaccinated, though, the effect is hard to sort out from the voluntary measures an informed public would have taken anyway.

Meanwhile, bans on elective medical procedures, forced unemployment, school closures and other extreme measures produced their own toll. Among the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, their average age was 74 and they lost 12 years of life. Nobody yet knows the total years lost to younger people due to “excess deaths” from substance abuse, suicide, homicide, accidents, lack of cancer screening and other non-Covid causes. Only with the arrival of the Biden administration did it become expedient to acknowledge a truth known from the start: The virus was something we would have to “live with,” not defeat with indiscriminate social and economic curbs.

This is where the decision of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty sheds light. His detailed recounting shows a Washington energetic in protecting Americans from Covid opinions, expertise and claims that conflicted with its own, at a time when it served politicians to show they were trying to save Americans from encountering a virus that couldn’t be avoided. When government has a message to deliver, especially when the political stakes are high, it won’t be content just to push its own message, it will try to silence others. Fighting back will always be necessary. The only surprise in our age is how thoroughly the “liberal” position has become the pro-censorship position.

Related: Taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Public Health mandates




Modernity and Allergies



Theresa Macphail

Elizabeth, an engineer in her late-30s, has three children, all with some form of allergy. Her eldest daughter, Viola, 12, had eczema as a baby; has environmental allergies to pollen; and allergies to corn, tree nuts and peanuts.

Her youngest son, Brian, 3, also had eczema as a baby and subsequently developed allergies to peanuts and barley, though Elizabeth fears there could be more. Her middle daughter, five-year-old Amelia, had a dairy allergy as an infant, but is now just lactose intolerant. She’s the easiest of the three, at least in terms of allergy.

By the time I hear her story, Elizabeth is already a veteran at dealing with her children’s irritated immune systems. She began a support group for parents of children with corn allergies and is heavily involved in trying to educate other parents about food allergies.

The parents share their theories about why their children have allergies. Her own is that Viola and Brian both went to the emergency room with high fevers as babies and were given precautionary antibiotics. She blames the antibiotics for altering her children’s gut microbiome and herself for agreeing to the treatment in the first place.

Part of Elizabeth’s rationale is that no one else in her family has allergies. In fact, it’s so rare that her parents initially didn’t believe the diagnoses. They argued that “back in their day,” everyone ate everything and was fine; food allergy was made-up nonsense. But when both Viola and Brian landed in the ER repeatedly for food-related anaphylaxis, her parents realized these allergies were indeed “real.”




An educational entrepreneur creates a school for kids with reading difficulties.



Danyela Souza Egorov:

Tim Castanza admits that he was “triggered.” The year was 2016, and Castanza, then working for the New York City Department of Education, attended a Community Education Council meeting in Staten Island, where several mothers of kids with dyslexia spoke. The public schools didn’t have any programs for their children, they said, describing how long schools took to offer proper evaluations and how the district failed to provide adequate services, even after children received diagnoses. Along with Rose Kerr, a retired DOE principal and director of education for Staten Island’s borough president, Castanza wanted to do something. “I know what good phonics instruction looks like because of my elementary school teacher,” Castanza, who received an ADHD diagnosis in college, said. “Still, I had a lot of needs that were not met at that school.”

Three years later, Castanza opened the school that he wished he could have attended himself: Bridge Prep Charter School. Designed according to scientific reading instruction, the school offers all the necessary support for children with dyslexia and other language-based learning difficulties. City leaders should learn from its impressive results.

Bridge Prep’s advantage consists not just of a different curriculum but of a different way of training teachers and an expansive capacity to meet students’ needs. Nearly two-thirds of students at Bridge Prep have an Individual Education Plan, and nearly all of these receive multiple services. Seven in ten Bridge Prep students also hail from low-income families, which often cannot afford extracurricular phonics coaching (a common but expensive practice among high-income students who struggle to read). The school, therefore, offers 60 minutes of daily instruction based on the Orton-Gillingham Approach. Phonics instruction gets delivered to students grouped by grade and ability. This is “equity,” Castanza says. A school is “not prepared to teach every kid” unless it has a structured literacy program, he adds.

Georgia Orosz’s son has benefited. When he came to Bridge Prep to repeat second grade, he was reading at kindergarten level, had a dyslexia diagnosis, and was writing in reverse. And his struggles at school had become a behavioral issue. His mother was so frustrated with the Staten Island public school he attended that she planned to homeschool him—until a therapist referred her to Bridge Prep. Her son enrolled in the school right before the pandemic. By the beginning of fifth grade, he was reading at grade level.

“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?




Students blocked from campus when COVID hit want money back. Some are getting refunds.



Elaine Povich

Thousands of college students will get hundreds of dollars in compensation as colleges and universities move this summer to settle multimillion-dollar lawsuits stemming from canceled classes and activities during COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.

While some of the class-action suits against the colleges and universities are still in litigation, and still others dismissed, several major cases have been settled in recent weeks.

The settlements mean students who were charged tuition and fees but weren’t able to use in-person services during the pandemic shutdowns will receive some compensation, though they won’t be refunded for all the on-campus amenities they lost.

The amounts depend on the total settlement figure, minus legal fees and other court expenses. Each case has a different timeline.




Deja Vu: The FBI Proves Again It Can’t be Trusted with Section 702



Matthew Guariglia:

We all deserve privacy in our communications, and part of that is trusting that the government will only access them within the limits of the law. But at this point, it’s crystal clear that the FBI doesn’t believe that either our rights nor the limitations that Congress has placed upon the bureau matter when it comes to the vast amount of information about us collected under FISA Section 702.  

The latest exhibit in this is in yet another newly declassified opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). This opinion further reiterates what we already know, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation simply cannot be trusted with conducting foreign intelligence queries on American persons.  Regardless of the rules, or consistent FISC disapprovals, the FBI continues to act in a way that shows no regard for privacy and civil liberties. 

According to the declassified FISC ruling, despite paper reforms which the FBI has touted that it put into place to respond to the last time it was caught violating U.S. law, the Bureau conducted four queries for the communications of a state senator and a U.S. senator. And they did so without even meeting their own already-inadequate standards for these kinds of searches.




Lawfare and Wisconsin School Choice: Minocqua Brewing Edition



notes and links on Minocqua Brewing.

“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?




Civics: Influence and “media”






Proposed ABA free speech standard



Stephanie Francis Ward:

It’s important for schools to clearly state that the disruption of speakers is not tolerated, and if students do that, they will face academic discipline,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and an ABA Journal contributor. Image from Shutterstock.

Following various controversies around campus speech and a U.S. House of Representatives committee request to investigate a Stanford Law School incident, the Strategic Review Committee of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has proposed a new accreditation standard focused on guidance for academic freedom policies.

Outlined in an Aug. 2 memo, the proposal also addresses freedom of expression. Currently, Standard 405(b) requires law schools to have an “established and announced policy” about academic freedom. The memo suggests creating a new standard, which would include language saying it applies to full- and part-time faculty, affords due process to people who claim their academic freedom has been violated and condemns disruptive behavior that hinders free expression.

The memo marks the first step of the proposed revision, and its authors suggest it go out for notice and comment if approved, as is customary with standards changes. The Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar council is scheduled to vote on the matter Friday when it meets in Chicago.




China’s Defeated Youth



The Economist:

In the southern city of Huizhou an electronics factory is hiring. The monthly salary on offer is between 4,500 and 6,000 yuan (or $620 and $830), enough to pay for food and essentials, but not much else. The advertisement says new employees are expected to “work hard and endure hardship”. The message might have resonated with Chinese of an older generation, many of whom worked long hours in poor conditions to give their children a brighter future. But many of those children now face similar drudgery—and are unwilling to endure it. “I can’t sit on an assembly line,” says Zhang, a 20-something barista with dyed-red hair at a local tea shop. He scoffs at the idea of making such sacrifices for so little gain. The job at the tea shop pays just 4,000 yuan a month, but he enjoys chatting up customers.




Mister Rogers Had a Point: Routinely Greeting Six Neighbors Maximizes Wellbeing Outcomes



Andy Corbley:

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, haven’t you heard? Mister Rogers said so—and now his simple advice on how to be a good person has been backed by sophisticated polling data.

As part of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, saying hello to more than 1 neighbor was shown to correlate with greater self-perception of well-being.

Averaged across five dimensions that included career, communal, physical, financial, and social well-being, the increase which greeting a neighbor had led to around a 2-point increase on a scale of 0-100 up until the sixth neighbor, at which point further greetings had no measured impact.




Civics: influence and government






Princeton Companion to Mathematics



Timothy Gowers

Bertrand Russell, in his book The Principles of Mathematics, proposes the following as a definition of pure mathematics.

Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form “ p implies q ,” where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical constants are all notions definable in terms of the following: Implication, the relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which it considers, namely the notion of truth.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics could be said to be about everything that Russell’s definition leaves out.

Russell’s book was published in 1903, and many mathematicians at that time were preoccupied with the logical foundations of the subject. Now, just over a century later, it is no longer a new idea that mathematics can be regarded as a formal system of the kind that Russell describes, and today’s mathematician is more likely to have other concerns. In particular, in an era where so much mathematics is being published that no individual can understand more than a tiny fraction of it, it is useful to know not just which arrangements of symbols form grammatically correct mathematical statements, but also which of these statements deserve our attention.




Civics: Warmongering



Matt Taibbi:

The Harpers piece doesn’t blame the United States for war in Ukraine, but does tell a story about a foreign policy establishment that wriggled free of our more conflict-averse late seventies and eighties, and created a new expansionism that eschews diplomacy and generates military confrontation almost by design. “Far from making the world safer by setting it in order,” the authors write, “we have made it all the more dangerous.”

There was a time when avoiding war was a chief priority of American liberalism, which would have taken a story like the Harpers piece as a rallying cry. The issue containing the Layne-Schwarz story reportedly did brisk sales, but generated little discussion in media, beyond a tweet from Ann Coulter:




Lawyers and elections



Larry Lessig

I certainly did have a view about what the Constitution required. Though I am not a conservative, I share the view of Michael Rappaport that the Constitution did vest discretion in electors, and that no state law could take that discretion away. (The only other place the Constitution uses the word “Electors” is to refer to the people who vote for Members of the House: So could the Commonwealth of Massachusetts say that all such “Electors” must vote for a Democrat?)

But whether or not I (and Rappaport and many others) were right about what the Constitution required, I thought it important to resolve the question before it created a constitutional crisis. So many pro bono hours of my life (and the life of many at EqualCitizens.US, including our lead lawyer Jason Harrow) were devoted to getting the Supreme Court to resolve this question outside of the context of an election. In July 2020, the Court did indeed resolve it. In an 8–1 opinion (by a friend, Elena Kagan, who had started teaching with me in the same year at Chicago), the Court held that states were free to direct the vote of presidential electors. Thomas was the only one to write separately. But he agreed with the result.




A poll on k-12 sentiments






Idiot Students Are Submitting Answers Saying “I Am an AI Language Model”



Frank Landymore:

It’s no secret that OpenAI’s gangbusters chatbot ChatGPT has become the bane of educators trying to get their pupils to turn in some honest work. Cheating will never go away, but chatbots just make it more tempting and easy than ever.

The thing with being a cheat, though, is that a good one has to be careful to cover their tracks — something that some lazy students relying on an AI that does all the work for them appear not to be bothering with.

“I had answers come in that said, ‘I am just an AI language model, I don’t have an opinion on that,'” Timothy Main, a writing professor at Conestoga College in Canada, told The Associated Press.




“The Future of Our Work in Education”



Sandra:

Since 2015, our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed. And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary. The truth is, the depth of needs and the complexity of our education system requires constant questioning, strong partnerships, and the willingness to iterate. No single organization can accomplish all of what is needed for systems change — and at CZI, we want to sharpen who we are and how we can best serve through our educational research investments, our relationships with educators and students, and our ability to build useful applications with our technology team.




Notes on Learning Stations



Daniel Buck:

Can we stop with the learning stations already? My teacher prep endorsed them. My first instructional coach trained me in them. Every school that I’ve ever worked at has incorporated them. Look them up on Teachers Pay Teachers and you’ll find scores of activities for various literacy stations, each one promising that they are proven effective.

Unfortunately, this idea—that a teacher should only teach for a few minutes before setting kids loose to transition through a maze of stations full of glitter, glue, and razzmatazz—is a glossy, inefficient, ineffective use of class time.

Stroll through a classroom that uses learning stations and you’ll see students engaged in all sorts of seemingly compelling activities and projects. Look more closely, and one sees a hodgepodge of the promising and the pointless, tasks that demand thinking beyond realistic expectations and tasks that require no mental effort at all: some extended writing or structured practice and lots of needless coloring or word searches.

Consider just one concrete example. In a video on the influential site Edutopia, which specializes in instructional advice, one station-based classroom exhibits high student engagement and seamless routines. But a critical consideration of what’s actually happening at these centers raises concerns. What’s the point of a twenty-minute station where students spend their time cutting, pasting, and writing in rainbow letters? And that doesn’t even touch on the copious references to kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and other ways of learning, allusions to the myth of “learning styles,” which has as much basis in reality as homeopathic medicine.




Free speech, and the American Bar Association



Aaron Sibarium

The group’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which accredits all law schools in the United States, proposed the rule after hundreds of students at Stanford Law School shouted down a sitting federal judge in March, prompting House Republicans to call on the bar association to investigate the school. Those events were “in the background” of the draft requirement, according to an August 2 memo from the bar association. Yale Law Schooland the University of California Hastings Law School experienced similar disruptions in 2022, each instigated by progressive students upset about a conservative speaker.

The accreditation standard reads as a direct response to those incidents. Law schools must “protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular,” the draft requirement states, including through public demonstrations. At the same time, the standard would prohibit protests that stifle “free expression by preventing or substantially interfering with the carrying out of law school functions or approved activities.”

The proposal comes amid accusations that the bar association has stifled free speech through its accreditation process. The group drew criticism last year when it required all law schools to instruct students that they have a duty to eliminate racism, a move that many law professors, including 10 at Yale, said would imperil academic freedom and result in compelled speech. It also considered requiring law schools to “diversify” their student bodies—only to axe the proposal a month before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case that outlawed race-based college admissions.




K-12 tax & spending climate: stagflation and jobs



John Hawkins:

And guess what? Things have gotten significantly worse since then because the Fed printed so much money during COVID that it massively spiked inflation. Supposedly, the yearly target number for inflation is 2% and it reached a high of 9.1% in June of last year, but since the government has a lot of leeway in determining which products count towards the consumer price index, it’s very easy to rig the numbers – and they do. Big time:




JAMA network open paper policing misinformation is full of misinformation



Vinay Prasad:

There’s a new paper in Jama Network Open that calls out misinformation spread by Physicians. Of course the key question is what counts as misinformation. Shall we look?

Here are things that the authors consider misinformation:

  1. Claiming that “COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing COVID-19 spread” is misinformationUnfortunately, covid 19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing spread.  See also: we all got covid anyway and/or escape variants
  2. “Claims that myocarditis was common in children who received the vaccine and that the risks of myocarditis outweighed the risk of vaccination were also unfounded.”Myocarditis does outweigh the benefits of vaccinations for some ages, in men, and some doses. We proved that here.



Math Proof Draws New Boundaries Around Black Hole Formation



Allison Li:

The modern notion of a black hole has been with us since February 1916, three months after Albert Einstein unveiled his theory of gravity. That’s when the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, in the midst of fighting in the German army during World War I, published a paper with astonishing implications: If enough mass is confined within a perfectly spherical region (bounded by the “Schwarzschild radius”), nothing can escape such an object’s intense gravitational pull, not even light itself. At the center of this sphere lies a singularity where density approaches infinity and known physics goes off the rails.

In the 100-plus years since, physicists and mathematicians have explored the properties of these enigmatic objects from the perspective of both theory and experiment. So it may be surprising to hear that “if you took a region of space with a bunch of matter spread out in it and asked a physicist if that region would collapse to form a black hole, we don’t yet have the tools to answer that question,” said Marcus Khuri, a mathematician at Stony Brook University.

Don’t despair. Khuri and three colleagues — Sven Hirsch at the Institute for Advanced Study, Demetre Kazaras at Duke University, and Yiyue Zhang at the University of California, Irvine — have released a new paper that brings us closer to determining the presence of black holes based solely on the concentration of matter. In addition, their paper proves mathematically that higher-dimensional black holes — those of four, five, six or seven spatial dimensions — can exist, which is not something that could confidently have been said before.




Civics: The Pervasive Influence of Ideology at the Federal Circuit Courts



Alma Cohen:

This paper seeks to contribute to the long-standing debate on the extent to which the ideology of federal circuit court judges, as proxied by the party of the president nominating them, can help to predict case outcomes. To this end, I combine and analyze a novel dataset containing about 670,000 circuit court cases from 1985 to 2020. I show that the political affiliation of judges is associated with outcomes, and thus can help to predict them, throughout the vast universe of circuit court cases – and not only in the ideologically contested cases on which prior empirical research has focused.
In particular, I find an association between political affiliation and outcomes in each of six categories of cases in which the two litigating parties could be perceived by judges to have unequal power. In each of these six case categories, which together add up to more than 550,000 cases, the more Democratic judges a panel has, the higher the odds of the panel siding with the seemingly weaker party.
Furthermore, I identify evidence of polarization over time in circuit court decisions. Consistent with such growing polarization, in the important subset of published cases, the identified patterns are more pronounced in the last two decades of the examined period than earlier.




‘Work-from-anywhere’ families are increasingly crossing the globe to provide their children with a progressive curriculum



Liz Rowlinson:

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/b6077200-ca54-46c1-8c3a-2e93195b28ca

During the pandemic, Despina and Taso decided that the US public school system wasn’t working for their eight-year-old daughter. The Greek-American family took a “leap of faith” and moved from Massachusetts to the Monferrato wine region of Piedmont in northern Italy, where a new Village Forest School had just opened.

“We can work from anywhere and were culturally drawn back to Europe. The new school offered the sort of education we dreamt of: letting children remain children for longer,” says Despina — now also the mother of twin boys — who declined to give her surname. “It’s been a massive change for the family but we now have a lifestyle more closely aligned with our values of living a slower life more closely connected with the natural world and the people around us.”

A typical school day starts with the children singing songs together, combining counting and language skills, before two blocks of classroom-based lessons: maths, history, geography etc, taught by both an Italian and an English teacher. Lunch is based on the nose-to-tail, non-processed food principles of the Weston Price diet — there’s rice soaked in bone broth, for example, or a ragù made from the whole organs of a cow or pig. After lunch there will be art, crafts, woodwork, maybe horseriding and even grape-picking at harvest time.




More States Threaten to Hold Back Third-Graders Who Can’t Read



Sara Randazzo & Scott Calvert:

In the race to fix a nationwide reading crisis that worsened during the pandemic, more states are threatening to make students repeat third grade to help them catch up.

Tennessee, Michigan and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests and laws requiring students to repeat third grade to improve literacy. Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and Nevada have all passed similar laws that will go into effect in the coming years.

Politicians and educational officials say the goal isn’t to hold children back, but to create an incentive to do well while also reducing social promotion.

Tennessee state Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who co-sponsored a 2021 law that went into effect for students entering fourth grade this fall, said the threat of retention brings needed accountability.

“We cannot continue to kick the can down the road when it comes to reading literacy and proficiency with young people,” he said, citing a desire from businesses for a better-educated workforce.

Reading by the end of third grade is considered a pivotal benchmark, because students must be able to read in subsequent grades to learn math, science, social studies and other subjects. Third-graders who lack reading proficiency are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to a 2011 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Reading scores dropped last year on a federal reading test known as the Nation’s Report Card, with 33% of fourth-graders scoring proficient or higher in 2022, down from 35% in 2019.

Tying fourth-grade advancement to reading has fallen in and out of favor over the decades. Opponents say the policies cause families unnecessary stress and social turmoil for children, and can disproportionately impact minority students.

“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?




Notes on funding school choice



Ameillia Wedward:

Janet Protasiewicz’ recent confirmation as a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this month has conservatives worried about the possible end of a decade of conservative reforms, from Act 10 to voter ID laws. But another concern receiving less attention is the prospect of challenges to Wisconsin’s school choice programs.

School choice has stood against challenges in the past, but now that it’s at stake in state court, taxpayer dollars are on the line.

While there are several cases and laws that reaffirm Wisconsin’s choice programs from a religious angle — and Wisconsin’s own governor signed into law increases to choice earlier this summer — the current concern is that school choice will face scrutiny from a financial standpoint: Can the state fund both school choice and public schools simultaneously?

Currently, under the Wisconsin constitution, local funds must be used for local schools. Although the state finances the choice program, when a student leaves the public school system to participate, the state subtracts that pupil’s funding from their respective district, which then has to make up the revenue loss by increasing property taxes. In other words, to fund both systems, taxpayers end up paying twice: once to fund the school choice program and again to pay the district’s tax hikes.

Some have argued that this violates the state constitutional requirement that property taxes fund “common schools.” But concerns like this ignore a plausible funding mechanism that could appease school choice and public school advocates alike while sparing the taxpayer’s wallet. By decoupling private choice funding from property taxes and funding students instead, the state could reduce costs for local taxpayers. Under a decoupling plan, students that use school choice would be financed fully by the state, and all property tax implications would be removed.

This isn’t a new idea. By the 2024-25 school year, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will be funded directly via the state. By the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s conservative estimations — before the new law and under the old voucher amount — if the state followed the same model, decoupling would cut property taxes over $168 million statewide.

“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?




Harvard Loses $15 Million Insurance Claim For Legal Fees In Famous Race Discrimination Case, Appeals Ct Calls Arguments “Gaslighting”



William Jacobson:

First, we find out insurance companies are refusing to reimburse Oberlin College for the $36 million it had to pay Gibson’s Bakery,Oberlin College Sues Insurers For Refusing To Cover $36 Million It Paid Gibson’s Bakery For Defamation And Other Torts (Update)

Now, the First Circuit just rejected a $15 million insurance claim by Harvard University against its insurance company for legal fees incurred in defending the Students For Fair Admissions case that ended up with a sweeping defeat for Harvard (and win for equality and equal protection) in the Supreme Court.

From the Opinion in Harvard University v. Zurich American Insurance Co.:

With $15,000,000 in coverage at stake, this case requires us to apply Massachusetts law to determine the effect of a failure to give notice as specified in an excess insurance policy affording coverage on a “claims made and reported” basis. Where, as here, a federal court sits in diversity jurisdiction, tasked with following state law, it is not free to innovate but, rather, must apply state substantive rules of decision as those rules have been articulated by the state’s highest tribunal….

In this instance, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) has spoken directly to the critical issue…. Staying within the borders of this well-beaten path, we hold that the failure to give notice according to the policy’s terms and conditions forfeits any right to coverage. Consequently, we affirm the district court’s entry of summary judgment in favor of the insurer….




An America of Secrets



Jon Askonas:

There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life.

What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media. According to this story, the Internet in general and social media in particular reward telling audiences what they want to hear and undermining faith in existing institutions. A range of nefarious actors, from unscrupulous partisan media to foreign intelligence agencies, all benefit from algorithms that are designed to boost engagement, which winds up catering misinformation to specific audience demands. Traditional journalism, bound by ethics, has not been able to keep up.

The alternative narrative — put forward by Fox News, the populist fringes of the Left and the Right, Substackers of all sorts — holds almost the inverse. For decades, mainstream political discourse in America has been controlled by the chummy relationship between media, political, and economic elites. These actors, caught up in trading information, access, and influence with each other, fed the American people a thoroughly sanitized and limited picture of the world. But now, their dominance is being broken by the Internet, and all of the dirty laundry is being aired. In this view, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” are simply the establishment’s slanders for inconvenient truths it can no longer suppress. Whether it’s the Biden administration establishing a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security or the New York Times’s Kevin Roose calling for a federal “reality czar,” the establishment is desperate to put the Humpty Dumpty of controlled consensus reality back together again.

As opposed as they seem, in fact both of these narratives are right, so far as they go. But neither of them captures the underlying truth. There is indeed a dark matter ripping the country apart, shredding our shared sense of reality and faith in our democratic government. But this dark matter is not misinformation, it isn’t conspiracy theories, and it isn’t the establishment, exactly. It is secrecy.

Truth Decay

In discussions of online misinformation, one inevitably comes across some version of a ubiquitous quote by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” This is often mustered at the climax of some defense of “journalism” or “science” against “fake news.” But the bon mot is always tossed out without any interest in Moynihan himself. Defenders of the social importance, and the ongoing possibility, of a fact-based democratic culture would do well to consider how the quote holds up against one of the major preoccupations of this great legislator and intellectual.

The Moynihan quote captures an important dichotomy between facts and opinions, one that has been blurred by the rise of alternative media, the explosion of “news-commentary” in newspapers and on television, and an influencer-centric media economy. But at the same time, hanging like the sword of Damocles over our shared sense of reality, is an invisible and unspoken third category, one on which Moynihan became increasingly fixated.

Born in 1927, Moynihan had government roles for most of his career, serving in the Navy, on the staff of New York Governor Averell Harriman, in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then to India, and finally a quarter-century as a U.S. Senator from New York. Late in his political career, in the 1990s, Moynihan became deeply concerned about government secrecy. Beyond particular worries about the legal and practical consequences of an explosion of classified documents, Moynihan believed that expansive secrecy was deleterious to our form of government. The 1997 Moynihan Secrecy Commission Report warned:




Newer research suggests it’s better to guess before Googling



Jill Barshay:

One of the great debates in education spans more than two millennia.  

Around 370 B.C., Plato wrote that his teacher Socrates fretted that writing things down would cause humans to become ignorant because they wouldn’t have to memorize anything. (Ironically, the only reason we know this is because it was written down in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” still available today.)  

Albert Einstein argued the opposite in 1921. “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts,” the Nobel laureate said, according to his biographer Philipp Frank. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

But neither of these great thinkers could anticipate how the debate would play out in the Age of Google. Not long after the search engine company was founded in 1998, psychologists began to wonder how the ability to have so much information instantly available was changing our brains. A seminal 2011 paper established the so-called “Google effect,” our tendency to forget information that we can easily look up on the internet.




Lockdowns and student outcomes



Liv Finne:

The COVID school shutdowns are being blamed for current shortages of nurses, engineers, customer service representatives, seasonal workers, and army recruits.  

A recent WSJ article notes that since 2020 the pass rates on certification exams taken by engineers, office workers, soldiers and nurses have all fallen. This means fewer engineers and other skilled workers on the job, and a lower degree of competency among those who make it: 

“It is one reason that professional service jobs are going unfilled, and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S Labor Department.”  

These facts do not even begin to describe the psychological and mental distress suffered by teenagers isolated from their friends for nearly two years, a harm that may linger throughout their lives. 

Parents aren’t fooled by the falsehoods being told by Washington’s school officials. The families of 46,000 students have withdrawntheir children from the public schools, among the highest out-migration from the public schools in the nation. 

Across the country lawmakers are trying to help parents. They are responding to the COVID school shutdowns, and to the radical CRT agenda now in the public schools, by passing school choice programs to give parents an alternative to public schools.




Urban disarray and declining tax base



Kevin Truong:

These properties are among the most iconic in San Francisco, but what they also have in common is their owners are applying for dramatic cuts in their assessed values in a worrying sign for the city’s fiscal health. 

At Chase Center, property owners are attempting to cut the city’s assessed $1.48 billion value for the stadium by some 58% to $635 million. 

The owner of the Transamerica Pyramid, New York developer Shvo, which purchased the building in 2020, is seeking a 53% reduction in its assessed value from $485.5 million to $227 million. 

The Westin St. Francis Hotel owners are applying for a more than 90% decrease in its assessed value of $787 million all the way down to $76 million.




What Happened When One Illinois Town Passed Reparations



Adam Popescu:

Louis Weathers came into this world 70 years after the Civil War ended, 70 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. And yet in 1935, when his mother went into labor, the local hospital in Evanston, Illinois, wouldn’t admit her because of her skin color. Louis’s father had to drive her two hours to a hospital that would let a black woman give birth to her baby.

In the early 1950s, Weathers was the first black kid to go to the local public high school. The teacher picked on him; so did the white kids. 

“If I raised my hand, she wouldn’t call on me, because she didn’t want the white kids to see I knew the answer,” Weathers told me. “She called on me when I kept my hand down to make me look stupid.”

When he tried to buy a house, years later, white real estate agents steered him away from the better neighborhoods with better schools, where you almost never saw cops and it was safe to take an evening stroll. Even if he’d been able to visit those neighborhoods, it wouldn’t have mattered; the discriminatory practice of redlining made it nearly impossible for a black applicant to get a mortgage for a house outside black neighborhoods.




The Victorians achieved so much because they were cleverer than us, a new study suggests.



Nick Collins:

Reaction times – a reliable marker of general intelligence – have declined steadily since the Victorian era from about 183 milliseconds to 250ms in men, and from 187ms to 277ms in women. 

The slowing of our reflexes points to a decrease in general intelligence equivalent to 1.23 IQ points per decade since the 1880s or about 14 IQ points overall, researchers said. 

Actual IQ scores from different decades cannot be directly compared because people today enjoy better teaching, health and nutrition which would help improve their results, the scientists explained. 

But the reaction times signify that the genetic component of general intelligence – which leads to the type of creativity and invention typical of the Victorian era – has been dwindling over the past century. 

Dr Michael Woodley, who led the study published in the Intelligence journal this month, identified the trend by comparing reaction times from trials conducted by Victorian scientists against those carried out in recent decades.

Our declining intelligence is most likely down to a “reverse” in the process of natural selection, he explained. The most intelligent people now have fewer children on average than in previous decades, while there are higher survival rates among people with less favourable genes.




The effort to recall Alameda County DA Pamela Price took a major step forward Tuesday



Emilie Raguso:

The recall committee, dubbed Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE), formed last month, but Tuesday’s filing is the first concrete sign that the recall effort will proceed.

Now it will be up to the Alameda County registrar of voters to certify materials submitted Tuesday by the committee. That includes the first 100 signatures for the recall petition. 

Once certification happens, the broader signature collection can begin. 

“As an advocate for families who have lost loved ones, what I see now is something I have never seen before,” said Brenda Grisham, a recall committee member and the mother of Christopher LaVell Jones, who was killed in Oakland in 2010. “DA Price is destroying the safety of our community and trampling on victims. We are here to bring balance back — and that starts with recalling DA Price.”Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE) recall committee members file their notice of intent, Aug. 15, 2023. From left: Virginia Nishita, Brenda Grisham, Carl Chan, Letifah Wilson and Lorie and Eric Mohs. SAFE

Pamela Price supporters have said she is doing what she was elected to do as a progressive prosecutor and Alameda County’s first Black district attorney.




School Choice Programs in Los Angeles



Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns:

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Commentary.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: US inflation means families are spending $709 more per month than two years ago



Matt Egan:

US inflation has had a snowballing effect on family budgets.

The typical American household spent $709 more in July than they did two years ago to buy the same goods and services, according to Moody’s Analytics. 

That figure underscores the cumulative impact high inflation has had on consumer finances — even as price growth has cooled considerably in recent months.

“High inflation of the past 2+ years has done lots of economic damage,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Most of that increase in spending is driven by housing costs, which have surged, Zandi told CNN in an email on Friday. He added that families are also spending more at the grocery store; on buying, maintaining and insuring vehicles and on recreational services like cable.




North Iowa city relies on AI in banning of 19 renowned books, including Bissinger’s bestseller about a high school football team and the world in which it lived



Mike Hlas:

“Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the 1990 non-fiction bestseller by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger about a prominent west Texas high school football team and societal issues in its Odessa, Texas home is one of 19 books recently removed from school shelves in Mason City.

Others include Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

“I’m flattered to be in the same company,” Bissinger said by phone Wednesday. “These are great, great books.”

The rest of what he said wasn’t so flattering, and with good reason.

Iowa Senate File 496, passed this year, requires every book available to students be “age-appropriate” and free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” according to Iowa Code 702.17.

Mason City Community School District Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Bridgette Exman said it was “simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.” So, as Popular Science reported this week, that district is using ChatGPT. That’s an artificial intelligence software, to help provide textual analysis of each title.

“This use of AI is ridiculous,” Bissinger said, “There’s no sex at all. I’ve never depicted a sex act. I don’t know what the (expletive) they’re talking about. I purposely stayed away from that.”

As for the book possibly not being age-appropriate?

“My book is being falsely depicted,” said Bissinger. “The tragedy is, this is a great book for kids. It is a great book for teenage males because they don’t like to read anything. But they devour this book, and I know because I’ve had over 30 years of emails telling me that.




Censorship: Google/YouTube






The mind is muscle: use it or lose it



David Deming:

Cognitive endurance reframes grit as a skill that is developed through practice rather than as a mindset to be shifted. The difference is more than semantic. If we are going to build higher-order skills in children, we need to better understand the science of how to do it.

It has taken more than 100 years to develop a science of teaching reading, and even today, lots of ink is spilled on how to do it better. Why should we expect anything less for grit, or teamwork, or problem-solving? More research is needed to take the “soft” out of soft skills.




What 35 years of groundbreaking research on education, neighborhoods, and inequality has taught us



David Deming:

This week I want to talk about Larry Katz, a man who has a profound influence on my scholarly career and on the careers and lives of countless others. The impetus is a chapter that David Autor and I just completed for the Palgrave Companion to Harvard Economics, entitled “A Young Person’s Guide to Lawrence F. Katz”. If you are an economist (current or aspiring), or a person who cares about education, skills, technology, labor markets, neighborhoods, or economic inequality (which seems likely, given that you’re reading this newsletter), you should really read the entire paper.

My purpose today is partly tribute, and partly intellectual history. Larry is responsible for some of the most important ideas and findings in modern labor economics. He’s also served as a steward of the profession through his editorship of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and his mentorship of more than two hundred PhD students over the years, two of whom are David Autor and me. In his time at Harvard, Larry has served on an average of 6 dissertation committees per year. That’s staggering! He’s advised multiple John Bates Clark medal winners and MacArthur “genius” grant winners and dozens of scholars at top economics departments all around the country.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is the top journal in economics, with an impact factor nearly double the next highest competitor. But it was not always so. When Larry took over as coeditor of the QJE in 1991, it was ranked below the average of the other “top 5” journals.1 As the figure below shows, the “treatment effect” of Larry Katz in an event study framework is positive and (probably) statistically significant. By 2022, the QJE had an impact factor more than double the average of the other top 5 journals.

I will praise Larry in this post because he deserves it. But I also want to use this opportunity to explain two important lessons that we should all learn from Larry’s work.

The first half of my Katz encomium focuses on his contribution to helping us think about wage differences between workers with different levels of education. Part two, airing next week, covers his contribution to our understanding of the benefits of living in a better neighborhood, along with some meta-commentary about the importance of a principled, scientific approach to tackling difficult questions.

The Race between Education and Technology

Why does education increase earnings? And why does the return to education vary so much across places and over different periods in history? The college wage premium ranges from 15 percent in Denmark and Sweden to 63 percent in the U.S. and 179 percent in Chile.




Harvard University Encourages Students To Go On Food Stamps, Even Though It’s the Richest School In The World With A $53 Billion Endowment



Jeannine Mancini:

The voiceover provides a clue: “When you live with moderate or severe Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, your day can be full of reminders of your condition. Never knowing, always wondering.” And there’s another hint: the woman keeps grimacing and clutching her belly.

But these clues may not be enough. What’s never explained in this ad is that abdominal pain and sudden diarrhea are among the most common symptoms of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, conditions known collectively as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The “never knowing, always wondering” refers to the way people with these conditions often have unpredictable bouts of diarrhea and an urgent need to get to a restroom. And that’s why there are toilets everywhere.




Viewpoint Discrimination: The District allowed “Black Lives Matter” protestors to violate the city’s defacement ordiance, but enforced the law against groups with a different political message



Jonathan Adler:

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit revived a lawsuit agaisnt the District of Columbia for selective enforcement of the district’s defacement ordinance in violation of the First Amendment. Judge Rao wrote for the court in Frederick Douglass Foundation v. District of Columbia, joined by Judge Childs, reversing the district court’s dismissal of the Foundation’s First Amendment claim, but affirming dismissal of an Equal Protection claim. Judge Wilkins concurred in the judgment.

Judge Rao’s opinion for the court summarizes the case and decision as follows:

The First Amendment prohibits government discrimination on the basis of viewpoint. “To permit one side … to have a monopoly in expressing its views … is the antithesis of constitutional guarantees.” City of Madison Joint Sch. Dist. No. 8 v. Wis. Emp. Relations Comm’n, 429 U.S. 167, 175–76 (1976). The protection for freedom of speech applies not only to legislation, but also to enforcement of the laws. This case concerns a constitutional challenge to the selective enforcement of the District of Columbia’s defacement ordinance against some viewpoints but not others.

In the summer of 2020, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of the District to proclaim “Black Lives Matter.” Over several weeks, the protesters covered streets, sidewalks, and storefronts with paint and chalk. The markings were ubiquitous and in open violation of the District’s defacement ordinance, yet none of the protesters were arrested. During the same summer, District police officers arrested two pro-life advocates in a smaller protest for chalking “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a public sidewalk.




Civics: Lawfare and elections



Chuck Ross:

Elias alleged that “irregularities” in voting machines switched votes from Brindisi to Tenney. The case drew some national attention because the argument mirrored Republicans’ baseless claims that voting machine irregularities were responsible for Donald Trump losing to President Joe Biden in some states.

A judge ruled in favor of Tenney on Feb. 5 after finding insufficient evidence of any widespread problems with voting machines.

Elias, a partner at the firm Perkins Coie, is perhaps best known outside Democratic circles for his links to the Steele dossier.




Artists like Oliver Anthony represent the new counterculture — one spurred on by our failed elite class who can’t even do corruption right.



Rich Cromwell:

Oliver Anthony’s viral song “Rich Men North of Richmond” is clever on several levels. First, there’s the wordplay between “rich men” and “Richmond.” Second, there’s the district north of Richmond, one not known for its relative poverty, but for its indifference to both the material and spiritual poverty experienced outside of its borders. Third, there’s the lyrical content, telling tales of the men and women whose lives are shaped by those who occupy the district that wields far too much control over our culture and economic well-being.

While the song has been heralded by Fox, the Blaze, and here at The Federalist, neither the artist nor the song are about the battles between conservatives vs. liberals, but about the battles between the elites and everyday citizens. Anthony even said in a conversation with Rolling Stone that he is “pretty dead center down the aisle on politics” and that “it seems like both sides serve the same master — and that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.” Naturally, Rolling Stone titled the piece “Right-Wing Influencers Just Found Their Favorite New Country Song.”

There are also people on Twitter claiming the musician’s overnight success must be the result of right-wing astroturfing. Maybe, though the better explanation is the return of norms aside, the populist anger captured in the Sanders-Trump voters of 2016 has not gone away, especially in light of the failures of elected officials to address the shared concerns that led to that overlap in the first place. In other words, while David Brooks may have recently remembered them, albeit in the way an amateur primatologist remembers a group of chimps he once observed, it’s Jon Gabriel who gets to the heart of why Anthony’s song resonates.

Writing at Discourse, Gabriel says:

“As it slowly replaced the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy, meritocracy promised to reward ability over pedigree. In many cases, this goal was realized. But the system has devolved into a new caste system stressing academic accreditation and boutique beliefs over simple merit and hard work. An Ivy League student garners degrees, builds a social network and marries a similarly educated spouse. Through their high-salary professions, these members of the meritocracy lavish advantages on their offspring, who matriculate to the same elite schools. Once the cycle repeats for a generation or two, you start referring to common cold cuts as ‘charcuterie.’”

It’s not that they refer to meat and cheese plates as charcuterie or that we have elites, Gabriel notes, but that the quality of our current crop has gotten so poor. “Elites of previous eras won world wars, established lasting peace, raised prosperity around the globe and transformed a backwater set of colonies into a global hegemon,” he adds. “Today’s crew can’t defeat third-world foes, police our cities, pay their bills, or keep the power on.”




Prohibit “gain-of-function” research that creates enhanced potential pandemic pathogens



change.org:

On Thursday, 11 May 2023, the state of Florida enacted a law that bans research that is “reasonably likely to create an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen,” or ePPP. The law, Florida Statues section 381.875, is the first of its kind in the US and marks a major victory in the fight to prevent future lab-generated pandemics.

We, the undersigned, applaud the new Florida law banning ePPP research.  We urge other US states to adopt similar legislation.

Potential pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms that are highly virulent and highly transmissible. Examples include the viruses that cause COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fever. An ePPP is a potential pandemic pathogen that scientists have manipulated (e.g., for scientific, commercial, or military applications) and made even more virulent or more transmissible than the naturally occurring strain. Laboratory accidents that happen during the course of ePPP research have the potential to trigger devastating pandemics.

ePPP research is scientifically unethical, as it places the public at risk without their consent. ePPP research also has limited benefits, as it does not meaningfully contribute to the development of vaccines or disease treatments. The US federal government has, for decades, failed to enact legislation that meaningfully protects US citizens and the global public from the dangers of ePPP research. Indeed, the US federal government actively puts its citizens and the global public at risk by continuing to fund ePPP research, both in the US and in other countries. This funding continues despite multiple US federal agencies assessing that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) may have originated as an ePPP that accidentally escaped from a research lab that had been funded by the US federal government.




College enrollment peaked in 2010 and has since fallen by 15%



Alex Tabarrok:

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




How Much Does A Teacher Really Make?



Jeffrey Carter:

There are so many arguments about teacher pay. Everywhere in the country, Democrats are shilling for more teacher pay which is really a sell-out to the Teacher’s Union. Democrats fight school choice at every single turn. They hurt underprivileged and poor kids when they do. Yet, many of those same people active in killing school choice send their kids to private schools.

No one is saying teachers do not provide a service. The reason they are paid what they are paid is that they are unionized, and it’s simply not that difficult to become a teacher compared to say a lawyer, accountant, or doctor. Other professions that make a lot of money have significantly higher degrees of risk. There is no risk of losing your entire year’s worth of salary if you are a teacher. There is one on Wall Street. Salespeople can work years on one sale that will bring them a big commission and it can fall through. 

The other thing to remember about salaries is that the higher you go in a public company, the more influence you have over the bottom line. Doesn’t it make sense that someone who is a C-Suite executive that has responsibility for billions in assets makes more than a teacher?




I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy



Daniel Solove:

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.




The FBI and ‘Radical’ Catholics



Wall Street Journal:

That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.

This story began in February when a whistleblower leaked a heavily redacted January report from the FBI’s Richmond office: “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

The document defined “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as those who attend the Latin Mass and who frequently adhere to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.” The agents relied on half-baked “open-source” reporting from liberal outlets to justify more bureau investigation.

FBI headquarters quickly said the report didn’t meet its “exacting standards” and had been withdrawn. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Judiciary Committee in July that the report was “a single product by a single field office.” He added that “as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” and he said he began an internal probe.




Curriculum and Wisconsin’s long term, disastrous reading results



Benjamin Yount:

A new report on reading in Wisconsin shows many schools across the state continue to use reading lessons shown to leave students behind.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is out with a new report called Trust the Science? The Use of Outdated Reading Curricula in Wisconsin Schools. It looks at how whole-language reading curricula have performed over the years.

“Forward Exam scores show that Wisconsin students are struggling in reading. Currently statewide, only about 36.8% of students scored proficient or higher on the Forward Exam, meaning the majority of students are falling behind. Reading problems cut across all socioeconomic and racial lines,” the report states. “This paper takes advantage of a new dataset available from the Department of Public Instruction that details the curricula used in each district around the state. We correlate reading outcomes on the Forward Exam with some two of the most widely criticized curricula that rely on “Whole Language” techniques – Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell.”

“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?




University of Chicago Agrees to $13.5 Million Settlement in Financial Aid Antitrust Case



Melissa Korn:

The University of Chicago has agreed to pay $13.5 million to settle a lawsuit in which it was accused of illegally colluding with other top universities to limit financial aid to students, making it the first defendant in the case to settle, according to a court filing Monday. 

The lawsuit, filed in Illinois federal court in January 2022, accuses 17 colleges and universities, including most members of the Ivy League, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and the California Institute of Technology, of engaging in price fixing by using a shared methodology to calculate applicants’ financial need.




Rethinking The Parent-School Compact After The Pandemic



Frederick Hess

Across the land, parents are starting to get their kids ready for the new school year. In talking to parents, you can hear relief—and an undercurrent of angst. The last few years have been tumultuous for the relationship between parents and schools. The disruptions of school closure and spotty remote learning were followed by masking fights, learning loss, and fierce culture clashes.

It’s been a trying time for parents and educators, alike. But it’s one that also offers the much-needed opportunity, as I suggest in The Great School Rethink, to reset the dysfunctional relationship between families and schools.




Top 8 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know 💯



AbdulAzeez Sherif

In programming, an algorithm is a set of instructions or a procedure for solving a specific problem or achieving a specific task. Algorithms can be expressed in any programming language and can be as simple as a sequence of basic operations or as complex as a multi-step process involving different data structures and logic. The main goal of an algorithm is to take in input, process it and provide an output that is expected. Algorithms can be classified based on the time and space complexity, the technique used for solving the problem, and the type of problem it solves. Examples of algorithm are sorting, searching, graph traversals, string manipulations, mathematical operations, and many more.

Algorithms we will be talking about:




Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges



Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, John Friedman

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.