Jeffrey Tucker:

It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room.

It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.

It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as H.L. Mencken might have said, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.

It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: It reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.

The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.”

Reporting on the spectacle, The New York Timessaid these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?

Attacks on Free Speech Aren’t New

Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.

The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1920) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the U.S. that the communists, anarchists and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the U.S. government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.

Frederick Hess:

In education policy circles, there’s a lot of enthusiasmregarding the promise of AI-enabled tutoring. After all, a huge stumbling block for tutoring has been the limited number of affordable, reliable, and skilled tutors. That’s why ubiquitous AI could be such a game-changer.

But there’s reason to fear that the excitement of AI-enabled tutoring will distract us from some of the other, less fantastical possibilities offered by web-enabled mentoring. Look, I want to be clear. I am, and have long been, a believer in the promise of computer-assisted tutoring—especially when an AI tutor knows a student’s vocabulary or can inhabit fictional characters.

I post this clip often but it is so important when it comes to exposing climate change propaganda.

This was over 30 years ago. Every single word that Rush says is correct. pic.twitter.com/eNrfIeh1in

— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 22, 2023

Matthew Contenitti:

Conservatives have placed freedom at the heart of their political program since the 1930s. They have resisted the encroaching control of centralized bureaucracies by appealing to the dignity of human life, the limited government of the Constitution, and the space that market economics provides for individual choice and competition.

This consensus held despite criticism from libertarians and traditionalists. It held because the principles and institutions of the American Founding anchored conservatives in a national history and culture that, among other things, have long been individualistic and suspicious of authority. It held because conservatives of all stripes perceived a common danger in unconstrained government and, perhaps most important, in the Soviet Union and global communism.

The consensus unraveled in the 1990s. Victory defeated American conservatism. The collapse of the Soviet Empire, disintegration of the Soviet Union, and China’s turn toward state capitalism removed, or obscured, the communist threat. Congress lowered marginal tax rates and exempted more Americans from income taxes. Lawmakers imposed time limits and work requirements on welfare, and caseloads fell. Cities adopted broken-windows policing and removed violent criminals from the streets, and crime declined. For a moment in 2001, and again from 2003 to 2007, Republicans enjoyed full control of the federal government for the first time in 50 years.

Jim Hinch:

Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.

Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.

For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.

Henry Mack:

In May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a series of higher-education bills, among them Senate Bill 266. As Florida’s system chancellor over public colleges, I helped design the provisions of that bill, which amended general-education requirements for students at all Florida colleges and universities. General education had become larded with “diversity” education; SB 266 stipulates that it should aim instead at universal knowledge and an understanding of our democracy. In short, the law clarified the legislative and executive expectation for what every undergraduate student attending our public colleges and universities should know, or at least be exposed to, in general-education coursework.

Naturally, the reform drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Journalists and academics argued that it would drive talent away from Florida and compromise the state’s competitiveness. Faculty claimed that the legislation infringes on academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and shared governance. The American Association of University Professors has been particularly vocal about its displeasure with the direction of Florida’s higher-education aims. Still others speculated that the change would result in the loss of accreditation statusfor the Sunshine State’s universities, or in hostile environments for minority and low-income students.

None of this is true. Since the bill’s passage, Florida education leaders have in fact been flooded with inquiries from teachers wanting to move to the state. These interested instructors also believe that public colleges and universities should ground their general education coursework in the history of Western Civilization and the Great Books tradition—aims that SB 266 now makes explicit. This approach is not new, nor should it be controversial.

Dan Lennington

The battle lines are drawn. After the United States Supreme Court declared affirmative action in college admissions illegal last month, politicians and university presidents vowed to make the decision a dead letter. Taking them at their word, “diversity” — that is, favoring applicants based on race — will be preserved by any means necessary.

President Biden pledged that his administration would find a “new path” that “protects diversity.” Harvard’s president Lawrence Bacow promisedto marshal the “talent and expertise of our Harvard community” to figure out a way to “preserve” an admission system that results in racial diversity. And the Association of American Universities declared that America’s top 71 research institutions will continue to pursue “diversity throughout the academic enterprise.”

In other words, our universities have ironically recalled George Wallace, essentially declaring, “Racialism now, racialism tomorrow, racialism forever.” But to succeed, they must find a way to subvert the law. Absent direct defiance (and schools may try to hide a fair amount of that), the answer is finding a racial proxy — something that isn’t race but approximates the same result.

Brett Beasley:

“Benjamin Franklin saw that the Colonies’ financial independence was necessary for their political independence. Most of the silver and gold coins brought to the British American colonies were rapidly drained away to pay for manufactured goods imported from abroad, leaving the Colonies without sufficient monetary supply to expand their economy,” Manukyan said.

However, one major problem stood in the way of efforts to print paper money: counterfeiting. When Franklin opened his printing house in 1728, paper money was a relatively new concept. Unlike gold and silver, paper money’s lack of intrinsic value meant it was constantly at risk of depreciating. There were no standardized bills in the Colonial period, leaving an opportunity for counterfeiters to pass off fake bills as real ones. In response, Franklin worked to embed a suite of security features that made his bills distinctive.

Anatoly Liberman:

In 1894, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen brought out a book titled Progress in Language. Whether anything in language can legitimately be labeled as progress is a moot point, but no one doubts that language indeed has history. The larger the speaking community and the more mobile the population, the faster the change. Problems arise when we go beyond such trivialities. Language does not remain stable even in our lifetime, and different people react differently to this phenomenon. Assuming that we notice the changes, do we accept, or do we resist them? I will skip phonetic problems, because it is the vocabulary and usage that deserve our attention here. 

This post owes its existence to Valerie Fridland’s book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English (Viking, 2023). The book deals with some processes in Modern (American) English, and the author is very much on the side of “progress in language.” If I am not mistaken, her main point is that as long as some widespread phenomenon can be explained, it should be accepted. This approach does not convince me. For instance, I have read numerous interviews with celebrities in sports and music, and almost every noun in them is accompanied by a single epithet, namely, f—ing. I can easily explain why people speak so: the word is nowadays on everybody’s lips from the age of three, and many Americans don’t know any other equally expressive qualifying word. This argument does not make me look “for the good in [their] bad English.” 

Some chapters in the book are less exciting than others: among them, the triumph of the word dude. Dude is a respectable relative of the aforementioned epithet: instead of using many nouns, people have limited their vocabulary to a single one: this is practical and convenient, because with overchoice comes much sorrow: the more knowledge, the more grief.

NEW: Equable Institute report shows Illinois' pension crisis is the worst in the nation. Public pension funds ended FY2023 with an estimated $210 BILLION in unfunded pension liabilities. 🧵

— Bryce Hill (@BryceTHill) July 19, 2023

Andrew Lowenthal and Matt Taibbi:

Yesterday witnessed another bizarre display of cartoon authoritarianism on the part of the Democratic Party, as members beat up one of their own presidential candidates, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in a hearing of the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Bezos is reportedly taking a direct interest in the Post , which will reportedly lose $100 million this year due to failing subscriptions. One suggestion…https://t.co/HTofUbjhes

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 22, 2023

Related: RFK Jr. is — by far — the most approved-of political figure in the United States right now.

Josh Blackman:

Last week, I wrote about the apparent efforts to make the NextGen Bar Exam far simpler that the current exam. I received an email from a person who worked as a state board of law examiners. With permission, I reproduce the email, stripping any reference to the person’s state.

I was an Assistant to the *** Board of Law Examiners when the *** Supreme Court decided to adopt the UBE [Uniform Bar Exam]. The sales pitch for the UBE from the NCBE, as presented to the group of assistant bar examiners I was among, was threefold.  First, it won’t be any worse that the current bar exam.  Second, it will be better for the applicants because they will have more flexibility in deciding to which state they should move.  Third, everybody else is doing it.  None of those explanations supports such a dramatic change in public policy as the adoption of the UBE and the abandonment of a state-specific essay test.  For my part, I asked two questions:  If the UBE is not an affirmative improvement over the status quo, why should we change?  Why should the *** Supreme Court elevate the applicants’ interests in residential flexibility over ensuring that ***’s new lawyers have demonstrated some level of competence in *** law?  I did not receive satisfactory answers to either question.  The Board and the other assistants seemed inclined to blindly defer to the so-called expertise of the NCBE and generally unwilling to consider the consequences of the policy change.

Nate Silver:

But I’m going to make an exception here, because we have a scandal where the facts are relatively simple and clear — but which was nevertheless extremely consequential.

Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular1, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.

We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There’s also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level). 

The messages show that the authors were highly uncertain about COVID’s origins — and if anything, they leaned more toward a lab leak than a spillover from an animal source. But none of that was expressed in the “Proximal Origin” paper, which instead said that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Granted, there is a little bit of ass-covering — “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another,” they also wrote in the paper. But the message — natural origin good, lab leak bad — was received clearly enough by mainstream news outlets. “No, the new coronavirus wasn’t created in a lab, scientists say”, reported the CBC in covering the paper. “COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin” was the headline at Science Daily.

In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message. This went beyond mere motivated reasoning. There was an enormous gap between what the authors believed privately and what they stated publicly, including in the “Proximal Origin” paper — again, see the above links for more detail.

Alisa Rosenbaum:

The old idiom, “if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck,” directly applies to the Latin School of Chicago for what increasingly appears to be a hostile, bullying environment for both students and parents alike.

Both Chicago Contrarian and many other media outlets have covered the story of the $100 million lawsuit filed against the Latin School by Rosellene and Robert Bronstein for its role in the suicide of 15-year-old Nate Bronstein, a former student there.

Recently, Latin stands accused of failing to deliver school records (as highlighted in a recent Chicago Tribune article) to the parents of Nate, who took his own life in early 2022 due to repeated bullying and cyberbullying at the hands of students at school-sanctioned events. Nevertheless, Latin’s latest blunder shows how far this school has fallen in its treatment of students.

In the latest Latin offense, a pair of graduating twins were allowed to walk but not receive their diplomas nor transcripts for college matriculation due to a dispute between the school and the twins’ mother, Katie O’Dea.

Ms. O’Dea had left her role as the school’s director of communications after 16 years in November 2022 (according to her LinkedIn profile), holding a valid enrollment contract for her children to finish the academic year after paying the agreed upon discounted sum. Yet her children were still denied their diplomas and transcripts.

O’Dea filed a lawsuit on June 27 along with her husband, Daniel McKee, and their children, Molly and Hugh McKee.

Te-Ping Chen and Lauren Weber:

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer. 

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

The number of CDO searches is down 75% in the past year, says Jason Hanold, chief executive of Hanold Associates Executive Search, which works with Fortune 100 companies to recruit HR and DEI executives, among other roles. Demand is the lowest he has seen in his 30 years of recruiting.

At the same time, he says, more executives are feeling skittish about taking on diversity roles.

Dan Wang:

I think the reason they haven’t given everyone access to AI chatbots is straightforward: regulators in Beijing would rather not let them run in the wild. Chinese tech companies may be hobbled by lack of access to the most advanced chips; and they’re probably hurt by the lack of training data, since most of the trainable texts are in English rather than Chinese. But Chinese companies rarely hesitate to release substandard products into the market in order to claim early-mover advantages, so a greater force must be holding them back.

Taxpayer funded Central Intelligence Agency:

Test your cryptography skills by cracking the code of Kryptos, a sculpture at CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Be warned though, many have tried and few have succeeded. To date, only three of the four messages have been revealed. Can you solve the last one? Download the code here to test your skills.

Jennifer Calfas:

The Mid­dle­town, Conn., in­sti­tu­tion joins sev­eral other uni­ver­si­ties for­go­ing the decades-old prac­tice of giv­ing the chil­dren of alumni pref­er­en­tial treat­ment in the ad­mis­sions process, which dis­pro­por­tion­ately ben­e­fits stu­dents who are wealthy and white. The Supreme Court’s de­ci­sion strik­ing down the use of af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion in col­lege de­ci­sions in June elim­i­nated a tool many uni­ver­si­ties used to di­ver­sify their cam­puses, thrust­ing legacy pref­er­ence into the spot­light.

Wes­leyan Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Michael S. Roth said in a state­ment Wednes­day that legacy sta­tus “has played a neg­li­gi­ble role in our ad­mis­sions process for many years.” But the lib­eral-arts col­lege, which had a 15.7% ac­cep­tance rate for the class of 2027, found it nec­es­sary to for­mally end the prac­tice fol­low­ing the high court’s de­ci­sion, he said.

Yes, this paragraph appeared in @nytimes. Which appears to have completely, totally lost its way and forgotten the business it is in. pic.twitter.com/UTRxiprvEe

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 21, 2023

Matt Taibbi:

When Public and Racket obtained hundreds of pages of communications between the scientists who published perhaps the most influential Nature Medicine paper about the origins of Covid-19, one of the first things we noticed was the scientists’ fixation with hits and Internet traffic. If Heathers had been written for the Instagram age, the script would have read a lot like the Slack chats between Drs. Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and Eddie Holmes.

This is the NY Post reporter who used authentic docs to report on Joe Biden's role in Hunter's business deals in Ukraine and China before the 2020 vote.

CIA and @NatashaBertrand smeared her with lies that it was "Russian disinformation," then Big Tech censored her reporting. https://t.co/cmUIcGjUxc

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 20, 2023

Charles Cooke:

Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, a former president of the Association of American Law Schools, and the author of many of the books that America’s law students use while in college, has joined forces with a political-science professor from San Francisco State University to write an open letter to President Biden urging him to begin openly ignoring the Supreme Court:

We urge President Biden to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations.

I contended recently that the Left has no comprehensible judicial philosophy. This is a good example of that problem. There is no principle on display here, and there is no use pretending otherwise. By “mistaken interpretations,” Tushnet means decisions that he personally dislikes. By “fundamental commitment,” he means political outcomes that he personally desires. By “MAGA justices,” he means members of the Supreme Court whom he personally wishes had not been nominated and confirmed. He provides no rubrics, frameworks, standards, canons, doctrines, or objective arguments of any sort in the course of his proposition. Why not? Because he doesn’t have any.

As Tushnet goes on to confirm:

BREAKING: Stanford Law School has parted ways with Tirien Steinbach, the DEI administrator who accosted a sitting federal judge. Story forthcoming. pic.twitter.com/JHMBTIPuLC

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) July 20, 2023

Gail Heriot:

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

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

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

Here are some predictions for the coming year or so.

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

Elisabeth Bik:

One evening in January 2014, I sat at my computer at home, sifting through scientific papers. Being a microbiologist, this wasn’t unusual, although I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did that night.

These particular papers were write-ups of medical research, with many including photographs of biological samples, like tissue. One picture caught my eye. Was there something familiar about it? Curious, I quickly scrolled back through other papers by the same authors, checking their images against each other.

There it was. A section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments.

What’s more, the authors seemed to be deliberately covering their tracks. Although the photos were of the same sample, one appeared to have been flipped back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.

Louis Bonham:

At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education.

Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply obey laws that forbid practices they consider moral imperatives is naïve.

Expecting state employees to simply obey anti-affirmative-action laws is naïve.

Take California’s ban on affirmative action. For decades, it has been illegal for California institutions to give racial preference in admissions, hiring, or contracting. Despite this clear, politically popular law, have California state universities ended their use of racial preferences? Anyone familiar with the UC System will tell you they have not.

Instead, state employees violate the law and continue such practices. UC Berkeley’s law-school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, typifies this prevailing attitude. In a recently surfaced video from earlier this year, this head of a public law school admits he and his school violate California law, via a process he calls “unstated affirmative action”:

Christopher Rufo:

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists desired not only to remake the world of politics and economics, but to reshape human nature according to the dictates of left-wing ideology. “And so,” he continued, “I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.”

This concept—the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit—would drive the communist regimes for the middle part of the twentieth century. The Soviets had their artists. The Chinese had their propagandists. The Third World armies had their pedagogists. All were committed to the creation of the New Man.

The Marxists in the West, such as Paulo Freire, held the same philosophy. Freire and his disciples believed that the critical pedagogies could reengineer the human soul and inspire a revolution from the bottom up. But in contradiction to their counterparts in the East, the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed in the West was not social class, but racial identity. 

“Although [Freire]’s early work was understandably rooted in an almost exclusive concern with class, many of us realized that it had theoretical shortcomings in dealing with the central issues shaping the multicultural debate,” explained Freire’s closest American collaborator, Henry Giroux. “Many of us began to expand the notion of social justice to include a discourse about racial justice. That is, justice could not be taken up solely in terms of the ownership of the means of production, or strictly around questions of labor or the division of wealth. These were very important issues, but they excluded fundamental questions about racism, colonialism, and the workings of the racial state.”

A federally funded, university and progressive media project to limit “information disorder’s scope and impact.” Is it me or does that sound just astoundingly misguided? https://t.co/j2Duq2vlEY

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 20, 2023

The vision of the university as a place to interact with those from differing viewpoints has never been weaker. I appreciated liberal professors in college bc it taught me how to debate & argue in a civil manner. But it appears many on left & right now want an echo chamber. https://t.co/kXrTmQ9T9r

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) July 20, 2023

While the @nytimes was blindly and unquestioningly following the lead of the Proximal Origin authors re #COVID19 origins, those scientists were scheming to manipulate NYT coverage. It’s time for the NYT to review its disastrous coverage of the pandemic origins issue. pic.twitter.com/MJbToUrvXk

— Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) July 19, 2023

Shankar Institute:

raction due to the joint efforts of educators, parents, and state leaders. This movement for better reading instruction has helped to fuel a wave of legislation to address widespread and persistent reading deficits of American students. While reading difficulties cut across socioeconomic lines, they disproportionately affect students living in poverty as well as those from black, brown, and indigenous communities.

Reading Reform Across America documents how state legislatures nationwide have responded to these challenges. Specifically, the report examines reading-related legislation enacted between 2019 and 2022. We analyzed a total of 223 bills enacted in 45 states and the District of Columbia, examining over 40 features, such as teacher preparation, professional development, and curriculum, to name a few.

Our objective is to provide a robust and granular description of states’ efforts to enhance reading instruction, with the following goals:

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Rep Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) just said one of the most disturbing and insane things a member of Congress has ever said:

“The DOJ, FBI, and IRS keep this democracy in check [and] provide the checks and the balances."
pic.twitter.com/gTBHLvSmaV

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 19, 2023

The fact that @FrancescaHongWI is a state lawmaker seems relevant here, but not mentioned. Sponsorships, news media, politics all a bit of a melange. https://t.co/5TxQuqzVtX

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 19, 2023

To make a point about “far right” GOP opposition to federal law enforcement, ⁦@AP⁩ goes all the way back to Reconstruction, without mentioning the resistance then was Democratic. https://t.co/lJ9e8LOhkB

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 20, 2023

William Jacobson:

CriticalRace.org, a project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, has unique and unparalleled interactive maps and databases demonstrating how Critical Race Theory and its progeny, such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Ibram Kendi’s misnamed “anti-racism,” have deeply penetrated every corner of academia. The racialization of education is all but complete

🚨BREAKING: ELKHORN, WI GENDER SUPPORT POLICY UPDATED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS WITHOUT PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE OR INPUT…IN 2021!
👉🏽Parents only realized this after they discovered a 10 yr old biological boy was using the girl’s bathroom.@Moms4Liberty@DefendingEd pic.twitter.com/x6fAgcaj8i

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) July 18, 2023

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson promised to raise $800 million in new revenue without hiking property taxes.
His allies support a Chicago income tax–3.5% on all household income above $100,000. #NeverEnough #Taxes #Chicago #Illinois #Mondayhttps://t.co/sJAQugvZAD

— Beverly A. Pekala (@PekalaLaw) July 17, 2023

Eugene Volokh:

From Judge Clifton Corker’s opinion today in Ultima Servs. Corp. v. U.S. Dep’t of Agric. (E.D. Tenn.):

This case concerns whether, under the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, Defendants the United States’ Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) and the Small Business Administration (“SBA”) may use a “rebuttable presumption” of social disadvantage for certain minority groups to qualify them for inclusion in a federal program that awards government contracts on a preferred basis to businesses owned by individuals in those minority groups.

The court generally answers this “no”; here’s an excerpt, though if you’re interested in the details you should read the whole opinion:

“The liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause contains within it the prohibition against denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.” United States v. Windsor (2013); see also Bolling v. Sharpe (1954); Ctr. for Bio-Ethical Reform v. Napolitano, 648 F.3d 365, 379 (6th Cir. 2011) (“The Fifth Amendment, of course, does not itself contain a guarantee of equal protection, but instead incorporates, as against the federal government, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”). Courts, therefore, “evaluate equal protection claims against the federal government under the Fifth Amendment just as [they] would evaluate equal protection claims against state and local governments under the Fourteenth Amendment.” …

To satisfy the compelling-interest prong [of the strict scrutiny applicable to race classifications], the government must both identify a compelling interest and provide evidentiary support concerning the need for the proposed remedial action. The Supreme Court has held that the government has a compelling interest in “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc.Additionally, the government must present goals that are “sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.”

To say that teachers weren’t involved in discussions as we worked through the process is untrue.
I also personally met with @WSRAliteracy. At that meeting, a light was shined on why we are in this reading crisis. https://t.co/w6tZfArOUx

— John Jagler (@JohnJagler) July 19, 2023

I am pleased to announce the Right to Read Act has been signed into law. @RepKitchens and I authored AB 321 to curb Wisconsin’s ongoing literacy crisis by investing $50 million in early literacy development and banning reading curriculum that has hindered students for decades. pic.twitter.com/mBGSR0Gya1

— Duey Stroebel (@SenStroebel) July 19, 2023

Mitchell Schmidt:

Wisconsin falls for MS miracle scam

And children and teachers suffer the consequences

https://t.co/0ELJUm0KL9

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) July 19, 2023

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Meta’s new AI provides a good example of early AI alignment.

If you can insert your values into this process, you will be able to control the future. These language models will be a foundational part of technological development going forward. https://t.co/sjXA7lPBzJ

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 19, 2023

Tom Knighton

When I was in middle school here in Georgia, they did something kind of smart. They broke us all into classes based on our grades. All the “A” students were in one group, “B” students in another, and so on.

The result was that those who excelled could excel and those who needed special help weren’t holding anyone else back.

Apparently, someone thought that was horribly unfair and the schools stopped doing it, which is a big problem.

You see, while the term “equity” wasn’t really a thing when this happened, it was the same mentality. If everyone couldn’t succeed academically, it seems, no one should.

It sounds stupid, but it’s the crab bucket mentality. The crabs pull down all the other crabs lest someone else escape.

Frankly, I could deal with it if I knew that was the end of it, but the practice continues to go on. Take this example from Massachusetts:

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Matt Taibbi calls the covid origins cover up “perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality”

Never forget pic.twitter.com/XRO4ygKckv

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 19, 2023

Noah Smith:

“The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.” — John Dewey

A couple of weeks ago, Armand Domalewski wrote a guest post for Noahpinion about how the new California Math Framework threatened to dumb down math education in the state — for example, by forbidding kids from taking algebra before high school:

Well, I’m going to write another post about this subject, because the direction in which math education is trending in America under “progressive” guidance just frustrates me so deeply. 

A few days after Armand’s post, the new California Math Framework was adopted. Some of the worst provisions had been thankfully watered down, but the basic strategy of trying to delay the teaching of subjects like algebra remained. It’s a sign that the so-called “progressive” approach to math education championed by people like Stanford’s Jo Boaler has not yet engendered a critical mass of pushback. 

And meanwhile, the idea that teaching kids less math will create “equity” has spread far beyond the Golden State. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.

It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.

The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.

Related: Madison’s various one size fits all schemes:

Connected Math

Discovery math:

Not, Singapore math, however.

Linda Jacobson & Asher Lehrer-Small:

But a 10-month examination by The 74 shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have barely tapped monies advocates say are critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic. 

With just over a year left to allocate the funds, the question isn’t only if districts will hit the September 2024 deadline, but whether the unprecedented windfall will leave students better off. 

Districts have not made it easy to answer those questions. Despite the unprecedented expense, Congress said little about districts’ responsibility to keep the public informed.

“Are districts with the biggest declines in student achievement spending their money the way you hope they would?” asked Matthew Steinberg, an education professor at George Mason University. “We just don’t know.”

A recent government report said gaps in spending data “make it difficult for the oversight community, decision-makers, and American taxpayers to fully understand where the money went and how it was used.”

Wall Street Journal:

More than 100,000 students attend Ohio’s charter schools, which are especially important for the state’s inner-city students. Out of 26 cities measured, Cleveland students posted the biggest drop in National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores last year compared to 2019. Cleveland also has its own school voucher program, and one common-sense measure from the Legislature was to allow students to take the vouchers to any private school—not only schools within the district.

Ohio has expanded its school choice offerings from cities to suburbs over the years. Good for Gov. DeWine and the Legislature for making private schools available to more families, and let’s hope they have their eye on education savings accounts next.

Adam Townsend:

The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “the FTC would take exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”

A private litigant who engaged in such conduct might well be facing charges of witness tampering. As the Plaintiff in this civil enforcement action, the FTC should not receive preferential treatment. There simply is no way to square the striking record of bias recounted above, along with other evidence described in this motion, with any semblance of the impartiality, due process, or equitable conduct that the law requires from administrative agencies like the FTC when they act pursuant to court-authorized and -supervised consent orders. 

This Court should intervene to stop the FTC’s ongoing improper conduct.

The alarming recent developments in this case occur against the backdrop of a consent order between the FTC and Twitter (now X Corp) entered more than a decade ago to resolve allegations that Twitter had not adequately safeguarded user information.

The Pentagon re-authorization bill provides a study to understand the “impacts of decreased testosterone levels on readiness” of special forces. pic.twitter.com/4gTP2R509A

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 18, 2023

Paul Cassell:

It is well known that there were significant spikes in homicides in 2020, particularly in major urban areas. In an article I published in 2021, I attributed these spikes to what I dubbed the “Minneapolis Effect”–specifically reductions in proactive policing as police pulled back in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I blogged about my article here.

A few days ago, an important new statistical study found corroboration for my hypothesis in New York City. Professor Dae-Young Kim’s article “Did De-Policing Contribute to the 2020 Homicide Spikes?” answers the question posed in the title in the affirmative.

Professor Kim’s article examines NYC homicide data from 2017 through 2020. It divides homicides into six different categories: gun, non-gun, domestic, non-domestic, gang, and non-gang. It assesses the connection between homicide rates in those categories and a significant reduction  in NYPD police stops of pedestrians. In NYC, stops fell from 13,453 in 2019 to 8,375 in 2020–a 30% decrease in proactive policing.

Professor Kim’s article found that the reduction in stops led to an increase in three homicide categories:

data wars — controlling access to your data https://t.co/Wbzp42Pcud

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 14, 2023

MATT TAIBBI, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Chats showing Proximal Origins authors saying things like “The truth will never come out (if lab escape is the truth)” were published first by independent researcher Francisco Del Asis of the independent investigatory group DRASTIC, after which the story was picked up by Ryan Grim of The Intercept. From there, health officials did their best to ignore the material — “Many of them remained silent with this revelation,” is how De Asis puts it — almost as if they were waiting for another shoe to drop. 

That other shoe is dropping. Public and Racket last week obtained a full complement of the “Proximal Origins” communications examined by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, revealing a story far worse than previously believed. While today’s Public story details the unprecedented scientific cover-up, the letters and chats examined here at Racket show how health officials and scientists constructed perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality. Because House investigators uncovered such a wealth of material, some of the Proximal Origin communications — which shed light on other Covid-related controversies — will be addressed in a second part of this series later this week. For now, however, the degree to which these communications blow up years of news stories stands out.

Maya Bodnick

Two weeks ago, I asked eight Harvard professors and teaching assistants to grade essays written by ChatGPT-4 in response to a prompt assigned in their class.2 Here are the summarized prompts with links to the essays:

• Microeconomics and Macroeconomics(Professors Jason Furman and David Laibson): Explain an economic concept creatively (300-500 for Micro and 800-1000 words for Macro).
• Latin American Politics (Professor Steven Levitsky): What has caused the many presidential crises in Latin America in recent decades (5-7 pages)?
• The American Presidency (Professor Roger Porter): Pick a modern president and identify his three greatest successes and three greatest failures (6-8 pages).
• Conflict Resolution (Professor Daniel Shapiro): Describe a conflict in your life and give recommendations for how to negotiate it (7-9 pages).
• Intermediate Spanish (Preceptor Adriana Gutierrez): Write a letter to activist Rigoberta Menchú (550-600 words).
• Freshman Seminar on Proust (Professor Virginie Greene): Close-read a passage from “In Search of Lost Time” (3-4 pages).
• Freshman Expository Writing (instructor chose to remain anonymous): Close-read a passage from “Middlemarch” (4-5 pages).

I told these instructors that each essay might have been written by me or the AI in order to minimize response bias, although in fact they were all written by ChatGPT-4. I submitted exactly what ChatGPT-4 wrote, except that I sequenced multiple responses in order to meet the word count (ChatGPT-4 only writes about 750 words at a time). Finally, I told the professors and TAs to grade these essays normally, except to ignore citations, which I didn’t include.

Bobby Jindal:

The elevation of victimhood over achievement has led many to misrepresent their racial and gender identities in pursuit of advantages in professional and academic positions. Students at selective colleges are identifying as non-heterosexual at rates several times higher than historic or national averages, though University of London political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in sexual behavior tied to those identities. I’ve heard of parents at elite private high schools using genetic testing services hoping to identify any ethnic heritage that would boost their children’s college applications and of young professionals falsely identifying as bisexual for a career boost.

Racial and gender quotas result in liberals’ willful hypocrisy and convoluted rationalizations when they are confronted with the reality that aptitudes, interests and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among their superficial and shifting politicized racial categories. Liberals have translated their calls for increased diversity into demands that colleges admit and employers hire black and Hispanic applicants in proportion to their group’s share of the U.S. population.

1. Twitter Files: Who Are the People Claiming RFK Jr. is “Disinformation”?

Let's look at what I found inside Twitter's internal documents. pic.twitter.com/fnzgPu7giQ

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) July 18, 2023

Martin Gurri:

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

At the same time, the speech police protected from criticism members in good standing of the establishment, with a special fondness for Anthony Fauci. It did that for Joe Biden, too, before and after his election to the presidency. There’s no need to repeat here the sordid details of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, but given that the predicate for censorship has been the defense of truth, the bare facts of the story should be noted: the FBI lied to Twitter, and Twitter passed the lie on to the public. If it was a disinformation operation, it succeeded completely.

As Taibbi and Shellenberger observed, these maneuvers were unprecedented in the lifetimes of those assembled at the hearing. Even Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy encountered strong opposition from elements of the political and media establishment. The new censorship seemed to rely on universal elite conformity. No debates had been held, no enabling laws passed. The federal government’s standing legal authority had been used to silence, in secret, the online opinions of an untold number of Americans. Whatever the Republicans’ motivation, one would think this to be a worthy subject of conversation for the House.

Joanne Jacobs:

Founded less than three years ago to fight masking mandates, the Moms for Liberty — with 120,000 members and nearly 300 chapters in 45 U.S. states — is now a political force, he writes. Members believe “malign forces in public schools — gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism — have come for their children, and they’re having exactly none of it.” 

Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the summit to woo members. No doubt they remember that “school choice moms” helped Ron DeSantis win in his first run for governor of Florida, and Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost the race for Virginia governor in 2021 after saying “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

In breakout sessions, Moms learned “how to run for school boards — and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority,” Pondiscio writes. “More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races.”

Rick Hess:

While it’s not widely remembered today, the apocalyptic language in “A Nation at Risk” was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse. What do I mean? Consider the report’s major recommendations:

• Increase the number of Carnegie units that students complete in high school in core subjects.
• Resist grade inflation, encourage colleges to raise admissions standards, and test students at key transition points.
• Extend the school day and school year.
• Raise teacher pay, make pay performance-based and market-sensitive, and require teachers to demonstrate content mastery.

All of these recommendations sought to make the traditional school systems more rigorous, time-consuming, and demanding. None of it envisioned any fundamental alterations to the schoolhouse as understood by Horace Mann or the architects of David Tyack’s One Best System. One consequence was that, especially in a less polarized era, leading figures on the left and right basically agreed on the merits of more courses, more testing, more minutes in school, and more pay for teachers. (Whether this agreement led to the kind of change they hoped for, or even any change at all, is another story.)

Today? For better or worse, the conversation about school improvement has fundamentally changed. Instead of more rigor, time, or testing, the most popular proposals tend to be more controversial and more disruptive to familiar routines.

College Fix:

Perry told The Chronicle, “He’s simply trying to end the ‘selective enforcement’ of federal civil-rights laws, in which the rights of favored groups are vigorously protected, while the rights of other groups are routinely violated.”

“He casts himself as a civil-rights advocate, standing up for those male white and Asian students, faculty, and staff who are being excluded from programs and awards and are too scared to challenge their colleges themselves,” The Chronicle reported.

“I’m trying to pursue justice for everybody and hold universities accountable to their legal obligations, and their mission of true diversity, equity and inclusion,” Perry said.

I review Rufo’s new book. The fact that the education system was taken over by bloodthirsty communists is known, but rarely stressed enough.

No one else has been as effective in fighting back. His book is a call to action. https://t.co/SfqoQmMJuz

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) July 17, 2023

“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?

Today I am unveiling my hand-picked list of judicial appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court & to the federal Courts of Appeals. Biden’s top focus appeared to be on diversity of race & gender. While I drew from diverse experiences – current & former federal judges, a former…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 17, 2023

Sriram Krishnan

As a technologist, my hope is that the answers lie in code rather than lawyers and that we see creative technology solutions to help keep the internet open.

For far too long, the online world has been in stasis limited to a few options dominated by a few large companies. Technological breakthroughs and unrest were needed to shake things up, and that has happened. A pessimist might say that this is going to lead to chaos and challenges. As an optimist who invests in technology entrepreneurs for a living, I believe we are in for an age of major innovation, with all of us having more options and say in how things are run online.

Either way, it’s going to be one heck of a ride.

John Kerry's private jet emitted more carbon in a single flight than your car in your entire lifetime.

Here he denies under oath that he ever owned a private jet. Gets busted, and then said he didn't own the plane, his wife did 🤡#ClimateHypocrisypic.twitter.com/H4hWF6VpgG

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) July 17, 2023

Wisconsin Employer Survey

A new survey of Wisconsin businesses paints an unflattering picture of the education system in the state. According to the Wisconsin Employer Survey, nearly three-quarters of businesses think students graduating from the public K-12 system are not prepared for the workforce. Making matters worse, 56 percent of respondents said they have employees who struggle with the ability to read or do math.

The unsettling new information sadly reflects the fact that more than 60 percent of students cannot read or do math at grade level in Wisconsin.

“Not only is this new data disappointing, but it should also make all of us outraged,” said WMC Senior Director of Workforce, Education & Employment Policy Rachel Ver Velde. “Wisconsin’s public school system is failing our children, and it is having an outsized impact on our workforce and economy.”

With young people set up for failure, employers are now having to step in to provide remedial education for workers on top of the technical training they already offer. Forty-one percent of businesses said they have provided employees with additional education or tutoring because their K-12 education did not prepare them with the basic skills needed for a career.

The educational failures are also impacting Wisconsin’s already challenging workforce shortage. According to the survey, nearly two-thirds of employers said they have reduced hiring requirements in an effort to get more job applicants.

“Wisconsin taxpayers should be asking themselves what our return is on the billions of dollars we spend each year on public education,” added Ver Velde. “We cannot measure success by how much money is spent. Instead, we need to start focusing on what students are learning and if they are being set up to succeed upon graduation.”

“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?

Andrew Hartz:

A patient came to a clinic where I worked a few years ago. He was looking for help with depression but also told his therapist that he was feeling frustrated after having lost out on a research fellowship. The patient, who was white, felt the reason was affirmative action. The therapist was Arab. A group of psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists discussed the case at a clinic-wide meeting and came to an apparent consensus: Confront the patient and tell him that if he didn’t overcome his biases, he would be transferred elsewhere. They argued that it would be unfair for a clinician of color to have to provide therapy to a “racist” patient.

Margot Cleveland

I “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” a CPA with nearly 30 years of experience with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) testified last month. The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he sought guidance from another partner concerning controlling ethical standards for CPAs to assess whether his independence had been compromised by the federal agency. 

Roque’s testimony prompted attorneys for Twitter to seek documents from the FTC to assess whether the federal agency had repeated its pressure campaign with EY’s successors, but the agency refused to provide any details to the social media giant. Twitter responded last week by filing a “Motion for a Protective Order and Relief From Consent Order.” 

That motion and its accompanying exhibits provide shocking details of an abusive agency targeting Twitter. When those facts are coupled with the report on the FTC issued earlier this year by the House Weaponization Subcommittee, it seems clear the Biden administration is targeting Twitter because Musk seceded from the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

FTC’s Pre-Musk Enforcement Actions

Thursday’s motion began with the background necessary to appreciate the gravity of the FTC’s scorched-earth campaign against Twitter. 

More than a decade ago, the FTC entered into a settlement agreement with Twitter after finding Twitter had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act by misrepresenting the extent it protected user information from unauthorized access. That 2011 settlement agreement resulted in a consent order that required Twitter to establish a “comprehensive information security program” that met specific parameters. The 2011 consent order also required Twitter to obtain an assessment from an independent third-party professional confirming compliance with the terms of the settlement agreement.

Scott Girard:

From the quality of the food to communication about what was on the menu, parents and school staff sounded the alarm last fall about what schools were serving to students. One teacher described the lunches as “awful” and another parent said her “kid came home starving from school” as the food served differed from what was on the menu sent to parents.

District Director of Food Services Josh Perkins said this summer is “totally different” from last, when he had just taken over the job and the department was short-staffed.

“We spent 2022 in a period of stabilizing things,” Perkins said. “In fall 2023, the goals of the department are to establish a much higher level of confidence and trust with the Madison community in the school meals.”

Florian Sohnke:

When Cook County State’s Attorney Bernard Carey was approached with the grim news venality and corruption had adulterated Cook County courts, one of his first acts was to speak with Thomas P. Sullivan, who was the then-United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Recalling the exchange with Carey, Sullivan revealed decades later Carey’s appeal for assistance to contend with the fetid pool of corruption sweeping through the court system was based on Carey’s realization his office was insufficiently staffed and funded to shoulder a probe of such scale.  

A notable prosecutor, Sullivan applied his calm, methodical legal mind to what would become known as Operation Greylord. Following President Jimmy Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election, Sullivan was replaced by Dan Webb, who, with a social scientist’s detachment and dispassion, embarked on a complex, lengthy, and challenging investigation. Over the next four years, Webb and FBI agents uncovered a preponderance of evidence demonstrating a massive case-fixing scheme involving judges, Cook County prosecutors, lawyers, court bailiffs, clerks, and a state lawmaker. Working undercover, federal agents posing as prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, victims of crimes, and criminals, fabricated criminal cases to ensnare — amongst others — corrupt public officials and defense attorneys involved in bribery, kickbacks, and fraud.

NYC spends $38k per pupil and most kids don’t learn at grade level and 100k a year drop out. There are similar stories across the country. This should be the focus of American education policy debate not the nuances of admissions policies at elite schools.

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) July 16, 2023

James Reinl

University of officials massively downplayed the scale of their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in official filings to Ron , one of the governor’s appointees has alleged to DailyMail.com.

Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis education hire, accused university bosses of ‘lying through their teeth to the governor’ by declaring they had some 30 DEI schemes costing $5million a year – when they were really running more than 1,000.

Maggie Kelly:

“I am writing to stress the need to comply strictly with the decision’s holding,” Yost wrote to public colleges and universities the following day, according to The Dispatch.

“And to warn the higher education community about the dangers that institutions of higher education and institutional employees face by failing to do so.”

Employees found guilty of such practices as employing application essays to discern an applicant’s race “might not be protected by qualified immunity, a doctrine that protects public officials from being personally liable in certain situations,” Yost wrote, according to The Dispatch.

DEI is in the crosshairs of THE LAW. The Legislature is sensibly reducing taxpayers' liability for these illegal programs. Corporate America will need to do its own liability calculations. If they are "business as usual," they're getting bad legal advice. https://t.co/2aUhWZOXzh

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) July 16, 2023

We voted on legislation to require a strategy for US involvement in Ukraine.

Unbelievably, it failed 301 to 129.

No Democrats voted for it.

Here’s a link to the roll call for @WarrenDavidson’s common sense amendment to the NDAA:https://t.co/m6SkFkUw7g pic.twitter.com/KQsQehdWJi

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 16, 2023

There is a worthy academic study that academia will never do on the MSM’s treatment, framing and punctuation of terms including wokeness (or “wokeness” or so-called wokeness), equity, systemic racism and white supremacy.

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 16, 2023

Astral Codex Ten:

Matt Yglesias’ five-year old son asks: why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help? This is one of those questions that’s so naive it loops back and becomes interesting again.

To avoid corrupting the youth, we might provide an optimistic answer: anyone can teach addition, any college math major can teach calculus, but it takes a world expert to teach ten-dimensional hypertopology. We want to take the few students smart enough to learn hypertopology and connect them to the few experts smart enough to teach it. But this seems false; most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else; you don’t get into subjects that need world experts until postgrad.

Another answer, still somewhat optimistic: we want to maximize the chance of geniuses doing revolutionary work. If we give a mediocre student the world’s best writing teacher, and a genius a mediocre writing teacher, they might each write a pretty good novel. But if we give a mediocre student a mediocre writing teacher, and the genius the world’s best writing teacher, then we might get one mediocre novel and one work of staggering genius which revolutionizes literature forever. Likewise, if we connect the world’s most talented young scientists to the world’s best science teachers and labs, maybe they’ll cross some threshold of understanding where they can discover a cure for cancer. I think this is the best explanation that sticks to optimistic prosocial answers.

Christopher Huffaker:

Martin Udengaard wants more for his son, and he doesn’t think Cambridge schools can deliver.

Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.

Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.“The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class are students from better-resourced backgrounds,” said Jacob Barandes, another district parent and a Harvard physicist. “They’re shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.”

Justice Rebecca Bradley is getting some guff over an opinion concurring in the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision rejecting a petition that would have created a separate category of CLE credit for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion “training. It’s sharply worded. It’s also correct.…

— Rick Esenberg (@RickEsenberg) July 15, 2023

more.

Matt Taibbi:

A brief story sums up my theory of journalism: 

In 1991 I was trying to work as a freelance reporter in newly ex-communist St. Petersburg, Russia. I heard a hot rumor. After decades of deprivation, gorillas at the city zoo were to be given bananas.

I thought Western editors would go crazy. I’d been rejected for more negative stories about the arrival of heroin, or gun violence. Bananas were positive! 

I went to the zoo, and interviewed a zookeeper. Then I did what journalists do: I hovered around the gorilla cage looking creepy before mustering the courage to ask a few strangers in broken Russian what they thought about gorillas and bananas. (The newly ex-Soviet Russians had funny answers, like, “How come nobody’s given me bananas?”) When this man on the street portion was done, I stood wondering what to do next. I remember having the thought, “Well, I can’t interview the gorilla.”

I shrugged, went home, wrote it up, and got rejected, but that’s not the point. The point is, journalism isn’t rocket science. You show up, talk to a few people, give your best guess at what you’re looking at, and when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on.

Thirty years later — at the end of last year — I was in San Francisco looking at content moderation requests sent to Twitter by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Obviously, the degree of difficulty had gone up a bit, but the job was more or less the same: “Tech Company Gets Unpleasant Bananas.”

US vs Twitter; X Corp motion for relief

This motion asks the Court to rein in an investigation that has spiraled out of control and become tainted by bias, and to terminate a misfit consent order that no longer can serve any proper equitable purpose. As detailed below, the FTC has engaged in conduct so irregular and improper that Ernst & Young (“EY”)—the independent assessor designated under a consent order between Twitter and the FTC to evaluate the company’s privacy, data protection, and information security program—“felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started.” Recent sworn testimony details how the FTC, through a series of interactions with EY immediately after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, attempted to co-opt EY’s independent assessment in order to generate evidence of “deficiencies in Twitter’s privacy and information security program.” These efforts included dictating to EY “very specific types of procedures that they expected” EY to perform and “[conveying] expectations … about what th[e] results should be before [EY] had even begun any procedures.” The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “[t]he FTC [would] take[] exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create[] ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”

A private litigant who engaged in such conduct might well be facing charges of witness tampering. As the Plaintiff in this civil enforcement action, the FTC should not receive preferential treatment. There simply is no way to square the striking record of bias recounted above—along with other evidence described in this motion—with any semblance of the impartiality, due process, or equitable conduct that the law requires from administrative agencies like the FTC when they act pursuant to court-authorized and -supervised consent orders. This Court should intervene to stop the FTC’s ongoing improper conduct.

William Jacobson

Parlaying that into the topic at hand, which is the biggest professional networking platform out there. LinkedIn, another social media application in its own right, is now being accused or found to have manipulated candidate pools for jobs that are available on the website based on race and other EEOC protected categories. And I think this is not, again, not a surprise. We’ve seen another big ruling that just came out reversing affirmative action. And I think things like this will continue where you still, you strike things down, but you’re gonna have admissions policies or LinkedIn, algorithms that are still gonna hold true to what they believe.

WAJ:

Well, this is something that we raised at Equal Protection Project, which is their diversity in recruiting program at LinkedIn. And what it is, they have tweaked their algorithms. Nobody sees it, nobody really knows what’s going on, but they do it, admit it. They tweak their algorithms so that when they present pools of potential employees, candidates, potential hires, job seekers to employers, they manipulate those pools to give a diverse pool.

So if you’re an engineer and you’re applying for a job, their algorithms don’t just look at your grades in college or your job experience, or where you worked or what your specialty is. It will also consider, if you’ve consented, which probably most people do, they check the box that LinkedIn can use your demographic information, they will then tweak that pool and take into account other things. So they’re basically discriminating against people on the base of race and other factors as part of this Diversity In Recruiting program. And that’s how they’re manipulating it.

And getting to your point about what the Supreme Court just decided, this is how the Supreme Court’s admonition that you can’t use race as a factor in admission and by implication other ways is going to be evaded. They’ll plug it into their algorithms, they’ll plug it into their artificial intelligence, they’ll plug it into their [computer] program, and you will never know. And that’s why I think what’s happening at LinkedIn is so important.

***

… It’s not even clear how much the employers know about what’s going on. LinkedIn has not been forthcoming with that information.

Richard Adams and Aubrey Allegretti

Rishi Sunak will force universities to limit the number of students taking “low-value” degrees in England, a measure which is most likely to hit working class and black, Asian and minority ethnic applicants.

Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday.

But vice-chancellors say the measures will act as a “red flag to students”, who will be turned off the idea of entering a capped course as they feel it will damage their life chances, at considerable cost to institutions.

The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.

Here are the two versions of Fauci's highly incriminating email, the FOIA version versus what GOP released today.

(btw why hasn't any presidential candidate committed to completely tear down the entire FOIA bureaucracy and replacing it with honest and accountable structures?) pic.twitter.com/2C4dat07Os

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) July 14, 2023

Mary Rice Hasson:

Wake up, friends. America’s stubborn commitment to progressive-controlled government education has already abandoned “the vast majority” of our children “to the progressive cause” for well over a decade. The results have been disastrous.

For starters, schools have failed abysmally in their fundamental task — teaching basic academic skills — despite spending staggering sums. In 2019, annual expenditures for K–12 public schools totaled almost $800 billion, but, according to the Nation’s Report Card, barely one-third of public school students were “proficient” in math and reading pre-COVID, a dismal track record that worsened significantly post-COVID. Nationally, just 26 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math, with 31 percent proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 3 percent of fourth graders are mathematically proficient, while twenty-three Baltimore public schools reported exactly zero math-proficient students. Government schools, which enroll almost nine out of ten American children, repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises but are rewarded with big budgets and near-monopolistic power.

The most troubling aspect of our government school system, however, is not what it has failed to teach but what it has succeeded in teaching.

As cultural revolutionaries have long known, it is far easier to capture and mold the beliefs of children than to change the minds of adults. The evidence is in: the cultural revolutionaries are winning. A recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found disturbing gaps in the values embraced by Americans under thirty compared to those espoused by older adults. While majorities of older Americans say patriotism, religion, and having children are “very important,” shockingly few young people agree. Among Americans under thirty, just 23 percent consider patriotism and having children to be very important, while only 31 percent say the same of religion. The shift in the values and beliefs of younger Americans is dramatic but hardly surprising, as it tracks the leftward swing of our public education — indoctrination — system.

Ashley Belanger:

Yesterday, Congress members revealed the results of a seven-month investigation into tax-filing companies. Lawmakers found that H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer “recklessly shared” potentially hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ sensitive personal and financial data with Google and Meta “for years” in apparent violation of laws prohibiting tax preparers from sharing tax return information without customers’ consent.

In a press release provided to Ars from the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), lawmakers alleged a “massive, likely illegal breach of taxpayer privacy.” Insisting upon urgent redress, lawmakers are now calling upon the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Federal Trade Commission, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to “fully investigate this matter and prosecute any company or individuals who violated the law.”

The Congress members’ report said that “any tax return preparer who ‘knowingly or recklessly discloses'” tax return information “is subject to a fine up to $1,000 per violation, and a prison term of up to one year.”

Ari Kaufman:

Conservatives and common-sense Americans cheered last month when the Supreme Court correctly ruled that Joe Biden’s abominable attempt to “forgive” $430 billion in college debt for over 25 million borrowers was unlawful.

The White House plan was purely unconstitutional and insulting to Americans. Legislation that Congress designed for a small number of military members in the wake of 9/11 should not be applied to a large portion of the population two decades later.

It was also regressive, robbing blue-collar workers who saved their money and giving to wealthier doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Biden engaged in left-wing class warfare on behalf of the affluent. Or, as Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said, a way for Biden to “pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families.”

Knowing that transferring college debt can lure ignorant young voters in 2024, Team Biden attempted a political scam to transform attending college from bettering your future prospects through learning to partisan political allegiance. The effort was appalling.

Student debt doled out by schools, and the government is indeed abusive; however, the problem with Biden’s plan is that, like many callous liberal ideas, it does nothingto stop the problem and instead sets a precedent that presidents can erase large portions of student debt.

Robert Pondiscio:

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 

Will Flanders

As private school choice programs expand at a rapid pace across the nation, a common complaint is that they will harm public schools. In Wisconsin, where a large increase in private school choice funding was recently passed, a state senator claimed that public schools would be “defunded,” despite $1 billion in public school increases being passed at the same time. In Iowa, where a ground-breaking Education Savings Account was passed earlier this year, the director of Iowa’s School Board Association complained that the funding “can be better spent serving the 485,000 students in public schools, given the needs that they have.” With school choice options growing across the nation, it is important for policymakers to know whether these complaints are valid. Fortunately, new research is able to answer this question.  

We analyzed data from Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s oldest school choice programs began in Milwaukee in 1990. In addition to the Milwaukee program, Wisconsin has been home to a statewide school choice program since 2013, providing a lengthy time frame to study. We compared public school proficiency outcomes across districts as enrollment in school choice increased. Contrary to the doom-and-gloom predictions of some choice opponents, we found that there was no impact on math outcomes, and a positive relationship to reading outcomes—as choice enrollment in a district increased, so did public school test scores. In other words, the growth of school choice did not harm public schools and may have even helped them.

Matt Taibbi:

I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but since I’m persona non grata on Twitter these days and this material needs to get out in the wake of the ruling in the Missouri v. Biden internet censorship case, I’m invoking a political necessity exception to post #TwitterFiles emails that may be germane to the suit.

College Fix:

Nearly 400 Pennsylvania State University professors have signed a letter that defends antiracism teaching and administrative practices targeted in a lawsuit objecting to giving black students inflated grades.

The four-paragraph “Letter in Support of Antiracist Faculty at Penn State” denigrates a recent lawsuit filed against the university by Zack De Piero, who taught English at the school’s Abingdon campus and has since filed a lawsuit that alleges he was discriminated against because of his race. He is white.

The 36-page lawsuit details a June 2020 exercise in which white faculty were told they are privileged because they can “breathe” while George Floyd could not.

Leah Platt Boustan, Christine Cai, and Tammy Tseng:

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

Commentary

Andrew Jack:

In the days since the US Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in higher education, Adam Nguyen has been emailing warnings to the Asian clients that he advises on US elite college admissions.

“There’s a perception now that it’s easier for them to get in. That’s false,” he said. “They still have to distinguish themselves on subjective measures. I don’t want my clients to be lulled into complacency.”

America’s highest court last month ruled that it was unconstitutional for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) to use race as a basis for admissions. The decision was cheered by some who claimed that affirmative action discriminated against Asian students.

Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.

Commentary

NEW GALLUP POLL shows confidence in public schools at ALL-TIME LOW.

Only 26% of Americans now report "great deal/fair amount of confidence" in the public schools. pic.twitter.com/3extqKENmc

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 12, 2023

One of the very few House Democrats to do her job and actually question the FBI Director the way Congress is required to do was @RepJayapal, who grilled Wray about the FBI's purchase of sweeping dossiers on US citizens. We reported on that program here:https://t.co/zq8gxDfrZY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 12, 2023

John Rigolizzo

A Los Angeles Times article comparing outcomes at community colleges and elite universities garnered a colorful response in the letters page.

The original piece, written June 21, compared the financial outcomes of college graduates at state vs private schools; and in STEM fields and vocational training vs humanities and social sciences. The data showed that graduates of the hard sciences and even the trades vastly outearn some graduates of California’s elite universities.

The original article began with a story of a young man who took a one-year-long training course at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College to become a power lineman. Upon completion, he is set to make about $105,000 a year, and $165,000, not including overtime, as a journeyman in 3-4 years. In the same amount of time, a graduate of Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in political science will earn a median income of $75,500; a graduate of UC Berkeley with a sociology degree earns about $64,000; a UCLA graduate in history will make about $47,900.

Jeremy Howard:

Proposals for stringent AI model licensing and surveillance will likely be ineffective or counterproductive, concentrating power in unsustainable ways, and potentially rolling back the societal gains of the Enlightenment. The balance between defending society and empowering society to defend itself is delicate. We should advocate for openness, humility and broad consultation to develop better responses aligned with our principles and values — responses that can evolve as we learn more about this technology with the potential to transform society for good or ill.

Kyle Morris:

Democrats have ‘gotten away with using and abusing the black community,’ Mesha Mainor told Fox News Digital

FIRST ON FOX: A Peach State lawmaker who angered her Democratic colleagues in the Georgia state House of Representatives over her support for a recent school choice bill is expected to announce that she is officially switching parties.

Mesha Mainor – a Democrat who has represented District 56 in the Georgia state House since January 2021 – will announce shortly before noon Tuesday that she will switch her party registration to Republican.

“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”

Anthony LoCoco

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, the flagship of the UW system, proudly operates the so-called Target of Opportunity Program (TOP). It allows academic departments to obtain waivers from the requirement to post job positions publicly and instead hire “diverse” candidates directly. The university provides the irresistible incentive of salary funding for approved hires. Public records of internal TOP requests obtained by my group, the Institute for Reforming Government, show blatant, widespread and pernicious racial classification of faculty applicants that is difficult to reconcile with the Supreme Court’s recent decision. 

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Similar to Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions policies, the actions of several UW departments approximated racial balancing, which the court called “patently unconstitutional.” The university’s business school supported its proposal for TOP funding with a helpful chart showing faculty race by percentage with categories such as “Asian,” “White,” and “African American” and expressed a desire that faculty and student racial diversification proceed “at the same rate.” The school of medicine and public health argued that a targeted hire was necessary in part because “there are only 4.2% of dermatologists of Hispanic origin compared with 16.3% in the general American population.” 

“As recently as five years ago,” boasted the department of gender and women’s studies in another TOP proposal, “our department had only one faculty member who identified as a person of color. Through targeted recruiting and lucky opportunities, roughly 30 percent of our faculty now so identify.” Perhaps those recruits whose race unlocked a separate hiring track felt lucky. It’s doubtful the rest of the applicants did.

Alex Tabarrok:

Maxim Massenkoff asks a very good question. If pollution reduces birth weight as much as the micro studies on pollution suggest, why aren’t birth weights very low in very polluted cities and countries? Figure 1, for example, shows birth weights in a variety of highly polluted world cities. The yellow dashed and blue lines show “predicted” birth weights extrapolated from the well-known Alexander and Schwandt “Volkswagen study” which looked at the effects of increased pollution in the United States. Despite the fact that every one of the highly-polluted cities is much more polluted than the most polluted US city, birth weight is not tremendously lower in these cities. Indeed, there is no obvious correlation between birth weight and pollution at all.

AP:

A federal judge has blocked a Wisconsin school district from requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth while a lawsuit plays out against the school.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said Thursday that the Mukwonago Area School District must allow a transgender student to use facilities that align with their gender identity, temporarily blocking a policy approved last month by the school board, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The order comes in a lawsuit brought anonymously by an 11-year-old transgender student and her mother. The judge ruled that the school’s policy was causing emotional and mental harm to the student, who was described as a boy at birth but has identified as a girl since she was 3 years old.

Zukunft-der-sub

Saving Göttingen State and University Library as an interface between research and infrastructure

Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen) is one of the most prominent and powerful academic libraries in Germany with a wide range of offers and services far beyond Göttingen. It is valued worldwide for its appeal as a location for unique holdings and as a node for innovative developments in research and information infrastructures within an international network and ecosystem.

We need and support the SUB Göttingen as an established and excellent partner, whose supra-regionally significant role should not be limited by a local process of administrative optimization. After all, a modern, high-performance information infrastructure can only function through an international network of cooperating institutions.

Baby Vinick:

Wisconsin schools that had a longer period of virtual or hybrid learning during the pandemic saw graduation rates rise among wealthier students and fall among those at an economic disadvantage, a new study found.

The study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the journal Educational Researcher, analyzed data from 429 public high schools in the state during the 2020-21 school year and two years before then.

It found that between September 2020 to May 2021, a full school year, virtual or hybrid learning increased the socioeconomic gaps in high school graduation rates by nearly 5 percent. Students are considered economically disadvantaged if they are from a household eligible for free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Program. 

Ran Liu, a UW-Madison education professor and author of the study, called the finding that affluent students’ graduation rates increased surprising. But she said disparities in access to resources is likely part of the explanation. And it’s possible that future events – not just a pandemic – could cause new disruptions.  

“We need to understand that in-person schooling may have merits that cannot be replaced by virtual and hybrid learning mode,” Liu said.

Dane County Madison Public Health mandate summary.

“Dance studio complaint”

“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?

Change in the under-5 population at the state level since the start of the pandemic.

New York, Chicago, Illinois, Hawaii… pic.twitter.com/63KqFd17ea

— Connor O’Brien (@cojobrien) July 11, 2023

Michael Bailey:

I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns. 

My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth. 

But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.

On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

The retracted article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). 

ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.

Richard Hanania

The first thing to point out about public education is that it involves an extreme restriction of liberty beyond anything we usually accept. How common is it for government to force you to be in a certain place at a certain time? What I call “time-place” mandates are rare. Sometimes you have to go to the DMV, but even then you spend a short amount of time there, and can generally choose when to go. Sometimes people have to respond to subpoenas or jury duty, but those are uncommon events in most people’s lives. Government says to do your taxes, though you only have a deadline and can fill out the paperwork whenever and under whatever conditions you want.

The only substantial populations of individuals who have their lives structured according to time-place mandates in a free society like ours are prisoners, members of the military, and children. The mandates for children have gotten less strict over the years now that all states allow homeschooling, but opponents of school choice for all practical purposes want to do what they can to shape the incentive structures of parents so that they all use public schools (liberal reformers tend to like vouchers that can be used at charter schools, but not ESAs, which give parents complete control). Of course, children don’t have the freedom of adults, and so others are by default in control of how they spend most of their time. But it’s usually parents, not the government, that we trust in this role. Given the unusual degree to which public education infringes on individual liberty and family autonomy, the burden of proof has to be on those in favor of maintaining such an extreme institution.

Commentary

Jeff Eiden:

But there’s a major problem undercutting our progress. We don’t have nearly enough skilled workers to get this job done at the speed required. It’s estimated that we’re going to need 1 million more electricians and 400 thousand new HVAC technicians in the next ten years. 

Tradespeople are the true lifeblood of the clean energy transition — they do the critical on-the-ground work to rewire homes, upgrade electrical panels, and put solar panels up onto roofs. Without enough of them, we risk falling short of our climate goals, while frustrating the very early adopting customers we need to kickstart the transition to fully electrified buildings.

“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?

Arman Madani:

The resulting $1.78T of debt includes $1.65T that is federally owned (93%). 45M Americans have federal student loan debt. Roughly half of all the debt belongs to individuals with graduate degrees while the other half belongs to individuals with undergraduate degrees; though it’s worth noting that there are fewer graduate students overall so the debt held per student is higher for graduates: