Maps are symbols, and symbols are powerful,’ says map enthusiast



Natalie Stechyson

The fact is that people don’t know how to read maps anymore. I love maps,” said Professor Bradford Parkinson, according to Yahoo News.

It’s a concern shared by Brad Green, who, along with his partner Petra Thoms, owns the shop World of Maps in Ottawa.

Green estimates that the shop, which has run a successful business since 1994, has thousands of maps in stock, and tens of thousands more in its electronic library, ready to be printed.

“There is a bit of a risk of it becoming a lost skill,’ Green said of map reading. “And I think what you lose is the big picture.”

What a hyper-local phone map doesn’t necessarily give you is perspective, Green explained. For example, if you look from the Arctic Circle down, Canada borders on Greenland; if you look at a map of North America, Point Pelee, Ont., runs along the same latitude as Northern California.




Tuition Discount Rates Are Rising



Chris Corrigan:

The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) released its biennial tuition-discounting survey in April. The results indicate that increasing discounts may be the canary in the coal mine for serious financial difficulties looming for private colleges.

The headline from the NACUBO press release is that discount rates for private higher-education institutions are up from 46.4 percent to 56.2 percent in the last 10 years. (The numbers in question apply to first-time undergraduates.) NACUBO defines the tuition discount rate as “the total institutional grant aid awarded to undergraduates” by colleges and universities, as “a percentage of the gross tuition and fee revenue the institution would collect if all students paid the full tuition and fee sticker price.”

In addition to the higher discount rate, the number of students receiving some kind of “grant” rose from 88 percent 10 years ago to 91 percent this year, and the amount of the average grant rose from 53.1 percent to 62.1 percent.

Lower tuition is good for students and families, of course, but enticing students with cheaper fees can be extraordinarily damaging to colleges’ bottom lines. As NACUBO puts it,

Private colleges often advertise high sticker prices compared to public institutions. To enroll students who are unable or unwilling to pay those high prices, colleges employ tuition discounting strategies that subsidize a fraction of the sticker price through financial aid grants. As the competition for students gets more intense, private colleges will be pushed to increase their tuition discount rates in order to enroll the same number of students.

NACUBO tells us what these increasing discount rates have meant for institutions: “After accounting for inflation, net tuition and fee revenue decreased by 5.4 percent per first-time undergraduate and by 5.9 percent among all undergraduates.” Net revenue is what institutions have left to cover their costs, and it is going down.




Notes on taxpayer funded DIE bureaucracies






Baraboo Schools Accused of Holding Racially Discriminatory Focus Groups on ‘Racism as a Public Health Issue’



MD Kittle:

The Baraboo School District held focus groups as part of a “Racism as a Public Health Issue” initiative that was exclusively for black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) middle schoolers, offering the minority students in attendance a $100 gift card plus a pizza party.

According to records obtained by The Wisconsin Daily Star, the public health session was part of a $35,000 grant issued to Public Health Sauk County by Governor Tony Evers’ Department of Health Services. The “Qualitative Data for Capacity Building and Alignment” grant program is aimed at engaging with community members or organizations representing “underserved communities in an authentic way,” according to the emails.




Sex Offenders per capita, by state



Maxine Bernstein:

Nearly a decade into an effort to reduce the glut of sex offenders on the state registry to allow more intense focus on the most dangerous, a bureaucratic morass has nearly doubled the registry instead.

The Oregon parole board remains bogged down in state-mandated assessments to gauge the risk of each offender to commit new crimes.

Of 32,523 people on the sex offender registry, almost two-thirds, or 20,575, are waiting to be classified into one of the state’s three notification levels: Level 1 for low risk, Level 2 for medium risk and Level 3 for high risk.

The backlog has kept hundreds of low-level sex offenders in limbo. Those who stay crime-free for years can petition to no longer register. But they must wait until the state gets around to reclassifying their risk level to petition for relief.

State lawmakers have twice extended a 2016 deadline to complete the risk assessments and set aside more than $6 million for the work. The deadline now is December 2026, but state officials tasked with the job aren’t confident they can meet even that date.

Last year, the state parole board’s executive director, Dylan Arthur, told a legislative committee that it would take two more decades with the current funding and staff to finish.

The reclassifications began in 2014 after the Legislature passed a bill the year before that was touted as a public safety measure to allow the state to focus resources on those at highest risk to commit new sex crimes.

The law was supposed to create uniformity in assigning risk levels based on a single assessment tool instead of the discretion of trial judges based on criminal charges and convictions.

More.




Oregon fails to turn page on reading: $250 million spent in 25 years



Alex Baumhardt:

Carl Cole was alarmed by the growing number of students sent to him for special education in the late 1990s. He was director of special education for the Bethel School District near Eugene, and he doubted that so many kids had learning disabilities. 

One of the district’s elementary schools was referring nearly one in five students to special education, and most of them were struggling readers. When he went to visit their classrooms, he realized why.

“Many kids were what we later coined ‘instructionally disabled,’ not special education,” Cole said in a recent interview. In other words, they weren’t being taught to read in ways that many experts, especially those in the field of special education, knew all kids needed to be taught. 

The Capital Chronicle determined that Oregon has spent more than $250 million in the past 25 years on reading. But that money has failed to help more than a generation of students. Over the last 25 years, nearly two in five fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words. Today, few Oregon fourth and eighth graders are proficient readers, according to the report card.

To address this, Gov. Tina Kotek is backing the state’s single largest reading investment in two decades, the Early Literacy Success Initiative, a $140 million grant program to get “evidence-based literacy instruction” methods into classrooms in districts that apply for the funding. Kotek and the bill’s supporters have said it will finally get the “science of reading” into Oregon classrooms, though it’s yet to pass the Legislature that’s been stalled by a Republican-led walkout.




“America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques”



Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott

The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.

However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.




Anatomy of a Scientific Scandal



Colin Wright:

Under pressure, a journal once notable for its courage retracts a major paper on the social roots of gender-related distress—all over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.

The scientific method is the best way for humans to investigate phenomena, acquire new knowledge, and correct mistaken beliefs. Scientific journals play a vital role in this process, encouraging rational, evidence-based debate and the pursuit of truth above all. But since the inner workings of these journals remain largely opaque, citizens, policymakers, and science journalists can struggle to discern when politics has compromised a given publication—especially when ideological agendas are couched in scientific language and given the veneer of scientific authority.

Medical journals writ large are on the brink of such ideological capture, if they haven’t already succumbed to it. Findings that contradict the prevailing “gender-affirming” model of care for transgender-identifying youth, or offer even mild critiques, have become nearly impossible to publish. Still, rare exceptions exist, including the Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB), a journal published by Springer Nature. This publication has distinguished itself by its willingness to facilitate viewpoint diversity in gender medicine—until now.

An alarming recent event highlights the vulnerability of the scientific endeavor to politics. ASB is a primary target for activist researchers who will not tolerate dissent from their views, and a months-long campaign by activists to pressure Springer Nature into retracting an ASB paper that they didn’t like has culminated in success. While the activists’ desire to censor inconvenient research should come as no surprise, Springer Nature’s capitulation to their demands represents a profound betrayal of scientific integrity and the publisher’s commitment to truth.




Notes on the Memphis K-12 Superintendent Search



Laura Testino:

Eight of the board members voted for the change in the job requirements. The ninth, Vice Chair Sheleah Harris, abstained from the vote and denounced the board’s decision. Then she announced she would quit her elected seat. 

Before the amendments approved Tuesday, board policy required candidates to have a certain amount of in-school experience and training in education. Under the new requirements, the board could consider a candidate who has 10 years of work experience and advanced degrees in any of several fields, rather than just education. Board member Amber Huett-Garcia suggested the updates to the existing policies. 

Board members also voted to reopen the application for the superintendent role, hoping to solicit more candidates. Those who apply will have to meet the updated requirements, plus a revised set of desired qualifications the board also approved. 

The decisions Tuesday reactivate a search that has been suspended for nearly two months, as board members tried to resolve differences and misunderstandings about the search process.

“We’ve been hanging this over the heads of the public for far too long,” board member Frank Johnson said of the policy vote.




Chicago grows K-12 $pending and taxes, amidst declining enrollment ($29k/student)



Nader Issa, Fran Spielman:

To avoid ballooning the overall $9.4 billion budget – which also includes pension payments, central office staff salaries and expenses tied to CPS’ significant debt – officials presented a scaled-down $155 million capital budget plan that will address emergency facility needs to have schools ready for the fall. In past years, the capital plan was released later in the summer and detailed more substantial construction projects. Last year it was $765 million. Officials said they’ll present a plan for more capital funding later this year.

While 25 schools are facing cuts of at least $75,000, the increase in spending at most schools is welcome news compared to last year, when CPS faced protests over its funding allocations. Mayor Brandon Johnson was a Chicago Teachers Union official last year, and more recently campaigned on infusing under-resourced neighborhood schools with more funding. He had little time to influence a budget process that started late last year, months before he was inaugurated in May, but Johnson will be happy to to avoid trouble in his first major education announcement after teachers heavily backed his candidacy.

More.




Materiality: a lost concept in the legacy media? No mention of total $pending / changes over time….



Alexander Shur:

The Legislature’s GOP-controlled finance committee on Tuesday approved increasing K-12 education spending by $1 billion, $1.6 billion less than what Democratic Gov. Tony Evers requested in his budget.

The increase will go toward funding both public schools, which Evers prioritized, and the state’s voucher programs, which Evers had originally sought to limit in his budget despite Republican calls to dramatically expand it.

Many of the education provisions the budget committee approved Tuesday along party lines were first announced last week as part of a deal between Republican legislative leaders and Evers on a separate bill to increase local aid to communities across Wisconsin. Republicans have for months said they would increase spending on public schools if Evers agreed to spend more on the state’s voucher programs.

Same issue…

Somewhat related (deeper dive example): Did Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers veto legislation to increase literacy tests? More.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

And..




U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, U.S. Says



Byron Tau & Dustin Volz:

new report shows that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence appeared unaware which federal intelligence agencies were buying Americans’ personal data.

WASHINGTON—The vast amount of Americans’ personal data available for sale has provided a rich stream of intelligence for the U.S. government but created significant threats to privacy, according to a newly released report by the U.S.’s top spy agency.




Civics: A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.



Dell Cameron:

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. 

What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders. 

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” 

In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system’s cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts.




“Declining enrollment and rising costs have pushed the Minneapolis school district to the brink of insolvency”



Deena Winter:

The district was built to serve about 40,000 students, but currently enrolls about 28,000.

Roethke pointed out that other large Minnesota districts use fewer, larger schools to reduce costs. 

The district’s most recent five-year budget projectionpredicts an “imminent financial crisis” due to declining enrollment and a failure to cut costs. If the district’s leaders continue with the existing “footprint, practices, policies, and priorities… we expect the district to confront an unprecedented fiscal crisis in the 2024-2025 school year,” the report said.

If no action is taken, the general fund will be depleted sometime in 2025 and the district will quickly descend into the red, triggering state intervention.

“Without significant changes, MPS will run out of money during the 2024-2025 school year and be unable to operate as it does now,” the report said.




A look at education school literacy prep variation



NCTQ

All children deserve to learn to read, and all teachers deserve the preparation and support that will allow them to help their students achieve this goal. Yet more than one-third of fourth graders—1.3 million children1 in the U.S.—cannot read at a basic level.2

Not learning how to read has lifelong consequences. Students who are not reading at grade level by the time they reach fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school,3 which in turn leads to additional challenges for them as adults: lower lifetime earnings,4 higher rates of unemployment,5and a higher likelihood of entering the criminal justice system.6 Even more alarming, the rate of students who cannot read proficiently by fourth grade climbs even higher for students of color, those with learning differences, and those who grow up in low-income households, perpetuating disparate life outcomes.7 This dismal data has nothing to do with the students and everything to do with inequities in access to effective literacy instruction.

The status quo is far from inevitable. In fact, we know the solution to this reading crisis, but we are not using the solution at scale. More than 50 years of research provides a clear picture of effective literacy instruction. These strategies and methods—collectively called scientifically based reading instruction, which is grounded in the science of reading—could dramatically reduce the rate of reading failure. Past estimates have found that while three in 10 children struggle to read (and that rate has grown higher since the pandemic), research indicates that more than 90% of all students could learn to read if they had access to teachers who employed scientifically based reading instruction.8

“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?




Governance Reform and taxpayer funded censorship



Philip Wegman:

“We’ve seen throughout this country that the DOJ and the FBI are controlled by one faction of our society,” DeSantis said on the call, pointing to how those agencies were “going after pro-life activists,” wrongfully investigating parents at school board meetings “who are concerned about things like critical race theory, and forcing kids to wear masks,” and “colluding with tech companies to censor information such as what they did with the 2020 election.”

There are some functions DeSantis would not allow law enforcement to do at all. For instance, he told advisors that as president, he would “completely put the kibosh on the FBI and DOJ’s nonsense with respect to so-called misinformation.”

There are other things DeSantis would have the Justice Department do much differently. He described the mission of the Civil Rights Division during his presidency as one where the agency “is actually policing discrimination.” That division would be truly colorblind, the governor said, because “discrimination is discrimination,” adding that he didn’t think it was acceptable to discriminate against individuals who “happen to be white or Asian.”

And while much of the DeSantis plan to end “weaponization of federal agencies” involves limiting and focusing the role of the Justice Department, the governor pointed to one area of federal expansion. Pointing to Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, he promised to direct the DOJ to go after and hold “accountable” progressive local prosecutors who “are not prosecuting cases against violent criminals.”

David Blaska:

Even at that, reforming justice doesn’t pay as well as disrupting school board meetings. Freedom Inc. paid its co-executive director in 2021, the disputatious M Adams. $545,038! That’s according to the non-profit’s IRS-required 990 form, unearthed by the Werkes’ CPA. Up from $116,115 the prior year on income of $8.3 million.  

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Irony is Freedom Inc. picketed Mahoney’s residence during the push to expel police from our high schools. Unless one believes local law enforcement is targeting minorities for spitting on the sidewalk, we observe (once again) that correlation is not causation.




Higher Ed Climate



Thomas Kika:

Outrage has been expressed online at Johns Hopkins University over its non-binary-inclusive definition of “lesbian” in its glossary of LGBTQ+ terms.

The Baltimore-based university, a major hub of medical research in the U.S., maintains an extensive glossary of definitions for terms relevant to the broad LGBTQ+ community, which is updated as the subject of gender and sexual identity changes.

On Monday, the glossary’s new definition of “lesbian” came under attack as the university defined the term as “a non-man attracted to non-men.” The update is meant to be inclusive of non-binary individuals who might still identify as lesbians.




Civics: Misinformation Is a Word We Use to Shut You Up



Daniel Klein:

The policing of “information” is the stuff of Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, and similar anti-liberal regimes. To repress criticism of their dicta and diktats, anti-liberals label criticism “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Those labels are instruments to crush dissent. 

This paper offers an understanding of knowledge as involving three chief facets: information, interpretation, and judgment. Usually, what people argue fervently over is not information, but interpretation and judgment. 

What is being labeled and attacked as “misinformation” is not a matter of true or false information, but of true or false knowledge—meaning that disagreement more commonly arises over interpretations and judgments as to which interpretations to take stock in or believe. We make judgments, “good” and “bad,” “wise” and “foolish,” about interpretations, “true” and “false.” 

On that understanding, the paper explains that the projects and policies now afoot styled “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” are dishonest, as it should be obvious to all that those projects and policies would, if advanced honestly, be called something like “anti-falsehood” campaigns.

But to prosecute an “anti-falsehood” campaign would make obvious the true nature of what is afoot—an Orwellian boot to stomp on Wrongthink. To support governmental policing of “information” is to confess one’s anti-liberalism and illiberality. The essay offers a spiral diagram to show the three chief facets of knowledge (information, interpretation, and judgment) plus a fourth facet, fact, which also deserves distinct conceptualization, even though the spiral reminds us: Facts are theory-laden.




Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools



dw.com

German primary school students should no longer be taught English, and instead teachers should dedicate this time to improving their German reading and mathematics skills, the president of the German Teachers’ Association, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, has said.

Meidinger told German public broadcaster ARD on Friday that focusing on English lessons was setting the wrong priorities.

“We believe that English lessons are indeed dispensable, and that they can be shifted to, for example, reading lessons,” Meidinger said. “We have to pay more attention to the basics at primary schools: reading skills, writing skills, arithmetic.”




El Paquete Semanal



wikipedia:

El Paquete Semanal (“The Weekly Package”) or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008[1] on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet.[2]Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans,[1] as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years with only about a 38.8% Internet penetration rate as of 2018.[3] El Paquete Semanal has its own page that is running in the United States, where one could view its contents and is consistently updated every week.[4]




Virtue Signaling and academia



Deivis Angeli, Matt Lowe, and The Village Team:

We study whether tweets about racial justice predict the offline behaviors of nearly 20,000 US academics. In an audit study, academics that tweet about racial justice discriminate more in favor of minority students than academics that do not tweet about racial justice. Racial justice tweets are more predictive of race-related political tweets than political contributions, suggesting that visibility increases informativeness. In contrast, the informativeness of tweets is lower during periods of high social pressure to tweet about racial justice. Finally, most graduate students mispredict informativeness, more often underestimating than overestimating, reducing the welfare benefits of social media.




Civics: SPLC rhetoric






Virtual Townhall: Proposed Title IX Rule Problems, Coming to a School Near You Soon



Luke Berg and Cory Brewer,:

Jun 27, 2023 11:00 AM in
DescriptionOver 50 years of Title IX is at stake, and the hard-fought rights, safety, and wellbeing of young women and girls could be turned upside-down. The U.S. Department of Education under the Biden Administration recently published two proposed rules related to Title IX. One would change the definition of sex to include gender identity, and the other is specific to athletics and would prohibit schools from adopting or enforcing policies that categorically ban transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.

To learn more, please join WILL attorneys, Luke Berg and Cory Brewer, for a virtual townhall on the recent proposed changes to Title IX on June 27th, at 11 AM CST. Attorneys Berg and Brewer will discuss specifically the status of the law in terms of students’ bathroom and locker room use, and WILL’s work on this very issue.




The Great School Rethink



Frederick Hess:

An invigorating examination of the potential for meaningful change in education, from one of the nation’s most astute observers of schooling and school improvement.

In The Great School Rethink, education policy sentinel Frederick M. Hess offers a pithy and perceptive appraisal of American schooling and finds, in the uncertain period following pandemic disruption, an ideal moment to reimagine US education. Now is the time, he asserts, to ask hard questions about how schools use time and talent, how they work with parents, what they do with digital tools, and how they meet the needs of their communities.




Madison full-day 4k students had gains similar to half-day peers



Scott Girard:

A report last month showed that students in Madison schools’ full-day and half-day 4-year-old kindergarten programs had similar academic gains over the 2021-22 school year.

The results of the study, which covers the first year of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s full-day 4K program, weren’t a surprise to Director of Early Learning Culleen Witthuhn, given how “tricky” it is to look at academic information for 4-year-olds.

Plus, Witthuhn said, the full-day 4K implementation wasn’t necessarily about seeing better test results for 4-year-olds.

“(That) really wasn’t our goal or our intent,” Witthuhn said. “It was really to provide access to families who typically might not have been able to have any high-quality, early learning experiences at all otherwise.”

Accessing half-day programming can be difficult for families experiencing homelessness, or who have parents or caregivers who work full-time throughout the day, Witthuhn said. 

Full-day programs in MMSD, on average, included more students of color and children whose parents did not attend college compared to the half-day programs, according to the Madison Education Partnership study.

The district began its full-day 4K program in fall 2021 and expanded it for this school year, with enrollment growing from 237 in the first year to 417 in the second.

This fall, it will once again grow with five more classrooms at additional schools.

“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?




Creating a reference to AI models and software



apastyle:

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual(American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:




SCOTUS Must Go for the Heart of the Race State



Richard Hanania:

Within a few months, it’s likely that the Supreme Court will eliminate the explicit consideration of race in college and university admissions in the consolidated cases of SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC. This is a big deal, and should be celebrated, if for no other reason than it pushes the law in the right direction. At the same time, while listening to the oral arguments, I got a sinking feeling that the coming decision may have certain unintended consequences as a result of not going far enough. This could lead to institutions that are less explicitly conscious of race, but more left-wing and less meritocratic due to a desire to indirectly take it into account. If this is the end result of SFFA, it will be the latest in a long line of Supreme Court decisions that sought to push back race- and gender-based governance while only making it stronger. In order to get around this problem, the Supreme Court should make clear that attempts to achieve a racially balanced student body are themselves in violation of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause.

Imagine that there was a Southern municipality with a history of discriminating against black people. It is taken to court, at which point a judge decrees that while the city cannot simply refuse to hire blacks, it’s fine for it to only recruit from white areas in hopes of achieving a certain demographic composition of its workforce. This would never be accepted. The principle of disparate impact of course goes much furtherthan this — practices that have the effect of excluding racial minorities from a job or other kind of benefit can be prohibited regardless of the intent of the accused.




Survey: Roughly Three-Fourths of Princeton Students Believe Shouting Down Speakers is Acceptable



Jonathan Turley:

A new survey by Princetonians for Free Speech shows that roughly three-fourths of students believe that it is acceptable to shout down a speaker. The distressing results are consistent with other studies and surveys that have been discussed on this blog. Of course, some faculty maintain that it is better to “shoot down rather than shout down” conservatives.

Princeton has tried recently to reinforce free speech principles, but the survey shows these anti-free speech views have been reinforced continually in elementary and high schools. They were told by teachers that free speech is harmful and triggering.

That is evident in this survey:




The cult of gender ideology is finally disintegrating



Suzanne Moore:

Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.

The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.

We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.




Study Finds School Choice Does Not Harm Student Outcomes in Wisconsin Public Schools



Jeff Zymeri:

School choice programs in Wisconsin have not significantly affected outcomes for public school students or led to a decline in their test scores, according to a study released on Monday.

Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which commissioned the study alongside School Choice Wisconsin, told National Review that this finding goes directly against one of the main talking points of school choice opponents.

Instead of finding test scores in steep decline, the study saw small positive shifts in reading scores and no statistically significant effect on math scores. Wisconsin has been offering private school alternatives since the 1990s.

Critics often argue that school choice not only diverts critical resources from public schools, but also that choice schools will “skim” the best students, leading to a group of students in public schools that is more challenging to educate. “We have a long track record of this program in Wisconsin and we have no evidence in support of that notion,” Flanders said.

Flanders said Milton Friedman’s notion of school choice as providing the necessary competition to lift all ships is at the heart of the study’s findings.

“When the public school monopoly actually has to deal with competitors, for the first time in many instances, they’re forced to start listening to the desires and needs of families in their communities and that results in improved performance,” said Flanders. “They’re required to become more efficient.”

The study builds upon past research on the Milwaukee Public Schools to include data on outcomes in Racine Public Schools and schools throughout Wisconsin.

More, here.

“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?




National Charter School Study III



Center for Research on Education Outcomes:

Our third installment: This study examines the academic progress of students enrolled in charter schools compared with the progress of students enrolled in traditional public schools (TPS).

How charter school students learned over time
Fifteen years of student performance can provide insights into how schools, school operators, K–12 academic programs and education policy impact student academic success.

Study results: A valuable tool for possibility and growth
Our evidence shows how successful, diverse schools deliver critical proof points of ways to improve outcomes for students and pave the road ahead.

“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?




Literacy and NAEP Proficient



Tom Loveless:

In February, 2023 Bari Weiss produced a podcast, “Why 65% of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read” and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, wrote “Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It.” Both headlines are misleading. The 65% and two-thirds figures are referring to the percentage of 4th graders who scored below proficient on the last reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered in 2022.

The problem is this: scoring below proficient doesn’t mean “can’t really read” or “struggling to read.”   It also does not mean “functionally illiterate” or identify “non- readers” as some of the more vituperative descriptions on social media have claimed. It doesn’t even mean “below grade level in reading,” one of the milder distortions.

Both press reports were second-hand accountings of Emily Hanford’s series, Sold a Story. Hanford immediately took to Twitter to try to clear up the matter.

“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?




Faculty Fight for Academic Freedom at Harvard



National Association of Scholars:

The National Association of Scholars is delighted that 52 Harvard University professors have formed a Council on Academic Freedom. This group will “advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas on campus” by promoting the principles of free inquiry, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity. Harvard, no less than other universities, needs professors who defend intellectual freedom—and freedom in general. But because Harvard is Harvard—the oldest and most respected college in the country—the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom sends a message that will reverberate throughout American higher education.

That message is that faculty everywhere face a choice: either to fight for academic freedom or to watch it disappear. Those who imagine that academic freedom will continue without special efforts to preserve it are mistaken. American higher education is sinking into a morass of ideological conformity. A great many faculty members dislike having to endorse views they privately disagree with, avoid subjects that activists say are off-limits, and apologize for imaginary infractions—but they see no practical way to resist. The creation of the Council on Academic Freedom shows that there is indeed a way to resist.




Defending “balanced literacy”



Madison, long tolerating disastrous reading results, embraced “balanced literacy”.

“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?




The diversity myth



Peter Thiel:

What I’d like to do is delineate a few areas in which diversity is making us ignore the real issues that we should be paying attention to. I want to suggest that, at least on a public-policy level, all these debates about diversity, identity politics, multiculturalism, the woke religion, etc., should be treated like debates about homelessness. Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness. It becomes an all-purpose excuse for ignoring what’s really going on. So let me, in quick succession, list a few of the deeper issues obscured by our diversity obsession today.

Start with the university. It’s easy to focus on all the insanity in the humanities. But if you remember what universities themselves believe—that all their serious work, their cutting-edge research, is done in the sciences—the focus on the humanities begins to resemble an attention redirect, stifling the hard questions about what is actually going on in the sciences. Are they progressing as advertised? Are we still living in an accelerating world in which science is fundamentally healthy and critical, with diversity of thought? It shouldn’t have required covid to be able to ask these questions, to notice that “science” has somehow gotten to be a very, very diseased thing. Most imagine a scientist to be an independent researcher who thinks for himself, and this figure may still appear in children’s books, but in practice the occupation mostly entails the enforcement of a fixed set of dogmas.

A few years after The Diversity Myth came out, a Stanford physics professor, Bob Laughlin, got a Nobel Prize. And he began to suffer from the supreme delusion that, now that he had a Nobel Prize in physics, he also had academic freedom and could investigate anything he wanted. Now, there are a lot of controversial topics in science. You could have a heterodox view on stem-cell research, or you could be a skeptic of climate change or Darwinism. But Laughlin hit on a topic that was far more taboo than any of the above. He had the idea that most of the scientists were doing no work at all. They were actually stealing money from the government, just creating all these fraudulent grant applications. Laughlin had done a lot of work studying the physics of super-high temperatures (superconductivity and the like), and he once told me that, of the roughly fifty thousand papers written on the subject, maybe twenty-five of them were any good at all.

Laughlin’s team started with the biology department at Stanford, launching a sort of inquiry into what, exactly, it was doing. They didn’t actually publish the results—they just had a public hearing and generally denounced all the professors as having stolen money from the government. The generous conclusion would be that the department wasn’t fully fraudulent: just an incredibly incrementalist exercise in groupthink that wasn’t really moving the dial forward. This was a line of thinking that was completely, completely taboo. I don’t need to tell you how the story ends.




Civics: D.C.-area carjackings have soared. Here’s where they’re happening.



Jasmine Hilton, John D. Harden, Keith L. Alexander and Emily Davies:

Carjackings — which involve violence or the threat of violence and are different from unoccupied cars being stolen — have become so prevalent in the District that they became a political talking point as Congress debatedD.C.’s crime and policing bills. D.C. currently averages one reported carjacking per day compared with every three days in the two years before the pandemic.

Cities nationwide are facing the same burden. According to a Post analysis of crime reports from 2018 to March 2023, Chicago, Fort Worth, New Orleans and San Francisco also recorded an increase in carjackings during the pandemic.Data shows those crimes have remained at elevated levels in each city.

Officials and community leaders have said gaps in the social safety net that were widened by the pandemic explain some of the uptick in carjackings and increased arrests of juveniles charged with the crime.

In the end, scores of victims are left traumatized. Some have been injured or killed.

Lee Alexander Thomas, 54, was killed in December by teens trying to steal his BMW at a gas station in Largo, according to police. The Washington Commanders fan and local bus driver was shot after assailants confronted him and he wouldn’t give up his car, according to hisolder brother, Ernest Thomas.

“There’s no safeguard,” Ernest Thomas said. “He wasn’t doing anything that a normal citizen wouldn’t be doing, getting gas in his car. … You can’t stay in the house all the time.”




NYC private schools teaching ‘sexuality curriculum’ in woke kindergarten classes



Jon Levine, Mary Kay Linge and Matthew Sedacca

One education consultant confirms that some of the city’s top private schools now ask about a child’s gender identity and preferred pronouns on their kindergarten admissions applications.

The schools — with kindergarten tuition north of $60,000 — shamelessly boast about the instruction in their online course materials.

Dalton’s First Program for grades K-3 on East 91st Street on the Upper East Side promises a curriculum that teaches “races” and “gender expressions.” 

There, even the youngest students will “develop an appreciation for, and value the importance of diversity by directly addressing issues of fairness, gender equity, and social justice,” according to the Dalton website.




Google censorship, continued



Paula Bolyard:

Dan Phillips, a Christian pastor and sometimes blogger, recently posted a letter he sent to his congregation to help parents explain Pride Month to their children.

The letter (read it in its entirety below) was posted on June 5 on the Pyromaniacs blog, which is hosted on the Google-owned Blogger platform. It was a thoughtful letter with sound biblical advice for families trying to navigate the rainbow-saturated month of June. In fact, I forwarded it to my son and daughter-in-law and told them to bookmark it for when those questions come up with our granddaughter, as they inevitably will.

Not long after the letter was posted, Google/Blogger stepped in and censored the post. If you try to access the page now, you will see this:




“the mania for eugenic sterilization of those deemed “unfit to reproduce” for the first 75+ years of the 20th century”; public health groupthink



Robert Graboyes:

As Ted and I discussed: 

“They were forced to undergo hysterectomies. Their tubes were tied and they were given vasectomies, sometimes without anesthesia.” 

The scientific and political communities in America were solidly behind the project. Those performing the sterilizations were considered humanitarian heroes, and academics who questioned the idea were subject to vilification, loss of employment, and loss of academic funding. The press and political activists formed a solid phalanx to protect the pro-eugenics side. Glenn Reynolds of Glenn’s Substack (another worthy subscribable) linked to the interview on Instapundit.com, framing it as follows: 

PUBLIC HEALTH HAS ALWAYS INVOLVED A LOT OF GROUPTHINK:When Sterilization Was Dogma: Why the Eugenics Movement is Relevant Today.“Eugenicists sought to ‘improve’ the human species in the same way that one would improve cattle or soybeans—and using basically the same techniques.”

Later in the day, Glenn added an update—an excruciatingly poignant email that he had received from a reader:




Nearly a Third of Gen Z Favors the Government Installing Surveillance Cameras in Homes



Emily Ekins and Jordan Gygi

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of our society’s most frequently referenced illustrations of what life would be like under an authoritarian government. Actual government policies that are viewed as illiberal in varying degrees are often tied to this novel by opponents, an easy and effective way to call out government overreach and control. In the book 1984, citizens of the fictional nation Oceania are under constant government surveillance, including in their own homes. Devices called telescreens display propaganda and record peoples’ actions, allowing the government to monitor people even in what should be the most private place they know—their homes. This type of behavior is meant to be an extreme example of what can happen when a government gains too much power, and opposition to such surveillance has been assumed to be overwhelming and obvious. But is it? We don’t know how much of this preference for security over privacy or freedom is something unique to this generation (a cohort effect) or simply the result of youth (age effect). However, there is reason to think part of this is generational. Americans over age 45 have vastly different attitudes on in‐home surveillance cameras than those who are younger. These Americans were born in or before 1978. Thus the very youngest were at least 11 before the Berlin Wall fell. Being raised during the Cold War amidst regular news reports of the Soviet Union surveilling their own people may have demonstrated to Americans the dangers of giving the government too much power to monitor people. Young people today are less exposed to these types of examples and thus less aware of the dangers of expansive government power.




No AI in my courtroom unless a human verifies its accuracy



Jon Brodkin:

A federal judge in Texas has a new rule for lawyers in his courtroom: No submissions written by artificial intelligence unless the AI’s output is checked by a human. US District Judge Brantley Starr also ordered lawyers to file certificates attesting that their filings are either written or reviewed by humans.

“All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being,” according to a new “judge-specific requirement” in Starr’s courtroom.




No AI in my courtroom unless a human verifies its accuracy



Jon Brodkin:

A federal judge in Texas has a new rule for lawyers in his courtroom: No submissions written by artificial intelligence unless the AI’s output is checked by a human. US District Judge Brantley Starr also ordered lawyers to file certificates attesting that their filings are either written or reviewed by humans.

“All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being,” according to a new “judge-specific requirement” in Starr’s courtroom.




DPI Superintendent Underly Speaks at the 2023 Wisconsin Democrat Party Convention



WisPolitics:

Underly road a historic wave of cashflow to win in 2021, marking a significant win for Dems of the GOP. While the race was officially nonpartisan, the Dem Party contributed $949,844 to Underly’s campaign, which spent $1.53 million over the election. In all, candidates and outside groups spent $3 million on the race, a record to elect Wisconsin’s education department head. 

She also said she knows schools aren’t perfect right now, but she loves them enough to see that “and devote my life to making them better, more equitable and stronger.”

Much more on Jill Underly, here (and her efforts to abort our elementary teacher literacy test: the Foundations of Reading).




From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You



Jon Keegan and Joel Eastwood:

Many of the Xandr ad categories are more prosaic, classifying people as “Affluent Millennials,” for example, or as “Dunkin Donuts Visitors.” Industry critics have raised questions about the accuracy of this type of targeting. And the practice of slicing and dicing audiences for advertisers is an old one. 

But the exposure of a collection of audience segments this size offers consumers an unusual look at how they and their families are packaged, described, and categorized by ad companies. 

Because the segments also include the names of the companies involved in creating them, they also shed light on how disparate pools of personal data—collected by tracking people’s online activity and real-world movements—are combined into bespoke, branded groups of potential ad viewers that can be marketed to publishers and advertisers.




A dive into the causes of violence



Ranjit Singh

None of these laws did anything. We don’t know how the shooter got his gun. If he got it legally from a firearms retailer, he passed a background check. If he got it illegally, the joke’s on the writers of the “universal” part of Virginia’s background check legislation. The handgun limit didn’t do anything, nor did the Due Process busting red flag law. Crooks don’t give a hoot about any of that. The gun grabbers know it, and they don’t care. Because they want *another* bite at the apple.




Missouri State Civil Rights legislation



William Jacobson:

As previously covered here, the Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) of Legal Insurrection Foundation asked the Missouri Attorney General to investigate a business boot camp at Missouri State University that discriminated against white males, and only white males.

In reaction to substantial media coverage, MSU quickly told the media that it was changing the terms for future programs, and that future business boot camps would be open to everyone. We took that as a VICTORY – Missouri State U To Stop Discriminating Against White Males For ‘Business Boot Camp” After Equal Protection Project Complaint.

But in those public statements, MSU was not contrite and accepted no responsibility. To the contrary, MSU President Clif Smart was quoted as saying:

“Frankly, I still don’t think we did anything wrong … given that we have multiple cohorts of this going on and this was just one cohort that was limited. We won’t do that. We’ll do a better job on the marketing and information (and) dissemination side and review the process to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate, but we’re not going to exclude people.”

That sounds like MSU was upset for being caught, not for discriminating. While we were happy that the discriminatory program was changed, what good is a promise from a university that violated its own (and federal and state) anti-discrimination rules, when caught said it did nothing wrong, and appears only to have succumbed due to media attention? What will happen when the media attention fades?




Civics: UK Government Censorship



Christopher Hope:

However, it has “trusted flagger” status with Twitter and Facebook, allowing it to fast-track complaints about content it believes to be in breach of the platforms’ rules.

During the pandemic, Mr Dowden and Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, also attended a meeting with technology companies about how to tackle Covid disinformation.




High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Students



Ernesto Van der Sar

To reduce costs, some students choose to share books or buy cheaper second-hand versions. Others go a step further and venture onto the dark side, by downloading or even buying ‘pirated’ books. 

These cost-saving tactics are nothing new. A few decades ago, copying machines at universities were already duplicating copyrighted works every day of the week. However, with digital books becoming more common, copying has become a breeze. This is a form of progress that publishers are not happy with. 

Danish Deterrent?

Textbook piracy is happening around the globe. While enforcement is relatively rare, in Denmark several students have been convicted for selling pirated copies of textbooks. Publishers hoped that these cases would act as a deterrent but there are no signs that this is the case.

Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance recently published a new study, conducted by Epinion, which polled the attitudes and behaviors of students towards digital textbooks. In particular, those that are obtained illegally




Civics: taxpayer funded Facebook censorship



Related: Dane County Madison Public Health mandates.




Civics: “Apparently, the mainstream press doesn’t consider it news when the FBI works with a foreign intelligence service to try to censor an award-winning Western reporter”



Matt Taibbi:

CNN had the gall the other day to run a story called, “Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship.” The plummeting cable network, which consistently refused to cover any of the Twitter Files revelations in real time, is citing a legal motion filed by Twitter that, shockingly, does not confess to liability in a years-old First Amendment claim filed by Donald Trump. 

This motion, in conjunction with stories like CNN’s, is being used by the usual suspects to argue that the Twitter Files reports, and the notion that they “exposed government censorship,” have been proven untrue. If nothing else, the stubborn dishonesty is impressive, especially given the confidence they’ve again showed in blowing off another clearly newsworthy Twitter Files expose, this time by Aaron Maté. 




Mayo Clinic Suspends A Doctor Who Commented in NYTimes About Testosterone’s impact when Trans-athletes compete in Women’s sports



Vijay Prasad:

FIRE— an organization devoted to championing free speech on university campuses— has broken the story of Mike Joyner, a Mayo Clinic Professor suspended for comments he made to the news media. They even published his disciplinary letter. 

It appears Mike Joyner is in part being punished for comments he made about fairness when trans-athletes compete in women’s sports. Allow me to outline the details of this action, and build my case that Mayo clinic is in complete and egregious violation of Academic Freedom. 

As a bit of background. Mike Joyner is an anesthesiologist and expert in sports physiology. Pre-pandemic we were allies. We agreed that the genome has been massively overhyped and Francis Collins specialized in that hype. We exchanged hundreds of emails on genomic oncology, and I have published extensively on it.

During the pandemic, we drifted apart because I was opposed to giving convalescent plasma outside of randomized studies, and Mike gave a ton of it, outside randomized studies. As readers know, my philosophy is RCT or STFU— especially for experimental agents that may have negative side effects. But here are the rules of academics. It Mike’s job to say what he thinks, and my job to say why he is wrong. 

Now let’s turn to what happened.




China’s Lost Generation



Nathaniel Taplin:

In other ways, how­ever, the of­fi­cial sta­tistics may ac­tu­ally un­der­es­ti­mate young peo­ple’s strug­gles—par­tic­u­larly for uni­ver­sity grad­u­ates. A spring 2023 sur­vey by job-search plat­form Zhaopin found that, for the sec­ond year in a row, only about 50% of grad­u­at­ing uni­ver­sity stu­dents had an of­fer in hand by late spring—down from 63% in 2021 and about three quar­ters in 2018. More­over, nearly a quar­ter of those sur­veyed hoped to en­ter the in­for­ma­tion-tech­nol­ogy and in­ter­net sec­tor, where salaries have tra­di­tion­ally been among the high­est on of­fer. That in­dus­try, al­though re­cov­er­ing now, was hit hard by the reg­u­la­tory crack­down of 2021 and 2022, with ma­jor job cuts among key em­ploy­ers such as Al­ibaba, Ten­cent and Didi.

What­ever the true level of youth un­em­ploy­ment is, what does seem clear is that it has marched much higher over the past four years. This is also what of­fi­cial sta­tistics show.




10 years after Snowden’s first leak, what have we learned?



Jessica Lyons Hardcastle

The world got a first glimpse into the US government’s far-reaching surveillance of American citizens’ communications – namely, their Verizon telephone calls – 10 years ago this week when Edward Snowden’s initial leaks hit the press.

Verizon, we all learned, had handed over information to the US National Security Agency (NSA) on all calls in its systems on a daily basis, under a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order.

Thousands more secret documents were subsequently published by journalists in the days and years to come, followed by lawsuits, privacy-enabling tech and – more slowly – some transparency into and reforms of Uncle Sam’s domestic spying efforts.

At least that’s what lawmakers, digital privacy and civil liberties advocates tell us. It’s always hard to know for sure when you’re dealing with classified, top-secret domestic spying programs.




K-12 Tax & Spending climate: Why Do Electricity Costs Keep Going Up Despite More Wind And Solar Being Added To Grid?



Kevin Killough:

The answer is complicated. 

Paul Bonifas, director of operations for 9H Research Foundation, which is partnered with the University of Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily that costs of different sources of energy are calculated using a measurement called the levelized costs of energy (LCOE), which doesn’t tell the full story. 

“Levelized cost of electricity tells you the cost of the electricity, but only when that power source is generating electricity,” Bonifas said. 

Electricity as a product is unique to any other product produced in that it’s consumed instantaneously to the moment it’s produced. 

“What do we want to happen when we flick a light switch? It’s not that we want electricity, it’s that we want electricity all the time,” Bonifas said. 

When the wind isn’t blowing or the sun not shining, coal-fired and natural gas-fired power plants increase their output to cover the lack of energy from wind and solar farms. Without this dispatchable power available, the lights don’t stay on.

As more wind and solar farms are built, dispatchable power plants sit idle more often, but they are indispensable because they must be available when they’re needed, he said. This means more infrastructure has to be built to back up intermittent solar and wind power.




Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep



Privacy International:

Privacy International and UCL student exposes how productivity suite like Office 365 offers features that can enable employers to access all communications and activities on Microsoft services without the employees’ knowledge

KEY FINDINGS

  • Working from home bolstered the use of remote surveillance software to monitor employees.
  • It’s not only tools that are developed specifically for surveillance, traditional productivity suites might also enable an intrusive level of monitoring.
  • PI and UCL students looked into Office 365 and found features that can enable employers to access all communications and activities on Microsoft services
  • These features can be operated without the employees’ knowledge and there seems to be a lack of transparency for users in terms of what data is collected and for what purpose



What are the risks of being an older father?



BBC:

Researchers at Stanford University, for example, found older father were linked to increased risks of low birth weight and seizures in newborns. Advanced paternal age is also associated with increased rates of various childhood cancers, as well as congenital cardiac defects.

It is worth remembering, however, that like many studies that examine associations between health and possible causes, the mechanisms are unclear. There could be other complicating factors that play a role, such as the lifestyle of parents and environmental pollution.




A look at the rigor of our education establishment



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




Legislation and K-12 reading: 2023 Wisconsin Edition



Corrinne Hess:

A bipartisan bill is expected to be released this month that would change the way most public schools in Wisconsin teach reading. 

State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, who chairs the Assembly Committee on Education, has been working with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on the plan that would move more schools away from teaching what is known as “balanced literacy,” to a “science of reading” approach.

Instead of being taught reading through pictures, word cues and memorization, children would be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on learning to sound out letters and phrases.

According to DPI, only about 20 percent of school districts are using a phonics-based approach to literacy education. Other reading curriculums that don’t include phonics have been shown to be less effective for students.

The bill will be introduced separately from the 2023-25 biennial budget that is currently being crafted but $15 million to support the plan would be included in the budget, Kitchens said during an April 24 interview on Wisconsin Eye.  

“Education is the one chance we have to break the cycle of generational poverty that we see in Wisconsin and reading is by far the most important skill to allow children to be successful in school,” Kitchens said. 

Kitchens told Wisconsin Public Radio on Thursday he is updating the current draft of the bill and will share it with DPI “in coming days.”

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?




The Three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Reparations?



Jonathan Turley:

The 1619 Project Education Network, in conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, have released a new curriculum for high school students that will convert some math classes into a discussion of reparations and racial justice.  Students will be asked to work out the math on the payment for past years of slavery and racial discrimination. A 2020 report found that prior 1619 Project curriculum proposals have been adopted in over 3,500 classrooms across all 50 states.The program, “Reparations Math and Reparations History,” is designed to have “students apply math skills, research into historical wealth gaps in the U.S., and an analysis of different reparations models to an investigation into whether or not reparations should be paid to the descendents of enslaved people in the U.S..”The 1619 Project has long been controversial due to questions over its historical accuracy, including opposition by some history teachers. The project is most associated with former New York Times writer and now Howard University Professor Nikole Hannah-Smith.  Hannah-Smith has declared that “all journalism is activism.”

As previously discussed, the objections to the 1619 Project concerned some of its sweeping historical claims over slavery being a motivation for the American Revolution and labeling figures like Abraham Lincoln as racists.

According to The Atlantic, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz criticized that work and some of Hannah-Jones’s other work in a letter signed by scholars James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. They raised “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’” They objected that the work represented “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” The Atlantic noted that “given the stature of the historians involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the 1619 Project, which has drawn its share not just of admirers but also critics.” Researchers claimed the New York Times ignored them in raising the errors. The New York Times was criticized later for a “clarification” that undermined a main premise of her writing. None of that appeared to concern the Pulitzer Committee.




Influence & K-12 ESG



InCorporatED

In the summer of 2020, the University of Washington, using $1,336,657 in funding from the National Science Foundation, ran a professional development for high school physics teachers. The report, titled “Redefining Energy Justice in Physics Classrooms,” focused on training teachers to integrate discussions around “energy justice” into existing physics curriculum. The authors stated the “original purpose of the energy concept was to improve factories and steamships in the British Industrial Revolution and advance capitalism and colonialism.” They also claimed the traditional method of teaching upholds capitalism and the use of fossil fuels and is responsible for “energy injustices” and “environmental racism.” Upon completion of the training, participants concluded that equity, social justice, and physics are inseparable because “there are inequities and injustices present in physics.”




Closed model vendors won’t tell you what’s in their training data



Simon Willison:

One of the most common concerns I see about large language models regards their training data. People are worried that anything they say to ChatGPT could be memorized by it and spat out to other users. People are concerned that anything they store in a private repository on GitHub might be used as training data for future versions of Copilot.

When someone asked Google Bard how it was trained back in March, it told them its training data included Gmail! This turned out to be a complete fabrication—a hallucination by the model itself—and Google issued firm denials, but it’s easy to see why that freaked people out.

I’ve been wanting to write something reassuring about this issue for a while now. The problem is… I can’t do it. I don’t have the information I need to credibly declare these concerns unfounded, and the more I look into this the murkier it seems to get.

The fundamental issue here is one of transparency. The builders of the big closed models—GPT-3, GPT-4, Google’s PaLM and PaLM 2, Anthropic’s Claude—refuse to tell us what’s in their training data.

Given this lack of transparency, there’s no way to confidently state that private data that is passed to them isn’t being used to further train future versions of these models.

I’ve spent a lot of time digging around in openly available training sets. I built an early tool for searching the training set for Stable Diffusion. I can tell you exactly what has gone in to the RedPajama training setthat’s being used for an increasing number of recent openly licensed language models.

But for those closed models? Barring loose, high-level details that are revealed piecemeal in blog posts and papers, I have no idea what’s in them.




World’s Largest Soil Archive Brings History to Life



Jenna Hoffman:

In 2018, a barn on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) main campus was set to be demolished. On demo day, Andrew Margenot, associate professor of soil sciences, walked into the dusty, dilapidated barn to size up the job at hand. That’s when he stumbled upon a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

Nestled within the confines of the decaying barn walls sat 8,000 mason jars filled with Illinois soil dating back to 1862. At 450 sampling locations spanning 21 million crop acres, it’s the world’s largest soil archive.

This unique find is likely the oldest collection, as few soil archives exceed 40 years.

“I went in there thinking I might find a few soil samples from a professor before me. But as I walked through the barn, I found collapsed wooden aisles that previously held the hundreds of jars on the ground — some broken, others in perfect condition,” Margenot says.

Upon closer inspection, he discovered the labels on the jars provided a road map. Each label included the sample date (down to the day), sample county and soil classification.




Sun Prairie School District Racks Up $2,781 in Attorney Fees to Send Mom Cease & Desist Letter



Jim Piwowarczyk

Axley Attorneys, a Madison law firm, sent the letter on Feb. 20, 2023, to parent Kris Ganske, a well-known anti-bullying advocate in the district and mother of a first grader. The four-page letter is signed by attorney Lori M. Lubinsky, who wrote that she represents the Sun Prairie Area School District.

Through an open records request, WRN obtained Axley Attorneys’ invoice summary for fees related to the cease & desist letter. The invoice, dated March 20, shows the Sun Prairie School District was billed in the amount of $2,781.60.

The invoice detailed multiple reviews, phone calls, drafts, reviews, zoom calls and emails with the “client.” In total, Attorney Lori Lubinsky charged the school district for 10.3 hours of work at a rate of $270/hour.

You can see the full invoice here:




Southern Poverty Law Center Adds Parental Rights Groups to ‘Hate Map’



Tyler O’Neil:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, added a slew of parental rights organizations to that “hate map” for 2022 and labeled them “antigovernment groups.”

“Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups,” the SPLC’s “Year in Hate and Extremism” report claims. 

“These groups were, in part, spurred by the right-wing backlash to COVID-19 public safety measures in schools,” the SPLC report says. “But they have grown into an anti-student inclusion movement that targets any inclusive curriculum that contains discussions of race, discrimination and LGBTQ identities.”

“At the forefront of this mobilization is Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group with vast connections to the GOP that this year the SPLC designated as an extremist group,” the report notes. “They can be spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, ‘We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.’”

The SPLC report does not once mention the Left’s aggressive promotion of sexualized material for children in schools and at other venues. It does not mention the “Drag Queen Story Hour” movement or the fact that many of the books which parents demand removed from school libraries include pornographic content. It does not mention how many on the Left champion the idea that children should be able to identify with a gender opposite their biological sex, hide that identity from their parents, and even obtain life-altering drugs without parental consent. Instead, it acts as though the parental rights movement emerged in a vacuum, or worse, is motivated by hatred.

The SPLC long has demonized conservative Christian groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom as “anti-LGBT hate groups,” national security groups such as the Center for Security Policy as “anti-Muslim hate groups,” and immigration groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies as “anti-immigrant hate groups.”




In the 1950s you could buy your kid radioactive samples for fun



Keith McNulty:

As a child, I remember reading the warning messages on plastic shopping bags: ‘This bag is not a toy, keep away from children’. I found this statement hilarious. Of course a plastic shopping bag is not a toy.

At the time, I was too young to appreciate the reason for the warning — that anything can be a toy and that toys can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Over the years since, I’ve heard many stories of young children swallowing lego pieces or small batteries, or teenagers causing injury from flying Wii controllers.

But when it comes to truly dangerous toys, you’d struggle to beat the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. Billed as ‘Exciting and Safe’, the kit contained four sealed jars containing actual Uranium ores. Made by the A.C. Gilbert Toy Company, this kit came on the market in 1950 at a price of $49.50 (over $500 in today’s money).

Nowadays, it seems completely unbelievable that a children’s toy like this would be allowed on the market. Let’s have quick look into the story of what could be the most dangerous toy ever.




A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT



Jules White, Quchen Fu, Sam Hays, Michael Sandborn, Carlos Olea, Henry Gilbert, Ashraf Elnashar, Jesse Spencer-Smith, Douglas C. Schmidt

Prompt engineering is an increasingly important skill set needed to converse effectively with large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. Prompts are instructions given to an LLM to enforce rules, automate processes, and ensure specific qualities (and quantities) of generated output. Prompts are also a form of programming that can customize the outputs and interactions with an LLM. This paper describes a catalog of prompt engineering techniques presented in pattern form that have been applied to solve common problems when conversing with LLMs. Prompt patterns are a knowledge transfer method analogous to software patterns since they provide reusable solutions to common problems faced in a particular context, i.e., output generation and interaction when working with LLMs. This paper provides the following contributions to research on prompt engineering that apply LLMs to automate software development tasks. First, it provides a framework for documenting patterns for structuring prompts to solve a range of problems so that they can be adapted to different domains. Second, it presents a catalog of patterns that have been applied successfully to improve the outputs of LLM conversations. Third, it explains how prompts can be built from multiple patterns and illustrates prompt patterns that benefit from combination with other prompt patterns.




Civics: Litigation on SPLC’s hate group activity



Tyler O’Neil:

In order to win a defamation lawsuit, the person suing must convince the court and ultimately the jury that the slanderer didn’t just publish something false, but that he did so even while suspecting that the attack was false. 

Immigration enforcement activist D.A. King’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center made it to the discovery process while so many other lawsuits have failed precisely because King showed that the SPLC had reason to doubt the truth of its claim that his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, was an “anti-immigrant hate group.” In fact, the SPLC had explicitly stated that the society was not a “hate group” in 2011, but it reversed course in 2018, right after registering a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. This smear inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, but when conservatives sue to defend their good names in court, they repeatedly fail, in part because they do not allege that the SPLC itself doubted the “hate group” smear.

King can claim that, and newly revealed evidence bolsters his claim even further. 

According to an article King unearthed on the SPLC website, not only did the SPLC state publicly that his group was not a “hate group” before it reversed course, but an SPLC whistleblower who went on to describe the SPLC’s “hate” accusations as a “highly profitable scam” had himself been involved in the SPLC’s monitoring of King’s organization. He even quoted a source who stated that an early version of King’s organization was not a “traditional ‘hate’ group.”




The backlash against British Boarding Schools



The Economist:

The moment when his chemistry master pulled a pistol, declared it loaded and waved it in the air was “probably”, says Justin Webb, a broadcaster, the worst point of his boarding-school career. Winston Churchill would recall the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. In “Such, Such Were The Joys”, George Orwell writes of being beaten so violently that his headmaster broke his riding crop and “reduced me to tears”.

That British boarding schools are odd places is not news. For several centuries and for fat fees they provided the English upper classes with a ripping blend of architectural beauty and physical discomfort; with neoclassical corridors and cold showers; with lashings of Latin and just plain lashings. The pupils they produced were an equally idiosyncratic mix of the sophisticated and the childlike, mingling precocious brilliance with speech that never quite left the classroom. It was a heady brew and Britain was intoxicated by it: of the 57 British prime ministers, 20 went to Eton. As Boris Johnson, one of their number, might say: “Crikey!”

Boarding schools are not yet in trouble. Their pupil numbers are relatively constant—around 70,000, owing partly to masses of boarders from abroad. But their charms may be becoming easier to resist. Elite private schools are a less secure route into the top universities than they were. In 2014, 99 pupils from Eton were accepted into Oxbridge; in the 2021-22 school year, it managed 47. (Brampton Manor Academy, a state school in London, had 54.)




The Philadelphia Military Academy offers a chance for career development and upward mobility.



Carine Haijar

Ka­heem Bai­ley-Tay­lor was leav­ing a party last Au­gust at a cousin’s house in North­ern Phil­adelphia when he heard gun­shots. “The sus­pect started shoot­ing out the door to­wards us,” he says. Po­lice soon ar­rived and cleared the house. Mr. Bai­ley-Tay­lor fol­lowed of­fi­cers in to as­sess the sit­u­a­tion. Min­utes later, he was sit­ting in the back of a po­lice car ap­ply­ing pres­sure to a par­ty­go­er’s gun­shot wounds.

Mr. Bai­ley-Tay­lor isn’t a para­medic or a cop; he’s a 17-year-old high-school ju­nior. He is cadet colonel at the Phil­adelphia Mil­i­tary Acad­emy, where all stu­dents are en­rolled in the U.S. Army’s Ju­nior Re­serve Of­fi­cers’ Train­ing Corps pro­gram. On my visit to the acad­emy, Mr. Bai­ley-Tay­lor helps show me around. As we sit in the back of a 10th-grade class on first aid, he leans over and tells me that he used these skills, along with his life­guard train­ing, the night he helped save the par­ty­goer, one of his class­mates.

The class starts like any other, with the buzz of chatty stu­dents. It then cuts to si­lence in uni­son as a stu­dent leader takes his po­si­tion at the front. Then stu­dents re­cite the cadet creed in one voice: “I will al­ways con­duct my­self to bring credit to my fam­ily, coun­try, school and the Corps of Cadets. I am loyal and pa­tri­otic. . . . I will seek the man­tle of lead­er­ship and stand pre­pared to up­hold the Con­sti­tu­tion and the Amer­i­can way of life. May God grant me the strength to al­ways live by this creed.”




Madison: “Without additional revenue, the district faces an estimated more than $30 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2025” amidst declining enrollment



Scott Girard:

School Board President Nichelle Nichols said in the release that “the state must increase its support for schools” in the upcoming biennial budget.

“Without additional revenue, the district will have to make difficult decisions to realign the impact of this budget over the next several years, including the possibility of pursuing additional sources of revenue,” Nichols said.

Gov. Tony Evers proposed a historic investment in K-12 education in his budget, but Republican legislators, who control both legislative chambers, have thrown out much of what he proposed and begun building their own base budget. The Joint Finance Committee has not yet discussed K-12 funding, though, leaving school districts in the dark about how much they can expect to be able to spend and receive in state aid.

If legislators increase revenue limits for schools, which they have indicated they will to some level, it will lower the future deficits somewhat.

In the release, MTI leaders suggested the investment “acknowledges our most vital asset for student achievement and a thriving community, which is our staff.”

“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?




Self-Censorship at Harvard



Harvey Mansfield:

Not long ago, an Iranian woman in my class told me that in her country, one had to be careful about what you said in public, but could say what you wanted in private.

“At Harvard, however, it’s the reverse,” she said.

This is the self-censorship some Harvard students complain of. Only some complain because the complaint is directed against the rest who dominate conversation and do not want to hear opposition. These dominant students may not begin as a majority, but the activist few create the majority who accept their view and then impose it on those who disagree, forcing them to censor themselves.

The punishment for not censoring yourself is to lose the company of fellow students and to be disregarded and shunned. You are not put in jail, as happens in Iran and other countries, but you are deprived of the fellowship you want from college life.




K-12 Tax & spending climate: Texas plans big property tax cut, perhaps eliminating it…



Texas Governor Abbott:

Governor Greg Abbott today touted the many achievements from the 88th regular legislative session and highlighted his plan to complete unfinished business in subsequent special sessions during a fireside chat at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in Austin.

“In Texas, we don’t do things half-heartedly,” said Governor Abbott. “We go big, and we make sure we accomplish our big vision—that includes delivering the largest property tax cut in the history of our state and expanding education freedom for all Texans. Texans want to own their property, not rent it from the government. Under my property tax plan, we will put Texans on the pathway to eliminate property taxes. Texas must also empower every parent in our state to choose the best education pathway for their child, and we will do that under my plan to expand access to Education Savings Accounts. I look forward to working with my partners in the legislature during these special sessions to pass legislation that builds on the momentum of freedom and prosperity embedded in the promise of Texas.”

During a discussion moderated by TPPF CEO Greg Sindelar, the Governor touted several major achievements accomplished during the regular 88th Legislative Session, including providing more than $5.1 billion to secure the border, but emphasized that many critical items—like cutting property taxes and expanding school choice—still need to be passed. Governor Abbott noted that his property tax plan would direct $17.6 billion of Texas’ historic budget surplus already appropriated by the legislature to cut property tax rates, putting money back into the pockets of hardworking Texans. Pointing to the quality of education in states with robust school choice programs, the Governor also emphasized the importance of passing his plan to expand state-funded Education Savings Accounts to every Texas student.




Jo Boaler of Stanford is leading the math-instruction revolution. Critics say her claims don’t always add up.



Stephanie Lee

Last April, Jelani Nelson woke up to a jarring email from Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor and the nation’s most prominent expert on math education. The two had never met. “As you know,” she began, “I am one of the authors of the proposed mathematics framework and I know you are working to oppose it.”

That “framework” is a policy document that will shape how math is taught in California and beyond, and Nelson, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had major problems with it — and with Boaler, too. He’d seen a series of tweets critical of her, and reposted one of them with his own scathing commentary. Now, Boaler was confronting him.




Google/YouTube censorship






Euthanasia is Not Healthcare



Josh Anderson:

In 2024, eligibility will increase to include people whose only underlying condition is mental illness. By the way, in 2021, Mental Health Research Canada concluded that they’d found a correlation “between vaccine hesitancy and mental illness.” Not even COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy specifically, just vaccine hesitancy broadly speaking, because surely there are no legitimate reasons anyone might reasonably regard pubic health institutions with skepticism! That same year, New York City psychiatrist Dr. Aruna Khilanani was invited to none other than the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center to give a talk entitled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” The Yale School of Medicine eventually distanced themselves from Khilanani, but only after she indicated that perhaps she was the psychopathic one. Among other things, she told her audience that she “had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.” Apparently the title of the talk wasn’t enough of a red flag. (Writing about the incident, the Washington Post included several defenses of Khilanani, including, “Her comments and the negative feedback she’s received are more revealing about white supremacist thoughts than about Khilanani’s view on racism, said Nikki Coleman, a psychologist and consultant on diversity, equity and inclusion.”) I bring up this incident because if this is the sort of mental health “expert” invited to speak to students of a… *checks notes* 📔🧐 … Child Study Center at one of the most highly regarded universities in the world – if hers is the sort of speech to readily find defenders in the media and academia… then let’s just say I… hesitate… when the government officially enshrines into law the stance that death is preferable to however the “experts” of the day define “mental illness.”

Indeed, that stance – the stance that death is preferable to disability – has been the thrust behind the pushback towards this bill. Three disability rights advocates associated with the United Nations wrote futilely in a letter to the federal government before they expanded MAID in 2021:




The economics of school choice: political rhetoric on the tree, missing the forest



Jason Bedrick and Corey DeAngelis

That $900 mil­lion is barely 2% of to­tal Ari­zona state spend­ing of $80.5 bil­lion in 2022. Ari­zona pub­lic schools spend about $14,000 per pupil, or $1.4 bil­lion for 100,000 stu­dents. If the de­part­ment’s en­roll­ment pro­jec­tion is reached, school choice would serve roughly 8% of Ari­zona’s stu­dents for 6% of the $15 bil­lion that Ari­zona will spend on pub­lic schools.

A new re­port by the Com­mon Sense In­sti­tute finds that “cur­rent en­roll­ment in Ari­zona pub­lic dis­trict and char­ter schools com­bined is over 80,000 stu­dents be­low pre-pan­demic pro­jec­tions,” pro­duc­ing a sav­ings of $639 mil­lion. Ari­zona’s pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing, so the vast ma­jor­ity of those stu­dents left for pri­vate or home schools, for which they could avail them­selves of Ari­zona’s two pri­vate choice poli­cies. In ad­di­tion to the 58,000 stu­dents us­ing ed­u­ca­tion sav­ings ac­counts, last year school tu­ition or­ga­ni­za­tions is­sued more than 32,000 tax-credit schol­ar­ships.

The at­tacks on school choice are more than a pub­lic re­la­tions cam­paign. When Ms. Hobbs’s bud­get re­tained last year’s school-choice ex­pan­sion, Ari­zona’s At­tor­ney Gen­eral Kris Mayes used the “bank­rupt the state” talk­ing point as a pre­text to threaten a law­suit. In a pub­lic let­ter to Ms. Hobbs and the Leg­is­la­ture, Ms. Mayes de­cried the “cat­astrophic drain on state re­sources caused by uni­ver­sal Em­pow­er­ment Schol­ar­ship Ac­counts.” She later went on tele­vi­sion and threat­ened to in­ves­ti­gate par­tic­i­pat­ing fam­i­lies for “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Interesting “Wisconsin Watch” choice school coverage and a very recent public school article

“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?




Teens Learn to Talk to Baby Boomers



Joseph Pisani:

The exercises are part of a new effort in the nation’s largest school district to teach teenagers how to relate to older Americans. The youngsters are watching videos of their elders doing yoga, hanging out with them and learning how to talk to them without using the old-age labels baby boomers hate. (Goodbye, “senior.” Hello, “older adult.”)

The curriculum is being tested at 13 New York City public high schools for the first time this spring semester, including at The School for Human Rights in Brooklyn, where O’Mealley teaches.

Teen Imani Stanback said the lessons have made her more patient with her grandma, who recently activated closed captioning on her TV but couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.




Science Should Leave the University



J Scott Turner:

A dozen years ago, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood posed the provocative question: Could science leave the university?

Wood framed his question in practical terms. There has always been a bargain of sorts between universities and their science faculties. Universities provide the means for scientists to do science—laboratories, students, bookkeepers, etc. Scientists hustle the grant monies not only to do their work, but also to pay for universities’ costs. Wood argued that the bargain works mostly in favor of the universities, because they ride along on the substantial streams of research revenues their scientists bring in. While scientists were not exactly disadvantaged thereby, Wood suggested that they could prosper as much outside the university as in, raising the question that logically follows: who needs whom? 

Since 2011, academic scientists have largely stayed put in the universities. “Who cares what universities charge for their services, as long as we are left alone to ‘do science,’” was the prevailing sentiment. Such a blasé attitude is no longer viable. While scientists busied themselves at their benches, the terms of the bargain have been steadily shifting to scientists’ disadvantage. The unique attractions of academic life are relentlessly, if slowly, falling away. Tenure is on its way out. Freedom of inquiry is increasingly constrained. Pushy administrators presume to dictate hiring, promotion, and curricular decisions that should sit squarely in scientists’ hands. Faculty governance has become mostly performative, with no power to make decisions stick—particularly budgetary and personnel decisions, which have become concentrated in the hands of administrators, governments, and favored political activists. Accreditation boards brazenly impose political agendas on faculties of science and engineering. Challenging the new racial / gender / sexual orthodoxies can snuff out careers in the blink of an eye.




Customer Ratings Have Become Meaningless. ‘People Hand Out 5 Stars Like It’s Candy.’



Prestika Rana:

Mike Johnson has endured some awkward Uberrides. He once held his nose throughout a trip because the driver was carrying chopped-up Durian—the world’s smelliest fruit. Another time, he was stuck in the back seat while a driver bickered with her boyfriend. Yet another driver tried to sell him a Ponzi scheme.

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




Rare media advocacy for Madison K-12 Accountability



Wisconsin State Journal:

It’s not just LeMonds’ staff that has struggled to work with him. LeMonds physically blocked a WMTV-TV (Ch. 15) news reporter from posing a question to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins at a public event — even grabbing and pushing down her hand and microphone, as video of the incident shows. He allegedly called the same female reporter a “pig,” among other insults, according to LeMonds’ staff. He used an expletive to describe how much he hated a female reporter for the State Journal last summer, his staff alleges.

LeMonds even ignored requests from Kelly Lecker, our executive editor, to meet with her after she was hired more than a year ago. What kind of a public relations manager refuses to sit down with and get to know the incoming leader of the major news outlet in his city? A bad one. A really bad one.

LeMonds only made the staff complaint against him a bigger and lengthier story by suing the district — the same one that employs him — to try to keep the allegations secret. A Dane County judge rejected his awkward and brash move, siding with the district in favor of the public’s right to know.

LeMonds recently told the State Journal he hasn’t been following the news coverage of the staff complaints against him. Really? His job should require him to be on top of any and all news about Madison’s schools, especially the bad stuff. That’s only more evidence he’s not doing his job.

“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?




“There is no bread”



Gareth Jones:

The snow lay deep around as I began my tramp through the villages of the North Ukraine, the part of Russia which once fed Europe and was known as the granary of the world.

I decided therefore to walk along the railway tracks, for if I penetrated into the country I should be lost in the snow and perhaps never return.

The first words I heard were ominous, for an old peasant woman moving with difficulty along the track answered my greeting with that phrase, “Hleba nietu” (“there is no bread”).

“For two months we have had no bread here,” she added in that deep crying voice which most of the peasant women had. 

“Many are dying in the village. Some huts have potatoes, but many of us have only cattle fodder left, and that will only last another month.”

She moved away and I stood watching her bent, ugly, tragic figure outlined against the snow.

The Next village to which I came had an unearthly quietness about it and it was long before I came upon any living being.

John Kerry has advocated reducing US agriculture production vis a vis climate concerns.

The eu has attempted to reduce Dutch farming as well. Although, Dutch farmers recently won a big election….




Politics and civil rights