Children & chatbots



Tyler Cowen:

With the introduction of GPT-4 and Claude, AI has taken another big step forward. GPT-4 is human-levelor better at many hard tasks, a huge improvement over GPT-3.5, which was released only a few months ago. Yet amid the debate over these advances, there has been very little discussion of one of the most profound effects of AI large language models: how they will reshape childhood.

In the future, every middle-class kid will grow up with a personalized AI assistant — so long as the parents are OK with that.

As for the children, most of them will be willing if not downright eager. When I was 4 years old, I had an imaginary friend who lived under the refrigerator, called (ironically) Bing Bing. I would talk to him and report his opinions to my parents and sister.

In the near future, such friends will be quite real, albeit automated, and they will talk back to our children as directly as we wish. Having an AI service for your child will be as normal as having a pet, except the AI service will never bite. It will be carried around in something like a tablet, though with a design that is oriented toward the AI.




A toolkit tells teachers how to push radical ideology on children despite Gov. Youngkin’s ban.



Wall Street Journal:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin won election in 2021 in no small part on education policy, including a promise to ban critical race theory in schools. His first executive order instructed the Superintendent of Public Instruction to review curricula and end the use of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.”

The Black Lives Matter at School organization promotes an annual “week of action,” which took place Feb. 6-10 this year. The VEA encouraged its members to participate and offered an instruction manual “to be used as a resource guide for advancing racial justice in Virginia’s schools,” as Taisha Steele, director of the Human and Civil Rights division at the VEA, wrote in a memo with the materials.

By “advancing racial justice,” she means following the highly politicized agenda of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The materials show this isn’t an attempt to teach black history as part of American history, or to fill in the gaps in black history that no doubt have existed in instruction in the past.




Civics: Taxpayer Supported censorship – “asking questions”






Civics: legacy newspaper circulation data



Don Surber:

Nice try, but Gannett eliminated no jobs. Its former readers did. While Benton blamed the company, he also had to admit that Sunday circulation fell 77% at Gannett’s 9 biggest newspapers between 2018 and 2022. Fewer readers, fewer reporters.

He pointed out the Lafayette Advertiser in Louisiana — his hometown paper — saw an 85% collapse in circulation over the past 7 years. 

2015: 26,885

2016: 23,773

2017: 20,177

2018: 14,670

2019: 10,389

2020: 8,592

2021: 6,528

2022: 3,996

The Internet won’t save the paper. Its online presence is pathetic — and it too dropped from 1,421 online subscribers in 2015 to just 468 online subscribers in 2022. 

Benton blamed Gannett.




Los Angeles Teacher Strike Looms



Kayla Jimenez:

More than 60,000 bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria employees, campus security, teaching assistants and educators from the Los Angeles Unified School District say they’ll strike from March 21 to 23, a move likely to shut down hundreds of schools. 

The labor union representing the support staff announced the dates during a lively rally Wednesday afternoon at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles. 

Represented by labor union SEIU Local 99, about 30,000 school support staff are demanding LAUSD provide a 30% raise and $2 per hour equity wage increase. About 35,000 teachers represented by the United Teachers of Los Angeles plan to join them. The school district has offered, in part, more than a 15% raise, retention bonuses and to bring its minimum wage up to $20.

In a letter to families on Monday evening, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told parents the district is trying to work with the union to come to an agreement before kids are severely impacted by the closures. And he and district negotiators are prepared to work around the clock to come to negotiations before the strike, he told news reporters on Wednesday morning.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: What $100,000 Is Actually Worth in the Largest U.S. Cities – 2023 Study



Smart Asset:

Key Findings

$100K goes furthest in Memphis. The city may be known as the “Home of the Blues,” but Memphis’ low cost of living surely won’t make you sing them. A $100,000 salary is worth more here ($86,444) than in any other city in our study after subtracting taxes and adjusting for the cost of living.

Texas cities dominate the top 10. Thanks to no state income tax and the low cost of living, the Lone Star State looms large in our study. Seven out of the 10 cities in our top 10 are located in Texas. After deducting taxes and adjusting for the cost of living, a $100,000 salary on average is worth $77,885 across the 10 Texas cities that we analyzed in our study.

Oklahoma City has the lowest cost of living. A $100,000 goes a long way in the Sooner State’s largest city, considering that the cost of living is only 83.2% of the national average – the lowest out of all 76 cities in our study. A $100,000 salary is worth $84,498 in Oklahoma City after adjusting for the cost of living.

In New York City, $100K amounts to just $35,791 when you consider taxes and the cost of living. Taxes and cost of living take a big bite out of a $100,000 income in the Big Apple, which ranked last in our analysis. After adjusting for those factors, $100,000 is worth just $35,791.




Digital Rights



Digital rights charter:

  1. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the digital realm.
  2. Everyone has the right to own, and hold in their own direct and exclusive possession and control, digital objects, without unreasonable burdens. The government shall not have the right to store or access passwords or private keys without due process of law. All other legal or natural persons shall not have the right to store or access passwords or private keys without explicit permission.
  3. Everyone has the right to be free to transact digital objects, without unreasonable burdens.
  4. Everyone has the right to use decentralized applications, without unreasonable burdens.
  5. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures of their digital objects and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. This right extends to digital objects and information a person provides to a third party, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The government may not search or seize such digital objects or information without complying with the requirements of the foregoing sentence.
  6. Everyone has the right to participate in the creation and maintenance of digital public commons, such as open-source software and public blockchains and distributed ledgers. No one shall be held responsible for the actions of others in a digital public commons that is not under that person’s control.
  7. Everyone has the right to privacy in their digital life. The right to privacy also includes the right of everyone to use encryption that is free from back doors or other intentional weaknesses or circumventions in the encryption that are accessible by the government or private companies or individuals. Interpretations of this right should be read broadly and to favor an individual’s right to privacy



“But in the 1970s, the department turned away from educational practice”



Christopher Rufo

The process of shutting down the education department at University of Chicago was more orderly. The department’s pedigree was impressive: it was founded by reformer John Dewey and had been home to prominent scholars such as Bruno Bettelheim and William S. Gray, creator of the “Dick and Jane” reading series. But in the 1970s, the department turned away from educational practice and focused more on left-wing educational theory. Over time, the quality of academic work declined, and external funding began to dwindle. Finally, in 1996, after a formal review, the dean of the social science division, Richard Saller, recommended that the university close down the department, citing “uneven” research and “low expectations.” It was officially shuttered soon afterward.

These examples establish an important precedent: it is not a violation of “academic freedom” to close down ideologically captured or poor-performing academic departments; it is, to the contrary, part of the normal course of business. Legislators in states such as Florida and Texas, which will both be considering higher education reform this year, should propose the abolition of academic departments that have abandoned their missions in pursuit of shoddy scholarship and ideological activism.

It is time for the “victim’s revolution” to be met with a meaningful counter-revolution. Legislators have an opportunity to abolish academic programs, such as critical race theory, ethnic studies, queer theory, gender studies, and intersectionality, that do not contribute to the production of scholarly knowledge but serve as taxpayer-funded sinecures for activists who despise the values of the public whom they are supposed to serve.

Enough is enough. It is time for principled action, not fatalism and defeat. Conservatives have an opportunity to move beyond critique and enact meaningful reforms that will restore the pursuit of truth as the telos of America’s public universities.




Commentary on Diversity Statements



Francie Diep:

As Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, was taking fresh aim at diversity initiatives in higher education, the state’s college presidents put out an unusual statement.

Some diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives “have come to mean and accomplish the very opposite and seek to push ideologies such as critical race theory and its related tenets,” said the statement, which was dated January 18 and stamped with the logos of the 28 state and community colleges that belong to the Florida College System. (These don’t include the four-year public universities, which are part of the separate State University System of Florida.)




Tabloid-style education news is all the rage



Alexander Russo:

All three of these challenges include large investments of money, energetic state and local policy activity, and — most important — a large number of kids affected.

All three are happening now, in the present.

And yet, you’ll see relatively little about these core challenges and changes looking at the education pages of some of our biggest national news outlets.

Instead of covering core education issues, the Times and Post are focused on stories about culture wars and violence.

Intentionally or not, tabloid-style coverage has become a mainstay.




Jaded with education, more Americans are skipping college



Collin Hinkley:

Hart is among hundreds of thousands of young people who came of age during the pandemic but didn’t go to college. Many have turned to hourly jobs or careers that don’t require a degree, while others have been deterred by high tuition and the prospect of student debt.

What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists say the impact could be dire.

At worst, it could signal a new generation with little faith in the value of a college degree. At minimum, it appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good. Predictions that they would enroll after a year or two haven’t borne out.




K-12 Parent climate commentary



Tom Knighton;

I’ve experienced education from a variety of angles. I went to both public and private schools. I’ve known people who went to parochial schools and talked with them about their experience and I’m now homeschooling my daughter.

So I’ve got some perspective on the idea of public education.

As I noted last week, I’m a proponent of school choice.

Yet let’s also be honest, the current paradigm in public education has a limited shelf life. 

Why? 

Because there are teachers like this:




Madison mayor election and the taxpayer supported k-12 schools



Scott Girard:

The debate also featured discussions about how high-density developments affect Madison Metropolitan School District’s student population and whether it is time to bring police back into schools.

Reyes said there is concern among some residents that large housing developments taking place all over the city are pricing some families out of areas and diminishing school enrollments. She said that as mayor she wants the school district to be represented on Madison’s Plan Commission so that schools have a voice in development proposals.

Rhodes-Conway pointed out that there already is a slot reserved for the MMSD superintendent on the Plan Commission but that no one from that office has ever decided to serve in the position.

“We have asked repeatedly to have the school district appoint someone to the Plan Commission,” Rhodes-Conway said. “They have declined so far, which I think is really disappointing. In the meantime, we need to listen to what the district has told us, which is that we need more housing.”

Reyes, who was Madison School Board president during much of the pandemic, said she did not see collaboration between the school district and the mayor’s office during her tenure.

“This is the first time I’ve heard that there was a relationship between the school district and the mayor’s office,” Reyes said about Rhodes-Conway meeting with the superintendent. “During the pandemic we were on our own and did not have the support of the mayor.”

“It’s possible the superintendent didn’t keep my opponent informed of his calendar, but we met every week during the pandemic about how we could keep schools safe, keep kids fed and do virtual learning for kids who could not learn at home,” Rhodes-Conway replied.

On the topic of school safety, Rhodes-Conway pointed to the city’s Community Alternative Responsive Emerging Services, or CARES – a unit dedicated to deescalating tensions during a mental health crisis – as a program that could help school safety. CARES started in September 2021 during Rhodes-Conway’s first term as mayor.

Reyes said she believes it is time to consider whether to return school resource officers to school beats. Reyes, a former law enforcement officer, voted against removing police from schools prior to the pandemic during her tenure on the School Board, but then reversed course in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and voted to remove the resources officers from Madison schools.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Universities Need to Do More to Protect Free Speech. Here’s How We’re Succeeding



Adam Weinberg:

Free speech on college campus has emerged as a new front in the culture wars. But despite what you may have heard, most university students and faculty are supportive of free speech and the robust exchange of ideas on university campuses. According to recent research by the Knight Foundation, 84 percent of students view free speech rights as critical to our democracy.

Still, college campuses are increasingly challenging places to have challenging conversations. The same study found that the percentage of students who believe that free speech rights are secure has dropped from 59 percent to 47 percent since 2019—fully 12 points. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who felt their campus climate prevents students from expressing their opinions has increased, from 54 percent to 65 percent, since 2016.

Universities need to do more to protect free inquiry and expression, which will only flourish on campuses ​that ​​ ​are clear ​about ​their purpose, driven by cultures of curiosity and intellectual humility, hold the line when controversies arise, and focus on creating communities where everybody feels a sense of connection.

How do we do this kind of work? Universities can start by laying out clearly and loudly our purpose and articulating why free inquiry and expression of ideas are crucial to our work. This should be simple: Colleges and universities exist to produce knowledge and educate students. Neither of these is possible if faculty feel a need to censor themselves and students don’t have the opportunity to voice their views, hear the views of others and engage across intellectual differences.




Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms



Arvind Narayanan

I think a broader understanding of recommendation algorithms is sorely needed. Policymakers and legal scholars must understand these algorithms so that they can sharpen their thinking on platform governance; journalists must understand them so that they can explain them to readers and better hold platforms accountable; technologists must understand them so that the platforms of tomorrow may be better than the ones we have; researchers must understand them so that they can get at the intricate interplay between algorithms and human behavior. Content creators would also benefit from understanding them so that they can better navigate the new landscape of algorithmic distribution. More generally, anyone concerned about the impact of algorithmic platforms on themselves or on society may find this essay of interest.

I hope to show you that social media algorithms are simple to understand. In addition to the mathematical principles of information cascades (which are independent of any platform), it’s also straightforward to understand what recommendation algorithms are trained to do, and what inputs they use. Of course, companies’ lack of transparency about some of the details is a big problem, but that’s a separate issue from the details being hard to understand—they aren’t. In this regard, recommendation algorithms are like any other technology, say a car or a smartphone. Many details of those products are proprietary, but we can and do understand how cars and smartphones work. Once we understand the basics of recommendation algorithms, we can also gain clarity on which details matter for transparency.

In composing this essay, I’ve r




Conservatives on campus



Henry Farrel:

However, as the book’s publication date suggests, this shift began to take hold years before the Great Awokening. And Binder and Wood provided persuasive evidence that the shift had far less to do with what was happening on college campuses than changes in the broader conservative movement. There was money – and lots of it – for organizations that were willing to take the culture war to America’s universities, creating an entire political economy.

The later consequences are described in The Channels of Student Activism, a more recent academic book, published by Binder and Jeff Kidder last year. While Binder and Kidder are sympathetic to Haidt’s broad program of reform, they push back with evidence against his causal argument. People like George Lukianoff and Haidt “point fingers at the supposed shortcomings of Generation Z,” blaming the purported psychological frailty of an entire generation. Binder and Kidder find that the evidence points towards organizations as the key factors of change. Students “are channeled not coddled,” provided with incentives, identities and even entire career paths by political organizations.

Binder and Kidder identify very different organizational political economies for conservative and liberal/left students. Right leaning students are “encouraged by organizations external to their schools to adopt a discourse hostile to the academic enterprise,” “targeting a liberal campus culture, which plays into a larger Republican game plan.”

As they describe it (on the basis of interviews with students and figures within the relevant organizations):




On the decline in public health trust



Gillian K. SteelFisher, Mary G. Findling, Hannah L. Caporello, Keri M. Lubell,

Public health agencies’ ability to protect health in the wake of COVID-19 largely depends on public trust. In February 2022 we conducted a first-of-its-kind nationally representative survey of 4,208 US adults to learn the public’s reported reasons for trust in federal, state, and local public health agencies. Among respondents who expressed a “great deal” of trust, that trust was not related primarily to agencies’ ability to control the spread of COVID-19 but, rather, to beliefs that those agencies made clear, science-based recommendations and provided protective resources. Scientific expertise was a more commonly reported reason for “a great deal” of trust at the federal level, whereas perceptions of hard work, compassionate policy, and direct services were emphasized more at the state and local levels. Although trust in public health agencies was not especially high, few respondents indicated that they had no trust. Lower trust was related primarily to respondents’ beliefs that health recommendations were politically influenced and inconsistent. The least trusting respondents also endorsed concerns about private-sector influence and excessive restrictions and had low trust in government overall. Our findings suggest the need to support a robust federal, state, and local public health communications infrastructure; ensure agencies’ authority to make science-based recommendations; and develop strategies for engaging different segments of the public.




Why write?



FS blog

Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.

Writing about something teaches you about what you know, what you don’t know, and how to think. Writing about something is one of the best ways to learn about it. Writing is not just a vehicle to share ideas with others but also a way to understand them better yourself. 

Paul Graham put it this way: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”

There is another important element to writing that often gets overlooked. Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both thinking and understanding, which is one reason writing is so important.




Civics: How Graphic Artists Facilitate Deliberative Democracy



Democracy next

France’s ongoing Citizens’ Assembly on end-of-life issues is proving that reading isn’t always the best way to soak up knowledge or solve problems. 

As an observer, I’ve watched as a graphic artists have come to play a critical role in the assembly, where 185 French citizen-members are sorting through complex questions relating palliative care, assisted suicide, euthanasia and related issues. 

When taking an important decision – absorbing unfamiliar information, questioning one’s conscience, prioritising options and finding consensus with others – illustrations are proving an excellent assist to the extensive reading materials. It turns out they help with thinking, talking and assembling a final report as well. Perhaps it should come as no surprise: the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.

The role of the three artists who accompany each assembly session at first seemed mostly decorative, like the cartoonists who enliven conferences and speeches with real time caricatures of what’s going on.




New Thinking on Peer Review at NIH



Stuart Buck:

That said, there are some lingering issues with grant peer review that aren’t new at all. 

In 1975, the NIH launched a major “Grants Peer Review Study Team” that produced a number of reports and recommendations (much thanks to Bhaven Sampat at Columbia for sending me the documents in question!). 

A 1978 report from that team tried to address many of the comments raised by the scientific community about NIH’s grant peer review. Despite the passage of some 45 years, the issues might feel . . . very familiar:

First, some commenters felt that peer review was stacking the deck against outsiders:




The Democrats’ Disastrous Miscalculation on Civil Liberties



Matt Taibbi:

Civil liberties have officially gone out of style, a phenomenon on full display at the Weaponization of Government Hearing at which I just testified. 

The circus-like scene featured a ranking member calling two journalists a “direct threat,” a Stanford-educated former prosecutor who confused accusation with proof, and a Texas congressman, Colin Allred, who proudly held up the results of an adjudicated criminal case to argue against due process in another arena. When I asked Allred’s permission to point out that he’d just demonstrated that a proper forum for dealing with campaign abuses already existed in the court system, he basically told me to shut up. 

“No,” he said, “you don’t get to ask questions here.”

I then had to keep my mouth shut as an elected official shifted to Dad mode to admonish me to “take off the tinfoil hat,” because “there’s not a “vast conspiracy,” by which he meant he apparently meant my last three months of research.




Notes on the state of “education reform”



Matthew Yglesias

I keep trying to write an article about the strange death of the education reform movement and the extent to which many of the contemporary woke wars emerged from these once-intense, now-forgotten battlegrounds. Every time I sit down to write it, though, the column spirals out of control. But this is my newsletter and I can do what I want, so instead it’s going to be a series of posts that come out on no particular schedule. Some of them will probably be a little unsatisfying and anti-climactic, but I appreciate you all bearing with me on this journey because I think it’s important. 

What finally got me to actually start this series is the Chicago mayor’s race, where the incumbent Lori Lightfoot failed to make the runoff. 

To grossly oversimplify a situation that has lots of local nuance: with Lightfoot out, the final round will feature Paul Vallas, the candidate of the police union running on a law-and-order platform, against Brandon Johnson, the candidate carrying the progressive torch. This is Chicago of course, so all the main candidates, including Vallas, are left-of-center in a national political context, and the vanquished Lightfoot is genuinely very progressive. Johnson, though, is the preferred candidate of the Chicago Teachers Union.1

But I think what’s interesting about it from a national perspective is the extent to which Vallas’ profile is centered around the crime issue.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Health department logs reveal a sad time of neighbors tattling on neighbors for Covid violations



David Zweig:

This is a summary of one of the many complaints—some of which were bizarrely detailed like this—that were submitted to the Santa Clara County, California, complaint department, where citizens were encouraged to rat our their fellow county residents for violating health orders. I gained access to a government spreadsheet of some of the complaints [which I’ve included at the bottom of this post] while reviewing legal documents for my article about the lawsuit of Santa Clara vs Calvary Chapel for Covid violations. 

Reading the complaints gives a window into the psyche of our fellow Americans during the pandemic, and introduces serious questions about the healthy functioning of a society that encourages neighbors to snitch on neighbors for minor offenses.

In late November, a household was tattled on for regularly holding social gatherings, and doing so without people wearing face coverings or social distancing. At one of the gatherings kids from different families were running around together. To make matters worse, the complainant said that “contractors working at the premises do not wear face coverings” . . .and they were “chatting and laughing.”

The following day, a complaint came in about a neighbor who has a “swing band” that gets together every Saturday to practice. They don’t wear masks or distance, and they were “playing loud wind instruments.”

What’s so amusing, and perhaps unsettling about many of the complaints is their odd degree of specificity. A swing band? Really?




Privatizing our digital identities



Ciprian Dorin Craciun

Imagine a parallel universe in which the society has developed so that, just like in our society, every time a person needs to interact with some business or governmental institution, one needs to present some form of document that, within a reasonable limit of certainty, attests that one is who one says to be. Also, to simplify the exercise, imagine that there is exactly one form of such identification document, the ID-card.

What happens if one doesn’t have such an ID-card? One basically doesn’t exist, or at least practically can’t get anything done. Lose it, and one needs to get another ID-card, which is identical to the previous one, obviously after jumping through some hoops in a sacred bureaucratic ritual. If one, for some reason, doesn’t manage to get an identical ID-card to the previous one, but instead gets even a slightly different one, for all practical purposes it’s just like one is now a completely different person that was born just yesterday. (Remember, this is a strange far away parallel universe.)




Lottery admissions



Joanne Jacobs:

An influx of unprepared students, admitted by a new lottery system, is destroying Philadelphia’s top-ranked school, charges a report by parents at Masterman, a middle and high school.

The selective school is being “systematically dismantled,” charges the Masterman Home and School Association. “The long history of rigor and enriched curriculum is fading. The identity of the school and its purpose and mission are in disarray, leaving a fractured community.”

The new admissions system gives preferences to students from previously underrepresented zip codes, writes Kristen A. Graham in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Students coming from Masterman’s very challenging middle school no longer are guaranteed admission to the high school.

Masterman lacks the staff and resources to support students entering at the “basic” and “below basic” level, the report states.




Teacher Cost of Living



Edwin Rios:

Ongoing negotiations between teachers unions and school districts in recent years in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere have increasingly centered around compelling districts to address housing affordability challenges their employees face beyond raising salaries and bolstering benefits.

In California, teachers on a weekly basis make nearly 18% less than comparable college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Gray says that disparity puts an “additional tax” on teachers of color who come into the profession saddled with more debt. She blames the lack of diversity among teachers on meager wages and benefits that are worsened by the housing affordability and childcare challenges.




Litmus Tests for Nuclear Scientists



John Sailer:

Ohio State University’s (OSU) College of Engineering heavily emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). For faculty, contributing to DEI is now simply a part of the job—in 2020, the college added questions about DEI to its annual reviews. That move is no surprise, as the college already asked for diversity statements from many of its prospective faculty, a practice which, of course, continues to this day. Applicants for a currently-open job in nuclear engineering, for example, must submit “a written statement that describes [their] commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The OSU College of Engineering makes its approach to evaluating diversity statements abundantly clear, listing a rubric for assessing the statements on its website. The rubric illustrates, once again, the basic problem with diversity statements—namely, that they invite ideological screening.

We link the rubric below, but certain features are worth highlighting. Here are a few items that can earn a low score, according to the rubric:




Madison College alum to bring business education to African students through new partnership



Kimberly Wethal

“In Africa, for example, our people were using WhatsApp to study — that’s not the way to study, WhatsApp is a platform for communication,” Kabre said. “We can do better, and in fact, we can do even something much bigger that can really cover more areas, and also partner with institutions to have good content.”

For MATC, also known as Madison College, its partnership with Kabre fits neatly into one of its established initiatives. As part of its Africa Initiative, MATC sees the continent as an area of growth, both in terms of curriculum and international student enrollment. About 70% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 30, but there’s a skilled labor gap — less than 10% of traditionally college-age people there are enrolled in a post-secondary program and there are not enough universities to meet demand.

MATC signed partnerships with Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute of Business Studies and the University of Gambia last fall and is collaborating with UW-Madison to craft an African Studies certificate that could launch as early as this fall.

“The discussion we’ve had over the past few months (is) how can we assist those countries here in Africa to see some of the educational programs that we have?” MATC President Jack Daniels said. “It also fits within our mission of providing training, and we’ve done a great job here in the state of Wisconsin in terms of providing the types of skill-based training folks need for jobs.”




The latest spelling bee news



Daniela Jaime:

After several close calls and unconventional rounds, Madison’s top speller for two years running emerged as the winner of Saturday’s Badger State Spelling Bee.

The awards presentation at the All-City Spelling Bee on Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023.

The spelling bee at Madison Youth Arts Center went for four hours and more than 20 rounds before 12-year-old Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya, a student at Blessed Sacrament School, claimed the top spot after he spelled all 10 words correctly in a written test to determine the champion.

Runner-up Finn Siegl-Gesin, a seventh-grader at Platteville Middle School, spelled six of the words correctly.

Wijeyakulasuriya will be representing the Badger State at the National Spelling Bee near Washington, D.C., starting May 30.




K-12 tax & spending climate: Madison Projections show that “annual deficits could reach between $20 million and $30 million.”



Dean Mosiman:

Reyes, who said she’d seek five recommendations from Finance Department staff to address coming shortfalls, sees a different landscape. “I feel right now we are on the Titanic and we’re about to hit the iceberg,” she said. “We need a strong leader who’s going to be able to make some tough decisions.”

How’d we get here?

The candidates in the April 4 election disagree on why the city faces future budget deficits.

Reyes contends Rhodes-Conway has “mismanaged” city finances largely though the use of borrowing and one-time funds for operations. Asked for specifics, Reyes said the mayor is using federal funds to build the coming bus rapid transit (BRT) system but will not have the money to operate it.

“I think significantly what’s going to put us in this budget deficit is the bus rapid transit system,” she said.

Rhodes-Conway said Reyes doesn’t seem to have a grasp of how BRT and a coming Metro Transit redesign will work, contending that BRT — the backbone of the bus system — is replacing current service on main east-to-west and north-to-south routes and won’t add operating costs.

Madison taxpayers have long supported substantially higher per student spending than most K-12 school districts.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Jurist silenced by elite Stanford Law mob explains why it matters for democracy



Rod Dreher:

It was a revolt of the elites, a pogrom against free speech and civil discourse carried out by some of the nation’s most privileged. It was a scene from Dostoevsky’s political novel Demons played out in one of America’s most exclusive training schools for its legal ruling class. And it is a stark warning about the potentially totalitarian future of the US.

You will have heard by now about the shocking incident last week at Stanford Law School, one of the country’s top three, in which Kyle Duncan, an appellate judge on the federal Fifth Circuit, was shouted down and verbally abused by woke students who did not want to let him give a talk to students of the Federalist Society, which had invited him. 

The law school’s diversity dean, Tirien Steinbach, turned up to read a long prepared statement in which she lectured the conservative judge for his wickedness, and for causing “pain” and “harm” to Stanford students through his jurisprudence and presence on campus. You can watch the entire debacle below — and you should, because you have to see it and hear it to grasp the grotesque and repulsive nature of what happened at one of America’s most elite law schools.




Stanford President and Stanford Law School Dean Apologize to Judge Kyle Duncan



Eugene Volokh:

From today’s letter (posted by Ed Whelan [National Review Online]):

Dear Judge Duncan,

We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School. As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.




Merit vs lottery admissions



Sara Randazzo

Phil­adelphia schools Su­per­in­ten­dent Tony B. Watling­ton Sr. said he knows the process isn’t per­fect but calls the lot­tery an ap­pro­pri­ate step to­ward eq­ui­table ac­cess. The dis­trict is hir­ing out­side con­sul­tants and lis­ten­ing to com­mu­nity feed­back to see if the sys­tem needs to be ad­justed, he said.

“I want to ad­dress the is­sues in a way that we all get bet­ter,” Dr. Watling­ton said. “It doesn’t have to be an in­her­ent us-ver­sus-them sce­nario.”

Schools that set aca­d­e­mic qual­i­fi­ca­tions for en­roll­ment are rare in the na­tion’s pub­lic school sys­tems. Chester E. Finn Jr., a se­nior fel­low at the Thomas B. Ford­ham In­sti­tute, found 165 se­lec­tive-ad­mis­sions high schools na­tion­wide, many on the East Coast.




Virginia AG orders Fairfax school to stop racial discrimination against Asian, white students in college prep



Yaron Steinbuch

The woke district’s letter didn’t cite Asian or white students as being qualified for the program.

“It has come to the attention of this Office that Cooper Middle School is engaging in conduct in contravention of the Virginia Human Rights Act … and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution,” Johnson wrote.

“It appears that Cooper Middle School is soliciting and selecting applicants to the College Partnership Program based on race, color, and national origin,” she continued.




Stolen Youth



Glenn Reynolds:

Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel are the authors of a new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.  Writers, thinkers, and mothers, the pair look at what’s being done to children today by schools, Hollywood, government, and the medical profession.  Because Helen is interested in this stuff too – she stole the review copy when it arrived and I had to work hard to get it back – she’s contributed some questions to this interview, too.

Make a Donation

Glenn:  You had rather a rough childhood both before and after immigrating. Can you tell us a little about it? Does that have something to do with your concern for how today’s kids are treated?

Karol: It’s funny because while it was rough, in so many ways, I always felt like being a child was an important time and that childhood was something the people around me were trying to protect for me. What I saw during the pandemic was a reverse of that. Children were put last, again and again, especially in New York City where we were living. I knew I could save my own kids but because I had grown up poor, in a bad neighborhood, I knew there were so many people who couldn’t just easily form a pod for their kid or get them a tutor or move to their beach house to have space and sanity. I couldn’t forget about those people and I could not forget about their children. 

Helen: I was stunned when I read about the hardships you dealt with as a child.  You had to endure a lot of childhood trauma with a sick mom and an absent Dad yet you proved yourself resilient. Why are so many young people unable to cope with life these days?

Bethany: My mother was a social worker and prided herself on raising me tough. There was no wallowing, there was only moving forward. I was praised for working hard and she deeply resented the participation trophies they handed out to us as kids. In the last chapter, I talked about the therapist that “tough loved” me into not just self-identifying as an orphan and a victim. Now, kids are praised for their victimhood status; they’re encouraged to marinate in the bad parts of life.




Declining US IQ?



Shelby Kearns:

A recent study suggests that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, Americans’ average intelligence quotient (IQ) is declining. 

The professors who authored the study theorize that the quality of education could play a role in reversing the IQ gains enjoyed by previous generations.

The study, published in a spring 2023 edition of Intelligence, measures IQ test results among 18- to 60-year-olds to examine the phenomenon first observed by philosopher James Flynn. 

Professors from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and the University of Oregon in Eugene explain the Flynn effect: starting in 1932, average IQ scores increased roughly three to five points per decade. In other words, “younger generations are expected to have higher IQ scores than the previous cohort.”

Data from the sample of U.S. adults, however, imply that there is a reverse Flynn effect. From 2006 to 2018, the age groups measured generally saw declines in the IQ test used by the study, the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR).

Overall declines held true across age groups after controlling for educational attainment and gender, but the study shows that the loss in cognitive abilities is steeper for younger participants. “[T]he greatest differences in annual scores were observed for 18- to 22-year-olds,” the authors write.




Higher Education Governance






“If enough of these kids get into the legal profession,” he said, “the rule of law will descend into barbarism.”



Aaron Sibarium:

The protest is perhaps the most extreme example yet of law students shouting down conservative speakers. A similar incident occurred at Yale Law School last year when Kristen Waggoner, a prominent Supreme Court litigator, was drowned out by hundreds of students protesting her views on transgender issues. Also last year, students at the University of California-Hastings disrupted a talk with the libertarian law professor Ilya Shapiro, shrieking and jeering each time he opened his mouth.

The tactics used against Duncan were nearly identical. Nearly everyone in the room showed up to disrupt the proceeding, according to Duncan and two members of the Federalist Society, and many of the hundred or so students on hand were holding profane signs, including one that declared: “Duncan can’t find the clit.”

Each time Duncan began to speak, the protesters would heckle him with insults, shouting things like “scumbag!” and “you’re a liar!”

The din became so loud that Duncan asked for an administrator to keep order, according to video of the event. That’s when Steinbach, the associate diversity dean, delivered her remarks. While she reminded students of the law school’s free speech policies, which prohibit the disruption of speakers, she proceeded to stand by while students continued to  heckle Duncan, videos from the event show.

She also expressed sympathy for students who wanted to “reconsider” those free speech policies, given the “harm” Duncan’s appearance had caused.

At least three other administrators—associate dean of student affairs Jory Steele, associate director of student affairs Holly Parish, and student affairs coordinator Megan Brown—were present throughout the event, according to Tim Rosenberger, a member of Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter. None of them told the students to allow Duncan to speak without interruption.

Eventually, one of the leaders of the protest instructed the students to “tone down the heckling slightly so we can get to our questions,” a video obtained by the Free Beacon shows. So began a contentious question and answer session between Duncan, who never got to read his prepared remarks, and his critics, who continued to disrupt and jeer as he spoke.




DIE Speech Suppression at Stanford



Audio.

David Lat:

What did Judge Duncan have to say for himself in general? In a phone interview this afternoon, he made several points to me:

  • “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because I had to endure a bunch of people jeering at me. I did think it was outrageous and unacceptable, but nobody should feel sorry for me. I’m still going to be a judge, and I’m still going to decide my cases.”

  • “I do feel bad—and outraged—for the Stanford FedSoc students. They are awesome people who just want to invite interesting judges to come talk to them. They’re a small group, obviously way outnumbered. They are the ones who lack power and status at Stanford Law. It’s ridiculous that they can’t get treated with civility, and it’s grotesquely unfair.”

  • “I get where my critics are coming from, and I understand why they don’t like me. They claim that I am marginalizing them and not recognizing their existence. But this is hypocritical of them, since that’s exactly what they are doing to their classmates in FedSoc.”

  • “I get the protesters, they are socialized into thinking the right approach to a federal judge you don’t agree with is to call him a f**ker and make jokes about his sex life. Awesome. I don’t care what they think about my sex life. But it took a surreal turn when the associate dean of DEI got up to speak…. She opens up her portfolio and lo and behold, there is a printed speech. It was a set up—and the fact that the administration was in on it to a certain degree makes me mad.”

  • “I later heard that the associate dean of DEI was claiming two things. First, she claimed that I didn’t have a prepared speech and was just there to stir up trouble. It was a long flight out to Stanford, I’m not a professional rabble-rouser like Milo Yiannopoulos, and I’m not trying to sell a book. I actually had a speech, it was on my iPad, and I was going to be talking about controversial cases handled by the Fifth Circuit that present difficult issues because the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on them is in flux.”

  • “Second, she claimed that the fact that two U.S. marshals showed up at the event was a sign that I’m a rabble-rouser and disruption always happens when I speak. But I didn’t bring or invite these marshals; these marshals from the Northern District of California just showed up after getting a tip-off. I have never been protested like that at any other law school, I have known of other conservative judges who have spoken at Stanford without any problems, and I spoke there in 2019 without any problems. So I was lulled into a false sense of security.”

  • “You don’t invite someone to your campus to scream and hurl invective at them. Did I speak sharply to some of the students? I did. Do I feel sorry about it? I don’t.”




Civics: the politics of independence and self reliance



James Pogue:

“When people who would abort a baby the day it’s born, threw kids under the bus during the pandemic, take kids to drag shows, and saddle our children with crippling debt,” Mr. Massie tweeted in October, “tell you how to live because they’re concerned about sea levels in 100 years, hide your children.”

It’s a debate that cuts to the heart of American politics. Mr. Massie’s version of being the “greenest member of Congress” is an explicit throwback to a Jeffersonian vision — of America as a country of people who live and work close to the land, with minimal government interference and a maximum of personal responsibility for the future of the nation. It is also a vision of rugged self-reliance that has long informed back-to-the-landers on the left, but that many on that side of politics now regard as the most insidious of American political poisons, one that has made collective action on issues like climate change impossible to achieve in this country.

“If Thomas Jefferson could have had solar panels at Monticello, he’d have had solar panels,” Mr. Massie told the libertarian economist and podcaster Matt Kibbe in 2019. “The less you have to go to the store and buy, the less dependent you are on Walmart — it’s not just that you’re greener, but you’re more independent.”




Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest



Jon Haidt:

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causesdepression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.




Civics: How Press Bias Fed FISA Abuse in the Trump-Russia Panic



Stewart Baker:


It looks like we’re in the morning-after stage of media coverage of former President Trump and his Russia connections. Most recently, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published a harsh analysis of the press’s role in stoking the Trump-Russia panic. The author, Jeff Gerth, is a respected former journalist, and the CJR is more or less the official organ of mainstream media, but the piece is an unsparing chronicle of how the media’s hostility to Trump led it to overhype the Trump-Russia connection. 

Gerth concludes that entering into an “undeclared war” with Trump has saddled the U.S. press with a lasting credibility problem. What’s been unnoticed until now is how the press’s unremitting hostility to Trump also hurt the credibility of the FBI and its intelligence operations. 

The Trump-Russia media saga began with a bit of journalistic malpractice. As the GOP convention was preparing to nominate Trump, Gerth tells us, the Washington Post ran one of the early attacks on Trump for kowtowing to Russian interests: a July 18 opinion column from Josh Rogin headlined, “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” It was wrong. In Gerth’s understated words:




Civics: Anatomy of Misinformation






Education fads will make learning decline worse



Joanne Jacobs

“As bad as the pandemic was for student learning,” some education fads will make it worse, writes Greg Richmond, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Across the country, schools are moving away from homework, grades, attendance and academic honors, he writes. “Numerous public school districts now prohibit teachers from giving students a score of less than 50% on homework,” even if the student does nothing or turns in plagiarized work. 

Parents who want a traditional education — grades and all — can turn to Catholic schools, Richmond writes. “As measured in last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, Catholic schools’ eighth-grade reading scores increased during the pandemic, while public school scores declined,” he writes. 

“If Catholic schools were a state, they would be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests,” Kathleen Porter-Magee, superintendent of Partnership Schools, a network of Catholic schools in New York and Ohio, tweeted in October.

Many parents want a safe, orderly school that respects their role in raising their children.




Here’s the Ugly Truth About Why Middle Class Kids Aren’t Getting Into Harvard



Revolver:

Reading the comments leads to an army of angry replies claiming the story is phony. Admittedly, it’s an unnamed person sharing an account from an unnamed source, so of course it’s unproven. But anybody who finds Keenan’s story to be unlikely, or a surprise, is not paying attention to the reality at American colleges today. 

Critics of Keenan’s post pointed out that, thanks to 1996’s Proposition 209 (which survived a repeal push in 2020), California’s public universities are not allowed to use race as a factor in admissions. The response of those with a brain is simple: If you think the UC system is strictly following that law, you’re an idiot.




“Government adds approximately $88,500 to the average cost of each new-built home in the Midwest”



WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a new policy report,Priced Out of House and Home: How Laws and Regulation Add to Housing Prices in Wisconsin. The report examines the ways in which government regulation has contributed to the rising cost of home prices in Wisconsin. The report makes recommendations for both state and local policy makers to remove barriers to the development of more affordable market-rate housing. 

The Quote: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, said, “Arbitrary government regulations that restrict property rights and depress the supply of affordable, market-rate housing options are pricing more and more families out of their version of the American dream. Policymakers at all levels of government should work to remove unnecessary barriers that contribute to the growing costs of homes nationwide.” 

Background: Over the past few years, the rising cost of housing has been a growing concern amongst Americans, particularly those looking to purchase their first home. Fewer Americans believe that now is a good time to buy a home than those who believed this during the Great Recession. Furthermore, a record low number of Americans believe they are ever going to own a home. Historically, low levels of housing inventory suggest that the lack of supply plays a key role in the shortage of affordable market-rate housing options. In a nation where homeownership has historically been one of the primary means of wealth creation for lower- and middle-class families, the increase of people being crowded out of the housing market has the potential to obstruct upward mobility in the long-run.  

This tight supply can be attributed to a number of factors, including the inflation of construction materials and a lack of qualified labor. However, for developers that prepare land for housing and builders that build the homes, government regulations from the local, state and federal level make it more difficult and expensive to develop affordable-market rate housing.




K-12 Governance notes: reform edition



Christopher Rufo:

But now, five years later, the IDW has become a spent force. As the group was confronted with a series of real-world political decisions—the rise of Trump, the COVID crisis, and the anti-CRT movement—it fractured, splintered, and decomposed. With some notable exceptions, such as Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and Bret Weinstein, the “centrists” of the IDW could never move from the domain of criticism to the domain of action. They acted as if they could solve political problems through interminable podcast debates and failed to offer a viable theory of change. 

Consequently, the IDW was overtaken by events. Although the movement deserves credit for pointing out the problem of left-wing overreach in America’s institutions, this critique is now part of conventional wisdom and is no longer sufficient. As I explain in my new video essay, the lesson of the IDW’s disintegration is clear: opponents of left-wing orthodoxy must grapple with the reality that, in a two-party democratic system, the path to reform must go through politics. If they want results, they must be willing to get their hands dirty.




Dropping the SAT Requirement Is a Luxury Belief



Rob Henderson:

The writer claims standardized tests penalize poor kids who get good grades. He calls it a “barrier.”1
 
I rarely see discussions about the reverse situations. There are poor kids who get bad grades but find a path upward because of standardized testing.

A 2016 study found that implementing a standardized testing requirement increased the number of poor and nonwhite kids in gifted programs. In other words, an IQ test administered to all students revealed that previously overlooked students from disadvantaged backgrounds qualified as academically gifted. 

Similarly, a British study found that when relying on their own impressions, teachers tended to view a kid from a low-income background as less academically competent even when they had the same test score as a rich kid. The objectivity of scores can serve as a useful corrective to the subjective nature of teacher evaluations.




Why Elite Law and Medical Schools Can’t Stand U.S. News



Eric Gentler:

Choosing the right school is one of the most important decisions students will ever make. Besides being a significant investment of time and money, it is a critical first step to ensuring a student’s future career opportunities, earning potential, and quality of life. But absent U.S. News’s academic rankings, it’s difficult to find accurate, comprehensive information that empowers students to compare institutions and identify the factors that matter most to them. We are one of the few places that do.

Our rankings don’t capture every nuance. Academic institutions aren’t monolithic or static; comparing them across a common data set can be challenging. But we reject our critics’ paternalistic view that students are somehow incapable of discerning for themselves from this information which school is the best fit.

Moreover, the perspective of elite schools doesn’t fit with that of the broader law- and medical-school community. Our editors held meetings with 110 law deans following the outcry over our rankings. Excepting the top 14 law schools, almost 75% of the schools that submitted surveys in 2022 did so in 2023. For medical schools, the engagement level was higher.




The unresponsive taxpayer supported Madison School District






In A Country With A Lot Of Parents, Why Can’t Democrats Even Cough Up The Words ‘Parent’s Rights?’
It’s reactionary, tone deaf, and not good for young people



Andrew Rotherham:

I was recently having lunch with a friend, who was a senior hand in the Carter White House. We were noting that in those days if you had predicted there would be a TV network where much of the guest talent was former military, CIA and other spooky types, FBI, and assorted other national security players and the audience lapping it up would be mostly Democrats you’d be laughed at. You’d be ridiculed even more if you then added that when the Russians invaded a sovereign nation many Republicans and conservatives would advocate against supporting efforts to counter Russian military force.

Yet here we are. It’s hard to miss how as a feature of the partisan hardening in this country our politics are becoming predictably and sometimes comically reactionary. There are counterexamples, sure, Joe Biden on crime and policing for instance cuts against the activist grain of the Democratic Party. But in general there is a reaction – counter-reaction problem. How many people died because they wouldn’t follow “Democratic” public health advice? When Donald Trump would call for due process Twitter would light up with people who formerly were at least nominally on board with civil liberties shouting him down. (Reader, even toxic losers deserve due process, it’s basically the whole idea). The ongoing January 6th saga is a depressing, and dangerous, example. Not long ago the Twitter spectacle would have freaked out liberals.

Here in education, one place this reactionary trend shows up a lot is around “parents rights.” Like “Make America Great Again” it’s one of these slogans that it’s sort of politically suicidal to be against yet people do it anyway. (I’m not talking about “MAGA” and 1/6 and all that, but just the 2016 version with those four words and their plain meaning.) When confronted with “Make America Great Again” Democrats could have said, yes, we should do that and here’s our agenda for how. Instead, prominent voices started arguing America wasn’t really ever great, and ridiculing people who love their country. Or, worse, claiming those who believe in American greatness are racist or deplorable and openly or secretly hoping to resurrect a pre-civil rights America. Sure, those types exist, but, not surprisingly this sentiment didn’t sit well with a lot of people who don’t think like that and also love their country. It helped turn a consequential election and drive a brutal wedge in our politics and culture. It’s why “ultra” MAGA or whatever stupid nomenclature is now being road tested.




Civics: The FBI Just Admitted It Bought US Location Data



Dell Cameron:

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. While the practice of buying people’s location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government’s ability to warrantlessly track Americans’ phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases. 

The disclosure came today during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation’s intelligence chiefs. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau’s use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: “Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?” Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. 

“To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising,” Wray said. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.” He added that the bureau now relies on a “court-authorized process” to obtain location data from companies.




Georgia State Law School is putting together a conference on “Restoring trust in the CDC and FDA”



Steve Kirsch:

Georgia State Law School put together a “Restoring trust in the CDC and the FDA” conference in Atlanta. 

I think I can help with that but I was not asked to speak for some reason. I thought I have a valuable perspective to share.

I will be there with a cameraman and will try to see if I can help them with the “restoring trust” part. It will be fun.

You can attend too. It’s free. You can register for free.




DeWine’s laudable K-12 proposals on literacy instruction should not be mandatory for schools: editorial



Cleveland Plain Dealer:

In the two-year state budget he’s proposed, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is asking the General Assembly to heavily invest in reading instruction as a cornerstone of Ohio’s schooling.

In doing so, the governor is coming down on one side of a longtime debate over which teaching strategy for reading — phonics instruction, now also known as “science of reading,” or “whole-language” strategies — is optimal. DeWine has cast his vote for phonics.

Pedagogical debates aside, there’s little wonder the governor is concerned. As DeWine said in his annual State of the State address, “Tragically, today 40% of all Ohio third-grade students are not proficient in reading — 40 percent!” There’s no Ohioan who can find that circumstance acceptable, least of all parents.

That’s why DeWine is calling for a “renewed focus on literacy — and on the way we teach reading in the state of Ohio.” On that front, the governor said the “evidence is clear, the verdict is in,” about the “great value and importance of phonics.”

To be sure, not all professional educators agree with that approach, but that’s what the pending state budget, if passed as proposed by DeWine, opts for. Decisively.




S.F. bureaucrats give woman a choice: Remove free library or pay $1,400 after one anonymous complaint



Heather Knight

For more than a decade, Susan Meyers’ front sidewalk proved a cheerful hub in her Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood — until one anonymous grump called 311. In this city notorious for giving tremendous credence to solitary complainers — who have the right to halt housing projects, foil their neighbors’ housing remodels and stall emergency transit projects — that one call compelled a visit from a Public Works inspector.

And soon, Meyers’ adorable little library had a notice affixed to it with bright blue tape giving her two choices: Remove the bench and the library or pay $1,402 for a “minor encroachment permit.”




Why school choice won’t get here fast enough



Tom Knighton:

When I was in school, I went to public school bookended by stints at private school. I’ve seen a bit of everything, in that regard, including secular and religious instruction, to some degree.

So when I tell people I’m a school choice supporter, they need to understand I’ve seen both sides of it.

But there’s another reason to support school choice, and that’s the fact that progressive policies have made so many public schools into Thunderdome.

From National Review:

A 200-pound Ontario middle schooler was getting ready to pummel his classmate when a group of teachers escorted him to an office where they hoped to calm him down — instead, he proceeded to ram into the two adults, a man and a woman, for the better part of an hour, leaving them shaken and bruised. He never faced any consequences.




Civics: notes on YouTube (google) censorship



Amy:

What was the content? A somewhat geeky episode in which Benjamin and I explored the epistemological implications of an analogy between a specific aspect of the Dominion v. Fox News defamation case, and an accusation commonly leveled at COVID-19 mRNA “vaccine skeptics.” Apparently, during the course of this long-form discussion on the contextual nature of the onus of proof, Benjamin or I shared Super Dangerous Medical Misinformation. Watch it if you dare on Rumble:




Madison East High School senior wins Journalist of the Year award



Wyatt Bandt:

A Madison high school student was named Journalist of the Year by the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association.

Kadjtata Bah, a senior from Madison East High School, was given the title for her “outstanding background in journalistic work.” 

She began writing about topics she was interested in for the Simpson Street Free Press at the age of 11. Now, she’s one of the publication’s Senior Teen Editors, and she helps writers as old as seven grow their skills. Bah’s written on historical, cultural, political and community-focused topics.

She’s also been an intern for the Dane County Land and Water Resources Department, The Cap Times and Madison Magazine. She also works as a volunteer reporter for the Eastside news, is a staff writer for her school’s yearbook and is a staff member for her school’s broadcast program.




Our public education system has abandoned excellence for ideology



Scott Yenor:

Scenes from the Loudoun county, Virginia, school board meetings riveted Americans during 2021. A girl had been raped in a school bathroom by a boy dressed as a girl. For fear of running afoul of transgender ideologues, the district covered up the crime. Soon after her father was arrested for complaining bitterly at a school board meeting, the National Association of School Boards asked the U.S. Department of Justice to treat complaining parents as domestic terror threats. An early draft of the Association’s letter called on the federal government to deploy the National Guard and military police to restrain parents at school board meetings.

Luke Rosiak’s Race to the Bottom shows that such episodes are produced by an educational system that has abandoned excellence for ideology. The proximate causes of the equity agenda include zealots in the ranks of teachers, principals, and board members. But, Rosiak shows, the ultimate cause is a system funded from top to bottom by social justice crusaders determined to transform the public schools in order to transform the country.

An investigative reporter for the Daily Wire who broke stories putting a national spotlight on Loudoun County public schools, Rosiak reveals “the secret forces destroying American public education,” as his subtitle promises. The book also shows how the Left “marches through”—captures and controls—powerful governing institutions. Once you see this process in detail here, you will see it everywhere.




Civics: Texit






Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?



Suzy Weiss:

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.




Civics: Collecting information from Americans raises ongoing civil liberties concerns.



Betsy Woodruff Swan:

Carrie Bachner, formerly the career senior legislative adviser to the DHS under secretary for intelligence, said the fact that the agency is directly questioning Americans as part of a domestic-intelligence program is deeply concerning, given the history of scandals related to past domestic-intelligence programs by the FBI.

Bachner, who served as a DHS liaison with Capitol Hill from 2006 to 2010, said she told members of Congress “adamantly” — over and over and over again — that I&A didn’t collect intelligence in the U.S.

“I don’t know any counsel in their right mind that would sign off on that, and any member of Congress that would say, ‘That’s OK,’” said Bachner, who currently runs a consulting firm. “If these people are out there interviewing folks that still have constitutional privileges, without their lawyer present, that’s immoral.”

DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Kenneth Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor who took the helm of I&A last June, said in a statement that his office is addressing its employees’ concerns. An I&A spokesperson provided POLITICO with a list of steps the office has taken since September 2020 to address internal complaints, including conducting a number of new trainings and hiring two full-time ombudsmen.




Thomas Jefferson and the smoothening of the American mind



Douglas Murray:

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet.

Imagine if someone had said to you then: “We are heading into a world where almost anything can be…




College Should Be More Like Prison



Brooke Allen:

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.




Civics: Diving into the US “Censorship Industrial Complex“






Notes on math education



Summer Allen:

A new study finds that high school students identify more with math if they see their math teacher treating everyone in the class equitably, especially in racially diverse schools. The study by researchers at Portland State University, Loyola University Chicago and the University of North Texas was published in the journal Sociology of Education. Dara Shifrer, associate professor of sociology at Portland State and former middle school math teacher, led the study.

Who can do well in math? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. Whereas people in East Asian countries tend to believe that hard work can lead anyone to succeed at math, people in the United States are more likely to believe that people need natural talent in the subject to succeed. This perception means that students in the U.S. may be particularly susceptible to racial and gender stereotypes about who is and is not “good at math.”

“Americans don’t realize what strange stereotypes we have about math,” says Shifrer. “It really sets kids up for failure here.”

The fact that some high school students are more likely to give up on math than others has important implications for their individual futures and for the lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.

Much more on the successful citizen lawsuit overturning the Seattle School District’s use of Discovery Math, here.

http://seattlemathgroup.blogspot.com/.

Discovery Math

Connected math.

Singapore Math


Local links: Math Task Force, Math Forum Audio/Video and West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus.




Civics: “And they posed as democracy preservationists!”



Ann Althouse:

“… to disclose that video and they did not do so. And all the while, they were actively representing to the court and the American people that Jake was a leader, leading the charge into the Capitol….They did not disclose that footage because it ran contrary to their rote narrative…. I’ve never seen anything so vile as what I’m seeing right now…. It’s a departure from a pretty high standard they’ve maintained for a long time. Anyone who needs to have belief in the integrity of our justice system, whether they’re a left-wing New England academic or a raging right-winger, needs to say that this is really wrong and f—ing it up for everyone.”




Thousands of US public schools hide child’s gender status from parents



Josh Christenson

Nearly 6,000 US public schools are employing guidance policies that block parents from knowing whether their child identifies as a different gender in the classroom — which could become federal policy if President Biden’s Title IX proposals are approved in May.

At least 168 school districts nationwide have rules on the books that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission, according to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education and shared with The Post.

More than 3.2 million students are affected by such policies in all kinds of districts — large and small, affluent and poor, urban and rural, red and blue — stretching from North Carolina to Alaska.




21-day antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity challenge at our former public school in Maskachusetts



Philip Greenspun:

We are informed that racism is a public health emergency (example from Minneapolis; and “Declare Racism a Public Health Emergency” (New York Times)). Yet, according to the above chart, the emergency is not so severe as to preclude a “Pause for February Vacation”. It is okay to sit on the beach in Aruba while daily oppression continues.

The white background indicates that white is the default and/or preferred race? One good thing about our former town is that I’m pretty sure almost everyone there is qualified as an expert on the Day 4 subject: “What is Whiteness?” Also note that the next step after identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+ is joining the military (days 18 and 19).




I called for more research on the COVID ‘lab leak theory.’ Here’s what I found out



Michael Worobey:

We should instead be asking: What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion.

I remain open to any and all evidence supporting a laboratory origin of the pandemic. So far, we have no such evidence.




Radical Optimist: Kevin Kelly



Noah Smith:

Despite the relentless hype, I think AI overall is underhyped. The long-term effects of AI will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire, but its full effects will take centuries to play out. That means that we’ll be arguing, discussing, and wrangling with the changes brought about by AI for the next 10 decades. Because AI operates so close to our own inner self and identity, we are headed into a century-long identity crisis.




“The false promise of ChatGPT, et al”



Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.




Civics: Taxpayer Supported City of Madison plans to sue Carmakers over theft vulnerability….



Kimberly Wethal:

The city of Madison is gearing up to sue carmakers Kia and Hyundai for creating a public nuisance by failing to equip their vehicles with anti-theft software, which it says led to a sharp uptick in the theft of the companies’ vehicles last year.

The City Council on Tuesday passed a resolution authorizing the city to hire outside legal counsel to file a federal lawsuit against Kia and Hyundai for what the city in a statement called their “role in creating a public nuisance.”

Car thefts dropped by 5% in Madison last summer, compared to the prior year, but thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles increased by 270%, making up 45% of all stolen auto cases in July and August. Rates of Kia and Hyundai thefts are even higher in Milwaukee, where the two brands comprise 60% of all stolen autos.




Reflecting on learning, yesterday and today



David Foster

Reading the above, the first thing that struck me was that a university dean, especially one who is an English professor, should not view the 19th century as ‘a very long time ago’…most likely, though, she herself probably does not have such a foreshortened view of time,  rather, she’s probably describing what she observes as the perspective of her students (though it’s hard to tell from the quote).  It does seem very likely that the K-12 experiences of the students have been high on presentism, resulting in students arriving at college  “with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach,” as a junior professor who joined the faulty in 2021 put it.  One would hope, though, that to the extent Harvard admits a large number of such students, it would focus very seriously on challenging that worldview.  I do not get the impression that it actually does so.

In a discussion of the above passage at Twitter, Paul Graham @PaulG said:

One of the reasons they have such a strong “orientation toward the present” is that the past has been rewritten for a lot of them.

to which someone responded: 

that’s always been true! it’s not like the us didn’t rewrite the history of the civil war to preserve southern feelings for 100 years. what’s different is that high schools are no longer providing the technical skills necessary for students to read literature!




How I Was Wrong About Covid; When even libertarians trust the government too much.



Glenn Reynolds:

I was right about all that, though it was worse than I anticipated.  And yet Covid was, it turned out, not as bad as I anticipated.  In the early days, I was a Covid hawk, but I was wrong to be.  It seemed right at the time.  The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and their tendency had always been to downplay bad things in China.  There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi and Bill DeBlasio were telling us not to worry and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them.  (Hey, I was right about that.)  They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, that Covid’s mortality rate was significantly less than 1/10 of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly, and those with heart failure and diabetes.  (Even in those early days, just about exactly three years ago now, my yoga teacher told me that her son-in-law, an ER doc in New Orleans, said that all his Covid ICU patients were morbidly obese).  Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, really, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience, and colossal economic destruction.

In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical.  It’s hard to believe that I, of all people, trusted the government too much, but there you are.  Well, lesson learned.

In mitigation, I should note that co-bloggers Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin were as skeptical as I should have been. There were people who wanted me to shut them down, but that’s not how we work at InstaPundit, and even then I was open to – and hopeful for – the prospect that they might be right, as of course they were, and I might be wrong, as of course I was.




The link between IQ and income is overrated



Tyler Cowen:

The evidence is striking. One study of CEOs of large Swedish companies found that on average they ranked at the 83rd percentile of measured IQ (for CEOs of smaller companies, the rank was the 66th percentile). That’s above average, but it’s hardly a cluster at the top of the distribution. Many CEOs undoubtedly achieved their position through hard work, charisma, people skills and other abilities, not to mention luck.

In the broader distribution, the connection between IQ and income is also positive but underwhelming. One study concluded that moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of IQ correlates with a 10% to 16% boost in earnings. That may feel significant when you get it, but it doesn’t push you into a whole new socioeconomic class.




Film Review: Review: The Right to Read



Kadjata Bah, age 18

new documentary film called The Right to Readadds to growing national debates about literacy and the science of reading. This timely and compelling film is streaming for free until March 9, 2023.

Directed by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar Burton, the film follows a long-time activist, a teacher, and two families as they navigate the future of education.

Kareem Weaver is an Oakland-based activist with the NAACP. He is an experienced educator, and his mission is to create a world where 95% of children can read. Working with Sabrina Causey, a rookie first grade teacher in Oakland, the two make a case for a new curriculum for their students based in the science of reading.

The film comes right as the “reading wars” of the 1990s have come to another head. The debate between the research-based science of reading and the whole language or balanced literacy approach now holds more dire consequences for the crisis American children face.

Currently, 37% of fourth graders in the U.S. read below grade level. While literacy is a concern for all children, gaps are especially pronounced among children of color. In fact, about 50% of all Black students graduate high school reading below grade level. Illiteracy is not only an academic burden as research shows that people who cannot read proficiently are more likely to end up in prison, homeless, and unemployed.

“Imagine being in the Stone Age and you ain’t got no stone. Imagine being in the Bronze Age and you ain’t got no bronze. We’re in the Information Age right now—and you can’t read the information,” said Weaver while explaining the current reading crisis.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Civics: FTC Twitter Investigation Sought Elon Musk’s Internal Communications, Journalist NamesCivics:



Ryan Tracy:

The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.

In 12 letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers since Mr. Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover, the FTC also asked the company to “identify all journalists” granted access to company records and to provide information about the launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service, the documents show.

The FTC is also seeking to depose Mr. Musk in connection with the probe.

“We are concerned these staff reductions impact Twitter’s ability to protect consumers’ information,” an FTC official wrote to Twitter’s lawyers on Nov. 10 following an initial wave of layoffs, according to a copy of the letter viewed by the Journal.




Math challenges



Joanne Jacobs:

Math scores are way down: The Education Recovery Scorecard estimates students lost half a year. But Boaler believes it doesn’t matter. It’s “quite clear” the students gained “knowledge and insights about the world, health challenges, global upheaval, exponential growth, technology, and ways to help their families and navigate complex social situations,” she writes.

This is not clear to me at all. If anything, it’s quite clear that many lost the ability to navigate complex — or even simple — social situations, and I’m dubious about their knowledge and insights too. Screen time soared. That doesn’t mean they’re masters of technology. Physical and mental health declined.

Learning math matters, responds Fordham’s Nathaniel Grossman. Two decades of growth was “wiped out in just three years,” NAEP scores revealed. If we don’t do something about learning loss, this generation could be locked out of high-paying STEM careers, he writes. “One Stanford economist estimates that it’ll reduce the lifetime earnings of students by $70,000 and cause a $28 trillion hit to the American economy.”




Civics: Santa Clara County, California, imposed some of the harshest Covid restrictions in America. A church and its members defied them — and became the targets of an unprecedented surveillance operation



David Zweig:

Long famous as the core of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, California, also earned the distinction in the last three years as perhaps the most aggressive and punitive enforcer of pandemic restrictions in the country. On March 16, 2020, Santa Clara, along with a half-dozen other Bay Area counties, was the first in the nation to announce a shelter in place order, commanding all citizens to remain at home other than for specific activities that the county deemed essential, such as food shopping or medical care. It wasn’t until mid-October — seven months after the initial order — that Sara Cody, the head of the county’s public health department, began allowing indoor gatherings at churches, provided they were no more than 100 people or 25 percent of a facility’s capacity, whichever was fewer. At these limited gatherings face coverings and social distancing were required, and singing was banned.

San Jose’s Calvary Chapel, led by its pastor, Mike McClure, brazenly defied these orders. On May 24, 2020, McClure stated publicly that he would reopen the church the following week, regardless of the health department’s orders, and that he would never close the church again. After two months of isolation, many congregants were teetering toward despair. They were suffering greatly from loneliness, depression, and crippling anxiety — the church was their community, and returning to the normalcy of its rituals and in-person fellowship was vital for their mental, spiritual, and physical well-being. 

True to McClure’s word, at the end of May Calvary began holding indoor gatherings, often with hundreds of worshipers, a large portion of whom were without masks, in breach of distancing rules, and singing. This set off a collision between the openly defiant church and the county that culminated in two lawsuits. One, in federal court, in June 2020, by the church against the county, claiming the restrictions violated a list of constitutional rights, and the other, in state court, in October 2020, by the county against the church, for “flagrantly and repeatedly” violating public health orders and nonpayment of fines.




Civics: California Public Health is building a “decision support” system



Dr. Tomas Aragón

Decision-making is our most important activity.1“A decision is a choice between two or more alternatives that involves an irrevocable allocation of resources.” Decisions drive vision, strategy, policy, and transformational change. Every decision has causal assumptions, predictions, trade-offs, and an opportunity cost—the lost benefit of the better option(s) not chosen or not considered. Some decisions have extreme time constraints under deep uncertainty.

Decision intelligence is using ethics, science, and technology to improve individual and team decisions for finding and solving problems, and achieving objectives and key results in challenging, including VUCA,2 environments (Figure 1).




Reducing Rigor at CUNY



Bob McManus:

n mid-January, when Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez grandly announced it will no longer be necessary to do college-level academic work to receive graduation credit at CUNY’s seven community colleges.

How long it will take for that policy to migrate to the institution’s 11 senior colleges is anybody’s guess; entropy being what it is, however, it’ll happen soon enough — if it hasn’t already.

Here’s a summary of the sad facts.

CUNY’s student body overwhelmingly is drawn from the New York City public-school system. Way back in the day, when city schools more or less worked, CUNY freshmen arrived more or less prepared for college-level instruction.




Roald Dahl ebooks ‘force censored versions on readers’ despite backlash



The Times:

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matildaand Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.




Libraries can’t escape the push for digitization, but we still need actual books on shelves



Andrew Stauffer:

In “Church Going”—Philip Larkin’s 1955 poem on the fade-out of religious faith in the modern world—the narrator wonders why, despite his own apathy and ignorance, he keeps visiting churches. Bicycling on Sunday afternoons, he finds himself “tending to this cross of ground,” even as he recognizes they no longer have the power to hold “unspilt . . . what since is found / Only in separation.” Looking forward, he wonders “when churches will fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into,” imagining most of them slowly crumbling to ruin amid rain and sheep, with only “a few cathedrals” kept “chronically on show.” The poem ends as he tries to foresee “who / Will be the last, the very last,” to seek a church “for what it was,” the final representative of beliefs wedded to practices within “the special shell” created to house them.

Larkin’s poem has been coming to mind lately as I visit libraries, and I’ve begun to wonder to what extent my interactions with them and their contents are becoming anomalous, a twilit posture. Many institutions have moved, or are on the verge of moving, significant portions of their collections off-site. Some are embarking on large-scale book de-accessioning projects, a process by which books are removed permanently from a collection. Across North America, academic library buildings themselves are being reconfigured as “information hubs” and “learning spaces.” 

Going forward, what will be the claim of printed materials on our resources, our scholarship, and our imaginations?




Wisconsin Governor Evers Comments on our Long Term, Disastrous Reading Results



About 25 to 27 minutes into the program.

Jeff Mayers: “You want a big hunk of the surplus to go to K-12, you’ve already talked about that along with the state school Superintendent. I want to focus a bit on the reading program. Last session you vetoed a bi-partisan bill to boost reading scores. This time around, there’s something in the budget about that. I’m wondering, what is your approach vs what that approach was? How does it differ? What’s your view as a former school Superintendent on the state of reading in Wisconsin?

Governor Evers: “Well, I’ll start with the latter, it has to be better. It cannot exist as it does right now. Certainly the pandemic played a huge role in that, but at the end of the day, we’ve struggled with reading outcomes for some time. We need to take a different look at it. The difference between that bill and what’s in the budget now is frankly that I thought the bill took away authority from the local boards of education in the State which I think is the wrong approach.

This is more about retraining teachers and providing support to teaching staff as it relates to reading, and I think its a winner, I think it adopts practices that we’ve seen working across the country. I think its a step in the right direction. It’s pricey, there’s no question about that. But education is where our economy starts and ends, frankly. If we don’t invest and take care of issues that are difficult we are hurting our state’s economy and our quality of life.”

Jeff Mayers: “There does seem to be a consensus building around that.” Governor Evers: “Yes, that’s a good thing.”

Governor Evers vetoed AB446 during the fall of 2021.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




DPI Testimony, Q&A Wisconsin Education Committee



Audio

Transcript

One of the line items in Wisconsin Motion 57 directly connects to our ED prep programs and reading. It states that Wisconsin will [00:11:00] contract with a vendor who will conduct an analysis of reading program coursework in our UW institutions. After engaging in our very robust and required state procurement process, the Department of Administration selected a vendor for that work.

[00:11:15] That vendor is TPI Today, March 2nd, ironically, national Read Across America Day. Uh, that vendor is meeting with the deans of our Schools of Education in the UW system in order to provide details and timelines about that opportunity. The other thing that Motion 57 provides for is additional funds for grants for those UW systems that want to make changes to their courses.

Based on the findings and the report of that vendor, T P I us, I bring this to your attention to remind us of an existing policy that is currently in the early stages of implementation that could also have a real impact on [00:12:00] reading achievement in Wisconsin. We are definitely taking both and approaches in every step of the way.

…..

[00:27:25] Senator John Jagler: So to, to that end. If you’ve already kind of identified some that you would recommend, and they’re not the local, we are a local control state. I ran for state senate, not for Watertown school, district School board. But having said that, if 80% of the school districts aren’t recommending what youth put out there on, on a general level, would you then support a, a type of bill that had included a package that, that eliminated some of the bad programs and curriculum, the queuing method, fountain and Pinnell as, as the professor recommended.

…..

[00:45:09] It’s important to note here that while while many states, um, went in the direction of eliminating lifetime teaching licenses in order to add professional learning requirements, in Wisconsin, we did the opposite. We used to have professional learning requirements for our educators, and we eliminated those in the favor of having lifetime licenses.

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel




Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse Wisconsin Education Committee Testimony; Q&A; Lucy Calkins




Transcript

mp3 Audio Entire hearing video.

An interesting excerpt, regarding their use of the discredited Lucy Caulkins Reading Curriculum (see Sold a Story):

Senator John Jagler. Thank you. I, as I talked to, to my local administrators, [00:21:00] um, I’m fascinated. Curriculum choices that have been made and continue to be made.

[00:21:06] And I’m, I’m, I’m quite honestly surprised you, you, you double down on one of the bad actors, uh, not my words, I’m not an expert, but identified Lucy Calkins in this units of study as one of the bad actors, a bad actors in this, um, whole fight on the science of reading. Why did you go there? Why did you go back to, to you, you know, went back to her version 2.0, which her critics would say, were only done because the spotlight was being shined on her by, by others.

[00:21:42] Kyle Thayse: I knew this question was coming today, so I kind of prepared myself. I thought that that was gonna be asked. So, um, you know, there was, there’s a couple, a couple of reasons. I think as a district, we, we, we made that decision. Um, and I’ll be honest, I was, I was, I was for it. Um, and, and a lot of it is, The, um, the [00:22:00] professional development that, um, I feel like we were able to lead through the district outside of the curriculum problems.

[00:22:08] Kyle Thayse: The what, what the curriculum brought to the table as far as the growth of our teachers, the tightness, the, the tightness, and the, uh, the collegial conversations about learning that happened on a daily basis in, in our classrooms. It was brought upon by that, by the models of that. and, um, above that second grade level, we, we don’t have, there’s, there’s no real issues, you know, with the curriculum.

[00:22:32] Kyle Thayse: It’s, it’s, it’s robust, it has great topics. Um, kids are exposed to a lot of different vocabulary with within it, and even at the lower levels it is too. Um, we did identify those problems that were in there and, uh, we didn’t, we didn’t take the full leap of faith right away. We purchased first the, the manuals and, um, I tasked myself with reading.

[00:22:50] Kyle Thayse: Every kindergarten manual, every first grade manual said to me, those were the two most important, uh, manuals. Every unit in that manual to identify in there, do, do I find [00:23:00] any of this at all? And, um, there was one little spot that I was concerned and I thought we were gonna have an issue. . Um, but what ended up happening was the, that part of the unit was actually more of an emergent reader.

[00:23:10] Kyle Thayse: Early, early literacy before students are even learning sounds, portion of the curriculum, um, where students were, were learning. Uh, the, the pattern part of the book was more of the memorization, the storytelling part where kids learn how stories go. This is like 4K, early kindergarten curriculum stuff. And, um, And past that, there were, I, they, there was the use of decodable texts.

[00:23:30] Kyle Thayse: There was, um, there was not any of the use of, of of, of the, uh, use the picture to solve the word. There was, um, a lot, uh, actually I would say almost triple the amount of lessons on phonics and emmic awareness within the actual reading curriculum. I mean, this is outside of the phonic tum that we already used.

[00:23:46] Kyle Thayse: Um, so once we saw that all in there, um, the price tag on a whole new curriculum, uh, the professional development that goes along. Um, and, and, and the time that it would take, uh, we thought we would be able to move faster as long [00:24:00] as the right tools were in there and we felt the tools were there.

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk DPI

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel




DIE and the taxpayer supported Madison School District



Scott Girard:

An effort that began in summer 2021 to gauge the Madison Metropolitan School District’s equity work found that students, parents and staff are aware of some district efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion but want more involvement and more communication with district administration.

The district partnered with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, for the work, which included interviews of 380 people. Jackson was the director of the Wisconsin Equity & Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until last summer when he left for MSU.

On Monday, Jackson presented the findings to the Madison School Board along with seven recommendations:

• Develop and disseminate a DEI strategic plan

• Create systems of rewards and accountability for MMSD DEI efforts

• Generate a strategy for hiring and retaining teachers of color

• Engage families in DEI efforts

• Review and standardize DEI curriculum and implementation efforts across the MMSD

• Emphasize and advance diversity in all its forms

• Provide transparent, accessible, and safe opportunities for feedback to MMSD leaders

District officials and School Board members suggested changes in response to the audit must work in conjunction with changes resulting from the recent human resources report and the ongoing strategic framework recalibration process. Superintendent Carlton Jenkins said moving toward equity will require a “collaborative effort” with the board, administration and community involved.

“This has got to be all in,” Jenkins said.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




“But Joseph, a Haitian immigrant raising him by herself, did not know how far behind he was in reading — in the 30th percentile”



Bianca Vasquez Toness

“I’m sad and disappointed,” Joseph said through an interpreter. “It’s only because I was assigned an educational advocate that I know this about my son.”

It’s widely known from test scores that the pandemic set back students across the country. But many parents don’t realize that includes their own child.

Schools have long faced criticism for failing to inform certain parents about their kids’ academic progress. But after the COVID-19 school closures, the stakes for children have in many ways never been greater. Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




A guide to Plan S: the open-access initiative shaking up science publishing



Holly Else

In 2018, an influential group of research funders announced a bold pledge: the scientists they fund should publish their peer-reviewed papers outside journal paywalls. The initiative, called Plan S, caused an instant uproar over its aim of ending journal subscription models — the means by which many scholarly publications have financed their existence. Its intended start date in 2020 was delayed, and its details were tweaked. But after much sparring over policy, the project formally began in 2021, with 25 funding agencies rolling out similar open-access (OA) mandates.




What happens when people live to be very old and don’t have a passel of kids to take care of them?



Virginia Postrel:

Most of the coverage of Japan’s aging population focuses on the current low birth rate and its implications for the future. In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate. “In thinking of the sustainability and inclusiveness of our nation’s economy and society, we place child-rearing support as our most important policy,” he said.

But even if the government succeeds in goosing the birth rate, the effects will be felt decades from now. Japan has an immediate problem that dates back to policies adopted in 1948. People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population, and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964. 

In 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law. It made abortions legal and cheap, about $10. “Critics assert that it is easier for a woman to avoid an unwanted child in this way than to have her tonsils re­moved,” The New York Times reported in 1964. “One result of the prac­tice has been the virtual elimi­nation of illegitimate births.”