schoolinfosystem.org
Scott Girard: “I’d been looking forward to high school and it was so hyped up,” said West High School senior Alex Vakar. “It felt like this necessary period for growth because people always talk about them being the best days of their lives, and we missed out on half of that.” Dances, sports, time with […]
Glenn Zorpette: Rapid and pivotal advances in technology have a way of unsettling people, because they can reverberate mercilessly, sometimes, through business, employment, and cultural spheres. And so it is with the current shock and awe over large language models, such as GPT-4 from OpenAI. It’s a textbook example of the mixture of amazement and, especially, anxiety that […]
Matt Taibbi: I read Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s “Eight Key Takeaways” summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten […]
Will Flanders and Matt Levene: Forward Exam scores show that Wisconsin students are struggling in reading. Currently statewide, only about 36.8% of students scored proficient or higher on the Forward Exam, meaning the majority of students are falling behind. Reading problems cut across all socioeconomic and racial lines. Much attention has been focused on the […]
Jessica Winter: Travis came to live at his ninth home the day before he started kindergarten. When his new foster parents, Elizabeth and Dan, enrolled Travis at their neighborhood public school, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, they learned that Travis was eligible for special-education services. (Some names in this story have been changed.) […]
Will-Law Recently Wisconsin Watch released articles criticizing the Wisconsin parental choice programs and incorrectly claiming that private schools may “discriminate.” This memo provides resources and information about the false claims made in the article and talking points to refute them. The claims that private schools may “discriminate” are false. These claims are false. Wisconsin Watch claims […]
DRAKE BENTLEY: In her letter, Underly stated, “Whether you realize it or not, you are, under the guise of protection, causing undue harm to students and staff. However, this damage is reversible. It is paramount that you change course now.” Underly requested that the administration reverse the policy to “foster inclusive environments,” saying the controversial […]
J Scott Turner: How thoroughly has diversity, equity and inclusion penetrated the sciences? “To the core!” at least if the recent travails of the National Audubon Society are any indication. For over two years, a woke storm has roiled the Society over whether it should purge its namesake, John James Audubon, from its title. After […]
Saul Costa: They are constantly “hallucinating” alternative versions of reality, and then passing that on in a very convincing manner for the user to absorb. It is an unfortunate limitation, but one that can be mitigated through careful use of the AIs. Using these AIs effectively in educational settings depends largely on the ability of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Transcript: $pending, K-12 Governance, Ed Schools and Reading Outcomes [00:00:00] Senator Duey Stroebel: Actually looking at, uh, US census data, all funds, all sources. Um, Wisconsin’s at about $13,000 and Mississippi is about $9,200. So there’s significant that’s per the US census data, all funds, all sources. So pretty clear there. I think it’s, uh, […]
Mark Judge: There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward. That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting […]
The Economist: Should you wish to know the best way to carry a hot coffee or avoid backache, Britain’s employers have you covered. But set your sights a bit higher than health-and-safety briefings—on courses that risk making you better at your job, say—and the chance of disappointment soars. According to data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics […]
Irwin Collier: On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At […]
Irwin Collier: On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At […]
St Johns: St. John’s College is best known for its reading list and the Great Books curriculum that was adopted in 1937. While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains. The reading list at St. John’s includes classic works in […]
Alec Johnson: Stein shared a copy of her resignation letter to the board with the Journal Sentinel, but referred a reporter to Russ for questions about the matter. Her letter, dated Jan. 17, did not explain her decision but thanked the community and offered her “best wishes” to the district. “I am very grateful for […]
Martin Gurri: The name of our Substack publication, Public came from the 2018 book, Revolt of the Public by a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurri. It is perhaps the best book ever written about the impact of the Internet on social and political life. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to watch Leighton’s video about Martin’s great book […]
Matthew Barakat: Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is launching an investigation into one of the state’s most prestigious high schools, acting on complaints that students there weren’t properly recognized for their achievements on a standardized test. Miyares said at a news conference Wednesday that his Office of Civil Rights is investigating the Thomas Jefferson High […]
Maxim Lott: As with ChatGPT’s essay-writing ability, the current best use of the AI is to take its output as a starting point, from which humans can then edit it, and add their own knowledge and critical thinking ability. But that will likely change down the road. As Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution notes, humans working with computer […]
Will-Law The News: On behalf of School Choice Wisconsin Action, Inc. (SCWA), Catholic Memorial High School of Waukesha, Inc., and Roncalli Catholic Schools, Inc., the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jill Underly. The suit challenges several of DPI’s rules […]
Ed Treleven: Remington’s Nov. 23 decision does not directly address the merits of the policy but spends a great number of its 33 pages discussing what is considered legal standing, as expressed in recent state and federal court decisions. Ignoring Doe’s lack of standing, Remington wrote, would be ignoring his own “limited and modest role […]
Joanne Jacobs: He remembers “when teachers were saying the problem was that parents weren’t involved in their children’s education.” Then parents were forced to get involved by the pandemic, he writes. Educators seem to see that as a problem too. Homeschooling isn’t easy, writes Knight. But it gives parents the choice of what and how […]
Pamela Cotant: Some seventh-grade students went on the field trip Thursday with Ropa and Cecilia Goodale, a math teacher. The two seventh-grade humanities teachers at Spring Harbor, Tiffani Lewis and Cindi Lewis, took the remaining seventh-graders to the school forest on Friday. “Although we do a lot of these types of activities at school, where […]
Lev Golinkin: Trump’s mendacity is arguably the Second Big Lie. Four years earlier, the Hillary Clinton campaign and leading Democrats refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2016 election, by claiming Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. These actions, while certainly not as dramatic or as immediately damaging as the events leading to Jan. 6 (and today), helped […]
james allan I fell in love with the place my first week there. I was a Visiting Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, taking a sabbatical from my home institution, the University of Queensland in Australia. That was back in January of 2013. My wife and I were to spend the […]
Jeb Bush: The U.S. has a choice: Give up on a generation or confront this challenge head-on. Some adults find it easier to give up. They won’t say it out loud; they’ll simply lower expectations. Or they’ll explain away the drop in scores, blaming the pandemic when scores had already begun to decline before Covid […]
David Lat: For the past year or so, I’ve been speaking all over the country about free-speech problems at American law schools. The institution that figures most prominently in my talks is Yale Law School—partly because it’s the longtime #1 law school and top producer of law professors and deans, making it a trendsetter in […]
Olivia Herken: The La Crosse School District has the largest referendum in the state this fall, asking voters to approve nearly $195 million to consolidate its two high schools due to declining enrollment and aging facilities. Some Oregon residents who oppose the referendum doubt it would have a big impact. Some question whether they’ve been […]
Adam Andrzejewski Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives. On the morning of […]
Claire Woodcock: While Laffin acknowledges that a reevaluation of effective education is necessary, he says this can happen when looking at the types of prompts educators assign students, noting a difference between the regurgitation of facts and information discovery. However, he worries that products like OpenAI’s text generator will make essay writing a moot point.“We […]
Alhussein Fawzi, Matej Balog, …Pushmeet Kohli Improving the efficiency of algorithms for fundamental computations can have a widespread impact, as it can affect the overall speed of a large amount of computations. Matrix multiplication is one such primitive task, occurring in many systems—from neural networks to scientific computing routines. The automatic discovery of algorithms using […]
Evan Mandery: To some extent, elite colleges are simply collateral damage in the culture war. Indeed, the thrust of Vance’s speech is about the need to break through the indoctrination of the liberal intelligentsia — via what he calls “red pilling,” a reference to The Matrix — where the “fundamental corruption” at the root of the system, […]
Andy Kessler: Why so many quitters? And who’s paying for DoorDashed dinners and the exorbitant rent for all these un- and underemployed? Government handouts are dwindling, so, you guessed it, now it’s mom and dad—enabling parents. They can afford it: As of March, baby boomers were sitting on a whopping $71 trillion to spoil their […]
Roger Simon: “Fight Fiercely Harvard!” as Tom Lehrer used to sing in a mock football fight song. “Demonstrate to them our will.” However, that will—a university devoted to even-handed intellectual inquiry for the public good—no longer exists. The truth has an inconvenient way of interfering with propaganda. The Ivy League schools that once did so much to […]
Robert Pondiscio In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The […]
Ferenc Huszár: Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it’s like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master’s programs in Cambridge. Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A) cultural differences – we are very good at sarcasm, painfully good […]
Everyone is talking about the monetary cost of student debt forgiveness. But what about the moral cost? Joe Biden has essentially co-signed the greatest endorsement of duty abdication in American history. Without a sense of duty and obligation, society is rendered impossible. — Christian Watson (@OfficialCWATSON) August 24, 2022 Related: US debt clock #studentloanforgiveness pic.twitter.com/0l3xwToPFo […]
Libby Sobic: WILL Director of Education Policy, Libby Sobic, is the author of Empower School Board Members With Policy Solutions, a new publication from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The rising tide of parent engagement and activism requires policy thinkers to turn their attention to the local level where school boards can debate and pass reforms […]
David Boaz: But increasingly parents and teachers are pushing back against “whole language” and “balanced literacy” theories. They cite decades of research on how children actually learn to read and write. In 1997 Congress instructed the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development to work with the Department of Education to establish a National Reading Panel […]
Lucy Kellaway: In less than two weeks, 250,000 18-year-olds in England will turn up at school for one last time to collect a piece of paper on which three letters of the alphabet will be printed. These grades will sum up their academic achievement so far, will affect the rest of their education — and […]
Elizabeth Beyer: The Madison School Board voted 6-1 in June to adopt the district’s $561.3 million preliminary budget for next school year, which included the 3% base wage increase. Negotiations began in May with MTI requesting the 4.7% increase — the annual inflationary amount and the maximum allowed in bargaining under state law. The district […]
Natalie Wexler: In fact, the evidence is equivocal at best. Some studies have found positive effects, at least from moderate amounts of computer use, especially in math. But much of the data shows a negative impact at a range of grade levels. A study of millions of high school students in the 36 member countries […]
Francois Balloux: A common misunderstanding is that “the science” is a set of absolute, immutable, indisputable and verifiable facts. Rather, science is a messy process eventually converging towards the truth in a process of trial and error. Many scientific publications are false – because they relied on inadequate data or analyses, but more often the results […]
Ann Althouse: But what’s really bothering Strauss isn’t the outrage of insulting education departments. It’s Hillsdale’s participation in charter schools around the country. There’s the “Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help ‘students acquire a mature love for America.’” Valerie Strauss: At the reception last week, held at a […]
Ian Miller: But a new study out provides some important new evidence with regards to the efficacy of mask mandates. The Study Design The study authors included several credentialed experts like Tracy Høeg and USC’s Neeraj Sood, along with one extremely qualified data analyst, Josh Stevenson. You may know Josh from his fantastic work on Twitter as well as Substack, […]
Ann Althouse A key I use to understanding puzzles like this is: People do what they want to do. What have they done? Begin with the hypothesis that what they did is what they wanted to do. If they postured that they wanted to do something else, regard that as a con. Work from there. […]
Charlie Warzel: Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland. In February, an engineer named Dmitri Brereton wrote a blog post about Google’s search-engine decay, rounding up […]
Nicholas Garton Retired Madison Police Lieutenant Wayne Strong, 62, passed away Monday, leaving many who knew him in the community shocked and saddened. Strong was a beloved presence in the lives of youths he mentored, people he worked with and community organizations he was involved with. “He’s just one of those people who is irreplaceable,” […]
Dana Goldstein: How Professor Calkins ended up influencing tens of millions of children is, in one sense, the story of education in America. Unlike many developed countries, the United States lacks a national curriculum or teacher-training standards. Local policies change constantly, as governors, school boards, mayors and superintendents flow in and out of jobs. Amid […]
Michael Hardy: Seventh-grader Jordan Banks loves playing video games and drawing cartoons. He dreams of going to art school, but instead his parents enroll him at preppy Riverdale Academy, where the most popular sport is lacrosse and everyone wears Vineyard Vines. At first, Jordan has trouble fitting in—he’s one of the few Black students at […]
Donald Devine: Ludwig von Mises’ Yale University Press classic Bureaucracy explains in a relatively few pages the difference between public and private-sector bureaucratic management. The private sector can measure what is going on in large hierarchies of bureaucracy below its CEO simply by asking whether each unit is making a profit. The public sector has no equivalent measuring […]
David Wallace-Wells: There is one data point that might serve as an exceptional interpretative tool, one that blinks bright through all that narrative fog: excess mortality. The idea is simple: You look at the recent past to find an average for how many people die in a given country in a typical year, count the number […]
Katherine Boyle: There’s a common question in Silicon Valley about what makes an extraordinary entrepreneur. Experienced investors point to various traits. Perseverance. Grit. Overcoming adversity. Hustle. Innate genius. A good childhood. A bad childhood. Luck. But the trait that is most meaningful is the hardest to describe. It is the fire in the eyes, the […]
Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore and Casey Mulligan: Almost exactly two years ago COVID-19 spread to the United States and our federal, state and local governments implemented strategies to mitigate the damage from this deadly virus. We now know from the responses across countries that the U.S. federal government (and most governments around the world) made […]
Jason Riley: “I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to […]
Houman David Hemmati The evidence now proves (as Dr. Fauci said in the early days of the pandemic) that cloth masks are ineffective, and we now also know surgical masks are minimally protective, while properly fitted N95 masks can protect the wearer against infection. Once we finally reopened schools, we discovered what many of us […]
Joshua Benton: Benton: So it’s the big academic publishing companies that bought up rights to microfilm that was created 50 or 80 years ago? Kahle: There’s a play I really want to see put on at the Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square — a two-person play, fictitious, of Binkley meeting Eugene Power.5 Eugene Power started University Microfilms, and […]
Michael Thaddeus: The 100% figure claimed by Columbia cannot be accurate. Among 958 members of the (full-time) Faculty of Columbia College, listed in the Columbia College Bulletin online, are included some 69 persons whose highest degree, if any, is a bachelor’s or master’s degree.12 It is not clear exactly which faculty are supposed to be counted in this […]
James Pethokoukis: Central to that cultural history has also been the notion of meritocracy, going back to the Mandarin bureaucrat-scholars who obtained their positions through the imperial examination system. More recently, China’s communists have attempted to run a more vibrant economy by reintroducing meritocracy — and not just in government. As Adrian Wooldridge, author of The […]
DPI Superintendent Jill Underly: Dear Wisconsin Families and Educators, I am writing this letter to you as a fellow parent and a former teacher. Like you, I know what it means to be involved with my children’s education, and I love it. But I look at the way politicians talk about parental involvement, and I […]
Tyler Cowen: Of course this process has very little transparency and not much in the way of appeal, or even competition, or for that matter accountability to outside parties. Might it also be a factor behind a lot of the academic conformism we witness? You go through the early part of your career knowing that […]
Charles Schifano: To care about the state and quality of writing today is to scream into a void while knowing that the void does nothing but laugh. Of course gripes about writing standards are a timeless and rather trite pastime: there’s always a market for shouts about how the kids these days are inarticulate. Or […]
Kayla Huynh “If we are a truly great nation, how could the truth destroy us? Why would we have to hide from it?” she asked. “Great people acknowledge what they’ve done, and then they work to fix it. What will destroy us are the lies that we maintain.” “I’m just one 5-foot-5 journalist,” she added, […]
Isaac Morehouse: Universities are dying. They have long ceased being the best way to gain knowledge. More recently, the degrees they confer have ceased being the best way to signal employability; the only exception being jobs that legally require them. (Such jobs are increasingly stodgy, unattractive, bureaucratic, backwards, and subservient to tyrannical governments). The final […]
Ben Zeisloft: Canadian psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson announced that he is no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. In an article for The National Post, Peterson — who recently sat down with Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro in the inaugural episode of “The Search” — pointed to the school’s obsession […]
Kareem Weaver: Where is the humility? Where is the institutional courage to admit mistakes and move forward? Individuals in leadership positions often derive their credibility from being the most knowledgeable person in the room, the unquestioned oracles of knowledge. This moment in education, however, requires leaders who will publicly position themselves as the best learners, […]
I recently saw a sign prominently posted in a Madison restaurant that said: “Wear a Mask, it’s the law”. This is a teaching moment. The current Dane County Madison Public Health mask requirement is a mandate, not (yet) a law. The status of said mask requirement is the subject of law fare and activism. Some […]
Matt Taibbi: The terrific humorist, journalist, and novelist talks about the downfall of journalism, bureaucratic absurdity, and class cruelty in a blistering indictment of an America turned upside down I know there’s frustration that Callin is still exclusive to iPhone, but in an effort to share some of yesterday’s wide-ranging talk about the state of […]
Matt Taibbi: The terrific humorist, journalist, and novelist talks about the downfall of journalism, bureaucratic absurdity, and class cruelty in a blistering indictment of an America turned upside down I know there’s frustration that Callin is still exclusive to iPhone, but in an effort to share some of yesterday’s wide-ranging talk about the state of […]
104 Page PDF: The Early Literacy and Beyond Task Force was established in December 2020, charged with analyzing promising approaches to literacy education and making recommendations to Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) and the teacher education programs at the University of Wisconsin -Madison School of Education (UW-SoE) to improve literacy outcomes and reduce gaps in […]
State Senator Kathy Bernier and State Representative Joel Kitchens: Literacy in Wisconsin is in crisis: 64% of Wisconsin 4th graders can’t read at grade level, with 34% failing to read at even the basic level. As co-chair of Governor Walker’s Read to Lead Task Force, you know that high quality universal literacy screening is the […]
William Briggs: Stars In Our EyesAn Appealing Authority Every kid learns what seems to be, but isn’t, the Appeal to Authority Fallacy early when he asks “Why should I?” and is told “Because I said so.” Only this isn’t a proper fallacy because kids should listen to and honor their parents, and because parents, besides […]
Tara Henley: For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade. People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority […]
Matt Taibbi: However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range […]
Bari Weiss: A year ago, I still believed very much that the best use of my energy was to try to work to shore up the old institutions from the inside. I was wrong. My readers know: This newsletter would not exist if I hadn’t changed my mind.
Aaron Kheriaty: Yesterday I received the following notice from the University of California, effective immediately, where I have served for almost fifteen years as Professor at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health: This termination has been an opportunity for me to reflect on my time at UCI, […]
Pilita Clark: One went into a spin as he was making a boardroom presentation to a company whose chief executive interrupted to tell him his ideas were insane. One panicked after being assigned to a merger and acquisition project and realising her business background was so meagre she had no clue what the term “due […]
Abigail Shrier Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target […]
Freddie deBoer: Harvard, then, and soon all the rest because of them. I’m not going to rehash all of my SAT stuff here. If you want the litany – Your anger at the SATs is actually anger at broader social conditions which the SATs reveal None of the arguments against the SAT are correct, or […]
Jan Hendrik Kirchner: The subtext for the thought experiment is: How should you act when interacting with someone smarter than yourself? What can you say or do, when your interlocutor has thought of everything you might say and more? Should you trust someone’s advice, when you can’t pinpoint their motivation? As a Ph.D. student, I run into this […]
Goldwater Institute Two Virginia moms who were silenced by the Fairfax County school district won a resounding victory in court this morning when a judge upheld their First Amendment rights and struck down the district’s unconstitutional attempts to shut down their speech. “This is an important victory against the bullying tactics of school bureaucrats who […]
WILL: School district refuses to respect parents’ decision about transitioning at school The News: Two sets of Wisconsin parents are suing the Kettle Moraine School District (KMSD) for a policy that facilitates and “affirms” a minor student’s gender transition at school, even over the parents’ objection. The Kettle Moraine School District’s policy violates parents’ constitutional rights to raise […]
Bent Spira: Finally, consider a recently published study , in which researchers carried out, under laboratory conditions, several well-controlled experiments with masks. What did they conclude? First, that efficiency varies greatly. Surgical or cloth masks, which are used by the vast majority of people, provide only 10-12% filtration efficiency. Masks known as respirators are more efficient, but […]
Andrew Sullivan: The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, […]
Theodore W. Gray and Jerry Glynn: Jerry: I have young students who reach for their calculators to get the answer to 5×6. My response, when I see that, is to explain that such behavior is socially unacceptable, sort of like picking your nose. Many people will see this and think the student must be brain damaged. It’s a […]
Governor Evers: TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE:I am vetoing Senate Bill 454 in its entirety. The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan […]
Elizabeth Blair: When The Electric Company debuted in October 1971, television hadn’t seen anything quite like it. Psychedelic graphics, wildly creative animation, mod outfits, over-the-top characters and sketch comedy all functioned to serve the same goal: teaching kids to read. Brought to you by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) — the same producers behind Sesame Street, which debuted […]
William Jacobson: For the first decade of Legal Insurrection, we documented and did our best to oppose the “gradually” phase of societal collapse, what in 2017 on our 9th anniversary I described as the continuing loss of institutions: Imagine living in a repressive country in which the government blocked access to and suppressed internet content. You […]
Paula Bolyard: ** I recall a former Madison Superintendent occasionally using these words “we have the children”. ** Moms and dads, you know what’s best for your own children. That’s long been my mantra, harkening back to my early blogger days when I fiercely defended a parent’s right to determine the course of his or […]
David Card: Card is best known amongst intellectuals for his minimum wage work, but he also has been central in estimating the returns to higher education, using superior methods. In particular, he has induced many economists to downgrade the import of the signaling model of education. Here is one excerpt from his Econometrica paper, appropriately entitled […]
Timothy Sandefur: The Goldwater Institute filed a motion with a Virginia judge today to defend the rights of two moms in Fairfax County, Virginia, who are under attack by their local school district for exercising their freedom of speech. It’s just the latest example of a growing trend of school districts nationwide aggressively persecuting parents […]
Daniel Engber and Adam Federman: As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory […]
Matt Taibbi: A long list of press figures — from Stelter’s own CNN colleague and shameless intelligence community spokesclown Natasha Bertrand, to reporters from The New Yorker, Time, MSNBC, Fortune, the Financial Times, and especially Slate and The Atlantic — were witting or unwitting pawns in a scheme to sell the public on a transparently […]
CBS4 Boston: The Massachusetts Teachers Association is speaking out against MCAS, saying the state’s standardized test “has allowed white supremacy to flourish in public schools.” The teachers union is endorsing a bill that would eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement in the state. The bill scheduled for a committee hearing Monday on Beacon Hill would offer […]
David Zweig: At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even […]
Carl Heneghan and Martin Kulldorff: Open scientific discourse is especially critical during a public health crisis such as a pandemic. Academics should be free to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead, without undue or unreasonable interference. It is deeply troubling when scientists try to limit rather than engage in scientific debate. Last week, anonymous posters […]
Robin Hanson Consider a typical firm or other small organization, run via a typical management hierarchy. At the bottom are specialists, who do very particular tasks. At the top are generalists, who supposedly consider it all in the context of a bigger picture. In the middle are people who specialize to some degree, but who […]
Shelley Hepworth: It will be a digital experiment in serialising fiction (“the way [it] used to be published, right at the beginning”) with new sections coming out approximately once a week over the course of about a year, he says. A surprising number of the classics were originally serialised: Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers is […]