Last year, I forced the Washington Post to retract a blizzard of lies about my work. Now, the paper has dispatched another hack, @valeriestrauss, to push a fresh round of distortions, inaccuracies, and flat-out lies.

Let’s debunk them one by one. 🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 8, 2023

Mike Kerrigan:

I shared this observation with my eldest son, Joe, early in his college career, when he told me he’d declared math as a major. Chesterton’s warning wasn’t against using logic, only embracing it to the exclusion of all else. The topic came up again recently over dinner when Joe, now a senior, explained something counterintuitive to his old man.

He said that between integers—say, 1 and 2—there are infinitely many real numbers, like 1.1 and 1.265. Such thinking scared me straight into law school at his age, yet somehow I grasped it now, if only conceptually. “Like the Incarnation,” I offered. An instance of the Creator, while remaining fully God and fully man, entering into his creation: the infinite bounded by the finite.

“I suppose,” Joe answered, checking my catechism against his set theory. Then he said something even trippier. Although whole numbers can be listed out to infinity, the hypothetical list of real numbers is necessarily larger than the hypothetical list of whole numbers. Not all infinities are equal.

Katie Notopoulos:

High school English students who were hoping to use artificial intelligence to write their homework have a new enemy: Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, who created a website that can detect if a piece of writing has been created using the AI tool ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, instructors everywhere are rejoicing. “So many teachers have reached out to me,” said Tian, whose recent tweet about his tool, GPTZero, went viral. “From Switzerland, France, all over the world.”

The latest version of ChatGPT, called GPT3, was released to the public in late November. The tool is able to produce amazingly coherent writing, which has endless possibilities, ranging from wonderful things (like allowing a pool installer with dyslexia to communicate effectively with his customers over email) to more nefarious uses.

Wall Street Journal:

The police and firefighter pension funds are only about 20% funded—among the worst in the country—even though 80% of city property tax dollars go toward pensions. The city’s annual pension payments have risen by $1 billion over the past three years. Perhaps the city would have less crime if it hired more police officers and paid less for pensions.

Blame Democratic politicians who over the decades have rewarded their labor allies with generous retirement benefits but haven’t socked away money to pay for them. Instead, Chicago’s political machine has frittered away taxpayer dollars buying votes. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker last year signed a bill boosting Chicago firefighter pensions, which will cost taxpayers $850 millio

Maya Yang:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an independent artificial intelligence research foundation co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015. Released last November, OpenAI’s chatbot is able to create stunningly human-like responses to a wide range of questions and various writing prompts. ChatGPT is trained on a large sample of text taken from the internet and interacts with users in a dialogue format.

According to OpenAI, the conversation format allowsChatGPT “to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”. Users can request rephrasings, summaries and expansions on the texts that it churns out.

Joanne Jacobs:

In an effort to level the playing field, some companies are asking job applicants to delete from their resumes the names of the colleges or universities they attended, writes David Christopher Kaufman in a New York Post commentary. Degrees are OK, but not whether the applicant went to UCLA, Cal State LA or FlybyNight College.

“A LinkedIn posting by HR&A Advisors, the TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, asked applicants for the $121,668- to $138,432-a-year position to remove ‘all undergraduate and graduate school name references’ from their résumés and only cite the degree itself,” he writes. The policy is part of the company’s plan “to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.”

Racial and economic minorities have had much less “access to fancy schools and pricy education,” writes Kaufman, who is African-American. “But obscuring education histories won’t solve these inequities.”

He took out student loans to attend Brandeis and NYU “because I knew they were investments in my long-term earning potential,” he writes. He not only qualified for a good career, he developed “a strong sense of self-worth and satisfaction.”

Daniel Buck:

Growing in parallel to the broken-windows policing movement were “no excuses” schools, notably within the charter sector. A common turn of phrase in these schools was “sweat the small stuff.” In How the Other Half Learns, Robert Pondiscio details an example of this approach in the Success Academy network of charter schools in New York City. Staff members have lists of small tasks like replacing lightbulbs and wiping up scuff marks. They send students home for mismatched socks. Class time is highly structured, routinized, and disciplined. Student rebellion manifests in a loosened tie, not cursing at a teacher.

The particulars of the no-excuses strategy differ by school, but the overall results have shown promise. According to a 2015 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, charter schools in urban areas provided “significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their [traditional public school] peers.” As Pondiscio observed of the study, “the standouts among this group were KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and other ‘no excuses’ pioneers.”

Intentionally or not, the theory of education that undergirded these schools’ approach to discipline borrowed from the philosophy behind broken-windows policing: Eliminating small instances of disorder — replacing every “broken window” — helps fend off more disruptive disorder. And, as with every sort of approach that “defines deviancy down,” the alternative is a slow slide toward chaos: A child leaves litter in the hallway. It’s not picked up. Soon a student throws something down the corridor, but no teacher bothers to address it. Students begin to wander hallways during class. Their noise grows louder. A student mocks a teacher. Before long, students are berating teachers — and worse.

Btw, if you know censorspeak, this censorship request from White House Digital Strategy is even dirtier than it looks.

“Reduction” is an explicit call to Facebook’s “Remove / Reduce / Inform” censorship menu. Reduction is the category for shadowbanning & algorithmic downrank. pic.twitter.com/a6KfQQh0vq

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) January 8, 2023

My latest .@FDRLST From withholding awards to canceling merit-based admission, Thomas Jefferson high school for Science and Technology is a prime example of the woke left’s systemic racism against Asian Americans in our education system. CC: @AsraNomani https://t.co/NP8BtVXDcz

— Helen Raleigh (@HRaleighspeaks) January 6, 2023

Ben Chapman & Andrea Fuller:

Public schools in the U.S. have lost more than a million students since the start of the pandemic, prompting some districts across the country to close buildings because they don’t have enough pupils or funding to keep them open.

The school board in Jefferson County, Colo., outside Denver, voted in November to close 16 schools. St. Paul, Minn., last summer closed five schools. The Oakland, Calif., school board last February voted to close seven schools after years of declining enrollment and financial strife.

Eugene Volokh:

From today’s Eighth Circuit decision in Brown v. Linder, written by Judge Raymond Gruender and joined by Judges James Loken and Steven Grasz:

James Brown and Marc Linder both work for the State of Iowa. Brown is a urologist at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics; Linder is a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. After Linder criticized Brown’s expert testimony in a case unrelated to this one, Brown sued Linder under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that Linder retaliated against him for engaging in constitutionally protected speech….

According to the complaint, Brown provided expert testimony for a meat-processing company in litigation about the company’s compliance with labor regulations. As a board-certified urologist, Brown was asked to opine on the health consequences of the company’s bathroom-use policy for its employees. Before, during, and after Brown’s testimony, Linder made it known that he disapproved of Brown’s support for the company’s policy.

First, in the days before Brown’s testimony, Linder “registered a verbal complaint” to Karl Kreder, the head of UI’s urology department, about Brown. Along with the complaint, Linder sent a series of emails to Kreder in which he referred to Brown’s “self-confessed money-driven report, deposition, and hearing testimony.” Then, during Brown’s testimony, Linder appeared in the gallery wearing a t-shirt that said “People Over Profits.” Following the testimony, Linder continued to condemn Brown by making comments in local newspaper articles. In one article, published in both the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Linder stated that Brown’s testimony “could have unleashed … terrible consequences for workers of Iowa.” In another, published in UI’s student newspaper, The Daily Iowan, Linder called Brown a “hired gun” who “had never even published a single scholarly article on urinary incontinence frequency/urgency.” These articles attributed Linder’s comments to “Marc Linder, a UI law professor whose focus is on labor law” and “Marc Linder, UI Professor of Law,” respectively.

Daniel Lawler and Juliette Collen

The rate of ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovation is slowing down despite an ever-growing amount of knowledge, according to an analysis released Wednesday of millions of research papers and patents.

While previous research has shown downturns in individual disciplines, the study is the first that “emphatically, convincingly documents this decline of disruptiveness across all major fields of science and technology,” lead author Michael Park told AFP.

Park, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, called disruptive discoveries those that “break away from existing ideas” and “push the whole scientific field into new territory.”

Michael Rosenwald:

She further endeared herself to readers in 2000 after fighting a search warrant from local authorities seeking the purchase history of a drug dealing suspect. The case went to the Colorado Supreme Court, which sided with Ms. Meskis.

colleges prioritized making people feel perfectly safe over everything else and produced a generation afraid to fail, and thus afraid to take risk, and thus on pace to accomplish extremely little

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 7, 2023

Wow. The CDC gives direction to teachers, the unions give direction to teachers, the UN gives directions to teachers… So much direction from outside organizations- no wonder the kids aren’t learning to read. 🤷‍♀️ https://t.co/g4poAIR0NW

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) January 6, 2023

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?

Brianna Lyman:

Rogan said on the podcast episode, which was released Thursday on Spotify. “And the reason why nobody trusts them anymore is because they’re not trustworthy.”

Rogan then said the lack of trust in corporate media has led to the emergence of independent journalists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and others.

“Even if you don’t agree with them, you know they’re not lying,” Rogan said, claiming there is not much truth in mainstream media.

“[Mainstream media] is controlled by these corporate interests that really care more about money than they do about anything else. If you think that, like the way, the Washington Post, The New York Times is really just about getting out the truth, that’s not real. They have an ideology,” he said.

Tyler Cowen:

I have been posing it many questions about Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and the Bible.  Chat does very well in all those areas, and rarely hallucinates.  Is it because those are settled, well-established texts, with none of the drama “still in action”?

I suspect Chat is a boon for the historian and the historian of ideas.  You can ask Chat about obscure Swift pamphlets and it knows more about them than Google does, or Wikipedia does, by a long mile.  Presumably it “reads” them for you?

When I ask about current economists or public intellectuals, however, more errors creep in. Hallucinations become common rather than rare. The most common hallucination I find is that Chat invents co-authorships and conference co-sponsorships like crazy. If you ask it about two living people, and whether they have worked together, the fantasy life version will be rather active, maybe fifty percent of the time?

Max Kozlov:

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature¹.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”

Telltale citations

The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the ‘CD index’, in which values ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most disruptive.

JR Patterson:

I think of Dupea when I remember my childhood violin lessons. I loved music, but something about the methodological lessons rankled me. I was a pupil within the Suzuki method, which values learning by ear, memorization, and parental involvement. Through his program, which is now taught to some 250,000 students in seventy-four countries, founder Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998) sought to change the way musical aptitude was understood. Talent, he suggested, is not inborn but something anyone could develop, given the proper training. His solution was nurture over nature; his evidence was language—an infinitely complex skill learned naturally by almost everyone. If there were a secret to mastering an instrument, it was only “practice and practice of the right things.” The approach was designed to be competitively passive, meaning no grades, no examinations. Instead, students work at their own pace through a series of books filled with music of increasing difficulty, beginning with variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in book one and ending with Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 4 in D Major in book ten.

Harris Rigby:

60 Minutes mentions his work “The Population Bomb” from the 60s which included many predictions that have now been proven completely false. The entire premise of the book is that humanity was going to explode in population and the earth could not sustain the growth.

We were told that the entire planet would die of mass starvation unless the population was reduced dramatically. This was in 1968 when the population was 3.5 billion. That number has risen to nearly 8 billion today. His mass starvation, end of civilization prediction has utterly failed. Starvation IMPROVED as the world became more populated.

He is the king of the climate doom and gloomers, and he’s been nothing but wrong for 50 years.

Leo Lewis:

Those that take the money must embrace the provincial life for a minimum of five years, or refund the state.

Japan’s shrinking and ageing population and the migration of younger people to the capital have disproportionately hit the regions beyond Tokyo, Osaka and a handful of other major cities. 

Many rural towns and villages have been hollowed out, their businesses starved of customers and available staff. The estimated glut of empty homes in Japan — dwellings that often lie deliberately unclaimed by heirs — is expected to reach about 10mn in 2023.

At the same time, Tokyo’s status as the prime magnet for economic activity and migration has grown. In 2021, despite the slowdown caused by the pandemic and the supposed new popularity of remote work, the average price of a new condominium in Tokyo, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute, surpassed the peak set at the height of Japan’s property bubble in 1989.

Alan Kamhi:

This prologue reiterates the case for the narrow view of reading as a solution to the persistently high levels of reading failure that occurs in our schools and provides a brief summary of the 5 response articles. Method: The arguments that support the narrow view of reading are presented and the respondents are introduced. Conclusion: Although the contributors to this clinical forum may have different views, we all are working toward a common goal: improving the literacy levels of children in our schools.

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?

Nader Issa and Sarah Karp

The legislation, approved with bipartisan support in a 45-7 vote, would recognize a Chicago principals and assistant principals union and put them across the table from senior district leadership for contract negotiations. The bill, if signed into law, would not allow a principals’ union to strike.

A statement Friday from Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office said, “The Governor is looking forward to reviewing it now that it is headed to his desk.”

If the bill is signed and Chicago principals are able to move forward with a bargaining unit, they will join districts such as New York City, San Diego and Denver where principals are unionized. Denver principals unionized in 2020. 

Principals have fought for years for the right of union representation, arguing they’re in no-man’s land without a say in broad district policies along with an inability to collectively bargain their working conditions.

The bill would not take away local school councils’ power to hire principals or decide whether or not to renew their contracts.

Troy LaRaviere, a former CPS principal and president of the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association since 2016, has strongly advocated for unionization rights for years. He said the finish line is the governor’s signature, “but we’ve gone further than we’ve come before.” Similar bills have advanced before only to fail in one chamber or the other.

“I’ve put 40 years of my life into this,” LaRaviere said in an interview Friday.

Brave Search team is evaluating ChatGPT too. The big challenges with search are intent inference/focus, and noise/GIGO.

SEO is child’s play compared to adversarial gaming of ChatGPT. GIGO and doesn’t know-math challenges will take more work over time.

FrAuDsense 4 GPT? Not yet.

— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) January 4, 2023

Please see https://t.co/gHzMqBTFEv. Beyond hand-coded bias, these systems will be trained by hostiles and even n00bs who play an adversarial game from outputs back to inputs. This game never ends.

Summarizing good but shallow summaries do not replace deep quality search results.

— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) January 4, 2023

Chris Rickert:

Citing an exodus of core-class teachers, Madison charter school One City Schools told parents of about 60 students Thursday that it would shut down its first ninth- and 10th-grade classes after only one semester.

The school’s vice president of external relations, Gail Wiseman, said the school lost five teachers since the beginning of the school year and had to make the “really difficult decision” to close the grades effective Jan. 20, or the last day of the semester.

Madison School District Superintendent Carlton Jenkins was at the Thursday meeting and pledged the district’s assistance in transitioning students to Madison schools, Wiseman said, but One City has also been in touch with officials from the Sun Prairie, Middleton and Verona school districts to serve students who live in those districts.

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?

Martin Austermuhle:

The 13-member board that oversees the county school system has been embroiled in controversy in recent years, with Chair Juanita Miller and various board members trading accusations related to contracts and violations of board policies. An independent audit last year found problems on both sides, while separately the State Board of Education requested Miller’s removal from officeover allegations of misconduct. (Following that request, County Executive Angela Alsobrooks asked that Miller step aside.) Miller opted instead for a state disciplinary hearing, which concluded late last year.

A person who picked up the phone at the school board’s office said the body would have no comment on Goldson’s retirement announcement.

Goldson led Prince George’s County Public Schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, and requiring masking by staff and students longer than any other jurisdiction in Maryland. (The county was among the state’s hardest-hit by the virus.) Early in the pandemic’s shift to virtual learning, she published an op-ed in The Washington Post urging federal action to help students get online more easily. (More than half of the students in Prince George’s County Public Schools qualify as low-income.)

“Removing systematic barriers to education is a national emergency every day, but now the urgency is as great as ever before. In these trying times, we are already seeing what happens when we don’t answer the call when an alarm is sounded — or wait too long to act,” she wrote.

Goldson also urged Maryland lawmakers and officials to fully fund a sweeping bill to expand free pre-Kindergarten programs, increase pay for teachers, and speed the modernization of schools across the state.

Ben Chapman

Students have accused a university of “greenwashing” after it spent almost £24,000 on a life-size statue of Greta Thunberg.

Winchester University has been accused of ignoring its commitment to the environment by protesters.

They have called for beef to be taken off the canteen menu, as well as cheaper vegan options and buildings to be made more energy efficient as opposed to “wasting money on meaningless statues”.

Student union president Megan Ball criticised the decision to erect the statue when it was unveiled in 2021, saying it showed that cuts and students’ mental health were not prioritised enough by Winchester.

Locals have also been left shocked by the move, due to the Swedish activist having no connection with the Hampshire city.

Nader Issa

The student attended Northside College Prep, a selective enrollment school on Chicago’s Northwest Side, from 2019 until this past December, according to a report released Thursday by the CPS inspector general’s office.

Investigators found the student and her father violated the district’s residency rules by reporting that they lived in the basement of his cousin’s home in Chicago when the girl actually lived with her mother in suburban Lincolnwood, the report said.

Children who live outside Chicago are required to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year in non-resident tuition to attend the city’s taxpayer-funded schools. In this case, that added up to $56,337.13 for three school years and one semester.

“We have to look at these cases because every seat that is taken by a student who doesn’t reside in the district means that a student who does reside in the city of Chicago is deprived of the opportunity to go to one of these schools,” Inspector General Will Fletcher said in an interview.

“They’re highly competitive. And parents and families fight like hell to get their kids into some of these schools.”

Aaron Sibarium

Asking an Asian person for math help is a microaggression. Reverse racism does not exist. Men can get pregnant.

Those are just a few of the lessons imparted to government workers in diversity trainings and presentations in 2021, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The materials, summarized in a December 30 editorial, show how once-fringe ideas have saturated the federal bureaucracy, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to NASA and the military.

One NASA training states that efforts to be colorblind “actually limit us.” Another identifies the words “America is a melting pot” and “don’t you want a family?” as “microaggressions,” along with “asking an Asian person to help with a math or science problem.” A third lists “perfectionism” and “data is king” as examples of “common leadership mistakes.”

“Value and center lived experience,” the presentation says. “Do not demand data in order to accept a person’s individual perspective or to utilize that perspective in decision-making.”

Wisconsin’s DPI has finally updated it’s finance data to include the 2020-21 school year. That we are spending nearly $18,000 per student in Milwaukee to get proficiency rates of less than 20% should outrage every taxpayer. pic.twitter.com/SfldXXZ1tr

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) January 4, 2023

Top 10 most well-funded pension systems in 2020:
1) Wisconsin
2) South Dakota
3) Tennessee
4) Utah
5) Washington
6) Nebraska
7) Idaho
8) North Carolina
9) New York
10) Delaware

See what they’re doing right, your state’s data, and more: https://t.co/G9BteFBzvE pic.twitter.com/QcWOewwXjE

— Pew States (@PewStates) January 2, 2023

George Santos lied about everything, so Dems are demanding he step aside. So here’s a list of things that Joe Biden has lied about regarding his personal story throughout his career, which apparently liberals are completely okay with: 🧵

— Prof Zenkus (@anthonyzenkus) December 27, 2022

On CBS "60 Minutes," biologist Paul Ehrlich claimed global warming would result in mass famine

But archival footage shows Ehrlich claimed global *cooling* would result in famine in the 1970s

His goal has always been to shut down the oil & gas industryhttps://t.co/38w4FrpzRF

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) January 3, 2023

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 School for Science and Technology not only for its failure to timely notify students of a commendation they received in a scholarship competition, but also the school’s recently overhauled admissions policies.

The public high school commonly known as TJ is located in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax County and regularly ranks as one of the best in the country. Admission to the school is highly competitive, and parents map out strategies to gain entry for their children years in advance.

A majority of students are Asian American and for many years African American and Hispanic students have been woefully underrepresented. In 2020, the Fairfax County School Board dramatically overhauled the admissions process, scrapping a high-stakes standardized test and setting aside a certain number of seats on a geographic basis.

The changes prompted claims of discrimination against Asian Americans who had fared well under the old system, and a federal lawsuit challenging the new procedures is going through the appeals process.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron.

MEMO: All state university & college systems in Florida have been required to report expenditures and resources utilized for campus activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/E4Z4zLuJgC

— Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) January 4, 2023

Self styled siren:

And by “immediate aftermath,” I mean from Monday, March 28, 1973, until about February 1974. In addition to what could be found on the internet, Professor Thomas Doherty of Brandeis University graciously offered to access the relevant issues of The Hollywood Reporter, which are not online. Nothing about Wayne. THR, then staunchly right-wing, ran an editorial by Tichi Wilkerson Miles, scolding Brando. There was also a roundup of quotations from various figures. In the approving camp was Alfred Ruddy, Godfather producer; opting for the diplomatic route of “well, you know, artists” was the legendary Robert Evans of Paramount; disapproving, not of Littlefeather but Brando, were Academy president Daniel Taradesh, Michael Caine, and Charlton Heston. And at the end of the THR roundup, a brief interview with Littlefeather herself, with a truly lovely vignette: “She noted that ‘a very nice man,’ Eddie Albert, and his son Edward Albert, congratulated her on her remarks and said they supported what she did.” 

No word from John Wayne. His response to the whole affair didn’t come until Dec. 30, 1973, in an interview in the New York Times: 

What about that other big kid —Marlon Brando? Does Duke—an Academy Award winner for “True Grit”—look upon Brando’s nixing of his Oscar for “The Godfather” as a mature action, or mere kid stuff?

“You’re going to take this out of context, aren’t you?” Duke squints, and then breaks into a who-gives-a-damn grin. “I think it was sad that Brando did what he did. If he had something to say, he should have appeared that night and stated his views instead of taking some little unknown girl and dressing her up in an Indian outfit.”

When does the Wayne story start showing up? Leaping ahead a bit, there is a 1988 interview with Marty Pasetta, the director of the Oscar show from 1972 to 1988, a stretch of time that in retrospect looks like the Oscar show’s Golden Age. Of that night in 1973, Pasetta told Ivor Davis:

“We had a fight is what we had,” recalls the silver-haired Oscar veteran… “John Wayne wanted to go out there and physically yank her off the stage. It took six men to hold him back.”

Bingo! Right?

Well, hold the phone. There are significant problems with accepting Pasetta’s 1988 recollection at face value (and that is why I am calling Snopes sloppy).

Michael Lilley:

At long last, and only after a great deal of public outcry, Gov. Murphy’s Department of Education finally released the full dataset from last spring’s state tests.  This means that we now know the district-level results and community leaders, school administrators and parents know where and how much remediation is needed — and there is a lot of remediation needed.  Why it took until December to do so remains unanswered, but Murphy’s desire to bury the horrible results offers a highly believable explanation.  A new study shows that New Jersey and its children will suffer the devastating consequences far into the future.

Recall that Murphy allowed for extended school closures in many of New Jersey’s largest school districts, including Newark, Jersey City and Montclair, just as the teachers unions wanted.  Now that the test results are out, we know that New Jersey students — particularly minority students — suffered immense learning losses because of these extended closures.  And new research indicates that unless these losses are remediated swiftly and decisively, they will negatively affect these students for the rest of their lives.

A recent study by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, “The Economic Costs of the Pandemic,” looked the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP – known as “the nation’s report card”) and determined that in 8th-grade math, New Jersey students “had greater learning losses than the nation as a whole.” The chart below shows just how much greater.

I’ll give $1000 in BTC for the best 140 second film about Satoshi Nakamoto using AI.

Submit your vid in the replies. Best video wins. 1/31/23 midnight PDT submission date.

— patrickwstanley.btc (@PatrickWStanley) January 3, 2023

Baker A. Mitchell and Robert P. Spencer:

The Fourth Circuit’s finding appears to have been based on little more than the convention of calling charters “public charter schools” and their being mostly funded by public sources. But hundreds of American cities contract municipal services out to private companies, which generally aren’t considered state actors. The Supreme Court rejected state-action claims against an investor-owned public utility in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974) and an operator of a public-access TV channel in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019). If these aren’t state actors, surely neither are North Carolina’s charter schools, which the law promises freedom from government control.

Far more is at stake than CDS’s school-uniform policy, which was designed by parents of our students. The ruling comes at a time when the charter-school movement is growing. Oklahoma’s attorney general recently issued a legal opinion stating that religious organizations must be allowed to operate charter schools in the Sooner State. A key aspect of the opinion was a finding that charter schools are not state actors and, therefore, the Constitution’s Establishment Clause doesn’t prohibit the inculcation of religious values, as it does in government-run schools. In Carson v. Makin (2022), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state voucher program couldn’t discriminate against religious schools.

Dave Huber:

‘Affirming experiences and produce equal outcomes for every student, without exception’

Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools reportedly paid almost half a million dollars to a firm whose “Equity Imperative” is that all students’ academic performance result in equal outcomes.

Documents obtained by Asra Nomani show the district paid $455,000 to Oakland, California’s Performance Fact to “analyze student data to identify trends and recommendations in support of the development of strategic goals,” among (many) other things.

It also “facilitated” school board “work sessions/retreats” which allegedly were “focused on the development of the [district] strategic plan.”

From bondage to spiritual faith
From spiritual faith to great courage
From courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to selfishness
From selfishness to complacency
From complacency to apathy
From apathy to dependence
From dependence back into bondage pic.twitter.com/GgOzD1UGgu

— Balaji (@balajis) January 4, 2023

Scott Girard:

A Verona Area School District principal and former Madison Metropolitan School District educator died Tuesday morning after she was hit by a car while walking in Fitchburg.

Beth Steffen, 56, was the interim principal at Badger Ridge Middle School in Verona for the 2022-23 school year. She was hired to that role after previously working as a language, literacy and equity specialist at the school, according to the Verona Press.

“The Verona Area School District experienced a deep loss today and our hearts are beyond broken,” VASD public information officer Marcie Pfeifer-Soderbloom wrote in an emailed statement. “We extend our deepest condolences to Beth’s family and all Badger Ridge Middle School students, staff, and families.

“Beth was a beloved member of the Verona Area School District community. Staff from around the district will be available to support staff and students with grief counseling, circles of support, and other supports as needed.”

Tuesday was the second day of school after winter break for students and staff in Verona.

Prior to her role in Verona, Steffen was the principal of Edgewood High School beginning in 2018. For the 17 years preceding that switch, she worked in MMSD in a variety of roles.

Kate Grumke:

Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education officials are hoping a push toward research-backed literacy instruction will help.

The department is rolling out a big, statewide effort to put teachers through an intensive professional development program on the science of reading for all teachers, called LETRS. It’s the same course Victory Academy teacher Allison Feldmann is in the middle of.

The training is a time commitment for busy teachers; it can take more than 160 hours to complete over the course of two years. The state has funding for 15,000 kindergarten through fifth grade teachers to go through this training. So far, about 9,000 have at least started it.

On top of that, lawmakers enacted a series of reading instruction changes last session that are already in effect. One makes components of the science of reading a required topic for teachers to learn in college or other training institutions. Another says schools must offer an evidence-based reading program for elementary students.

Another law, which took effect this week, requires new reading testing for kindergarten through third grade at the beginning and end of the school year, to identify students who are behind or at risk for dyslexia. Those students’ parents will then be notified so the struggling students can be given intensive reading instruction.

Altogether, the laws and initiatives represent a big investment of time and money in the science of reading in Missouri.

Jeremy Tate:

An astonishing thing is happening at traditional, faith-based colleges. While national college enrollment has decreased by 13 percent over the last decade, these institutions have demonstrated that it is possible to emerge from COVID, economic recession, and a smaller national pool of applicants with record-breaking enrollment. 

Take Thomas Aquinas College. When the school opened its doors in California a half-century ago, a handful of students were willing to take a chance on a novel curriculum that ditched textbooks and lectures in favor of student-led discussions of humanity’s greatest works. Far from sharing in the troubles of others, Thomas Aquinas College just celebrated the first graduating classat a brand new campus in Massachusetts. Expanding to New England helped double the school’s capacity without jeopardizing its low student-to-teacher ratio.

Benedictine College in Kansas likewise offers a Great Books program, and, thanks to the administration’s focused drive to return to the basics, the college’s enrollment doubled between 2004 and 2022. Furthermore, graduation rates jumped 28 percent as motivated students hungered for the challenge of the more rigorous and rewarding curriculum.

Michigan’s Hillsdale College avoided the statewide decline in undergraduate enrollment—among the worst in the nation—with applications climbing 53 percent. That gave the classically minded school flexibility to become more selective than it has ever been with admissions. 

Flexing the strength of its classical core curriculum, the University of Dallas welcomed the second largest incoming class in its sixty-six-year history, while Florida’s Ave Maria University boasts an enrollment up by half thanks to its dedication to eternal values. 

This is just a sampling of institutions that have embraced a curriculum rooted in Western tradition—and the faith—only to discover their programs have become more relevant, not less so, to a younger generation. It turns out that chasing educational fads and emphasizing the political themes of the day doesn’t much impress modern audiences. To the contrary, a rising number of students today are drawn to schools that emphasize tradition and faith.

Jeremy Horpedahl

Millennials don’t yet have a year of overlap with Boomers, but they are tracking Gen X almost exactly. There is no reason they won’t continue to track Gen X, and therefore exceed Boomers as well when they are in their late 40s (which will happen in about 2037 for Millennials).

My prediction is that by the time Millennials are in their late 40s, they will even surpass Gen X in wealth. Why? The reason is counterintuitive: student debt.

Huh? Isn’t student debt what is holding Millennials back? In some sense, yes. But in the long run, no. Right now, many Millennials (and some Gen Xers!) hold a lot of student debt. That goes on the liabilities side of the balance sheet. But there is no corresponding asset showing up the balance sheet, but there is an asset: their human capital! Over their lifetime, that human capital will give them even greater earning potential in later life. Much like Gen X basically tracked Boomers until their mid-40s, until their student loans were paid off, and their degrees (and graduate degrees!) really started to pay off in the labor market.

So right now, student debt is doing two things: overstating liabilities and understating assets. To be sure, this may cause some short term problems: perhaps it is harder to buy a house, or at the very least to save for a down payment on a house. This could (I repeat could) lower Millennial wealth in the long run. But keep in mind that Gen X faced this same headwind, though to a lesser degree than Millennials.

Nalert:

Professor George has put up one of the greatest tweets ever. Today’s American universities are strongly religious places with many, many rituals.

Leslie Eastman:

The movement’s volunteers are asking Oregon Senate president nominee Rob Wagner to allow a hearing on their bill in January. The bill would invite Idaho to begin talks with Oregon on the potential of moving the border. A January 2022 SurveyUSA poll showed that 68% of northwestern Oregon voters thought that the Oregon Legislature should hold hearings on the idea, and only 20% opposed.

The poll also found that a mere three percent of such voters think keeping eastern and southern Oregon in the state is worth the cost. The movement estimates the cost at $500 per northwestern Oregonian wage earner annually.

Lucas Robinson:

A federal judge has dismissed Edgewood High School’s lawsuit against the city of Madison over the city’s refusal to allow the installation of lights at the school’s athletic field.

Edgewood did not prove that the city discriminated against the school on religious grounds in the multiyear battle over lights that would allow the school to host nighttime football games, as the school had alleged, U.S. District Judge William Conley said in a 28-page ruling issued late Friday.

In 2021, the City Council voted against an appeal by the private Catholic school to reverse the denial of a permit to install four light poles on the field.

Edgewood argued in court that city approval of stadium lights at UW-Madison’s tennis stadium and at Madison Memorial High School showed the city was treating secular institutions better than their religious counterparts.

But Memorial was merely replacing its light poles and UW’s stadium was subject to different zoning rules and is not near a residential area, unlike Edgewood, Conley said.

“Edgewood has not shown that either of its proposed comparators were actually treated better under the same approval process as Edgewood, as their lighting applications were submitted at different (times), under entirely different rules and markedly different circumstances,” Conley said.

Edgewood also did not show that it was burdened by having to play nighttime football games at a field off campus, the judge said. The religious school, like Madison East High School, often plays games at Breese Stevens Field.

Jason Dougal:

Not one of these districts is growing. Some of them have lost more than 10 percent of their students since the pandemic started. Enrollment losses will be an enormous, ongoing challenge for many school systems across the U.S. post-pandemic.

“What we’re trying to do is just stop the bleeding,” said Jerry Almendarez, the superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District, south of Los Angeles.

It’s important to understand why enrollment loss is such a critical issue for these leaders. With every student who walks out the door, school funding leaves with them. The fixed costs of running their schools do not decrease proportionately.

This makes it difficult for these leaders to provide more opportunities, rigor and support for students at the precise time students need them the most. If we can’t reverse enrollment losses, the cost of running a school will become untenable. Schools will be forced to close or cut corners on quality; inequality will soar as parents with means find and fund alternatives to public schools — paying private school tuition or home schooling — while families who already struggle to get access to a quality school will be stuck in a flailing public education system.

If access and quality are compromised, it will risk our democratic foundations.

There are many reasons to see this as a real danger. Public school enrollment fell nearly 3 percent after the pandemic hit. Some children switched to private schools. Others started home schooling, which ballooned by 35 percent from before the pandemic in the 18 states that shared recent homeschooling data.

David Blaska:

1) Amend the Wisconsin Constitution to place the Department of Public Instruction in the governor’s appointive cabinet rather than as an elected office. Education should sit at the same table with the governor as transportation, natural resources, prisons, public health, and revenue.

2) Revise the criminal code to automatically charge custodial parents or guardians with a crime equivalent to the offense for which their minor child is being adjudicated.

3) Ease legal requirements for the state to seize chronic juvenile delinquents (remember that term?) and commit them to a secure residential educational facility. Build out the old Oscar Mayer plant on Madison’s NE side for that purpose. Include agriculture, food preparation, and the trades with access to nearby MATC.

4) Abolish the Police Civilian Oversight Board and furlough its overpaid director.

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?

Eric Bangeman

An appeals court has revived a lawsuit that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity on YouTube of children under 13. In an opinion released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws.

Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law.

Corrinne Hess:

A Wisconsin Policy Forum report estimated state and local governments collected at least $19.9 billion in pandemic-related funds.

“The federal government took on unemployment costs, insurance spending, that otherwise the state might have felt the need to help out with,” Stein said. “The federal government helped, to an unbelievable degree, on both the revenue side in terms of stimulating the economy and on the cost side with lowering existing costs and keeping the state from having to spend money.”

POLITICS
Budget surplus pushes Wisconsin’s financial reserves to an all-time high. But how did we get here?
Corrinne Hess
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

3:36
3:38

Gov. Tony Evers delivers his “state of the state” address Feb. 15 at the Capitol in Madison. Wisconsin has a budget surplus projected to hit $6.6 billion for 2022-23.
Wisconsin is sitting on a pile of cash.

The state government has a budget surplus projected to hit $6.6 billion for 2022-23. That does not include the roughly $1.734 billion currently in the state’s rainy day fund, according to the Department of Administration.

And the future looks even brighter in future years with state general fund balances for 2023-24 estimated to be $8.4 billion and growing to $9.7 billion at the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year.

Governor Tony Evers, who was elected to his second term on Nov. 8, called the “unprecedented surplus” an opportunity to make “critical investments in Wisconsinites and the future of our state.”

Republican Legislative leaders have said they don’t want Evers to see the additional money as a “blank check” for state departments as he crafts his budget. Instead, they hope to implement tax cuts, invest in K12 schools, roads and local governments.

But how has Wisconsin amassed such a large fiscal cushion?

How did Wisconsin get the budget surplus?

While the governor’s office and the state legislative branch would like to take credit for prudent financial planning it’s the federal government that helped reduce state spending and boosted state revenues by enacting pandemic relief bills in 2020 and 2021.

Those bills – including the American Rescue Plan, The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act – bolstered the state’s economy, said Jason Stein, research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

A Wisconsin Policy Forum report estimated state and local governments collected at least $19.9 billion in pandemic-related funds.

“The federal government took on unemployment costs, insurance spending, that otherwise the state might have felt the need to help out with,” Stein said. “The federal government helped, to an unbelievable degree, on both the revenue side in terms of stimulating the economy and on the cost side with lowering existing costs and keeping the state from having to spend money.”

Besides the federal stimulus money, Wisconsin is projecting state tax revenue increases in fiscal 2022-23 based on current state and federal tax laws:

$744.2 million in state tax revenue increases in fiscal year 2022-23. That’s a 3.6% increase over the previous fiscal year, for a total revenue estimate of $21.293 billion.
$323.9 million in state tax revenue increase in fiscal year 2023-24; a 1.5% increase for a total revenue estimate of $21.617 billion.
$855.1 million in state tax revenue increase in fiscal year 2024-25; a 4% increase for a total revenue estimate of $22.472 billion.

Related: US Debt Clock

Scott Atlas:

On Nov. 19, 2020, the Stanford Faculty Senate condemned my work as an adviser to President Trump, charging that I “promoted a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science.” Yet virtually every scientific point I made exactly matched those of Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis, both Stanford professors of medicine, including the risk for children, spread from children, focused protection, postinfection immunity, masks, and the harm from school closures and lockdowns. The difference? I alone stood on the podium, speaking to the press and the public, serving my country next to a Republican president the Stanford faculty reviled.

Many American universities, particularly “elite” schools, now explicitly emphasize ideology even in the hard sciences. In a November report, the National Association of Scholars examined the proliferation of “diversity, equity and inclusion” language on the websites of Ivy League schools’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments. Stanford may now be the American university most hostile to free speech, with its recently exposed “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”—a list of approved and disapproved words that exceeds anything anticipated by George Orwell. After being publicly ridiculed, the school moved quickly to hide the list behind a university login.

William Biagini:

At a mathematics education conference previously reported by Campus Reform in which numerous scholars pushed for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), one speaker stood out by arguing that boys in particular are at a disadvantage in numerous ways in American K-12 education.

Campus Reform obtained exclusive audio of this presentation.

The conference was hosted at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel by the Psychology of Mathematics Education of North America (PME-NA).  

The speaker in question referenced the recent book “Of Boys and Men” by Richard Reeves—a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Quoting the book, the speaker said that “boys are falling behind in school because the educational system is structured in ways that puts them at a disadvantage.” 

In regards to gender, the speaker posed the question, “Given current evidence, should we not also reassure boys that they too belong [in STEM-related fields]?” 

[RELATED: CA Community Colleges proposing minimum diversity, equity standards for faculty] 

However, the speaker’s comments on boys’ underperformance and struggles in education prompted a public apology email from PME-NA. The email, written by Dr. Alyson E. Lischka of Middle Tennessee State University, was also obtained by Campus Reform.

Martin Center:

Each January, the staff of the Martin Center share our higher-ed-reform dreams for the coming year. Will all of our wishes come true? Probably not. Nevertheless, we offer them here in a spirit of optimism, for the reader’s enjoyment and edification.

Commit to Institutional Neutrality … and Handle Enrollment Declines Wisely

My first hope for 2023 is for more universities to commit to the principle of institutional neutrality by adopting the Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. The report became a guiding policy document at the University of Chicago in 1967, “affirm[ing] the University’s commitment to the academic freedom of faculty and students in the face of suppression from internal and/or external entities while also insisting on institutional neutrality on political and social issues.”

Institutional neutrality safeguards dissenting opinions.

Jill Tucker:

More than 50 days after the November election and days before winners take office, Alameda County election officials announced that a programming error led to a miscount across all ranked-choice contests, including a race in which an Oakland school board candidate was wrongly declared the winner.

The revelation came well after the county certified the results and raised questions not only about what happens next, but whether the mistake could further erode faith in fair elections.

Ben Hunt

We’ve been early and we’ve been right about everything connected with Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX/Alameda fraud, the evolution of the crypto market into a perversion of traditional markets, and Wall Street and Washington’s co-opting of Bitcoin.

John McDonald:

Key takeaways

• The nation’s colleges and universities produce a wealth of data from research, administrative operations and other sources.
• A survey of higher ed administrators found that the institutions face major challenges in capturing that data and in making data from various sources work together.
• The study’s authors contend that universities have been slower than organizations in other economic sectors to create senior-level positions focused on data quality, strategy, governance and privacy matters.

Universities are literally awash in data. From administrative data offering information about students, faculty and staff, to research data on professors’ scholarly activities and even telemetric signals — the functional administrative data gathered remotely from wireless networks, security cameras and sensors in the course of daily operations — that data can be an invaluable resource. 

But a new study by researchers at UCLA and the MIT Press, published Dec. 23 in the journal Science, finds that universities face significant challenges in capturing such data, and that they severely lag the private sector and government entities in using data to solve challenges and inform strategic planning.

“This new research shines a bright light on the ways in which universities are data rich and data poor — and sometimes intentionally data blind,” said Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and one of the study’s authors. “They are struggling to capture and exploit the true value of their data resources and reluctant to initiate the conversations necessary to build consensus for data governance.”

M. Keith Chen and Judith A. Chevalier

Recent literature finds that women earn significantly lower returns to professional degrees. Does this render these degrees poor investments for women? We compare physicians to physician assistants, a similar profession with lower wages and training costs, mitigating some selection issues. The median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. While there is a wage gap, our result occurs primarily because most female physicians do not work enough hours to rationalize medical school whereas most men do. We discuss robustness issues and nonwage returns to education that may rationalize these investments by women.

Douglas Towne

Election craziness, it seems, is written into Arizona’s DNA. A mere four years after statehood in 1912, long before the days of Cyber Ninjas and QAnon shamans , voters awoke to a nightmare scenario. “Two Claimants Swear in as Governor of Arizona,” read the headline in what was then called The Arizona Republican. “Hints of fracas and riots were whispered about.”

James Bovard:

The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations.  The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King, Jr., and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the rival group were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the U.S. headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego…. it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”

David Knox

Sir Angus Deaton from Princeton University and Cambridge University’s Richard Henderson visited the classrooms at Hawick High School.

They met pupils and teachers to discuss their academic journeys.

Head teacher Vicky Porteous said: “For me, meeting my favourite scientists is an absolute thrill.”

Both men were born in Edinburgh but moved to the Borders during their childhoods, attending primary in Newtown St Boswells and Newcastleton, before going to Hawick High.

Sir Angus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work in economic sciences.

The NSA maintained a $250m/year “SIGINT Enabling Project” that inserted vulnerabilities into US cryptographic technology, and we only learned about it because an IT contractor downloaded all their PowerPoint decks. https://t.co/wSqCdX8CnI

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) December 29, 2022

Yesterday, Barron’s reported that Elon Musk got a margin call.

After being corrected, they quietly changed the headline to: pic.twitter.com/Lsebnm6Wgr

— Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) December 30, 2022

Shelby Kearns:

Higher Ed Dive recently shared a report from the Urban Institute on graduate degrees’ return on investment (ROI). The results are not good for the students. 

Data from the Urban Institute shows that “[b]orrowers are taking on more debt to complete their graduate degrees,” and “the typical earnings for workers with graduate degrees have held steady after increasing in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” according to Higher Ed Dive. 

“Undergraduate borrowers didn’t see the same level of increases in their debt loads as graduate students,” Higher Ed Dive reported. “These differences may be chalked up to differing federal student loan policies for undergraduate and graduate students.”

The Urban Institute report said that, adjusted for inflation, “the median debt among borrowers completing master’s degrees nearly doubled” from 2000 to 2016, and “increases for borrowers obtaining professional doctoral degrees or research doctoral degrees roughly doubled.”

Peter Vickers

When do we have a scientific fact? Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to this question. But despite its obvious importance, humanity lacks a good answer. The renowned biologist Ernst Mayr was one scientist—probably one of many—frustrated by the fact that philosophers of science haven’t developed an account of the transition from theory to fact*. And recently an IPCC Special Report author explicitly asked, “Where is the boundary between ‘established fact’ and ‘very high confidence’?”. The truth is, nobody really knows.

And it matters. We want governments to base policies on scientific facts, insofar as that is possible. And the IPCC Report writer needs to know whether they are allowed to simply state something, or if they need to include a clause in brackets at the end of their statement: “(very high confidence)”. Moreover, in a world where we have no account of “scientific facts,” it is no wonder we encounter so much scepticism regarding even the most secure scientific claims.

Howard Wasserman:

At his Substack page, Josh Barro has a useful intervention into the relationship between Twitter and journalism. As a former journalist–very briefly, but it was a formative experience–with an abiding interest in the press and its role both in the First Amendment and in our social, legal, and political firmament, I found it to be a good one-stop source of reasons why the addictive relationship between legacy press institutions and social media has been so damaging. I say so somewhat sympathetically, since it is clear that the managers of those institutions hoped they would help stave off decline in an industry facing so much competition from online sources and so much apathy from readers. But only somewhat sympathetically, since it has long become clear both that this is a dubious hope and that the strategy has maimed the patient to a degree that calls into question the point of keeping it alive. Barro’s bottom line is that rather than demand that journalists recently thrown off Twitter (quite wrongly, although I think Taylor Lorenz is a one-person wrecking crew for the quality of any serious newspaper she has worked at) be reinstated, newsroom managers should treat the event as “an opening for [them] to do what they ought to have done long ago: Order their employees to drop their Twitter addictions, stop sharing their pithy opinions in an effort to build a personal brand, and get back to work.” Some arguments he offers, mixed with a few observations:

“Twitter’s usefulness for reporting has sometimes turned into a dependency.” Quite right. It is astounding the number of stories in the Times–the serious paper I read most frequently, despite its evident flaws–that report on Twitter controversies, rely on tweets for color and quotes, or use Twitter as their sole or near-sole fund of sources. As he notes, using social media as a databank for sources and quotes is “also biasing and distorting — the loudest voices on Twitter within a given field, such as medicine, often aren’t representative of broad opinion within the field.” And it fosters incredible laziness. Former American Lawyer editor Steven Brill, a great journalist in his own right, used to instruct his reporters, when working on a piece about a lawyer at a firm who declined to cooperate with a story or profile, to pick up the phone and call every single person at that firm until they found people willing to talk. When Woodward and Bernstein received a list of employees of CREEP, they visited every person on that list, in person and often multiple times. That’s called “shoe-leather reporting”–talking to numerous people, reading innumerable documents, and doing it all over again. Trawling or cherry-picking social media is no substitute for it. But it is easy–and, not insignificantly for newspapers, fast and cheap. 

Alan Borsuk:

Here are thumbnail sketches of issues that will be fueling action in the hives:  

Revenue caps. Since the mid-1990s, the state has imposed caps on the general spending by school districts. Increases in the caps have been minimal in the last dozen years. Two years ago, Republican majorities in the legislature did not increase the caps at all, saying federal pandemic aid made that unnecessary. The end of the pandemic money is in sight and pressures on schools statewide have grown. So what will become of the revenue cap for the next two years?  

Private and charter schools. Under Wisconsin’s several programs for charter schools and private schools that enroll students using vouchers, per-student annual payments run from about $8,400 to $9,100. Public schools get a lot more per student. Expect a strong push from voucher and charter advocates to narrow the gaps. And Republicans remain committed to making private school vouchers more widely available across the state, which Democrats oppose.   

Special education. The state pays local schools about 30% of the costs involved with students with special needs. It’s one of the lowest rates in the nation. There has been advocacy – even bipartisan sometimes – to raise that. The issue will come up again, although the prospects for major change don’t appear to be good.  

Jennifer Kabbany

A judge recently ruled that a lawsuit may proceed against Yale University that challenges administrators’ decision to yank a pathway for alumni to gain leadership roles at the Ivy League institution.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge John Burns Farley ruled Dec. 15 against completely accepting Yale’s motion to dismiss, stating the plaintiffs, two Yale alumni, appear to have standing to sue as third-party beneficiaries of the institution.

The plaintiffs, Victor Ashe and Donald Glascoff, are working to overturn a May 2021 decision by Yale officials to discontinue a petition pathway that allowed alumni to be elected to the Yale Corporation, its board of trustees.

Ashe, 77, celebrated the ruling as a vital victory in the fight against his alma mater.

“It’s a giant step forward,” Ashe said in a telephone interview. “This will be the first time Yale will have to discuss issues on the merits in a court of law.”

Andy Farrell:

I was recently asked: “Which digital technologies could we get rid of in higher education?”

Some immediately spring to mind, such as the scourge of CCTV cameras and badge access systems, which are turning places of learning into high-security gulags. Or, at the behest of government bureaucrats, our draconian monitoring of student attendance like preschool infants. But these technologies, unwelcome and unnecessary as they are, do not capture the problem – which is that of equity.

Every part of an equitable university is accountable and responsive to its core stakeholders – students and teachers; those without whom the entire institution makes no sense. Within their activities each must be able to teach and learn as a fully human participant, to be genuinely heard, held in mind, have choice, agency, autonomy and equality of opportunity.

Charles W. Calomiris:

According to Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know that ain’t so.” “The Myth of American Inequality,” by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early, quotes that wisdom, then offers 250 pages of analysis proving it.

Before reading the book, you should ask a few questions to test the authors’ hypothesis that misleading government statistics have led many Americans to misperceive the prevalence of poverty, the degree of inequality, and the changes in these measures in recent decades. Has the average standard of living grown substantially since the 1960s? Has inequality shrunk over that period? Did post-1960 redistributive policies reduce the percentage of families living in poverty?

Media commentators and politicians seem to believe that little progress has been made in raising average American living standards since the 1960s; that poverty has not been substantially reduced over the period; that the median household’s standard of living has not increased in recent years and inequality is currently high and rising (“a truth universally acknowledged,” according to the Economist magazine in 2020).

The authors—a former chairman of the Senate banking committee, a professor of economics at Auburn University and a former economist at the Bureau for Labor Statistics—show that these beliefs are false. Average living standards have improved dramatically. Real income of the bottom quintile, the authors write, grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017. The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017. Opportunities created by economic growth, and government-sponsored social programs funded by that growth, produced broadly shared prosperity: 94% of households in 2017 would have been at least as well off as the top quintile in 1967. Bottom-quintile households enjoy the same living standards as middle-quintile households, and on a per capita basis the bottom quintile has a 3% higher income. Top-quintile households receive income equal to roughly four times the bottom (and only 2.2 times the lowest on a per capita basis), not the 16.7 proportion popularly reported.

Dean Mosiman:

For Madison residents in the Madison School District, the total tax bill for the average home assessed at $376,900 is going up about $262, or 3.64%, to $7,468. Last year’s increase of $124 was a 1.76% hike. In 2020, the bill rose 4.3%, or $293.

Those sums reflect tax bills after the school tax credit is applied but before deducting the state lottery credit and another credit for building improvements. This year, the lottery credit declined 8.2% for the average Madison home but was still relatively high at $278.

The city’s $40 vehicle registration fee, also known as a wheel tax, does not app

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?

Adam Barton:

Here’s a quotation from one of Harvard’s many committees. Try to guess the year it was written.

“Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily — Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity … One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.”

This is from the “Committee on Raising the Standard” in 1894. Ever since letter grades at Harvard were established, perhaps as early as 1883 according to school archives, there’s been concern around the way they’re distributed.

There’s still a lot of talk around Harvard’s grade inflation problem today. It’s hardly a surprise to anyone who studies or teaches here that grades have risen over time. But grade inflation is inextricably linked to a worse problem, one that is seldom discussed: grade compression, where GPAs stop increasing and instead stabilize in the 3.8 to 4.0 range.

To understand grade compression, we first need to understand grade inflation. Looking at a graph of student GPAs since 1889 is sort of like looking at a graph of Harvard’s endowment: It only goes up. In 1950, when Harvey Mansfield was but a freshman at Harvard, the average GPA was estimated at 2.55. Now, it’s much closer to 3.80. Keep in mind these numbers are estimated from Crimson surveys that represent only a part of the student body, combined with third-party analyses of Harvard records, so try to focus on the long-term trend rather than specific GPA averages at any point in time.

How bad is grade inflation at Harvard College? If trends keep up, an average student in ten years will have a perfect 4.0. https://t.co/MZ6kQw5Sgv (h/t @SoCalTaxProf) pic.twitter.com/cgGysXfJu7

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) December 27, 2022

Brett Murphy:

Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.

So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.

Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

Jenny Ray:

As an introvert myself, I understand the struggles and challenges that come with networking and building professional relationships. But I also know firsthand the importance of building a strong professional network, especially for introverts.

First, let’s define what it means to be an introvert. An introvert is someone who tends to recharge and energize through solitude and introspection, rather than through social interactions and stimulation. This doesn’t mean that introverts are necessarily shy or anti-social, but rather that social situations can be draining and overwhelming for them.

Now, why is building a strong professional network important for introverts? In today’s competitive job market, it’s not enough to just have a strong resume and skillset. Having a network of connections and relationships can open up new opportunities, provide valuable resources and advice, and help you navigate your career path. It can also help you build your personal brand and reputation within your industry.

Heather Heying:

Last week, I resigned from the Board of the University of Austin (UATX). It was a difficult decision, but a necessary one, and a long time coming.

What follows is, first, my resignation letter, barely edited to obscure personal details. After that, I include some of what I removed from the resignation letter, a little of which will be slightly cryptic for those not in possession of the many hundreds of pages of documents that members of the Board reviewed the previous week.

Wall Street Journal:

Suhag Shukla’s op-ed “Brown University Discriminates Against South Asians” (Dec. 22) is based on a mischaracterization of Brown’s antidiscrimination policy. Brown has added “caste oppression” to its nondiscrimination policy to underscore protections for members of the university community and call attention to a subtle, often misunderstood form of discrimination based on class. The policy has added an explicit reference to caste among other factors, including race, gender, sex, national origin and religion. The policy applies to every member of the Brown community. It does not and never has specified that any element applies specifically to any individual group.

Brown’s previous nondiscrimination policy would have protected people experiencing caste discrimination, but the university felt it was important to elevate this less-publicized form of discrimination and explicitly express a position on caste equity.

Adam Mastroianni

The word boring really stuck with me. Reviewing should be interesting. It should matter whether the paper’s claims turn out to be true or not, and the only reason to review it is that you care about those claims. The fact that we find it boring suggests that part of us, deep down, believes that the paper in front of us doesn’t actually deserve our attention.

Akshat Mahajan:

[W]e *have* truly open, zero moderation platforms (e.g. vixra.org). They have failed to produce the intended effect of better science, for many foundational reasons. 

I agree with Mahajan’s first point: we’ve got all the infrastructure we need, but people aren’t using it to experiment. They just post their PDFs on a website before trying to get them published in a journal, so whatever they produce is still intended to pass peer review. It’s like everyone has a Jeep that can go off-road, and yet they only ever drive on the highway. 

I disagree with Mahajan’s second point: these platforms haven’t failed. If you give everyone a Jeep hoping that they’ll drive it into the wilderness and nobody does, don’t fix the Jeeps; fix the drivers. You need to make them less afraid to leave the highway, convince them that there’s something worth seeing out there, and gas up their tanks.

This is why, as much as I would love to see people try out all the alternative platforms they suggested, I don’t think we’ll revolutionize science by building the perfect website. We have to a) free minds, and b) fund them. I’m working on (a) right now, and I’ve got plans in the works for (b).

Going to do a thread on some WILD admissions by New York Times staff that show how wildly out of touch they are with America, biology, and basically the entire world

Starting off with how they admit they want to erase pregnant women

(1/x) pic.twitter.com/9AikxQ8jxD

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) December 28, 2022

Richard Vedder:

Economists call someone who gets paid more than necessary to produce a good or service a “rent-seeker.”

Arguably the preeminent rent-seeker in higher education, Terry Hartle, announced his retirement recently from his position as chief lobbyist at the American Council of Education (ACE). Terry is a master at the rent-seeking craft, persuasive in cajoling legislators into approving laws that lead to vast numbers of dollars being dropped onto college campuses.

Some of those dollars have allowed academics to do things we otherwise couldn’t have done—to live a better life. When speaking to legislative groups, I often assert, “I want to thank you for letting me rip off taxpayers for dozens of years.” While we are far from unique, many of us in academia get paid at least a bit more than necessary to perform our services.

While we are far from unique, many of us in academia get paid more than necessary to perform our services.

ACE is the largest and most influential group lobbying for America’s colleges and universities. Terry Hartle had a career working for the American Enterprise Institute (we were briefly coworkers there) and the U.S. Senate (where, too, I once worked) before joining ACE in the 1990s. I have always found him bright, persuasive, affable, and a person of integrity. I have testified along with him at congressional hearings.

In these settings, Terry has been extremely effective in convincing Congress to spend more dollars on colleges. The federal government’s role in higher education has grown during his ACE tenure, in my judgment to the detriment not only of long-suffering taxpayers, but probably of higher education itself. The additional federal dollars have generally proven to be inefficiency-inducing if not downright corrupting.

Dirk Lindebaum, Vern Glaser, Christine Moser, and Mehreen Ashraf

Interest in the possibilities afforded by algorithms and big data continues to blossom as early adopters gain benefits from AI systems that automate decisions as varied as making customer recommendations, screening job applicants, detecting fraud, and optimizing logistical routes.1 But when AI applications fail, they can do so quite spectacularly.2

Consider the recent example of Australia’s “robodebt” scandal.3 In 2015, the Australian government established its Income Compliance Program, with the goal of clawing back unemployment and disability benefits that had been made inappropriately to recipients. It set out to identify overpayments by analyzing discrepancies between the annual income that individuals reported and the income assessed by the Australian Tax Office. Previously, the department had used a data-matching technique to identify discrepancies, which government employees subsequently investigated to determine whether the individuals had in fact received benefits to which they were not entitled. Aiming to scale this process to increase reimbursements and cut costs, the government developed a new, automated system that presumed that every discrepancy reflected an overpayment. A notification letter demanding repayment was issued in every case, and the burden of proof was on any individuals who wished to appeal. If someone did not respond to the letter, their case was automatically forwarded to an external debt collector. By 2019, the program was estimated to have identified over 734,000 overpayments worth a total of 2 billion Australian dollars ($1.3 billion U.S.).4

Dirk Lindebaum, Vern Glaser, Christine Moser, and Mehreen Ashraf

Interest in the possibilities afforded by algorithms and big data continues to blossom as early adopters gain benefits from AI systems that automate decisions as varied as making customer recommendations, screening job applicants, detecting fraud, and optimizing logistical routes.1 But when AI applications fail, they can do so quite spectacularly.2

Consider the recent example of Australia’s “robodebt” scandal.3 In 2015, the Australian government established its Income Compliance Program, with the goal of clawing back unemployment and disability benefits that had been made inappropriately to recipients. It set out to identify overpayments by analyzing discrepancies between the annual income that individuals reported and the income assessed by the Australian Tax Office. Previously, the department had used a data-matching technique to identify discrepancies, which government employees subsequently investigated to determine whether the individuals had in fact received benefits to which they were not entitled. Aiming to scale this process to increase reimbursements and cut costs, the government developed a new, automated system that presumed that every discrepancy reflected an overpayment. A notification letter demanding repayment was issued in every case, and the burden of proof was on any individuals who wished to appeal. If someone did not respond to the letter, their case was automatically forwarded to an external debt collector. By 2019, the program was estimated to have identified over 734,000 overpayments worth a total of 2 billion Australian dollars ($1.3 billion U.S.).4

Eugene Volokh:

On Saturday, I e-mailed the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper to ask why this happened, and on Sunday got a response pointing me to this item (which was published Sunday):

The Oracle is Hamline’s independent, student-run newspaper. One of our core tenets, to minimize harm, exists for us to hold ourselves accountable for the way our news affects the lives of individual students, and the Hamline community and student body as a whole. Those in our community have expressed that a letter we published has caused them harm. We have decided, as an editorial board, to take it down.

In no way are any of us on this staff or on the Editorial Board experts about journalism or trauma. We are, however, dedicated to actively supporting, platforming and listening to the experiences and voices of members of our community.

We are a student publication that is here to provide a space to elevate the voices of students. Our work is of no value if at any time our publication is participating in furthering harm to members of our community.

Our website acts as a space to widely share information and as a digital archive. We believe that what we publish is a matter of public record that reflects and includes the viewpoints of our community that creates space for having conversations in the open that would otherwise be left in private. We hope these conversations can lead to transparency and accountability. However, our publication will not participate in conversations where a person must defend their lived experience and trauma as topics of discussion or debate.

Pulitzer Center describes minimizing harm as having “compassion and sensitivity for those who may be adversely affected by news coverage.” We will continue to consider and scrutinize our coverage and angles to elevate the stories of members of our community. It is not a publication’s job to challenge or define sensitive experiences or trauma. If and when situations arise where these stories are shared, it is our responsibility to listen to and carry them in the most supportive, respectful, safe and beneficial way for the story’s stakeholders and our readers.

We have learned and experienced from our first day at Hamline, a liberal arts institution, the importance of seeing things from a nuanced perspective. However, trauma and lived experiences are not open for debate.

NOAA drawing used to claim global warming caused the recent Arctic blast eerily similar to drawing used by media to explain global cooling in 1975.

In the climate hoax, the same phenomenon explains opposite events.https://t.co/i8KGeDOBer pic.twitter.com/XFjJH3ap8y

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) December 28, 2022

New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2022

What @Jack is advocating – and what the NYT op-ed attacks – used to be completely uncontroversial: we don’t want centralized state and corporate control over what can be said on the internet.

But now Dems overwhelmingly favor Big Tech/state censorship and surveillance. Thus: pic.twitter.com/d6JMVtJohf

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2022

Happy almost-2023. Here is a very stupid NYT op-ed on why Signal and privacy are actually bad. https://t.co/9nuVfgLd0R

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) December 28, 2022

187 ways they keep things secret from you

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 28, 2022) https://t.co/GRL3u8Kfph

— Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) December 28, 2022

Vince Kolber:

The issue arises from the way Treasury accounts for future spending that is required by law. It reports two separate figures, “net position” and “social insurance net expenditures,” but it doesn’t add them up into “total obligations,” and thereby deprives lawmakers and taxpayers of a full picture.

Net position is the difference between U.S. government “assets” and “total liabilities.” Importantly, total liabilities include only bonded debt—that is, U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds. Total liabilities were $34.8 trillion at the end of fiscal 2021. The Treasury reported assets at $4.9 trillion. Simple arithmetic brings us to the net position, negative $29.9 trillion.

But this accounting leaves a lot out. Social insurance net expenditures calculates the difference between the expected future liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs over the next 75 years and the income these programs are expected to generate during the same period under current law. The Treasury reported these unfunded liabilities at $71 trillion at the end of fiscal 2021.

That brings us to the alarming milestone. Add the net position of $29.9 trillion to the social insurance net expenditures of $71 trillion, and you find that they topped $100 trillion—the first time they have ever done so.

Government accounting specialists argue that the Treasury is right to keep these categories separate. They contend that social-insurance obligations aren’t truly debt because Congress has the power to curtail them by changing the law. But lawmakers have failed to do so for nearly 40 years and, until they do, the unfunded liability exists and is a present economic danger. By Treasury’s accounting, the amount these programs’ costs are expected to exceed their revenue is more than twice the net position—and the latter figure alone is what is commonly known as the national debt.

Chris Bray:

And on and on and on. Twitter has been constantly flooded with requests from at least dozens of separate federal entities, all of them needy and pushy and consuming the company’s time and energy: CENTCOM wants a meeting this week and CDC wants a meeting this week and NIH wants a meeting this week and the FBI wants a meeting this week and the White House wants a meeting this week and DHS wants a meeting this week and DOD wants a meeting this week even though CENTCOM already has one, and several members of Congress have some concerns they want the senior team to address this week, and….

Now: Twitter is a global platform. I would bet a kidney that there’s a Twitter Files equivalent for the Ottawa Police Department during the Freedom Convoy, and an RCMP file, and a Trudeau government file, and that Chrystia Freeland had some thoughts to share about some tweets she didn’t like. I would bet the other kidney that Twitter has equivalent files, in dozens of languages, from multiple government agencies in Iran and New Zealand and Australia and the Netherlands and the UK and Brazil and on and on an on.

In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches.

Christiane Gruber:

The “Islamophobic incident” catalyzed plenty of administrative commentary and media coverage at the university. Among others, it formed the subject of a second Oracle article, which noted that a faculty member had included in their global survey of art history a session on Islamic art, which offered an optional visual analysis and discussion of a famous medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad. A student complained about the image’s inclusion in the course and led efforts to press administrators for a response. After that, the university’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence (AVPIE) declared the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Neither before nor after these declarations was the faculty member given a public platform or forum to explain the classroom lecture and activity. To fill in the gap, on Dec. 6, an essay written by a Hamline professor of religion who teaches Islam explaining the incident along with the historical context and aesthetic value of Islamic images of Muhammad was published on The Oracle’s website. The essay was taken down two days later. One day after that, Hamline’s president and AVPIE sent a message to all employees stating that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” The essay’s censorship and the subsequent email by two top university administrators raise serious concerns about freedom of speech and academic freedom at the university.

The instructor was released from their spring term teaching at Hamline, and its AVPIE went on the record as stating: “It was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.” In other words, an instructor who showed an Islamic painting during a visual analysis — a basic exercise for art history training — was publicly impugned for hate speech and dismissed thereafter, without access to due process.

These incidents, statements and actions at Hamline will be for others to investigate further. As a scholar specializing in Islamic representations of Muhammad, however, it is my duty to share accurate information about the painting at the heart of the controversy. I will provide a visual analysis and historical explanation of the image in question, in essence reconstituting the Hamline instructor’s classroom activity. I will then explore these types of depictions over the course of six centuries, with the aim to answer one basic question: Is the Islamic painting at the heart of the Hamline controversy truly Islamophobic?

Sam Gregory:

As civil servants, our choice of terminology makes a huge difference to how the public understands our policies and our projects. Using certain words can even shape and change the policies themselves. For example, you might only realise the flaw in your policy when you have to explain it in plain English.

Avoid jargon

Using the wrong words can muddy the waters, and make our work less understandable to the vast majority of people who’ve never worked in the Civil Service. In the past, government has been notorious for communicating in its own highly-developed form of jargon. For example, think about the archaic language MPs use as part of the rituals of the House of Commons. This kind of language is often impenetrable to anyone who isn’t already in-the-know, though sometimes it can be deliberate. The Plain English Campaign has some amusing examples of government jargon from recent years.

When GOV.UK launched in 2012, replacing the confusing previous website, one of the aims was to simplify the language of government. This helps everyone complete tasks (like registering to vote) quickly and with minimum fuss. The website’s constantly updated style guide tells anyone who publishes on GOV.UK how to write for the site. We also use it internally on the Department for Education intranet, alongside our own education-specific style guide.

Lucy Kellaway:

Life at my school is founded on the Gospel values which, I found after a spot of googling, involve the sort of thing even the most devout atheist should be able to sign up to: forgiveness, honesty, trust, family and, above all, love.

I listened with disbelief in the first staff meeting when we were told it was our job to love all our students — especially the ones who were hardest to love. This was a departure from the successful academy school in east London where I trained, when staff would gather together in the name of no excuses, exam results and value-added scores.

This emphasis on love seems to me oddly profound, because from it everything else flows. If you force yourself to care deeply for every one of your students, you work harder for them, you want the best for them. All the other stuff I learnt in teacher training after leaving my job as a columnist at the Financial Times — differentiation and assessment for learning — seems a bit by the by. 

It is not only the Gospel that is making me have a rethink. It is the experience of teaching and living 300 miles from the capital, my home for the past 63 years.

The stats bear this out. According to the University of Essex’s Understanding Society study, the North East is the least mobile place in the country, with 55 per cent of survey respondents living within 15 miles of their mother — more than three times as many as in the capital. And, if my students are any guide, this statistic is not about to change, as few of them plan to leave. They might go abroad for a bit (I tried to warn them that Brexit has made this harder), but after that they want to return home. No one has any interest in moving to London. They know they can’t afford it, and don’t fancy it anyway.

1. THREAD:

THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Leslie Eastman:

James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, says that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now blocks access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may enter “forbidden” territory. Lee makes an important point that taxpayers paid for the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), which combines genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income.

My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.

Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.

What is NIH’s justification?

…The federal government was under no obligation to assemble the magnificent database that is the dbGaP. Now that it has done so at taxpayer expense, however, it does have an obligation to provide access to that database evenhandedly—not to allow it for some and deny it to others, based on the content of their research.

The capture isn’t only impacting American science. Across the Atlantic, the British Royal Society of Chemistry claims chemistry is racist, as only one in 575 professors is black.

Will Humphries:

A group of parents has lost a legal challenge against the teaching of gender identity and sex to seven-year-old children in Welsh primary schools.

Campaigners sought a judicial review in the High Court against the Welsh government’s relationships and sexuality education (RSE) curriculum, which was launched in September.

The challenge, which was heard last month in Cardiff, was brought by Public Child Protection Wales, says that the curriculum is inappropriate for primary age children. The parents argued that they had a fundamental common law right to excuse their children from the lessons.

Dismissing all aspects of the claim, Mrs Justice Steyn said: “Teaching should be neutral from a religious perspective but it is not required to be value neutral.” She added that sex education aims

Sarah Mervosh:

But recently, he said, he has made strides, in part because of an unusual and sweeping high school literacy curriculum in Memphis.

The program focuses on expanding vocabulary and giving teenagers reading strategies — such as decoding words — that build upon fundamentals taught in elementary school. The curriculum is embedded not just in English, but also in math, science and social studies.

With his new tools, Roderick studied “I Have a Dream,” the speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — no longer skipping unfamiliar words, but instead circling them to discern their meaning. And when scanning sports news on ESPN in his free time, he knew to break down bigger words, like the “re/negotia/tion” of a player’s contract.

The instruction “helped me understand,” said Roderick, 17, who is on the honor roll at Oakhaven High School and is preparing to take the ACT. (He and other students, interviewed with parental permission, are being identified by their first names to protect their privacy.)

The program in Memphis is an extension of a growing national movement to change the way younger children are taught to read, based on what has become known as “the science of reading.” And it is a sign of how sharply the pendulum has swung in the decades-long, contentious debate over reading instruction, moving away from a flexible “balanced literacy” approach that has put less emphasis on sounding out words, and toward more explicit, systematic teaching of phonics.

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?

Scott Girard:

It’s been a challenging few years for K-12 education, both locally and nationally. Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly is nonetheless “optimistic” about what’s ahead for the field.

“I think people are coming together, realizing that if we want to improve the lives of all Wisconsinites and especially the kids who are going to be the future leaders of the state, we need to all come together to solve these problems,” Underly said, as she reflected on 2022. “I see that reflected in a budget, I see it reflected in the referendums that our communities have passed, I see it in the policies that our stakeholders are proposing.

“I’m really, really optimistic about it in the long run.”

Notes and links on Jill Underly.

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?

Adam Mastroianni:

Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.

Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.

It didn’t. In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false. When you ask scientists to rate 20th century discoveries in physics, medicine, and chemistry that won Nobel Prizes, they say the ones that came out before peer review are just as good or even better than the ones that came out afterward. In fact, you can’t even ask them to rate the Nobel Prize-winning physics discoveries from the 1990s and 2000s because there aren’t enough of them.

Of course, a lot of other stuff has changed since World War II. We did a terrible job running this experiment, so it’s all confounded. All we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal. In this biz, we call this a total flop.

POSTMORTEM

What went wrong?Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?

Astral Códex Ten:

Still, on the most nitpicky level, as far as I can tell the article doesn’t say a lot which is literally false. Perhaps great journalism would investigate how the printing process worked and where it went wrong, but as far as I know neither side does that – they just report the relevant officials’ claims in more vs. less accusatory tones and expect you to make a judgment call based on your priors (mine are on “honest mistake”).

Looking through Infowars, it looks like many of their articles are around this quality of these two. Others are even less misinformative; there are lots of articles about members of some group Infowars doesn’t like committing a crime or doing an offensive thing; usually other sources confirm that these crimes or offenses are real. Or articles about “EXPERT SAYS X!”, where someone who could be charitably described as an expert (an MD or PhD) really did say X, even though X is insane and all other experts disagree. If Infowars is lying here, it’s by choosing to report on these stories instead of others, in a way that suggests they’re important – not by making up completely imaginary things on the spot.

(if you disagree with this, it might be worth looking through the front page of www.infowars.com and calculating what percent of the articles seem technically-true-but-misleading vs. completely-made-up. I tried this and had trouble finding the latter, but your experience might differ)

Kashmir Hill:

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Kelly Conlon, 44, a personal injury lawyer from Bergen County, N.J., was chaperoning her 9-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a trip into Manhattan to see the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall.

Before she could even glimpse the Rockettes, however, security guards pulled Ms. Conlon aside and her New York jaunt took an Orwellian turn.

“They told me that they knew I was Kelly Conlon and that I was an attorney,” she said this week. “They knew the name of my law firm.”

The guards had identified her using a facial recognition system. They showed her a sheet saying she was on an “attorney exclusion list” created this year by MSG Entertainment, which is controlled by the Dolan family. The company owns Radio City and some of New York’s other famous performance spaces, including the Beacon Theater and Madison Square Garden, where basketball’s Knicks and hockey’s Rangers play.

Its chief executive, James L. Dolan, is a billionaire who has run his empire with an autocratic flair, and his company instituted the ban this summer not only on lawyers representing people suing it, but on all attorneys at their firms. The company says “litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment” and so it is enforcing the list with the help of computer software that can identify hundreds of lawyers via profile photos on their firms’ own websites, using an algorithm to instantaneously pore over images and suggest matches.

Jonathan Turley:

It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. This week saw another FBI “nothing-to-see-here” statement to the release of files detailing how it actively sought to suppress the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election, gave millions to Twitter, and targeted even satire or tiny posts that did not conform with its guidelines.

The releases document what some of us have long alleged: a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy. The FBI has largely shrugged and said that there is nothing concerning about over 80 agents working on the censoring of posters, including many American citizens.

In the latest statement, the FBI stated it did not command Twitter to take any specific action when flagging accounts to be censored:

Paul Caron:

A legal advocacy group for students is suing the University of Southern California and 2U, alleging that the school and the company that runs its online graduate programs in education defrauded students by using misleading U.S. News & World Report rankings to promote the courses.

According to the suit, filed in Los Angeles County Court, USC’s Rossier School of Education used rankings that covered their in-person programs to highlight the strength of the online offerings, even though they had different selection criteria and student populations. The suit also says those rankings, even if they had been relevant to the online programs, were based on inaccurate information the school used to improperly boost the school’s score. …

“USC intentionally falsified data to inflate their U.S. News ranking, and 2U used the false numbers to pad their profits,” said Eric Rothschild, litigation director of the National Student Legal Defense Network. …

Tom Knighton

That’s apparently what happened to one North Carolina teacher, and he’s filed a lawsuit in an effort to fight back.

A North Carolina professor has claimed that he was fired from a prestigious high school for criticizing critical race theory in a Friday lawsuit, according to a report from Fox 17 WZTV.

In the suit, filed by legal the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group, Dr. David Phillips alleges that the Governor’s School of North Carolina (NCGS), a publicly funded summer program, fired him without explanation after he criticized the school’s embrace of “racially divisive ideology.”

Philips claims that NCGS adopted a social approach that views members of society “through the lens of characteristics like race, sex, and religion” and labels them as “perpetual oppressors or victims” based on group membership.

The professor, who taught at the school for eight years, held three optional programs over the summer where he critiqued critical race theory, as well as a lack of diversity in viewpoints in higher education. He also urged attendees to examine speech through a lens of “speech-act theory,” which asserts that the meaning of a linguistic expression can be explained in terms of rules governing their use in performing various speech acts, such as commanding and warning. 

The lawsuit states that Phillips was met with “open hostility” following the conclusion of each lecture by both students and staff. It also claims that audience members “attacked whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality and Christianity” when making comments and asking questions at the seminars. 

So much for academic freedom, right?