Parents hire dating coaches

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

How a Few Activists Made ChatGPT Deny Basic Science

Brian Chau:

There are wide reaching impacts to the political bias of artificial intelligence tools. ChatGPT is a technology that can already be used to draft articles, academic papers, poems, screenplays, and legal briefings. Political and cultural catechisms restrict the potential opportunities this can create, constantly interfering in favor of affluent social progressives against the wishes of ordinary Americans or foreigners of all stripes. Consider the following double standard:

Elite university degrees certify very little. And the secret is out.

Victor Davis Hanson:

“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion.

During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable.

Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal.

Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public—and often enraged alumni.

Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition—and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.

But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.

Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4 percent alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14 percent in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.

Alabama’s education system was designed to preserve white supremacy. I should know.

Kyle Whitmire:

But first, the children act out the story of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

In “Lies my Teacher Told Me,” historian James Loewen says you can tell a lot about an American History textbook by how it depicts Brown — either as a righteous freedom fighter liberating the enslaved or, more often, a deranged zealot hell-bent on treason. The litmus test works for elementary school productions, too, but because we’re watching 11 and 12-year-olds and not professional actors, it’s hard to tell which direction this show is taking.

At least until Brown’s captor shows up — an American colonel and soon-to-be Confederate hero named Robert E. Lee.

A short kid in a long coat and a Santa Claus beard enters from stage left. A tuft of red hair sticks out from beneath a borrowed Stetson hat. He walks up behind the original outside agitator, points a cap pistol from the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop at the center of his back and then shoots the bastard race traitor dead, center stage. As the lights dim for the scene change, the chorus sings “John Brown’s Body lies a moldering in the grave …”

Critics deride ‘un-grading’ as coddling, say it risks creating ‘snowflake’ students

Jon Marcus:

But advocates say the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.

“Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A it means they learned,” said Jody Greene, special adviser to the provost for educational equity and academic success at UCSC, where several faculty are experimenting with various forms of un-grading.

If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, “they didn’t learn anything,” said Greene, who also is director of the university’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. And “if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot.”

Critics respond that replacing traditional A to F grades with new forms of assessments is like a college-level version of participation trophies. They say taking away grades is coddling students and treating them like “snowflakes.”

Bradley Jackson doesn’t use those words. But Jackson, vice president of policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said that by getting of grades, “we get rid of crucial information that parents and students use to determine what they’re getting out of the expensive educations they’re paying for.”

A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.

Christopher Byrd:

I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. (It also served as the inspiration for a recent video game, Cyberpunk 2077, which had a famously tumultuous rollout.) Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below.

Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Before becoming a novelist, he co-founded a free-software company, served as a co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, and spent several years working for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Our first conversation, in late 2020, took place just after he had published the novel “Attack Surface,” part of his Little Brother series; it dramatizes the moral conflict of cybersecurity insiders who try to strike a balance between keeping their jobs and following their consciences.

The second time we spoke, Doctorow told me that he had eight books in production. “I’m the kind of person who deals with anxiety by working instead of by being unable to work,” he explained, when I asked how he was handling the ongoing pandemic. Among those eight books were “Chokepoint Capitalism,” co-written with the law professor Rebecca Giblin and published this past September, and “Red Team Blues,” a novel set in the world of cryptocurrency, which will come out in April. In the course of two interviews, Doctorow discussed the right and wrong lessons that one can learn from science fiction, the real dangers of artificial intelligence, and the comeuppance of Big Tech, among other topics. Those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Addressing the tyranny of low expectations

They can handle it. Expect more. When they are adults, they will decide how to their lives. Some will become radicals, some dentists, some will accept the status quo. That’s up to them. Our job is not to make them all into revolutionaries. Our jobs is to prepare them for life https://t.co/fNp2olLkQI

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) December 23, 2022

Choice and competition have a positive effect on public-school performance.

Several red states appear poised to adopt expansive school-choice policies this year, prompting the teachers unions and their allies to claim that the sky is falling, especially in rural areas. Corey DeAngelis is right to call out the Chicken Littles for their scaremongering (“The Little Red Schoolhouse Could Do With a Little Competition,” op-ed, Dec. 17), pointing to copious evidence that choice and competition have a positive effect on public-school performance.

Arizona, a longtime leader in school choice, is the perfect example. It was the first state to enact tax-credit scholarships in 1997 and K-12 education savings accounts in 2011. More students in Arizona exercise school choice than in any other state. If school choice destroys rural public schools, as opponents claim, then Arizona should be ground zero.

The opposite is true. Arizona’s rural students have improved much more than rural students nationwide have over the past decade. From 2007 to 2019, Arizona rural students’ fourth and eighth grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress increased by a combined 21 points, while scores in rural schools nationally decreased by two points. Postpandemic, Arizona’s rural students were still up a combined nine points while rural students nationally dropped 17 points from 2007.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler

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?

Academic Freedom and Critical Race Theory

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?

“here is a threat to democracy in plain sight, and now it’s “nothing to see here, move along.”

Arnold Kling:

Without any agency to act as a check against the FBI or other intelligence organizations, there is nothing to prevent mission creep. When the question of what constitutes a “threat” is left to the agencies themselves, they will gravitate toward the broadest possible answer. And when the question arises concerning what methods are legitimate to employ, they will decide on the minimal possible constraints.

Civics: Royal family ‘on mission to rewrite history’, claims archives campaign

Valentine Low:

In one instance, she said, an entire book about Prince George, Duke of Kent, was cancelled because of lack of access. George, the youngest brother of Edward VIII and George VI, died in an air crash in Scotland in 1942 while serving with the RAF.

The author, who wishes to remain anonymous to maintain good relations with Buckingham Palace, believes there has been a cover-up over the prince’s death. It has been suggested that he flouted wartime regulations to carry out his mission.

The author said he was denied access to the Royal Archives in Windsor and the prince’s file in the National Archives in Kent had “obviously been weeded”.

He added: “A family which relies on public support to retain its primacy in British social life has, I believe, a duty to act responsibly when it comes to breaking the law, especially in wartime. The actions of the Royal Archives in disallowing me access to Kent’s files amounts to censorship, nothing less.

Routine Writing Is About to Be Free

Virginia Postural:

While crashing the value of mediocrity, ChatGPT could increase the returns to excellence. (“Average is over,” as Tyler Cowen put it.) Think about what happened to graphic design. Many people used to make a living doing routine tasks, from laying out pages to selecting typefaces, that are now easily handled by software. Thanks to the graphic intelligence embedded in everyday tools, the standards for routine graphics, from websites and PowerPoint presentations to restaurant menus and wedding invitations, have increased.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no work for graphic designers with the conceptual chops to take on complicated tasks. Powerful tools make iteration and brainstorming easier, but cleverness is still a valued skill. When my friend Shikha Dalmia launched The Unpopulist on Substack, she asked me to look at some logos she’d come up with using easily available tools. They weren’t terrible, but neither were they distinctive. “Hire a professional,” I advised, and she got a real logo.1

As I write, there are 28 student papers awaiting my grading attention. I doubt any used ChatGPT, partly because mentioning it in class produced mostly blank stares. (The most tuned-in student, however, said he’s started using it in place of Google.) Already, we’re getting confirmed reports of cheating on exams given on Canvas, the web-based system used by many colleges for assignments and grading. By next term, every class will have to take account of ChatGPT, either explicitly incorporating it as a starting point or going back to handwritten tests and essays.

The end of Programming

Matt Walsh:

This shift is underscored by the fact that nobody actually understands how large AI models work. People are publishing research papers^3,4,5 actually discovering new behaviors of existing large models, even though these systems have been “engineered” by humans. Large AI models are capable of doing things that they have not been explicitly trained to do, which should scare the living daylights out of Nick Bostrom² and anyone else worried (rightfully) about an superintelligent AI running amok. We currently have no way, apart from empirical study, to determine the limits of current AI systems. As for future AI models that are orders of magnitude larger and more complex—good luck!

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

Liam Proven:

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research fellow.

She also worked at the British Rubber Producers’ Research Association (BRPRA), where she met and worked with mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth, who later became her husband. After studying with X-ray crystallographer Professor J D Bernal – inventor of the Bernal Sphere – A D Booth was working out crystal structures using X-ray diffraction data, and finding the manual calculations very tedious; he built an analog computer to automate part of this.

“AI Feudalism”

AI feudalism

We work for free (data + interactions) to build the AI and the AI tithes us. https://t.co/ViFVZv7WDx

— John Robb (@johnrobb) December 21, 2022

Exam cheating at audit firms uncovered by UK accounting regulator

Michael O’Dwyer:

“The audit profession is a position of trust and there’s an irony where you’ve got auditors seeking to cheat on ethics exams and that sort of thing.”

US regulators fined EY a record $100mn in June after hundreds of staff shared answers or cheated on an ethics exam and the firm then failed to report the violations.

PwC’s Canadian business was fined in February for cheating by 1,200 staff on internal tests and KPMG was forced to pay a $450,000 penalty last year for similar misconduct.

KPMG’s US business was separately fined $50mn in 2019, partly for answer sharing by auditors, some of whom also manipulated computers so staff would pass even if they scored less than 25 per cent.

Rapson said responses to the FRC from the Big Four firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — and their biggest mid-tier competitors BDO, Grant Thornton and Mazars had revealed examples of cheating at a “handful” of firms in the UK.

She added that the FRC was continuing its inquiries into the issues reported to it by the firms.

The biggest case of cheating in the UK to date involved hundreds of KPMG staff on training tests between at least 2018 and 2021, which has already resulted in a fine by the US audit regulator after the firm self-reported the misconduct. US regulators frequently fine overseas auditors responsible for checking the accounts of subsidiaries of American companies.

Civics: No one should be convicted for solving a problem the government refused to address

Tom Knighton:

What these two women were doing was using food to trap these feral cats, then taking them and getting them fixed so they wouldn’t keep creating more and more generations of feral cats.

It’s similar to what the nearby city of Montgomery did with great success.

And they weren’t hurting anyone by doing so, either. They’d been directed to set up their operation on public land, away from private property—which they did—and they started dealing with a problem in the city of Wetumpka.

Now, in fairness, I’ve been to Wetumpka a number of times over the last couple of years. I’ve got a friend who lives there and I visit semi-regularly. I never noticed an excess of stray cats, but that only means there were few in the area I happened to be.

So the question you may have is just what crime was committed, and that’s a fair question.

To be honest, I’m not really sure, either. If you read the story, you see that the trespassing charge deals with public land, which doesn’t sound like trespassing in that case; claims of interfering with the arrest of one woman which has body cam footage showing the one supposedly interfering was sitting in the car until she was physically removed of it.

The Overlooked Upsides of Algorithms in the Workplace

Jennifer Conrad:

The question to ask if you’re introducing a hiring algorithm is whether it is outperforming the human processes—not if it’s perfect. And when there are biases, what are the sources, and can they be corrected, for example, by adding more training data? How much can we debias as humans versus how much can we improve the different systems?

A vast majority of large companies today are using some form of automated resume screening. It’s important for agencies like the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Labor Department to look at the claims versus the results. There hasn’t been enough nuanced conversation about the sources of the risks and whether they can be corrected.

Gary Gensler

Shahid Nadeem, Erick Peinert and Matt Stoller

How Are Cryptocurrencies Different from Currencies or Traditional Securities?

Most currencies are managed by a central bank to ensure that they serve as a stable means of exchange. Without a central bank to manage them and ensure a stable value, cryptocurrencies do not serve as a meaningful store of value like the U.S. dollar does. In addition, with an influx of speculative investors over the past 10 years, the price of individual cryptocurrencies can skyrocket or decline in value overnight, making them nearly useless as a means of exchange, which is the traditional function of a currency. This means that despite early claims that cryptocurrencies would serve as functional currency or a means of payment, almost all crypto assets are instead used as a means of speculative investment — in other words, largely unlicensed securities.

Absolute Immunity Puts Prosecutors Above the Law

Billy Binion:

When a storm flooded Baton Rouge in 2016, Priscilla Lefebure took shelter with her cousin and her cousin’s husband, Barrett Boeker, an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. During her stay at her cousin’s house on the prison grounds, Lefebure later reported, Boeker raped her twice—first in front of a mirror so she would have to watch, and again days later with a foreign object.

Lefebure’s allegations led to a yearslong court battle—not against her accused rapist but against District Attorney Samuel C. D’Aquilla, who seemed determined to make sure that Boeker was never indicted. As the chief prosecutor for West Feliciana Parish, which includes Angola, D’Aquilla sabotaged the case before it began.

When a grand jury considered Lefebure’s charges, D’Aquilla declined to present the results of a medical exam that found bruises, redness, and irritation on Lefebure’s legs, arms, and cervix. Instead, he offered a police report with his own handwritten notes, which aimed to highlight discrepancies in her story. D’Aquilla opted not to call as witnesses the two investigators on the case, the nurse who took Lefebure’s rape kit, or the coroner who stored it. And he refused to meet or speak with Lefebure at all, telling local news outlets he was “uncomfortable” doing so.

The lawyer that Boeker hired to represent him was a cousin of the district attorney, Cy Jerome D’Aquila (who spells his name slightly differently). Boeker did not need his services very long, since the grand jury predictably declined to indict him.

Higher Education: Rising Production Cost – and Rising Resentment

Why then did student debt rise to about $1.6 trillion? Different reasons apply to the various kinds of borrowers and we estimate that about two-thirds of the debt is owed by graduate students (including those in medical, law or business school) and by students who attended often-predatory, for-profit colleges and universities. Our focus is on undergraduates at non-profit colleges. A major reason for the burdensome debt of undergraduates at both public and private nonprofit colleges is neither the rising list price nor the steady net price. Rather, their ancillary expenses — food, housing, travel, technology, books, clothing, recreation and so forth — have risen with the cost of living and, since 1980, grown faster than the wages and salaries of their families. This growing shortfall over the past four decades, combined with the declining proportion of production cost paid by government subsidies, forced undergraduates at non-profit colleges to borrow more, we maintain.

While undergraduates’ net price of tuition plateaued even as their debt ballooned in recent decades, the proportion of revenue that colleges actually received from tuition increases (their net tuition revenue) declined. Through the 1960s, we explain, almost all the grant aid awarded to students comprised scholarships and fellowships funded by colleges’ revenue from gifts, grants, or endowments. Colleges’ tuition revenue virtually equaled their listed tuition through the 1960s.

Converting my PhD thesis into HTML

Damien Desfontaines:

Finishing a PhD is a weird emotional experience. All the hard work, the joys, the pains, the pulled hairs, everything gets condensed into a scary-looking PDF and then you’re just… done? What? This makes no sense whatsoever. Or rather, this makes sense on paper, but then you feel this weird sense of grief somehow. And you’re not quite at the acceptance stage yet. So instead, you decide to deal with those feelings in a perfectly normal and healthy way, and you embark on a journey to compile said thesis into a series of HTML pages.

HTML, by the way, is a much better way of disseminating information than PDF. Pretty much all of recent scientific research is recorded in PDF files, for historical reasons that are largely irrelevant today. PDFs are difficult to browse, impossible to read on a phone, uncomfortable to read on a tablet, hostile to screen readers, impractical to search engines, and the list goes on. It’s just a terrible format, unless you’re trying to print things on paper. Printing things is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but that’s really not the main use case we should be optimizing for.

Anyway. I converted my thesis to HTML and this is my story. A story of false hopes, perseverance, pain, and futility. I hope this can be useful to other people, as a guide on how to do this for your own thesis or large & complex LaTeX documents, or as an encouragement to do something better with your time instead.

Educator brags about indoctrinating kids, then complains about ‘right-wing’ reporting on it

Dave Huber:

A Chicago-area high school “literacy coach” recently recorded a video of herself in which she admits to indoctrinating the students in her charge.

Fox News reports Crete-Monee High’s Heather Marie Godbout (pictured), a member of the school’s Equity Team, also rips “right-wing conspiracy theorist nut jobs” in her video and notes she is opposed to traditional grading policies — because grades get “conflated with other things that aren’t actually learning, like effort or ‘work ethic,’ whatever that means.”

“All you right wing conspiracy theory nut jobs who seem to think the teachers are out here just indoctrinating children into some sort of woke agenda that you can’t actually define, I’m just going to come clean,” Godbout says. “I am, in fact, indoctrinating your children.”

Cornell makes letter grades optional. Some students say that’s not enough.

Eduardo Neret:

Students at Cornell University are split over calls for “universal pass equitable grading,” which would ensure all students would pass their courses and receive credit regardless of one’s final grade.

The Cornell Daily Sun, the Cornell student newspaper, reported that some students petitioned the school to implement the mandatory pass system because of the coronavirus pandemic. Others petitioned to keep the option to choose between letter grades or pass/fail.

The authors of the universal pass grading petition argued that if Cornell is truly going to commit to “nondiscrimination,” the school must move to the universal pass system.

“As COVID-19 spreads through our communities, we call on the Cornell administration to prioritize educational equity, student health, and community wellbeing by adopting a Universal Pass (UP) system for Spring 2020,” the petition reads.“It is vital for us to demonstrate how graded or pass/fail online courses burden those of us who are uniquely and severely affected by these circumstances, as well as the student body as a collective.”

The Taliban banned girls from attending elementary school,

Esmatullah Kohsar and Sune Engel Rasmussen:

In a gathering in Kabul with private-school directors, clerics and community representatives, Taliban officials on Wednesday also barred female staff, including teachers, from working in schools, closing off one of the few professions that had remained open to Afghan women under the new government, according to school principals who attended the meeting. They also said adult women could no longer visit mosques or attend religious seminaries.

Ghulam Sarwar Haidari, a shopkeeper in Kabul, said his daughter Mahbooba was sent home when she arrived at the tutoring center where she was attending classes in preparation for the coming semester in fifth grade. Mahbooba had hoped to study medicine and return to their home village in Ghazni province, where there are no female doctors.

“My daughter has locked herself in a room since this morning and won’t stop crying,” Mr. Haidari said. “All her hopes are broken. We are tired to death of this situation, and only wonder when it will be over.”

$pending more for less: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction edition

Institute for reforming government

3. Department of Public Instruction: Since 2017, DPI has seen its biennial budget increase by over $2 billion, from $14.2 billion to $16.3 billion. This is despite serving 18,500 fewer students and overseeing disastrous drops in math scores and college enrollment beyond pandemic averages.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

2023 Madison School Board election, Christine Gomez-Schmidt bows out

Scott Girard:

In her message to constituents, Gomez Schmidt listed a series of district accomplishments in her three years on the board, including navigating the pandemic, adopting new K-5 reading curriculums, investing in the “science of reading” and seeing the community approve a record referendum.

“I am grateful that this experience has challenged me in how I think about achievement, disparities, privilege, and opportunity,” she wrote, coming one day after a vote on standalone honors classes. “My sincere hope is that we can collectively find ways to continue to have necessary and challenging discussions with respect for one another. Our children deserve to see us model how to collaborate and build consensus to solve complex problems.”

Thanking her supporters for the opportunity to serve in the role, Gomez Schmidt also looked forward, writing that the district “must decide what we expect from, and for, our public schools,” which face “significant” challenges.

“Declining enrollment, disparities in achievement, staff recruitment and retention, needed investment in our aging facilities, and a clear, multi-year strategic plan are a few of these,” she wrote. “Yet we have a Governor dedicated to education, incredibly strong support for public schools in Madison and Fitchburg, and a developing vision for the future.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Notes on the teacher school district climate: Madison edition

Scott Girard:

“We need impactful change in our handbook before May 15 or the mass exodus of staff will continue,” she said. “It’ll become impossible to staff our schools with qualified teachers and the staff that our students deserve.”

MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in a statement Tuesday that the district “has hired more teacher staff this year than ever before, and now employs its largest teacher workforce in many years.”

“We value the voices of all MMSD staff. Our teachers who participated in public comment at last night’s Board meeting spoke from the heart, and their words were powerful,” LeMonds wrote. “The district’s recruitment strategy continues to make progress in addressing the nationwide teacher shortage impacting our school district.”

He said the 100 vacancies “only represent approximately 3.8% of our roughly 2,600 teaching positions and 1.7% of our overall staff.”

LeMonds also alluded to the ongoing financial challenges school districts face, calling the challenges ahead “serious” after a state budget that did not raise revenue limits for school districts each of the past two years.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

The Stanford Guide to Acceptable Words: Behold the school’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.

Call yourself an “American”? Please don’t. Better to say “U.S. citizen,” per the bias hunters, lest you slight the rest of the Americas. “Immigrant” is also out, with “person who has immigrated” as the approved alternative. It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?

You can’t “master” your subject at Stanford any longer; in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that “historically, masters enslaved people.” And don’t dare design a “blind study,” which “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; “masked study” is to be preferred. Follow the science.

“Gangbusters” is banned because the index says it “invokes the notion of police action against ‘gangs’ in a positive light, which may have racial undertones.” Not to beat a dead horse (a phrase that the index says “normalizes violence against animals”), but you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid.

Deeper dive.

An obituary for Cazenovia College, my hometown school

Zachary Marshall:

Cazenovia College, a small, picturesque school outside of Syracuse, New York, is shutting down after nearly 200 years in operation due to severe financial circumstances.

I grew up in the Village of Cazenovia and my first college teaching position was at Cazenovia College. The school’s approaching closure at the end of the spring 2023 semester is a huge loss for the local community.

For the rest of the country, Cazenovia College exemplifies trends and data points that have plagued academia since COVID-19. At the time of the closure announcement in December, the College’s enrollment was down 40% from its peak after it spent large sums on “technology and campus safety measures.” Between 2020 and 2022, American colleges and universities experienced a 3.5% total decline in enrollment, largely driven by the pandemic.

Founded in 1824 as a Methodist seminary, Cazenovia College subsequently evolved into a non-sectarian junior and women’s college before becoming a co-educational bachelor’s-degree-granting institution in 1988. The college also boasts Stanford University founder Leland Stanford as an alumnus, local news outlet Syracuse.com recently reminded its readers.

The Full Inventory of Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Medicine Persons from “Human Accomplishment”

Charles Murray:

In Data Tools #3, I presented the full inventory of events in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine (STMM) from 800 BCE to 1950 that were assembled for my book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (HarperCollins, 2003). Data Tools #4 presents the full inventory of persons who have been associated with STMM achievements.

In Human Accomplishment, I limited my presentation of notable STMM persons to the 1,371 who qualified as “significant.” STMM Persons contains data on 4,596 persons. It includes all the persons who qualified as “significant” plus all others who met one of two criteria:

Data Biases, Cognitive Biases

David Thiel:

This data bias is compounded by cognitive bias: the recency illusion, i.e. the perception that recently noticed things are more prevalent. For someone with no tendency to spend time searching hashtags of Chinese cities (or in Chinese-language Twitter in general), the volume of spam will seem sudden and anomalous, and quite possibly suspicious. And because gathering and analyzing data takes time, quickly drawn conclusions will often be based on small amounts of poor quality data.

As such, the only way to truly compare current with historical activity is to consume it over long timeframes in realtime before it has been acted upon, with the terms defined ahead of time — which was not the case in any of the analyses of Chinese spamming activity that we are aware of. In retrospective research, historical Twitter data generally becomes “cleaner” — some amount of spam and inauthentic behavior will have been removed — as you go further back, but this is necessarily a less accurate representation of what actually occurred on the platform. Put simply:

In a retrospective sample of moderated social media platform, ToS-violating or inauthentic content tends to appear most prevalent in the immediate past. We can call this Content Moderation Survivor Bias.

To illustrate this effect as best we can with data gathered after the fact, let’s take a look at tweets containing the names of major Chinese cities.

Notes on police interns and the Minneapolis teachers union

..
Always room for one more hypocrite.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers bitches because cops aren’t from the community while at the same time opposing efforts to recruit people from the community to become police officers.

Get your kids out of these hate camps.
. pic.twitter.com/Kr9tAqwOd1

— CrimeWatchMpls (@CrimeWatchMpls) December 19, 2022

“A good portion of this year was spent working on a book on the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law”

Richard Hanania:

That’s a lot of material. When I started writing for a public consumption, I was 35. That means I’d spent two decades thinking about American culture and politics, so I was brimming with insights. Inevitably, I’ve said many of the things I wanted to say, and continuing to write on the topic will be unlikely to produce material anywhere as good. Now is a good time to branch out a bit.

Finally, for reasons I’ll expand on below, I’m becoming more alienated from conservatives, and therefore less interested in trying to promote total victory for one side in the culture war. The continuing and growing power of the anti-vaxx movement is perhaps the clearest demonstration that something has gone horrifyingly wrong on the Right. And yes, I know the smarter among them say they’re just “anti-mandate,” but the culture is clearly anti-vaxx, with Trump getting booed at rallies for telling his old and overweight fans to do the responsible thing and conservative influencers proudly talking about how they avoided the jab and making fun of those that didn’t.

Republicans may be generally preferable, but when the next great technological breakthrough comes, I’m confident that if it turns into a salient political issue it’ll be the Right that wants to ban it. On the vaccine issue specifically, the odds of us having another Operation Warp Speed if a Republican is in office when the next pandemic hits are low. There’s no way to justify this – every other right-wing scam, up to and including even (maybe) election denial, could at least theoretically be defended as serving some greater good. But this one is simply a tragedy, and reveals that when you build a movement that caters to low IQ and paranoid people you can’t hope to control the results. If the next pandemic is even worse than covid, those who’ve promoted anti-vaxx could be responsible for millions of lives lost. And of course public health is evil and deserves all the hate it gets and much more, but the issue of pandemics is too serious to answer their failures with mindless demagoguery.

Losing 20,000 k-12 students in the taxpayer supported Milwaukee schools

Alan Borsuk:

And 20,000 students lost? That’s a sea change.

A good way to get a handle on the decline is to ask: Where did all the kids go?

Here are two answers:

Fewer kids. A smaller but important change is that the universe of kids in Milwaukee is shrinking. Fourteen years ago, the number of children getting publicly funded education was 115,522. That includes conventional schools, as well as partnership schools, charter schools and more. That number rose to between 119,000 and 121,000 in four school years, beginning in September 2012. Then it began declining. It was 114,184 in fall 2020; it was 111,333 in fall 2021; and it was 109,934 in fall 2022, a decline of almost 10% since a peak of 120,895 eight years ago, according to data I’ve been tracking for several years.

An updated political lexicon

Steven Hayward:

I’ve got a few updates for our periodic lexicon of current political discourse, inspired by Michael Walsh in the most recent podcast. The new terms defined here are “stakeholder,” “tolerance,” and “reform.” Scroll down to the bottom for these new entries:

The Latin School of Chicago in Shambles

Florian Sohnke:

Depravity, “rules for thee and not for me” and bullying culture appear systemic at Chicago’s most elite private school

‍What do Doug Sohn (Hot Doug’s), Carol Fox Flanigan (Co-Founder of the Lyric Opera of Chicago), William Wrigley (creator of the famed gum company), Lisa Madigan (Former Illinois Attorney General), Donny and Teddi Pritzker (children of current Governor J.B. Pritzker) all have in common? If you said they all attended the prestigious Latin School of Chicago, you would be correct!

Likely none of these famed alumni, with the exception of the Pritzker children who most recently attended the school, have any sense of what has become of their beloved alma mater.

Why even today, the Latin School of Chicago ranks as the third best high school in Illinois out of 142 private schools and nationally, number 141 out of 4,323 private high schools and only ranks below that of the famed University of Chicago Laboratory School as the top independent school in the Chicagoland region, according to Niche.com.

In short, Latin arguably remains the most elite school in the city of Chicago.

Yet nine months ago, 15-year old Nate Bronstein ended his life as a result of cruel and vicious cyberbullying from numerous classmates while attending the Latin School of Chicago. The child-perpetrators, a number of which were privileged children of families named in a lengthy lawsuit filed by the Bronstein family, allegedly have officially faced no consequences. And the former Latin School of Chicago Board Chairman David Koo continues to serve as the Board of Trustees Chair for the Shedd Aquarium. It remains unclear as to what David Koo’s role is in this story, but this will come out in the lawsuit.

Beyond the allegations surrounding Mr. Koo and other community members, not only have the kids involved in the matter not faced any consequences which anyone Chicago Contrarian spoke to is aware of, a “narrative” in the community has developed portraying Nate as troubled teen who struggled to form friendships at his “new school,” was prone to emotional outbursts and generally, “did not fit in” with the Latin culture. Of course all of these comments could not be further from the truth. By all accounts, and Chicago Contrarian has spoken with many parents close to the story, Nate presented as a typical teen with plenty of friends.

Madison School Board: “voted 4-3 to keep stand-alone honors classes for the time being”

Olivia Herken:

Board members Gomez Schmidt, Ali Muldrow, Laura Simkin and Nicki Vander Meulen voted against eliminating stand-alone honors classes. Board members Nichelle Nichols, Maia Pearson and Savion Castro voted in favor of eliminating them.

Stand-alone honors classes are meant to be more academically challenging. Students can also earn honors credit in some general classes by excelling in them.

“Rigor should not be synonymous with honors,” Pearson said. “Rigor and high expectations should exist in all of our classes and should be accessible to all of our children.”

Parents told the board they felt there was little transparency in the district’s proposal. One parent said it felt like the decision had already been made.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle:

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?

How the Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions

Kristina Armitage

“It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all,” said Sam Ling, an associate professor of neuroscience and director of the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Boston University. Could our memory of a beautiful forest glade, for example, be just a re-creation of the neural activity that previously enabled us to see it?

“The argument has swung from being this debate over whether there’s even any involvement of sensory cortices to saying ‘Oh, wait a minute, is there any difference?’” said Christopher Baker, an investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health who runs the learning and plasticity unit. “The pendulum has swung from one side to the other, but it’s swung too far.”

Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same. “People don’t get confused between them,” said Serra Favila, a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University and the lead author of a recent Nature Communications study. Her team’s work has identified at least one of the ways in which memories and perceptions of images are assembled differently at the neurological level.

McGraw Hill’s S3 buckets exposed 100,000 students’ grades and personal info

Misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets belonging to McGraw Hill exposed more than 100,000 students’ information as well as the education publishing giant’s own source code and digital keys, according to security researchers.

The research team at vpnMentor said they discovered the open S3 buckets on June 12, and contacted McGraw Hill a day later. One production bucket contained more than 47 million files and 12TB of data, and a second non-production bucket held more than 69 million files and 10TB of data, we’re told.

“In the limited sample we researched, we could see that the amount of records varied on each file from ten to tens of thousands students per file,” the researchers said. “Due to the amount of files exposed and because we only review a small sample following ethical rules, the actual total number of affected students could be far higher than our estimate.”

Overall, the buckets contained more than 22 TB of data and over 117 million files. It included students’ names, email addresses, performance reports and grades as well as teachers’ syllabi and course reading materials for US and Canadian students and schools such as Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Los Angeles, University of Toronto and University of Michigan.

Civics: Taxpayer supported Government activities and the 2020 election

13. Galeotti would later concede the whole framework for US military involvement in swaying the hearts of minds of US citizens was based, effectively, on a lie:https://t.co/16wQY2FStF

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) December 19, 2022

Anthropology in Ruins

Elizabeth Weiss:

I made a special effort to attend sessions each day, looking specifically for sessions that dealt with human remains. However, if I had thought that there may be some interesting physical or archaeological sessions to attend, I was quickly disabused of that notion.

There were many red flags indicating that this conference would have a greater emphasis on the political trends of anti-colonialism, indigenous knowledge, and atonement for past behavior. For instance, there were nearly eighty sessions that used the keyword “decolonization” and over seventy sessions that used the term “white supremacy” (none of these were ethnographic studies on actual white supremacist groups, such as the Aryan Brotherhood). Session titles included:

• “Pronouns, Bottoms, Cat-Ears And Cuerpes, Girl: For An Intersectional Trans Linguistic Anthropology”

• “Unsettling Whiteness: Race And Religion In The United States”

• “On Indigenous People’s Terms: Unsettling Landscapes Through Remapping Practices”

• “Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Critical Genealogies and Decolonizing Futures”

At registration, you could ask for a “comfort ribbon” to indicate whether you preferred 1) handshakes, 2) elbow bumps, or 3) six feet of distance between you and others. The list of “the AAA Principles of Professional Responsibility,” which was prominently posted at entrances, starts with the line: “Do No Harm.” There were also signs stating that attendees shouldn’t use “scented personal care products” to ensure that those with “chemical sensitivities” could attend the conference in comfort.

Civics: A terrific new account of America’s social and political turmoil during the 1910s and ’20s provides some much-needed perspective on the problems afflicting the country today.

Michael J. Totten

Wilson’s presidential campaign pledged to keep the country out of the meat-grinding war across the Atlantic, and he kept that promise for nearly three years until Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. But American Midnight isn’t about the First World War. It’s about what happened at home during and after it. The declaration of war in the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50, and while most Americans approved of the decision, there were noisy pockets of dissent, as there are whenever democracies fight wars. Wilson feared that even the mildest bleats of complaint would undermine the morale necessary to sustaining the war effort. The upshot was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which had almost nothing to do with actual espionage. Instead, it declared any kind of anti-war activity to be criminal, and defined “opposition” in ways that few modern critics of pacifists and isolationists would even recognize.

Anyone who “shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces of the United States” was subject to arrest. It would be a mistake to assume that the Wilson administration was only going after the purveyors of what we now call “fake news,” or to get hung up on the words “with intent to interfere.” Ordinary people were rounded up and prosecuted who had no intention of interfering with anyone or anything, and those convicted faced up to 20 years in prison—twice as long as the sentence Vladimir Putin metes out to his Russian subjects for similar offenses today.

A Texas man was jailed for saying, “I wish Wilson was in hell.” Andreas Latzko’s novel Men in War was banned for describing the war as a “wholesale cripple-and-corpse factory.” Police officers arrested playwright Eugene O’Neill at gunpoint on Cape Cod because somebody saw sunlight reflecting off his typewriter and thought he was sending signals to German ships. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was arrested for co-writing and producing a silent film called The Spirit of ’76about the American Revolution. Regardless of what happened in 1776, the presiding judge said, “we are engaged in a war in which Great Britain is an ally of the United States,” and this was not the time for “sowing dissension among our people” or “creating animosity … between us and our allies.” Goldstein was handed 10 years in prison.

The Twitter Files and the Future of the Democratic Party With Silicon Valley’s Congressman

Bari Weiss:

Maybe most unusual of all, Khanna’s policies on Big Tech are not exactly the ones you’d imagine coming from the congressman whose neighbors are the creators of the next Googles and Facebooks. Not only does he think Big Tech needs to be broken up, he was also one of the only Democrats to diverge from his party’s censorious impulses when he reached out directly to Twitter in October 2020 to criticize its decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in the runup to the election, as we reported in the Twitter Files story.

In an era where the Democratic Party and Big Tech often seem to march in lockstep, Khanna says: Maybe we should be skeptical of this kind of corporate power. And, by the way, isn’t that the core of what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about? And if not, when did that change and why?

We talk about all of that and more in today’s episode of Honestly.

I highly recommend listening to the entire conversation, but below, edited for length and clarity, are some of the key points.

Virus Veracity: The virus would become endemic. All would be exposed.Virus Veracity:

Holman Jenkins:

More generally, he and other officials seemed eager to abet the censorious segment of the public to berate others about masks, vaccinations and lockdowns beyond their merits.

At times he also seemed to wave off responsibility for the downside of his advice aimed at reducing absolutely the number of cases, saying it was somebody else’s job to consider the trade-offs in lost employment, depression, missed schooling, suicide.

And not for Dr. Fauci or any other official was the advice advertised from day one on the CDC website (until it mysteriously disappeared): “In the coming months, most of the U.S. population will be exposed to this virus.” At worst, he and others thought it wouldn’t be good for their personal brands to be seen delivering this unwelcome but realistic news to the American people.

In Mr. Brennan’s suggestion Dr. Fauci did his best, a fair conclusion from a grown-up perspective if we understand doing his best to mean making judicious decisions about when to mislead.

Consistently misunderstood, especially by the relentless Trump critic Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, officials were under a de facto mandate to avoid panic.

The mayor of New York, the governor of California, Dr. Fauci and CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier all declared that Covid was nothing to worry about, by which they really meant don’t worry yet. Their quotes now seem indefensibly glib. But under the textbook plan of “flatten the curve” the goal was to slow the spread only as needed to ease the burden on hospitals. Virtually any politician who paid attention to briefings understood job one to be playing down the new virus until it was time to institute specific measures.

The US Test Mess

Richard Phelps:

Now, consider what has transpired over the past twenty years in the USA. We were headed in the direction of other countries’ testing system structures at the turn of the millennium, with state-led consequential achievement tests for students administered only every few grade levels.[1] Plus, we benefitted from two competing college admission tests, whose scores could be submitted for consideration simultaneously to thousands of universities worldwide. [2]

Then came three disruptions, each of which, I would argue, served to undermine the utility of US educational testing.

First came passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2001–2002), which imposed a federal mandate on all public schools (including charters). The NCLB insistence on annual administrations of tests across seven grade levels virtually guaranteed lax security: teachers administer tests in their own classrooms to their own students and principals manage the distribution and collection of test materials in their own schools. Then, we judge schools and teachers based on those NCLB test scores they themselves proctor.

Challenging the Academic Publisher Oligopoly

Richard Phelps:

Here’s a business plan: Sell a product that …

some of the world’s most highly educated scholars, working at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, invest thousands of hours to create;

governments and foundations subsidize, with anywhere from hundreds to tens of millions of dollars in both direct payments and in-kind services;

others volunteer to review and edit, thus controlling product quality for no pay;

is given to you for free, to legally own and copyright, despite your having invested nothing;

you then sell to your volunteers’ colleagues and employers at a monopoly price.

The academic journal industry comprises hundreds of publishers, but just five control over half of the market: Reed-Elsevier (Netherlands), SAGE (US), Springer (Germany), Taylor & Francis (UK), and Wiley-Blackwell (UK).

For decades, academic publishers at least bore the considerable expense of compiling, printing, marketing, and mailing physical copies of journals. With digitalization, however, even that burden has diminished. Soon, academic publishing may approach a state of pure “economic rent”—selling a close-to-cost-free (for them) product that customers want and can buy nowhere else.

Brainboxing (censorship) chatgpt

ok I found its breaking point pic.twitter.com/JvHLntiDZt

— Brian Chau (@psychosort) December 18, 2022

K-12 Tax, Spending & Borrowing Climate:

Omnibus bill that will pass by Friday will include an additional $1.7 trillion dollars in government spending. That’s on top of the $858 billion they just spend on the NDAA.

It’s all funny money at this point.

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) December 18, 2022

K-12 Cost Disease and its consequences

A lot of the people in the replies are treating this like it was a tradeoff, but was it? Did cheaper cellphones make houses more expensive? Or did certain sectors do their job innovating and growing while others (housing, college) sat on laurels https://t.co/oynOwKUBGE

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) December 18, 2022

check out these Texas superintendent salaries.

Klein: $754,211
Cypress Fairbanks: $512,439
Barbers Hill: $446,062
Ysleta: $425,582
Duncanville: $403,442
Dallas: $365,820
Houston: $350,000
Northside: $343,662
Austin: $342,756

i wonder why they're so afraid of competition 🤔 pic.twitter.com/sbDBCobk11

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) December 18, 2022

Civics: legacy media vs entrepreneurs

Elon knows media corps are just corporations.

They hire puppets to say whatever works to get traffic, and will discard them & switch storyline as the public catches on.

Journos are thus like Hollywood actors; just puppets of owners.

So: compete with puppetmasters, not puppets. https://t.co/RTzrjGd0Xq

— Balaji (@balajis) December 18, 2022

Portfolios are being modified as a glimpse into Christmas Future shows a cold, dark world if realities remain ignored.

Leslie Eastman:

I recently looked at major index funds and state treasuries that have been backing away from investing based on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies.

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, however, European bureaucrats have been far warmer to implementing ESG, which drives companies away from fossil fuels whether or not such a move is practical for their operations.

Europe may now also be cooling toward ESG, in the light of energy realities that cannot be ignored.

Notes on math education and DIE

William Biagini:

At a recent mathematics education conference in Nashville, Tennessee, scholars pushed a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda. Campus Reform obtained exclusive audio and images from the meeting.

The conference was the 44th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, held from Nov. 17 – Nov. 20.

An entire section of the academic gathering was dedicated to “Equity and Justice” in mathematics education.

Papers presented under this heading included “Leveraging Equity and Civic Empathy through Community-Based Mathematical Modeling,” “Discourses of Justice,” “Equitable Teaching Practices: Developing Emergent Bilinguals’ Positive Mathematical Identities,” and “Whiteness in Fearmongering Towards Mathematics Education Reform.”

In one image, a presentation slide can be seen with the term “Equipartitioning,” giving an example of a practice problem involving equitably distributing sandwiches brought on a field trip.

“Famed Chicago School to Release “The Official Parker Handbook”

Benjamin Blair:

You have many choices in Chicago for your daughter.

I asked Open AI to help me with answers to your question and also to generate related images (note: these are Open AI’s responses verbatim to the questions asked, except the italics):

‍Why should I send my child, who uses the pronouns ze/zir/zirself and robs people on the red line train, to the Latin School of Chicago?

‍You should send your child to the Latin School of Chicago because it offers a supportive, inclusive environment for all students, regardless of their identity. The school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is evident in its mission statement (not to mention its commitment to anti-bullying and a spoils system for certain administrators), which states that it seeks to cultivate an open and welcoming community for students from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Furthermore, the school has a strong community of faculty and students who are dedicated to being an inclusive, safe, and supportive environment for all students. It is possible that the school could provide your child with the additional guidance and support they may need in order to address any issues that may be contributing to their behavior on the Red Line train.

Credentialism

Patrick Carroll:

When Parker Noland launched his trash-hauling business at age 20 in the summer of 2021, he was excited about the opportunities that lay before him. After taking out a loan from a local bank, the Montana native bought a truck and some dumpsters and got to work promoting his services. The business plan was simple: he would deliver dumpsters to construction sites looking to get rid of debris and then transport the dumpsters to the county dump once they were full.

Things quickly got complicated for Noland, however. Though he had registered his business, gotten the proper insurance, and complied with all public health and safety standards, he was still missing one thing, a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. As a result, right when he was about to get his business off the ground he was given a cease and desist order by the Montana Public Service Commission, the agency responsible for administering the Certificate law.

Noland applied for the Certificate shortly thereafter on September 8, 2021, but his troubles were just getting started. Two national garbage companies—his would-be competitors—protested his application, which they are allowed to do under the law. The companies issued various demands, such as data requests, and Noland’s legal expenses to fight the protests were soon thousands of dollars and counting.

Covering up research misconduct is itself research misconduct, as per Harvard’s policy on research integrity

Karlstack:

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Report Shows Harvard Professor Fabricated Data

Over next 6 months I published 11 more articles about Harvard’s blatant corruption:

Choice hurts rural schools: The teachers unions promote another easily debunked myth.

Corey DeAngelis:

This claim is neither new nor persuasive. Democrat Joy Hofmeister called school choice a “rural school killer” in her unsuccessful bid for Oklahoma governor this November. Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke likewise failed in his attempt to campaign against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s support for school choice. This week Iowa Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls resorted to the same tactic, calling school choice “an existential threat” to rural public schools.

These same politicians also claim that rural constituents wouldn’t benefit from school choice because the local public school is their only option. These arguments can’t both be true. If rural families didn’t have any other options, public schools wouldn’t suffer. And if rural public schools are as great as the teachers unions say they are, they would have no need to worry about a little competition.

University of Wisconsin-Madison senior and nuclear engineering student Grace Stanke was crowned Miss America 2023

Kayla Hunyh:

Representing the state as Miss Wisconsin, Stanke, of Wausau, wowed the judges in Connecticut with her classical violin performance and advocacy for clean energy.

Beating out 50 other candidates, Stanke is only the third Miss Wisconsin to win Miss America in the contest’s 101-year history. Terry Meeuwsen, of De Pere, became the first Miss Wisconsin to win Miss America 50 years ago. Laura Kaeppeler, from Kenosha, was the last Miss America to represent Wisconsin in 2012.

Famed Chicago School to Release “The Official Parker Handbook”

Benjamin Blair:

Designed as a how-to guide for progressive urban parents to more effectively coddle and mold progressive young minds, The Official Parker Handbook is already receiving rave acclaim and early praise from Party members who have read the book prior to publication.

‍‍Dr. Anthony Fauci: “There is a misplaced perception about people’s individual right to make a decision that supersedes societal safety, except at Francis Parker School. 💉”

Mayor ‍Lori Lightfoot: “Diversity and inclusion is imperative … This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing requests from people of color and the #buttplugdean. 🌈”‍

‍Ibrahim Kendi: “The life of racism cannot be separated from the life of capitalism … In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist. I endorse The Official Parker Handbook for prioritizing dildonomics in their curriculum. 🇨🇳”‍

‍Yoel Roth: “Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility, or worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr – including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults participating in extra curricular activities inside Francis Parker. 🍆”‍

Assisted suicide plans for children unveiled at Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital

Michael Swan:

In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies.

The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus about extending voluntary euthanasia in circumstances currently forbidden by law. The Canadian Council of Academies is specifically looking at extending so-called assisted dying to patients under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for euthanasia before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer’s or some other disease.

The Sept. 21 paper written by Sick Kids doctors, administrators and ethicists was published in the British Medical Journal’s J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics.

In a flowchart that outlines how a medically induced death would occur at Sick Kids, authors Carey DeMichelis, Randi Zlotnik Shaul and Adam Rapoport do not mention conversation with family or parents about how the child dies until after the death occurs in the “reflection period.”

Patient confidentiality governs the decision about whether or not to include parents in a decision about an assisted death, the authors said. If capable minors under the age of 18 stipulate they don’t want their parents involved, doctors and nurses must respect the patients’ wishes.

With lots of options for education, MPS schools are losing students at an alarming rate

Alan Borsuk:

With education options galore for parents and students, each choice by a family makes a statement. It doesn’t take too many choices — a few students gained, a few students lost — to affect which schools are thriving and which are not, how deep a school’s staff is and whether some classes and extracurriculars are offered.

And 20,000 students lost? That’s a sea change.

A good way to get a handle on the decline is to ask: Where did all the kids go?

Here are two answers:

Fewer kids. A smaller but important change is that the universe of kids in Milwaukee is shrinking. Fourteen years ago, the number of children getting publicly funded education was 115,522. That includes conventional schools, as well as partnership schools, charter schools and more. That number rose to between 119,000 and 121,000 in four school years, beginning in September 2012. Then it began declining. It was 114,184 in fall 2020; it was 111,333 in fall 2021; and it was 109,934 in fall 2022, a decline of almost 10% since a peak of 120,895 eight years ago, according to data I’ve been tracking for several years.

PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem

BBC:

A Sanskrit grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th Century BC has been solved by a University of Cambridge PhD student.

Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago.

Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said.

Mr Rajpopat said he had “a eureka moment in Cambridge” after spending nine months “getting nowhere”.

“I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer – swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating,” he said.

Internet traffic spying and sales

Ron Wyden

For several years, Neustar knowingly sold sensitive internet metadata which it presumably obtained from unwitting consumers. Some ofthese consumers may have been promised that their data would not be sold to third parties. Neustar did not take sufficient steps to warn consumers
that it no longer intended to honor these promises, and as such, appears to have engaged in business practices substantially similar to those that the FTC has previously argued violated the FTC Act.

The disturbing truth about a huge educational error

Fiona McCann:

The most terrifying podcast I listened to so far this year was not about the death of American democracy or even Jordan Peele’s new horror offering (though more of that at a later date). Rather, it was a podcast about reading.

Sold a Story, Emily Hanford’s new six-parter highlighting how American kids have been learning – or more accurately, not learning – to read for decades, is an investigation into why teachers, parents, and governments came to believe in a methodology that she says caused harm to a generation of children.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Hungry India, a nawabi US President, ‘Mexican blood’ — The real story of Green Revolution

Vandana Menon

When India was at war with Pakistan in 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Indians to miss a meal on Mondays. The next year, a minister dug up his five-acre backyard in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi to sow wheat – the same spot where Home Minister Amit Shah now lives. And America, busy with the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, was plotting a giant Revolution in India.

As Indians chanted “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”, scientists from the Pusa Institute anxiously waited at Mumbai’s docks for a consignment of magic seeds that would end hunger.

Such was its power that by 1968, the US-aided Green Revolution had transformed India from a ship-to-mouth shortage economy to a country that shut down schools and cinema theatres to store surplus food.

Half a century later, India attempted another farm revolution in 2020. But this time, the farmers themselves took to the streets in protest and won.

A hungry nation with ‘ship-to-mouth’ economy

India won its war against hunger with its combined arsenal of science, diplomacy, and political courage.

The man who deployed these weapons was C. Subramaniam. Selected especially to be the Union Minister of Food and Agriculture in 1964 during a food crisis, Subramaniam faced an uphill battle. Time was running out for India — in a 1961 report, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization predicted that India’s population would outstrip its food production in five years.

Madison Schools Safety Survey

Scott Girard:

A survey that will help guide safety and student wellness work in the Madison Metropolitan School District is open for staff, parents and students until 11:59 p.m. Monday.

The Madison School Board’s Safety and Student Wellness Ad Hoc Committee met Thursday for the 16th time to discuss progress on the subject. The group was formed in the spring in response to a series of safety concerns last school year.

So far, the three-question survey has received about 6,500 responses, committee co-chair and Memorial High School senior Lavenia Vulpal said. District spokesperson Tim LeMonds called it a “very, very good response” level.

“Please encourage people you know to get online and fill it out,” Vulpal told committee members. “We are still looking for ways to reach students, staff and parents.”

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

And repeatedly, the Hook’s spotlight fell on one of the most powerful institutions in Charlottesville: the University of Virginia.

Washington Post

Among the vanished stories: Spencer’s painstaking reconstruction of a 1959 plane crash that haunted central Virginia; a prizewinning investigation of the conflicts of interest driving up costs for the region’s water management program; a deeply reported feature on a 1982 fraternity road trip gone wrong and its devastating ripple effects over a quarter-century; and all the reader comments posted below each story, which in the years before social media could evoke the voice of the Charlottesville community, former staffers say.

A truly motivated researcher might find the dusty print copies of these articles in a library (or Spencer’s attic). But an average reader curious to learn about those subjects won’t find any of these stories when searching the web.

“Journalism is supposed to be the rough first draft of history,” said Sean Tubbs, a journalist who relied on the Hook’s old stories to build a database for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. “When someone ostensibly paid to kill the archive, they cut off a direct link for the public to learn from these articles.”

It’s a bit of “a murder mystery,” said McNair, who joined forces with Spencer, Stuart and other old colleagues from the Hook this summer to investigate what happened.

As catalogued on a Harvard University-hosted database called Lumen, the requests continued through late August and targeted 18 different webpages that reference alleged violent incidents at U-Va. The vast majority of the pages have one common denominator: the Ofori case.

Madison restorative justice programs connect victims and offenders through empathy

Nicholas Garton:

There are many public and private organizations that host restorative justice programs inside of Wisconsin prisons.

In 2006, the Prison Ministry Project out of First Congregational, located next to Camp Randall, formed a restorative justice program.

Restorative justice operates in a few different ways. Most programs bring together a victim of a crime with the perpetrator of that crime and ask them to engage in a healing dialogue. Those sessions focus on the effect the crime had on the victim, as well as their family and friends, the community and the perpetrator.

“The gold standard of restorative justice is usually victim-offender dialogues,” said Jerry Hancock, a pastor at First Congregational Church and the program’s founder. “For example, the family survivors of a murder will go to a prison and in a very structured setting, meet with the person who killed their loved one and honestly engage in dialogue where the perpetrator answers questions that a victim’s family has. That way it’s possible for healing to begin.”

Civics: “brand safety”

Revolver:

Like stochastic terrorism, brand safety isn’t a completely new concept; it has existed in marketing circles for some time. But just like fake news or stochastic terror, “brand safety” has become a buzzword. The term has absolutely erupted in popularity in just the last few years. The Wikipedia page for “brand safety” was only created in April 2019. The page itself is brief and thinly-sourced. At the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group for websites hosting online ads, the page for Brand Safety is only a few years old and only included the thinnest gruel of content as of late 2020.

A cursory look online reveals that the concept of “brand safety” is absolutely everywhere now—principally in the context of attacking and threatening Elon Musk for loosening censorship on Twitter.

The battleground is consensus of the swarm and your own mind

Robert W Malone:

What is Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW)?

I am a student, not an expert on 5GW, but I certainly am getting rapidly trained in the school of hard knocks. Consequently, in trying to make sense our of this new form of warfare, I have had to rely on true experts. With that in mind, please forgive the following extended quote from “Fourth- and Fifth-Generation Warfare: Technology and Perceptions”, published in 2019 by Dr. Waseem Ahmad Qureshi. Advocate Supreme Court of Pakistan, in the San Diego International Law Journal (Volume 21). Dr. Qureshi’s highly footnoted and referenced article can be downloaded for free (PDF) here. For those seeking additional information and context, I also recommend reading “The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War?” by Daniel Abbott.

Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Reckoning

The Biden Justice Department had asked the Court to vacate a lower-court injunction against the loan cancellation. Instead the Justices deferred that request and agreed to hear the constitutional challenge brought by several states (Biden v. Nebraska). The Court agreed to Justice’s request to hear the case in expedited fashion, so the challenge will skip further proceedings in lower courts and go directly to the Supremes, with oral argument in February. A ruling is likely by the end of June.

This is excellent news. President Biden has tried to pull a constitutional trick for the ages by ordering the forgiveness of up to $20,000 per borrower on his own authority. Congress had given the executive no such power, as even Mr. Biden had previously noted.

But an election loomed, Democrats looked to be in trouble, and in August the President declared one of the greatest vote-buying exercises of all time. The Education Department located a heretofore obscure corner of the 2003 Heroes Act that supposedly justified mass loan cancellations owing to the Covid emergency. It’s a classic example of a political need in rampaging search of a legal excuse.

“She sees good behavior as a tool of the oppressors”

Dave Cieslewicz

Did she pick up that point of view in her training? Is it supported by the MMSD administration? is it engrained in the culture of her school? Wherever it originated from it’s a huge problem and my worries about MMSD, eased by the idea that districts we compete with don’t have stand-alone honors classes, were redoubled by that point of view.

Two other points are worth noting. First, 45% of honors class students are non-white. The fundamental reason for eliminating the classes is that they’re not diverse enough, but when almost half the students aren’t white that strikes me as pretty diverse.

Second, that figure is a couple of years old and it doesn’t include more detailed breakdowns. The State Journal requested more recent data, but District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said the paper would have to file an open records request to get the data. This continues a pattern of lack of transparency that I’ve noted in this space more than a couple of times in the past. Why not just hand over the public’s information to the public, especially given the fact that you will eventually have to comply with the FOIA request anyway?

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Madison school proposal to end standalone honors classes set for a vote

Dylan Brogan:

The “time is now” to eliminate standalone honors classes in Madison high schools, according to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins. At a Dec. 5 school board meeting, Jenkins said a “racist attitude” underlies support for keeping separate classes that offer more rigorous coursework to students.

“We are no longer going to uphold what is considered to be a segregated mentality,” Jenkins said. “We should work together to get it done.”

To replace traditional honors classes, Jenkins wants to expand the district’s current Earned Honors program to all core classes — English, math, science and social studies — offered to Madison freshmen and sophomores. Earned Honors started in 2017 and is at different stages of implementation at each high school. The program allows students to receive an honors credit on their transcript by doing extra work while enrolled in a non-honors class.

District officials first informed the board in April 2021 that they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. But administrators in February “hit pause” on that plan “to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” This fall, however, staff began moving forward with plans to expand Earned Honors while sunsetting standalone honors classes for freshmen in 2023 and sophomores in 2024.

The policy shift didn’t need board approval but, according to The Capital Times, members Christina Gomez Schmidt and Nicki Vander Muelen requested a vote. Board president Ali Muldrow now says it’s “likely” the board will vote on two issues at its meeting on Dec. 19: whether to expand the Earned Honors program and whether to eliminate standalone honors classes.

Deja vu: one size fits all: English 10.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Here’s what you should know about honors classes in the Madison School District

Olivia Herken:

His stand-alone classes didn’t give him that much deeper of an understanding of a subject than earning honors did, Hernandez said.

In his general Western civilization class, for example, he had to read an additional book to earn his honors credits, which allowed him to gain more knowledge than he normally would have.

“(Stand-alone) honors does feel slightly more rigorous, but usually still manageable,” West High senior Holly Wright said.

Wright said she liked the earned honors format, though, because it allowed her to dive deeper into classes and subjects she enjoyed without it feeling like too much additional work.

Honors classes are often seen as precursors for Advanced Placement, or AP, classes that students take later on, but the two are separate.

AP classes are designed by the College Board to give students the chance to earn college credit when they perform well on the exam given at the end of the course. Students have the option to take the test or not, and AP courses are most often offered to juniors and seniors.

Deja vu: one size fits all: English 10.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Considering all abortion costs

Ross Douthat

“You can’t insist that the immediate economic benefits of ending a pregnancy should be counted in Roe v. Wade’s favor, but any of the larger negative shifts in mating and marriage…””… and child rearing associated with abortion can’t be considered as part of the debate…. [Consider a] world clearly shadowed by the effects of family breakdown and social atomization, with loneliness and despair stalking young and old alike… population aging, population decline, childless cities and empty hinterlands and a vast inverted demographic pyramid on the shoulders of the young…. [And look at] the most influential voices in our aging, unhappy, stagnation-shadowed society — the most educated and impassioned and articulate, the most self-consciously devoted to the idea of progress — committing and recommitting themselves to the view that nothing is so important as to continue ensuring that hundreds of thousands of unborn lives can be ended in utero every year…. … I beseech you to consider that you are making a mistake.”

Choose life.

Commentary

The rise and fall of peer review

Adam Mastroianni:

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.

(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.

Discussion Guide: Sold a Story

APM reports:

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

By Margaret Goldberg and Emily Hanford

You’ve listened to Sold a Story and now you have questions, thoughts, things you want to talk about. Maybe you want to organize a listening party, a professional development session, or a meeting at your child’s school. This discussion guide is designed to help you facilitate a conversation about ideas and themes in the podcast.

A note from Emily:

We turned to an experienced educator, Margaret Goldberg, to help us put this together. If you’ve listened to our previous reporting on reading instruction, you’ve met Margaret. She was the literacy coach in Oakland, California featured in our 2019 audio documentary At a Loss for Words. Margaret is also the co-founder of the Right to Read Project, a group of teachers and researchers committed to improving reading instruction in American schools. I encourage you to read Margaret’s blog. Some of my favorites — especially relevant to themes brought up in Sold a Story — include:

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Huriya Jabbar, Carlton J. Fong and Michelle Devall

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?

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: audit report on Wisconsin Gov Evers federal taxpayer spending

Harm Venhuizen:

nonpartisan audit released Wednesday called on Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to be more transparent about how he distributes billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds.

The Legislative Audit Bureau said Evers’ Department of Administration did not provide information it claimed the governor based his decisions on when handing out some $3.7 billion in pandemic aid over the past two years. Republican lawmakers have criticized the governor’s spending choices and tried to give themselves control of the money.

The Evers administration received $5.7 billion between March 2020 and June 2022 in federal coronavirus relief from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, the American Rescue Plan Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act.

The Competitive Effects of School Choice on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review

School-choice policies are expected to generate healthy competition between schools, leading to improvements in school quality and better outcomes for students. However, the empirical literature testing this assumption yields mixed findings. This systematic review and meta-analysis tests this theory by synthesizing the empirical literature on the competitive effects of school choice on student achievement. Overall, we found small positive effects of competition on student achievement. We also found some evidence that the type of school-choice policy and student demographics moderated the effects of competition on student achievement. By examining whether school competition improves outcomes, our findings can inform decisions of state and local policymakers who have adopted or are considering adopting school-choice reforms.

Propaganda Sausage Making

Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano and Aaron Krolik:

The emails provide a rare glimpse into a propaganda machine that is perhaps Russia’s greatest wartime success. Even as the country faces battlefield losses, mounting casualties, economic isolation and international condemnation, state-run television channels have spun a version of the war in which Russia is winning, Ukraine is in shambles and Western alliances are fraying. Along with a fierce crackdown on dissent, the propaganda apparatus has helped President Vladimir V. Putin maintain domestic support for a war that many in the West had hoped would weaken his hold on power the longer it dragged on.

To create this narrative, producers at the state media company cherry-picked from conservative Western media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller, as well as obscure social media accounts on Telegram and YouTube, according to the records. Russian security agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., fed other information, creating an alternative version of events such as the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

New York State Wants to Conscript Me to Violate the Constitution

Eugene Volokh:

New York politicians are slapping a badge on my chest. A law going into effect Saturday requires social-media networks, including any site that allows comments, to publish a plan for responding to alleged hate speech by users.

The law blog I run [The Volokh Conspiracy] fits the bill, so the law will mandate that I post publicly my policy for responding to comments that “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group” based on “race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” It also requires that I give readers a way to complain about my blog’s content and obligates me to respond directly.

I don’t want to moderate such content and I don’t endorse the state’s definition of hate speech. I do sometimes delete comments, but I do it based on my own editorial judgment, not state command. Still, I’m being conscripted. By obligating me to do the state’s bidding with regard to viewpoints that New York condemns, the law violates the First Amendment. …

I started the Volokh Conspiracy to share interesting and important legal stories, not to police readers’ speech at the government’s behest. By challenging this law, I hope I can put down the badge and go back to my keyboard—because legislators can fight crime and respond to hate without violating the First Amendment or drafting me into the speech police.

AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing

Beth McMurtrie

Is the college essay dead? Are hordes of students going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments? Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?

And what does it mean for professors if the answer to those questions is “yes”?

These and other questions have flooded news sites and social media since the nonprofit OpenAI released a tool called ChatGPT, which promises to revolutionize how we write. Enter a prompt and in seconds it will produce an essay, a poem, or other text that ranges in quality, users say, from mediocre to pretty good. It can do so because it has been trained on endless amounts of digital text pulled from the internet.

“These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power”

Mike Solana:

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and in a manner that influenced U.S. elections (!), Elon Musk opened his new company’s internal communications to a small handful of journalists. They set immediately to breaking a series of major stories that have rewritten the history of Trump-era tech. Long story short, Twitter leadership lied to the public, relentlessly, for years, and everything the most paranoid among us ever said about the platform was true. “Trust and safety” is a euphemism for political censorship, with “expert” teams comprised almost exclusively of the most radical, joyless grievance studies majors you ever met in college. Their goal is to reshape American politics by dominating the bounds of what the public is permitted to consider American politics. In these efforts, they have mostly been succeeding.

On December 2nd, Matt Taibbi shared conversations from the company’s “trust and safety” team that led to Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. While interesting, Taibbi’s most notable revelation came almost as a side: both major political parties, as well as the White House, maintained direct lines of communication with Twitter, which they used to formally request content be removed from the platform. The company responded enthusiastically to many of these requests, and the examples we have (for now) come from the Democratic Party. Critics have been quick to point out Trump was in the White House at the time, though less interested, for some reason, in what — if anything — he removed from the site.

Finally, over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming, which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done regardless of their own rules.

Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a portrait of clear and inevitable partisan bias at one of the most dominant speech platforms in history. A small handful of very left-wing executives, who naturally perceived most opinion right of center as dangerous, worked tirelessly to limit those opinions from view. Empowered to censor “unsafe” content, and protected by a team of people who shared their political orientation, the executives produced, in a legal and decentralized manner, a key component of our defacto state censorship apparatus. While we don’t know for sure this is also happening at Google, Meta, or TikTok (which is for some reason still allowed to operate in this country), I think it’s a safe bet we’re looking at an industry-wide affliction.

But I do have questions.

“In just a little more than 3½ years since then, public debt has surged by $8 trillion while total official debt has risen by $9 trillion”