Greg Toppo:

New research on post-pandemic student achievement presents a sobering picture, offering a reality check for anyone who might think recovery is proceeding apace.

The study, from CALDER at the American Institutes for Research, NWEA and Harvard University, suggests school districts should do more. “We need more kids to get more hours of interventions,” said CALDER’s Dan Goldhaber.  

Taken together, the dozen mid-to-large sized school districts investigated enroll more than 600,000 students across 10 states in every region in the country. And they serve higher proportions of students of color and students attending high-poverty schools than national averages. The districts range from Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia to Dallas Independent School District, Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, and Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma.

Jon Brown:

A judge recently ruled that a former Virginia Tech women’s soccer player can continue a lawsuit against her former coach after she was allegedly benched and pressured to leave the team for declining to kneel during a pregame social justice demonstration.

Kiersten Hening, who was a midfielder/defender for the Hokies from 2018 to 2020, sued coach Charles “Chugger” Aidair in 2021 on First Amendment grounds, which federal Judge Thomas Cullen announced on Dec. 2 can proceed to trial.

Hening alleged that Adair was not a fan of her political views and that she often differed from her teammates on social justice issues during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Hening further explained in the lawsuit that while she “supports social justice and believes that black lives matter,” she “does not support BLM the organization,” citing its “tactics and core tenets of its mission statement, including defunding the police.”

Wall Street Journal:

There’s a new job for those 87,000 new employees at the Internal Revenue Service, and it isn’t chasing billionaires. It’s digging around to discover if you reported that extra $600 you made from selling grandma’s heirlooms at your garage sale.

The IRS is reminding Americans that the reporting rules have changed for payment-card and third-party payment network transactions. This means that if you received a payment of more than $600 via such networks as Venmo, PayPal, Amazon or Square, you will probably receive a Form 1099-K this year. The reporting limit for receiving a Form 1099-K used to be $20,000 a year.

You can thank the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, the $1.9 trillion spending blowout that did so much to spur inflation. Democrats unleashed the IRS to find the money to pay for this spending, and apparently their belief is that tens of millions of you are hiding income from your side hustle or selling old furniture.

Americans are obliged to report all of their income, whether they receive a 1099 or not. But chasing after transactions as low as $600 means more hassle for you and millions of others, though we wonder how much money this effort will raise.

Scott Girard:

Those totals don’t include the Madison Metropolitan School District or Milwaukee Public Schools, both of which passed operational referendums in 2020 that continue to allow them to surpass the revenue limit. Both districts are among those that are increasing their total tax levies and contributing to the statewide rise, WPF notes.

“Property tax levies increased 3.7% on December tax bills in those districts that have adopted referenda since 2020 while they fell 1.3% in districts that have not,” the report states.

State leaders are expected to begin discussing the next biennial budget early next year. Regardless of what they do with the revenue limit, there are two factors to watch for their impact on property taxes toward K-12 schools.

The first is the soon-to-sunset federal COVID-19 relief funding that has boosted school budgets over the past two years. Most funds must be spent by September 2024, which could leave holes in some district budgets if they’ve used the influx of one-time money on operational costs.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Scott Girard:

The Madison School Board will “most likely” take two votes later this month on changes to the district’s high school honors learning program.

Board president Ali Muldrow said Friday that she expects the board will split the elimination of ninth and 10th grade standalone honors classes from an expansion of earned honors programming into two, separate decisions, rather than combining them into one vote at the Dec. 19 meeting. Until this point, the changes have been discussed in concert with each other.

But the first piece of the potential change — eliminating standalone honors for ninth and 10th grades — has proven much more controversial.

Watch @RepNancyMace destroy trans activist Alejandra Caraballo with “her” own tweets 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/ignohVS6vH

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 13, 2022

Thomas Toch:

While teacher shortages dominated education news coverage during the summer, the tremendous amount of federal pandemic-relief money that states and school districts are pouring into the profession—and the funding’s substantial consequences for longstanding policies and practices in the more-than-three-million-member occupation—has received far less attention. Local education agencies are on pace to spend as much as $20 billion on instructional staff under the 2021 federal American Rescue Plan, making teachers the single largest investment under the plan nationwide.

To understand state and local policymakers’ strategies for bolstering teaching resources in the wake of the pandemic, FutureEd analyzed the Covid-relief spending plans of 5,000 school districts and charter organizations representing
74 percent of the nation’s public-school students. And we examined additional documents and conducted a range of interviews to gauge how the nation’s 100 largest school districts plan to reinforce their teaching ranks with American Rescue Plan aid.

The result is a comprehensive picture of state and local spending of recovery resources on the nation’s teaching force. And it’s clear that momentum is building behind several spending strategies with important policy implications, including an emerging commitment to extra pay for longer hours, and bonuses that break with traditional pay schedules to combat widespread teacher shortages.
Associate Director Phyllis Jordan and Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco researched and wrote the report. Nathan Kriha provided research assistance. And Merry Alderman, Molly Breen, Jackie Arthur provided editorial and design support.

Rupa Subramanya

One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”

There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy. 

They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”

Kevin Xu:

These trainings are not some two-to-four week corporate offsites, but up to one and a half years long!

Yet, despite all this extra cost and personnel hassle, Chang believes this is a “very good sign” and the right thing to do. That’s because these are the “people problems” and “cultural problems” that he learned the hard way 25 years ago when trying to open TSMC’s first American fab, located in Camas, Washington – an experience he called “a dream fulfilled became a nightmare fulfilled”. TSMC Arizona is now investing up front to avoid the same mistakes.

Beyond the talent shortage problem, there is also an equipment shortage and supplier shortage problem, so much so that TSMC has been shippingas many tools and equipment as possible, directly from Taiwan to Arizona. TSMC has voiced these and other concerns in a letter last month, sent to the NIST bureau of the Commerce Department (an agency I happened to have served in during the Obama administration). Of course, you wouldn’t hear about any of this if you only listen to Gina Raimondo.

Tom Hartsfield:

Do you want to be a professor? Countless PhD students harbor this dream. However, a firsthand look at the nature of academic hiring is enough to change the minds of many. A new research paper published in Nature, which explicitly analyzes faculty hiring, certainly won’t help matters: The picture it paints of the academic hiring market is not pretty.

Large universities maintain departments in most academic fields, and the competition for prestige and ranking between departments is ferocious. The paper examines 387 U.S. universities, containing more than 10,000 departments, with nearly 300,000 faculty coming and going over the ten years under study. (Here the term faculty represents a person who is tenured, or in a tenure trackposition, which gives them a shot at tenure. This excludes part-time instructors and other adjunct positions with no chance of obtaining tenure.)

PhD inequality

One might be tempted to believe that a PhD is a PhD; that is, once you have a “golden ticket,” you are employable as a faculty member. This is not so. The top five universities, which might be expected to produce roughly 1.3% (5/387) of all eventual faculty hires, produce 13.7% (53/387) — more than ten times what is expected. Continuing down the list, the top 3% of universities produce 27% of all professors; the top 10% produce 58% of professors.

Colleen Flaherty:

Faculty diversity is positively associated with student success across a variety of metrics. Black and Latino students are more likely to graduate when they see themselves represented in their instructors, for instance. But the benefits of faculty diversity aren’t just evident among historically underrepresented students: research suggests that engaging with diverse instructors, perspectives and ideas benefits all students—including in the development of empathy and problem-solving skills.

So how are institutions doing with respect to faculty diversity? Not great, says a new report from the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that promotes high academic achievement for all students.

As part of the analysis, researchers examined faculty diversity relative to student diversity, as well as hiring equity, tenure equity and changes in faculty representation over time for Black and Latino faculty members at 543 public, four-year institutions. The colleges and universities were given a score of zero to 100 based on faculty diversity, hiring equity and tenure equity. Numerical ratings were then translated to letter grades, with 60 being the threshold for failing (F).

Bee Wilson:

If there was​ one thing Maria Montessori hated, it was play. She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. This came as a surprise to me. I had the impression – from the hippyish reputation of modern Montessori schools – that the essence of the Montessori method was ‘learning through play’. Indeed, this is the way her philosophy is often summarised, including by her admirers. When you read her own words, however, you realise that the foundation of Montessori’s methods was a belief in work: effortful, concentrated, purposeful work. In her view, the work of children was more focused than the work of adults. Many adults were lazy, working only because they were paid to and doing as little as possible. But in her schools, she wrote, ‘we observe something strange: left to themselves, the children work ceaselessly … and after long and continuous activity, the children’s capacity for work does not appear to diminish but to improve.’ The fierce concentration Montessori observed in children had much in common with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘flow’: the state of being completely absorbed in an activity for its own sake. More recently, some psychologists studying children on the ADHD and autistic spectrums have used the word ‘hyperfocus’. For Montessori, this phenomenon was something that all children were capable of, as creatures of God.

Montessori’s educational theory is both less playful than one might assume and, as Cristina de Stefano’s biography shows, more deeply rooted in Catholicism. She wrote that the task of education was to find in the child ‘the true spirit of man, the design of the Creator: the scientific and religious truth’. She often contrasted her own methods with those of the German education theorist Friedrich Froebel, who died in 1852 (Montessori was born in 1870). Froebel coined the word ‘Kindergarten’ in 1840 to describe preschool establishments where children would spend their days at play. He created a series of sets of objects called ‘play gifts’ (Spielgaben) suitable for children of different ages. For example, ‘gift one’ consisted of balls of coloured yarn and ‘gift three’ consisted of eight identical wooden cubes. Many of Froebel’s gifts were the same objects Montessori used in her schools. The difference was the meaning assigned to them. Froebel thought a child should be encouraged to arrange a set of toy bricks as if they were horses and a stable, and then to rearrange them as a church. To Montessori, such fancies could only result in ‘mental confusion’ and even ‘savagery’ on the part of the child. For her, a brick was a brick was a brick and it was liberating for a child not to have to pretend otherwise.

Wall Street Journal:

Central States last year was only 17% funded and projected to collapse in a few years. The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) insures pensions up to $12,870 a year for participants with 30 years on the job. But it, too, is under-funded. If Central States failed, its liabilities could have taken down the PBGC, which insures multi-employer pensions for 11.2 million workers and retirees.

Congress in 2014 acted to prevent this death spiral by passing bipartisan legislation that let sick plans reduce benefits and make other changes to avoid insolvency. Eighteen plans took advantage of the law, but Democrats then had second thoughts and decided to ding taxpayers instead.

WisPolitics:

Still, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau in a June 2021 memo projected that school levies would fall by 2.6 percent on the bills sent out a year ago and 1.9 percent this year.

Instead, they went up 0.3 percent last year and 1.5 percent this year.

In all, 219 districts will see their levies go up on this December’s bills, 186 will see decreases and 16 will see them remain the same.

It is the 11th straight year that statewide school property taxes will rise.

According to the report, voters have approved 456 referendum questions since 2018. That includes 246 for operating budgets and 210 for capital projects.

Levies increased 3.7 percent in the districts that have adopted referendums since 2020, while they fell 1.3 percent in those that have not.

Viola Zhou:

Watching through a camera, a proctor monitors a Chinese student taking an English exam. Sitting in a Beijing living room, the student appears to be taking the test seriously. They frown during the listening session, as if trying hard to think about the answer. And for the written portion, their arms move about, with the tapping of a keyboard being heard.

But the student wasn’t typing anything. They weren’t even looking at the screen. Sitting next to the student, just outside of the camera’s field of view, was 34-year-old Tony Wang. As he’d done for dozens of students before, Wang was answering the questions by typing on a wireless keyboard, sometimes while eating barbecued skewers. For the speaking portion, he’d type the answers on an iPad or a smartphone for students to read out. And students who couldn’t speak English at all would silently move their lips while Wang invisibly spoke aloud the answer on their behalf.

Wang, who runs an agency that helps Chinese students study abroad, told Rest of World he had helped more than 100 students cheat on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Toefl) exam since at-home tests became available in 2020. “To insiders like us, ETS online testing is just a joke,” Wang said. (ETS, or Educational Testing Service, is the New Jersey-based company that administers Toefl and the GRE graduate school entry exam.)

Matthew Yglesias:

why have the past 50 years of technological change had so little impact on schooling?

The English word “lecture” derives from Medieval Latin’s “lectura” and is cognate with words like “lecteur” (French) and “lector” (Spanish) which mean “reader.” A lecturer, in other words, is a reader. 

Today, giving a lecture that consisted of simply standing at a podium reading a book would be considered bad practice. But several hundred years ago, books were extremely expensive because hand-copying manuscripts doesn’t scale. What does scale, at least to an extent, is the human voice. So an institution could serve the very useful function of providing a place where students could gather to hear a person read out loud from a book and write down what the lecturer was saying, securing knowledge. 

An institution like that would need to have a lot of books on hand and a scholar would need ready access to books, so producing scholarship was highly complementary to lecturing. The scholars take books as inputs but also produce books as outputs. To earn money, they would lecture — which is to say, read the books — to students. The students themselves would benefit not only from learning about what the books say but also from some kind of formal certification. And thus was born the familiar university bundle that combines libraries, scholarship, teaching, and certification. 

This is a somewhat rickety pile of in-principle-separate ideas that really does seem vulnerable to technological disruption. On its face, the relevant disruptive technology should have been the printing press, and the disruption should have happened three or four hundred years ago. But not only did the basic structure of the university persist, but most of the world’s leading universities are also much newer than the printing press. Harvard and Yale are really old by the standards of American institutions, but they’re not older than printing — and many other prestigious American universities date from the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time Stanford and the University of Texas were founded, it was already extremely clear that people could study books at home (or in libraries) and then take exams administered by certifying bodies that had nothing to do with teaching or research.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education—the subject of his new book, “The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It.” It’s an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.

Many young Americans—old ones, too—don’t see the point of liberal arts: “We are suspicious, because we don’t know what good they are and we don’t know what use they are,” Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were “allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what’s the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind” while also being “a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything.”

Víctor Davis Hanson:

Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.

What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.

7. There were dissenters inside Twitter.

“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” pic.twitter.com/LtonK0gfS3

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

6. It is a war fought not with weapons but with illegitimate rules, wicked economic policies, and intolerable limitations of natural rights.

— Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (QTE) (@ArchbpVigano) December 11, 2022

Union Leader:

The official stated reason for doing this is that we have too many White people. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Biden on the matter: “We must ensure that voters of color have a choice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window.” Under the new math, South Carolina, with a Black population of 26.7%, leapfrogs New Hampshire on the primary calendar, which has a Black population of just under 2%. Which party is obsessed with race again?

Margaret Harris:

What is a topological material?

The most interesting topological materials are topological insulators, which are materials that are insulating in the bulk, but conducting on the surface. In these materials, the conducting channels where the electronic current flows are very robust. They persist independently of some external disturbances that one can have in experiments, such as weak disorder or temperature fluctuations, and they’re also independent of size. This is very interesting because it means these materials have a constant resistance, a constant conductivity. Having such tight control of the electronic current is useful for many applications.

Max Gorin:

I’m generally happy with my level of English. I’m fluent at speaking, I’ve been using the language at work for the past 24 years. I’ve spoken at conferences and read a good number of books rarely resorting to a dictionary. I believe that my first job as a junior developer at Philips was granted to me for being garrulous at the interview, rather than for any other skills.

About 3 weeks ago I realized it was not enough any more.

The expression “resorting to”, which I used a couple of sentences prior, would not just pop up in my head in the middle of an otherwise lively English conversation. I actually had to look it up.

In Russian, I would use the expression “to resort to” without even thinking.

This puts together my main point. When speaking my mother tongue, I’m used to expressing my thoughts in somewhat more sophisticated ways. I enjoy myself trying to keep an engaging conversation, using resonating words and phrasal expressions, putting in an occasional wordplay, or cracking a joke. And all that is mostly hidden from me when I use English. So, I plan to change that.

Charlie Meyer:

I’ve remained skeptical of AI code generation for a long time, until I began chatting with ChatGPT last week. It effortlessly worked through problems in Java, Python, C++, and helped me solve a configuration issue in Pickcode’s backend. Plenty has been written about how impressive this is, and there are hundreds of examples being shared online every day. The quick summary of all of this is that AI code completion and large language models will be an invaluable tool to everyone writing software going forward, and I certainly agree.

The important question for me is how does ChatGPT change computer science education? For seemingly the first time, computers have achieved supremacy in writing nested loops in Java to print out Xs and Os in alternating order. ChatGPT is also demonstrably better at writing Python programs to calculate a basketball player’s free throw percentage, and every other intro to programming assignment you might think of. This does not mean that we can hand every kid Copilot or Replit Ghostwriter and watch them code circles around Linus Torvalds. This means we need to rethink what it means to learn how to program.

Justin Hart:

Unlike Dr. Bhattacharya, I am not a medical expert. Normally I wouldn’t insert myself into someone else’s domain, but the nation’s health authorities had no problem inserting themselves into mine. They meddled in my business, my church, my kids’ education, my health, my grocery store, my gym, my coffee shop, my barber. In each case, some government entity was there with strangling regulations or an order to shut down entirely.

So I formed a ragtag group of activists, analysts, experts and parents, all trying to get our lives back to normal. We called our group Rational Ground and worked to amplify common-sense Covid policies. We published interactive charts, highlighted data refuting the stay-at-home orders, and pointed out the low risk of the virus for children. It was a lonely and difficult fight, but Dr. Bhattacharya was a calm and steady ally.

By the fall of 2020 we focused our efforts to support Scott Atlas, a Stanford colleague of Dr. Bhattacharya and a key adviser to the Trump administration on Covid. After President Trump lost the election, the momentum Dr. Atlas had won was seemingly lost. The Biden administration pushed for restrictions and for censorship of those who disagreed with the government’s official position.

In July 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced, “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Ms. Psaki also revealed that senior staff for President Biden were a part of the White House’s efforts to suppress free speech.

This week’s revelations about Twitter add to the evidence that something bad was afoot. Dr. Bhattacharya expressed shock on learning his account had been targeted for censorship. “The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt,” he tweeted. Remembering the adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, Elon Musk, whose takeover of Twitter led to this and a series of other revelations, replied to Dr. Bhattacharya, “The Sun is coming.”

I spent the afternoon yesterday at Twitter HQ at the invitation of @elonmusk to find out more about the trend "blacklist" that twitter placed on me & more. A short thread on what I found out follows.
1/4

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022

Freddie deBoer

Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.

William Jacobson:

We have received numerous inquiries from readers as to whether the Gibsons had been paid.

We have confirmed with the Gibsons’ lawyers that the Gibsons have, indeed, finally been paid. The money was wired recently.

That payment, while large, hardly compensates the family for the pain they went through for over 6 years, and the loss of David and Grandpa after the verdict but before the appeals were resolved.

Alan Borsuk:

Compared to what children need and should be getting? There is more stability in Grantosa’s school leadership and in the teaching staff, and improved services from a school psychologist, a guidance counselor and others. But more than half the teachers are new to the school since the 2019-20 school year, including five first-year teachers currently. There are two classes with teachers who are not permanent members of the staff. And the availability of counselors and others still falls short of what would be best for these children. On these scores, things are cheery in a limited way.   

How about the basic matter of the school’s 538 students showing up on a regular basis? Attendance through Nov. 30 was 83.7%, compared to 75.4% a year ago. Obviously, that’s an improvement, but it still means about one in six students is missing on a typical day. That’s much below the average in elementary schools statewide. More limited cheeriness.

Brad Polumbo:

Alongside other Apple Daily staff, Lai was arrested in August 2020 after the Chinese government cracked down on Hong Kong and ended its previous status as a semiautonomous free city. In a telling move, the authorities went so far as to destroy Lai’s media company and the paper, not just arrest its leadership.

But Lai’s arrest wasn’t inevitable. Perhaps the most haunting yet inspiring part of his story, as told by Gigot, is that Lai had the opportunity to flee Hong Kong before he was arrested. He chose to remain and face the perverse “justice” that awaited him rather than run from the forces working against democracy and freedom. That takes a level of bravery that’s difficult to comprehend.

What does any of this have to do with Americans?

Well, for one thing, Lai’s only hope of release seems to be some form of negotiation from the U.S. government. Given our support as a nation and government for the freedom cause in Hong Kong, the Biden administration should do whatever it can to help his cause. But more broadly, Lai’s story should remind us why a free press is so important.

Adrienne Raphel:

Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. “Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). “Eenty, teenty, ithery, bithery” (England). “Ippetty, sipetty, ippetty sap, ipetty, sipetty, kinella kinack” (Scotland). And I’d be remiss in omitting “One potato, two potato, three potato, four / Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more,” which flirts with replacing eeny meeny as the counting-out gold standard in the United States.

In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.” The nigger-to-tiger shift is one of the rare instances where changes in the rhyme happen in such an explicit and pointed fashion. The rhyme morphs constantly, but usually ad hoc, and each kickball court has its own particular flavor based more on random chance; one child’s popular improvisation might catch on and change the rhyme in a certain region for decades.

Still trying to process my emotions on learning that @twitter blacklisted me. The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt.
1/2

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 9, 2022

Related: the great Barrington declaration.

and:

UW’s Oct. 18 response to PPT estimated it would take five months to fulfill two requests for Starbird’s communications and hinted it could take longer, pledging to notify PPT if “additional time is needed,” according to the suits filed in King County Superior Court.

The first request names Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which leads EIP with CIP; Emerson Brooking and Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Ben Nimmo and Camille Francois of social media analytics firm Graphika.

Natalie Alms:

The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday to override an existing law and update requirements for government agencies to write communications in easy-to-understand language.

Specifically, the Clear and Concise Content Act, backed by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chair Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), zeroes in on the use of plain writing in government content about benefits and services or filing taxes, provided on paper or digitally. 

“This bill does exactly what its name implies – it makes government communications easier to understand,” said Peters in a statement.

“Stop the ‘government speak,’” said Lankford in a statement. “Federal agencies don’t need to use jargon, countless legal citations and confusing references to laws so only ‘insiders’ can understand.”

The bill defines plain writing as “writing that is clear, concise, well-organized” and follows best practices to make the content understandable to an audience, “including an audience who may be disabled, may not be proficient in English or may otherwise be disadvantaged or traditionally underserved.”

Ann Althouse on the suppression of Stanford professor Dr Jay Bhattacharya:

He sounds like any intelligent American who isn’t drawn to party politics. We may even be the majority! If only the New York Times could stop catering to the Democratic Party and write for us. 

Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy….

Great! An actual human being. Some people love them.

ARTHUR KOESTLER RICHARD WRIGHT LOUIS FISCHER, IGNAZIO SILONE ANDR E GIDE STEPHEN SPENDER

we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.” And with that the talk veered to why so-and-so had ever become a Communist, and why he had or had not left the Party. When the argument began to boil up again, I said, ‘Wait. Tell me exactly what happened when you joined the Party-not what you feel about it now, but what you felt then.” So Koestler began the strange story of his meeting with Herr Schneller in the Schneidemiihl paper-mill; and suddenly I interrupted, “This should be a book,” and we began to discuss names of ex­ Communists capable of telling the truth about themselves.

At first our choice ranged far and wide, but before the night was out we decided to limit the list to half a dozen writers and journalists. We were not in the least interested either in swelling the Hood of anti-Communist propaganda or in pro­ viding an opportunity for personal apologetics. Our concern was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period-from 1917 to 1939-when con­ version was so common. For this purpose it was essential that each contributor should be able not to relive the past-that is impossible-but, by an act of imaginative self-analysis, to recreate it, despite the foreknowledge of the present. As I well know, autobiography of this sort is almost impossible for the practical politician: his self-respect distorts the past in terms of the present. So-called scientillc analysis is equally mislead­ ing; dissecting the personality into a set of psychological and sociological causes, it explains away the emotions, which we wanted described. The objectivity we sought was thepower to recollect-if not in tranquillity, at least in “dispassion”­ and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.

Robby Soave:

The Weiss installment, on the other hand, offers significant evidence of something that many people merely suspected was taking place: wholesale blacklisting of Twitter accounts that were perceived to be causing harm.

Weiss provides several examples of ways in which the platform limited the reach of various high-profile users: Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine who opposed various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, was on a “trends blacklist,” which meant that his tweets would not appear in the trending topics section; right-wing radio host Dan Bongino landed on a “search blacklist,” which meant that he did not show up in searches; and conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was slapped with a “do not amplify” label. At no point did anyone at Twitter communicate to these individuals that their content was being limited in such a manner.

These actions, of course, sound a lot like “shadow banning,” which is the theory that Twitter surreptitiously restricts users’ content, even in cases where the platform has not formally issued a ban or suspension. For years, various figures on the right and contrarian left have complained that the reach of their tweets had substantially and artificially diminished for nonobvious reasons, contrary to the stated claims of top-level Twitter staffers who steadfastly asserted: “We do not shadow ban.”

This claim depends upon how the term is defined. To be clear, Twitter has publicly admitted that it suppresses tweets that “detract from the conversation,” though the platform’s plan was to eventually move toward a policy of informing users about suppression efforts—a move that never took place.

BabylonBee:

Researchers are reporting that disinformation on Twitter, Facebook, and mainstream news sources is already down by 92% in the wake of a 24-hour writer’s strike at the New York Times.

“We always wondered where all this harmful disinformation was coming from,” said Darryl Ball, a researcher with the Center for Combatting Bad Things Online. “Turns out, it was all coming from those knuckleheads at the Times. Who knew?” 

Several studies indicate the country has seen a sharp decrease in hate speech, foreign propaganda, and shockingly dumb hot takes since the entire writing staff walked out of the building in New York City, which experts believe could lead to an outbreak of peace and harmony across the nation.

“All this time, the threat to democracy was us all along!” said NYT Union Boss Fuggs Crullers to reporters from other news organizations not on strike. “We have begun negotiations with leadership to pay us more money to never come back to work in hopes of saving America.” 

At publishing time, all other news outlets around the country reported feeling “lost” as they were so used to just copying and pasting from the New York Times each morning. 

Maxim Lott:

As with ChatGPT’s essay-writing ability, the current best use of the AI is to take its output as a starting point, from which humans can then edit it, and add their own knowledge and critical thinking ability.

But that will likely change down the road.

As Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution notes, humans working with computer assistance were once better at playing chess than unaided humans, or computers alone. But for a while now, computers alone have been better at chess than even humans working along with computers.

The same thing, he notes, has happened with facial recognition. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that humans no longer provide added value in matching an identity with a photo. Instead, a computer working alone now has less error.

Leslie Eastman:

Last week I reported on two volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Kilauea, that were simultaneously erupting on the Big Island of Hawaii.

As I projected in that report, lava is continuing to flow toward the main highway on the island. However, there are no current plans to control the flow.

Rob Wiesenthal

Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he has undertaken a rapid restructuring that few large technology companies would attempt unless faced with an immediate liquidity crisis. Minutes after closing his purchase of the company, he started a process that reduced the workforce from 7,500 to 2,500 in 10 days.

Media pundits immediately slammed him, arguing that his slash-and-burn strategy would destroy one of the world’s most important social-media platforms—already in danger under the burden of $14 billion in debt. Much of this criticism came in the form of tweets, as the irony of using Twitter to denounce Twitter apparently escaped Mr. Musk’s critics. But the restructuring of Twitter won’t destroy the company.

Morgan Housel:

Self-interest can lead people to believe and justify nearly anything. Think about businesses trying to survive competition being run by people trying to prove their career worth, and the incentive to run with the option that provides the cleanest path to the next win is huge, even when that option is something you wouldn’t accept in less-stressful circumstances. I have seen investors justify strategies and sales techniques they fiercely argued against at previous employers, coming around the moment their career depended on it. These are good, honest people. But self-interest is a freight train of persuasion. When you accept how powerful it is you become more skeptical of promotion, and more empathetic to those doing the promoting.

While subtle, if you look closely at this chart, you might notice a slight bias: pic.twitter.com/QAC0GexiNz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022

David Bernstein:

At oral argument in the recent affirmative action cases, attorneys for the defendants argued that although they do ask applicants to check a racial/ethnic box, they do not limit their consideration of diversity just to those classifications, but also to religion, ideology, and other aspects of identity that affect viewpoint. (For example, Mr. Waxman for Harvard: “Harvard greatly values religious diversity.”) That’s what they tell the courts. Here, however, is how Yale Law School describes its upcoming “Diversity Homecoming:” 

Please join us for Yale Law School’s Diversity Homecoming, a two-day event in New Haven that fosters a dialogue on diversity among the YLS community.

The programming in New Haven, spanning Friday evening through Saturday evening, will feature remarks by Dean Heather Gerken, alumni and faculty presentations, and opportunities to engage with Yale Law School student affinity groups, including the Asian Pacific American Law Students’ Association; the Black Law Students’ Association; Latinx Law Students’ Association; the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students’ Association; the Native American Law Students’ Association; and the South Asian Law Students’ Association.

In a development that should surprise no one, YLS does not include religious or ideological groups in their list of student groups that contribute to diversity. Of course, Yale Law School isn’t UNC or Harvard, the defendants in the case. And Yale does include the South Asian and MENA groups, for which there are no boxes on application forms. But I think we all know that Yale Law’s narrow view of the sort diversity that contributes to the university experience is shared by other elite educational institutions.

Katie Harbath:

To start, defining who should or shouldn’t be on a list gets complicated fast. 

For instance, the Board, in its analysis, says Meta should do more to “prioritize expression that is important for human rights, including expression which is of special public importance.” Meta is criticized for not having a “comprehensive system in place to systematically assess which journalists, human rights defenders or civil society figures in a particular geography should be subject to ERSR.”

Yeah – that’s because not only defining who a journalist is, let alone the real security risks of Meta having a clean taxonomy of journalists and activists worldwide. While I understand that the Board doesn’t see it as part of their job to write policies, I wish they gave a little more guidance on how they would want Meta to define and find who these people are. An opt-in system would help some – but you still need a way to confirm that the people asking for protection should get protection and ensure you are covering those who may not realize they can request it.

We ran into the same problem in defining who a politician is. Let’s create a list of every politician and government page worldwide. Sounds so simple at first blush, right? Surely someone has built this. Nope. They still haven’t.

Andrew

Of the four options given above, I think option A is the best, then D is the second best, but the best choice is not completely clear. The trouble with option A is that the norespondents might not respond even after encouragement. The trouble with option D is that the nonrespondents can differ from the respondents. Options B and E are fine too, as they both involve gathering more data, but presumably the new data will still have noresponse issues.

Usual good practice would be to gather available data on the respondents and use this information to adjust the sample to the population. We discuss this in chapter 17 of Regression and Other Stories. This would go beyond what is taught in high school, though. I actually don’t like this sort of message that says that nonrandom samples are bad but without a discussion of how to fix the problems. I hope someday to design a high-school-level statistics course, but I’m not there yet.

Corey DeAngelis:

Until 2018, Oregon was one of 23 states without right-to-work protections for government workers, meaning teachers and thousands of other public employees were required to financially support union activities.

That changed in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Janus v. AFSCME, affirmed that mandatory union payments violate public employees’ First Amendment rights.
Knowing members could suddenly walk away without losing their jobs, OEA and other government unions could have responded by simply working harder to provide a service worth paying for. 

But of course, that is not what happened.

Len Gutkin:

John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, out in January from the University of Chicago Press, promises to be a landmark in the study of higher education. Or perhaps an epitaph. This sprawling amalgam of disciplinary history with the sociology of institutions would be of interest even if the future of its subject, academic literary study, were assured. But the book, which largely collects and reworks essays published over the last three decades, gains a note of poignant urgency because the topic it devotes so much learning and intelligence to may well be in permanent eclipse. Although Guillory is analytically detached about the fact that, as he says, large and irremediable forces “have irreversibly transformed the social conditions of literary study and relegated literature to a smaller place in the educational system and in society,” the attentive reader will hear Guillory’s characteristically subdued lament.

Paul Thacker:

But a few years later, I helped to write a Senate report on ghostwriting in biomedicine and realized how common and damaging to public health this practice is. After we released the report, I met for coffee with the NIH congressional affairs person and demanded that Collins do something about ghostwriting. Ghostwriting was unethical and dangerous for public health, I pointed out. While Collins didn’t realize this, he had put his name on a paper that had been ghostwritten for him by an NIEHS employee who was not given credit for her work. 

Collins needed to act.

Shortly after, I left my job in Congress to work at the Project on Government Oversight. When I uncovered the court documents showing ghostwriting that involved NIH-funded scientists, I wrote a letter to Collins detailing what I had found in the documents.

I then called the NIH congressional affairs employee and reminded him of our talk over coffee and what I knew about the Science paper with Collins’ name on it. If Collins ignored my letter, if he ignored this problem with ghostwriting, I was going public about that paper in Science and how it had been ghostwritten by a low-ranking woman at the NIEHS.

When Collins wrote me back, I kept my end of the agreement and remained silent.

Walt Gardner:

As long as college students are considered entitled customers, their complaints about their professors will be taken seriously by administrators. That’s because happy students boost college applications, affect the closely-watched U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, and are part of the corporatization of higher education.

The latest example involves Maitland Jones Jr. and his organic chemistry course at NYU. When 82 of the professor’s 350 students signed a petition charging that his course was too hard, the deans terminated his contract and allowed students to withdraw from the class retroactively. This highly unusual step ignited an equal and opposite reaction from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decision, and pro-Jones students.

Not surprisingly, professors who have yet to achieve tenure are reluctant to disappoint students.

The controversy surrounding Jones has far-reaching implications for higher education today as it attempts to handle its Gen-Z student body. There was a time when college administrators paid little attention to student dissatisfaction. Their opinions were largely written off as a sign of their immaturity. But things have changed because of the high stakes involved. Students believe that they are entitled to all A’s while putting in little effort because they are paying soaring tuition. Not surprisingly, professors who have not yet achieved tenure are reluctant to disappoint students out of fear that poor ratings will be used against them. In contrast, tenured professors simply dig in their heels, citing lowering standards.

Although learning is the shared responsibility of students and professors, students are the easier target. They study only 13 hours per week on average, or less than two hours per day in a typical semester, according to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning On College Campuses. That’s half as much as their peers in the early 1960s. More than 80 percent of their time, on average, is spent on work, clubs, socializing, and sleeping. No wonder they struggle to master rigorous work, particularly in the hard sciences and math.

Landon Mion:

Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired by the school board Tuesday night in response to a grand jury report on the district’s handling of two sexual assaults committed by the same student.

The Northern Virginia district drew national attention last year after a father accused it at a school board meeting of covering up his daughter’s sexual assault in which a biological boy wearing a skirt raped her in the girls’ bathroom. The suspect then transferred to another school in the district and assaulted another girl, and faced charges in both cases.

The father alleged the district had attempted to cover up his daughter’s assault to advance its transgender policy, which had been subject to parental protests at LCPS school board meetings.

The grand jury report released Monday said the district was looking out for its own interests instead of the best interests of its students and that the school system “failed at every juncture.”

🚨NEW LOUDOUN COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 🧵

1: The Loudoun County School Board CLAIMS there were things in special grand jury report that weren't in its own report from an "independent review" and that's why it didn't fire Superintendent Ziegler earlier.

Let's review some receipts⬇️

— Ian Prior (@iandprior) December 9, 2022

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Keep the above in mind when you read about Twitter’s role in suppressing accounts linked to the GBD. There is a compelling public interest right now to investigate the government’s role in pressuring social media companies to censor.https://t.co/umy5Ut6l5C

— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) December 9, 2022

Paul Thacker:

According to newly unredacted emails, after Collins and Fauci reviewed multiple drafts of the paper over several weeks, the study’s lead author then thanked the two for their “advice and leadership” on the paper before publishing the piece in Nature Medicine without noting their participation. After helping with the manuscript, both Collins and Fauci then cited the paper as proof of a natural origin for COVID-19—Collins in a post on the NIH Director’s blog, and Fauci during a White House pandemic briefing with President Donald Trump.

Last week, I sent copies of these unredacted emails, as well a link to Collin’s 2011 letter, and asked HHS and NIH a series of questions about how they handle evidence of ghostwriting and plagiarism as defined by Collins. Both HHS, NIH have refused to respond.

Free Black Thought:

The purpose of this article and its associated downloadable Powerpoint is to make available, for parents, educators, and all who care about K-12 education, information about some of the potentially harmful ideas and practices around race that have become increasingly prevalent in K-12 education. For convenience, we call these new ideas and practices “DEI,” that is, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Other terms you may have seen for roughly the same phenomenon include “Critical Race Theory (CRT),” “(critical) social justice,” “diversity work,” and “antiracism.” This is not to say that there are no constructive alternative-DEI / alternative-to-DEI frameworks out there. There are, and we discuss some in the final section. It is merely to say that the broad mainstream of the DEI industry, now asserting itself in classrooms everywhere, tends to evince some unsettling features. Some of these features are the subject of this post. 

In the following six sections, we explore six of these unsettling features of DEI as it manifests in K-12. A final coda offers some alternatives to traditional DEI that are worth exploring. This post is long. We hope, however, that you find it to be a useful resource. Each section is independent of the others and so may be consulted independently. You may click on a section number to jump to that section:

          1. "Oppressed vs. oppressor" framing

          2. "White supremacy culture" framing

          3. Segregating children by race or ethnicity in “affinity groups”

          4. Constructive vs. Critical/Liberated Ethnic Studies

          5. Lowering/eliminating standards in math education

          6. Misrepresentation of “Implicit Bias”

          Coda: For what may we hope? Alternatives to DEI

Tate LaFrenier:

In a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily, Galen Metzger, University of Denver student and prominent ET user, described ET as a community “where a whole bunch of nerdy 20-somethings routinely have the most accurate information and predictions about elections as a group.”

It’s difficult to dispute this. Twitter user @umichvoter (who, in a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily, requested anonymity after being doxxed before) is a University of Michigan Class of 2021 graduate — yet in late August, they correctly predicted the makeup of the Senate and the margins in the House within a few seats, back when many outlets were handing control of Congress to the GOP.

And they’re just one example. Similar accounts have been cited by networks like TIME, AP, MSNBC and more, and have been recognized for their work by prominent figures such as Rachel Maddow. 

Despite this, ET hasn’t been widely written about outside of its own sphere. The community has existed in some capacity since the early days of Twitter, but many active users seem to have gotten their start sometime between 2018 and 2020. Considering Gen Z’s increased voter engagement since 2018, this makes sense.

James Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, said in a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily that Twitter was one of his main sources of election news.

“One of the best resources we have when it comes to making sense of these races,” Coleman said, “is people on (Election) Twitter … and these are oftentimes college kids.”

Aaron Sibarium:

So some audience members were shocked when Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, lauded a transgender teenager for committing suicide. 

In an address about “standing up for gender-affirming care,” Ladinsky eulogized Leelah Alcorn, an Ohio 17-year-old who, in Ladinsky’s words, “stepped boldly in front of a tractor trailer, ending her life,” in 2014, after leaving a suicide note that “went viral, literally around the world.” 

Ladinsky’s remarks were captured on video by a horrified onlooker, Oregon pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, who expressed outrage on Twitter that Ladinsky was “glorifying suicide,” an act she described as “unprofessional and dangerous.”  

That isn’t just Mason’s opinion. Technically speaking, it is also the official stance of the AAP, whose website for parents, healthychildren.org, explicitly warns that “glorifying suicide” can have a “‘contagious’ effect” and inspire others to take their own lives.  

Reached for comment, Ladinsky expressed “regret” about her choice of words and said it was “never my intent” to glorify self-harm. 

But how did this esteemed doctor wind up telling a group of physicians that a teen had, as she put it, “boldly ended her life?”

In any large organization, some members are bound to hold fringe views. But Ladinsky, who has devoted her career in part to facilitating the gender transition of teenagers including by challenging state laws that restrict the kinds of treatment physicians can provide to them, is hardly an outlier at the AAP. And the AAP is an organization that matters a great deal.

Remarkable to see doctors and public health experts from the big country at the bottom of this table constantly try to lecture doctors and public health experts from countries at the top of this table about child well-being and health. https://t.co/NuH6w1ihOr pic.twitter.com/GY4u2NytgS

— Anthony LaMesa (@ajlamesa) December 7, 2022

Sam Hammond:

Indeed, within a decade, ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag. You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link. Games like chess and poker will have to be played naked and in the presence of (currently illegal) RF signal blockers to guarantee no one’s cheating. Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?

William Yiu:

Hong Kong schools were forced to cut more than 40 Form One classes this academic year, a 20 per cent increase compared with the previous one, due to a shrinking student population, renewing calls to open enrolment to pupils in mainland China and Southeast Asian countries.

According to a report published on Tuesday by the Committee on Home-School Co-operation, 46 Form One classes at secondary schools were axed in the 2022-23 academic year, compared with 38 in the previous year.

Twelve additional classes were added this year for reasons such as a higher number of students in some areas or a school’s growing popularity.

Christopher Snowdon:

Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence.

After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it. I have been listing them on my blog and last week added the hundredth study. It seems a good time to stop. By any reasonable standard, the jury is in.

Of the 100 studies from around the world, 87 of them show a statistically significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk among current smokers as compared to non-smokers. Seven of them found no statistically significant association either way. Two of them found mixed results. Four of them found a positive association between smoking and infection, although three of these looked at people with a genetic propensity to smoke rather than at smokers themselves. 

The studies used a range of methodologies. Very few of them set out to look at the effect of smoking specifically, but epidemiologists tend to ask people if they smoke as a matter of course and so the association kept popping up. Some of the studies looked at specific outbreaks of Covid-19, such as on a French aircraft carrier. Several of them looked at healthcare workers, such as this one from Germany and this one from Chile. Others looked at groups of hospital patients, such as psychiatric patients in New York or HIV patients in South Africa. A large number of them used seroprevalence surveys to see who had antibodies and, therefore, who had been infected in the past (prior to the vaccines).

Zhang Tong:

Several Chinese graduate students have invented a plain-looking, low-cost coat that can hide the human body, day or night, from security cameras monitored by AI, according to the team.

The InvisDefense coat can be seen by human eyes but is covered in a pattern that blinds cameras in the day and sends out unusual heat signals at night, according to the team.

Their work won first prize in a creative work contest on November 27 sponsored by Huawei Technologies Co as part of the China Postgraduate Innovation and Practice Competitions.

The project was overseen by Professor Wang Zheng, of the school of computer science at Wuhan University, and the developers’ paper on the invention has been accepted by AAAI 2023, a top academic conference on artificial intelligence.

This document, which was just leaked to me, is from the Portland Public Schools Social Sciences Adoption Committee, which approves new curricular materials for over 45,000 students. @realchrisrufo pic.twitter.com/2QWKQlejCo

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) November 30, 2022

Adam Johnso:

NBC News dedicated 39 minutes to the royal visits, ABC News 20 minutes, CBS news 12 minutes, and CNN 25 minutes. (Note: These figures do not include ABC, NBC, and CBS’s online only streaming platforms. If it did the number would likely be much greater.) Both Harry and William took separate trips to Boston, which producers at America’s leading TV news networks determined was of urgent and top news priority. NBC News and The Today Show, in particular, covered each and every move of the Princes’ visit like they were the moon landing. 

It wasn’t just puffy morning shows either. Ostensibly hard news programs like NBC Nightly News ran two different segments on the Royal visits. ABC World News Tonight ran two segments, and CBS Evening News ran three. None of the network evening news shows have mentioned the California academic strike at all.

The strike, which is now entering its 22nd day, has seen over 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, postdoctoral scholars and other university workers demanding minimum living wages amidst a crushing California housing crisis. In a recent union survey, according to the New York Times, “92 percent of graduate student workers said housing consumed more than a third of their income. For 40 percent of them, it was more than half.” Yesterday, 17 strikers were arrestedstaging a sit-in in the lobby of the UC president’s office in Sacramento.

Will-Law:

Student loan forgiveness has been a major topic of debate in the United States in recent years. While many students face crippling debt, taxpayers argue that this debt is not the responsibility of those who did not take out the loans. Meanwhile, the college and universities that have encouraged students to take on this debt are largely ignored, creating another generation of heavily indebted students.

David Rieff:

For the Woke sincerely and passionately believe themselves to be redeeming culture, the humanities, and, increasingly the STEM fields as well, both ethically and intellectually. What this blinds them to is that in reality they are the humanities’ death rattle. This is not because, as many of Woke’s critics are pleased to imagine, that Woke are the humanities’ executioners. Rather, it is because in a world where the universities have either become or are becoming trade schools, and where the past is considered only of interest insofar as it is relevant to the present, Woke plays an extremely important role, though in fairness, largely an unwitting one, in providing the ethical grease to ease this transition.

It is the idealization of relevance that is behind victory of the idea that the most important thing art and culture can do is equitably represent communities, rather than inspire something that transcends both communities and individuals. In practical terms, within the subsidized world of the academic-philanthropic-cultural complex this explains why relevance is more and more prized over excellence on moral and ethical grounds. A representative statement of this view came from the Arts Council England’s deputy chief executive for arts and culture, Simon Mellor, who stated categorically that, “Relevance not excellence will be the new litmus test for funding.” It its a view seconded by the Arts Council director of music, Claire Mera-Nelson, who insisted that, “It is sometimes more important to think about audience opportunity than it is to always prioritize the quality of the platform.”*

The problem here is not that what has mass appeal is always junk whereas what appeals only to the few is always good. To say this would mere snobbery, and too much of the critique of Woke is just that: snobbery. But what is true is that understanding certain kinds of art, just like engaging with certain forms of spiritual practice – Zen meditation is an obvious example here – and, of course, attaining athletic excellence, are very difficult things to do, and take a great deal of time, effort, and commitment. There is an old Buddhist joke about the student who goes to the Roshi and says, “Master, how long until I find enlightenment?” The master thinks, and then replies, “Ten years.” Aghast, the pupils cries out, “Ten years??” To which the Roshianswers, “Twenty years.”

Jenny Brundin:

Denver’s controversial decade-long embrace of school choice and accountability led to some of the largest academic improvements in education research history, according to a University of Colorado Denver study.

The authors of the study argue argue that the results imply it is possible to improve public education on a large scale using the reform strategy adopted by Colorado’s largest district from 2008 to 2019 — a strategy they say relied on school choice and competition, closing low-performing schools, empowering educators, and holding everyone accountable for test results.

“Did the reforms launched by Denver Public Schools improve student achievement district-wide, for the average DPS student? The answer is unequivocally yes,” said Parker Baxter, director of CU Denver’s Center for Education Policy analysis.

The study was funded by Arnold Ventures, which invests in evidence-based research and solutions in the areas of criminal justice, education, health and public finance.

It shows that DPS, despite having a larger population with much higher needs than other districts, improved at a much faster rate than other large districts and other low-performing districts in Colorado.

High school graduation rates went up 14 percentage points, and between 2008 and 2019, DPS students received about 1 to 1.5 years of additional schooling compared to students at other large and low-performing districts.

Tyler Cowen:

Twitter has reached some all-time highs in the last month.  The first was the coverage of FTX/SBF.  Some of the early MSM coverage was oddly exculpatory, while other pieces seemed pedestrian.  On Twitter, AutismCapital and others tore up a storm.  Every day one learned something exciting, almost unbelievable, and new.  I learned new words such as “polycule.”

The other issue is ChatGPT. At least as of yesterday (when I composed this post), the NYT hadn’t had a single story about it, and I believe the same is true for WaPo. There is Bloomberg, which in general is on top of things, and also I have heard of a single Guardian piece. Wake up people!

Vadim Berman:

Low-tech solutions combined with social engineering usually prove the most effective, both from the engagement perspective and the perspective of hosting expenses. A post saying “Fake news” in the comment section of Flipboard is a standard opening move, the King’s Pawn Game of trolling. Someone from the opposite political camp will likely be provoked. Does the article merely cite another article? Maybe it discusses a court decision that can’t be fake news? So what, a stupid remark is even more likely to generate a negative response — and that’s all they want!

How do they know where to post it? One way is to detect a combo of negative sentiment + mention of a particular political figure. Or, with the current partisan political environment, it could be assumed that a particular publication will be negative towards that figure most of the time or all the time, and skip the sentiment analysis altogether.

Today, several off-the-shelf platforms (sold at least to law enforcement agencies) allow managing fake persona, choreographing hardware fingerprint (SIM cards + devices) and generating text content GPT-style based on predefined profiles (e.g. radicals of a certain type). I had a chat with one of the vendors at a law enforcement trade event. I was told, “it’s a headache to manage even two sock puppet accounts. With our platform, you can manage tens of them, and generate content effortlessly”. My impression is that the TrollOps vendors still do not have access to these platforms, but it’s just a matter of time until they gain these capabilities.

Thomas Prosser:

The decolonization of curriculums is growing in popularity. Based on social justice ideology, this agenda stipulates that university curriculums reflect Western prejudices, entailing discrimination against non-Western students and the reinforcement of colonial hierarchies. Supporters argue that curriculums should feature non-Western topics and readings.

Whilst some efforts can be laudable – in certain fields (e.g. history), curriculums could be more diverse – other initiatives can seem bizarre (e.g. mathematics) and/or dangerous (e.g. medicine). Therefore, the agenda raises questions about coalitions within universities and the trajectory of liberal democracy.

Notwithstanding academic demand for such agendas – famously, social justice ideology originated within universities – decolonization programmes have exogenous impetus. Curriculums reflect consensuses within disciplines and, given the slow pace of disciplinary change, profound disruption is more likely to come from external sources. And decolonization takes place in fields in which internal demand seems limited, such as mathematics, suggesting an external provenance.

Louis Bonham:

Fall is in the air, which means it’s time to award the annual Minding the CampusTrofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech (a Lysenko Award, for short).

As detailed in the inaugural award announcement, the Lysenko Award is named after Stalinist agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Like so many in today’s woke colleges and universities, Lysenko discarded the scientific method in favor of his own politicized theories (which happened to coincide with the Marxist concept of materialism). While his agricultural theories were neo-Lamarckian pseudoscience and, predictably, failed (causing millions to die from induced famines), Lysenko compounded matters by denouncing as an enemy of the state anyone who even questioned the veracity of his claims. With dissenters executed, sent to the gulags, or, at best, ruined, no one could point out the obvious: Lysenko’s theories were simply bunk. As a result, Lysenkoism remained official Soviet policy well into the 1960s, and Soviet biological science was set back decades.

As I wrote last year:

John D. Harden and Steven Johnson

The pandemic transformed the landscape of K-12 education. Some parents withdrew their kids from public school and placed them into private or home schools. Their reasons varied: Many preferred private schools that offered in-person instruction; others distrusted public schools’ pandemic precautions.

It’s not clear whether those trends will stick, and the factors are complex. So far, data show that since 2019, private enrollment is up, public enrollment is down and home schooling has become more popular. Families flocked to private and home schools at the greatest rate in a decade, according to American Community Survey estimates from the U.S. Census. The government projects that K-12 public school enrollment — already facing demographic pressures — will drop further to about 46 million students by fall 2030, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, reversing decades of growth.

The Washington Post Magazine asked parents why they chose private or home schooling, and what the right to control their child’s education means to them. In written responses, many parents said they believed their child’s special needs or abilities were best served in a private school. Others thought public schools focused too much on teaching to standardized tests and not enough on social and emotional learning. Still others wanted to raise their children in the tradition of their faith — the sort of decision at the core of Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

Kerry McDonald

We really couldn’t find what we were looking for. We tried several different schools,” added Funchess, who has a master’s degree in computer science and is a certified mathematics teacher. “We decided that if we can’t get the table, we’ll build the table.”

The result is Harper Academy, a mixed-age, K-12 microschool for children who benefit from a smaller school setting with a customized curriculum approach. The microschool currently has 14 students and two classroom teachers, along with Harper and Funchess who serve as administrators while continuing to do their consulting work. Indeed, it’s the consulting business that subsidizes the microschool and makes it more financially accessible to families.

Located in an inviting, home-like setting along a commercial strip, the microschool exudes warmth and happiness. The smiling children, most of whom have learning differences, learn at their own pace, with creative curriculum and state-of-the-art technology. In one language arts lesson, the teacher guided the older elementary and middle school-age children through an “escape the room” writing and critical thinking activity that blended Chromebooks and lively conversations. Meanwhile, a group of younger students in the adjacent classroom were enthusiastically working through a math lesson. They were allowed, and encouraged, to move their bodies as they listened to their teacher, rather than being told to sit still in their seats—something that is difficult for many young children and especially for children who may have an ADHD diagnosis, as many of these microschoolers do.

Funchess’s daughter is one of them. She struggled with ADHD and anxiety, and had been taking medications to treat these conditions. Since beginning Harper Academy over the summer, she no longer needs any medication. “A lot of it was because of her school settings,” said Funchess. “School was a big trigger for her. Here, we make them feel human. My daughter now says that when she’s here, she’s happy.” In addition to being happier, her daughter and the other microschooled children are also excelling academically through this more individualized educational approach.

Melissa Korn:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report Monday saying that the aid letters that are supposed to lay out tuition, fees and other expenses, and what grants, loans and other financing options are available to cover those costs, lack crucial information that would allow families to compare institutions. At their worst, some financial aid offer letters lead students to enroll in schools they can’t afford.

One of the most troubling findings from its review, the GAO said, was that 91% of schools don’t properly list their net price, or the amount a student is expected to pay for tuition, fees, room, board and other expenses after taking into account scholarships and grants.

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Studying recent aid offers from a nationally representative sample of 176 colleges, the GAO found 41% of colleges didn’t include a net price, while 50% did offer a figure—but understated the cost by excluding certain items, or by factoring in loans for students and parents that ultimately need to be repaid.

Scott Girard:

The Madison Metropolitan School District can expect its recent enrollment losses to continue, according to new projections.

The School Board discussed projections from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab Monday during an Instruction Work Group meeting. The reason for the drop is a mix of declining birth rates and increasing rates of students using open enrollment to attend school elsewhere.

The latter point gave board member Laura Simkin a glimmer of hope.

APL’s forecasting models show an average drop of 10% over the next five years, from 25,139 this year to 22,739 by the 2027-28 school year. The lowest projection would have the district at 21,668, while the most optimistic still has a decrease to 23,884.

In the 2018-19 school year, MMSD had 26,916 students, which was similar to the 27,028 it had five years prior. But the district has seen a significant dropoff since the COVID-19 pandemic, losing hundreds of students in each of 2020-21, 2021-22 and this year.

MMSD quantitative analyst Grady Brown pointed out that the district is not alone in its experience over the past few years, noting that the state experienced a 5% decline in public school enrollment from 2009-10 to 2020-21 and 3% decline from 2019-20 to 2020-21.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

It’s all bs they said. It’s all partisan they said. Nothing happened they said…

This report is ghastly. https://t.co/vYe8x4AXsM

— Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) December 6, 2022

Glenn Reynolds:

Well, no problem, you can just tell the IRS that Venmo is wrong, right?

Oh, no. That would be too easy. According to the IRS: “Those who receive a 1099-K reflecting income they didn’t earn should call the issuer. The IRS cannot correct it.”

So if Venmo or PayPal mischaracterizes your nontaxable gifts as taxable income, you have to try to get Venmo or PayPal to change things. Good luck with that. You may wind up having to pay an accountant hundreds or thousands of dollars to straighten out the mess or face an IRS audit.

The threshold used to be $20,000 but was lowered to $600 as part of the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act. (No Republicans voted for this monstrosity.) The legislation tightened the screws on the little guy, and that was no accident.

As The Post editorialized in June, “Think about this the next time Elizabeth Warren and AOC whine about the wealthy not paying their share. Yet the legislation they passed goes after hobbyists and little folks trying to earn a few bucks in various side hustles. It’s only going to punish the US economy a bit more: Some will have to charge more to make the work worthwhile; others will quit now that it means more paperwork and taxes.”

Mary Chastain:

The administration picked “Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and multiple pro-Black Lives Matter groups, including Mocha Moms Inc., United Parent Leaders Action Network (UPLAN), and UnidosUS.”

Parents Defending Education President Nicole Neily told Fox News: “We are gratified that Secretary Cardona’s Potemkin village ‘Parents Council’ will be disbanded, because families should never be used merely as props to advance progressive policies. Parental engagement is essential for students to succeed; accordingly, it is critical that ALL voices and perspectives be integrated into any feedback mechanism that the Biden Administration operates – and that the Department of Education respect the rule of law.”

CNN:

“… showed the average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is down to just 0.79. That is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population and low even compared to other developed countries where the rate is falling, such as the United States (1.6) and Japan – which at 1.3 reported its own lowest rate on record. And it spells trouble for a country with an aging population that faces a looming shortage of workers to support its pension system…. [M]ore than $200 billion has been spent trying to boost the population over the past 16 years…. A monthly allowance for parents with babies up to 1-year-old will increase from the current 300,000 won to 700,000 won ($230 to $540) in 2023 and to 1 million Korean won ($770) by 2024…. Government-funded nurseries are free…”

Mark Tapscott:

An investigation by Open the Books found that hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars went to top law and accounting firms even though most of them didn’t qualify as small businesses and didn’t have to lay off employees.

Open the Books is a nonprofit watchdog that uses public information laws such as the federal Freedom of Information Act to make government spending public, including “every dime online, in real time.”

By Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao and John Liu

In one video, a man sarcastically sings a patriotic song. In another, a group of protesters hold up blank pieces of paper and chant in unison. In a third clip, a group of mourners light candles around a vigil to those who died in a fire while in lockdown in western China.

Signs of organized dissent are relatively rare in China; so is their survival in the country’s digital space. China’s censorship apparatus — the most sophisticated of its kind in the world — has hunted down and deleted countless posts on social media showing the eruption of protests and anger at the government.

On Wednesday, it was unclear the extent of the protests, in part because of censorship, but new videos emerged of clashes the night before in the southern city of Guangzhou. Workers and residents resisting a Covid lockdown in an industrial district tore down barricades and threw bottles at riot police, as a top official in Beijing was ordering a crackdown on “sabotage activities by hostile forces.”

Yet over the past few days, as Chinese people frustrated by severe Covid lockdowns have taken to the streets, videos of the marches and rallies have continued to surface on Chinese sites such as WeChat, a chat app, and the short video sharing app, Douyin. Experts say the sheer volume of video clips has likely overwhelmed the automated software and armies of censors China has tasked with policing the internet.

Twitter announced it will no longer enforce its COVID policy. Just a reminder of what that policy actually was. As usual: full of vague, inherently subjective jargon — like banning content which “may lead to harm,” and potentially even banning criticism of “official regulations” pic.twitter.com/iE06F6x8cw

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 29, 2022

Roth argues that Grindr should "possibly" craft a strategy to accommodate underage Queer youth on the platform pic.twitter.com/KFxWybQEAa

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 9, 2022

Kerry McDonald:

The result is Harper Academy, a mixed-age, K-12 microschool for children who benefit from a smaller school setting with a customized curriculum approach. The microschool currently has 14 students and two classroom teachers, along with Harper and Funchess who serve as administrators while continuing to do their consulting work. Indeed, it’s the consulting business that subsidizes the microschool and makes it more financially accessible to families.

Located in an inviting, home-like setting along a commercial strip, the microschool exudes warmth and happiness. The smiling children, most of whom have learning differences, learn at their own pace, with creative curriculum and state-of-the-art technology. In one language arts lesson, the teacher guided the older elementary and middle school-age children through an “escape the room” writing and critical thinking activity that blended Chromebooks and lively conversations. Meanwhile, a group of younger students in the adjacent classroom were enthusiastically working through a math lesson. They were allowed, and encouraged, to move their bodies as they listened to their teacher, rather than being told to sit still in their seats—something that is difficult for many young children and especially for children who may have an ADHD diagnosis, as many of these microschoolers do.

Funchess’s daughter is one of them. She struggled with ADHD and anxiety, and had been taking medications to treat these conditions. Since beginning Harper Academy over the summer, she no longer needs any medication. “A lot of it was because of her school settings,” said Funchess. “School was a big trigger for her. Here, we make them feel human. My daughter now says that when she’s here, she’s happy.” In addition to being happier, her daughter and the other microschooled children are also excelling academically through this more individualized educational approach.

From their experience working in public schools as teachers and consultants, Harper and Funchess say that the educators working in conventional schools try their best and are often hamstrung by institutional constraints, such as rigid curriculum standards and frequent testing. “It’s not the people, it’s how the system was created,” said Harper. “Our philosophy is that we’re doing what’s best for each child, not an institution.”

Susie Neilson:

After Brooke Jenkins replaced Chesa Boudin as San Francisco’s district attorney, police ramped up the number of arrests they brought to the District Attorney’s Office for possible prosecution by nearly 20%, according to an analysis of data.

The Chronicle compared data from the last four months of Boudin’s term to Jenkins’ first four months, seeking to understand how arrest and prosecution rates have shifted following her appointment. While overall crime rates have not changed significantly, police presented an average of 100 more arrests per month to the D.A. since Jenkins took over in July.

Other than the number of arrests presented to them, few major differences in prosecutorial outcomes between Boudin and Jenkins are detectable yet. San Francisco’s jail population has not grown much; neither have the D.A. office’s conviction, dismissal or overall charging rates. The one case outcome that has shifted significantly is that Jenkins’ office is diverting a smaller share of criminal cases than under Boudin in his final months.

In an interview, Jenkins said she’s expecting the gap between her and Boudin’s case statistics to widen as her policies spread through the city’s criminal justice system.

Below is a breakdown of what has and hasn’t changed under Jenkins.

Dave Cieslewicz:

There has been lots of news out of the Madison School District lately. I’d like to focus on three stories that are interrelated. 

The first is the reinstatement of Sennett Middle School Principal Jeffrey Copeland. I’ve writtenabout that extensively, so I won’t go over the details here, but his return is a good thing. Copeland had been credited with restoring order to his school before he was fired over a minor infraction (if it was any infraction at all) and the School Board had the good sense to reverse an ill-considered decision by the central administration. 

The next story is about the decline in MMSD enrollment. The District is rightly concerned about that and it also understands that it needs to get a better feel for exactly what’s going on. While it’s true that there is something of a baby bust at work here, it’s also true that Madison is growing. The Board needs to get more demographic data to better understand how those two things — a smaller school age cohort nationally but a growing population locally — are interacting. 

And the third story is an ongoing debate about stand alone honors classes. The administration and most of the Board want to eliminate them in favor of honors work that can be done as part of regular classes. The Board had a spirited debate about that last night. 

These things are all related because they go to the health and quality of the Madison public schools. MMSD is losing enrollment in part because more parents are transferring their kids out of the system than into it. The Board wants more data on that. They suggest doing exit and entry interviews to get a better handle on why parents are opting out or in. 

That’s fine, but the net out migration is a key problem. It could be related to lack of discipline and good order in the schools. That’s why putting Copeland back to work was so important. It sends the message that the Board cares about this issue. Now let’s see what Copeland can do in a full semester next year. Maybe he has approaches and answers that can be replicated throughout the District.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Scott Girard:

West math teacher Sigrid Murphy said that even more recently, in the 2020-21 school year, “30% of the students in geometry at West identified as white while 72% of the students in geometry honors identified as white.” The school’s overall enrollment that year was about 52% white students.

“Within the (West) math department, all of us are completely, 100% behind the district’s plan,” Murphy said.

Those opposed suggest eliminating the classes isn’t the solution — instead, preparing students earlier on in their school careers so they feel ready to take on a challenge is key. Lately, some have also pointed to low reading scores on standardized tests to show that the district may not be doing that.

Laurie Frost, who is part of a group of Madison residents that has pushed the district on literacy in recent years, wrote in an email to the School Board and district administration on honors last month that she is “as concerned about the race-based disparities in enrollment in our honors classes as you are,” but that she has “a different way of understanding why the disparities exist.

“Put simply, the race-based disparity in honors class enrollment is due to the fact that we are not preparing our students of color for honors classes in their pre-high school years,” Frost wrote.

Board president Ali Muldrow suggested the district needs to focus on what outcome it wants, “striving for greater inclusion for all at the most rigorous levels of opportunity for our district.” She, like Frost, pointed out that preparing students for success in advanced high school coursework needs to begin early.

“One of my problems with how we’ve had this conversation over and over again is that we create the achievement gap in elementary school and then we pretend to resolve it in high school,” Muldrow said. “I’m really curious how what we’re doing in elementary school and middle school is going to align with this approach in high school, or if we’re just going to kind of create classrooms where some kids are more successful in a variety of ways than others.”

Associate superintendent of teaching and learning Cindy Green said the district is working on early literacy, full-day 4K and access to the arts, among other initiatives, to do just that.

Another concern from some opponents to the plan has been whether or not classes will be rigorous enough. La Follette High School senior and student representative to the School Board Yoanna Hoskins said she completed earned honors for a history course, and it only required one additional piece of work from the rest of the class.

“It wasn’t hard or anything like that,” Hoskins said.

The plan’s timeline includes updating course catalogs and course selection cards in November 2022, a step Green said they have already taken.

Round and round we go: Once size fits all English 10 in the mid 2000’s.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Andrew Rotherham

Over the past year and a half I wrote a few posts on Loudoun Countyand how the “narrative” about it was often at odds with the facts on the ground. From an October 2021 post:

A common response to those posts was the idea this Loudoun controversy was all partisan, it was transphobic, it was much ado about nothing. In fact, the local newspaper, The Washington Post, could barely be bothered to report on it in any depth until today. It was freelance journalist Matt Taibbi – far from a local – who did the most definitive deep dive.

This is the key takeaway from a grand jury report released today about Loudoun’s handling of two sexual assaults:

Jonathan Adler and Congressman Ro Khanna:

Twitter banned links to the story and suspended accounts that shared it, including President Trump’s press secretary and the New York Post itself—arguing that the story violated company policy because it contained information obtained through illegal means. Under the same logic, they’d have to suspend any account that posted the Pentagon Papers, which is protected by New York Times Co. v. U.S. (1971), or the story of Mr. Trump’s leaked tax returns.

As Silicon Valley’s representative in Congress, I reached out to Twitter at the time to share these concerns. In an email meant to be private, but recently made public by Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” thread, I wrote to Twitter’s general counsel that the company’s actions “seemed to be a violation of First Amendment principles.” Although Twitter is a private actor not legally bound by the First Amendment, Twitter has come to function as a modern public square. As such, Twitter has a responsibility to the public to allow the free exchange of ideas and open debate.

Unlike many who comment on such controversies, Rep. Khanna recognizes that whether a company like Twitter is legally obligated to respect free speech principles is a seprate question from whether it is desirable or beneficial for it to do so. That Twitter is not required to provide a robust forum for divergent views and perspectives does not mean it should not do so. Put another way, pointing out that Twitter is not bound by the First Amendment is no answer to criticism of Twitter for selectively suppressing speech or information that is disagreeable or disfavored.

Dan Hannan:

No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) captured the mood: “To the people of China — we hear you and we stand with you as you fight for your freedom.”

Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were crushing liberty.

So, what changed? Perhaps pundits tell themselves that the disease is less virulent now, or that vaccination has altered the balance of risk, or that, in some other way, Beijing’s crackdown is less proportionate than those of 2020. But none of these explanations stacks up.

Yes, the coronavirus became less lethal. All viruses that spread through human contact eventually become less lethal because they have an evolved tendency to want to keep their hosts up and active and therefore more infectious. For this to happen, they require a critical mass. Enough people need to be incapacitated or killed by the original version to give milder strains an advantage. And, yes, the vaccines helped, too.

But the trade-offs are essentially the same in China today as they were three years ago — coronavirus deaths versus other deaths. The current unrest was sparked by a fire in Xinjiang, which was allowed to become needlessly deadly because the authorities were following COVID protocols. In other words, they were elevating COVID above other forms of harm.

Most countries did the same in 2020 with, as we now see, disastrous results. The lockdowns did not just cause an economic meltdown from which we will take years to recover. They also failed on their own terms. They killed more people than they saved.

Jyoti Madhusoodanan

Dupree and her co-author, Susan Fiske of Princeton University, began by analyzing the words used in campaign speeches delivered by Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to different audiences over the years. They scanned 74 speeches delivered by white candidates over a 25-year period. Approximately half were addressed to mostly-minority audiences—at a Hispanic small business roundtable discussion or a black church, for example. They then paired each speech delivered to a mostly-minority audience with a comparable speech delivered at a mostly-white audience—at a mostly-white church or university, for example. The researchers analyzed the text of these speeches for two measures: words related to competence (that is, words about ability or status, such as “assertive” or “competitive”) and words related to warmth (that is, words about friendliness, such as “supportive” and “compassionate”). 

Warmth, related to intentions towards others, and competence, related to the ability to carry out those intentions, are two fundamental dimensions of how we see others and portray ourselves in social interactions. Stereotypical portrayals of black Americans generally show them as being less competent than their white counterparts, but not necessarily less friendly or warm, Dupree explains.

The team found that Democratic candidates used fewer competence-related words in speeches delivered to mostly minority audiences than they did in speeches delivered to mostly white audiences. The difference wasn’t statistically significant in speeches by Republican candidates, though “it was harder to find speeches from Republicans delivered to minority audiences,” Dupree notes. There was no difference in Democrats’ or Republicans’ usage of words related to warmth. “It was really surprising to see that for nearly three decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been engaging in this predicted behavior.” 

With this preliminary evidence in hand, the researchers set out to further test their ideas.

Luke Rosiak:

A Virginia grand jury investigating a public school district’s apparent coverup of the rape of a girl by a male student in a girls bathroom–which made national headlines after a Daily Wire investigation–blasted school officials for their “stunning lack” of transparency and “intentional amnesia” in a much-anticipated report released Monday.

In the fact-finding report, the nine-person Loudoun County panel disclosed for the first time that a teacher’s aide walked into the bathroom while the ninth-grade victim was being raped by her male classmate and saw two pairs of feet under a stall door, but did nothing. The 91-page report called out district officials for a host of lapses that continued long after the initial attack.

“We believe that throughout this ordeal LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS,” the report stated. “This invariably led to a stunning lack of openness, transparency, and accountability both to the public and the special grand jury.”

The report also found that the district concealed the nature of the attack even as the district was preparing to impose a controversial new transgender bathroom policy. After the rape, the student was transferred to another school where he was involved in multiple incidents of misbehavior against girls that were known to officials but, until now, unknown to the public, the report said. Even the rapist’s own grandmother told officials he was a sociopath, but little was done, it said. The rapist soon committed another sexual assault, this time in a classroom.

A

A Loudoun County Special Grand Jury report investigating two sexual assaults that happened inside two different high schools by the same student has been released. The review states: “They (LCPS) failed at every juncture.” pic.twitter.com/F6YyTz9g2L

— Sierra Fox (@thesierrafox) December 6, 2022

Anne Sylvaine-Chassany:

Ghafari was born in Kabul in 1994, the eldest of eight children, to parents who at times supported, at times resisted her getting an education. Before 2001, with girls’ education banned under the first Taliban regime, they sent her to a clandestine school, risking their lives in doing so. After the US-led invasion, Ghafari’s father was transferred to Paktia, a Taliban stronghold near Pakistan. There her parents barred her from going to class after a suicide attack aimed at the school nearly killed her. She attended in secret and ended up in hospital after being caught up in a bombing that killed the provincial governor. Back in Kabul, her parents refused to let her go to Khost university, in eastern Afghanistan, because it would have meant living alone. She had been ready to give up until she learnt about the scholarship in India. When she won it, her father relented.

2. The first thing to understand is that the Censorship Industry has been constructed using a “Whole-Of-Society” model.

That means censorship is coordinated through the government, the private sector (tech platforms), and civil society (academia, NGOs) working together: pic.twitter.com/zpVjDTeics

— Foundation For Freedom Online (@FFO_Freedom) December 5, 2022

Techno Fog:

For example, Fauci couldn’t remember what anyone said on a call discussing whether the virus originated in a lab:

During that same call, Fauci couldn’t recall whether anyone expressed concern that the lab leak “might discredit scientific funding projects.” He also couldn’t recall whether there was a discussion about a lab leak distracting from the virus response. Fauci did remember, however, that they agreed there needed to be more time to investigate the virus origins – including the lab leak theory.

What else couldn’t Fauci remember? Whether, early into the pandemic, his confidants raised concerns about social media posts about the origins of COVID-19. 

Yet Fauci did admit he was concerned about social media posts blaming China for the pandemic. He even admitted the accidental lab leak “certainly is a possibility,” contradicting his prior claims to National Geographic where he said the virus “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”

Henry Mance:

Britons have a love-hate relationship with Oxford university. It designed a Covid-19 vaccine, yet oozes academic feuds. It represents aspiration, yet the left see it as elitist and the right as woke. Its attempts to portray itself as a modern university — which needs more public support — jar with the medieval architecture and formal dinners.

Of the 13 postwar prime ministers who undertook higher education, only one did not go to Oxford. Yet Oxford’s academics, who often lead the world, receive potshots from politicians, who usually do not.

Dame Louise Richardson has faced all of this with a direct style that some colleagues find no-nonsense, others find abrasive. When she steps down as vice-chancellor this month, she can claim to leave the university on a high. “We have exploded the myth that Oxford can’t change,” she says, seated in her imposing, impersonal office in the city centre.

Oxford has been named the world’s top university by Times Higher Education in each of Richardson’s seven years in charge. The vice-chancellor, whose academic influence is limited, can’t take credit for that. But she has overseen a financial reset. Faced with a public funding squeeze, Oxford took advantage of low interest rates in 2017, raising £750mn in 100-year bonds, yielding 2.54 per cent. It has also received its “largest gift since the Renaissance” — £185mn from private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman — and created a new graduate college with £80mn from the Reuben brothers. It has also struck a £4bn property dealwith Legal & General.

Hal Pashler and Gail L. Heriot

Are people’s perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed likely to encourage people to adopt attitudes on the opposite side of a particular controversial issue (e.g. affirmative action and gay marriage). In total, 569 subjects were asked to evaluate the importance of these stories ‘to the readership of a generalcirculation newspaper’, disregarding how interesting they happened to find the event. Subjects later indicated their own personal attitudes to the underlying political issues. Predicted crossover interactions were confirmed for all six issues. All the interactions took the form of subjects rating stories offering ‘ammunition’ for their own side of the controversial issue as possessing greater intrinsic news importance.

Richard Lindzen:

The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂. For the glaciation cycles of the past 700 thousand years, the proxy data from the Vostok ice cores shows that cooling precedes decreases in CO₂ despite the very coarse temporal resolution (Jouzel et al.,1987, Gore, 2006). Higher temporal resolution is needed to show that warming preceded the increase in CO₂ as well (Caillon et al, 2003). For earlier variations, there is no suggestion of any correlation with carbon dioxide at all, as shown in Figure 9a, a commonly presented reconstruction of CO₂ levels and ‘temperature’ for the past 600 million years or so.

…

This all leaves us with a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system (a process that has played a prominent role in causing current inflation), while lifting sanctions for Russia’s Nordstream 2 pipeline, which was designed to bypass the existing pipeline through the Ukraine used to supply Germany. It has caused much of the European Union to ban exploitation of shale gas and other sources of fossil fuel, thus leaving it with much higher energy costs, increased energy poverty, and dependence on Russia, thus markedly reducing its ability to oppose Mr Putin’s aggressions. … 

Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂. Changing course will be far from a simple task. As President Eisenhower noted in his farewell address in 1961: The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education—the subject of his new book, “The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It.” It’s an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.

Many young Americans—old ones, too—don’t see the point of liberal arts: “We are suspicious, because we don’t know what good they are and we don’t know what use they are,” Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were “allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what’s the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind” while also being “a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything.”

Scott R. Anderson

For the past two years, Congress has been on the verge of a step that it hasn’t taken in more than half a century: the repeal of an outstanding war authorization. Several decades-old authorizations are nominally on the chopping block. But only one has been the subject of substantial debate: the repeal of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 that authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Legislation rescinding the 2002 AUMF was among the first House measures introduced in the 117th Congress in 2021. A few weeks later, the Senate reintroduced its own longstanding bipartisan proposal to repeal both the 2002 AUMF and the separate 1991 AUMF that authorized the first Gulf War. A bipartisan House majority voted 268-161 in support of repeal in the summer of 2021. The Biden administration even endorsed the move, providing assurances that it “would likely have minimal impact on current military operations,” as “the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on the 2002 AUMF as a domestic legal basis.” And after holding an additional hearing on the matter, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 14-8 to favorably report that chamber’s own repeal measure to the broader Senate a few months later.

But since then, progress on the proposal has flagged. Despite discussions among Senate leadership, the Senate proposal has yet to receive a floor vote. Last year, the House incorporated repeal into its version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but the Senate did not, leading the conferees to omit it from the final version that was enacted into law. This year, the same scenario may yet repeat itself: while the House has included repeal in its version of the 2023 NDAA, it’s not yet clear whether a parallel measure will make its way through the complex NDAA process being pursued by the Senate. If it does not, then the robust bipartisan coalition of Senators supporting repeal will have to find another legislative vehicle—or make the difficult case that a freestanding bill warrants some of the extremely limited floor time both chambers have left before this Congress ends. Otherwise, they will have to start the process all over again when the 118th Congress sits in January next year.

Kayley Fryre:

In all education, and life in general, there is nothing more important than writing. From writing school essays and reports to applying for a job, the ability to write well is essential. More than that, in recent years, with the emergence of texting and social media, writing has devolved to be much more casual and lighthearted. While casual writing is not necessarily bad, it harms writing as an art. The beauty of writing seems to be lost, along with great writers like Tolkien, Shakespeare, or Charles Dickens. By reading those classical works of literature, a student expands their vocabulary and writing style.

Part of this problem has to do with the media we consume, but another problem is public school’s approach to writing. In my experience, and those of my friends, schools have removed classic books from their curriculum, and with it, artistic, thoughtful writing. 

In my own life, I have seen the effect public schools have had on my writing capabilities, but only in hindsight. I now realize the forest I was trapped in, and how detrimental it was to my educational health. After all, as a kid, I read plenty on my own, so I never thought anything was wrong. However, my parents also saw it differently. They believed that school should teach children, instead of having children independently teach themselves, or worse, other students. So, they made a decision. 

Once my parents saw the problem of public-school education, they pulled me out and put me in a Classical Homeschool program. Classical curriculums have been around for thousands of years, and it focuses on “training your child’s mind” (homeschoolon.com, Classical Homeschooling Style: What is it and How Does it Work?) The classical curriculum has students read works of literature like the Odyssey, the legends of Beowulf and The Hobbit. Besides that, they study ancient history, Latin, as well as core classes. Learning Latin greatly expanded my knowledge of the English language and its structure. The classical curriculum is almost certainly the reason I enjoy writing and succeeded at it in school.

Natalie Wexler:

In the debate over Emily Hanford’s podcast “Sold a Story,” two groups have been vocal: those who agree that teachers have been conned into believing most children learn to read without systematic phonics instruction; and those who, like the 58 educators who signed a letter to the editor of the Hechinger Report, respond that Hanford has “reduce[d] the teaching of reading to phonics.”

But there’s a third perspective that needs to be heard if all children are to become fully literate.

Related: Reading Matters: Read Hechinger’s reporting on literacy

I disagree with the contention that Hanford has reduced reading instruction to phonics. She’s acknowledged that comprehension is important. And she deserves enormous credit for revealing that standard instructional methods have left many children unable to decode words.

But I agree with the letter writers that there’smore to the story than Hanford’s podcasts cover. I just don’t think we agree on what that is.

Those who signed the letter ask for “stories of school districts and educators who have seen incredible success using comprehensive approaches to reading instruction.” Given that Lucy Calkins is one of the letter’s signatories, I suspect they mean approaches that include methods of teaching reading comprehension and writing that Calkins herself has long promoted. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College, Columbia University, where Calkins and several other signatories to the letter serve as professors.)

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Matt Bivens:

Could a single, late-breaking corruption allegation really have dictated a presidential election’s outcome? 

Yes, and it has happened before. The 2020 election was razor close — but four years earlier, in 2016, the election had also been razor close, and many later blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on the FBI’s last-minute announcement that she was back under investigation for improper handling of official e-mails. Clinton herself, in her memoirs, used a prison metaphor to say FBI Director James Comey “shivved” her; statistician Nate Silver is among those who assert that the Comey surprise cost Clinton the presidency. 

Comey and the FBI were clearly embarrassed and haunted by that possibility — Comey has called it “a nightmare I can’t awaken from” — and making matters worse, many top FBI officials loathed their new and unexpected boss Trump. (Comey in his memoirs says he just assumed Clinton would win.)

So it was Comey’s fault. 

Or maybe it was the Russians? Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, in the final days of the Obama-Biden White House, the intelligence community — meaning, Comey & colleagues — handed down a major report that alleged broad-based Russian interference in our affairs. 

This was the first big public report, the one that kicked off a cottage industry of government publications and investigations about “Russian meddling in our democracy” in the years since. Yet more than half of this grand report was just a prolonged, petulant sulk about ingrates around the world who, on YouTube, seemed to actually prefer English-language Kremlin television over BBC and CNN. 

In fact, our intelligence community continued, Kremlin-sponsored television had garnered such popularity by reporting on things like fracking damage to the environment and “alleged” Wall Street greed that it was now more popular in London than CNN. (It was still Russia-run television, though: it got very unpopular very quickly after the invasion of Ukraine).

The intelligence community was indignant about all of this, and the FBI, cheered on by a wildly delusional press corps, soon opened a new chapter in the story of American xenophobia. They would spend years investigating (or manufacturing) some ludicrous propositions: that Donald Trump was a Russian sleeper agent; that Russia had compromised the 2016 election by posting a tiny amount of totally obscure clickbait ads of no possible logical significance.

Fast forward to 2020. After years of hyperventilating that Russians are trying to control us through our social media and “hack our elections”, representatives of FBI and CIA now seemed far better placed to do that instead.

Jonathan Turley:

Not unexpectedly, Gadde and Baker would play prominent roles in the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal. There was hardly a need to round up “the usual suspects” in the suppression scandal when Musk took over the company. Both lawyers swatted down internal misgivings to bury a story that could well have made the difference in the close 2020 election.

The Cambridge medievalist Eileen Power writing in 1938 on the decline and fall of Rome. She might as well have written this today and of Western Civilization. pic.twitter.com/0gcFMHzvVc

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) January 29, 2019