Dell Cameron and Mack DeGeurin
Multiple military intelligence offices have paid a data broker for access to internet traffic logs, which could reveal the online browsing histories of U.S. citizens, Sen. Ron Wyden said in a letter Wednesday, citing an anonymous whistleblower that had contacted his office.
The state of Florida asserted on Friday that faculty members’ curriculum and in-class instruction at public universities is “government speech” and “not the speech of the educators themselves.” Therefore, such expression is fair game to be regulated by state lawmakers.
“A public university’s curriculum is set by the university in accordance with the strictures and guidance of the State’s elected officials,” lawyers for the state wrote in a court filing. “It is government speech.”
The state was responding to a lawsuit that several professors and a student filed earlier this year, alleging that the “Stop WOKE” Act violates the First Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague and racially discriminatory.
Twitter and Facebook suspended numerous fake accounts which were spreading propaganda and disinformation to support US foreign policy and the US Security State.
Turns out these fake accounts were created and controlled by the Biden Pentagon😱.https://t.co/8lA24LQ1RJ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 24, 2022
Good. The PayPal situation is outrageous. Defunding critics is how you end up in political frameworks that bring about Putin types. https://t.co/HEW9d1Yt0i
— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) September 24, 2022
That departure made some sense. Back in February, Biden seemed to grant Vladimir Putin a green light to invade Ukraine. White House spokesmen quickly walked that back, but the green light, coming directly from Biden’s lips, apparently convinced Putin that he could launch an invasion without blowback.
That turned out to be wrong, of course, and now the United States is involved in a proxy war with Russia, while sanctions and export disruptions cause the world’s food and fuel markets to go crazy and have Europe looking at a long, cold winter of gas shortages and electrical blackouts. So firmness, this time.
But last school year, basketball dropped to the fourth-most-popular girls’ sport by participation, according to the data released this month by the National Federation of State High School Associations. Girls’ basketball has lost 19% of its players since 2002, while the top girls’ sport, track and field, grew 10%, along with volleyball (+15%) and soccer (+27%).
Though boys’ and girls’ high school sports participation overall declined 4% since 2019 in the first post-pandemic national survey, girls’ basketball dropped 7%.
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The fall of girls’ basketball is even more pronounced given the growth in popularity of the women’s game: TV ratings for the NCAA women’s basketball tournament and the WNBA are on the rise.
Several forces are driving the decline. More athletes are sticking to one sport nearly year-round. Schools have added other sports for girls, which have lured athletes away from basketball. Some girls see basketball as too difficult to play, or even not “girly” enough, coaches say.
“It’s sad,” said Erica Delley, first-year head coach at Dallas’s Kimball High School, which was a regional power when she played there in the early 2000s. “That’s why I came back, to make a difference and try to encourage kids to play.”
It was inevitable that some kind of backlash would happen; you can only force people to pay so much for the places they live before they get mad and revolt. And it was predictable that the revolt would begin in California, the country’s most NIMBY state. YIMBYism is the form that backlash took.
The YIMBY movement is not a typical American movement. Its goals are narrower than most economic movements — it’s not about changing the whole role of government, it’s just about getting more housing. At the same time, it’s an ideological big tent — most YIMBYs are lefties (because most people in overpriced metros are lefties), but a few are libertarian types or fed-up businesspeople, and a few are hardcore socialists. This combination of narrow goals and freedom from broader ideology allows the movement to launch a pragmatic, multi-pronged assault on housing scarcity. YIMBYs want deregulation when it comes to things like zoning and parking requirements, but they also strongly support public housing and a vigorous role for state development planning. In other words, YIMBYs just want housing, and lots of it, any and every way they can get it.
Many student borrowers get into trouble because they don’t understand basic financial management. Neither do the Biden officials who claim the President’s student loan cancellation is fully paid for by this year’s decline in the federal budget deficit.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that the President’s student loan relief could cost as much as $1 trillion. The White House is cagey about the cost, and says it doesn’t matter anyway since the federal deficit is on track to fall by about $1.7 trillion this fiscal year from last year’s $2.7 trillion, which was the second largest in history after 2020.
Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, recently explained: “This is paid for. It is paid for and far more by the amount of deficit reduction that we’re already on track for this year,” adding that “compared to the previous year, 1.7 trillion more dollars are coming into the Treasury than are going out.”
But in a statement after the speech, Republican Sen. Alberta Darling, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said Wisconsin students’ poor performance stems from Gov. Tony Evers “refusing to reform education in Wisconsin” despite Republican efforts, including a literacy bill Evers vetoed twice.
Darling said Underly is following in his footsteps.
“The DPI Secretary refuses to acknowledge failure,” Darling said. “Under her watch, too many children in our schools are failing. There was not a single acknowledgment that less than one-third of students are proficient in English or Math. Instead of accepting we have the largest achievement gap in the country, she’d rather change the definition.”
Underly, however, outlined ways to improve student achievement and bridge racial disparities. She said policymakers and educators need to recognize that those disparities stem from a gap in representation and engagement, not the student.
“Instead of blaming the student because of their learning challenges or their family, because their parents are working multiple jobs to get by, or their school district or teachers are under-resourced,” Underly said, “instead of placing blame about their achievement, we can make important choices about curriculum that can make a difference.”
That includes increasing representation in curriculum, she said. All students, especially students of color, need to see themselves reflected in what they learn, she said, and not just learn about trauma and struggle, but also growth.
That includes teaching students about the country’s complicated history, Underly said.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
But going forward, I think the old metrics that showed large advantages for single payer are going to continue to slide. Unions (formal or otherwise) are going to militate for higher pay. Governments are going to have to deal with one side of the political spectrum going into hoc to the health employees and the other polarizing to the folks in the disfavored region(s) who are lower priority for healthcare and pay more in taxes for the “giveaways”. And all of it is going to run into the trouble that the developing world is going to have fewer kids and hence fewer physicians while the relative advantage of immigrating is going to continue to fall.
Single payer was overwhelmingly built on the post-World Wars consensus and environment. It operates as a monopsony. What on earth would make us think that it would be stable into the future?
That is from “Sure.”
TC again: There is a natural tendency on the internet to think that all universal coverage systems are single payer, but they are not. There is also a natural tendency to contrast single payer systems with freer market alternatives, but that is also an option not a necessity. You also can contrast single payer systems with mixed systems where both the government and the private sector have a major role, such as in Switzerland.
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
Instead, many will write how they never actually read the U.S. Constitution, which is horrifying given the number of years they have attended school prior to taking my course. Others will reference Article 7 where it explains “…guaranteed minimum wages and salaries shall be established, state support ensured to the family, maternity, paternity and childhood, to disabled persons and the elderly, the system of social services developed, state pensions, allowances and other social security guarantees shall be established,” and praise the foresight of the founding fathers.
Needless to say, when I reveal the results and my deception, the look on the students’ faces is priceless. The shock, embarrassment, and shame can be seen in their expressions. These exercises, however, have proven to be an invaluable tool to make my classes more successful, and they dramatically improve student engagement.
There are three objectives behind these assignments.
The first is to open students’ eyes to how unfamiliar they are with the country they are living. As I explain to the students, they have opinions about everything, but how can they say what the government should/should not be doing when they do not know why the government exists, the institutions within the government, and the roles and responsibilities of these institutions?
A gas tax is commonly used to describe the variety of taxes levied on gasoline at both the federal and state levels, to provide funds for highway repair and maintenance, as well as for other government infrastructure projects. These taxes are levied in a few ways, including per-gallon excise taxes, excise taxes imposed on wholesalers, and general sales taxes that apply to the purchase of gasoline.
It’s no secret that university students, once known for their brash defense of unfettered free speech, have gone rather quiet on the issue. Campus surveys reveal that most college students self-censor to some degree and that certain ideas are now taboo on campus.
A new report from Speech First, a membership association of students, parents, faculty, alumni, and concerned citizens fighting back against toxic censorship culture on college campuses, provides insight into one of the reasons students fear speaking up: Bias Response Teams. These squads (or reporting systems) are specifically created to “solicit, receive, investigate, and respond to” reports of “bias incidents” or other allegedly offensive speech. Speech First’s report pulls no punches, calling Bias Response Systems “elaborate schemes … designed to silence dissenters, stifle open dialogue, and encourage students to report speech they deem unacceptable.” Like most such initiatives on campus, their efforts tend to run in a single ideological direction.
One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.
The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.
Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardianstill like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nationto orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.
Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.” Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a videodepicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.
Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”
The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”
Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.
Writes Lubet:
To protect Ginsburg from surprises, Totenberg routinely alerted her in advance to the topics she intended to cover, which is generally prohibited by NPR’s Ethics Handbook. The rule against “previewing” questions does not apply to side jobs, but even then the handbook cautions against “entanglements that conflict with our journalistic independence.”
In raising questions about whether Totenberg’s coverage was influenced by her relationship, Lubet focuses on the controversy surrounding Justice RBG’s comments about then-candidate Donald Trump (which I coveredextensively on this blog).
Following an uproar about her flagrant breach of judicial ethics, Ginsburg issued a tepid statement of regret, calling her remarks “ill-advised” and promising to “be more circumspect” in the future.
Totenberg was scheduled to interview Ginsburg a few days later. Following her “usual practice,” she told the justice that “I was going to ask her about what she had said.” “That’s my job,” she explained, “I’m going to ask you about it as I would anybody else,” telling Ginsburg, “she could get mad at me” if she wanted to.
The interview was not much to get mad at. Totenberg asked Ginsburg why she decided to “say you were sorry,” rather than why she’d made the remarks in the first place. Ginsberg gave her prepared answer: “Because it was incautious.” Totenberg did not raise the ethics issue, suggesting instead that the justice had merely “goofed.” Even that was too much for Ginsburg. “It’s over and done with, and I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
Totenberg accepted the stonewalling. The obvious next question – to anyone not tiptoeing around a friend’s embarrassment – was whether Ginsburg would recuse herself from cases challenging the election. That would have put Ginsburg on the spot – and any answer would have been extremely meaningful in light of later events – but Totenberg let it drop.
Over the past year, schools and libraries around the country have been banning a whole lot of books. And while this is a nationwide phenomenon, no state’s schools have embraced the practice of declaring certain stories and perspectives forbidden to their young people the way that Texas’s have. According to a list compiled by the literature and human rights nonprofit PEN America, between July 1 of last year and June 30, Texas has seen 801 bannings. That’s a huge number! Compare that with, say, Alaska or South Carolina, which have banned one book each. (In both instances, it’s Maia Kobabe’s award-winning comic book memoir Gender Queer, which has also been banned in nine districts in Texas.)
That figure—801 banned books—refers not to individual titles but rather to the number of times any school district has issued a ban. Some titles, such as Gender Queer, appear multiple times, having been banned from Canutillo (fifteen miles northwest of downtown El Paso) to Clear Creek, 785 miles to its east. Others, such as Brent Sherrard’s Final Takedown—a slim, out-of-print volume from a small Canadian publisher about a kid who faces time in juvenile detention—appear but once (in San Antonio’s North East Independent School District, the most avid banner of books in the state). Some are banned in school libraries, others in classrooms. Some have been removed pending an investigation that the school district may or may not have the time and resources to conduct in a timely manner. Most have been banned by administrators, while others are the result of a formal challenge from a parent or other community member. In any event, the guiding principle remains the same: to ensure that students are not exposed to ideas that their elders do not want them to consider, by making it increasingly difficult to access the volumes in which those ideas are contained. (Teenagers are, of course, famously respectful of such rules, and rarely seek out such materials on their own.)
The Danish Data Protection Agency
rganisations in Denmark that use Google Analytics must therefore assess whether their possible continued use of the tool takes place in compliance with data protection law. If this is not the case, the organisation must either bring its use of the tool into compliance, or, if necessary, discontinue using the tool.
A very important task for the Danish Data Protection Agency is to give guidance to citizens about their rights and to give guidance to Danish organisations in how they comply with data protection law. As is the case with data protection law, we at the Danish Data Protection Agency are neutral to technology, and therefore have no interest in either approving or banning certain products. We are not at all empowered to do so,” added Makar Juhl Holst and continued:
“Following the decisions of our European colleagues, however, we have experienced a great demand for guidance in relation to specifically Google Analytics, and we have therefore made an effort to look into this specific tool more closely.”
I apologize for being gross, but it’s necessary. You have to be shocked into recognizing the moral horror of what a part of the nation’s largest teacher’s union is doing. It is unspeakable, but we have to speak about it.
The most effective work that the irreplaceable Christopher Rufo does is simply to get documents from institutions, and post them in full to the web, so ordinary people can see what kind of corrupt, racist or otherwise depraved people run these institutions. His latest is from the LGBTQ+ caucus of the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teachers union, representing three million teachers nationwide.
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
Colleen Connolly and Alexander Russo:
School district takeovers. Lawsuits. Recalls. Sudden resignations. Providence Journal reporter Linda Borg has seen and done it all.
She’s been at the paper for 35 years, the last 15 of which she’s covered K-12 education.
But nothing could have prepared her for the pandemic, during which the vast majority of Democratic-controlled school districts closed in-person learning and — with the exception of Providence —kept them closed for prolonged periods.
“I think I focused more on the challenges rather than the pluses,” Borg told us about her pandemic coverage. “We wasted a lot of time on the latest school to close, how superintendents felt unsupported, and how Providence was screwing up online learning.”
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What are the big education stories for your coverage area?
LB: Probably the biggest one is the takeover, which is now in its fourth year. Schools Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green has become kind of a punching bag for the Providence Teachers Union.
The other big issue has been COVID. We were one of the first states to really reopen, at least in a hybrid fashion.
In my view, those words in the most recent Goalkeepers report, are the most important Gates wrote in the annual update.
The brilliance of the words is masked in its simplicity.
Gates notes that, as millions of people in low-income countries go hungry, the cumulative spend on food aid from 2005 to 2020 was $57 billion while just $9 billion was spent on agriculture research in the same time period. This vast contrast in spending illustrates that much of the industry is focused on perpetuating the existing system designed to tackle symptoms and not the root cause.
Although Gates’ comments were about food aid in particular, I think the same paradigm shifting thinking should apply to all aid.
The broader aid industry is no different. In our book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, my co-authors and I describe how the vast majority of official development assistance (foreign aid) funds conventional development projects–building schools, hospitals, institutional reform initiatives, etc.–target the symptoms of poverty, not the root cause.
As the U.S. government intensifies its efforts to decouple American technology from China’s sprawling surveillance state, a new report by the U.N.’s human rights agency demonstrates the urgency of that task. The U.N. found that China’s treatment of Turkic Muslims in the remote region of Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Chinese government’s chilling campaign to forcibly assimilate minorities in Xinjiang relies heavily on a sophisticated system of mass digital surveillance—one that was built, and continues to operate, thanks to contributions from Silicon Valley. U.S. companies have long sought to profit off China’s desire to monitor its citizens, and it is surprising how deep those connections go.
Some 20 million students will head off to college and university this fall, and we wish all of them well. But are we allowed to ask whether that number is too high?
Economists call it the “fallacy of composition,” which is the assumption that what’s true for members of a group must also be true for the group as a whole. To use a popular example: It’s true that if someone stands up in a football stadium, that person will be able to see better. But it’s not true that if everyone stands up, everyone will have a better view.
“Fight Fiercely Harvard!” as Tom Lehrer used to sing in a mock football fight song. “Demonstrate to them our will.” However, that will—a university devoted to even-handed intellectual inquiry for the public good—no longer exists. The truth has an inconvenient way of interfering with propaganda.
The Ivy League schools that once did so much to help build our country along with others conventionally highly ranked by U.S. News and World Report are now doing their best to undermine its principles and destroy it.
So why is this a good thing?
Because when they do something so stupid, and almost ludicrously anti-intellectual, as to hire the likes of Stelter and de Blasio, they expose the nature of who they really are, what their institutions have become.
More people, including reluctant alumni, have to face reality. Many aren’t giving as much—and they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t give at all, yet “alma mater” continues to exert a significant pull on the emotions and values of many. They work hard to make it that way.
In our house, we know this well, since my wife is a graduate of Princeton and I’m a graduate of Dartmouth and Yale. We are bombarded with alumni newsletters, magazines, and so forth. All are now written, clone-like, in the same contemporary left-wing politically correct style. That makes them seen oddly unsophisticated and, again, almost deliberately anti-intellectual, as if created by “woke” robots.
They immediately fill our waste baskets, just as we no longer donate to the schools’ alumni funds—not that the latter matters. Most of these institutions are so rich that you have no influence unless you are prepared to donate in the millions.
But we have more power than we think. Not just alumni, all parents do. It could be put succinctly: Are you so stupid you would send your children to be educated by Stelter for 75 grand a year? (Dorothy Parker could have written a great limerick about that. )
It’s also possible that lawmakers have realized vaccinated individuals can still get sick and spread the virus, and therefore concluded vaccinations are a matter of personal health, not public health. Yet once again this theory is undermined by the presence of other vaccine mandates that remain in place. Some may contend that we’ve simply beaten the virus and mandates are no longer necessary, but official statistics show Covid deaths and cases remain stubbornly high.
So what’s the answer?
What’s most likely is that political considerations are at play. Yet this thesis too, at first blush, appears to be undermined by the reality that polls show Americans support Covid vaccine mandates in schools.
Good morning and happy Tuesday, Kate, Xxoo have a terrific day!
My membership in the American College of Surgeons goes back almost 30 years. The 84,000-member professional society’s sole focus should be improving the standard of surgical care, but in recent years the college has made a priority of promoting critical race theory and so-called antiracism. Like many radicalized organizations, the college has taken to punishing members who raise concerns over its new agenda.
The college’s elevation of ideology—and demotion of surgery—was swift. I saw the first signs in 2019, when the college invited Joan Y. Reede to deliver its prestigious annual lecture. Dr. Reede is dean for diversity and community partnership at Harvard Medical School. The topic of her speech was “a path toward diversity, inclusion, and excellence.”
As the son of a Brazilian mother and American father, I welcomed her praise of diversity, but Dr. Reede’s speech made no meaningful mention of “excellence.” Surgery is a discipline that demands excellence in all its stages, from training to practice. Should diversity supplant quality in surgeon performance, patient care would suffer. Remarkably, Dr. Reede’s vision was met with rapturous acceptance by the college’s leadership, and the unqualified push for diversity became a lodestar for the group.
In truth, however, the issue of student-loan forgiveness is a distraction from the real problem in higher education. Tuition rates have risen faster than inflation for decades. What no one wants to confront, even as we proceed to forgive as much as $1 trillion in student loan debt, is what has created the whole situation: the stranglehold that the higher-education cartel has on colleges and universities.
The last person to look at this seriously was William Bennett, back when he was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education. A study he commissioned found that tuition rates rose each year by about as much as Congress boosted federal educational assistance to college students. It was never established whether this was an example of coincidence or correlation. Media coverage ever since has tended to focus instead on suggesting that too many young people, especially the poor and minorities, can’t afford to go to college.
It’s time to take another look. Mitch Daniels, the outgoing president of Indiana’s Purdue University, has managed to keep tuition flat (and under $10,000 a year) for most of his tenure. He’s the exception, at least among the leaders of big schools. The cost to attend most colleges and universities is soaring, likely because so few people question the activities of “Big Ed.”
The cartel works hard to keep everyone in line. Almost a year ago, the University of Austin (UATX) was founded to provide an alternative to the conformist wasteland of modern American academia. UATX’s ability to move forward was contingent, it said, on its ability to raise an initial $10 million – an amount subsequently pledged by Matt Andresen, a co-founder of the Chicago-based Headlands Technologies LLC., and his wife Teri. That much money may well get the school off and running, but to challenge Big Ed, a much more fundamental problem will need to be addressed: accreditation, a process that the cartel, with the backing of the Department of Education, uses to control the curriculum of virtually every American university.
UATX has, inexplicably, announced it will seek accreditation. Its founders and advisers must know that to achieve accreditation they will have to compromise, if not surrender outright, on the very things that they created the school to do: break from the learning environment that can be found at most any other college or university. The threat of withholding accreditation is used to enforce intellectual and ideological conformity, wokeism, and censorship on campus. Even such conservative icons as Hillsdale College and the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies bow down to the accreditation gods.
A push to pass a law promoting the use of simple language in New Zealand’s government documents is proving complicated. For one thing, no one can quite agree on what plain English actually means.
Nearly 70 citizens and groups have made written comments. Officials put together a 53-page report, and a legislative committee needed 19 pages to explain and present an amended version of the bill. Lawmakers have quoted “Chronicles of Narnia” author C.S. Lewis, American linguist Julia Penelope and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the importance of being clear and concise.
In The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think I argued that the Biden student loan plan would incentivize students to take on more debt and incentivize schools to raise tuition with most of the increased costs being passed on to taxpayers through generous income based repayment plans. Adam Looney at Brookings takes a deep dive into the IDR plan and concludes that it’s even worse than I thought. Here are some of Looney’s key points:
Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory has raised the price of transparency at Lafayette Consolidated Government with a new fee for public records that appears to violate the Home Rule Charter.
Guillory’s administration has embraced a recent change in state law that allows local governments to charge the public for “electronic transmission” of public records.
In the past, LCG has not charged for electronic records, and it has typically only levied fees for physical copies or for CDs to deliver large amounts of records.
But Guillory recently implemented a new $1 per page charge to deliver any digital public records, including by email or through thumb drives and CDs. The change comes without approval from Lafayette’s city and parish councils, a likely violation of Lafayette’s Home Rule Charter.
My chess career peaked when I was 6. One game away from victory in the Ontario Chess Championships for the first grade, I blundered and lost.
Since then, I’ve traded on chess trivia. My father spiked a tennis ball into the face of Aman Hambleton, now a grandmaster and popular online chess streamer, when Mr. Hambleton was 12. I tried, without success, to recruit grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky to my college fraternity. In hindsight, his wonderful attacking style might not have translated to the beer-pong table. After my brother accepted a draw in a game at the 2004 World Youth Chess Championships, a 12-year-old Fabiano Caruana, now one of the world’s top players, leaned over from a neighboring board and told him that there had been a way to win. After a decade of second-guessing, my brother entered the game into a computer engine and found out it was a dead draw. Mr. Caruana had been wrong.
Computer engines have another use in chess: cheating. Magnus Carlsen, the best in the world, wouldn’t stand a chance against Stockfish, a top engine. That’s the issue today in a scandal that has the chess world as agitated as a Russian chain smoker with his chess clock winding down.
Some job candidates are hiring proxies to sit in job interviews for them — and even paying up to $150 an hour for one.
In a recent Insider investigation into the “bait-and-switch” job interview that’s becoming increasingly trendy, one “professional” job interview proxy, who uses a website to book clients and keeps a Google Driver folder of past video interviews, said he charges clients $150 an hour.
The proxy was approached by Aamil Karimi, who works at cybersecurity firm Optiv as a principal intelligence analyst. Karimi, who posed as a job seeker to talk to the proxy, told Insider’s Rob Pricethat the “bait-and-switch” trend has been on the rise because of more work-from-home jobs and overseas hiring.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is moving forward on a proposed statement of principles on free speech and academic freedom.
MIT President Rafael Reif announced in early September that there will be two forums this month with faculty to discuss the proposed “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.”
The working group’s effort, which included a 56-page report released this summer, grew out of a controversy surrounding a canceled speech to be given by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot.
Professor Abbot saw his speech canceled at MIT after activists led a campaign against him due to his comments critical of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. He was slated to speak on climate change, not DEI policies.
He did not respond to a media inquiry sent by The College Fix in the past week that asked for comments on the university’s free speech efforts.
This course is an introduction to mathematical modeling of computational problems, as well as common algorithms, algorithmic paradigms, and
The heart of the DOJ/FBI prosecution was the allegation that Stevens had failed to disclose over $250,000 worth of work on his Girdwood “chalet”. It was $250,000 of work ostensibly done by his friend Bill Allen’s company, VECO, in addition to the $180,000 which Stevens had paid for the so-called improvements.
Events would eventually make it obvious that Stevens overpaid by $80,000 or more and should have been suing to get some of his money back.
But the FBI/DOJ team had a different narrative they were selling.
On July 30, 2007 they hired a locksmith and invited news and TV crews to observe their “raid” on Sen. Stevens home.
The Anchorage Daily News, in the person of Rich Mauer, as well as reporters from Anchorage TV station Channel 2 and commentator-for-hire Shannon (Shannyn) Moore were there by invitation.
What this intrepid band of reporters failed somehow to notice was that there was no way that $180,000 much less the alleged additional $250,000 from VECO, had been spent on upgrading Ted’s rather modest chalet.
Nor did they see any incongruity in the FBI, normally religiously silent about ongoing investigations, inviting them to what became a show and tell.
Nor, it is worth noting, have any of these intrepid souls had the moral courage to set the record straight by admitting that they were duped by the investigators.
But why would Sen. Stevens’ friend Bill Allen testify to something which was patently untrue?
Undisclosed by the FBI/DOJ team were several salient facts:
Bill Allen was in the process of selling his company, VECO, to CH2MHill for net cash proceeds somewhere in the neighborhood of $432,000,000.
The majority of those proceeds were allowed to flow through to Allen family members and trusts as well as several minority owners. Only the $70,000,000, which was to go directly to Bill Allen, was impounded by the DOJ pending his cooperation in the prosecution of Sen. Stevens.
Also undisclosed was the fact that Allen, once named Alaskan of the Year, now drunken and brain-damaged from a motorcycle accident, was himself under investigation by the Anchorage Police Department for illicit sexual relations with a minor, and that the investigation was being quashed by the FBI/DOJ.
The carrot for Allen’s cooperation was the release of his $70,000,000; the stick was the frozen investigation of Allen’s own corrupt criminal acts.
Ultimately the illegal prosecution of Sen. Stevens was thrown out, first by Judge Emmett Sullivan, and then by Eric Holder.
But it cost Stevens his seat in the US Senate.
In July of 2008, just months before the elections, a DC jury convicted Stevens. Using the suborned false testimony of Bill Allen, hiding evidence of Stevens’ innocence, the FBI and DOJ had piled on charges and leaked so much false and damaging evidence to the “press” that the Washington DC jury returned a conviction.
But all this was only part of the story. In Florida, a minor league Democrat named Vic Vickers, packed up his household goods and headed to Alaska. He changed his registration to Republican, filed to run for US Senate and proceeded to spend a million dollars on “campaign” ads that said little, other than “Stevens is a crook.”
And, in Washington DC, the Democratic National Committee, then under Chuck Schumer’s leadership, was grooming Mark Begich to replace Stevens. In Alaska Begich was cautious in his criticism of Stevens because of Stevens’ popularity. In DC where his financial and political support was based he was vicious in attacking Ted.
In April of 2009 Judge Emmet G. Sullivan dismissed the ethics conviction of Ted Stevens. In a 14 minute diatribe he said that he had never seen “mishandling and misconduct like I have seen” in the Stevens trial. He then appointed a special counsel to determine if the prosecutors themselves should face criminal charges themselves.
But, they say, don’t worry, we’re not using any of those secrets, you can trust us. After all, we’re United States Attorneys. (And their paralegals. And legal assistants. And, perhaps, a few IRS or DEA or FBI agents, whose only job is to make cases against the types of people in those files. But still, don’t worry). Just because the whole concept of attorney-client privilege, as well as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments — guaranteeing rights to free speech, against unreasonable searches, and to due process and legal counsel, respectively — were created to bar exactly this kind of behavior, they insist the state would never abuse this authority.
Taint team targets are unpopular. They’re accused drug dealers, terrorists, corporate tax cheats, money launderers, Medicare fraudsters, and, importantly of late, their lawyers. You can add Trump administration officials to the list now. In cases involving such people government prosecutors have begun making an extraordinary claim. As a citizen cries foul when the state peeks at attorney communications, the Justice Department increasingly argues that affording certain people rights harms the secret objectives of the secret state.
The Trump case is almost incidental to this wider story of extralegal short-cuts, intimidation, improper searches, and especially, a constant, intensifying effort at discrediting the adversarial system in favor of an executive-branch-only vision of the law, in which your right to stand before a judge or jury would be replaced by secret bureaucratic decisions. “Trump has become the way they sell this,” says one defense attorney. “But it’s not about Trump. If you focus on Trump, you’ll miss how serious this is. And it started a long time ago.” When? “Go back to 9/11,” he says. “You’ll see.”
What follows is a brief history of the cases leading to the controversial decisions in Donald J. Trump v. United States of America, as told by some of the key figures in those episodes. TV experts have told you Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a Special Master in Trump’s case is an “atrocious,” “shady as fuck,” “utterly lawless” ruling by a “stupid” and “profoundly partisan” jurist, placing Trump “above the law.” Have you noticed these analyses almost always come from ex-prosecutors, that you’ve been trained to not even blink at headlines like, Ex-CIA officer calls judge’s ruling in Trump case “silly,” and that defense attorneys on television are rarer than pearls?
This is from an editorial announcing Nature Human Behavior’s decision to censor scientific results, however rigorous, that do not conform to a political narrative.
It is hard to exaggerate the scientific insanity this represents. pic.twitter.com/oraecbZFSq— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) August 24, 2022
I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.
I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain.
For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can’t be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.
The citizen behind the lawsuit, Peggy McClain, claimed that Hoffman violated the Parents’ Bill of Rights provision prohibiting any attempts to encourage or coerce minors to withhold information from their parents. McClain further asserted that the children’s data was vulnerable to hacking and could therefore be sold on the dark web to child predators, noting that some of the adult chat facilitators could be child predators as well.
“By doing the things set forth above, Katherine Hoffman is encouraging the grooming of young children,” stated McClain.
A controversy erupted in St. Louis last week when Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, withdrew from a top tournament. One interpretation of his decision, drawing upon his tweet, is that he believes competitor Hans Niemann, who beat him in the third round, may have been cheating with computer assistance. Suspicions were raised further when Niemann admitted having cheated twice previously, and when Chess.com issued a statement alleging yet further cheating and banning Niemann from its site.
A brief-ish summary of my thoughts on maths textbooks from my talk yesterday… 🧵1/n pic.twitter.com/bxNgb7zd5n
— Ed Southall (@edsouthall) September 4, 2022
There are over 1 million Black people in Central Europe today. Most Europeans still don’t know of the long history of the Black Diaspora in their countries. As a result, there is a general assumption that Black people are a relatively new presence on the continent and thus are historical and national outsiders. Through historical investigation, Black Central Europe challenges these assumptions.
In our extensive Collection, you can find a wide range of sources that trace the history of the Black Diaspora in Central Europe from as early as 1000 AD until the present day. The sources include paintings, photographs, letters, excerpts of novels, sculptures, newspaper articles and much more. We have organized them into historical categories: 1000-1500, 1500-1750, 1750-1850, 1850-1914, 1914-1945, 1945-1989, and 1989-today. Small icons indicate what type of source you find when you follow the link (text, image, etc). Most of our sources and introductions can be found in both English and German; we are still working on making the website fully bilingual.
Wegman’s losses from the app point to a common problem among companies that utilize in-store scan-and-go technology — shoplifting. Walmart temporarily suspended Scan and Go, its cashierless checkout program due to theft, an ex-Walmart exec told Business Insider in 2019. Walmart initially tested the technology in 2012 and has since relaunched the self-scanning system.
The Michigan Department of Education has adopted a radical gender theory program that promotes gender “fluidity” beginning in elementary school and encourages teachers to facilitate the sexual transition of minors without parental consent.
I have obtained videos and internal documentation from the state’s training program, which first took place in 2020 and was repackaged for public school employees for the 2021–2022 school year. The training program mimics the basic narrative of academic queer theory: the presenters claim that the West has created a false notion that “gender is binary” in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. In response, the department encourages teachers to adopt the principle of “intersectionality,” a key tenet of critical race theory, in order to “dismantle systems of oppression,” which are replicated through the culture and institutions of education. (In a statement, the Michigan Department of Education defended the program as “respecting all children” and “meet[ing] the needs of their LGBTQ+ students.”)
The first step to dismantling these systems, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary. In one presentation, trainer Amorie Robinson, who describes herself as a “Black, masculine-identified, cisgendered lesbian baby boomer” and uses the “African name” Kofi Adoma, says that “we’ve been conditioned and we’ve been acculturated in this particular culture that gender is binary.” But teachers should know that, in fact, gender is a spectrum, including identities such as “gender non-binary,” “gender fluid,” “gender queer,” “gender non-conforming,” and “bi-gender.” Likewise, sexual orientation can include an expanding range of categories. Students might identify as “asexual, lesbian, straight, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, demisexual, demiromantic, aromantic, and skoliosexual,” says Robinson. “I’ll leave that to you to go Google on those. Because we ain’t got time today!”
The Fed and their collection of well-placed pawns keep lecturing us on their policy path filled with endless rate hikes to fight inflation – but the math tells us the sales pitch is all bs.
Three Things You Need to Know
1. The income that the Federal reserve generates comes almost exclusively from their $8.8Tr portfolio of Treasuries and agency MBS. The Fed transfers that interest income to the Federal government, and this has been a nice source of income that supports Washington DC deficit spending. However, the interest income the Fed generates is reduced by the interest it pays the commercial banks for their excess reserves. The Fed likes to call these “interest to depository institutions”. Last year this interest rate was still a paltry 0.15% but as it is directly linked to the Fed funds rate, it has since risen to 2.4%. So the interest income the Fed earns is the sum of the money it makes on the QE assets minus the money it pays the banks for their $3Tr in excess reserves.
The Backstory goes all the Way to Lehman Brothers
Fourteen years ago this week – Lehman Brothers failed.How is this colossal financial collapse, tied into the road ahead? After the Great Financial Crisis – our brain trusts in Washington wanted to make sure the U.S. financial system would never again succumb to the double-edged sword of excess leverage. Regulators forced U.S. banks to “reserve up” and so – for the last 14 years – Wall St.’s financial epicenter stored an ever-enormous dollar number of reserves – mostly found in U.S. Treasuries. Today, as promised the Fed must pay these banks MORE and MORE interest on these reserves. As the central bank hikes rates – the unintended consequences are MOUNTING along with a political backlash – potentially louder than a Donald Trump appearance on “The View.” This time next year, the Federal Government is looking at a near $400B negative swing; a) from profit to a loss on the Fed´s transfer of net interest income – triggered by a surge in interest payments to banks on reserves, b) plus $200B additional interest on their $31T debt load. Dollar headwinds are mounting from; emerging market credit risk, China currency devaluation, the Eurozone energy crisis, a weaker U.S. consumer (see Capital One CDS, the cost of default protection is on the rise), and one-year inflation expectations crashing at the fastest pace since the fall of Lehman Brothers. Sit back, think of taking the Fed Funds rate from 25bps in March to 325bps this month, that´s three years of accommodation withdrawal in just six months. The Fed is very close to table max, the risks that they have over-cooked the goose are sky high.
This isn’t a thing. If students’ families can pick where they go, there is no segregation. In the current setup, unless you can afford to live in the neighborhoods with nice schools, you’re locked out. https://t.co/D9ETr84Bfj
— Mister Vigilante (@MisterVigilante) September 16, 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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos.
This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean. With videos often less than 60 seconds long, TikTok returns what feels like more relevant answers, many said.
Alexandria Kinsey, 24, a communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Va., uses TikTok for many search queries: recipes to cook, films to watch and nearby happy hours to try. She also turns to it for less typical questions, like looking up interviews with the actor Andrew Garfield and weird conspiracy theories.
TikTok’s results “don’t seem as biased” as Google’s, she said, adding that she often wants “a different opinion” from what ads and websites optimized for Google say.
TikTok has leaned into becoming a venue for finding information. The app is testing a feature that identifies keywords in comments and links to search results for them. In Southeast Asia, it is also testing a feed with local content, so people can find businesses and events near them.
Ms. Johnson, a digital marketer, added that she particularly appreciated TikTok when she and her parents were searching for places to visit and things to do. Her parents often wade through pages of Google search results, she said, while she needs to scroll through only a few short videos.
“God bless,” she said she thinks. “You could have gotten that in seconds.”
Morrisey proposed revisions to the South Dakota Department of Education standards to provide “a true, honest, and balanced approach to American history that is not influenced by political agendas” according to an Aug. 15 statement from Governor Kristi Noem.
Campus Reform spoke with Governor Noem’s Chief of Staff Mark Miller. He said, “Dr. Morrisey is a retired professor of civics, history, an expert on history, and we thought he was the perfect fit for what we are trying to do.”
“We, as a nation, we’re grappling with challenges to civic illiteracy and this…uncivil division between different political points of view.” Miller continued, “So we think a change in approach to how we teach social studies is in order and we expect that South Dakota will become a leader for the country and we think the other states will look to this as a model.”
On the state Department of Education’s (DOEd) website, the new standards are defined as an “[h]onest, balanced, and complete accounts of historical events and debates that foster a love of country that, like any love, is not blind to faults.”
It continues, promising “[h]istory and civics instruction free from political agendas and activism.”
But there is a provision of federal law that allows electronic service providers to volunteer information to law enforcement. To do so, they need to believe “in good faith … that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of communications relating to the emergency.” 18 USC 2702(c).
So, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies could have developed an AI engine to search for strings of words that its legal department has precleared — in good faith — as evidence of an emergency involving a danger of death or serious injury. (And after the fact, the injuries that occurred in the January 6 riot could be used to predict such a danger from a lot of antigovernment and “rigged election” talk.)
These passages could be excerpted by social media platforms, along with identifying information, and sent to Justice, under the “danger of death or injury” exception. Justice could then use them to subpoena all of the less inflammatory posts by the same people and then farm out the results to local FBI offices for investigation across the country.
Paul Overberg and John McCormick:
Americans as a whole have experienced two years in a row of flat or declining household income, new government data showed Tuesday, reflecting the pandemic’s lingering economic pain as inflation is also taking the largest bite out of pocketbooks in four decades.
The lack of any real growth for 2021 follows a decrease in incomes recorded in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Totals in 2020 and 2021 were boosted by significant government spending in response to the pandemic that helped reduce poverty.
With concerns about college costs and thegrowing burden of student debt, one state university has a plan to change how its students manage their finances.
In addition to spending millions on financial aid, the University of Kentucky will offer investment accounts to all of its students by 2023.
University president Eli Capilouto said he believes the accounts will help students learn financial literacy, even if it doesn’t make them rich.
“It’s investing in yourself,” Capilouto said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY ahead of the university’s official announcement. “To me, this is experiential learning on steroids. We’re going to learn with our students. They’ll be our partners too in how we craft these to be impactful.”
Like an overlong proxy war, the “canon” skirmishes of the 1980s and ’90s no longer feature in the media, though the conflict persists. As in a battle over this or that town, the ongoing war might manifest as a fight over particular books, but the real disagreement exists between competing visions for humanity and society.
Critics of the literary canon usually point to its preponderance of white males, but this antipathy toward tradition traces down to a more fundamental, even revolutionary, first principle. The radicals behind the anti-canon movement want more than the expansion of the existing canon; they want to eradicate any commitment to aesthetic ideals, objective truth, or moral imposition. Undergirding their resentment of Shakespeare or Tolstoy is a resentment of Western values as such, and so saving the canon is about more than saving Romeo and Juliet.
Undergirding resentment of Shakespeare is a resentment of Western values as such.
In an essay that astutely chronicles the original canon war, philosopher John Searle rightly observes that “opening up the canon” would not satisfy most professorial radicals; rather, “the whole idea of ‘the canon’” had to be abolished. Professor of education Henry Giroux expresses the more radical belief of the anti-canon proponents when he criticizes the mere liberals of the 1960s (as opposed to the postmodernists), who “remained partially constrained by modernist assumptions.” Postmodernism, meanwhile, “asserts no privileged place, aside from power considerations, for the art works, scientific achievements, and philosophical traditions by which Western Culture legitimates itself.”
Attending a class where discussion is always dominated by the same handful of confident students can be annoying. It’s not great for learning, either: Participation is a form of practice, and hearing from a broad selection of classmates enhances everyone’s education.
For those reasons, many professors use “cold calling,” picking out a student who did not volunteer to contribute. Or they might use the related practice of “random calling,” found mostly in large STEM classes, in which instructors select a student or group to hear from using a random-number generator, names from a hat, or a similar tool.
On average, each “consumer unit” paid more than $16,000 in taxes last year. This outpaces average spending on food, clothing, education, and health care combined.
The mean for total spending per unit on health care, food, education, and clothing was $16,721.42. This included an average of $8,289.28 on food, $5,451.61 on health care, $1,226.14 on education, and $1,754.39 on apparel.
The mean for total spending per unit on taxes was $16,729.73. This included $8,561.46 in federal income tax, $2,564.14 in state and local income taxes, $2,475.18 in property taxes, $5,565.45 in Social Security deductions, and $105.21 in other taxes, offset by an average stimulus payment of $2,541.71.
In addition to this disturbing tidbit, the new BLS data contains a wealth of other information on American spending habits and offers an interesting glimpse at recovery—and inflation—during the second year of the coronavirus pandemic.
How the 1619 Project does economics. pic.twitter.com/f5BXDEdvAx
— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) September 15, 2022
A new coalition of conservatives, policy groups and advocacy organizations has begun developing a package of education goals for the coming legislative session — with expanded school choice as a top priority — that could play a considerable role in the upcoming race for governor this November.
Officials with the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom say the goal is to give parents and students more options. But the proposals also stand in stark contrast to priorities laid out by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — setting up an education policy battle in the Nov. 8 election, in which Evers, a former educator and state superintendent who has opposed expanded private school vouchers, faces businessman Tim Michels, a Republican who has pledged to expand school choice offerings across Wisconsin.
“The election is critically important,” said Susan Mitchell, a longtime advocate for school vouchers and founder of School Choice Wisconsin. “Gov. Evers, both as (Department of Public Instruction) superintendent and as governor, has repeatedly opposed the expansion of these programs. Tim Michels has made public a completely opposite sort of perspective, so it matters a lot in terms of getting things done.”
The coalition, launched Thursday, includes conservative groups Americans for Prosperity, Badger Institute and law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, as well as education stakeholders such as American Federation for Children, virtual education company K12/Stride, School Choice Wisconsin and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobbying organization.
The group did not provide specific legislative proposals, but officials told the Wisconsin State Journal the two biggest priorities will be “school choice for all families” and legislation seeking to establish a “Parental Bill of Rights,” letting parents sue a school district or school official if they don’t allow parents to determine the names and pronouns used for the child while at school, review instructional materials and outlines used by the child’s school and access any education-related information regarding the child, among other measures.
Evers vetoed a GOP-authored bill last session that would have extended those powers to parents, stating in an April 15 veto message he opposed it “because I object to sowing division in our schools, which only hurts our kids and learning in our classrooms.”
He also vetoed a measure that would have vastly expanded private school vouchers by eliminating the income limits in the statewide, Milwaukee County and Racine County private school voucher programs, as well as create a temporary education expense reimbursement program for public school students. A fiscal report estimated the bill could raise property taxes as much as $577 million.
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
A new coalition of conservatives, policy groups and advocacy organizations has begun developing a package of education goals for the coming legislative session — with expanded school choice as a top priority — that could play a considerable role in the upcoming race for governor this November.
Officials with the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom say the goal is to give parents and students more options. But the proposals also stand in stark contrast to priorities laid out by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — setting up an education policy battle in the Nov. 8 election, in which Evers, a former educator and state superintendent who has opposed expanded private school vouchers, faces businessman Tim Michels, a Republican who has pledged to expand school choice offerings across Wisconsin.
“The election is critically important,” said Susan Mitchell, a longtime advocate for school vouchers and founder of School Choice Wisconsin. “Gov. Evers, both as (Department of Public Instruction) superintendent and as governor, has repeatedly opposed the expansion of these programs. Tim Michels has made public a completely opposite sort of perspective, so it matters a lot in terms of getting things done.”
The coalition, launched Thursday, includes conservative groups Americans for Prosperity, Badger Institute and law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, as well as education stakeholders such as American Federation for Children, virtual education company K12/Stride, School Choice Wisconsin and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobbying organization.
The group did not provide specific legislative proposals, but officials told the Wisconsin State Journal the two biggest priorities will be “school choice for all families” and legislation seeking to establish a “Parental Bill of Rights,” letting parents sue a school district or school official if they don’t allow parents to determine the names and pronouns used for the child while at school, review instructional materials and outlines used by the child’s school and access any education-related information regarding the child, among other measures.
Evers vetoed a GOP-authored bill last session that would have extended those powers to parents, stating in an April 15 veto message he opposed it “because I object to sowing division in our schools, which only hurts our kids and learning in our classrooms.”
He also vetoed a measure that would have vastly expanded private school vouchers by eliminating the income limits in the statewide, Milwaukee County and Racine County private school voucher programs, as well as create a temporary education expense reimbursement program for public school students. A fiscal report estimated the bill could raise property taxes as much as $577 million.
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
So, I am going to be taking a short break, starting tonight, to recharge & reorganize after my recent projects & also to prepare myself to take up these challenges. A new course requires a clearing of the decks, a re-stocking of provisions, & a re-rigging of the sails.
I leave you for now with this observation from Elmer Davis:
“This republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it.”
We need now to screw up our courage and do what needs doing to preserve the Republic. No one else is going to do it for us.
It will not be easy. Nothing worth doing is.
elainey Tidwell says she loves reading. The tricky part for her is understanding the words on the page.
Though she returned to school in August 2020, repeated quarantines left her mostly on her own at home. Her father is a construction supervisor who has to be on site. Her mother works from home but gets few breaks during the day. Delainey sometimes had to care for her little sister during virtual school.
Delainey’s difficulty with comprehension is also hurting her in math class, where she struggles to understand word problems, said her mother, Danyal Tidwell, who pins some blame on the pandemic. “We want to give her every resource we can between school and home, because we want her caught up,” Mrs. Tidwell said.
For two years, schools and researchers have wrestled with pandemic-era learning setbacks resulting mostly from a lack of in-person classes. They are struggling to combat the learning loss, as well as to measure just how deep it is. Some answers to the second question are becoming clear. National data show that children who were learning to read earlier in the pandemic have the lowest reading proficiency rates in about 20 years.
The U.S. Department of Education last Thursday released data showing that from 2020 to 2022, average reading scores for 9-year-olds slid 5 points—to 215 out of a possible 500—in the sharpest decline since 1990. Average math scores fell 7 points to 234, the first statistically significant decline in math scores since the long-term trend assessments began in the 1970s.
The largest public university in the United States is reserving faculty positions based on race and making six-figure bonuses available exclusively to minorities, programs that are now the subject of a class action lawsuit.
As part of a new initiative to attract “faculty of color,” Texas A&M University set aside $2 million in July to be spent on bonuses for “hires from underrepresented minority groups,” according to a memo from the university’s office of diversity. The max bonus is $100,000, and eligible minority groups are defined by the university to include “African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians.”
🚨🚨GROOMING ALERT! The Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction has created a guide for “gender expansive” PRESCHOOLERS
The guide dubs parents “trolls” and “jerks” if they refuse to use “they/them” pronouns or allow their kids to read books about trans toddlers pic.twitter.com/TrQ5BVc1Yw
— Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) September 13, 2022
“The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction supports and advocates for all Wisconsin students, and that includes our trans and nonbinary students of all ages, as well as their cisgender classmates,” Bucher said. “Creating safe spaces by affirming identities benefits every student, and part of high-quality education is learning about different perspectives and lived experiences.”
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
The $1 billion for Yeshiva students mentioned in the Times was in a time frame that NY state and NYC spent a combined $225 BILLION on education.
Not $2.5 billion.
Not $25 billion.
$225 BILLION!
“The money is flowing” to Yeshivas “as NYC is cutting public school funds.” pic.twitter.com/SKONEMqjZq
— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) September 13, 2022
Some have been pushed to take more inventive approaches to solve the staffing shortages. In Philadelphia, during a districtwide bus-driver shortage, the district paid families $300 a month to drive their kids to and from school. Atlanta Public Schools used nearly $2.2 million to provide on-site child care for 1,800 teachers to enable them to staff summer programs. Sometimes, retaining teachers has come at the cost of other planned investments: the Alamance-Burlington School System in North Carolina planned to spend $36 million on HVAC upgrades; amid severe staff shortages last fall, it put $10 million of that money toward teacher bonuses instead.
Once they’ve hired the staff, districts have tended to focus on three approaches to addressing learning loss: summer learning, intensive tutoring and extending the school day, often through after-school programs. According to Burbio, 62 percent of districts plan on summer learning or after-school programs, allocating $1.7 million on average; 23 percent are planning on tutoring, with average spending of $1.4 million. The cost and scale are often staggering. With $27 million, Baltimore created an enormous summer-school program, hiring over a thousand educators to teach 15,000 students at 75 different sites and conduct more than 3,000 home visits. Dallas will spend close to $100 million to extend learning opportunities for nearly 22,000 students, including reinventing the school calendar. Instead of an annual 10-week vacation, a fifth of the district’s campuses will add five weeklong “intersessions” across the calendar, during which students who have fallen behind can still attend school and receive more personalized attention.
But however much sense it might make to address lost learning by expanding time in the classroom, a longer school year or summer school often aren’t politically feasible. In their advocacy on behalf of exhausted, burned-out teachers, unions often protest proposals that require more work from educators, whether a shorter summer, longer school days or mandatory tutoring. Parents themselves often aren’t much interested in tutoring and summer school, particularly when they think their kids aren’t struggling. Many educators are still grading students on a pandemic-adjusted curve, which may be skewing parents’ understanding of the extent to which the crisis has hampered their own children’s educational progress. According to a recent Brookings Institution report, 90 percent of parents responded that their child was doing well academically; less than a quarter were interested in summer school and only 28 percent in tutoring.
Objections from educators and apathy from parents often dilute proposals to add school hours to the point that they become ineffective. In the spring, the Los Angeles Unified School District considered a proposal to lengthen the upcoming school year by two weeks. After opposition from the teachers’ union and lukewarm support from families, the Board of Education instead voted in favor of adding four optional days of school for students, citing the widespread exhaustion among educators. “Students in Los Angeles will have lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of typical math learning,” says Thomas Kane, the faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. “There is no way you can make up for 22 weeks of lost learning with four optional days.”
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
In response to the concerns raised by Professor Michael Thaddeus on his faculty website, the school said in Junethat it would review past years’ data submissions and wouldn’t participate in this year’s U.S. News & World Report ranking of the nation’s best colleges. …
Also Friday, the school released two sets of numbers for what is known as the Common Data Set, a standardized set of figures that schools can voluntarily publish detailing information about student enrollment, graduation rates, financial aid and faculty, among other subjects [Understanding Columbia’s Common Data Set].
Frederick M. Hess
Biden’s calculus is simple. He’s giving up to $20,000 in taxpayer money to millions of college-educated borrowers, whom Democrats trust to be appropriately grateful. Meanwhile, the cost will be borne by, well, everyone, including children and grandchildren who aren’t yet with us. The politics here are those of sugar subsidies— concentrated, visible benefits and dispersed, ephemeral costs. Most of the time, this kind of politics pays off.
Is there any reason to think things might work differently in this case? Maybe.
Recall that it took some time for the political consequences of Dobbs to shake out. Indeed, the very reasons that Dobbs aids Democrats might suggest why loan forgiveness could cut the other way.
Both Dobbs and loan forgiveness raise hard questions regarding the motives of those upending the status quo. Democrats have effectively used Dobbs to suggest that the right is willing to trample on individual rights in pursuit of some kind of Handmaid’s Tale-style theocracy. Biden’s loan maneuver was tailor-made to fuel the suspicion that Democrats are contemptuous of personal responsibility and intent on catering to woke kids with graduate degrees.
Both hint at slippery slopes. Dobbs raised the specter that the Supreme Court might revisit other decisions governing gay marriage and privacy. The audacious illegality of Biden’s move and the calls for more from the progressive back-benchers feed the suspicion that Democrats will be itching to do a reprise in the future.
Economists call it the “fallacy of composition,” which is the assumption that what’s true for members of a group must also be true for the group as a whole. To use a popular example: It’s true that if someone stands up in a football stadium, that person will be able to see better. But it’s not true that if everyone stands up, everyone will have a better view.
Much public support for President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan rests on the same faulty logic. Just because some will benefit from a four-year degree in pay and choice of jobs, it doesn’t follow that everyone will. Yes, the student-debt problem stems from the dramatic rise in college costs in recent decades. But it’s also a function of too many young people who have little to gain from four more years of classroom instruction being tempted to take out loans and attend college anyway.
Tuition is about 20% of the total cost of attending college, and increases in tuition subsidies track closely with colleges raising their prices. In addition to being legally dubious and economically reckless, Mr. Biden’s debt-cancellation plan will create incentives for schools and potential borrowers alike to act in ways that exacerbate the problem. But the worst part might be that it will also encourage more young people to make poor decisions about their future.
The college-for-all advocates note that degree-holders tend to earn more, but as the economist Richard Vedder explains in his 2019 book on higher education, “Restoring the Promise,” first you must graduate, and 40% of the people who attend college don’t finish. Moreover, “college graduates with poor academic performance, graduating in the bottom quartile of their class, earn roughly the same after graduation as high school graduates.” These former college students must then pay back student debt with earnings equivalent to those of someone with only a high-school diploma.
I wanted diversity. I wanted my children to see, like, different nationalities. I wanted them to feel included. And I also wanted, like – I’m an educator, so I have an education background with early childhood, and I just wanted intentional learning experiences for my children.
I was actually unfamiliar with what a choice school was. I really didn’t have a connection. I didn’t have a source. I didn’t have anybody to say, “Do step one, two and three.” It was an emotional rollercoaster. I wanted the best for my kids, but how do I get there?
I really truly – I went down on my hands and knees praying, like I need something different for my children. And I spent days crying, trying to figure X, Y, and Z out. I kind of like did everything, and then I just, kind of like, threw my hands in the air, and I just left it to the universe. Whatever happens from here, I did my part.
And so, we did it, and we got accepted, every child got accepted, and I was like, it’s a weight that lifts off of you. Like you’ve been accepted to the choice.
I have a 10-year-old who is going into fifth grade starting tomorrow, and I have a 13-year-old who will be entering eighth grade tomorrow at St. Marcus. My son attends Martin Luther High School in Greendale.
Without Choice, I could not have afforded to send my children to St. Marcus or Martin Luther. It’s money well spent. I would agree, both as a professional, as a parent and from a personal standpoint. I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity.
It would just be the over-excelling academic piece that I was like, this is what they need – the challenge. And he (my son) plays sports, so for us choosing Martin Luther specifically is their academics are really high, but their sports program is really good, too.
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The Court agreed, unanimously. States are permitted to run and regulate schools, even to require that all children receive an adequate education. But the Justices held that the state may not “unreasonably interfere with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”
The decision in Pierce v. the Society of Sisters featured one of the more memorable turns of phrase in Supreme Court history. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” wrote Justice James C. McReynolds. “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”
The notion that the state must not interfere with parents and their right to direct their children’s upbringing and education has cast a long shadow over U.S. education. But now, nearly a century after Pierce, the state seems increasingly inclined to relitigate the matter—if not in court, then in practice and policy in America’s public schools. There is a rising and unmistakable tendency on the part of teachers and school districts to assume that government is better positioned than a child’s parents to judge what’s best for children and to act on that assumption, often aggressively, making critical decisions about children’s upbringing and well-being without their parents’ consent or even their knowledge.
There have been myriad recent examples of schools imposing their staffs’ ideological preferences, and in so doing being disingenuous or openly dishonest about critical race theory, trangenderism, “social and emotional learning” programs, and other controversial aspects of school curriculum and culture. The picture that has begun to emerge is of an education establishment straying beyond its remit, emboldened to ignore parents, and determined to subvert local control of schools to advance a social-justice agenda. “It’s infuriating, it’s harmful to children, and it’s unacceptable,” says Vernadette Broyles, an attorney and the founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign. “And it’s contrary to law.”
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
The regretters include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues. When he delivered his 2011 State of the Union address in the shadow of the Great Recession, former president Barack Obama plugged math and science education and called on Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Since then, the number of new graduates in the arts and humanities has plunged.
A new poll shows that President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for many individuals who borrowed money from the federal government to pay for college (and $20,000 for those with need-based Pell Grants) is broadly popular—as long as people don’t think about the scheme’s knock-on effects. Once the potential consequences—including higher inflation and rising college tuition costs, are taken into account—support for student debt forgiveness craters, even among self-identified Democrats.
“Support for cancelling federal student loan debt plummets when Americans consider its trade-offs,” writes Emily Ekins, director of polling for the libertarian Cato Institute, which published polling data on student debt forgiveness Thursday. The Cato/YouGov survey includes more than 2,300 Americans and was conducted over six days in mid-August, just prior to the White House’s August 24 announcement of the student loan forgiveness plan.
The results are striking. While 64 percent of respondents (and 88 percent of Democrats) back student loan forgiveness of $10,000 for individuals earning up to $150,000 annually, those totals fall significantly once potential consequences are introduced.
Critics of the policy see it as rewarding Democratic supporters and interest groups, including university faculty and administrators but most of all students. This perception, regardless of whether it’s true, will influence political behavior…
Republicans, when they hold political power, are likely to strike back. They may be more interested in draining the sector of revenue. The simplest way of doing this would be to limit tuition hikes in state universities. De facto tuition caps are already common, but they may become tighter and more explicit, especially in red and purple states. Such policies might also prove popular with voters, especially during a time of high inflation.
A second set of reforms might limit the ability of public universities to spend money on hiring more administrators, including people who work on so-called DEI issues. Given the fungibility of funds, and the ability of administrators to retitle new positions, such restrictions may not be entirely enforceable. Still, they would mean less autonomy for public universities as policy in many states tried to counteract their current leftward swing.
The percentage of students who performed at or above the proficient level in reading was 36% in 2019, 35% in 2017 and 34% in 1998. While Wisconsin’s numbers remain higher than Mississippi’s, the trend line is flat.
Further, Black fourth-graders in Mississippi are outperforming Black fourthgraders in Wisconsin in reading, portending what’s to come in other academic measurements as the students age. And while Black students in Mississippi averaged a reading score 21 percentage points lower than White students — nothing to be content with — the performance gap was 39 points in Wisconsin, a chasm that is both shocking and familiar.
“We have done virtually nothing to close the Black-white gap,” said state Rep. LaKeshia Myers, a Milwaukee Democrat.
Nationally, a just-released NAEP report, the first to gauge the impact of the COVID pandemic, shows a national drop in scores. State by state results will come later. Still, while far from perfect, Mississippi appears to offer lessons on how reading improvements can be achieved.
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”
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?
The new 990 report shows that since the foundation was created in 2014, when Obama was still in office, the foundation has raised $866.4 million
The foundation reported on its 990 that in 2021, the Obama Foundation collected $159.6 million in contributions and grants. That’s down from 2020 when the foundation gained $171 million in gifts…. (snip)
Fundraising at this scale is expensive: Overall, 21.95% of the foundation operating expenses were for fundraising, with 54.8% on programs and 23.22% on general administration.
More, here:
Based on my conversations, here are some common workarounds children use in their attempts to bypass Apple’s Screen Time restrictions:
Changing the time zone. Setting the device to an earlier time zone can fool Downtime, the Screen Time function that prevents users from accessing a device’s apps after a preset time. Apple was supposed to have fixed this in iOS 15, but the trick sometimes still works on iPhones and iPads.
I tested it out on my daughter’s iPad Pro, which was running the slightly older iPadOS 15.5. I scheduled downtime to begin at 8:25 a.m. Pacific. At that time, all the apps went gray and I couldn’t open them. But when I changed the device’s time zone to Honolulu’s, three hours behind me in California—bingo!—I was able to open any app.
I updated the tablet to the latest version of iPadOS, 15.6.1, and the time-zone hack no longer worked.
Chris McKenna, founder of internet-safety company Protect Young Eyes, has been informing Apple of Screen Time hacks for years. When he scheduled downtime on his up-to-date iPhone and then changed the time zone to an earlier one, he was still able to access all his apps. (This might be because he is the admin for his Family Sharing group.)
The author is Hasheng Huang of MIT and the subtitle is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Excerpt:
For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state. There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.
A few weeks ago, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the abysmal results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress regarding 9-year-olds. “The nation’s report card,” as the assessment’s crafters like it to be known, had found the sharpest drop ever in mathematics and the steepest decline in reading in over 30 years.
There was no way to escape the damning implications of the extended COVID-19 school closures or Democrats’ owning the lion’s share of the blame for them, so Jean-Pierre tried to deflect: “In less than six months, our schools went from 46% to nearly all of them open to full time. That was the work of this president, and that was the work of Democrats in spite of Republicans not voting for the American Rescue Plan, [of] which $130 billion went to schools to be able to have the ventilation, to have the tutoring and the teachers and being able to hire more teachers, and that was because of the work that this administration did.”
This is a lie Democrats are increasingly telling themselves and anyone who will listen because they need the villains of this particular story to somehow be transformed in the public’s imagination into the heroes. The arsonists want to be remembered as the firefighters.
But the reality wholeheartedly refutes the spin. Before President Joe Biden even took office in January 2021, he set a very unambitious goal to get schools open in the first 100 days. One problem: That 100-day goal meant children would finally head back to regular school in May, right around the time schools around the country were shutting down for the summer. In the end, it wouldn’t matter. The 100-day plan would run headlong into the same roadblock that had kept schools closed before Biden became president: Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers who had directed the Democratic officials in her pocket to fall in line.
During a press briefing on Feb. 9, 2021, then-press secretary Jen Psaki suddenly backtracked on what “open schools” meant to the president. “His goal that he set is to have the majority of schools, so more than 50%, open by Day 100 of his presidency. And that means some teaching in classrooms, so at least one day a week. Hopefully, it’s more. And obviously, it is as much as is safe in each school and local district.” Asked to clarify, Psaki answered, “Well, teaching at least one day a week in the majority of schools by Day 100.”
My mother had a gift for these hard conversations, to be clear and honest while not being unkind. There are a million examples for me of this, when I think of it. Once, when a close friend’s boyfriend broke up with her the year we graduated from college, my mom said to her, “I know this seems like a big deal now, but I’m telling you: it’s not.” My friend remembers that interaction not as harsh but as kind, honest. Of course, it was also true.
The one example I always come back to, though, is the time that my mother brought one of her favorite MBA students into her office and told her she needed to upgrade her wardrobe before starting her job in investment banking. Mom even found a fellow MBA student, a friend, to take her shopping. (I think we might all have wished this conversation wasn’t necessary, but my mother was practical, and she was deeply worried that this fixable, external issue would get in the way of the student’s success.) This cannot have been an easy thing to say, or to hear. But it was kind, if not especially nice.
She was so good at these hard conversations that even when she had retired, she’d occasionally be asked to come back to have one of them, when no one else could do it. Her magic wasn’t just the willingness to have the conversation but the ability to make clear that it wasn’t with malice, it wasn’t to be mean.
I think about this all the time. Mentoring students, in particular, requires these conversations frequently. Be clear, I channel. Be kind.
Now, as the pandemic disruptions wane, many of these families aren’t going back, opting instead to stick with personalized curricula and private instruction. The model, once limited to the very wealthy, is being adopted by families in the upper middle class, according to private-tutor placement companies and their clients.
Many children have endured months of stalled academic progress as a result of the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Last week national fourth-grade reading and math scores revealed the worst decline in decades, one that some educators said could hobble a generation of children.
That stalled progress, combined with teacher shortages, school-board political divisions and classroom disruptions, has for many fueled a flight out of K-12 schools to home schooling and private schools.
Adam Caller, who founded Tutors International in Oxford, England, 23 years ago, said too few schools impart the skills necessary to succeed in a rapidly evolving society, and his clients want a more forward thinking approach to prepare their children to be leaders.
FIRE:
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https://www.ft.com/content/6ff4bc06-ea5c-43c4-b8f7-57e13a7597bballing life expectancy is the last thing you would expect on a worry list about US national security. Yet when it is dropping as fast as it is in the US — Americans live almost five years less than the wealthy country average — even the Pentagon has to sit up. At 76, Americans now live shorter lives than their peers in China and only a year longer than the citizens of supposedly benighted Mexico. People in Japan, Italy and Spain, on the other hand, can expect to live until around 84. Your people’s longevity is the ultimate test of a system’s ability to deliver. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans, presidents or legislators, seem too bothered.
Do Americans no longer care how long they live? The answer is obviously no. Yet concern about the country’s falling lifespan is barely reflected in its politics. It is as though Washington has turned a blind eye to the issue that captures the deepest trends behind America’s democratic woes. Terms such as “deaths of despair” and “obesity epidemic” are in frequent use. But America’s shortening lifespan seems too big a subject for Washington to acknowledge. US life expectancy has fallen in six of the last seven years and is now almost three years below what it was in 2014. The last time it fell in consecutive years was during the first world war. In most other democracies this would trigger a national debate.
What explains US indifference? The biggest drivers of America’s morbid trajectory are politically hard to confront — rising obesity, the opioid epidemic and Covid. Over 40 per cent of US adults are now classified as obese — a problem that keeps getting worse. More than half of American adults suffer from a chronic condition, most of which are associated with obesity, such as diabetes, hypertension and heart problems. A quarter suffer from two or more of these conditions. This partly explains America’s unusually high death rate from coronavirus. Almost two-thirds of Americans hospitalised with Covid were suffering from at least one pre-existing condition. The pathogen was working in fertile territory. America’s obesity rate is by far the highest among wealthy countries.
Choose life.
Hoenig’s clipped remarks didn’t land with the fanfare of Bryan’s grandiloquent oratory. In fact, it’s hard to imagine two men with less in common, stylistically. Hoenig was and is a reserved former soldier and number-cruncher who disdained limelight and believed in economy in all things, including words, while Bryan was a man born for the soapbox. Moreover, in a misdiagnosis that that persists to this day, Hoenig’s remarks were criticized as the tightwad meanderings of a hard-money reactionary, an impression that grew stronger when “The Fed’s dissident” was lionized in congressional hearings by the likes of “End the Fed” campaigner and gold-standard advocate Ron Paul. If Bryan wanted to loosen the money supply, and Hoenig wanted to rein it in, what linked them? What could American history’s prototype populist possibly share with a fusty economic traditionalist like Hoenig?
In fact there were similarities. Hoenig’s critics tended to see things backwards, pegging beliefs of his we’d now recognize as economic populism as conservatism, and more importantly mis-labeling the bank-friendly, trickle-down policies of Bernanke as liberal progressivism. This radical switcheroo, turning traditional perceptions of liberalism and conservatism on their head, soon spread to non-financial arenas, as elite officials pitched themselves as progressives, deriding opponents as conspiracist reactionaries. Hoenig is essentially patient zero of this phenomenon, and his story is explained brilliantly in The Lords of Easy Money, in my mind the first book that makes the inner workings of the Fed truly accessible to ordinary readers.
Leonard gets particularly high marks because the Fed — whose officials always used dullness and inscrutability to deflect public scrutiny — is nearly impossible to make interesting and understandable. Leonard pulls it off. A neophyte will come away from The Lords of Easy Money understanding the mechanics of money creation, and the bank’s awesome influence in widening the wealth gap and driving political divisions.
Discovery has unveiled an army of federal censorship bureaucrats, including officials arrayed at the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Communications show these federal officials are fully aware that the pressure they exert is an effective and necessary way to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship. The head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency even griped about the need to overcome social-media companies’ “hesitation” to work with the government.
These actions have precipitated an unprecedented rise in censorship and suppression of free speech—including core political speech—on social-media platforms. Many viewpoints and speakers have been unlawfully and unconstitutionally silenced or suppressed in the modern public square. This unlawful government interference violates the fundamental right of free speech for all Americans, whether or not they are on social media. More discovery is needed to uncover the full extent of this regime—i.e., the identities of other White House and agency officials involved and the nature and content of their communications with social-media companies.
Sometimes you have to take a step back.”
Professor Hutchens said it also made a difference that Gibson’s was a small family business, not a large multinational corporation like Walmart or Amazon, which would be better able to sustain the economic losses from such a protest.
Oberlin is a small liberal arts college with a reputation for turning out students who are strong in the arts and humanities and for its progressive politics, leaning heavily on its history of being a stop on the Underground Railroad as well as one of the first colleges to admit Black students. Tuition at Oberlin is more than $61,000 a year, and the overall cost of attendance tops $80,000 a year. The college is also very much part of the town, which is economically dependent on the school and its students. The bakery, across the street from the college, sold donuts and chocolates, and was considered a must-eat part of the Oberlin dining experience.
The incident that started the dispute unfolded in November 2016, when a student tried to buy a bottle of wine with a fake ID while shoplifting two more bottles by hiding them under his coat, according to court papers.
….
After the 2019 jury award against Oberlin, Carmen Twillie Ambar, the college president, said that the case was far from over and that “none of this will sway us from our core values.” The college said then that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”
But in its statement on Thursday, Oberlin hinted that the protracted and bitter fight had undermined its relationship with the people and businesses in the surrounding community.
“We value our relationship with the city of Oberlin,” its statement said. “And we look forward to continuing our support of and partnership with local businesses as we work together to help our city thrive.”
The highest-rated comment (by a lot) quotes “Archaic chase-and-detain policy” and asks “What should a storekeeper do about a shoplifter?” Good question. Is the answer that what’s not archaic is not to have any sort of shop that is open to the public?
Anyway, I’m glad the bakery is getting its money, and I hope colleges learn how to support student speech without joining the speech. Only join the speech if you stand behind it. Your speech is your speech. You’re not absolved from your lies because you were echoing what somebody else said. That should have been obvious all along.
You’d think this would be cause for reflection by our education elites, but no such luck. Media headlines blamed “the pandemic,” as if Covid-19 ran America’s school districts and decided to force students to sit at home in front of screens for more than a year. Educators—as they call themselves—did that.
National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr had a grab-bag of excuses for the tragic learning loss: “School shootings, violence, and classroom disruptions are up, as are teacher and staff vacancies, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and students’ use of mental health services. This information provides some important context for the results we’re seeing from the long-term trend assessment.”
She missed the “classroom disruptions” of not being able to go to class at all.
American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, who pushed shutdowns as long as she possibly could before parents revolted, tried to forget this ever happened with her statement on Twitter: “Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive. This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics.” But she and her union were the chief disrupters.
Max Marin and Kasturi Pananjady:
Philadelphia’s latest property reassessment represents “a key moment” for Philadelphia, according to a new report from Pew Charitable Trusts, with the city’s total combined property value rising to $204 billion, up from $168 billion just three years ago.
The report comes amid controversy over thefirst citywide reassessment in three years — and property owners’ frustration over resulting tax hikes. Public opinion of the city’s property tax remains low, with residents scoring it in a Pew poll as one of the most unfair levies. Among large cities in the country, Philadelphia has one of the highest home-ownership rates — both generally and among low-income homeowners in particular.
» READ MORE: Philly property assessments are systemically inaccurate in Black and low-income neighborhoods
Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy think tank that conducts research on issues in Philadelphia, released the report Thursday.Here are six key takeaways:
Despite ongoing problems with the city’s property tax system, revenue is booming.
Annual revenues collected from property taxes have skyrocketed from just over $1 billion in 2010 to more than $1.6 billion in 2021, a period in which the city implemented four rate increases and multiple reassessments that led to higher tax bills for many property owners.
It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule. The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public. It didn’t hire ex-CIA directors, top FBI men, NSA brass, or other past and future sources to sit beside its anchors at spot-lit news-desks that blocked our view of their lower extremities. But it gave in.
I’m stipulating these points, I’m not debating them, so log off if you find them too extreme. Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Comfort yourself with the thoughts that the same fortunes engaged in the building of amusement parks, the production and distribution of TV comedies, and the provision of computing services to the defense and intelligence establishments, have allied to protect your family’s health, advance the causes of equity and justice, and safeguard our democratic institutions. Dismiss as cynical the notion that you, the reader, are not their client but their product. Your data for their bullshit, that’s the deal. And Build Back Better. That’s the sermon.
Pious bullshit, unceasing. But what to do?
One reason to stick with the premium name-brand bullshit is to deconstruct it. What lines are the propagandists pushing now? Where will they lead? How blatant will they get? Why are the authors so weirdly fearless? The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom. One wire-service headline used the protests to raise concerns about viral spread in crowds. A puzzling message. It wasn’t meant for the defiant Cubans, who weren’t at liberty to read it and whose anger at their rulers clearly outweighed their concerns about contagion. It had to be aimed at English-speaking Americans. But to what end? American protests of the previous summer hadn’t raised such cautions from the press. To the contrary. Our riots, if one could call them that (and one could not at many companies) were framed as transcendent cries for justice whose risks to public health were negligible, almost as though moral passion enhances immunity. And maybe it does, but why not in Cuba, too? To me, the headline only made sense in the context of the offensive against domestic “vaccine hesitancy” and its alleged fascist-bumpkin leaders. The Reuters writer had seen in Cuba’s revolt a chance to glancingly editorialize against rebelliousness of another type. The type its staff abhors day in, day out, no matter what’s happening in Cuba, or, for that matter, in America. The bullshit is consistent in this way, reducing stories of every kind into nitrogen-rich soil for the same views. These views feel unusually ferocious now, reflecting the convictions of those on high that they should determine the fates of those on low with minimal backtalk and no laughter. Because science. Because Putin. Democracy. Because we’re inside your phones and know your names.
Most observers of the Supreme Court expect that it will declare affirmative action unconstitutional next year in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The plaintiff’s case isn’t strong. Asian American students are admitted in lower numbers than their grades and standardized-test scores alone would predict, but most of the statistical disparity is attributable not to affirmative action but to admissions considerations such as regional diversity, athletic talent, alumni and donor preferences, and subjective evaluation — all of which favor
On the night of Nov., 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and the country was forever changed. But for my family, it was the following night — Nov. 9, 2016 — that our world was turned upside down and has never been set right.
Late that night, my husband, David, came home from work and told me that there had been a shoplifting incident at our bakery, Gibson’s. We’ve been in business for 137 years, so we’ve had our fair share of shoplifters, including earlier that very week. That particular night, a student from the local college, Oberlin, had tried to steal two bottles of wine and use a fake ID to buy a third. Our son, Allyn, had pursued him across the street. Two more students got involved. Allyn was beaten up pretty badly, and the three students were arrested.
David was afraid the incident would blow up, since the students claimed to the police that my son had assaulted them — not the other way around. He told me he was scared it would hurt our business since the students who were arrested were black and bystanders were already claiming that Allyn had racially profiled them.
But none of us had any idea of what was about to happen.
From Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School Dist., decided yesterday by the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Kenneth Lee joined by Judge Danielle Forrest (it’s on a preliminary injunction, so this is technically based on a finding of likelihood of success on the merits, but the panel majority seems pretty firm of the subject):
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) requires students serving in leadership roles to abide by a Statement of Faith, which includes the belief that sexual relations should be limited within the context of a marriage between a man and a woman. The San Jose Unified School District … revoked FCA’s status as an official student club at its high schools, claiming that FCA’s religious pledge requirement violates the School District’s non-discrimination policy….
The School District engaged in selective enforcement of its own non-discrimination policy, penalizing FCA while looking the other way with other student groups. For example, the School District blessed student clubs whose constitutions limited membership based on gender identity or ethnicity, despite the school’s policies barring such restricted membership. The government cannot set double standards to the detriment of religious groups only….
We apply strict scrutiny to government regulations that burden religious exercise unless those laws are neutral and generally applicable. A law is not neutral and generally applicable if it is selectively enforced against religious entities but not comparable secular entities. “[W]hether two activities are comparable for purposes of the Free Exercise Clause must be judged against the asserted government interest that justifies the regulation at issue.” … Finally, the “Government fails to act neutrally when it proceeds in a manner intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature.”
Wannabe computer science superstars must all run the same rather scary and capricious gauntlet, one that sounds deceptively dull: the computer science conference paper review process. To have a research paper accepted for presentation at a CS conference is a coveted rite of passage among academics and professionals, bestowing on its author a status symbol that can open the door to tenure or competitive job offers.
Last month, the University of California, Berkeley’s much-respected Edward Lee, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences who for several decades has served on program committees that judge research papers, caused an uproar in the CS community after he publicly shared a scathing review of the system, which he’d sent earlier to fellow judges. Program committee members who decide which papers are accepted are volunteers, members of the academic community who agree to spend hours of their time (theoretically) reading submissions, writing opinions and voting on whether papers are worthy of the hallowed halls of whatever conference is in session.
Seattle Public Schools canceled Wednesday’s first day of school after teachers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike over issues that include pay, mental health support, and staffing ratios for special education and multilingual students.
Seattle Education Association President Jennifer Matter announced Tuesday that 95% of ballots returned by the union’s membership favored going on strike absent an agreement with Seattle Public Schools. Contract talks continued.
“No one wants to strike,” Matter said. “But SPS has given us no choice. We can’t go back to the way things have been.”
The district said in an email to parents that it was “optimistic the bargaining teams will come to a positive solution for students, staff, and families.”
Districts around the country have faced labor challenges as the pandemic put extraordinary stress on teachers and students alike. An infusion of federal stimulus money has helped stabilize school district budgets, and teachers unions have sought to improve pay, resources and and working conditions after a difficult few years.
Radical gender theory is a catch-all term for academic queer theory, transgender ideology, and gender identity activism. The premise of this ideology is that sex and gender are socially constructed—that is, they are human inventions used as instruments of power, rather than features of objective reality. Radical gender theorists argue that white, European men invented the “gender binary,” or division between man and woman, in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They believe that this system of “heteronormativity” must be exposed, critiqued, and deconstructed in order to usher in a world beyond the norms of heterosexual, middle-class society. In order to facilitate the destruction of this system, radical gender activists promote synthetic sexual identities, such as “pansexual,” “genderqueer,” and “two-spirit,” and neo-pronouns, such as “ze,” “zim,” and “zir.” The goal is to replace notions of biological sex, the male-female binary, and the nuclear family with “queer alternatives” and “a world beyond binaries.” Some strains of academic queer theory also support eliminating prohibitions on child pornography, valorizing transgressive sex, and permitting adult-child sexual relationships.
I combine a regression discontinuity design with rich data on academic and labor market outcomes for a large sample of Florida students to estimate the returns to college admission for academically marginal students. Students with grades just above a threshold for admissions eligibility at a large public university in Florida are much more likely to attend any university than below-threshold students. The marginal admission yields earnings gains of 22% between 8 and 14 years after high school completion. These gains outstrip the costs of college attendance, and they are largest for male students and free-lunch recipients
The intervention dynamic: subsidize, drive up prices, institute price controls. https://t.co/7RN9pwVwRW
— Alex Tabarrok (@ATabarrok) August 29, 2022
But here’s the thing: If a constitutional convention is called and proposes amendments, they still have to be ratified by legislatures or conventions (the convention gets to decide which) in 3/4 of all states:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress;
Maybe I’m wrong, but I expect that this will be a pretty serious bar to any particularly radical proposals. If you disagree, tell me this: What amendments do you think a convention could propose that would get the support of legislatures or conventions in at least 38 of the 50 states, and how conservative (or liberal) do you think those amendments would be?
The authors kicked off a national tour Tuesday at Marquette Law School, where Feingold started his teaching career after losing his Senate re-election race to Ron Johnson in 2010. He has since taught at Yale and Stanford, and currently serves as president of the American Constitution Society, often described as a progressive counterpart to the conservative Federalist Society.
The colorful Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes once likened George Romney’s run for the presidency to “a duck trying to [make love to] a football.” I wish he had been around to put a label on the federal student-loan program. In the sad catalog of its failures, the federal government has set a new standard. President Biden’s debt-cancellation announce-ment represents the final confession of failure for a venture flawed in concept, botched in execution, and draped with duplicity.
The scheme’s flaws have been well chronicled. It’s regressive, rewarding the well-to-do at the expense of the less fortunate. It’s grossly unfair to those who repaid what they borrowed or never went to college. It’s grotesquely expensive, adding hundreds of billions to a federal debt that already threatens our safety-net programs and national security. Like so much of what government does, it’s iatrogenic, inflating college costs as schools continue to pocket the subsidies Uncle Sam showers on them. And it’s profanely contemptu-ous of the Constitution, which authorizes only Congress to spend money.
After the 2020 presidential election, the Trump administration attempted to pre-empt the use of the Heroes Act for this purpose, issuing a memoclaiming that “Congress never intended the Heroes Act as authority for mass cancellation, compromise, discharge or forgiveness of student loan principal balances.”
In its own memo last week, however, the Biden administration argued that the Trump administration’s conclusions were “unsupported and incorrect.” The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the executive branch, concurred in a separate opinion, concluding that “reducing or canceling the principal balances of student loans, including for a broad class of borrowers who the secretary determines suffered financial harm because of Covid-19, could be a permissible response to the Covid-19 pandemic.”
‘You must stay at home.’ That simple instruction from prime minister Boris Johnson, issued before the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, changed the fate of the nation forever.
You might have imagined that in a democratic country such as Britain, a decision of this magnitude would not simply have been imposed by executive fiat. That the shutting down of schools, the economy and society might have been something worth debating and discussing. But for much of the pandemic, lockdown was never subjected to proper scrutiny, even though its harms were obvious from the start.
Indeed, the harms of lockdown are becoming clearer by the day. The near-collapse of the NHS, the crisis in education and runaway inflation can all be traced back, at least in part, to March 2020. And while the Russian invasion of Ukraine has since sparked a global energy crisis, lockdown is part of what left us so vulnerable to its effects.
After all, the lockdown was the biggest shock to the UK economy in the history of industrial capitalism. And in the words of one High Court judge, it was ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’. Many of its awful impacts were predictable and predicted.
schoolinfosystem.org