Kimberly Strassel:

Then along comes Blu­tarsky, and seven years of col­lege down the drain. It would be hard to fash­ion a pro­gram that car­ries more po­lit­i­cal risk for less po­lit­i­cal re­ward. In the name of pay­ing off that pow­er­ful vot­ing bloc known as “overe­d­u­cated and un­der­em­ployed dead­beats,” Mr. Biden is dump­ing on his own in­fla­tion mes­sage, di­vid­ing his party, and in­sult­ing any Amer­i­can who has ever worked, saved or paid a bill.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent (with a lot of noise), a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects — how good someone is at taking some type of exams designed by unsophisticated nerds. It is via negativa not via positiva. Designed for learning disabilities, and given that it is not too needed there (see argument further down), it ends up selecting for exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”. (The fact that it correlates with general incompetence makes the overall correlation look high, even when it is random, see Figures 1 and 2.) The concept is poorly thought out mathematically by the field (commits a severe flaw in correlation under fat tails and asymmetries; fails to properly deal with dimensionality; treats the mind as an instrument not a complex system), and seems to be promoted by

David Blaska:

This Wednesday 09-07-22, Khari Sanford will be sentenced in Dane County Circuit Court for the execution-style slaying of Dr. Beth Potter and her husband Robin Carre.

They were murdered by a person they had tried to help,” their memorial obituary reads.

Khari Sanford was 18 years old on March 30, 2020 when he entered the Carre-Potter’s home in upper middle-class University Heights some time after 10:40 p.m. Using the Volkswagen minivan the couple had lent him, Sanford and his convicted accomplice Alijah “Hunch” Larrue took their captives on a circuitous route to the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. There, not far off the Vilas Park entrance, Sanford forced the two, still wearing their bed clothes in the March cold, to their knees.

With his powerful Glock .357 SIG semi-automatic handgun, Sanford shot Robin once behind the left ear at close range, execution-style. He shot Beth twice, once in the upper arm, once in the back of the head. Perhaps she had struggled. During the 26-minute drive to their execution, one can only imagine how Beth and Robin tried to dissuade the young man from his deadly deed, to remember their many kindnesses, to promise more favors.

“It was calculated, cold blooded and senseless,” the chief of University of Wisconsin Police said at the time.

Shocking and puzzling, too, since the murdered couple had given every consideration to Sanford, a young black man in a romantic relationship with the Carre-Potter’s daughter Miriam, whom the white couple had adopted out of an orphanage in Guatemala.

In the immediate hours after his deadly deed, Sanford attempted to cash out the dead couple’s ATM cards. A form of reparations, perhaps. Payment for the dead couple’s white privilege and the larger society’s institutional racism, it could be argued. Because Khari Sanford certainly identified as a victim. He posted on his Facebook page a few months before the murders. (Source here.)

“We gon’ change this world, cause it’s time to let our diversity and youth shine over all oppressive systemsand rebuild our democracy.”

“They were murdered by a person they had tried to help.”
—  Robin Carre – Beth Potter obituary.

In fairness, Khari O. Sanford came to Madison as damaged goods. Writing from his jail cell to Judge Ellen Berz in September 2021, Sanford wrote he was the oldest of seven children to a single mother in Chicago and a father who spent the son’s first 10 years in prison.

“One of my greatest friends died in my arm at the age of seven years old as the result of a drive by shooting,” he wrote. “That was my first traumatic experience.”

Did progressive Madison teach Sanford his sense victimhood — despite all the opportunities presented him? In his sophomore year at West high school, Sanford joined its newly formed Black Student Union just as social justice warriors, informed by critical race theory taught at the University of Wisconsin, were waging war on police.

A culture of victimization

Madison public schools had already sacrificed discipline in favor of identity politics because “A zero tolerance policy toward discipline … was having a disproportionate and negative effect on students of color.”

A dedicated practitioner of cancel culture, the school district erased name of the slave-holding Founder and renamed one of its schools after a minor black office holder. Inconveniently, Wisconsin’s capital city — founded the year that President died — retains his disgraced name.

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?

Rory Linnane:

Evers said his plan for the 2023-25 budget would draw on the state’s projected $5 billion budget surplus while “holding the line” on property taxes. 

Evers’ opponent in the November election, Tim Michels, called Evers’ plan “more money and more bureaucracy.” 

“The tired, old Evers approach has not worked,” Michels said in a statement. 

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos also quickly derided Evers’ proposal, taking to Twitter to call the plan a “feeble ploy to try to win votes.”

Republican lawmakers rewrote much of Evers’ proposed 2021-23 state budget, nixing his plan to increase the caps on how much school districts are allowed to spend each year. School district leaders have argued they cannot keep up with inflation with flat spending limits.

The biggest chunk of state funding, $800 million, would allow schools to spend $350 more per student in the 2023-24 school year and $650 more the following year. 

The plan would also invest $750 million to increase how much the state reimburses school districts for special education costs, from about 30% to about 45% in the first year, and 60% the next year. 

The plan also includes: 

• $240 million to expand the “Get Kids Ahead” initiative for school-based mental health services with an investment of $100 per student, ensuring that each district has at least one full-time staff member focused on mental health 
• $20 million for before- and after-school programming in and outside schools
• $10 million for literacy programming, including a state literacy center that would provide training for teachers
• $5 million to help school districts implement financial literacy curriculum
• An unspecified amount of funding to reimburse school districts for meal costs to provide free meals for students who already qualify for free and reduced-price meals, and decrease the cost to other students

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?

Hannah Natanson

We have all heard, by this point, that school closures during the first year of the pandemic damaged children. We have heard that children slid behind where they should be academically, with the most vulnerable slipping fastest; that many children with disabilities did not learn anything at all and began regressing; that the nation’s youngest citizens spent years feeling upset, angry, sad, frustrated and oh so alone.

Tyler Cowen:

Bryan Caplan as you know argues that even the private return to higher education isn’t what it usually is cracked up to be, especially since large numbers of individuals do not finish with a four-year degree. Susan Dynarski (tenured at Harvard education, but an economist), writing in the NYT, seems to have started flirting with this view:

John McGinnis:

What differentiates a simple democracy from a republic is the complex system of checks and balances that the latter employs to promote both liberty and stability. In the federal American Republic, authorities are divided vertically between the states and the national government. Powers are also separated among the President, Congress. and federal Judiciary. The Constitution is in essence a charter for dividing decision-making power.

A decision-making charter requires dispassionate enforcement. The political issues that stir people’s souls are almost always substantive rather than decisional. People march for and against abortion rights, not in defense of the appropriate constitutional entity to make that decision. But the locus of the decision is one of paramount importance to the maintenance of a republic, not least because of the danger that one branch of the federal government or the federal government as a whole will usurp power, creating more dangers of tyranny.

Thus, a central underlying issue for a republic is how to assure that those decisions about the proper authority are made in a neutral, dispassionate way—not swamped by the emotions generated by substantive disagreements. The first line of defense is to choose the most dispassionate institution to make these meta-decisions (i.e., the decisions about who decides). When Alexander Hamilton said that constitutional review should be lodged in the judiciary because the judiciary embodies judgment rather than will, he was emphasizing the comparative dispassion of the third branch.

Kevin Dugan:

The thing about Elon Musk is that whatever it is he’s involved with, the guy wants you to think it’s about something else, something bigger. Tesla isn’t about cars — it’s about the future or the environment or innovation. SpaceX isn’t a rocket-maker; it’s a save-the-human-race-from-extinction company.With Twitter v. Musk, the suit isn’t just about whether the world’s richest man can save $43 billion or so by backing out of an agreement to buy Twitter. There’s a deeper question, one Musk may not like observers asking:Does Elon Musk think he’s bigger than the law?

Law is often made through unusual cases, and there’s a trail of them behind Musk, going as far back to his days with Zip2, his first internet mapping company from shortly after dropping out of Stanford. Since then, he has been challenging corporate law in bigger and weirder ways. There’s Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, of which Musk was chairman and the major shareholder. There’s the “funding secured” tweet two years later about taking Tesla private, which ended with a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and his resignation as Tesla’s chairman. Despite settling, Musk continues to say that he actually didn’t do anything wrong with the tweet — and earlier this year, he won a suit against a group of shareholders that challenged the SolarCity deal even though Tesla’s directors settled.

How did you get the idea of starting a class about Elon Musk and his effect on the law?
He’s generating a lot of really interesting case law out of Delaware. Tesla’s acquisition of SolarCity is an excellent case to teach students. And then there is a pending case on his Tesla CEO-compensation package, which is a great case because it’s what will strike the students as an egregious amount of money — billions of dollars in CEO compensation — in excess of anything we’ve ever seen. It’s a great case to talk about: Is this a situation in which it would be rational for a company to put together that sort of a compensation package?

There are all these cases from different areas that all involve Musk, and given how high profile he is this year with Twitter and everything, I thought this would be a way of really grabbing the students’ attention.

Jonathan Tobin:

Berenson’s final tweet before being banned said the following about Covid vaccines: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” 

As The Atlantic admitted this past week, his claims are inarguably correct. The notion that merely stating his concerns on an issue about which much is yet to be learned was something that merited government intervention and censorship is risible. 

It may be advantageous to take the vaccines, especially for those who are most at risk due to age or other health problems, but you don’t have to be an anti-vaxxer to understand that in the U.S., the government is not meant to have the power to shut down debates. 

Some might claim that normal rules don’t apply during public health emergencies, but that is undermined by the fact that pretty much all of the advice and warnings that came out of the public health establishment during the height of the pandemic were eventually proven wrong. The fact that the government was able to pressure the regulators of the 21st-century town square to silence controversial speech is outrageous and dangerous to democracy.

Our joint statement on discovery disputes legal brief, filed with the court and made public today, reveals scores of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful. Here are just a few excerpts from this document, which includes attachments of hundreds of pages of emails and other governmental and big tech internal communications as supporting evidence. These documents were obtained after we requested the following information on discovery:

Jesse Opoien

The funds would create an elections inspector general program and hire 10 additional staffers, in order to “increase the agency’s ability to research public or legislative inquiries — especially those alleging unlawful or non-compliant behavior — in a more timely and effective manner,” according to a proposal from WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe and agency staff.

Jesse Opoien

The funds would create an elections inspector general program and hire 10 additional staffers, in order to “increase the agency’s ability to research public or legislative inquiries — especially those alleging unlawful or non-compliant behavior — in a more timely and effective manner,” according to a proposal from WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe and agency staff.

Cloudfare:/

This isn’t hypothetical. Thousands of times per day we receive calls that we terminate security services based on content that someone reports as offensive. Most of these don’t make news. Most of the time these decisions don’t conflict with our moral views. Yet two times in the past we decided to terminate content from our security services because we found it reprehensible. In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.

In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.

Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold. Not because the content of those sites wasn’t abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.

Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.

Karen Hao:

Earlier this month, the Cyberspace Administration of China published summaries of 30 core algorithms belonging to two dozen of the country’s most influential internet companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., owner of China’s ubiquitous WeChat super app.

The milestone marks the first systematic effort by a regulator to compel internet companies to reveal information about the technologies powering their platforms, which have shown the capacity to radically alter everything from pop culture to politics. It also puts Beijing on a path that some technology experts say few governments, if any, are equipped to handle.

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The public versions of the filings explain in plain language what types of data a given algorithm uses and what it does with the data. In many instances, they provide less detail than what Facebook voluntarily discloses to users about how it ranks content in its news feed.

Bethany Mandel:

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience.

Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious…

Nicole Ault and Megan Keller:

Randi Wein­garten left no room for doubt. “Crit­i­cal race the­ory is not taught in el­e­men­tary schools or high schools,” the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers pres­i­dent said in a speech last year. Even if that’s true, a Penn­syl­va­nia fa­ther’s bat­tle with a school dis­trict demon­strates that pub­lic-school teach­ers are be­ing trained in the deeply di­vi­sive racial ide­ol­ogy—and de­fen­sive ad­min­is­tra­tors are play­ing se­man­tic games to al­lay parental con­cerns.

In 2018 the Tredyf­frin-East­town School Dis­trict near Phil­adelphia signed a con­tract with Pa­cific Ed­u­ca­tional Group, a Cal­i­for­nia-based con­sult­ing firm. Ac­cord­ing to the school dis­trict’s web­site, the part­ner­ship’s pur­pose was “to en­hance the poli­cies and prac­tices around racial eq­uity.” The dis­trict as­sured par­ents in an on­line up­date last sum­mer that no “course, cur­ricu­lum or pro­gram” in the dis­trict “teaches Crit­i­cal Race The­ory.”

Ben­jamin Aus­lan­der didn’t buy it. The par­ent of a high schooler in the dis­trict, he wanted to see the ma­te­ri­als used to train teach­ers. Mr. Aus­lan­der, 54, made a for­mal doc­u­ment re­quest but was de­nied. Of­fi­cials told him the ma­te­ri­als couldn’t be shared be­cause they were pro­tected by Pa­cific Ed­u­ca­tional Group’s copy­right. His only op­tion was to in­spect them in per­son—no copies or pho­tos al­lowed. “What are you try­ing to hide?” he asked school board mem­bers at a meet­ing in De­cem­ber.

Bryan Caplan:

I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My argument in a nutshell: First, everyone leaves school eventually. Second, most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after graduation. Third, human beings soon forget knowledge they rarely use.

Strangely, these very doubts imply that the educational costs of the coronavirus pandemic are already behind us. Forced optimism notwithstanding, the remote schooling that millions of students endured during the pandemic looks like a pedagogical disaster. Some researchers found that being in Zoom school was about equivalent to not being in school at all. Others simply found that test scores rose much less than they normally would.

But given my doubts about the value of school, I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.

How do we know all this? My work focuses on tests of adult knowledge — what adults retain after graduation. The general pattern is that grown-ups have shockingly little academic knowledge. College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know next to nothing. This doesn’t mean that these students never knew more; it just means that only a tiny fraction of what they learn durably stays in their heads.

This is especially clear for subjects beyond the three R’s — reading, writing and arithmetic. Fewer than 1 percent of American adults even claim to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, even when two years of coursework is standard. Adults’ knowledge of history and civics is negligible. If you test the most elementary facts, like naming the three branches of government, they get about half right. The same goes for questions of basic science, like “Are electrons smaller than atoms?” and “Do antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria?”

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?

Tyler Cowen:

I am now reading quite a few analyses of the problem, and so few mention price!  Even when written by economists.  I find this article somewhat useful:

“We are a city with very high levels of poverty, and it’s difficult for us to raise the rates enough to do large scale replacement type projects and not make it unaffordable to live in the city of Jackson,” said former city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.

Yet the cost of Jackson’s poor quality water is still passed on to families who don’t trust the tap and purchase bottled water — which can cost a family of four $50-$100 a month — to drink instead.

The city raised water rates in 2013, but the Siemens deal penned the same year came with an onslaught of problems, including the installation of faulty water meters and meters that measured water in gallons instead of the correct cubic feet. This made any benefits of the rate increase virtually impossible to see.

The results have been nonsensical. Over the past several years, the city has mailed exorbitant bills to some customers and none to others. Sometimes, the charges weren’t based on how much water a household used and other times, city officials advised residents to “pay what they think they owe.” Past officials said the city lacked the manpower and expertise in the billing department to manually rectify the account issues with any speed.

In trying to protect people during the persistent billing blunders, the city has at times instituted no-shutoff policies, which demonstrate compassion but haven’t helped to compel payment.

Ann Althouse:

Is he saying vote Democratic? He’s at least saying vote agains the non-mainstream MAGA Republicans. Did we the people pay for this event? Why were Marines there?  

… America is still the beacon to the world, an ideal to be realized, a promise to be kept. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred….

Nothing more sacred than government? And the other guys are the fascists? 

That’s our soul. That’s who we truly are. And that’s who we must always be…. We just need to remember who we are. We are the United States of America, the United States of America….

More:

All 3 networks judged it too political to deserve live coverage in prime time? And yet the Marines were there, attesting to its nonpolitical nature!

Farhi supplies this hilarious tweet from polisci prof Brendan Nyhan: “‘The networks refusing to cover Biden’s speech (presumably because it was going to be critical of Trump and/or not newsworthy enough) is precisely the problem’ confronting democracy.” No, it’s precisely the separation of government and journalism we need in a healthy democracy.

Related: taxpayer funded Administrative censorship.

Wall Street Journal:

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.

Mike Masnick:

If you thought cookie pop-ups were an annoying nuisance, just wait until you have to scan your face for some third party to “verify your age” after California’s new design code becomes law.

On Friday, I wrote about the companies and organizations most likely to benefit from California’s AB 2273, the “Age Appropriate Design Code” bill that the California legislature seems eager to pass (and which they refer to as the “Kid’s Code” even though the details show it will impact everyone, and not just kids). The bill seemed to be getting very little attention, but after a few of my posts started to go viral, the backers of the bill ramped up their smear campaigns and lies — including telling me that I’m not covered by it (and when I dug in and pointed out how I am… they stopped responding). But, even if somehow Techdirt is not covered (which, frankly, would be a relief), I can still be quite concerned about how it will impact everyone else.

Stefania Albanesi, Rania Gihleb, and Ning Zhang:

Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of ‘matched jobs’ that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. Using a structurally estimated model of child-parent decisions, in which coresidence improves college graduates’ quality of job matches, we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role.

Commentary:

Dylan M. Palmer & Will Flanders:

Generally speaking, university professors enjoy a great deal of trust and respect from their students. They wield considerable influence in shaping how young people, during some of the most formative years of their lives, wind up viewing the world.  

When a professor instructs a future K-12 teacher to view the classroom with reference to “interlocking systems of oppression, including . . . race, class, [and] gender,” as one syllabus for an education-major required course at UW-Green Bay describes), that future teacher may end up believing that this is the proper way to understand the school system. But describing K-12 education as a place of racial, class, or gender oppression is a radical political viewpoint. It’s not clear whether future teachers learning ideas like those at UW-Green Bay understand how damaging and divisive such ideas are. 

We also found, in a required course for education majors at UW-Stevens Point, that students were made to read both “Antiracist Baby” by Ibram X. Kendi and a portion of “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. “Antiracist Baby” presents itself as a children’s book, even though it traffics in highly political ideas about race and society—most notably, that colorblindness, or treating people without discriminating on the basis of race, is, in fact, racist. “White Fragility,” for its part, argues that virtually all white people are complicit in systemic racism.

This is not to say that college courses shouldn’t expose students to politically controversial topics. Indeed, such exposure is a key part of becoming educated. But, far too often, these radical viewpoints are presented to students as the onlyones through which to understand the world—instead of just another set of arguments, subject to debate and scrutiny. It is no wonder that future teachers come out of this environment primed to indoctrinate young students into similar viewpoints.

Orlando Figes:

The gulf between these two worlds is historical. It was the fundamental problem of the 19th-century revolutionaries and democratic reformers, as it has been a major reason for the failure of today’s intelligentsia to play a more decisive role of national leadership since the collapse of the Soviet regime. The social background of the intelligentsia may have broadened greatly in the intervening period — the revolution cut its roots in the nobility — but in education and outlook it remained just as isolated from the common people as before. In that isolation is its tragedy.

Christopher Lloyd:

My mother, 12 years a widow and a deeply private woman all her life, died in January, at home, surrounded by 800 friends.

Like my father, she had entered the workforce as a high school English teacher, serving in a rough area of New Haven, Conn., where she was once admonished by a student for calling Shakespeare’s Polonius a criminal (“I checked with my parole officer, Mizz Lloyd—he was an accessory.”). And like my father she adored books—teaching them, reading them, owning them. But in those days of $4,000 annual salaries, neither she nor my father could remotely have foreseen building a world-class collection of first editions, 800 of which graced the shelves of the home library into which she had moved a hospital bed for her final days.

So it was bittersweet this month to watch my parents’ collection sold via online auction to settle their estate. One at a time they went, one per minute, each with a ping of the computer, a steady disassembly of this literary family built over 50 years—orphans sent to new homes. 

Jonathan Turley:

Only seven percent of liberal students were concerned about how their professor’s ideology would affect their grades while that rate is 6 times higher for conservatives at 42 percent. Sixty-eight percent of conservatives were worried about sharing their views with other students (as opposed to 31 percent among liberal students).

The authors also concluded that a “significant number of students have concerns about stating their sincere political views in class and have self-censored because they were concerned about the potential reactions.”

Universities have failed to push for greater ideological diversity on faculties as hiring committees continue to replicate their own viewpoints and bias. It is not just students but faculty who face this pressure to self-censure. Faculty members risk cancel campaigns that threaten publications, conference invitations, and even their employment if they voice dissenting views.

It is heartbreaking to meet with students who feel, even in law school, that they must remain silent in class to avoid the ire or retaliation from faculty. Most faculties have a small and diminishing number of conservative or libertarian members. I discuss that long trend in my recent publication in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. The article is entitled “Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States.”

Florent:

But I don’t think our institutional woes stem only from politics — there’s a deeper cultural issue at play, and everybody should wonder to what extent they contribute to the problem.

Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick.

I for one like Michael Bloomberg’s approach better:

While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make
the design perfect, we’ve already gone through five rounds of testing.
By the time our rivals are ready to begin development, we are on
version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from
day one; others plan how to plan—for months.

Christopher Rufo:

I have obtained insider documents that reveal this troubling collaboration between gender activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and school administrators throughout the Chicago area. According to these documents, and a review of school district websites, Lurie Children’s Hospital has provided materials to school leaders promoting radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204. According to a whistleblower, these documents were circulated to administrators, teachers, and other staff at the middle school and high school level as part of ongoing employee-training programs.

The primary training document, “Beyond Binary: Gender in Schools,” follows the basic narrative of academic queer theory: white, Western society has created an oppressive gender binary, falsely dividing the world into the categories of man and woman, that has resulted in “transphobia,” “cissexism,” and “systemic discrimination” against racial and sexual minorities. Versions of the document were attributed toJennifer Leininger, associate director of Lurie’s Community Programs and Initiatives, and Hadeis Safi, a “nonbinary” gender activist who uses “they/them” pronouns and works for the hospital’s LGBTQ and Gender Inclusion program—which advertises its care for children with “gender expansive” identities and offers “gender-affirming” medical procedures, including puberty blockers for children.

The presentation encourages teachers and school administrators to support “gender diversity” in their districts, automatically “affirm” students who announce sexual transitions, and “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” to children in the classrooms. The objective, as one version of the presentation suggests, is to disrupt the “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” and facilitate the transition to a more “gender creative” world.

Sarah KetchenLipson DanielEisenberg

Mental health worsened among all groups over the study period. American Indian/Alaskan Native students experienced the largest increases in depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and meeting criteria for one or more mental health problem. Students of color had the lowest rates of mental health service utilization. The highest annual rate of past-year treatment for Asian, Black, and Latinx students was at or below the lowest rate for White students. Although Arab American students experienced a 22% increase in prevalence, there was an 18% decrease in treatment.

Limitations

Response rates raise the potential of nonresponse bias. Sample weights adjust along known characteristics, but there may be differences on unobserved characteristics.

Scott Jaschik

Harvard University may lose the title of the nation’s wealthiest university, Bloomberg reported.

The potential new wealthiest university is the University of Texas, which may overtake Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, as of June 21. The value of the Texas endowment at that time was $42.9 billion.

The source of the new wealth: crude oil and natural gas. Bloomberg reports that with rising prices, Texas earns $6 million a day on 2.1 million acres it owns in the Permian Basin.

At a time when other colleges are shedding fossil fuel investments, Texas is having a windfall. “The University of Texas has a cash windfall when everyone is looking at a potential cash crunch,” said William Goetzmann, a professor of finance and management studies at Yale University. “Adjusting your portfolio for social concerns is not costless.”

George Bulman:

Estimates reveal that growing endowments generate large and persistent increases in spending overall and for instruction, student services, and administration in particular. However, wealthier colleges and universities do not increase the number of students they serve or the fraction of students receiving aid, and only modestly increase the generosity of aid packages. Instead, these institutions offset higher freshman yield rates by becoming more selective and enrolling fewer low-income students and students of color. Overall, colleges and universities appear to use greater endowment wealth to increase spending and to become more selective, resulting in higher institutional rankings, but do not increase the size or diversity of their student bodies.

Talis Shelbourne:

But as he grew older, Ma’Siah suffered more and more crises. After he turned 3 years old, doctors suspected he was severely asthmatic, but because of his age, they waited to confirm the diagnosis.

Farr was terrified to sleep, fearing she wouldn’t be available if he began having breathing problems. She watched Ma’Siah to catch the slightest hitch in his breath or wheeze from his chest. On the way home from each emergency department visit, she worried about when the next would come.

After having four healthy children, Farr’s focus on her son’s challenges brought an element of trepidation into the family.

Ma’Siah’s asthma was uncontrolled. And when Farr watched him, her feelings went from joy to helplessness.

Farr’s angst would be familiar to parents and caregivers of the 6 million asthmatic children in the United States. The chronic respiratory condition, which afflicts 25 million people overall, disrupts breathing and prevents oxygen from reaching vital organs. A severe attack can be fatal; on average, 11 people die from an attack every day.

Jessica Winter:

In the first spring of the pandemic, as families across the country were acclimating to remote learning and countless other upheavals, I sat down on the living-room sofa with my daughter, who was in kindergarten, to go over a daily item on her academic schedule called Reading Workshop. She had selected a beginner-level book about the alliterative habitués of a back-yard garden: birds and butterflies, cats and caterpillars. Her decoding skills, at that stage, were limited to the starting letter of each word, and all else was hurried guesswork—pointing at “butterfly,” she might ask, “Bird?” and start to turn the page. I coaxed her to look at how the letters worked together, to sound them out, starting by taking apart the first few phonemes: bh-uh-tih, butt. She didn’t appear to be familiar with this approach. She seemed to find it frankly outrageous.

Our subsequent reading workshops followed the same script. She would pick out a book, flip around, guess, bluff, and try to match words to pictures, while I plodded along behind her, grunting phonemes, until her patience frayed. I ascribed our ongoing failure to any number of factors—I wasn’t a teacher, for starters. (My kid wasn’t the only one bluffing.) She perhaps wasn’t ready to read. There were ambulance sirens wailing outside, forever.

I looked online for help, and learned that our Brooklyn public school’s main reading-and-writing curriculum, Units of Study, is rooted in a method known as balanced literacy. Early readers are encouraged to choose books from an in-classroom library and read silently on their own. They figure out unfamiliar words based on a “cueing” strategy: the reader asks herself if the word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense in context. My daughter was taught to use “picture power”—guessing words based on the accompanying illustrations. She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera.

It seemed to me that, rather than learning to decode a word using phonics, by matching sounds to letters with close adult guidance, a reader following this method is conditioned to look away from the word, in favor of the surrounding words or the accompanying illustrations—to make a quasi-educated guess, perhaps all on her own. It seemed possible that my kid’s scattered, self-directed reading style wasn’t entirely a product of her age or her temperament. To some extent, it had been taught to her.

Ben Chapman and Douglas Belkin:

Scores re­leased Thurs­day show un­prece­dented drops on the long-term trends tests that are part of the Na­tional As­sess­ment of Ed­u­ca­tional Progress, known as the “Na­tion’s Re­port Card.” The tests are ad­min­is­tered to U.S. stu­dents age 9.

The test scores re­flect more than a pan­demic prob­lem, with ex­perts say­ing it could take a gen­er­a­tion for some scores to re­bound. Some say cur­rent achieve­ment lev­els could weigh on eco­nomic out­put in years to come.

The scores of lower-per­form­ing stu­dents are most trou­bling and could take decades to bounce back, said Dr. Aaron Pal­las, pro­fes­sor of So­ci­ol­ogy and Ed­u­ca­tion at Teach­ers Col­lege, Co­lumbia Uni­ver­sity.

“I don’t think we can ex­pect to see these 9-year-olds catch up by the time they leave high school,” he said, re­fer­ring to the lower-per­form­ing stu­dents. “This is not some­thing that is go­ing to dis­ap­pear quickly.”

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?

Revolver News:

This wasn’t just a harmless myth. For decades, ordinary people in Cincinnati were tarred as hateful racists in order to further a specific narrative about America. They weren’t the only victims of myths related to Robinson. Enos Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals has been villainized for decades for slashing Robinson with his spiked cleats during a play at first base. But Slaughter always insisted the injury was accidental, and sportswriters at the game from both St. Louis and New York City agreed, saying that nothing appeared deliberate about the incident. Similarly, in the 2013 film about Robinson, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Fritz Ostermueller is portrayed intentionally hitting Robinson in the head with a pitch before insulting him with a racist comment. In reality, the pitch hit Robinson on the wrist and there is no evidence of such an insult at all.

But all three myths will live on, because they are useful. They promote a certain story about America: That until very recently the country was overwhelmingly bigoted and hateful, and good for very little else. In fact, America’s entire 20th-century history, as it is taught in schools and portrayed on screen, is essentially “fake.” It is a sequence of myths atop myths, created to make Americans hate their ancestors and their history.

A full list of these myths could fill several books. For now, we will illustrate the point with some central examples.

Jonathan Turley:

Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo reportedly joined the massive protests and even handed out a flier denouncing the bakery as a racist business. When some people contacted Oberlin to object that the students admitted guilt, special assistant to the president for community and government relations Tita Reed wrote that it did not change a “damn thing” for her. Reed also reportedly participated in the campus protests.

Other faculty members encouraged students who denounced the bakery. The chairman of Africana studies posted, “Very proud of our students!” Oberlin barred purchases from the bakery, pending its investigation into whether this was “a pattern and not an isolated incident.” Raimondo also pressured Bon Appetit, a major contractor with the college, to cease business with the bakery. Reed even suggested that “once charges are dropped, orders will resume” and added that she was “baffled by their combined audacity and arrogance to assume the position of victim.”

The jury in June 2019 awarded the Gibsons $44 million in compensatory and punitive damages. A judge later reduced the award to $25 million. That was upheld and the appellate court also upheld an award of $6.2 million payment in attorney fees. Now interest has pushed the reduced award back up to roughly $36 million but you then have to add the attorney fees and the college’s own towering legal costs. That is likely to put the total back to near the original $44 million award.

It takes considerable work to burn over $40 million on such a case. Yet, time and again President Ambar and the college threw more money into a losing hand like a bad gambler at Vegas while refusing to apologize for the college’s reprehensible record in the case.

As the grocery recently warned that it might have to shutdown due to the lack of funds and drain of litigation, the college fought to pay the damages.

The Ohio Supreme Court finally ended this farce by refusing to hear a new appeal on jurisdictional grounds. It voted 4-3 to end further litigation.

In a statement, Oberlin College expressed disappointment but not an apology:

Troy.edu:

“I hear from friends working for corporations in Birmingham and Atlanta who are afraid that woke ideologies are creeping into their offices and board rooms. They question why their employers are taking positions on controversial issues–unrelated to their apolitical business–that could alienate consumers,” he said.

The Free Enterprise Scholars will participate in the Johnson Center’s fall and spring reading groups, attend a monthly MJC event and write an op-ed about free enterprise. Along with that, scholars will take a Moral Foundations of Capitalism course, attend academic conferences, and take field trips.

“The moral value of free enterprise means that business leaders do not have to apologize for profits earned honorably or purchase absolution through wokeness.  Future business leaders and entrepreneurs should know this and be able to be articulate spokespersons for the moral value of business, properly conducted,” Mendenhall said.

Another focus of the program is to secure fundraising from individuals and organizations looking to impact free-market education by supporting Scholars’ activities and providing funding for an M. Stanton Evans Annual Lectureship, featuring journalists who write about free enterprise.

Evans, who died in 2015, was noted as “an early leader of the conservative movement” by the New York Times. In college, he acted as editor of the Yale Daily News and became editor of the Indianapolis News at 26. He was a commentator for CBS and NPR and was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in large papers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Times. In 1977, he became the founding director of the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He authored 11 books. In 1980, Evans took on a role as visiting professor at TROY, a role he kept until 2010.

Allison Morrow:

Progressives and conservatives alike are sounding off about President Joe Biden’s planto erase billions of dollars in student debt — that it’s either a half-a-loaf gesture to an overburdened middle class or a massive socialist handout to rich people, depending on your politics. 

But whatever your opinion is on Biden’s motives, a couple of things seem clear. First: Relieving up to $20,000 in student debt per borrower is a financial tourniquet that will help 43 million people who’ve been swept into a complex and undeniably broken system. Second: It doesn’t even begin to solve the problem. 

Once the debt is wiped away, what we’re left with is the gnarly reality that tuition costs are out of control, with no magic bullet to rein them in.

Ferenc Huszár:

Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it’s like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master’s programs in Cambridge. 

Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A) cultural differences – we are very good at sarcasm, painfully good at giving direct negative feedback, not so good at praising others and (B) the fact that reference letters play no role in Eastern Europe and most professors have never written or seen a good one before.

Poor reference letters hurt students. They give us no insight into the applicant’s true strengths, and no ammunition to support the best candidates in scholarship competitions or the admission process in general. I decided to write this guide for students so they can share it with their professors when asking for reference letters. Although reading letters from the region is what triggered me to write this, mist of this advice should be generally useful for many other people who don’t know how to write good academic reference letters.

Megan Cassidy:

As a crime reporter in San Francisco, I should have known better than to park my car under an overpass near the Hall of Justice, a nice stroller visible in the back seat.

And it couldn’t have hurt to check that I didn’t drop my keys onto the ground next to the vehicle as I scrambled to pay the meter and run to a court hearing.

Alas, the predictable outcome: As I sat in court taking notes, my phone vibrated with a text from my partner, Miguel, from our Oakland home. His phone was in communication with our Subaru Outback, which was moving.

“The alarm of the car went off was it you???”

I tried to respond but had no cell service in the granite-clad building. By the time I walked out of the courtroom a few minutes later, Miguel was frantic. The texts came tumbling out.

SHOCKING: How can the no. of “diversicrats” (126 & growing) at @UMich and the $15.6M (and growing) annual cost possibly be justified? Even UM’s Botanical Gardens & Arboretum has a “diversity/inclusion specialist.” @GadSaad @RichardLoweryTX @GregGutfled @TuckerCarlson @CHSommers pic.twitter.com/WabLof6XpK

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) August 29, 2022

Jesse Signal:

An article called “Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care” was published in JAMA Network Open late in February. The authors, listed as Diana M. Tordoff, Jonathon W. Wanta, Arin Collin, Cesalie Stepney, David J. Inwards-Breland, and Kym Ahrens, are mostly based at the University of Washington–Seattle or Seattle Children’s Hospital. 

In their study, the researchers examined a cohort of kids who came through Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic. They simply followed the kids over time as some of them went on puberty blockers and/or hormones, administering self-report surveys tracking their mental health. There were four waves of data collection: when they first arrived at the clinic, three months later, six months later, and 12 months later.

The study was propelled into the national discourse by a big PR push on the part of UW–Seattle. It was successful — Diana Tordoff discussed her and her colleagues’ findings on Science Friday, a very popular weekly public radio science show, not long after the study was published.

All the publicity materials the university released tell a very straightforward, exciting story: The kids in this study who accessed puberty blockers or hormones (henceforth GAM, for “gender-affirming medicine”) had better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at its beginning. 

The headline of the emailed version of the press release, for example, reads, “Gender-affirming care dramatically reduces depression for transgender teens, study finds.” The first sentence reads, “UW Medicine researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary adolescents caused rates of depression to plummet.” All of this is straightforwardly causal language, with “dramatically reduces” and “caused rates… to plummet” clearly communicating improvement over time.

Kat Albrecht, Laura Beth Nielsen, Lydia Wuorinen:

Colleges and universities are legally required to attempt to prevent and redress sexual violations on campus. Neo-institutional theory suggests that the implementation of law by compliance professionals rarely achieves law’s goals. It is critical in claims-based systems that those who are potential claimants understand the law. This article demonstrates that (a) intended subjects of the law (colleges and universities) interpret and frame the law in very similar ways; (b) resultant policies are complex and difficult to navigate; and (c) university undergraduates in an experimental setting are not able to comprehend the Title IX policies designed to protect them. These findings suggest that current implementations of Title IX policies leave them structurally ineffective to combat sexual assaults on campus.

Chuck Ross:

Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D.) opposes vouchers that let children in failing public school districts attend private and charter schools. But the progressive champion, who lives in one of Pennsylvania’s worst performing school districts, sends his kids to an elite prep school.

Fetterman’s kids attend the Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, where parents pay up to $34,250 for a “dynamic” learning environment and an “innovative” approach to teaching. They would otherwise go to schools in Woodland Hills School District, where graduation rates are far below the state average. The local elementary school that serves Fetterman’s town of Braddock is in the bottom 15 percent of the state in academic performance. Fetterman and his wife Gisele have sent at least one of their three kids to Winchester Thurston for the past seven years. A 2018 news article mentioned that Fetterman sends his kids to a private school in Pittsburgh, though the school was not identified. Gisele Fetterman has been a “WT parent” since at least 2015. Last year, Winchester Thurston praisedGisele, a “WT Mom,” for her help on an art project.

Fetterman’s embrace of school choice for his own family opens him up to allegations of hypocrisy on several fronts. Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, has made his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz’s wealth a centerpiece of his campaign. He has also called for increased funding for public schools, though by sending his kids to private school he is diverting funds from Woodland Hills under a state funding formula that awards money to districts based on enrollment.

Jon Udell:

This week I tried a different approach when editing a document written by a colleague. Again the goal was not only to produce an edited version, but also to narrate the edits in a didactic way. In this case I tried bending GitHub to my purpose. I put the original doc in a repository, made step-by-step edits in a branch, and created a pull request. We were then able to review the pull request, step through the changes, and review each as a color-coded diff with an explanation. No screenshots had to be made, named, organized, or linked to the narration. I could focus all my attention on doing and narrating the edits. Perfect!

Well, perfect for someone like me who uses GitHub every day. If that’s not you, could this technique possibly work?

In GitHub for the rest of us I argued that GitHub’s superpowers could serve everyone, not just programmers. In retrospect I felt that I’d overstated the case. GitHub was, and remains, a tool that’s deeply optimized for programmers who create and review versioned source code. Other uses are possible, but awkward.

Adam Heitzman:

The study also found that 27% of Gen Z believe that their parents would be unsupportive of them becoming social media influencers, preferring for them to go to college (50.30%).

Elizabeth Beyer:

Legislative Republicans have defended their decision to keep revenue limits flat by noting Wisconsin schools will be getting $2.3 billion in federal COVID relief aid, known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER funds. Madison is anticipating its share will be roughly $66.7 million.

School officials have not laid out how they plan to spend that money but say using it for ongoing expenses, such as hiring more staff or increasing wages, could create a fiscal cliff once the one-time dollars run out.

Monday’s vote came one month after the board approved a 3% base wage increase for all staff for the coming school year, two-thirds of what was sought by MTI for teachers at the start of negotiations. Teachers also get automatic raises for seniority and degree-attainment on top of that.

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?

Jared Walczak:

Here’s one more question to add to the mix: will states consider student loan debt forgiveness a taxable event? In many states, the answer could be yes.

As a general rule, a discharge of indebtedness counts as income and is taxable, as my colleague Will McBride explains. Under § 9675 of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), however, the forgiveness of student loan debt between 2021 and 2025 does not count toward federal taxable income. States which follow the federal treatment here will likewise exclude debt forgiveness from their own state income tax bases. But, for a variety of reasons, not every state does that. There are at least six relevant interactions with the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) for purposes of the treatment of student loan debt cancelation. States can:

Callan Goldeneye:

How can the most widely used search engine in the world only have 438 total results about one of the most widely discussed issues in the world? How can there only be 438 results including duplicates — about an issue that stands to “impact the entire world and all of humanity?

Victor Davis Hanson

T]here was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation. 

In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.

Brian Ray:

Homeschooling has grown phenomenally during the past 30 years around the world, and especially during the past two years. For example, the number of home-educated children in grades K-12 in the United States grew from an estimated 2.65 million during 2019-2020 to 3.72 million during 2020-2021 (Ray, 2021). In the eastern hemisphere, as another example, “The number of homeschooling families approved by the Israel Ministry of Education increased by 700% from 2005 through 2019” (Madara & BenDavid-Hadar, 2021).

Numerous studies have examined the demographics and academic achievement of home-educating families and the students (e.g., Ray, 2017). An increasing number of scholars have become focused on an increasingly wider variety of topics with respect to homeschooling. Recently, Michal Unger Madara and Iris BenDavid-Hadar probed the social competencies and creative thinking of home-educated children. This brief review will touch upon only the former topic in the study.

Jim Riccioli

Prosecutors argued that case law supports that investigators had the right to access to Brooks’ jail cell, and also felt that the search qualified for a warrant. The defense disagreed, citing other case law that limited access to jail cells to certain circumstances only, particularly jail security.

But Dorow cited a U.S. Supreme Court case in which justices summarized that “society is not prepared to recognize” privacy in a jail cell, especially when investigators sought a warrant to conduct the search.

Megan McArdle:

There are so many things wrong with President Biden’s newly unveiled policy on student loans that one hardly knows where to begin. So I might as well start with … the Medicare doc fix.

In 1997, Congress became alarmed by the rising cost of health care, which was particularly concerning because it was amping up the cost of Medicare. So when Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act, it created something called the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), which was supposed to keep physician reimbursements from growing faster than gross domestic product.

That was all well and good until 2003, when the federal government realized it would need to actually impose significant cuts on those reimbursements. Physicians squealed, and a wincing Congress passed the first “doc fix,” temporarily suspending the caps. Freed from the constraints of the SGR, physician reimbursements continued to grow faster than GDP — which meant that every year, the cost of actually imposing the SGR got bigger.

The “doc fix” became a regular ritual in Washington, because the alternative became increasingly unthinkable: By January 2013, doctors were facing a potential pay cut of 26.5 percent. Unwilling to anger doctors, or to anger seniors whose doctors stopped taking Medicare, Congress kept granting reprieves, until the Obama administration finally bit the bullet and pushed through a (now very expensive) reform in 2015.

Notes and links, here.

Naomi Nix:

Facebook and Twitter disrupted a web of accounts that were covertly seeking to influence users in the Middle East and Asia with pro-western perspectives about international politics, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a new report from social media analytics firm Graphika and Stanford University.

The covert influence operation used accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media giants to promote narratives supporting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, according to the report.

Covert influence campaigns run out of Russia and Iran have repeatedly have been targeted by social media platforms over the years. This crackdown is the rare instance in which a U.S-sponsored campaign targeting foreign audiences was found to violate the companies’ rules.

The accounts are being taken down at a time when social media giants have been trying to crack down on disinformation campaigns about the war in Ukraine. But much of that work has been focused on fighting efforts by Russian authorities to promote propaganda about the war, including false claims about Ukrainian military aggression in the region or blaming Western nations’ complicity in the war.

Margarita Franklin, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, confirmed in a statement that the company a recently removed a network of accounts that originated in the United States for violating the platforms’ rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Franklin said it’s the first time the company has removed a foreign-focused influence network promoting the United States’ position.

Wall Street Journal:

He and a passel of public-health experts used their authority to lobby for broad economic lockdowns that we now know were far more destructive than they needed to be. He also lobbied for mask and vaccine mandates that were far less protective than his assertions to the public. Dr. Fauci’s influence was all the greater because he had an echo chamber in the press corps and among public elites who disdained and ostracized dissenters.

A flagrant example was Dr. Fauci’s refusal even to consider that the novel coronavirus had originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. This may have been because the NIH had provided grant money to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund “gain of function” virus research at the Wuhan lab. In a semantic battle with Republicans, Dr. Fauci denied that the NIH funded such research. But his refusal even to consider the possibility that the virus started in a Wuhan lab showed that Dr. Fauci was as much a politician as a scientist.

Worse, Dr. Fauci smeared the few brave scientists who opposed blanket lockdowns and endorsed a strategy of “focused protection” on the elderly and those at high risk. This was the message of the Great Barrington Declaration authors, and emails later surfaced showing that Dr. Fauci worked with others in government to deride that alternative so it never got a truly fair public hearing.

John McWhorter

The Association of Social Work Boards administers tests typically required for the licensure of social workers. Apparently, this amounts to a kind of racism that must be reckoned with.

There is a Change.org petition circulating saying just that, based on the claim that the association’s clinical exam is biased because from 2018 to 2021 84 percent of white test-takers passed it the first time while only 45 percent of Black test-takers and 65 percent of Latino test-takers did. “These numbers are grossly disproportionate and demonstrate a failure in the exam’s design,” the petition states, adding that an “assertion that the problem lies with test-takers only reinforces the racism inherent to the test.” The petitioners add that the exam is administered only in English and its questions are based on survey responses from a disproportionately white pool of social workers.

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?

Branko

A common argument I read from proponents of student debt cancellation is that cancelling student debt is essentially destroying money. Some amount was sitting in a ledger somewhere as an asset in a government agency and now poof, it’s gone. Essentially, it’s an accounting gimmick not impacting much of anything else apart from benefiting borrowers.

But this is opposite of what’s really happening. When the loan was made, money was sent to the school and the student promised to pay it back. Had the student went on to pay back the principal, no money would have been created. It would only have been money transferred through time. Take money from the future and use it today; basically an investment.

What happens when debt is cancelled is the money doesn’t have to be paid back. But the school still got paid. So cancelling debt is money creation.

Wall Street Journal:

Consider the agency’s chronic mishandling of tax credits. By the IRS’s own admission, some $19 billion—or 28%—of earned-income tax credit payments in fiscal 2021 were “improper.” The amount hasn’t improved despite years of IRS promises to do better.

• A January Tigta audit found that an estimated 67,000 claims—totaling $15.6 billion—for the low-income housing tax credit from 2015 to 2019 “lacked or did not match supporting documentation due to potential reporting errors or noncompliance.”

• A May audit found that 26% ($1.9 billion) of its American opportunity tax credits for education expenses were improper in fiscal 2021, and 27% ($541 million) of its net premium tax credits (ObamaCare) were improper in fiscal 2019 (the most recent year it estimated). The same May audit said the IRS acknowledged that 13% ($5.2 billion) of its enhanced child tax credit payments were improper.

• How did it handle $1,200 stimulus checks, the sick and paid family leave credit, or the employee retention tax credit? Unknown, since the agency didn’t estimate failure rates—for which Tigta rapped its knuckles.

I made a very very simple tool that makes some noise every time your computer sends data to Google. Here a demo on the official Dutch government jobs site. The noise starts while typing the domain name already. Code, currently Linux only: https://t.co/ZjKeOSfYff pic.twitter.com/dEr8ktIGdo

— Bert Hubert 🇺🇦 (@bert_hu_bert) August 21, 2022

Alex Tabarrok:

Wiping out 10k in student debt is not the most expensive part of the Biden student loan program. Most Federal student loans are now eligible for an income based repayment plan, under these plans you pay a small percentage of your “discretionary” income, say 10%, and then after a fixed number of years the debt is wiped off the student’s books. At first glance these plans don’t seem crazy, but as Matt Bruenig points out they create perverse incentives.

Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, law graduates that go on to work in the public sector, which is a lot of them as the public sector employs many lawyers, only have to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 10 years in order to have their debt forgiven.

Law schools figured out many years ago that, for a student who is planning to enroll in PSLF upon graduation, prices and debt loads don’t matter. Ten percent of your discretionary income is ten percent of your discretionary income regardless of what the law school charges you and how much debt you nominally have to take on.

Law schools also realized that they could make the deal even sweeter by setting up LRAPs [repayment programs, AT] that give graduates money to cover the the modest repayments required by the PSLF.

Jeffrey Tucker:

None of this pertains in the case of the Covid shots. Moderna received fast-track regulatory approval and $10 billion in tax subsidies for its mRNA innovation. Even then, it claimed the right to demand exclusive rights to its formulas. During the pandemic – during which time the company also enlisted governments and private business into forcing consumers to accept its product – it agreed to forego its claims.

Now that the pandemic is over, and the demand for the shots has plummeted worldwide and vaccine mandates scrapped, Moderns is suing Pfizer for stealing its intellectual property. The court fight could last years, at the end of which they will likely settle and redistribute their loot. 

On top of that, both are publicly-traded corporations that made enormous profits off the pandemic, while the jury is still out on whether and to what extent their product proved to be a net benefit in terms of reducing disease severity. It certainly did not stop infection or spread.

To top it off, the actual patent holder for mRNA has opposed these vaccines all along. His name is Robert Malone and he just wrote the following:

Wall Street Journal:

Like other Great So­ci­ety pro­grams, fed­eral stu­dent loans and grants were ini­tially aimed at help­ing low-in­come Amer­i­cans. They have since be­come an­other all-you-can-eat en­ti­tle­ment. Its costs grow on au­topi­lot as law­mak­ers boost sub­si­dies in the name of mak­ing higher ed­u­ca­tion more af­ford­able, but in re­al­ity do­ing the op­po­site.

Marty Makary:

Very early on in this pandemic, we knew that there was an extremely stratified risk from Covid. The elderly and those with co-morbidities were especially vulnerable, while children were extremely unlikely to get dangerously ill. 

Instead of acting on the good news for children—or drawing on the ample experience in Scandinavian and European countries where schools were open and students were without masks—American kids were seen as vectors of disease. Young children were forced to wear masks inside school and out, affecting the language and social development of many. The effects of school closures will play out for decades, but we already know that children suffered major learning loss, and many left school never to return. Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Fauci supported the most oppressive restrictions for children, including school closures and mandatory cloth masking. 

Yesterday on Fox Neil Cavuto asked Dr. Fauci whether Covid restrictions “went too far” and if they “forever damaged” the children “who couldn’t go to school except remotely.” Dr. Fauci replied: “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”

Parents know otherwise. 

A generation is coping with learning loss, and the impact has been the worst in poor and minority communities. According to the Brookings Institute, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading over the pandemic. Meantime, anxiety and depression have hit record highs among young Americans, and the surgeon general has described a youth mental health crisis. Of all of Dr. Fauci’s legacies, this might be the gravest.

Sam Leith

The central question in Brenna Hassett’s book, put simply, is: why are our children so very useless for so very long? Or: ‘What is the possible adaptive value of teenagers?’ If we consider maturity, or adulthood, to be the point at which an animal can play its own role in the evolutionary process – i.e. have its own babies – why is it that we have evolved to mature so slowly; and, even when mature, to delay having children until many years after we’re first physically capable of doing so? 

The framework in which Hassett sets out to answer this is one to do with investment and return on investment. An animal invests energy in growing its young. Sometimes that energy is front-loaded in gestation: infant giraffes come out more or less fully baked, or precocial, and are making their knock-kneed way across the savannah soon after birth. In other species, infants are altricial: they come out like baby rats or baby humans, helpless. They need care and feeding. They can’t be trusted to cross busy roads, sweep chimneys or hunt mammoths for ages. They’re sitting ducks for sabre-toothed tigers. Considerable investment of time and energy in growing them to physical maturity (not to mention the opportunity cost of not being able to procreate for a bit) is made by the parents after birth. 

Some animals spread their bets – giving birth to very many infants in the hopes that enough survive to breed. Some, like us, tend to bet the farm on a relatively small number. Seasonal scarcity of food, the presence of predators and all sorts of other factors affect when and how animals mate and give birth, how long they care for their children, and when those children start making children of their own. With a wide range of reference, Hassett sets out to put our human investment strategies in their evolutionary context.

The Washington Post would have you believe that “gender-affirming surgery” for minors is a myth, but the research is clear: American doctor are performing sex change operations on children as young as 15 years old.https://t.co/gzXoWpZj0v pic.twitter.com/5Xw9Md7Lf4

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2022

Ann Althouse:

The removal of healthy, functioning organs from children is shocking. True threats of violence are wrong, but they don’t cancel out the wrongs that provoked the death threats. But did the hospital do wrong? We’re told the recording was real — “not disputed” — but “employees provided inaccurate information.” How inaccurate?

David Lauter:

Countywide, voters disapprove of Gascón’s performance in office by a large margin, 46% to 21%, with about a third of voters saying they strongly disapprove of him. An additional third of voters said they don’t have an opinion. Disapproval was strongest among the county’s Republican minority, but even among Democrats, about a third of voters said they disapproved of Gascón’s work.

As district attorney, Gascón has pursued progressive policies that have aimed to reduce the number of people imprisoned, especially for nonviolent offenses.

Wilfred Chan:

“Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.” I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. “Now I have enabled the accent translation,” he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn.

Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word “technology” with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed.

The man calling me was a product manager from Sanas, a Silicon Valley startup that’s building real-time voice-altering technology that aims to help call center workers around the world sound like westerners. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to “use your white voice”. The idea is that mimicking the accent will smooth interactions with customers, “like being pulled over by the police”, the older worker says. In the film, Cassius quickly acquires a “white voice”, and his sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling.

Accents are a constant hurdle for millions of call center workers, especially in countries like the Philippines and India, where an entire “accent neutralization” industry tries to train workers to sound more like the western customers they’re calling – often unsuccessfully.

David Blaska:

But you’re a Loony Toons cartoon if you believe critical race theory is not taught in the public schools (as does WI State Journal education reporter Elizabeth Beyer). The unionized teachers in Madison WI are obsessed with corrosive identity politics and taxpayers are helping pay for it!

Their militant-left labor union, Madison Teachers Inc., has seeded over 60 “equity-centered leadership positions” through the Madison Metropolitan School District. They’ve posted a “guaranteed representative for staff of color” at each of the four main high schools. All part of MTI’s jihad for “education justice.” You’ve heard of “economic justice” (the politically correct term for socialism). MTI explains that “Education justice is racial justice.”

Iccl.ie:

Oracle is an important part of the tracking and data industry.[1] It has claimed to have amassed detailed dossiers on 5 billion people,[2] and generates $42.4 billion in annual revenue.[3]

Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity: [4] for example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site.[5]

Oracle also coordinates a global trade in dossiers about people through the Oracle Data Marketplace.

Mary Katherine Ham:

Twelve years after he was acquitted of murder, O.J. Simpson and a ghostwriter penned a book called If I Did It. I was reminded of that when The Stolen Year arrived on my doorstep. A chronicling of the horrors wrought by COVID policies that kept American kids from their school buildings and childhood milestones for more than a year, this book was written by someone at the scene of the crime, intimate with the gory details, and ultimately uninterested in reckoning with who was responsible for it. This is a whodunnit without a culprit.

As The Stolen Year‘s title implies, a crime was perpetrated on U.S. children during the pandemic—one that “increase[d] inequality and destroy[ed] individual hopes and dreams,” one whose “impact can be measured for a generation,” in author Anya Kamenetz’s words.

Kamenetz, an NPR education reporter, is highly credentialed and well-informed. But if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that degrees and area expertise don’t necessarily lead people to good decisions or sound interpretations of data. Knowing the facts was not synonymous with having the courage to buck the pressure to padlock playgrounds.

There were signs in Kamenetz’s reporting that she understood that the risks of opening schools were being exaggerated and the harms of closures downplayed. (I frequently shared her early reporting on YMCAs safely opening for children of essential workers.) Despite that, she admits that she and her colleagues largely missed the biggest story in the modern education beat’s history.

“It was all easy to predict,” she told The Grade. “So we could have been a lot louder.”

Sharon Epperson & Stephanie Dhue:

Yet, a new poll finds Americans worry that debt forgiveness could have unintended consequences. 

Already battling higher prices, 59% of Americans are concerned that student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse, according to a new CNBC survey,conducted online by Momentive among a national sample of 5,142 adults from Aug. 4 to 15.

Still, the concern that canceling student debt would give borrowers more money to spend and therefore increase inflation may not hold true for many borrowers. Some say they would not change their spending habits if their college debt — or a portion of it — is canceled. Also, others haven’t made many changes during the payment pause.

Barton Swaim::

It’s hard to contemplate American public life in the 21st century and not arrive at the unhappy conclusion that we are led by idiots. The political class has lately produced an impressive string of debacles: the Afghanistan pullout, urban crime waves, easily foreseen inflation, mayhem at the southern border, a self-generated energy crisis, a pandemic response that wrought little good and vast ruin. Then there are the perennial national embarrassments: a mind-bogglingly expensive welfare state that doesn’t work, public schools that make kids dumber, universities that nurture destructive grievances and noxious ideologies, and a news media nobody trusts.

Readers may object to parts of this list, but few will deny feeling that the country’s government and major institutions are run by people who don’t know what they’re doing. A similar situation obtained seven centuries ago in Europe, as I learned recently from “Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy.” The 2019 book, by Harvard historian James Hankins, is a study of Italian humanist writers and statesmen beginning with Francesco Petrarca (1304-74), known to English speakers as Petrarch. Fourteenth-century humanism arose, Mr. Hankins writes, from a widespread disgust with the venality and incompetence of political and ecclesiastical leaders in late-medieval Italy.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Here are highlights of the work being done currently at Madison’s four main high schools, according to the Madison School District.

Notes and links on the recent Madison tax and spending increase referendum

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?

AFA

The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) today released a statement urging institutions of higher education to desist from demanding “diversity statements” as conditions of employment or promotion. The AFA’s statement responds to the rising trend of academic institutions requiring members or prospective members of faculties to sign pledges or make statements committing themselves to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or to detail the ways in which they have done or will do so.

“Academics seeking employment or promotion will almost inescapably feel pressured to say things that accommodate the perceived ideological preferences of an institution demanding a diversity statement, notwithstanding the actual beliefs or commitments of those forced to speak” said Janet Halley, co-chair of the AFA Academic Committee and Eli Goldston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.*

Joel Kotkin:

Housing is an industry, but it is also where people live, raise families, and stake their future. Yet increasingly, all around the world, housing has increasingly become just a commodity to be traded, often by foreigner investors, notably from China, as well as by large well-capitalized financial institutions who plan to cultivate a generation of lifelong renters. In the notorious words of the World Economic Forum, “You will own nothing, and love it.” Well, you may not love it, but the first part is coming true.

This shift has been taking place for decades, as the superrich and large investment companies buy up much of the land. In the United States, the proportion of land owned by the one hundred largest private landowners, reports the New York Times grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2007, this group owned a total of 27 million acres of land, equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined; a decade later, the one hundred largest landowners held 40.2 million acres, more than the entire area of New England.

In much of the American West, billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner have created vast estates that systematically make the local population land-poor. Landownership in Europe, too, is becoming more concentrated in fewer hands. In Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than 1 percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is being consolidated into larger holdings, while urban real estate has been falling into the hands of a small number of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy. Amidst instability in commodity and stock markets, this trend of big capital investment in housing may be expected to accelerate.

Tyler Cowen Summary

…I was shocked to discover that many social policy interventions, including some of the most touted, don’t help boys and men. The one that first caught my eye was a free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan. According to its evaluation team, “women experienced large gains,” in terms of college completion (increasing by 50%), “while men seem to experience zero benefit.” This is an astonishing finding. Making college free had no impact on men…So not only are many boys and men struggling, they are less likely to be helped by policy interventions.

Gian-Carlo Rota

One of many mistakes of my youth was writing a textbook in ordinary differential equations. It set me back several years in my career in mathematics. However, it had a redeeming feature: it led me to realize that I had no idea what a differential equation is. The more I teach differential equations, the less I understand the mystery of differential equations.

One of several unpleasant consequences of writing such a textbook is my being called upon to teach the sophomore differential equations course at MIT. This course is justly viewed as the most unpleasant undergraduate course in mathematics, by both teachers and students. Some of my colleagues have publicly announced that they would rather resign from MIT than lecture in sophomore differential equations. No such threat is available to me, since I am incorrectly labeled as the one member of the department who is supposed to have some expertise in the subject, guilty of writing an elementary textbook still in print.

The Administrative Director of the MIT mathematics department, who exercises supreme au- thority upon the faculty’s teaching, has only to wave a copy of my book at me, while staring at me in silence. At her prompting, I bow and fall into line; I will be the lecturer in the dreaded course for one more year, and I will repeat the mistakes I have been making every year since I first taught differential equations in 1958.

Julie Jargon:

The Remind app was studied in a school in North Dakota and shown to be most effective when the communication was concise. There was a higher response rate from parents when they replied to a short prompt from a teacher than when they were asked to give more thought to a reply.

A study of another such app’s implementation in 132 New York City schools found that buy-in from all sides is necessary. Without training from the app developer, assistance in signing up parents, and incentives for teachers to use it as a primary communication tool, adoption and engagement were low.

Getting everyone to use a new app isn’t always easy. Administrators and parents say once schools adopt and get into the habit of using a singular app, the streamlined communication is worth it. The apps are also more equitable, say their advocates, because built-in translation tools can bridge communication gaps with parents who aren’t fluent in English.

Andrew Lautz:

Public reporting indicates President Biden may soon announce executive action canceling federal student loan debt for a large set of borrowers. Though parameters of the student debt cancellation have yet to be announced, the Biden administration may cancel $10,000 of debt per borrower for borrowers making $125,000 in income per year or less.

Based on projections from the Penn Wharton Budget Model for the total cost of such cancellation, we estimate President Biden’s plan would cost the average taxpayer over $2,000.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) released a policy report on Tuesday that estimated the total cost of $10,000 in debt cancellation for borrowers making less than $125,000 per year would be $329.1 billion over 10 years. There were just under 158 million taxpayers in 2019 according to the IRS, meaning that the average cost of debt cancellation is $2,085.59 per taxpayer.

This is not a perfect proxy for cost, however, given the U.S. tax code is progressive and tax burdens are not evenly distributed across households. Accounting for the share of taxes paid by low- and middle-income households, we estimate that:

Analysis of the policy’s taxpayer costs.

Dave Cieslewicz

Biden probably balked at this because he understands the bad politics for Democrats. Two out of three American adults didn’t complete a four year degree. They have every right to question why people who did, and who on average make about twice as much as they do, should get this big government handout. 

And then, of course, there are the millions of us who did go to college, did take out a loan and did, in fact, do what we promised to do: pay it back. 

This is bad politics for Democrats because it should be. Asking taxpayers to pay off the student loans of people who were irresponsible or careless in taking on debt they couldn’t afford is horrible public policy. And worse, Biden’s plan does nothing about the real problem: the skyrocketing cost of higher education. What’s going to happen next year when a new crop of college grads starts demanding that they get the same handout that last year’s grads got? 

This could well stop the progress Democrats have made in this election cycle. It was beginning to look like a combination of legislative wins, the abortion issue, public concern over gun violence and the easing of gas prices might result in a better November than had been predicted for Biden’s party. Now this policy will remind voters without a college degree just how much disdain the Democrats have for them.

Additional commentary:

Of the 43 million people with federal loans, 15 million owe less than $10,000. Another 9 million owe between $10,000 and $20,000. By eliminating a minority of outstanding debt, Biden would forgive most or all balances for the majority of student debtors, disproportionately those who are at the highest risk of default.

Is this even legal? Is there anything Biden’s political opponents can do to stop him?

Maybe? And, maybe? The Higher Education Act is almost 60 years old, and no president has ever done anything like this before. The Trump administration’s 2020 decision to suspend all federal student loan payments, which Biden has extended multiple times, came from a separate law granting the president powers during a national emergency like a pandemic. Biden is citing that authority for the new loan forgiveness plan. 

There are a host of constitutional provisions, federal laws, and legal precedents that obligate federal agencies to collect on outstanding debts. Skeptics also point out that Congress has enacted a number of specific student loan forgiveness programs, including plans that eliminate remaining debt after 20 years of payments or 10 years of public service. The administration’s recent decision to wipe out debt for students who attended the notorious for-profit Corinthian Colleges was based on a discrete legal provision meant to protect students who were defrauded by their college.

Related: the moral cost of student loan policies.

Was a bit confused at the initial Twitter whistleblower claims about China, but this makes sense. Basically Chinese firms buy access to ad tools that allow them to link emails other id info to Twitter accounts. Happening as China’s internet police detained 1000s for their Tweets. https://t.co/Sa1OhRPFiZ

— Paul Mozur 孟建國 (@paulmozur) August 25, 2022

Allison Garfield:

Three police funding grants are working their way through committees to eventually go before the Madison City Council, none of which would require taxpayer dollars but could add hundreds of thousands to the police department’s operating budget.

Police funding has been a controversial topic in recent years, heightening after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. In response, Madison erupted with looting, tear gas and fire after hours of peaceful protesting; local activists called on elected leaders to defund the city’s own police department.

Later that summer in 2020, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway slashed the department’s general fund by nearly $2 million as part of budget cuts. It was the largest decrease to the Madison Police Department’s budget in the last 10 years.

Taxpayer dollars toward the city’s police department have fluctuated since. But MPD might have a workaround to combat the cuts in the form of grants.

Over the past three decades, law enforcement and police spending have been top priorities for municipalities, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum report, receiving one out of every five operating and capital dollars spent by cities in the state.

In the past year, Madison shifted $82,000 from MPD’s 2022 budget to the Madison Fire Department for the Community Alternative Response Emergency Services, or CARES. The program is an alternative to police addressing mental and behavioral health crises, with CARES teams deescalating, treating or referring people to behavioral health services in the community instead.

While MPD’s 2022 budget is approximately $80 million, the vast majority of spending goes to salaries, wages and benefits for department staff. With 2023 budget decisions ahead and a projected $13 million deficit in the city’s operating budget, cuts seem imminent. 

The three resolutions approving additional state and federal funds for MPD have already passed the Public Safety Review Committee and are moving to the Finance Committee for approval before heading to the City Council.

Related: Police and the Madison Schools.

Christopher Nadon:

I teach at Claremont McKenna College, the No. 1-ranked liberal-arts college for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE may need to consider its ratings.

On Oct. 4, 2021, my class discussed Plato’s “Republic” and his views about censorship. A student objected that Plato was mistaken about its necessity. Here in the U.S., she said, there is none. Someone brought up “Huckleberry Finn.” She replied, correctly, that removing a book from curriculums doesn’t constitute censorship. I pointed out that the case was more complicated. The book had also been removed from libraries and published in expurgated editions.

An international student asked me why. I told her, quoting Mark Twain’s precise language, which meant speaking the N-word. This caused the first student to change her mind and acknowledge the existence of censorship in America. Far from being harmed by hearing the word, she now saw that Plato’s views couldn’t be dismissed as outdated and merited more serious consideration. This liberation from her initial prejudice bore fruit. Later in the semester she raised a very thoughtful question about Socrates’ criticisms of the poets: “But isn’t Plato a poet?” A rare success.

Phil Dini:

The second tool is something I’ve been working on recently: SQL-backed full text search of city meeting minutes. You can see this working for the cities of Alameda and Oakland right now. That’s 18,746 pages of city minutes for Alameda, and 37,172 pages of city minutes for Oakland, now fully searchable by anyone.

So let’s talk about how I did this, and how you can do this for your city, possibly with my help!

The Economist:

t the age of 18 Asher Friedman (not his real name) could still neither read nor speak English. His parents, both ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, had sent him to an unregistered boys’ school in Stamford Hill, in east London, when he was three. Pupils studied scripture for up to 14 hours a day. Beatings with belts or sticks were common. Around 250 boys shared three toilets and there was no soap in the bathrooms—they were told it was a secular extravagance. His brother, who still attends the school, says little has changed.

Melissa Korn:

In early 2013, Mikaela Sanford responded to a Craigslist job posting for a small Sacramento company with mundane-sounding responsibilities: communicating with contractors, overseeing data entry and handling client correspondence.

The job led to a felony conviction and a front-row seat to what became known as the Varsity Blues college-admissions cheating scandal.

Ms. Sanford worked for six years at the Key, the company run by William “Rick” Singer that provided standard college counseling and test prep—as well as a side menu of illicit services involving fraud and bribery. She pleaded guilty in 2020 to racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced in May to one year of supervised release and a $67,062 forfeiture order.

Ms. Sanford, 36, testified last fall at the Boston trial of two parents who worked with Mr. Singer, but she hadn’t spoken publicly about the case until a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Jessica Wildfire:

My university has partnered with a dozen major corporations to outline curricula for us. They believe a CEO is more qualified to decide what students should be learning than I am. They’ve hired a dozen consulting firms to decide everything down to when we should teach.

Almost every school does the same.

They love consultants.

They hate teachers.

Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do.

So, we give up.

Dave Zweifel:

A number of factors are causing this crisis, including low pay and a lack of discipline in classrooms. But the biggest reason is that all too many teachers feel they aren’t getting the support they need to succeed in their jobs.

Per Axbom:

By making this the default map in classrooms for centuries, with little context given to the reasons for its appearance, many people have necessarily had a truly twisted view of what the world looks like. There have been many different projections proposed and presented over these centuries, but none have really gained the same popularity as the Mercator one.

Given that the people who claim ownership and ensure distribution of this map have historically been white and rich representatives of the countries in the northern hemisphere, we may have a clue to the reason for its persistence. Why would any of these representatives and leaders have wanted their countries to suddenly appear smaller in favor of poorer countries?

Isabelle Sarraf:

Some federal pandemic-era provisions that allowed schools to serve universal free meals will expire when districts start school for the fall, leaving many districts unprepared to make up the difference and urging parents to apply for a free or reduced-price lunch. The expiration comes as supply-chain disruptions and rising food prices are pushing school-meal prices higher.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service in fiscal year 2020 suspended eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price meal applications and gave every student a free breakfast and lunch regardless of family income. The government pumped $26.8 billion from pandemic-related funds such as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act to provide universal free lunch in fiscal year 2021.

In 2019, 67.9% of students received free lunches through the National School Lunch Program, while 5.7% got reduced-price lunches.

David Blaska:

Daniel Buck’s Bottom Line: “Legislators should ease teacher licensing requirements and support any reforms that stop the flow of ideology from schools of education to America’s classrooms.”

Everyone is talking about the monetary cost of student debt forgiveness. But what about the moral cost? Joe Biden has essentially co-signed the greatest endorsement of duty abdication in American history. Without a sense of duty and obligation, society is rendered impossible.

— Christian Watson (@OfficialCWATSON) August 24, 2022

Related: US debt clock

#studentloanforgiveness pic.twitter.com/0l3xwToPFo

— Kyle Welch (@Prof__Welch) August 24, 2022

(1/2) The problem with this loan forgiveness BS is that it creates a moral hazard ie no consequence for bad decision-making. I went to the best low-cost j-school and graduated w no debt and lots of job offers because I learned a skill in writing about econ at @mujschool. All my https://t.co/lxIZ9XbV7i

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) August 24, 2022

:

In 2010, Obama eliminated the federal guaranteed loan program, which let private lenders offer student loans at low interest rates. Now, the Department of Education is the only place to go for such loans.

Obama sold this government takeover as a way to save money — why bear the costs of guaranteeing private loans, he said, when the government could cut out the middleman and lend the money itself?

Ann Althouse:

The answer to the question in the post title is Paragraph 16. The answer to the question in boldface at the beginning of the post — What legal basis did President Biden cite for his power to cancel student debt? — is that this article never says whether he said anything at all about the need for power. 

I suspect the answer to that question is “none,” so I’m going to let go of my suspicion that “less than 1% of Americans, if surveyed now, could correctly answer the question.” I think a good chunk of Americans are savvy — or cynical — enough to say: NONE! 

But is that the correct answer? Must I comb through the President’s speech? 

ADDED: No, “none” is not correct. Here‘s an AP stating clearly what Biden is relying on:

[I]n a legal opinion released Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the HEROES Act of 2003 gives the administration “sweeping authority” to reduce or eliminate student debt during a national emergency, “when significant actions with potentially far-reaching consequences are often required.”

The law was adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support at a time when U.S. forces were fighting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It gives the Education secretary authority to waive rules relating to student financial aid programs in times or war or national emergency.

Houston Keene:

“Just at the White House, nearly 71% or 336 White House officials earn under the $125,000 threshold and potentially even more could be eligible under the household income cap. Counting the agencies, Inside Biden’s Basement has identified over 200 officials who may be eligible for this Biden handout on the backs of taxpayers,” Hollie continued.

“Knowing that hundreds of financial disclosures exposing potential student loan debt have yet to be made public by the White House and federal agencies, the number of Biden officials set to benefit from today’s EO is staggering,” he said. “And the people who will be footing the bill are those who scraped, saved, and sacrificed to pay off their debt, or avoided taking out loans altogether, and those who did not attend college but still have to deal with Biden’s record-high inflation and recession-laden economy.”

White House spokesman Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital he is “unfamiliar” with Inside Biden’s Basement, which he called a “club,” saying “the relief the President just delivered applies to millions of Americans regardless of workplace.”

“Whether they are employed by Fox News, another private business, or a Republican Senate office, 43 million eligible borrowers now have help available to them,” Bates said. “Almost 90 percent of the benefits will go to people earning under $75,000, and none will go to those earning over $125,000.”

Spare me the argument that @POTUS‘s college loan bailout will make the cost of college go up. It’s been going up for years, which is why we have this problem. pic.twitter.com/uChHeHUKU0

— Rick Green (@VTConfidential) August 25, 2022

political commentary.

Susan Dynarski:

Aaron Sibarium:

Google is setting strict caps on the number of white and Asian students that universities can nominate for a prestigious fellowship program, a policy legal experts say likely violates civil rights law and could threaten the federal funding of nearly every elite university in the United States.

The Google Ph.D. Fellowship, which gives promising computer scientists nearly $100,000, allows each participating university—a group that includes most elite schools—to nominate four Ph.D. students annually. “If a university chooses to nominate more than two students,” Google says, “the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black / African descent, Hispanic / Latino / Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability.”

That criterion, which an archived webpageshows has been in place since at least April 2020, is almost certainly illegal, civil rights lawyers told the Washington Free Beacon—both for Google and the universities.

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice.

Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond.

His reply was a doozy. pic.twitter.com/ozZjFXRDQE

— Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) August 22, 2022

Charmaine Choi and William Yiu

The head of a Hong Kong special education secondary school who was fired at the weekend has filed a complaint with the Labour Department claiming “unreasonable termination”.

The move came after principal Wong Lai-ting, who was sacked last Saturday, and about 10 teaching and administrative staff accused the board of Hong Kong Juvenile Care Centre Chan Nam Cheong Memorial School in Aberdeen of gross mismanagement at a press conference last Thursday and asked the government to step in.

The group said the board was trying to “paralyse the school operation” by “suppressing teachers”.

Wong spoke through a video link at the press conference and other staff involved attended in person.

Bryan Greene:

John Stauffer, a Harvard English professor who edited The Works of James McCune Smith, says that Smith is one of the underappreciated literary lights of the 19th century, calling him “one of the best-read people that I’ve encountered.”

“The closest equivalent I really can say about [him] as a writer is [Herman] Melville,” adds Stauffer. “The subtlety and the intricacy and the nuance…and what he reveals about life and culture and society are truly extraordinary. Every sentence contains a huge amount.”

Smith was born enslaved in New York City, in 1813, to Lavinia Smith, a woman born in Charleston, South Carolina, who historians believe was brought to New York in bondage. While James McCune Smith never knew his father, a white man, university records indicate he was a merchant named Samuel Smith. (Amy Cools, a University of Edinburgh scholar who has conducted the most extensive research into Smith’s paternity, maintains, however, “Meticulous research has thus far failed to yield any records of [such] a Samuel Smith…indicating the name “Samuel” may possibly have been entered into [the] university records for convenience or respectability’s sake.”). Smith received his primary education at the African Free School #2 on Lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, an institution founded in 1787 by governing New York elites. Their aim was to prepare free and enslaved blacks “to the end that they may become good and useful Citizens of the State,” once the state granted full emancipation.

The school graduated a roster of boys who would fill the upper ranks of black intellectual and public life. Smith’s cohort alone included Ira Aldridge, the Shakespearean tragedian and first black actor to play Othello on the London stage; the abolitionist minister Henry Highland Garnet, the first African American to address Congress; Alexander Crummell, an early pan-Africanist minister and inspiration to W.E.B. DuBois; and brothers Charlesand Patrick Reason, the first African American to teach at a largely white college and a renowned illustrator-engraver, respectively. These men’s achievements would be exceptional by any standard, but even more so, for a group who were born enslaved or deprived basic rights as free blacks.

Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen:

We believe now is a good time to work hard on this vision again. In this essay we sketch out a set of ideas we believe can be used to help develop transformative new tools for thought. In the first part of the essay we describe an experimental prototype system that we’ve built, a kind of mnemonic medium intended to augment human memory. This is a snapshot of an ongoing project, detailing both encouraging progress as well as many challenges and opportunities. In the second part of the essay, we broaden the focus. We sketch several other prototype systems. And we address the question: why is it that the technology industry has made comparatively little effort developing this vision of transformative tools for thought?

Beck Andrew Salgado

Passionate debate defined the Aug. 8 Wauwatosa School Board meeting after a presentation on a more comprehensive sex education curriculum that would include information on sexual orientation and gender identity lessons.

The updated human growth and development curriculum is proposed for the 2022-23 school year.

As the line for public comment filed to the back of the room at the meeting, parents ardently argued for and against the new curriculum.

“I stand here to vigorously protest the sexual content of your special program. I would feel ashamed and humiliated if I just stood by and let it happen without my vigorous protest,” said one parent.

Others said the new curriculum was not comprehensive enough, saying, It is “beyond time” to update the curriculum and that even the proposed version “is not inclusive enough.”

Richard Vedder:

• A rise in ignorance. Despite having immediate access to more information than their parents could have dreamed of, today’s youth increasingly know less about the world around them. On the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment—an international evaluation in math, science and reading for 15-year-old students—Americans scored lower than their peers in Asian powerhouses such as China and Japan and in European allies from the U.K. to Germany.

American universities are subordinating academic achievement to ideology while constricting free expression—the lifeblood of intellectual advancement and prosperity. Teachers unions restrict competition. Knowledge of the past is particularly spotty as schools either down play or distort the nation’s history. The effect is a decline in patriotism and love of country, which loosens the glue of national unity embodied in the motto E pluribus unum.

Andrew C. Barr, Jonathan Eggleston & Alexander A. Smith

We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child’s outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children receiving substantially different refunds during the first year of life. For the average low-income single-child family in our sample this difference amounts to roughly $1,300, or 10 percent of income. Using the universe of administrative federal tax data in selected years, we show that this transfer in infancy increases young adult earnings by at least 1 to 2 percent, with larger effects for males. These effects show up at earlier ages in terms of improved math and reading test scores and a higher likelihood of high school graduation. The observed effects on shorter-run parental outcomes suggest that additional liquidity during the critical window following the birth of a first child leads to persistent increases in family income that likely contribute to the downstream effects on children’s outcomes. The longer-term effects on child earnings alone are large enough that the transfer pays for itself through subsequent increases in federal income tax revenue.

Rick Hess:

There aren’t many good novels about K-12 schooling. I tend to think this is for the same reason there aren’t a lot of good novels about sports. With sports, the story usually comes down to a big game. Win or lose, the tropes are familiar. And the emphasis on cathartic victory or growth-inducing loss leaves little room for character depth, complexity, or whimsy.

Novels about schooling suffer from a similar problem. They’re usually about a teacher’s heroic journey or success in helping that hard-to-reach kid. The themes are worn-out, and the tales tend to feature the moral complexity of a grade-B Western.

Well, Class Dismissed ditches the familiar school novel formula, and it pays off nicely. Published last year by 30-year teaching veteran Kevin McIntosh, who has authored Pushcart Prize-nominated short stories, Class Dismissed traces the eventful journey of high school teacher Patrick Lynch from Minnesota to New York—and then back to Minnesota.

Scott Shackford:

The speech orientation of the law is clearly not neutral: It censors only one position on the controversy based on its viewpoint. Walker further rejects the state’s attempt to say that the act aims to regulate conduct, not speech. (This argument may be familiar to libertarians, who have seen states use it to try to unduly control who is and is not allowed to give advice.) Walker notes that laws against racist conduct at the workplace can be identified separately from speech. But IFA can only be understood through the lens of what is and is not said. It is entirely a regulation of speech, not conduct.

Walker then subjects the law to strict scrutiny, requiring the state to prove that it has a compelling interest to justify engaging in such censorship. To put it mildly, constitutional law is not on the state’s side here.

“The First Amendment does not give the state license to censor speech because it finds it ‘repugnant,’ no matter how captive the audience,” Walker writes. “And even assuming the IFA serves a compelling government interest—like prohibiting discrimination—it is not narrowly tailored. In large part, this is because the [Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992] already prohibited much of what Defendants claim the IFA aims to prohibit. For example, a diversity and inclusion training could be so offensive, and so hostile to White employees, that it could create a hostile work environment. That is already illegal—as both parties acknowledge.” Walker concludes that the IFA attacks ideas, not conduct, and so the plaintiffs are likely to win the case.

Walker also agrees with the plaintiffs that the IFA is “impermissibly vague” in how it defines the forbidden ideas, leaving it for the state to resolve and leaving employers unclear about what sort of discussion about race is and is not forbidden.

NYT:

Nearly 200 episodes of “Sesame Street” have been pulled from HBO Max, the streaming platform that has been purging films and television shows in recent weeks as it prepares to combine with another streaming service, Discovery+.

Fans of “Sesame Street” were surprised on Friday to see that hundreds of episodes, most from the first 40 years of the show, had been removed from HBO Max.

It is the latest shift at HBO Max following the merger of its former parent company, WarnerMedia, with Discovery Inc. in April. Together, the companies formed Warner Bros. Discovery, which is aiming to find $3 billion in savings in an effort to reduce its $55 billion in debt.

This week, about 70 HBO Max staff members were laid off as a part of the reorganization, and HBO Max announced that 36 titles were being pulled from the platform. The pulled programming included the animated series “Infinity Train” and “The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo,” a “Sesame Street” spinoff.

David Zaslav, the company’s chief executive, also told investors this month that the company plans to offer a single paid subscription streaming service, bringing together content from HBO Max and Discovery+.

It was not clear what that means for the future of “Sesame Street” on HBO Max.