Brianna Lyman

The “Equal Representation Act” would modify the Census Bureau’s questionnaire for each decennial census beginning in 2030 by requiring individuals to attest to their citizenship status on the form and then using that data to exclude foreign nationals from the count used to determine congressional and electoral college apportionment. Apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area but does not currently differentiate legal citizens from foreigners who, in many cases, are illegal immigrants. A state can gain or lose congressional seats and electoral college votes based on the size of its population.

This means that millions of illegal aliens who have invaded the country can dilute the representation of American citizens by inflating the populations of the left-leaning areas to which they flock — even as American citizens flee those same states. 

When former President Donald Trump signed a memo in July 2020 barring illegal aliens from being counted in the census, it was promptly met with a flurry of challenges. A handful of judges blocked the memo, and President Joe Biden eventually reve

Aaron Sibarium:

Thirteen federal judges said Monday that they would no longer hire law clerks from Columbia College or Columbia Law School after the university allowed an encampment on its lawn to spiral into a destructive occupation of a campus building. The judges cited the “explosion of student disruptions” and the “virulent spread of antisemitism” at Columbia, which has now canceled its main graduation ceremony because of the unrest.

Led by appellate judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, who spearheaded a clerkship boycott of Yale Law School in 2022 and Stanford Law School in 2023, as well as by Matthew Solomson on the U.S Court of Federal Claims, the judges wrote in a letter to Columbia president Minouche Shafik that they would no longer hire “anyone who joins the Columbia University community—whether as undergraduates or as law students—beginning with the entering class of 2024.”

“Freedom of speech protects protest, not trespass, and certainly not acts or threats of violence or terrorism,” the judges wrote. “It has become clear that Columbia applies double standards when it comes to free speech and student misconduct.”

The letter’s signatories include Alan Albright, a district judge who hears a fourth of the nation’s patent cases; Stephen Vaden, a former general counsel at the Department of Agriculture who now sits on the United States Court of International Trade; and Matthew Kacsmaryk, the district judge who suspended approval of the abortion drug mifepristone in a controversial ruling last year. Others are well-known district judges appointed by former president Donald Trump.

Jack Balkin:

For all the talk of how the modern university has been corporatized, neoliberalized, and so on, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the ways in which it has been presidentialized. 

The presidentialization of Columbia dates back well before the current moment. Our last president, Lee Bollinger, ran the university for over two decades. During his tenure, Bollinger oversaw the rise of a substantial administrative apparatus—the ten highest paid Columbia employees, apart from surgeons, are now all senior executives—as well as the creation of a dizzying array of research centers, policy institutes, and global programs that operate more or less independently of the academic departments. Bollinger’s office also launched countless smaller projects with discretionary funds. After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for instance, he came up with the idea for a Constitutional Democracy Initiative (with which I am affiliated) and, within weeks, an impressive new outfit was up and running. Meanwhile, the most broadly representative body on campus, the University Senate, seemed to become less relevant with every passing year.

This basic dynamic is familiar to scholars of U.S. public law, who have long documented the growth of executive power relative to Congress and the growth of presidential power within the executive branch—what Justice Elena Kagan famously termed “presidential administration.” Under presidential administration, as Kagan describes it, regulatory activity increasingly becomes “an extension of [the president’s] own policy and political agenda.” This mode of governance has some real benefits, above all energy and efficiency. And President Bollinger did many valuable things for the university. Yet by the time he created a constitutional democracy initiative, Columbia’s own democratic life had withered considerably.

——

Commentary.

Abbey Machtig

So far, feedback on the referendums has been mixed, with some residents supporting funding operational costs and smaller building renovations. But district administrators said others were unsure about the feasibility and cost of a 20-year referendum.

About 60% of survey respondents said supporting the district to invest in a 20-year facilities referendum was either a high or moderate priority. Almost one-third of respondents said they were undecided.

A similar percentage of respondents said supporting a facilities referendum that prioritized updating middle schools over a shorter time was a high or moderate priority. Again, about one-third of respondents said they were undecided.

Poll results shared at Monday’s meetingindicated a lack of public support for a 20-year facilities referendum, too. The Madison Public Schools Foundation commissioned the poll.

The sample size was about 400 people, according to Luke Martin, vice president of Impact Research.

“Especially with the challenges of complexity that are potentially in store for the November ballot, I do think the 20-year would be a much more difficult measure to pass,” Martin said Monday.

——

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Miguel Grinberg:

I’m sure you agree that it has become impossible to ignore Generative AI (GenAI), as we are constantly bombarded with mainstream news about Large Language Models (LLMs). Very likely you have tried ChatGPT, maybe even keep it open all the time as an assistant.

A basic question I think a lot of people have about the GenAI revolution is where does the apparent intelligence these models have come from. In this article, I’m going to attempt to explain in simple terms and without using advanced math how generative text models work, to help you think about them as computer algorithms and not as magic.

What Does An LLM Do?

Dan Kois:

Those of us who believe in the power of books worry all the time that reading, as a pursuit, is collapsing, eclipsed by (depending on the era) streaming video, the internet, the television, or the hula hoop. Yet, somehow, reading persists; more books are sold today than were sold before the pandemic. Though print book sales were down 2.6 percent in 2023, they were still 10 percent greater than in 2019, and some genres—adult fiction, memoirs—rose in sales last year.

But right now, there’s one sector of publishing that is in free fall. At least among one audience, books are dying. Alarmingly, it’s the exact audience whose departure from reading might actually presage a catastrophe for the publishing industry—and for the entire concept of pleasure reading as a common pursuit.

Ask anyone who works with elementary-school children about the state of reading among their kids and you’ll get some dire reports. Sales of “middle-grade” books—the classification covering ages 8 through 12—were down 10 percent in the first three quarters of 2023, after falling 16 percent in 2022. It’s the only sector of the industry that’s underperforming compared to 2019. There hasn’t been a middle-grade phenomenon since Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spinoff Dog Man hit the scene in 2016. New middle-grade titles are vanishing from Barnes and Noble shelves, agents and publishers say, due to a new corporate policyfocusing on books the company can guarantee will be bestsellers.

Ian Leslie

After we lost access to the office, software provided us with a substitute that functioned just well enough for us to get fooled, for a while, into believing we hadn’t lost anything at all.

Software designers refer to “the good enough principle”. It means, simply put, that sometimes you should prioritise functionality over perfection. As a relentless imperfectionist, I’m inclined to embrace this idea. I gave this newsletter its name to encourage myself to post rough versions of my pieces rather than not to write them at all. When it comes to parenting, I’m a Winnicottian: I believe you shouldn’t try to be the perfect mum or dad because there’s no such thing. At work and in life, it’s often true that the optimal strategy is not to strive for the optimal result, but to aim for what works and hope for the best. 

The good enough can be a staging post to the perfect. The iPhone’s camera was a “good enough” substitute for a compact camera. It did the job, but it wasn’t as good as a Kodak or a Fuji. Until it was. Technological innovation often works like this, but the improvement curve isn’t always as steep as with the smartphone camera. Sometimes we allow ourselves to get stuck with a product which is good enough to displace the competition, without fulfilling the same range of needs. The psychological and social ramifications can be profound.

Ian Sailer:

In what’s likely to be a watershed moment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended the use of diversity statements for faculty hiring, making it the first elite private university to backtrack on the practice that has been roundly criticised as a political litmus test.

On Saturday, an MIT spokesperson confirmed in an email to me that “requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT”, adding that the decision was made by embattled MIT President Sally Kornbluth “with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans”.

The decision marks an inflection point in the battle over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. Since at least the late 2010s, diversity statements have been ubiquitous in faculty hiring, sometimes carrying serious weight in the selection process. As one dean at Emory University put it while describing her approach to hiring, “Diversity statement, then dossier.”

Alex Tabarrok:

In my 2011 book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, I wrote:

At times, teacher pay in the United States seems more like something from Soviet-era Russia than 21st-century America. Wages for teachers are
low, egalitarian and not based on performance. We pay physical education teachers about the same as math teachers despite the fact that math teachers
have greater opportunities elsewhere in the economy. As a result, we have lots of excellent physical education teachers but not nearly enough excellent
math teachers. The teachers unions oppose even the most modest proposals to add measures of teacher quality to selection and pay decisions.

As I wrote, however, Wisconsin passed Act 10, a bill that discontinued collective bargaining over teachers’ salary schedules. Act 10 took power away from the labor unions and gave districts full autonomy to negotiate salaries with individual teachers. In a paper that just won the Best Paper published in AEJ: Policy in the last three years, Barbara Biasi studies the effect of Act 10 on salaries, effort and student achievement.

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform some districts switched to flexible compensation. Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement.

We still have a long way to go but COVID, homeschooling and open-access voucher programs have put a huge dent in the power of the teacher’s unions. There is now a chance to bring teacher pay into the American model. Moreover, such a model is pro-teacher! Not every district in Wisconsin grasped the opportunity to reform teacher pay but those districts that did raised pay considerably. Appleton district, for example, instituted pay for performance, Oshkosh did not. Prior to the Act salaries were about the same in the two districts:

After the expiration of the CBAs, the same teacher could earn up to $68,000 in Appleton, and only between $39,000 and $43,000 in Oshkosh.

——-

Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets: Student test scores rise in flexible-pay districts. So does a gender gap for teacher compensation.

If not to teacher salaries, where is this money going?

More on Act 10 and the related Milwaukee pension scandal.

——-

More. “Important insights into the impact of flexibility in teacher pay schemes on student outcomes.”

——

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Steve McGuire:

A student in the Columbia encampment is asked when she started learning about Israel-Palestine:

She says “not too much,” credits a NYC public school teacher for telling them there can’t be much sympathy for Israel’s position, and closes by calling President Obama a terrorist.

Ben Southwood:

In August Works in Progress is hosting a week-long residential seminar in Cambridge for people aged 18–22. During this week, we aim to give attendees a thorough grounding in three of the topics most important to us: how the world got rich; what is going wrong with science today; and how to design public policies so they have a chance of being implemented. 

This will involve lectures, discussions, and other classes led by the people that we think are making the biggest impacts on these subjects today, including Works in Progress authors such as Saloni Dattani, Stuart Ritchie, and Anton Howes.

The programme’s name comes from the supposed group of seventeenth century thinkers known as the Invisible College, led by the Irish chemist Robert Boyle and the English economist Sir William Petty. 

Attendance is open to anyone around the world who will be aged 18–22 in August 2024. The main requirement is that you are thirsty for knowledge, curious about new ideas, and excited about shaping the world of the future. Please forward this invitation on to anyone you know whom you think might fit the bill.

Fareed Khan:

The easiest way to spot AI-generated text is by checking for words that you don’t usually use but are common for ChatGPT. Consider a massive corpus of over 19 billion English wordsfrom blogs, articles, news, and more, updated daily from 2010 to now. I looked for the word “delve” using a string search algorithm, and it showed up 52,388 times. I plot its yearly pattern and identified an unusual behavior, a ~200%growth in its appearance on the internet from 2022, the same year when ChatGPT was released on November 30th.

John Hawkins:

Why do so many kids in the West want to be influencers? Because we heavily reward successful influencers in our society and kids see that. However, is it GOOD for our society to have so many kids wanting to be influencers? Not at all, because many of the traits that tend to make someone a successful influencer don’t make them particularly good citizens or people. Think about it – what makes someone a good influencer? Things like being extremely emotional, being unstable, willing to do anything for attention, being willing to offend others, enjoying controversy, and lacking a sense of conscience or shame. Will our society be better or worse if it’s full of people like that?

Now, how about this?

Mabel Banfield-Nwachi:

A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases.

The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.

Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked “everything going downhill”. They urged the authority to retain them.

Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe – such as the nearby St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it – infuriated her.

Michael Dorgan:

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is negotiating a new contract with the public schools system and is understood to be calling for an extra $50 billion to pay for wage hikes as well as other demands such as fully paid abortions for its members, new migrant services and facilities and a host of LGBT-related requirements and training in schools. 

To put the figure into context, the total base tax receipts for the state of Illinois last year were $50.7 billion.

The incredible demands are being made despite its members delivering underwhelming results for its students, with only 21 percent of the city’s eighth graders being proficient readers, according to the last Nation’s Report Card, which provides national results about students’ performance.

Ann Althouse:

ABC News, which I never watch, is the home of “The View,” “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight with David Muir.” I have no idea how archaic broadcast TV like that is manufactured or what Godwin did that bothered people.

Stop protecting powerful people! And stop patronizing the first Black woman and all the other firsts. Spread accountability around evenly.

Eugene Yan:

Why does complexity sell better?

Complexity signals effort. Papers with difficult ideas and technical details suggest blood, sweat, and tears. Systems with more components and features hint at more effort than systems with less. Because complex artifacts are viewed as requiring more effort, they’re also deemed as more challenging to create and thus more worthy. And because of the perceived effort involved, they’re often judged to be higher quality.

Complexity signals mastery. A complex system with many moving parts suggests that the designer has proficiency over each part and the ability to integrate them. Inaccessible papers peppered with jargon and proofs demonstrate expertise on the subject. (This is also why we quiz interview candidates on algorithms and data structures that are rarely used at work.) If laymen have a hard time understanding the complex idea or system, its creator must be an expert, right?

Complexity signals innovation. Papers that invent entirely new model architectures are recognized as more novel relative to papers that adapt existing networks. Systems with components built from scratch are considered more inventive than systems that reuse existing parts. Work that just builds on or reuses existing work isn’t that innovative.

Shia Kapos:

Solidaire has received financial support from the Pritzkers, who also founded the Libra Foundation, which funds smaller nonprofits that address criminal justice, environmental and gender justice issues. Susan Pritzker declined to comment for this story. Some of the groups funded by Libra have also been involved in protests against Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

For instance, The Climate Justice Alliance took part in pro-Palestinian marches that have used the phrase “Genocide Joe.” Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, another group backed by the Libra Foundation, promotes pro-Palestinian demonstrations on its website. And a third, the Immigrant Defense Project, was part of a protest in Washington that saw 13 activists arrested by Capitol police after demanding a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

Derek Robertson:

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?

Artificial intelligence. You take that idea about free throws and apply it to all text that has ever existed, and that’s the idea behind the technology. My problem is that once you call it “artificial intelligence” instead of “pattern recognition,” it conjures dangerous robots that are threatening our existence, or automating human jobs, or beings that are more powerful or more intelligent than we are.

That’s never panned out. That narrative has accompanied artificial intelligence since they came up with the term in the 1950s, and it’s the same narrative no matter what the technology does. One on hand, you have people like me who think that machine learning technology, or pattern recognition technology, is incredible; transcription services are incredible; handwriting recognition is incredible; coding assistants are incredible. These are incredible tools that make my life better on a daily basis. But you see that we pour all this money into them as if they’re going to create some new consciousness or end humanity, or that they’re somehow equivalent to nuclear bombs. It’s just incongruous.

Hans Bader:

police declining the requests of universities to help the universities–which generally do not have law enforcement officers capable of dealing with hundreds of people resisting arrest–arrest  protestors and remove their protest encampments. I was preparing to write a blog post about this, but Hans Bader beat me to it. So rather than reinvent the wheel, with permission, below is a shortened version of Hans’ post:

You have a right to free speech, but that doesn’t give you a First Amendment right to camp out on my lawn with protest signs. That’s trespassing. But government officials sometimes allow trespassing when they sympathize with the trespasser’s viewpoint. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC have refused to remove progressive anti-Israel protesters camping out at private universities — Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University.

Law professor David Bernstein notes that “Baltimore police will not assist in removing illegal encampment at Johns Hopkins University. Worse, they actually praise the illegal encampment as a valid exercise of First Amendment rights, which is complete nonsense. It’s especially nonsensical because most of the protesters are trespassers with no connection to the university.”

Wisconsin Right Now:

You may remember that he was outrageously ousted as New York Times opinion page editor some time ago for… running an editorial by Republican US Senator Tom Cotton urging military intervention to quell violent riots and looting. We enjoyed his talk. It was very thoughtful. He pulled no punches either and he got a standing ovation.

He believes that the Times brought in young reporters who are “detached from life as it’s lived in America,” and who brought the culture of their “Ivy League” educations into the newsroom and who thought they were part of, his word, “the resistance.” They saw the publishing of the Cotton column as a “betrayal,” he said.

The leadership of the paper “lost control” of the culture of the newsroom, he believes.

He said the Times decided a mainstream conservative argument was too scary to publish. He believes they’re now trying to “reel it back in, but it’s hard.”

Adam Andrzejewski

Here is just a sample of our findings: 

• $10.3 billion given by Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), United Arab Emeritus ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($800 million) dwarfed China who gave $2.8 billion.   
• During the past 40 years $1 of every $4 of foreign gifts into U.S. colleges and universities flowed from these four countries.
• Are these countries buying seats in our elite schools? Our auditors found millions of dollars in restricted gifts paying the tuition bills for their students.  

Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other elite universities are turning out graduates who believe that open antisemitism and the championing of terrorism are forms of “social justice.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Kirn would never describe himself as a Trump supporter, but he cares less about Trump’s rampage through American democracy, or even the lunacy and violence of January 6, than he does about the selfish and self-satisfied elites—all noblesse, no oblige—who sparked that anger and sustained it. Call him a counter-elite. As he said about Skull and Bones: “That’s our elite. Who wouldn’t want to be counter to it?”

Kirn described the dominant politics of his Minnesota youth as “rural progressivism.” He spoke reverently of his grandfather, also named Walter Kirn, a local politician in Akron, Ohio, who, in the 1950s, ruined his career by defending the right of the Black thespian and suspected communist Paul Robeson to come to town. Family legend has it that he opened up a high-school auditorium for Robeson’s performance “purely on the basis of his right to express himself. It wasn’t out of empathy for his views.” Kirn sees that “as the right kind of politics.”

Today he regards Trump’s supporters not as the proverbial basket of deplorables but as more or less reasonable citizens with valid concerns. The movement around Trump, Kirn told me, is “an expression of American frustration on the part of people who feel like they got a really raw deal.” He described himself as “anti-anti-Trump, in the sense that I don’t think that this is the unique challenge in American history for which we should throw away all sorts of liberties and prerogatives that we are going to want back.” One reason he doesn’t see the coming election as a state of emergency is he does not believe that previous American leaders, such as the Bushes, were particularly virtuous, even in comparison with Trump—a figure Kirn and his colleagues at that bastion of 1990s East Coast snobbism, Spymagazine, used to relentlessly mock. Here, Kirn’s personal evolution is telling: He is perhaps the most salient example of a mainstream writer rejecting his past to throw in with the populists.

Peter Singer:

In January, Cofnas published a post called “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.” No one at Cambridge seems to have been bothered by his argument that people on the political right have, on average, lower intelligence than those on the left.

Some people at Cambridge were, however, very much bothered by Cofnas’s February post, “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution.” To follow Cofnas’s “guide,” one must accept “race realism”: the view that heredity plays a role in the existing social and economic differences between different demographic groups. Only by challenging the taboo against race realism, Cofnas believes, can conservatives overcome “wokism,” which he sees as a barrier to understanding the causes of inequality and to allowing people to succeed on the basis of merit.

If Harvard University admitted students “under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications,” Cofnas asserted, Black people “would make up 0.7 percent of Harvard students.” He also wrote that in a meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard “would approach 0 percent.”

That post gave rise to a petition from Cambridge students demanding that the university dismiss Cofnas. The petition currently has about 1,200 signatures.

CRFB:

Including the Biden Administration’s new student debt cancellation plan, we estimate all recent student debt cancellation policies will cost a combined $870 billion to $1.4 trillion. That’s more than all federal spending on higher education over the nation’s entire history. The vast majority of this debt cancellation was put in place through executive actions under President Biden.

$620 billion of debt cancellation has already been implemented, including $275 billion from President Biden’s new Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) program known as SAVE, $195 billion from cancelling interest as part of nearly 41 months of repayment pauses since March of 2020, and roughly $150 billion from a variety of more targeted actions such as discharging debt for those who attended closing schools and making it easier to cancel debt under existing loan forgiveness programs. The President’s newest debt cancellation scheme could cost an additional $250 to $750 billion based on our preliminary estimates.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170 percent.

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

Lewis Pennock:

The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined, hurting tax income.

Conservative thinktanks have now grouped Illinois with other blue states like New York and California, which have also faced an exodusamid issues ranging from immigration to crime.

‘Unemployment rates are very high; wage growth is lagging compared to most other states,’ said Bryce Hill, the director of fiscal and economic research at the Illinois Policy Institute.

Hill told the Daily Caller: ‘The Census Bureau has reported that residents are leaving the state en masse to the tune of hundreds of thousands every single year, so much so that the state’s population has actually been declining for the past 10 years.

Judiciary.House.Gov:

“Just got off [an] hour long call with [Senior Advisor to President Biden] Andy Slavitt. . . . [H]e was outraged – not too strong of a word to describe his reaction that we did not remove this post. . . . I countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US but he replied that the post was directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way which demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden Administration is trying to reach.”

– Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, describing his efforts to explain the boundaries of the First Amendment to the Biden White House in April 2021.1

This interim report details the monthslong campaign by the Biden White House to coerce large companies, namely Meta (parent company of Facebook), Alphabet (parent company of YouTube), and Amazon, to censor books, videos, posts, and other content online. By the end of 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon changed their content moderation policies in ways that were directly responsive to criticism from the Biden Administration.

Marlene Sokol and Ian Hodgson

Each day, 18,000 students take their seats inside Hillsborough County’s most struggling schools, enough to fill a small city.

The county by far logged more schools with D or F grades than any other in Florida, according to state numbers released in December. In all, 33 elementary and middle schools.

The vast majority of students in those schools come from poor families, with stresses at home that can hamper their ability to learn.

They are kids who need the most from their school district. Yet they are more likely to be greeted in class by a substitute teacher, or one with far less experience than those at higher-performing schools, a Tampa Bay Times analysis found.

Robert Pondisco:

The thing young people “do together” is go to school. At least they used to. The phrase Levin coined, “disordered passivity,” or simply a “failure to launch,” fits more comprehensively the rise in chronic absenteeism, which was a problem even before Covid; the pandemic merely legitimized it. Nearly one in six U.S. students missed fifteen or more days in 2018–19, the last full school year before the pandemic. Seen through this lens, school is just one more activity from which young people are becoming estranged, one more opportunity to stay on the sidelines, but the easiest to quantify: we take attendance.

In the past, even bored or indifferent students might have dragged themselves to school to escape their parents, to avoid the drudgery of being housebound, or to socialize. But as David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a former New York State education commissioner, points out, smartphones and social media have made leaving the house unnecessary. Worse, they feed this poisonous passivity. “You think you are enjoying the experience, but it’s cementing you into a cognitive and emotional coma,” he told me. “Others are living ‘for you’ in ways you know you never will, so why try to take any baby steps? Just keep scrolling.”

Erin Mcgroarty

Yarianie Rodriguez, a student from Monona Grove High School, outlined the group’s demands, which included state drivers’ licenses for all residents of age and regardless of documentation status, free school lunches, improvements to the work permitting process, and divestment from the Israeli war in Gaza. 

Rally organizers view the two issues as deeply intertwined and both important for the students, many of whom will be old enough to vote in November’s presidential election.

A banner held by students read “No borders in the workers’ struggle. Free Palestine. La clase obrera no tienes fronteras (The working class has no borders).”

“All of these are things that have to be said and be advocated for, because many things go unnoticed,” Rodriguez said. “And this is the day where all students come and make their demands and voices heard.”

ANI WILCENSKI

It’s the latest and most visible example of a frustrating trend in campus culture, in which elite universities pander to a small minority of progressive students at the expense of the students who simply want to enjoy a normal college experience, which involves things like frat parties, university traditions, and joy, and have found their social lives increasingly restricted at every turn.

At Cornell University, a third of the student body (including my own brother and cousin) belongs to Greek life and frat parties are a major part of the social scene, largely because there is effectively nothing else to do in Ithaca, New York, on a Saturday night. But their social centrality means little to the university administration, which has been waging a determined war on frats for years, wielding an arsenal of nitpicky, draconian, and sometimes openly unfair policies to keep many fraternities in a near-perpetual state of punishment.

At Cornell, the school uses an anonymous reporting system in which anyone can submit a complaint against a frat, even people who don’t attend the university—which can then become near-immediate grounds for a formal investigation during which the fraternity may very likely be suspended. This happened as recently as February, when Cornell’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (OSCCS) received “an anonymous incident report” making unspecified allegations against at least 10 fraternities. By 9 p.m. the same day, OSCCS emailed every new member of those fraternities encouraging them to come forward with their own reports; three days later the school began suspending the accused chapters. The frats were prohibited from all social activity during the investigation, which included banning new members from eating at the house, even though they were paying for the fraternity meal plan, and limiting events at campus apartments occupied by graduating seniors, some of whom even had to cancel their birthday parties. I talked to one senior who wrote to the university, explaining that their guidelines were making it impossible to hold even small gatherings among friends and asking for additional clarity so seniors could find approved ways to enjoy their final days as students—especially since the anti-Israel protests were making campus life notably unenjoyable.

Newshub:

Education Minister Erica Stanford has not ruled out job losses as the Government moves to end New Zealand’s long-running reading recovery programme.  

The programme, which helps struggling readers, is being dumped as part of a $67 million dollar shake-up of the way literacy is taught in state schools.

The Government is making it mandatory for schools to use a structured literacy approach to teach reaching from next year – which is based on phonics, decoding and word understanding.

The reading recovery programme uses a different “whole language” approach, which has been criticised for using pictures to help children guess words.  

On Friday, Stanford confirmed the end of the programme.  

The Economist:

If prudence is a virtue then America’s budget is an exercise in vice. Over the past 12 months the federal government has spent $2trn, or 7.2% of gdp, more than it has raised in taxes, after stripping out temporary factors. Usually such a vast deficit would be the result of a recession and accompanying stimulus. Today the lavish borrowing comes despite America’s longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment in half a century. The deficit has not been below 3% of gdp, an old measure of sound fiscal management, since 2015, and next year Uncle Sam’s net debts will probably cross 100% of gdp, up by about two-fifths in a decade. Whereas near-zero interest rates once made large debts affordable, today rates are higher and the government is spending more servicing the debt than on national defence.

How has it come to this? The costs of wars, a global financial crisis and pandemic, unfunded tax cuts and stimulus programmes have all piled up. Both Republicans and Democrats pay lip service to fiscal responsibility. But the record of each side in office is of throwing caution to the wind as they indulge in extra spending or tax cuts. The biggest economic decision facing the next president is how generously to renew Donald Trump’s tax cuts of 2017, a step that will only worsen America’s dire fiscal trajectory.

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America’s fiscal outlook is disastrous, but forgotten

Conor Friedersdorf

One quality I wouldn’t personally want in a lawyer is shaken and unable to focus after witnessing the state deploy force

——

Columbia Dumps SAT Admissions Requirement for Good

Josh Hammer:

The rise of an insidious American ruling class, far removed from the interests and desires of most Americans and hardly still accountable to them, is not a recent development. The late, great Angelo Codevilla documented its emergence 14 years ago now, in his definitive essay on the subject. I have also written about the modern American ruling class no shortage of times—both within and beyond the ambit of the Claremont Institute, where Codevilla was a senior fellow and where Tom Klingenstein serves as chairman. That American society has a deeply embedded ruling class is now well accepted by most of Red America, and it is not uncommon to hear Republican candidates and elected officials denounce its prevalence and malevolence.

Philip Pilkington:

According to the latest estimates, taxpayers will be on the hook to cover £85bn in losses stemming from the unwinding of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) policy…

Sorry to pile on, but aren’t we watching here the catastrophic failure of a university to develop an intelligent and self-critical mind?

This isn’t freshman cosplaying. She’s a PhD student. She’s not the raw material on its way in. She’s the intellectual product coming out. https://t.co/l040jkbUPW

— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) May 1, 2024

Bruce Schneier:

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection.

But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.

To understand why, you must understand publishing. Its core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on.

The internet initially promised to change this process. Anyone could publish anything! But so much was published that finding anything useful grew challenging. It quickly became apparent that the deluge of media made many of the functions that traditional publishers supplied even more necessary.

Zac Schultz:

Here’s the amount Fort Atkinson receives from property taxes: The school district could promise a $6.5 million increase for the next three years wouldn’t raise taxes because they’d already increased their levy by $7 million the year before to prepay an old construction loan.

It’s called defeasance, and it’s one of the only ways a school district can increase their spending limits without permission from voters or the state Legislature.

If the operating referendum is passed — which is what happened on April 2 — the district would go back to paying its normal debt payment in future years.

Defeasance is essentially prepaying debt to avoid interest.

Fort Atkinson’s district administrator Rob Abbott said after their operating referendums failed the prior two years, the school board decided to raise their levy to prepay debt.

“So, the idea of defeasance or prepaying debt is difficult for people to understand. But it definitely is a strategy that is a long-term benefit to the taxpayer,” said Abbott. “In our case, it equates to around $3.4 million in savings of interest over the term of those 20-year bonds.”

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More.

John Johnson:

Across 608 bachelor degrees from WI colleges and universities,

-Best deal: UW-Madison Computer Engineering degree, w/a 0.14 cost-to-earnings ratio
-Worst deal: MKE Inst. of Art & Design Fine and Studio Arts degree, w/a 0.94 cost-to-earnings ratio

Will Flanders:

I’m always happy to admit when data changes my perception. The NYC data on chronic absenteeism made me seek out the same data for Wisconsin. The data looks nearly identical (1/2).

Matthew Green:

The plan, to repeat, is to mandate that every phone contains software that receives a list of illicit material (photos, keywords, AI models that can determine the sentiment of conversations) and scans your data for matches before it is encrypted, and alerts the police directly.

——

Two separate courts — a federal district court judge and a unanimous 3-judge panel — concluded that the Biden Admin gravely and directly violated the 1st Am free speech guarantee by coercing and threatening Big Tech to remove online dissent to Biden administration policies:

Kevin Bass;

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

———

A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public health lock down policies and outcomes has yet to appear….

———

“As he left the committee room and got on the elevator I asked Daszak repeatedly why he never asked his longtime colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for more recent sequences. Daszak hung his head and refused to answer.”

More.

Kate O’Keefe:

Huawei is the sole funder of a research competition that has awarded millions of dollars since its inception in 2022 and attracted hundreds of proposals from scientists around the world, including those at top US universities that have banned their researchers from working with the company, according to documents and people familiar with the matter.

The competition is administered by the Optica Foundation, an arm of the nonprofit professional society Optica, whose members’ research on light underpins technologies such as communications, biomedical diagnostics and lasers.

The foundation “shall not be required to designate Huawei as the funding source or program sponsor” of the competition and “the existence and content of this Agreement and the relationship between the Parties shall also be considered Confidential Information,” says a nonpublic document reviewed by Bloomberg.

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1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Rory Linnane

Milwaukee School Board member Aisha Carr submitted her resignation Wednesday evening, according to an email obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The resignation comes after questions were raised about Carr’s residency and comments she made about planting a recording device in the district superintendent’s office.

Carr’s resignation letter did not include an explanation for why she was resigning. She did not immediately reply to interview requests from the Journal Sentinel. The resignation was confirmed by multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

Rep Jim Jordan:

In Amazon Files Part 1, we saw that Amazon had to prep talking points in March 2021 about whether the Biden Admin was asking the company to remove books.

David Bauder:

Besides inaccuracies, many also expressed serious concern about election news that focuses too much on division or controversies or concentrates on who may win or lose — the horserace aspect of political coverage — rather than issues or the character of candidates.

Most Americans say that for them to make informed decisions about the 2024 state and local elections, they want national and local news outlets to highlight candidates’ values or their different positions on key social issues. In each case, about three-quarters of U.S. adults say they would like “a lot” or “some” coverage of these topics.

——-

More.

James Vaznis:

In an effort to address declining enrollment and raise additional revenue, the Newton School Committee is debating whether to open the city’s schools to students from Boston and other districts through the state’s school choice program.

The first year of the program could bring in up to 70 students and roughly $276,000 or more in additional per-student state aid, filling empty seats in existing classrooms, according to a Newton Public Schools analysis.

The program would operate separately from Metco, the voluntary racial integration program that allows Boston students to attend Newton and other suburban districts, potentially providing unsuccessful applicants for that program another way into Newton.

Paul Thacker:

Some of the shine on the disinformation industry has gone dull in recent years, as many misinformation experts having been caught trafficking in misinformation themselves, or exposed for their ties to intelligence agencies. This should not come as a shock.

It’s a basic tenet of “mirror politics” and practitioners of propaganda to accuse others of the very same actions they plan to commit.

In late 2018, the New York Times and Washington Post reported on a leaked document discussing a secret project by Democratic Party operatives that falsely accused Republican candidate Roy Moore of support by Russians, while he was running in a tight race for the Senate in Alabama. The scheme linked the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts on Twitter and drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the New York Times reportedthat the leaked documents stated.

Pat Verga, Sebastian Hofstatter, Sophia Althammer, Yixuan Su, Aleksandra Piktus, Arkady Arkhangorodsky, Minjie Xu, Naomi White, Patrick Lewis

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have become more advanced, they have outpaced our abilities to accurately evaluate their quality. Not only is finding data to adequately probe particular model properties difficult, but evaluating the correctness of a model’s freeform generation alone is a challenge. To address this, many evaluations now rely on using LLMs themselves as judges to score the quality of outputs from other LLMs. Evaluations most commonly use a single large model like GPT4. While this method has grown in popularity, it is costly, has been shown to introduce intramodel bias, and in this work, we find that very large models are often unnecessary. We propose instead to evaluate models using a Panel of LLm evaluators (PoLL). Across three distinct judge settings and spanning six different datasets, we find that using a PoLL composed of a larger number of smaller models outperforms a single large judge, exhibits less intra-model bias due to its composition of disjoint model families, and does so while being over seven times less expensive.

Manuel Ansede:

Only one person has presented his candidacy for rector of one of the oldest academic institutions in the world, the University of Salamanca. He is Professor Juan Manuel Corchado, who specializes in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. On March 15 EL PAÍS published a story revealing that for years this academic has been enhancing his resume with tricks, publishing odd documents such as a pseudo-study on Covid with four insubstantial paragraphs and citing a hundred references to his own work. Corchado, a 52-year-old native of Salamanca, denied claims of fraud and continued on his path towards the university’s highest position, once held by the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. On May 7, 33,000 university students are called to vote for a single candidate. If there are no surprises, the candidate will assume command of the university, with an annual budget of almost €290 million.

Corchado told seven lies in his reply to the information published by this newspaperand which he posted on his website with the title Defending the truth. The professor claimed that the documents with thousands of self-citations were simply “class exercises posted on a university website.” That’s the first lie. The reality is that Corchado used the same trick in his presentations at conferences. In a two-page abstract for a conference in Chennai, India, he cited himself 200 times. The academic knew that the Google Scholar search engine would track these documents and take them into account to develop its metrics, which is why Corchado appears to be one of the experts in artificial intelligence with the greatest impact in the world, without actually being one. Corchado has ignored new requests for information from this newspaper.

Quinton Klabon:

NEW ACT 20 READING UPDATE
DPI will
-reimburse curriculum (including consumables or Geodes/Really Great Reading for Wit And Wisdom) if bought after January 1
-clarify if reimbursable more than once
-survey schools’ purchase timing to estimate proration

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

And.

Katherine Eban:

In 2015, Ralph S. Baric, arguably the world’s most accomplished coronavirologist, published groundbreaking research with Shi Zhengli, the leading coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

They had mixed components of different coronaviruses and created an artificial virus, or chimera, that could infect human cells. The research helped crystallize the threat posed by bat coronaviruses lurking in nature. But the experiments were dangerous too. In 2014, while their research was underway, the Obama administration enacted a pause on so-called gain-of-function research that could increase the virulence or transmissibility of certain viruses. Baric and Shi even flagged the dangers of the research themselves, writing, “Scientific review panels may deem similar studies…too risky to pursue.”

The experiments were done in Baric’s well-secured laboratory in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Afterward, however, Shi’s team at the WIV continued to utilize Baric’s cutting-edge research techniques. Their work was funded in part with a US research grant.

Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections.

Amid competing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19—including whether it could have originated in a Wuhan laboratory—Baric has become a figure of intense interest. After all, he had pioneered techniques the WIV was using, including one that allows researchers to invisibly splice components of viruses together without leaving a trace.

For the last three years, as the COVID-19 origins debate has grown increasingly toxic, a small army of global sleuths and Freedom of Information petitioners have taken aim at Baric’s emails and research documents, hoping to uncover information about the true genetic-engineering capabilities of the WIV scientists, the ongoing research they were pursuing, and the viral genome sequences they had in their possession prior to the pandemic.

—-

More.

——

Could Facebook tell the world that “the [Biden] WH put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?”

Abbey Machtig:

Shabazz High School science teacher Brian Counselman has been named a Wisconsin Teacher of the Year, the first time since 2010 that a Madison School District teacher has earned that honor.

The school held a surprise assembly Tuesday to announce the award, which was presented by State Superintendent Jill Underly in front of staff, students and some of Counselman’s family and friends.

“It is clear that the students not only deeply respect and trust him, but admire and adore him, which aids their ability to learn and grow,” Underly said.

Lenore Skenazy:

Time spent in dining halls is down 40 percent, according to Degree Analytics, a college data company. Attendance at sporting events, clubs, and even dorm meetings is down too. The Journal quotes one residential adviser who said several students asked to attend her meeting by Zoom, even though they were down the hall.

The story documents classroom changes too—and not just at the fancy colleges. The changes include less class participation and more students handing in half-finished assignments. These same students are then shocked when they get Fs. They tell their professors: Look, I tried.

Where’s my participation trophy?

Props to reporter Douglas Belkin and assistant Harry Carr for gleaning so many granular examples of a generation that seems to have arrived on campus undercooked. The authors found that at Wesleyan University, student government meetings used to begin with a walk around campus. Today, they still take a walk, but they hold onto a shared rope, preschool style.

Nate Silver:

Wait, was I serious about this one? Yeah, more or less. If I were advising a friend’s son or daughter facing Decision Day, I’d tell them to pass on the Ivy League and go to a high-quality state school instead under some conditions. Let me articulate some exceptions:

• If the student’s identity were deeply tied up into being a Princeton Man or a Cornell Woman or whatever, then I’d think that was a little weird — but by all means I’d tell them to go, I’m not here to kink-shame.
• I’d also tell them to go with the elite private college if (i) they had a high degree of confidence in what they wanted to do with their degree and (ii) it was in a field like law that regards the credential as particularly valuable. 
• And I’d tell them to strongly consider going if they came from an economically disadvantaged background and had been offered a golden ticket to join the elite. I’m not super familiar with the literature on the selective college wage premium, but it’s among this group of disadvantaged students where the benefits seem to be concentrated. 

But if this student was just going to school to “find herself” — and she or her parents were footing most of the bill? Yeah, probably go with the top-flight state school — especially if she’s in a state with a very good in-state public school where the cost savings are much greater. Better that than to emerge with a mountain of debt and a degree from an institution that is likely to be viewed as highly polarizing. Public perceptions of higher education have declined rapidly, and I expect the problems to get worse.

Henry Mance:

They put themselves in a comparative advantage, and we haven’t come to terms with that.”

China’s success in electric vehicles is also evidence for Stiglitz that, in climate policy, regulations often work better than subsidies. More than a decade ago, “I was in a meeting with the premier [Wen Jiabao] where he told the car companies: you have to be electric within five years or you’re out of here. China has made it clear it will be an EV country; we haven’t.”

So does Stiglitz support bringing industrial jobs back home? “The pandemic made it very clear that we don’t have a resilient economy and that borders do matter and, no matter what our agreements are, when push comes to shove, we’re going to put our citizens number one.” 

A fellow Nobel laureate, Angus Deaton, recently switched to arguing that the leaders of rich countries must prioritise their own citizens over the world’s poorest people. Stiglitz disagrees: if the west is seen to prioritise its own people, it will fail to encourage global co-operation, for example, on climate change. “We can implement industrial policies in which there is more sharing of green technologies.”

Rick Esenberg:

University administrators tend to be extremely risk-adverse – largely because they have to run institutions whose values have become incoherent. They don’t want to look bad by enforcing their own rules. What they don’t understand is how bad they look by not enforcing them.

Christopher Peak:

The educational publisher raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during the 2010s selling reading programs based on a disproven theory. The company now faces financial fallout, as schools ditch its products.

A publisher that once held a commanding shareof the market for materials to teach and test reading has seen its sales drop significantly in recent years — a decline its attorney attributes to the 2022 APM Reports podcast Sold a Story.

Heinemann published some of the most widely used programs for teaching reading in U.S. elementary schools. Its roster of authors — including Lucy Calkins, Gay Su Pinnell, Irene Fountas, Jennifer Serravallo and the late Marie Clay — helped to define how literacy was taught to two generations of students. Their work also helped Heinemann rack up higher and higher sales on an unbroken growth streak from 2006 through 2019.

But recent data suggests school districts are turning away from Heinemann. The company’s 2023 sales were down about 75% compared to what they were in 2019, according to current numbers from GovSpend, a database of government spending.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Katherine Birbalsingh

An extraordinary letter about this man’s visit to Michaela but also of the decline of European education since the 1960s.

It is exactly as he says.

We all know it is.

But at Michaela we reject progressive ways and embrace traditionalism.

Glenn Reynolds:

So I spent some time at the Harvard campus this weekend, and visited the “encampment” on Harvard Yard.  It brought back some memories.

As some of you know, I’m an academic brat, and spent a fair bit of my childhood growing up around Harvard, mostly in various married student apartments.  My dad got his Ph.D at the Divinity School, and we were around there basically from when I turned 4 until I turned 9, with a year off when we lived in Heidelberg as my father taught at the University of Heidelberg.

It was the 1960s, which means that there was a lot of protesting going on, of course, and my father was involved in a fair bit of it.  Most of it took place elsewhere – for example, he traveled south back to his home turf in central Alabama to participate in the march at Selma, and was in the room with Martin Luther King and his advisers when some important decisions were made.  (District Judge Frank Johnson, generally viewed as pro-civil rights, had issued a temporary restraining order blocking the march.  Some of King’s advisors wanted to violate the order, which they, probably correctly, thought was unconstitutional.  King said that they had gotten a lot of court orders against the segregationists, who had grudgingly obeyed them, and that was sure to come to an end if the civil rights folks started flouting them in their turn.  They prayed instead of marching, until the order was lifted.)

Will Flanders:

Of note is that the only Milwaukee school on here—Reagan—has selective admissions. Meaning, unlike voucher and charter schools, they get to “pick and choose” the best students. Yet I don’t hear anyoutcry from public school advocates about this 🤔

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a response to a case brought by Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW) that would create a constitutional right to an abortion in Wisconsin. WILL believes ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood would embroil SCoW in the same mess of policy questions that Roe v. Wade created.  

As WILL has stated before, Wisconsin’s duly elected legislature and governor should go through the normal legislative process and create policy to govern abortion.  

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “There is no right to an abortion in Wisconsin’s Constitution. No judge, justice, or lawyer should be creating policy for Wisconsinites out of thin air. Reversing Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision rightfully placed the abortion issue back where it should have been all along—in the halls of state legislatures. That’s where the debate and conversation must remain.”  

Where Would the Court Draw the Line? If the Wisconsin Supreme Court were to agree with Planned Parenthood, what would happen next? For example, would the prohibitions on abortions after viability, Wis. Stat. § 940.15, or after the unborn child can experience pain (defined in the statute as 20 weeks), Wis. Stat. § 253.107, also be unconstitutional? How about partial-birth abortions, very late term abortions? None of those prohibitions are challenged or at issue in this case, but if this Court constitutionalizes abortion, it will have to answer these questions sooner or later.  

—-

Choose life.

FT

The Financial Times today announced a strategic partnership and licensing agreement with OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence research and deployment, to enhance ChatGPT with attributed content, help improve its models’ usefulness by incorporating FT journalism, and collaborate on developing new AI products and features for FT readers. 

Through the partnership, ChatGPT users will be able to see select attributed summaries, quotes and links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries. 

In addition, the FT became a customer of ChatGPT Enterprise earlier this year, purchasing access for all FT employees to ensure its teams are well-versed in the technology and can benefit from the creativity and productivity gains made possible by OpenAI’s tools.

Patrick Anderson:

A new pension report from the state legislature’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability shows statewide pension debt rose by 1.8% to $142.3 billion, based on the market value of the assets.

After growing for the second consecutive year, pension debt for the five statewide systems now sits at the second-highest level in the past 20 years. Federal pandemic funding allowed the state to temporarily arrest the deepening debt, but it is again growing.

Researchers attributed the rapid rise in pension debt to “larger than expected salary increases in all five systems.”

Pay raises for state employees in FY 2023 increased the unfunded liability by a total of $1.074 billion, with members of the three largest systems – the Teachers’ Retirement System, State Employees’ Retirement System and State Universities Retirement System – spurring most of the growth.

Jake Griffin

It continues a trend that has seen enrollment drop by nearly 200,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade statewide over the past decade. That represents a 9.8% decline since the 2015 school year. Among the 104 suburban school districts, enrollment is down 6.9% during the same time frame, records show.

Nowhere is the decline more stark than at West Chicago Elementary District 33, which has 27.8% fewer students this year than a decade ago. That amounts to 1,149 fewer kindergarten through eighth grade students. The district’s enrollment also dropped 3.5% from last year as well.

“We’re in a unique situation where we’re essentially landlocked with almost no available residential land left to be developed for new families to come into the district,” said Karen Apostoli, District 33’s executive director for business and operations. “We also have a large population of empty-nesters who do not appear to be in any hurry to move out of the area.”

District 33’s enrollment decline means the district is closing one school next year to convert it to a preschool center and changing school building boundaries that will send many students to new schools.

Beverly Pakala:

Enrollments dropping across US.

Illinois public schools–10,000 drop since last yr, continuing trend of 200,000 K-12 drop in past 10yrs.

Chicago Public Schools, $9.4Billion yr budget, lost 80,000 in past 10yrs.

And CTU wants $50Billion.

Ben Shapiro interviews RFK:

The service on that debt is now larger than our defense budget…. President Trump and President Biden are largely responsible individually for the that debt…. Within 10 years 100% of every dollar collected in taxes will go to servicing the debt. This is really an existential crisis for our country and you don’t hear President Biden or President Trump ever talk about it and they have no solutions…. You can vote for Trump and Biden but you’re going to get more of this same… They… both had four years in there and… they’re not able to avert these this train that’s coming at us…. They won’t even talk about it because those policies are the products of a corrupt system, and I have the capacity to fix that system….”

Maya:

Subject: [EXTERNAL] Feedback from the SFUSD Math Department to the Math Framework

To the California Department of Education:

We are writing to offer comment on the CA Mathematics Framework. As the Mathematics Department of the San Francisco Unified School District, we appreciate the number of times that the draft Framework makes note of our district’s policy leadership and pedagogical stance.

In chapter 1, lines 471 – 476, the Framework says, “Educators in the San Francisco Unified
School District found similar benefits when they delayed any students taking advanced classes in
mathematics until after tenth grade and moved the algebra course from eighth to ninth grade. After
making this change the proportion of students [who had to retake] algebra fell from 40 percent to eight
percent, and the proportion of students taking advanced classes rose to a third of the students, more
than any other number in the history of the district (Boaler et al, 2018).” And again, in chapter 8, lines
203 – 206, the Framework says “An NCTM case study of the San Francisco Unified School District’s move
away from middle-school acceleration and high-school tracking demonstrates that such an approach can result in increased numbers of students continuing in higher-level mathematics courses (Barnes & Torres, 2019).”

We are indeed very proud of these outcomes. Aligned with our social justice mission, our policy against tracking in mathematics aims to interrupt the racialized outcomes associated with tracking and fixed beliefs about what it means to be “smart at
math.” We applaud that the Framework takes a strong stance against tracking,alongside recommendations for deep mathematical sense making grounded in Universal Design for Learning. More and more districts nationwide are taking up the complex and powerful work towards equitable policies in mathematics; a Math Framework that supports this work will serve the students of California, and
demonstrate national leadership.

Respectfully,

The San Francisco Unified School District Mathematics Department

Nancy Kaffer:

Powerful, because of the efforts of brave Flint residents to tell the truth about the end point of absolute systemic failure, and because of the reporting undertaken by a handful of dedicated journalists at a slew of statewide organizations. I’ll never forget meeting Flint moms struggling to care for their children without tap water, or their anger and frustration at the disregard they’d been subject to. Or kids whose futures might be shaped by circumstances they were too young to understand. Some of those children reminded me of my son, then 5. I had to not think about that part too much.

Frustrating, because the the failures that led to the Flint water crisis were all too clear, and none of it needed to happen.  

Frustrating because of the lying. 

People sometimes suggest that politicians and their representatives lie often. But with a notable exception or two, they don’t. Sure, politicians stretch the truth, shade things to flatter themselves and their interests. But to lie outright is rare, in no small part because it’s just too easy to get caught. Moral objections aside, it’s just not worth it.

NBC15:

His wife, Ruthann, helped in the early day, organizing shirts for 1,500 runners in their basement. UW Athletics expects around 9,000 runners at the 42nd race.

“It was like the blind leading the blind initially,” Ruthann said. “No one really knew what was going to happen or how many were going to show up that first year.”

Walter Russel Mead:

Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time. If you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the “go along to get along” principle and who recognizes only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college when the future of civilization is on the line. And if you are someone who believes that “misgenderment” is a serious offense that demands heavy punishment while calls for the murder of Jews fall into a gray zone, you will likely lead a happier and more useful life if you avoid the public sphere.

The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.

The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought “Death to the Gays” Islamism, “Death to the TERFS” radical identitarianism, and “Jews are Nazis” antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years.

By Jon Marcus

So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.

Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it.

The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished.

“I was asking my dad, ‘Can I not go back?’” said Fernandes, who eventually decided to continue at another college and now works as a patient coordinator at a hospital.

Holman Jenkins;

Will heavy-handed U.S. intelligence spooks re-elect Trump? Will the New York Times help?

We sometimes lose sight of how downright weird so much news reporting has become. Imagine you’re the New York Times. Donald Trump might return to the presidency so you report, as the paper did on April 12, on the “distrust” that exists between him and the U.S. intelligence agencies. But you leave out the part about top Obama intelligence officers going on national TV to call Mr. Trump a Russian agent. You leave out the part about FBI counterintelligence leaders knowingly trafficking in fabricated evidence about him. You leave out the part about 51 former intelligence officials lying to voters to influence an election and help his opponent.

How should we cover Mr. Trump, the Times famously asked on its home page in 2017. The answer might have been “fairly.” Don’t lie about him or anyone else. If his critics lie, say they lie just as you do when Mr. Trump lies. This fogey advice has now evidently given way to the psychology of “splitting,” a defense mechanism that involves editing out facts and realities that cause emotional dissonance.

Edward Snowden:

Remember the expansion of warrantless spying that Biden rammed through Congress and signed into law a week ago despite public outcry? That the FBI had already used to spy on Americans more than 278,000 times? You’ll never guess what he’s using right now against student protests:

Jon Marcus:

It was when the shuttle bus stopped coming that Luka Fernandes began to worry.

Fernandes was a student at Newbury College near Boston whose enrollment had declined in the previous two decades from more than 5,300 to about 600.

“Things started closing down,” Fernandes remembered. “There was definitely a sense of things going wrong. The food went downhill. It felt like they didn’t really care anymore.”

The private, nonprofit school had been placed on probation by its accreditors because of its shaky finances. Then the shuttle bus connecting the suburban campus with the nearest station on the public transportation system started running late or not showing up at all. “That was one of the things that made us feel like they were giving up.”

After students went home for their winter holiday, an email came: Newbury would shut down at the end of the next semester.

Timothy P. Carney

But there are a hundred caveats to the notion that cash transfers drive up birthrates. Some subsidies encourage family formation and some encourage particularly unwed births. Some speed up births, but they don’t appear to increase the number of births. Others have no effect on birthrates.

The simple lesson from all the available data is this: 

To help people have more children, just give them cash, either unconditionally or on the condition of having children. Any other effort to subsidize families, such as subsidizing work or subsidizing child care, has no effect, a tiny effect, or even a negative effect on family formation.

A new study out of Finland reaffirms this general rule in a very specific way. The Finnish government randomly awarded work subsidies to men and women. The finding is a bit awkward in these days of gender equity: If you subsidize work for men, birthrates go up. If you subsidize work for women, birthrates go down.

Check out these two charts highlighted by demographer Lyman Stone:

Robert Kennedy:

The TikTok ban is yet another example of how neither political party has any compunctions about sacrificing your freedoms, rights, and choices, when it serves their political interests.

Melissa Whitler:

Since the 2019-20 school year, transportation spending in the district has increased by more than 90%, while the overall operating budget has increased by 28%.

In a report critical of the district’s budget practices, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers singled out the district’s spending on contracted services as one area where the district can trim its budget. For the current school year, the district has budgeted $102 million for contracted services. Transportation makes up about 30% of that amount.

Over half of district transportation costs come from mandatory services it provides for a subset of special education students and homeless students. State aid reimburses the district for the cost of special education transportation, and starting next year the State will also reimburse the district for the cost of transportation for homeless students. 

The State special education transportation aid is reimbursed in the year after the district incurs the costs. When costs are increasing, this means the district must cover the difference between the current year’s expenses and the previous year’s expenses during the current fiscal year.

Transportation costs are increasing for two main reasons: an increasing number of students are qualifying for special education and homeless transportation, and the cost of providing bus services is increasing. Transportation costs for the district are also higher than in other districts because the district provides bus service to students who live closer to school compared to other large districts.

Kevin Fagan:

Hello to the city, goodbye to your luggage. That was Senatorial candidate Adam Schiff’s rude introduction to San Francisco’s vexing reputation for car burglaries Thursday when thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage.

The heist meant the Democratic congressman got stuck at a fancy dinner party in his shirt sleeves and a hiking vest while everyone else sat in suits. Not quite the look the man from Burbank was aiming for as he rose to thank powerhouse attorney Joe Cotchett for his support in his bid to replace the late Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate.

Wall Street Journal:

The Administration rolled out the SAVE plans a mere 10 days after the Supreme Court last summer struck down Mr. Biden’s $430 billion loan forgiveness. As states argue in their lawsuits, the Education Department rushed out the plans with sloppy regulatory analysis and illegally converted loans into de facto grants.

Mr. Biden’s SAVE plans cap monthly payments at 5% of discretionary income, waive unpaid interest that accrues, and forgive remaining balances after 10 to 20 years. Discretionary income is defined as exceeding 225% of the poverty line. This means borrowers who earn less than $33,885 can pay nothing.

These are a sweetened version of the plans Democrats in Congress enacted in 2010, which capped payments at 10% of discretionary income (above 150% of the poverty line) and canceled remaining debt after 20 years. Democrats claimed these plans would reduce defaults. Instead, borrowers accrued more debt because their payments didn’t cover interest costs.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in debt is set to be written off under these plans. The government loses thousands of dollars on each borrower because they are paying less in interest than the government does to borrow. As the states note, the typical borrower is still paying $10,956 for every $10,000 borrowed.

Richard Phelps:

Much has been made of recent decisions to re-require ACT or SAT scores in student applications to several elite Northeastern colleges. Start of a trend? Will more colleges now follow suit?

Covid-19 accelerated an already-existing trend toward adoption of “test optional” admissions, whereby college aspirants could choose whether to include their ACT or SAT scores with their applications. COVID-19 precautions severely inhibited regularly scheduled testing sessions both at secure sites and in high school classrooms or canceled them altogether. These mass disruptions led to some unsatisfactory jerry-rigged attempts to administer the tests over the internet but, even more, to almost universal adoption of test-optional policies.

In short order, test-optional became the default policy.

College admission officials tend to consider a wide variety of factors in making individual admission decisions. Ranking highest—as the most predictive indicators of college success—are high school grade point average (GPA), admission test scores, and upper-level high school course selection. Other considered factors tend to be much less predictive. They include recommendation letters, application essays, extracurricular activities, and community service.

Quinton Klabon:

MILWAUKEE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 2025 BUDGET RELEASED

• $1.47 billion, -$201.8 million decrease assuming 4% inflation
• reasons: 2024 $111.7 million over approved budget, construction complete
• $22,279 per student at 66,000 students (MPS estimates 66,377)
• public meeting May 7

Drake Bentley and Claudia Levens:

The Glendale-River Hills School District is spotlighting a heroic middle schooler who helped stop a school bus from veering into oncoming traffic after the driver lost consciousness.

Acie Holland III, an eighth grader at Glen Hills Middle School, said his mother’s mantra to always be aware of his surroundings came in handy on Wednesday evening, when the driver of school bus route 207 had a medical emergency resulting in her temporarily losing consciousness.

Holland told the Journal Sentinel that he started to sense something might be wrong when the driver quickly passed by his stop on the route. For a split-second, he thought she was just joking around. But when he saw the bus start to veer toward the wrong side of the road, he quickly sprang into action.

Just as the bus approached oncoming traffic, Holland rushed over, moved the driver’s foot off the gas pedal, applied the brake and securely parked the bus, according to a statement from Glen Hills Principal Anna Young sent to parents and shared on Facebook Thursday.

Holland then called 911 and ensured younger students were OK and instructed them to call their parents. Holland also contacted his grandmother, who is a nurse.

Kaylee Anesta

Average U.S. public school spending per pupil in elementary and secondary schools rose 8.9% to $15,633 in fiscal year (FY) 2022 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent Annual Survey of School System Finances data. 

All nine states in the Northeast region ranked in the top 14 for current per pupil spending and seven were in the top 10.

While statistics are not adjusted for inflation or cost-of-living differences, this change marks the largest year-to-year percentage increase in over two decades.

States with the highest per pupil spending:

—-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average per student $pending.

Glenn Reynolds:

Over a decade ago, I wrote a short book titled The Higher Education Bubble, which was followed by a much longer one called The New School, and a significantly longer and updated paperback version called The Education Apocalypse.

In all of these books I explained, with increasing amounts of detail and examples, why I thought that the existing system of higher education in America was doomed.  Not that higher education itself would cease to exist, but that the standard model of college, graduate, and professional education that had obtained since the passage of the G.I. Bill, and in many ways since the late 19^th Century, would largely cease to exist.  This was due to a combination of out-of-control costs and loss of prestige.

So is the apocalypse now?  Maybe.  At the very least, we’re at some sort of a turning point.

The cost part is now pretty obvious.  When I started writing on this, a college education was almost uniformly seen as the way to get ahead.  Nowadays sitcoms often feature jokes about people with useless degrees and heavy debt, professors more interested in avoiding controversy than teaching, and corrupt administrators. 

People – especially young men – are increasingly foregoing college for the trades, and other areas where they can make good livings without running up debt.  (I have a nephew who recently graduated from welding school and who is already making well over $50/hour as a beginning welder, which translates to a six-figure annual income.  I think his debt at graduation was like $3000.  Compare that to many college grads who have $200,000 or more in debt and take jobs paying in the mid five figures.)  So falling college enrollment and an increasing gender imbalance have become the norm.

Edward White

A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her 57-year-old daughter, the Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. Days later the old woman relays the encounter to her granddaughter, Akeda Paluti. “Your mother is doing well,” she says. “Try not to worry.” 

Rahile’s life was devoted to the preservation of cultural diversity across the vast Xinjiang region, nearly three times the size of France and covering about one-sixth of modern China. For centuries, ancient Silk Roads wove past its mountain ranges, lakes, deserts and valleys. Today, officially called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, it shares borders with Russia and Mongolia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Rahile insisted on conducting gruelling fieldwork. She regularly travelled hundreds of kilometres from the capital Ürümqi to isolated villages to research the local Mazar — the shrines and tombs, sometimes attached to mosques, where saints have been buried or where miracles happened — as well as the farmers and craftsmen to understand the traditions etched into their daily lives. She recorded the oral histories that local leaders had for centuries offered to pilgrims; their poetry, music, folkways and other traditions.

Ann Althouse:

1. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, encourages the Court to see far beyond Trump to the true horror of criminally prosecuting ex-Presidents:

The implications of the Court’s decision here extend far beyond the facts of this case. Could President George W. Bush have been sent to prison for… allegedly lying to Congress to induce war in Iraq? Could President Obama be charged with murder for killing U.S. citizens abroad by drone strike? Could President Biden someday be charged with unlawfully inducing immigrants to enter the country illegally for his border policies?

2. In a similar vein, from Justice Alito:

So what about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese Americans during World War II? Couldn’t that have been charged under 18 U.S.C. 241, conspiracy against civil rights?

3. Justice Gorsuch makes a brilliant suggestion. If Presidents didn’t have immunity from prosecution, they could give themselves the equivalent by pardoning themselves on the way out. And note the reminder that Obama could be on the hook for those drone strike murders:

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

in Oxford Econ Papers 1994. This paper is lifted almost entirely from a 1992 report coauthored with consultant not credited in the publication. This is wholesale intellectual theft, not subtle plagiarism

and.

More.

By Jennifer Calfas and Anthony DeBarros

About 3.59 million children were born in the U.S. in 2023, a 2% drop compared with 3.66 million in 2022. Photo: LM Otero/Associated Press

American women are giving birth at record-low rates. 

The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.

Matt Pearce:

If you’re Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg or a libertarian, you might be looking at this and thinking: “It seems like news publishers need Meta more than Meta needs news publishers. We banned journalism from our services and our users didn’t even abandon us! It’s time for Justin Trudeau to drop this law, which is based on a fundamentally flawed premise” yadda yadda.

I wrote the preceding paragraph before looking up what Meta actually said in response to this study; let’s see how I did.

Marco Giancott:

Chinese and Japanese are enormously different spoken languages. Except for a large number of words imported directly into Japanese (but evolved to sound quite unlike the originals), the two languages have essentially nothing in common. The pronunciation, the grammar, everything is 180° different. A consequence of this is that those Chinese characters, evolved over millennia to fit the Chinese language like a glove, were a bad match for the way the islanders spoke.

Imagine those poor scholars of the Yamato court in Western Japan in the 7th century. They must have been intrigued by this revolutionary technology called “writing”, where you could freeze your words onto a stone or the blade of a sword so that others may understand it later. Why leave it to the Chinese immigrants? Why not master it for their own native language?

Except it must have been excruciatingly difficult. The characters were meant to be used as modular building blocks—a kind of modularity that Japanese just didn’t have.

Matt Barnum:

A legal battle over a proposed charter school in Oklahoma could unlock a new avenue for religious education—and some of the fiercest opposition is coming from within the existing charter-school movement.

State laws have long barred such schools. Supporters, including conservative lawyers and religious-education advocates, call those laws discriminatory and say they run afoul of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings. Some observers expect the issue to eventually reach the high court.

If the effort to allow religious charters is successful, it could open up school options for some parents, redirect public money to support religious instruction and upend the charter-school movement and publicly funded education more broadly.

Some charter advocates are wary of this future. They say that charters were always intended to be secular, public schools. A religious charter school, they say, is a contradiction in terms.

“It’s a complete repudiation of the central principles of the chartering idea,” said Joe Nathan, who was a leader in the successful effort to pass the country’s first charter-school law in Minnesota in 1991.

Adam Piore:

When Peter Gray remarried and became a stepfather to two small children in the early aughts, he made a discovery that surprised him. Most children were no longer allowed to play outdoors on their own.

The Boston College evolutionary biologist soon noticed other changes that highlighted just how much childhood had transformed since his first son, Scott, graduated from high school in the late 1980s. Once they entered elementary school, his stepchildren spent more time in the classroom and on homework at younger ages. Their after-school hours were overscheduled with adult-supervised sports and activities.

Even before smartphones ushered in the age of the modern “screenager,” it seemed to him, unstructured play time — a staple of most childhoods since the dawn of humanity — had almost completely disappeared.

Jon Murphy:

Over the past few years, numerous plagiarism scandals have rocked the world of higher education. Prominent public intellectuals and university scholars have been caught improperly citing passages or even straight-up wholesale copying from other scholars’ works in their academic writing. The most high-profile of these scandals involved Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University. She resigned her position under pressure due to her academic misconduct, which involved lifting quotes from other authors and not attributing other writers’ work.

Many of Claudine Gay’s supporters were quick to minimize her actions. For example, D. Stephen Voss, associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky (and one of the people Gay plagiarized), dismissed her actions as “no big deal.” It’s a fairly common practice, and she only borrowed a few words, Voss argued. If Gay’s behavior is no big deal and (as the series of scandals shows) is indeed a fairly common occurrence in higher education, why waste so much digital ink discussing it?

Colleges need to uphold moral standards, including respect for the property of others.The problem is that “borrowing” the words written by others and passing them off as your own is dishonest. It’s intellectual theft. Colleges and universities need to uphold and exemplify moral standards, including respect for the property of others. Plagiarism cannot be allowed any more than more tactile forms of stealing.

I contend that Gay’s behavior is a big deal. In fact, Harvard University itself seems to think so. The university’s own guide to freshman students on plagiarism states: “When you fail to cite your sources, or when you cite them inadequately, you are plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard.” Voss’s statements aside, Gay’s mistake is an important failing and must be treated that way. Why? Because the rule of law matters.

Wall Street Journal:

Bad ideas never die. They go to California in the hope they’ll eventually become law, and the latest is reparations for slavery. The California Senate’s Judiciary Committee voted 8 to 1 this month to create the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency. This would be an agency to implement recommendations from the state’s task force on reparations. It would establish a Genealogy Office to determine who would be eligible for a reparations windfall.

Matthew Yglesias:

Among last year’s cavalcade of Big Ideas movies, Alexander Payne’s quiet period dramedy “The Holdovers” was, I think, considered somewhat slight, despite being well-regarded. But although it lacked any literal nuclear explosions or dramatic political speeches, the film wrestled with one of the major social themes of our times: a kind of structural transformation in the value proposition of elite education that I think about whenever I see a new campus controversy. 

This is not so much the plot of the movie (no spoilers here) as the backdrop to it. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a teacher at the fictional Barton Academy in the 1970s. Barton is an elite boys’ boarding school, but even though the students are mostly very rich, the accommodations are not particularly nice. 

Part of the ethic of this kind of school is that students live under rather spartan conditions, away from the comforts of their parents’ posh lifestyles. And Hunham, who teaches ancient history, is a particularly strict old-school teacher. He maintains high standards for discipline and for learning. He assigns a lot of reading, expects his students to do it, and gives them bad grades if they don’t. He expects students who receive bad grades to suffer consequences. In his understanding of himself and his job, this is the role of an elite educational institution: Wealthy parents hire Barton to put their kids through the paces, because they think that this will be good for the students in the longer term. The school is providing a service, and part of the service they are providing is harshness.

Jacob Sullum:

Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.”

According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the “censorship-industrial complex,” I had committed the offense of “malinformation.” Unlike “disinformation,” which is intentionally misleading, or “misinformation,” which is erroneous, “malinformation” is true but inconvenient.

Eric Spatznagel:

The recent wave of violent protests and arrests at elite universities like Yaleand Columbia have only confirmed for Scott Katz that he made the right decision to attend Elon University. The North Carolina college, where he is currently wrapping up his sophomore year, is a long way from his hometown of Lafayette Hill, the predominantly liberal Philadelphia suburb where the average home costs $610,000.

Katz, who is Jewish, says the antisemitism that’s increasingly visible at colleges nationwide—especially in the Ivy League, and other elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley—hasn’t even touched his campus.

“I haven’t been affected by it at all,” Katz told me. “I definitely feel very safe on campus regarding my religion.” 

He notes that Elon was one of only two universities in the country to get an A grade from the Anti-Defamation League for its policies protecting Jewish students against hate. (The other is Brandeis.) According to the ADL ranking, Elon has seen zero “severe antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents” and zero “hostile anti-Zionist student groups.”

“It was a big deal,” Katz says of the level of comfort he feels on campus.

Just a few years ago, in the fall of 2022, Katz was nervous about his college decision. His mom had grown up in South Carolina but fled the South at 18, disturbed by the racism and antisemitism in her local community, vowing never to return.

By Becky Jacobs

Miscommunication and “a technology error” led to a polling place issue earlier this month that created a brief controversy over extending voting hours at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a campus spokesperson said.

Neither the university nor city officials expect such a problem to occur in future elections, they said.

“This was a very weird situation,” said Madison Ald. MGR Govindarajan, who represents a campus-area district on the City Council. “It’s not something that’s happened before,” he said, and it’s unlikely to happen again. 

Some voters were turned away April 2 at one of the largest campus gathering spaces. The city clerk then successfully filed a petition with the Dane County Circuit Court to extend voting hours by an hour and a half in Madison Wards 60 and 134.