Brandon Dupré

Northern Illinois University reported a $31.8 million deficit for fiscal year 2024 and now faculty and staff brace for what’s next as the school year approaches.

Beverly Pekala:

Northern #Illinois Univ facing $31.8 million deficit.
Enrollment ⬇️ to 15,504 from 25,313 in 2006.
‘The union has been told there will not be any layoffs.’
IL taxpayers give public univs/colleges $2.6 billion yr,

Clark Ross:

In a recent Boston Globe column, correspondent Kara Miller wrote that our colleges and universities now “embrac[e] the status quo,” preventing them from responding to new challenges. Her article draws heavily on a 2023 book by Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Both Miller and Rosenberg write of the difficulty of fostering meaningful change in our colleges and universities. Private businesses in the United States demonstrating such inflexibility would quickly endanger their viability and existence.

In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education means risking irrelevance.In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education is risking exactly that irrelevance. In prior years, the status quo filtered down from elite universities and helped “ground” post-secondary education with some positive moorings. Today is different. American post-secondary education confronts a bevy of challenges that threaten its stability. Adherence to the status quo has become an “anchor” preventing meaningful change.

Let’s review briefly a few of these challenges: financial, demographic, ideological, pedagogical, and political.

Labor-intensive in their financial model, higher-ed institutions are confronting financial challenges. Rising costs, for everything from health-care insurance to student services, threaten financial stability. This challenge is occurring just as families, particularly middle-income ones, are less able to respond to higher tuition and fees. Just look at the scores of small private schools that have failed in recent years, in all sections of the country. Possible remedies, such as shortened semesters and larger classes with smaller discussion sections, are promptly vetoed, with little study or discussion, by faculty groups.

A second challenge is the so-called demographic cliff, an expectation that a peak number of high-school graduates, perhaps 3.5 million, will be present in 2025, followed by annual declines of nearly 1.5 percent for the next five to 10 years. With many schools already heavily under-enrolled, how will U.S. higher education confront this challenge? There are really only two ways: Try to increase the number of domestic college students, or turn to an increased number of international students. Yet cost increases, curricular challenges, and (to an extent) xenophobia are preventing higher education from increasing its draw.

Ling Huang:

The glaring mistakes in Jo Boaler’s new book “Math-ish” reveal her unsolid and erroneous conceptual understanding of fractions and simple multiplication. If anything, the mistakes suggest weak procedural fluency and vague conceptual understanding reinforce each other.

Joe Pompliano:

Amazon is releasing a new docuseries that follows LSU athletes as they started to make money through NIL.

Daniel Buck:

These new laws are no more “bans” than a bonfire in my backyard is arson—only alike superficially. As Mark Twain famously observed, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” There’s quite a difference between a federal government black-bagging dissidents for sharing censored content, a major seller such as Barnes and Noble refusing to carry a book, a public or school library choosing not to shelve a book, and a teacher replacing one with another on a curriculum. To call routine library and curricular curation a “ban” is really a rather large categorical error.

Only a few thousand books can fit into a school library, and a handful onto school curriculum. It is the duty of school personnel to select the best books with the most educative potential to include in those small selections and the duty of our lawmakers to establish clear expectations for the personnel in and policies guiding our public institutions. Thankfully, just the other week, I strolled past a “banned books” display at my local bookstore where I could bravely buy many of these supposedly censored titles for $29.95 each. It may be false advertising, but it sure is effective.

Kris Holt:

Several months after a hacking group claimed to be selling nearly 3 billion records stolen from a prominent data broker, much of the information appears to have been leaked on a forum. According to Bleeping Computer, the data dump includes 2.7 billion records of personal info for people in the US, such as names, Social Security Numbers, potential aliases and all physical addresses they are known to have lived at.

The data, which is unencrypted, is believed to have been obtained from a broker called National Public Data. It’s said that the business assembles profiles for individuals by scraping information from public sources and then sells the data for the likes of background checks and looking up criminal records. (A proposed class-action suit was filedagainst National Public Data over the breach earlier this month.)

Carolyn Steyn:

The $374 million campus includes eight tennis courts, a weight room with 10 new rowing machines, and a student union with sky-high ceilings. Once construction is completed in 2026, it will have a 600-seat performing arts center, a swimming pool and two academic towers. 

Liz Wolfe:

Prices are signals, ways of communicating how much of a good is needed by consumers and how much ought to be produced. Interfering with these signals will create terrible shortages. Giving the government the power to meddle in the economy in this way will not drive prices down, it will force some firms to go out of business and some consumers to experience shortages of goods they would have otherwise been able to purchase. The scale at which this devastation happens is contingent on the scale at which the government chooses to meddle.

In a speech tomorrow, Harris will detail her economic agenda to an even greater degree. Expect more of the same strategy: blaming big corporations for the fact that Americans’ grocery bills are substantially more expensive now than before the pandemic. But this wholly ignores the main driver of this spike in costs: inflation, which was driven in large part by pandemic-era government spending, including stimulus checks.

Christopher Rufo:

We’ve seen a similar playbook in Latin American regimes: Flood the market with inflation. Shift the blame to the “capitalists.” Promise to crack down on “price gouging.” When that fails, on to the next step: expropriation.

Vivek:

Kamala Harris is set to announce a federal price control protections in the food & grocery industries. This is a god-awful idea. But it’s an open question whether Republicans will have the spine to criticize her for it, because this would require abandoning other ideas that some Republicans have favored in recent years – like capping interest rates on credit cards, expanding FTC regulations, and raising the federal minimum wage.

The Big Cheat: the so-called “defenders of democracy” aren’t who you think they are 👇 pic.twitter.com/8e1mVs0mOQ

— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) August 15, 2024

Abbey Machtig:

The school also would focus on building literacy and math skills through “boot camps” in the first year of enrollment. Beyond this bootcamp, students would get grade-level English instruction through the Odell High School Literacy Program, according to the proposal.

——-

A majority of the taxpayer financed Madison school board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School.

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

When familiarity leads to false assumptions

One of the most famous illustrations of the curse of knowledge is a 1990 experiment which was conducted at Stanford by a graduate student named Elizabeth Newton. In this study, she asked a group of participants to “tap out” famous songs with their fingers, while another group tried to name the melodies.

When the “tappers” were asked to predict how many of the songs would be recognised by the listeners, they would always overestimate. The “tappers” were so familiar with what they were tapping, they assumed listeners would easily recognize the melody.

These findings have interesting implications. For example, research suggests that sales people who are better informed about their product may be at a disadvantage compared to less-informed sales people.

Austin Berg:

Martinez recently pushed back on pressure from the mayor and the union to take out a $300M payday loan that would have cost the district a total of $700M+ over the next 20 years.

Hannah Schmid, Jon Josko

Nearly 31% of public school teachers in Chicago send at least one of their children to private school, according to federal data.

The leader of the Chicago Teachers Union sends her oldest child to a private school, too.

The fact that so many public schools teachers are choosing private schools for their children is according to an original analysis of data from the 2018-2022 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

What does it mean for a city if 3-in-10 of its public school teachers choose to pay for private school rather than send their child to a public school like where they teach? It could mean these children need something different from the public school model. It could also mean teachers in the system know firsthand the school system is failing its students, and they want better for their own children.

The stats show why so many of Chicago’s public school teachers have put their children in private schools: just 1-in-4 Chicago Public Schools students in third through eighth grade could read at grade level in 2023; by 11th grade even fewer students could meet grade-level reading standards.

Scott Bauer:

A member of the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to remove the Green Party’s presidential candidate from the ballot in Wisconsin, arguing that the party is ineligible. 

It’s the latest move by the DNC to block third-party candidates from the ballot. Democrats are also seeking to stop independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in several states.

The Green Party’s appearance on the presidential ballot could make a difference in swing state Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by between 5,700 votes and about 23,000 votes. Jill Stein is expected to officially become the Green Party’s presidential nominee at its national convention, which begins Thursday. 

The Associated Press left email messages with the Green Party and Stein’s campaign Wednesday afternoon.

Amber Duke:

We have a long cultural tradition of free speech in this country that is an unwritten but near-universally understood extension from the First Amendment protection of speech from the government. Our Founders and other enlightened thinkers from the time reasoned that “bad speech” is best countered with more speech. Censoring “bad” ideas would drive them underground and allow them to fester, which promotes unhealthy conflict resolution and national disunity. In addition, the majority “right” or “good” idea can be wrong, so being open to new ideas and minority opinions is vital for societal progress and determining truth.

This philosophy requires a belief in democratic principles. That is, you have to trust the populace to be able to ascertain for themselves what is true versus false or good versus bad and make good decisions based on the speech they hear. It would seem obvious that America believes in that idea; after all, we allow nearly everyone to vote for their elected officials. We trust them enough to choose the government, so we must trust them enough to consume information without censorship.

Unfortunately, the news media in this country has increasingly isolated itself from most of this country which has allowed an elitist attitude to emerge within the industry. It became more prevalent during the Trump era. We know Trump is crazy and dangerous, but the people are too stupid to figure it out on their own, so we need to do everything possible to help defeat him, even if it means shielding the public from what he has to say. Journalists repeatedly lobbied social media companies to remove Trump from their platforms — with many of them finally acquiescing post-January 6 — and encouraged corporate advertisers to pull paid ads from conservative or Trump-related content on social media and television. Many stopped carrying his speeches and events live so that viewers could not see for themselves what he had to say. All of his words were filtered through a biased media that wanted to present him in the most unfavorable light possible. Private persons who chose to support Trump anonymously online were harassed and “canceled” by news organizations, a warning that ideological dissent to the regime would not be tolerated. 

Few of these journalists have ever stopped during this process to consider that their opinion of Trump might be wrong — or wonder why their strategy to silence him hasn’t meaningfully diminished his support. Instead, they have doubled down.

Chancellor Mark A. Mone

Today, I recommended to Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman that the Board of Regents discontinue the program of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s (UWM) College of General Studies (CGS) and its three academic departments: Arts & Humanities, Math & Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences & Business, pursuant to Regent Policy Document (RPD) 20-24. Read a PDF of the recommendation letter.

This decision weighs heavily on me, as the impact is profound, affecting 32 dedicated tenured faculty members, their families and communities, as well as many other dedicated CGS staff. This process has been underway in some form for months. Last fall, President Rothman directed the closure of UWM at Washington County, which prompted UWM to examine CGS’s future in a new context. A UWM work team was formed to address the closure, including how to strengthen programming at UWM at Waukesha. This led to findings that there is no viable path for UWM at Waukesha. In March, President Rothman directed the closure of UWM at Waukesha and the College of General Studies, and UWM then announced the program closure to the campus community.  

Alex Tabarrok 

Three months later Helen’s daughter, Barbara, was born. Not long after, Helen began to experience some frightening health problems; her face swelled, and her hair fell out. She then experienced two miscarriages, one of which necessitated 16 blood transfusions (Welsome 1999, p. 220). Baby Barbara experienced her own health problems from early childhood. She suffered from extreme fatigue and developed an autoimmune disorder and eventually skin cancer.

…Unbeknownst to Helen, she and her unborn baby had been subjects in a government-funded experiment. She was one of hundreds of women who received an experimental “cocktail” between 1945 and 1947 during one of their prenatal visits, compliments of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which provided the materials (Wittenstein 2014, p. 39).

Julian Roberts Grmela:

HSHMC’s approach of integrating literacy into content classes is something that researchers are calling for. Jade Wexler, a professor of special education with a focus on secondary literacy at the University of Maryland, said her research suggests that while some students are able to catch up to their peers after interventions — or pull-out sessions in the special education setting — others merely “trudge along and maintain status relative to their typically developing peers.” According to Wexler, a bigger impact may come from embedding reading instruction into other classes, “where these kids spend a majority of their day.”

But very few schools currently integrate effective literacy practices into content classes, according to experts on reading. That said, a handful of states and school districts are starting to explore the approach.

Ted Balaker:

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars so your children can spend four to seven years under the tutelage of the world’s worst therapist. 

Too often that comes pretty close to describing the modern college experience. Universities routinely toss out wisdom that’s been accumulated over centuries and backed up by modern psychology in favor of fashionable claptrap that makes students miserable. 

Psychologists have long known that people who believe they have a good deal of control over their life outcomes are more likely to be happy. But colleges teach students, especially those from minority groups, that systemic “isms” will undermine their hard work. 

Our minds are threat-generating marvels, but those who embrace Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) learn how to separate the countless fake threats from the relatively few real ones. Too bad universities fill students’ heads with microaggression dogma, which trains them to interpret benign, everyday interactions as threats. 

And that’s just the beginning. Universities whip up tribalism, encourage fragility, and leave students with broken moral compasses. 

But as frustrating as college can be, it’s important to avoid myopia.

Chris Edwards:

First Solar became perhaps the biggest beneficiary from $1 trillion in environmental spending enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022 after it cleared Congress solely with Democratic votes. Since then, First Solar’s stock price has doubled and its profits have soared thanks to new federal subsidies that could be worth up to $10 billion over a decade. The success has delivered a massive windfall to a small group of Democratic donors who invested heavily in the company.

… First Solar offers an example of how that legislation, shaped by lobbyists and potentially influenced by a flood of campaign cash, can yield mammoth returns to the well-connected.

… Company officials cultivated a constituency with Democrats during President Barack Obama’s administration, which in turn subsidized them through billions of dollars in government-backed loans. When the Biden administration started writing rules to implement the Democrats’ new law, First Solar executives and lobbyists met at least four times in late 2022 and 2023 with administration officials, including John Podesta, who oversaw the measure’s environmental provisions.

… The company will benefit from billions of dollars in lucrative tax credits for domestic clean energy manufacturers … Last December, First Solar agreed to sell roughly $650 million of these credits to a tech company — providing a massive influx of cash, courtesy of the US government.

More:

First Solar spent $4.3 million on lobbying, won $10 BILLION in US subsidies, & “delivered a massive windfall to a small group of Democratic donors” along the way.

Heckuva business model:

The Economist on fiscal indulgences:

“As the campaign contributions jingle into the campaign funds, the tax revenues fly out”, he adds. As a result, “we have categories within categories within subgroups, all at different prices, deductions or exemptions that release some elites from the published tax rates.”

Bryce Hill:

Population loss in Chicago – and Illinois in general – can be attributed to one cause: people moving out. More people are moving out of the city than are moving in. While international migration continues to be a boon to population counts and births still outpace deaths, Chicago’s population decline is because Chicagoans are leaving.

The latest data from the Census Bureau confirms Illinois’ outmigration and population crises are ongoing and continue to plague the state and Chicago. While politicians have disputed the numbers, Illinois’ population loss and outmigration crises have been continuously affirmed by data from the U.S. Census Bureau, IRS, as well as U-Haul, United Van Lines and Allied Van Lines moving companies.

While the new city-level data does not break down population change by components such as domestic and international migration, births and deaths, Illinois’ population declines during the past decade have been solely attributable to domestic outmigration. The same is very likely true for Chicago – the city’s population is declining because residents are fleeing.

When taxes were not a response option, surveys of those who have left the state showed the major reasons were for better housing and employment opportunities. The Chicago metro area’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nationamong large metropolitan areas and Illinois unemployment remains well above the U.S. average.

Both housing and employment opportunities have been damaged by poor public policy in Illinois.

Kimberly Wethal

UW-Stevens Point leadership is warning that its two branch campuses in Marshfield and Wausau can’t survive unless enrollment increases.

The campuses’ enrollment has dropped nearly 70% in the last 13 years. UW-Stevens Point Chancellor Thomas Gibson said in a viability report to Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman this spring that other revenue strategies, such as renting space to community groups and other UW system organizations, won’t stop both of the campuses from collectively hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The Marshfield and Wausau campuses were projected to have $1.59 million in debt at the end of 2024. Marshfield is expected to fall an additional $190,000 short in 2025, and Wausau alone will fall nearly $1 million short.

UW-Stevens Point uses a quarter of the space available at the branch campuses, according to the report, only a handful of classrooms are used more than half of the day and most are empty two-thirds or more of the day.

Becky Jacobs:

At a Thursday hearing in the state Capitol, members of a legislative study committeepeppered Rothman with questions about the finances of Wisconsin’s 13 state universities as part of their work to develop a list of policy recommendations for lawmakers next year.

James Langdon, one committee member who previously served as vice president for administration of the UW system, asked Rothman how he would spend an $800 million increase in state aid as proposed this summerby the governor.

“Are you going to reduce tuition substantially to use those funds or have you got some other plan for them?” Langdon asked.

Without specific dollar amounts, Rothman launched into a variety of budget goals. He said he would prioritize more funding for academic advising, career-readiness programs and expanding the Wisconsin Tuition Promiseprogram, which aims to help lower-income students pay to attend state universities.

Rothman also said the money would allow the UW system to pay employees higher salaries, evaluate where it could “invest in innovation,” such as artificial intelligence, and better address the mental health needs of students.

“We know we have a serious mental health challenge in our state,” Rothman said.

Jonathan Butcher & Lindsey M. Burke:

The department is playing fast and loose with taxpayer money and federal law. But that is about to change. Last week, the Supreme Court held in Loper Bright v. Raimondo that administrative agencies (like the Department of Education) no longer deserve deference from the courts when there is ambiguity in federal law. Known as Chevron deference, this practice gave outsized influence to unelected bureaucrats in federal departments to interpret the law. For instance, consider that the Biden administration’s attempt to rewrite Title IX comes in a 423-page regulation based on just 37 words in the original statue. That’s exactly the kind of overreach the Supreme Court just rejected.

The administration’s future plans to shift the burden of student loan repayments to taxpayers face an uphill battle in the wake of Loper. Based on a few vague words in the Higher Education Act, the Department of Education’s Savings on Valuable Education plan rewards upper-income earners and penalizes responsible borrowers who repaid their own loans. Fortunately for taxpayers, the Loper decision will make it harder for the agency to force taxpayers to pay for college loans.

Overturning Chevron should help wind down a department that Jimmy Carter created after making promises to teacher unions. The Education Department has clearly failed to live up to its promises to American children. It would be a victory for families and students to end the agency’s losing streak by closing it down.

Patrick McDonald:

A judicial council recently declared that a group of federal judges who refuse to hire graduates from Columbia University as law clerks did not violate judicial ethical regulations. 

The judges’ refusal was related to the disruptive anti-Israel protests that gripped Columbia this spring. 

A complaint was filed against the judges, arguing that their opposition to hiring Columbia graduates could mean they would discriminate in the future against defendants on the basis of their political beliefs. 

Fifth Circuit Court chief judge Priscilla Richman dismissed the complaint in June, claiming it “does not support a finding of misconduct,” and the Judicial Council for the Fifth Court upheldJudge Richman’s decision on Aug. 2. 

Joe Lonsdale:

Throughout American history, the federal government has tended to expand dramatically during periods of war and crisis. About a generation after each crisis subsided, there tended to be a reset, an attempt to claw back the cronyism and dysfunction that results from large growth in budget, personnel, and authority. We’re in desperate need of such a clawback today. 

President Lincoln used war powers to create new departments during the Civil War, and levied a small income tax in contravention of the norm that the federal government could not collect direct taxes (that tax was later ruled unconstitutional). For most of the 19th century, a “Spoils System” existed, in which the parties awarded professional government positions to friends. Incompetent “Spoils” appointees bloated the government, and created a mess. The Pendleton Act of 1883 ended the spoils system and created a robust system of merit-based tests for the civil service.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Congress and States adopted the 16th Amendment, allowing a federal income tax. The rest is history: the crisis of the Great Depression led to the New Deal, the biggest expansion of federal power to that point. The Second World War and its aftermath was another period of major expansion, when bureaucratic authority began to meld with military and industrial power. The clawback attempt came again: President Eisenhower, who fought the war in Europe, warned of the “military-industrial complex” growing out of control. And in the 1970s, when the U.S. economy faltered significantly for the first time since the Great Depression, the country was so anxious and fed up that even President Jimmy Carter felt the political need to campaign on reducing and streamlining bureaucracy. 

——-

Commentary. More.

Andrew Bahl

Five of the six elections commissioners and four of the six ethics commissioners have donated to candidates or political parties in 2024. The most any one individual gave was Thomsen, who contributed over $14,000, primarily to Democratic candidates for state and local office in the Milwaukee area.

The Cap Times reached out to all 12 Ethics and Elections commission members for this story. Just two — Thomsen and Jacobs — returned phone calls or emails.

Nearly half of the 72 county clerks across the state have made donations. Most of the clerks who donated sent the money to their local county Republican or Democratic party. The most active is Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who has given $600 so far this year to local Democratic candidates for the state Assembly, as well as the campaign arm for state Senate Democrats.

McDonell did not return a message seeking an interview.

Abbey Machtig:

The district administered a survey and held a series of input meetings earlier this year, which indicated mixed opinions from the public on referendums for this fall. That was before the School Board voted to place the questions on the ballot, and before the district shared the exact dollar amounts of the proposals and the list of schools selected for updates.

The School Board and district have already begun requesting contract proposals from vendors, should the facilities referendum pass.

Those contracts are for architects and engineers, project managers and construction firms.

All contracts must be approved by the School Board.

—-

Commentary on Madison’s tax & $pending increase referendums

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Daniel Buck:

Oh, this one’s easy

Teach math, science, history, art, music, or whatever else as the job description outlines.

It’s not our job to preach politics to other people’s children no matter how unprecedented “these times”

Next question

Gad Saad:

This tells you all that you need to know about how intellectuals view the free exchange of ideas. Ideas with which they vehemently disagree are “dangerous,” “far-right,” “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” Most intellectuals are enemies of liberty.

Ann Althouse Summary:

We want safe and clean cities. We want secure borders. We want sensible government spending. We want to restore both the perception and the reality of respect in the judicial system, just, you know, stop the lawfare. And I think that’s like, and how are those even right-wing positions? I think those are just, that’s just common sense….

“What media bias?” pic.twitter.com/80u5iFQRoT

— Sophie Louise Delquié (@SophieDelquie) August 12, 2024

Joshua Trevino:

The circumstance is quite different in America’s British — or more specifically, its English — inheritance. The Americans never convulsed themselves in a general social rejection of their British heritage: even the most-radical of the Founders, a handful of Jeffersonian and adjacent thinkers, nevertheless conceived of themselves as restoring Anglo-Saxon (which is to say, pre-Norman) liberties. We care about Britain because we see it as a font, and so it is — although it is really Englandthat is the font. We can understand American history as an extended re-litigation of the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, and there is no comparable template in Scottish, and still less in Welsh or Irish, history. America is rooted in England, we feel Aristotelian philia for it — that civic friendship, united in a noble and common purpose, that is the indispensable prerequisite of nationhood — and so England becomes surpassingly important for us. We do not understand ourselves without understanding it. We also do not understand the universality underlying American propositionalism without grasping England and its achievements. I reflected upon this as I told my son, time after time, across London: this is a memorial to men who saved the world. This is Elizabeth: she defeated the Habsburg imperium. This is Drake: he turned back the Spanish at sea. This is Nelson: he confined Napoleon to Europe. This is Churchill: he waged the twilight fight against Hitler. London defied the Blitz, alone. Twice we encountered memorials related to the 1982 Falklands War, and I told him: even here a principle was at stake, and had Britain not defended it, the whole world would have suffered. 

——-

There is a regime narrative undergirding this iron fixation. You see it in the outlets for elite-approved materials at their expositions of history and its interpretations. The regime functionaries administering the British Museum, for example — arguably the single greatest museum of any kind in the world, with only Madrid’s extraordinary El Prado standing in real rivalry — make known their interpretive preferences in the capacious gift shop. There we find shelves upon shelves of books on offer detailing the evils that England has inflicted upon the world. There is Shashi Tharoor on the harm done by Britain to India. (Take that, Chaudhuri.) There is David Veevers on how the world fought Britain’s predations. There is Kris Manjapra on how British emancipation — the world’s first consequential mass emancipation in the entire history of mankind — was bad, actually. There is Barnaby Phillips with a helpful tome describing Museum holdings as “loot.” Over and over and over. The median visitor gets the message: about his country, about his ancestors, about himself. The National Maritime Museum, a comparatively unheralded but excellent expository space on British seafaring adventure and exploration — it has Nelson’s jacket with the fatal bullet hole, which spurred real emotion upon encounter — also in its shop foregrounds works by which the visitor is to understand that what he has just seen and admired is in fact deeply wrong and immoral. It is a total inversion of the scale of values and virtues to which every society across all history has adhered, and this is a regime choice. 

Andrew Crocker:

In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet.

The new Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Smith, involved an armed robbery and assault of a US Postal Service worker at a post office in Mississippi in 2018. After several months of investigation, police had no identifiable suspects, so they obtained a geofence warrant covering a large geographic area around the post office for the hour surrounding the crime. Google responded to the warrant with information on several devices, ultimately leading police to the two defendants.

On appeal, the Fifth Circuit reached several important holdings.

First, it determined that under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Carpenter v. United States, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data implicated by geofence warrants. As a result, the court broke from the Fourth Circuit’s deeply flawed decision last month in United States v. Chatrie, noting that although geofence warrants can be more “limited temporally” than the data sought in Carpenter, geofence location data is still highly invasive because it can expose sensitive information about a person’s associations and allow police to “follow” them into private spaces.

Liam Beran:

In an interview after the meeting, Soglin said that he was opposed to the referendum. “It’s unnecessary,” he said. Soglin believes that the city should close this year’s budget gap using its rainy day fund and lobby the state Legislature next year for sales tax authority and increased payments for municipal services for state properties in Madison.

Patrick Andriesen:

Illinois law now forbids employers from discussing ‘religious or political matters’ with employees. The Illinois Policy Institute is suing because that restriction on its free speech threatens its ability to operate.

The Illinois Policy Institute is suing in federal court over a new state law that denies its First Amendment right to communicate with its employees.

The lawsuit states Senate Bill 3649, or the “Worker Freedom of Speech Act,” would effectively revokeemployers’ right to free speech across the state by criminalizing discussions of political or religious matters during meetings. The law takes effect Jan. 1.

“Illinois has enacted a law that prohibits speech based solely on its content, political or religious,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing the institute. “The Supreme Court has held that such content-based prohibitions are presumptively invalid. For that reason, SB 3649 should be held unconstitutional.”

Jill Barshay:

Inflated grades were more common than depressed grades. In this analysis, over 40 percent of the 33,000 grades analyzed – more than 13,000 transcript grades – were higher than they should have been, while only 16 percent or 5,300 grades were lower than they should have been.  In other words, two out of five transcript grades indicated that students were more competent in the course than they actually were, while nearly one out of six grades was lower than the student’s true understanding of the course content.

Garrett Shanley:

Sasse’s consulting contracts have been kept largely under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees. The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers.

The university said Sasse’s budget expansion went through the “appropriate approval process” but did not answer questions about how Sasse bankrolled his splurges, where the funds originated or who authorized the spending. 

Keeping friends close

Amid protests over his conservative track record as a Nebraska Republican senator, Sasse promised during his ascension to the UF presidency in Fall 2022 that he would divorce himself from partisan politics under what he called a vow of “political celibacy.”

But the senator-turned-university president quietly broke that promise in his 17-month term at the university’s helm, hiring six ex-Senate staffers and two former Republican officials to high-paying, remote jobs at the university. 

Danielle Wallace:

Kamala Harris panned for requiring ID to enter Arizona rally after previously painting voter ID laws as racist. Harris rallygoers outside Phoenix were required to present IDs upon entry.

Vice President Harris was mocked online for requiring campaign rallygoers to present a government-issued ID upon entry, despite the Democratic presidential nominee opposing voter ID laws. 

Natasha Singer:

Cellphones have become a school scourge. More than 70 percent of high school teachers say student phone distraction is a “major problem,” according to a survey this year by Pew Research.

That’s why states are mounting a bipartisan effort to crack down on rampant student cellphone use. So far this year, at least eight states have passed laws, issued orders or adopted rules to curb phone use among students during school hours.

The issue isn’t simply that some children and teenagers compulsively use apps like Snap, TikTok and Instagram during lessons, distracting themselves and their classmates. In many schools, students have also used their phones to bully, sexually exploit and share videos of physical attacks on their peers.

Michael Barrett:

Danish criminal groups have hired teenagers from Sweden to commit crimes on Danish territory on some 25 occasions in the last four months, according to Denmark’s Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard.

Three shootings – two in Copenhagen and one in Kolding – have been linked with Swedish teenagers in the last two weeks, with Hummelgaard now releasing a figure covering a significant number of other incidents.

The minister has previously said Danish authorities take the trend “very, very seriously”and are working with Swedish counterparts to stamp out the apparent use of hired Swedish youths to commit crimes.

He commented on the broader number of incidents after meeting with police special crime unit NSK and the chief of the National Police on Thursday.

“Criminal groups in Denmark have hired Swedish child soldiers – that’s what I call them – to commit criminal acts,” he told broadcaster DR.

Holly Korbey

In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. “Teachers don’t actually need someone to connect the dots, many just needed someone to explain to them some basic things about how people learn to read, and then they said, ‘Oh, my God, why have I been doing it this other way?’”

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws pertaining to teaching children to read according to the “science of reading” since 2019—and about 15, according to Hanford’s count, are directly in response to her reporting. In 2022, Lucy Calkins, creator of the Units of Study reading curriculum investigated in Sold a Story and used by nearly a quarter of all U.S. elementary schools, revised her curricula to include more phonics. Meanwhile, sales at Heinemann, one of the biggest publishers of reading curricula, including Fountas & Pinnell, declined 75 percent in 2023, according to APM Reports, as schools opt to invest in more evidence-aligned approaches.

We spoke with Hanford about the tectonic shifts created by Sold a Story, her take on the criticism of her work, and what she thinks lies ahead after the dust settles. 

Holly Korbey: Your thesis that students are being taught to read using disproven methods hit a nerve—Sold a Story has been downloaded millions of times. What are some of the measurable, concrete outcomes in response to the podcast that you’ve been able to track? 

Emily Hanford: The outcomes that mean the most to me are the thousands of emails and social media posts I got from teachers—overwhelmingly, these have been positive. Not positive like: ‘we’re so happy about this.’ It’s more like: ‘Oh, wow, this is really important stuff that I needed to know. Thank you for putting this out there.’ Those notes are often full of emotion, but many are also characterized with, ‘We can do this, I’m psyched. I want to learn more about this.’

At our last count, about 15 pieces of legislation had actually passed. I have mixed feelings about the legislation; obviously, it’s a way to show the impact of journalism, and I hear from teachers that legislative changes are needed, so there’s a role for policy here. 

But one of the problems with policies is they have lots of different impacts. For example, they make it possible to galvanize a certain kind of resistance, they give critics something to shoot at. I don’t disagree with some of the points being made, like the criticism of bans on three-cueing. I think policies like the three-cueing bans give detractors an opening to say, ‘all of this science of reading stuff, we just need to move on.’ And I think that’s disingenuous at best.

———

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Thierry Breton:

A timely and useful thread.

Linda Yaccarino:

This is an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US. It also patronizes European citizens, suggesting they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.

The Free Press:

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what Nadhim Zahawi—who fled Saddam’s death squads as a boy only to become Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote last week in our pages. 

Elbridge Colby:

Europe needs American military support, I’m told.

Does threatening Americans’ exercise of our most important and cherished right support or undermine that?

and Garcia-Martinez

Robert F Kennedy, Jr.

The elites who want to decide what is permissible to read and watch justify their censorship by labeling dissenting opinions as “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “far right,” or “extremist.” During the lockdowns, MI-6 designated me and other health freedom activists as potential “terrorists.” But the label applies more closely to themselves, as they try to scare us into submission again with bird flu hoaxes, debt-fueled financial collapse, and ever more dangerous imperial wars of choice.

Bezos Washington Post Reporter:

What role does the White House or the President have any sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of inter — intervening in that. Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but you know it’s a wider thing, right?” More.

Ro Khanna;

In America, we value free speech, including conversations like the one @elonmusk is having tonight with ideas and opinions people may dislike or even find offensive. We don’t censor. Ironic, this used to be a European idea advocated by someone named John Stuart Mill.

Andrea White:

Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to cure the long-ailing Houston Independent School District. He is arguably the most influential and certainly the most controversial educator in the nation’s second-largest state. He’s 67, and he roams the maze of desks with the agility of an athlete, peering over the shoulders of 25 or so of the more than 180,000 students in the state’s largest school district. They are enrolled at 1 of the 85 schools that adopted his custom cocktail of education reforms last year; 45 more will join this academic year. 

The buzzer goes off. The teacher presses the reset button and claps her hands. After the timed segment, she picks one of a handful of Miles-approved strategies to engage her students. The teacher opts for T&T (Turn and Talk); others include Whip Around (the entire class stands and the instructor asks every student a question) and Oral Choral (students call out responses to questions in unison). The children stand up, turn toward their neighbors, and discuss a short passage from the lesson.

The teacher circles the desks and listens to her students. At the end of the class, she will keep some of the children in the classroom for additional instruction, while sending others to the “team center”—what students would have called the library just a year ago—to complete a more challenging assignment to reinforce their mastery of the material covered. But for now, the teacher clicks a remote, and a new passage displays on the whiteboard. The students settle into their chairs, and their eyes turn to the screen. The timer again begins its countdown: 3:59, 3:58, 3:57. . . 

Miles and his entourage, which includes the principal and a district supervisor, file out of the classroom and regroup in the quiet hallway. He asks principal Eileen Puente what she thought of the class. The superintendent’s voice is soft, his manner relaxed. But Puente, a woman with a warm smile who’s led the school for five years, stands at attention. She knows it’s now her turn to be evaluated. She answers that student engagement seemed high, but that she is worried the teacher’s pace was too slow because the lesson reviewed material that had already been covered. Miles agrees, checking the silver dial on his black Movado watch. Then he is off to observe another classroom. 

——

Houston spends about $2,600,000,000 for 180,000 students – about $14,444.44 per student. Far, far less than Madison’s 22 to 29k/student – depending on the figures supplied……

Good Reason Houston

Scott Johnson:

Some observers outside Minnesota may reasonably ask, if Governor Tim Walz is so bad (and, as I say, worse than bad), why he has done so well politically. The reasons are many. One reason is the subservience of the Star Tribune to the needs of the Democratic Party. After the 2018 election I talked about this at some length to the Minnesota Rough Riders in “The role of the Star Tribune.”

The work of the Star Tribune in Walz’s service provides a current case study. See, for example, Rochelle Olson’s treatment of the current controversy regarding Walz’s departure from the Minnesota National Guard before it was to deploy to Iraq in this classic “Fact check: Walz’s National Guard records show that Vance’s claim of ‘stolen valor’ is false.”Subhead: “GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance claims that the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate bailed as his unit headed to Iraq, but Walz retired before his unit was called up.” The Star Tribune featured Olson’s story on page one yesterday. (Dustin Grage has stepped up to serve as a one-man Walz truth squad.)

Lenore Skenazy and Jon Haidt:

At last, a journalist has done the proper test, and the results are thrilling. Decca Aitkenhead, who writes for The Sunday Times (UK), recruited her two sons (ages 13 and 14), along with six of their male friends, plus two teen girls with whom some of the boys were acquainted. They agreed to go for a month using basic phones with no internet access (although they got access to their smartphones for one hour each evening). In other words, Decca did a study with teens, for a long enough period, in a group. 

She then did something harder and more amazing: she added a mega-dose of independence. She sent them on an unsupervised two-day camping trip––a chance to experience independence, risk, and problem-solving in the real world, together, just as kids had always done before the 1990s. 

The camping trip confirmed everything that Lenore Skenazy has been saying since her 2009 book Free Range Kids (updated in 2021): Young people are starved for independence in the real world. Given some, they flourish. 

Decca’s group was incompetent at first, but the kids developed competence as the experiment went on. They took risks (some, admittedly, dumb). They tried new things. And without smartphones glued to their hands, they connected. Yesterday, I heard Decca’s son Jake on a radio program, talking about how much he loved the month-long project. He said, of the camping trip, that it gave him “one of the best nights of my year, maybe of my life.”

Preston Cooper:

Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which could have cost taxpayers $475 billion. Additional loan-cancelation initiatives—also certain to face legal challenges—are in the works.

But the high drama of loan cancelation has drawn attention away from a more pressing issue in the student-loan system. After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called on-ramp is set to expire at the end of September—yet tens of millions of borrowers have not yet made a payment.

The Looming Student-Loan Nonpayment Crisis

During the payment pause, no federal student-loan borrower had to make a payment, and interest rates were set at zero. During the on-ramp, payments are due and interest accrues once again. But borrowers who don’t pay their loans can avoid the worst consequences of failing to do so: Delinquencies will not appear on their credit records, nor will loans be placed in default or sent to collections.

Since most student borrowers had not made a payment on their loans for over three years, the logic of a one-year on-ramp was to allow borrowers time to make financial arrangements to recommence payment. Missing a payment or two would be no big deal. After a year, the logic ran, most borrowers should be comfortably paying their loans every month.

That ideal couldn’t be farther from reality. At the end of 2019, prior to the payment pause, 3.1 million borrowers were more than 30 days behind on their loan payments. As of March 2024—the latest month for which data are available—the number of delinquent borrowers had reached 7.3 million.

Ilya Somin:

On Wednesday, in Darby Development Co. v. United States, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which reviews takings claims against the federal government ruled that a takings lawsuit against the 2020-21 federal eviction moratorium can proceed. In so doing, it overruled a trial court decision by the Court of Claims, which I criticized here. The decision could well end up setting an important takings precedent.

In September 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the Trump Administration Centers for Disease Control (CDC) imposed a nationwide eviction moratorium, claiming that it would reduce the spread of the disease. The Biden Administration extended the moratorium multiple times. In August 2021, the eviction moratorium was invalidated by the Supreme Court because the CDC lacked proper statutory authority to institute it. But, in the meantime, numerous landlords suffered financial losses, because they could not evict tenants who weren’t paying rent.

Some of the property owners filed a lawsuit arguing that the eviction moratorium violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires the government to pay “just compensation” whenever it takes private property. As I explained at the time, their position was backed by the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which held that even temporary physical occupations of property qualify as “per se” (automatic) takings requiring compensation.

Marguerite Roza and Team:

Special Ed is consuming a growing share of public school budgets. With new data emerging, Edunomics Lab is taking a fresh look at Special Ed spending to better understand the extent to which rising identification rates and staffing increases deliver value for students.

State-by-state comparisons make it clear that systems are making different choices when it comes to serving students with disabilities and those choices are delivering wildly different results for students. In this 30-minute webinar we share our findings. They may surprise you; they certainly did us.

Beth Hawkins:

Higher Special Education Funding Not Tied to Better Outcomes
Early look at state-by-state spending on special ed reveals scattershot efforts, suggests evidence-backed reading instruction for all kids is crucial.

Bill Ackman:

If people question whether there is bias in media, you should watch this clip. When the answers given by the subject of the interview do not match the narrative which the network would like to advance, the anchor terminates the interview using as an excuse that the subject’s time is valuable and the connection is choppy. Watch to the end and see for yourself whether these reasons are a pretext or whether this is good journalism and fairness in media.

Samir Jeraj:

The Birmingham example also highlights another problem. Public-sector organisations have legacy systems and old data, which make any new system a challenge to implement. The underlying problem is that digital technology moves and develops quickly, whereas large organisations tend to move at a slower pace using bureaucratic processes. So, from the start there is a mismatch, according to Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy in Index (Initiative for the Digital Economy) at the University of Exeter.

“These large technology projects are often conceived to last for two, three, four years,” explains Thompson. Buying in technology, however, tends to contract on a ten-year cycle. The first three years work well, as the contractor invests in the technology and engages in improving services, but the following seven years are lacklustre. When the needs of the organisation change, the contractor will argue that any change to the systems are outside of the scope and will cost more.

Wilfred Reilly:

We need to talk about today’s critical mass of unimpressive “experts.”

Just a week or so back, at the end of July, Columbia and UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw — the founder of “intersectional” theory — took to Twitter/X to argue a point. As she passionately put it: “Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey. #SayHerName.” This post, so far, has received 1,800 likes and has been shared 1,200 times.

Rebel Educator

This is an 8th grade graduation exam from 1912.

8th graders then were better prepared for life in the real world than 12th graders are today.

And.

Phil Pennington

third speed bump came just last week, when NZTA deferred using number-plate spotting cameras on a highway (see below).

The march is mostly one way, though – including to the bank for the tech-makers and marketers, who are known to protest at the media calling their products “surveillance”.

Such sensitivities have not put off governments spending on public-private hybrid systems.

New Zealand has its own, used by powerful state agencies, the police and Immigration.

Many of the camera systems could run facial recognition (FR). Sometimes you are just asked to trust the FR function is not switched on.

NS Lyons:

Last month, the US Supreme Court considered arguments in a landmark case on the legality of America’s metastasising censorship-industrial complex. The case, Murthy vs Missouri, rests on whether White House requests that Twitter and Facebook take down alleged Covid misinformation constituted illegal censorship that violated the First Amendment right to free speech.

Given the ample evidence of the Biden administration’s sweeping censorship efforts in recent years, many legal observers assumed the case was a done deal. And yet, during the hearing, it quickly became apparent that a majority of the court’s justices were sympathetic to a counter-argument that, actually, it’s the Government who’s the real victim in this case — because what “free speech” really means is that the Government has a right to tell Facebook that you need to shut up.

The court’s newest and most innovative justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, stole the headlines with comments about how she was “really worried” about “the First Amendment hamstringing the Government in significant ways in the most important time periods” — i.e. elections involving Donald Trump. But even some of the court’s allegedly more “conservative” justices such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett appeared openly sympathetic to the idea that it’s more important to preserve the national security state’s uninhibited power to bully platforms into silencing information they consider “harmful” than it is to preserve fundamental individual rights. In short, although a ruling on the issue won’t be released until this summer, as of now the Supreme Court seems poised to effectively enshrine the legality of mass state censorship and deliver what could be a mortal blow to America’s tradition of free speech.

Anjali Huynh

Massachusetts collected $40.8 billion in overall tax revenue for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, with $2.2 billion coming from the state’s so-called “millionaires tax,” state finance officials said Friday.

The total haul was $967 million more than projected, much of which came from the millionaire’s tax — funds that can only be spent on education and transportation.

While the millionaire’s tax revenue was more than double the $1 billion that Governor Maura Healey and other legislators had allocated to spend, the windfall won’t leave state coffers flush with cash.

Jon Levine, Deirdre Bardolf and Matthew Sedacca

• Reading proficiency among Minnesota students fellto 49.9% in 2023, down from 59.2% in 2019, according to the state Department of Education. Math comprehension similarly sank, from 55% in 2019 to 45.5% last year. 
• Thirty percent of all Minnesotan students were chronically absent, or missed more than 10% of school days, during the 2021-22 school year. That’s more than double from just 14% during the 2019 school year, according to the American Enterprise Institute. 

Jonathan Amos

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

Richard Dawkins:

“My entire Facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics.

Of course, my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?”

Nataliya Vasilyeva:

Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.

As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin’s interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn’t immediately comment on the issue.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russia increased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.

The Splintered Mind

Method

* Only authors born 1900 or later are included.

* Each author is only counted once per headline entry (subentries are excluded). In 2010, I found that this generated more plausible results than counting authors multiple times per entry.

* As in 2019, but unlike 2014 and 2010, I include co-authors. Due to the unsystematic formatting of SEP references, this was a somewhat noisy process. To capture last authors, I searched for “and” or “&” in each bibliographic line, if appearing before a “19”, “20”, “forthcoming”, or “in press”, then pulled the text immediately after. To capture second authors that were not last authors, I searched for a second comma before such a date-preceding “and” or “&”, then pulled the text after that. I omitted co-authors in position three or higher unless they were last author. Fortunately for the analysis, co-authorship is relatively uncommon in philosophy compared to the sciences, constituting by my estimate less than 10% of the bibliographic lines.

* Also as in 2019 but unlike 2014, I included editors, but only if their name appears before the date in the bibliographical line. Putting the editor at the front of the bibliographical line highlights the editor’s role or the edited collection as a whole.

* After computerized search and sort, I hand-coded the data, in some cases correcting misspellings and merging authors (e.g., Ruth Barcan = Ruth Marcus), more often separating authors with similar names (e.g., various A. Goldmans and J. Cohens), in a process that involved some guesswork and pattern recognition. Inconsistent syntax and imperfect redundancy removal procedures also created some error, though nothing large or systematic that I noticed. Bear in mind that with about 208,000 bibliographic entries, perfection is not possible! I estimate coding error of up to about +/- 2 entries.

John Sexton

It turns out that putting Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi in charge of the nation’s collective HR programs hasn’t gone smoothly in all cases. Who would have guessed?

Today the Washington Post has a story about the legal backlash that ubiquitous anti-racism training has created. There are at least 59 current lawsuits brought against these training programs by people who say they felt discriminated against.

Paul Craig Roberts:

Journalism as an occupation no longer exists. Today the struggle is not to get at the heart of an issue, but to have one’s agenda prevail.

In 2013 I returned to the issue of offshoring production for the home market in my book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalsim. In the decade since Schumer and I had published our article, the US had lost 54,000 factories. The number of factories employing 1,000 or more declined by 40%. Those employing 500-1,000 declined by 44%. Those employing 250-500 declined by 37%. Factories employing 100-250 declined by 30%. The losses are net of new start ups. The US manufacturing work force shrank by 5,000,000 employees.

In the first decade of the 21st century the population of Detroit, Michigan, declined by 25%. Gary, Indiana, lost 22% of its population. Flint, Michigan lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio, lost 17%. St Louis, Missouri, lost 20%. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, South Bend Indiana, and Rochester New York also lost population. These cities were once the home of American manufacturing and industrial might.

Wherever the alleged “gains of trade” might have occurred, it wasn’t in these cities.

The Democrats’ open borders policy might be replenishing these cities’ populations, but the jobs are not there to support them.

There is another reason jobs offshoring did not produce for Americans any gains from trade. When the goods and services produced abroad are brought back into the US to be marketed, they come in as imports. Thus the trade deficit widens, which means the US incurs more foreign debt. Is the growth in debt caused by jobs offshoring covered by gains from trade?

Peter May:

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children’s opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

James Cirrone:

‘The problem is California is going broke,’ he wrote on X. ‘California will begin raising taxes and cutting subsidies to the poor, to prisons, environmental problems, and teachers unions. That means crime will spread as police will be cut.’

He believes even Americans who don’t live in the Golden State should care about its prospects because it’s a bell weather for the rest of the country.

‘Since California is a Bell Weather state and is going broke, which states will follow?’ he asked. 

So, is California actually going broke?

Cremieux

I’m delighted to see my charts have been posted in response to this multiple times.

If you look at American PISA performance, you see a consistent picture: Americans utterly dominate once you split them by race.

@visualcapitalist

Three out of four members of Team USA played at the collegiate level.

Stanford University has the most Olympic athletes of any college in the Games, including U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky, who has won nine Olympic gold medals, the most in history for a female swimmer.

Following Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has 17 athletes, and the University of Southern California (USC) has 16.

Jessica Costescu:

Since Tim Walz became governor, Minnesota has faced an exodus of residents fleeing the state, taking nearly $5 billion of household income with them, according to data reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

On net, nearly 46,000 Minnesotans left between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2023, according to the most recently available Census data, with many fleeing Walz’s major tax increases for the income tax-free states of Florida and Texas. The Land of 10,000 Lakes lost more than 19,000 in 2022 alone, the biggest drop in at least 30 years.

It’s not clear what led to the exodus, but in addition to tax surges, spending increases, and other progressive initiatives, Minnesota, under Walz’s watch, has faced a spike in violent crime and a drop in academic achievement. The downward domestic migration trend became apparent soon after Walz—who was recently tapped as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate—became governor.

Mike Benz:

A complicated legacy. She helped build YouTube, the greatest font of knowledge & freedom in my generation’s upbringing, but then she utterly destroyed it, leaving half my generation bitter & resentful. She helped build Google, which opened worlds of wisdom, then oversaw its end to its Don’t Be Evil promise. RIP to an old foe, undoubtably a formidable figure, one whose legacy — whether in the grand scheme of things she was a force for good or ill — is now very much up to an unwritten history to decide.

Many taxpayer funded K-12 systems use Google services, including Madison.

A thread. Another.

Joanne Jacobs:

Walz increased education funding by $2.2 billion, but new state mandates are eating up half the money, reports Beth Hawkins on The 74. “District leaders statewide are scrambling to explain to their communities that, in fact, they are facing massive cuts.” Enrollment is declining. “In many places, balancing the budget will mean layoffs or school closures.”

There are “as many as 65 new mandates, ranging from free meals for all students to menstrual products in school restrooms,” she writes. The bill has added costly benefits for seasonal workers — such as unemployment insurance for substitutes. 

School districts must divert some of the “new” money to make up shortfalls in other funding, such as “$750 million just to fill the special education funding gap,” writes Hawkins. 

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah:

Harvard will not remove the Sackler name from one of three University art museums and another campus building, ending a yearslong campaign by student activists for Harvard to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.

A committee tasked with reviewing a request to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from the two buildings announced in a report on Wednesday that it did not recommend denaming. The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s recommendation last month.

Sackler’s family, which owned the company that became Purdue Pharma, has been considered by some activists to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin — a drug credited with fueling the opioid crisis.

Mark Perry:

Since 1970 these are the increases:
Students: 8.9%
Teachers: 60.1%
Non-Teaching Staff: 165.3%
Real Spending per Student: 177.3%

Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken:

We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of $17,843 per pupil, which was 13.4% above the statewide average of $15,734 and ranked 120th among the 421 districts in Wisconsin.

Declining enrollment and the latest referendum will send those amounts higher for MPS starting in 2025. MPS also ranks relatively high in total revenue per student compared to other large districts nationally. The NCES data show MPS with 2020 revenues of $17,520 per student, 3.7% more than the average funding of $16,894 per student and 25th-highest among the 120 largest districts in the country. As noted earlier, however, there are reasons for higher funding levels given that the poverty rate for school-age children in Milwaukee is among the highest for these districts and is relatively high for districts in Wisconsin as well

Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most other Districts in the US and around the globe, with a massive tax & $pending increase referendum planned for this fall.

Madison’s K-12 tax & spending summary over the years:

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Additional background on the Milwaukee Report (Madison’s business community has been dormant for decades on our challenged and well funded K-12 system).

In the 1990s, Milwaukee was widely seen as the epicenter of “education reform” in the country,earning both praise from proponents and scorn from detractors. In the face of poor studentoutcomes and societal trends such as increasing segregation and poverty, multiple interests hadconverged to establish the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the country’s first initiativeto offer publicly funded tuition vouchers for students to attend private schools. Independently operated public charter schools opened a few years later, further expanding the options available tofamilies.

Democratic State Representative Annette “Polly” Williams advocated for the choice programs as ameans of empowerment for low-income city residents, particularly aiming to increase Black families’control over their children’s education. Republican Governor Tommy Thompson publicly expressedhope of encouraging better quality by increasing competition between schools in Milwaukee,following the arguments of free market economists like Milton Friedman. The views of these andother elected officials – supported by a coalition of parent and community organizers, businessinterests, and private philanthropy – rested on the belief that students were not sufficiently orequitably served by the current education system, and that families would take more school optionsif given them.

Opponents, however, characterized the shift of students and funds away from Milwaukee PublicSchools (MPS) as privatization efforts that undermined the traditional public school system and itsobligations under the state constitution. They feared that the resulting dispersion of students wouldexacerbate inequality, fail to offer public accountability and transparency, and divert resources fromMPS, threatening its ability to provide an adequately and equitably resourced system of publicschools to its residents. The stakes were high for Milwaukee students, whose levels of poverty standout on both a statewide and national scale, as well as for the city’s wellbeing and for the state’sworkforce and economy.

The Forum took stock of the resulting educational landscape 20 years later in a 2014 series of reports: “What is the Milwaukee K-12 School System?” and “The K-12 School System in Milwaukee:How has it changed and how does it measure up to peers?” Our research provided a broad overviewof the types of schools operating in Milwaukee, admissions processes, academic quality, student demographics, and education funding. It further analyzed recent changes in the landscape andcompared them to the experiences of national peers.

In the fall of 2023, we took up these questions again, equipped with nearly a decade of additionaldata. We did so in the context of recovery from a global pandemic and a recently passed statebudget and related legislation that, among other provisions, provided K-12 funds and – separately –helped stabilize the finances of both the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. With localgovernment now on firmer ground, the time appeared ripe to return civic attention to the quality ofeducation in the city. Our specific research questions included the following:

● What does the educational ecosystem look like in Milwaukee right now?

● What trends were found in regard to enrollment, demographics, and finances across thedifferent sectors of schools in Milwaukee?

● What trends are identifiable in regard to outcomes for students on the whole in Milwaukee, using both local and national benchmarks?

Corrinne Hess: (more)

Milwaukee Public Schools operated 143 schools in 2023 with a total of 59,899 students. That represented about half of the students served in the city. From 2006 to 2024, enrollment in MPS plummeted by one third. 

Meanwhile, charter school enrollments more than doubled during that same time period from  7,323 in 2006 to 15,695 in 2024. 

Enrollment in Milwaukee’s private choice schools increased nearly 90 percent since 2006 from 15,864 to 30,103 last school year, according to the report. 

Besides parents moving their children from public to private schools, there are fewer children being born (abortion data).

Quinton Klabon:

I hate to see quotations printed uncritically when the report directly contradicts them.

Here is hoping the city focuses on solutions and not the same dull, unhelpful conversations…and soon. School starts for some students next week, everybody in 3 weeks!

Will Flanders:

A new @policyforum report paints a relatively fair picture of the education landscape in MKE. But articles like this zeroing in on the role of school choice are unfair (1/3)

After 30 years of reforms, report examines state of Milwaukee schools (jsonline.com)

Related: Where have all the students gone?

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

University of Tennessee news:

The Institute of American Civics, housed in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, conducted a statewide survey this spring examining civic knowledge and participation by Tennesseans.

The survey report says its results lead to two obvious conclusions: “It is crucial that Tennesseans develop a higher level of civic knowledge, and the process will not be easy. Strong efforts will need to be made at the K-12 level, in universities, and in the general public across the state.”

Key findings include:

• Only about half of respondents knew that Tennessee has a state constitution.
• Fewer than half of respondents said they know who their state legislators are, and only around one-third said they knew their county commissioner or city council member.
• Nearly half of respondents said they were somewhat or extremely worried about their reputation being harmed by a political opinion they post on social media or say at work, and a third said they were less likely to discuss politics with friends and family than 10 years ago.

Gurwinder:

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders —  narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are associated with heavy social media use, most likely because impulsive and dramatic cluster-B behaviors, such as playing the victim and catastrophizing, excel at getting attention on such platforms.

The ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama. Many activists on both the Left and Right now hope to bring about their ideal world the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year old.

It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification, activism for the attention-deficit generation. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.

Larry Kummer

Summary: The effects of debt are among the most widely misunderstood factors of macroeconomics. The almost delusional writings of perma-bears and conservatives have demonized debt, while economists often regard high debt levels with complacency. Yet economists have learned much about dynamics of debt. This post looks at this cutting edge of economic theory, very relevant to us today — because the debt supercycle is the story of modern America, and it’s over.  First of 2 posts today.

“In final examinations {this economics} professor always posed the same questions. When he was asked how his students could possibly fail the test, he replied simply ‘Well it is true that the questions do not change, but the answers do.’
— From a speech by Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr., 19 October 1955.

Pipeline:

It’s difficult to describe how awful modern journalism has become. It is preening, biased, ignorant, vainglorious, arrogant, unfair, corrupt, vindictive, smug, anti-science, and stupid beyond measure. It hasn’t always been this way. Vintage news hawks reveled in their role as a yellow rabble of ill-educated, over-intoxicated, ink-stained wretches. Today’s reporters, inconceivably, consider themselves our betters.

Their pretension to status is puzzling. Perhaps, they could have been lawyers but lacked the intelligence or study skills. Or politicians, but they’re too socially awkward. Engineering is out of the question; they don’t know math. Science, too, as it requires critical thinking. Not good-looking enough to be Hollywood celebrities, not entrepreneurial enough to create businesses, not courageous enough to be out-of-the closet activists, let alone out-of-the-box artists. The only requirement for modern journalism is a rudimentary ability to stitch sentences together at forty words per minute. For on-camera talent, not even that. Contrary to recruitment pitches from the Columbia School of Journalism, reporting is a trade, not a profession.

Anthony Watts

 Why the difference? Apparently the WaPo reporter can’t convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit correctly, due to an attempt to “Americanize” the story, she wanted to display the temperature in Fahrenheit, used in the United States.

If you don’t know the formula, you can use Google to do it, which is what she likely did. With Google 0.5°C converts to 32.9°F.

But that’s clearly wrong, because Blakemore is assuming that 0.5°C is an absolute temperature, rather than a difference in temperature due to the cooling effect between rural and city areas. If what she said were true, a pleasant city temperature of 65°F would be impossibly cooled down to 32.1°F (nearly freezing) by the effect of nearby rural areas. How embarrassing.

Despite this laughable failure of grade-school science, the WaPo story does point out the mechanism for how rural areas help keep cities cooler. The study, done in China says that heat is transported from the cities to the rural areas through a meteorological mechanism. The reason is a matter of physics, they write:

America First Legal

Our lawsuit just exposed that the FBI implemented extensive nationwide social media monitoring ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

The FBI’s National Election Command Post received lists of “multiple Twitter accounts posting misinformation.” 🧵

Sky News

We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests.’

More.

Shaping flow.

Biden/Harris digital director Rob Flaherty says the DNC created a program to detect, track, and censor what it deemed “misinformation” (like Biden’s mental decline). He calls it “critical” and “one of the more important decisions” made by the party in recent years. /2

Glenn Reynolds:

Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.

The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA  speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example.  (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.

The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

“Facts & Trends”

In December 2022, the Board of Regents approved a five-year Strategic Plan for the Universities of Wisconsin for 2023-28. The broad objectives of the plan include enhancing the student experience and social mobility; fostering civic engagement and serving the public good; creating and disseminating knowledge that contributes to innovation and a better understanding of the human condition; and advancing economic prosperity.

• Link: wisconsin.edu/president/strategic-plan/

The Strategic Plan informs and guides the priorities and actions of the Universities of Wisconsin.

Among its goals, the plan aims:

• To graduate nearly 41,000 students annually across our universities by 2028, or a 10% increase
• To close the opportunity gap between historically underserved students (including first-generation students and those from lower socio-economic populations) and other students
• To recruit, develop, and retain a diverse, high-quality faculty and staff
• To enhance the position of our two Research I (R1) universities – UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee – by increasing UW-Madison’s position in research dollars and its national ranking and to maintain UW-Milwaukee’s R1 status and increase its research dollars
• To serve as national leaders in teaching critical thinking and the principles of civil discourse, as well as the preservation of academic freedom
• To meet pressing workforce talent needs, serving as the educational provider of choice to employers, and driving the economic vibrancy of Wisconsin through innovation and entrepreneurial activity

As a university system, we have identified three core values to guide us:

1. We are purpose-driven
2. We are people-focused
3. We are stewards of our resources, including those allocated to us by the State of Wisconsin

Jay Rothman:

Today, we published our latest Facts and Trends data book, filled w/key statistics affecting WI’s 13 public UWs including info on state funding trends, talent development, degrees, enrollment, participation rates, affordability/tuition, & infrastructure. A thread:

A summary.

Wall Street Journal:

Massachusetts students are currently required to take an assessment during their sophomore year and meet thresholds for proficiency in math, English and science. Students who meet the minimum requirement are cleared for graduation. Those who don’t are assigned extra help and an “educational proficiency” plan to make sure they catch up by senior year.

The point is to make sure students don’t fall through the cracks, and it works. Massachusetts ranks at the top in student achievement among states. In 2022 the state tied for first for eighth grade student achievement in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Most states envy that performance, but the Massachusetts Teachers Association wants to end it. At a 2022 state Board of Education meeting, president Max Page explained the union’s thinking: “The focus on income, on college and career readiness speaks to a system tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.”

Wow. In their hostility to measuring student achievement, the union is now hostile to upward economic mobility. What’s the goal: Keep kids on the dole all their lives?

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test isn’t a barrier to success: Some 80% of black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged children still pass it on the first try. For those who don’t, the graduation requirement commits resources to helping close the achievement gap. Students are given five chances to pass the test. Of the roughly 70,000 students in each graduating class, some 700 don’t receive a diploma because of failure on the state test.

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah:

Harvard will not remove the Sackler name from one of three University art museums and another campus building, ending a yearslong campaign by student activists for Harvard to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.

A committee tasked with reviewing a request to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from the two buildings announced in a report on Wednesday that it did not recommend denaming. The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s recommendation last month.

Sackler’s family, which owned the company that became Purdue Pharma, has been considered by some activists to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin — a drug credited with fueling the opioid crisis.

Leo Lewis in Tokyo and Wang Xueqiao and Thomas Hale in Shanghai

In the US, which is by far the world’s largest pet market, there are more pets than children of any age. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there were 84mn-89mn dogs and 60mn-62mn cats in 2020. Government data shows there were 73mn children of all ages in the same year. Chinese pet ownership also came into focus under the country’s strict lockdowns between 2020 and 2022. A survey by UBS of 1,500 pet owners found 80 per cent maintained or increased pet-related spending “after the pandemic versus before the pandemic”.

Analysts at the Swiss bank said this was “evidence of the pet market’s strong resilience in the face of macro headwinds”. It attributed resilience during the pandemic to “the significant role that pets can play in households”.

—-1

Choose life.

Dr. Mindle

Before we examine the origin of the reverse diversity problem, let’s define a few terms:

• American Elites. The powerful, the rich, the establishment who control policies, corporations and institutions.
• American Majority. The majority of American population who are not or not yet elites. 
• Model minority. Asian Americans were characterized as a “model” minorityamid the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

It all started with Outsourcing which as a term originated no later than 1981 and it took four decades in the making:

1. American elites outsourced manufacturing to China.
2. American elites outsourced IT to India.
3. American majority value finance and management jobs over manufacturing, IT and STEM.
4. American model minorities occupy domestic IT and STEM positions.
5. All-model-minority teams emerge across IT and STEM industries. 

Matt Taibbi:

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes. 

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter. 

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

Abbey Machtig:

The two referendums total $607 million, making them the second-largest request of voters by a school district in state history. It comes in behind Racine’s $1 billion school referendum, which passed in 2020 by only five votes

Lucas Robinson and Gayle Worland

“Residents in Madison are likely looking at a higher cost of living across the board, whether you’re a renter or an owner,” said Adam Nelson, who noted two other Madison School District referendums that voters will decide in November. “If you’re in the middle or lower-income bracket, if you’re cost-burdened in housing, this could be a harder pill to swallow.”

The School District’s two referendums would add $1,370 to the property tax bill of the average home by 2028.

More.

——

Meanwhile:

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Marguerite Roza:

In our next 30-min webinar, we’ll cover:

The “Big Hire” in MA schools.

A typical high poverty school got > 11 new staff:
2.5 new teachers
2.5 new specialists
6 new aides

Is it working?

CTUP:

The Democrats are mighty nervous about Trump’s latest idea to stop the unfair taxation of Social Security benefits. Why? Because it turns out the policy is popular with voters over the age of 65.

Unleash Prosperity’s lead piece in Fox Business this weekend notes that seniors who continue to work after they’re eligible for Social Security face marginal tax rates that can easily rise above 50 to 60%. In other words, for every dollar they earn, the federal government takes away more than 50 cents.

John Goodman of the Goodman Institute finds the rates can be above 70%.

—-

Meanwhile, large tax & $pending referendums will be on the fall ballot:

Sequoyah Sudler:

Avila would only find out about this new language when she was nineteen years old. She was at home when she received a knock at the door from a man who she had never met before. Strangely, the man was American. He had a long, thin face, adorned with wiry metal glasses perched above a graying goatee. His name was James Shepard-Kegl, and he had helped establish a boarding school for deaf children in Bluefields, a city in southeastern Nicaragua. He had a proposition for Avila.

Shepard-Kegl offered Avila the chance to study at the boarding school, where Nicaraguan Sign Language was the standard language for all students and faculty. However, she would have to leave behind her family and the small town that she had known her entire life, only to be immersed in a language that was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The transition would be difficult, but Avila agreed. In 1999, she packed up her bags and boarded a plane to Bluefields.

It was a decision that would change her life forever.

Katha Pollitt:

KP: What is “left”? You criticize “progressives” for what you see as an excessive focus on victimhood and identity politics, in which people are lumped together according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on, with massive assumptions made about what they want and need. You want universalist values. But isn’t a major feature of today’s left that people are demanding the right to speak up for themselves about their own issues and problems?

SN: Traditionally, the left was concerned with universal justice, which included the right to speak up about each group’s own problems but was never confined to it. Thanks to a combination of ideologies that took hold at the end of the 20th century, including neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, we have come to normalize the idea that self-interest is the only thing that motivates us to action. That’s actually a right-wing philosophical assumption.

KP: You support universalism over what you call tribalism, but where does that leave women and minorities? Universal programs, such as national health insurance, are important and help everybody, but it takes a lot more to give disadvantaged people equal access to good care. Countries that have universal programs, like the United Kingdom, still have big problems with racism and sexism in medical care. Doesn’t universalism use white men as the (unconscious) norm?

Jacob Sullum:

In a “specification of charges” filed with the D.C. Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility last month, Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III alleges that Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, who is now a federal prosecutor in Utah but previously worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, violated six rules of professional conduct while trying to convict “DisruptJ20” protesters, including many who had not participated in vandalism or violence. Muyskens “knew that most defendants did not commit violent acts themselves,” Fox notes, but “she argued that these defendants were still liable for felony rioting and felony property destruction because they joined a criminal conspiracy to use the protest march to further the violence and destruction that occurred.”

To support that theory, Muyskens presented video of a DisruptJ20 planning meeting that had been clandestinely recorded by an “operative” from Project Veritas, a conservative group that frequently has been accused of using misleadingly edited videos to portray progressive and leftist organizations in a negative light. Although Muyskens “understood Project Veritas had a reputation for editing videos in a misleading way,” Fox says, she initially concealed the source of the video, saying in court that “who provided it is irrelevant.” And although Muyskens “knew that Project Veritas had omitted and edited some of its videos” before releasing them, Fox adds, she “did not request or obtain Project Veritas’s missing videos or unedited footage.”

Chris Rickert:

The first half of Rhodes-Conway’s signature initiative, a Bus Rapid Transit system, is also expected to launch this fall, and while the federal government is picking up from 75% to 80% of the costs to build it, that still leaves the city on the hook for at least $70 million. City officials say the borrowing needed to cover that amount will not be significant, and the system will not cost more to operate than the traditional bus system it replaces.

Madison’s population has grown by 13.3% over the last five years, the city’s Finance Department reports, and the consumer price index, also known as inflation, is up 23% in that time.

Voters are already sure to see two referendums from the Madison School District on the Nov. 5 ballot. They would raise annual property taxes $1,370 by 2028.

———

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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?

Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today.

And that’s just the average. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran more than 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.

TJ Harker:

For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” were used to advance the Left’s racist social policies, first on the pretense that they remedied prior discrimination, next in alignment with the theory that diversity was good for the nation, and most recently to deal with the pretend phenomena known as “systemic racism” and “white privilege.”

More Americans are fighting back against the Left’s racist admissions policies, scholarship criteria, and related practices.Such racist, utopian scheming used to be called “affirmative action,” an innocuous term designed to conceal blatantly racist and unlawful discrimination. But despite the anodyne packaging, discrimination against whites and Asians violates the plain meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and amendments thereto) and the Fourteenth Amendment. It always has. Today, more Americans, including more white and Asian-American students, are fighting back against the Left’s racist university-admissions policies, scholarship eligibility criteria, and related practices.

These changes are happening around the nation, including in North Carolina’s leading institutions, with Duke walking back a race-based scholarship program on the heels of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling against the University of North Carolina and Harvard College in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions.

Micaiah Bilger:

A Penn State University trustee who ran on a fiscal responsibility platform says he has been denied access to financial records about its $5 billion endowment.

Now, after facing a “runaround” for years, Trustee Barry Fenchak said he is suing the university in an attempt to gain access to the documents.

“For raising issues, requesting information I am legally entitled to, and trying to engage my fellow trustees in honest deliberation I have been stripped of committee assignments, issued a Letter of Censure from the Executive Committee, and had my social privileges revoked,” Fenchak wrote Wednesday in his personal newsletter, shared with The College Fix.

April Rubin:

The class of 2023 had the worst ACT performance in more than three decades, according to newly released data from the nonprofit that administers the college admissions test.

Why it matters: The scores are the latest indication of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education, with academic performance and test scores declining at all levels. The 2023 cohort was in its first year of high school when the pandemic began.

By the numbers: The 2023 composite score, an average of the scores for the English, math, reading and science sections, was 19.5 out of 36.

Derek Thompson:

But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.

First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new analysis of Census databy Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

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Meanwhile, Madison, amidst excess space, seeks additional taxpayer funds to replace schools with excess space, rather than address boundaries.

Justin;

If you depend on a massive base of learners, most of whom are unserious, that puts hard constraints on how you teach. You have to employ ineffective learning strategies that do not repel unserious students.

When I tell people I work in math edtech, it’s initially kind of embarrassing.

They think of edutainment videos or arithmetic games where dinosaurs dance in front of you for answering 2+2 correctly.

Now, I’m fortunate enough to work on a learning system that’s pretty hardcore. Every decision we make is based on the science of optimizing student learning. It’s like quantitative finance but instead of optimizing return in the stock market, we’re optimizing learning efficiency in students’ brains. We go all the way up from 4th grade to university-level math (like, serious math major math, well beyond calculus).

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The power of tuition promise programs like Ripon’s is in the simple message it sends.

Students may not understand the college’s posted sticker price of more than $50,000 isn’t what they will actually pay. The Ripon Commitment is aimed at cutting through the confusing financial aid system, which can be particularly challenging for low-income students who rely on multiple sources of aid.

Other Wisconsin colleges offer tuition promise programs

College Promise, a nonprofit that advocates making the first two or more years of college free, identified at least 19 other promise programs in Wisconsin.

Most state technical colleges offer programs, including Milwaukee Area Technical College. So do a few other private institutions, including Lakeland College and Carthage College.

Among public universities, UW-Madison covers tuition for students whose families earn $65,000 or less. The program launched in 2018 and is funded through a mix of private money and institutional resources, not taxpayer money.

Kelly Meyerhofer and Sophie Carson:

At UW-Madison, Mnookin made the call for police to break up the encampment May 1. She texted the dean of students just before 7 a.m. to make clear protesters could walk away instead of facing arrest. She would later say using law enforcement against the campus community is “the last thing” a chancellor ever wants to do.

UW-Madison’s action raised the temperature in Milwaukee. Some began to call out UWM for what they saw as inaction, including UWM donors Jodi and Karen Peck. The university’s Peck School of the Arts is named after their family.

“We believe that you are ‘passing the buck’, burying your head in the sand and not actively dealing with this serious issue,” they emailed Mone on May 1. “Your communications have been weak and an affront to the Jewish community.”

That same day, Joel Berkowitz, director of UWM’s Center for Jewish Studies, reached out to Mone and the UWM police chief, urging them to stand down.

“I’m finding it literally painful to see so many campuses getting this moment very wrong,” Berkowitz emailed. “I hope we can continue to get it right.”

Mone thanked Berkowitz for the encouragement, then asked him for help.

Madison Lammert :

If you ask Wisconsin families about their child care situation, you’re bound to hear some startling anecdotes.

Often, child care is one of the biggest expenses in a household’s budget, sometimes surpassing mortgage payments. In dual-income households, one parent may decide it’s more economical to quit their job than pay for care each month.

Chances are by now you’ve also seen headlines about child care costing more than college.

How much does child care cost in Wisconsin, and how do costs fluctuate from county to county? The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families’ newly-released market-rate survey, which examines the cost of licensed full-time care for different age groups in most counties, shines light on these questions.

How much does child care cost in Wisconsin?

Child care prices fluctuate depending on a child’s age, the type of care they receive and where the child care is located.

Madison Lammert:

Child care prices in Wisconsin are increasing, yet they are often less than what it costs to provide care for children. At the same time, teachers are making less than what’s recommended.

These are all findings from Wisconsin’s latest Child Care Market Survey Results, which the state Department of Children and Families released Wednesday. The report, which is required to receive federal funding for the state’s child care subsidy program, draws on multiple data points from 2023 to better understand the state’s child care landscape.

Here are some key insights:

DCF’s Market Rate Survey breaks down care costs by location, type of care and children’s ages. The department surveys two types of child care providers: licensed family child care providers, who typically run their child care businesses out of their homes and can care for up to 8 children, and licensed group, or center-based, providers. These centers can care for more children than family providers.

Ben Landau-Taylor:

That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer review” processes of Nature and six other academic journals undetected, before eventually being uncovered by unrelated channels.

Schrag’s investigation that uncovered the fraudulent papers began as a tangent from his work uncovering doctored images used in studies supporting simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease. The suspicion would prove vindicated when in June 2024 Hoau-Yan Wang, a paid adviser to simufilam’s developer, was indicted by a federal grand juryfor fabricating data and images in simufilam studies for which he obtained $16 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, following a 2021 petition to the Food and Drug Administration, a method of reporting research fraud which is highly unusual if not unique.

Follow-up to evidence of Lesné’s fraud was slow. Schrag’s discovery kicked off two years of wrangling, eventually leading all of Lesné’s coauthors—but not Lesné himself—to agree to retract the 2006 Nature paper. As Sciencereported in 2022, “The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled ‘amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s’ has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and [his coauthor] Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.”

Scientists must now untangle the strands of fraud woven through decades of arguments stretching across a billion dollars worth of research. The paper’s contribution to the allocation of this billion dollars might also be a reason why such a widely-cited paper, presumably read by thousands of experts where some must have spotted the fraud, wasn’t reported earlier. Whether the amyloid hypothesis survives or not, this fraud has likely delayed the arrival of life-saving medication for tens of millions of people, perhaps by many years. If so, it is a humanitarian disaster larger than most wars.

No Consequences for Fraud 

Lee Smith:

But without a primary, without a popular referendum, without even the open convention that Obama was rumored to favor, how did the people make their will known, and strongly? Was it social media influencers? Mass rallies across the country? Media chronicling the excitement surrounding a Harris candidacy? No, it was nothing like that. Obama is the people. The people are Obama.

The endorsement was more than five years in the making. Obama had long wanted her in that spot. Their families are old friends. Like him, Harris is progressive, multiracial, physically attractive, nominally hip, a child of academics—in other words, according to Obama-friendly media, she’s a “female Barack Obama.” He directed donors to support her 2020 presidential campaign, Capitol Hill sources told me at the time. More billionaires, 47, backed her campaign than any other candidate’s—with Obama strongholds in Hollywood (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and Big Tech (Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Craig Newmark, etc.) leading the way.

Obama got her the vice presidential nod even when she was forced to drop out of the primary race after hitting just 3 percent in the polls. Jill Biden objected—Harris had called her husband a racist! The First Lady’s reported recent tantrums show that even after four years, she never fully grasped the arrangement the party had made with her husband. Biden was just an imperfect placeholder for Obama, and it was only a matter of time before the superior avatar would be slotted in.

The question is when, exactly, did it become clear to Obama that it was time for Harris to finally replace Biden? Was it after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump? After the attempted assassination of Trump? No, it seems the countdown officially began Oct. 7. The Palestinians’ murderous assault on communities in southern Israel exposed Biden’s limited ability to represent the interests of the party he was tapped to temporarily preside over. It didn’t require an especially refined moral sensibility to be appalled and terrified by the carnivalesque depravity of Oct. 7—but to give Biden credit, he evidently was. And that was the signal his time was up.

He‘s no John Fetterman. Biden is not a particularly courageous friend of the Jewish state, nor does he appear to much value the strategic importance of an ally that lessens America’s burden in a region vital to U.S. interests. When it comes to Israel, the 81-year-old president is just a normal late-20th-century Democrat who likes the country well enough, recognizes Jews as an important albeit small voting bloc and a crucial source of campaign funds, and performs ritualistic contempt for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But last Wednesday’s pro-Hamas riots in Washington, D.C.—in which domestic left-wing extremists linked arms with Middle East terror supporters and other foreigners to burn the American flag, deface monuments, and brawl with police, all in the name of protesting Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress—was only the latest evidence that the crux of Biden’s Oct. 7 problem was not that Michigan and Minnesota’s voter rolls are swollen with advocates of Muslim and Arab terror. The issue was not a party constituency at all, but rather the party itself and its leader. Barack Obama fundamentally reshaped the party when he struck the 2015 deal legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Hamas’ sponsor, Iran. By legitimizing the apocalyptic foreign policy aims of the world power that embodies Jew hatred, Obama sidelined the Jews and other centrists and made the progressive, anti-Israel faction the party’s new center of gravity.

The media did yeoman’s work obscuring the details and purpose of the agreement, but the fact is, by putting Iran’s bomb under a protective American umbrella, Obama was arming an American adversary to make it his own ally. The Iran deal was the first clear sign that Obama was not a normal U.S. commander in chief. When Biden extended even half-hearted, halting support to Israel’s response to Oct. 7, he crossed the only real red line Obama has ever had. Harris—who, unlike Biden, has no foreign policy beliefs or instincts of her own—never will.