Dr. Vinay Prasad reports on the insanity. Here is is in a nutshell (this is my mini-summary):
Mount Sinai School of Medicine: Striving for a healthy weight is racist. NYT: Stop worrying about losing weight. This is part of the new American ethos: This bad thing that is happening to you is not your fault. In fact, nothing is your fault. And there is no need to work hard to achieve anything.
If we tweak (or totally revamp) education, can we turn lackluster students into excellent students? Freddie DeBoer claims that, with some exceptions, no. The answer to this question bears substantially and harshly on many public policy issues. First, an excerpt from DeBoer's essay, "Education Doesn't Work 2.0: a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps":
The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded economically and socially in our society.
This phenomenon is relevant to the question of genetic influence on intelligence, but this post is not about that. The evidence of such influence appears strong to me, and opposition to it seems to rely on a kind of Cartesian dualism. However, one need not believe in genetic influence on academic outcomes to recognize the phenomenon I’m describing today. Entirely separate from the debate about genetic influences on academic performance, we cannot dismiss the summative reality of limited educational plasticity and its potentially immense social repercussions. What I’m here to argue today is not about a genetic influence on academic outcomes. I’m here to argue that regardless of the reasons why, most students stay in the same relative academic performance band throughout life, defying all manner of life changes and schooling and policy interventions. We need to work to provide an accounting of this fact, and we need to do so without falling into endorsing a naïve environmentalism that is demonstrably false. And people in education and politics, particularly those who insist education will save us, need to start acknowledging this simple reality. Without communal acceptance that there is such a thing as an individual’s natural level of ability, we cannot have sensible educational policy. . .
Fascinating conversation between Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. I'd like to know more, of course. Did Twitter have plenty of bandwidth for censoring real doctors in the COVID debates, but no bandwidth to protect children from sexual exploitation?
Consider first, Tucker Carlson's report on Balenciaga:
Now consider this thread by Shoe:
Gays Against Groomers adds this commentary.
There is only one conclusion to draw regarding Balenciaga.
Balenziaga's conduct is odious and I agree with Tucker Carlson that the left-leaning legacy media's silence is also odious. This is not a close call. I write this as the father of two daughters. I also write this as someone who has LONG been against the sexualization of children. And see here and here.
Excerpt from a new article at Reason: New Data Show COVID School Closures Contributed to Largest Learning Loss in Decades: Teachers unions and progressive politicians pushed for school closures during the pandemic.
Last week, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released new data showing a dramatic decline in test scores among American 9-year-olds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data indicate a devastating learning loss among American schoolchildren, marking the largest decline in reading scores since 1990, and the first ever recorded drop in mathematics scores.
These results come from a special administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend (LTT) assessments, which measured reading and mathematics outcomes among 9-year-olds. Since its inception, the LTT has tracked a steady rise in educational performance among 9-year-olds. However, from 2020 to 2022, the LTT revealed a steep drop in 9-year-old students' performance. Reading scores dropped by five points over the two-year period, while mathematics scores dropped by seven points. In all, the decline in test scores represents the reversal of around two decades of improvement in math and reading scores.
"These results are sobering," Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told The Washington Post. "It's clear that covid-19 shocked American education and stunted the academic growth of this age group."
Glenn Greenwald was excoriated by many people when he suggested (in August 2021) that we do a cost-benefit analysis before shutting down schools. We do such a cost-benefit analysis in most other walks of life, such as automobile safety. We failed to think rationally with regard to our schools and now we've hurt millions of children. Too many of us became obsessed with achieving something that clearly impossible: Zero Covid." Too many of us were not interested in looking at statistics showing that Covid presented only a tiny risk to most school children. We did not follow the science. Why are so many people still not willing to admit that Ron DeSantis made the right call about keeping the schools open in Florida? Why am I not confident that we've learned a damned thing from this tragedy?