Category: Education

So-Called “Progressives” Block Progress Toward School Choice

(p. A15) I was wrong to think that Democrats would support school choice to help their constituents out of poverty. Although polling consistently shows that a majority of minority parents want school choice, progressive politicians consistently oppose all such programs.

To understand why, consider who’s funding their campaigns: teachers unions. For unions, choice means competition, and urban public schools with low proficiency ratings can’t compete. Unions know the only way to keep their political power is to keep children trapped in failing schools. Give parents access to other educational options, and they’ll ditch the schools that take them for granted.

. . .

I have discussed school choice with Mr. Trump, and I’m encouraged by what he said. I’m likewise impressed by his actions to advance the cause in real time—namely, by endorsing several of the pro-school choice Republicans in Texas’s legislative primaries. If Mr. Trump uses his bully pulpit to build support for school choice across the country, as he did in Texas, I believe he’ll help improve the lives of many generations of Americans.

I’ve never given financial support to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and I don’t plan to. But on the issue I care about most deeply, the stakes are high.  . . .  . . . the choice is clear.

For the full commentary see:

Jeff Yass. “Trump Is Best for School Choice, Even if I Won’t Donate to Him.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 9, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 8, 2024, and has the title “Trump Is Best for School Choice, Even if I Won’t Donate to His Campaign.”)

Babies’ Curiosity Leads Them to Prefer Persons Who Inform

(p. C2) . . . Katarina Begus of Birkbeck, University of London and her colleagues . . . started out exploring the origins of curiosity. When grown-ups think that they are about to learn something new, their brains exhibit a pattern of activity called a theta wave. The researchers fitted out 45 11-month-old babies with little caps covered with electrodes to record brain activity. The researchers wanted to see if the babies would also produce theta waves when they thought that they might learn something new.

The babies saw two very similar-looking people interact with a familiar toy like a rubber duck. One experimenter pointed at the toy and said, “That’s a duck.” The other just pointed at the object and instead of naming it made a noise: She said “oooh” in an uninformative way.

Then the babies saw one of the experimenters pick up an unfamiliar gadget. You would expect that the person who told you the name of the duck could also tell you about this new thing. And, sure enough, when the babies saw the informative experimenter, their brains produced theta waves, as if they expected to learn something. On the other hand, you might expect that the experimenter who didn’t tell you anything about the duck would also be unlikely to help you learn more about the new object. Indeed, the babies didn’t produce theta waves when they saw this uninformative person.

. . .

Babies leap at the chance to learn something new—and can figure out who is likely to teach them. The babies did prefer the person in their own group, but that may have reflected curiosity, not bias. They thought that someone who spoke the same language could tell them the most about the world around them.

For the full commentary see:

Alison Gopnik. “Mind & Matter; Babies Show a Clear Bias—To Learn New Things.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016 [sic]): C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Oct. 26, 2016 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

Begus’s co-authored academic paper is:

Begus, Katarina, Teodora Gliga, and Victoria Southgate. “Infants’ Preferences for Native Speakers Are Associated with an Expectation of Information.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 44 (2016): 12397-402.

In “An Entrenched Echo Chamber” the Highly Credentialed Slow Progress Toward an Alzheimer’s Cure

Centralized research funding (often centralized by government agencies) reduces the pluralism of ideas and methods that often lead to breakthrough innovations. The story of Alzheimer’s research, quoted below, is a dramatic case-in-point.

A secondary related lesson from the story quoted below is that Dr. Thambisetty, one of the outsiders struggling to make a difference, is trying to evade the enormous costs of mandated phase 3 clinical trials, by only investigating drugs that already have been approved by the FDA for use against other conditions. With his severely limited funding, and the huge costs of mandated phase 3 clinical trials, this may be a shrewd strategy for Thambisetty, but notice that by following it, he will never explore all the as-yet-unapproved chemicals that might include the best magic bullet against Alzheimer’s.)

(p. A25) What if a preposterous failed treatment for Covid-19 — the arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine — could successfully treat another dreaded disease, Alzheimer’s?

Dr. Madhav Thambisetty, a neurologist at the National Institute on Aging, thinks the drug’s suppression of inflammation, commonly associated with neurodegenerative disorders, might provide surprising benefits for dementia.

It’s an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, we won’t know for quite a while, if ever, whether Dr. Thambisetty is right. That’s because unconventional ideas that do not offer fealty to the dominant approach to study and treat Alzheimer’s — what’s known as the amyloid hypothesis — often find themselves starved for funds and scientific mind share.

Such shortsighted rigidity may have slowed progress toward a cure — a tragedy for a disease projected to affect more than 11 million people in the United States by 2040.

. . .

. . ., in 2006, an animal experiment published in the journal Nature identified a specific type of amyloid protein as the first substance found in brain tissue to directly cause symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s. Top scientists called it a breakthrough that provided a key target for treatments. The paper became one of the most cited in the field, and funds to explore similar proteins skyrocketed.

. . .

In 2022, my investigation in Science showed evidence that the famous 2006 experiment that helped push forward the amyloid hypothesis used falsified data. On June 24 [2024], after most of its authors conceded technical images were doctored, the paper was finally retracted.

. . .

In reporting for my forthcoming book about the disturbing state of play in Alzheimer’s research, I’ve spoken to many scientists pursuing alternatives. Dr. Thambisetty, for example, compares brain tissues from people who died in their 30s or 40s with and without genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s. He then compares these findings to tissues from deceased Alzheimer’s patients and people who didn’t have the disease. Where changes overlap, drug targets might emerge. Rather than develop new drugs through lab and animal testing, followed by clinical trials that cost vast sums — a process that can take decades — he examines treatments already approved as reasonably safe and effective for other conditions. Patent protections have lapsed for many, making them inexpensive.

Experiments have also begun to test the weight-loss drug semaglutide (sold as Wegovy, among other brands). Researchers hope that results due in 2026 will show that its anti-inflammatory effects — like Dr. Thambisetty’s idea about hydroxychloroquine — slow cognitive decline.

Ruth Itzhaki, a research scientist at the University of Oxford, stirred curiosity in the 1990s when she shared evidence tying Alzheimer’s to herpesvirus — a scourge spread by oral or genital contact and often resulting in painful infections. For years, powerful promoters of the amyloid hypothesis ignored or dismissed the infection hypothesis for Alzheimer’s, effectively rendering it invisible, Dr. Itzhaki said with exasperation. Research suggests that viruses may hide undetected in organs, including the brain, for years, causing symptoms divergent from the original infection.

. . .

Sometimes a disease stems from a single clear-cut origin, such as genetic mutations that cause deadly sickle cell disease. “But very few diseases of aging have just one cause. It’s just not logical,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Working independently of his university, he discovered the 2006 research image manipulations.

. . .

“There is an entrenched echo chamber that involves a lot of big names,” Dr. Schrag said. “It’s time for the field to move on.”

For the full commentary see:

Charles Piller. “All the Alzheimer’s Research We Didn’t Do.” The New York Times (Friday, July 12, 2024): A25.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 7, 2024, and has the same title as the print version. Where there are a couple of small differences in wording, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Piller’s paper in Science, mentioned above, is:

Piller, Charles. “Blots on a Field?” Science 377, no. 6604 (July 2022): 358-63.

Piller’s commentary is related to his forthcoming book:

Piller, Charles. Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, Forthcoming on February 4, 2025.

“Funny, Obsessed Weirdos . . . Taking Children’s Entertainment . . . Seriously”

(p. C4) . . . to everyone other than Muppet obsessives, Henson the artist is still a bit shadowy. Good news: Now we have “Jim Henson Idea Man” (on Disney+), a tribute to the artist and a treasure trove of archival footage and interviews about his work and life.  . . .

The film, directed by Ron Howard, starts with Henson and two of his Muppet friends, Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog — Henson’s alter ego — being interviewed on TV by none other than Orson Welles.

. . .

. . . what struck me especially was that Howard has made a movie that every young artist should watch (and older ones, too), whether they’re making puppets, paintings, music, movies or anything that requires creative labor.

That’s because the film shows that Henson’s work was rooted in an unquenchable drive for exploration. One interviewee notes that he was lured into working on “Sesame Street” by the promise that he could make the kind of short experimental films he loved — and suddenly I realized that my taste for unhinged abstraction in film had been partly shaped when I was 4 and plopped in front of PBS.

. . .

The immense delight in “Jim Henson Idea Man” comes with simply watching funny, obsessed weirdos like Henson and his friends doing something nobody else was doing, something few people do anymore: taking children’s entertainment (and later adult entertainment) seriously as craft. I’ve heard naysayers argue that it’s silly to ask children’s movies to be any good, since they’re just for kids. But Henson knew better: Every opportunity to make something was a chance to explore with the audience. There’s a reason, then, that his work lasts.

For the full review see:

Alissa Wilkinson. “CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; Took Kid Stuff Seriously.” The New York Times (Wednesday, June 5, 2024): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the dated May 31, 2024, and has the title “CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; ‘Jim Henson Idea Man’: In a Joyful Weirdo, Lessons for Young Artists.”)

“Extended School Closures Did Not Significantly Stop the Spread of Covid, While the Academic Harms for Children Have Been Large and Long-Lasting”

(p. A13) Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

For the full story see:

Sarah Mervosh, Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris. “Pandemic School Closures Came at a Steep Cost to Students, Data Shows.” The New York Times (Friday, March 29, 2024): A13.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 19, 2024, and has the title “What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later.”)

Jerry Seinfeld Knows “the Extreme Left and P.C. Crap” Hampers Comedy

(p. C1) Since the attacks of Oct. 7 [2023] in Israel, and through their bloody and volatile aftermath in Gaza, Mr. Seinfeld, 70, has emerged as a strikingly public voice against antisemitism and in support of Jews in Israel and the United States, edging warily toward a more forward-facing advocacy role than he ever seemed to seek across his decades of fame.

He has shared reflections about life on a kibbutz in his teens, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with hostages’ families, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that greeted him during the trip.

He has participated, to a point, in the kind of celebrity activism with which few associate him — letter-signing campaigns, earnest messages on social media — answering simply recently when asked about the motivation for his visit to Israel: “I’m Jewish.”

And as some American cities and college campuses simmer with conflict over the Middle East crisis and Israel’s military response, Mr. Seinfeld has faced a measure of public scorn that he has rarely courted as a breakfast-obsessed comedian, intensified by the more vocal advocacy of his wife, Jessica, a cookbook author.

. . .

(p. C4) Since “Seinfeld,” he has spoken most expansively about the art of comedy itself, framing it as a morally neutral pursuit whose highest aim is to make people laugh. (Mr. Seinfeld recently made headlines for suggesting in an interview with The New Yorker that “the extreme left and P.C. crap” had hampered comedy.)

For the full story see:

Matt Flegenheimer and Marc Tracy. “Jerry Seinfeld Is Clearly No Longer About Nothing.” The New York Times (Monday, May 6, 2024): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 4, 2024, and has the title “Jerry Seinfeld Can No Longer Be About Nothing.”)

Tax Universities to Offset Their Negative Externalities?

(p. A11) What can we do about the corruption of American higher education? Milton Friedman had an idea 20 years ago: Tax the schools rather than subsidize them. That reflected a change of heart. In “Capitalism and Freedom” (1960), he argued that college education had enough “positive externalities” to justify subsidies. But when I was researching a book in 2003, I emailed him (then 91) and asked if he still believed that.

He replied: “I have not changed my view that higher education has some positive externality, but I have become much more aware that it also has negative externalities. I am much more dubious than I was . . . that there is any justification at all for government subsidy of higher education. The spread of PC”—political correctness—“would seem to be a very strong negative externality, and certainly the 1960s student demonstrations were negative externalities. . . . A full analysis along those lines might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.”

For the full commentary, see:

Richard Vedder. “Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 23, 2023): A11.

(Note: ellipses in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 22, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Friedman’s book mentioned above is:

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Physicians Are Neither Trained Nor Paid to Express the “Medical Heresy” that Good Health Depends on Good Nutrition

(p. A17) Amazingly, medical schools in the United States focus very little on nutrition. The topic, according to one study, gets less than 1% of the classroom time that aspiring physicians are required to sit through over four years—even though the foods and beverages people ingest are far and away, in America, the biggest drivers of disease.

Because of the knowledge gap, doctors routinely miss opportunities to counsel their patients on the connection between nutrition and health—thus allowing bad eating habits to keep doing major damage. This failure is one of many indictments that Robert Lustig, a physician, brings against America’s medical-nutritional establishment in “Metabolical,” a wide-ranging polemic that covers the misdeeds of food and beverage companies and the misinformation that, in his view, contributes to the undermining of health.

. . .

Dr. Lustig’s real complaint is with “ultra-processed” products, which account for 58% of Americans’ calorie intake. Such products—candy, crackers, deli meat, frozen pizzas, fruit juices—are increasingly found not just in supermarkets and restaurants but virtually everywhere: movie theaters, hardware stores, gas stations, even health clubs. They’re typically mass produced, have a long shelf life and offer low nutritional quality.

How low? Dr. Lustig characterizes these products as “poison” more than two dozen times. To validate the claim, he describes in detail how the dominant features of such foods—high in sugar but also teeming with nitrates and refined carbohydrates—lead to cancer and other chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Roughly 60% of Americans are afflicted with such diseases today (up from 30% in 1980). Relatedly, unhealthy eating has contributed to the decline in U.S. life expectancy in recent years.

That doctors don’t do more to steer their patients away from such hazards is only part of Dr. Lustig’s attack on the medical profession. He believes that, on the whole, doctors are “parochial,” taking their cues mostly from other doctors and thus succumbing to herd thinking. He worries that too many elements in their professional world—research, clinical meetings, webinars—are underwritten by Big Pharma and that the little nutrition science they know is compromised by studies that are sponsored by food companies. He says that doctors “don’t listen” to their patients and prefer to reach for the “quickest and easiest form of treatment,” whether it works or not, in part because insurance companies have limited the length of patient visits. “Talking about lifestyle changes takes time that we don’t have—because that’s how we’ve been trained and how we get paid.”

. . .

Dr. Lustig says that his book is “both my act of contrition to you, the public, and my act of medical disobedience to the medical establishment.” He hints that he could write such a book only after retiring from clinical practice—at the University of California, San Francisco (where he is an emeritus professor)—because “no ivory tower academic bastion would want to take credit for the ‘medical heresy’ that you’ll find sandwiched within these pages.”

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; Is It Something I Ate?” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, May 10, 2021 [sic]): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2021 [sic], and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Metabolical’ Review: Is It Something I Ate?”)

The book under review is:

Lustig, Robert H. Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. New York: Harper, 2021.

Banning the SAT as Racist Is an Insult “Against Black Intelligence”

The soundness of Prof. McWhorter’s argument is neither increased nor decreased by the fact that he is black. His courage in stating the argument is increased by the fact that he is black.

(p. 4) . . . lately, evidence has mounted, steadily, that the SAT is in fact useful in demonstrating students’ abilities regardless of their economic backgrounds or the quality of their high schools. Some studies show scores correlate with student performance in college more strongly than high-school grades, and that without the standardized test data it is harder to identify Black, Latino and lower-income white kids who would likely thrive in elite universities.

. . .

The SAT as racist, objectivity as white privilege, making academic training easier to attract Black majors and graduate students — there is a family relationship between them. Namely, an assumption that it is graceless or unfair to require Black people to grapple with detail, solve puzzles and make sense of the unfamiliar. At least, we are not to be expected to engage in such things nearly as much as, say, white people.

. . .

I’m sorry, but I find this a diminished, not to mention depressing, and downright boring racial self-image. It just doesn’t correspond with so very much that Black people do, and are, and seek and always have.

. . .

No coherent admissions assessment would use the SAT as the sole measure of an applicant’s potential. However, the elimination of such tests from the process is less a favor to than an insult leveled against Black intelligence.

For the full commentary, see:

John McWhorter. “No, the SAT Isn’t Racist.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, March 17, 2024): 4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 14, 2024, and has the title “The Best Way to Find Out if We Can Cool the Planet.”)

Dissenters from Orthodoxy Can Be Easily Blackballed When They Are Required to Write Diversity Statements

(p. A15) Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.”

. . .

The biology department’s motion mandates that every search committee issue a report on its diversity statement evaluations. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I have acquired the evaluations of more than a dozen job candidates.

To my knowledge, these documents—published in redacted form by the National Association of Scholars—are the first evaluations of prospective faculty DEI contributions to be made publicly available. They confirm what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.

One Texas Tech search committee penalized a candidate for espousing race-neutrality in teaching. The candidate “mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally,” the evaluation notes. “This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”

. . .

The biology department’s search committees also rewarded fluency in the language of identity politics. An immunology candidate was praised for awareness of the problems of “unconscious bias.” “Inclusivity in lab” was listed as a virology candidate’s strength: “her theme will be diversity, and she will actively work to creating the culture—e.g. enforce code of conduct, prevent microaggressions etc.”   . . .

Many critics rightly point out that diversity statements invite viewpoint discrimination. DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views. Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.

For the full commentary, see:

John D. Sailer. “How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023 [sic]): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 6, 2023 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

Campus D.E.I. Perpetuates “a Strong Political Orientation Bias”

(p. A24) The same week that a U.C. Berkeley protest ended in violence, with doors broken, people allegedly injured, a guest lecture organized by Jewish students canceled and attendees evacuated by the police through an underground passageway, a group of academics gathered across the bay at Stanford to discuss restoring inclusive civil discourse on campus. The underlying question: In today’s heated political environment, is that even possible?

. . .

Hosted by Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the conference brought together professors, deans and academic leaders who were largely liberal, with libertarians and a few conservatives and progressives in the mix. Unfortunately, one of the organizers told me, most of the invited progressives, which is to say the group that currently dominates campus debates, refused to come.

. . .

Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College, endorsed the goal of diversifying staffs. The problem isn’t principle or legality, she said; it’s practice. Diversity according to whom? And in what context?

“It’s always ‘historically excluded and underrepresented,’” she said. “But historically when? Conservatives could argue they have been historically excluded. What’s underrepresented at Hillsdale College will be different from what’s underrepresented in the U.C. system.”

“We all know that there’s a strong political orientation bias being perpetuated,” she continued. “‘Not a good fit,’ they’ll say. It’s fundamentally dishonest, and it creates more problems than it addresses.”

. . .

“What they want are non-straights, nonwhites and non-men,” said Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University. “But they don’t say it that way. There’s a lack of forthrightness that breaks people in these situations.” In his field, men are underrepresented, and queer scholarship is overrepresented. “But it strains credulity to say that anyone would read a D.E.I. statement about someone’s queer work and say that’s an overrepresented group.”

For the full story, see:

Pamela Paul. “Civil Discourse on Campus Is Put to the Test.” The New York Times (Friday, March 8, 2024): A24.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 7, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)