The Myth of the ‘Underfunded School’

The Myth of the ‘Underfunded School’ - John Hirschauer

• A new report casts doubt on the old “underfunded schools” trope.

"It is hard to think of a pathology in American urban life, from crime to poverty to fatherlessness, that is not blamed on “underfunded schools.” 

Progressives conjure up images of a run-down schoolhouse with moldy walls, tattered decades-old textbooks, and musty blackboards to explain away the decades of academic underperformance and high drop-out, truancy, and delinquency rates in inner-city schools...

It's the Bee, but it's fact!

Film incentives still don’t make sense for Michigan

Film incentives still don’t make sense for Michigan

• Michigan corporate welfare meets Hollywood accounting: What could go wrong?

A reminder of what transpired from 2008-2015 when Michigan had film incentives:

• Taxpayers spent $500 million, resulting in only a small, temporary job blip.
• There were multiple studio collapses, including one in Pontiac (which required a bailout from the teacher pension system) and one in Allen Park (which nearly bankrupted the city).
• The state film office approved a $1 million subsidy for a Michael Moore documentary...a movie that was about how those with connections took advantage of taxpayers...

#1 This day 1956-----Heaven on earth - The Platters

Out of Outrage: Where is the U.S. Response? :: Gatestone Institute

Out of Outrage: Where is the U.S. Response? :: Gatestone Institute - by Pete Hoekstra

• Despite COVID having killed more than 1.13 million Americans as of mid-June 2023, and with a cost to the U.S. economy estimated to be $14 trillion — yes trillion — by the end of 2023, where is the united outrage among American citizens over the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the pandemic?...

• [T]he CCP has also been sending across America's southern border groups of single men of military age, with the apparent aim of sabotaging American installations on the first day of a conflict if the U.S. tries to counter a Chinese offensive on Taiwan...

• Many American political, tech and business leaders are funding the China's military and seem casually indifferent about the deadly-serious existential threat from the CCP...

Many American political, tech and business leaders are funding the China's military and seem casually indifferent about the deadly-serious existential threat from the Chinese Communist Party. Pictured: DF-17 hypersonic missiles at a military parade in Beijing, China, on October 1, 2019. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The statewide child abuse EXPANDS!

Black comedian from same town as Jason Aldean reveals the real motive behind leftist outrage: 'A very patriotic song' - TheBlaze

Black comedian from same town as Jason Aldean reveals the real motive behind leftist outrage: 'A very patriotic song' - TheBlaze: 

Comedian David Lucas hit back on Monday at critics who complain that country music star Jason Aldean's newest song, "Try That In a Small Town," is racist.

Lucas — who grew up in the same town where Aldean was born, Macon, Georgia — said in a new video that he cannot understand how the song is being painted as racist.

The Left’s Latest Trump Freakout — He Wants To Control The Executive Branch!

The Left’s Latest Trump Freakout — He Wants To Control The Executive Branch! - I & I Editorial Board

"...What has the left grasping for the Xanax again? 

Here are the horrifying facts as reported by the Times:

Trump – as well as other Republicans running for office – hope to “increase the president’s authority” over the executive branch of government, including “independent” federal agencies.
“He wants to revive the practice of ‘impounding’ funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like,” the Times reports. “He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda.”...

Maddow and others throwing temper tantrums might try reading the Constitution one day. 

Right there, in Article II, Section 1, it says “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”...

Also worth noting is that when a Democratic president seeks to purge the government of political opponents, they are celebrated.
Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, the Washington Post wrote a glowing story about how he was cleaning house of Trump holdovers and why it was a good thing...

Try as we might, we could not find a single story that compared Biden to Hitler for taking such actions.

AM Fruitcake

 

History for July 28

History for July 28 - On-This-Day.com

Rudy Vallee 1901

• 1821 - Peru declared its independence from Spain.
• 1866 - The metric system was legalized by the U.S. Congress for the standardization of weights and measures throughout the United States.
• 1868 - The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was declared in effect. The amendment guaranteed due process of law.
• 1914 - World War I officially began when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
• 1945 - A U.S. Army bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York City's Empire State Building. 14 people were killed and 26 were injured.
• 1965 - U.S. President Johnson announced he was increasing the number of American troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000.
• 1982 - San Francisco, CA, became the first city in the U.S. to ban handguns.

Hunter Biden pleads 'not guilty' as plea deal falls apart during Delaware court appearance | Fox News

Hunter Biden pleads 'not guilty' as plea deal falls apart during Delaware court appearance | Fox News: 

Hunter Biden's plea deal fell apart during his first court appearance Wednesday morning and he pleaded "not guilty" as federal prosecutors confirmed the president's son is still under federal investigation. Hunter Biden was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, as part of plea deal to avoid jail time on a felony gun charge.

The way we were-----The Great Blizzard of 1888

So much drivel here Read it all. The latest weapon for "quota-ists"? "Economic diversity"!-----The Morning: Behind the scenes of college admissions

The Morning: Behind the scenes of college admissions
"Thumb on the scale
For almost 20 years, I have been writing about economic diversity at selective colleges. 

Many of my articles have suggested that the colleges are not enrolling as many low- and middle-income students as they could.
Every so often, I hear from a professor or college administrator who pushes back, and the critique tends to go something like this:

Do you realize how many of the top-performing students on our campus are affluent? By the time students arrive here, they have been living in America’s highly unequal society for 18 years. We wish that weren’t the case, but it is, and there are real problems with pretending otherwise.
You’d see this if you looked at who did the best in our classes. Or who our top research assistants are. Those students often come from comfortable backgrounds. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to do the cutting-edge research we do.

This morning, a team of economists released a detailed study of elite college enrollment. It’s based on admissions records that several colleges made available as well as tax returns that tracked students after college. 

The findings likely apply to many elite colleges, including the Ivy League, Duke, Stanford, Swarthmore and Williams. 

And the implications are particularly relevant when many colleges are revamping admissions policies in response to the Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action.
The findings have also helped me understand both how my interlocutors have been right and how they have been wrong.
Today’s newsletter explains what I mean by that. If you want to learn more about the study, The Times has published a detailed article.
7 vs. 16
The new study, by Raj Chetty and David Deming of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown, demonstrates that the country’s most qualified high school students are indeed disproportionately affluent.
About 7 percent of the country’s very top students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. These students tend to have scored at least 1500 on the SAT (or 35 on the ACT), received top marks on Advanced Placement tests, earned almost all A’s in their high school classes, and often excelled in science fairs or other competitions.
Perhaps the most surprising pattern involves so-called legacy students, those who attend the same college that their parents did. 

At the elite colleges that the researchers studied, legacy students had stronger academic qualifications on average than nonlegacy students. 

Similarly, graduates of private high schools had stronger academic records on average than graduates of public high schools or Catholic schools.
These stellar academic backgrounds predict later success. 

Highly qualified affluent students tend to excel in college and afterward — which indicates that the professors and university officials who’ve reached out to me over the years have a point.
Yet they are also overlooking an important part of the story: Most of these colleges do not admit only the hyper-qualified affluent students; they also admit many other high-income students.
As I mentioned above, 7 percent of the country’s very best high school students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. 

But what proportion of students at elite colleges comes from the top 1 percent of the income distribution? 

Much more: 16 percent.
This combination of facts is a tricky one to grasp. Affluent students are overrepresented among the nation’s best high school students — but the colleges are nonetheless admitting a larger number of affluent students than if the decisions were based on academics alone. 

The biggest boost goes to the wealthiest students:

Source: Opportunity Insights | Data is from at least three of the top 12 colleges with available records. | By The New York Times

Private school polish

The results from Chetty, Deming and Friedman point to three main explanations:

Legacy is a major advantage. These colleges are inundated with strong applications. When admissions offices are making close calls among students with similar transcripts, legacy status acts as a trump card. About half of legacy students at these colleges would not be there without the admissions boost they receive. A similar advantage applies to the graduates of private schools (not including religious schools). Schools like Andover, Brentwood and Dalton do such a good job of selling their students — through teacher recommendations, essay editing and other help — that colleges admit them more often than academic merit would dictate. Many college admissions officers think they can see through this polish, but they don’t. Recruited athletes are admitted with much lower academic standards — and are disproportionately affluent. It’s not just true of the obvious teams, like golf, squash, fencing and sailing. In today’s era of expensive youth sports, most teams skew wealthy. If colleges changed their approach to sports, they could admit more middle-class and poor athletes (or nonathletes) with stronger academic credentials.

Source: Opportunity Insights | By The New York Times

The bottom line
Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Obama administration official who has seen the study’s results, has a helpful way of making sense of them. 

At some point, there really would be a trade-off between equity and excellence. 

But elite colleges aren’t anywhere near that point, Furman said. They are admitting many more affluent students than their qualifications justify.
Chetty put it this way: “The key point is that we don’t need to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the poor. We just need to take the thumb that we — perhaps inadvertently — have on the scale in favor of the rich.”
There are obviously still hard questions, like how selective colleges might make up the lost tuition from well-off students or the lost donations from alumni and sports fans. 

The good news, though, is that there are plenty of standout students from modest backgrounds who would benefit from attending these schools. 

Elite colleges can become more economically diverse without sacrificing academic preparation.
(A note of disclosure: I’m on the unpaid board of advisers of Opportunity Insights, the research group that published the paper.)
For more: The Times’s article and graphics explain much more, including these colleges’ outsize role in propelling their graduates into elite jobs.

Rewriting America's BRAVE, WISE history!-----Hollywood Shocker: The Authors of the Book Behind Nolan’s Oppenheimer Were Both Editors and Writers at The Nation.

Instapundit-- Hollywood Shocker: The Authors of the Book Behind Nolan’s Oppenheimer Were Both Editors and Writers at The Nation. - by Ed Driscoll

The New York Times seems to be deliriously in favor of the movie Oppenheimer, with Kai Bird assuring us in his New York Times piece that opposition to the Red Scare was good and principled, that he hopes that “Christopher Nolan’s stunning new film on Oppenheimer’s complicated legacy will initiate a national conversation”...

Over ten years after Antony Beevor came out with astonishing revelations from the Kremlin’s archives...the historian’s conclusions are still not accepted by the élites (they are not challenged — with arguments good or ill — they are simply ignored), leading them to call opposition to communism and to the USSR “a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues.”

Astonishingly, [Oppenheimer] had gone so far as to say that the Hiroshima bomb was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.” The atomic bomb, he warned, “is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”

“An essentially defeated enemy?” That would be news to the author of this 1946 Atlantic article: If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used. Was Japan already beaten before the August 1945 bombings?

Was Japan already beaten before the atomic bomb? 

• The answer is certainly “yes” in the sense that the fortunes of war had turned against her.
• The answer is “no” in the sense that she was still fighting desperately and there was every reason to believe that she would continue to do so; and this is the only answer that has any practical significance.

General MacArthur’s staff anticipated about 50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu...

UPDATE:

NY Times reporter quickly exposes glaring hole in KJP's answer about Biden's role in Hunter's business dealings - TheBlaze

NY Times reporter quickly exposes glaring hole in KJP's answer about Biden's role in Hunter's business dealings - TheBlaze: 

The White House is raising eyebrows with a new answer about President Joe Biden's alleged involvement in Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings.

For years, Biden has insisted he not only was never involved with his son's business deals — or the business of any Biden family member, for that matter — but that he has never even discussed business with Hunter.

What are they scared of?

"@deeceea9488 - 7 days ago (edited)

It's wild. I was in the theater to see the film and not only did they not turn the lights off, but ushers were constantly whirling around distracting viewers.  

At one point, an usher annoyingly asked a lady, "What's the problem?!?"

This giant dude who resembled Lawrence Taylor stood up and belted out, "Kill The M'F'in Lights!!!".

The audience applauded wildly.

The lights went out."

The slow suicide, continuing of the once great NR-----The Most National Review Column Ever

The Most National Review Column Ever - Kurt Schlichter

"...The latest headshaker is Kathryn Jean Lopez tut-tutting that "Jason Aldean Isn't Helping,"..
...I could fisk through Lopez's sorry take on "Try That In A Small Town" to explain why no, it is not bad to protect your home from rampaging criminal scumbags even if you have to use violence. 

But I should not have to. 

That is a self-evident truth...
I am at a loss as to why Kathryn Jean Lopez fails to understand this. 

• Being a conservative does not mean being a pacifist, though that pacifism does not appear to extend to Ukraine, only to Americans defending themselves. 

It is of a kind with NR's tendency to embrace a neutered, weak conservativism that offends no one, defends nothing, and always goes down in defeat...

Lunch video-----Reduce Knee Pain by 50% with ONE Simple Trick!

Noon-toon

 

Democrat Donor Bought Hunter's Art, Named to Commission by Joe Biden

Democrat Donor Bought Hunter's Art, Named to Commission by Joe Biden: 

Hunter Biden reportedly knows the identities of at least two of his art buyers, one of whom is reportedly a large Democrat donor, Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, who President Joe Biden placed as the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.

The White House previously claimed Hunter Biden would not know who the identities of the “anonymous” art buyers when questioned about conflicts of interest and ethics concerns.

Thet're teaching this in America's inner-city schools!

 

Leftists take care of their own. With YOUR MONEY!-----Leftist prosecutor booted from office gets $210,000 job at UC Berkeley | The College Fix

Leftist prosecutor booted from office gets $210,000 job at UC Berkeley | The College Fix - ANNA WASCOVICH

• 
  
• 'If Boudin was hired to relate his experience, the only take could be how to destroy a city’s criminal justice system piece by piece,’ critic says

A former leftist prosecutor in San Francisco who lost a recall election as district attorney due to voter dissatisfaction with his soft-on-crime policies is going to be paid $210,000 per year in his new job at the University of California Berkeley...

Why would anyone believe these selfish hypocrites?!!

 

Subclinical Heart Damage More Prevalent Than Thought After Moderna Vaccination: Study

Subclinical Heart Damage More Prevalent Than Thought After Moderna Vaccination: Study - Zachary Stieber, Reporter

• "Damage to the heart is more common than thought after receipt of Moderna’s COVID-19 booster, a new study indicates.
• One in 35 (2.8%) health care workers at a Swiss hospital had signs of heart injury associated with the vaccine, mRNA-1273, researchers found.
• In a generally healthy population, the level would be about 1 percent, the researchers said...

“According to current knowledge, the cardiac muscle can’t regenerate, or only to a very limited degree at best. 

So it’s possible that repeated booster vaccinations every year could cause moderate damage to the heart muscle cells,” University Hospital Basel professor Christian Muller, a cardiologist and the lead researcher, said in a statement...

#1 this day 1949-----Some Enchanted Evening - Perry Como (a #1 record)

The entire med/pharma/gov world has been proven to be liars and we aren't allowed to ask questions?!!-----Elon Musk Questions Whether The COVID Vaccine Caused Bronny James' Recent Cardiac Arrest - Bounding Into Sports

Elon Musk Questions Whether The COVID Vaccine Caused Bronny James' Recent Cardiac Arrest - Bounding Into Sports

"Elon Musk came under fire on Tuesday after the billionaire mogul tweeted and speculated on a possible connection between the COVID-19 vaccine and the cardiac arrest suffered by Bronny James, the 18-year-old son of NBA megastar LeBron James...

Not just silly. Brain damaging!

 

Jason Aldean refuses to back down over song backlash, and his newest response leaves crowd chanting 'USA!' - TheBlaze

Jason Aldean refuses to back down over song backlash, and his newest response leaves crowd chanting 'USA!' - TheBlaze: 

Country music star Jason Aldean is not backing down in the face of controversy over his song, "Try That in a Small Town." At a concert in Cincinnati on Friday, Aldean addressed backlash about the song, telling the crowd that he believes "everybody's entitled to their opinion" before offering up one of his own: Cancel culture is "bulls**t."

DC District Judge Reggie Walton, appointed by W... reverses Bowe Bergdahl's Court Martial.

Michael Smith - DC District Judge Reggie Walton, appointed by... | Facebook - Michael Smith

"DC District Judge Reggie Walton, appointed by George W. Bush to the federal bench, reverses Bowe Bergdahl's Court Martial - despite the fact Bergdahl pled guilty.
This is the guy who consistently rules against Republican defendants, he is the one who 

• sentenced Scooter Libby to 30 months in jail and denied him bail, 
• arraigned Roger Clemens, 
• kept Hillary's Whitewater records sealed in 2016, 
• sided with GITMO prisoners multiple times, 
• said Bill Barr was mischaracterizing the Mueller report and 
• stopped the unredacted release of the report as ordered by President Trump.

In short, a complete DC swamp creature...

The video making lib-heads explode!-----"IF I WAS THE DEEP STATE"