Anchor Rising has launched the People’s Data Armory, a transparency initiative to arm Rhode Islanders ― as parents, taxpayers, voters, citizens, and residents ― with the information they need to even the fight in the public square.
The first tool in the arsenal is an interactive visualization application showing October enrollment levels, including by race and additional-needs group, for all Rhode Island public school districts and independent public schools.
“A decade ago, transparency was the big thing,” recalls Managing Editor Justin Katz. “The success of private groups releasing information inspired government to launch its own sites. Unfortunately, the wave has passed, and every year public access to information slips a little more.”
One reason government officials and ideological political activists may be moving on from the age of openness is that having data is a great equalizer. If the people cannot see clearly what the facts are, activists and politicians can push narratives and make claims with no basis in reality.
The October enrollment module allows users to filter and compare data throughout Rhode Island public education, illustrating in most cases how the Ocean State’s schools have been emptying out and challenging implicit assumptions about identity politics in education.
“This tool, and those planned for future release, will be invaluable for Rhode Islanders who have been feeling that something isn’t quite right, but who have not had the evidence to substantiate their feelings,” says Katz. “Now they will.”
Rhode Islanders with ideas for future research and transparency initiatives are invited to submit suggestions through the Contact Us form appearing on all pages of Anchor Rising.
Anchor Rising also emphasizes that it cannot continue and grow without financial support. Monthly subscriptions and one-time or recurring “tips” of any amount are critical to our mission of making Rhode Island the gem of New England that it can be.
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In case you’re wondering (like I did) whether Elon Musk walks the walk he’s talking here, he does:
“I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” Musk explained on Monday evening, as recorded by the New York Post.
“And yet, so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control,” Musk continued. “It’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers — if people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words.”
Musk has six boys of his own. Of course, most people won’t have the advantages he does if they separate from spouses with whom they have five children, but life happens, and I don’t know enough about him to judge.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s insulting COVID bribe for state workers
- Filippi’s decision to pass on the governor’s race
- The RI GOP’s options for statewide offices
- Foulkes’s puzzling decision to be a Democrat
- Homelessness as an issue for progressive grandstanding
- The national progressive eye turns to the Ocean State
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Here’s an interesting take on a policy that’s apparently new to South Kingstown:
A local chapter of the nation’s largest teachers union has acknowledged the importance of school choice, at least for its own members.
Thanks to an agreement quietly reached between the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, chapter of the National Education Association and the South Kingstown School Department, teachers there now have access to an exclusive school choice program.
Under the formal agreement, teachers who live outside the South Kingstown Public Schools district may send their children to schools there at no additional cost.
Other parents outside the school district, however, cannot do the same for their children.
With a familial connection to the business, so to speak, I’d say this policy isn’t unusual. Indeed, I’ve always thought of it in the category of employee discounts and that sort of thing, and it’s not objectionable for employees to have special relationships with the organizations for which they work.
Still, when the union actively fights on the political stage to prevent parents from increasing their access to school choice, it does cast a different light on the question.
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Yesterday, a post in this space looked at the way in which Trinity Rep leveraged woke identity politics to bully a Providence Journal theater critic over a critique in her generally positive review of A Christmas Carol.
Today, let’s consider a letter that RI ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown (a white man) and Policy Associate Hannah Stern (a white woman) sent to the Bristol-Warren School Committee. It has the same sly-talking fascist-enforcer feel as Trinity Rep’s letter, with passive-aggressive phrases such as, “we trust that the committee will be as deeply distressed about these racial disparities.” It also has the characteristic lack of acknowledgement that there might be multiple perspectives on controversial issues.
In its way, though, the RI ACLU’s letter is worse, because it pretends to base its intimidation in a factual analysis. “Pretends” is the right word, because reading the following, one might wonder whether there are any adults capable of reasoned analysis in the organization:
For Mt. Hope High School, the statistics (though examining an admittedly smaller population, but still demonstrating very consistent trends) are even more stark. In 2018-2019, even though Black students comprised only 1.9% of the student body, they were given 9% of all out-of-school suspensions, meaning they received nearly five times the number of suspensions which would be expected for their student population. Once again, white students at the school represented a smaller part of the suspension population than their presence at the school would predict. As with the district-wide data referenced above, significantly disproportionate suspension figures for Black students at the high school were also present in the two prior school years.
Nobody who is reasonably familiar with the process of analyzing anything would truly believe something like a discipline policy can be assessed along a straight line such that students will be perfectly distributed by demographic qualities.
This is especially true — as the writers seem to know, but ignore — when the population is small. If a particular group is only 2% of the total, then it won’t take many who are not average to make their whole group not average.
In the 2018-19 school year, Mt. Hope High School had no more than 27 black students. (State data doesn’t show results of fewer than 10, and it shows 18 black males and no black females.) That year, 124 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions; eight of them were black. Already, you can see the ACLU’s game.
The reason black students account for 9% of all out-of-school suspensions but only 6.5% of all students who were suspended is that one or more of the four who were suspended multiple times were suspended more often than the average. Maybe they’re victims of racism, or maybe they were just difficult students (as teenage boys can sometimes be). No doubt, all the progressive rhetoric about systemic racism exacerbates bad attitudes, rather than helping them, when they emerge. But the point is that the ACLU can’t know which it is from the numbers and should be embarrassed to lie.
We could keep going. Notice that the ACLU completely ignores the 138 students who received in-school suspensions. One suspects they did so because only 2.9% of those students were black. (And there’s probably overlap with out-of-school suspension, here.)
With this in mind, it’s hard not to read the rest of the letter with disgust:
The continued implementation of a disciplinary system that has such a disparate impact based on students’ race is clearly not a system providing equal opportunities to students. While your school district is far from alone in the state in meting out unequal punishment to students of color, the contretemps over the proposed hiring of Ms. Simpson-Thomas provides a seamless segue for the school committee to examine, and address, the incontrovertible disciplinary racial disparities that exist in your district
Ah. There we see the reason for the dishonest bullying. The white ACLU activists want the school district to give a lucrative contract to their fellow left-wing activist to increase indoctrination.
Although perhaps not in the way they like to think, the RI ACLU is nothing if not transparent.
Featured image by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash.
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The very obscure reference of my subject line is to Jonathan Coulton’s song, “I Crush Everything.” Spoiler alert: It’s about a lonely sea monster that has banished itself to the bottom of the sea because everything it tries to get close to and hug it crushes.
The chorus came to mind as I read Dennis Prager’s recent column about “leftist destruction”:
To understand the modern world, perhaps the most important rule one needs to know is this: Everything the Left touches it ruins.
This first became clear to me years ago during my radio show. I was talking about the Left’s war on the Boy Scouts (for not accepting announced gay people). It was becoming clear that this would ultimately lead to the decline of the Boy Scouts, which led me to ask: “Will the left replace the Boy Scouts with a left-wing Boy Scouts?”
Then I answered my own question: Of course not. Because the Left only destroys; it doesn’t build anything (other than government).
He goes on to describe how this happens across multiple areas in our society.
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In drug trials, researchers give a control group of participants a placebo (or a pill with no medical effect) because it is understood that just doing something can have an effect on people’s symptoms, or at least their perception of their symptoms. In most cases, the effect is small, which is why the research can show the benefit of the actual medicine. Naturally, it’s absolutely imperative that the placebo have no negative effects.
Now, I’m not saying that mandating masks in all indoor spaces, which is what Dan McGowan is calling for at the Boston Globe link above, would be totally without effect on the spread of COVID-19. The proposal is, however, very much in keeping with the Democrat (and especially progressive) approach t0 government, which is, in a phrase: just do something! We’ve got this government thing lying around, so we ought to use it… seems to be their attitude. Does masking help? Well, it couldn’t hurt, they believe, so just do it.
But masking does hurt, in all sorts of ways. On the surface, of course, is the hotly debated physical harm they can do by trapping germs outside your mouth and limiting oxygen. I think these risks are minimal, although advocates are overly confident that it’s just fine to mask everybody all the time. More profound, especially for children, is the effect on our ability to communicate, both in the muffling of sound and in the inability to observe whole faces. Even deeper is the erosion of our rights as we lose the assumption that government (1) must thoroughly justify its impositions, and (2) must follow a legislative process involving elected representatives to impose them.
This is where Dan’s column is way too blithe. He contrasts two events in Providence: a college basketball game, without required masks, and a musical performance, with required masks. This comparison should be where the analysis starts, not where it ends. With respect to outcomes, do we know that COVID spread at the game but not at the show, or we just assuming that it probably could have? With respect to particulars, are there any differences between the types of people at each event that are relevant, such as the average age, considering that COVID is barely a danger to younger people?
Other details Dan provides are similarly inadequate to justify the harms of masking:
On Monday, six hospitals were at 100 percent occupancy (based on staff levels) for ICU beds, according to data from the health department. For example, at Kent Hospital, there were 10 staffed ICU beds, and 10 patients in them. The occupancy rates for staffed inpatient beds are lower, but they’ve consistently been above 85 percent occupancy.
Take very careful note of the phrase Dan squeezes between two parentheses: “based on staff levels.” We should want a well-managed hospital to always run near capacity for staffed beds. Otherwise, nurses would be standing around collecting healthcare-dollar paychecks with nothing to do. If we’re in the position that hospitals can’t easily increase the number of employees to service their beds, that’s a different problem than COVID (and it’s one that isn’t helped by things like vaccine mandates).
These are considerations that must be included in any serious suggestion to force our fellow citizens to do something that they don’t want to do. The need to be clear and justified is especially high when your primary source of authority, Dr. Megan Ranney, is infamous for her insistence that, “We are never going back to a pre-pandemic realty.”
Yeah, says you. Some of us think this attitude is becoming a disease in need of something more than the placebo of disregard.
Featured image from the Matrix on YouTube.
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Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the school-shooting story in Oxford, Michigan, is that it shouldn’t have happened at all, judging from details provided by Tim Meads in the Daily Wire:
The morning of the attack, school administrators met with the boy’s parents and showed them disturbing notes found that day indicating the boy was willing to do harm to himself and others. The boy also was caught searching for ammo on his phone just days before the shooting.
But, rather than disciplining the child, the school simply gave the parents the option of pulling him out of class or leaving him in school following a meeting with school officials.
School officials found and ultimately, in consultation with the boy’s parents, let slide notes with comments like “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” and “my life is useless,” even as he had a gun in the room, in his backpack. To a disturbed mind, the chain of events must have seemed to be confirmation of his feelings and his plans. Yet, his handling appears to have been in line with the “restorative justice” policy of the school, which emphasized avoiding punishment in favor of keeping troubled students in class.
The contrast is stark with the freakout in Coventry after a staff member heard a student say, “he’s got a gun,” between classes in the hallway. In that case, the school shut down, and the student was arrested for his spoken words for no apparent reason.
Obviously, the single most significant difference between the two events is that Oxford had a shooting and Coventry did not, but Coventry would not have had a shooting had the staff member simply gone about his or her day; it was never a possibility. Yes, the Coventry approach probably would have prevented the Oxford outcome in the same situation, but so would a broad spectrum of possible policies that aren’t so insane.
Both extremes arguably point to the same, incredibly unhealthy institutional trend.
Healthy institutions have balance and common sense. They’re able to differentiate between extremes — between threats and non-threats. Unhealthy institutions have no discernment. They will take obvious falsehoods as truth and obvious realities as falsehoods. Faced with potential threats, they either freak out or ignore the obvious, depending on the panic threshold of those involved.
Currently, the lack of balance traces back to denial of our own responsibility and willingness to hand it off to government agencies, which are almost always unaccountable. Note that no news has emerged of consequences for the school officials who caused so much anxiety in Coventry, even though the student was arrested, or for the school officials who facilitated the incident in Oxford, even though the parents have been arrested and charged with manslaughter.
Featured image by Edvard Munch on WikiArt.
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Wherever you look to find your bogeymen or whether you support some individual or organization or oppose it, modern society absolutely requires you to keep an eye out for the nudging that Joel Kotkin describes:
Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge. It now has widespread public support and has influenced everything from health warnings for cigarettes to calorie counts for fast food. Yet nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote the ‘right behaviour’.
Tech firms, both in the US and China, already use messaging nudges to ‘control behaviours’. They use their power to purge their platforms of the wrong messages, as both Facebook and Twitter did when they censored the New York Post’s pre-election story about President Biden’s dissolute son, Hunter.
I’m with Kotkin in thinking the threat is mainly from government and leftist elites, but you can be reasonably certain that anybody who cares about changing opinions in organized ways for good or evil is contemplating studies about brain chemistry and human behavior. With everything you absorb, be aware.
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Judging by social media comments, mainstream media types have been thrilled to hear from NPR that people are dying with COVID-19 at a higher rate in Trump-supporting counties across the United States.
Of course, substantive analysis would require many more caveats than our social-media-driven culture tends to address. As the article concedes, the analysis does not make any attempt to align actual deaths with actual political views. It’s all aggregate by county. It also doesn’t attempt to assess breakthrough infections of people who are vaccinated or, for that matter, to measure ready access to healthcare and other important factors, like average age or the prevalence of comorbidities.
Then there are the numerical caveats that ought to be considered, because counties vary by hugely by size. The most populous county in the U.S. is L.A. county, with around 10 million people. On the other end of the spectrum (leaving out Hawaii, which NPR excluded), the least populous county is Loving County in Texas, with around 170 people. If a single person died while testing positive with COVID in Loving, that would be a death rate of 588 per 100k. The same rate in L.
A. would require 58,800 deaths.
More interesting, however, are two very important points that NPR avoids.
The first point is that the percentage vote for Trump is not the most relevant variable. As the article intimates, and as a Kaiser Foundation survey it cites further amplifies, it is probably more relevant and more fundamental that the pro-Trump counties are also much more likely to distrust the mainstream media. If journalists consider it their higher calling to inform the public, then the COVID outcomes are in large part their fault. Yet, there’s no handwringing to be seen about what they can do to regain trust. Indeed, the tone is the typical one of treating flyover country as a separate nation.
The second point follows on the first. NPR claims “misinformation appears to be a major factor in the lagging vaccination rates, with “a full 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true,” but you have to dig to find the source survey linked above. An objective review of the supposedly false statements shows that all reasonably well-informed people should think one or more of them “might be true” (which the survey actual characterizes as “haven’t heard” or “unsure about”).
The government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths, to the extent that it includes people who obviously did not die from the disease, but only while testing positive. Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19, especially when stated absent any standards or comparisons. And the COVID-19 vaccines can change DNA, albeit probably in a limited number of cells, not in the whole-body way people tend to think when they hear that phrase.
Other statements are certainly not settled matters. Should pregnant women get the COVID-19 vaccine? We can’t say for certain, yet. Is the government hiding data about COVID-19 deaths? Maybe; check in a decade from now.
So, of the eight supposedly false statements, people should say “true” or “unsure” to five of them. Arguably, those relying on the mainstream media are less-well-informed than those who look to other sources for information. At the very least, we can say that the mainstream media is providing the same amount of misinformation as alternative sources, except in the opposite direction — the direction promoting the Democrat, government line.
For evidence, consider that NPR’s study did not compare vaccine side-effects in Trump and anti-Trump counties. Indeed, nobody should expect that NPR or the rest of the mainstream media is now conducting or will ever in the future conduct analyses that might disprove their preconceptions, which is why so many people don’t trust them even when the demands of Democrat politics allow them to be correct.
Featured image by the Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.
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