The perils of spinelessness

Santa Ono was hoping to be appointed to the presidency of the University of Florida. I have sad news.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ono’s presidency was shot down in a 6-10 vote by the Florida Board of Governors, the governing board for the state’s university system. The move was made after prominent Florida conservatives questioned Ono’s past support of DEI and alleged inaction on combating antisemitism.

He was formerly the president of the University of Michigan. He wasn’t well liked there, either.

University leaders, faculty and alumni took aim at Ono for various reasons, from his decisions to curb DEI efforts on the Ann Arbor campus to his crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters to alleging he too easily changes his views on issues.

He seems to have been a wishy-washy Trumpian.

Ono oversaw cuts to the university’s long-standing diversity, equity and inclusion programs. This includes March moves to discontinue UM’s DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan and close its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Office for Health Equity and Inclusion.
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Ono also saw criticism from both sides on his handling of pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitism on the Ann Arbor campus. At least 50 people have been arrested in connection with pro-Palestine protesting at the Ann Arbor university since October 2023.

I’m a bit exasperated with this predictable rhetorical trick of claiming that protesting a genocide is “anti-semitic”. I don’t think murdering civilians is a standard Jewish value.

I finally get to try out this toy

I collected my first spider egg sac of the summer — see, that means summer is finally here — and I got to load up the egg incubator.

Some of you might protest that that’s a device design for chicken eggs, but that’s just what Big Chicken wants you to think. It’s calibrated for 28°C and 65% humidity, which is perfect for spiders, and I also bought some decorative plastic ovoids from a craft store that might, from a distance, look a bit like chicken eggs, but I’m putting spider egg sacs in them.

I’m just saying, next time you crack an egg for your breakfast, you might be surprised at what comes swarming out.

Slap fight!

The spoiled brats are fighting. Musk went there:

Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate, Musk said in a post on X. He added: Such ingratitude.

Oh no! Tainting Trump’s victory is one of those things that’ll really piss him off.

So Trump fired back.

The Trump-Musk relationship may yet get worse. Hours after the feud kicked off, Trump threatened to punish Musk, posting on Truth Social: The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.

Not so fast! Musk is happy to punch himself in the face to spite Trump.

In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately

Are you not entertained?

The only good thing to come out of this will be the spectacle of their fan bases splitting and starting their own slapfights.

Face-eating leopards hard at work

This is the family of Kasper Eriksen. He was a Danish citizen who emigrated to the US and started a family in Mississippi.

Look at them! They’re perfect! Blonde and probably blue-eyed, coming from one of the “good” countries, and Kasper even made Xitter posts praising Trump. It’s not like he’s from one of the 12 countries that were just fully excluded from sending people to the US (curiously, those banned countries just happen to be full of brown people.)

And Kasper was a model alien, he was even close to achieving US citizenship!

Kasper has never been charged with or convicted of any crime. He has not been accused of being a member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. What led the government to rip Kasper out of the arms of his family was, to the best of his knowledge, a single document. Form I-751, appropriately clinical, a “Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence,” was just one of the endless documents he needed on his decade-plus journey to American citizenship.

Kasper and his wife, Savannah Hobart Eriksen, never submitted that form, which was due all the way back in 2015. She had suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child, and in the days of grief that followed, the deadline slipped right past them. But Kasper’s naturalization continued unimpeded. He corresponded with immigration officials numerous times over the next 10 years, and says agents never warned him that a critical document was missing. He paid taxes each year, reliably contributing a portion of his labor to the nation he already felt a part of.

Oh, right, he neglected to fill out one form, missed a deadline, and when he went in to an immigration center to dot that final ‘i’ and cross that last ‘t’, ICE put him in chains and shipped him off to a detention center in Louisiana, where…

He spends most of his day in a wide cell, housing upwards of 90 other detained immigrants at a time. He gets a couple of hours of yard time each day, a routine pleasure he says is critical to his sanity. Even so, Kasper has already lost about 25 pounds during his detention.

This shouldn’t be a plea for special treatment for a white man. The ICE administrators were apparently dismayed that they had to lock up someone who was “obviously” an acceptable member of society — I wonder if they ever feel the same way about detainees with a less Danish accent — but nobody should be treated this way.

Nathalia Rocha Dickson, an immigration attorney in Louisiana, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 6 interview that violent, criminal narratives are increasingly employed to justify a crackdown on all immigrants, the majority of whom have done nothing wrong.

“The government is more interested in feeding into rhetoric—these ugly stories about immigration. We’re feeding a monster for an administration that is not really concerned about the rule of law,” she said.

Dickson has represented clients in detention and deportation for eight years now. What strikes her most about the new deportation regime is how arbitrarily it operates. “It’s totally random. This is the stupidity of it,” she said. “There’s no way for you to determine who’s gonna be picked up and who’s not. You may show up for a scheduled hearing and get picked up. You may be driving and get pulled over. It’s really, really crazy right now.”

The lesson here should be that ICE must be disbanded and immigration should be welcoming immigrants. They’re a rogue, criminal organization — America’s new SS.

By the way, there was a massive raid on a Minneapolis taqueria the other day, with police claiming it was drug-related. So why were ICE agents involved? Why were they dressed and armed like this, with masks covering their faces?

Officer Friendly on duty

I’m happy to report that the people of Minneapolis swarmed these thugs and no arrests were made. Seriously, when someone in a military-style uniform, masked and carrying a rifle is spotted, it is a citizen’s duty to make their job more difficult.

I like the name: Operation Spiderweb

I also like the cleverness of Ukraine’s recent attack: smuggling over a hundred drones on trucks to military airports deep into Russia, then suddenly launching them to blow up billions of dollars worth of bombers on the runway. Brilliant! And terrifying!

I imagine that military planners in countries all around the world are panicking right now at the idea that a poorer country can build $600 devices and sneakily destroy their pretty fancy mega-million dollar toys before they can be used to reduce a village to rubble. They’ve introduced so much uncertainty into the Great Game!

I also appreciate the beauty of the drone launches. Those trucks were like egg sacs, they opened up, and a swarm of little multi-limbed creatures emerged to float into the air and disperse. I’ve seen phenomena like that so many times, it’s no wonder they called it Operation Spiderweb.

Now…please don’t terrorize my country or me with your flying weapons, no matter how adorkably comparable to spiders they are.

How Pete Hegseth celebrates Pride Month

Future DoD requirements will include giving it a fierce name

He does it by being petty and vindictive, which will no doubt curry favor with the pig running the government.

The U.S. Navy plans to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replenishment oiler named after the slain gay rights leader and Navy veteran, and is considering renaming multiple naval ships named after civil rights leaders and prominent American voices, CBS News has learned.
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The documents obtained by CBS News also show other vessels named after prominent leaders are also on the Navy’s renaming “recommended list.”

Among them are the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers.

I have mixed feelings about the principle of naming warships after civil rights leaders, but I don’t think this is about morality. It’s all about spite.

Following his confirmation in January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a directive instructing the Pentagon and U.S. military services to cease hosting events tied to heritage or awareness months, citing concerns that such programs could undermine unity within the ranks. The “Identity Months Dead at DoD” guidance banned official manpower and resources from being used on such events — among them, Pride Month, Black History Month and Women’s History Month.

It might undermine unity to pander to Nazis, too.

And this is just stupid.

The memo said the renaming of naval ships was to realign the U.S. military with Trump administration priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.

Warrior culture. I don’t want to live in a warrior culture, especially since that seems to be a synonym for “insecure bullying lickspittle culture”.

I’m confused about math

I was interested in this map that purports to rate the quality of math teaching. It’s from the National Council on Teaching Quality, and at first I thought it explained a phenomenon I’ve noticed.

Minnesota grade schools aren’t doing a good job preparing students with math skills. It’s the #1 obstacle to young people coming into science and math majors, especially biology (if they aren’t strong in math in the first place, they aren’t going to even try physics; everyone wrongly thinks you don’t need math to do biology.) We get students who fail the algebra requirement*, which surprises me every time. What are the schools doing? Back in my day, the high schools had a college prep track which told you that you at least needed pre-calc (trigonometry, etc.) to get into a good college. How do you get through middle school without algebra and geometry?

They have a state-by-state breakdown of their evaluation. I looked at Minnesota’s. It expresses a lot of sentiments I agree with: we should “require districts to adopt and implement high quality math curricula,” but they say we fail on that. We should “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy,” and again they say we don’t, but I don’t have any experience working directly with grade school math programs, so I’m taking their word on it. Then I notice that the way NCTQ assesses schools is with checklists of various aspects of teaching, and it’s all yes/no stuff. What are “high quality math curricula”? It seems to me that there ought to be something a little more quantitative about that.

Then I looked at their evaluation of our universities’ math teacher prep, and we get low marks, but again there’s a lack of specificity. All they score is how many hours of instruction math education students get in 4 areas, and the only evaluations are “does not meet” or “fully meets” their quota for instruction hours. And the variation is wild! On “Numbers & Operations+Algebraic Thinking,” for instance, some of our colleges provide 0 hours of instruction, while others provide 100 hours. I think the assessment is a bit inconsistent, and maybe not aligned with the goals of the specific programs.

I’m not trying to make excuses for the schools. I’ve been looking at their products, the students, for years and have been unsatisfied with their end result.

They declare that “13% of Minnesota programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy” where again, they’re scoring them by this single metric. 26% of our colleges fail by that metric. Also, to get an A, the “program requires at least 135 instructional hours across the five topics and at least 90% of the recommended target hours for each topic,” but there are only four topics listed. I guess someone failed arithmetic, or copy editing.

I had to look at Alabama‘s evaluation. The South in general is scoring very well on math education, so good for them. They get lots of checkmarks in the binary metrics, for instance Alabama does “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy” where Minnesota doesn’t, but now I’m wondering what that means. “16% of Alabama programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy,” but 24% fail.

I think we could all improve the quality of math education, but I didn’t find any of their reports particularly useful, and they seemed almost arbitrary. So I looked up the NCTQ, and discovered that it was the product of a conservative think-tank, and was associated with the US News & World Report, the magazine that publishes scores for colleges every year (I do not like them, even if my university scores well in their assessments). Then I read this review:

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I respect, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

I should have read that before wasting all that time trying to interpret the data in the report. And now I understand how Texas and Florida did so well in the NCTQ evaluations.

We still have a problem in poor math preparation. I don’t think turning a bunch of conservative ideologues loose on the schools will solve it.

*I should mention that my university invests a lot of effort in remedial instruction to bring students’ math skills up to the level they need to succeed in our majors.