"Because schools are funded on a per-pupil basis, the loss of 3,000 of the district’s 200,000 students could amount to a $28 million funding decrease."

"The district... has... hired Caissa K12 to help it recruit back families tempted by other options.... In mid-May, Caissa’s team of paid canvassers fanned out across Orange County, looking for parents. Caroline Christian, a 25-year-old with a degree in marketing, set up a table at a Boys and Girls Club after-school program. Destiny Arnold, a former police officer, looked for garden apartments with children’s bikes parked out front. The team also visited a homeless shelter and a church preschool.... Caissa staff members, who can earn performance bonuses, might contact a parent 10, 20, even 30 times to prompt them to complete school-enrollment paperwork.... If a child whose parent has been in touch with Caissa shows up for public school in the fall, Caissa will be paid. In Orange County, the company will earn $935 for each former student the firm attracts back to the district, about 10 percent of state and local per-pupil funding for that child...."

From "Public Schools Try to Sell Themselves as More Students Use Vouchers/A decline in the number of children and rise in the number of choices has created a crisis for public schools. Some are trying new strategies to recruit students" (NYT).

"At the Boys and Girls Club in Orlando, one mother who asked that her name not be included, quickly rejected the suggestion that her daughter should attend her zoned school in a low-income neighborhood. The mother believed the school was rife with behavioral problems. Caissa also conducts parent surveys for districts, which have shown that perceptions of safety and academic quality drive school-choice decisions. 'Our job is to adjust the perception.... There’s always some positive stuff in every school.'"

Let's talk about the home page of The New York Times.

As it looks right now:

1. I had thought the Jeffrey Epstein story was running out of energy, but here it is back on the front page and in the top spot. But it's a real estate story: "A Look Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan Lair." As if we're into his mystique!

2. Sharing the top of the page is "How to Break Free From Your Phone" — a generic self-help topic, not news at all. The pretty blue of the sky in the illustration lines up with the blue sky in Jeffrey Epstein's stairwell. The legs of the phoneless woman in the grass chime with the legs of the stairwell woman. Both women grip something tubular — one, a flower stem and the other, a rope. We are reminded that Jeffrey hanged himself — reminded whether he did it or not. 

3. 2 things to angst over: declining school enrollment and a nuclear reactor on the moon.

4. Something that isn't even vaguely surprising — an old bookshelf contained a particular old book. It might be worth $20,000. Who cares!? This is like the news that somebody won the lottery. The winning ticket is rare, but you know it's in the great mass of tickets, and somebody found it.

5. Suddenly, it's time to talk about your intestines. That seems to scream: slow news day.

6. At last, the name Trump appears. Tariff business. The ongoing story. The photo is of immigrants — caption (outside of my screen shot): "Trump’s New Tactic to Separate Immigrant Families."

7. And then, there's Thomas Friedman, supplying the overarching and very high-level-abstract theme: "The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away." It begins: "Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened...."

***

Strangely low-level anxiety wafts up from the usual jumble of well-worn topics.

"Professors like myself hate ChatGPT and similar platforms because our students turn in artificially generated, robotic papers. But..."

"... if we ordinarily gave vapid, shallow papers the D’s or F’s they deserved, this problem wouldn’t exist. The fact that such papers routinely get A’s or B’s shows that we have come to expect and to train humans to write robotic papers. Similarly, when I worry I can’t distinguish a colleague’s genuine sentiments from the vaporous generalities Gmail’s AI suggests, what am I really worrying about? Is it that the machine is so good? Or that my interactions with my colleague are so empty? Once we step back from the paranoid reaction, the problem presented by AI facial recognition assumes different contours. In posing anew the question of facial control, the technology provides us with an opportunity to think about how such control works in both its artificial and natural forms...."

Writes Michael W. Clune, in "Your Face Tomorrow/The puzzle of AI facial recognition" (Harper's)(Harper's gives you 2 free articles a month, and I used one of mine to read that. I doubt that you'll find 2 better choices and recommend that you go ahead and redeem your freebie on the first of the month).

If people are poor, give them money.

I've heard that said as if it's obtuse to concoct more complicated policies. But now I'm seeing:

[A] rigorous experiment, in a more direct test, found that years of monthly payments did nothing to boost children’s well-being.... After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development....

It has long been clear that children from affluent families exhibit stronger cognitive development and fewer behavioral problems, on average, than their low-income counterparts. The question is whether their advantage comes from money itself or from related forces like parental health and education, neighborhood influences or the likelihood of having two parents in the home....

From "Study May Undercut Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development/Rigorous new research appears to show that monthly checks intended to help disadvantaged children did little for their well-being, adding a new element to a dispute over expanded government aid" (NYT)(gift link).

"And let me just put it to you with startling bluntness is President Trump Gatsby or Tom?"

"And I'll let you kind of imagine why I've even posed that question — because it's infused with new money, anti-establishmentism, and a motto — Make America Great Again — that to my mind borrows from — whether it means to or not — one of the great lines in Gatsby, which is when Gatsby says to Nick, 'You can't repeat the past? Of course you can.' I mean, what is MAGA other than a pleading to reclaim a past that's so central to this book?"/"It's a very interesting question of, I mean, with Trump, is this old money or new money? What elite does he or doesn't he belong to? And certainly his own mythology is that he's been, and I think our colleagues have written a lot about this, about his sense of outsiderness, his sense of the Manhattan elite, the Manhattan establishment, the fancy know-it-alls and eggheads who he was, you know, desperate for a long time to join, who always sort of rebuffed him, or went to his parties, but didn't necessarily accept him into their midst...."

That happens almost half an hour into "100 Years of ‘The Great Gatsby,'" today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. That's Michael Barbaro asking the question and then A.O. Scott answering. 

It's mostly a solid discussion of the novel and not political... though there's also this near the end:

"Interestingly, I think there is an argument to bring back the MRS degree."

My latest: I went inside Turning Point USA's conference for conservative young women

To get a sense of what I saw, watch this video of Charlie Kirk telling a 14-year-old in braces that she should only go to college to get an "MRS degree"

Subscribe to my newsletter below ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/lNdIS0Ia9v

— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) June 18, 2025

I don't think he said only.

And I don't think you can ignore the smile that broke out on that girl's face at 0:30. You can want more than one thing, and you don't have to pretend to yourself that you don't want those things that are not your career. 

Take this NYT article... and make a blog post out of it in the style used on the blog Althouse....

I asked Grok, citing the NYT article, "The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It/Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs."

Grok responded, and I was all "That's not in the style of the blog Althouse. How would Althouse use this material and construct a blog post?"

Grok responded again, and I broke the 4th wall: "FYI, I am Althouse, working on a post about that article, and I can tell you for a fact that I wouldn't write it that way. But that's okay. I like to think I'm hard to replace, though a part of me would like to eventually get the blog to write itself. And by 'eventually,' I mean after I die."

For the whole conversation, go to Grok, here.

"Vickie Segar was there, with the blessing of the university’s athletic department, to pitch them on turning their TikTok and Instagram accounts into cash cows...."

"'Does anybody follow Alix Earle?' The students said yes, amid several chuckles, because asking a college student that question in 2025 is like asking if a millennial has ever heard of Beyoncé. How much money, she continued, did they think that Ms. Earle, a TikTok megastar who rose to fame with confessional-style videos about beauty and college life, makes for promoting a brand across several posts on Instagram Stories? '$100,000?' one student guessed. '$70,000,' another tossed out. Ms. Segar, whose firm has worked with Ms. Earle on brand deals, paused. She drew out her response: '$450,000 per Instagram Story.' For a moment, there was just the hum of the pool and a single exclamation from one student: 'Oh. My. God.' Ms. Segar smiled and explained, 'Our job is to help you guys bring in some of that money.'"

From "They’re on the Varsity Influencer Team/A new effort at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is aimed at turning its student-athletes into well-remunerated social media stars. Other schools are following suit" (NYT).

"‘Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore."

Said a little kindergarten boy, quoted in "The Zuckerbergs Founded Two Bay Area Schools. Now They’re Closing. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, opened the schools to help communities of color. Some families wonder if the shutting of the schools is related to his D.E.I. retrenchment" (NYT).

Why doesn't the guy who’s been giving money to the school not want to give it anymore? Even if Zuck has turned against DEI efforts within institutions, this is a free-standing school, located in a place where it serves underprivileged children. That sounds like a traditional charity. Why would you cut that off? The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has given only $100 million to this school over the past 4 years. What's that in the larger scheme of Zuckerberg's wealth? You're just suddenly casting out hundreds of children you've made a show of saving from the "trauma" you attributed to their status as "low-income." I'm sorry, I don't see how closing the school is worth doing. 

What is the evidence that the closure of the school represents opposition to the greater DEI agenda? I'm seeing this:

"Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel..."

"... not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity."

Writes Merve Emre, in "An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals" (NYRB).

I know you're unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you're thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, "Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955."

That's one of the best photos I've ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" got a lot of attention when it came out in 2004, and it will be interesting to see reactions to it 20 years later. 2004 was the first year of this blog. I read the book.

"I'm not worried about whether I would be protected or not at said institution. I'm, you know, Privileged White Woman..."

Tim Walz’s daughter announced that she was accepted into a graduate school but has decided not to attend, stating that as a “privileged white woman,” she does not want to support institutions that fail to protect student protesters. 🤡 pic.twitter.com/F995YVHPrl

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) March 30, 2025

Nothing more privileged than choosing to do nothing. She's just doing nothing for a year. But that's okay. She's "not really in a rush."

I wonder which institution "said institution" was. It would help in understanding how much of a sacrifice this is. In some cases, an ambitious person, who can afford to take a year off, could do things to bolster her credentials and gain access to a more prestigious school. Why, this public declining of an offer is itself a credential! Especially in some fields... so I have to wonder what she majored in, undergrad. Sociology? I looked it up. It was indeed sociology! And a minor in women’s gender and sexuality studies. 

So, great viral video. Great audition tape. 

I remember when feminism involved seeing woman as the victim, but now we see young women contemptuous of that viewpoint and not worried about whether I would be protected. 

"An A.I. tool may learn how to superficially mimic the end result of writing, but it will never mimic a writer’s soul or how he or she actually produces meaningful writing..."

"... that process by which an individual idiosyncratic mind works out a problem, granting readers access to the inner life of another actual person, that constitutes the lifeblood of writing and storytelling.our institutions embrace a totally unproven technology. University administrators routinely announce new partnerships with A.I. startups, and well-meaning instructors — perhaps imagining an ideal student in an ideal world, or just wanting to feel like they’re on the cutting edge — incorporate these tools in their classrooms.... I will continue to teach students that, whether they go on to write a best-selling memoir or simply scribble in their journals occasionally, we can try to do the work as honestly and earnestly as possible, bringing our full obsessive selves to the page. The act of writing itself can be an act of self-preservation, even one of defiance...."

Writes Tom McAllister, in "I Teach Memoir Writing. Don’t Outsource Your Life Story to A.I." (NYT).

Good luck enforcing student authenticity. They're writing for you, but what you want is for them to do what's for their own good. So you must structure things so that when they do what's for their own good you will reward them. I'm tempted to... I mean, here I am, going straight to A.I. with: "A creative writing teacher wants students not to use A.I. How can that rule be enforced?" Grok gave me 7 ways to detect the use of A.I., then suggested "flipping the script: allow AI as a brainstorming tool but require students to document how they transformed its suggestions."

I've never taken a creative writing class, but I have thought of writing a memoir. If I did, at this point, I would definitely use Grok, not because I want help composing sentences and paragraphs, but to get encouragement to see the value of the material. 

"[Trump] is fighting for the fundamental idea that this country belongs... not to the radical left Communists...."

"We are going to have to be on top of it every single day focused every single day, driving forward every single day with unrelenting focus and passion because God gave us this country our founding fathers fought and died for this country, generations of Americans have sacrificed and bled for this country and we are not going to let the radical left — the Communists — and the American haters take our country. It's not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. So I ask you all to send a message right now to all the bureaucrats, to all the radical left commies, to the criminal aliens... to everyone who threatens the future of this country...."

Stephen Miller — at CPAC yesterday — called America's left wing "communists" and even "commies."

I think this is the only serious current use of the word "commie" that I've recorded in this blog. I've quoted a couple comic deployments of the word — here and here.

And I quoted Rush Limbaugh describing the "Dr. Strangelove" character Buck Turgidson: He just loves war and hates the Russians, hates the commies."

And I've got John Wayne in a Playboy interview — back in 1971: 

"Across the country, there is no clear guidance for young people on how to have healthy relationships and hookups..."

"... no collective understanding of what consent means. They need this desperately, especially now, with a president who was found liable for sexually abusing one woman and who has bragged about assaulting others. This essential education cannot come just from squeamish gym teachers. One idea would be to put more of this work into the hands of teenagers themselves. This is not without precedent. In 1973 a group called the Student Committee for Rational Sex Education conducted workshops in a dozen New York City public schools. Peer educators ran learning centers that they called 'rap rooms,' where students could stop by during free periods. Unlike their adult counterparts, the teenage educators made sex ed fun and playful, motivating their peers to voluntarily seek answers to their questions or to watch a demonstration of a contraceptive device."

Writes Hillary Frank, in "Our Kids Cannot Learn About Sex Just From Squeamish Gym Teachers" (NYT).

I don't like "how to have healthy relationships and hookups." Does "healthy" modify "hookups" as well as "relationships"? "Healthy hookups"? I'm sorry, I have no "collective understanding" of what that might be.

I enjoyed seeing the old term "rap rooms." There was a time when "rapping" just meant talking. 

As for "squeamish" teachers... I can think of worse problems. Just do your job and teach the material. It's a science topic. Skip the dogma.

Merry Christmas to all. I want to begin the day by talking about getting better at prompting A.I.

This really struck me. From the new episode of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast, "#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions." The link is pinpointed to the right place in the audio and the transcript (using Podscribe):

So do you know the Elon Musk quote? It's around how to learn. It's essentially this idea that you want to view knowledge as a semantic tree. So you start at the roots, then you go up to the trunk, then you have the branches, then you have like the secondary branches, then you have the leaves. Whereas often the way we'll approach things is, oh, I wanna learn about the heart. I'll just put on this random Andrew Huberman podcast with a specialist about the heart and just kind of hop in. But you don't have any of the roots or anything there.

Trump isn't going to shut down the federal Department of Education.

I'm reading "Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept./A friend and financial backer of Donald J. Trump’s, Ms. McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration during his first term, remained close to him during the campaign" (NYT):

While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education....

So it's just something to talk about, not actually do. So what is McMahon really going to try to do? She's the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

[T]he America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding voucher programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.

"But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them."

"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).

I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.

For example... 

"There were way too many kids and it seemed to her that since they didn’t speak the language, or didn’t understand what was going on, they were getting more attention."

"And so she and the other kids who grew up here who were having issues or struggling in certain things weren’t able to get the attention that they needed — the help they needed from the school.... You can’t just focus all your resources on one group of children and everybody else is falling behind...."

Said the mother of a 16-year-old who dropped out of public school and enrolled in an "online homeschool," quoted in "In Logansport, Indiana, kids are being pushed out of schools after migrants swelled county’s population by 30%:/'Everybody else is falling behind'" (NY Post).

The numbers are confusing. We're told that 2,000 Haitian migrants may have been added to a city of 18,000 and also that 11,000 may have been added to a county of 38,000. There are also claims of being "verbally accosted" and stared at ("It’s not safe. They just stare at you and won’t talk to you. They stand there staring at my house with cameras on their phones. I don’t know if they’re recording, what they’re doing"). The mayor objects to the attention: "Stop playing politics with the smaller communities. We don’t like this. We don’t appreciate this. We would rather you do your job and actually do something instead of talking about this."

"Some faculty brought up the spectre of student evaluations, which has been cited as a prime mover behind grade inflation...."

"Online course listings enable faculty, students, and administrators to see which classes fill up the fastest and, by implication, which professors are perceived as benevolent and easygoing. A professor of sociology at a large public university told me that these (surprisingly public) pressures on faculty are symptomatic of a transactional model of higher education. 'Broadly speaking, there are students and administrators who treat higher education as a service industry: students are the customers, faculty are the service providers, admin are the managers,' he said.... Any faculty member who is tolerant of extensions and makeup tests—who, in other words, gives the customer what she asks for—will earn more rave reviews than a less indulgent colleague...."

From "Can Colleges Do Without Deadlines? Since covid, many professors have become more flexible about due dates. But some teachers believe that the way to address student anxiety is more deadlines, not fewer" by Jessica Winter (in The New Yorker).

"For some of the schools, the migrants coming here has been a godsend because we’ve lost so many other kids."

"Some schools were being threatened with whether we’re going to be able to keep the doors open. I push back on a lot of the kind of negative politics that people talk about with migrants. This is a city of immigrants. I mean, that’s the uniqueness of New York. We never make it easy for immigrants who are coming. But they find their way. And the same thing is going to happen here."

Said David C. Banks, quoted in "Migrants Have Been a ‘Godsend,’ New York Schools Chief Says/In an interview, Chancellor David C. Banks said migrants had helped schools that were bleeding students. He also promised a big new role for artificial intelligence" (NYT).