Rachel Fish

Friends @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social is doing well— she’s at home, released last night. I’ll let her speak on the ordeal when she’s ready but for now wanted to share this update.

ICE just blatantly violated the law and arrested sitting Chicago Alderperson Jessie Fuentes while seeking to illegally arrest a patient in a hospital. Fuck these fascists.

2 million rally in Italy for Gaza as general strike halts key services Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

State police assisted ICE in the performative brutalization and arrest of protesters today. @govpritzker.illinois.gov must answer for this.

This is who @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social is. Brilliant. Fearless. I fucking hate typing this shit out: Free Eman.

Amplify amplify amplify please.

Press Release: Gov. Evers Signs Executive Order to Ensure Access to Vaccines in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has issued an executive order to ensure COVID vaccines are accessible to everyone and insurers continue to cover them.

“Failed to live up to the hype” is a lesson with tech that we will never learn

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

I gave my students an anti-AI spiel on the first day of our class today, and a student asked if all of us had been to a training, because all of her professors spent about 15 minutes doing the same thing this year. I told her no, but it seems like maybe the tide is turning!

Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low

We expanded who reaches 12th grade. That’s the educational miracle of the last 35 years. Today’s 12th graders aren’t 1992’s 12th graders. Beyond cohort change, this is not only a school story; adult PIAAC scores in the bottom half of the distribution have tanked, too, and that’s not about schools.

Anyone have teaching tips for a *very* small undergrad class? My junior/senior seminar may just have 4-5 students in it. Last year I had 12 students and ran it like a grad seminar, and that worked well. But this is going to be so small!

Supporting each other through difficult and challenging times - The Research Companion Science, healthcare and education are threatened worldwide. Here are some starter ideas for ways to work together to share and save vital information. And to care for one another.

"This guide is for anyone studying or working in universities, or in research environments within healthcare, local government, NGOs, charities, or other health and social care organisations.

It is designed to help you calm, focus, connect in order to prioritise your safety, rights and wellbeing."

How Are We Supposed to Talk to Our Kids About AI? We adopted social media with the critical thinking of a toddler putting a LEGO in their mouth. Let’s not make that mistake again.

www.thecut.com/article/broo...

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Are Black students under-referred to special education?

@rachelefish.bsky.social, Kenneth Shores & @jmsoutomaior.bsky.social challenge recent claims of under-representation.

📄 Full paper here: edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1227

The site Oracle plans to power entirely with gas generation is located in Shackleford County, Texas, near another Oracle server farm in Abilene. It is being developed by DigitalBridge Group Inc.’s Vantage Data Centers and will have an compute capacity of 1.4 gigawatts, making it among the largest known sites.

Yet another 100% fossil-fuelled data centre site popping up - 1.4 gigawatts.

This was definitely all very predictable!!!

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

WARZEL: What if Gen AI is “just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? ..

“.. Good enough .. would likely mean that not enough people recognize what’s really being built—and what’s being sacrificed—until it’s too late.”

@cwarzel.bsky.social
www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

“the productivity gains following the introduction of LLMs in the workplace were quite small: they found only a 2.8% increase in time-savings. On the flip side, the introduction of AI tools created new work for 8.4% of these workers, including people who do not use the tools directly”

Brown University is ‘functionally inaccessible’ to transgender students after Trump settlement “Everyone I talked to thought it only applied to sports. But it applies to everything," one transgender student told The Advocate.

The Trump administration effectively created a de facto bathroom ban at Brown University and none of the major media is covering it, and if they do, they character it as about sports. This is how the trans visa ban was enacted and characterized.

www.advocate.com/news/transge...

I wish this piece was on the front page and not the opinion section, because it's more fact-based than the majority of the reporting I've seen on the state of boys and men.

We urge policymakers, researchers, and education leaders to be more cautious and develop better research methods for understanding racial disproportionality in special education. The stakes are high for kids who are struggling in school - with and without disabilities.

This research has gotten a lot of attention for being methodologically superior to models that only examine racial disparities in the raw data, and for its surprising findings. Notably, it's cited in Project 2025 and also in DeVos' move to pause disproportionality monitoring in the 1st Trum admin.

This research also largely relies on limited datasets - the often-used ECLS-K does not even replicate population-level disability rates in models without these controls. The CRDC data, also often used, does not include data by grade level or student-level factors.

This body of research aims to estimate racial disparities in special ed between comparable Black and White children -- an important goal! But current methods introduce problems of over-controlling, so that current models find "no racism" after essentially controlling for racism . . .

Screenshot of abstract from journal: This essay provides a two-pronged critical assessment of a subset of the literature on racial disproportionality in special education: that which aims to estimate racial disparities among otherwise similar children. This body of research has shown that Black students are less likely than comparable White students to receive special education, and has been interpreted by many to mean that current policies meant to reduce Black over-representation may be exacerbating inequality. Our essay argues that this subset of research has fundamental limitations in its covariate adjustment practices and its data quality, making “under-representation” findings questionable. We argue that caution and further study are needed for an accurate understanding of the nature of racial disproportionality in special education.

New paper with Ken Shores and João Souto Maior, with important implications for current/potential policy changes: doi.org/10.1177/0014....

We argue that current research concluding that Black kids are "under-represented" in special education has fundamental limitations in data and methods.

Whoops…

“Meta’s AI climate tool raised false hope of CO₂ removal, scientists say”

archive.is/8sYNv

Beginning to have my doubts about whatever this America party will be

Part of a very informative thread. I can’t fathom the losses in Texas, especially of the young kids at camp.