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Epstein gives away his sexism immediately by opening his op-ed with the advice that "no one should call himself 'Dr.' unless he has delivered a child." In other words, part of his problem appears to be that Dr. Biden is not a man.

Epstein also argues that it has become easy to get a doctorate degree these days. He makes this inaccurate and offensive claim despite never having managed to earn one himself.

In 2018, when Dr. Julia Baird earned her Ph.D. and changed her title on Twitter, she ignited a firestorm of complaints -- mostly from men. The discussion that ensued among academics revealed that women are routinely ridiculed for using the titles they earn, while the expertise of men doesn't seem to meet with the same level of skepticism and censure. One man who holds a Ph.D. responded, "I had no idea doctorate-shaming was even a thing!"

A 2017 study found that when men introduced female medical doctors at a professional event, they used their titles 50 percent of the time -- but when men introduced fellow male doctors, they used their titles over 70 percent of the time.

As Cornell philosopher Kate Manne writes in her 2020 book "Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women," when women make claims, their credibility is questioned much more than that of men. In fact, Rebecca Solnit wrote an entire book entitled "Men Explain Things to Me" after suffering through a man explaining one of her other books to her at a party. Scores of female academics have taken to Twitter to describe similar experiences of men explaining their own publications to them.

America needs to stop lecturing and start learning from women who have expertise. By using her "Dr." title in the White House, Dr. Biden would show by example that women shouldn't deny their rightful authority.

In 2017, Dr. Biden spoke at the commencement ceremony at Hofstra University, where I teach. The president of our university told her that one of my colleagues, a university administrator, had just earned her graduate degree but was not planning to walk in the ceremony. Dr. Biden insisted that my colleague put on a robe and go up to the stage with her classmates because it was important to recognize all the work that had gotten her there.

Since 2019, French law provides a waiver to the 40% rule if the new hires do not lead to an overall gender imbalance, Le Monde explains. That's the case for the city of Paris, according to the newspaper: Women still make up just 47% of senior executives on its government. And female city officials are paid 6% less than their male counterparts.

"It is paradoxical to blame us for appointments that make it possible to catch up on the backlog we had," Antoine Guillou, the mayor's deputy in charge of human resources, told Le Monde.

the aim is to resolve an existing imbalance toward men

"In Paris, we are doing everything to make it a success, and I am very, very proud of a large team of women and men who carry together this fight for equality," Hidalgo added.

Amélie de Montchalin, France's Minister of Public Service, lamented the fine and called the provision "absurd."

a different trend covered in the Peltzman paper: the persistent happiness advantage enjoyed by married couples over the unmarried, which has slightly widened since the early 1970s and now sits at around 35 points on a scale running from -100 to 100.

Over that same period, Americans have become much less likely to be married overall. In 1970, just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never tied the knot; in 2018, it was 35 percent.

the simplest possible explanation for declining happiness: For women maybe first, and for men too, eventually, less wedlock means more woe.

Barbieland itself is a female-first utopia that looks fundamentally dystopian — plastic, denatured, death-denying, cut off from love and procreation. The way that Barbiedom marginalizes images of pregnancy and motherhood, to say nothing of literal baby dolls, is a running preoccupation of the film

Is the Greta Gerwig movie proudly feminist, crypto-conservative or somewhere in between?

The simplest reading is the feminist one. The movie depicts a dolltopia where Barbies occupy every important job and office (with their Kens as arm candy) and tell themselves that their example has solved all of women’s problems in the real world, too — only to discover, when Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie” goes on a quest into our own contemporary reality, that sexism still exists, the patriarchy is disguised but maybe still resilient, the board of Mattel is proudly “feminist” but all male, and early 21st-century women are being asked to do it all for meager recompense.

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire claims, “conservative, anti-feminist, pro-family, pro-motherhood” themes

In part, the conservative spin comes from the sheer fun of Gosling’s performance

I want to talk about these findings in the light of the running debate about the true ideological perspective of the billion-dollar box-office juggernaut “Barbie.”

Ken’s plight is treated sympathetically — he’s mostly running his coup to impress Barbie, and what are men for in the post-sexual-revolution landscape, anyway?

Barbie’s own arc is away from the female-dominated dystopia and back toward embodied womanhood, the real world with all its patriarchal holdovers

“Barbie” is a movie with a feminist default, but also complicated and sometimes muddled feelings about what the sexual revolution has done and where feminism ought to go.

It’s against the resilient patriarchy, but wary of the girlboss alternative

It wants womanhood and motherhood, but it doesn’t want the Kens back in charge, and it doesn’t really know what purpose men should serve.

In each narrative, the one way that the current dissatisfactions of women and men can’t be resolved is with the happy ending that even stories about the battle of the sexes used to take for granted — not a rearrangement of political power but a romantic partnership, not one sex’s rule but both sexes’ contentment.

so the movie ends — again, spoiler — with Barbie out of Barbieland but on her own, seeking out some sort of reproductive destiny at the gynecologist with a mother-daughter cheerleading squad beside her and no Ken in sight.

There’s an interesting parallel to the ending of Lena Dunham’s series “Girls,”

A guy can literally organize a revolution and it still isn’t enough to make Barbie see him as a lover, a romantic partner, an erotic object, a husband or a father.

In the movie they made, “Barbie and Ken” is a statement of reverse subordination, female rule and male eclipse. But in reality, nothing may matter as much to male and female happiness, and indeed, to the future of the human race, as whether Barbie and Ken can make that “and” into something reciprocal and fertile — a bridge, a bond, a marriage.

When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised. (Zuck-Musk cage match, anyone?) But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless.

It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet

I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been.

If the X rebrand disgusts you—if, like me, you’ve been made a little queasy by having the new logo thrust upon your phone via automatic update—that feeling is about more than Musk alone. He has merely surfaced what has been there all along. The internet is magical and empowering. The internet is childish and disgusting.

They call the advocates for diversity “biased” and defenders of social stagnation “impartial.” They prefer ideology to ideas, replacing the exquisite democratic choreography of checks and balances with the myopic march of majoritarianism.

We’re in a mean-spirited moral free-for-all, a climate polluted by bombastic insensitivity, antisemitism, racism, sexism, islamophobia, homophobia and discrimination generally

Too often, law and justice are in a dysfunctional relationship. Too often, hate kills, truth is homeless and lives don’t matter.

We need to put justice back in charge, and to do that, we need to put compassion back in the service of law and law in the service of humanity. We need the rule of justice, not just the rule of law.

what’s the point of law? Or lawyers? What good is the rule of law if there’s no justice?

to make justice happen, we can never forget how the world looks to those who are vulnerable.

My life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, no justice. No one with this history does not feel lucky to be alive and free. No one with this history takes anything for granted. And no one with this history does not feel that we have a particular duty to wear our identities with pride and to promise our children that we will do everything humanly possible to keep the world safer for them than it was for their grandparents

This matters because there are few professions in this world where women are paid a lot more than men.

womenswear, for example, no longer exists as an idea. If you look up the shows on Vogue.com you will see there is only menswear, and ready-to-wear — the word “women” has literally been removed, possibly in order to paper over the fact that female models have been effectively booted off the catwalks and replaced largely with trans models and men.

There is ballet, of course, and porn. Unlike either of these, fashion is mainstream and acceptable: the one place where women can be seen, globally, to score big. But now half of the models I see at Paris and Milan are male. Not just men, but people who need the money the least: rich, famous men. Every time I see Kanye West modelling at what used to be a womenswear show, I see struggling Balkans model done out of a job.

Meanwhile the fashion disciples drink in the various “visions” as if they were gospel, explaining how important they are politically, without realising that nothing matters to them, politically, more than their status as women.

not only are women being physically removed from the one world they thought might be theirs, but are again being invited to diet themselves out of existence.

Now, after the Peronista government of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has failed to halt the country’s economic decline, a new force among Argentina’s Generation Z is rising.

This time, it’s young men who are at the forefront. Milei is speaking for them.

An admirer of Donald Trump and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Milei is campaigning on an Argentine version of “Drain the Swamp.” His aggressive style, outlandish comments and unusual presentation — he claims he hasn’t brushed that hair in years — have drawn millions of viewers to his videos and disrupted traditional politics

He has branded Pope Francis — the Argentine former Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio, the first South American pontiff — an “evil” leftist. Climate change, he says, is a “socialist lie.” He would hold a referendum to undo the three-year-old law that legalized abortion. He has called for creating a market for the sale of organs.

But he has also offered frustrated Argentines a break from the status quo: He has proposed shutting down the central bank, dollarizing the economy and taking a “chain saw” to government spending.

His attacks on the peso are already shocking the Argentine economy; the currency has taken a nose dive in the widely traded black market in recent weeks. The inflation rate has skyrocketed.

If Milei wins, it will likely be on the strength of the country’s young. Voters aged 18 to 29 account for a quarter of the electorate, and polls show they’re overwhelmingly inclined to vote for the iconoclast. That’s especially true for young men.

Coronel grew up watching the North American right-wing provocateurs Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos on a YouTube channel that translated their words into Spanish. “They were a fundamental part of my ideological awakening,” he said. But his greatest inspiration was Trump.

“We stopped listening to the intellectuals to listen to the politicians,” Coronel said.

“While everyone was focused on feminist demands and gay rights, there was a generation slowly starting to pay attention to Javier Milei.”

He decided to become an economist in 1989 during the early days of hyperinflation in Argentina. He worked as a risk analyst for Corporacion America, owned by one of Argentina’s billionaires, before leaping into television as a regular guest on shows.

Milei’s unconventional ideas and brash style — rants peppered with personal insults — was a TV hit. As the peso plunged and inflation skyrocketed, his economic theories began to find an audience.

He was elected to Congress in 2021 on pledges to tear the political elite down. He gained national prominence by raffling off his congressional salary each month.

Milei describes himself as a liberal-libertarian or a miniarchist. He supports limiting government to just a few functions — ideally, only security and justice — a night-watchman state.

He promises to slash the number of federal ministries from 18 to eight. He applies his free-market ideas to just about everything — he proposes loosening gun restrictions to “maximize the cost of robbery” — and letting the invisible hand of the market do the rest.

“Sometimes I have to pinch myself to ask whether I am living a dream or it’s a reality,” he told The Washington Post. “Because what Javier Milei proposes in politics hasn’t been heard in Argentina for 80 years.”

Milei’s originality is perhaps exactly why Gen Z is so transfixed by him. It’s a generation craving authenticity, Argentine political analyst Ana Iparraguirre said. “They see this guy telling it like it is,” she said. “I might not like that he’ll be selling guns in the streets, but at least this guy is not faking it.”

Most of his 1.4 million TikTok followers are younger than 24, according to his social media team. Iñaki Gutierrez, a 22-year old unpaid volunteer who manages his TikTok, said Milei managed to win the primaries in remote provinces “we didn’t even set foot in.” “TikTok was the answer,” Gutierrez said.

The fastest-growing social media site in Latin America has helped elect a wave of millennial presidents in the region, including Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and, last week, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador.

Milei’s TikTok posts offer Gen Z voters an outlet for rebellion against a system that they say is doing very little for them.

According to one recent survey, more than 65 percent of young voters say they would leave Argentina if they could.

“They feel they have no future,” Iparraguirre said. “If you’ve got nothing to lose you may as well try something different.”

Fragoso’s girlfriend, Victoria Alegre, 23, walking with him in a mall in Buenos Aires this week, said she thinks Milei is a machista who could roll back rights for women. Fragoso said he also dislikes the way Milei speaks about feminism. But he’s willing to overlook it, he said, to take a chance on something — anything — different.

“They said we were dangerous and that we needed to be quiet,” Milei shouted. “But we’re here, we fought the battle and we’re going to win!

The gripe drew a chagrined reply from Musk. “Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he responded. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”

While many tech ethicists and AI experts warn that these systems can absorb and reinforce harmful stereotypes, efforts by tech firms to counter those tendencies have provoked a backlash from some on the right who see them as overly censorial.

Touting xAI to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk accused OpenAI’s programmers of “training the AI to lie” or to refrain from commenting when asked about sensitive issues. (OpenAI wrote in a February blog post that its goal is not for the AI to lie, but for it to avoid favoring any one political group or taking positions on controversial topics.) Musk said his AI, in contrast, would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” even if that meant offending people.

So far, however, the people most offended by Grok’s answers seem to be the people who were counting on it to readily disparage minorities, vaccines and President Biden.

an academic researcher from New Zealand who examines AI bias, gained attention for a paper published in March that found ChatGPT’s responses to political questions tended to lean moderately left and socially libertarian. Recently, he subjected Grok to some of the same tests and found that its answers to political orientation tests were broadly similar to those of ChatGPT.

“I think both ChatGPT and Grok have probably been trained on similar Internet-derived corpora, so the similarity of responses should perhaps not be too surprising,”

Other AI researchers argue that the sort of political orientation tests used by Rozado overlook ways in which chatbots, including ChatGPT, often exhibit negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.

Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment as to what actions they’re taking to alter Grok’s politics, or whether that amounts to putting a thumb on the scale in much the same way Musk has accused OpenAI of doing with ChatGPT.

It often borrows the language of social justice movements

BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type

“I don’t know what the economy is, I don’t know what supply and demand is,” Ms. Chlapecka says in one video. “All I know is that our problems would be solved if we’d just print more money.” There’s a way in which her monologues can come to feel almost incisive — why can’t we print more money? The answer is complicated, obviously, and on some level Ms. Chlapecka knows that. “I’m asking a lot of questions that, yes, I have the answer to, but are also valid,” she said. “The whole world we made is literally made up, so we can make up solutions to the issues we have.”

Bimboism is the antithesis of the mode of feminism that was dominant in the 2010s, a kind of hyperambitious you-can-have-it-all feminism that can be summed up by the label “girlboss.”

It encourages asking the dumb questions that get to the heart of things.

Amid the resurgence of leftist politics, and the disillusionment with capitalism among millennials and Gen Z, the framing of careerism and individualism as feminist rings hollow

That girlboss model was critiqued for its lack of inclusivity — its overwhelming whiteness and its focus on a level of economic success that was never attainable for a vast majority of women.

Not to mention, girlboss aesthetics are simply cringe, for a generation steeped in internet irony.

In its most interesting form, bimboism also makes a connection between the ideas of pleasure — sexual pleasure, pleasure in clothes, pleasure in simply existing as a woman in the world with a body on display — and political gains that would make it more possible, like universal health care, student loan debt cancellation and abortion rights.

It’s anticapitalist, even anti-work. (In one video, another BimboTok comedian, @brattybarbiana, dances behind text that reads, “Rule of thumb: All relationships should be 50/50 … He works for his money, I spend it!”)

Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.

But to dismiss this corner of the internet as totally backward would be to miss the point.

Is it really leftist for a woman to want to just go shopping and never get a job?

“Are you a leftist who likes to have their tits out? Do you like to flick off pro-lifers?” Chrissy Chlapecka asks the camera in a 51-second TikTok captioned “BIMBOS, RISE

Today, there are many more people like Claudia who regret transitioning, and who feel their mental health problems were ignored when their condition was put in a neat box marked ‘gender dysphoria’.

some mental health professionals were deeply concerned with the medicalisation of children. They believed these children required talking therapies, not irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions. But these staff were in a difficult position: they were under pressure from ‘powerful lobbies’ to opt for medication

the service was coming under pressure to recommend the prescription of drugs more often and more quickly, and that the independence of professional judgement was also coming under increasing pressure. Young patients may threaten suicide if their anxieties are not immediately addressed. Parents and others may threaten to complain and there are powerful lobbies from older patients pressing for the use of medication, which even more worryingly, is now available without regulation via the internet.

Clinicians feared the consequences if they refused to comply with what patients, and their parents, wanted. Sonia Appleby, a former safeguarding lead, told Barnes that those who spoke out against the transition of children were ‘demonised’.

From the start of the American experiment the language of freedom applied only to a privileged few.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, only 2 percent of the city’s population were qualified to vote.

overtake freedom’s meaning entirely, harnessing freedom solely to projects of exclusion, privilege and harm.

In the 20th century, racial segregation was justified as the freedom of white people to control public space and make their own business choices.

It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination.

more and more laws, caucuses, rallies and hard-right movements use the language of freedom as a cudgel to erode democratic governance and civil rights; these laws expand the creep of authoritarianism.

Slave codes allowed white property owners to possess Black humans — creating what the historian Tyler Stovall called “white freedom,” the “belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.” This freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.

The ugly freedoms in American politics today increasingly justify minority rule, prejudice and anti-democratic governance. If we don’t push back against their growing popularity, we will have ceded what freedom means to those who support monopolistic rule and furthered the country’s downward slide toward authoritarianism.

How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true?

respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views

the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.

The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,

Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.

The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.

Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.

the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:

election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete

The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”

understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.

Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”

Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.

“It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”

Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors

The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.

Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means

It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.

and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).

It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group

the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.

The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe

that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate

Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win

Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.

it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation

One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.

the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining

racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time

Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower

And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.

While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment

Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment

In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.

that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment

there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.

my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.

Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.

In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”

We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

“The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years

a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010

The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.

Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.

The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”

By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.

These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,

Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure

“We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”

teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.

the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.

Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.

How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.

policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.

The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.

“On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”

Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”

These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”

Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress

In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364

Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.

White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.

and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar

A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint

Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?

Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.

Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.

Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.

Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.

The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.

These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.

State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.

Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?

Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years

the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low

Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years

The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.

Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.

The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color

We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions

We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.

In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.

If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.

Opening the marriage wasn’t just about doing whatever — and whoever — she wanted, she said. She had to cast off internalized sexism and her tendency to put others’ needs before her own, issues she worked through in therapy. What began as sexual thrill-seeking led unexpectedly to self-discovery.

“I thought non-monogamy was going to be all about the sex,” she said. “I thought I was going on a big sexual adventure, and it was going to be super exciting. And it was, until it wasn’t.”

Eventually, Winter swore off men who were cheating and began seeing people who were also in open relationships, a demographic that became easier to find when online dating services added non-monogamous to their menus. Even then, options were limited.

Winter and her husband struggled with when and how to tell their sons about their arrangement, and wanted to wait until their children were mature enough to handle it. That plan failed when their oldest son, then 13, saw his dad’s online dating profile on his laptop, and texted his mother in a panic, asking if they were in an open marriage. Her youngest son found out in a similar way a few years ago, when he was 14, she said.