Colorado governor pleads with parents to sign their kids up for school as state faces enrollment declines

Jesse Paul and Erica Breunlin:

Gov. Jared Polis on Tuesday pleaded with Colorado parents to enroll their children in school, saying that districts have seen declines in the number of kids signed up for classes during the coronavirus crisis, especially among younger grades.

“Your kid will return to school someday,” Polis said at a coronavirus briefing with reporters at the governor’s mansion in downtown Denver. “You don’t want them to be behind.”

Polis said the state doesn’t have specific data showing how large the declines are in enrollment. It’s anecdotal thus far, but widespread.

“There are certainly more than usual.” Polis said

Polis said he fears some Colorado parents are trying to home school their kids without proper planning and curriculum.

“Don’t just think you’re home-schooling because you’re giving your kid a book all day and leaving them at home,” Polis said. “… It’s not something to be taken lightly.”

The governor said that parents who don’t feel comfortable sending their kids back to school for in-person learning should at least enroll them in an online program. That will give children access to social interaction with their peers as well as counseling, should they need it.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

“I am particularly unhappy about the fact that Dane County has chosen some very low numbers of case limits to decide whether to allow K-12 to start back up again in person”

Will Cioci:

“I am particularly unhappy about the fact that Dane County has chosen some very low numbers of case limits to decide whether to allow K-12 to start back up again in person,” she said. “I have asked that the county should revisit some of those K-12 limits.”

One particular area of concern with off-campus spread is the return of the Badger football games and the tailgating events that will inevitably come with.

“While we all love our football Saturdays, the festivities that come with them are going to serve as new spreading events within our community,” Parisi wrote in a statement after the Big Ten announced that its football season would resume in late October.

On Tuesday, Blank defended the choice to restart the season, which she and the other heads of Big Ten schools agreed upon unanimously. Before that decision was made, she said, a Big Ten Medical Advisory Group supplied a list of recommendations with which a safe season would be possible, and that the schools will implement those recommendations. 

The Chancellor also said that there would be no fans in attendance at Badger football games.

“There’s no way you can have, even if it’s only one quarter of your stadium, 20,000 people walking in and standing in line for the restrooms,” Blank said. “There are no fans in the stadium this year.”

Blank ended the call by emphasizing the agency of students in behaving responsibly and limiting the spread of the virus.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

New OECD PISA report reveals challenge of online learning for many students and schools

PISA, via a kind email:

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to school closures across the world and forced teachers and students in many countries to adapt quickly to teaching and learning online. But a new OECD PISA report reveals wide disparities both between and within countries in the availability of technology in schools and of teachers’ capacities to use ICT effectively.

Effective Policies, Successful Schools analyses findings from the most recent OECD PISA 2018 test, involving around 600,000 15-year-old students in 79 countries and economies.

On average across OECD countries in 2018, there was almost one computer available at school for educational purposes for every 15-year-old student. Yet in many countries school principals reported that the computers were not powerful enough in terms of computing capacity, affecting one in three students globally.

“This crisis has exposed the many inadequacies and inequities in education systems across the world,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills. “Disadvantaged young people have been particularly affected and every country should do more to ensure that all schools have the resources they need so that every student has an equal opportunity to learn and succeed.” 

Differences between advantaged and disadvantaged schools were significant. In Brazil 68% of students in advantaged schools had access to sufficiently powerful digital devices, according to principals, compared to just 10% of students in disadvantaged schools. In Spain, there was a 40 percentage-point difference (70% vs. 30%) in the availability of sufficiently powerful digital devices between advantaged and disadvantaged schools.

Madison School District Staff Cannot Lie or Deceive Parents About Gender Transitions at School

WILL:

WILL sued MMSD for violating parental rights with gender identity policy

The News: Dane County Circuit Court Judge Frank Remington issued an injunction last week in a WILL parental rights lawsuit that forbids Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) employees from lying or deceiving parents about the gender identity that their child may have adopted at school. The lawsuit is ongoing, but the injunction goes into effect immediately as the case is under consideration.

The Quote: Deputy Counsel Luke Berg said, “We are pleased Judge Remington issued this injunction that will require honesty when Madison Metropolitan School District staff interact with parents about critical matters impacting their child’s health and wellbeing. This is an important win for parental rights as the court considers this matter.”

Background: On behalf of a group of Madison parents, WILL and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court against the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) in February 2020 for adopting and implementing policies that violate the rights of District parents. MMSD policies adopted in April 2018 enable children, of any age, to change their gender identity at school without parental notice or consent, and then directs District employees to conceal and even deceive parents about the gender identity their son or daughter has adopted at school. The Circuit Court’s injunction prevents District staff from lying to or deceiving parents if they directly ask about their child, including the name and pronouns their child is using at school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Test-Optional Admissions Policies Hurt the Populations They Intend to Help

Jillian Ludwig:

In late July, the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined the rest of the UW System in receiving a waiver from the Board of Regents to suspend ACT and SAT score requirements for admissions in response to COVID-19. The original waiver was set to expire on December 31, 2020, but the university has already opted to extend the suspension until the summer of 2023. This raises suspicions that their choice is not solely due to COVID-19 but a trend spreading throughout higher education.

In the middle of an unprecedented pandemic, flexibility is necessary, but as the UW System’s flagship university, UW-Madison must refrain from having fashionable policies and work to maintain its high academic standard. If the university wants to maintain that standard, they will continue to take into account all measures of academic preparedness — both high school performance and standardized test scores, first and foremost.

In recent years, test-optional admissions policies have become increasingly popular in higher education, as standardized tests have been scrutinized for furthering inequity among students. While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a wrench into many aspects of life, it has also had the unintended effect of spurring on this movement. In fact, the pandemic has resulted in hundreds of universities from California to New York opting to remove their requirements for scores.

College enrollments are falling in the US—except for graduate degrees

Oliver Staley:

One of the more worrying aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US is its effect on undergraduate enrollments.

Over the summer there were indications, through student loan data and Census surveys, that students were either dropping out or not enrolling in previous numbers. For some students, particularly those from low-income and minority families, the financial and logistical challenges posed by the pandemic were too much to overcome.

Now we have an early glimpse of actual enrollment figures from 629 US colleges (or about 22%) that reported their data to the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that collects information for universities. The data, which compare the same colleges from 2019 to 2020, go through Sept. 10, and were reported Sept. 24.

Why Music is Helpful for Concentration

Tinnire:

Content

1 What is concentration?

2 Ways to improve focus and concentration

3 What kind of music disrupts focusing

4 Flow state music

What is Concentration?

There are several meanings of the word concentration. If we talk about focusing attention, then this is keeping the interest on one aspect while ignoring other things.

In English language, this word came in the 1630s from Italian concentrare. Its origin is Latin: com ‘with, together’ + centrum ‘center’. This literally means ‘action of bringing to a central point’.

Our ability to concentrate is important because the human body has limited resources. If we work being constantly distracted, then we will not be able to complete the task.

Since ancient times, people have developed various techniques to stay focused. Let’s dwell on the most popular methods.

What Republicans Must Do To Get Critical Race Theory Out Of Schools

Joy Pullmann

President Trump is bringing some attention to the connections between this summer’s riots, the 63 percent of young Americans who believe America is racist, and the disaster that is civics and history instruction in U.S. public schools. He recently announced a federal commission to counter the saturation of anti-American ideology in American education institutions through “patriotic education.” He also “threatened to cut funding to schools that teach the 1619 Project.”

This is a start, but it’s going to take a lot more to address this serious problem. Significant structural changes are required, and state-level elected officials need to do most of it. Since schooling that teaches children to hate their own nation threatens its very existence, it’s past time to get serious about this.

The examples are myriad and expansive, and they are not limited to deep-blue locales (as if indoctrination is okay if local politicians approve). The College Board’s changes to its U.S. and European history Advanced Placement curriculum, which more than 800,000 American high school students take each year, are one major example.

Hacker Releases Information on Las Vegas-Area Students After Officials Don’t Pay Ransom

Tawnell Hobbs:

A hacker published documents containing Social Security numbers, student grades and other private information stolen from a large public-school district in Las Vegas after officials refused a ransom demanded in return for unlocking district computer servers.

The illegal release late last week of sensitive information from the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, with about 320,000 students, demonstrates an escalation in tactics for hackers who have taken advantage of schools heavily reliant on online learning and technology to run operations during the coronavirus pandemic. The release of the district’s information is being reported for the first time by The Wall Street Journal.

Hackers have attacked school districts and other institutions with sensitive information even before the pandemic, typically blocking users’ access to their own computer systems unless a ransom is paid. In those instances, the so-called ransomware crippled the district’s operations but hackers didn’t usually expose damaging information about students or employees.

“A big difference between this school year and last school year is they didn’t steal data, and this year they do,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst for cybersecurity company Emsisoft, who said he was able to easily access the Clark County data on a hacker website. “If there’s no payment, they publish that stolen data online, and that has happened to multiple districts.”

Oconomowoc High School and two intermediate schools will shift to all in-person classes

Alec Johnson:

Nature Hill Intermediate School, Silver Lake Intermediate School and Oconomowoc High School students will have class in person five days a week starting Sept. 28 after an Oconomowoc School Board vote on Sept. 23.

The board voted, 4-2, in a special meeting to have the intermediate school and high school students return to a full, five-day face-to-face setting. The vote also provided a virtual option for students in grades five through 12 who do not want to return to school in person beginning Sept. 28.

Those three schools started the school year in a hybrid model, alternating in-person and virtual learning from home.

Board members Jessica Karnowski, Kim Herro, Rick Grothaus and James Wood voted in favor of the new plan, while board members Scott Roehl and Dan Raasch voted against it. Board member Juliet Steitzer abstained, saying there was insufficient data for her to make a decision.

Oconomowoc made substantive changes to their high school teaching approach several years ago. I wonder how that has played out?

How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

Aris Roussinos:

The extraordinary spread in recent months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as “the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives, still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?

What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital.

K-12 Tax; referendum and spending climate: Blue-city urbanization imposes a downward mobility people don’t want and don’t need.

Joel Kotkin:

“No Bourgeois, No Democracy”
– Barrington Moore

Protecting and fighting for the middle class regularly dominates rhetoric on the Right and Left. Yet activists on both sides now often seek to undermine single-family home ownership, the linchpin of middle-class aspiration.

The current drive to outlaw single-family zoning—the one protection homeowners possess against unwanted development—has notched bans in the City of Minneapolis and the state of Oregon, with California not far behind. Advocates have tapped an odd alliance of progressives and libertarians. Essentially, it marries two inflexible ideologies, in principle diametrically opposed, but neither of which see housing as a critical element of family and community. In its stead, the Left seeks to place the state in charge, while libertarians bow instinctively to any de-regulatory step they see as increasing “freedom and choice.”

Although couched in noble sentiments, both approaches are fundamentally hostile to both middle- and working-class aspirations. Without a home, the new generation—including minorities—will face a “formidable challenge” in boosting their worth. Property remains key to financial security: Homes today account for roughly two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans while home owners have a median net worth more than 40 times that of renters, according to the Census Bureau. Equally important, a shift from homeownership would also weaken the basis of democracy. Since ancient times, republican institutions have rested on the firmament of dispersed property ownership, and forced unwilling millions to live not as they wish to but in such a way as to fulfill the visions of planners and of portions of the capitalist elite.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

America’s missing kids: Amid COVID-19 and online school, thousands of students haven’t shown up

Erin Richards:

This year, after a lot of research about COVID-19 and schooling options and after the district announced it was starting virtually, Ludtke withdrew the girls and enrolled them in a state college that offers online classes. They’re earning both college and high school credit in English and math. (Because the girls are 12 and 13, the college administrators asked to interview them first – then offered them a grant toward tuition.) 

Ludtke resigned from her principal role and stepped back to teaching, which leaves her time to home-school her daughters in their other necessary subjects, such as social studies and physical education. The girls hadn’t learned much in the spring when Clark County moved to remote instruction, she said, and the combination of college classes and home-schooling seemed to be the most rigorous option.

The upshot: The girls are learning, but they’re no longer enrolled in any school district.

As parents nationwide tread through a wildly different education landscape this year, many kids, like the Ludtke sisters, disappear from the rosters of their public schools. Clark County schools are down about 10,000 students this year, a loss that will translate into a reduction of about $61 million from the state of Nevada, though the impact won’t be felt right away.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Florida schools reopened en masse, but a surge in coronavirus didn’t follow, a USA TODAY analysis finds

Jayme Fraser, Mike Stucka, Emily Bloch, Rachel Fradette, Sommer Brugal:

Many teachers and families feared a spike in COVID-19 cases when Florida made the controversial push to reopen schools in August with in-person instruction.

A USA TODAY analysis shows the state’s positive case count among kids ages 5 to 17 declined through late September after a peak in July. Among the counties seeing surges in overall cases, it’s college-age adults – not schoolchildren – driving the trend, the analysis found.

The early results in Florida show the success of rigorous mask wearing, social distancing, isolating contacts and quick contact tracing when necessary, health experts said.

“Many of the schools that have been able to successfully open have also been implementing control measures that are an important part of managing spread in these schools,” said Dr. Nathaniel Beers, who serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on School Health.

Although things went well early, the experts cautioned that schools could still be the source of future problems. They warned against reading the data as a reason to reopen all schools or abandon safety measures.

Hundreds of students and staffers contracted the novel coronavirus despite the precautionary measures. The Florida Department of Health published a report last month showing 559 COVID-19 cases related to elementary, middle and high schools logged from Aug. 10 to 23. State health officials quickly retracted the report, saying it was a draft and “inadvertently made available.” 

A majority of teens (59%) say that online learning is worse than in-person schooling

Laura Wonski:

A majority of teens (59%) say that online learning is worse than in-person schooling, though just 19% characterize it as “much worse,” according to a new poll from Common Sense Media and SurveyMonkey. The rest of teens are nearly evenly split between those who say online learning is better than in-person schooling (19%) and those who say they are about the same (21%). 

US society at risk as it decouples from China in science and tech

Yuki Okoshi and Yuki Misumi:

The U.S. government is starting to exclude Chinese students and researchers, while the Chinese government is going its own way when it comes to developing science and technology, trends that academics say will hollow out the institutions America has come to rely on to maintain its global competitiveness.

Researchers from the hegemons are used to collaborating and in many cases have become interdependent, but the U.S.-China decoupling in scientific research puts American science and technology advances at risk.

“I thought studying in Japan would be better than in the U.S.,” said Wang Yuchen, who is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo. Wang graduated from Peking University in 2016, having majored in physics. Accepted by Princeton University, he chose not to go.

The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning

Alec MacGillis:

The biggest challenge was not technological. No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account. His grandmother, who is in her seventies, is a steady presence, but she attended little school while growing up, in a sharecropping family in South Carolina. She was also losing her eyesight. One day, she explained to me the family’s struggles to assist Shemar: though three of his four older siblings lived in the house, too, they had jobs or attended vocational school, and one of them had a baby to care for; Shemar’s mother was often absent; and his great-uncle, who also lived in the house, had dropped out of school in South Carolina around the age of eight, and was illiterate.

Shemar’s teachers worried about him but had a hard time reaching him, given his mother’s frequent changes of phone number. One time, his English teacher drove to his house and visited with him on the small front porch.

Foundation for Madison PUblic Schools $pend$ to Support 2020 Referendum

Foundation for Madison Public Schools [Board] recently spent funds on a pro 2020 Tax & Spending increase referendum Facebook advertising campaign.

The advertisement.

The advertisement includes a reference to https://yes2investmsn.org

The Foundation for Madison Public Schools lists $9,011,063 in assets at the end of 2019 (!) via FMPS’ IRS Tax Form 990 “Return of Organization Exempt from Tax” .

How to digitize your lab notebooks

Anna Nowogrodzki:

When the coronavirus pandemic closed the University of Minnesota in St Paul, plant pathologist Linda Kinkel’s laboratory team cast around for tasks they could do from home. They realized there was one job they’d wanted to do for some time: digitizing the team’s 30-year-old collection of paper lab notebooks. “COVID really was what made us commit to the digital lab notebooks,” says technician Andrew Mann. “All of us being alone and needing access to former students’ experiments so we can write grants and plan our next experiments.”

Research groups digitize their old lab notebooks for a host of reasons. Digital records can be backed up so they are impervious to floods and fires, and encrypted to protect them from theft. They require no physical space, and can be used by multiple team members at the same time from different locations. The scanning process makes the text readable, accessible and suitable for archiving; if the software includes optical character recognition (OCR), scanned typewritten text can also generally be searched — although OCR is not error-free, so the resulting text often needs manual correction.

Some researchers scan notebooks using smartphone apps or physical scanners; others outsource the work to specialized companies. “Digitization is on the increase, especially after COVID,” says Jan Cahill, marketing director at Cleardata, near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, which digitizes books and documents. Lab closures because of pandemic restrictions have highlighted the benefits of having documents remotely accessible by every team member simultaneously, Mann says. For Glenn Lockwood, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, digitization was about providing peace of mind. “It just helps me sleep better at night,” he says.

Commentary on 2020 Urban Governance

Kevin Williamson:

This represents a truly impressive display of political incompetence on the part of Black Lives Matter and its allies. If you came to the American public with an argument that cities such as Louisville and Philadelphia are poorly governed, that this poor governance imposes especially terrible costs on African Americans, that the municipal incompetence naturally extends to police work, and that sweeping reform is called for, you would get a great deal of buy-in from both sides of the aisle. Republicans don’t need a whole lot of convincing that Chicago is a flying circus of whirling buffoonery.

In truth, the Left isn’t especially interested in police reform. If they cared about police reform, progressives would be offering actual halfway serious proposals for police reform, which have been notably few and far between over these past months, drowned out by unserious and irresponsible rhetoric about abolishing city police departments. The police are a special problem for the Left in that they represent an incompatibility between the Left’s post-1960s Bill Ayers–style radicalism and the realpolitik that recognizes police as unionized municipal employees and hence natural constituents of the Democratic Party.

The scandal of urban America is a stumbling-block for Democrats, for the obvious reason that this is pretty much exclusively their show and has been for generations. Louisville, currently convulsed by the death of Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Portions of American cities were ceded to armed militias over the summer, not by Republican authorities accommodating right-wing radicals descending from the hills of Idaho but by the powers that be in impeccably progressive Seattle inviting a left-wing occupation force to set up shop in a corner of that declining city, where they promptly set about shooting a few children.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Dishonesty in academia: the deafening silence of the Royal Society Open Science Journal on an accepted paper that failed the peer review process

iqoqi:

More than two years ago, on February 26th 2018, I was contacted by the Royal Society Open Science Journal to referee a submitted manuscript. Two prior referees had accepted the paper and two had rejected it, and I was the tiebreaker. The manuscript, Quantum Correlations are Weaved by the Spinors of the Euclidean Primitives by Joy Christian, basically claims that Bell’s theorem is incorrect. If true, this would be a game changer in the foundation of quantum mechanics. Bell’s theorem shows that it is impossible to construct a local realistic model of the theory.

Bell’s result is an impossibility proof; it attracts such passion as the impossibility of perpetual motion machines that were so popular some 100 years ago. A manuscript claiming the invention of a working perpetual motion device, proof that Earth is flat (yes, there is such a thing as an annual conference of Flat-Earth-ers), or that the sun circles Earth would be rejected by any respectable journal right away.

So, what if someone managed to “disprove” Bell’s theorem and, better yet, to publish that “discovery”? This would create lots of debates and excitement – certainly, notoriety and free publicity for the journal who published your claim. In other words, good business.

You’re Enlightened. Now What?

Zohar Atkins:

Suppose you are enlightened. Whether it was because you were born into it, stumbled into it, or worked at it, no matter. Perhaps you ate some magic mushrooms. Perhaps you had an epiphany on a park bench. Perhaps you spent decades meditating in a monastery. Perhaps you read a self-help book or attended a retreat or some high-end executive workshops. How do you translate the experience or insight into the wider world?

Do you try to turn your experience into a commodity so that everyone gets to have more of it, on the cheap? Do you create a tribe of like minded missionaries?

What makes you think that your company or religion or city-state will avoid all the pitfalls that have traditionally bogged every other cult: authoritarianism, corruption, hypocrisy, compromised quality produced by effects at scale? Why should you be exempt from “the innovator’s dilemma?” Doesn’t every new Jesus eventually become a Grand Inquisitor? Is enlightenment compatible with bureaucracy? 

You describe your experience as one in which you realize everything is one. You are photosynthesis. You are infinitely compassionate and truly feel the pain of all beings.

But there are political considerations. Will you go to war to protect your values and ideals against those who are not infinitely compassionate and do not feel the pain of all beings? Will you renounce your family and your communities of origin so as not to be overly tied down in your loyalties, being free to love everyone all the same? But you will have to choose a country in which to live? You already speak English and are unlikely to learn more than one or two second languages.

What led to Utah’s K-12 enrollment dropping for the first time in 20 years

Courtney Tanner:

The coronavirus pandemic has caused a shift that hasn’t been seen in Utah’s public schools in 20 years: The number of students enrolled has declined.

Some parents have started home-schooling their kids. Others have opted to keep their 5-year-olds out of kindergarten for now. As a result of those and other decisions, the state’s anticipated 7,000 increase in students this fall evaporated. In reality, the school population is instead down roughly 2,000.

A change like this, even if it is temporary, has huge ramifications.

“It’s cause for real concern,” said Mark Huntsman, chair of the Utah Board of Education, which reviewed the preliminary fall head counts for K-12 during a special meeting Tuesday.

The enrollment numbers dictate how much money districts get each year from the state. Put simply, fewer students means less funding. And with a drop as big as this year’s, that could mean losing millions of dollars for public school districts.

The Case for Urban Charter Schooling

David Griffith & Michael J. Petrilli:

A decade ago, the charter-school movement was moving from strength to strength. As student enrollment surged and new schools opened in cities across the country, America’s first black president provided much-needed political cover from teachers’ union attacks. Yet today, with public support fading and enrollment stalling nationwide — and with Democratic politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Joe Biden disregarding, downplaying, or publicly disavowing the charter movement — the situation for America’s charter schools has become virtually unrecognizable.

This is a strange state of affairs, given the ever-growing and almost universally positive research base on urban charter schools. On average, students in these schools — and black and Latino students in particular — learn more than their peers in traditional public schools and go on to have greater success in college and beyond. Moreover, these gains have not come at the expense of traditional public schools or their students. In fact, as charter schools have replicated and expanded, surrounding school systems have usually improved as well.

To be sure, the research is not as positive for charter schools operating outside of the nation’s urban centers. Furthermore, multiple studies suggest that internet-based schools, along with programs serving mostly middle-class students, perform worse than their district counterparts, at least on traditional test-score-based measures. But like the technologies behind renewable energy (which work poorly in places where the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine), charter schools needn’t work everywhere to be of service to society. And, contrary to much of the public rhetoric, the evidence makes a compelling case for expanding charter schools in urban areas — especially in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, and San Francisco, where their market share is still relatively modest. Indeed, encouraging such an expansion may be the single most important step we can take to improve the lives of low-income and minority children in America’s most underserved urban communities.

It is a particularly cruel irony that many within the Democratic Party — with its historic legacy of standing up for needy urban families — have turned against a policy that could so dramatically improve the lives of their constituents. But despite some Democrats’ about-face on charter schools, it is imperative that America’s dispirited education reformers — who have experienced more than their fair share of disappointment — not throw in the towel just yet. Although the political climate may now entail a serious fight over charter schools in the coming years, the benefits of such schools make them well worth the effort.

What Is Math?

Dan Falk:

It all started with an innocuous TikTok video posted by a high school student named Gracie Cunningham. Applying make-up while speaking into the camera, the teenager questioned whether math is “real.” She added: “I know it’s real, because we all learn it in school… but who came up with this concept?” Pythagoras, she muses, “didn’t even have plumbing—and he was like, ‘Let me worry about y = mx + b’”—referring to the equation describing a straight line on a two-dimensional plane. She wondered where it all came from. “I get addition,” she said, “but how would you come up with the concept of algebra? What would you need it for?”

Someone re-posted the video to Twitter, where it soon went viral. Many of the comments were unkind: One person said it was the “dumbest video” they had ever seen; others suggested it was indicative of a failed education system. Others, meanwhile, came to Cunningham’s defense, saying that her questions were actually rather profound.

Major Changes to Student Visa Rules Proposed

Elizabeth Redden:

The Trump administration is set to publish a new proposed rule today that would set fixed terms of up to four years for student visas and establish procedures for international students to apply to extend their stay and continue studying in the United States. Applications for extensions of stay could be approved “if the additional time needed is due to a compelling academic reason, documented medical illness or medical condition, or circumstance that was beyond the student’s control,” the new rule states.

Currently, student visas are good for “duration of status,” meaning students can stay in the U.S. indefinitely if they remain enrolled in school and otherwise abide by the rules relevant to their immigration status.

The fixed four-year term is notably shorter than the length of a typical Ph.D. program — and shorter than the time many students take to finish a baccalaureate program — meaning that if the proposed rule were to take effect as written, many students would need to apply for an extension of stay midprogram.

The Trump administration says the proposed rule is necessary to increase oversight of international students and combat fraud and visa overstays. Advocates for international students say the proposed rule creates unnecessary new burdens for international students and makes the U.S. a less welcoming destination at a time when international student enrollment has already been declining.

The more than one million international students in the U.S. are estimated to have a $41 billion economic impact and account for 5.5 percent of all students enrolled in higher education in this country.

Woke Science Is an Experiment Certain to Fail

Heather MacDonald:

President Trump has ordered an end to training on “white privilege” and “critical race theory” in the federal bureaucracy. The directive is a good first step toward removing identity politics from federal operations. Next up should be the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted annually to cultivating race- and sex-based grievance in the sciences. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women. Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the theory that scientific advancement depends on a “diverse” scientific workforce.

Earlier this year the NIH announced a new round of “Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.” Academic science labs could get additional federal money if they hire “diverse” researchers; no mention was made of relevant scientific qualifications. This latest grant solicitation expanded the agency’s social-justice agenda into novel territory. Besides the usual preferences for blacks, Hispanics and women, the NIH would fund student researchers who were or had been homeless, who were or had been in foster care, who had been eligible for free school lunches, or who had received WIC payments (a food program for low-income mothers) as a child or mother.

The federal science agencies have absorbed the vocabulary of academic victimology—from “intersectionality” to “heteronormativity” and “stereotype threat.” Intersectionality holds that people who can check off more than one victimhood box are particularly burdened by American bigotry. Science labs angling for the latest NIH diversity supplements will increase their chances of federal funding by hiring a woman who is also an underrepresented minority, disabled or from a “disadvantaged background.”

On Quitting Academia

Malcolm Gaskill:

In​ May, I gave up my academic career after 27 years. A voluntary severance scheme had been announced in December, and I dithered about it until the pandemic enforced focus on a fuzzy dilemma. Already far from the sunlit uplands, universities would now, it seemed, descend into a dark tunnel. I swallowed hard, expressed an interest, hesitated, and then declared my intention to leave. A settlement agreement was drafted, and I instructed a solicitor. Hesitating again, I made a few calls, stared out of the window, then signed.

My anxiety about academia dates back to my first job, a temporary lectureship in history at Keele University. I had drifted into doctoral research with a 2.1 from Cambridge and an unclassified O-Level in self-confidence. My friends from university, many headed for work in London, had initially been sceptical. One of them, later the deputy prime minister, worried that academic pay was crap and I’d have to read everything. Besides, decent posts were scarce. But I liked my subject, was taken on by a charismatic professor, scraped a grant, and switched Cambridge colleges as a gesture towards a fresh start. Reality had been evaded. To an extent unthinkable today, arts postgrads were left alone to read. At lamplit tutorials and seminars, held in book-lined rooms in dark courtyards, it was hard not to feel like an impostor, though, looking back, I now realise that others were also straining to suspend disbelief in themselves. Then, suddenly, I was out of time and needed a job. It was the end of what feels now like one long autumn of snug teas and cycling through mists.

Princeton’s Confession of Bias

Wall Street Journal:

The folks at Princeton are supposed to be smart. But you have to wonder about the intelligence of inviting federal scrutiny by declaring their own school guilty of racism.

Amid a struggle session with progressive faculty and students this month, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber published an open letter promising to combat “systemic racism” at the school. That’s an eye-opener since Princeton has assured students and the federal government that it doesn’t discriminate. Has the university been lying?

Enter the Education Department, which wants to know. On Wednesday Assistant Secretary Robert King wrote Mr. Eisgruber requesting records related to his confession of bias. “Among other things,” Mr. King writes, “you said ‘[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton . . .’ and ‘[r]acist assumptions . . . remain embedded in structures of the University itself.’”

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that no one on the basis of race should “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Colleges each year must certify to the Education Department that this is true to receive federal funds.

25 Madison high school students named semifinalists for National Merit Scholarship

Elizabeth Beyer:

Twenty-five Madison high school seniors have been named semifinalists for the 2021 National Merit Scholarships.

The students join about 16,000 other high school seniors across the country that were named this month as semifinalists for the prestigious scholarship. About 15,000 of semifinalists are named finalists, and about 7,600 of the finalists go on to receive a scholarship.

More than 1.5 million high school juniors from roughly 21,000 schools across the country entered the 2021 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2019 Preliminary SAT National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The test is used to screen initial program applicants. Semifinalists represent less than 1% of high school seniors in the U.S.

Wisconsin’s cut score is 216. Texas is 221, Minnesota 219, California 222 and New York 221….

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

The mysterious cause of stuttering in the brain

Amber Dance:

After centuries of misunderstanding, research is finally tying the speech disorder which affects millions of people around the world to certain genes and brain alterations – and new treatments may be on the horizon.

Gerald Maguire has stuttered since childhood, but you might not guess it from talking to him. For the past 25 years, Maguire – a psychiatrist at the University of California, Riverside – has been treating his disorder with antipsychotic medications not officially approved for the condition. Only with careful attention might you discern his occasional stumble on multisyllabic words like “statistically” and “pharmaceutical”.

Maguire has plenty of company – more than 70 million people worldwide, including about three million Americans, stutter. That is, they have difficulty with the starting and timing of speech, resulting in halting and repetition. That number includes approximately 5% of children, many of whom outgrow the condition, and 1% of adults. Their numbers include presidential candidate Joe Biden, actor James Earl Jones and actress Emily Blunt. Though those people and many others, including Maguire, have achieved career success, stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others.

2021 Best Colleges in America: Harvard Leads the University Rankings

David M. Ewalt:

The more things change, the more they stay the same—at least at some of the oldest, most prestigious universities in the U.S.

That’s one of the takeaways from this year’s Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, which award Harvard University the top spot for the fourth straight year, followed by its next-door neighbor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in second place, and Yale University in third.

In fact, the eight private universities traditionally known as the Ivy League are all among the top 15 schools. In addition to Harvard and Yale, the Ivies dominated with Brown University tied for fifth place, Princeton University tied for seventh, Cornell University ninth, Dartmouth College at No. 12, the University of Pennsylvania at No. 13 and Columbia University tied for No. 15.

(You can see our full rankings as well as sort the complete rankings by a variety of measures and reweight the main contributing factors to reflect what’s most important to you. Or you can compare two colleges.)

Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study

Adam Tyner, Ph.D. Sarah Kabourek; Foreword by: Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. Michael J. Petrilli:

Even as phonics battles rage in the realm of primary reading and with two-thirds of American fourth and eighth graders failing to read proficiently, another tussle has been with us for ages regarding how best to develop the vital elements of reading ability that go beyond decoding skills and phonemic awareness.

The dominant view is that the way to improve America’s abysmal elementary reading outcomes is for schools to spend more time on literacy instruction. Many schools provide a “literacy block” that can stretch to more than two hours per day, much of it allocated to efforts to develop reading skills such as “finding the main idea,” and “determining the author’s perspective.” But it doesn’t seem to be working.

Yet a small army of cognitive psychologists, analysts, and educators has long cast doubt on the view that reading is a discrete skill that can be mastered independently from acquiring knowledge. To these contrarians, a focus on academic content—not generalized reading skills and strategies—will equip students with the background knowledge they need to comprehend all sorts of texts and make them truly literate.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Man out on bail charged with homicide in crash that killed former Madison schools standout, board member

Chris Rickert:

An 18-year-old Madison man out on bail was charged with reckless homicide Thursday in a crash last week on the West Side that killed a 22-year-old former Madison School Board member and National Merit Scholar.

Maurice M. Chandler is also charged with driving with a revoked license, reckless injury and eight bail-jumping violations after the Jeep he was driving T-boned a car driven by Anthony M. Chung as Chung was making a left turn Sept. 17 on Mineral Point Road at Grand Canyon Drive. Chung died at the scene, according to investigators.

Chung was a 2016 graduate of Memorial High School who served as the student representative on the School Board. His girlfriend and front-seat passenger, Rory Demick, 22, was seriously injured in the crash, according to court records, suffering multiple broken bones.

Former School Board member T.J. Mertz, who served with Chung, said he had a bright future.

“He was a hard worker,” he said. “He did his research. He cared about making a difference. … He was going to do good or even great on a bigger scale.”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

K-12 Tax, Spending & Referendum Climate: Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’

Jack Goldstone & Peter Turchin:

Almost three decades ago, one of us, Jack Goldstone, published a simple model to determine a country’s vulnerability to political crisis. The model was based on how population changes shifted state, elite and popular behavior. Goldstone argued that, according to this Demographic-Structural Theory, in the 21st century, America was likely to get a populist, America-first leader who would sow a whirlwind of conflict.

Then ten years ago, the other of us, Peter Turchin, applied Goldstone’s model to U.S. history, using current data. What emerged was alarming: The U.S. was heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years. Even before Trump was elected, Turchin published his prediction that the U.S. was headed for the “Turbulent Twenties,” forecasting a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.

Given the Black Lives Matter protests and cascading clashes between competing armed factions in cities across the United States, from Portland, Oregon to Kenosha, Wisconsin, we are already well on our way there. But worse likely lies ahead.

Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins.

First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality.

Schools aren’t spreading coronavirus

Joanne Jacobs:

Reopening schools isn’t spreading coronavirus, say public health experts. Early evidence “suggests that opening schools may not be as risky as many have feared,” report Laura Meckler and Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post. While students and teachers have become sick with coronavirus, there’s “little evidence that the virus is spreading inside buildings.”

Sweden, which didn’t close schools, reported no higher rate of infection among  schoolchildren than in Finland, where schools did close in spring. Photo: Lena Granefelt

The new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard released its first data showing low levels of infection among students and teachers. Emily Oster, a Brown economics professor who helped create the dashboard, said school coronavirus rates are “much lower” than those in the surrounding community.

The Network for Public Education has been tracking 37 school districts in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania. It’s found 23 confirmed cases of coronavirus at 20 schools, with “no indication the virus was spread in schools,” report Meckler and Strauss. So far, “outbreaks have not occurred, even when someone tests positive for covid-19,” said Carol Burris, the executive director.

“We’re not seeing schools as crucibles for onward transmission,” said Sara Johnson, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Grants help parents form ‘equity pods’

Joanne Jacobs:

Pods and microschools aren’t just for affluent parents who can afford to hire a teacher or tutor, writes Beth Hawkins on The 74. Lower-income and minority parents are using small grants to create “equity pods” and microschools.

With a $10,000 grant from the National Parents Union, Brandice Hatcher is opening her Righteous Voice Mentoring pod in her Wisconsin home. She’ll help six girls in grades 4 through 8 use the district’s remote learning program, adding “membership in the national Black Girl Book Club, encounters with strong Black women in their community and other activities to promote the development of healthy identities,” writes Hawkins.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Civics: The Cement of Society Is….

Siris:

submission to the laws of society (George Berkeley, 1712): “And since the bond and cement of society is submission to its laws, it plainly follows, that this duty hath an equal right with any other to be thought a law of nature.”

… charity (Jonas Hanway, 1758): “As charity is the great bond of union, and the surest cement of society, the present occasion will warrant the greater indulgence.”

… sympathy (Henry Home, 1758): “When we examine those particular passions, which, though painful, are yet accompanied with no aversion; we find that they are all of the social kind, arising from that eminent principle of sympathy, which is the cement of human society.”

(Henry Home, 1758): “Nor must we judge of this principle as any way vitious or faulty: for besides that it is the great cement of human society, we ought to consider, that, as no state is exempt from misfortunes, mutual sympathy must greatly promote the security and happiness of mankind.”

… sincerity (Henry Venn, 1763): “In these several important particulars, and in all similar to them, you will pay a conscientious regard to sincerity. Your motives also will be distinct from those of the mere moralist, and infinitely more cogent. He may be an advocate for truth and sincerity, and would have all men practice it, because it is the cement of society, and the only foundation of mutual confidence. Feeble motives, alas!”

More than 1,200 sign petition to change UT grading scale

Lauren Meyers:

More than 1,200 people have signed a petition to change the University of Tennessee’s grading scale to pass or fail.

According to the petition on change.org, 1,277 have signed a petition to support UT staff to give students an option to switch their classes into a pass or fail grading scale.

The petition was started on Tuesday Sept. 22 around 10:00 a.m. and has gained over 1,000 supporters in less than 2 hours.

“As students, we have gone through a lot in the last calendar year. Break schedules are thrown off, quarantine, a pandemic, friends, and family getting sick, classes totally different now that they are online. We should not be disciplined for struggling to adapt to an imperfect system. UT has made strides to switch classes to handle a totally virtual environment, and unfortunately, there are still countless professors that struggle with this setup, and the students are paying the price. Sign this petition to show your support for UT’s staff to give students the option to switch their classes into a pass/fail grading scale,” the petition reads.

College Admissions in a Covid Year: SATs Are Out, Personal Stories Are In

Douglas Belkin:

Memo to high-school seniors applying to selective colleges: A high score on your SAT is out. A Covid-19 epiphany is in.

Hundreds of colleges dropped their mandate for a standardized test score this year as a result of the pandemic, but the replacement criterion at many schools may be just as daunting for would-be college freshmen: a new understanding of themselves and their place in the world as a result of the pandemic.

“This wasn’t something you could study for or plan for, but it offers a great opportunity for students to show us what they were able to do when they just had to figure out how to make it work. That’s a unique story,” says Catherine Davenport, dean of admissions at Dickinson College, which won’t include test scores in its admissions decisions for the first time this year.

Who will get them all to change their minds?

Rob Copeland, via Erich Zellmer:

After calling around, Mr. Weston found a school district south of the city, Somerset Independent School District, ready to take a leap of faith. Superintendent Saul Hinojosa says the solution comes at a dire time: Just 35% of the district’s students showed up in the first week of classes. Many of their parents work as day laborers or at a local Toyota factory.

Local foundations connected to Mr. Weston are picking up the bill. Gov. Abbott says he plans to use federal funding on the initiative, too.

Mr. Hinojosa plans to test every student and staffer every week, with parental permission, mostly in the cafeteria or gymnasium. At-home instruction will be mandated for anyone who comes back positive. Students who refuse to be tested will be barred from after-school activities.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, says he favors the mandate, and is hoping to apply Mr. Weston’s approach in his own state. “One person’s liberty to be tested or not does not extend to potentially exposing others to disease,” says Sen. Cassidy, a physician.

Though Mr. Weston has some prominent support in San Antonio—including from the county judge, a Democrat and the region’s highest elected official—he hasn’t yet cracked the main school district in his hometown.

San Antonio’s medical director said in a late-August town hall that she didn’t favor testing asymptomatic students, citing CDC guidance and potential cost. The school board, too, will have to give its assent.

Who will get them all to change their minds? “I will,” says Mr. Weston.

The Moral Case for Reopening Schools—Without Masks

John Tierney:

If you’re a public-minded student or teacher committed to reducing the death toll from Covid-19, what is the morally correct way to behave?

According to the epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, you should do just about the opposite of what’s being preached by college presidents, teachers’ unions, political leaders, and the scientific and media establishment. Unless you’re elderly or particularly vulnerable, you shouldn’t be wearing a mask all day, or shaming others for going unmasked. You should be careful not to endanger the vulnerable, but otherwise you should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity.

Gupta, 55, wants to teach her classes at Oxford in person, without a mask, and she is appalled at her colleagues’ reluctance to go back to the classroom.

“It’s such a disservice to this generation of students,” she says. “Teachers and students who are vulnerable should have the option to go online, but for the rest of us this virus is no bigger than other risks we take in daily life. It’s not rational, and certainly not communitarian, to avoid being infected with a pathogen that carries such a low risk to you when there’s a high benefit to the community by helping to create herd immunity.”

Gupta’s strategy is heresy to the public-health establishment, but it seems to be paying off in Sweden, and her research team at Oxford has a far better track record on Covid-19 than the scientists whose work inspired the widespread lockdowns and mask mandates in the first place. In March, when Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London terrified politicians and the public with its projections of Covid deaths—more than 500,000 in Britain and 2 million in the United States—Gupta’s team warned that this scenario was based on dubious assumptions about the virus’s spread and lethality.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Tennessee students likely experienced ‘significant’ learning loss due to school closures this year, state says

Meghan Mangrum:

Tennessee students have likely experienced significant learning loss, especially in reading and math, this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Preliminary data released Wednesday by the Tennessee Department of Education projects an estimated 50% decrease in proficiency rates in 3rd grade reading and a projected 65% decrease in proficiency in math.

“The department has identified trends that indicate real challenges that have been experienced by students at all levels.” Gov. Bill Lee said during a news briefing Wednesday. “It just shows how important it is that our kids get back into the classroom and that’s why we’ve put such a strong effort in making sure our kids do return back to classrooms for in-person learning.”

Lee characterized the data as “an alarm that’s been sounded.”

“We are seeing through this report an alarm that’s been sounded, especially with regard to not only the short term impacts on kids but the long-term impact on our state,” Lee said.

Most students traditionally experience some sort of learning loss over the summer, but educators have worried that students might experience greater loss since schools initially closed in March thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Court Victory Ensures Wisconsin DPI Cannot Play Games with School Choice Data

Will Flanders:

Last week, a Jefferson County Circuit Judge  “); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat”>ruled that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) violated the law when it came to releasing data on the state’s private school choice programs. Along with Jim Bender of School Choice Wisconsin and Matt Kittle of Empower Wisconsin, I served as a plaintiff in this case brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL). While issues with data may tend to make people’s eyes glaze over, this case actually represents an important opportunity to highlight the successes of Wisconsin’s school choice programs, and how DPI has routinely tried to hide them.

The Court ruled in WILL’s favor on two counts. First, the Court ruled that the Department cannot hold a private press briefing before releasing all school choice data to the public. State law requires a public release of the data, and instead DPI regularly has held a private briefing in the days leading up to the release. This provides DPI with an opportunity to shape the narrative that will be reported when the data becomes public. Those of us who are regular critics of the public school system are denied access to the calls, meaning that our opportunity to respond to what is released is limited. In today’s 24-hour news cycle, immediate response is critical if one wants their perspective to be a part of the narrative on the data. Mandating a full, public release will give those on all sides of education issues in the state a fair shot to let their voice be heard.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Not indoctrinated, just ignorant

Joanne Jacobs:

I remember the fight over national history standards in 1994.  The standards, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which would have been available for state adoption, if they wished, were attacked for for anti-Americanism. They crashed and burned.

History isn’t about good and evil, writes Natalie Wexler in Forbes. History is complicated.

President Trump wants the National Endowment for the Humanities to commission a “pro-American curriculum”to counter “left-wing indoctrination,” such as the curriculum based on the New York Times‘ slavery-centric 1619 Projectcritical race theory and Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States.

“Those who would paint American history as a virtuous march of progress are clearly missing a lot,” writes Wexler. But the “warts and all” approach tends to be all warts.

Zinn’s book appears on many college reading lists for future social studies teachers, says Sam Wineburg, a Stanford history education professor. It’s very influential, he believes, but not very good.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Unique challenges: Special education was difficult for families in the spring. Will this fall be better?

Scott Girard:

Leani Tell is starting kindergarten this year.

Like thousands of her peers, she’s doing so from home. Unlike most of them, she would have been at home even without the pandemic that will keep Madison Metropolitan School District buildings mostly closed through at least Oct. 31.

Leani, 4, has spinal muscular atrophy, which causes symptoms similar to those that ALS causes in adults. It also means she is especially susceptible to respiratory infections, with even colds sending her to the hospital for days.

“I didn’t really care a whole lot if kids were going back to school or not because she was never going to be going in-person,” said her mother, Nichole Fritts. “She was always going to be virtual because of her health status.”

But the pandemic is hurting Leani’s education anyway, as the school district is not providing an in-person educational aide as outlined in her Individualized Education Program (IEP) created in the spring. That leaves Fritts, her husband and part-time, in-home nurses they pay for out-of-pocket to guide her health and schooling.

“I would love for there to be someone that is actually trained for them to actually go by her IEP for school to be more accessible for her,” Fritts said. “There’s times where I’m juggling being a mom, a nurse and a student aide and it is absolutely impossible to do all three of those effectively.”

Critical Race Theory Is The Root Of Our Current Unrest, And They’re Teaching It In Schools

SG Cheah:

10 years ago, if you told someone they’d be watching children depicted pornographically on a mainstream media service, they’d tell you to get lost and stop your fear-mongering. Fast forward today, and we have “Cuties” on Netflix. What happened?

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what happened. 

Recently, the White House issued an executive order to stop funding the instruction of Critical Race Theory at the federal level. Why is this a controversy? In order to answer that question, we’ll have to understand the Frankfurt School’s influence on American institutions.

Just a Conspiracy Theory?

But before we dive into the world of Critical Race Theory, let’s first examine a peculiar trend you might be familiar with today. Have you noticed how often questions that may lead to uncovering uncomfortable truths are quickly deemed to be “conspiracy theories” by the media establishment? 

Learning How to Learn Japanese

Zach Daniel:

tl;dr – This essay is broken into four sections: 1) why I’m learning Japanese, 2) some basics about Japanese alphabets, 3) what makes it a hard language to learn, and 4) the tools I’m using to learn it. If you just want to know about that last bit feel free to scroll down to the bottom.

I’ve always wanted to learn another language. For years, I would pick up Duolingo and mess around with it for a few weeks before moving on to something else. Then, a little over a year ago, my best friend decided that he wanted to learn Japanese. While I’d love to say that being able to speak Japanese has been a lifelong dream, my motivation is slightly less pure. Specifically, I took the fact that Japanese is, by some accounts, the most difficult language an English speaker can attempt to learn, as a personal challenge.

This changed the shape of my learning journey. Now, instead of trying to optimize for short-term usage, I was headed down a path that would take years to complete. Knowing that was surprisingly helpful with my motivation, as it changed my whole perspective around comprehension, ensuring the time took to learn new things didn’t get me down. I was finally equipped for my language journey: I had motivation, a partner, and time, and that is all you need. Or so I thought.

Campus Staff Took Advantage of Weaknesses in Admissions Processes to Inappropriately Admit 64 Students as Favors to Donors, Family, and Friends

UC-Berkeley:

• Our review found that campuses admitted 64 applicants—in addition to the two identified in the federal investigation—for academic years 2013–14 through 2018–19 on the basis of their families’ donations to campuses or their connections to campus staff, leadership, and donors. These inappropriate admissions decisions subverted the university’s high standards for admissions and denied more qualified applicants educational opportunities.

• Campus staff falsely designated 22 of these applicants as student‑athlete recruits because of donations from or as favors to well‑connected families. Each campus we reviewed lacked sufficient processes for verifying that the applicants whom coaches identified as student‑athlete recruits actually possessed experience or athletic talent in the sport that they purportedly played.

• UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants who were connected to campus staff and donors. These applicants were less qualified than many others for whom the campuses denied admission. In fact, some of these applicants received the lowest possible scores on their applications. The involvement of multiple members of management at UC Berkeley in these inappropriate admissions demonstrates that campus leadership failed to foster a culture committed to the university’s principles of fairness in admissions decisions.

Wadge Degrees – the origin story

Bill Wadge:

I’m fortunate enough to have a mathematical concept named after me. And not just Wadge degrees. There’s also the Wadge hierarchy, Wadge reducibility, and the Wadge game. In fact I’ve seen people say they’re interested in “Wadge theory”. A whole theory!

I’ve posted about this before but that was mainly technical and for most readers not all that accessible. It left out the human element, the passion, the drama, the thrill of victory etc. So here’s the real story.

I arrived in Berkeley (California) fresh from getting a math degree at UBC in Vancouver. I arrived a long time ago, in the Fall of 1966 (!). There was a lot going on on campus – roll on from the previous year’s “Free Speech” movement. And the Vietnam war was raging. Soon after I arrived the Marines set up a recruiting table in the student union building. Hundreds of protesters chased them and the police out of the building and across Sproul Plaza into Sproul Hall, the administration building. That was quite a sight, the first of many. But I’ll talk about that another time.

Zoom classes can have SEVENTY New York Public School students at a time, under new DOE rule, sparking concerns over ‘less manageable’ conditions for learning

Matthew Wright:

New York Public School virtual classrooms could see as many as 68 students signing onto Zoom classes, as per recently negotiated contracts from the city’s Department of Education.

The contracts made with the teachers union allows for remote classes to be twice the 34 student maximum for in-person classes for high school, the Wall Street Journal reports.

‘I can handle a class of 25 kids online, but as it starts pushing to more and more, it becomes less manageable,’ said Kirk Schneider, a teacher at the Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan.

K-12 Tax, Referendum and Spending Climate: No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances

AnnaMaria Andriotis:

Until mid-March, Alysse Hopkins earned a comfortable living in Rockland County, N.Y., representing clients in foreclosure cases and personal-injury lawsuits.

In a good year, the 43-year-old lawyer and her husband, Ian Boschen, 41, together brought in about $175,000, the couple said—enough to cover the mortgage, two car leases, student loans, credit cards and assorted costs of raising two daughters in the New York City suburbs.

After the coronavirus halted many foreclosures and closed courts, her work dried up. Unemployment benefits have helped, Ms. Hopkins said, but the family is running low on savings and can’t keep up with $9,000 in monthly debt payments including mortgage installments. “It frustrates me to not be able to earn a living,” she said. “I have a law degree, almost 20 years of practice.”

Millions of Americans have lost jobs during a pandemic that kept restaurants, shops and public institutions closed for months and hit the travel industry hard. While lower-wage workers have borne much of the brunt, the crisis is wreaking a particular kind of havoc on the debt-laden middle class.

2020 Referendum: Commentary on adding another physical Madison School amidst flat/declining enrollment..

2020 tax and spending increase referendum notes and links.

A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while Milwaukee is about $2. – October 2019 presentation. Milwaukee taxpayers plan to spend $1.2B for 75,234 students, or $15,950 per student, about 16% less than Madison.

Taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District’s far above average spending, while tolerating our long term, disastrous reading results.

The Charter School Advantage A new study shows African-Americans and children from poorer backgrounds outpace their peers in traditional district schools.

Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel:

Public charter schools were once viewed as a nonpartisan compromise between vouchers for private schools and no choice at all. Not now. In its 2020 national platform, the Democratic Party calls for “stringent guardrails to ensure charter schools are good stewards” and says federal funding for charters must be conditioned on “whether the charter will systematically underserve the neediest students.” Charter schools are indeed acting as good stewards by outpacing district schools on achievement growth—especially for the most at-risk students.

In a new study we compare the progress made by cohorts of charter and district school students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2005-17—a sample of more than four million test performances. Overall, students at charters are advancing at a faster pace than those at district schools. The strides made by African-American charter students have been particularly impressive. We also see larger gains at charters, relative to district schools, by students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

Sometimes known as “the nation’s report card,” the NAEP administers math and reading tests every other year to representative samples of fourth- and eighth-grade students in all 50 states. Ours is the first study to use this vast storehouse of information to analyze changes over time in the charter and district sectors. By adjusting for student background characteristics—sex, ethnicity, income, and (for eighth-grade students) computer availability and the number of books in the home—we made direct comparisons between student outcomes at charter and district schools. Because NAEP data don’t allow us to track specific students, we looked at changes in performance from one student cohort to the next over 12 years.

After a turbulent search process, MMSD’s first Black superintendent takes charge

Benjamin Farrell:

On July 10, after another, much shorter search, MMSD settled on UW-Madison alumnus and former associate principal of Madison Memorial High School Dr. Carlton Jenkins to be the district’s first Black superintendent. Since his time at Madison Memorial, Jenkinshas held high-ranking positions in school districts in New Hope, Minnesota; Beloit, Wisconsin; and Atlanta, Georgia. Madisonians, especially the signatories of the open letter to MMSD, were extremely relieved to have someone they saw as competent and experienced in the role. 

“I’m just happy someone’s working,” said Marcus Allen, Rev. of Mt. Zion Baptist Church and co-author of the Madison365 op-ed. “First and foremost I’m a parent, and someone needs to be in that job, especially right now. And I’m very happy it’s Mr. Jenkins.”

In his first press conference, Jenkins repeatedly referenced the strength of community as a means to get through the coming semester, which was slated to begin online.

“We will not put at risk any student, any staff or any parent, any community person coming into our schools,” Jenkins said.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Civics: Facebook vows to restrict users if U.S. election descends into chaos

Reuters:

The company had drawn up plans for how to handle a range of outcomes, including widespread civic unrest or “the political dilemmas” of having in-person votes counted more rapidly than mail-in ballots, the report on.ft.com/3hRRNdf said, citing an interview with Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Q&A: Maxine McKinney de Royston says virtual instruction is a chance to “reimagine education”

Scott Girard:

Maxine McKinney de Royston has a pair of perspectives on virtual learning.

The parent of three is also an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, seeing the clash between the reality of what the Madison Metropolitan School District is implementing and what she considers best practices.

MMSD has moved to a nearly full-day schedule of live, remote instruction this fall after its unexpected transition to virtual learning in the spring, when students were learning through screens for fewer hours. McKinney de Royston is concerned the fall plan has “gone a little too far” in requiring too much active screen time. 

“I feel like it’s just gone too far to the over-planning side and the over-structured side, which is unfortunate, but I also understand that there’s competing needs,” she said during the first week of school. “There’s the needs by the Department of Public Instruction to get a certain number of instructional minutes. And so everybody’s between a rock and a hard place.

“It’s just as somebody who studies learning I’m like, ‘No!’”

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Civics: I asked an online tracking company for all of my data and here’s what I found

Privacy International:

It’s 15:10 pm on April 18, 2018. I’m in the Privacy International office, reading a news story on the use of facial recognition in Thailand. On April 20, at 21:10, I clicked on a CNN Money Exclusive on my phone. At 11:45 on May 11, 2018, I read a story on USA Today about Facebook knowing when teen users are feeling insecure.

How do I know all of this? Because I asked an advertising company called Quantcast for all of the data they have about me.

Most people will have never heard of Quantcast, but Quantcast will certainly have heard about them. The San Francisco-based company collects real-time insights on audience characteristics across the internet and claims that it can do so on over 100 million websites.

Quantcast is just one of many companies that form part of a complex back-end systems used to direct advertising to individuals and specific target audiences.

Google’s Plan to Disrupt the College Degree Is Absolute Genius

Justin Bariso:

Google’s new ‘career certificate’ program is just the right thing, at just the right time.

Google made waves recently by announcing its new program, “Google Career Certificates,” a collection of courses designed to help participants get qualifications in high-paying, high-growth job fields without attending university.

The courses should take about six months to complete, and will cost a fraction of a traditional college education. 

The response was huge. The article has been shared thousands of times and has prompted thousands of comments. Additionally, tons of people have reached out to me personally to share their thoughts.

Most of the feedback has been extremely positive, but some readers have expressed skepticism. Let’s take a deeper dive into both of these responses to see just why Google’s new certificates are such a big deal–and why the plan is ingenious.

As Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google, succinctly put it in a blog post:

“We will consider our new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles.”

UW-Madison fires back at Dane County for proposing online classes, sending students home

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The best way to reduce the number of infections, Blank said, is “not by issuing press releases calling for students to leave, but to partner in developing collaborative solutions for the benefit of all residents.” She warned that the county is unlikely to see a rapid decline in cases until agencies with jurisdiction over off-campus areas take action.

“It’s long past time to stop arguing,” Blank said in a statement. “We’d welcome a conversation on how we can work together to help our community.”

UW campuses forge ahead in reopening this fall despite growing COVID-19 concerns

Parisi was baffled by Blank’s latest statement, saying UW-Madison went ahead in reopening this fall despite both he and officials with Public Health Madison and Dane County expressing concern.

“The university did not ask for our permission,” he said in an interview. “They informed us. For them to somehow shift the responsibility of their decision onto the community doesn’t really pass the smell test.”

UW-Madison started the semester with an inadequate testing ability and number of contact tracers on staff, straining the county’s public health resources, Parisi said.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Madison seeks to waive the State of Wisconsin’s civics exam requirement

Logan Wroge:

In other action Monday, the School Board gave district administrators the go-ahead to request waivers this year on attendance and truancy enforcement, annual instructional hours and a civics exam high schoolers need to pass to graduate.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Madison School Board strikes tentative property deal for referendum-envisioned elementary, amidst declining enrollment

Logan Wroge:

The district has made it a priority to bring an elementary school to the racially diverse neighborhood where most students need to take long bus rides out of the area to attend Allis Elementary on the Southeast Side.

About 450 elementary students live in the neighborhood bounded by the Beltline to the north, Highway 14 to the west, and parkland and marshes to the south and east.

If the facilities referendum passes, it would create the first new elementary school in the district since 2008. An elementary in Moorland-Rimrock could open as early as fall 2023.

Additional notes and commentary from Scott Girard.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [May, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

K-12 Tax, Referendum and Spending climate: Nashville could run out of cash due to confusion around property tax referendum, finance director says

Yihyun Jeong:

Nashville could run dangerously low or “run out of cash altogether” just from the public confusion surrounding a referendum effort to repeal the city’s property tax increase, warns Metro Finance Director Kevin Crumbo. 

Crumbo’s remarks were made to Metro Council’s budget committee Monday, hours after Mayor John Cooper and other city leadership went on the offense against a petition they say, if successful, would “cripple” the city and gut essential services. 

Madison has a substantial tax & spending increase referendum on the November, 2020 ballot, including a new school building amidst declining enrollment.

2020 Referendum: Commentary on adding another physical Madison School amidst flat/declining enrollment..

2020 tax and spending increase referendum notes and links.

A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while Milwaukee is about $2. – October 2019 presentation. Milwaukee taxpayers plan to spend $1.2B for 75,234 students, or $15,950 per student, about 16% less than Madison.

Taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District’s far above average spending, while tolerating our long term, disastrous reading results.

At the Math Olympiad, Computers Prepare to Go for the Gold

Kevin Hartnett:

The 61st International Mathematical Olympiad, or IMO, begins today. It may go down in history for at least two reasons: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic it’s the first time the event has been held remotely, and it may also be the last time that artificial intelligence doesn’t compete.

Indeed, researchers view the IMO as the ideal proving ground for machines designed to think like humans. If an AI system can excel here, it will have matched an important dimension of human cognition.

“The IMO, to me, represents the hardest class of problems that smart people can be taught to solve somewhat reliably,” said Daniel Selsam of Microsoft Research. Selsam is a founder of the IMO Grand Challenge, whose goal is to train an AI system to win a gold medal at the world’s premier math competition.

Since 1959, the IMO has brought together the best pre-college math students in the world. On each of the competition’s two days, participants have four and a half hours to answer three problems of increasing difficulty. They earn up to seven points per problem, and top scorers take home medals, just like at the Olympic Games. The most decorated IMO participants become legends in the mathematics community. Some have gone on to become superlative research mathematicians.

K-12 Tax, Referendum & Spending Climate: 60% of Restaurants don’t plan to reopen

Yelp:

The restaurant industry continues to be among the most impacted with an increasing number of closures – totalling 32,109 closures as of August 31, with 19,590 of these business closures indicated to be permanent (61%). Breakfast and brunch restaurants, burger joints, sandwich shops, dessert places and Mexican restaurants are among the types of restaurants with the highest rate of business closures. Foods that work well for delivery and takeout have been able to keep their closure rates lower than others, including pizza places, delis, food trucks, bakeries and coffee shops.

Meanwhile, bars and nightlife, an industry 6X smaller than restaurants, has endured an especially high closure rate, with an increasing percentage of closures being permanent. As of the end of August there were 6,451 total business closures, of which 3,499 were permanently closed (54%). The share of permanent closures within bars and nightlife have increased by 10% since our Economic Average Report in July.

Retail and shopping follows closely behind restaurants with 30,374 total business closures, 17,503 of which are permanent (58%). Similar to bars and nightlife, the share of permanent closures increased by 10% since July. Both men and women’s clothing, as well as home decor, have the highest rate of business closures.

The Forecasting Fallacy

Alex Murrell:

Marketers are prone to a prediction.

You’ll find them in the annual tirade of trend decks. In the PowerPoint projections of self-proclaimed prophets. In the feeds of forecasters and futurists. They crop up on every conference stage. They make their mark on every marketing magazine. And they work their way into every white paper.

To understand the extent of our forecasting fascination, I analysed the websites of three management consultancies looking for predictions with time frames ranging from 2025 to 2050. Whilst one prediction may be published multiple times, the size of the numbers still shocked me. Deloitte’s site makes 6904 predictions. McKinsey & Company make 4296. And Boston Consulting Group, 3679.

In total, these three companies’ websites include just shy of 15,000 predictions stretching out over the next 30 years.

But it doesn’t stop there.

My analysis finished in the year 2050 not because the predictions came to an end but because my enthusiasm did.

Search the sites and you’ll find forecasts stretching all the way to the year 2100. We’re still finding our feet in this century but some, it seems, already understand the next.

I believe the vast majority of these to be not forecasts but fantasies. Snake oil dressed up as science. Fiction masquerading as fact.

More Than 20 Percent of Universities Could Fail Because of the Lockdowns

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan:

As bad as the COVID-19 lockdown has been in any number of sectors of the US economy, colleges and universities have been hit particularly hard. Restaurants and movie theaters have physical plants that continue to cost them money regardless of whether they are serving food or showing movies. Hotels have it even worse, because they are far more expensive to maintain. But colleges and universities have it worse still. Their physical plants include not only housing and dining facilities, but also recreation areas, classrooms, and expansive grounds. In addition, colleges and universities have staff that often number hundreds of times that of hotels.

Unlike restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels, colleges and universities do have the ability to offer their product remotely. Students with their faces planted firmly into Zoom calls have become the new normal pretty quickly. But when a quarter to almost half of a university’s income comes from room and board, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that those Zoom classes are gutting college and university revenue streams.

Making matters worse, foreign students are staying home in droves because of both the virus and US policy. This might not sound like much, but universities obtain more than twice the revenue from the typical foreign student than from the typical American student. Foreign students have been subsidizing American students for years. And now they aren’t.

The upshot of all of this, according to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, is rather disconcerting. In examining some 442 US universities, Galloway estimates that more than 20 percent could fail because of the lockdowns, and that another 30 percent will struggle to remain open. That’s 50 percent of US colleges and universities at very serious (or mortal) risk.

Judge blocks US attempts to ban downloads of Chinese app

BBC:

US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said the ban raised serious questions related to the constitution’s first amendment, guaranteeing free speech.

The Department of Commerce had announced a bar on WeChat appearing in US app stores from Sunday, effectively shutting it down.

The Trump administration has alleged it threatens national security.

It says it could pass user data to the Chinese government.

Both WeChat and China have strongly denied the claim. Tencent, the conglomerate that owns WeChat, had previously described the US ban as “unfortunate”.

The ruling comes just after TikTok, which was also named in the Department of Commerce order, reached a deal with US firms Oracle and Walmart to hopefully allow them to keep operating.

Mayflower 400: the science of sailing across the ocean in 1620

Jonathan Ridley:

It is July 1620 in Southampton, England. Arriving into port is the Speedwell, a ship carrying a small religious group from the Netherlands. Anchored just off of the west quay of the town is the Mayflower, a larger ship with more passengers aboard, which is loading for a transatlantic voyage with the Speedwell. The passengers have permission and funding to start a trading settlement in the Colony of Virginia (which at the time extended far further than the modern state of Virginia), under the control of the Virginia Company.

Despite the historical significance of the Mayflower, we know very little about the ship and its voyage. We only know its name from a document written three years after the voyage. At the time the Mayflower was not notable or special and – because some of the passengers faced persecution for their religious activities – they probably kept a low profile.

Evidence suggests that it was “burden about nine score” or 180 tons. “Burden” was a term for cargo capacity, while a “tun” was a large cask of wine. The ship could therefore carry the equivalent of 180 tuns of wine.

There are unfortunately no illustrations or plans of The Mayflower from the time, so we don’t even know for certain what the ship looked like. We do know, however, that ships around this time were built to a series of similar rules (outlined in Swedish shipbuilder Fredrik Henrik af Chapman’s Architectura Navalis Mercatoria, published in 1768). We can therefore begin to estimate the proportions for the cargo carried, but with a caution that the rules varied between shipwrights, with many details not recorded and drawings not made.

Civics: The Post-Objectivity Era

Matt Taibbi:

We live in a time of incredible political division. Many of us have had the experience of talking to someone whose idea of reality seems to be completely different from our own. It’s become difficult to have an argument in the traditional sense. People with differing opinions are often no longer even working from the same commonly-accepted set of facts. It’s a problem that has a lot to do with changes in how we receive and digest information, especially through the news media.

I’ve worked in the press for thirty years. In my lifetime the core commercial strategy of the news business has changed radically. At the national level, companies have moved from trying to attract one big audience to trying to capture and retain multiple small audiences.

Fundamentally, this means the press has gone from selling a vision of reality they perceive to be acceptable to a broad mean, to selling division. For technological, commercial, and political reasons this instinct has become more exaggerated with time, snowballing toward the dysfunctional state we’re in today.

A story that illustrates how the old system worked involves the first major national news broadcast, the CBS radio program anchored by the legendary Lowell Thomas.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay:

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play;

Judge finds Wisconsin DPI improperly released test scores to media

Todd Richmond:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction violated state law when it withheld voucher students’ standardized test scores for a day last fall, a judge ruled Friday.

School Choice Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm, sued the department in Jefferson County court in November. The lawsuit revolved around the 2018-19 standardized test scores that the department released that September.

The scores showed only 39% of all students were proficient or advanced in English and that 40% were proficient or advanced in math. Only 20.7% of voucher students were proficient or advanced in English and just 17.8% were proficient or advanced in math.

Students in voucher programs can use state dollars to subsidize tuition at private schools. Republicans have touted the programs as an alternative for students stuck in failing public schools. Democrats argue the programs are a drain on state revenues that could go to help public schools.

Wisconsin has generally lacked a rigorous approach to statewide assessments: see the oft criticized WKCE.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

How algorithms discern our mood from what we write online

Dana Mackenzie:

In addition to taking Twitter user’s emotional temperature, researchers are employing sentiment analysis to gauge people’s perceptions of climate change and to test conventional wisdom such as, in music, whether a minor chord is sadder than a major chord (and by how much). Businesses who covet information about customers’ feelings are harnessing sentiment analysis to assess reviews on platforms like Yelp. Some are using it to measure employees’ moods on the internal social networks at work. The technique might also have medical applications, such as identifying depressed people in need of help.

Sentiment analysis is allowing researchers to examine a deluge of data that was previously time-consuming and difficult to collect, let alone study, says Danforth. “In social science we tend to measure things that are easy, like gross domestic product. Happiness is an important thing that is hard to measure.”

Deconstructing the ‘word stew’

You might think the first step in sentiment analysis would be teaching the computer to understand what humans are saying. But that’s one thing that computer scientists cannot do; understanding language is one of the most notoriously difficult problems in artificial intelligence. Yet there are abundant clues to the emotions behind a written text, which computers can recognize even without understanding the meaning of the words.

Dutch Education Minister Wants Academics to Have Weekends

David Matthews:

Ingrid van Engelshoven wants to reduce stress and time pressure in academe by tipping the balance away from competitive grants and toward more stable support for universities, reversing a long-term research funding trend in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Speaking to Times Higher Education in the Hague, she hoped that reforms to Dutch academe would mean that in five to 10 years, academics would be able to do their research “within normal working hours.”

“So you don’t have to skip your vacation, skip your weekend, because you’re busy all week with teaching your students, designing your online courses [or] … drafting your applications for grants,” she said.

Dutch academe has witnessed a rising tide of dissatisfaction over what some academics see as intolerable stress. Earlier this year, universities were reported to the country’s employment regulator over hundreds of complaints about “structural overtime,” leading to family problems and burnout.

Civics: Here’s The Absurdly Detailed California Covid Orders to Prevent Churches From Meeting To Worship Indoors

HillFaith:

California authorities are clearly determined to make an example of Pastor John MacArthur and Grace Community Church (GCC) in Los Angeles County in retaliation for defying the state’s ban on indoor worship meetings.

The ban has been challenged by other California congregations, but MacArthur is an internationally known evangelical pastor, book author and opinion molder. He and GCC are represented in court by Jenna Ellis and the Thomas More Society. Go here, here and here for previous HillFaith posts on GCC.

Yesterday, Sunday, September 13, MacArthur and GBC defied a court order specifically banning the congregation from meeting indoors. During the service, MacArthur described the specific demands California seeks to impose on all churches in the state.

As MacArthur goes through these demands, it should be obvious to all reasonable persons that California officials are attempting bureaucratic strangulation by regulation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and assembly.

Judge Rules Wisconsin DPI Violated State Law in Release of 2019 School Choice Data

Wisconsin institute for law and liberty:

The News: Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Bennett Brantmeier issued a summary judgement ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) violated state law when the state agency released partial data on Wisconsin’s school choice programs to a select media list ahead of a September 2019 public release. The Court’s decision includes a permanent injunction to prevent DPI from violating state law that says data on Wisconsin’s school choice programs must be released “all at the same time, uniformly, and completely.”

WILL sued DPI in Jefferson County in November 2019 on behalf of School Choice Wisconsin (SCW), Empower Wisconsin journalist Matt Kittle, and WILL Research Director Will Flanders.

The Court’s Decision: Judge Brantmeier ruled that DPI’s actions violated state law by providing press with early access and by releasing incomplete data on Wisconsin’s school choice programs. Judge Brantmeier declined to restrict the state Superintendent’s ability to comment on the data it releases but emphasized that DPI remains bound to release full data sets on equal terms to all Wisconsinites.

Why It Matters: Wisconsin’s state agencies must understand that following state law is not optional. This is another victory for a more accountable state government.

Wisconsin has generally lacked a rigorous approach to statewide assessments: see the oft criticized WKCE.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Analyzing ‘the homework gap’ among high school students

Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero:

Researchers have struggled for decades to identify a causal, or even correlational, relationship between time spent in school and improved learning outcomes for students. Some studies have focused on the length of a school year while others have focused on hours in a day and others on hours in the week.

In this blog post, we will look at time spent outside of school–specifically time spent doing homework–among different racial and socio-economic groups. We will use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to shed light on those differences and then attempt to explain those gaps, using ATUS data and other evidence.

Diversity-Related Training: What Is It Good For?

Musa al-Gharbi:

In wake of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, many colleges and universities have been rolling out new training requirements – often oriented towards reducing biases and encouraging people from high-status groups to ‘check their privilege.’

The explicit goal of these training programs is generally to help create a more positive and welcoming institutional environment for people from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. However, many of these approaches were implemented by corporations, non-profits and universities before their effectiveness had been tested rigorously (if at all).

Harvard and Yale Face Broad Attack on Race-Conscious Admissions

Patricia Hurtado:

The court ruled more than four decades ago in its Bakke decision that race can be considered as one factor among many in creating a diverse class — which it has deemed an educational benefit for the whole student body — and has reaffirmed that stance over the years. Now, with Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the bench, alongside their conservative brethren, some see a chance to take down what they argue is bias masquerading as equity.

“Sandra Day O’Connor basically opined that we could have another 20 years or 25 years of affirmative action programs, but that they would not go on forever,” said Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group that focuses on race and ethnicity. O’Connor speculated on such a time frame in 2003 when she wrote the high court’s majority opinion upholding the use of race in admissions at the University of Michigan.

“And yet we do see them going on forever,” Chavez said. “We’re now talking about kids who are getting into college on the basis of some racial or ethnic preference who are the grandchildren of people who first got those preferences.”

CIVICS: “IN RECENT YEARS, THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT HAS SOMETIMES ACTED MORE LIKE A TRADE ASSOCIATION FOR FEDERAL PROSECUTORS THAN THE ADMINISTRATOR OF A FAIR SYSTEM OF JUSTICE BASED ON CLEAR AND SENSIBLE LEGAL RULES.”

Ann Althouse:

“In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it…. We should want a fair system with clear rules that the people can understand. It does not serve the ends of justice to advocate for fuzzy and manipulable criminal prohibitions that maximize our options as prosecutors…. Advocating for clear and defined prohibitions will sometimes mean we cannot bring charges against someone whom we believe engaged in questionable conduct. But that is what it means to have a government of laws and not of men…. If criminal statutes are endlessly manipulable, then everything becomes a potential crime. Rather than watch policy experts debate the merits or demerits of a particular policy choice, we are nowadays treated to ad na[u]seum speculation by legal pundits — often former prosecutors themselves — that some action by the President, a senior official, or a member of congress constitutes a federal felony under this or that vague federal criminal statute. This criminalization of politics is not healthy.

Going to elite Indian colleges improves earnings, but not test scores

The Economist:

GRADUATES FROM higher-ranked universities tend to earn more money. That is well known. What is less understood is why. One theory is that these schools are better at imparting knowledge—employers might reasonably offer higher salaries to new hires they believe are better qualified. An alternative theory is that admission is a form of signalling. Prestigious colleges are selective. Their students may not learn anything particularly useful, but are paid more because simply getting accepted to a leading college gives employers the impression that they are talented.

A new paper by Sheetal Sekhri of the University of Virginia adds further evidence for the latter theory by looking at the wages of university graduates in India. There, pupils in their final year of secondary school sit a leaving exam known as the Senior Secondary School Examination. Those who score well enough are eligible for admission to India’s well-regarded public colleges; those who fall short enrol at less-prestigious private colleges. India is atypical in that its college students have to take standardised exit exams. These tests give researchers a good opportunity to see whether highly ranked universities do a better job of educating their students than average ones.

Parents Withdrawing Students From Texas Public Schools To Home-school Increases 400 Percent

Tristan Justice:

The Texas Home School Coalition (THSC), which processes requests for families pulling their children out of public schools, reported a 400 percent increase in withdrawals for August leading into the 2020-2021 school year, compared to August of 2019.

The August numbers follow a record-setting month in July where their online process saw a 1,500 percent jump from July last year.

The spike, the group reported, stems directly from the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) pandemic schooling guidelines sparking a mass exodus from the public school system as parents opt to teach their children at home over enrolling them in a digitized, remote state-run classroom.

In August 2019, THSC processed 1,044 family withdrawals, a fraction of the 4,055 processed this year. The group added that even these numbers are likely underreported, as THSC is not immediately notified of every withdrawal in the state.

Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack

Timothy Rybeck:

Three infamous conflagrations illuminate the pages of Richard Ovenden’s fascinating new history, Burning the Books. The first is the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which, according to Ovenden, did not go up in a single blaze but was gradually destroyed by repeated acts of arson and plunder, until there was nothing left but a metaphor. The second is the burning of the US Library of Congress by the British in 1814, when soldiers’ faces were ‘illumined’ by the flames. ‘I do not recollect to have witnessed, at any period in my life,’ a British soldier said, ‘a scene more striking or sublime.’ The third burning is certainly the best known: the Nazi Bücherverbrennungen that followed Hitler’s rise to power. ‘The 10 May 1933 book-burning was merely the forerunner of arguably the most concerted and well-resourced eradication of books in history,’ Ovenden writes.

Khan Academy’s Sal Khan shares advice for online learning: Do less, and turn off the camera

Heather Kelly:

For the past 12 years, Salman Khan has been touting online learning as the future of education. But even he didn’t imagine us crashing into that future so suddenly and with little time to prepare.

Now millions of schools are starting the fall semester with distance learning over laptops and tablets to minimize the spread of the novel coronavirus, while many others have started with a hybrid of in-person and online learning. Teachers, parents and kids are figuring out what works or doesn’t, fumbling and adjusting along the way. Khan hopes to help guide them.

Khan is the founder of the nonprofit Khan Academy, a collection of online learning tools and video classes for kids that he started in 2008 after successfully tutoring his own cousins over video. In 2014, he started an in-person school in Silicon Valley called the Khan Labs School, which has also had to make the switch to online classes this month.

Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents

Will Flanders:

This year, no Forward Exam was administered to Wisconsin students due to the coronavirus and school shutdowns. For policymakers, this presents a challenge as it makes it more difficult to understand where problems lie, and where the focus should be for improvement. However, this also presents an opportunity to make modifications to some of the deficient components of the report card that can mislead parents and policymakers on school quality.

This first section of this policy brief is designed to explain how the current report card works. The second section builds on this knowledge to highlight issues with the current report card, and suggest ways to improve it. The key takeaways of this brief include:

Report Card Scores are Based on Several Components of Student Performance. Forward Exam scores, growth, and gap closure all play important roles.

The Composition of the Report Card Score Varies Based on Student Demographics. In schools with fewer low-income students, overall performance is given more weight. In schools with more low-income students, growth is given more weight.

Wisconsin has generally lacked a rigorous approach to statewide assessments: see the oft criticized WKCE.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Madison estimated to lose 400 students this fall; continuing to seek a new school building via 2020 tax & spending increase

Scott Girard:

Ruppell estimated Monday that the district would see a 400-student drop in enrollment this school year, though that won’t be finalized until the state certifies enrollment numbers in early October. That’s up nearly 350 students from the estimated drop of 51 pre-COVID, which is why the district implemented a hiring freeze over the summer, Ruppell said.

“We have a game plan in place regarding this,” Ruppell said. “These numbers can get much better by the time we hit Friday.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Madison School District to hold Facebook Live sessions on 2020 tax & spending increase referendum beginning this week

Scott Girard:

The $317 million ask is among the largest in the history of the state, according to state Department of Public Instruction data. It is surpassed only by Racine’s barely approved $1 billion question in April, which won by five votes, and Milwaukee’s $366 million 1993 question that failed.

[New Madison elementary school would go on Badger Rock site if referendum approved]

Each of the comprehensive high schools would receive about $70 million for renovations under the plan, while the other funds would go toward the Capital High move, elementary school construction and $2 million earmarked for sustainability projects.

The second question on the ballot would provide MMSD with additional revenue authority above the state-imposed limit, phased in over four years. It would provide an additional $6 million in year one, an additional $8 million in year two, another $9 million in year three and $10 million more in year four. The district would then be able to surpass the revenue limit by $33 million in perpetuity thereafter.

The facilities referendum would add an average of $50 per $100,000 of property value each year in taxes for homeowners over its 22-year payoff period, according to the district. The operating referendum would add about $103 per $100,000 of property value in property taxes by the time it reaches year four, rising incrementally each year.

2020 Referendum: Commentary on adding another physical Madison School amidst flat/declining enrollment..

2020 tax and spending increase referendum notes and links.

A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while Milwaukee is about $2. – October 2019 presentation. Milwaukee taxpayers plan to spend $1.2B for 75,234 students, or $15,950 per student, about 16% less than Madison.

Taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District’s far above average spending, while tolerating our long term, disastrous reading results.

Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software

Richard Stallman:

Free software can save schools money, but this is a secondary benefit. Savings are possible because free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software; the school system can give a copy to every school, and each school can install the program in all its computers, with no obligation to pay for doing so.

This benefit is useful, but we firmly refuse to give it first place, because it is shallow compared to the important ethical issues at stake. Moving schools to free software is more than a way to make education a little “better”: it is a matter of doing good education instead of bad education. So let’s consider the deeper issues.

Schools have a social mission: to teach students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote conservation and voting. By teaching students free software, they can graduate citizens ready to live in a free digital society. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated by megacorporations.

Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report

Scott Shackford:

When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.

That’s the primary theme of a new report, “Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent,” released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.

This new report drills into all of the exonerations they’ve archived up until February 2019. That’s 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.

In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.

Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.

Chinese firm harvests social media posts, data of prominent Americans and military

Gerry Shih:

Biographies and service records of aircraft carrier captains and up-and-coming officers in the U.S. Navy. Real-time tweets originating from overseas U.S. military installations. Profiles and family maps of foreign leaders, including their relatives and children. Records of social media chatter among China watchers in Washington.

Those digital crumbs, along with millions of other scraps of social media and online data, have been systematically collected since 2017 by a small Chinese company called Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology for the stated purpose of providing intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients, according to a copy of the database that was left unsecured on the Internet and retrieved by an Australian cybersecurity consultancy.

The cache, called the Overseas Key Information Database, or OKIDB, purports to offer insights into foreign political, military and business figures, details about countries’ infrastructure and military deployments, and public opinion analysis. The database contains information on more than 2 million people, including at least 50,000 Americans and tens of thousands of people who hold prominent public positions, according to Zhenhua’s marketing documents and a review of a portion of the database.

Although there is no evidence showing that the OKIDB software is currently being used by the Chinese government, Zhenhua’s marketing and recruiting documents characterize the company as a patriotic firm, with the military as its primary target customer.

What I found out when I blocked apps from tracking my iPhone for one week

Rob Sturgeon.

When Apple made an appearance at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2019, they also put up a sign. It wasn’t a billboard, as many news outlets claimed, but a 13-story Apple ad plastered onto the side of a hotel. It had one message: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone”.

To anyone who knows the first thing about what makes smartphones smart, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. In order to browse any website or use most apps, you need to be connected to the internet.

Requests need to leave your phone, travel to a server, and a response needs to return with the information you want. But those requests aren’t always for data the user has requested. In fact, in many cases, those requests aren’t initiated by the user at all.

And so I tried a little experiment: blocked apps from tracking my iPhone for just one week

And during that time I was tracked 4,341 times by 33 tracking platforms.

Some highlights:

• Google tracked me nearly twice as much as all others combined

• Facebook and Amazon tracked me more than any other company (except Google)

• The rest of the data goes to 29 companies, most of which I’ve never heard of

Let’s remember this was just one week. If we assume the rate of tracking has always been somewhat similar, we can extrapolate from there. If all 52 weeks in a year are the same, I’m being tracked 225,732 times a year. And I’ve been using iPhones exclusively for 10 years, which means…

Madison Edgewood savors fall football opportunity

Jon Masson:

Concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic and county health guidelines varying across counties led area schools to make different decisions about academic models and athletics this school year — including for football, which is considered a “higher-risk” sport.

Edgewood is the lone Madison school and one of 13 area schools playing football this fall. The other area schools plan to play during the WIAA’s alternative spring season.

“I honestly didn’t expect that we were going to be able to play this fall, so it was definitely good news to hear those words,” said Edgewood senior Charlie Clark, a 6-foot-7, 302-pound offensive and defensive lineman. “It was a really big surprise, really nice to hear, especially because we will be able to show how we’ve improved over the summer.”

On-line education in Oklahoma, from my email box

Tyler Cowen:

“…this is seemingly starting to be a big deal in OK, but flying under the radar.

Background:

• 10-15 years ago Oklahoma passed a law allowing online-only charter schools with a separate regulatory structure from physical charter schools.

• Critically, the unions did not think to push for an enrollment cap.

• There are 5-10 schools, all quite small, except for one named EPIC.

About EPIC:

• Has enrollment (~38,000) that is larger than any district in the state. This enrollment is currently surging faster than its usual high growth because of COVID-19 and could reach 46,000 by the Oct 1 “Money Head Count” deadline.

• From Oct 1, 2018 to Oct 1, 2019, EPIC’s enrollment grew more than the enrollment growth for the entire state of OK.

• Like all public charters in OK, the school is free to attend. Parents get paid $1000 per student per year for school supplies and activities.

• They have 100% online and blended learning options. Teachers in the online-only are paid by how many students they take on and can earn over $100,000. The state average pay for teachers is just over $50,000/yr.

• They are a non-profit but they are run by a closely related for-profit management company that is paid 10% of gross revenue. (Incentives!)

• Everyone in OK education that isn’t EPIC, hates EPIC. The state has multiple lawsuits and audits alleging that they have been committing fraud. These go back as far as 2012 but none have yet been resolved, even with open investigations by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The alleged amounts are less than 1% of cumulative revenue.

Comparison to Regular Schools:

Schools in China are trying to make pupils’ lives easier

The Economist:

THE LARGEST museum commemorating the gruelling examination system China used in imperial days to select civil servants opened in 2017 in Nanjing. It would not seem an obvious destination for a fun family outing in the eastern city. As visitors walk into it down a grey ramp—130 metres long to symbolise the test’s 1,300-year history—a sign tells them they will “experience the hardships of the journey to success” for those who sat the keju before its abolition in 1905. Bamboo slips affixed to towering walls represent the “myriad” books that candidates had to read.

Yet on a recent weekday afternoon, there were as many youngsters filling the museum’s cavernous halls as there were attentive adults. A mother from the city of Xi’an, hundreds of kilometres inland, had brought her four-year-old son in order to inspire him. “He likes the dioramas,” she said brightly, “even though he doesn’t know what an exam is yet.” A coalmine engineer from Ordos, a city in distant Inner Mongolia, was there with his nine-year-old son whose “fate” he hoped to alter through their visit. “Xiangshi, huishi, dianshi,” his son piped up, naming three levels of the ancient test that inspired the creation of civil-service exams in the West.

In terms of the awe it inspires, the keju has a modern rival: the gaokao, a punishingly hard university-entrance exam which is taken by over 10m students every year. For those from poor families, a good score is often their only chance to escape a life toiling on farms or in factories. As a result, Chinese education has long involved little more than rote learning, aimed purely at the gaokao. Pupils attend late-night cram sessions and shoulder twice as much homework as the global average.

(Taxpayer supported) Wisconsin Public Radio Source Demographic Survey Shows Need For Improvement

Hannah Haynes and Jennifer Dargan:

Wisconsin Public Radio works daily to bring news content that accurately reflects the diversity of the state. But results of a year-long internal review confirmed what many at WPR had suspected — sources on air are overwhelmingly white. 

New data collected over the last year shows that of the people who appeared on air on WPR’s two radio networks nearly nine out of 10 were white. There was an even split between males and females.

The data also showed geographical distribution, with a significant number of the state’s 772 zip codes represented. This is an important metric for a statewide network such as WPR. 

So how can WPR as an organization best represent the people who live in Wisconsin? WPR has plans to improve representation going forward. Those plans are outlined below. WPR will continue to collect this crucial demographic data to find out how the organization is doing and make that data public. 

Understanding The Project

A year ago, WPR began a project to survey sources who appeared on The Ideas Network and the NPR News & Music Network to better understand who reporters and producers at WPR were featuring on talk shows and in their reporting. 

When developing this project, it was important to the organization to survey people and learn their race and/or ethnicity and gender from them rather than having a reporter or producer make an educated guess, which different teams at WPR had been doing prior to this project. 

Civics: Americans’ main sources for political news vary by party and age

Elizabeth Greico:

MSNBC’s core audience is more Democratic than Fox’s is Republican (it’s close, but MSNBC is the single most partisan outlet in this poll: pure choir preaching).

More importantly, those who cite NYT as their main news source are almost entirely Democrats. – Glenn Greenwald.

The number that stands out here is the New York Times being as nearly perfect a partisan product as MSNBC – I imagine the numbers would have been at least somewhat different ten years ago. – Matt Taibbi.

Four of the eight sources named by at least 2% of U.S. adults are much more likely to be named by Democrats and independents who lean Democratic than by Republicans and GOP leaners: MSNBC, The New York Times, NPR and CNN. Fox News is the one outlet among these eight that is far more likely to be named by Republicans than by Democrats.

Those who name Fox News and MSNBC display roughly the same high levels of partisanship. About nine-in-ten of those whose main source is Fox News (93%) identify as Republican, very close to the 95% of those who name MSNBC and identify as Democrats. Similarly, about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).

The three major broadcast news networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – have more of a mix of Democrats and Republicans among those who name these outlets as their main sources for political news. For example, the makeup of those who name NBC News as their main source is 57% Democratic versus 38% Republican.

Civics: UW-Madison student newspaper rejects op-ed opposing defunding police

Kara Zupkus:

The Badger-Herald, an independent student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, rejected a conservative columnist’s op-ed arguing against defunding the police, claiming “it is too much of a hot take right now” and that it “would cause a lot of backlash.”

Editors at the Badger-Herald denied Tripp Grebe’s op-ed on the basis of its content, noting that the Editorial Board recently had recently published a piece endorsing BLM and endorsing candidates who want to defund the police.

“While your article was well-written, it is too much of a hot take right now and upper management is worried about alienating incoming freshman students from the Herald,” Opinions Editor Samiha Bhushan said in an email. “Additionally, we just published an editorial board supporting BLM and another article publicly endorsing two candidates who want to defund the police. As a result, your article would cause a lot of backlash that we cannot afford right now.”

The Race to the Pole Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott – 1911-1912

Cool Antarctica:

The attainment of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen ahead of Robert Scott has frequently described Amundsen as the winner in a race.  Over a hundred years later there is still debate about the events, how well the two men were prepared, how they conducted themselves, what role luck had to play and not least of their legacies. They both led five man teams to the pole, though while Amundsen’s team returned alive and well, Scott’s party all died on the return journey.