K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Federal Taxpayer Subsidies for high tax states

Matt Taibbi:

The effort by the “SALT caucus” to hold a $2 trillion relief bill hostage in order to help what they’re calling “struggling families” in the “middle class” is just the latest development in a years-long saga revealing Congress at its phoniest and most shameless.

This issue that “means so much to the American people,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is really a niche matter concerning a sliver of the most well-off Americans in a handful of blue states, who were made the target of a political prank of sorts by the Trump administration in 2017.

There are a lot of people who own homes in blue states, could use the deduction, probably don’t think of themselves as rich, and would balk at the idea that repealing the cap would be a luxury giveaway. The story has been framed in the press as more of an everyman issue, and the fact that most of the money at stake involves people at the very top of the curve has been obscured.

The start of this story was classic Trump. Looking for ways to help pay for his own monster tax break at the end of 2017, the Donald decided to poke Democrats with a long stick, via the cap on the unlimited state and local tax deduction.

Creating a competency marketplace

Joanne Jacobs:


The competency marketplace — a digital hub for job seekers, employers and postsecondary skills providers — is taking a step toward reality, writes Paul on The Job.

The idea is the brainchild of author and investor Ryan Craig, writes Fain. It would “allow learners to see the skills or competencies they need to land posted jobs, with the site then offering applicable online courses and programs from featured colleges and other providers. Employers could recruit completers directly from the hub.”

Among those working on the idea are LinkedIn, the  Markle Foundation’s Skillful and Unmudl, writes Fain.

Unmudl features non-degree online and hybrid courses from seven partner community colleges, explains Julian Alssid of SocialTech.ai, a public benefit corporation that created the course marketplace.

Fake curriculum for parents

Luke Rosiak:

Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.

Natalie Fallert, EdD, 6-12 Literacy Speech Coordinator, wrote to all middle and high school principals that parents had repeatedly complained that “we are pushing an agenda,” “we are pushing Critical Race Theory (I had to look this one up!),” “we are making white kids feel bad about their privilege,” we are “stereotyping,” “we are teaching kids to be social activists,” and “we are teaching kids to be democratic thinkers and activists.”

The problem was that, for the first time, parents could see what teachers were telling their children thanks to virtual learning, where assignments were visible for at-home learners in a tool called Canvas.

The Falling Time Cost of College

Philip S. Babcock Mindy Marks:

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: So you want to tax the rich? Okay, let’s start with Harvard.

Henry Olsen:

President Biden and congressional Democrats seem determined to raise taxes on the rich, especially the rate paid on capital gains. If they’re really serious about this, there’s one sector of American wealth that is undertaxed even by today’s standards: universities and foundations.

The amount of wealth held by major colleges and large grant-making foundations is astounding. The National Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual study found that 107 institutions held endowments of $1 billion or more as of June 30, 2019. Together, these institutions of higher earning held $494 billion in assets, or roughly a tenth of the total net worth of all individual billionaires in the United States combined. The university figure is surely much higher today.

Charitable foundations hold even more wealth. One estimate found they held more than $1 trillionin assets in 2017, with the richest five alone holding nearly $100 billion between them. Given that the stock market has risen more than 50 percent since then, their portfolios should be hundreds of billions of dollars richer. That means America’s charitable foundations and billionaire universities hold at least $1.5 trillion in assets. That’s far more wealth than that of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the founders of Google and Oracle combined.

Understanding Legal Argument (1): The Five Types of Argument

John Danaher:

I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argument is both simple and complex.

It is simple because in every legal case there is, in essence, one basic type of argument at the core of the dispute between the parties. This argument works from a general legal rule to a conclusion about the application of that rule to a set of facts. Philosophers and logicians would say that the basic form of legal argument is a syllogism: a simple three-step argument involving a major premise (a general principle or rule), a minor premise (a claim about a particular case or scenario) and then a conclusion (an application of the general rule to the particular case). 

Here is a simple conditional syllogism:

“The federal budget assumes the government will recover 96 cents of every dollar borrowers default on”

Josh Mitchell:

hat sounded high to Mr. Courtney because in the private sector 20 cents would be more appropriate for defaulted consumer loans that aren’t backed by an asset.

He asked Education Department budget officials how they calculated that number. They told him that when borrowers default, the government often puts them into new loans. These pay off the old loans, and this is considered a recovery, even though in many cases the borrowers haven’t repaid anything and default on the new loans as well.

In reality, the government is likely to recover just 51% to 63% of defaulted amounts, according to Mr. Courtney’s forecast in a 144-page report of his findings, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“If you accounted this way in the private sector, you wouldn’t be in business anymore,” Mrs. DeVos said in a December interview. “You’d probably be behind bars.”

Mr. Courtney’s calculation was one of several supporting the disclosure in a Journal article last fall that taxpayers could ultimately be on the hook for roughly a third of the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. This could amount to more than $500 billion, exceeding what taxpayers lost on the saving-and-loan crisis 30 years ago.

If Mr. Courtney is right, there are big implications for taxpayers and families alike. While defaulted student loans can’t cause the federal government to go bankrupt the way bad mortgage lending upended banks during the financial crisis, they expose a similar problem: Billions of dollars lent based on flawed assumptions about whether the money can be repaid.

In COVID Tuition Refund Cases, Courts Continue to Differ on Whether Schools ‘Promised’ In-Person Learning:

Zack Needles:

As Law.com’s Amanda Bronstad reported back in October, judges, faced with a lack of specific written contracts in these cases, have been forced to look to other sources, such as tuition agreements and marketing materials, to determine whether an institution for higher learning had made a pact to provide in-person learning.

“I would have told you 15 years ago these claims have no chance, but today I can’t be that predictive—you may see some judges who think, well, promises were made and representations made, there’s some contract,” Peter Lake, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida, told Bronstad at the time. “My guess is somewhere, someplace, some judges are going to evolve claims against institutions in ways that wouldn’t have been obvious 10 to 15 years ago.”

A charter school leaves the traditional taxpayer supported public district

WUWM:

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is set to lose 2,000 students and at least $4 million next year, as charter school network Milwaukee College Prep (MCP) cuts ties with the district.

MPS has contracts with 15 independent charter schools, including the four MCP locations. The charter schools are independently-run but publicly-funded, and are accountable to the MPS Board.

MCP’s departure is one sign of growing tension between MPS and the charter schools under its umbrella.

On a windy day in late April, staff at Milwaukee College Prep’s North Avenue campus are greeting students as they get dropped off at three separate entrances for social distancing purposes.

K-12 Governance: 2021 Commentary

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.

Vail School Board Flees, Parents Elect New Board, Vote To End Mask Mandate

Garret Lewis:

Hundreds of parents showed up to the Vail School Board meeting to demand the board make masks optional. The board didn’t want to hear it so they walked out of the meeting before it even began. So the parents, under Robert’s Rules of Order, voted in a new school board. Then, the new members voted to end the mask requirement in Vail Schools. The old school board members revealed exactly who they are and that includes GOP LD 10 Chairman, Chris King.

“Zoom in a Room”

Jill Tucker:

Thousands of San Francisco students heading back to their classrooms this month will be carrying their computers to school each day and sitting in front of a screen to learn from their teachers — who will remain at home.

That’s because nearly 500 district teachers and classroom aides scheduled to return to in-person instruction won’t because they have a medical exemption, allowing them to continue teaching online even if their students are at school, where they are supervised by a credentialed substitute or other qualified staff member.

That’s an estimated 10% of eligible educators.

Parents call it “Zoom in a room,” and many are frustrated at the plan for kindergartners or other elementary students showing up to school only to stare at screens.

The arrangement is the latest hitch in a return to in-person learning in San Francisco Unified, which is already among the last large school districts in the country to reopen. The number of teachers and aides on a medical exemption far surpasses that of neighboring districts and is expected to cost San Francisco more than $40,000 per day for substitutes to supervise students in those classrooms, or about $1.5 million before summer break.

More sleep or more exercise: the best time trade-offs for children’s health.

University of South Australia:

More sleep could offset children’s excess indulgence over the school holidays as new research from the University of South Australia shows that the same decline in body mass index may be achieved by either extra sleep or extra exercise.

The striking new finding is part of a study that shows how children can achieve equivalent physical and mental health benefits by choosing different activity trade-offs across the 24-hour day.

Conducted in partnership with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and supported by the National Heart Foundation of Australia, the team examined the optimal balance between children’s physical activity, sleep, and sedentary time across the 24-hour day to better inform tailored lifestyle choices.

On a minute-for-minute basis, moderate-to-vigorous physical exercise was shown to be 2-6 times more potent than sleep or sedentary time

Here are the top public and private colleges with the most generous financial aid packages

Jessica Dickler:

“This year, due to Covid, students are making changes in the way they think about their college applications,” said Robert Franek, The Princeton Review’s editor-in-chief. “They are much more sensitive around cost and staying closer to home.”

To that end, The Princeton Review ranked colleges by how much financial aid is awarded and how satisfied students are with their packages. After nearly 20 years, the college admissions company also changed its criteria to include more in-state public schools. The report is based on data from its surveys of administrators at 650 colleges in 2019 and 2020, as well as students attending the schools.

“Never cross an expensive school off your list based on sticker price alone,” Franek said. “Financial aid is available and can make many, many schools so affordable.”

Federal COVID relief coming to Wisconsin and its local governments totals $20 billion

Patrick Marley:

Congress is showering Wisconsin and its local governments with $20 billion in help because of the coronavirus pandemic, a report released Friday shows.

Since last year, Congress has passed five major spending bills to address COVID-19 and its toll. The two biggest ones cost more than $4 trillion, deepening the federal deficit but softening the economic blow of the pandemic.

The spending packages have given Gov. Tony Evers wide latitude to spend more than $5 billion. They have also provided more than $4 billion in assistance for Wisconsin workers who were laid off and they have infused about $3.7 billion into schools, colleges and universities, according to the report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

A Yale Law Prof Was Disciplined for Holding Dinner Parties. There’s More to the Story.

Tom Bartlett:

The Yale Daily News reported recently that a professor at the university’s law school, Amy Chua, had been disciplined for allegedly inviting students to dinner parties at her house in violation of a 2019 agreement with the dean. Current and former students of Chua’s sent dozens of emails to the administration to protest the decision. Some high-profile supporters condemned her treatment: One deemed it “sinister,” while others suggested it might be racist and sexist. Chua herself called the whole thing “surreal,” denied any wrongdoing, and demanded an investigation.

At first it does seem surreal, if not absurd. How could such a seemingly trivial accusation lead to such public consternation? Was the law school, as some of her allies believed, targeting Chua because of her politics or her persona? Had her personnel file been leaked by the dean in order to discredit her, as Chua seemed to imply? What exactly was going on at the nation’s top-ranked law school?

Chua is probably Yale law’s most famous professor. She’s the author of the 2011 best seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a memoir of her attempt to raise her two daughters in a strict, traditional fashion. In 2018, Chua wrote an op-ed in support of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, praising him as a “mentor for young lawyers, particularly women.” (That op-ed was published before Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault when the two were in high school — allegations that he denied.) Stories also emerged about how Chua had supposedly told female students who wanted to clerk for Kavanaugh that they should dress “model-like” in order to win his favor. Chua has called those claims “100% false.”

Commentary on Wisconsin K-12 Tax & Spending Policies

Will Flanders:

  1. The school finance structure is based on systems—not students. The testimony highlighted the archaic nature of school finance in the state in funding particular school districts and types rather than students themselves. School funding in Wisconsin is based on two student-count dates, and a three-year-rolling average of enrollment. The student count dates are in September and January. This means that funding is based on the number of students attending the school on those specific count dates. This means the current system continues to fund a student even if they no longer attend the school after the count date.

A three-year-rolling average requirement means that a student who leaves a school district today will still be partially funded by taxpayers for three years. Moreover, funding for our school choice and independent charter school students exists entirely outside of the system that funds public schools, even as more and more students take advantage of these programs.This archaic system fails to reflect the dynamic nature of modern education, where students regularly move between districts and sectors. Our system is essentially funding ghost students who are not actually attending the schools receiving the funding. Particularly in the aftermath of COVID-19, it is vital that education funding in Wisconsin be less tied to buildings, and more to where students live.

Facebook allows advertisers to target children interested in smoking, alcohol and weight loss

Josh Taylor:

Facebook is allowing businesses to advertise to children as young as 13 who express an interest in smoking, extreme weight loss and gambling for as little as $3, research by the lobby group Reset Australia has found.

The organisation, which is critical of digital platforms, set up a Facebook page and advertising account under the name “Ozzie news network” to see what ad options Facebook would provide through its Ads Manager platform.

While Facebook will not allow the advertising of alcohol and other age-inappropriate content to people under 18, it does not prevent advertisers from targeting children determined by Facebook’s profile to have an interest in alcohol, for advertising that might not appear explicitly to be about those topics.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook (and instagram) services, including Madison.

Too many kids can’t read, and it’s crippling them for life

George Korda:

Being disgorged annually from schools across the Volunteer State and the United States is a virtual army of young people with limited or no education or skills, rendering them incapable of prospering – or economically surviving – in a 21st century economy apart from being supported by taxpayers. Add to that figure the hundreds of thousands who drop out of school each year.

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: Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private—But It Wasn’t

Alfred Ng:

But The Markup has learned that not only does the Android version of the contact tracing tool contain a privacy flaw, but when researchers from the privacy analysis firm AppCensus alerted Google to the problem back in February of this year, Google failed to change it. AppCensus was testing the system as part of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The company found no similar issues with the iPhone version of the framework.

It’s such an obvious fix, and I was flabbergasted that it wasn’t seen as that.

Joel Reardon, AppCensus

“This fix is a one-line thing where you remove a line that logs sensitive information to the system log. It doesn’t impact the program, it doesn’t change how it works, ” said Joel Reardon, co-founder and forensics lead of AppCensus. “It’s such an obvious fix, and I was flabbergasted that it wasn’t seen as that.”

“We were notified of an issue where the Bluetooth identifiers were temporarily accessible to specific system level applications for debugging purposes, and we immediately started rolling out a fix to address this,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in an emailed statement to The Markup.

Serge Egelman, AppCensus’s co-founder and chief technology officer, however, said that Google had repeatedly dismissed the firm’s concerns about the bug until The Markup contacted Google for comment on the issue late last week.

Asked if the vulnerability has been eliminated, Castañeda said the “roll out of this update to Android devices began several weeks ago and will be complete in the coming days.”

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

the failure of state institutions during the pandemic

Yascha Mounk:

What has the pandemic told us about the state of our political institutions and the state of our economic institutions? Have you changed your mind about what’s working, or what’s not working, in light of the experience we’ve had over the last months?

Tyler Cowen: Let’s focus on the United States. Our early response, especially in that first two months, was essentially non-existent. It was from the Trump administration, but to be entirely fair, Democratic governors did the same thing. There were Democratic Party rallies up until some date in March. The voters did not rebel against this, so it is ultimately a failing of American society. The failures of our public sector are, in some ways, mirroring the failures of our private sector. For instance, if you take the libertarian critique of the FDA, which I very much agree with, I think one has to notice also [that] voters have not rebelled against various FDA decisions. The public health experts who are not working for the FDA often will endorse what the FDA is saying, and they are private sector individuals. The failings of our government are reflecting broader failings with the country, and I think you’ll find that in many other countries as well.

Mounk: Let’s start with the failings of the state institutions. I increasingly worry that this should really change our model of how well we’re going to be able to deal with a crisis. The institutions don’t seem capable of understanding when a situation has changed. And that failure seems to be reflected, as you’re saying, at the level of what people can actually imagine, what people can actually demand. Is that something we should just get used to?

Cowen: Part of the picture, especially for the U.S., is that on the vaccines front, we put in one of the best performances in all of human history, in terms of the science and eventually, after a bad start, the mobilization. We do need this bigger picture, where our government was incredibly good at one thing, and it needed to be something that the U.S. is culturally good at, which is a kind of mass mobilization of getting stuff out to people. It’s one of the greatest events in human history. It’s maybe a common pattern in American history that we close well and start off very poorly. Also, [with] the vaccines, it was something where you can hand out goodies to voters. And government, often for the worse, is good at that. In this case, obviously, it was for the better.

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.

San Mateo Foster City school board eliminates an early acceleration program for qualified students.

Austin Walsh:

Following hours of intensive deliberation, San Mateo-Foster City Elementary School District officials narrowly agreed to overhaul the school system’s sixth grade math curriculum, despite vigorous parent protest.

Board President Kenneth Chin joined trustees Noelia Corzo and Shara Watkins in supporting a proposal to offer a single sixth grade math class next year, doing away with an early acceleration program for qualified students.

Trustees voting for the proposal cited the support of district teachers who enthusiastically backed introducing the change in the coming fall, with claims a consolidated program will assure equitable access to rigorous curriculum.

Related: English 10.

Children of Chernobyl cleanup crew don’t have excess mutations

John Timmer:

The study did genome sequencing for both those exposed and their children, which allowed the researchers to detect how many new mutations had been inherited from those exposed. A number of new mutations appear with each generation, so the team was looking at a higher rate than found in controls born after the event.

And the researchers found nothing. Their search was sensitive enough that they were able to detect the effect of parental age on the number of new mutations (old parents pass on more mutations to their offspring), but it saw no effect from the dose of radiation their parents had received. Parental smoking and drinking had no impact on their offspring’s DNA as well.

One of the radioactive elements spread widely by Chernobyl was a radioactive isotope of iodine, which causes elevated thyroid cancers. As expected, a number of people exposed to the Chernobyl debris have since developed this cancer, and the researchers obtained both cancerous and healthy tissue from them. Again, they sequenced the genomes and looked at the mutations that occurred in these cancers.

Meet the school with no classes, no classrooms and no curriculum

Andrew Webb:

“We get around 70 requests a week from all over the world from people wanting to come and see what we do here” says Rob Houben, manager of the Agora school in Roermond, Netherlands, and the closest thing school has to a principal or headteacher. “And I turn most of them down, I just don’t have the time to do all that!”

It’s clear such interest is a testament to Agora’s unconventional approach, which is why I’m glad to be here. I first met Rob at Bett 2019, when he wandered onto pi-top’s stand, and we quickly struck up a rapport. If pi-top designed a school, it would be this. It’s amazing not because it’s awash with cash and has state of the art facilities, but because their entire approach is centred around projects. This is a school focused on learning, not teaching.

“We give children the opportunity to play, because when children are playing with something they get interested. And then you don’t have to teach, and you don’t have to police them either” says Rob.

Parents, Social Lives & Snowplow Activities

Joshua Coleman:

Over the past few decades, American parents have been pressured into making a costly wager: If they sacrifice their hobbies, interests, and friendships to devote as much time and as many resources as possible to parenting, they might be able to launch their children into a stable adulthood. While this gamble sometimes pays off, parents who give themselves over to this intensive form of child-rearing may find themselves at a loss when their children are grown and don’t need them as much.

Prior generations didn’t need to be as preoccupied with their children’s well-being or future. Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1960s, my brothers and I were as luxuriously removed from our parents’ minds as they were from ours. It was the gilded age of childhood freedom. My brothers and I consumed hours of television and ate staggering amounts of sugar—for breakfast. We vanished each summer morning, biked back for lunch, and then disappeared again ’til dusk. My parents also had a life. My mother played mah-jongg weekly with “the girls” and went out every weekend with my father without calling it “date night.” My dad played squash on weekends at the downtown YMCA and didn’t seem to worry about whether my brothers and I felt neglected.

“No matter what, we have a bold vision for every kid for every kid to succeed in Madison”

Robert Chappell :

Muldrow and Castro both said the moment reflects a new commitment in the school district.

“Our community is coming together to prioritize Black children and to reconcile a history in which black children have been harmed by this district and this community and this country, and then denied education effectively,” she said. “It’s time to be honest about that. And I think that this community has selected people who could engage in that process of truth and reconciliation. I’m very proud of my board for coming together to elevate that work, because it’s part of the reason I ran for school board.”

“I think this means that we are being intentional about trying to correct the historical wrongs in terms of listening to communities that have been historically erased in our district,” Castro said. “And also try and be a model for the entire community in terms of listening to community, being bold in a vision, being bold about the issues we face in our district, whether it be racism or the way we speak, treat kids with special needs or English language learners. And being bold about dismantling those systems and trying to replace them with something better.”

In terms of policy specifics, Muldrow said her first priority is “to conduct a safe transition between virtual learning and in-person learning as we address the pandemic.” She also hopes to provide for support for arts education and opportunities for students to “express themselves artistically within their education.”

It’ll also be a top priority “to address the achievement gap, to make sure that the color of a child’s skin doesn’t determine whether or not they’re thought of as disruptive or intelligent in their classroom,” she said.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: 2020 Census shows U.S. population grew at slowest pace since the 1930s

Tara Bahrampour, Harry Stevens and Adrian Blanco:

The birthrate has also dropped, and life expectancy has dipped in the past couple of years — a reversal that has been driven by factors such as drug overdoses, obesity, suicide and liver disease and that sharply accelerated last year during the pandemic.

The extent to which the coronavirus has contributed to population patterns is not apparent in the new census data because much of the related displacement and the deaths of over half a million people took place after Census Day. According to the Pew Research Center, 5 percent of U.S. adults said they moved because of the pandemic; it is not clear whether these moves will be permanent.

But it is clear that going forward, older populations, especially those over age 65, will continue to see far higher rates of growth than young ones. The percentage of Americans 65 and over has grown by 35 percent, based on census estimates released last year. In the coming decade, the large baby boomer generation will reach their 60s, 70s and 80s.

Choose life.

Commentary on Virginia’s planned advanced math course reductions

Caroline Downey:

Democratic Virginia state Senator J. Chapman Petersen is one of many parents voicing concerns about a new racial equity push that would eliminate certain advanced placement classes in the state’s mathematics curriculum.

The Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI) would replace the traditional mathematics progression of Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 courses with courses that teach so-called “essential” topics. Under the plan, all students would take the same courses through the tenth grade but would then be allowed to enroll in classes that correspond with their post-graduation career plans.

A major goal of the VMPI is to combat disparities in educational outcomes between racial and ethnic minorities. However, many Northern Virginia parents are mobilizing to reject the program, claiming that the new “pathway” will inhibit higher-achieving students and discourage academic exploration and performance among all kids, including the racial minorities the program is designed to help.

Related: Connected Math Discovery Math

In the early 20th century, a pioneering partnership between a Black educator and a white businessman brought new opportunity to the American South.

Andrew Feiler:

The building, now a community center, is a surviving testament of one of the most dramatic and effective philanthropic initiatives the U.S. has ever seen. From 1912 to 1937, a collaboration between Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute built 4,978 schools for Black children across 15 Southern and border states.

Today, at a moment when America seems torn along racial and regional lines, when debates around opportunity, infrastructure and the American Dream ripple across the country, the remarkable success of the Rosenwald-Washington partnership is a reminder that people from divergent experiences can come together to effect real and lasting change.

The Brinkleys bear witness to the multigenerational impact of this program. The brothers attended the one-teacher school in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They went on to college and graduate school, and both became educators. They have four sisters, each of whom also attended the Cairo School and college; the siblings’ 10 children all went to college. Without this schoolhouse, that legacy may not have happened.

Grade Inflation Is Ruining Education

Shane Trotter:

A recent study conducted at the Naval Academy showed that students learn less from easy teachers. As the researchers state, “Instructors who tend to give out easier subjective grades… dramatically hurt subsequent student performance.” While a generalization, these claims support the intuitions of anyone who has ever been to school or met a human. When students can give less effort, they do. So, why have schools been moving toward easier grading?

The Art of Mathematics in Chalk

Clara Moskowitz:

Even when it is inscrutable, math is beautiful. Photographer Jessica Wynne set out to capture this appeal when she began photographing mathematicians’ chalkboards around the world in 2018. “I’ve always been interested in entering into worlds outside my realm of knowledge,” Wynne says. Without comprehending what the math on the chalkboards represented, she was able to appreciate it on a purely aesthetic level. “It’s a similar feeling as when I’m looking at an abstract painting. But it added more interest that beyond the surface there’s great meaning and great depth, and they’re trying to reveal universal truth.”

Wynne was first drawn into the world of math when she befriended two mathematicians who vacationed near where she spent summers on Cape Cod. As she learned about their research, she found many parallels between the process of math and the process of art. “I was really surprised to witness how they work and how creative what they do is,” she says.

As Wynne began to travel to different universities to meet more mathematicians, she discovered how diverse their chalkboard styles are. “Some were very clean and neat and very carefully considered,” she recalls. “And some were just this explosion and chaos. The chalkboards almost felt like portraits of the person and depended on the personality of the mathematician.”

Bruce Viemetti:

Two dozen small Wisconsin newspapers have sued Google and Facebook, claiming the firms’ grip on digital advertising threatens the publications’ existence and violates federal antitrust law.

Their 40-page federal lawsuit recaps the historical role of a free press in America, the decline of the newspaper industry and technical aspects of how it says Google controls the sales, purchase and placement of digital advertising.

“Google’s dominance of the digital advertising marketplace threatens the extinction of local news journalism across the country,” financial damage to publishers “and a profoundly negative effect on American democracy and civic life,” the suit states.

It was among about a dozen similar complaints filed by newspaper publishers in other states, said Michael J. Fuller Jr., an attorney with the law firm leading the effort.

Fuller said the team of plaintiffs’ lawyers hopes to follow a model it established suing pharmaceutical companies on behalf of local governments devastated by the opioid crisis, and that the many suits will be consolidated before a single federal judge and later attract participation of much larger newspaper publishers, like Gannett, which owns the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and more than 200 other papers.

The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions

Matt Feeney:

This year, Harvard applications were up 43 percent from last year. At Yale, applicants were up 33 percent. At Duke, 25 percent. The result is plunging acceptance rates. Harvard admitted just 3.4 percent of applicants; Yale, 4.6 percent; Duke, 5.8 percent. The deluge of applications poses a problem: Admissions officers at the most selective colleges increasingly must squint to discern any meaningful difference between thoroughly deserving applicants.

My wife is a high-school counselor, and her boss (the head counselor) conveyed a revealing tidbit to me: An Ivy League admissions dean told her that his office could simply replace the class they admitted with the next most competitive group of applicants, and the next several after that, and it would make no difference. In 2015 the undergraduate admissions dean at Tufts University made a similar confession, noting that 74 percent of the nearly 20,000 applicants to Tufts were deemed qualified for admission while 42 percent were recommended for acceptance. The school’s actual acceptance rate that year? Sixteen percent, a number that has likely only shrunk: This year, applications to Tufts ballooned by 35 percent.

Potential lawsuit over Madison West High Racial Segregation Policies

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter, Monday, to Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Superintendent, Dr. Carlton Jenkins, urging the school district to address the racial segregation employed at Madison West High School for Zoom conversations on current events. This is the second occasion in the last year where WILL has warned MMSD that racial segregation in education is illegal under federal law.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “Racial segregation is never beneficial or benign. It is our hope that the leadership at MMSD take this opportunity to commit the school district to the principle of equality and end all racial segregation immediately.”

Background: Recently, an email originating from the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) invited families of Madison West High School to a conversation related to “all the police brutality and violence that is going on.” After asserting that it is “very necessary to have space for our families to discuss and process,” the email provides two different Zoom links: one for Parents of Color and another for White Parents.

West High School principal apologizes for email suggesting racially segregated meetings

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 incarcerati

Widespread coronavirus surveillance testing at schools is a bad idea

Tracy Beth Hoeg,, Monica Gandhi and Lillian Brown

First, classrooms have thankfully been found — in studies examining schools in multiplestates — to be places of limited disease transmission, compared with communities at large. The rate of transmission within schools from individuals who test positive has been estimated to be on the order of 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent (and this includes people exhibiting symptoms).

A rate that low implies that a testing regimen would need to identify roughly 200 infected people to prevent one person from transmitting the disease in school. It would take an awful lot of tests to achieve those numbers. In New York City, where more than 234,000 asymptomatic students and staff members across approximately 1,600 schools were tested last fall, the overall rate of positive tests was only 0.4 percent. That suggests that — even during a time of high community spread — about 40,000 tests among asymptomatic individuals would need to be performed to prevent one in-school transmission.

And how accurate are these tests? Rapid antigen and saliva PCR tests, which are frequently used in schools, can have a false positive rate of 1 or 2 percent. That may sound low, but statisticians know that, when testing in a setting of low prevalence of disease, even a single-digit false-positive rate can be extremely problematic.

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.

In recent years there’s a push to de-emphasize STEM, mostly out of egalitarian concerns. But this push is wrongheaded.

Noah Smith:

A “Sputnik moment” is a historical reference to the launch of the first orbital satellite in October 1957. Though this was a triumph for humankind, it also triggered a panic in the United States, as we realized that the Soviet Union had a level of technical competence we hadn’t yet achieved (and which might be used for weapons). Sputnik made the U.S. wake up and realize the need for large-scale STEM education as a matter of national security. The response was the National Defense Education Act, whose provisions included, among other things:

  • financial assistance to public schools for STEM programs 
  • funding for scholarships, graduate fellowships, and student loans
  • testing programs to identify talented students
  • funding for technical vocational training

Many believe that the NDEA was effective at making the U.S. one of the more scientifically and technically competent nations in the world. But it certainly shows the importance that the country’s leaders placed on STEM education.

Today, the U.S. is facing another kind of Sputnik moment — slower and less terrifying, perhaps, but no less crucial for our nation’s future. This is the shift of high-tech industries from North America to Asia.

U.S. prosperity depends on something called local multipliers. This means that stuff that we export brings in revenue from other countries, that then gets spread around the country via various service industries. In a 2010 paper, economist Enrico Moretti attempted to quantify this effect, and found the following:

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.

Where life is normal:
Just outside of city centers the pandemic is hardly visible

Amber Athey:

‘As we’ve come to know more about the virus, as vaccinations are ramping up, and as we’re trying to figure out how to live with some level of COVID in a sustainable way, masking up outside when you’re at most briefly crossing paths with people is starting to feel barely understandable,’ the author reasoned.

Mask enthusiasts melted down in response, insisting that Slate‘s article was ‘irresponsible‘, ‘going to get people killed‘ and ‘misleading‘. Others celebrated the article as ‘a good sign of progress‘. A Harvard infectious disease specialist asserted, ‘I am generally a hawk about maintaining rules with a clear benefit. Outdoor masking has notable costs and really no evidence of benefits.’

Meanwhile, the rest of us normal people thought, ‘wait a second, you guys were still wearing masks outside?’

Yes, outside of the Twitter bubble and large city centers where mask virtue-signaling reigns supreme, no sane person has been wearing a mask outdoors for months. The science doesn’t support it. As Slate noted in its late-to-the-party piece, the chances of catching COVID during a brief moment passing someone else on the sidewalk are lower than getting struck by lightning.

Still, leftists persisted because they didn’t dare upset their woke neighbors who believe a ‘culture of safety‘ is more important than a return to normalcy. In downtown Washington DC, bikers and runners double mask and veer into the middle of the street rather than risk passing another pedestrian in close quarters. In Arlington, Virginia, I still spot people wearing masks while driving in their cars or sitting alone in parks. Refusing to comply often means getting the stink eye from a still terrified traverser.

The Slander Industry

Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill:

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

To assess the slander’s impact, we wrote a software program to download every post from a dozen of the most active complaint sites: more than 150,000 posts about some 47,000 people. Then we set up a web crawler that searched Google and Bing for thousands of the people who had been attacked.

For about one-third of the people, the nasty posts appeared on the first pages of their results. For more than half, the gripe sites showed up at the top of their image results.

These were the Google image results for “aaron krolik nyc.”

Civics: Twitter Takes Down Tweets From MP, MLA, Editor Criticising Handling Of Pandemic Upon Government Request

Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru:

You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised India’s handling of the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. These tweets, which are now inaccessible to Indian users of the social media website, include posts by Revanth Reddy, a sitting Member of Parliament; Moloy Ghatak, a West Bengal state minister; actor Vineet Kumar Singh; and two filmmakers, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das. 

MediaNama has seen public disclosures of the orders made available by Twitter to the Lumen Database. Lumen Database receives and publishes disclosures from private entities, including social media companies, of legal takedown notices they get from governments and private entities all over the world. MediaNama has previously reported the withholding of Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament Sukhram Singh Yadav’s Twitter account based on a Lumen Database disclosure. Such orders are typically sent by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY).

College as a Marriage Market

Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven & Magne Mogstad:

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

In Germany, more than 1,200 new words have been created in age of COVID-19

Frank Miles:

A singular German word overflowing with length and precision can flummox an English speaker: from its number of letters to its complex meaning.

In the age of COVID-19, more than 1,200 words in German have been created.

“I can’t think of anything, at least since the Second World War, that would have changed the vocabulary as drastically and at the same time as quickly, as the corona pandemic,” said Anatol Stefanowitsch, a professor of linguistics at the Free University of Berlin. “I can think of many other examples of a huge cultural shift that changed the German vocabulary. But they didn’t happen within a few months.”

The list of new words was compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language.

“When new things happen in the world [we] look for a name,” said Dr. Christine Möhrs, who works at the institute and collects the words. “Things that do not have a name can cause people to feel fear and insecurity. However, if we can talk about things and name them, then we can communicate with each other. Especially in times of crisis, this is important.”

She noted the new words are helping reduce Coronaangst (anxiety about the virus).

The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions

Matt Feeney:

This year, Harvard applications were up 43 percent from last year. At Yale, applicants were up 33 percent. At Duke, 25 percent. The result is plunging acceptance rates. Harvard admitted just 3.4 percent of applicants; Yale, 4.6 percent; Duke, 5.8 percent. The deluge of applications poses a problem: Admissions officers at the most selective colleges increasingly must squint to discern any meaningful difference between thoroughly deserving applicants.

My wife is a high-school counselor, and her boss (the head counselor) conveyed a revealing tidbit to me: An Ivy League admissions dean told her that his office could simply replace the class they admitted with the next most competitive group of applicants, and the next several after that, and it would make no difference. In 2015 the undergraduate admissions dean at Tufts University made a similar confession, noting that 74 percent of the nearly 20,000 applicants to Tufts were deemed qualified for admission while 42 percent were recommended for acceptance. The school’s actual acceptance rate that year? Sixteen percent, a number that has likely only shrunk: This year, applications to Tufts ballooned by 35 percent.

A sane approach to this glut of qualified applicants would be for a college’s admissions office to take the names of all qualified applicants, spread them over a cork board, and start throwing some darts. Indeed, such a straightforward and compelling proposal to reform the admissions process — a type of lottery — has been offered in these pages by Barry Schwartz and Dalton Conley.

Hershey Profits Fund $17 Billion Endowment for Nonprofit School, but Board Member Says It Won’t Let Him See Financial Records

Bob Fernandez:

For over a year, lawyer Bob Heist, then-chairman of the Milton Hershey School’s board, says he sought internal financial records detailing the spending history of the $17 billion charity, which has a mission to educate low-income students for free.

He now says he is being denied records he needs as a board member charged with overseeing the Pennsylvania boarding school’s operations, and earlier this month he sued the school to obtain the documents. It’s an extremely unusual step for a sitting board member, taken against an extremely unusual institution: The Milton Hershey School is the wealthiest pre-college educational institution in the United States. It controls 80% of the Hershey Co. candy giant’s voting shares, and reaps profits from the sale of Hershey chocolate bars, Reese’s peanut butter cups and SkinnyPop-brand snacks sold in thousand of U.S. retail stores.

The dispute is the latest in a series of legal entanglements involving the nonprofit Milton Hershey School and the members of its governing board. Two previous financial controversies raised questions about whether the school’s spending was serving the needs of its roughly 2,100 students, as required by law and enforced by the state attorney general’s office.

How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley

Aaron Timms:

“Competition,” wrote Peter Thiel in his 2014 manual Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future, “is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.” The idea Thiel articulated in Zero to One—that achieving greatness and building the future means “avoiding competition as much as possible”—is among the most important of his many achievements of the last decade. Equally important was Thiel’s decision, in 2016, before he headlined the Republican National Convention and told the country to vote for Donald Trump, to invite one of the country’s most influential white nationalists to dinner.

On your path to becoming an intellectual in Silicon Valley, understanding these two lessons—the Peter Principles, we’ll call them, since that adds nothing to the conversation but sounds sophisticated—will be key to your success. First, the point of your interventions in the public sphere is not to “win” any “argument,” nor to attract new adherents or convince neutrals of the righteousness of your cause. It is to avoid competition. When competition seeks you out, as it invariably will, your task will be to lose the debate and propose ideas that “seem” (and often are) “shit,” since popular discourse is a test of conventional mindedness; to be truly radical, you must be wrong. Second, there is no absolute moral evil that cannot be playfully reframed on irrelevant grounds as a net historical good. Take, for instance, poverty: what looks to most people like a recipe for social inequality, resentment, division, and violence will be, in your spritely retelling, the most powerful mechanism for income mobility in the history of human civilization. Or consider, say, Pol Pot’s killing fields: bad for the people who got stuck in them, but good for Cambodia’s startup ecosystem? Nazis did bad things to the world in the middle of the twentieth century, but there’s no reason to think they won’t do wonders for agency culture at the Food and Drug Administration in the early 2020s. Your success as a Silicon Valley intellectual will depend on your ability to insert difficult but necessary conversations like these into the public domain. A couple of half-decent ratioed tweets about the beauty of population control or the necessity of transphobia, and you’ll be well on your way to securing your status among the Silicon Valley elite.

Explicit Instruction in Legal Education: Boon or Spoon?

Beth A. Brennan:

While legal education unquestionably hones students’ critical thinking skills, it also privileges students who are faster readers and have prior background knowledge or larger working memories. According to the prevailing mythology of law school pedagogy, students learn by struggling to find their way out of chaos. Only then is their learning deep enough to permit them to engage in critical thinking and legal reasoning.

Learning theory and research suggest this type of “inquiry” learning is not an effective way to introduce novice learners to a subject. Lacking basic substantive and procedural knowledge, students’ struggles are often unproductive and dispiriting.

Initial explicit instruction early in a student’s learning more predictably creates stable, accurate knowledge. Because higher-order thinking depends on having some knowledge, ensuring students have a strong foundation of substantive and procedural knowledge increases the likelihood that they will develop critical thinking skills.

However, legal education uniformly dismisses anything that looks like “spoon-feeding.” If the academy is going to incorporate learning theory into its pedagogy, it must understand and articulate the differences between spoon-feeding and explicit instruction.

This Article examines explicit instruction as a pedagogical tool for legal educators. Part I examines cognitive psychological theories of thinking and learning to understand the differences between spoon-feeding and explicit instruction and explain why initial explicit instruction is useful. Part II delves into the cognitive differences between novices and experts that support initial explicit instruction. Part III examines experts’ cognitive barriers to effective teaching. Part IV provides examples of how explicit instruction can be used in the law school classroom.

Related: English 10.

Kaleem Caire and driving student / parent K-12 choice and achievement alternatives

John Roach:

I worked with Caire when he headed the Urban League of Greater Madison and on his effort to launch Madison Prep, the earnest but quixotic attempt to address Madison’s embarrassing racial achievement gap. The failure to launch that school was a bitter blow. And the gap has remained unchanged.

Madison Prep failed because the teachers’ union and other supporters of the educational status quo were motivated and powerful. But they are not invincible. Caire discovered that the best way to battle those who stand in opposition to righteous change is not to meet them head on, but to adroitly scoot around them.

It also helps to enlist allies.

Allies like the legendary Pleasant Rowland, who just donated $14 million to help address Madison’s stark racial reality by expanding Caire’s One City Schools to a bigger, better building in Monona. Like Caire, I am a Madisonian, born and raised, and cannot think of anyone who’s had a greater impact on our city in modern times than Rowland and her husband, Jerry Frautschi. There is simply no precedent for such philanthropy in Madison’s history. None. Rowland and Frautschi deserve a statue at the head of State Street, once we elect leaders who can figure out how to fix Madison’s shabby aorta.

Caire has other allies, like the UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity. This entity moved to alter the painful reality that its flagship university is in a town with one of the worst racial gaps in America. So, they chartered One City Schools. Yes, the C word. Charter.

Notes and links on Kaleem Caire.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter 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 incarcer

For God and Progress: Notes On Training the Medical Mind

The scholar’s Stage:

Understanding changing perceptions of “great works”— what books are included in a canon at a given moment in history, why certain works make the cut while others fall to the wayside, and tracking down the individuals responsible for these decisions—is a hobby of mine. I have written about it many times on the Scholar’s Stage. This week I came across an interesting example of cannon formation in action. William Osler was one of the founding physicians of John Hopkins Medicine, creator of the hospital residency system, inventor of much of the hands-on medical pedagogy still used in medical schools today, and one of the most famous doctors of his day. On the final page of Aequanimitas, a collection of Osler’s lectures and orations published in 1904, is a list of books that Osler believes should be on every medical student’s bookshelf. He suggests that while in medical school young doctors-to-be should spend the last 30 minutes of their night reading from this chosen library.

Commentary on the future of education

Omenti:

Last week I sent a note to regular readers:

Perhaps it’s a sense that things are possible post-pandemic, but I’ve been asked for comments on the future of education three times since the beginning of the year. While I have some unscientific and undoubtedly biased thoughts I’m happy to share it occurs to me this group is exceptionally diverse.

So the request: Could you write a bit about what you’d like to see in education going forward? The subject is huge and readers represent at least seven countries so just pick a few and stay away from clear needs in some countries – like affordable and equitable education. Those are incredibly important, but perhaps some thoughts on curriculum, teaching, etc.. I’ll collect and post them with my comments in a week – say a cutoff on the 24th of April. Let me know if you want your name attached or not. And don’t worry about it if you don’t have time.

Commentary on Chinese Students in the USA

Remco Zwetsloot and Zachary Arnold:

Kicking out Chinese students might seem like tough, decisive policymaking, but it’s exactly the wrong way to protect the United States’ scientific and technological advantage. Welcoming foreign talent isn’t simply a virtuous position to take—in fact, that openness is at the core of U.S. power. The United States gains tremendously from the inflow of Chinese students, and China loses from its top talent going abroad. The Biden administration should work to reduce the risk of technology transfer, including through intelligence and research security reforms. But driving Chinese students away could cripple U.S. innovation and supercharge China’s technological progress. The United States should make the most of its talent advantage, not throw it away on an ineffective ban.

Lehman’s Lemons: Do Career Disruptions Matter for the Top 5%?

Anastassia Fedyk and James Hodson:

How resilient are high-skilled, white collar workers? We exploit a uniquely comprehensive dataset of individual-level resumes of bank employees and the setting of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to estimate the effect of an unanticipated shock on the career paths of mobile and high skilled labor. We find evidence of short-term effects that largely dissipate over the course of the decade and that touch only the senior-most employees. We match each employee of Lehman Brothers in January 2008 to the most similar employees at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and UBS based on job positions, skills, education, and demographics. By 2019, the former Lehman Brothers employees are 2% more likely to have experienced at least a six-months-long break from reported employment and 3% more likely to have left the financial services industry. However, these effects concentrate among the senior individuals such as vice presidents and managing directors and are absent for junior employees such as analysts and associates. Furthermore, in terms of subsequent career growth, junior employees of Lehman Brothers fare no worse than their counterparts at the other banks. Analysts and associates employed at Lehman Brothers in January 2008 have equal or greater likelihoods of achieving senior roles such as managing director in existing enterprises by January 2019 and are more likely to found their own businesses.

National Spelling Bee Adds New Rules To Help Winners Sting The Competition

Emma Bowman

In between the usual oral spelling rounds, “word meaning,” the new vocabulary portion, will ask the speller to answer a multiple-choice question during the second round of each competition level all the way to the finals.

Also new is the “spell-off”: For the July 8 finals, officials can now trigger a lightning round to rule out the possibility of a tie.

If, as time is running down in the last round, there is still no winner, all spellers left standing will be given 90 seconds to spell as many words as possible from a prepared list. Whoever spells the most words correctly wins the title.

J. Michael Durnil, who stepped in as the bee’s executive director in March, is overseeing the changes to the 96-year-old competition.

“The Bee’s competition format this year – inspired by proactive safety measures as the pandemic evolves – has allowed us to introduce new competition elements, aligned with our regular program review to ensure the competition continues to mature in a way that appropriately challenges the most accomplished spellers in the country,” Durnil said in a press release. “The spell-off, if activated, promises to be a gripping moment for both the spellers onstage during the finals and audiences on the edges of their seats at home.”

Article continues after sponsor message

This new feature will almost certainly prevent repeats of past bees, in which reigning spellers had to share their glory. In 2019, a record-busting eight contestants were named co-champions after enduring 20 spelling rounds. All three bees from 2014 through 2016 also ended in a tie.

Commentary on Federal Taxpayer Funds for “racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically responsive teaching and learning practices”

Alex Nester:

School districts in recent months have increased their efforts to weave critical race theory—the idea that America’s political and economic systems are inherently racist—into K-12 curriculum standards. The Education Department’s proposal signals the Biden administration’s support for this trend.

The rule would allocate federal funding for education contractors who work to “improve” K-12 curriculum by promoting “racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically responsive teaching and learning practices.” The rule would also require the Education Department to encourage social studies curricula that teach students about “systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history.”

The Education Department claims that the coronavirus pandemic and “ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism” make changes to the education system necessary. The proposal cites the New York Times‘s 1619 Project and antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s criticisms of American education.

“Schools across the country are working to incorporate antiracist practices into teaching and learning,” the proposal reads. “It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students.”

Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan

Sam Dorman:

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).

“[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade,” he said. “That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses.”

His post included a chart with what appeared to be set math courses for 2022-2030.

Smart Folk Often Full of Crap, Study Finds

The multidisciplinarian:

For most of us, there is a large gap between what we know and what we think we know. We hold a level of confidence about our factual knowledge and predictions that doesn’t match our abilities. Since our personal decisions are really predictions about the future based on our available present knowledge, it makes sense to work toward adjusting our confidence to match our skill.

Last year I measured the knowledge-confidence gap of 3500 participants in a trivia game with a twist. For each True/False trivia question the respondents specified their level of confidence (between 50 and 100% inclusive) with each answer. The questions, presented in banks of 10, covered many topics and ranged from easy (American stop signs have 8 sides) to expert (Stockholm is further west than Vienna).

I ran this experiment on a website using 1500 True/False questions, about half of which belonged to specific categories including music, art, current events, World War II, sports, movies and science. Visitors could choose between the category “Various” or from a specific category. I asked for personal information such as age, gender current profession, title, and education. About 20% of site visitors gave most of that information. 30% provided their professions.

Participants were told that the point of the game was not to get the questions right but to have an appropriate level of confidence. For example, if a your average confidence value is 75%, 75% of their your answers should be correct. If your confidence and accuracy match, you are said to be calibrated. Otherwise you are either overconfident or underconfident. Overconfidence – sometime extreme – is more common, though a small percentage are significantly underconfident.

Commentary on the taxpayer supported Madison School District’s 2021-2022 $500m+ budget (-1000 students, still building a new school)

Elizabeth Beyer:

The district is still reeling from a significant drop in enrollment due to COVID-19 during the 2020-21 school year and, despite the passage of an operating referendum in November, operating revenue is expected to be up only 0.8%, less than the annual cost of living adjustment. Any additional funding the district may get through the state budget will be used to cover the funding gap created by the enrollment drop of roughly 1,000 students.

“Had it have not been for the passing of the operating referendum, we would have been in a negative revenue cycle, based on our estimates, but the referendum is allowing us to stay stable as a school district through the effects of COVID-19 enrollment,” Ruppel said. “It’ll take us a couple of years to build this enrollment back up.”

The district is also expecting more federal funds, including $18.9 million meant to combat COVID-19 related learning loss, which has not yet been included in its preliminary budget draft. Those funds should be included in the next budget draft, to be released in June, Ruppel said.

The district said all funds from the referendum that passed in November along with $7 million in repurposed local funding will be earmarked for “Excellence and Equity projects” in the operating budget.

These numbers do not appear to include substantial redistributed federal taxpayer (debt) funds ($70m in the latest tranche!).

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts. This, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

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 incarcerat

Madison’s school and parent climate

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 schools: Press #1 if you’re white, #2 if you’re not

Thinking Different: SerenA Williams Fund Invests in Fiveable

Sarah Hauer:

Serena Williams’ venture capital firm has invested in Milwaukee education technology startup Fiveable.

Fiveable announced that the tennis star’s investment fund was backing the company in a news release. The education streaming startup has seen huge increases in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What impresses us most about Fiveable is how well they understand and are immersed in today’s students; that’s what initially piqued our interest. The way they’ve brought students in to help guide their roadmap is unlike anything I’ve seen,” said Serena Williams, founder of Serena Ventures, in a statement.

“Based on their growth in users and engagement, it’s evident that their social learning community has cracked the code on peer-to-peer learning.”

Fiveable’s online education platform focuses on Advanced Placement courses with most content available for free. The company has study guides for every unit in all 38 AP subjects, hosts a Discord server for students to study and livestream cram sessions. More than half a million students have used Fiveable in the last 30 days, according to the company.

The Courage of Our Convictions: How to fight critical race theory

Christopher Rufo:

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the twentieth century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

Commentary on Expanding Wisconsin Open Enrollment

WILL:

Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony in support of Senate Bill 41. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) believes that every student in Wisconsin deserves access to a high-quality education and this bill advances that principle by removing barriers in the Open Enrollment and Wisconsin Parental Choice Programs.


Senate Bill 41 expands access to both the Open Enrollment and Wisconsin Parental Choice Programs by removing the zip code barrier, which locks students into limited educational options based on their address.


The Open Enrollment Program is the state’s largest school choice program with over 65,000 students last year choosing to attend a public school outside of their residential district. Our research1 found that demand and utilization of this program have grown over the past 20 years. In fact, overall participation increases each year 3-6% (or approx. 2,000-4,000 students). However, over 9,000 applications (24%) were denied in the 2019-2020 school year by districts and the overwhelming reason for denial was space.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted families’ interest and need for additional educational options. Without a doubt, more families are looking for the best educational options for their students outside of their assigned public schools. The program must be amended to respond to the increased demand. But the Open Enrollment Program limits applications to only three non-residential districts per year, which restricts families’ options even further. SB 41 expands options for families by removing the three application limit for the 2021-2022 school year so families can find the school that best meets the educational needs of their child.


The Open Enrollment Program also allows students to apply outside of the traditional enrollment window by submitting an “alternative application” under certain circumstances, including “best interest for the child.” Just last year, 14,000 of the 15,000 alternative applications were submitted for that reason. SB 41 prohibits a child’s resident school district from denying a student transfer to a nonresidential district if both the parents and nonresidential district agree it’s in the best interest of the child. This will help keep families seeking alternative education options from being denied access to a nonresidential public school.

The Age of Over-Abundant Elites

Mark Jeftovic:

I’ve been reading Peter Turchin’s “Ages of Discord”, which tries to look at patterns of societal strife that he found in previous, pre-industrial civilizations such as Rome and France, and examine how it holds up in a post-industrial era. It bears some resemblance to other cycle theories like Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning” or other long-wave models like Kondratiev Waves (K-Waves). The basic premise behind these ideas are that societies undergo cyclical or pendulum-like dynamics between relatively steady states of prosperity and stability, the internal dynamics of which then produce the conditions that precipitate reversions into turbulent periods of strife and chaotic change.

The important thing to keep in mind is that to that the likes of Turchin and other historical statisticians, the periods of societal discord that they try to map may look like this:

Getting Rich in the Diversity Marketplace

Sean Cooper:

The ideological battles over California’s ethnic studies curriculum are finally over, at least for now. The disputed model curriculum was approved by the state legislature in March, and soon the guidelines for mandated high school programs will be disseminated to local school boards across the state.

Last summer, though, when it was still too close to call, the cadre of ethnic studies professors and education bureaucrats, the ones who were the primary instigators of the new curriculum, were furious that there was any resistance at all. “I’m pissed,” said Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, an ethnic studies professor at San Francisco State and key architect of the controversial curriculum. She was addressing a Zoom meeting, joined by concerned colleagues throughout the state. They were up in arms over proposed revisions to their plan, which they felt would undermine the political essence of the program. “For them to slap us in the face! That’s not cool.”

The revisions were minimal, and the legislature was almost certain to pass the bill—a state law requiring every public high school to teach ethnic studies, using their curriculum as the model. They were on the verge of achieving their dream. So why the panic?

For all the talk of this being a movement for social good, a new dawn for American students, and a solution to oppression, ethnic studies is also, crucially, very much a nascent but nationwide white-collar industry. Indeed, while evidence for its educational or even social value is hotly debated, what’s not in dispute is that the business of flipping the public education establishment on its head is beginning to pay—and very well.

K-12 Governance

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 incarceratio

An Ode to Elementary Schools

Michael Petrilli:

If I had to name the most important institution in American life, and the one with the most potential for changing the course of our country, it would be the humble elementary school. Especially the 20,000 or so high-poverty elementary schools in the nation’s cities and inner-ring suburbs, educating millions of kids growing up in poor or working-class families.

Yes, of course, we also need to dramatically improve the other parts of our education system if we’re to help all young Americans fulfill their God-given potential. That includes making high-quality pre-K more widely accessible to those who need it most, upping the quality of our middle schools, and rethinking and improving our high schools. Not to mention revamping our post-secondary education system and overhauling our workforce training programs.

Still, if I were king for a day, or even just superintendent of a large district, I would spend at least twenty-three of my twenty-four hours in charge obsessing about elementary schools. And that’s for four big reasons.

First, these schools have the greatest potential impact on kids’ academic, social, and emotional progress. Partly that’s just basic math: Most children spend almost half of their K–12 time in elementary schools, usually six out of thirteen years. And those also happen to be the six years when kids tend to learn the most. To wit, the average student achievement gains during elementary school far outpace those seen before or after.

How L.A.’s Brentwood School Became a Battleground in the Culture Wars

Max Kutner:

Early last June, Brentwood School posted an image of a black square on Instagram. This was eight days after George Floyd had been killed, and it was part of #BlackoutTuesday, a social media campaign against racism and inequality. Other Los Angeles prep schools also participated in the well-intentioned if largely symbolic online gesture, along with millions of other institutions, businesses, and individuals. But Brentwood’s black box got what’s known as ratioed; it received more negative comments than likes. Many more.

“Brentwood is a toxic racist cesspool for students of color, but an ivory tower for the wealthy, white elite,” read one of the scores of scathing remarks that kept popping up on Instagram throughout the day. “If you cared about racial justice, you would close your doors and redistribute your obscene wealth,” read another.

In the year since Floyd’s murder, the atmosphere at this bucolic, super-exclusive, $38,000- to $45,000-a-year private school has only grown more poisonous, with some Brentwood alumni of color not only hurling accusations of racism but also demanding that the school completely scrap what they see as a biased curriculum. Meanwhile, parents, teachers, and administrators spent much of last summer and fall wrestling over the value of books like To Kill a Mockingbird—a civil rights classic to some; an outdated, problematic text to others—in what’s shaping up to be an epic battle over the hearts and minds of the children of America’s one percent.

To be sure, scenes like this are not occurring only at Brentwood. Similar skirmishes are breaking out at elite prep schools all over—at Harvard-Westlake, Marlborough, and Archer School for Girls in L.A. and in New York at Chapin and Dalton—making headlines across the country in publications as ideologically divergent as the New York Post and The Atlantic. But it’s worth focusing on what’s going on at this particular school off West Sunset. Because it’s here at Brentwood that all the forces arrayed in this conflict—woke alumni who want to tear the system down; teachers who’ve had a hard enough time getting through the year on Zoom, let alone dealing with paradigm shifts in educational priorities; and angry, frustrated moms and dads who just want their kids to get into good colleges—are most dramatically and publicly clashing, like those stranded boys battling each other on a deserted island in Lord of the Flies, one of the novels Brentwood struck from reading lists last year.

As students return to classrooms, Mt. Zion plans to phase out Schools Without Walls

Elizabeth Beyer:

When Monica Warren learned her church, Mt. Zion Baptist, planned to host an in-person tutoring program during the school day to supplement online learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she knew she had to get her 11-year-old son enrolled.

Jeremiah Warren, a normally shy and introverted student, blossomed in the church’s Schools Without Walls program, she said. He began to come out of his shell and strike up conversations with other students.

After schools closed in March 2020 and before Mt. Zion launched Schools Without Walls, Jeremiah struggled with online learning. In September, Warren said her son didn’t log in to his online classroom on the first day of school because he was nervous and hadn’t yet had a chance to meet his fifth-grade teacher in person.

“It was hard for him. I feel like he’s more of an in-person type of student because he needs, not constant supervision, but knowing that someone is looking out for (him),” she said. But she wasn’t able to give him the guidance he needed to support his online learning at home because she needed to return to work at Edgewood College.

Author claims ‘woke culture infecting our schools’ amid dad’s viral letter

Yaron Steinbuch:

A biotech entrepreneur assailed a growing “wokeness” that he said is “infecting schools,” after a dad decided not to re-enroll his daughter in an elite Manhattan prep school due to its focus on race.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 35, founder and executive chairman of Roivant Sciences and author of “Woke Inc.,” launched into a tirade on “Fox News Sunday” following Andrew Gutmann’s scathing letter in which he blasted the posh, all-girls Brearley School.

Gutmann, who accused Brearley of trying to “brainwash” kids with woke philosophies rather than teaching them how to think on their own, attacked the school’s “cowardly and appalling lack of leadership [for] appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob.”

In his missive to 650 families, the incensed dad compared the growing “woke” culture to the Communist Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The Coming Bipartisan Backlash to Public School Wokeness

Erika Sanzi:

The backlash to critical race theory, gender ideology and what is often called “wokeness” in schools represents a rare example of bipartisan agreement during a hyper-polarized time. While this might not fit the mainstream narrative, journalists and politicians ignore what is happening at their own peril.

The growing resistance is easy to miss on the surface. There is much more pressure on the Left to toe the ideological line in public and hide one’s real opinions in the safe harbor of DMs and text messages to trusted friends and allies.

But conversations with parents, students and teachers reveal that even self-described liberals and lifelong Democrats are extremely alarmed by what they see as dogmatic classroom activism and outright discrimination in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.

I have spent the past two weeks reading through submissions to Parents Defending Education, a new group we launched recently to fight back against the “woke” ideology in our children’s schools. We are getting letters daily from concerned parents and teachers about what they describe as a “racially divisive curriculum,” “blatant activism in the classroom,” “infantilization of students and staff of color,” “sanctioned discrimination,” “radical gender ideology” and “racist poison.”

Masking Children Is Unnecessary—and Harmful

John Tierney:

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela famously said, “than the way in which it treats its children.” By that standard, our society now has the soul of an abusive parent. The pandemic has turned American adults, or at least the ones who make the rules, into selfish neurotics who have been punishing innocent children for over a year—and still can’t restrain themselves.

When the pandemic began, the lack of knowledge about Covid-19 justified this behavior. That excuse has vanished. It became clear long ago that the virus is less dangerous to children than the flu, and that keeping schools open poses minimal risk of spreading infections. Yet despite this evidence—and despite the widespread availability of vaccines to teachers and other adults—many schools have yet to reopen full-time, and others are still making students as miserable as possible.

Schools have canceled many sports and other extracurricular activities, isolated students in Plexiglas cells, and forced them to wear masks in classrooms and on playgrounds. Social distancing and masks hinder learning while harming children emotionally, socially, and physically, all for no purpose other than providing false comfort to adults who ought to know better.

The rationale for forcing anyone to wear a mask is questionable, as my colleague Connor Harris has meticulously demonstrated. Wearing masks might provide some protection for some high-risk adults in crowded indoor settings, but the evidence is mixed, and masks can be not just uncomfortable but harmful. Some adults may judge the trade-offs worthwhile for themselves, but for children it’s all pain and no gain.

Begin With The End: What’s The Purpose Of Schooling?

Michael Horn:

What’s the purpose of schooling?

Even though it may seem like a straightforward question, once you scratch the surface, it’s anything but.

There are countless views on the topic. But as we seek to build schools back better—and not just return to how schools operated prior to the pandemic when the system writ large didn’t serve anyone particularly well—individual schooling communities must be clear about purpose and priorities.

That means, as Stephen Covey wrote in one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” beginning “with the end in mind.” Or, as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote in the context of education in “Understanding by Design,” good teachers start with the goals and how they would know if students have met them and then backwards map all the things they need to provide to get to those outcomes.

Although it’s unlikely there will be any consensus across all communities in the country around a central purpose, that’s OK. That’s part of a robust pluralism underlying our democracy that values the fact that students sit in different circumstances and will have different needs.

But clarity in any specific schooling community is critical.

Student False Positive Los Angeles School District Tests

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.

Public records show students struggling across SE Wisconsin

Amanda St. Hilaire:

For students struggling through the last year of pandemic learning, GPA is not just a number.

“Before we got kicked out of school, my grades was top-notch,” said Maleak Taylor, a Milwaukee Public Schools 11th grade student. His eyes were smiling behind his mask as he logged into his virtual classes.

“After this?” Maleak’s eyes dropped. “I try to keep my grades up, but my grades fell dramatically. And I’m just trying to keep it up there where I can graduate this year.”

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.

Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

Jeremy Tate:

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

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.

Commentary on the Taxpayer Supported Milwaukee Public Schools

Jordan Morales:

Switching now to MPS, we see that according to the Department of Public Instruction’s 2018-19 Report Card, 71% of Black or African-American students had a “Below Basic” score in mathematics. Indeed, only 10% of Black students had either a proficient or advanced understanding of mathematics. Meanwhile, only 30% of white students scored “Below Basic,” whereas 39% had a proficient or advanced understanding in mathematics.

Looking at another statistic, Black students in MPS have a graduation rate of only 63% whereas their white counterparts had a graduation rate of 94%. The racial disparities in MPS are obvious.

The racism is also evident in the way MPS disciplines its students. Much like how MPD had to sign an agreement with the ACLU to end racially biased stop-and-frisk, MPS had to sign an agreement with the Department of Education to address racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. Like MPD, MPS has shown little progress in this agreement according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

They found that African Americans accounted for 81% of suspensions and expulsions despite making up only 51% of the student body. This isn’t because Black students are more unruly. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights found that Black students were disciplined in a discriminatory manner, uncovering over 100 instances where white students weren’t punished as severely for the exact same behaviors. MPS’s response was to establish disciplinary committees to evaluate the disparities, half of which rarely meet.

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.

Civics: Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?

Dan Froomkin:

For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant. And once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet. You’re kind of beholden to them.” It’s not exactly payola, Ingram told me, searching for the right metaphor. Nor is it a protection racket. “It’s like you’re a kept person,” he said. “You’re Facebook’s mistress.

Many taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Facebook and Instagram services, including Madison.

NUS researchers create SmartFarm device to harvest air moisture for autonomous, self-sustaining urban farming

NUS News:

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has recently developed a simple solution to address two of the world’s biggest problems – water scarcity and food shortage. They created a solar-powered, fully automated device called ‘SmartFarm’ that is equipped with a moisture-attracting material to absorb air moisture at night when the relative humidity is higher, and releases water when exposed to sunlight in the day for irrigation.

SmartFarm has another advantage – the water harvesting and irrigation process can be fine-tuned to suit different types of plants and local climate for optimal cultivation. The hygroscopic material that is used in the SmartFarm was earlier tested by Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) for its application for humidity control for space-based agriculture.

“Atmospheric humidity is a huge source of freshwater but it has remained relatively unexplored. In this work, we’ve tried to mitigate food and water shortage simultaneously. We created a hygroscopic copper-based material and used it to draw moisture from the air. We then integrate this material into a fully automated solar-driven device that utilises the harvested water to irrigate plants daily without manual intervention,” explained project leader Assistant Professor Tan Swee Ching, who is from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at NUS.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms

Jay Dixon, Bryan Hong & Lynn Wu:

As a new general-purpose technology, robots have the potential to radically transform employment and organizations. In contrast to prior studies that predict dramatic employment declines, we find that investments in robotics are associated with increases in total firm employment but decreases in the total number of managers. Similarly, we find that robots are associated with an increase in the span of control for supervisors remaining within the organization. We also provide evidence that robot adoption is not motivated by the desire to reduce labor costs but is instead related to improving product and service quality. Our findings are consistent with the notion that robots reduce variance in production processes, diminishing the need for managers to monitor worker activities to ensure production quality. As additional evidence, we also find that robot investments predict improved performance measurement and increased adoption of incentive pay based on individual employee performance. With respect to changes in skill composition within the organization, robots predict decreases in employment for middle-skilled workers but increases in employment for low- and high-skilled workers. We also find that robots predict not only changes in employment but also corresponding adaptations in organizational structure. Robot investments are associated with both centralization and decentralization of decision-making authority depending on the task, but decision rights in either case are reassigned away from the managerial level of the hierarchy. Overall, our results suggest that robots have distinct and profound effects on employment and organizations that require fundamental changes in firm practices and organizational design.

Libraries and Pandemics: Past and Present

Julia Skinner:

In 1918, World War I was coming to a close, and widespread changes were afoot. It was in some ways a moment similar to today: rapid technological development brought sweeping changes to workplaces and homes. Fights for labor and voting rights were underway. Then, in the spring, a pandemic began to sweep the globe, killing millions. Libraries across the U.S. helped people stay informed, entertained, and cared for as they disseminated information and resources, shifted their services, and re-imagined how they brought collections to the communities they served.

Public libraries in the United States started to proliferate in the late 1800s and early 1900s, often founded by women’s clubs and other social groups seeking to benefit their communities. Their early focus was on classic literature, which was thought to improve and transform the reader. However, thanks in part to librarianship during the pandemic , a shift occurred after World War I towards “useful information”, and with that shift came a focus on readers’ needs and interests.

“data malfeasance involving Imperial College and Neil Ferguson”

Phil Magness:

Huge discovery this morning showing data malfeasance involving Imperial College and Neil Ferguson.

Almost exactly 1 year ago I wrote an article on how a team of researchers at Uppsala University had adapted Ferguson’s UK model to Sweden, and yielded preposterous results – e.g. a prediction of over 90K dead if they did not go into lockdowns. My article made waves over in the UK, and Ferguson himself was grilled about it in testimony before the House of Lords. This caused Imperial College to fire off a bunch of tweets and statements disavowing any connection to the Uppsala adaptation of their model. It wasn’t their product, they insisted, and Imperial itself had never claimed between 40-100K deaths would result in Sweden

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.

In the Beginning, There Were Taxes

Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod:

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh drew on his experiences in 1930s Abyssinia to imagine tax collection in fictional Ishmaelia:

It had been found expedient to merge the functions of national defense and inland revenue in an office then held in the capable hands of General Gollancz Jackson; his forces were in two main companies, the Ishmaelite Mule Tax-gathering Force and the Rifle Excisemen with a small Artillery Death Duties Corps for use against the heirs of powerful noblemen…Towards the end of each financial year the general’s flying columns would lumber out into the surrounding country on the heels of the fugitive population and return in time for budget day laden with the spoils of the less nimble; coffee and hides, silver coinage, slaves, livestock, and firearms.

It was from simple plundering of much this kind that today’s often mind-numbingly complicated tax systems evolved. Taxation may be one of the few things in our lives that our ancestors would recognize from theirs.

Something recognizable as taxation doubtless began as simple plunder in the mold of General Jackson, long before Ptolemaic Egypt or even ancient Sumer. Elements of plunder continued over the centuries. In the Roman Empire, victories were sometimes spectacular enough to allow remission of all other taxes for that year. In England, a primary function of the Domesday Book of 1087 was to provide the newly installed Norman conquerors with a record of exactly how much they had acquired. Plunder continued through the conquest of resource-rich South America, though the plunderers themselves were occasionally plundered: Francis Drake’s capture of the Spanish treasure ships (and other piracy against the Spanish in 1577–80) brought Queen Elizabeth I the equivalent of about one year of her ordinary income.

Federal Student Loan Policy: Payment forbearance costs $5 billion a month, as the affluent benefit

Wall Street Journal:

The great stu­dent loan scam rolls on, mostly out of pub­lic sight. But oc­ca­sion­ally the ugly fis­cal facts ap­pear as they did this week at a Sen­ate Bank­ing hear­ing.

The Cares Act al­lowed stu­dent loan bor­row­ers to de­fer pay­ments with­out ac­cru­ing in­ter­est through last Sep­tember. Pres­i­dents Trump and Biden have both used emer­gency ex­ec­u­tive power to ex­tend the for­bear­ance. Now bor­row­ers don’t have to make pay­ments un­til at least Oc­to­ber, and mean­time their bal­ances won’t in­crease.

Effective Digital Communications; K-12? Madison is adding bricks & mortar despite flat to declining enrollment

Christopher Mims:

It’s a sunny, breezy morning in Eugene, Ore., a place best known for access to the great outdoors, a history of environmental activism and being the birthplace of Nike . I’m standing outside a nondescript, one-story industrial space, speaking with Mark Frohnmayer, chief executive of Arcimoto, maker of a three-wheeled electric vehicle it calls a “fun utility vehicle.”

Only I’m not in Oregon. I’m still stuck at home, on the opposite coast, relying—like many of us—on an ever-growing array of tools that allow me to do my job remotely. In this case, I’m getting a tour of Arcimoto ’s factory via FaceTime. Mr. Frohnmayer is carrying “me” around on an iPhone, pointing things out, getting me up close to machinery, parts and half-finished vehicles, and fielding my questions. For me, it turns out to be a reasonable facsimile of actually being there. Minus the eight-hour flight and stay at a Dow Jones-approved discount hotelwith continental breakfast, that is.

This is how Mr. Frohnmayer and his team have been giving factory tours to investors, customers and suppliers since the pandemic began. It works well enough that Mr. Frohnmayer wants to keep doing it after the pandemic ends, because it comes with no loss in productivity due to travel days.

Thanks to cloud-based collaborative tools of every description—not just Zoom—the pandemic has led to a reset in office culture, from in-person to remote or hybrid. Surprisingly, there’s also been a reset for workers that almost no one thought could do their jobs remotely, including field service engineers and emergency medical personnel. 

While these changes explain trends within the post-pandemic workplace, they also demonstrate a new way forward for relationships between businesses. Many examples come from the most hands-on industry of all: manufacturing. Workers still have to show up at a factory and assemble products, and quality control may demand overseas travel from time to time, but many other activities—including investment due diligence, relationship-building with suppliers and customers, and even research and development—have unexpectedly and perhaps permanently gone remote.

How a Bathroom Log Helped One Middle School Understand Its Literacy Issues

Seth Feldman:

Reading isn’t just a set of skills. The most important factor in helping middle schoolers overcome literacy issues is creating strong relationships with students and families. As an administrator, I’m always using assistive technology to help guide curricular decisions and working to build structure so that students can access their education, but my best educators are the ones who stay laser-focused on developing meaningful relationships.

How to Support Struggling Readers in Middle School

The embarrassment of having a hard time reading can lead to evasive behavior and hopelessness. Here’s how my school steps in.

At the age of 13, around 65 percent of students who play competitive sports quit that sport and try a new sport. It’s because they stop winning or adopt some notion that they aren’t good enough. The same goes for reading. At Bay Area Technology School, we’ve found that 7th and 8th grades are the most crucial years in terms of making sure that kids don’t feel hopeless about their reading ability.

If we can identify struggling readers and keep them motivated, we can turn them around in life-changing ways. They might not be reading Faulkner or Shakespeare, but they can read their high school textbooks and graduate from high school. The challenge for our educators is that, by 7th grade, students might be hiding their challenges behind coping mechanisms that keep them from being discovered. Here’s how we find and help our middle schoolers who have trouble with reading.

Out on Good Behavior: Teaching Math while Looking Over Your Shoulder

Barbara Oakley:

Out on Good Behavior: Teaching Math while Looking Over Your Shoulder, by Barry Garelick. We greatly enjoyed and got a lot out of this brief, sardonic memoir of an outstanding math teacher in an era when teaching math in public schools is becoming increasingly divorced from what neuroscience has revealed about how students actually learn math. Garelick’s witty observations give a sense of what’s going on in a way that would be difficult for most parents to discover—and some of Garelick’s observations are priceless: “I once told my eighth-grade algebra class that my classroom is one place where they won’t hear the words ‘growth mindset’—to which the class reacted with wild applause. Someone then asked what my objections to ‘growth mindset’ were. I said I didn’t like how it was interpreted: Motivational cliches like ‘I can’t do it…yet’ supposedly build up confidence leading to motivation and success. I believe it’s the other way around: success causes motivation more than motivation causes success. [Or, as researchers Szu-Han Wang and Richard Morris have noted: “we rapidly remember what interests us, but what interests us takes time to develop.” And this Slate Star Codex article about growth mindset remains timeless.]

Garelick presciently observes: “Where students frequently see through ineffective educational fads, people in education—after buying into such theories—see what they want to see.” Out on Good Behavior is well worth reading if you care about what your child is learning—or not learning—in school, particularly when it comes to math.

Much more on Barry Garelick, here.

West Point Scraps Second-Chance Program After Major Cheating Scandal

Ed Shanahan:

Responding to its worst academic scandal in decades, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point will scrap a program that provided a second chance to cadets who violated the honor code that is central to its mission, officials said on Friday.

The program, which the academy adopted in 2015, was sharply criticized by some West Point graduates in December after officials disclosed that 73 cadets had been accused of cheating on a calculus exam last spring.

Commentary.

Understanding quantum computing through drunken walks

Dylan Miracle and Dr. César A. Rodríguez-Rosario:

Quantum computing is the biggest revolution in computing since… computing. Our world is made of quantum information, but we perceive the world in classical information. That is, there is a whole lot going on at small scales that are not accessible with our normal senses. As humans we evolved to process classical information, not quantum information: our brains are wired to think about Sabertooth cats, not Schrodinger’s cats. We can encode our classical information easily enough with zeros and ones, but what about accessing the extra information available that makes up our universe? Can we use the quantum nature of reality to process information? Of course, otherwise we would have to end this post here and that would be unsatisfying to us all. Let’s explore the power of quantum computing then get you started writing some of your own quantum code.

Graphs

Sourcetarget:

It’s Leonard Euler’s 314th birthday today. In network circles the grandfather of graph theory is perhaps best known for his 1735 solution to the problem known as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. Using novel graph theory techniques Euler was able to show that a route across the seven bridges without crossing the same one twice was impossible.

Euler’s work was fundamental for graph theory and I find it delightful to overlay the original problem statement over the roads and bridges that make up Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, today.

US Research University Supremacy

Tyler Smith:

At the turn of the 19th century, American universities were mostly under-resourced, regional schools. By World War II, they had become research leaders on the global stage, attracting the world’s best scientists.

In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists W. Bentley MacLeod and  Miguel Urquiola say that the US universities’ ascendancy in research started earlier than many people believe. 

Just after the Civil War, two innovators found a successful formula. Johns Hopkins and Cornell made key reforms that started attracting the best research talent—and the large sums of money needed to keep it. 

Today, reformers would like to tweak practices like tenure that helped create this virtuous circle. But Urquiola says they should keep a few important tradeoffs in mind.

Urquiola recently spoke with the AEA’s Tyler Smith about the history of the US university system and what today’s education policymakers can learn from it.  

Civics: Facebook Censorship

Shant Mesrobian and Zaid Jilani:

Now, it appears that Facebook is once again putting its thumb on the scale, and it has to do with another New York Post article. Users worldwide are reporting that they can’t share a New York Post story about a Black Lives Matter co-founder buying several real estate properties, including a $1.4 million California home, on any of Facebook’s services (Facebook’s social network, Instagram, and Messenger all appear to be impacted):

Daniel Villarreal:

When Newsweek reporters attempted to post a link to the Post’s story, the action couldn’t be completed. The following message also appeared: “Your post couldn’t be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards. If you think this doesn’t go against our Community Standards let us know

Many taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Facebook services, including Madison.

Opting your Website out of Google’s FLoC Network

Paramdeo Singh:

The FLoC Header

The primary way an end-user can avoid being FLoC’d is to simply not use Chrome, and instead choose a privacy-respecting browser such as Mozilla Firefox .

But website owners can also ensure that their web servers are not participating in this massive network by opting-out of FLoC.

To do so, the following custom HTTP response header needs to be added:

Many taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Google services, including Madison. YouTube censorship.

Can teaching be improved by law?

Robert Pondisco:

If there’s one lesson education policymakers might have learned in the last twenty-five years, it’s that it’s not hard to make schools and districts do something, but it’s extremely hard to make them do it well. There has always been at least a tacit assumption among policy wonks that schools and teachers are sitting on vast reserves of untapped potential that must either to be set free from bureaucratic constraints or shaken out of its complacency. Those of us who have spent lots of time in classrooms watching teachers trying their best and failing (or trying hard and failing ourselves) often find those assumptions curious. Compliance is easy. It’s competence that’s the rub.

Last week, North Carolina’s Democratic governor signed into law a bill that mandates, among other things, that schools in the state use a phonics-based approach to reading instruction. Dubbed the “Excellent Public Schools Act,” the law, which enjoyed strong bipartisan support, requires teachers to be trained in the “science of reading” and to base their reading instruction on it. Despite my inherent skepticism that policy alone can move classroom practice in the right direction, I’m having a hard time finding fault with what North Carolina has done.

I’m generally not keen to impose my preferred flavors of curriculum and instruction on schools, despite some well-defined opinions on such matters. But if there’s an exception, it’s early childhood literacy with curriculum and instruction grounded in the science of reading. The foundational role of proficient decoding and comprehension in academic success suggests that, while it might make sense to let a thousand flowers bloom in curriculum, instruction, and school models—vive la différence!—we have no more important shared task than getting kids to the starting line of basic literacy from the first days of school. So if I have any lingering technocratic impulses left, they’re limited to early childhood literacy and the “science of reading.” But the open question is whether literacy laws—from mandating phonics to third grade retention policies—can have a beneficial effect on classroom practice.

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

Parenting, 2021

Bari Weiss:

I was planning to publish a roundup today of the many thoughtful responses to Paul Rossi’s essay. I’m going to save that post for Sunday, because I was just sent this letter that has my jaw on the floor. It was written by a Brearley parent named Andrew Gutmann.

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

I’m pasting the whole thing below.

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.

“They can be manipulated, chosen and framed . . . to support whatever arguments the communicator wants to make,”

Jemima Kelly:

From the point of view of health risks, the raw oyster that Sir David Spiegelhalter is in the process of releasing from its shell and preparing to slide into his mouth probably wasn’t the safest bet. But from the perspective of sheer pleasure, after a year of restrictions and restraint, it feels like the perfect choice. He chews it a few times — the correct way to eat an oyster — and slurps it down, beaming. “Oh, lovely!”

Besides, his nickname might be “Professor Risk” but if there’s one thing the 67-year-old Spiegelhalter wishes he’d done more of over the years, it’s throwing caution to the wind. “My one regret in my life is that I haven’t taken enough risks,” he tells me wistfully. “I’ve been too cautious — in my career, in my travels. I wish I’d done far more adventurous things.”

Google Privacy issues – Australian Court

ACCC:

The Court ruled that when consumers created a new Google Account during the initial set-up process of their Android device, Google misrepresented that the ‘Location History’ setting was the only Google Account setting that affected whether Google collected, kept or used personally identifiable data about their location. In fact, another Google Account setting titled ‘Web & App Activity’ also enabled Google to collect, store and use personally identifiable location data when it was turned on, and that setting was turned on by default.

The Court also found that when consumers later accessed the ‘Location History’ setting on their Android device during the same time period to turn that setting off, they were also misled because Google did not inform them that by leaving the ‘Web & App Activity’ setting switched on, Google would continue to collect, store and use their personally identifiable location data.

Many taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Google services, including Madison. YouTube censorship.

“The future is certain but history is unsettled”

RFA:

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set up a hotline for people to report each other to the authorities for failing to toe the party’s freshly revised line on matters of history.

The Cyberspace Administration said in a post to its official Weibo account on April 9 that people should use the number “to report erroneous online remarks relating to historical nihilism.”

The move is to “create a good public opinion environment” regarding China’s history since the CCP took power in 1949, the post said.

To help those who may be unsure of which opinions are the “correct” ones, the CCP has also published a handy guide in the form of a book titled A Brief History of the Communist Party of China.

Published to mark the party’s centenary this year, the revised history plays down the cautious diplomatic approach of late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in the wake of international sanctions following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, instead highlighting his comments to former U.S. president Richard Nixon in November 2019.

Deng told Nixon that China would never “beg” for sanctions to be lifted, the book says.