James Freeman:

President Joe Biden appeared to fall asleep on Monday at an international gathering to discuss the climate issue he describes as an existential threat to the world. But back in the U.S. the remaining so-called moderate Democrats in Congress are the ones who seem to be asleep as they prepare to vote for an existential threat to private preschools and day care.

Given the multitrillion-dollar bundle of government interventions Mr. Biden is attempting to enact, it’s not surprising that even highly consequential items are getting lost in the legislative shuttle without serious debate.

Last week White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted a comment calling the emerging reconciliation bill a grab bag of “ill-designed” programs.

Now Doyle McManus writes in the Los Angeles Times that the current draft includes “many, many ideas — maybe too many for one piece of legislation” and adds: The product is what aficionados call a “Frankenbill,” an awkward creation stitched together from scraps of this and that. (The term refers to the gothic monster, not the former senator from Minnesota.)

It isn’t a thing of beauty… But it’s undeniably big…

Here’s Youngkin’s riff on education got the biggest cheers. Watch it here: pic.twitter.com/T8D6xCKhMu

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) November 2, 2021

.@AFTunion President @rweingarten is speaking at McAuliffe’s rally now #vagov pic.twitter.com/Kj2C55Iw5X

— Julia Manchester (@JuliaManch) November 1, 2021

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

James Hankins:

In 2020 the American educational system was attacked by two viruses: Covid-19 and an unusually virulent strain of hyper-progressive ideology. Many parents and educators have been shocked and disoriented to find that institutions they trusted appear to have been taken over by zombie Marxists, filled with self-righteous anger. Unless they are from “URMs” (under-represented minorities), their children are likely to be told that their heritage makes them racist, the spawn of oppressors, and that they need to renounce their “white privilege” or be made outcasts in their own schools. They are being taught to despise their own country as well as the literature, philosophy, and arts of the Western tradition. Even mathematics teaching now has to be filtered through a social justice lens.  

But every crisis is also an opportunity, as activists on the left frequently remind us. There are even grounds, dare one say it, to have hope for the future. Both the health crisis and the ideological crisis of American education have left the radical progressives’ near-monopoly of K-12 schooling considerably weaker than in pre-Covid times. It is now exposed as never before to competition from innovators who are introducing new ways to learn. Some of these innovators are giving us new ways to connect with older and sounder educational traditions, the very traditions hyper-progressives have been aiming to poison or supplant.

There is no doubt that the part of K-12 public education controlled by the teacher’s unions—the schools directly supervised by public school districts—took a serious hit after 2019. Exact numbers are hard to verify, but the trend is clear. According to figures supplied by National Center for Education Statistics, run by the Department of Education, the total enrollment in K-12 public education grew gradually from about 47 million in 2000-01 to more than 50.33 million in 2019. Since 2019 it has dropped by over two million. The actual number of students lost by unionized public schools is probably closer to 2.5 million, since public charter schools have markedly increased their share of enrollments since 2019—the only part of the public system to experience growth. Public charters are also the one part of the public school system that has demonstrated a commitment to in-person teaching during the pandemic. In the last fourteen years (the only period for which statistics are available), public charter school enrollment increased by more than three times, growing from less than 2.1% of all public school students in 2005 to 6.5% in 2019. For the school year 2020-21, the National Alliance for Public Charters (NAPC) reports an increase of about 240,000 new students, a year-over-year increase of about 7%. This represents a doubling of the rate of increase over the previous period.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Dorian Abbot:

I am a professor at the University of Chicago. I was recently invited to give an honorary lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lecture was canceled because I have openly advocated moral and philosophical views that are unpopular on university campuses.

Here are those views:

I believe that every human being should be treated as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means evaluating people for positions based on their individual qualities, not on membership in favored or disfavored groups. It also means allowing them to present their ideas and perspectives freely, even when we disagree with them.

I care for all of my students equally. None of them are overrepresented or underrepresented to me: They represent themselves. Their grades are based on a process that I define at the beginning of the quarter. That process treats each student fairly and equally. I hold office hours for students who would like extra help so that everyone has the opportunity to improve his or her grade through hard work and discipline.

Similarly, I believe that admissions and faculty hiring at universities are best focused on academic merit, with the goal of producing intellectual excellence. We should not penalize hard-working students and faculty applicants simply because they have been classified as belonging to the wrong group. It is true that not everyone has had the same educational opportunities. The solution is improving K-12 education, not introducing discrimination at late stages.

Douglas Belkin:

The last school-board meeting before Election Day capped what has become one of the most vitriol-filled political contests in Douglas County in years, and is one of hundreds of school-board elections across the country that have turned into hard-fought political battles. Many of the elections set for Tuesday have become proxies for the larger culture war over masking mandates and the teaching of tenets of critical race theory.

In Loudoun County, Va., a school-board member resigned following threats of violence to her and her family. Florida districts are considering shortening public-comment periods at meetings, and in Kentucky a school board has asked parents to communicate through emails after board meetings became rowdy. Little of the contention is tied to the local issues such as building maintenance and teacher pay that usually animate school-board elections.

Across the 23 states that allow recalls for school-board members, 84 campaigns are targeting 215 board members, about four times greater than the 15-year average, according to Ballotpedia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization based in Wisconsin.

Jason Riley:

During a recent appearance on “The View,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on the national debate over teaching racial propaganda to schoolchildren. In the process, she made a broader point about the mindset of a previous generation of black people when it came to dealing with racial adversity.

“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice,” said Ms. Rice, a product of segregated Birmingham, Ala. “But they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ ” Ms. Rice said that blaming whites today for past racism strikes her as unproductive. You don’t help black kids by making “white kids feel guilty for being white.”

The contrast with the current woke approach to racial inequality is stark. In that earlier era, there was an expectation among blacks that advancement would take place despite racial barriers, that discrimination was no excuse for not trying. The generations that produced such civil-rights luminaries as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that whites had a role to play in changing a fundamentally racist system. Yet they also understood that blacks had a role to play, and they were willing to hold black people accountable for their behavior.

Rohit:

Here are two stories about tacit knowledge.

1. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory hired three fresh PhDs with little nuclear physics background and asked them to go build a nuke, and they did.
2. The DoE in the 1990s realised they didn’t know how to make a particular foam crucial to nuclear warheads, and spent a decade and $70m inventing a substitute– (h/t Leopold)

They pleasingly mirror each other, which is nice for storytelling but kind of a paradox. In one, we spend untold millions in figuring out the smallest moving part to manufacture, and in the other some smart alec fresh faces postdocs made a goddamn nuke.

So which is it, tacit knowledge is impossible to easily replicate or smart folks can just figure stuff out?

The first story. How did they do it?

Bari Weiss:

This “Great Awokening” has been impossible to miss if you consume mainstream news. But you don’t have to rely on your impressions. David Rozado, a computer scientist who teaches at New Zealand’s Otago Polytechnic, created a computer program that trawled the online archives of the Times from 1970 to 2018 to track the frequency with which certain words were used. What he found was that the frequency of words like “racism,” “white supremacy,” “KKK,” “traumatizing,” “marginalized,” “hate speech,” “intersectionality,” and “activism” had absolutely skyrocketed during that time.

His work echoes that of another academic, Zach Goldberg, a PhD candidate in political science at Georgia State University who found that in 2010, the term “white supremacy” was used fewer than 75 times in 2010 in the Washington Post and the New York Times, but over 700 times in 2020 alone; at NPR, it was used 2,400 times. The word “racism” appeared in the Washington Post over 4,000 times in 2020. That’s the equivalent of using it in 10 articles every single day.

What could explain the sudden market for this obsession with race and power?

The reason for this radical shift, despite the media’s fixation on race, has very little to do with it. It has everything to do with class.

Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.

Siddhesh:

People

The class divide seems to be lesser in general. People in lesser paying jobs, like say waiters, are less timid and subservient than in India. (This is a good thing!) They’re not afraid to raise their voices if needed. In general, you can tell that they have boundaries that should not be crossed.

People liberally carry coffees and soda cans to drink into flights. I’ve never seen this before. Is it even allowed in India?

Watchmen and policemen are heavily, scarily equipped.

Apparently it’s perfectly normal to walk around shirtless on campus. I’ve seen shirtless guys walking, jogging, and cycling in broad daylight. I wish I had that kind of confidence. It makes me question whether there is or isn’t an explicit law against this in India, not that it matters too much either way.

I noticed this in my first week here because the difference was striking: when you look at people, they just somehow seem a bit more free and confident. It’s hard to explain how, but you can tell. And they look very, very confident especially when driving cars. There’s a swagger to it all.

I don’t know how many people will agree, but striking up a conversation with an American stranger is much easier than it is with an Indian stranger. Americans just seem to have that natural conversational flow – I would say that talking is the one thing they’re definitively better at than Indians.
I know that the US has some of the highest obesity rates in the world, but from what I’ve personally seen, it doesn’t seem that way at all. The people that I see day to day are generally extremely fit. (Or is it just students?)

This made me very happy: I’ve seen people reading books – and I mean physical books, not Kindles or iPads – in every place imaginable, from gym treadmills to trains and buses. I once even saw I guy read a book while walking. I hope he didn’t trip.

Patrick Toomey:

The Supreme Court denied cert this morning in our case seeking public access to legal opinions issued by the country’s secret surveillance court. Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor dissented, writing, “If these matters are not worthy of our time, what is?”

Matt Welch:

The progressive journalist Zaid Jilani, who lives in northern Virginia and teaches part time there, retorted on an episode of The Fifth Column podcast Wednesday that Toobin’s vision bore no resemblance to what he’s experienced on the ground.

“Those debates actually have been happening for a number of months, before this all became like a national thing,” Jilani said. “There were debates about some of the selective high schools, and…should they use testing to get people in, should it be a holistic process. There were debates about curriculum, there were debates about COVID and masking. And I don’t think at any point in those debates did any white supremacists show up. I didn’t see anyone in a Klan hood.”

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Dan Luu:

People frequently¹ think that I’m very stupid. I don’t find this surprising, since I don’t mind if other people think I’m stupid, which means that I don’t adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I’m stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I’m stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides.

I don’t know why this one example sticks in my head but, for me, the most memorable example of other people thinking that I’m stupid was from college. I’ve had numerous instances where more people thought I was stupid and also where people thought the depths of my stupidity was greater, but this one was really memorable for me.

Back in college, there was one group of folks that, for whatever reason, stood out to me as people who really didn’t understand the class material. When they talked, they said things that didn’t make any sense, they were struggling in the classes and barely passing, etc. I don’t remember any direct interactions but, one day, a friend of mine who also knew them remarked to me, “did you know [that group] thinks you’re really dumb?”. I found that really delightful and asked why. It turned out the reason was that I asked really stupid sounding questions.

In particular, it’s often the case that there’s a seemingly obvious but actually incorrect reason something is true, a slightly less obvious reason the thing seems untrue, and then a subtle and complex reason that the thing is actually true². I would regularly figure out that the seemingly obvious reason was wrong and then ask a question to try to understand the subtler reason, which sounded stupid to someone who thought the seemingly obvious reason was correct or thought that the refutation to the obvious but incorrect reason meant that the thing was untrue.

By Kadjata Bah, Josepha DaCosta and Moises Hernandez

The Kohlenberg paper looks closely at school-to-prison pipelines and uses the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause to emphasize her case. She points out the Constitution “authorizes and mandates Congress to guarantee a meaningful floor of adequate functional literacy instruction nationwide.” During the past few years, federal courts have agreed several times with Kohlenberg’s positions.

Notes and links on AB446.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Abbi Debelack:

The latest data on testing and proficiency rates for Wisconsin’s children were recently released by the Department of Public Instruction and it is not pretty. Yet despite the alarmingly low test scores, there appears to be little to no outrage by the media and education establishment.

Each year, Wisconsin students, in various grades, take a series of standardized tests to assess their proficiency in a range of different subjects. Test results are a useful tool to track a student’s academic progress and gauge the overall effectiveness of Wisconsin’s K12 education system. The Forward Exam is given to students in grades three through eight and ten. The ACT Aspire test is given in grades nine and ten. The ACT writing test is given in grade eleven and the Dynamic Learning Maps is given to students with cognitive disabilities. This year, the tests were administered to students in the spring. The tests were not administered in 2020 because of COVID-19.

This year, English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency is 27.5%, down 5.4 points or a 16.41% reduction from 2019. Math proficiency is at 27%, down 7 points from 2019 or a 20.59% reduction. These figures look at proficiency rates as a percentage of TOTAL Wisconsin students, not just those tested as Superintendent Underly reported in her press release.

We must point out that this is not a particularly difficult or rigorous grading metric. A student who is graded as being proficient on the Forward Exam means the child is operating at grade level. Let that sink in. Shockingly, less than one-third of Wisconsin students are proficient in math or English Language Arts.

Related: Wisconsin AB446.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Scott Girard:

As a trail of Lake View Elementary School fifth-graders walked up the hill in the school’s forest Friday afternoon, a classmate’s excited voice rang out in front of them.

“They’re rebuilding it!”

The student was referencing the school’s fort, one of its many learning stations throughout the forest area behind the building on Madison’s north side. On Monday morning, students and staff found a distressing site: the fort had been burned.

:

From Blue Collar to White Collar

I went directly from high school to the workforce after graduating in 1985, holding a series of blue-collar jobs of increasing complexity. In the late 1990s I took my first administrative job, where I applied the interpersonal skills learned in blue-collar roles to white-collar tasks.

Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day’s Opinion headlines.
My 20-year administrative career culminated in a decade at the executive level, earning more than many colleagues with master’s degrees—without onerous college debt. My current pursuit of a bachelor’s degree is a bucket-list item funded by company tuition reimbursement.

Such a career trajectory seems unlikely today. Even entry-level jobs require a degree, although I see little evidence that those degrees improve day-to-day skills. Company communications are frequently riddled with cringe-worthy errors. Nor do the college graduates seem to have learned reliability in the university lecture halls, where attendance is optional.

Wall Street Journal:

“Nearly seven decades of Supreme Court precedent have made two things clear: Public schools cannot segregate students by race, and students do not abandon their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” says the suit filed in federal court Tuesday afternoon by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education. The suit says Wellesley Public Schools “is flouting both of these principles.”

Wellesley has promoted “affinity groups” that hold events for specific races. Parents Defending Education alleges these groups are racially exclusionary “by definition and design,” given that “certain Wellesley students” including the plaintiffs’ children “are prohibited from participating in certain school activities because of their race and ethnicity.” The parents say this violates the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The parents group raised similar concerns earlier this year in a complaint to the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, but the agency hasn’t acted. In May Wellesley superintendent of schools David Lussier and director of diversity, equity and inclusion Charmie Curry told us that no students or staff were barred from participating.

But email correspondence obtained by the nonprofit Judicial Watch and cited in the complaint adds credence to the Wellesley parents’ worries. After a March 2021 shooting in Atlanta that killed several Asian women, Ms. Curry promoted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American Community.” A white teacher asked whether it was “appropriate for me to go.” Ms. Curry responded that “this time, we want to hold the space for the Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff.”

Wall Street Journal:

It took a few weeks, but the National School Boards Association has apologized for sending a letter to President Biden suggesting that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might be “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA now admits there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” which could have parents investigated under the Patriot Act for trying to influence what their children are taught.

The retraction comes after tremendous blowback. First came parents at school board meetings with T-shirts saying “Parents are not domestic terrorists.” Then 21 state school board associations distanced themselves from the letter. The Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania state associations cut ties altogether.

It turns out that when Chip Slaven, the NSBA interim executive director and CEO, and president Viola Garcia sent the letter, they did so without consulting their own board. But according to one of Mr. Slaven’s emails, they did work with White House staff.

Jennifer Calfas:

Nearly 40% of U.S. households said they faced serious financial difficulties in recent months of the Covid-19 pandemic, citing problems such as paying utility bills or credit card debt, according to a recent poll. About one-fifth have depleted all of their savings.

U.S. households are struggling in many ways over a year into the coronavirus pandemic, according to the poll conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and National Public Radio.

Nearly 60% of households earning less than $50,000 a year reported facing serious financial challenges in recent months. Of those, 30% lost all of their savings, according to the poll.

The survey questioned about 3,600 adults in August and early September about a variety of potential problems during the pandemic and how the effects have continued in more recent months. In addition to financial concerns, respondents were asked about healthcare, education, child care and personal safety.

Matt Welch:

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Since this issue is not going away anytime soon, particularly if Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin upsets Virginia power pol Terry McAuliffe in the governor’s race next week, it’s worth being on the lookout for recurrent media framing devices that distort the depiction of an important set of debates. (K-12 instruction amounts to about 20 percent of all state and local government spending, don’t forget.) The point is not to be steered toward my admittedly idiosyncratic school policy preferences, but rather to become via pattern recognition a more discerning consumer of news.

Here are two of the most common ways the media warp school board politics.

1) Exaggerating the incidence of violence.

On October 22, in an article picked up widely and also adapted by the Associated Press, Minnesota Public Radio made this alarming assertion: “Violent school board meetings and threats toward school board members [in Minnesota] over these issues have caused dozens of board leaders to quit their positions.” Do note the serial pluralization.

Were there really multiple acts of violence, and multiple threats, causing “dozens” of board members to quit, in a state known for its niceness? The 757-word article did not explicitly list any; there was one hyperlink to a June piece that mentioned “someone had recently threatened on a community Facebook page to rush the podium” at one meeting, but no such bum-rush took place.

I was able to find one violent incident in Minnesota, from late September, when two members of the public who were on opposite sides of a school masking policy debate got into a brief scuffle that was broken up by a police officer.

Josh Blackman:

Let’s assume that Justice Barrett is correct and this case is only the first such petition to reach the Court. What happens when the second and third cases are denied? The state of our free exercise clause jurisprudence remains unsettled, and most of the potential litigants will likely get vaccinated, rather than risk losing their jobs.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Students, parents file lawsuit in federal court against Madison School District, David Kruchten

Seven former East High School students and parents of two current students filed a federal civil lawsuit Friday against the Madison School District and a former teacher recently sentenced to 12 years in prison, for injuries sustained after the teacher planted hidden cameras in their hotel bathrooms.

“The high school girls felt tremendously violated and are still dealing with those emotions,” attorney Jeff Scott Olson said. “What you would expect a responsible school district to do is to be relatively transparent when addressing the situation.”

Instead, Olson said, the school district has structured its internal investigations surrounding the incident to avoid releasing the details to families based on attorney-client privilege.

The district has looked for ways to share as little as possible with them rather than looking for ways to help them heal, Olson said. The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages.

The Wisconsin State Journal filed an open records request for reports from the district’s third-party investigation into two camera incidents, one involving former teacher David Kruchten and a separate discovery that hidden cameras were once installed in an East High School coach’s office, but both requests were denied due to attorney-client privilege. The district spent roughly $38,000 to conduct both internal investigations.