Why San Francisco’s School Board Recall May Be One Of 2022’s Most Important Elections

Helen Raleigh:

Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only elementary schools last April and didn’t return to full-time in-person learning for all K-12 until fall 2021.

Board President López claimed the long delays didn’t cause any learning loss because children were “just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” and they learned more “about their families and cultures by staying home.” Her tone-deaf comments angered many parents, who have witnessed their kids’ academic and emotional struggles at home due to the school closures.

The school district has experienced such a sharp decline in student enrollment during its long closure that it had to implement a steep cut this school year to fill a budget hole of $125 million.
Social Justice at the Expense of Education

Second, the school board focused on leftist politics rather than education. In 2019, the board voted to cover a mural depicting slavery and Native Americans at George Washington High School, a decision that would cost taxpayers between $600,000 to $1 million. Fortunately, the mural will stay after a San Francisco Superior Court judge overturned the school board’s decision last year.

In January 2021, rather than focusing on reopening schools, the board voted to rename 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington High Schools. Even Democrat Mayor London Breed expressed her disbelief in a statement, saying, “I can’t understand why the school board is advancing a plan to rename all these schools when there isn’t a plan to have kids back in those physical schools.”

“against censorship of scientific misinformation online”

Royal Society:

Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online, a report by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has said.

The Online Information Environment report also warns that the UK Government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill focuses on harms to individuals while failing to recognise the wider ‘societal harms’ that misinformation can cause. Misinformation about scientific issues, from vaccine safety to climate change, can cause harm to individuals and society at large. 

The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.

It recommends wide-ranging measures that governments, tech platforms and academic institutions can take to build resilience to misinformation and a healthy online information environment.

The Problem With Contemporary Writing

Charles Schifano:

To care about the state and quality of writing today is to scream into a void while knowing that the void does nothing but laugh. Of course gripes about writing standards are a timeless and rather trite pastime: there’s always a market for shouts about how the kids these days are inarticulate. Or about the slipping of standards. Or about how so much contemporary writing is clunky and hackneyed and uninspired. There’s always an old man, always a porch, and always a lawn where the neighborhood kids bark this week’s cliché, speak in punchlines, and repeat metaphors so drained of life that you don’t even recognize them as metaphors.

What’s undeniable, however, is that there’s been a change in writing instruction. This is a change for which the evidence and the results are clear, but any discussion about the subject comes suspiciously close to snipes about language. To talk about writing instruction and its shortcoming is to be, almost certainly, muddled in a debate about style or taste or even authority. But the truth is that hardly anyone who studies how language shifts by swings and whims is troubled by the newest fashions in contemporary use. The frustration isn’t with the kids on the lawn; it is the mentality and standards and methods used to teach those kids that triggers the frustration.

And that’s true even though writing has always been a tricky subject to teach, as even great stylists are unable to explain what we might call the spooky elements that make some sentences soar and others sink. There’s no directory of good writing techniques, or surefire rules to follow, just as nobody can give you the correct order of musical notes to create a melody. Any list of the typical absolutes in contemporary writing instruction—shun adverbs, loathe the passive voice, cut latinate words, use short sentences—has the character of, at best, limiting the threat of mistakes because it removes so many tools. If you’re only permitted one note on the piano, perhaps it’s a little easier to keep it tuned. So the typical writer today ends up with a pen and paper and a very narrow range of expressions: nothing beyond what can be stated with short sentences and short words and short, crisp thoughts. This is the ethos of the contemporary writing seminar, or most communication classes, even though any template that promises to induce good prose will also shove away any potential for expansive or artful prose—it is the realm of instructions, manuals, blueprints, and checklists. Where all sentences are trapped between guardrails. Where the purpose of writing instruction is to prevent errors. Where the writer begins every sentence with nothing more than thoughts of what to avoid.

Advocating School choice in Virginia

Mel Leonor

Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s push to open more privately run public schools got the support of a number of Virginia higher education leaders who signed onto a proposal by the administration to open charter schools run by their institutions and funded by the state.

On Thursday, Youngkin and more than 30 higher education officials, surrounded by children and teens from Virginia schools, touted the need for “innovation” in K-12 education in Virginia.

“We stand together because we know there is an opportunity for us to innovate in K-12 education,” the governor said during the event at the Patrick Henry Building.

Civics: A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.

NYTimes:

In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.

The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.

Since NSO had introduced Pegasus to the global market in 2011, it had helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries. In a broader sense, NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the 21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global.

But by the time the company’s engineers walked through the door of the New Jersey facility in 2019, the many abuses of Pegasus had also been well documented. Mexico deployed the software not just against gangsters but also against journalists and political dissidents. The United Arab Emirates used the software to hack the phone of a civil rights activist whom the government threw in jail. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and, according to a lawsuit filed by a Saudi dissident, to spy on communications with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, whom Saudi operatives killed and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018.

None of this prevented new customers from approaching NSO, including the United States. The details of the F.B.I.’s purchase and testing of Pegasus have never before been made public. Additionally, the same year that Khashoggi was killed, the Central Intelligence Agency arranged and paid for the government of Djibouti to acquire Pegasus to assist the American ally in combating terrorism, despite longstanding concerns about human rights abuses there, including the persecution of journalists and the torture of government opponents. The D.E.A., the Secret Service and the U.S. military’s Africa Command had all held discussions with NSO. The F.B.I. was now taking the next step.

“that social need drives the interpretation of academic findings”

Thomas Prosser:

Admittedly, this is not always the case. In little time, the discovery of the Omicron variant has instigated major societal change, reflecting its lethal potential. But normally, the process is inverse. This occurs at macro level, epochal needs determiningparadigms, and micro level, inconvenient findings (e.g. those on partisanship) being discarded. Often, controversial results meet this fate, several inconvenient findings about race and sex being absent from public debate. Consequently, notions of being ‘led by evidence’ are suspect. Undoubtedly, academic evidence should be at the heart of policymaking. Yet those who propose this often misunderstand complexities.

Secondly, this phenomenon demonstrates alternative foundations of political behaviour. Given weak links with policy outcomes, the politically engaged have other motivations. Comparison with sports fans is useful. At one level, sports fandom shows how people behave when consequences are insignificant; all agree that the strict outcome of a sports match is trivial. But even without real world stakes, tribal behaviours still thrive. These sentiments tend not to be as strong as political rivalries, hooliganism aside(!), yet many fans have negative views of opposing teams. As a Swansea fan, I cannot purge a feeling that Cardiff fans are the enemy, despite living in Cardiff for over a decade! I blame my father. The foundations of this are primal, meaning that my conversations with myself (‘your friends support Cardiff!’; ‘your daughter was born in Cardiff!’) are fruitless.

The Emergency Must Be Ended, Now

Harvey Risch, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Paul Elias Alexander

The time has come to terminate the pandemic state of emergency. It is time to end the controls, the closures, the restrictions, the plexiglass, the stickers, the exhortations, the panic-mongering, the distancing announcements, the ubiquitous commercials, the forced masking, the vaccine mandates.  

We don’t mean that the virus is gone – omicron is still spreading wildly, and the virus may circulate forever.  But with a normal focus on protecting the vulnerable, we can treat the virus as a medical rather than a social matter and manage it in ordinary ways. A declared emergency needs continuous justification, and that is now lacking.

Over the last six weeks in the US, the delta variant strain – the most recent aggressive version of the infection – has according to CDC been declining in both the proportion of infections (60% on December 18 to 0.5% on January 15) and the number of daily infected people (95,000 to 2,100). During the next two weeks, delta will decline to the point that it essentially disappears like the strains before it.

Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many high-risk people, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. A large portion of the vulnerable population in the developed world is already vaccinated and protected against severe disease. We have learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like Vitamin D to reduce disease risk, and there is a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. And for younger people, the risk of severe disease – already low before omicron – is minuscule.

Abstractions, Their Algorithms, and Their Compilers

Alfred Aho, Jeffrey Ullman:

Computational thinking, which centers around devising abstractions for problems so they can be solved with computational steps and efficient algorithms, is a concept that serves not only computer science (CS) but progressively more of science and everyday life. After Jeannette Wing published her influential paper on computational thinking,50 the discussion of computational thinking has greatly expanded in scale to include topics such as modeling natural processes as information processing.18

At the heart of computational thinking is abstraction, the primary subject of this essay. While abstractions have always been an essential part of computer science, the modern emphasis on computational thinking highlights their importance when teaching CS to a broad audience. 

Abstractions play an important role in shaping virtually every field of science. However, in computer science, abstractions are not tethered to a physical reality, so we find useful abstractions pervading the field. For example, we shall encounter in Section 4 a vital abstraction from physics: quantum mechanics. There is a derived computing abstraction called quantum circuits, which starts with the physical ideas, but has led to programming languages for its simulation, to theoretical algorithms that exploit its unique capabilities and that one day may be implemented on a large-scale machine.

Every abstraction in computer science consists of the following:

More Than Digital Copies: Maps That Interpret Maps

David Ramsey:

When we digitize historical maps we create copies that can be shared and used by all. But we also create the potential to repurpose these copies to advance understanding of the original maps. To do this, we create composite maps, georeferenced maps, composite views, interactive globes, composite texts and other types of digital versions that expand map interpretation and enhance use. Below are some examples of these interpretive maps that we have created over the past 20 years. To date we have created 1,674 interpretive composite maps, views, and texts as well as over 56,000 georeferenced maps.
Click on any of the images below to view the interactive online version.

The 1914 Atlas of Egypt shows the entire Nile River in 165 sheets at a large scale of 1:50,000. We combined all 165 sheets, georeferenced them, and overlaid them on modern maps below to show changes.

“The Chinese Communist Party has found the best model for controlling people,” Xie Yang, a rights lawyer, said in an interview last month. He was detained this month.

Chris Buckley Vivian Wang Keith Bradsher:

The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway.

His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks.

Then his app turned red, flagging him as high risk. Airport security tried to put him in quarantine, but he resisted. Mr. Xie accused the authorities of meddling with his health code to bar him from traveling.

“The Chinese Communist Party has found the best model for controlling people,” Xie Yang, a rights lawyer, said in an interview last month. He was detained this month.

Chris Buckley Vivian Wang Keith Bradsher:

The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway.

His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks.

Then his app turned red, flagging him as high risk. Airport security tried to put him in quarantine, but he resisted. Mr. Xie accused the authorities of meddling with his health code to bar him from traveling.

Reforming Education: “fewer administrators and more intellectual openness”

Emily Bobrow:

Growing up in Chicago, Pano Kanelos was expected to take over his parents’ Greek diner someday. But he loved books—he used to read in a booth at the back of the restaurant—and decided to go to college so he could keep reading. He chose Northwestern University in part because it was the only campus he had ever seen: No one in his family had gone to college. “I had no idea what to expect,” he recalls. 

The experience, Mr. Kanelos says, was “transformational.” Instead of running a restaurant he pursued a career in higher education. Last summer he resigned as the president of St. John’s College, a small liberal-arts school in Annapolis, Md., to take on his biggest challenge yet: helping to create the new University of Austin in Texas (UATX) as its first president. The plan, Mr. Kanelos explains, is to offer the kind of affordable, intellectually rigorous, ideologically heterodox experience that was available when he was a student in the late 1980s, but which he believes is increasingly rare in higher education today.

Advocating the end of race based affirmative action

John McWhorter:

I don’t want an admissions officer to consider the obstacles my children have faced, because in 2022, as opposed to in 1972, they really face no more or less than their white peers do.

I don’t want that admissions officer to consider that, perhaps here and there, someone, somewhere, underestimated them because both of their parents aren’t white. In the 2020s, that will have happened so seldom to them, as upper-middle-class persons living amid America’s most racially enlightened Blue American white people, that I’m quite sure it will not imprint them existentially any more than it did me, coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s.

I don’t want the admissions officer to consider my children’s “diversity.” For one thing, their diversity from the other kids in their neighborhoods, classrooms and lives is something of an abstraction. They wear clothes from Old Navy, watch (and rewatch) “Frozen” and “Encanto,” and play a lot of Roblox, just like their peers. And I will never forget a line from a guidebook that Black students at Harvard wrote two decades ago: “We are not here to provide diversity training for Kate and Timmy.” Yep — and if we salute the enterprising undergrads who wrote that, we must question the general thrust of the sundry amicus briefs that will be offered in the Harvard and U.N.C. cases, about how kids of color are vital to a campus because of their diversity, echoing the statement of Harvard’s president, just this week, that “Considering race as one factor among many in admissions decisions produces a more diverse student body which strengthens the learning environment for all.”

“Diversity” has become one of those terms (and ideas) that makes us feel cozy inside, like freshly baked blueberry muffins and “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” But how would you feel about looking a Black undergraduate in the eye and saying, “A lot of the reason we wanted you here, on our campus, is your differences from most of the other students and the life lessons they can learn from them”? Someone says, “I want my kids to interact with Black students before they go out into the world.” I ask, “Just what was it about Black people that you were hoping your kids would learn?”

AFT Parent Survey

American Federation of teachers:

Notwithstanding the considerable difficulties of the pandemic, public school parents express high levels of satisfaction with the schools serving their children and say that public schools are helping their children achieve their full potential.
• More than seven in 10 public school parents give a high performance rating to their children’s schools. Fully 72% of parents say that the public school(s) their children attend provide them with an excellent or good quality education. In contrast, just 7% feel that the education received by their children is not so good or poor (another 21% say “adequate”). Parents across the demographic spectrum give high marks to their public schools, including Black parents (70% excellent or good), Hispanic parents (67%), and parents in cities (75%).
• Parents are overwhelmingly satisfied with the job public schools are doing to help their children achieve their potential. Four in five (79%) parents are satisfied with their children’s public schools when it comes to helping their child or children achieve their full potential, while only 21% report feeling dissatisfied. This widespread satisfaction includes 83% of parents in cities, 81% of Black parents, 73% of Hispanic parents, and 81% of younger parents (under age 40).

  1. Parents give very high performance ratings to their children’s teachers, recognize the challenges facing teachers during the pandemic, and appreciate the extra efforts that teachers are making to help their children.
    • A remarkable 78% of parents feel that the quality and performance of their children’s teachers is excellent or good. This positive rating is seven points higher than the last time we asked this question of a national sample of parents (71% in 2013). Teachers receive high marks from parents in cities (84%), Black parents (72%), Hispanic parents (75%), and younger parents (79%).
    • Parents feel overwhelmingly that teaching during the pandemic has been a hard job (79%), not an easy one (21%).
    • Eighty percent (80%) say that their children’s teachers have …

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The latest release from the General Social Survey shows the toll the pandemic has taken on our mental health

Christopher Ingraham:

But in 2021 that all changed. The very-happies plummeted from 31 percent of the population in 2018 down to 19, while the not-too-happies surged by a nearly identical amount, from 13 to 24 percent. The balance is made up by the pretty-happies at around 57 percent, who I omitted from the chart because their numbers didn’t change from 2018 to 2021.

For the first time in polling history, in other words, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy. The obvious driver of this is the pandemic. In 2021 happiness took a major hit across the board — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy people — all reported a decline in the quality of their life.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Waymo sues state DMV to keep robotaxi safety details secret

Russ Mitchell:

Waymo, the driverless car company operating an autonomous taxi fleet in San Francisco, is suing the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The immediate issue: whether the company, owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., can hide from the public safety-related information by designating it as a trade secret. 

The topics Waymo wants to keep hidden include how it plans to handle driverless car emergencies, what it would do if a robot taxi started driving itself where it wasn’t supposed to go, and what constraints there are on the car’s ability to traverse San Francisco’s tunnels, tight curves and steep hills. Waymo also wants to keep secret descriptions of crashes involving its driverless cars.

That’s among the information the DMV requires to determine whether to issue permits to deploy robot vehicles on public roads.

The permit was issued last year. Waymo is focusing on San Francisco, where, for the time being, its robotaxis operate under the supervision of trained human drivers. 

The wider issue: how to handle the explosion in trade secret claims in an age of artificial intelligence, robot technology, the internet of things and pervasive data collection.

The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento County Superior Court on Jan. 21, contends that Waymo would lose out against other driverless car companies if full permit information were shared with the public.

Who Got It Right: Orwell or Huxley?

Rod Dreher & Bo Winegard

When I first began hearing that emigres from Communist countries see America inching towards totalitarianism, I didn’t take it seriously. Totalitarianism was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state controlled everyone through the infliction of pain and terror. Whatever our problems in America, we don’t have that, or anything close to it.It turns out that my definition of totalitarianism, formed during my Cold War youth, was too narrow. Orwell gave us one totalitarian model, based on the Soviet reality. Aldous Huxley gave us a rival version in his novel Brave New World. Huxley’s totalitarian state controlled the masses not through pain and terror, but by manipulating their pleasure and comfort. The people of Brave New World were happy to surrender their political liberties in exchange for guarantees of sex, drugs, and entertainment. This “pink police state” is the form of totalitarianism coming to the United States. “Totalitarianism” is a term coined by Mussolini to describe a society in which the state controls all aspects of life. He defined it like this: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Under authoritarianism, a single party or leader monopolizes all political power, but leaves it at that. Totalitarianism also monopolizes political power, but regards everything as political. And, as Orwell wrote, totalitarians not only want you to obey Big Brother, but to love him as well. Huxley gives us a society that is totally controlled through technology, and by convincing people to love their slavery. They have the drug soma to keep them blissed out, and all the sex and bodily comforts they desire. When John the Savage, a non-conformist who lives in the wild, confronts Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers, Mond has no intention of torturing him into submission, as Orwell’s O’Brien does to Winston Smith. Rather, Mond can’t understand why the Savage would refuse to live in a society that offers “Christianity without tears” — life in heaven without having to die.

A call to honesty in pandemic modeling

Maria Chikina and Wesley Pegden

Hiding infections in the future is not the same as avoiding them

A keen figure-reader will notice something peculiar in Kristof’s figure. At the tail end of his “Social distancing for 2 months” scenario, there is an intriguing rise in the number of infections (could it be exponential?), right before the figure ends. That’s because of an inevitable feature of realistic models of epidemics; once transmission rates return to normal, the epidemic will proceed largely as it would have without mitigations, unless a significant fraction of the population is immune (either because they have recovered from the infection or because an effective vaccine has been developed), or the infectious agent has been completely eliminated, without risk of reintroduction. In the case of the model presented in Kristof’s article, assumptions about seasonality of the virus combined with the longer mitigation period simply push the epidemic outside the window they consider.

For example, in our work studying the possible effects of heterogeneous measures, we presented examples of epidemic trajectories for COVID-19 assuming no mitigations at all, or assuming extreme mitigations which are gradually lifted at 6 months, to resume normal levels at 1 year.With no mitigations we see nearly 500,000 deaths relatively quickly.With mitigations which let up between 6 months and a year we still see nearly 500,000 deaths, just later.

Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus.

In the case of Kristof’s article, the epidemic model being employed is actually implemented in Javascript, and run — live — in a users web browser. This means that it is actually possible to hack their model to run past the end of October. In particular, we can look into the future, and see what happens in their model after October, assuming mitigations continue for 2 months. In particular, instead of the right-hand figure here:

Lessons for a Young Scientist

Martin Rees:

I sometimes worry that many who would enjoy a scientific career are put off by a narrow and outdated conception of what’s involved. The word “scientist” still conjures up an unworldly image of an Einstein lookalike (male and elderly) or else a youthful geek. There’s still too little racial and gender diversity among scientists. But there’s a huge variety in the intellectual and social styles of work the sciences involve. They require speculative theorists, lone experimenters, ecologists gaining data in the field, and quasi-industrial teams working on giant particle accelerators or big space projects.

Scientists are widely believed to think in a special way—to follow what’s called the “scientific method.” It would be truer to say scientists follow the same rational style of reasoning as lawyers or detectives in categorizing phenomena, forming hypotheses, and testing evidence. A related and damaging misperception is the mindset that supposes that there’s something elite about the quality of scientists’ thought and they have to be especially clever. Academic ability is one facet of the far wider concept of intellectual ability—possessed in equal measure by the best journalists, lawyers, engineers, and politicians.

While imprisoned for being a “reactionary,” physicist and engineer Zhi Bingyi began devising a system to help computing machines read Chinese characters.

Jing Tsu:

It was 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution. Shanghai was in the middle of an unseasonal heat wave, and its people cursed the “autumn tiger.” Zhi Bingyi had more to worry about than the heat. He had been branded a “reactionary academic authority,” one of the many damning allegations that sent millions of people to their deaths or to labor camps during the Cultural Revolution. Was it still appropriate for Zhi to think of himself as one of the people? Hadn’t he betrayed them, as he’d been told?

Just four years earlier, Zhi had gone to work every day as director of the newly established Shanghai Municipal Electric Instrument and Research Office under the government’s First Ministry of Machinery Industry. It was one of the most secure jobs one could have. First Ministry was in charge of building heavy industrial machines in the early period of New China, and later split off a Fourth Ministry to oversee electronic communications technology. Zhi’s specialty was electric metering—focusing on precision meters and electronic modeling by enhancing the performance of a device’s various parts.

Quiet, cautious, and insistent, Zhi was also highly qualified. He earned a PhD in physics from Leipzig University but declined a job offer in the United States in order to return to China. He taught at two Chinese universities and later helped to devise China’s landmark 12-year Plan for the Development of Science and Technology of 1956. It was a hopeful time for scientists and technicians who were deemed useful for their contributing roles in a state-guided socialist economy.

Since his arrest in July 1968 for being a “reactionary academic authority,” Zhi had been cut off from his research, the news, and his devoted German wife. He was used to working on equations and engineering problems with teams of colleagues. No longer. His only company was the eight characters on the wall of his cell reminding him that prisoners faced two options from their minders: “Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse.”

“the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children”

Durkin, K., Lipsey, M. W., Farran, D. C., & Wiesen, S. E.:

As state-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs expand, it is critical to investigate their short- and long-term effects. This article presents the results through sixth grade of a longitudinal randomized control study of the effects of a scaled-up, state-supported pre-K program. The analytic sample includes 2,990 children from low-income families who applied to oversubscribed pre-K program sites across the state and were randomly assigned to offers of admission or a wait list control. Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention. The implications of these findings for pre-K policies and practices are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) Get Access

WHY SAN FRANCISCO’S SCHOOL BOARD RECALL MAY BE ONE OF 2022’S MOST IMPORTANT ELECTIONS

Helen Raleigh:

Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only elementary schools last April and didn’t return to full-time in-person learning for all K-12 until fall 2021.

Board President López claimed the long delays didn’t cause any learning loss because children were “just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” and they learned more “about their families and cultures by staying home.” Her tone-deaf comments angered many parents, who have witnessed their kids’ academic and emotional struggles at home due to the school closures.

The school district has experienced such a sharp decline in student enrollment during its long closure that it had to implement a steep cut this school year to fill a budget hole of $125 million.
Social Justice at the Expense of Education

Second, the school board focused on leftist politics rather than education. In 2019, the board voted to cover a mural depicting slavery and Native Americans at George Washington High School, a decision that would cost taxpayers between $600,000 to $1 million. Fortunately, the mural will stay after a San Francisco Superior Court judge overturned the school board’s decision last year.

In January 2021, rather than focusing on reopening schools, the board voted to rename 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington High Schools. Even Democrat Mayor London Breed expressed her disbelief in a statement, saying, “I can’t understand why the school board is advancing a plan to rename all these schools when there isn’t a plan to have kids back in those physical schools.”

Civics: Discrimination and lawfare: Madison edition

Ann Althouse:

[H]e began looking at the public social media pages of members of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board [and found]… “29 separate instances of biased, defamatory statements — occasionally containing obscene language — impugning my race, gender and former profession, among the social media accounts of seven out of the 11 voting members in charge of hiring for this position,” he says….

Nikole Hannah-Jones UW-Madison’s $55k speech

Kayla Huynh

“If we are a truly great nation, how could the truth destroy us? Why would we have to hide from it?” she asked. “Great people acknowledge what they’ve done, and then they work to fix it. What will destroy us are the lies that we maintain.” 

“I’m just one 5-foot-5 journalist,” she added, “yet some of the most powerful people in the nation — from the former president to sitting senators to state governors — have sought to discredit this work.” 

She denounced those unwilling to “fight for the policies and laws that Dr. King gave his life securing,” saying they have no right to determine how to best honor his legacy. Hannah-Jones also warned that U.S. democracy is on the brink of being destroyed. 

“We cannot be here talking about dreams and service and singing kumbaya,” she said. “We are in danger of losing the very democracy that Dr. King gave his life for.” 

While Hannah-Jones acknowledged that King did long for a day when his children would be judged by their character, he also understood this could not come without a “radical restructuring of our society.” 

“The real Dr. King,” she said, “did not pretend that hoping for a colorblind society one day meant ignoring the racial caste system that exists right now.” 

Hannah-Jones ended her remarks by reminding the crowd it takes action to make change.

“Dr. King did not sit around and hope for a better day,” she said. “He was determined to bring that day about. He took action.” 

“He put himself on the line,” she added. “He did what was not popular but what was right; what was not easy; what was not safe; what was not practical, and really what was not sane — because he lost his life for it.” 

She told the crowd it’s not enough simply to hope.

“We must act,” she said. “We have more power than we believe that we do, and we squander it in this moment. Our democracy is on the brink.”

Jackson Walker:

“The speaker was paid $55,000, consistent with past speakers for this event, from private funding sources; no public funds were used,” spokesperson Meredith McGlone told The College Fix via email.

The public university’s Student Affairs and its diversity office hosted the event in the student union. People who want to watch her speech again will have trouble doing so due to press and recording restrictions.

“Sharing or recording of the broadcast is strictly prohibited,” the university said in an email to participants. The only way to watch the $55,000 speech was to attend in person or watch the livestream.

Hannah-Jones is the author of the “1619 Project,” a widely criticized New York Timesinitiative which claimed the first American settlers wanted a new country to protect slavery. Hannah-Jones has also said that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. The project has warranted criticism from Republican lawmakers who see the teaching of it in schools as divisive.

The symposium began with a performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song acknowledged by the event’s presenters as the “Black National Anthem.”

Civics: Rules were bent, GOP voters defected, and real fraud hasn’t turned up.

Wall Street Journal:

At his first big political rally of 2022, President Trump was again focused on 2020. “We had a rigged election, and the proof is all over the place,” he said. Mr. Trump was apparently too busy over Christmas to read a 136-page report by a conservative group in Wisconsin, whose review shows “no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

If curious Republicans want to know what really happened in 2020, this is the best summation to date. Released Dec. 7, it was written by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a policy shop with conservative bona fides that supported many of Mr. Trump’s policies. A Wisconsin judge this month said ballot dropboxes are illegal under state law, in a challenge brought by WILL.

Its report on 2020 wallops state officials for bending election rules amid the pandemic. That mistake put ballots into legal doubt, due to no fault of the voter, while fueling skepticism. Yet the stolen-election theory doesn’t hold up. President Biden won Wisconsin by 20,682, and mass fraud “would likely have resulted in some discernible anomaly,” WILL says. “In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. ” Here are some highlights:

***

• Only 14.7% of Wisconsin jurisdictions used Dominion voting machines. Mr. Trump won 57.2% of their ballots, up from 55.7% in 2016.

• In Milwaukee, the number of absentee votes tallied on election night is “consistent with what was reported to be outstanding.” Mr. Biden’s share, 85.7%, is plausible. The raw vote total in Milwaukee County was up only 4.4% from 2016, lower than the average rise of 10.2%. “Put simply, there was no unexplained ‘ballot dump.’”

• WILL’s hand recount of 20,000 votes from 20 wards, including in Milwaukee, found “no evidence of fraudulent ballots.” It did show “a significant number of voters who voted for Biden and a Republican for Congress.” In wards of suburban Mequon, to pick one, 10.5% of Biden ballots went for GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman.

• In 2020 only 0.2% of Wisconsin’s absentee ballots were rejected, a steep drop from 1.35% in 2016. This, however, was a nationwide trend, aided in part by dropboxes. Also, WILL says, “rejection rates were actually slightly higher in areas of the state that voted for Biden.”

• The state told clerks to correct incomplete witness addresses. Not every jurisdiction did so, and some didn’t track such fixes. WILL reviewed 29,000 ballot certificates in 29 wards. The “vast majority” of problem ballots “were simply missing a portion of the second address line, such as a city, state or ZIP Code.” State law doesn’t define how much “address” is required, so these ballots probably were valid regardless.

• The number of “indefinitely confined” voters, who are exempt from photo-ID rules, rose 199,000. Yet the election proceeded, WILL says, with “no clear statement” on whether fear of Covid could qualify as home bound. County data suggest no link between confinement rates and partisan lean. WILL polled 700 random confined voters, turning up little. Fraud here would be “risky,” it says, since real ballots by impersonated voters would then be flagged. Wisconsin has identified only four double votes.

• The state used dropboxes, which are legally disputed, and WILL says many clerks didn’t sufficiently log chain of custody. Its statistical analysis estimates that dropboxes maybe raised Mr. Biden’s turnout by 20,736. But WILL “does not claim” that such people “were ineligible voters or should have had their votes rejected.”

• A nonprofit tied to Mark Zuckerberg gave $10 million to help Wisconsin elections, mostly in five cities, a skewed distribution that WILL finds “troubling.” A statistical analysis suggests it maybe lifted Mr. Biden’s turnout by 8,000.

Commentary.

The Problem with Preble’s

Mike Dubrasich

Once upon a time there was a taxonomy war waged between two armed camps: the Lumpers and the Splitters. That war is history now, long over. The Splitters won and the Lumpers lost, big time.

For the uninitiated, Lumpers were the taxonomists who believed most animals and plants should be classified as members of a few well-defined species. They lost. The victorious Splitters are those who believe every individual organism is a species unto itself.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how mild mannered, obsequious and bespectacled academics puttering around labs and peering into dissection scopes could be accused of warfare. The assertion seems a trifle hyperbolic for mixed company. But it was a war, with territorial conquest, mass destruction, casualties of combatants and non-combatants alike, and plenty of collateral damage.

One of the bloodiest battles was over a common rodent. The Jumping Mouse (Zapus hudsonius) is a cute little furball distinguished by a long tapering tail, large hind feet, small front feet, and a propensity to hop erratically through the grass when disturbed. Sometimes called a kangaroo mouse, Z. hudsonius is native and common to Asia and North America, found from the Atlantic coast to the Great Plains, in the Southwest, in the Pacific Northwest, and northward to the arctic tree-line of Alaska and Canada, frequenting hayfields and wheat farms as well as native grasslands. Billions of the little critters live in perfect harmony with graziers and agriculturalists across two continents. They have the widest known distribution of mice in the subfamily Zapodinae.

That was before the Splitters weaponized the cowering wee beasties. Today there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of “recognized” species, sub-species, sub-subs, and Distinct Population Segments (DPS’s), including but not limited to:  Z. trinotatus orarius, Z. burti, Z. hudsonicus, Z. hudsonicus acadicus,· Z. hudsonius (Jumping Mouse), Z. hudsonius acadicus, Z. hudsonius alascensis (Alaska Jumping Mouse), Z. hudsonius alscensis, Z. hudsonius americanus, Z. hudsonius campestris, Z. hudsonius canadensis, Z. hudsonius hardyi, Z. hudsonius hodsonius, Z. hudsonius intermedius, Z. hudsonius ladas, Z. hudsonius luteus (Meadow Jumping Mouse), Z. hudsonius pallidus, Z. hudsonius preblei (Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse), Z. hudsonius tenellus, Z. insignis, Z. orarius, Z. princeps (Pacific Jumping Mouse), Z. princeps chrysogenys, Z. princeps cinereus, Z. princeps curtatus, Z. princeps idahoensis, Z. princeps kootenayensis, Z. princeps kootenayonsis, Z. princeps kootnayensis, Z. princeps luteus, Z. princeps major, Z. princeps minor, Z. princeps oreganus, Z. princeps oregonus (Big Jumping Mouse),  Z. princeps pacificus, Z. princeps palatinus, and  Z. princeps princeps (Western Jumping Mouse).

Is there any significant difference between these subspecies? Short answer: no. Dr. Matthew Cronin, PhD., Professor of Animal Genetics, Univ. Alaska Fairbanks, wrote in Cronin, M. A. 2007. The Preble’s meadow jumping mouse: subjective subspecies, advocacy and management. Correspondence, Animal Conservation 10 (2007) 159–161:

In December, Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) Michael McEvoy ordered the facial recognition company to stop collecting, using and disclosing images of British Columbians without consent.

Jeremy Hainsworth:

A global ‘mass surveillance’ company ordered by B.C.’s privacy watchdog to stop collecting British Columbians’ images is challenging that order in B.C. Supreme Court.

Clearview AI claims B.C.’s Personal Information Protection Act does not apply to the company as it is physically located in the United States. It calls the orders unreasonable and unenforceable.

In December, Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) Michael McEvoy ordered the facial recognition company to stop collecting, using and disclosing images of British Columbians without consent.

The order was initially a set of February recommendations that the company has refused to comply with, McEvoy’s office said.

The Quebec and Alberta commissioners issued similar orders. They found the New York-based company violated federal and provincial privacy laws.

The recommendations followed a joint investigation report by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta.

“What Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal,” Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien said at the time. “It is completely unacceptable for millions of people who will never be implicated in any crime to find themselves continually in a police line-up.”

The commissioners found Clearview scraped images of faces and associated data from publicly accessible online sources (including social media) and stored it in its database.

A Primer on Bézier Curves

Pomax:

In order to draw things in 2D, we usually rely on lines, which typically get classified into two categories: straight lines, and curves. The first of these are as easy to draw as they are easy to make a computer draw. Give a computer the first and last point in the line, and BAM! straight line. No questions asked.

Curves, however, are a much bigger problem. While we can draw curves with ridiculous ease freehand, computers are a bit handicapped in that they can’t draw curves unless there is a mathematical function that describes how it should be drawn. In fact, they even need this for straight lines, but the function is ridiculously easy, so we tend to ignore that as far as computers are concerned; all lines are “functions”, regardless of whether they’re straight or curves. However, that does mean that we need to come up with fast-to-compute functions that lead to nice looking curves on a computer. There are a number of these, and in this article we’ll focus on a particular function that has received quite a bit of attention and is used in pretty much anything that can draw curves: Bézier curves.

They’re named after Pierre Bézier, who is principally responsible for making them known to the world as a curve well-suited for design work (publishing his investigations in 1962 while working for Renault), although he was not the first, or only one, to “invent” these type of curves. One might be tempted to say that the mathematician Paul de Casteljauwas first, as he began investigating the nature of these curves in 1959 while working at Citroën, and came up with a really elegant way of figuring out how to draw them. However, de Casteljau did not publish his work, making the question “who was first” hard to answer in any absolute sense. Or is it? Bézier curves are, at their core, “Bernstein polynomials”, a family of mathematical functions investigated by Sergei Natanovich Bernstein, whose publications on them date back at least as far as 1912.

The Price of Censorship

Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj

Last year, in an interview with the New York Times, anthropologist Heidi Larson, founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, said that efforts to silence people who doubt the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines won’t get us very far. 

“If you shut down Facebook tomorrow,” she said, “it’s not going to make this go away. It’ll just move.” Public health solutions, then, would have to come from a different approach. “We don’t have a misinformation problem,” Larson said. “We have a trust problem.” 

This point rings true to us. That’s why, as we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation. While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society. 

This position has some uncomfortable consequences. It means we allow writers to publish what they want and readers to decide for themselves what to read, even when that content is wrong or offensive, and even when it means putting up with the presence of writers with whom we strongly disagree. But we believe this approach is a necessary precondition for building trust in the information ecosystem as a whole. The more that powerful institutions attempt to control what can and cannot be said in public, the more people there will be who are ready to create alternative narratives about what’s “true,” spurred by a belief that there’s a conspiracy to suppress important information. When you look at the data, it is clear that these effects are already in full force in society.

Civics: The Kennedy Administration’s Campaign to Silence the Radio Right

Paul Matzko:

President John F. Kennedy launched the most successful censorship campaign of the past half century. Its target was the Radio Right, an informal network of conservative broadcasters who reached millions of listeners across the country by the early 1960s. With Kennedy’s encouragement, the Internal Revenue Service audited conservative broadcasters to impair their ability to raise money while the Federal Communications Commission discouraged radio stations from airing their programs. The success of the counter–Radio Right campaign contradicts postrevisionist interpretations of Kennedy as a president who grew toward greatness while in office.

Changing Names and Some Memphis Schools

Samantha West:

The board of the newly-branded Memphis-Shelby County School District on Tuesday endorsed a sweeping facilities plan that includes closing two schools, merging another two schools, and relocating several schools and programs, among other changes. 

District officials said many of the changes are designed to better use schools with declining enrollment, address overcrowding at other schools, and move students out of buildings with millions of dollars in deferred maintenance.

The board agreed Tuesday night to close Alton and Shady Grove elementary schools after this school year. Alton students will instead attend A.B. Hill Elementary, and Shady Grove students will attend either Dexter K-8 School or White Station Elementary.

Dexter elementary and middle schools will merge to form Dexter K-8 School, and Mt. Pisgah Middle School will expand to include ninth grade.

In addition, three schools will relocate: 

A proposal to Break Up the Taxpayer Supported Milwaukee K-12 School System, Expand Choice Opportunities and a parent bill of rights

Molly Beck:

Republican lawmakers plan to propose a sweeping package of legislation to overhaul K-12 education in Wisconsin that would break up the state’s largest school district within two years and expand private-school vouchers to every student, regardless of family income.

The proposal is part of a package that expands taxpayer-funded alternatives to public schools, including increasing the number of charter schools and giving parents money to pay for additional learning opportunities outside of the normal school day, including college courses.

“These bills are in response to a number of issues parents and children are seeing as COVID-19 and failed school leadership are eliminating educational opportunities in our schools,” Senate Education Committee chairwoman Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, said in an email to colleagues on Friday with summaries of each bill.

The new plan for Milwaukee public school students would be created by a commission consisting of the governor and the mayor of Milwaukee, both of whom would make two appointments each to the commission, and the state superintendent of public instruction, according to Darling’s summary of the expected legislation.

Taxpayer Supported Madison K-12 Curriculum Documents

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Parents, Kids, & Education

Prof Ornery:

For some reason the question of “do parents have a right to know what their kids are being taught?” is highly contentious. It shouldn’t be. It should be a given no matter the political leanings of anybody that parents ALWAYS have a right to know what their children are being taught. 

Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s election largely because Terry McAuliffe said that parents have no right to know what’s taught in schools. This idea that children need to be removed from their parents and “educated” while parents are kept in the dark is totalitarian in the extreme. What McAuliffe, the teacher who said that children need to be educated so they don’t grow up to be like their parents, and the board of ed member in Pennsylvania, and many others, all believe is that children, once of age to go to school, no longer belong to their parents. They become the responsibility of the state at that point.

Of course, all of those spouting this theory (however they explain it) exclude their own children from the equation. I’m confident that if you asked the teacher who said that she wants to make sure kids don’t grow up to be like their parents would vociferously argue with you if you included her kids in that group. She, of course, is well-qualified to raise her children. She’s a teacher after all.

Education is a key factor in molding children to accept society’s norms and rules of interaction. It is such a big key to socialization that the left has been steadily working to control it for decades. They have largely succeeded at this point, at least in public schools and many private schools as well. 

One of the only silver linings of the Wuflu panic and shutdowns was that parents were in the same room with their kids during school hours for the first time. And for the first time many parents got a front-row view of what exactly is passing for education these days. There is so little focus on the fundamentals that most colleges and universities run freshmen through a series of remedial classes (they aren’t called that. Oh, no. These classes are labeled as freshman gen ed requirements.) before they are loosed into the general university population.

Education Choice Can Prevent Fights Over Covid Policie

Colleen Hroncich:

“One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to education.” This is a phrase that education-choice advocates have voiced for years to explain why families need options. But it’s never been truer than today while dealing with Covid-19.

Before Christmas break, many Pennsylvania school districts had considered moving to remote instructiondue to concerns about the Omicron variant. Some teachers – especially in Philadelphia – called for returning to remote instruction following the holidays.

A large spike in school closures occurred nationwide in early January, according to Burbio’s K-12 School Opening Tracker. In Pennsylvania, however, most districts have continued to operate in-person. Still, schools throughout the state have closed at least some days this month, with the largest cluster in Greater Philadelphia.

Some families felt a sense of relief when their schools announced closures and a transition to remote instruction. This was especially true for households with higher-risk family members. For example, one mother, who was scheduled to have breast cancer surgery, expressed her concern to the New York Times that her procedure would be delayed if she contracted Covid. Others, meanwhile, fear their children getting Covid despite the low statistical risk of severe infection. Regardless of their reasons, these parents should be free to choose a remote learning option for their children.

Punishment for Making Hard Choices in a Crisis: Federal Prison

Marguerite Roza:

This is a scenario we all know well: Responding to a crisis, the federal government quickly doles out sizable sums of relief dollars for schools with confusing rules about how education leaders can use it.

Here’s the part that’s maybe not so familiar: The federal government then discredits, prosecutes and imprisons an education leader for what amounts to a procedural error in spending the money, an error that (by the way) yields the leader no personal gain.

This is not a made-up scenario. It happened to Julia Keleher.

It’s a scenario that could have a chilling effect on district and state education leaders across the nation who are right now tasked with moving quickly to deploy federal relief funds.

Today’s crisis is the Covid-19 pandemic, and the $190 billion in federal pandemic relief money sent to states and districts is the closest thing to a blank check we’ve seen. Clearly there’s no playbook for this moment, and successive waves of U.S. Department of Education guidance have left many leaders unclear about how they’re allowed to spend the money.

Flash back to 2017, and the crisis was Puerto Rico, decimated from Hurricane Maria and facing a deepening financial predicament. With many of its historically low-performing schools in disrepair, and massive enrollment declines as families fled the island, the education system was in bad shape. The federal government sent nearly $500 million to rebuild schools and revamp the education system. Puerto Rico’s then-Secretary of Education, Julia Keleher, signed contracts to tackle the most immediate challenges quickly, including repairing buildings and working to resume and improve learning for the island’s remaining students as quickly as possible.

Rebuilding Notre Dame:

Carol Seidl:

This spring will mark the 3-year anniversary of the devastating fire that destroyed the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. A day after the inferno, President Emmanuel Macron announced to the world that within 5 years France would “rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral, more beautiful than ever”. Since then, the ambitious project has run into a series of setbacks and unforeseen sidetracks. In addition to raising the money needed to rebuild, organizers have employed hundreds of scientists, historical experts, and tradesmen to secure the site and put a restoration plan in place. In December, France’s National Heritage and Architecture Commission gave the green light for most of the proposed renovations. Now the process of recreating a new Notre Dame, which imitates the old, is in full swing, with a goal of opening to the public on April 16, 2024.

The Case Against Masks at School: Districts should rethink imposing on millions of children an intervention that provides little discernible benefit.

Margery Smelkinson, Leslie Bienen, and Jeanne Noble

But in America about half of the country’s 53 million children remain compulsorily masked in school for the indefinite future. Sixteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia follow the CDC guidance closely and require masks for students of all ages, regardless of vaccination status; other states rely on a patchwork of policies, usually leaving decisions up to local school districts. (Nine states have banned school mask mandates, though in five of them, lawsuits have delayed implementation of the ban.) Many deep-blue areas such as Portland, OregonLos Angeles; and New York City have gone beyond CDC guidance and are masking students outdoors at recess, in part because of byzantine rules that require an unmasked “exposed” student to miss multiple days of school, even if the putative exposure is outside.

Many public-health experts maintain that masks worn correctly are essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19. However, there’s reason to doubt that kids can pull off mask-wearing “correctly.” We reviewed a variety of studies—some conducted by the CDC itself, some cited by the CDC as evidence of masking effectiveness in a school setting, and others touted by media to the same end—to try to find evidence that would justify the CDC’s no-end-in-sight mask guidance for the very-low-risk pediatric population, particularly post-vaccination. We came up empty-handed.

To our knowledge, the CDC has performed three studies to determine whether masking children in school reduces COVID-19 transmission. The first is a study of elementary schools in Georgia, conducted before vaccines became available, which found that masking teachers was associated with a statistically significant decrease in COVID-19 transmission, but masking students was not—a finding that the CDC’s masking guidelines do not account for.

Commentary on Amy Wax & Penn

Paul Caron:

A LITERATURE REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS
OF THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWNS ON
COVID-19 MORTALITY

Ambika Kandasamy, Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke

This systematic review and meta-analysis are designed to determine whether there is empirical evidence to support the belief that “lockdowns” reduce COVID-19 mortality. Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict peoples’ possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel. This study employed a systematic search and screening procedure in which 18,590 studies are identified that could potentially address the belief posed. After three levels of screening, 34 studies ultimately qualified. Of those 34 eligible studies, 24 qualified for inclusion in the meta-analysis. They were separated into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-place- order (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies. An analysis of each of these three groups support the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on taxpayer funded Wauwatosa schools and the AVID program

Amanda St Hilaire:

“This reads to me like they’re trying to give her a payout,” one employee told FOX6. “She’ll be gone, but she’ll still get something out of it and the people who let it happen will get to go onto the next thing.”

Bowers’ resignation is tucked into Monday night’s personnel consent agenda for school board approval. The agenda does not indicate whether Bowers has a resignation agreement with the district that includes a payout.

In a phone call, superintendent Demond Means declined to answer questions about whether the district had a resignation agreement with Bowers, who is under contract until June 2023. When FOX6 emailed board members with questions about how a vote for a resignation agreement would work, a district spokesperson replied saying no “separate vote” is required.

Civics: Editing the Past at the BBC

Max Stephens:

The BBC has purged mentions of disgraced stars Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris along with a number of racist and misogynistic jokes used in several of its classic radio comedies.

An anonymous Radio 4 Extra listener discovered the BBC had been quietly editing repeats of shows over the past few years to be more in keeping with social mores, the Times reported.

Labelling them as “woke cuts,” the listener found edits had been made to old episodes of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son and I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again.

In some cases entire sketches had been removed.

For example, a repeat of a 1970 episode of I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, starring John Cleese and Bill Oddie, had a joke about a scantily clad woman removed.

In the original broadcast, Cleese, impersonating a BBC spokesman, said: “We have noticed that it is possible to see right up to the girls’ knickers, owing to the shortness of their miniskirts, so we’ve asked the girls to drop them.”

Why Don’t We Use the Math We Learn in School?

Scott Young:

Evidence for the Failure to Use Math

Casual observation tells us that most people don’t use math beyond simple arithmetic in everyday life. Few people make use of fractions, trigonometry, or multi-digit division algorithms they use in school. More advanced tools like algebra or calculus are even less likely to be brought out to solve everyday problems.

Research on the overall population’s use of math bears this out. A 2003 survey of 18,000 randomly selected Americans gave a battery of questions that embedded mathematics problems into situations they might encounter.1 The survey authors created the following scale to rank Americans’ quantitative abilities:

Below Basic – Add up two numbers to complete an ATM deposit.
Basic – Calculate the cost of a sandwich and salad using prices from a menu.
Intermediate – Calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies using a page from an office supplies catalog and an order form.
Proficient – Calculate an employee’s share of health insurance costs for a year using a table that shows how the employee’s monthly cost varies with income and family size.
Only 13% of Americans scored as “proficient,” while over half were “basic” or “below basic.”

Parents at Aspen council meeting speak out en mass against mask mandate for children

Carolyn Sackariason

While people party unmasked in packed bars and eat and drink in restaurants throughout Pitkin County and at the ski resorts, hundreds of children are forced to wear face coverings all day long in school and it’s impeding their education, eroding their mental health and creating fear of authority.

That’s according to two dozen parents who spoke for an hour during public comment at Aspen City Council’s meeting on Tuesday, urging elected officials to convince their colleagues on Pitkin County’s board of health to lift the mask mandate in public schools and child care facilities.

Julia DeBacker, a parent of six children in Aspen, said two years of forcing them to wear a mask has led them to be socially incompetent, fearful, full of anxiety and untrusting of authority.

“We know that you can’t change the health orders but your voices are louder than ours,” she told council.

Mayor Torre represents the city and council on the board of health, a governing body that is comprised of elected officials and citizens. The board of health doesn’t take public comment and is not scheduled to meet again until March.

Commentary on High School entrance exams

Michael Powell:

Liberal politicians, school leaders and organizers argue such schools are bastions of elitism and, because of low enrollment of Black and Latino students, functionally racist and segregated. Sixty-three percent of the city’s public school students are Black and Latino yet they account for just 15 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s population.

For Asian students, the percentages are flipped: They make up 61 percent of Brooklyn Tech, although they account for 18 percent of the public school population.

Some critics imply that the presence of so many South and East Asian students, along with the white students, accentuates this injustice. Such charges reached a heated pitch a few years ago when a prominent white liberal council member said such schools were overdue for “a racial reckoning.”

Richard Carranza, who served as New York’s schools chancellor until last year, was more caustic. “I just don’t buy into the narrative,” he said, “that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”

But several dozen in-depth interviews with Asian and Black students at Brooklyn Tech paint a more complicated portrait and often defy the political characterizations put forth in New York and across the country. These students speak of personal journeys and struggles at a far remove from the assumptions that dominate the raging battles over the future of their schools.

Their critiques often proved searching; most Asian students spoke of wanting more Black and Latino classmates.

Fully 63 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s students are classified as economically disadvantaged. Census data shows that Asians have the lowest median income in the city and that a majority speak a language other than English at home.

The admissions debate reaches far beyond New York’s selective high schools.

A proposal to reduce choice in the taxpayer supported Denver schools

Boardhawk:

The Denver school board last week introduced a draft policy that could limit the autonomy of innovation schools and zones — district-run schools that under state law have some charter-school-like autonomy.

The policy has been given the official title of Standard Teacher Rights and Protections. If passed, the rights and protections provided would be the same as those provided by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the local teachers’ union, to teachers in non-innovations schools.

According to the draft, those protections include but aren’t limited to a workload consistent with 40 hours per week, minimal duties outside of classroom teaching, a uniform school calendar and compensation ranking in the top three for neighboring school districts.

Since innovation schools operate under specifically designed waivers from both the collective bargaining agreement and district rules and regulations, removing the contract waivers could limit the schools’ ability to operate as they have in the past. The waivers have long been a sore point for the DCTA.

In some cases, the waivers allow innovation schools to offer students longer school days if needed and allow teachers to be resources to students outside regular class time.

Health and data reporter Betsy Ladyzhets on sensationalist school COVID headlines, missing context, and the importance of interviewing school clerks

Alexander Russo:

I first became aware of data journalist Betsy Ladyzhets about a year ago, working on a piece about smart ways to cover COVID cases in schools. She was concerned about the lack of data and transparency around school COVID cases. I was concerned that COVID school coverage was unnecessarily amplifying reopening risks and fears.

Little did I know then that I’d have many of the same concerns a year later – or that Ladyzhets would be writing more than ever about schools and COVID. With the help of the Solutions Journalism Network, she has now profiled five schools and districts that managed to reopen last year and keep kids and teachers safe. “The divided communities made the news — but not all U.S. schools were fighting grounds,” she wrote last month. “Many districts managed to bring the majority of their students back into classrooms without breeding a dreaded COVID-19 outbreak.”

These stories are a useful roadmap for education reporters and a great opportunity to learn what a health and science data journalist thinks about how COVID school stories are being written.

“Stories that highlight school outbreaks and tension may cause readers to think there’s no way to open schools safely,” Ladyzhets told me. “At the same time, stories that argue, ‘schools are extremely low risk’ or, ‘we don’t know if masks are actually beneficial for young kids,’ are also harmful.”

The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention

FS. Blog

The most important metaskill you can learn is how to learn. Learning allows you to adapt. As Darwin hinted, it’s not the strongest who survives. It’s the one who easily adapts to a changing environment. Learning how to learn is a part of a “work smarter, not harder” approach to life—one that probabilistically helps you avoid becoming irrelevant. Your time is precious, and you don’t want to waste it on something which will just be forgotten.

During the school years, most of us got used to spending hours at a time memorizing facts, equations, the names of the elements, French verbs, dates of key historical events. We found ourselves frantically cramming the night before a test. We probably read through our notes over and over, a gallon of coffee in hand, in the hope that the information would somehow lodge in our brains. Once the test was over, we doubtless forgot everything straight away.1

Even outside of formal education, we have to learn large amounts of new information on a regular basis: foreign languages, technical terms, sale scripts, speeches, the names of coworkers. Learning through rote memorization is tedious and—more important—ineffective. If we want to remember something, we need to work with our brains, not against them. To do that, we need to understand cognitive constraints and find intelligent ways to get around them or use them to our advantage.

This is where the spacing effect comes in. It’s a wildly useful phenomenon: we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything.

It works for words, numbers, images, and skills. It works for anyone of any age, from babies to elderly people. It works for animals, even species as simple as sea slugs. The effect cuts across disciplines and can be used to learn anything from artistic styles to mathematical equations.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school policies in the spotlight: Marlon Anderson edition

Sean Cooper:

he attempted to instruct the student that the word was offensive. In doing so, he used the slur himself, which was overheard by administrators who had recently installed a zero tolerance anti-racism policy that prompted them to immediately fire Anderson for the utterance. Students subsequently rallied to Anderson’s defense, walking out of class in protest demanding that administrators recognize that words have context and intent, a view that was largely demoted to the fringes of polite thought in 2019, but given the race of the parties involved, school administrators all but had to acquiesce to their demands and Anderson was reinstated. 

For Pesca and other journalists of a similar ilk, Anderson’s reversed expulsion was an interesting example of how the soft squishy language of anti-racism policies collapsed upon their hard impact with reality. What put meat on the bones of this story though was the way the media handled the whole affair, with several national news organizations taking up a narrative that Anderson was fired on the grounds of an anti-racism offense when he, to borrow the phrase deployed in myriad headlines, “used a racial slur” against a student. Other news outlets like CNN further obfuscated the crux of the issue—that intent and context change the meaning of language—when they covered the student protests and interviewed Anderson but blurred his face and silenced him speaking when he explained what was said and how. Though certainly there are sensitivities a cable broadcast network must abide by regarding racial epithets, CNN’s extensive effort to remove Anderson from the context of a story about context undermined their own journalistic inquiry.  

“When the news says he was using the N-word that implies he was wielding the N-word. And that was not done here,” Pesca said during the segment on The Gist. “In fact, when the media reports that he used the N-word but then the media doesn’t say the N-word, can’t give you the actual quotes, bleeps it out, they’re really agreeing with one side of the story. The side that says there is no context for this.” 

The problem for Pesca arose during the production of this segment when he originally recorded himself saying Anderson’s quote with the slur intact, something that offended at least one of his producers, according to Pesca’s account and another Slate employee familiar with the incident. (Both of his producers from that episode did not return requests to be interviewed for this story.)

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Censorship and Teacher Union spending

What’s happening: The AFT teachers union is buying NewsGuard licenses for its 1.7 million teachers, who will then be able to share it with tens of millions students around the country

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Why Vanderbilt is banning student attendance at home games until at least Jan. 24

Aria Gerson:

As part of a Commodores Care quarantine period, Vanderbilt students will not be able to attend  home athletic events until at least Jan. 24.

Commodores Care requires students to avoid the vast majority of in-person activities upon return to campus in an attempt to slow the spread of the omicron variant of COVID-19. Students are allowed to leave their residences only to attend class, get food or supplies, seek medical attention, exercise outdoors or perform essential work.

The university pushed the start of the semester back one week, to Jan. 17, and the dorms and Greek houses, where the majority of Vanderbilt students live, will not open until Jan. 15. This means the primary affected basketball games will be the Jan. 18 men’s game against Tennessee and the Jan. 20 women’s game against Missouri.

This is not the first time Vanderbilt has implemented Commodores Care. The period was also required for students returning in the winter of 2021, however, only family members of athletes were allowed to attend games. Currently, the general public is free to attend Vanderbilt basketball and other games as long as they present proof of vaccination or a negative test.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott introduces ‘Parental Bill of Rights’ targeting state education system

Ariana Garcia:

Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday evening plans to amend the Texas Constitution with a Parent Bill of Rights if he is re-elected. The proposal follows Abbott’s introduction of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights this week. 

Abbott publicly signed the bill at an event hosted by the Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, where he criticized schools shutting down during the pandemic and issuing mask mandates. He said the bill will help restore parents as the primary decision-makers of their child’s education and healthcare decisions.

“No government program can replace the role that parents play in the education of their children,” Abbott told the audience. “Our focal point is to ensure that parents are put at the forefront, both of education of their children as well as the decision-making for their child’s healthcare.”

Abbott continued to impart that the government often intrudes on parental decision-making and threatens the role guardians have in their child’s wellbeing. “Many parents are growing increasingly powerless about what to do to regain that control,” Abbott said. “That must end.”

A Covid Commission Americans Can Trust: The country has lost faith in experts, but a thorough review free from conflicts of interest could help.

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:

The pandemic is on its way out, but how many Americans think the U.S. approach succeeded? More than 600,000 Americans died from Covid, and lockdowns have left extensive collateral damage. Trust in science has eroded, and the damage won’t be limited to epidemiology, virology and public health. Scientists in other fields will unfortunately also have to deal with the fallout, including oncologists, physicists, computer scientists, environmental engineers and even economists. 

The first step to restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts is an honest and comprehensive evaluation of the nation’s pandemic response. Sens. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) have introduced a bill that would establish a Covid commission to examine the origins of the virus, the early response to the epidemic, and equity issues in the disease’s impact. Private foundations are also in the process of planning such a commission.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

How bad have universities got?
Conservatives exaggerate, but liberal bias is a real problem in universities; three factors underpin this.

Thomas Prosser

Universities are increasingly accused of bias. According to critics, high concentrations of liberals entail groupthink and discrimination against conservatives. Announcing the establishment of the University of Austin, founders cited damning statistics. Nearly a quarter of American social science and humanities academics supportdismissing colleagues who have unorthodox views in areas such as immigration or gender differences. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminateagainst right-wing scholars.

These statistics are important, but there are countervailing trends; most academics remain tolerant and many conservatives relish working in the sector. Moreover, conditions differ sharply across institutions and faculties; left-wing authoritarianism may be embedded within certain environments, yet others are models of tolerance. Debates which exchange statistics are often fruitless, opponents talking around each other. But deeper trends are elucidative. In recent decades, three developments have increased pressures for bias within universities.

Firstly, there is the rise of the education cleavage. As Western societies have embraced mass higher education, access to education increasingly shapes politics. Education predicts liberal attitudes on issues such as immigration, Brexit and the death penalty, those with less education tending to adopt conservative positions. There is a crucial implication for universities. Because universities provide education, they gather individuals who tend to have liberal views. Exceptions always exist, yet the education-liberalism nexus implies that liberalism will predominate; most academics have higher degrees and students work towards degrees.

Notes on South Africa’s Student Examination Results

Marcia Zali:

nder the difficulties posed by the Covid-19 pandemic the Independent Examination Board class of 2021 achieved a marginal increase in the matric pass rate moving from 98% in 2020 to 98.39%.

Out of the 12 857 full-time and 968 part-time candidates who wrote exams, 89.2% qualified to study towards a bachelor’s degree at university, 7.82% qualified to study towards a diploma, and 1.37% achieved entry to study for a higher certificate.

The IEB’s chief executive, Anne Oberholzer, said the increased pass rate was an indication of the resilience and dedication of the class of 2021, which had to adjust to a new way of learning in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Oberholzer said in a press release that the use of technology, which can no longer be ignored, has proven to be a valuable tool in classrooms.

An Emphasis on adult employment

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

49 taxpayer supported Madison school district staff cashiered

Scott Girard:

A Madison Metropolitan School District teacher plans to challenge what he considers unequal application of the district’s religious exemption to its staff COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Nathan Hataj, a technology and engineering teacher at La Follette High School, “didn’t think of it as an issue” when the School Board unanimously approved the staff vaccine mandate in September, as he had abstained from other vaccines in the past.

Staff were required to be vaccinated or submit an exemption request by Nov. 1, which Hataj said he did. In December, however, he was told his request was denied.

Hataj appealed the December decision and was told in January that he had until Friday, Jan. 14, to show that he had begun his COVID vaccine series or he would be fired effective Jan. 21. He said communications from the district when he’s asked questions about the policy and his application have been poor.

Monday, Hataj showed up at school, as he had not received a formal notice from the district that he had been fired. He wrote in an email that he still “assumed I’ll be fired” and felt like he was in “limbo.”

He said in an email Monday afternoon that an assistant principal told him not to come to school Tuesday. His principal also informed him via email that human resources director Tracy Carradine told the principal that Hataj’s employment was considered terminated as of Friday.

Paradoxically– Volunteer opportunities in the taxpayer supported Madison School District

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The BBC Quietly Censors Its Own Archives

Charles Cooke:

Out of public view, the state-owned broadcaster has been altering old episodes of its shows to make them ‘suitable’ for modern listeners.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE Reflecting upon George Orwell’s many authoritative predictions can grow tiresome for writer and reader alike. And yet, given our present predicament, one might ask what choice one truly has. “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England,” Orwell wrote back in 1945, “is that it is largely voluntary.” And so, indeed, it is. Over the weekend, the Daily Telegraph reported that “an anonymous Radio 4 Extra listener” had “discovered the BBC had been quietly editing repeats of shows over the past few years to be more in keeping with social mores.” To which the BBC said . . . well, yeah. In a statement addressing the charge, the institution confirmed that “on occasion we edit some episodes so they’re suitable for broadcast today, including removing racially offensive language and stereotypes from decades ago, as the vast majority of our audience would expect.” Thus, in the absence of law or regulation, has the British establishment begun to excise material it finds inappropriate by today’s lights.

The deployment of the word “broadcast” in the BBC’s affirmation was both deliberate and misleading. Historically, a “broadcast” was a one-off event, like a newspaper or stage performance. But, as the BBC presumably knows, in the age of streaming, “broadcasts” tend to be more permanent than that. Because it is so old, much of the material that the BBC has been altering is not available to purchase or download, nor broadly owned on physical media, which means that when the BBC elects to change it, it is changing the only working copy that the majority of the public may enjoy. In a free market, one might be obliged to throw up one’s hands and lament that the copyright holder was such a philistine. But the BBC is a de factogovernment agency — an agency for which all Britons who own televisions are forced by statute to pay — and, as a result, the material that it is modifying is effectively publicly owned.

This raises a host of important questions — chief among which is: Why, if “the vast majority” of the BBC’s audience expects the organization to render its archives more “suitable,” has it been doing so in secret? Again: In the Internet age, changes made to source material tend to be iterative rather than additive. When the New York Times updates a story in its newspaper, one can plausibly obtain both copies. By contrast, when the New York Times updates a story on its website, the original page disappears. By its own admission, the BBC has been deleting entire sketches from comedy series that are 50, 60, or 70 years old, many of which can be heard only with the BBC’s permission. Are we simply to assume that the public supports this development? And, if so, are we permitted to wonder why the BBC was not open about it?

Youngkin’s choice for education secretary might be a sign of good things to come

Washington Post Editorial:

Announcing his selection of Aimee Rogstad Guidera as education secretary, Mr. Youngkin cited her work in “advocating for innovation and choice, data-driven reform, and high standards.” Ms. Guidera is a national expert on the use of data in education policy. She headed up the Guidera Strategy consulting firm and is the founder and former leader of the Data Quality Campaign, a national nonprofit that advocates using data to shape education. Time magazine named her as one of its “12 Education Activists for 2012.” “This is a really good choice,” tweetedAndrew Rotherham, an educational reform activist with Bellwether Education Partners, when Ms. Guidera’s selection was announced last month. It signaled, he wrote, that Mr. Youngkin “wants to get something done substantively on education.”

Mr. Youngkin’s other top education appointments — Jillian Balow, superintendent of Wyoming’s public schools, as Virginia schools superintendent, and Elizabeth Schultz, a senior fellow with Parents Defending Education, as Ms. Balow’s deputy — seem to be more ideologically driven. While on the Fairfax County School Board, Ms. Schultz opposed a nondiscrimination policy against transgender students and railed against the decision to rename a high school named for a Confederate general. Both Ms. Balow and Ms. Schultz are outspoken critics of critical race theory, an academic framework used in higher education but not K-12 that examines how policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism. That Republicans have weaponized this phantom issue to rally their base diverts attention from the critical issues facing schools today.

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We hope Mr. Youngkin’s selection of Ms. Guidera shows a seriousness of purpose in addressing the deficiencies in public education, which too often negatively affect students who are poor, Black and at risk. Mr. Youngkin’s politically driven executive order forbidding the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory,” was misguided, but it is noteworthy that it also included a directive that the state schools superintendent produce a report within 90 days on the status of efforts to close the achievement gap between minority students and their peers.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

None of the fundamental drivers of “Wokeness” have relented

N.S. Lyons:

One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. They could have taken note of all the fundamental factors driving this ideological belief system, all of which had to be painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer, even as it swept through every institution. But they have not. (Like, do they even read the pages and pages of erudite Substack anthropology on the topic? No?) They could have recognized by now that this is not a simple political issue with a political solution, but they have not.

Look, honestly I really didn’t want to have to do this. Come the New Year I had resolved to focus on the positives and all that crap. But I haven’t seen anyone else do it, so guess I have no choice and the duty falls to me to deliver the pessimistic news: no, the Revolution is far from over.

So, in what might also serve as a handy tour guide to the vast depths of the ideological abyss, catalogued at length here – in convenient listicle format! – are twenty reasons to get woke and despair.

  1. One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs. What is called “Wokeness” – or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) – rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant – they hold them nonetheless. Such as:

The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…

Supreme Court to Consider Challenges to Race-Conscious Admissions Policies at Harvard, UNC

Brent Kendall & Melissa Korn:

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider challenges to race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, giving the justices a platform to review decades of precedent allowing affirmative action in higher education.

The court in a brief written order said it would consider a pair challenges by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, led by conservative legal activist Edward Blum, which sued both schools on the same day in 2014.

Anatomy of a bio security police state

Root Cause MD:

We are living in strange times.

A novel virus has swept the world, initially unknown in its virulence and pathogenicity. It is now endemic, exhibiting seasonality, and recognized to have an infection fatality rate of approximately 0.15%1.

What is abundantly clear is that this virus does not affect everyone equally. People with specific preexisting health conditions are disproportionately affected. There is an enormous risk gradient in severity of COVID-19 infection between the most vulnerable and the least vulnerable.

The Unspoken Metabolic Susceptibility Factors

SARS-COV-2 overwhelmingly and disproportionately affects the obese2, Vitamin D deficient34 and those with metabolic dysfunction56 i.e. insulin resistance, Type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, fatty liver and the constellation of lifestyle diseases attendant of the metabolic syndrome.

A number of physiological reasons underlie this susceptibility, most notably impaired immune system function and a smouldering fire of metabolic inflammation. Such a state of chronic, low level immune activation appears to predispose to an inflammatory cascade known as a cytokine storm7, which results in severe lung damage often necessitating hospitalization, supplemental oxygen and eventually ventilatory support.

Don’t believe me? Just ask any critical care nurse or doctor about the body mass index, metabolic health status and body fat distribution of their patients who are intubated, on non-invasive ventilation or on high-flow oxygen.

For the elderly, COVID-19 poses a particular risk. Older people have had more time to accumulate metabolic dysfunction and micronutrient deficiency. They also have less physiological reserve to deal with the stress of infection.

The Last Leg Universities Stand On Is Collapsing

Isaac Morehouse:

Universities are dying.

They have long ceased being the best way to gain knowledge.

More recently, the degrees they confer have ceased being the best way to signal employability; the only exception being jobs that legally require them. (Such jobs are increasingly stodgy, unattractive, bureaucratic, backwards, and subservient to tyrannical governments).

The final leg universities stand on is the mythology of social status. That’s it. That’s what gives them what waning power they have.

I can’t count the number of parents I’ve talked with who recognize that college is one of the worst places to learn and degrees are one of the weakest ways to try to get hired, but who still needlessly bite the bullet and send their kid anyway.

Often, they shackle themselves or their children to tens of thousands in debt along the way. They despise the infantilizing policies on campus and bitter ideas in the classroom. They see the waste, corruption, stupidity, warped worldview, and bad habits cultivated and rewarded by the system.

But they still send their kids.

Why?

This 22-Year-Old Builds Chips in His Parents’ Garage

Tom Simonite

Zeloof’s chip was his second. He made the first, much smaller one as a high school senior in 2018; he started making individual transistors a year before that. His chips lag Intel’s by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he’s making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore’s law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel’s breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition.

Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020

Leif Rasmussen

  1. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the main governmental scientific grant distributing body in the United States, with an annual budget of over $8 billion.
  2. This report uses natural language processing to analyze the abstracts of successful grants from 1990 to 2020 in the seven fields of Biological Sciences, Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Education & Human Resources, Engineering, Geosciences, Mathematical & Physical Sciences, and Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences.
  3. The frequency of documents containing highly politicized terms has been increasing consistently over the last three decades. As of 2020, 30.4% of all grants had one of the following politicized terms: “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” or “disparity.” This is up from 2.9% in 1990. The most politicized field is Education & Human Resources (53.8% in 2020, up from 4.3% in 1990). The least are Mathematical & Physical Sciences (22.6%, up from 0.9%) and Computer & Information Science & Engineering (24.9%, up from 1.5%), although even they are significantly more politicized than any field was in 1990.

U.S. Dismisses Criminal Charges Against MIT Professor Accused of Hiding China Ties

Aruna Viswanatha:

Federal prosecutors dropped criminal charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor accused of hiding his China ties, saying in a Thursday filing that the government no longer believed it could prove its case at trial.

Gang Chen was arrested last January on charges of concealing posts he held in China in a grant application he had made to the U.S. Department of Energy in 2017. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that prosecutors had recommended that the Justice Department drop the case, based in part on witness testimony that investigators obtained since his arrest, citing people familiar with the matter.

One of those people included an Energy Department official who told prosecutors in recent weeks that the agency didn’t believe Mr. Chen had an obligation to disclose the posts at the time, and didn’t believe the department would have withheld the grant if officials had known about them. The Energy Department in 2017 started asking researchers for more information about their foreign connections.

“As a result of our continued investigation, the government obtained additional information bearing on the materiality of the defendant’s alleged omissions,” prosecutors wrote. “Having assessed the evidence as a whole in light of that information, the government can no longer meet its burden of proof at trial.”

The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, signed off on the dismissal, but could ask the government for more information about its decision.

“public education employment has the second lowest quit rate of any sector of the U.S. economy”

Mike Antonucci:

As is plain from the numbers, we spiked in both during the summer of 2020, and everything returned to normal soon after.

Not one of the above stories, nor any news report on the issue I have seen, contains any mention that public education employment has the second lowest quit rate of any sector of the U.S. economy, behind only federal government employment.

Where we have shortages at the moment is because people are out sick. They haven’t quit, retired or vanished from the face of the earth. Get a grip, reporters

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

How education leaders can plan for recovery

McKinsey:

From coping with childcare and digital learning to ensuring safety in an uncertain environment, students, teachers, and parents have had it rough over the past couple of years. Now, Omicron and other virus variants are further disrupting the already hard-hit education system. Where do education leaders go from here? Ahead of #EducationDay, explore our full suite of Education Insights, or dive deeper with the articles below to understand the learning gaps caused by the pandemic, and how districts can plan for recovery programs that can not only help students catch up on unfinished learning, but also tackle long-standing historical inequities in education

University puts trigger warning for ‘explicit material’ on George Orwell’s 1984

Carl Bennett:

The University of Northampton have placed a trigger warning on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, saying it contains ‘explicit material’ which some may find ‘offensive and upsetting.’

The book is a dystopian social science fiction novel, first published in 1949, discusses the idea of truth and facts within politics and how they can be changed.

Orwell’s story also gave birth to popular phrases such as “Big Brother” and “Thought Police”.

In a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, it revealed the advice introduced at the university has been placed on a number books, including Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta and Sexing The Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.

Infertility: A Lifestyle Disease?
A deep dive on causes and treatment of infertility

Zeina Amhaz:

In the US, one in eight couples, or 6.7 million peoplestruggle to conceive. A quick Twitter search of “IVF” will return scores of women sharing heartbreaking stories of failed IVF rounds and crushing miscarriages, like Breanna. Each year, the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) increases 5-10%. Considering that our only real job, biologically, is to procreate, this is very alarming. 

Probably the most popular (and controversial) work regarding infertility comes from Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In her book Count Down, Swan finds that sperm count in Western men has dropped by more than 50% in the last forty years. Even more shocking, Swan predicts that by 2045, we’ll have a median sperm count of zero, and most people will have to use ART to reproduce. The cause of this “Spermageddon?” Swan points to weight, alcohol, smoking, and, most importantly, endocrine disruptors. 

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals like phthalates, bisphenols (e.g. BPA), pesticides, and flame retardants, which are found in everyday items like plastic, food, clothes, and skincare. When we absorb them (through eating, breathing, applying lotions, and wearing clothes), these chemicals can mess with our hormones. For example, phthalates are known to lower testosterone which, in turn, lowers sperm production. Research shows that women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)— the most common cause of female infertility— have higher levels of BPA in their bodies. Even exposure to these chemicals in small amounts can have major effects on the body, as delicate hormone levels are already controlled by only slight changes.

One of the most surprising things about endocrine disruptors is that they begin to affect the body in utero, via exposure to the mother. In a previous newsletter, I wrote about new research that found BPA-containing microplastics in human placentas. Not only is it terrifying to think about “cyborg babies” (babies made out of a combination of human cells and inorganic entities) being born, but scientists have also found that the chemicals in the microplastics have an effect on the fetus’sreproductive health. After all, a female fetus develops all the eggs she will have in her lifetime in utero. One studylooked at the effects of BPA in mice and found that it caused birth defects in the mice’s grandchildren; the first generation mouse’s BPA exposure disrupted its fetus’s egg development, resulting in chromosomal abnormalities in the next generation. This suggests that the effects of endocrine disruptors can be multigenerational. In male fetuses, exposures to endocrine disruptors like phthalates have been shown to result in smaller penis size and, in adulthood, lower count sperm.

Choose life.

Why A Successful Milwaukee High School Is Closing Their Doors

Will Flanders

So, what happened? Why is HOPE closing their high school doors? 

Schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (as well as the state’s other school choice programs) receive significantly less funding per student than do traditional public schools in the same area. For instance, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) receives about $13,344 per student in state and local funds, while a school like HOPE High School receives just $8,946 per student. Not only is this amount lower than MPS, it is lower than any public school district in the state. And this doesn’t even take into account federal funds, which add $2,500 per student to MPS with a smaller amount going to private schools in the choice program.  

To overcome this deficit, private schools are required to fundraise extensively, or limit the enrollment of students utilizing the voucher in the school in favor of tuition-paying students. These financial constraints tend to limit on the supply of private schools willing to participate in the state’s school choice programs because the voucher amount is, quite simply, insufficient for a typical high school education.

“If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”

NS Lyons:

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.

He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s “Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.

“He was most concerned with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong, centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”

From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.

The bronze monument, long the subject of debate in the city, will be moved to the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota

Jennifer Calfas:

The statue, by James Earle Fraser, shows the 26th U.S. president on horseback flanked by a Native American man and African man on foot. Named the “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt,” it was commissioned in 1925 and unveiled in 1940 at the museum, which his father had helped found.

The museum requested the statue be removed in June 2020 as the movement for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted many institutions to re-examine monuments. Owned by New York City, the statue sat on public parkland. The New York City Public Design Commission approved its removal unanimously in June 2021.

‘A Stunningly Corrupt Enterprise’

Ben Zeisloft:

Canadian psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson announced that he is no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto.

In an article for The National Post, Peterson — who recently sat down with Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro in the inaugural episode of “The Search” — pointed to the school’s obsession with “Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity,” which he abbreviated simply as “DIE.”

“I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me,” Peterson said. “But that career path was not meant to be.”

Peterson voiced frustration that his “qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students… face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers” thanks to diversity mandates.

“These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified ‘minority’ candidates were ever overlooked,” he wrote. “My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?”

Peterson pointed to other trends destroying academia “and, downstream, the general culture” — including the end of objective testing and “grievance studies” disciplines. He also observed that colleagues must bow to diversity mandates by crafting “DIE statements” to obtain research grants.

A moment for humility and a new path forward on reading

Kareem Weaver:

Where is the humility? Where is the institutional courage to admit mistakes and move forward?

Individuals in leadership positions often derive their credibility from being the most knowledgeable person in the room, the unquestioned oracles of knowledge. This moment in education, however, requires leaders who will publicly position themselves as the best learners, not the best knowers. The sector has to reacquaint itself with the science of reading, unlearn some habits, suspend beliefs, and be vulnerable enough to embrace the inevitable learning curve. It will take grace and humility.

The NAACP considers reading proficiency to be a civil rights issue because The Information Age requires literacy to participate fully in a society that pushes nonreaders, systematically, to its margins. Given this, the education sector’s willingness to ignore the neuroscience and research consensus about literacy instruction is worth examining. What allows universities to have internal debates about science and methods that have long been settled? Why would dyslexia receive scant attention in an American credentialing program? Why would thousands of K-12 systems continue to use curricula that, even the authors now acknowledge, must be revised to address deficiencies in core elements of literacy instruction? And why would K-12 systems ignore mountains of evidence showing that foundational reading skills are undertaught?

The same universities who claim to be leading research institutions are eerily silent about their failure to apply the research in preparing teaching candidates. Likewise, the K-12 institutions with mission statements citing equity have systematically created a resource gap where those without money to overcome inadequate instruction are consigned to the margins of society while their better-resourced peers seek tutors or more appropriate school placements. Rather than address these issues, we have focused on untangling America’s racial quagmire – as if these things are mutually exclusive. We seem oblivious to the impact race and class have on our tolerance for student failure and our willingness to promote external control narratives that undermine collective teacher efficacy and obfuscate the central issues: we have not provided direct, systematic, explicit instruction to teach reading; neither curricula nor materials have been evidence-based; professional development dollars have not been used well; assessment has been misunderstood and abused; interventions haven’t been timely; and the dearth of humility from leaders and institutions have limited the possibility of effective change management.

Google is working on a fix for the Camera app randomly changing QR code URLs on Android 12

Manuel Vonau:

As reported and investigated by German publication Heise, Google Camera routinely runs into at least three distinct errors. The first one revolves around a few country-code top level domains (ccTLD), and it doesn’t matter if a QR code only directs you to an affected domain (like the non-existent Austrian https://fooco.at) or if it links to further directories (https://fooco.at/bar/index.htm). If the domain’s second level (fooco) ends with certain strings, Google Camera will automatically insert a dot, turning a link like https://fooco.at into https://foo.co.at. Heise tested further combinations and found that the issue also exists for .au, .br, .hu, .il, .kr, .nz, .ru, .tr, .uk, and .za. The affected strings at the end of the second level include co, com, ac, net, org, gov, mil, muni, and edu, but not or, gv, and k12.

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

My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

Stacey Lance:

I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students’ development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently. 

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Students Have Legal Recourse Against Unreasonable Covid Restrictions

Max Schanzenbach & Nadav Shoked:

Many colleges and universities are starting the new semester online and imposing draconian restrictions on campus. At Yale, students are under a campuswide quarantine and told not to eat at restaurants, even outdoors. At Princeton, officials have banned undergraduates from traveling outside the area for “personal reasons”—thus conveniently permitting travel for athletic teams. In contrast, the personal lives of faculty, staff and administrators continue uninterrupted. Apparently Covid is a threat only to the young who can easily be bullied into submission.

The move to online learning and other intrusive policies goes beyond what any state or federal health agency is recommending, let alone requiring. The Biden administration opposes school shutdowns. Yet universities still are cautioning that online learning may be extended.

But students may have legal recourse. The university-student legal relationship is grounded in contract. Under contract-law principles, universities probably have the power to impose some health restrictions as circumstances arise. But any imposition must be done in good faith and based on evidence, not on the desire of a panicky provost’s office to “do something.” What harms are caused by students socializing, given the minuscule risk Covid presents to vaccinated 20-somethings? And why not apply these rules to higher-risk faculty and staff? …

A post mortem on the Chicago Teacher walk out that fizzled

Left Voice:

Our union members were going in. Some people stopped responding to our chat after the first day. They needed their paycheck, or they didn’t want to ruffle feathers, whatever their reason, they turned their back on us. This was happening everywhere. Since this wasn’t an official strike, people did not see the problem with going in. The problem is it completely undermined our action! Our leverage decreased with the growing amount of people who went in. Second, Mayor Lightfoot loves to play hardball, even when she is spouting nonsense. This was wearing down the leadership team, and it was very clear in the tenor of their webinars with us that they were getting exhausted. Still, as one colleague of mine put it, they are not allowed to be more exhausted than those of us who have to go into these buildings every day!

CPS put out a counter proposal that had some arbitrary guidelines in place– they’d pass out more KN95 masks. They’d rely on school safety committees (an unpaid volunteer position that some schools don’t even have set up!) to determine whether a class or school should flip remote. This agreement was by and large a farce. The House of Delegates, however, voted to suspend our work action that very night while waiting for membership to vote on the agreement. In exhaustion and with a strong tone of defeat, everyone from Jesse Sharkey to Stacy Davis Gates to Jen Johnson heavily encouraged us to vote yes on the agreement. “It’s not what we deserve, but it’s better than what we had,” was the message. 

We were back in the schools the next day, students were back the day after that, and the agreement barely passed with a 55% approval rating. I consider this agreement to be a huge embarrassment for the union. I can’t name a single colleague or friend who voted for it. I believe it is going to be a big struggle to bring our members in for our next action, knowing how played we all felt.

When we walked into our buildings, we were greeted with a little more hand sanitizer and a few more masks. Student attendance has been abysmal, because parents are making the right decision to keep their students safe, when the people in power chose to forget them.

Mike Antonucci:

* “I consider this agreement to be a huge embarrassment for the union. I can’t name a single colleague or friend who voted for it. I believe it is going to be a big struggle to bring our members in for our next action, knowing how played we all felt.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Being-in-the-Room Privilege; Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference

Olúfémi O. Táíwò:

To say what’s wrong with the popular, deferential applications of standpoint epistemology, we need to understand what makes it popular. A number of cynical answers present themselves: some (especially the more socially advantaged) don’t genuinely want social change – they just want the appearance of it. Alternatively, deference to figures from oppressed communities is a performance that sanitizes, apologizes for, or simply distracts from the fact that the deferrer has enough “in the room” privilege for their “lifting up” of a perspective to be of consequence.

I suspect there is some truth to these views, but I am unsatisfied. Many of the people who support and enact these deferential norms are rather like Helen: motivated by the right reasons, but trusting people they share such rooms with to help them find the proper practical expression of their joint moral commitments. We don’t need to attribute bad faith to all or even most of those who interpret standpoint epistemology deferentially to explain the phenomenon, and it’s not even clear it would help. Bad “roommates” aren’t the problem for the same reason that Helen being a good roommate wasn’t the solution: the problem emerges from how the rooms themselves are constructed and managed.

To return to the initial example with Helen, the issue wasn’t merely that I hadn’t grown up in the kind of low-income, redlined community she was imagining. The epistemic situation was much worse than this. Many of the facts about me that made my life chances different from those of the people she was imagining were the very same facts that made me likely to be offered things on their behalf. If I had grown up in such a community, we probably wouldn’t have been on the phone together.

I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright.

Stacey Lance:

I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students’ development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently. 

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.

Madison’s literacy task force report background, notes and links.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Perspective

School closures have been made with politics in mind — not science

Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis:

The long-term closing of schools, and the harm it did to children nationwide, was a decision based not on health, but on politics — thanks to teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they fund.

A study by researchers at Michigan State University found that when governors left it up to districts whether to have in-person education in the fall of 2020, the “decisions were more tied to local political partisanship and union strength than to COVID-19 severity.”

This despite the fact that politicians already knew children were less at risk for COVID.

Follow the science? More like follow the political science.

Mental, physical harm

Freedom of Information Act documents showed major teachers unions lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on school reopenings. In fact, e-mails The Post acquired revealed that the CDC adopted Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers’ suggested language for this guidance nearly verbatim at least twice. Government officials were also told to factor teachers union contract negotiations into their reopening guidance. 

These union-induced school closures harm students academically, mentally and physically, with virtually no reduction in overall coronavirus transmission or child mortality.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on Censorship

Tom McKay:

The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of sciences. On Wednesday, it published a report on what it calls the “online information environment,” challenging some key assumptions behind the movement to de-platform conspiracy theorists spreading hoax info on topics like climate change, 5G, and the coronavirus.

Based on literature reviews, workshops and roundtables with academic experts and fact-checking groups, and two surveys in the UK, the Royal Society reached several conclusions. The first is that while online misinformation is rampant, its influence may be exaggerated, at least as far as the UK goes: “the vast majority of respondents believe the COVID-19 vaccines are safe, that human activity is responsible for climate change, and that 5G technology is not harmful.” The second is that the impact of so-called echo chambers may be similarly exaggerated and there’s little evidence to support the “filter bubble” hypothesis (basically, algorithm-fueled extremist rabbit holes). The researchers also highlighted that many debates about what constitutes misinformation are rooted in disputes within the scientific community and that the anti-vax movement is far broader than any one set of beliefs or motivations.

Commentary on equity policies

Christopher Rufo:

This year, the new segregation has extended itself into new domains: public education and public-health policy. In Denver, Centennial Elementary School launched a racially exclusive “Families of Color Playground Night” as part of its racial equity programming. In Chicago, Downers Grove South High School held a racially exclusive “Students of Color Field Trip” as part of its own equity initiatives. In the words of Denver Public Schools officials, the administrators implemented the segregated program to “create a space of belonging,” which, they said, without a hint of irony, is “about uniting us, not dividing us.”

The new segregation has also been implemented in public health-care systems, with state and federal agencies denying Covid vaccines and treatment to individuals based on race. This trend began last year, when Vermont provided the vaccine to all members of racial minorities over age 16 but denied it for whites without specific age or health conditions. Later, New York State, Minnesota, Utah, and the federal government adopted health policies that explicitly discriminate against whites, rationing Covid treatments based on race. (After public outcry, Minnesota recently backtracked on this policy, and Utah announced that it is “reevaluating” its policy, but both Utah’s and New York’s arrangements remain in place as of this writing.)

The most common justification for the new segregation is that racial minorities suffer disparities that must be rectified through “positive” discrimination, which is presented as a solution for America’s historical racism. In practice, however, these policies often descend into illogic, cruelty, and malice. Minnesota’s recently rescinded criteria, for example, would have prioritized Covid treatment for a healthy 18-year-old black female over a 64-year-old white male with hypertension, who, given the totality of circumstances, faces a much greater risk of serious illness and death. The new politics of race supplants the old science of medicine, with potentially catastrophic consequences for disfavored racial groups.

Civics: The Right to Defy Criminal Demands: Introduction

Eugene Volokh:

I’ve just finished up a rough draft of this article (6 years in the making), and I thought I’d serialize it here, minus most of the footnotes (which you can see in the full PDF). I’d love to hear people’s reactions and recommendations, since there’s still plenty of time to edit it. You will also be able to see all the posts, as they come up, here.

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Craig is trying to force Danielle to do something, by explicitly or implicitly threatening to criminally retaliate if she doesn’t go along. And, as often happens, Craig’s threatened crime is endangering not just Danielle but also innocent bystanders.

almost half of education spending in the state goes for activities other than instruction, including nearly 23% on administrative costs.

Will Flanders,

DPI itself has also contributed to this problem in a number of ways.  Nearly $150,000,000 of state education spending is retained at the state level for operations.  In addition, DPI has contributed and created the barriers for teachers to access the classroom. With barrier upon barrier to get licensed to teach, it is difficult to recruit and keep high quality teachers in Wisconsin.  If DPI believes that school districts ought to be rewarding high quality teachers with more money, they should be working to solve all of the issues outlined here.

“The past 10 years we’ve suffered with budgets designed with austerity in mind.”

In keeping with the theme that schools aren’t getting enough money, Underly paints a picture of Wisconsin’s school spending that is at odds with the reality. The Figure below shows school spending since 2008, including the projected ahead figures from the recently passed budget.

Madison’s literacy task force report background, notes and links.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Latest iteration of Texas-led antitrust complaint against Google expands claims of bad behavior

Thomas Claburn:

The alleged 2017 deal between Google and Facebook to kill header bidding, a way for multiple ad exchanges to compete fairly in automated ad auctions, was negotiated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and endorsed by both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (now with Meta) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an updated complaint filed in the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google.

Texas, 14 other US states, and the Commonwealths of Kentucky and Puerto Rico accused Google of unlawfully monopolizing the online ad market and rigging ad auctions in a December, 2020, lawsuit. The plaintiffs subsequently filed an amendment complaint in October, 2021, that includes details previously redacted.

On Friday, Texas et al. filed a third amended complaint [PDF] that fills in more blanks and expands the allegations by 69 more pages.

What it Means to Teach Gifted Learners Well

Carol Ann Tomlinson

Some people suggest that gifted education is just sort of “fluffy” or enriching-gravy on the potatoes, perhaps, but not anything especially substantial or critical in the way of mental fare. Others propose that all gifted education is what’s good for all students. Unfortunately, those two criticisms sometimes stem from observing classrooms where gifted learners are taught inappropriately.

So what does it mean to teach a highly able student well? Of course it will vary some with the age of the child, the subject, the learning style of the student-and possibly even the child’s gender or culture. Certainly appropriate instruction for such learners varies for a child who comes to school rich with experiences vs. a child who is equally able but lacks richness of experience. And it will vary with a child who has immense potential vs. a peer with somewhat less capacity. Nonetheless, there are general indicators of appropriate curriculum and instruction for highly able students (in their areas of strength)-and general indicators of inappropriate curriculum and instruction for such learners.

Voting on a mask policy vs administrative mandates

Alison Dirr:

The City of Milwaukee Common Council on Tuesday approved a new mask mandate, and Acting Mayor Cavalier Johnson plans to sign it.

But it’s not the same mask mandate that residents and businesses had grown accustomed to earlier in the pandemic.

This one comes with a likely end date — and a pared down enforcement mechanism that the city doesn’t plan to use anyway.

Madison’s literacy task force report background, notes and links.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

New Tennessee law to formalize teachers’ roles for discipline in the classroom

News Channel 9:

A recent survey from the Professional Educators of Tennessee showed 22 percent of educators were “unlikely” to remain in public education.

Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed cited student discipline and behavior as “challenging” or “very challenging.”

The group says the law will help address this issue by putting “better discipline systems and processes in place,” and giving “teachers more voice on the critical issue of student discipline.”

“The best teacher in the school cannot teach if they have an unruly classroom,” said JC Bowman, director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, a non-partisan teacher’s association based in Nashville. “We’ve got to make sure that we’re protecting our teachers and our other students as well.”

Children’s Rights Defined and Defended

C Bradley Thompson:

The fundamental question of our time is: who is responsible for educating children, parents or the government?

And only after we answer this question can we address two related questions: what should children learn and how should they learn it? The “who” determines the “what” and the “how.”

But the “who” question is partly dependent on how we answer an even more basic question: do children have a right to an education, which is in turn dependent on the most fundamental question of all: do children have rights and if they do what kind of rights do they hold? This last question is the subject of this essay. In the next and last essay in this series, I will address directly the question of whether children have a right to an education.

In my seventh essay in the series on “Who Shall Educate the Children?” I demonstrated philosophically that parents—and only parents—have the sole right, authority, and responsibility to determine how and in what their children will educated. I have made it clear in this series that government should have no role in the education of children. The very idea is grotesque and immoral.

And in the eighth essay on “The Redneck Guide to Children’s Rights,” I established, in a general way, the metaphysical conditions of childhood and how the concept of rights applies to children given their natures.

But now we need to drill down much further than we have thus far to determine what sort of claim, if any, children have on their parents to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated? 

Children and the Right to Life

With the birth of a child a complex amalgam of interconnected and interdependent rights is created. Let’s begin with the foundational right—the right to life.