Baltimore County school board race heats up with endorsements, warnings

Kristen Griffith:

There are four contested races on the fall ballot, while three candidates are running unopposed. Meanwhile, the terms of four appointed members on the 11-member board are expiring later this year; their replacements will be appointed by the next governor, likely in January. Early voting has started and Election Day is Nov. 8.

Among the conservative contenders, none has drawn as much attention as Maggie Litz Domanowski, a mother of three children now enrolled in county schools whose past social media comments have come under scrutiny. She is running in council District 3 against retired educator Diane Jean Young.

Former state Sen. Jim Brochin recently endorsed Young, citing her experience as an educator and her volunteer work as a court appointed special advocate in Baltimore County. He also accused Domanowski of backing Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, who claimed falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Anyone who aligns with Cox “is a nonstarter and should not be part of any part of leadership,” Brochin said.

Domanowski did not answer a question from The Banner about whether she supports Cox, but did say she will work with and support whoever becomes the next governor.

As a senator, Brochin passed a bill that allowed board members to be elected instead of exclusively appointed. He described himself as a “very conservative Democrat” who voted with Republicans 40% of the time in the state Senate. He said Young’s more than two decades working in the Baltimore City and county school systems make her particularly qualified to serve on the board.

Domanowski has been endorsed by two Republican County Council members seeking reelection, Wade Kach and David Marks; state Del. Kathy Szeliga, who represents Baltimore and Harford counties; and U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, a social conservative who represents Maryland’s 1st District and is running for a seventh term.

Iowa Academic Standards Hold Teachers Hostage

Joye Walker:

I retired more than a year ago, giving me many months to process the discomfort I felt in my last few years of teaching. It was a difficult time for many reasons, but one big reason stands out: a problematic curriculum that holds teachers hostage.

The Iowa Academic Standards is a set of “Clear and rigorous learning standards educators use to ensure all students are college, career, and future ready.” They are “required for all students by state law.” (https://educateiowa.gov/iowa-academic-standards)

While the intentions of the Standards are admirable, the administration of actually delivering a curriculum that satisfies these Standards is fraught with problems. Teachers are required by state law to deliver a curriculum that consists of topics strictly outlined by grade level in the Iowa Academic Standards. Teaching math is an art that requires great flexibility on the part of teachers. Most administrators do not understand what is involved in teaching mathematics or how mathematics should be taught. Within a single classroom, students demonstrate a wide range of abilities and degrees of mastery of content previously taught to them. Teachers are faced with the monumental task of figuring out how to present content in order to bring each student forward in learning new concepts.

The Iowa Academic Standards consist of some major content domains, and within each domain are found specific standards. This is a simplistic view of school mathematics. It implies that mathematics can be reduced to a finite list of topics to be taught at each grade level. Realistically, mathematics is a complex intertwining of all math and other studies learned since elementary school, including reading, science, and social studies. Mathematics builds upon previously learned skills, including reading skills, language skills, computational skills, and logic skills. At any given grade level, the Iowa Academic Standards are written with the assumption that all students have some mastery of previously taught math standards. The reality is that no two students are at the same place in terms of concept mastery, in any given classroom. The skill of teaching is to bring students along, weaving previously learned skills and concepts with new ones.

Notes on out of school Madison k-12 suspensions

Scott Girard:

In 2021-22, there were 1,714 out-of-school suspensions (OSS) given to 766 students in grades 6-8. That was up from the 986 given to 529 students in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 school year, and most significantly from the 1,459 given to 714 students in the last fully in-person school year, 2018-19.

OSS dropped at both the high school and elementary school level, the latter aided by an October 2021 change to the BEP that forbade suspensions as a punishment for students in grades 4K-5.

Among high schools, there were just 12 more OSS in 2021-22 than 2019-20, despite an extra three months of in-person instruction. The 909 suspensions last year was well below the 1,303 given out in the 2018-19 school year.

In-school suspensions (ISS), meanwhile, were down at all levels of schools with fewer students involved. The largest drop from 2018-19 came at the high school level, which went from 1,286 ISS then to 320 last year.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

MasterChef Australia judge Melissa Leong is using her ‘cool superpower’ – spreading love of food through words – to guide children through the culinary universe

Charmaine Mok

“The most valuable lesson I have learned [from children] is that cheese goes with pretty much everything,” seasoned food writer Melissa Leong tells me. She is only half-joking.

“Dairy is never a bad idea. Cheese and pasta – no matter where you come from, it’s pretty special if it’s the right combination of squidgy textures and pungent flavours.”

“Like Kraft instant macaroni and cheese?” I ask.

“Long live the blue boxes,” she replies, with a grin.

A Law School Lacked and Lost

james allan

I fell in love with the place my first week there. I was a Visiting Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, taking a sabbatical from my home institution, the University of Queensland in Australia. That was back in January of 2013. My wife and I were to spend the first half of that year in San Diego and then, as we are both native-born Canadians, I had a second sabbatical post lined up at a university in Toronto. Of course, I knew back then that USD had some of America’s best-known scholars of the theory of constitutional interpretation known as “originalism.” I’d been invited to a few of their conferences already, and I had met Professors Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild, and Steven Smith at symposia and conferences in Australia.

So it was, then, that after a big family 2012 Christmas in Toronto we put one of our kids on a train back to his Canadian university, and the other on a plane to Belgium for a bit of French immersion before she too moved across the world to start university in Canada that fall. Then my wife and I got into the second-hand car we’d bought in Toronto and drove the 2,600 odd miles to San Diego.

“1619 and the Fight for Democracy.”

Josh Christenson:

The Arlington Public Library paid Nikole Hannah-Jones the princely sum to deliver a speech titled “1619 and the Fight for Democracy.” The talk focused almost entirely on backlash to her project, which claims that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. Historians have criticized Hannah-Jones and the Times for the 1619 Project’s inaccuracies, although the project has not actually been banned.

Hannah-Jones is one of several American writers who rake in money from lucrative speaking engagements while accusing America of systemic racism. Universities and public school districts have paid Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi tens of thousands of dollars to give talks on concepts like “white fragility” and “antiracism.”

The library’s contract with Hannah-Jones prevented recording of the event and pledged to pay her $100,000 if the contract were breached. The talk was live-streamed on YouTube but has since gone private. It is still available on an internet archive.

The Daily Wire obtained internal correspondence from library officials that shows Hannah-Jones’s visit pushed the library “$7,500 over and above the ‘approved’ budget.” One official noted in the lead-up to the event that it was “getting a lot of very ignorant and negative comments” from community members.

“Elite colleges are exceptionally good at keeping rich kids rich”

:

Now several new and thoughtful books are asking whether it is fair that ostensibly meritocratic societies have handed such extensive power to a small clutch of academic institutions. Though each comes at the question differently, they all conclude that the winner take all approach to tertiary education must change.

Evan Mandery, author of Poison Ivy, focuses primarily on class. A contemporary of mine at Harvard, he now teaches at John Jay College within the publicly funded City University of New York, which gives him insight to both America’s elite and its striving lower and middle classes. His book attempts to demolish claims by the most prestigious US schools that they dedicate their tax breaks, gigantic endowments and selective admissions for the greater good.

He marshals statistics and personal stories to show that the top schools mostly educate rich people and steer them into lucrative careers that equip them to send their children and donations back to their alma maters. Sixty-three per cent of Harvard’s 2020 graduates went into finance, consulting or technology, he reports. By contrast, about 60 per cent of John Jay students work for the government or a not-for-profit organisation. “Elite colleges are exceptionally good at keeping rich kids rich,” writes Mandery.

While the few poor students who attend rich colleges see an increase in social mobility, the impact is small. Three CUNY colleges lead the nation in economic mobility: at least 10 per cent of graduates move from the lowest quintile in income to the top quintile; Harvard and Princeton fail to crack 2 per cent.

Students Are Using AI Text Generators to Write Papers—Are They Cheating?

Chris Stokel-Walker:

Educators who are becoming increasingly aware of their students’ use of text-generating tools admit to being perplexed by them, perceiving both dangers and potential benefits in their use. Cath Ellis, associate dean for education at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a leading researcher in academic integrity, believes that using AI to complete one’s homework or exams is a form of cheating. (She bases that definition on whether a student can look a lecturer in the eye and tell them what they’ve done.) But she’s not an alarmist about the tools. “I think we should stop freaking out about it and calling it an existential crisis,” she said. In fact, Ellis puts them in the same category as word processors’ built-in spelling checkers or slideshow software’s automated design suggestions. “These are tools coming into our professional and personal worlds, and we’re using them,” she said.

One of Ellis’ students admitted to the professor that she had used QuillBot, an AI-powered paraphrasing tool, to summarize sections of prior academic research she wanted to cite in her own work. The same student has also used DeepAI’s text generator to create elements of essays in the past. “I’m not particularly troubled about students using AI bots to write their essays, if I have a conversation with them about their work and they can explain it to me,” she said. It’s when they can’t explain what the bots have generated that she finds it particularly problematic. “It’s not so much that they haven’t done the work. It’s that they haven’t embodied the learning. They don’t have the knowledge on board,” Ellis said.

Free Speech, Censorship and Penn State

Ellie Silverman

One day after Pennsylvania State University shut down an event that was to feature Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, criticism continued Tuesday over the planned appearance and its abrupt cancellation.

The university initially had resisted calls to cancel the event sponsored by a student group, citing the importance of upholding free-speech rights. But officials said escalating violence caused them to cancel the Monday event shortly before it was due to begin. The combination of agitated demonstrators, at least one physical altercation, a crowd surge toward the event venue, and chemical spray from both the crowd and police officers led to the decision, Penn State officials said.

The Rise of Biodigital Surveillance

Aaron Kheriaty:

CLEAR isn’t the only enterprise working at the intersection of biometric and digital authentication. Plans for digital IDs have been in the works for several years, but they gained traction during the pandemic. ID2020 is a nonprofit alliance founded in 2016 with seed money from Microsoft, Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Rockefeller Foundation, Cisco, and Gavi (a vaccine alliance founded by the Gates Foundation). The stated mission of ID2020 is to provide digital identities for all people worldwide by 2030. Digital IDs will be tied to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans, demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial transactions, and bank accounts.

Almost two years before Covid, ID2020 published an article titled “Immunization: An Entry Point of Digital Identity.” It argued that “immunization poses a huge opportunity to scale digital identity.” The article noted cumbersome inefficiencies with paper immunization records and delineated how health challenges in developing nations could be leveraged as the pretext for implementing digital IDs. The year before, Seth Berkeley, CEO of Gavi, published a piece in Nature making the same argument: To achieve 100 percent vaccination rates in underdeveloped nations, we need digital IDs. Gavi has promoted the same message at gatherings of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The ID2020 article attempted to frame the benefits of this system as follows: “Because immunization is conducted in infancy, providing children with a digital child health card would give them a unique, portable digital identity early in life.” It goes on to explain that “as children grow, their digital child health card can be used to access secondary services, such as primary school, or ease the process of obtaining alternative credentials. Effectively, the child health card becomes the first step in establishing a legal, broadly recognized identity.”

This may at first glance sound sensible. But consider: If an impoverished family doesn’t accept the health NGO’s preferred interventions for its children, these children may not be provided any other opportunity to establish a “legal, broadly recognized identity” necessary to access things like primary school. In other words, you are literally nobody until you are vaccinated.

Affirmative action commentary

Richard Sander:

In most public discussions, “affirmative action” in higher education is treated as one of the core issues that divides liberals from conservatives. It is rare in public life to hear a Democratic leader criticize the use of racial preferences in college admissions, and it is equally rare to hear a Republican support them. Supreme Court opinions on the use of preferences have typically broken down as splits between “liberal” supporters and “conservative” critics, and many journalists have opined that such preferences are now in great danger because of the six-to-three conservative majority on the Court.

The ideological divide on this issue has always mystified me because, as a lifelong liberal who tries to do objective empirical research on social issues, current admissions practices at colleges and universities strike me as both inconsistent with liberal values and ineffective in achieving liberal goals.

In this brief article, I explain why this is and suggest what universities should do if the Court does substantially restrict current practices.

Almost every liberal who knows about Harvard’s “Jewish quota” from the 1920s and 1930s finds it repellent.

Let’s begin by being clear on terminology. “Affirmative action” in higher education embraces many activities that the plaintiffs in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases are not challenging. Investing in educational pipelines to improve under-performing high schools, improving outreach to underrepresented students, improving admissions practices to better capture student ability—these all reflect the traditional meaning of “affirmative action,” and no one is questioning their legality.

The practices used by Harvard and UNC, and challenged by Students for Fair Admissions, are racial preferences—admitting some students with weak credentials, and rejecting other students with strong credentials, strictly based on which racial “box” they check.

“the success of the New York Times may be bad news for journalism.”

Ben Smith:

Two high-profile moments from that period continue to define the paper’s public brand for many readers: The firing of opinion editor James Bennet over a column by Senator Tom Cotton that called for sending the military into cities to suppress rioters and looters; and the company’s broad embrace of the 1619 Project’s provocative reinterpretation of slavery’s place in American history.

The culture wars are playing out in the newsroom now in far subtler ways these days. And in classic Times fashion, management is pushing them in two directions at the same time. They’re trying to deliver some staffers’ hopes from the summer of  2020 of a more progressive workplace and broad-minded journalism, while also doing what they can to ensure that the insurgency of 2020 never happens again.

But nobody seems entirely to know where the place is headed, ambitious internal figures are hedging their bets, and what began as a civil war has slid into a kind of frozen conflict, a distracting identity crisis at the heart of a company that Wall Street would like to transform.

On the progressive side of the ledger, the Times has installed a new administrative layer in the newsroom aimed at implementing a modern workplace culture. The new roles are neither reporters nor editors, but university-style administrators, focused variously on culture, careers, trust, strategy and DEI.

People I spoke to in those jobs find their own mandates confusing, however, in classic Timesian fashion. Their roles amount, as one told me, to trying to enact radical cultural change at the institution — from an old, white conservative institution to a progressive, inclusive one — as slowly as possible.

K-12 tax & spending climate: curious double taxation via Madison’s water utility

Chris Hubbach:

While supporting the proposal, Commissioner Ellen Nowak questioned why the utility continues to funnel nearly $8 million per year to the city’s general fund through what’s known as payments in lieu of taxes.

“Really, this is a double tax on ratepayers,” Nowak said. “If the city was truly concerned about the rate impact … it might look at using at least a portion of a pilot payment to offset the rate increase.”

Cambridge University Under Fire for Teaching ‘Woke’, Gender-Neutral German

Leslie Eastman:

One language at a time.

As an undergraduate, I studied German as part of the requirements for the science degree. When my son got bored with Spanish in high school, he asked to learn the language, and we spent a year with a fabulous instructor associated with the German Pacific School in San Diego learning “der/die/das.” German has been helpful to both of us during our many adventures in Central Europe.

So, imagine my shock at discovering that one of the most prestigious language schools in the world thought it was a great idea to teach “woke” German.

It aimed to encourage students to speak more “inclusively” and not fall foul of those who may be offended by sex-specific pronouns. But the University of Cambridge’s decision to say Auf Wiedersehen to teaching gendered German has prompted warnings from linguists that students risk making a fool of themselves when talking with native speakers.

..Course managers said they encouraged students and staff to choose newer forms with plural nouns.

Harvard pays students to support Supreme Court affirmative action protest

J Sellers Hill:

Convening for its weekly general meeting Sunday, the Harvard Undergraduate Association voted to allocate $2,700 toward the Harvard Affirmative Action Coalition to support its demonstrations at the Supreme Court later this month.

The allocation was the first to make use of the Association’s new “HUA Helps” grant program, which was established at the same meeting. HAAC plans to hold demonstrations in support of Harvard’s race-conscious admission policies when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in an anti-affirmative action lawsuit brought against the University later this month.

HUA Co-Presidents LyLena D. Estabine ’24 and Travis Allen Johnson ’24 opened the meeting with updates regarding the Association’s new “Social Life Fund,” which aims to subsidize accessible social events for undergraduates, such as those organized by House Committees.

Music teacher killed by truck / bike crash

Olivia Herken:

On Thursday morning, Tom Heninger was on his way to do something he loved.

A lifelong musician and former music teacher at Watertown High School, Heninger, 71, was riding his bike the few blocks from his home Downtown to Monona Terrace to volunteer at the annual Wisconsin Music Educators Association conference, something he did every year.

While crossing John Nolen Drive against a red light, police said, Heninger collided with a truck and later died.

Friends and colleagues remembered Heninger as a loving music teacher and friend who could form deep connections with anyone, especially his students.

Originally from Lake Como, Heninger graduated from Lake Geneva High School and UW-Stevens Point. After college, he began working as a music teacher in the Watertown School District in 1974, where he stayed until his retirement in 2009.

Madison West high school fight: 25 students and a strong-arm robbery in which police recovered marijuana, fake IDs, fake currency and a spent shell casing.

Chris Rickert:

Officers searching the vehicle the suspects arrived in found the marijuana and other items, the blog said. Lisko said that while no charges have been filed, a detective has been assigned to the matter.

Principal Dan Kigeya said in an email home to parents Thursday afternoon that “staff responded to the incident quickly, and due to the large number of students involved, requested support from the City of Madison Police Department.”

He also said some students reported that a weapon might have been involved in the incident, but a search of the area with a police dog didn’t turn up one. Lisko confirmed no weapons were found.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said later Thursday that seven students had been involved in the fight. He had not responded to a request to clarify whether the district was aware of other details in the incident and whether all of the people involved are district students.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“The meek will inherit the earth, especially those humble enough to raise children”

Kevin DeYoung

True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet faces a bleak demographic future. Many major European nations—such as Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Spain—have a TFR of 1.50 births per woman or lower, disastrously below the replacement rate of 2.1. Italy’s future is especially grim, as that country has one of the lowest TFRs in the world, just 1.22. Virtually every country in Europe—including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark—has a TFR below 1.8. Only France, with a TFR of 2.03, comes close to the replacement rate. Decline is on its way. The Russian population is already contracting. Germany’s population is on pace to shrink from 83 million to around 70 million over the next thirty years. If trends do not reverse, Europe’s population will plummet from 750 million today to less than 500 million by the end of the century.

The numbers for East Asia are even worse. Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan each have a TFR around 1.0; South Korea’s is 0.81. These countries make aging and shrinking Japan, with its TFR of 1.37, look almost vibrant. And whatever military and economic power resides in China, increasingly children do not. Despite the replacement of the notorious one-child policy by a two-child policy in 2016 and then a three-child policy in 2021, China’s birthrate has continued to tumble. As recently as 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China’s population would peak in 2029. But the decline has already started. This year, for the first time since the Great Famine (1959–61), China’s population has shrunk, by just over 1 percent since 2021, according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

For many years, the United States appeared to be an exception to the rule of declining birthrates in the industrialized world. In 2007 the United States had a TFR of 2.1, whereas the figure for the European Union was below 1.6. But since then, the U.S. birthrate has fallen by 20 percent, to as low as 1.73 according to some estimates. What looked like American exceptionalism less than a generation ago now looks like mere delay.

At no time in history have people been having fewer children. In most countries the number of births per woman is well below the replacement rate, and even in countries with a high TFR, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, the rate is dropping. The human race seems to have grown tired of itself.

The reasons for declining fertility are no doubt many and varied. Surely, some couples want to have more children but are unable to do so. Others struggle with economic pressures or health limitations. But fertility does not plummet worldwide without deeper issues at play, especially when people around the world are objectively richer, healthier, and afforded more conveniences than at any time in human history. Though individuals make their choices for many reasons, as a species we are suffering from a profound spiritual sickness—a metaphysical malaise in which children seem a burden on our time and a drag on our pursuit of happiness. Our malady is a lack of faith, and nowhere is the disbelief more startling than in the countries that once made up Christendom. “I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,” God promised a delighted Abraham (Gen. 26:4). Today, in the lands of Abraham’s offspring, that blessing strikes most as a curse.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine and a “race to oblivion” in his book The Population Bomb. Fifty years later, the bomb has not detonated. Today, we must fear population bust rather than boom. The list of Very Bad Things—as Jonathan Last calls the consequences of declining fertility in his 2013 book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting—is long and depressing: an aging population, a shrinking workforce, a declining tax base, a decrease in technological and ­industrial dynamism, difficulty in finding a spouse, empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure, unfunded entitlements, and a general disquiet as more and more people get older and sicker with fewer people to care for them. Some future president might be forced to coin the campaign slogan, “It’s midnight in America.”

Last emphasizes economic and national concerns, the sort of developments that get the attention of presidents and parliaments. But the problems with declining fertility, and the accompanying collapse of the family, go much deeper. Whittaker Chambers was led to reject atheism by studying the miracle of his infant daughter’s ear. As he watched his daughter eat in her high chair, an “involuntary and unwanted” thought entered his mind: “Those intricate perfect ears” could have been “created only by immense design.” Faith can give us a heart for children, but children can also give us the eyes of faith.

Choose life.

Machines Can Craft Essays. How Should Writing Be Taught Now?

Susan D’Agostino:

“It doesn’t feel like something I’d write, but it also doesn’t not feel like something I’d write,” a North Carolina State University student said about their work integrating prose from an artificial intelligence text-generating program into a final course essay. Paul Fyfe, associate professor of English and the student’s instructor in the Data and the Human course, had asked students to “cheat” in this way and then reflect on how the experiment tested or changed their ideas about writing, AI or humanness.

Humans have long relied on writing assistance powered by artificial intelligence to check spelling and grammar, predict text, translate or transcribe. Now, anyone with an internet connection can access an AI tool such as OpenAI or Moonbeam, give it a prompt and receive—in seconds—an essay written in humanlike prose.

Instructors who are concerned that students will use these tools to cheat may hold fast to in-class writing assessments or install surveillance tools to try to detect misconduct. But others argue those are fools’ errands. AI-generated prose is original, which prevents plagiarism software from detecting it.

What Will It Take to Keep SF Students in School Amid the Spike in Absenteeism?

Written by Ida Mojadad, Research by Liz Lindqwister

Chronic absenteeism in the San Francisco Unified School District has more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels, rising from 14% to 28%, according to preliminary data for 2021-22. A student is considered chronically absent when they miss 10% of the 180-day school year.

The impacts have fallen unevenly across San Francisco, with the highest concentrations of students repeatedly skipping class happening in the southeastern parts of the city.

Phonics Is Back; Did It Ever Leave Catholic Schools?

Joan Frawley Desmond:

Today, Units of Study is reportedly used in about one-quarter of U.S. elementary schools. But its primary author, Lucy Calkins, an influential Columbia University Teachers College professor, has been accused of failing millions of students who needed evidence-based techniques for building literacy, prompting her to add more phonics to her program.

And Donoghue, now the executive director of the Secretariat of Catholic Education for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), believes that the nation’s parochial schools can learn from this national reckoning with untested “whole language” or “blended literacy” methods — though most diocesan institutions never fully abandoned phonics, and their students typically score better than their public-school peers on standardized reading assessments.

“Lucy Calkins was the guru who advocated the idea that if you share rich, high-quality literature with students they will imbibe it, and you will create a reader,” Donoghue told the Register. She said that a child who lives in an environment rich in literature can benefit from that advantage. “But it isn’t the case for all children,” she added. “And when you deprive them of the rules, the building blocks of language itself, you make reading inaccessible for children.”

Things were bad. Then they got worse. So we wrung our hands. And nothing changed.

Alan Borsuk:

How willing are people, including education leaders and politicians, to tackle the needs of kids? The generally predictable reactions to the NAEP scores don’t provide encouragement.

The huge disruptions in schooling nationwide are become matters more for unhappy memories than present concerns. And it appears that many aspects of education are returning to the way they used to be. That’s good in some ways — and worrisome in others. There were big needs before COVID. There are big needs now. Is there much willingness to address them urgently and honestly?

“Party speak” and a COVID lab leak analysis

Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao:

Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

Commentary:

Pro-Publica (with Vanity Fair) is putting their reputation on the line with a very damning report suggesting COVID emerged from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The new information isn’t about the virus but about political reports that indicate that there was some kind of emergency at the lab in November of 2019, an emergency that was so serious Xi himself got involved.

“That it was the largest decrease in the country is also embarrassing”

Dick Hall-Sizemore

Governor Youngkin declared it “catastrophic” and proceeded to blame his predecessors.

It should be pointed out that the Northam administration and the “mainstream media” had begun sounding alarms several years ago. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, much criticized on this blog, declared in 2018 that “Virginia’s failing grade on reading SOLs must not be tolerated.” The administration began to take steps after the release of the 2019 NAEP scores to address the problem.  James Lane, then Superintendent of Public Instruction, expressed his dismay over the widening gap in the reading scores and declared the Department of Education (DOE) would examine the methods used by divisions in which students had scored well with an eye to determining whether those methods could be replicated in other divisions.  He also scheduled a statewide literacy summit in early 2020 in Charlottesville to address the problem. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and whatever was decided at that summit took a back seat to the efforts just to keep schools operating at some level during the crisis.  As the pandemic eased and schools re-opened to in-person instruction, it was recently pointed out on this blog that the Northam administration’s outgoing budget “prioritized reading initiatives for 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders.”

What has Governor Youngkin proposed? For months, his administration has advocated increasing accreditation standards and the SOL “cut scores.” He reiterated those goals in the wake of the NAEP scores. The top priority listed in the Governor’s news release was “Raise the Floor and the Ceiling” and the fourth priority was “Hold Ourselves and Our Schools Accountable.” Those goals were also expressed by Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera, as reported by Jim Bacon on this blog.

“Towards a More Vital World.”

Riva Tez vía disgraced propagandist

“1. Get your kids out of school (prison for the youth) 2. Bust your grandparents out of senior homes (prison for the aging) 3. Fire your psychiatrist (prison for you mind).”A revolt against the modern world and all the ways it lies and commodifies, pacifies us, stuns us like cattle. The sun set behind her, we crouched in our lawn chairs on the concrete, smoking, sweating. Apostates finally affirming our identities.

Parents & School Boards, Redux

Robert Zimmerman:

First we Sandra Hernden in Michigan. When her autistic child’s grade scores plummeted because he could not handle remote learning during the Wuhan panic, she began to raise the issue repeatedly with the Chippewa Valley School Board in Michigan, trying to show them that there was no scientific reason to isolate little kids, and that such remote learning policies were very detrimental not only to her son, but all the children in the schools.

The board not only refused to listen, it responded vindictively,so viciously in fact that Hernden as since filed a lawsuit [pdf]. First, the board’s secretary, Elizabeth Pyden, wrote Herndon’s work supervisor, accusing Herndon of expressing “anger, disrespect, and veiled racism.” This immediately caused an investigation to be mounted against Herndon which could have resulted in her losing her job.

Herndon by the way is a police officer. Her supervisors reviewed the evidence and cleared her. They understood that, according to the first amendment, they had no right to silence her, and the board’s attempt to use its power to punish her was actually illegal.

Since Herndon refused to back down, the school board’s president, Frank Bednard, decided to take more serious action. He wrote the Department of Justice, essentially making a criminal referral that asked if there was anything federal law enforcement could do “to curb this behavior by these people.”

What a thug. Bednard didn’t like the opinions of Herndon and other parents, so the obvious solution is to sic the Gestapo on them.

Free speech, law schools and the judiciary

Law & Crime:

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, hosted the 2022 Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture and live-streamed the event on YouTube, as it has in previous years. Past speakers included Alito’s fellow Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.

Justice Samuel Alito delivered remarks Tuesday evening in friendly territory — where attendees revere him as the author of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in what is arguably the crowning achievement of the conservative legal movement. …

When asked about the status of free speech on college campuses and in law schools in particular, Alito called the status quo “pretty abysmal,” “disgraceful,” and “really dangerous for our future as a united, democratic country.”

“We depend on freedom of speech,” Alito said. “Colleges and universities should be setting the example, and law schools should be setting the example for the university because our adversary system is based on the principle that the best way to get at the truth is to have a strong presentation of opposing views. So, law schools should be free to speak their minds without worrying about the consequences, and they should have their ideas tested in rational debating.”

A Closed Discussion on Academic Freedom?

Colleen Flaherty:

There’s mounting faculty opposition to an invitation-only, no-media-allowed academic freedom conferencescheduled for next week at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The conference, headlined by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel and organized by the business school’s Classical Liberalism Initiative, has been criticized as pre-emptively limiting dissent in the name of open discourse.

Critics also fault the conference for platforming such speakers as Amy Wax, Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, who is known for making racist remarks—including to and about students.

“While we respect the rights of free speech and academic freedom, both are meant to encourage debate and discussion that can test those assertions,” more than 30 Stanford professors from a variety of fields said in a statement asking Stanford to distance itself from the conference. “The organizers have in fact gone out of their way to create a hermetically-sealed event, safe from any and all meaningful debate, filled with self-affirmation and self-congratulation, an event where racism is given shelter and immunity.”

Largest score declines in NAEP mathematics at grades 4 and 8 since initial assessments in 1990

Nation’s Report Card:

In 2022, the average fourth-grade mathematics score decreased by 5 points and was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2005; the average score was one point higher compared to 2003. The average eighth-grade mathematics score decreased by 8 points compared to 2019 and was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2003. In 2022, fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics scores declined for most states/jurisdictions as well as for most participating urban districts compared to 2019. Average scores are reported on NAEP mathematics scales at grades 4 and 8 that range from 0 to 500

U.S. adults under 30 now trust information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets

Jacob Liedke and Jeffrey Gottfried:

The share of adults under 30 who express at least some trust in information from social media is at its highest level (tied with summer 2019), while the share with trust in national news is at its lowest level (tied with last year). Indeed, the 6 percentage point gap between the share of young adults who trust social media sites and the share who trust national news outlets is the smallest for any age group since the Center first asked this question in 2016.

Adults in all other age groups remain considerably less likely to trust information from social media sites than information from national and local news outlets. This is largely due to much lower levels of trust in the information they get on social media sites. Whereas half of adults under 30 have at least some trust in the information on these sites, the share falls to 36% among those ages 30 to 49, 25% among those 50 to 64, and just 20% among those 65 and older. In turn, older Americans, particularly those 50 and older, are often more likely than younger Americans to express trust in national and local news outlets.

Local news outlets are the most trusted among all age groups, but trust in these outlets among Americans overall is at its lowest point in recent years. While a large majority of Americans (71%) have some or a lot of trust in the information they get from local news outlets, this is down from a high of 85% in both 2019 and 2017. This decline has occurred across many demographic groups and in both political parties.

Priorities amidst long term, disastrous reading results: Madison’s Jefferson Middle School renaming committee restarts work

Scott Girard

After stalling out earlier this year, a Madison School Board ad hoc committee considering a new name for Jefferson Middle School reconvened Tuesday evening.

The School Board originally appointed the committee in March after then-Jefferson principal Sue Abplanalp made a renaming request to the board Feb. 28. The district received 42 proposals for new names by the April 8 deadline.

Britanica on Thomas Jefferson.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Tell parents truth: Enough with the happy talk

Joanne Jacobs:

Tell parents the unpleasant truth about learning loss, writes Andrew Rotherham in a story on the state NAEP scores in the The 74. “The disaster and inequity of pandemic policies is now in clear focus,” he writes. Despite a few outliers — Department of Defense and Catholic schools — “it’s an across-the-board disaster for the United States.”

“Students already furthest from success in school were most impacted,” he writes. “Thirty-eight percent of eighth-graders are at a level in mathematics that leaves them functionally unprepared to fend for themselves in the world, let alone pursue success in various college and career opportunities.”

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Civics: “McGovern’s manager, Frank Mankiewicz, lamented that the campaign had given in to pressure from wild-eyed radicals, “the cause people.””

David Mikics:

The Democratic presidential wannabes of 1972 were a rabbit hutch of also-rans, another sad likeness to the present day. “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here … Except Maybe Ted Kennedy …,” Thompson wrote—but Kennedy wasn’t running. Instead, Hubert Humphrey was in the house, “a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture,” Thompson observed. By late spring Humphrey, the Joe Biden of his day, was the last chance of the anti-McGovern faction.

The runt of the litter was John Lindsay, mayor of New York, a basket case of a city with a towering crime rate and over-the-top welfare rolls. In Florida he courted the Jewish vote, donned a scuba suit and acquired a tan, but this didn’t help him in the primary. Instead Florida went to the racist troglodyte George Wallace.

The early front-runner was Maine Sen. Ed Muskie, anointed by Big Labor and the Democratic establishment. Muskie called his chartered election train the “Sunshine Special.” On board was football star Rosey Grier, who sang “Let the Sun Shine In” (Grier had tackled Sirhan Sirhan after he killed RFK). Muskie gave people absolutely no reason to vote for him, and so he was a goner. After “crying in the snow” in New Hampshire, Muskie was eclipsed by McGovern, who crushed the competition in Wisconsin’s primary.

Here Nixon showed the streak of nobility that so many have denied him. The president wrote a letter in longhand to Eagleton’s 13-year-old son Terry: “What matters is not that your father fought a terribly difficult battle and lost. What matters is that in fighting the battle he won the admiration of foes and friends alike because of the courage, poise and just plain guts he showed against overwhelming odds.”

The Eagleton scandal was a serious blow, but even without it, McGovern would have lost. He was forever saddled with the spectacle of the hippies who canvassed for him, knocking on suburban doors with their unkempt beards, psychedelic shirts and sandals. McGovern didn’t even favor legalizing pot, but that didn’t matter. Except for the Black communist Angela Davis, who campaigned for the Kremlin stooge Gus Hall (and later ran with him twice on the Communist Party ticket), every crackpot domestic terrorist-sympathizer in the land was for George McGovern.

The 1972 Democratic convention, held in Miami Beach of all places—headquarters of Jackie Gleason, where the hotel lobbies were chilled to 60 degrees so that ladies could wear their furs—looked like the disgruntled celebratory dirty flowering of 1960s youthcult. The New York and California delegations, which Mayor Daley had kept to the back of the auditorium in 1968, were now front and center, and full of colorfully attired freaks.

“$3.8 Trillion of Investment in Renewables Moved Fossil Fuels from 82% to 81% of Overall Energy Consumption’ in 10 Years”

What’s up with that?

Economist Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs (Global Head of Commodities Research in the Global Investment Research Division): “Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what’s happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82.” … The net of it is clearly we haven’t made any progress.”

Online school put US kids behind. Some adults have regrets.

Bianca Vazquez Toness and Jocelyn Gecker:

But there’s another reason for asking what lessons have been learned: the kids who have fallen behind. Some third graders struggle to sound out words. Some ninth graders have given up on school because they feel so behind they can’t catch up. The future of American children hangs in the balance. 

Many adults are pushing to move on, to stop talking about the impact of the pandemic — especially learning loss

“As crazy as this sounds now, I’m afraid people are going to forget about the pandemic,” said Jason Kamras, superintendent in Richmond, Virginia. “People will say, ‘That was two years ago. Get over it.’”

When COVID-19 first reached the U.S., scientists didn’t fully understand how it spread or whether it was harmful to children. American schools, like most around the world, understandably shuttered in March 2020.

That summer, scientists learned kids didn’t face the same risks as adults, but experts couldn’t decide how to operate schools safely — or whether it was even possible.

Free Speech Concerns Prompt Calls To Shun Yale Law Grads

Inside Higher Ed:

Now other judges are slowly signing on to Ho’s boycott, an effort that has landed at the same time Yale Law announced new student disciplinary policies and efforts to protect free speech. …

As Ho’s remarks gained traction online, the legal community responded with both praise and criticism. …

Some People Who Appear to Be in a Coma May Actually Be Conscious

Jan Claassen & Brian Edlow:

A medical team surrounded Maria Mazurkevich’s hospital bed, all eyes on her as she did … nothing. Mazurkevich was 30 years old and had been admitted to New York–Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University on a blisteringly hot July day in New York City. A few days earlier, at home, she had suddenly fallen unconscious. She had suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her brain, and the bleeding area was putting tremendous pressure on critical brain regions. The team of nurses and physicians at the hospital’s neurological intensive care unit was looking for any sign that Mazurkevich could hear them. She was on a mechanical ventilator to help her breathe, and her vital signs were stable. But she showed no signs of consciousness.

Mazurkevich’s parents, also at her bed, asked, “Can we talk to our daughter? Does she hear us?” She didn’t appear to be aware of anything. One of us (Claassen) was on her medical team, and when he asked Mazurkevich to open her eyes, hold up two fingers or wiggle her toes, she remained motionless. Her eyes did not follow visual cues. Yet her loved ones still thought she was “in there.”

She was. The medical team gave her an EEG—placing sensors on her head to monitor her brain’s electrical activity—while they asked her to “keep opening and closing your right hand.” Then they asked her to “stop opening and closing your right hand.” Even though her hands themselves didn’t move, her brain’s activity patterns differed between the two commands. These brain reactions clearly indicated that she was aware of the requests and that those requests were different. And after about a week, her body began to follow her brain. Slowly, with minuscule responses, Mazurkevich started to wake up. Within a year she recovered fully without major limitations to her physical or cognitive abilities. She is now working as a pharmacist.

Zimbabwe’s Preganant schoolgirls

The Economist:

Ms Ndlovu was one of 4,770 Zimbabwean girls to drop out of school in 2020 because of pregnancy, up from about 3,000 the year before, according to government statistics. The true number may be higher. Siqinisweyinkosi Mhlanga, who runs Orphan’s Friend, a community centre in Tsholotsho where Ms Ndlovu now spends her days, says that there may be ten times more school dropouts in her province than the official tally. In August 2020 Zimbabwe’s government amended the Education Act to prohibit schools from expelling pregnant girls, joining a growing club of African countries that are letting pregnant teenagers continue with their education. A third of Zimbabwean women marry before they are 18.

Beyond the monumental problems with the merits of the policy, what Biden did was both illegal and unconstitutiona

Dave Cieslewicz:

Beyond the monumental problems with the merits of the policy, what Biden did was both illegal and unconstitutional. It’s illegal because he invoked the HEROES Act which was intended to aid veterans and requires the finding of a national emergency. Biden’s program would hand out money to everybody with a college loan regardless of their public service or lack thereof. And the national emergency Biden cites is COVID, which he himself declared to be over right about the time he was forgiving these debts.

Madison public schools make case for vouchers

David Blaska:

As with all public schools in progressive-run cities, education is no longer Job #1 in Madison WI. “Equity” is. The Madison Metropolitan School District is poised to scuttle its advanced honors courses in order to make the racial numbers work. Either not enough black and brown kids are doing advanced course work or too many white kids are.

“Officials called [scrapping honors classes] a pathway to becoming an anti-racist institution.”

Punishing achievement

A most-excellent report from our favorite Madison morning daily newspaper asks, “Can honors be equitable? Madison school district revisits controversial change.”

Progressivism is like rust — it never sleeps. Course work for the gifted and talented is damned as “gate-keeping knowledge in a really limited and white-washed manner,” says school board member Savion Castro, a young man with no real life accomplishments but an overweening sense of superiority informed by his own assumed victimhood.

He and a likely majority of four of the seven members instead contemplate doling out honors from within standard classes. Tellingly, WI State Journal news reporter Olivia Herken adds, “District officials did not answer questions about what students have to do to earn honors credit in standard classes.” Guesswork replaces homework!

Eliminating Advanced Courses in Madison’s Taxpayer Supported K-12 Schools, Redux. ““The problem is most of the parents are not that much involved, and they don’t even know what’s going on,” he said.”

Olivia Herken:

“Historically, the concept of advanced learning and honors has served to segregate students based on race, socioeconomic status and special education status,” School Board member Savion Castro said. And when these students do access the advanced classes, they often report feeling “isolated, feeling tokenized and experiencing a white-washed curriculum.”

“I think we all agree that disparities at this level are unacceptable, and change is needed,” board member Chris Gomez Schmidt said. “In my opinion, our focus should be on addressing the barriers to access and preparation for these courses instead of dismantling the courses themselves.”

“Stand-alone and earned honors can coexist to create more opportunity for more students,” she said.

Multiple parents contacted by the State Journal weren’t willing to be quoted for this article, saying the contentious issue had become toxic.

Green said honors courses are just a “singular point” in advanced coursework, which includes expanding advanced classes and more experiential learning and internships.

Regardless of whether the stand-alone honors courses are still around next year, the district plans to implement a universal approach to the earned-honors credits. All ninth-graders will be required to take an advanced course, which could include a course that offered earned-honors credits.

2007: Madison West High School English 10: One size fits all.

Madison West High School: Small Learning Communities

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

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”

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Lauded all-boys charter school faces Chicago Public Schools takeover

Sarah Karp:

Urban Prep is the city’s only all-male charter school operator, once celebrated nationally for getting all its seniors, who are almost all Black, into college year after year. It currently has two CPS campuses, one in Englewood and one in Bronzeville, with about 380 students. CPS budgeted $8 million for Urban Prep this year.

A third Urban Prep campus is run by the state. Earlier this month, the state board of education issued Urban Prep a “notice of revocation.” The state said Urban Prep must provide a corrective action plan and the state board will vote at its Nov. 17 whether to allow the campus to continue operating.

District officials lay out an extensive case against Urban Prep in a board report released Monday. Among the many failures cited: Only one-third of teachers are certified; a failure to provide special education services for disabled students; financial turmoil and mismanagement. Officials also lambasted the charter operator for refusing to sever ties with its founder and executive director after allegations of sexual misconductinvolving a student were substantiated against him.

“In the judgment of [Chicago Board of Education] representatives, [Urban Prep Academies] has prioritized personal considerations of executives and administrators over student health and safety, responsible fiscal management, compliance with laws, and compliance with their Charter obligations,” an attachment explaining the resolution read.

Tim King, the founder and executive director, denied sexually abusing a student. Through his attorney, he called them “wild accusations.” King filed court documents asking a judge to reverse disciplinary actions against him by CPS.

School district officials said they’ve been trying to work with Urban Prep’s board and executives to resolve the issues, but felt they weren’t negotiating in good faith, according to the attachment.

Urban Prep officials called CPS’ takeover attempt an “attack” and said the school district is “more interested in dragging down our leadership and school than in the successful education of young Black men.” They note that Urban Prep’s campuses were recognized as “commendable” by the state this year, the second highest rating.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Urban Prep leaders are planning a press called on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to “intervene and halt CPS’ move to revoke licenses of the only Black-run and Black Male focused charter school in Illinois.”

Chicago urban prep students visited Madison in 2011, as part of the effort to launch an independent charter school: Madison Preparatory Academy. The taxpayer supported Madison School board aborted that initiatiave.

Wisconsin falls from a tie for 18th to 32nd in fourth grade reading when demographics are accounted for.

Will Flanders:

Recently, results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) have caused shockwaves around the country. At least partially-related to teachers’ union-led shutdowns that kept schools closed well past when it was reasonable to do so,[i] decades of progress in scores were erased over the course of three years.[ii]  

Despite declining scores across the board, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) attempted to paint a relatively rosy picture of the results for the state. Claiming that elementary students had “bucked the trend,” a DPI press release[iii] pointed to evidence that Wisconsin students still ranked above the national average. On the surface, this information appeared to be true—Wisconsin 4th graders tied for 18th in reading and 8th graders tied for 9th. But a look below the surface reveals that Wisconsin families should be far more concerned than these rankings suggest.  

Among the key takeaways from the report include:

States like Florida and Mississippi that have implemented significant education reform show positive results for student achievement. States that have implemented extensive school-choice programs and stringent reading requirements rank higher when fair comparisons are made.

That said, the results for reading presented here show clearly that Wisconsin cannot afford to rely on its demographics to keep the state near the top in terms of education. While Wisconsin receives much deserved scrutiny for its persistent racial achievement gap, this analysis shows that problems are more widespread. Given the demographic characteristics of the state, Wisconsin should rank significantly higher on the NAEP than it does.  

There are a number of policy solutions to this issue. The implementation of school choice for all families would guarantee that no student is left out in the cold when it comes to educational choices regardless of their ZIP code or family income. Such a proposal would also provide needed competition to the public-school sector, and encourage improvement. But proposals for the improvement of public schools must be considered as well. As mentioned earlier, the fact that the state of Mississippi rises nearly to the top in the gap between predicted and actual performance is yet another signal that reading reforms in the state have been effective. Policymakers in Wisconsin ought to give these options another examination in the next legislative session.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Commentary on ai and discourse

Tyler Cowen:

Change is coming. Consider Twitter, which I use each morning to gather information about the world. Less than two years from now, maybe I will speak into my computer, outline my topics of interest, and somebody’s version of AI will spit back to me a kind of Twitter remix, in a readable format and tailored to my needs.

The AI also will be not only responsive but active. Maybe it will tell me, “Today you really do need to read about Russia and changes in the UK government.” Or I might say, “More serendipity today, please,” and that wish would be granted.

I also could ask, “What are my friends up to?” and I would receive a useful digest of web and social media services. Or I could ask the AI for content in a variety of foreign languages, all impeccably translated. Very often you won’t use Google, you will just ask your question to the AI and receive an answer, in audio form for your commute if you like. If your friends were especially interested in some video clips or passages from news stories, those might be more likely to be sent to you.

In short, many of the current core internet services will be intermediated by AI. This will create a fundamentally new kind of user experience.

It is unlikely that the underlying servi

The dumbing Down of America

Wall Street Journal:

The decline is all the more worrisome because fewer students are taking the test since fewer schools require it. About 1.35 million took the test this year, compared with 1.91 million in 2018. Playing down standardized tests lets schools rely on more subjective measures for admission, such as race or diversity.

ACT CEO Janet Godwin notes “rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure.” These benchmarks, for math or science, say, try to predict whether students are prepared to succeed in college courses. More than 40% of seniors met none of the ACT’s benchmarks for college readiness. None. No doubt many of these students will head off to campus anyway, unprepared for basic English courses, much less calculus or organic chemistry. They can thank heaven for college grade inflation.

The high schoolers in America doing the worst are from low-income families. Only 10% of students from households earning less than $50,000 met all four readiness benchmarks, compared with roughly half from homes with income north of $150,000. This is particularly depressing because education has long been an engine of upward mobility.

This dumbing down of American youth should set off alarms, as students are learning less and less even as the world grows more competitive. U.S. K-12 education is failing, and it’s getting worse despite the hundreds of billions of additional dollars that politicians have shoveled into public schools.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Civics: Google and election visibility

Gabriela Pariseau:

“Google must be investigated for its un-American efforts to sway the election,” said L. Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center. “First, researchers caught Google red-handed by proving Republican campaign emails were sent to spam. Now we’ve uncovered Google manipulating search results to hide Republican campaign websites while promoting Democratic ones. This is all an effort by Google to help Democrats and interfere in the democratic process.”

“all of them stressed the importance of more funding for public schools”

Scott Girard:

“This means a lot to me because I don’t want students who are younger than me to lack various resources and opportunities that will be offered,” La Follette’s Yoanna Hoskins said. “I want my teachers to be well compensated and respected for all the hard work they put in every single day.”

Adding that she’s not yet old enough to vote herself, she urged everyone else to do so.

“And leaders, the adults that I’m supposed to look up to, let’s work together so we can get caught up (on funding),” Hoskins said.

Among the stakes in the Nov. 8 election are school choice. GOP candidate Tim Michels has offered support for universal school choice, and while he hasn’t provided detailed plans, it’s likely that includes a voucher system without income limits, given his past statements.

Incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, running for reelection, won’t likely get many of his policy priorities regardless of the outcome of the race, given the overwhelming Republican majority in the Legislature. But he used his veto pen regularly in his first term, including on education items, like halting a “parental bill of rights” and stopping a proposed breakup of the Milwaukee Public Schools district.

Evers, along with State Superintendent Jill Underly, have proposed adding almost $2 billion for public schools across the state in the 2023-25 biennial budget.

Kabby Hong, who teaches English in Verona and was a 2022 Wisconsin Teacher of the Year, said that the “public education system is on the ballot.”

“One election can radically change the landscape for all of us,” Hong said. “That is why I’m asking all of you to go out and vote and to not give in to cynicism, apathy and indifference.”

$$ Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most k-12 school systems, now $21,720 per student!

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Test scores are not irrelevant

Dynomight

Surprised by this claim, I read the paper. I don’t want to be indelicate, but… the paper doesn’t give the slightest shred of evidence that the above claim is true. It’s not that the paper is wrong, exactly, it simply doesn’t address how useful ACT scores are for college admissions.

So why do we have all these articles that seem to make this claim, you ask? That’s an interesting question! But first, let’s see what’s actually in the paper.

Test scores are not irrelevant

The authors got data for 55,084 students who graduated from Chicago public schools between 2006 and 2009. Most of their analysis only looks at a subset of 17,753 who enrolled in a 4-year college immediately after high school. Here’s the percentage of those who graduated college within 6 years for each possible GPA and ACT score:

The Boys Feminism Left Behind

Richard Reeves:

In the span of just a few decades, an astonishing, epochal revolution in human relations has occurred. Since the widespread adoption of agriculture, patriarchy has been the norm in human societies. No longer. Patriarchy has been effectively demolished in advanced economies. 

Women are no longer dependent on men for material resources. By tearing down barriers to education and the labor market, feminism has achieved a central goal of securing for women economic independence and power. 

In 1970, when these changes began gaining steam, women were locked out of many educational and professional opportunities. On American campuses males dominated. In undergraduate enrollment they were 58 percent of students to females’ 42 percent. Men got more than 85 percent of PhDs. In law schools, about 90 percent of students were men. 

Today, undergraduate enrollment has flipped—female enrollment is at 58 percent. Women are awarded 53 percent of PhDs, and they make up the majority of law students. Whole professions, like psychology and veterinary medicine, are becoming overwhelmingly female. Forty percent of American women now earn more than the average man, up from just 13 percent in 1979.

Commentary on school cell phone policies

Scott Girard:

Students get one warning each class period if they have their phone out, and if they take it out again in that class, it goes into a bucket or is given to the teacher for the rest of the period. If a student refuses, school administrators take the phone to the office for the day. After a few times of that happening, administrators will meet with the student and their family to discuss a cell phone plan.

“The goal is we approach this whole process with a restorative spirit,” Dugas said. “We really want to make sure that we put the power in students’ hands with this process and our students have done a great job.”

Two La Follette students and one from West also shared their experiences, which differed slightly based on how their schools have treated phones.

Miriam Rodriguez Jimenez, a La Follette senior, explained that previously she used her phone to check her school email, gain easy access to Google Classroom and the calculator. With the school’s “Away For the Day” policy, however, she said “now I can’t use it for any academic purposes.”

“It has kept me from being able to check my missing assignments in a class, it has kept me from being able to text my sister to see if she needs a ride after school,” she said, adding that students can’t even listen to music during individual work time.

At West, junior Sandy Flores said she used her phone to help teach herself materials. This year, her school’s classrooms have their own rules, and in most you cannot use your phone during instructional time, but can during individual work time in some classes.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on Information Wars

Www link:

The content and placement of this warfare is hard to pin down. For example, both the CIA and the KGB worked in and around “the peace movement” in the U.S. and Europe. Their work often differed in outcome but employed the same fundamental tactic: to instigate and support movements and protests that manifest the legitimacy of one ideology (or the illegitimacy of the other). During the 1950s and 1960s the CIA was one of the main financial supports for the National Student Association, one of the largest student organizations in the U.S., with representatives on campuses across the country. The National Student Association organized protests for free speech, desegregation, anti-war, anti-colonialism, and feminism. The goal of CIA involvement was to demonstrate that the U.S. was an open society by promoting the visibility of dissent, which made America different from the Soviet Union. In “the free world,” students were able to speak their mind and protests were able to change public sentiment and even law. The CIA also used this operation to keep tabs on all the student radicals and maintain the protest movements within certain “safe limits.”[33]

The KGB by contrast was involved in orchestrating international scientific cooperation in the West for anti-nuclear proliferation protests. They leaked documents from the Pentagon to drive fear of U.S. belligerence within European nations, pushing them toward peace. They released the names and addresses of hundreds of CIA agents in a book published in English called Who’s Who in CIA. The response to this by the CIA was to publish a similar book simply called KGB.[34] More broadly, the Soviet Union promoted ideological war through cultural diplomacy involving events of high culture, including ballet, classical music, literature, science, and other aspects of Russian culture. The aim of this propaganda was to show that the U.S. was immature, capitalistic, and superficial, and therefore unable to hold a true vision for the future of the human race.[35]

A History of Palomar Observatory

Astro.caltech.edu

Palomar Observatory is among the most iconic scientific facilities in the world, and a crown jewel in the research traditions of Caltech. Conceived of nearly 100 years ago, the observatory has been in continuous scientific operation since the mid-30s, and remains productive and relevant today. Palomar is most directly the vision of George Ellery Hale (1868–1938). In a tour-de-force effort framed by the challenges of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Hale and a dedicated group of astronomers, engineers, technicians, and builders secured funding, designed the telescopes and site, and created the Observatory in much the same state as it exists today.

George Ellery Hale was the person most responsible for the building of Palomar Observatory. A graduate of MIT and a founder of Caltech, in 1928 he secured a grant of $6 million from the Rockefeller Foundation for the fabrication of a 200-inch reflecting telescope.[1] During the 1930s, he assembled a remarkable team of engineers and designers from academia and industry. Under his direction, these people set to work on the mirror, on the mounting, and on the dome and its support facilities on Palomar Mountain. A triumph of innovation, insight, persistence, and precision the telescope was dedicated in June 1948 ten years after Hale’s death.[2] This is the Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory, an instrument that after many decades of service continues to play a leading role in the advancement of astronomy and astrophysics.

Texas Sues Google for Collecting Biometric Data Without Consent

Kashmir Hill & David McCabe:

The lawsuit against Meta is continuing. It has already had one effect for Texan consumers: They must now give Meta-owned Instagram permission to analyze their facial features to use certain face filters that can transform their appearance into, for example, a puppy or a googly-eyed monster.

The legal complaint against Google was also filed in the run-up to an election. Mr. Paxton will face a Democratic challenger, Rochelle Garza, in the general election next month.

“Google has now spent years unlawfully capturing the faces and voices of both nonconsenting users and nonusers throughout Texas — including our children and grandparents, who simply have no idea that their biometric information is being mined for profit by a global corporation,” read the complaint against Google, which was filed in district court in Midland County.

I’ve Read Harvard’s Brief in the Pending Racial Preferences Case, and I Have a Question

David Bernstein:

Here is the first sentence of the second paragraph in Harvard’s brief:

This Court has consistently held that universities conducting such holistic review need not ignore that a person’s race—like their home state, national origin, family background, or interests—is part of who they are, and that in seeking the benefits of a diverse student body, universities may consider race as one among many factors provided they satisfy strict scrutiny. [emphasis added]

Harvard gives preferences to three groups: African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. The latter group is sufficiently small that I will put them aside for now. Meanwhile, I don’t think anyone is going to question whether, whatever one thinks of the concept of “race,” that African Americans constitute a “racial group” in American law and common parlance.

Help wanted: Texas’ superintendent posts becoming political pressure cooker

Dallas Morning News:

The superintendent job has always required political finesse but is now consumed by deeply divisive culture war fights on top of major classroom challenges, such as teacher fatigue and widespread student learning losses due to the pandemic.


Many superintendents increasingly find themselves under attack as local and national conservative groups target school board seats, and communities get riled up over book bans and how history is taught. So why would anyone want the job?

Wisconsin students’ math, reading scores drop from 2019

Scott Girard:

In reading, Wisconsin eighth graders saw their average score drop by five points compared to a three-point drop for the nation. Wisconsin students hadn’t had an average score this low in NAEP data going back to 1998.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“when science is politicized the questions that can be asked and the answers that can be given change as politics changes”

Alex Tabarrok and James Lee:

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

An open letter to the world

Alex Washburne:

Drs. Valentin Bruttel, Tony VanDongen and I wrote a preprint finding evidence of a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. The online discussion of our paper ranged from uncritical support to critical consideration to every manner of insult and accusation, including ableism, scientists claiming I don’t have a PhD, and more. This letter aims to clarify who I am, what colleagues and I have done in the preprint, and what my intentions are.

The new Philly superintendent’s transition team report is out. Here’s what it says.

Kristen Graham:

After months spent analyzing the Philadelphia School District from top to bottom, Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s transition team presented its report to the public and school board Thursday — with 91 short- and long-term recommendations on how to fix the system.

The 100-member committee — under the leadership ofCommunity College of Philadelphia President Donald “Guy” Generals and Andrea Custis, a former Verizon executive and president of the Philadelphia Urban League — studied academics, operations, and equity, among other issues.

Though the 114,000-student district has strengths — namely, a return to fiscal stability after a time when officials had to borrow to pay bills, and an end of the state’s takeover of the school system — the team also identified significant challenges.

Tops is academics: Student achievement is consistently low, and relatively flat on local, state and national assessments. Citywide, just 36% of district students meet state standards in reading and 22% in math. Moreover, the district “lacks a clear theory of action on how it expects to raise student achievement. When initiatives are launched, they rarely go to scale as they come from separate departments in the central office and simply layer on initiative after initiative.”

Teachers adapted to the calculator. They can certainly adapt to language models.

Arvind Narayanan:

The latest AI-related alarm: students around the world are using AI models such as GPT-3 to write essays, and getting good grades on them. 

I don’t condone cheating. But I think the availability of text generators will force changes to education which, while painful, will prove to be positive.

Consider the threat once posed by the calculator to homework that involved arithmetic. In some cases, the point of such exercises is to learn arithmetic or mathematical principles through practice. Teachers mostly shifted those exercises to the classroom, and prohibited the use of calculators in that setting.

In other cases, homework involved tedious arithmetic, but this was entirely incidental to the learning goals of the exercise (which might be about, say, gravity). After initial reluctance, teachers recognized that it was pointless to make students do these manually. Back when I was in high school, we were forced to use log tables out of the mistaken belief that there is pedagogical value in doing tedious calculations by hand. Mercifully, log tables have now joined the abacus.

Battle with Bots Prompts Mass Purge of Amazon, Apple Employee Accounts on LinkedIn

Brian Krebs:

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazoncomes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

Jay Pinho is a developer who is working on a product that tracks company data, including hiring. Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor daily employee headcounts at several dozen large organizations, and last week he noticed that two of them had far fewer people claiming to work for them than they did just 24 hours previously.

Pinho’s screenshot below shows the daily count of employees as displayed on Amazon’s LinkedIn homepage. Pinho said his scraper shows that the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, a 33 percent drop:

“American Experiment’s polling indicates that by a wide margin, Minnesotans want the public schools to prioritize academic excellence, not politics, “equity” or culture war issues”

John Hindraker:

Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts in our state. 

Today the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune both posted stories on the MPA and Minnesota’s school board races. The Pioneer Press article is long, and is titled “Social issues bring wave of conservative candidates to MN school board races.” Is educational quality now a “social issue”? 

The Pioneer Press piece is reasonably fair and includes an account of MPA’s founding:

In Minnesota last year, the Center of the American Experiment — a prominent think tank and member of the State Policy Network, which promotes conservative positions like an opposition to public-sector unions and support for voucher laws that help parents redirect tax dollars toward private school tuition — toured the state to fight against an “alarming” rewrite of the K-12 social studies standards for Minnesota schools.

“We filled rooms all across the state,” said the Center’s spokesman, Bill Walsh.

All true so far.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Doctors at CHOP say kids probably missed out on building immunity due to the pandemic

Michael DePeau-Wilson,:

Children have been presenting in large numbers and with more severe viral illnesses than typically seen, physicians at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) said.

The CHOP healthcare system, which includes two hospitals and more than 600 beds, is still grappling with a high volume of pediatric patients with viral infections, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), even after this year’s “sick season” began months earlier than expected, said chief medical officer Ron Keren, MD, MPH.

“It’s really important for everyone to know that volumes are extremely high right now in primary care pediatricians’ offices, in urgent care centers, in our emergency departments, as well as in our inpatient units,” Keren said during a press briefing on Wednesday. “It’s causing a lot of strain on the system, and it’s a phenomenon that’s happening across the country.”

Keren said that CHOP has been operating at near-full capacity every day for the last several weeks, and the demand for care is primarily coming from children, especially infants who have developed bronchiolitis caused by RSV. He attributed the surge in respiratory viruses over the past 2 months to a lack of immunity in this patient population.

“I think it gets to this idea that some folks are calling ‘an immunity debt,'” Keren said. “We think that that may be because during the pandemic, there were a few cohorts of infants born who, due to social distancing and masking, probably didn’t get exposed to these respiratory viruses, including RSV, and so they were not able to build up an immune defense to RSV and other respiratory viruses, leaving them vulnerable now.”

Although some of the cases at CHOP have been severe, with some infants being admitted to the ICU to receive a higher level of respiratory support for breathing difficulties, Keren noted that most of these illnesses have been short-lived and that typically kids are getting better within a day or two of receiving respiratory support.

Katie Lockwood, MD, MEd, an attending physician at CHOP, said that the key to addressing this surge and the immunity debt is to get children back on track with vaccinations and to teach them healthy habits, like hand washing and masking.

“During the pandemic, there were many children who did not seek routine preventative care, especially early in 2020,” Lockwood said. “So some families missed those appointments and have been slower to catch back up on those, [and] children have missed some of their routine childhood immunizations.”

She noted that when a large population falls behind on the standard vaccination schedule, community vaccination rates can decline, causing a loss of herd immunity that keeps communities safe from some of these vaccine-preventable diseases.

This concern was exacerbated, Keren noted, by several years of uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

The State of Education in Wisconsin

Will Flanders and Dylan Palmer:

How does Wisconsin stack up against other states in K-12 education? An eye-popping list from U.S. News and World Report ranked the Badger State K-12 system as the 8th best in the country.i But this rosy picture contradicts other key indicators that Wisconsin students are falling behind. So what’s going on? To get a clear look at public education in the Badger Sate requires a dive into the details.
Key Takeaways

• The academic proficiency data used by U.S. News & World Report to rank Wisconsin 8th is from the 2018-19 school year. Notably, this school year featured a transition in the governor’s mansion and was a full year before the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on Wisconsin schools.

• A sophisticated analysis of Wisconsin’s academic proficiency from 2018-19 puts Wisconsin in the middle of the pack. An Urban Institute analysis that controls for demographic factors finds Wisconsin falls out of the top ten in both math and reading on the NAEP scores.

• Academic proficiency has fallen significantly in Wisconsin since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020. Forward Exam scores fell by about 4 percentage points in reading and 5 percentage points in math.

• Chronic absenteeism in Wisconsin schools reached new heights in the most recent school year. The share of students not regularly showing up for class rose to 16% in 2020-21 school year—the highest in five years.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Counting the Cost: Wisconsin School Closures and Student Proficiency

Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt:

For the past two years, families across the country have been dealing with regular shutdowns of in-person learning in their schools. While people have speculated on what the effects of losing face-to-face class time would be on academic progress, we are beginning to have the data necessary to determine the extent of these effects. Recent data from Wisconsin allows us to conduct one of the first comprehensive analyses of this question.

Using newly available data from the 2021 administration of the state’s Forward Exam, combined with data gathered on school closures at the district level from the Fall of 2020, we describe the nature and impacts of school closure. The key findings of this research include:

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts with a higher percentage of African American students were more likely to remain closed in fall 2020. Our results show that the higher the percentage of African American students in a district, the more likely that district was to remain shut down for in-person learning.
• Districts with a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students saw larger performance declines. A district with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency declines of more than 6% in math and 7% in ELA relative to a school with no low-income students independent of closure status.
• More than 257,000 students in Wisconsin spent at least part of the 2020-21 school year without in-person learning. This represents approximately 30% of all students in the state.

Though annual security reports may imply otherwise, crime on UNC-System campuses remains low.

Graham Hillard & Natalia Mayorga :

Data “exceptions” reveal the inherent arbitrariness of the Clery Act system.Full disclosure: The authors approached these data expecting to see #MeToo-related spikes in sex-crime accusations in 2017 and 2018, at the height of the “Believe All Victims” frenzy. Yet the numbers don’t bear out that narrative. With exceptions so specific that the institutions themselves felt the need to comment on them (see below), not only rapes but fondlings, dating violence, and stalking incidents saw no dramatic jump between 2016 and 2018. Nor did the number of reports fade in 2019-21 as #MeToo waned as a political force.

Nevertheless, the aforementioned exceptions are worth noting, if only because they reveal the inherent arbitrariness of the Clery Act system. As the following excerpt from UNC-Chapel Hill’s 2019 report reveals, the number of stalking incidents experienced by Chapel Hill students nearly tripled between 2016 and 2017.

How to End the Epidemic of Failure in America’s Schools

Jeb Bush:

The U.S. has a choice: Give up on a generation or confront this challenge head-on. Some adults find it easier to give up. They won’t say it out loud; they’ll simply lower expectations. Or they’ll explain away the drop in scores, blaming the pandemic when scores had already begun to decline before Covid hit. Rather than raise the bar, they’ll dodge accountability, allowing today’s low math and reading scores to become tomorrow’s ceiling. That is unacceptable.

We can move forward rather than back. Doing so is a priority if the U.S. is to be a competitive nation in a competitive world. It also is a human necessity, as every student has God-given potential and deserves a great education.

The solutions are simple. There are math and reading policies every state should immediately enact and there are ways parents can contribute. Start with a call to all parents, guardians and families—those who know their children best. You were called on to step up when Covid kept kids at home. Now you are needed again to help close those learning gaps. Any trusted adult in a child’s life—parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, whoever—should lean into this moment. Help students recover lost learning by reading for 20 minutes a day. That can be a parent reading to a child, a child reading to a parent or children reading to themselves. In addition, research has found that 30 minutes a week of extra math work can help students who are struggling or behind. If you aren’t up to writing math equations for your kids, seek out free, high-quality online math tools.

Lawmakers must step up, too. One way to help parents is eliminating the barriers students face in accessing a better education. This year, Arizona became a national model by creating a universal education savings account program with flexible, portable and customizable funding. That kind of legislation is transformative for student learning.

Early literacy is the foundation for long-term reading success. To ensure every child can read by the third grade and be ready to succeed in life, policy makers must ensure that all educators are trained in phonics and the science of reading—an evidence-based approach to teach the understanding of sounds, decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This may require changing teacher-prep programs in colleges of education as well as installing literacy coaches in every elementary and middle school.

Civics: “Such trading is contrary to CFTC rules, but the agency waived them, fearing it could be sued.”

Jeffrey Carter:

Assume that nothing nefarious was happening and the husband was a person working for a hedge fund. Well, then one of the two people in the relationship has to make a choice. Work for the hedge fund or quit while your partner takes a gig with the CFTC. 

The integrity of the US capitalistic market system is more important that this couple’s freedom to choose their career. There is no free lunch.

I had a very wealthy friend that wanted to work for a Presidential administration. They couldn’t get through the “conflicts” part of assessing their background because they had a lot of investments. The committee taking a look was afraid that person could make a decision that would unfairly advantage one of the investments, even if it wasn’t intentional. 

Yet, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.” 

Prior to the Covid information hitting the market, Washington DC people made incredible trades with incredible timing. 

Disgusting. Actually, beyond disgusting. Especially given the government response. Think there was an extra incentive to make a policy decision or public announcement one way or another with money on the line?

Free Speech, Intellectual Diversity and the Yale Law School, an update

David Lat:

For the past year or so, I’ve been speaking all over the country about free-speech problems at American law schools. The institution that figures most prominently in my talks is Yale Law School—partly because it’s the longtime #1 law school and top producer of law professors and deans, making it a trendsetter in legal academia; partly because it’s the school I know the best, as my alma mater; and partly because it has had more high-profile controversies over free speech and cancel culture than any other school. If you look at the most popular stories in the history of Original Jurisdiction—which will celebrate its second anniversary in December, so thank you for your support—six out of the top ten posts are about Yale Law.

During the always vigorous question-and-answer sessions at my talks, I’m frequently asked: will things improve? A positive person by nature, I say yes, but this was often more wish than prediction.

Now I feel a stronger basis for optimism—and one thing giving me hope is recent news out of Yale Law. Some of this news emerged last week, when I was away on vacation, so I’ll double back to cover it. But I’ll begin with previously unreported news.

In the wake of the announcement of Judge James Ho (5th Cir.) that he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, a boycott joined so far by Judge Lisa Branch (11th Cir.) and a dozen other judges who wanted to remain nameless, Dean Heather Gerken has been quietly reaching out to prominent conservative jurists. Her message: YLS is deeply committed to free speech and intellectual diversity, it has taken concrete steps to support that commitment, and as dean, she welcomes hearing from judges about what else can be done to promote and protect academic freedom at Yale Law—including Judges Ho and Branch, the progenitors of the YLS boycott.1

The rest of the judges’ four-page letter—which I urge you to read in full, along with Judge Ho’s forthcoming article in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, Agreeing to Disagree: Restoring American by Resisting Cancel Culture—is an eloquent defense of free speech, open discourse, and civil disagreement. The last two pages respond to a statement by Dean Gerken that was posted on the YLS website last Wednesday, October 12, A Message to Our Alumni on Free Speech at Yale Law School (“Alumni Message”). So I’ll walk you through that statement now, offering reporting and opinion of my own, as well as comments from the Ho/Branch letter. (The Alumni Message was previously covered by Karen Sloan and Nate Raymond of Reuters, Brad Kutner of the National Law Journal, and Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal.)

The Scientific Asymptote: Treading water: drudgery, stagnation and the loss of hope.

Sai Medi:

The whole proposition was and still is so wild to me: self-organizing, distinct little molecular legos, which fit together a certain way and form sequences corresponding to another set of building blocks, proteins, which then go on to construct, well, everything. I mean literally everything. I’m talking about DNA. 

The early 2000s was like a golden age in genomics research. I was getting my undergraduate degree when the Human Genome Project had just wrapped up a few years earlier. Some of it was done in my hometown, Houston, at Baylor College of Medicine. An offshoot of that was the HapMap project, which after sequencing many individuals of different ethnicities to find distinct inheritance patterns, created the concept of ‘haplotypes,’ referring to set of gene variants that tend to occur together. With the use of haplotypes, geneticists were able to trace human ancestry and understand specific inheritance patterns.

“It’s now widely known and accepted that these estimates were wildly incorrect, off by orders of magnitude”

Ian Miller:

But a new paper out from one of the world’s leading experts confirms that they were off even more than we previously realized.

John Ioannidis is one of the nation’s leading public health experts, employed at Stanford University as Professor of Medicine in Stanford Prevention Research, of Epidemiology and Population Health,” as well as “of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science.”

You’d think that those impeccable qualifications and a track record of being one of the most published and cited scientists in the modern world would insulate him from criticism, but unfortunately that’s no longer how The Science™ works.

Ioannidis first drew the ire of The Keepers of The Science™ early in the outbreak, when he cautioned that society might be making tremendous decisions based on limited data that was of poor quality.

He also took part in the infamous seroprevalence study conducted in Santa Clara County, led by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. 

That examination, which looked at antibody prevalence in the San Jose area, came to the conclusion that COVID was already significantly more widespread by March and April 2020 than most people realized.

This had wide-ranging implications, but the most important revelation was that the estimates of COVID’s mortality rate used by “scientists” and the WHO were almost certainly much too high.

“exacerbating the global urban-rural divide in the digital platform labour market”

Oxford:

He maintains today’s findings point toward the connection between skills and place-bound institutions as enablers – even of remote work. People with access to specialised education, vocational training and local business opportunities – in other words urban dwellers – will be more likely to have in-demand, digital skills. They will find ample opportunities in the remote labour market. People who do not have the same access to enabling institutions – in other words, people in rural regions – tend not to have the most relevant digital skills. They will have a hard time finding good remote jobs.

Some People Really Are Mosquito Magnets, and They’re Stuck That Way

Daniel Leonard:

As you may have noticed, mosquitoes don’t attack everyone equally. Scientists have known that the pests are drawn to people at varying rates, but they have struggled to explain what makes certain people “mosquito magnets” while others get off bite-free.

In a new paper published on October 18 in the journal Cell, researchers suggest that certain body odors are the deciding factor. Every person has a unique scent profile made up of different chemical compounds, and the researchers found that mosquitoes were most drawn to people whose skin produces high levels of carboxylic acids. Additionally, the researchers found that peoples’ attractiveness to mosquitoes remained steady over time, regardless of changes in diet or grooming habits.

“The question of why some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others—that’s the question that everybody asks you,” says study co-author Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist and mosquito expert at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rockefeller University. “My mother, my sister, people in the street, my colleagues—everybody wants to know.” That public interest is what drove Vosshall and her colleagues to design this study, she says.

Colleges that ditched test scores for admissions find it’s harder to be fair in choosing students, researcher says

Jill Barshay:

One college admissions officer at a large public university described how test-optional admissions had spurred more disagreements in his office. A third reader on an application was often called in to break a tie when one staffer said ‘yes’ and another said ‘no.’ Without SAT and ACT scores, he explained, the job of admitting students had become more subjective and more time-consuming. “I feel like everyone who reviews applications has their own perspective or opinion,” he said.

This sobering anecdote comes from a research project led by Kelly Slay, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been conducting in-depth interviews with admissions officers in 2022 to understand how the elimination of SAT and ACT testing requirements has been playing out inside colleges and universities. According to Slay, admissions officers often described a “chaotic” and “stressful” process where they lacked clear guidance on how to select students without test scores. Admissions officers at selective colleges were also “overwhelmed” by the volume of applicants that test-optional policies had unleashed.

“One of our key findings were the tensions that were emerging around these test optional policies,” said Slay. “There’s a struggle on how to implement them.”

Slay’s work gives us a rare, unvarnished glimpse inside college admissions offices. It’s especially significant now because a college admissions case is currently before the Supreme Court that could strike down affirmative action, a practice that gives preferences to groups that have been discriminated against. As colleges experiment with alternative solutions, these interviews help shed light on why test-optional policies haven’t been helpful for increasing diversity on college campuses.

Inca Child Sacrifice Victims Were Drugged

National Geographic:

Three Inca mummies found near the lofty summit of in Volcán Llullaillaco Argentina were so well preserved that they put a human face on the ancient ritual of capacochawhich ended with their sacrifice.

Now the bodies of 13-year-old Llullaillaco Maiden and her younger companions Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl have revealed that mind-altering substances played a part in their deaths and during the year-long series of ceremonial processes that prepared them for their final hours.

Under biochemical analysis, the Maiden’s hair yielded a record of what she ate and drank during the last two years of her life. This evidence seems to support historical accounts of a few selected children taking part in a year of sacred ceremonies—marked in their hair by changes in food, coca, and alcohol consumption—that would ultimately lead to their sacrifice.

In Inca religious ideology, the authors note, coca and alcohol could induce altered states associated with the sacred. But the substances likely played a more pragmatic role as well, disorienting and sedating the young victims on the high mountainside to make them more accepting of their own grim fates.

Biden’s Student-Loan Action Is Obviously Unconstitutional. So Why Can’t Anyone Stop It?

Dan Lennington and Rick Esenberg

Standing rules are important guardrails for our separation of powers. Justice Scalia was concerned that Ms. Kelly’s injuries were too diffuse and too widely shared to constitute the type of injury that might count as a case or controversy.

But problems remain. What about cases in which a governmental policy will violate the Constitution in a way that harms many people similarly? What if the president decides to suspend collection of the income tax or announce a 40 percent increase in Social Security benefits? Standard doctrine is that no one is harmed by a benefit conferred on another. But even in the topsy-turvy world of the federal government, where we indulge the fiction that “no one” really pays for the spending of a trillion dollars, taxpayers are “really” harmed by large expenditures. The fact that many suffer the same injury makes it no less concrete or particularized.

So it is with Biden’s loan forgiveness. No one is hurt by the reduction in someone else’s debt. But many of us are harmed by another trillion dollars in debt which, notwithstanding the alchemists who run our government, will have to be paid for sooner or later.

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

David N. Figlio Cassandra M.D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more pre-program private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

K-12 tax & spending climate: declining live birth rates

choose life.

commentary

Is it worthwhile to teach self-regulation?

Tyler Cowen:

Children’s self-regulation abilities are key predictors of educational success and other life outcomes such as income and health. However, self-regulation is not a school subject, and knowledge about how to generate lasting improvements in self-regulation and academic achievements with easily scalable, low-cost interventions is still limited. Here we report the results of a randomized controlled field study that integrates a short self-regulation teaching unit based on the concept of mental contrasting with implementation intentions into the school curriculum of first graders.

Taxpayer supported bureaucracy and infant formula

Rick Barrett:

A doctor and a dentist from Nekoosa, near Wisconsin Rapids, say they’ve been robbed of their opportunity to market an infant formula made from Wisconsin goat’s milk.

Nikos Linardakis, a medical doctor, says the federal Food and Drug Administration has stymied efforts that he and dentist James Esselman have made to launch their Bêne Baby Co.’s product, even as the agency has relaxed its oversight of imported formula following a severe national shortage.

Most people on antidepressants don’t need them

The Economist:

Almost 35 years ago American drug regulators approved Prozac, the first in a series of blockbuster antidepressants known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (ssris). Prozac and its cousins were lauded by patients and doctors as miracle drugs. They lifted low moods quickly and seemed to have no drawbacks. Divorce, bereavement, problems at work—a daily pill was there to help with that, and anything else which made you sad. Many people have stayed on these drugs for life. In Western countries today between one person in seven and one in ten takes antidepressants.

The shine of ssris has worn off. A growing number of studies show that they are less effective than thought. Drug companies often publish the results of clinical trials selectively, withholding those in which the drugs turn out not to work well. When the results of all trials submitted to America’s medicines regulator between 1979 and 2016 were scrutinised by independent scientists, it turned out that antidepressants had a substantial benefit beyond a placebo effect in only 15% of patients.

U.S. Military Teaches Living Off the Land to Feed Future Warriors

Ben Keeling:

On the first day of training in the mountain forest on a recent fall day, Army Spc. Jennifer Evans struggled to properly sharpen a butcher’s knife. Two days later, she was expertly slicing roasts and steaks off a cow carcass and had learned to boil down the bones to make broth.

Spc. Evans was with a handful of military cooks being trained to butcher and prepare meat in austere conditions, skills that have the potential to make the U.S. military more nimble and combat-effective in the event of major conflict. The training, which began a few years ago as a pilot program for Green Beret cooks, recently expanded to include conventional units.

During two decades of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has largely come to rely on bulky truck convoys or air resupply to provide soldiers not only bullets and fuel, but also every morsel of food, even at remote combat outposts.

Military leaders say such lengthy supply chains may not be workable in a potential future large-scale conflict and are preparing troops to be more able to live off the land. They are rolling out lessons on how to source all sorts of food, including meat, through local means.

The Age of Boutique Authoritarianism
Galileo’s head was on the block / his crime was looking up the truth – Indigo Girls

Jeff Goldstein:

Lois Lerner refused to testify before lawmakers for her role in the targeted persecution of TEA Party organizations via her position as IRS Director of tax exempt non-profits, and was voted in contempt of Congress. 

Eric Holder refused a Congressional subpoena for documents related to the “Fast and Furious” operation that ran guns to Mexican cartel members, ostensibly to track the weapons, one of which was later used to kill US Border Agent Brian Terry.

Neither received any jail time. 

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith intentionally and materially altered an email included in an FBI application to renew a FISA warrant against Carter Page. He was found guilty, but spent no time in prison, receiving probation and community service hours. He has since had his law license reinstated. 

James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, John Brennan, James Clapper, and the entire Mueller Report team, among others, repeatedly perjured themselves in Congressional testimony. Brennan and Clapper now have contributor gigs at cable news channels; Strzok has filed a wrongful termination suit against the FBI. Mueller’s Report was chastised by the IG’s office for its misleading assertions and its lies by omission, with no apologies amongst the fallout. 

And no jail time for any of them. 

Today, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was given a 4-month jail sentence for Contempt of Congress. Bannon initially denied the legitimacy of the Congressional subpoena, citing executive privilege in his role as presidential advisor, but ultimately did testify. 

I no longer care what any of you think about Donald Trump. Nor do I care what you think of Bannon, who — full disclosure — invited me to New York for a preview of his Sarah Palin documentary over a decade ago. Neither man is the issue. Roger Stone isn’t the issue, either — whatever you think of him either as a person or a persona. The My Pillow guy? Not the issue.

Commentary on K-12 tax and spending increases amidst stagnant or declining enrollment

Olivia Herken:

The La Crosse School District has the largest referendum in the state this fall, asking voters to approve nearly $195 million to consolidate its two high schools due to declining enrollment and aging facilities.

Some Oregon residents who oppose the referendum doubt it would have a big impact. Some question whether they’ve been given full and accurate information.

“Many village of Oregon residents can’t afford this referendum, especially with all other current inflationary pressures,” Joshua King said. “But they should at least have the complete picture of the tax burden about to hit them so they can make the best decision.”

King said the referendum has become a “complex and very emotionally charged topic.”

“I’m against it,” Evy Collins said. “I’m not against people having better wages. I worked all my life, most of it as a single mother after (my) husband died of cancer. I know struggles. I always had to make do with what I had, and I still do today as a retired person. Why should our property taxes continue to go up and the propaganda that it’s for ‘the kids’ make me go for it? It’s not for the kids or better education. I’m voting no.”

The November referendums are appearing on the ballot alongside some higher turnout elections, including the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.

It’s not clear, though, how higher turnouts affect referendums. In the last decade, referendums have passed at slightly higher rates in even-numbered years when bigger elections are held, compared to odd-numbered years, Brown said. But he emphasized that other factors could be at play.

Scott Girard:

The questions come at the same time districts have received an influx of one-time money through COVID-19 relief funding. District officials have stressed, however, that because the funding isn’t ongoing, it cannot responsibly be used to pay for ongoing operating expenses without creating a fiscal cliff in future years.

The state Legislature, meanwhile, pointed to that funding in denying an increase in the revenue limit in the current biennial budget.

While the Madison Metropolitan School District is not among those asking voters for funds this fall, it is in the midst of implementing the successful capital and operating referendums from 2020. Officials have repeatedly described the current budget as a difficult one, with School Board member Savion Castro suggesting the district may need to go back for another referendum in the near future to continue funding its most important initiatives.

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”

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

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

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

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

John P. A. Ioannidis

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

Civics: Judge Doughty of the Dist. Court for the Western Dist. of Louisiana has granted NCLA’s request to depose fed officials, including Dr. Fauci, Jen Psaki, Vivek Murthy, & others, about their involvement in censoring Americans online.

NCLA Legal:

Plaintiffs move for the following government officials to be deposed as a part of their limited preliminary injunction discovery. These are:
(1) NIAID Director and White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, (2) Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, (3) former White House Senior COVID-19 Advisory Andrew Slavitt, (4) former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, (5) FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, (6) CISA Director Jen Easterly, (7) CISA official Lauren Protentis, (8) Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, (9) CDC Chief of the Digital Media Branch Carol Crawford, and (10) Acting Coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center Daniel Kimmage.

K-12 Governance Climate: But, the first strike in the fight happened in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

Jeffrey Carter:

First, some background.

Here is some data from Illinois that is also repeated across the country, I looked to two sources. Illinois Policy and Wirepoints. Illinois Policy tweeted out this video you should watch. Wirepoints compiled data on Illinois education. Here is an example. Decatur is mostly Black.

New Trier’s administration is woke and so is the school board. The teachers they hire are woke too. Instead of teaching students how to think critically and objectively, they try to indoctrinate them.

Finally, many parents had enough. My friend Beth Feely led the charge and in a lot of cases, she has paid a personal price for it. Typical of intolerant left-wing people, they cut off their friendships with her and discriminated against her. But, she kept going. She keeps going. 

Beth worked on The Policy Circle in its early days. It’s an organization targeted toward women. They organized local circles and women would get academic policy papers on societal problems. They avoided issues like abortion. They did talk about things like education. Their focus was to solve these problems from a free enterprise perspective. Beth started to find her voice here and her path shows how one person can make positive conservative change locally in their lives. 

Yesterday, Mother Jones published a hit piece on Beth’s organization castigating them as racists for fighting back. Isn’t that predictable? Beth works with the Woodson Center. Hardly a racist organization! But, they think different than the mainstream race hustlers you see on television all the time.

Commentary on political class and big tech election censorship

Dam Hee Kim, Anjana Susarla, and Scott Shackelford

2022 is looking like 2020

Dam Hee Kim, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Arizona

Social media are important sources of news for most Americans in 2022, but they also could be a fertile ground for spreading misinformation. Major social media platforms announced plans for dealing with misinformation in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but experts noted that they are not very different from their 2020 plans.

One important consideration: Users are not constrained to using just one platform. One company’s intervention may backfire and promote cross-platform diffusion of misinformation. Major social media platforms may need to coordinate efforts to combat misinformation. 

Facebook/Meta: C

Facebook was largely blamed for its failure to combat misinformation during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Although engagement – likes, shares and comments – with misinformation on Facebook peaked with 160 million per month during the 2016 presidential election, the level in July 2018, 60 million per month, was still at high levels. 

More recent evidence shows that Facebook’s approach still needs work when it comes to managing accounts that spread misinformation, flagging misinformation posts and reducing the reach of those accounts and posts. In April 2020, fact-checkers notified Facebook about 59 accounts that spread misinformation about COVID-19. As of November 2021, 31 of them were still active. Also, Chinese state-run Facebook accounts have been spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine in English to their hundreds of millions of followers.

Twitter: B

While Twitter has generally not been treated as the biggest culprit of misinformation since 2016, it is unclear if its misinformation measures are sufficient. In fact, shares of misinformation on Twitter increased from about 3 million per month during the 2016 presidential election to about 5 million per month in July 2018

This pattern seems to have continued as over 300,000 Tweets – excluding retweets – included links that were flagged as false after fact checksbetween April 2019 and February 2021. Fewer than 3% of these tweets were presented with warning labels or pop-up boxes. Among tweets that shared the same link to misinformation, only a minority displayed these warnings, suggesting that the process of putting warnings on misinformation is not automatic, uniform or efficient. Twitter did announce that it redesigned labels to hinder further interactions and facilitate clicks for additional information.

Commentary one ”ai” and grammar

Morten H. Christiansen, Pablo Contreras Kallens,

Unlike the carefully scripted dialogue found in most books and movies, the language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, full of false starts, interruptions and people talking over each other. From casual conversations between friends, to bickering between siblings, to formal discussions in a boardroom, authentic conversation is chaotic. It seems miraculous that anyone can learn language at all given the haphazard nature of the linguistic experience.

For this reason, many language scientists – including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics – believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience – or so the thinking goes.

This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).

Notes on tenure

Todd Williams:

The concept of tenure is a contested one, to be sure. For some, it is a mere faculty entitlement, guaranteeing employment and further insulating professors from the practical realities of life. For others, it is a vital means of protecting the academy and securing the greatest degree of academic and intellectual freedom.

Yet, regardless of the arguments for or against tenure, it is commonly assumed that schools can no longer do without it. Upon the release of the AAUP’s “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” the practice began rapidly to be incorporated into handbooks, contracts, and policy statements across the country. The arguments for tenure were clear enough: to safeguard academic freedom, promote stability, and protect teachers from those who would squelch their ideas. Soon, the notion of an indefinite appointment became the gold standard. It also became the brass ring for which young academics reached and the keep that seasoned faculty maneuvered to defend.

Tenure also created a culture of unrealistic entitlement within the academy.

Tenure also created, however, a culture of unrealistic entitlement within the academy. Where in the broader world is there a guarantee of employment for life? Furthermore, the practice places a burden on institutions by limiting their ability to respond to institutional, financial, and personnel challenges.

Granted, termination for cause, upon program closures, and during financial crises is accounted for in most tenure guidelines. Once tenure is in place, though, it is usually accompanied by such a high degree of faculty control that terminating a tenured faculty member is a daunting and arduous task, often abandoned outright or resulting in a significant financial settlement.

The U.S. Just Lost 26 Years’ Worth of Progress on Life Expectancy

Tanya Lewis:

With a few notable exceptions—such as during the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War II and the HIV crisis—life expectancy in the U.S. has had gradual upward trajectory over the past century. But that progress has steeply reversed in the past two years as COVID and other tragedies have cut millions of lives short.

U.S. life expectancy fell by a total of 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021 to 76.1 years—the lowest it has been since 1996, according to provisional data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The drop was 3.1 years for male individuals and 2.3 years for female ones. Non-Hispanic Native American and Alaska Native peoples saw the biggest decline—a staggering 6.6 years. But every racial and ethnic group suffered: life expectancy decreased by 4.2 years in the Hispanic population, by four years in the non-Hispanic Black population, by 2.4 years in the non-Hispanic white population and by 2.1 years in the non-Hispanic Asian population.