Ann Althouse The post title is the first sentence of the article, and the next part I quoted is very far down in the article. The SPLC’s designation takes prominence over any explanation of what this group is and why it deserves denouncement, and the explanation isn’t convincing at all. These are the parents who … Continue reading SPLC Rhetoric, “we know best” and Parents Rights →

I’m an educator. Masters in elementary ed, NYS certified. @ehanford knows far more about reading instruction than most of us, who weren’t properly trained to teach reading effectively. She’s done the field an immeasurable service. https://t.co/xkGg1Yd3F3 — Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) June 23, 2023

Tom Rees: “Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through onto customers,” Pill said in an interview streamed Tuesday on the “Beyond Unprecedented” podcast.

Reagan on PARENTAL RIGHTS: “Isn’t it the parents right to give counsel and advice to keep their children from making mistakes that may affect their entire lives? Many of us in government would like to know what parents think about this intrusion in their family by government.… pic.twitter.com/EdbiIyk61T — Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) April 18, 2023

Here is the snippet: pic.twitter.com/85iBeXC0Wn — Seidler (@SeidlerCorp) March 17, 2023

Wall Street Journal: All of this has been another failure of progressive economics. By focusing solely on macroeconomic demand, while ignoring supply-side and regulatory bottlenecks, their policies fueled the inflation we have today. They also ignored the role of excess money, forgetting economist Milton Friedman’s famous lesson. As President Biden declared in an April 2020 … Continue reading Why the public has lost confidence in claims to authority; “we know best, continued” →

Matthew Crawford: Throughout history, there have been crises that could be resolved only by suspending the normal rule of law and constitutional principles. A “state of exception” is declared until the emergency passes — it could be a foreign invasion, an earthquake or a plague. During this period, the legislative function is typically relocated from … Continue reading “we know best” Covid was liberalism’s endgame →

This is the first page of Paul Ehrlich’s book ‘The Population Bomb’, published in 1968. The book sold millions of copies and was taken very seriously. Extraordinary how confident Ehrlich was when making these extremely dark predictions. pic.twitter.com/2wHTLo3vXu — Max Roser (@MaxCRoser) May 20, 2022

Laura McKenna: Parental involvement went beyond homework and mental health. They also marched into school board meetings across the nation, loudly advocating for their positions on masks and curriculum. Their views were felt in the voting booth as the angry parent vote swung state elections, and may also play a critical role in the the … Continue reading Notes on Parents and taxpayer supported K-12 Governance (alt “we know best”) →

CDPH is refusing to disclose the emails between @CAPublicHealth & @WeAreCTA about K-12 school masking because they “reveal the deliberative process of CDPH leadership.” Why is CTA involved in the “deliberative process” of school masking policies? What is CDPH hiding? pic.twitter.com/pjbLD0PUQ0 — Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) February 28, 2022

Apporva Mandavilli: Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status … Continue reading Civics and we know best: The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects →

I would love to know what Harvard Prof. Thomas Burke, who testified in favor of shutting schools in Aug. 2020, now thinks. He is the Chief of the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Mass General Hospital.@MGHGlobalHealth https://t.co/hIHC4P6oW6 https://t.co/kqdtlza1pP pic.twitter.com/h1jCLCHtTq — Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 28, 2021 Professor Thomas Burke notes and links. … Continue reading School closings and “we know best” →

Member (and former President) of the SF school board thinks merit-based admissions are “segregationist”. Meanwhile her kids go to a special magnet school for children gifted in the arts. Utter hypocrisy. https://t.co/k6L2OwJg9E — Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) December 9, 2021

Meir Kohn: I did not become a libertarian because I was persuaded by philosophical arguments — those of Ayn Rand or F. A. Hayek, for example. Rather, I became a libertarian because I was persuaded by my own experiences and observations of reality. There were three important lessons. The first lesson was my personal experience of socialism. The second was … Continue reading On “we know best”: How I Became a Libertarian The consequences of intervention are rarely what we expect or desire. →

Eric Boehm: Kentucky’s public education establishment loudly complained about legislation that would have forced school districts to compete for students—and on Wednesday, Gov. Andy Beshear did their bidding. Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed a school choice bill that would have allowed families to cross district lines in pursuit of better schools, with education dollars following students who decided … Continue reading “We know best” – Kentucky edition →

Mackenzie Mays: Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to say Friday whether he will send his children back to class after several Sacramento County private elementary schools received waivers this week to resume in-person instruction, including one that sources say his own children attend. “I’ll let you know after I process that with my wife,” Newsom laughed … Continue reading “We know best” California edition →

Logan Wroge: The Madison School Board approved a contract Monday to hire a Minnesota school administrator as the next superintendent before releasing details of the agreement to the public. That’s a change from how the board handled the hiring process for its first choice for superintendent — who later backed out of the job — … Continue reading “We know best”: Madison School Board approves superintendent contract before it becomes public →

Michael Powell: Are Protests Unsafe? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What. Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests last spring as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. “We know best”, notes and links.

Chris von Csefalvay: In early March, British leaders planned to take a laissez-faire approach to the spread of the coronavirus. Officials would pursue “herd immunity,” allowing as many people in non-vulnerable categories to catch the virus in the hope that eventually it would stop spreading. But on March 16, a report from the Imperial College … Continue reading The Unexamined Model Is Not Worth Trusting (We know best…) →

Brendan O’Neill: It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. … Continue reading Commentary on The Price of “we Know Best →

Erin O’Donnell: RAPIDLY INCREASING number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number … Continue reading Anti-Homeschooling Rhetoric; “we know best” →

Brooke Binkowski: And this is what social media needs to do, now, today: Deplatform the proudly ignorant disinformers pushing snake oil and false hopes. Do so swiftly and mercilessly. They will whine about freedom of speech. They will cry about censorship. Let them. How can I be so cavalier about freedom of speech? I hear … Continue reading Free speech rhetoric, “we know best” and our long term, disastrous reading results →

Zeynep Tufekci: Authoritarian blindness is a perennial problem, especially in large countries like China with centralized, top-down administration. Indeed, Xi would not even be the first Chinese ruler to fall victim to the totality of his own power. On August 4, 1958, buoyed by reports pouring in from around the country of record grain, rice, … Continue reading “We know best”: Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw →

Brentin Mock: The tree-planters met stiff resistance: Roughly a quarter of the 7,500 residents they approached declined offers to have new trees planted in front of their homes. It was a high enough volume of rejections for such an otherwise valuable service that University of Vermont researcher Christine E. Carmichael wanted to know the reasons … Continue reading “we know best” pushback →

Daniel Jupp: Like Jeremy Corbyn or Channel 4’s scrupulously impartial Jon ‘fuck the Tories’ Snow, Attenborough has shown himself to be another elderly, middle-class man suffering under the delusion that he is an 18-year-old student radical. And Glastonbury was not an isolated incident, either. Anything a 16-year-old Swedish girl can do, Sir David has obviously … Continue reading Civics: class rhetOric – We know best →

Ross Douthat: Over the last three years, since Brexit and the Trumpening and the general rise of disreputable forces in Western politics, there has been a steadily boiling elite panic about the power of the paranoid fringe, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, the pull of fake news and the danger of alternative realities. And yet … Continue reading “We know best”, continued →

Dan Rasmussen & Haonan Li: An elite pedigree — the type of pedigree favored by headhunters and corporate boards — is not predictive of superior management. One of the central rationales for Jensen’s campaign (increasing CEO pay by tying it to share price performance) appears, in retrospect, to have little empirical support. These credentials, however, … Continue reading Questioning the substance of “We know Best” and credentialism →

Margot Cleveland: Two recent bills proposed by state legislators in Illinois and Iowa reveal a disturbing perspective on parental rights that’s becoming more prevalent in our country: the belief that parents cannot be trusted to care for their children. The Swiftly-Defeated Illinois Bill In Illinois, a little over a week ago, Democratic state Rep. Monica … Continue reading “We Know Best”, Redux →

Jared Diamond: these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean … Continue reading “We know best”, Disastrous Reading Results and a bit of history with Jared Diamond →

Robby Soave: Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited Harvard University’s Institute of Politics to discuss her school choice agenda. Students in the audience interrupted her several times; some even held up a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist.” The irony, of course, is twofold. One, the subject of DeVos’s Harvard address—school choice—is … Continue reading “We know best” at Harvard and K-12 Governance diversity →

Robert McFadden “We find when we bring average Americans together that they listen to one another, that they can contribute and that they can build, develop a vision of what they want our society to be like. And it’s really inspiring.” In a speech at the Drucker Institute in Claremont, Calif., in late 2008, Mr. … Continue reading Contra “We Know Best” →

Bagehot: For my money the best analysis of what happened was inadvertently penned by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his 1967 essay on “The Crisis of the 17th Century”. Trevor-Roper argued that the mid-17th century saw a succession of revolts, right across Europe, of the “country” against the “court”. The court had become ever more bloated and … Continue reading “We Know Best”… →

Caleb Crain It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from … Continue reading “We Know Best” If most voters are uninformed, who should make decisions about the public’s welfare? →

Peggy Noonan Those who come to this space know why I think what happened, happened. The unprotected people of America, who have to live with Washington’s policies, rebelled against the protected, who make and defend those policies and who care little if at all about the unprotected. That broke bonds of loyalty and allegiance. Tuesday … Continue reading Civics: “living, and responding to we know best” →

Emmmett Rensin There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s … Continue reading The smug style in American liberalism “We Know Best” →

Jeff Guo: Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous D.C. bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.” As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil … Continue reading Washington’s ‘governing elite’ think Americans are morons; “We Know Best”… →

Chris Arnade Trump voters may not vote the way I want them to, but, after having spent the last five years working in (and having grown up in) parts of the US few visit, I know they are not dumb. They are doing what all voters do: Trying to use their vote to better their … Continue reading A Critique Of “We Know Best” →

Madison students have long endured the disastrous results of “we know best“. Reading Recovery and Connected Math are two prominent examples. Chris Mooney: The question then is whether there is an effective way to prime people to be more science-curious — which could then also have political ramifications. “It’s an asset that there’s a segment … Continue reading “We know best” & curiosity →

Lawrence Summers: We do not want to learn what we can get used to. I’m sure once the historical commission had delayed the bridge for many months, there was an attitude of “What’s another couple?” In a broader sense, the Anderson Memorial Bridge tale tees up a bigger question. Where is the outrage? Why didn’t … Continue reading “We Know Best” & Why Americans don’t trust government →

Deirdre N. McCloskey: The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment. Why are we so rich? An American earns, on average, $130 a day, which puts the U.S. in the highest rank of the league table. China sits at … Continue reading Contra “We Know Best” →

Joe Gelonosi: I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally. The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing … Continue reading “We Know Best, Redux”: Is having a loving family an unfair advantage? →

Harriet Alexander: Venezuela’s embattled government has taken the drastic step of forcing food producers to sell their produce to the state, in a bid to counter the ever-worsening shortages. Farmers and manufacturers who produce milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour have been told to supply between 30 per cent and 100 per cent of … Continue reading Civics & we know best: Venezuelan farmers ordered to hand over produce to state →

Lee Cary:

With the nationalizing of the American healthcare system well underway, nationalizing public education pre-K through 12 is the next big thing on the progressive agenda. Wait for it.
It will be called ObamaCore Education, for short.
The original 2008 Obama campaign Blueprint for Change document included a “Plan to Give Every American Child a World Class Education” and linked to a 15-page, single-spaced document entitled “Barack Obama’s Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education.” It offered a litany of proposals as part of a broad, federal intervention into America’s public education system.
A case can be made that the regime would have been better off, in the long run, nationalizing public education before healthcare, because the fundamental transformation of education would have been easier.
How so? you ask.
The reasons for the relative ease — compared to ObamaCare — of installing ObamaCore Education were cited in the American Thinker back in June 2009.

Related: Up for re-election Madison School Board President Ed Hughes: “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”. Remarkable.

Matthew DeFour (and many others):

That led minority leaders to complain about the perceived control white Madison liberals — including teachers union leaders — exert on elections and on efforts meant to raise minority student achievement. Some local leaders have undertaken soul-searching while others say more minorities need to seek elective office.
“You could not have constructed a scenario to cause more alienation and more mistrust than what Sarah Manski did,” longtime local political observer Stuart Levitan said, referring to the primary winner for seat 5. “It exposed an underlying lack of connection between some of the progressive white community and the progressive African-American community that is very worrisome in the long run.”
In the last few weeks:

• Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire in a lengthy email described the failed negotiations involving him, district officials and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews over Caire’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy geared toward low-income minority students.
• Ananda Mirilli, who placed third behind Manski for seat 5, released emails in which Sarah Manski’s husband, Ben Manski, accused Caire of recruiting Mirilli to run for School Board and linking Caire to a conservative foundation. Caire confirmed the email exchange, but said he didn’t recruit Mirilli. The Manskis did not respond to requests for comment.
• Two School Board members, Mary Burke and Ed Hughes, vigorously backed former police lieutenant Wayne Strong, who is black, to counter the influence of political groups supporting his opponent. In the seat 3 race, Strong faces Dean Loumos, a low-income housing provider supported by MTI, the Dane County Democratic Party, Progressive Dane and the local Green Party.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.

Michele Solis: In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from … Continue reading We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make →

Annysa Johnson: The news conference, which also featured Madison Teachers Inc. President Andy Waity, was part of a national day of action by teachers unions across the country, calling for safe working conditions in schools during the pandemic. The renewed push to bar in-person instruction comes as the number of COVID-19 cases has spiked in the … Continue reading Wisconsin’s largest teachers unions again ask state leaders to move all schools to virtual-only instruction →

Gregory Kaebnick: This is where Fauci shines. He’s showing us how to be not just trustworthy but actually trusted. The role is still fundamentally about providing accurate information. Fauci is fighting the outbreak with “the sledgehammer of truth,” as the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty put it—helping everyone to understand the real dimensions of the problem in spite of … Continue reading “Credentials alone no longer make one credible” →

Larry Kammer: I have written thousands of posts about our problems and possible solutions (the former are much more popular than the latter, which is part of our problem). But the Millennials I know, mostly Scouts I led (now in 24-30), say that my solutions are inadequate to the problems I described. Far too small. … Continue reading The most radical prediction for America’s future →

Adam Rogan: A local education coalition is planning to file a complaint with the state alleging that the Racine Unified School District failed to include the community in its planning processes and didn’t follow federal requirements as a result. Representatives of the group planning to file the complaint, the Racine Community Coalition for Public Schools … Continue reading Coalition alleges Taxpayer supported Racine school district ‘completely left out’ community in planning →

Bill Lueders: This led to a determination that the vast majority of case records must be made public, as they should have been all along. As the Journal Times reported, the released invoices show Racine taxpayers have shelled out nearly $18,000 to fund Letteney’s crusade against Weidner. This went to pay two attorneys $350 and … Continue reading Civics: Bad judgment in Racine: City attorney and judge kept routine public records secret →

Robin Harris: Sunday marks the 53rd anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Parts of that speech—specifically, the part that asks for judgement based not on the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character—have come to define King and the Civil Rights … Continue reading Black and Proud: MLK, BLM, and Today’s Education Reformers →

Bimyanin Applebaum & Michael Shear: The Obama administration in its first seven years finalized 560 major regulations — those classified by the Congressional Budget Office as having particularly significant economic or social impacts. That was nearly 50 percent more than the George W. Bush administration during the comparable period, according to data kept by the … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “An Army of Lawyers” →

Ethan Zuckerman: Though he may be best know as co-founder of content marketing platform “Contently”, Shane Snow describes himself as “journalist, geek and best-selling author”. That last bit comes from his book “Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success”, which offers insights on how “innovators and icons” can “rethink convention” and break “rules that … Continue reading When smart people get important things really wrong →

Annysa Johnson: After months of trying to get school administrators to deal with the racially charged climate at Westosha Central High School in Salem, Niccole Simmons took her concerns to the elected School Board. Simmons told the Journal Sentinel she intended to plead for resources that would help Principal Lisa Albrecht address the issues at … Continue reading Limits on comments draw criticism in some school districts →

The Economist: IN JULY 2012 a man calling himself Sam Bacile posted a short video on YouTube. It showed the Prophet Muhammad bedding various women, taking part in gory battles and declaring: “Every non-Muslim is an infidel. Their lands, their women, their children are our spoils.” The film was, as Salman Rushdie, a British author, … Continue reading The muzzle grows tighter: Free Speech In Retreat →

Arnold Kling: Diversified knowledge required in the modern economy requires relying on experts, but imbuing these experts with political authority has disastrous consequences. The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. … Continue reading The Era of Expert Failure →

Tim Whewell: The case of a young couple in Norway whose five children were taken away by the state has fuelled mounting concern within the country and abroad over its child protection practices. Protesters around the world – and leading Norwegian professionals – say social workers are often too quick to separate children from their … Continue reading Norway’s Barnevernet: They took our four children… then the baby →

Citizen Stewart: Maybe I shouldn’t have tangled with people who have advanced education. These folks with acronyms before and after their names are sensitive about their scholarship and they want recognition for their expertise. Since then I’ve met a stream of Doctors of education who see themselves as the producers of the tablets we should … Continue reading It takes a nation of empty robes to hold us back →

Conor Boyack: Parents, ask yourself this question: who has stewardship over your child — you, or the government? Think it’s you? Apparently, the federal government disagrees. In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own … Continue reading Government Schools And Parenting →

Mitch Henck. much larger forces are at play on Madison’s monolithic “we know best” K-12 world.

Caroline Bermudez: Education is a public good, funded by taxpayer money. But to some, weighing in on education policy is the exclusive purview of those with classroom experience. We venture down a slippery slope when we act as gatekeepers on issues with import on all our lives. Do you have to be a doctor to … Continue reading You Don’t Have to Be a Teacher to Have an Opinion About Education →

Rick Esenberg, via a kind reader’s email:

Whether or not he is right, we are left with, again, with the very philosophical divide that I identified. Mr. Hughes thinks that centralized and collective decision-making will more properly value diversity (as he defines it) and make better educational choices for children than their parents will.
Of course to describe a philosophical divide does not tell us who has the better of the argument. Mr. Hughes defends his position by relying on a 2007 “study” by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute which, strictly speaking, was not a study at all and had more to do with the impact of choice on public schools than its value to the families who participate in the program.
The 2007 WPRI publication collected no data on what was actually happening in Milwaukee. It simply took a national data base on the educational involvement of families and extrapolated it to Milwaukee based on the socioeconomic characteristics of Milwaukee families. It was, strictly speaking, nothing more than a calculation. If low income and minority families in Milwaukee behave like low income and minority families nationally, the calculation showed, then, based on certain assumptions, very few would engage in informed decision-making regarding their children’s education.
It was an interesting and thought provoking exercise but one with an obvious limitation. It is not at all clear that national findings would extend to a city with a relatively longstanding and actively promoted choice program. It is possible that the existence of a greater array of educational choices would change the incentives and capacity of parents to engage in the informed and engaged decision-making that would otherwise not happen.
Beyond that, the fact that only a subset of families will exercise a choice tells us precisely nothing about whether they ought to have the opportunity to make one – unless you entertain a presumption against individual choice and a diversity of alternatives in education.
Mr. Hughes argues that education is an “experience good” which is a fancy way of saying that it is something that consumers have a difficult time evaluating before deciding whether to buy it. But, again, the extent to which you think something is that type of good (many things are difficult to be sure about before you try them) and whether, having decided it is, you think that people should have someone else choose for them reflects very philosophical divide I’m concerned with.

“We know best” has long been associated with parts of Madison’s K-12 community, despite long term, disastrous reading scores and spending twice the national average per student.
Background: “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”.
It would certainly be useful to spend a bit of time learning about Milwaukee’s experiences, positive and negative with a far more open k-12 climate. The results of Madison’s insular, non-diverse approach are an embarrassment to students, citizens, taxpayers and employers.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes

Call me crazy, but I think a record of involvement in our schools is a prerequisite for a School Board member. Sitting at the Board table isn’t the place to be learning the names of our schools or our principals.
Wayne Strong, TJ Mertz and James Howard rise far above their opponents for those of us who value School Board members with a history of engagement in local educational issues and a demonstrated record of commitment to our Madison schools and the students we serve.

Notes and links on Ed Hughes and the 2013 Madison School Board election.
I’ve become a broken record vis a vis Madison’s disastrous reading results. The District has been largely operating on auto-pilot for decades. It is as if a 1940’s/1950’s model is sufficient. Spending increases annually (at lower rates in recent years – roughly $15k/student), yet Madison’s disastrous reading results continue, apace.
Four links for your consideration.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use. This program continues, despite the results.
3rd Grade Madison School District Reading Proficiency Data (“Achievement Gap Plan”)

The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don’t present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print.

Madison Schools Distort Reading Data (2004) by Mark Seidenberg.
How many School Board elections, meetings, votes have taken place since 2005 (a number of candidates were elected unopposed)? How many Superintendents have been hired, retired or moved? Yet, the core structure remains. This, in my view is why we have seen the move to a more diffused governance model in many communities with charters, vouchers and online options.
Change is surely coming. Ideally, Madison should drive this rather than State or Federal requirements. I suspect it will be the latter, in the end, that opens up our monolithic, we know best approach to public education.

Oh, the places we go.
I’m glad Matt DeFour and the Wisconsin State Journal obtained the most recent Superintendent Review via open records. We, as a community have come a long way in just a few short years. The lack of Board oversight was a big issue in mid-2000’s competitive school board races. Former Superintendent Art Rainwater had not been reviewed for some time. These links are well worth reading and considering in light of the recent Superintendent review articles, including Chris Rickert’s latest. Rickert mentions a number of local statistics. However, he fails to mention:

1. Despite spending nearly $15,000 per student annually, our Reading Results, the District’s job number one, need reform. 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use. This is not a new topic.
2. The District’s math program has been an issue for some time, as well (Math Forum).
3. How does Madison compare to the World, or other US cities? We can and should do much better.
4. What is happening with Madison’s multi-million dollar investment (waste?) in Infinite Campus? Other Districts have been far more successful implementing this important tool.
5. Are the District’s tax expenditures well managed?

With respect to the current Superintendent Review, the job pays quite well (IRS income distribution data: table 7), so I believe the position should be fully accountable to parents and taxpayers. Matthew DeFour:

In 2014, Madison superintendent Dan Nerad qualifies for a $37,500 payment for six years of service, which like Gorrell’s would be paid into a retirement account. Nerad already receives an annual $10,000 payment into his retirement account, which is separate from his state pension and in addition to a $201,000 yearly salary.

More, here.
The current rhetoric is quite a change in just 8 years. (Why did things change? A number of citizens care, decided to run for school board – won – and made a difference…) I certainly hope that the Board and community do not revert to past practice where “we know best” – the status quo – prevailed, as the Obama Administration recently asserted in a vital constitutional matter:

Holder made clear that decisions about which citizens the government can kill are the exclusive province of the executive branch, because only the executive branch possess the “expertise and immediate access to information” to make these life-and-death judgments.
Holder argues that “robust oversight” is provided by Congress, but that “oversight” actually amounts to members of the relevant congressional committees being briefed. Press reports suggest this can simply amount to a curt fax to intelligence committees notifying them after the fact that an American has been added to a “kill list.” It also seems like it would be difficult for Congress to provide “robust oversight” of the targeted killing program when intelligence committee members like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are still demanding to see the actual legal memo justifying the policy.

More, here on the political class and the legal system.
The choice is ours. Use our rights locally/nationally, or lose them.
A look back at previous Madison Superintendents.
High expectations surely begin at the top.