Event @ Goodman Center:

Thursday Oct. 3, 5-8pm, Ironworks
Movie night, discussion and resource share with pizza, ice cream and activities for kids 3+.

In 1997, Wisconsin ranked 3rd in the US for literacy, and only 13 years later, we dropped to 30th, with proficiency for our Black youth ranking last. Today, the gap between white and Black students in Wisconsin is four grades wide — larger than any other state. Our students across race, age and income-levels are struggling learning to read.

What can we do to change this story?

We start by coming together as a community.

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The University of Wisconsin System is no longer reporting enrollment by campus, making it more difficult for the public to know where their local branch campus stands financially.

Six of the 13 branch campuses have closed or will by the end of this school year, with declining enrollment cited as the primary justification for closure.

Jay P. Greene & Frederick M. Hess

We estimate that public colleges and universities spend nearly $200 million a year subsidizing faculty dues and paying conference registration fees to politicized associations. While faculty certainly have a right to participate in such organizations, they have no right to do so with public funds.

——-

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

The State of Florida is conducting its own investigation into the second attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. It is not in the best interests of our state and nation to have the same federal agencies seeking to prosecute Trump leading this investigation.

As… pic.twitter.com/l61XCoe0ls

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) September 17, 2024

Civics: Lawfare at Its Most Dishonest (Wisconsin Attorney General)

The Florida Governor also mentioned the use of open records vis a vis a state vs federal investigation…

more.

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats are pushing election-year lawfare in the states, and a case in Wisconsin is being exposed for its unfairness. Documents unsealed Thursday show that Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul is prosecuting Republicans for actions his Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Election Commission knew about and didn’t object to.

But Mr. Kaul’s office didn’t think this was criminal behavior in 2020. On Dec. 13, 2020, Assistant Attorney General Steven Kilpatrick, a Kaul deputy, emailed Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) officials Meagan Wolfe and James Witecha, sharing documents from the Trump campaign. Mr. Kilpatrick noted that in one document “there is statement that the Trump electors are going to meet and vote on Monday, Dec. 14, in the event the Supreme court case comes out in their favor after Dec. 14 — to ensure that there is a slate of elector [sic] for Trump on Jan. 6.”

Ms. Wolfe forwarded those documents to her fellow commissioners without comment, and the WEC and state Department of Justice have since acknowledged that the lawyers’ action was acceptable under state law. In a Feb. 9, 2022, memo to the WEC, the state DOJ notes that while complainants say the Dec. 14 meeting was an “unlawful” plot to undermine the election, it wasn’t illegal.

“Based upon the text of the relevant statutes, and in light of the facts, historical precedent, and related federal authorities,” the DOJ wrote, “this memorandum concludes that the Complaint does not raise a reasonable suspicion that Respondents violated Wisconsin election law.” But suddenly in 2024, when Democrats are running to “protect democracy,” AG Kaul files charges.

In July, Mr. Troupis’s lawyers filed a motion to quash a subpoena against him, and the AG asked the court to keep the motion under seal. No wonder: The motion, now unsealed, lays out historical precedent for creating an alternate slate of electors in case they are needed.

In the past, the motion notes, states have handled competing slates of electors while election results were under a legal challenge, as the Wisconsin defendants were trying to do. In 1960 Richard Nixon initially won Hawaii by 141 votes. There was a legal challenge and while the recount was under way, the motion explains, “both the Democrats and the Republicans had their respective (alternate) slates of electors meet and cast their ballots.”

The Republican slate was initially certified and sent to Congress but the judge in charge of the recount ultimately decided more votes had been cast for John F. Kennedy and the Democratic slate was sent to Congress. Vice President Nixon opened the envelopes in front of Congress and directed that Hawaii’s electoral votes for Kennedy be counted.

Kayla Huynh:

Under the agreement, employees will also get an additional 2.06% increase to their base wages if voters in November approve the Madison Metropolitan School District’s $100 million operating referendum.

——-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Abbey Machtig

Last school year, the food and nutrition department used $1.5 million from the district’s general education fund to cover expenses. Another $2.9 million is set to be transferred this school year. 

“Those are dollars that we now don’t get to dream with in many ways,” School Board President Nichelle Nichols said Monday night.

—-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Nusaiba Mizan:

“And then the notion that, well, you have to be a certified teacher to be effective,” Miles said. “Yes, more likely than not you will be more effective than a teacher without a certification. Yes, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean in effect where non-certified teachers will be ineffective. We came in. We changed that concept.”

It is unclear at this time what subjects and grade levels uncertified teachers are covering. Waivers to hire uncertified teachers cannot be applied to special education, bilingual education, English as a Second Language or pre-kindergarten teaching roles, according to the Texas Education Agency. ABC 13 reported that uncertified teachers were hired into prohibited positions, including special education roles, last academic year.

Matthew Ladner:

Fortunately research has repeatedly demonstrated that certification has nothing to do with student learning gains.

—-

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

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

Jackie Longo and Christopher Maynard

In the fall of 2022, more than 49 million studentswere enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools across the U.S. About 32% ended the last academic year performing below their current grade level in at least one subject. Unfortunately, many of these kids were afforded different levels of assistance to help bridge the gap. For instance, 13% of public schools didn’t provide academic tutoring, while only a little over half offered after-school instruction.

Liz Cohen, Georgetown University’s FutureEd policy director, told ConsumerAffairs that parents should consider many factors when deciding what school will best fit their child, as there can be significant differences among schools — even within the same state.

“Look at the school culture. How does the school feel? Is my child going to feel like they belong in that community?” Cohen said. “There are bright spots and wonderful schools in every state in this country,” she added.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont told ConsumerAffairs he knows how vital schools are to a state’s overall success. “The success of our state is highly dependent upon the success of our schools,” he said. “Our administration remains committed to strengthening all the schools in our state so that every child — no matter their neighborhood or family income level — has the opportunity to receive an education that prepares them for achievement.”

Adopt Gupta:

One of the features of exclusionary zoning which really surprised me are the associations with educational outcomes: test scores are better in areas with exclusionary zoning, spending per pupil is a lot higher, as are Chetty opportunity measures — these are good places for social mobility.

I think one way to rationalize this set of regulations is the decentralized nature of school funding and administration. In many developed countries around the world, there don’t seem to be massive differences in the funding or curriculum of public schools. As a result, you don’t often hear of people in, say, Italy or France moving to specific neighborhoods to access local schools. School quality is, at least compared to the US, relatively homogenous, at least at the within-city level (there do seem to be large regional variations in some of these countries). 

As a result, with less scope for educational sorting, you typically see rich people live in the center of the city. And some of these people in the city center, in places like Madrid or Buenos Aires, vote for the right wing party. This basically never happens in the US, where the rich have decamped in many cities, and city centers are invariably left-wing strongholds.

So what explains this differential sorting of people and partisanship across countries?

We can’t prove it in our data conclusively, but I think a very plausible hypothesis is that tying school quality to local conditions generates incentives for rich people to decamp for suburban areas, exclude the poor through high bulk regulatory barriers, and thereby produce enclaves of high quality educational.

Quinton Klabon

Here are four concrete things we can do to change children’s lives by this time next year

“Progress is incremental. It is something that we all have to show up for, because…if we don’t care about our kids and our public schools, then we are destined to fail.,” said Milwaukee Public School Board Vice President Jilly Gokalgandhi at the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.

She was right.

With the start of a new school year for 66,000 students, Milwaukee’s civic, business, and cultural leaders have an opportunity to consider how they have supported MPS since its financial strife in May and how the city can show up going forward. Here are four ways they could change children’s lives by this time next year:

Amit N Sawant,  Mats J Stensrud

Birth rates in Canada and the USA declined sharply in March 2020 and deviated from historical trends. This decline was absent in similarly developed European countries. We argue that the selective decline was driven by incoming individuals, who would have travelled from abroad and given birth in Canada and the USA, had there been no travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, by leveraging data from periods before and during the COVID-19 travel restrictions, we quantified the extent of births by incoming individuals. In an interrupted time series analysis, the expected number of such births in Canada was 970 per month (95% CI: 710-1,200), which is 3.2% of all births in the country. The corresponding estimate for the USA was 6,700 per month (95% CI: 3,400-10,000), which is 2.2% of all births. A secondary difference-in-differences analysis gave similar estimates at 2.8% and 3.4% for Canada and the USA, respectively. Our study reveals the extent of births by recent international arrivals, which hitherto has been unknown and infeasible to study.

Danielle DuClos:

Urban Triage also provides the county’s housing navigation services, which aim to help residents find housing and fill out rental applications. The nonprofit’s contract with the county for housing navigation and other services is $456,000, according to county records.

Last year’s nonprofit tax filings show Urban Triage had 24 employees and $2.8 million in net assets. Grayson received $292,000 in reportable compensation from the nonprofit, the documents show.

The Salvation Army of Dane County offers rental assistance and rehousing support for homeless residents through some of its programs and was awarded part of the county contract. Its housing program is restricted to families and women.

Ted Goia:

Not long ago, 12 million families in the US subscribed to National Geographic, and many held on to every issue. Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches.

Anna Hansen

Middleton High School’s former head football coach has filed a lawsuit against the Middleton-Cross Plains School District over his resignation last year.

Jason Pertzborn, who resigned from coaching and teaching at the district in 2023 amid a hazing investigation involving the football team, filed the lawsuit Monday, alleging that the district “lied to, threatened and intimidated” him to pressure him into signing a resignation agreement.

The Middleton Police Department launched an investigation into the Middleton High School football team in early January of last year. A 22-page incident report provided to the Wisconsin State Journal through an open records request indicated that football players allegedly urinated on a fellow teammate, tried to grab his genitals in the shower, urged him to “kill himself” and engaged in additional hazing and bullying so severe one student worried the bullied player might harm himself or others.

Wall Street Journal:

The story’s theme is that in three cases last term the Chief steered the Court to help Donald Trump: “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak.” It is slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times, minimizing the constitutional arguments in the cases and highlighting the political benefit to Mr. Trump. The piece spins the cases from the legal and political view of critics, notably Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the member of the Court who has been most nonplussed in public about her status as a losing Justice in many constitutional decisions.

Most striking, and damaging to the comity at the Court, are leaks about the internal discussions among the Justices. The story describes a memo from the Chief to fellow Justices in February 2022 recommending that the Justices accept the appeal over presidential immunity, as well as follow-up notes from Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Also leaked is an account of the private conversation among the Justices after an oral argument. This is a betrayal of confidence that will affect how the Justices do their work. It’s arguably worse than the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs, the 2022 abortion case. That leaker still hasn’t been identified, but it was probably a clerk or functionary at the Court. This leak bears the possible fingerprints of one or more of the Justices.

Kayla Huynh

The total increase would be 4.12% — the maximum base wage increase allowed by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. The limit is based on inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index.

The increase would require approval from Madison School Board members. Jones said the union hopes that step will happen soon. He said union members voted to support the proposal in August.

“Given the lack of sufficient funding from the state and the expiration of federal funds related to the pandemic, we need our community to support the referendum to retain highly qualified educators and support professionals,” Jones said. “Otherwise, we anticipate higher vacancies in future years when educators leave for more stable district situations.”

Last school year, 255 employees resigned from the district by May, according to figures presented to the School Board by Jennifer Trendel, the district’s executive director of human resources. That number is a 64% decrease from 711 resignations during the 2022-23 school year.

Asked to verify the base wage proposal between the union and district leaders, Folger said the district had no information that it was able to share at this time.

——-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Erin McCormick

It’s part of a tragic pattern playing out across the country. An average of 22 high school-aged teens died of overdoses each week in the United States in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to a 2024 study by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard. The same study found that the overdose rate among high school-aged kidsdoubled between 2019 and 2022, the most recent year for which data was available – even though surveys show far fewer teens are using drugs than in previous decades.

Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig and David Dunning:

Recognizing one’s ignorance is a fundamental skill. We ask whether superior background knowledge or expertise improves the ability to distinguish what one knows from what one does not know, i.e., whether expertise leads to superior meta-knowledge. Supporting this hypothesis, we find that the more a person knows about a topic, the less likely they are to “overclaim” knowledge of nonexistent terms in that topic. Moreover, such expertise protects against overclaiming especially when people are most prone to overclaim – when they view themselves subjectively as experts. We find support for these conclusions in an internal meta-analysis (17 studies), in comparisons of experts and novices in medicine and developmental psychology, and in an experiment manipulating expertise. Finally, we find that more knowledgeable people make knowledge judgments more automatically, which is related to less false familiarity and more accurate recognition. In contrast, their less knowledgeable peers are more likely to deliberate about their knowledge judgments, potentially thinking their way into false familiarity. Whereas feeling like an expert predisposes one to overclaim impossible knowledge, true expertise provides a modest protection against doing so.

Debbie Kuether:

MPS interim superintendent bumps salaries of 6 figure admins once again. I don’t think this was mentioned in the referendum…

Josh Blackman:

Randy Barnett and I have written a new essay, titled Coping With a Court One Disagrees With. This essay was inspired, in part, by a recent New York Times article that identified a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law. In our view, there is no crisis. But we can relate with professors who are having difficulty teaching decisions they disagree with. We’ve done it for the entirety of our careers. We suggests that our method of teaching may be useful for liberal and progressive professors who are having trouble coping with the current court.

Here is the abstract:

Is there a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law? In our view, there is not. Still, we can empathize. As libertarian-conservative-ish law professors, for years we taught Supreme Court decisions that we disagreed with. We teach constitutional law as a historical narrative that began at the founding and continues to this day. The narrative approach underscores the contingent nature of what at any given time appears to be fixed and unchangeable. The narrative also remains remarkably stable from year to year even as new cases are added. This approach also makes preparing one’s syllabus relatively easy to do each year, regardless of what the Supreme Court may have decided in its most recent term.

The pedagogy we developed was premised on a Supreme Court jurisprudence we largely disagreed with. Indeed, we still disagree with much of this jurisprudence, especially the cases that were decided right before, during, and after Reconstruction. While some of these cases, like Prigg, Dred Scott, and Plessy are now in the anti-canon, others like Slaughter-House, Cruikshank, and the Civil Rights Cases remain good law. This pedagogy worked before 2016 and it will continue to work no matter what happens in the future. We submit that the time is ripe for liberal and progressive professors, especially those who are having trouble coping with the current Supreme Court, to consider adopting our narrative approach to the constitutional canon and anticanon.

Nancy Moews:

Many understand Wisconsin’s eventual inability to adequately support two school systems(public and private voucher schools).

I would not oppose vouchers to non-religious private schools that would be required, like public schools, to accept all applicants and to provide for special needs students. Also, required reading and math scores should be made public at the end of each school year, no exceptions.

I’m opposed to our tax dollars going to schools that teach that only Christians or any other denomination adherents are “saved.”

Meanwhile:

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”

A recent Henry Tyson talk.

Kulak:

What changed was the rise of the professional academic avante garde and their almost immediate capture by the ethnic, sexual-socio, and class enemies of the productive classes.

Every western ethnicity has had non-aristocratic class that has always produced objects almost the exact same as the ones now derided as kitsch, indeed these traditions have been core to the folklore, mythology, ethnic identity and sense of place of western peoples… It hard to name a part of old europe that did NOT have tales and regional arts depicting some diminutive forest people, anthropomorphic animals, or sexual joke. And it’s even harder to think of ones that did not produce intense amounts of idealized folklore, and almost parodically over the top depictions of their folklore.

Just as Americans now make art of bigfoot or other cryptids, Europeans for thousands of years produced sculptures and art of their monsters.

It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate. 

Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”

Anand Sanwal:

The results were predictable, if you knew where to look. In 2003, total student loan debt was around $250 billion. Today? It’s over $1.7 trillion. 

That’s not growth; that’s an explosion.

But here’s the real kicker: this debt isn’t just a personal burden. It’s propping up a deeply flawed system.

The results are insidious:

1. Millions of Americans graduate from college overloaded with debt and underprepared for the job market.
2. The institutions that create these outcomes are not held to account because market forces are not at play.
3. Colleges have no incentive to control costs or improve outcomes, as they get paid regardless.
4. Lenders keep issuing loans without regard for the borrower’s ability to repay, knowing the debt can’t be discharged.

In essence, the non-dischargeability of student loans has created a perfect storm of misaligned incentives. It’s a system that rewards failure and punishes success.

Consider these facts:

Anna Hansen:

Madison police have launched an investigation into the Goodman Community Center’s finances after an internal records review prompted by the discovery of “financial inconsistencies and impropriety,” according to a statement from spokesperson Florence Edwards-Miller.

In addition to cooperating with the police, the East Side center has retained a forensic accounting firm and made internal changes to promote financial security and integrity, Edwards-Miller wrote. 

“As an organization that prides itself on offering a helping hand to so many in our community, we find ourselves hurt by this difficult situation,” she wrote. “We are confident that the process we have in place will allow us to address this challenge and we humbly ask for your understanding, patience and continued support.”

Edwards-Miller declined to release any further information amid the ongoing investigation. Madison police spokesperson Korrie Rondorf confirmed the investigation but remained similarly tight-lipped on any additional details.

Sean Stevens:

This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June. 

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

This Year’s College Free Speech Rankings

FIRE launched the College Free Speech Rankings in 2020, surveying almost 20,000 students at 55 colleges and universities. Every year since, we have increased the number of students and schools surveyed. This year, almost 59,000 students were surveyed at over 250 campuses — once again the largest survey of student opinion about free speech in higher education ever conducted. 

The survey responses are broken down into seven components which form the bulk of a school’s score. Schools can gain or lose points based on the outcomes of speech controversies including attempts to deplatform speakers, attempts to cancel professors, and calls to sanction students for their protected expression. The scores are then standardized, so schools are only being measured against what other schools have actually achieved — as opposed to some arbitrary standard any of us might devise. This could also mean that even the best performing schools may not be bastions of free speech, just that they are simply better than everyone else. Finally, schools were given bonuses or penalties based on their campus policies, with good policies adding a standard deviation, ambiguous policies losing half of one, and policies that clearly restrain speech losing one. 

Steve Ballmer

Abbey Machtig:

After months of negotiations, the Madison School District has tentatively agreed to a 2.06% pay increase for teachers and staff, with an additional 2.06% tacked on if a $100 million operating referendum passes in November. 

The initial increase would be more than the wage freeze originally proposed by district officials in March, but it’s only half of the 4.12% wage increase Madison Teachers Inc. requested, MTI President Mike Jones said. 

The district is asking voters to approve two referendums on the Nov. 5 ballot: A $507 million capital referendum to fund new and updated schools and a $100 million referendum to pay for the costs of operating the school district, including wages.

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Via John Robb:

“I just keep thinking about all of the videos and first hand accounts of what’s really happening that will never ever make it to the legacy media or the nightly news where so much of the older population still gets their “news” and has their worldviews shaped”

Jeffrey Brainard:

When University of Seville researcher Maria Ángeles Oviedo‑García began to look at the peer reviews some journals publish alongside their papers, she was surprised to see the same vague, generic phrases kept turning up.

“In abstract, the author should add more scientific findings.” “Discuss the novelty and clear application of the work in the abstract as well as in introduction section.”

She ultimately identified 263 suspicious reviews prepared for 37 journals in multiple disciplines between 2021 and this year. One reviewer used duplicated phrases in 56 reviews, she reported last month in Scientometrics.

By Daniel T. Willingham

Question: Memory is mysterious. You may lose a memory created 15 seconds earlier, such as when you find yourself standing in your kitchen trying to remember what you came there to fetch. Other seemingly trivial memories (for example, advertisements) may last a lifetime. What makes something stick in memory, and what is likely to slip away?
Answer: We can’t store everything we experience in memory. Too much happens. So what should the memory system tuck away? How can the memory system know what you’ll need to remember later? Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.

A teacher once told me that for a fourth-grade unit on the Underground Railroad he had his students bake biscuits, because this was a staple food for enslaved people seeking escape. He asked what I thought about the assignment. I pointed out that his students probably thought for 40 seconds about the relationship of biscuits to the Underground Railroad, and for 40 minutes about measuring flour, mixing shortening, and so on. Whatever students think about is what they will remember.

The cognitive principle that guides this article is memory is the residue of thought. To teach well, consider what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.

Julie Jargon:

Parents worried about how much time students spend on iPads and laptops during school are trying to opt their kids out of classroom tech. They’re finding it isn’t easy.

Cellphone bans are taking effect in big districts across the country, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The next logical question, at least for some, is: What about the other screens? These concerned parents argue that the Covid-era shift that put Chromebooks and tablets in more students’ hands is fueling distraction more than learning.

Teachers and school systems point to the ease of online instruction and say switching for just one student puts a burden on teachers. Tech is woven so deeply into lesson plans and assessments that students using only pencil and paper would be at a disadvantage, they add.

Andrea Boyd of West Des Moines, Iowa, has spent a couple of years pushing for less school technology for her two children. When her son Colin’s school issued him an iPad in the sixth grade, he couldn’t put it down. Other students nicknamed him the “iPad kid.”

Dean Gorrell:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly recently took to defending her decision to lower the cut scores for the Wisconsin Forward Exam.

Lowering the cut scores will make it appear that a greater percentage of students are performing at higher levels. Underly offered this reason for the change: “They (the students) were appearing to be doing worse than they really were. And so, this will give us a better measure of where kids are.”

One can only imagine the psychometric gymnastics the data analysts at DPI went through to advise her on that soundbite. We’re used to gaslighting, spin, hyperbole and falsehoods from politicians, but with that statement, Superintendent Underly may have just set the new benchmark for nonsensical claims made by a politician.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the new cut scores are installed after the old cut scores were in place long enough, since 2012, to potentially yield valuable data and draw causal relationships between instruction, resource allocation and outcomes. So much for using assessments to help inform instruction, guide curricular programming and budgeting.

Lowering achievement standards does not serve the children, teachers or school districts of Wisconsin well in the short or long term.

Dean Gorrell, Verona

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Jessica Winter:

Such behavior—at once self-indulgent and masochistic, and as common as it is ostensibly irrational—“is basically a nonadaptive coping mechanism for the pressure and the stress that you are experiencing,” Jan Dirk Capelle, a psychologist who studies motivation, told me recently. These patterns may seem timeless, but in recent years many higher-learning institutions in the United States have felt the need to intervene. Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, in the spring of 2020, educators have seen a significant decline in virtually every metric of student performance: attendance, class participation, completed coursework, test scores. According to survey data collected during the 2022-23 school year by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, at Penn State, students’ self-reported levels of generalized anxiety, along with anxiety related directly to academics, family, and social life, still had not returned to pre-pandemic rates—and, in fact, social anxiety had continued to rise slightly. Students’ use of psychotropic medications was at its highest rate since the center began collecting such data, more than a decade ago. (Anyone with proximity to academia can find reams of anecdotal support for this bleak picture.)

The responses from colleges and universities to these worrying trends have run the gamut, from enhancing mental-health services on campus to incorporating more hands-on and student-directed learning. But there’s one lever that educators have pulled again and again: the deadline. Schools began hitting pause on strict due dates not long after the pandemic forced classes to move online. In 2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that faculty members from a range of colleges and universities had embraced more “fluid” and “flexible” policies on granting extensions on papers or arranging makeup exams. A writing professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, went so far as to let his students set their own deadlines. This softened stance reached younger students, too: in some public-school districts—including those in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Shaker Heights, Ohio—teachers were instructed not to dock the grades of students who turned in work late.

Carolyn Gorman:

School-based mental health initiatives have expanded over the past half-century. In recent years, troubling increases in the prevalence of school violence and youth emotional distress have prompted a sense of urgency among policymakers, leading to the bipartisan action of committing billions of dollars annually in federal funding to bolster these programs.

But school-based mental health initiatives face fundamental challenges that warrant more thoughtful attention: mental health interventions for youth are not a panacea and warrant judicious utilization; the goals of the education and mental health systems are often in conflict; and vague policy, guidance, and expected outcomes undermine accountability and confuse responsibilities within and across systems.

Policymakers and education authorities should be clear-eyed about these challenges and the unintended consequences of administering mental health services through the education system. A decades-long track record of inconsistent marginal benefit, poor implementation, and some evidence of harm tempers confidence that effective, comprehensive school-based mental health services are attainable or desirable.

Steve McGuire:

“It is not the role of the institution to render opinions—doing so risks suppressing the creativity and academic freedom of our faculty and students. Even as they seem to provide emotional support to individuals in our communities, institutional pronouncements undermine the diversity of thought that strengthens us and that is central to our missions.”

“Going forward, the University of Pennsylvania will refrain from institutional statements made in response to local and world events except for those which have direct and significant bearing on University functions. The University will issue messages on local or world events rarely, and only when those events lie within our operational remit.”

Wall Street Journal:

Should parents be held criminally liable if a child goes on a shooting spree with a gun from the home? That question is now in sharp public relief with the indictments this week after 14-year-old Colt Gray murdered two students and two adults at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga.

The U.S. has been mired for decades in a partisan gun debate that has stymied practical answers for school shootings. The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, and gun control has become a political and practical dead end.

But Americans are understandably frustrated, angry and searching for other ways to prevent mass murder, especially against children in schools. Holding parents criminally responsible for abuses by their children may make sense when the facts of a case demonstrate negligence or aiding or abetting the child’s commission of a crime.

Georgia authorities clearly feel they have enough facts to warrant a charge against Colin Gray. Colt and his father were interviewed by police in 2023 after the FBI received anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting” on the social-media platform Discord.

Jerry Ponio:

Seriously, what does @DrJillUnderly do all day?

Her administration at @WisconsinDPI allowed @MilwaukeeMPS to jeopardize school aid to every district in Wisconsin.

And now this…..

(@GovEvers, anytime you want to intervene the kids in MKE would benefit)

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) announced its newest addition to the education policy team. Daniel Buck is a senior visiting fellow at WILL, where he will write and advise on projects related to K-12 education policy. Daniel will play a key role in WILL’s Restoring American Education initiative.  

The Quotes: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “We’re excited to have Daniel join our expanding education policy team. His real-world expertise and insight are invaluable as we continue to address what’s lacking in American education and advance our efforts to restore it.” 

Daniel Buck remarked, “WILL continues to bring forward policies and ideas to reform education in Wisconsin and across the country. It’s an honor to join this team and work alongside these dedicated professionals. 

Alex Thompson and Sara Fischer

White House News Photographers Association president said Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team has engaged in an “unprecedented reduction in access” to the news media, according to an Aug. 28 letter from the association (WHNPA) to the Harris team obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: It adds to a growing frustration among the press corps about limiting access to leaders at the top of the Democratic Party.

• That includes Harris, who has yet to do a solo TV interview and has avoided unscripted moments since she entered the race on July 21.

Driving the news: Jessica Koscielniak, president of the WHNPA, wrote to Harris’ top aides last month protesting that “the four independent news photographer seats have been downgraded to one.”

Internet Archive

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Security week;

The ‘Serve for America’ initiative, announced by National Cyber Director Harry Coker, removes the four-year degree requirement in federal IT contracts and will push agencies to hire based on experience, certifications, and aptitude tests. 

“Our nation has a critical need for cyber talent. Today, there are approximately 500,000 – half a million! – open cyber jobs in the United States and that number is only going to grow as more services and products go online with the expansion of technologies like artificial intelligence,” Coker said in a note announcing the initiative.

“We are working to remove unnecessary degree requirements, moving toward a skills-based approach that emphasizes candidates’ ability to perform a job, rather than where they acquired their skills,” he added.

CRA:

The Center for Renewing America (“CRA”),1 a recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity, hereby respectfully requests that the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) immediately investigate Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan for unlawful personal income tax deduction(s) tracing to non-exempt Section 501(c)(3) activity.

Christina Buttons and Christopher F. Rufo

This was only the beginning. As the Venezuelan migrants settled in the apartments, they caused lots of trouble. According to a confidential legal report we have obtained, based on witness reports, the apartments saw a string of crimes, including trespassing, assault, extortion, drug use, illegal firearm possession, human trafficking, and sexual abuse of minors. Each of the three apartment complexes has since shown a localized spike in crime.

Volunteers who spoke with us on condition of anonymity said they were initially eager to assist with migrant resettlement but grew disillusioned with the NGOs running it. “I am passionate about helping migrants and I have been honestly shocked at the way the city is sending funds to an organization that clearly is not equipped to handle it,” one volunteer said.

The City of Denver, for its part, appears to be charging ahead. It recently voted to provide additional funding for migrant programs and, according to the right-leaning Common Sense Institute, the total cost to Denver could be up to $340 million, factoring in new burdens on schools and the health-care system. And the city also appears to have no qualms about exporting the crisis to the surrounding suburbs, including Aurora, which, in 2017, had declared itself a non-sanctuary city.

The truth is that there is no sanctuary for a city, a county, or a country that welcomes—and, in fact, attracts—violent gang members from Venezuela. This is cruelty, not compassion. Unfortunately, it might take more than the seizure of an apartment building, a dramatic rise in crime, and a grisly murder for cities like Denver to change course.

———

More.

Harvey Mansfield:

The Supreme Court case of Trump v. U.S. was about more than special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump, which continues under a superseding indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in Washington. The decision and the dissents contain a fundamental debate about the presidency that looks beyond the present personalities and campaign. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts concludes that the president has broad, though not unlimited, immunity from criminal prosecution. Outraged, the other side, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, declares that this makes him a king above the law and America not a republic (or a democracy).

The testy thrusts in the debate—“deeply wrong” from the minority and “tone of chilling doom” from the majority mocking the dissent—share the partisan heat of the case and the general bipartisan anger in our country. But this isn’t a new debate. In a separate lone dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson takes it back to Plato, where, let a professor tell you, it begins.

Danielle DuClos and Kayla Huynh:

Most Wisconsin students are poor readers. Each year, about three out of every five typically fail to score proficient in state reading tests.

But it’s not just students struggling. Wisconsin’s prospective teachers haven’t fared much better in exams they must pass to become a licensed educator.

In the most recent year of reported results, more than half of educators failed their first attempt on an exam that seeks to measure knowledge of reading instruction.

Like statewide student test scores, Wisconsin’s passage rates for these exams have steadily declined in the last eight years. A recent report by state authorities even raised alarm that a downward trend in these exams “is undoubtedly impacting the workforce.”

This fall, a new law called Act 20 is taking effect in Wisconsin with the goal of improving student literacy by making sure educators use evidence-based practices known as the science of reading.

The law is also focusing more attention on teachers transitioning from college to Act 20 changes in classrooms, said Andrea Ednie, associate dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

“It’s kind of an opportune time to really learn about how that transition works and what’s happening in the schools,” she said.

Donna Hejtmanek, a national reading advocate and former Wisconsin teacher, helped author the new literacy law. While others question the significance of Wisconsin’s passage rates on teacher exams, Hejtmanek said the results are reflecting a teacher knowledge problem.

Hejtmanek runs a Facebook group with over 200,000 members that serves as a space for conversations and training about teaching literacy. If more educators learned evidence-based reading practices in college, Hejtmanek said, Wisconsin would have fewer struggling students.

“We have kids struggling to read and teachers that don’t have the adequate skills to teach reading.”

“We have kids struggling to read and teachers that don’t have the adequate skills to teach reading,” Hejtmanek said. “They don’t understand how kids learn to read. They’re using ineffective practices of what they had learned in college because that’s what they were told.”

Teachers educated at UW-Madison have historically produced the state’s best passage rates on the reading instruction exam. Two years ago, 17% failed to pass on their first attempts. In the same year, by comparison, two-thirds of test-takers from UW-Whitewater, a top conferrer of education degrees in the state, failed to pass on their first attempts.

—–

Quinton Klabon:

This is an -essential- story.

1 addition: Does Massachusetts truly have less trouble with the FORT?

1 comment: “Educator programs are required under the new [reading] law to show DPI that evidence-based instruction is part of their curriculums.” I cannot wait to see! Woo hoo!

—–

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

John Schindler

Above all, Democrats don’t want to discuss our enormous Chinese espionage problem because so many Democrats, including top elected officials, are mixed up in it. Here’s the point where certain readers who are obsessively interested in speculation about Russian espionage and the GOP, who remain giddy about my extensive reporting on the murky myths and complex realities of Trump and the Kremlin, start to get upset. Don’t: the problem is you. I take a professional approach to counterintelligence, ignoring partisan matters altogether. When FBI Director Wray, America’s top counterintelligence official, states repeatedly in public that the biggest spy-influence problem we face is China, and it’s much bigger than any such challenge the country has ever confronted, I take him at his word, and so should you.

Matt Ridley:

What was the worst industrial accident in history? Bhopal in India, where in 1984, at least 25,000 people died as a result of a leak of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant? No, if – as most people who have examined the evidence now believe – the Covid pandemic began as a result of a laboratory leak, then what happened in Wuhan, China was worse than a thousand Bhopals. It killed around 28million people – and was by far the most lethal industrial or scientific accident that has ever occurred.

Yet the silence of members of the scientific establishment about even the possibility of a laboratory leak in Wuhan is deafening. They refuse to debate it – quite literally. The World Health Organisation studiously avoids talking about it. I tried to get the Royal Society to organise a debate: it’s not a suitable topic for discussion, it replied. I tried the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow: too controversial, it said. A former president of the Royal Society told me he hopes we never find out what happened, lest it annoy the Chinese. Would he have said the same about Bhopal, I wondered, or a plane crash?

Earlier this year, I was approached by Open to Debate, an online debating forum, to propose the motion that Covid probably began with a lab accident. I quickly agreed. The organiser then asked more than 30 scientists, journalists and politicians to oppose me, including some who have vocally argued that it cannot possibly have come from a lab. They all said no, sometimes with a barrage of insults about me. Finally, a Nobel-prize winning immunologist in Australia agreed. But two weeks later, he pulled out.

Jonathan Adler:

A new paper by Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati, “How Different Are the Trump Judges?” seeks to evaluate the quality of Trump’s judicial appointments as compared to their colleagues on the bench. It produces some interesting results. Here’s the abstract.

Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking “good” judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges.  Specifically, one that would underperform compared to sets of judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as “maverick” behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges.

Some of the data Choi and Gulati compile is quite interesting, in particular some of the rankings of the most productive and most-cited judges.

Zusha Elision:

The 14-year-old charged with killing two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school this week cut a sickeningly familiar figure: A troubled teen who had been reported to authorities for alleged past threats to carry out a school shooting.

Most mass shooters let the world know they are going to strike. When researchers at the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center studied school attacks between 2008 and 2017, they found that 77% of perpetrators threatened their targets or shared their intentions beforehand.

So why can’t they be stopped?

In the growing field of threat assessment, professionals say there is a way to stop them long before they pick up a gun. These experts work at schools, businesses and police agencies to identify, evaluate and manage threats with interventions such as monitoring, therapy or, in extreme cases, arrest.

Ben Smith:

The part of the book that kind of stuck with me most was something George W. Bush said to you about the financial crisis of 2007:

I listened to (Hank) Paulson and (Ben) Bernanke and spent your money to bail out the guys who created the instruments in the first place, which is an absolute political disaster,” Bush said. “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful. It really irritated a lot of Americans, and they haven’t gotten over it yet. That’s just part of it; there’s a lot of other reasons why. But we’ve had candidates say, “You’re mad, I’m going to make you madder.” As opposed to, “You’re mad, I have some solutions to make you less mad.” We’re kind of in the madder stage, where people are exploiting the anger as opposed to dealing with it like leaders should.

Do you agree with his diagnosis of this political moment?

David: George W. Bush, although he went to Harvard Business School, was not basically a Wall Street fan, needless to say. And when the financial crisis came, he couldn’t believe that his Secretary of Treasury and everybody were telling him, Ben Bernanke, that they have to do this kind of bailout, because he thought this is basically bailing out the banks for the mistakes they made. But eventually he became convinced that if he didn’t do that, the economy would collapse. So I think to a large extent, what was going on in that period of time was that Hank Paulson did not want to be Secretary of Treasury. He had to be importuned several times to take the job. And in the end, he took it because he was assured that he could run economic policy, wasn’t going to be run out of the White House, and therefore Bush tended to honor that commitment and basically delegated everything to Paulson. And so Bush went along with what Paulson wanted. Though I think George Bush’s Midland Texas instincts were the opposite of what his administration actually did.

Chad Aldeman:

As poverty rates rise, reading proficiency rates tend to fall.  

Every state has a downward-sloping line like this. But it’s not fate. Districts, schools and students nationwide are outperforming what might be expected of them. 

——

More.

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

NCTQ:

Analysis for the Reading Foundations standard began by determining the programs to be included. Both undergraduate and graduate (or post-baccalaureate) elementary teacher preparation programs that lead to initial licensure at all public institutions and private institutions that have an annual production of at least 10 elementary teachers were eligible for inclusion. This resulted in a universe of 1,147 programs housed within 960 institutions that qualified for analysis.²³ Because not all programs provided sufficient documentation to be rated, the final sample includes 702 programs housed in 580 institutions of higher education, and is inclusive of programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Once the sample was determined, a team of analysts used course catalogs to identify the required coursework for each elementary program. Course titles and descriptions were used to identify all courses that addressed reading instruction. Next, NCTQ sent a request for course material to each program in the universe of programs. Programs were asked to identify any missing courses to ensure that no reading courses were excluded. The majority of syllabi analyzed were from fall 2018 to fall 2022, although some programs submitted materials from spring 2023 in response to the preliminary analysis. In total, collecting evidence, analyzing materials, and conducting the preliminary review process with all programs took 12 months to complete.

Jill Barshay:

The study, which was posted online in late August 2024, tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.

The Oversight Project:

The Biden border crisis was sparked by the deliberate implementation of open-borders policies and the removal of Trump-era borders security policies by the Biden administration. While the Biden administration caused the crisis and allows it to persist, they are not the only party responsible for facilitating this crisis. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a substantial role in exacerbating the crisis by actively helping process and transport tens of thousands of illegal aliens into the interior of the United States.

After observing this dynamic, the Heritage Oversight Project and Heritage Border Security and Immigration Center obtained and analyzed movement patterns of anonymized mobile devices that were detected on the premises of over 30 NGO facilities at or near the border. These locations were selected either based on public knowledge of these facilities being used to process illegal aliens or on reliable human source information. All physical locations were verified and physical location boundaries were defined to include building and parking areas to minimize false positives.

The investigation found approximately 30,000 cell phone devices in the NGO facilities and traced the location of those devices in the U.S. during the month of January 2022. We assign a high degree of confidence to the assumption that the vast majority of these devices belong to individuals who illegally crossed the border. This is based on first-hand observation of facilities in which illegal aliens invariably outnumber facility workers and volunteers by many degrees. Additionally, based on the travel patterns and the end location of these devices, we assume that the vast majority of the devices reflect a migration pattern from the border of illegal aliens as opposed to a consistent travel pattern of NGO workers traveling from around the country to the border and back.

Clare Ansberry:

There are still plenty of grandparents—about 67 million Americans as of 2021. But the percentage of older parents without grandchildren is accelerating, says Krista Westrick-Payne, assistant director at the Bowling Green center. Of American parents between the ages of 50 and 90, some 35% don’t have grandkids. In 2018, that share was 30%.

Fewer babies were born in the U.S. in 2023 than any year since 1979, according to federal data. Reasons vary. Some young adults, juggling housing costs and student debt, don’t see how they can afford child care, or don’t see kids as compatible with their career aims. Others simply don’t want children, or are spooked by political divisiveness, climate change and rising expectations of parenthood.

Anna Stokke:

Unfortunately, illiteracy remains largely hidden and its impact on our society largely underappreciated. I agree that more needs to be done to support adult education.

But we should also ask ourselves how so many adults, who were once children, did not learn to read at elementary or middle school in Manitoba.

Without understanding these factors, we risk dumping more funds into ineffective approaches, programs and training, as well as contributing to the likely growing number of adults requiring literacy education.

There is currently a Manitoba Human Rights inquiry being conducted into reading instruction in Manitoba public schools.

Like similar investigations in Saskatchewan and Ontario, it will likely find schools do not use evidence-based approaches to teaching children to read.

Unfortunately, Manitoba Education has already indicated it does not accept the Ontario report, as outlined by Maggie Macintosh (Gaps in province’s literacy education probed, Feb. 23, 2023).

Somewhat comically, the Ontario report indicated bureaucrats would resist change.

Jim Silver cites that 192,000 Manitoba adults have literacy levels that are so low they are unable to participate in society. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding!

Dr. Natalie Riediger

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

Will Flanders:

Our 2020 election report dismissed many allegations of potential election fraud. But one issue we flagged as important to address in subsequent years was the indefinitely confined loophole that lets voters in the status avoid showing an ID.

More.

To gather this data, WILL went through a multi-month research effort that involved purchasing data from WEC and initiating open records requests to a sampling of 15 municipalities around the state. We generally found compliance with requirements for clerks to remove voters from the list, but did not receive a response from 1 municipality (Madison), while another admitted to not keeping the list up-to-date (Lake Geneva).

Bottom Line: While there is no concrete evidence of fraudulent votes under the indefinitely confined status, it poses a risk to election integrity by allowing many individuals to vote without providing identification. To address this issue, Wisconsin should follow the example of other states and implement commonsense changes to the process for obtaining this status. Previous legislative attempts to close this loophole were subsequently vetoed by Governor Evers. Additionally, Wisconsin should continue to remove individuals from the indefinitely confined list if they fail to renew their status after not voting in an election.

Commentary.

City of Madison Clerk. Maribeth, WCPC, Clerk

Madison citizens have seen many unopposed local elections, including the city clerk.

Angie Basiouny

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Students performed better in practice sessions with gen AI, but worse on tests when the software was taken away.
• Tutorial software that guided students with hints instead of direct answers was more beneficial to their learning.
• Students who relied on gen AI were overly optimistic about their abilities.

Jeb Hensarling:

Many big-name companies this summer have scrapped their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The manufacturer of Jack Daniel’s whiskey announced it will end its DEI initiatives, saying, “the world has evolved.” Harley-Davidson similarly dropped its DEI policies, saying it will focus on “retaining our loyal riding community.” Tractor Supply said it’s eliminating its DEI roles. “We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them,” the company said.

Companies are also getting pushback from shareholders on their environmental, social and governance policies. A report from shareholder consulting firm Georgeson found that investors submitted more anti-ESG proposals at annual shareholder meetings between July 2023 and May 2024 than in any previous year.

Pensioners are pushing back, too. Employees of American Airlines have filed a class-action lawsuit against the airline, alleging it mismanaged employees’ 401(k)s by loading their accounts up with ESG investments.

Conservatives were slow to recognize how deeply the left had burrowed into corporate human-resources departments and C-suites, but they’re clearly making up for lost time. Consumers and shareholders are showing that they’re willing and able to defend their values with cash, credit cards and investments.

Russell Contreras:

Rigid school attendance zones allow districts to legally keep many students of color and low-income families out of coveted, elite K-12 public schools, a new study finds.

Why it matters: The U.S. will soon mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in public schools. Yet, researchers found growing inequality in school access as the nation has become more diverse, according to the new study by nonpartisan education watchdog Available to All.

• School segregation between Black and white students has returned to 1968 levels.

——

Madison expanded its least diverse schools recently as well; Van Hise and Hamilton…. Nearby schools have plenty of space.

Hans von Spakovsky

The 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) revealed significant errors in the 2020 Census count. As a result, certain states will be shorted in their congressional representation until after the 2030 Census, while other states will get more representation than they are entitled to. Congress should investigate the 2020 Census to find out the cause of these errors and mandate changes to minimize, if not eliminate, problems in future counts. An effective investigation should determine why there were no such statistically significant errors in the 2010 Census in contrast to the 2020 Census. Congress should determine if federal funds should be distributed based on the corrected PES numbers, which requires an examination of the accuracy of the PES methods.

Tom Corrigan & Kevin McAllister:

With faith in higher education continuing to slide and colleges making headlines this year for on-campus protests, the investment in a college degree has come under increased scrutiny. As such, the WSJ/College Pulse ranking seeks to reward institutions that showcase demonstrable positive outcomes for their students and alumni. 

However, viewing higher education through this lens may not be best for everyone. The best school for any particular student might be one that’s close to family or friends, offers a particular program of study or matches their values—factors that can’t be analyzed in any one ranking.

NY daily news

The bar for removing an elected official from her position for saying something politically inappropriate should be extremely high — so high the whole city should have to squint to see it. Which is why we side with Brooklyn Federal Judge Diane Gujarati, who threw a legal brush-back pitch at a de Blasio era regulation used by Schools Chancellor David Banks for removing Maud Maron from a Manhattan p …

Yascha Mounk:

Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.

Junta Haider, Kristofer Rolf Soderstrom, Bjorn Eckstrom and Malte Rodl;

• A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.
• Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).
• Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

Paul Thacker:

In the recent Supreme Court ruling, judges skipped over claims of whether the Biden administration had actually censored Americans, arguing that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the White House. Swisher could have learned this by reading an article on the decision in the New York Times, the very publication where she was a contributor.

As for the Biden administration pressure to censor—something that Swisher denies—the evidence of this was made clear from Meta internal communications released by the House Judiciary Committee last May.

Zuckerberg texted three Meta officials—Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Joel Kaplan—on July 16, 2021, “Can we include that the [White House] put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?”

Open the Books:

Many large bank chains have blocked employees from donating to the Harris-Walz presidential campaign out of fear of violating federal “pay-to-play” rules. No such restraint was shown in Minnesota when Walz ran for governor.

Wells Fargo employees donated $8,090 to Walz’s campaign, and separately the bank got $266.6 million of state money. U.S. Bank received just over $1 billion from the state, and its employees donated $3,925. Bremer Bank employees donated $1,485 and also received almost $11.7 million from the state.

None of that is to say the donations are one-sided.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics recently called out 3M, U.S. Bank and other Minnesota-based corporations for donating to Republican candidates who disputed the results of the 2020 election, even after the companies promised not to.

——-

Fiscal indulgences.

Bill Ackman:

I am one of many who have been extraordinarily misled by the media on @realDonaldTrump. The reporter below outlines a number of important such examples of media manipulation in a four-minute segment that I strongly encourage you to watch.

These examples are often the ones that are brought to my attention by friends and family who say: ‘How can you support Trump when he said ….’

When I explain that his excerpted words were presented out of context and give an example like the ‘very fine people’ quote and show them the source video, they are stunned when they realize for the first time that they have been manipulated by the media about Trump for nearly a decade.

In a world with increasing demands on our time and an infinite amount of media and social media, very few people go to the source to check facts. As a result, the opportunity for media manipulation has become much greater.

Ironically, I was accused by the same friends and family of manipulation when I shared videos of @POTUS Biden which demonstrated his cognitive decline. I was scolded for sharing ‘right wing propaganda.’

An extremely well said 90 seconds on the media. https://t.co/yTM3g6EIDs

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) September 7, 2024

By Jeffrey Meitrodt

One of Minnesota’s worst-performing charter schools is still being run by a director who was leading the school when it fraudulently obtained more than $1 million in taxpayer funds by intentionally inflating the school’s attendance.

The Economist:

nqts’ salaries were raised to £30,000 ($39,400) last year, and will increase by 5.5% this month. But teachers will still be paid less in real terms than in 2010 (see chart) and less than many of their peers in other rich countries. On average teachers work six hours longer each week than other graduates during term time, although holiday and pension benefits are more generous. Teachers have had to tackle a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour after covid-19 lockdowns: suspensions have doubled compared with the pre-pandemic average. And flexible working, one of the principal benefits of the pandemic, has passed teachers by: schooling children remains an in-person job.

Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley:

“Age verifying app by app is a case of whack-a-mole,” said Chris McKenna, founder of advocacy group Protect Young Eyes, who also advises Apple on digital-safety issues for children. “Every device knows the age of its user. We give our devices an enormous amount of our identity.”

An Apple spokesman said that websites and social-media companies are best positioned to verify a user’s age and that user privacy expectations would be violated if the company was required to share the age of its users with third-party apps. Apple provides tools that allow parents to control the devices of their children, the spokesman said.

The company reiterated its allegation that Meta Platforms’s META 0.60% efforts to steer legislative responsibility toward Apple are an attempt to deflect responsibility for its challenges with child-safety issues.

A spokeswoman for Meta—the parent of Facebook, Instagram and other apps—disputed that assertion, saying that verifying a child’s age app-by-app isn’t practical.

Zenz:

Really bad news for the Humanities at UW. The College of Letters and Science unwittingly confirms rumors that CS,Stats, and Info Sciences are breaking off to form their own college. Admin services in other departments are being centrally consolidated into monster “pods.”

William Boyd:

All the same, Churchill’s task, as he himself saw it, was clear: somehow, in some way, the great mass of the population of the US had to be persuaded that it was in their interests to join the war in Europe, that to sit on the sidelines was in some way un-American. And so British Security Coordination came into being.

BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. But nobody on the American side of the fence knew what BSC’s full agenda was nor, indeed, what would be the massive scale of its operations. What eventually occurred as 1940 became 1941 was that BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist (such as the notoriously anti-British America First Committee – it had more than a million paid-up members).

Stephenson called his methods “political warfare”, but the remarkable fact about BSC was that no one had ever tried to achieve such a level of “spin”, as we would call it today, on such a vast and pervasive scale in another country. The aim was to change the minds of an entire population: to make the people of America think that joining the war in Europe was a “good thing” and thereby free Roosevelt to act without fear of censure from Congress or at the polls in an election.

Linda Blackford:

Cowen’s book is instructive for Kentucky because in just a couple of months we will be voting on Amendment 2, which would rewrite our state constitution to erase language that explicitly forbids public school dollars from going to private schools. Cowen is a former Kentuckian — he spent five years as a public policy professor at the University of Kentucky’s Martin School — and understands how harmful the amendment is to the state’s public schools.

Meanwhile, Cottage Grove and 6 year olds.

Erik Baker:

On campus, the atmosphere of disillusionment is just as thick—including at elite schools like Harvard, where I teach. College administrators have made it clear that education is no longer their top priority. Teachers’ working conditions are proof of this: more and more college classes, even at the wealthiest institutions, are being taught by underpaid and overworked contingent faculty members. College students appear to have gotten the memo: the amount of time they spend studying has declined significantly over the past half century. “Harvard has increasingly become a place in Cambridge for bright students to gather—that happens to offer lectures on the side,” one undergraduate recently wrote in Harvard Magazine. Survey data suggests that more and more students view college education in transactional terms: an exchange of time and tuition dollars for credentials and social connections more than a site of valuable learning. The Harvard Crimson’s survey of the graduating class of 2024 found that nearly half admitted to cheating, almost twice the figure in last year’s survey, conducted when ChatGPT was still new. The population of cheaters includes close to a third of students with GPAs rounded to 4.0, more than three times what it was just two years ago.

The response to this year’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza threw our ruling class’s skepticism of higher education into sharp relief. On campus, crackdowns on encampments proved an ideal opportunity for university administrators to vent their pent-up fury against students and faculty alike. Columbia’s quasi-military campaign against its protesters resulted, at its peak, in the near-total shutdown of its campus; meanwhile, my employer’s highest governing authority, the Harvard Corporation, composed largely of ultra-wealthy philanthropists, overruled the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and barred thirteen student activists from graduating, including two Rhodes Scholarship recipients. In the media, many political and economic elites have cheered on the repression of pro-Palestinian speech, revealing in the process their contempt for the very concept of college. “Higher education in four words: Garbage in, garbage out,” the Democratic New York representative Ritchie Torres wrote in a post on Twitter, mocking the research of a Columbia student involved in the school’s encampment. Bill Maher rolled out a symptomatic “New Rule” on his show in late October: “Don’t go to college.”

Robert Pondiscio

US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona this week embarked on a five-state bus tour to “fight for public education.” His campaign, amplified on social media, is ostensibly to rally support for traditional public schools. However, this “fight” is built on two flawed assumptions that, when scrutinized, reveal both the limitations of Cardona’s vision and an overtly political agenda. What Cardona is really fighting for is Kamala Harris’ White House bid (three of the five states on the tour are swing states critical to Democrats’ chances in November) and to enshrine in voters’ minds a narrow and impoverished view of public education strictly limited to traditional, district-run schools—a view that is already becoming an anachronism as new models and mechanisms for educating America’s children continue to gain traction post-Covid.

Cardona, who was Connecticut’s education commissioner before he was plucked from obscurity and named Education Secretary by President Biden, tweeted earlier this week that public schools are a “powerful engine driving the American Dream.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? This homily suggests that public schools are an equalizing force, particularly for low-income students and students of color. The reality has never matched the rhetoric: Despite decades of reform efforts, substantial public investment, and increased staffing levels, outcomes in public schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities, have barely budged in half a century, leaving many students ill-prepared for college or the workforce.

WIlL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed its 12th lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Administration, this time targeting the U.S. Department of Education’s McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. This $60 million program provides financial and educational opportunities to students nationwide who want to pursue graduate studies. But many college students are ineligible because of their race, including Asians, whites, Arabs, Jews, and some Latinos.  

WILL is representing Young Americans for Freedom Chapter at the University of North Dakota, the nationwide student organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), and two students who are ineligible for the program solely due to their skin color.  

The Quotes: Scott Walker, President of Young America’s Foundation, stated, “Denying a student the chance to compete for a scholarship based on their skin color is not only discriminatory but also demeaning and unconstitutional. At YAF, we proudly defend our students’ right to be judged on their merit and abilities, not on race.” 

Maud Maron

I know — I am the Manhattan mom removed from an elected school board because my words, about an anonymous author’s antisemitism in a student newspaper at my daughter’s school, offended the leader of New York City’s Public Schools.

This week, a U.S. District Court Judge in Brooklyn made clear that the First Amendment protects all of us in a comprehensive ruling that ordered me reseated and enjoined some of the most censorious provisions of the Chancellor’s Regulations.

Judge Gujarati told my censor — Chancellor David Banks — that “securing First Amendment rights is in the public interest.”

She’s right. 

Gerard Baker:

But it was the “teacher voice” remark that I found instructive.

It unintentionally captured the Democratic idea of the polity they seek to lead and reshape. It spoke to how they view themselves—and us. They are the teachers, equipped with the knowledge and authority to direct their hapless charges. We are the students, naive and ill-informed, sometimes attentive but too often insubordinate, with minds that need to be shaped and disciplined.

This self-image of Democrats and their role in government as benevolent, omniscient educators emerges from a mindset that represents a greater challenge to our freedoms than any attempts at interference in the lives of law-abiding Americans the Republicans are accused of planning. The didactic ethic, in which our leaders treat us as people who can’t make good decisions for ourselves, has been vividly on display in the last decade

Quinton Klabon:

@Emilee_Fannon talked about the test score changes, the test category name changes, the lagging student performance in Wisconsin (whatever the cut scores are) and legislation affecting all of those.

More.

Paul Fanlund:

It is all about the many thousands of people who theoretically may want to live here one day. Who knows, by the time they all get here, the city might have become considerably less appealing.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

David Blaska:

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Dave C. says voting NO is actually the progressive thing to do! Now if we could just find someone more electable than Blaska to run for school board next Spring.

Close some Madison schools, and a no on the November Referendums

David Blaska:

As the Chief of Police in Madison, I am deeply concerned about the safety of our students in the wake of the most recent school shooting in Georgia. It is a tragic reminder of the harsh reality that we live in a world where school shootings have become all too common. 

Yesterday’s tragic incident marks over 40 school shootings nationwide in just over one month of education. We cannot afford to be complacent, nor can we allow our biases or political beliefs to oppose good common sense when it comes to the safety of our children.

Ann Althouse:

I gave you a gift link to read the whole thing in what was my first post of the day: “A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: ‘How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America.'”

It was a long piece, and I really did have a lot to say about it myself, but I didn’t want to get dragged down dissecting what was so infuriatingly wrong about it. So I appreciated the active comments section.

The #1 thing I didn’t say but wanted to say was that contrary to Sulzberger’s perverted argument, criticizing the press is not censorship. Criticizing the press is more speech. Trump has been criticizing the press. It is Trump’s antagonists who have pursued censorship, for many reasons, including his criticism of the press.

FIRE:

For the fifth year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit organization committed to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, and College Pulse surveyed college undergraduates about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech on their campuses.

This year’s survey includes 58,807 student respondents from 257 colleges and universities. Students who were enrolled in four-year degree programs were surveyed via the College Pulse mobile app and web portal from January 25 through June 17, 2024. 

The College Free Speech Rankings are available online and are presented in an interactive dashboard (rankings.thefire.org) that allows for easy comparison between institutions. 

—-

More.

Mike Klein:

Boosted by strong scores in metrics measuring public service and an improved score in social mobility, the University of Wisconsin–Madison is ranked first among national public universities and 12th overall in Washington Monthly’s 2024 College Guide and Rankings.

Last year, UW was ranked second among public universities and 11th overall in the rankings released on Aug. 26.

”Public universities have a mission to provide an education both inside and outside of the classroom so that our students become more active, thoughtful, and well-rounded citizens of the world,” said Provost Charles Lee Isbell Jr. “While no single ranking tells the entire story, I’m pleased that Washington Monthly rankings value the Wisconsin Experience we provide to students.”

Washington Monthly says it rates schools “based on what they do for the country.”

The rankings are based on a school’s contribution to the public good in three categories: social mobility, research, and providing opportunities for public service.

Beatrice Lawrence:

Social studies teachers are returning to the classroom during the home stretch of a contentious election season in Wisconsin. On top of their back-to-school responsibilities, they’re navigating how to teach about the topic in a politically polarized state. 

Sarah Kopplin is a social studies teacher at Shorewood Intermediate School and president of the Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies. She said an alarming number of social studies teachers around the state have seen pushback on their lessons about elections and other current events. 

A survey from the council found 42 percent of council member respondents reported that building administration, school boards or community members lodged complaints or put restrictions on lessons related to politics, an election or current events, Kopplin said on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”  

Dan Lennington

Universities are starting to report the racial composition of their incoming class (Class of 2028), the first report post-SFFA. As expected, most schools are reporting a change in racial composition. What to expect from @UWMadison? A few points to consider:

1. UW calculates their demographics on the 10th day of classes, so 9/16. They release numbers a few days later (at the latest by Oct. 1).
2. UW admitted that it used race as a factor in admissions for the Class of 2027 and prior years. In response to SFFA, it stopped (they say). So the numbers should change. Otherwise why were they using race?

Katherine Bindley and Chip Cutter:

Gen Z workers are expected to outnumber baby boomers in the U.S. workforce this year. If only their bosses could understand them.

Companies find their youngest employees the most difficult to work with, surveys show. Now executives are making efforts to engage them more. They are arranging mentorship for employees who entered the workforce remotely during the pandemic; they are giving guidance on how to communicate and when to keep their thoughts to themselves; and they are offering new kinds of perks, like an on-site therapist.

Each new generation coming up in the workforce tends to confuse corporate management, at least initially. Members of Gen Z—generally defined as born between 1997 and 2012—are no exception. Dozens of board members from public companies gathered in June at the Sheraton hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., to discuss the questions this latest cohort raises.

Christine Heckart, who has worked as an executive in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years, told the audience that younger generations want meaning, mentorship and a sense of purpose.

Benjamin Yount:

A lot of students in Wisconsin are about to get far better grades on the state’s standardized tests, but advocates say it’s not because they are suddenly better at reading or math.

Wisconsin’s State Superintendent of Schools is defending the decision to change the standards for Wisconsin’s Fordward Exam and the ACT.

The Department of Public Instruction is both lowering the threshold for what is proficient, a 19 on the ACT will now count as proficient and changing the terms to measure student success. The most noticeable change is dropping the terms basic and below basic in exchange for approaching and developing.

“I feel again like this is easier to understand where kids are, and where they stand on the spectrum of learning,” Superintendent Jill Underly said in an interview.

Quinton Klabon, with the Institute for Reforming Government, said the changes are, once again, going to muddy the water to figuring out if students in Milwaukee Public Schools are actually learning.

——-

Defending Reduced Rigor….

“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT” – taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

Morgan Polikoff:

The high-level takeaway from our report: It is extremely difficult on most state report card websites to track longitudinal performance data at the school level going back to before COVID. There are a few exceptions — seven states (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee) earned an A for having this data available.

——

More.

Wisconsin Policy Forum

Gross property tax levies approved in 2023 by local taxing jurisdictions in Wisconsin increased by 4.6% statewide, which exceeded inflation and was the largest increase since 2007.

—-

Madison offers voters a $607,000,000 tax & spending increase on the November ballot…

Close some Madison schools, and a no on the November Referendums

Dave Cieslewicz (former Madison Mayor)

———

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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.

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

James Bacon

Virginia’s new Mathematics Standards of Learning (SOL) includes a return to memorizing the times tables this school year, like 44 other states and the District of Columbia, following a 6-year absence on ideological grounds.

The prior SOLs’ end goal for basic number facts was Virginia students using cognitively taxing computation strategies (e.g., repeated addition for multiplication), ignoring the cognitive science that, in addition, those facts need to be memorized. The return of Virginia’s evidence-based standards on number facts (the SOL also includes memorizing addition, subtraction, and division facts) are especially important for Virginia’s least advantaged children, who are much less likely to learn such essential skills through outside resources like parents and/or tutors.

But will Virginia school districts follow these standards or instead repeat the same mistake with math that they did with literacy, choosing ideology over science-based instruction?

Steph Machado:

Nearly five years into the state takeover of the Providence public schools, Rhode Island education officials have extended it for three more years until late 2027.

State Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green made the recommendation to the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education Thursday night, which unanimously voted to approve the plan.

“I am recommending an extension of the PPSD intervention for up to three years because the absence of an aligned, shared vision of governance and limited focus on improving student outcomes troubles me and is not conducive to continued success,” Infante-Green wrote in a memo to the council, which governs K-12 education.

The extension will last until Oct. 15, 2027. The order said Infante-Green has the discretion to recommend an end to the takeover “at any point” during the extension and return the schools to local control.

Anna Shapiro, Rebecca Sutherland, Julia H. Kaufman

Despite the growing body of research on how to support older readers, few studies consider whether U.S. teachers can identify students who have difficulty reading instructional materials across content areas or whether teachers feel like they have the knowledge and resources to support those students. Such information could lay the groundwork for states and school systems to provide better supports to teachers to address students’ reading difficulties. In this report, researchers explore U.S. public school teachers’ perceptions of students’ difficulties with reading in grades 3–8, those teachers’ knowledge about how students learn to read, their experiences supporting these readers, and what they need to help students become proficient readers.

The findings in this report highlight the importance of including teachers in upper elementary and middle school grades in resource development and allocation and offer guidance to policymakers designing or implementing reading instruction reforms.

Pfizer/White House Files:

But the crucial “fifth strike” and permanent censoring of my account caught them by surprise – because a Twitter lobbyist who was the company’s closest White House contact pushed it through in hours. The lobbyist, Todd O’Boyle, acted outside Twitter’s normal safeguards for actions against large accounts like mine. Instead, O’Boyle repeatedly pressured a junior Twitter employee to ban me on a Saturday evening in late August, when few employees were working.

“Hi all – did we perm suspend Alex berenson?” Gadde wrote an hour after my ban to a senior manager in “site integrity” unit, which was usually responsible for enforcement actions on accounts like mine. “Typically these are flagged to me first? Did I miss something[?]”

O’Boyle’s sudden move to ban me caught not just Gadde but the site integrity unit by surprise, the emails show. The manager responded, “this was not an action taken by SI [site integrity]. We’re investigating what happened.”

Shiori Chen:

Travelers’ Tour Through the United States was first published by Frederick and Roe Lockwood in 1822, 46 years after America gained its independence. This geography-centric game, designed for 2 to 4 players, is based on a map of the United States at the time. It features 24 states, ranging from the Atlantic coast to new Southern ones such as Missouri and Arkansas. The map includes 139 numbered cities and towns, which serve as spots for players to move to.

Tuxfamily

Depository

The primary intention of this project is to provide open access to mathematical texts in PDF format which individual mathematicians find particularly useful and which are clearly in the public domain or under open license. This provides a middle ground between large depositories like archive.org which host “everything” and subscription download services which often monopolize access to public domain texts. Please notify us, using the email below, if any of our PDF files are corrupted so that we can re-upload the readable file.

The PDFs of our mathematical texts are here.