Logan Wroge:

Increasing the amount staff pay for premiums would see teachers paying 6% of a HMO family plan — up from 3% — to about $44 more a month. Certain hourly employees, such as special education assistants, would pay 2.5% of an HMO family plan instead of 1.25%, or $8.53 more per month.

Scott Girard:

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

Health insurance costs have long been an issue in the Madison School District.

Administrators warned that benefits were unsustainable in 2014.

Much more on the planned 2020 tax and spending increase Madison referendum.

A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while Milwaukee is about $2.

Logan Wroge:

The Madison School Board signaled support Monday for a $317 million facilities referendum and a $33 million operating referendum, setting up the board to finalize the ballot questions later this month for the November election.

With several options on the table, board members expressed broad support for a slightly larger facilities referendum that would include more money for projects focused on sustainability and energy efficiency. Additionally, the board gravitated toward a smaller operating referendum than had been proposed.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” board member Kate Toews said during an Operations Work Group meeting. “Investing in kids is the future; investing in the climate is the future.”

Scott Girard:

Notes, links and some data on Madison’s planned 2020 referendum.

“Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a recent 2020 referendum presentation.

Projected enrollment drop means staffing cuts coming in Madison School District

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Benjamin Schwarz:

From its founding in 1890, the University of Chicago has occupied a singular place among American universities. Lacking the ancient lineages and social cachet of the Ivy League schools (Chicago welcomed women and Jews at a time when Harvard, et al, excluded the former and imposed strict quotas on the latter), Chicago, which is consistently ranked among the world’s top 10 universities, has always been known for its fierce intellectualism. ‘I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient Athens’, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once declared, ‘is the University of Chicago’. Indeed, whereas the Ivy League universities, Stanford and their ilk, admitted – and continue to admit – their undergraduates based on such qualities as athletic ability, family connections, and that vague attribute known as ‘leadership’, students came to Chicago because they prized what it still venerates as ‘the life of the mind’. (Chicago’s students score on average higher on the SAT – a national standardised test that assesses academic aptitude – than do those at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford).

Leila Fletcher, Kadjata Bah, and Leilani McNeal:

Madison school officials will consider hiring an Ohio-based company known for policies that some say hinder the free speech rights of student journalists.

Two school board members and Interim Superintendent Jane Belmore met last month with representatives of Ohio-based NEOLA. NEOLA is a policy-writing firm often hired by school districts to write and implement policies for local boards and local administrators. 

NEOLA policies were scrutinized recently in Wisconsin during a controversial case in Oshkosh. In that case a student reporter was prevented from publishing a story about abrupt staff changes at Oshkosh North High School.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Brock Doemel, a senior at Oshkosh North, eventually filed open records requests to learn more about an absent school staff member and to learn more about why the student-written story was removed from the school’s newspaper.

But policies written by NEOLA refer to student newspapers as “nonpublic forums” and therefore controlled by school district administrators. In the Oshkosh case, policies written by NEOLA were cited as reasons for denying open records requests, requiring student journalists to pay for public records, and asking student journalists to share their reporter’s notes, according the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

“The rule is that in what should be an open forum, the students have the right to publish unfettered and then they deal with the backlash that comes or the kudos that come,” said Vince Filak, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh who criticized NEOLA media policies.

Oshkosh students contacted the Student Press Law Center seeking advice in the case. Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the center, called NEOLA a “policy mill.” He said NEOLA’s “student media policies, in particular, has been something we’ve been battling here at the Student Press Law Center for 15-20 years.”

MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds spoke to The Capital Times and confirmed the district is “strongly considering” a partnership with NEOLA. The company’s website shows NEOLA offers services on bylaws and policies, administrative guidelines and procedures, and a district policy website.

Marie Connolly, Catherine Haeck, and Jean-William P. Lalibert:

This article provides evidence on the causal relationship between maternal education and the intergenerational transmission of income. Using a novel linkage between intergenerational income tax data and Census data for individuals born between 1963 and 1985 and their par- ents, we show that rank mobility has decreased over time, and that this decline was sharpest for children of mothers without a high school diploma. Using variation in compulsory school- ing laws, we show that rank mobility increases as the percentage of mothers with a high school diploma increases. We find weaker evidence that mobility increases with the percentage of mothers with a university degree.

Allison Hirschlag:

Everyone likes a good nap now and then, right? Whether you nod off during a boring movie, or rest your head on your desk at work for 20 minutes or so to fight the afternoon slump, naps can revitalize you in a major way.

One study even showed they can boost performance and memory regulation better than caffeine. This all sounds great in theory, but many people — myself included — find naps do the opposite.

I wake up from naps feeling like I’m in the throes of a New Year’s Day-strength hangover. It takes me at least 20 minutes to recover from them, and I never end up seeing any of the benefits. Even when I timed my nap to be no more than 30 minutes — the nap length sleep experts claim is the most beneficial — I came out of it certain I was experiencing the early stages of the flu (I wasn’t).

Theresa Harrington:

The Oakland School District is prepared to cut its workforce by up to 100 workers starting July 1 and may consider eliminating its police force in the future.

Both issues came before the school board on Wednesday night, ensuring that the district is likely to face months of turmoil as it cuts $18.8 million to balance its budget for the 2020-21 school year. At the same time, state and county officials have notified the district that its deficits could be higher than originally anticipated in December — $25 million this year and $33.5 million next year. The board expects to review updated budget projections in March.

The board cut fewer jobs than originally recommended by Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell and her staff, who recommended $20.2 million in cuts including about 76 central office administrators or other workers who support school services. Other cuts in school-based jobs are also expected, but which positions will be affected is unclear.

Oakland plans to spend $568,197,617 during the 2019-2020 school year for 50,202 students.

Madison spends just under $500m for about 27,000 students.

David Wahlberg:

A $10 million, five-year effort at UW-Madison to curb obesity in Wisconsin, which ended in December, met a stark reality: The state’s obesity rate, which is slightly higher than the national average, continued to go up.

Leaders of the Wisconsin Obesity Prevention Initiative, funded by the UW School of Medicine and Public Health’s Wisconsin Partnership Program, said they focused on creating systemic changes — such as encouraging bike paths and healthier snacks for kids — that could slow or reverse the uptick in coming years.

The national obesity rate has been climbing for decades, underscoring the pervasiveness of contributing factors such as unhealthy foods often being cheaper than healthy foods, increasing screen time among children and adults, and a lack of safe spaces to walk or exercise in many neighborhoods, health officials say.

“We need to fix the built environment and make our communities healthier for everyone,” said Dr. Vincent Cryns, a UW Health endocrinologist who led the obesity prevention initiative. Through the initiative, in Wisconsin, “we provided the infrastructure” to make such changes, he said.

Sara Lindberg, a UW-Madison researcher, works on the Wisconsin Health Atlas, a part of the initiative that continues to compile maps and track policies about obesity, neighborhood walkability, school wellness and other measures.

Jon Schuppe:

In the notice from Google was a case number. McCoy searched for it on the Gainesville Police Department’s website, and found a one-page investigation report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home 10 months earlier. The crime had occurred less than a mile from the home that McCoy, who had recently earned an associate degree in computer programming, shared with two others.

Now McCoy was even more panicked and confused. He knew he had nothing to do with the break-in ─ he’d never even been to the victim’s house ─ and didn’t know anyone who might have. And he didn’t have much time to prove it.

McCoy worried that going straight to police would lead to his arrest. So he went to his parents’ home in St. Augustine, where, over dinner, he told them what was happening. They agreed to dip into their savings to pay for a lawyer.

The lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “geofence warrant,” a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.

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

Scott Girard:

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

Health insurance costs have long been an issue in the Madison School District.

Administrators warned that benefits were unsustainable in 2014.

Much more on the planned 2020 tax and spending increase Madison referendum.

A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while Milwaukee is about $2.

Leslie Harris:

On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.

Hannah-Jones and I were on Georgia Public Radio to discuss the path-breaking New York Times 1619 Project, a major feature about the impact of slavery on American history, which she had spearheaded. The Times had just published the special 1619 edition of its magazine, which took its name from the year 20 Africans arrived in the colony of Virginia—a group believed to be the first enslaved Africans to arrive in British North America.

Weeks before, I had received an email from a New York Times research editor. Because I’m an historian of African American life and slavery, in New York, specifically, and the pre-Civil War era more generally, she wanted me to verify some statements for the project. At one point, she sent me this assertion: “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.

Andrew Ferguson

’ll tell you a funny story,” said Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University. It was the day before the first home football game of the season and he was sitting in his corner office, overlooking the postcard-perfect quad.

“So the cost of a year of undergraduate college at Purdue University, tuition and fees, is $9,992. I’m proud of that number.

“One day I’m looking at one of those college guides, and it said, ‘Tuition and fees: $10,002.’ I called up our people and said, ‘Lookit here, there’s a mistake. You got the wrong number.’ They said, ‘That’s not a mistake.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is. Believe me. I know.’ They went back and checked and they said, ‘No, that’s the right figure.’

“It just bugged me to death. Does Walmart have a special and price it at $10.02? I found out what happened. There’s a second installment on a preexisting gym fee that got tacked on. Ten dollars plus $9,992 equals $10,002.

“Next time I’m at the gym, I ask the guy who runs it, ‘How’s it going here?’ He said, ‘Membership’s up; we’re doing well, making a little profit.’ I thought, Okay, that’s all I needed to know. And the next meeting of the board of trustees, they repealed that fee.

“So now we’re back to $9,992,” he said. There was both self-deprecation and a note of triumph in his chuckle. “I don’t know why it bugged me so much, but it did.”

Conor Williams:

Charter schools used to be a bipartisan education reform, but Democrats have turned against it of late. Many of their complaints are bad-faith projections—criticism for problems that aren’t unique to charters but endemic throughout the public education system.

Take the objection that charters are an insufficiently transparent use of public dollars. In rolling out his education policy last May, Bernie Sanders charged that “charter schools are led by unaccountable, private bodies.” His campaign website promises he’ll make charters “comply with the same oversight requirements as public schools” and impose a moratorium on public funding for expanding charters. In an August interview with Education Week, Pete Buttigieg said “we want to see considerably more oversight” of charter schools.

Charters are governed differently from traditional district schools—usually, but not always, they sit outside of school-district control. Though for-profit charter schools exist in some states, the overwhelming majority are run by nonprofit organizations overseen by boards of directors, operating under contracts granted by a local or state authority.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Nathaniel Peters:

Kronman applies this vision of excellence to the controversies roiling American universities today: campus speech, diversity, and how we remember the past. He contrasts the university with an urban speakers’ corner. Debaters in a speakers’ corner and the public walking by compete as buyers and sellers in a marketplace of ideas. There is no obligation to offer sustained argument or to listen to the speaker. But the university is a community dedicated to the pursuit of truth and structured around the conversational idea. Their members must make and respond to arguments on the common ground of reason and shared premises. When students and professors assert their feelings or social location in place of rational argument, they shut down conversation without furthering it, thwarting the university’s core purpose.

Kronman’s final chapter examines the controversy over Yale’s decision to rename Calhoun College. The chapter has too much inside baseball for readers who didn’t choose Yale, but it helps show where the book’s overall argument breaks down. Kronman’s defense of keeping Calhoun’s name on the college rests on the university’s responsibility “to cultivate the capacity for enduring the moral ambiguities of life.” If we come to recognize that John Calhoun and Woodrow Wilson held odious views, he thinks, we should see the institutions that bear their names as monuments to the contradiction of good and evil in all human beings and the moral complexities that become clear only in hindsight. Colleges should help students learn to live with these ambiguities, not deny their existence.

This is true, up to a point. But it overlooks the primary purpose for which we erect memorials: honoring greatness and sacrifice, and mourning loss. Yes, we recognize that the great were not perfect. But we build statues of them and name buildings in their honor because they have been excellent. We may acknowledge ambiguity, but we don’t erect buildings for it. If our condemnation of Calhoun’s views about race and slavery now outweigh our appreciation of his political importance, it makes sense to reconsider the honors we have bestowed on him. If not, our memorials to Calhoun remain a testament to his excellence despite his vices, not to the moral ambiguity of his life overall.

Charles Levinson:

Federal agencies have big contracts with Virginia-based Babel Street. Depending on where you’ve traveled, your movements may be in the company’s data.

U.S. law enforcement agencies signed millions of dollars worth of contracts with a Virginia company after it rolled out a powerful tool that uses data from popular mobile apps to track the movement of people’s cell phones, according to federal contracting records and six people familiar with the software.

The product, called Locate X and sold by Babel Street, allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have traveled, going back months, the sources told Protocol.

They said the tool tracks the location of devices anonymously, using data that popular cell phone apps collect to enable features like mapping or targeted ads, or simply to sell it on to data brokers.

Vinson Cunningham:

A little more than half a century ago, New York City attempted an experiment in a handful of its public schools. In the thirteen years since Brown v. Board of Education, the city’s public schools had become more segregated. Many black parents decided that hope for their children rested in self-determination rather than in waiting for integration. Under pressure from grassroots groups, Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, approved a plan to create three locally governed school districts, in which community-elected boards would assume a degree of control over personnel and curriculum.

One of the school districts was in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that had once been Jewish and middle class but was, by the late sixties, mainly black and poor. Starting in the fall of 1967, the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville district deëmphasized traditional grading, added curricular units on black identity and culture, and, in predominantly Puerto Rican schools, adopted bilingual teaching. The new arrangement was popular with parents, and was supported by a surprisingly heterogeneous coalition that included Black Power separatists and the liberal Ford Foundation. It was opposed by the United Federation of Teachers, which was largely white and Jewish; the union’s leader, Albert Shanker, considered the community-control effort to be a veiled attempt at union-busting. Near the end of the school year, the district’s governing board dismissed thirteen teachers and six administrators—nearly all of whom were white, and critical of the new arrangement. Rhody McCoy, the district’s administrator, said that “the community lost confidence in them.” The union insisted that the dismissals were illegal. Local teachers went on strike. In September, 1968, the strike went citywide.

Gary Simons, the son of a housepainter and a homemaker, had just been hired as a teacher at P.S. 140, an elementary school in the Bronx, his home borough. When the strike reached the Bronx, he was living with a roommate about a half hour north of the school, in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Riverdale. As the days passed, he noticed that teachers in Riverdale and other rich areas were convening in synagogues, churches, and community centers, continuing to educate their students, albeit unofficially. In the South Bronx, the schools were simply closed.

Yvonne Kim:

Five University of Wisconsin-Madison students and one faculty member spoke in opposition to proposed amendments to a UW Board of Regents policy that would require disciplinary sanctions for students who disrupt other people’s free speech.

In October, the Regents voted in favor of amendments to Chapter UWS 17 that require a student found to have “materially and substantially disrupted the free expression of others” to be suspended after two violations and expelled after three. Since then, state lawmakers also passed a highly partisan, nearly identical Assembly Bill criticized by Democrats as vague and a threat to free speech.

Emily Files:

When Andrew Martin was hired to work in MPS in 2012, he showed up to his assigned high school and was greeted with confusion. “The principal said, ‘Oh I didn’t know we were getting somebody. What position are you here for?’ And I said ‘Well, I was hired as a social studies teacher,’” he remembers. 

The mix-up was sorted out, and Martin stayed with MPS for eight years. But along the way, he kept hearing other stories about human resources mishaps and delays that frustrate even teachers who really want to work for MPS.  

“I can’t imagine how many teachers … we’ve lost because they weren’t able to get questions answered,” Martin says. “Or if you get hired at a job and you do a background check and drug test, that takes a matter of days; whereas here, it takes weeks upon weeks to fill those positions.”

John Murawski:

College officials are trumpeting their new core mission of protecting female students from male student sexual aggressors. But academe is strangely silent in the face of professors or administrators themselves allegedly crossing the line by leering, making lewd comments, groping students or worse.

Buried within an influential campus sexual assault survey last year by the Association of American Universities is evidence of hundreds of incidents of inappropriate and potentially criminal behavior by faculty and staff against female students.

“The information buried in the report raises more questions than it answers and requires further investigation and explanation,” said Subodh Chandra, a Cleveland, Ohio, attorney who represents college plaintiffs in sexual misconduct lawsuits.

The anonymously conducted survey at 33 elite schools, ranging from Harvard to Ohio State, generated widespread news coverage by reaffirming a controversial statistic — that one in four college women will be assaulted or raped before they graduate.

The survey’s results concerning a more obvious power mismatch — faculty and staff sexual misbehavior toward female students — were not highlighted. Instead, the information was presented in tables, in a form difficult to decipher by students, parents and others. For example, the survey does not list the number of incidents, but provides the data as percentages – such as 0.3% or 0.5% – weighted for methodological reasons.

Scott Girard:

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

NBC 15:

Under a new pilot program the lowest grade students could get on assignments is 40 or 50 percent, not a zero.

Studies show freshman year is the most important year in high school and Geoffrey D. Borman, UW-Madison Education Policy Professor, said it can make or break you.

The modern A-F grading system has been around since the 1900’s.

It’s an evaluation performance of students that MMSD officials said is outdated.

MMSD is currently using the 0 to 100 percentage grading system, but high school teachers are trying out a new grade scale making forty or fifty percent– the new zero. In other words, a student could simply not turn in their assignment and still get credit.

“The grade scale itself is something I think not all students are accustomed to,” Geoffrey D. Borman, UW-Madison Education Policy Professor said.

Borman said one of the fears students face their freshman year is letter grades and failing early can have severe consequences.

…….

“Rather than coddling them we’re giving a little bit of a boost to them to support them and allow them to make a more successful transition,” he said. 

NBC15 spoke to parents who did not want to go on camera, but said they feel this grade scale is “dumbing it down” and only encourages students to be lazy in school.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Lotus Ruan, Jeffrey Knockel, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata:

YY, a live-streaming platform in China, began to censor keywords related to the coronavirus outbreak on December 31, 2019, a day after doctors (including the late Dr. Li Wenliang) tried to warn the public about the then unknown virus.

WeChat broadly censored coronavirus-related content (including critical and neutral information) and expanded the scope of censorship in February 2020. Censored content included criticism of government, rumours and speculative information on the epidemic, references to Dr. Li Wenliang, and neutral references to Chinese government efforts on handling the outbreak that had been reported on state media.

Many of the censorship rules are broad and effectively block messages that include names for the virus or sources for information about it. Such rules may restrict vital communication related to disease information and prevention.

Lizzy Francis:

Jess’s decision to “redshirt” her youngest children — let them stay in preschool for another year and delay their entry into kindergarten — did not come easily. She had all four of her children (eight, seven, and twin four-year-olds) in the span of three-and-a-half years, and wanted to keep her twins just two years behind her second oldest child. She liked the idea of keeping them together as a crew of some kind, protecting each other and sticking together. “From the beginning, I didn’t want to hold them back,” she says.

Jess’s stance changed when she went to a first grade parent-teacher conference for her 7-year-old. “Because he’s a year behind my first, he was doing everything my first would do. He was reading when he started kindergarten. He could color in the lines when he was three. Then, the teacher told me he was average. I’m pretty sure my jaw hit the floor. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? The child can read! He’s average!?’”

Kelly Stuart & Gina Fugnitto:

Dr. Louisa Moats: The body of work referred to as the “science of reading” is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, nor a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students.

Collaborative Classroom: What is your perspective on the current national discussion about the science of reading? For example, Emily Hanford of American Public Media has done significant reporting that has really elevated the conversation.

Dr. Louisa Moats: These days I have moments when I feel more optimistic. Emily Hanford’s reports have been the catalyst sparking our current national discussion.1 A growing number of states are confronting what is wrong with the way many children are being taught to read. I’m inspired by the dialogue and courage of the people who know enough about the science of reading to offer a vigorous critique of those practices, programs, and approaches that just don’t work for most children. I am also optimistic about the recent report out from the National Council on Teacher Quality. There’s an increasing trend of new teachers being trained in the components of reading, and I think that many veteran educators are open to deepening their learning.

However, there’s still a long way to go. In general our teaching practice lags far behind what the research tells us. We consolidated the research on what it takes to teach children to read way back in the early 1990s, and yet today a majority of teachers still haven’t been given the knowledge or instruction to effectively teach children to read.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

The Emory Wheel:

Syracuse University’s (N.Y.) suspension of 30 students who organized a sit-in earlier this week to protest campus bigotry blatantly obstructed students’ right to free expression. This injustice raises significant questions surrounding the implementation of Emory’s own free speech-related policies. While Syracuse’s administration has since lifted those suspensions, that such harsh punishments were levied in the first place should serve as a wake-up call for all institutions of higher education. 

Syracuse had an equal obligation to protect both students’ right to free expression and their safety. No college should abet the trauma of violent demonstration, as occurred during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally at the University of Virginia or the 2017 riot at at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Given that, only threats of immediate bodily harm should permit universities to assert their authority over protesters. Since the Syracuse sit-in was entirely peaceful, the university’s administration had no grounds on which to interfere.

In punishing the protesters while failing to adequately investigate the incidences of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia which sparked their demonstration, the university acted unevenly and with considerable bias. Unless the university can prevent further incidents of bigotry, such events will continue. Furthermore, penalizing a peaceful demonstration both constrains political activity and impairs the university’s ability to respond to genuinely violent demonstrations. 

Steven Elbow:

The problem, some say, is that disparities impact a population that has little political or economic clout. And white people, who control the levers of commerce and government, address only pieces of an interconnected web of issues that include child development, education, economics and criminal justice.

Brandi Grayson co-founded Young, Gifted and Black and now runs Urban Triage, an organization that provides educational support, teaches parenting skills and promotes wellness to help black families become self-sufficient.

She said elimination of racial disparities would require a seismic shift in attitude throughout society, which would take years, maybe generations. In the meantime, she said, government has to enact policies that enforce equitable treatment of people in housing, health care, education, employment and criminal justice.

David Blaska:

What’s Madison’s answer?

Teaching responsibility instead of victimhood? Demanding performance, not excuses? 

ARE YOU KIDDING? !!! This is Madison, where the answers are: More money, more baffling programs, more guilt, rinse and repeat. The Capital Times reports:

County officials and local nonprofits are hoping to reverse the trend with a new program that provides intensive mentoring for youthful offenders, which showed promise during a pilot program last year.

At $250,000 from the United Way and $100,000 from the county, the program would serve up to 49 kids — that’s $7,000 a kid for those who didn’t take math. As for the Policy Werkes, we’re siding with a neighbor who ventured, on social media:

If it isn’t stray bullets it is out-of-control 4,000-pound missiles. Next time you vote, consider how many chances a particular judge tends to give juveniles before applying the maximum extent of the law or creatively applies a deterrent.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Scott Girard:

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Corey DeAngelis:

The United States invests over $660 billion for K-12 education, or over $13,000 per student, each year, on average.¹ Real education expenditures in the U.S. have nearly quadrupled in the past half century without consistent improvements in student outcomes (Hanushek, 1997, 2015a, 2015b; Hanushek & Lindseth, 2009, 2010). Because education dollars are scarce resources, and because students’ academic success is important for society, it’s vital to examine which education sector delivers the most “bang for the buck.”

In theory, private schools and public charter schools might be more cost-effective than traditional public schools because of competitive pressures (Friedman,

Theoretically, it is possible that private schools and public charter schools have stronger financial incentives to spend scarce education dollars efficiently than traditional public schools because schools of choice must attract their customers (Friedman,

Voucher

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Jacob Mikanowski:

As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

Tanvi Misra:

The information age has ushered in an era of fear about children’s well-being, shifting norms heavily towards constant oversight and nearly impossible standards of safety. One casualty of that trend has been the playground, which has become mind-numbingly standard-issue—with the same type of plastic swing sets and slides—designed to minimize harm, rather than maximize enjoyment.

Over the last few years, however, pushback against the overly sanitized playground has grown considerably, with new research supporting the importance of play—especially unstructured play—for early childhood development. Critics also argue that concerns about actual harm are overstated. These findings have raised questions about playground design. Is the current playground model fostering creativity, independence, and problem-solving? What does risk really mean—and when is it OK? What can alternatives to current play spaces look like? And how can their benefits extend to all children in a city? Architects, researchers, childhood development specialists, and parents are weighing in on these questions around the world, and outlining a new vision for the future of play.

SUM:

Sometimes two abilities that appear very similar are controlled by two different parts of our brains.

In a new study, scientists found that two mental processes related to physical action take place in separate sections of the dorsal striatum, a part of the brain that’s important for movement. The results could lead to new insights about compulsive habits, authors say, as well as models of learning.

Eric Garr, who graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, was an author on the paper, published in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Professor Andrew Delamater (Brooklyn College, The Graduate Center), Garr’s Ph.D. adviser, is also an author.

By studying rodents, Garr and Delamater found that the process of learning how to do a series of actions by trial and error is regulated by the lateral part of the dorsal striatum, or DLS. However, the ability to actually do those actions when motivated by the anticipation of a reward is slightly separated—this is located in the medial part of the dorsal striatum, or DMS.

Alice O’Keefe:

In his treatise on the future of humanity, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the philosopher-historian Yuval Noah Harari offers the young people of today some advice. In order to survive and thrive in adulthood, they should not rely on traditional academic skills such as solving equations or learning computer code. These will soon become obsolete in a world in which computers can perform such techniques more quickly and accurately than humans. All information-based jobs, in fields as diverse as journalism and medicine, will be under threat by 2050.

Instead, Harari predicts that the key skills they need to survive and thrive in the 21st century will be emotional intelligence (it is still difficult to imagine a computer caring for a sick person or a child), and the ability to deal with change. If we can predict nothing else about the future, we know that it is going to involve a rapidly accelerating pace of change, from the growth of AI to a warming climate. Coping with this level of uncertainty will require adaptability and psychological resilience. These are best fostered by an education system that prioritises not traditional academic learning but rather “the four Cs”: critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.

None of this will come as news to the parents of today, who instinctively prioritise the emotional and physical health of their children over academic results. A survey released earlier last week by the Youth Sport Trust charity showed that 62% of parents with children aged 18 or under feel that the wellbeing of school pupils is more important than academic attainment. Another recent study by the ethnographers Bad Babysitter into the childcare sector in the US identified a similar cultural shift, away from parents aspiring to “the reassured child”, who is rewarded with prizes and certificates, towards “the resilient child”. “Being adaptive,” remarked the researchers, “is a 21st-century skill.” Young people themselves are, of course, also questioning the value of an education system with priorities that seem out of whack with the world around them. As one motto from the school climate strike had it, “No school on a dead planet”.

James Vaznis:

By many measures, the Boston schools are in crisis. Graduation rates dropped last year, while the gap between Black and white students earning diplomas more than doubled. The state last fall ordered the school district to ramp up improvement efforts at nearly three dozen low-performing schools. A Globe review revealed that fewer than one in four graduates at several Boston high schools earned college degrees. The school system’s buildings are deteriorating, and school officials can’t even keep bathrooms stocked with soap and toilet paper.

As the state wraps up its first comprehensive review of the Boston system in a decade, local officials are bracing themselves — and the public — for more bad news. Mayor Martin J. Walsh, whose administration has examined a draft of the findings, warned on public radio last week that the final version is “not going to be a real pretty report.”

The low performance of the Boston school system is propelling a growing number of state officials and other advocates to call on Massachusetts Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley to take decisive action, even a state takeover of the entire system. Just last week, a statewide advocacy organization representing Black and Latino families pleaded with Riley and the state education board to act swiftly and aggressively.

“Mayor Walsh and Superintendent [Brenda] Cassellius do not deserve more trust or more time,” Keri Rodrigues, founding president of Massachusetts Parents United, told the state education board members. “How much longer is the state going to accept Boston’s excuses for its inability to fix its schools? How many more children do we have to lose before you take this seriously?”

Many in Boston, though, believe state receivership would be a mistake.

“I don’t even want to say the word ‘receivership’ — that would be the worse thing that could happen,” said Ruby Reyes, director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance, a coalition of Boston students, parents, and educators, characterizing the state’s record on receivership as poor. “State oversight hasn’t been helpful. I think state assistance should be resources.”

Meanwhile: Outsourcing Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 School District Governance (while spending more, for less).

2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Baraboo School District officials said in court filings that police were contacted about the locker room note and that the district conducted a “thorough” investigation. They said students wearing inappropriate clothing are required to remove the items once staff is made aware. The district also said it now contracts with a company to screen music played at school events.

Bullying, assault

Banks’ mother became a district employee during her daughter’s eighth-grade year. She hoped her presence would change the dynamic but said she was stymied by administrators’ resistance. When she complained about behavior targeted specifically toward her daughter, administrators accused Banks of being a bully, the suit alleges.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Erin Richards:

American students struggle in math. 

The latest results of an international exam given to teenagers ranked the USA ninth in reading and 31st in math literacy out of 79 countries and economies. America has a smaller-than-average share of top-performing math students, and scores have essentially been flat for two decades.

One likely reason: U.S. high schools teach math differently than other countries. 

Classes here often focus on formulas and procedures rather than teaching students to think creatively about solving complex problems involving all sorts of mathematics, experts said. That makes it harder for students to compete globally, be it on an international exam or in colleges and careers that value sophisticated thinking and data science. 

Related: Math Task Force.

Sarah Sparks:

Eliminating racial segregation can be a little like playing whack-a-mole: Instead of going away, too often it just finds a new outlet.

A massive new study of North Carolina classrooms over nearly 20 years finds that as racial segregation between schools went down, the racial isolation within the classrooms inside those schools went up. This class-level isolation can limit black and Hispanic students’ access to challenging courses and hamstring district efforts to encourage the broader social and academic benefits of diversity.

In a working paper released earlier this month, Duke University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill researchers looked at data on the number of white, black, and Hispanic students in every class in the Tarheel State’s K-12 traditional and charter public schools. The researchers focused on English and math classes in grades 4, 7, and 10 during the 1997-98, 2005-06, and 2012-13 school years, a time when the state’s Hispanic student population grew from 3 percent of all students to 14 percent. They defined segregation as the degree to which the racial makeup of classrooms departed from the racial composition of all public school students in the county.

Segregation within schools accounted for up to 40 percent of all racial segregation in North Carolina, which has been a bellwether for national efforts to integrate schools. The study’s findings suggest this “hidden segregation” can become a problem for the very districts focused on making their overall schools more diverse.

“Within-school segregation is significant. Ignore this at your peril,” said Charles Clotfelter, who co-authored the study with Duke colleagues Helen Ladd and Mavzuna Turaeva, and Steven Hemelt of UNC-Chapel Hill, at a summit here by the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, part of the American Institutes of Research.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Henry Sanders:

This week, Henry welcomes Madison School Board president Gloria Reyes to talk about growing up on the North Side, hiring a new superintendent, the changing role of police in schools and more.

Meanwhile: Outsourcing Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 School District Governance (while spending more, for less).

2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

UC Santa Cruz:

As you are likely aware, in an effort to better support our Ph.D. and MFA students and help address the very legitimate financial concerns they have raised, we announced and implemented a number of new campus programs to help alleviate their financial burdens – and we are working together to provide greater levels of support. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to find an amenable resolution, 54 teaching assistants have continued to withhold fall grade information. As a result, we have been left with no choice but to take an action that we had truly and deeply hoped to avoid. As I previously shared, students who fail to meet their contractual obligations by withholding fall grade information will not receive spring quarter appointments, or if they have received them they will be dismissed from their spring quarter appointments.

Rachel Paula Abrahamson:

Alicia Hobson’s 11-year-old daughter, Azlyn, was counting down the days until the Valentine’s Day dance at her Utah middle school.

“She was so excited she could barely sleep,” Hobson told TODAY Parents, noting that the sixth grader picked out her outfit a week ahead of time.

“It was supposed to be the best day ever,” Hobson, 37, said.

But it wasn’t.

That afternoon, when Azlyn got home, she had an “emotional explosion” in the kitchen, while recounting how a boy who makes her uncomfortable had asked her to dance.

“She politely said, ‘No thank you,’” Hobson revealed. The problem? At Rich Middle School in Laketown, Utah, it’s against the rules to say “no,” and principal Kip Motta allegedly intervened when he heard Azlyn decline the invitation at the dance.

“He said something like, ‘No, no. You kids go out and dance,’” Hobson revealed. “He basically shooed Azlyn and the boy off onto the dance floor.”

Albert Cheng & Laura Florick:

Conventional wisdom and some empirical research suggests that study abroad programs enhance skills and personal growth in ways that translate into success in the labor market. However, this research is limited by its inability to address sources of selection bias that may confound the positive relationship between study abroad experience and labor-market success. We conduct a field experiment to overcome these limitations. Using a resume audit, we estimate the causal relationship between participation in study abroad experience and the likelihood of receiving a callback from a potential employer. We also tested for potential heterogeneities by the location (i.e., Asia versus Europe) and length (i.e., two weeks versus one year) of the study abroad experience. Compared to resumes that list no study abroad experience, resumes that list study abroad experience in Asia regardless of length are about 20 percent more likely to receive a callback for an interview if the resume studied. The differences in rates increases to 25 percent when comparing resumes without study abroad experience to those that list two-week programs in Asia. Resumes that list study abroad experience in Europe for one year are 20 percent less likely to receive any callback and 35 percent less likely to receiving a call back for an interview, relative to resumes that do not list study abroad experience. Implications about the value of study abroad are discussed.

Independent Institute:

Professor Heilbroner’s pronouncement of socialism’s death is greatly exaggerated. Socialism has risen from its own ashes perhaps more often than has any other political ideology on earth. Now, more than 30 years after Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev implemented reforms that helped burn the ideal of a planned economy to the ground, socialist doctrines are once again gaining in popularity, especially among young people.

Much has been written about socialism, yet too little has been read (too little serious writing, that is). This annotated list of recommended reading, compiled by Independent Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Williamson M. Evers, tries to remedy this deficiency by highlighting some of the most insightful critiques of socialism ever written. It’s not an exaggeration to say that anyone who carefully studies even a handful of these books will gain a stronger understanding of socialism than is possessed by the vast majority of socialists.

“This is the best list of what to read about socialism that’s out there,” says Dr. Evers.

William Davies:

The 20th century witnessed a distinctive model of interlocking political, educational and artistic institutions, with the humanities at their core. Public bodies such as the British Academy and the BBC set the template for the optimistic, post-1945 era of public investment in the arts and humanities. The state actively supported their expansion after the war via such icons of mass cultural modernity as the Arts Council, BBC2, the Open University and the new redbrick universities. By the 1980s, this project had borne such fruits as the South Bank Show, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and Channel 4. Threaded through all of this was the principle that there was a public interest in understanding ideas, artefacts and events.

Scott Girard:

An outside agency could soon be reviewing and updating the Madison Metropolitan School District’s policies.

Neola, based in Ohio with consultants based in Wisconsin, has more than 1,000 client districts around the country, including 269 in Wisconsin, where it has worked since 1989. In Dane County, those districts include DeForest, Stoughton, McFarland and Monona Grove.

MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds said the district’s legal services department needs the help, and confirmed it’s a partnership the district is “strongly considering.”

The department has four staff members, according to the district’s website: a secretary, Title IX investigator/Affirmative Action officer, general legal counsel and associate general legal counsel.

“We have such a small legal counsel that we need support on the policy piece,” LeMonds said. “Primarily the service that they’ll be providing is not writing the policy but working with us to update policy. There’s a lot of them, some are several years old and just need to be updated.”

But School Board member Nicki Vander Meulen, who is one of two board members on the board’s policy work team, is concerned that working with Neola will leave the district with boilerplate policies that aren’t applicable to local concerns.

“This is one of the most important things the board does,” Vander Meulen said.

Neola has more than 400 policy templates that “cover the vast array of issues facing K-12 school districts,” according to its website, though it “does not recommend the use or incorporation of district-specific materials.” While the company will provide legal assistance for claims that the policies do not “accurately reflect what is required by state and federal law,” the district is liable for risks related to included district-specific materials.

Vander Meulen is also concerned about the timing of the discussions, given new superintendent Matthew Gutierrez starts on June 1. She said any negotiations now make it seem like the administration “wants to limit his power.”

“Do we want him to be able to effect change in the district or do we want to force policy on him?” she said.

No matter the cost, Vander Meulen said it would be “incredibly problematic” to give up policy writing duties, one of the board’s “core functions.”

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Peter Hansteen:

The important point is that you are or were about to be the victim of what I consider a very obvious scam, and for no good or even nearly valid reason. You should not need to become the next victim.

And this, dear policy makers and tech heads in general is our problem: A large subset of the general public simply do not know their way around the digital world we created for them to live in. We need to do better.

In that context I find it quite disturbing that people who should know better, such as the Norwegian Center for Information Security, in a recently issued report (also see Digi.no’s article (both in Norwegian only, sorry)) predict that the sextortion attacks will become “more sophisticated and credible”. Then again at some level they may technically be right, since this kind of activity starts out with a net negative credibility score.

Marielle Argueza:

It’s census season, meaning there’s a lot of attention on how many people live where right now, but population numbers and projections are always changing, even between census years. In 2018, the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments forecast a slowdown in population growth in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. And that trend is beginning to appear, including in public school classrooms.

Salinas Union High School District and one of its largest feeder districts, Alisal Union, are showing signs of an enrollment decline. Both districts generate revenue from a funding formula including state funds. Those funds are dependent on average daily attendance. That means one student is the equivalent of a certain amount of state funding for a school, with the amount varying per fiscal year, based on the state’s budget.

It started slowly. Between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 school years, Alisal Union School District lost 31 students. But then from 2017-18 to 2018-19, the district lost 327 students.

An “emphasis on adult employment“.

Scott Girard:

More black students in Madison middle schools will soon have the opportunity to be part of a group with their peers.

Black Student Unions are already present at each of the four comprehensive high schools and some middle schools. The School Board approved a $45,665 contract Monday with Brandi Grayson’s Urban Triage organization to add two more to that list.

Grayson began leading a BSU at Sherman Middle School this year, and will hire facilitators to lead similar groups at Whitehorse and O’Keeffe middle schools.

Minding the Campus:

Two American elite universities, Yale and Harvard, are now in the crosshairs of the Education Department. Why? They accepted money from foreign countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and not reporting the gifts or contracts, which federal investigators estimate to be at least $6.5 billion.

The story, which appears in The Wall Street Journal, explains that “universities are required to disclose to the education department all contracts and gifts from a foreign source that alone or combined are worth $250,000 or more in a calendar year.” The Journal does not explain what, if anything, the money was intended for. What we do know is that it has not been used to lower tuition costs for students.

Last month, Charles Lieber, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was arrested and criminally charged with making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the U.S. Defense Department about his ties to a Chinese government program to recruit foreign scientists and researchers.

China wasn’t the only country of concern. The investigation, which began in 2019, showed one university had a relationship with Kaspersky Lab, a Russia-based cybersecurity company whose products the Trump administration has banned government agencies from using amid concerns it worked with Russian intelligence.