Francesca Gino:

The top performers in their fields—from LeBron James to Oprah Winfrey to Bill Gates—seem to have it all. Through a combination of talent, drive, and hard work, they lead their organizations to the next level. In fact, according to a recent estimate, top performers produce 20 to 30 times more than the average employee in their fields.

Many of us aspire to reap the accolades, respect, and influence that come with being one of the very best. But new research demonstrates that performing at high levels can also come with some heavy costs: It can make our peers resent us and try to undermine our good work. And there’s more: the “social penalty” that star performers suffer is actually higher in more collaborative workplaces.

A story from Hollywood provides an apt illustration. Tom Hanks won back-to-back Best Actor Academy Awards in 1993 and 1994 for his performances in the films Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. Many critics made the argument that Hanks performed equally well in many of his subsequent movies, such as Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, and Castaway. But Hanks didn’t receive enough votes from his fellow actors to be nominated for any of these movies. The lack of nominations, as various critics and fans alike concluded, seemed an intentional slight that robbed Hanks of awards he deserved. The actor’s peers may have failed to nominate him for a third Oscar because of the envy and resentment they knew they would likely experience if he won yet another Academy Award.

Jon Hilsenrath:

The full impact of the coronavirus pandemic may take years to play out. But one outcome is already clear: Government, businesses and some households will be loaded with mountains of additional debt.

The federal government budget deficit is on track to reach a record $3.6 trillion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and $2.4 trillion the year after that, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Businesses are drawing down bank credit lines and tapping bond markets. Preliminary signs are emerging that some households are turning to credit for funds, too.

The debt surge is set to shape how governments and the private sector function long after the virus is tamed. Among other things, it could be a weight on the expansion that follows.

Scott Gottlieb and Lauren Silvis:

Systems on the market are well suited to this mission. The GeneXpert by Cepheid is a highly sensitive machine that uses a chemical process called polymerase chain reaction to test for infection by detecting the viral RNA. This machine doesn’t require complicated sample prep or even a perfect swab of the nose and throat. It can use a relatively small sample of upper-airway secretions to discriminate a positive test from a negative one precisely. Cepheid said it is expanding its production of test kits and the machines that run them. Other testing systems in development may have the same potential.

For businesses that can’t easily bring testing to the work site, there are other options. They can work with companies developing home collection tests, which would help make this technology available sooner, or could contract with pharmacies running screening programs. States could sponsor collaborative testing programs and allow small businesses to join. Government could financially support these efforts for higher-risk businesses that may not have capital available to expand testing, such as grocery stores.

Frederick M. Hess:

A week after COVID-19 prompted the closure of Virginia’s schools, my five-year-old’s Montessori teacher started doing 30 minutes of Zoom with the class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. The content is nothing to write home about. The teacher reads a story, talks a bit about daffodils or frogs, and might celebrate a kid’s birthday.

But, you know what? The first morning, Grayson was utterly transfixed. He shyly extended his hand to touch his teacher’s face on the iPad. He giggled when she said good morning to him. He bounced as he pointed out each classmate in his or her little Zoom box. Watching this, I found myself choking back tears. 

Humans are social creatures. A primary task for schools is to help ensure that socialization takes a productive, healthy direction. That’s been widely recognized at least since Plato first sketched his fascist fantasy of schooling in The Republic. Even before the coronavirus, schools have been taking on more and more of this burden as civil society has atrophied, with schools asked to play the role once more widely shouldered by churches, Boy Scout troops, and 4-H clubs. 

But socialization is hardly the only purpose of schooling: Schools are also, of course, the places where we expect youth to learn the knowledge, skills, and habits needed to be responsible, autonomous citizens. Lots of adults in a community — from cousins to coaches — may be able to mentor a kid or provide a shoulder to cry on. Few, outside of educators, are prepared to coherently teach algebra, biology, or Spanish. 

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 Bauer:

Evers told Trump in a letter mailed Wednesday that Wisconsin faces more than $2 billion in revenue losses due to skyrocketing unemployment and other hits to the economy caused by the coronavirus. He signed the letter with the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania, all Democrats. They asked Trump to work with Congress to send $500 billion to states and local governments facing budget shortfalls.

On Thursday, Evers joined with six other Midwestern governors to coordinate reopening their state economies after similar pacts were made in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Other states joining are Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota and Kentucky.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Vivian Cromwell:

Donald Knuth is a computer scientist who came of age with his field. During the nascent years of computer programming in the middle of the last century, a candy company ran a contest that summoned his talents as a 13-year-old. The contest asked kids to determine how many words could be made from the letters of the candy’s name: Ziegler’s Giant Bar. It was a well-defined problem with distinct pieces, just the kind he loved.

“I had an obsessive-compulsive streak that drew me to digital, discrete problems. And I loved poring over large collections of information,” Knuth said.

Knuth methodically leafed through his family’s 2,000-page Funk & Wagnalls unabridged dictionary in the basement. He even convinced his parents he was sick, winning himself two weeks away from school to work on the problem. After labeling index cards with headings such as “Aa,” “Ab” and “Ba” based on the beginnings of possible words using letters from the candy’s name, he went down the dictionary’s columns noting words that qualified. He found that he could skip entire sections of the dictionary, such as pages for words starting with the letter “C,” or sections of the “B” words whose second letter was “U.”

Michael Barone:

Some of America’s most beautiful spaces, our college and university campuses, are closed and empty these days. Schools have canceled their spring semesters and commencements because of the COVID-19 virus; classrooms, dormitories, and athletic facilities have been closed. 

Students at many institutions are told that they can continue to access instruction online. But exams and grades have been canceled in many cases, and one suspects that online viewership will be sporadic and concentration intermittent.

But students shouldn’t hover around their home mailboxes waiting for an envelope with a tuition rebate check. And students (and parents) who expect that their campuses will reopen next fall, next spring, or the fall after that may be in for surprise and disappointment.

American higher education has been in serious trouble for the past two decades. Yes, it’s true that American universities science and technology departments lead the world, and the (increasingly unscientific) social sciences and (often inhumane) humanities departments can still boast some brilliant scholars. But at some point, too much of a good thing stops being a good thing. People have observed for years that college graduates make more money over their lifetimes than non-college graduates. But it doesn’t follow that people not headed to college will make more money if they go there.

Stanley Goldfarb:

As the number of Covid-19 infections rises and the death toll mounts, the media is doing a good job of focusing on the safety of the health-care workforce and the capacity of hospitals to deal with a surge of desperately ill patients. What has received less attention is that many doctors haven’t been adequately trained in medical school to deal with a situation like this.

Most medical schools don’t require students to do coursework on pandemic response or practical preparation for a widespread and sustained emergency. American medical training as a whole doesn’t include a strong grounding in public-health issues or disaster preparedness. Instead, two of the nine specific curricular requirements decreed by the body that accredits medical schools are focused on social issues in medicine, including “the diagnosis of common societal problems and the impacts of disparities in health care on medically underserved populations,” particularly “in a multidimensional and diverse society.” None mention public health or epidemics.

Last evening the SF Board of Education directed staff to present a plan to give all our students A’s. No incompletes. Just A’s.

This decision was made in full support of @UESF teachers and other education leaders.

I’m so grateful to be a part of this district. https://t.co/jdBQYntN8F

— Alison Collins 高勵思 (@AliMCollins) April 15, 2020

James Somers:

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

Amy Schwabe:

When school is in session, many Playworks recess games include lots of kids running around on a playground, using shared equipment and giving each other high-fives; none of that works with current social distancing requirements and safer-at-home orders.

But many games are flexible enough to play from home, with little equipment, with siblings or parents or even alone.

“Our coaches play games that are accessible to families, and they also introduce some fun, silly modifications during the videos,” said Carolyn Muckelberg, development director for Playworks Wisconsin. “They try to keep it as engaging as it would be if it was face-to-face real-time recess.”

Lucas Vebber and Daniel Suhr:

We are not here to argue anything is wrong with the policy choices made in these documents; indeed many may provide the type of regulatory relief that is sorely needed, especially right now. Ours is a purely procedural, legal point — all of this regulation-by-guidance should have been done by emergency rulemaking. It is both unfair and illegal to issue mandates on the regulated community by guidance. It creates legal uncertainty for citizens, increases their exposure to lawsuits, and undermines basic democratic principles. Emergency rulemaking is a preexisting statutory scheme that preserves transparency, accountability, and due process while providing nimble, fast response times for policy-makers.

An emergency rule, by definition, is a rule that must be quickly promulgated because “preservation of the public peace, health, safety, or welfare necessitates placing a rule into effect” faster than the traditional rulemaking process would allow. This process ensures that there is still minimal oversight and public involvement, while still allowing agencies to quickly react to emergency situations. The emergency rulemaking process stands in stark contrast to the Evers administration’s regulating-via-guidance documents, tweets, and press releases that we’ve seen in recent weeks.

The emergency rulemaking process is fairly straightforward, and allows agencies to promulgate new regulations without abiding by the statutorily mandated notice, comment and publication requirements for regular rules. The emergency rulemaking process goes like this: (1) the agency drafts a scope statement, which must be approved by the governor and sent to the legislature and to the Legislative Reference Bureau for publication in the administrative register; (2) the agency can hold any public hearing on the scope statement, if directed by the legislature; (3) the agency will draft the regulation; (4) the agency sends the draft regulation to the governor for approval; (5) and finally, the agency publishes the rule. The rule is effective immediately upon publication, unless it states otherwise. The whole process can take less than two weeks from start-to-finish, and the rule is valid for 150 days, unless extended by the legislature.

Once published, the rule is subject to legislative oversight. For example, the legislature could choose to suspend the rule at any time, or could simply allow it to expire at the end of its 150 days. The agency is also required to prepare a fiscal estimate for an emergency rule – adding to transparency. If the rule will have a significant effect on the private sector, the fiscal estimate must include “the anticipated costs that will be incurred by the private sector in complying with the rule.”

Related: The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by Governor Evers, granted thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge waivers. “Mulligans”.

This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Logan Wroge:

Scott Girard:

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

My recent email to the Madison School Board and District Chief Financial Officer:

I hope that you, your families and colleagues are well.

I write to see if anyone has modeled the implications of a property tax base drop on the proposed 2020 referendum? Madison’s property tax base has increased substantially over the past decade, somewhat due to a significant federal taxpayer ($38B+) electronic medical record backdoor subsidy.

How might a construction slow down and declining property values due to a recession/deep downturn affect the proposed tax & spending increases?

I further wondered if the looming substantial federal funds might be applied to replace part or all of the planned property tax based referendum?

Finally, I was part of the group that reviewed Infinite Campus (and other similar systems) years ago. Some time ago, the District completed a teacher, staff and parent usage study. Has that been updated? Please forward the % of teachers who use IC daily, weekly and monthly along with the % of parents, staff and students for similar time frames.

Best wishes,

Jim

John Burtka:

In historian Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism, he describes how “the new ruling class of administrators, bureaucrats, technicians, and experts” that dominates public life possesses neither the old aristocratic virtues of priests and monarchs nor the virtues of natural aristocrats described by Jefferson and Röpke. A “new therapeutic culture of narcissism” instead is at the center of their worldview. 

The biggest difference between the old aristocratic cultures and our own is how they raise children. And it’s in the home where the hopes of establishing a new, more virtuous leadership class go to die at a very young age. For today’s elites, guilt has replaced obligation as the organizing principle of family life. Instead of seeing society as “a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn,” as Edmund Burke aptly put it, they reject the concept of stewardship all together. Nature and tradition are   repressive or at least passé, and children are aided by an army of counselors, consultants, and programs in the hope of a lifetime of self-actualization. 

In order to justify such a selfish existence, they attempt to atone for the guilt of their privilege by ritual participation in the new religion of identity politics and its accompanying liturgical feasts. The high holy days of the past have been replaced with festivals and parades honoring various marginalized groups or identities. Anxious city managers and corporate boards offer pinches of incense to the new gods by modifying their branding guidelines and official communications to include the symbols of the new liturgical cult. Families themselves display these symbols from in their yards and on their cars. While their sense of guilt will not go away (there is no such thing as forgiveness for oppressors), they can learn to mitigate its effects and come to terms with their own narcissism so long as they pay lip service to the latest trends in social justice.

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.

Brooke Binkowski:

And this is what social media needs to do, now, today: Deplatform the proudly ignorant disinformers pushing snake oil and false hopes. Do so swiftly and mercilessly. They will whine about freedom of speech. They will cry about censorship. Let them.

How can I be so cavalier about freedom of speech? I hear the naysayers asking. Surely there is a right to say what you like? Certainly. But these are people with more than a platform. They have a megaphone. Verified accounts on social media platforms are offered extra layers of influence and spread. Claims made by those accounts are taken as having more authority and sincerity, despite the observable truth that they often do not and are simply abusing their influence. Give the liars three chances, if you like. They’ll blow it. They always do. Once that happens, delete their accounts. Deplatform them.

What, do you really think people like Laura Ingraham — who has a nightly television show broadcast all over the world — or heads of state like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, who have entire diplomatic networks dedicated to getting their messages to the public — will suffer for it? They will still be able to say whatever they like. They just won’t be able to disinform the public so readily. Deplatform them all.

So, social media, you should have done this a long time ago but now we are in a situation that is many orders of magnitude worse than the often-invoked “fire in a crowded theater” clause. Show the world what we all know to be true: That freedom of speech is an elegant concept that demands a sense of personal responsibility, and that freedom of speech is not an absolute right but an earned privilege that works in all directions. If your particular exercise of freedom of speech obfuscates or contravenes that same right in others, then it is no longer free by definition. So let the liars cry about their imaginary censorship. They’ll still be able to. It just won’t be used against the people of the world quite so readily in the middle of a pandemic. The time is now.

“A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny”. – Thomas Jefferson.

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.

Jason Beaubien:

For the first time, the number of children paralyzed by mutant strains of the polio vaccine are greater than the number of children paralyzed by polio itself.

So far in 2017, there have been only six cases of “wild” polio reported anywhere in the world. By “wild,” public health officials mean the disease caused by polio virus found naturally in the environment.

By contrast, there have been 21 cases of vaccine-derived polio this year. These cases look remarkably similar to regular polio. But laboratory tests show they’re caused by remnants of the oral polio vaccine that have gotten loose in the environment, mutated and regained their ability to paralyze unvaccinated children

“It’s actually an interesting conundrum. The very tool you are using for [polio] eradication is causing the problem,” says Raul Andino, a professor of microbiology at the University of California at San Francisco.

Greta Anderson:

Arica Kincheloe said she took a risk quitting her job and moving halfway across the country from Seattle to attend the University of Chicago’s nationally ranked master’s program in social service administration.

But now that her courses for the one-year accelerated program were moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kincheloe, a first-generation college graduate from a low-income background, is questioning what more than $50,000 in student loan debt will mean for her future.

“It’s a throwaway — a shortened quarter. They took away one week of the quarter,” she said. “I do not feel like I am getting the same education that I would have otherwise. The sort of enrichment and learning that I would have in the classroom isn’t there.”

David Folkenflik:

Michael Bloomberg’s short-lived presidential bid reignited a long-simmering dispute over the widespread use of nondisclosure agreements at American corporations — especially at his own.

His namesake company, Bloomberg LP, has used nondisclosure agreements broadly to conceal allegations and silence complaints from employees of sexual harassment or a hostile work environment, as published reports have documented.

The story of one Bloomberg reporter and his wife showcases the widespread use of such legal restraints at the company — and how far their reach can extend.

Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.

“They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife,” the author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher tells NPR. “I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being.”

Fincher is married to the journalist Mike Forsythe, a former Beijing correspondent for Bloomberg News who now works at The New York Times. In 2012, Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China’s ruling classes.

The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer.

Even so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders’ ties to the country’s richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters’ sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping. The story gained steam throughout 2013.

Cheryl Winokur Munk:

There was a mass exodus of students from college and university campuses last month in an effort to slow the march of coronavirus infections across the U.S. With a widespread shift to online learning now under way, many families are wondering: Will they be getting refunds or partial refunds, for room, board and related costs?

A look at what various schools have announced so far suggests what students get back, if anything, is going to depend on the institution they attend.

Many colleges and universities have said they plan to prorate charges for room and board based on the date students had to vacate campus. Some schools have already started refunding money; others have merely indicated they will. Still other schools have said decisions on these matters will be forthcoming, though in several cases no time frame has been given.

And how about tuition? Generally speaking, colleges aren’t refunding tuition as a result of the shift to online learning—the rationale being that classes are still taking place, albeit in a different medium. Also, colleges generally aren’t altering financial-aid commitments as a result of the shift, though there could be exceptions for students who drop out or reduce their course load below full-time status, says Karen McCarthy, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

Wall Street Journal:

Adapt

I’m a lucky one. My summer internship in finance is still set to begin in May, though that could change suddenly. Still, others aren’t so fortunate. Take the typical college junior. Maybe he didn’t get his act together to find an internship last summer, after his sophomore year. But there was no rush—he still had this summer, one more shot at some experience in, say, the corporate world. Now that chance is likely gone. Come fall, he and many like him will be seniors. They’ll apply for full-time positions without any job experience in their fields.

These students must ask how they nonetheless can make this summer productive and differentiate themselves from their peers. The key is to realize that for employers, an internship listed on a résumé is only a proxy for relevant experience. But this can take many forms. Instead of “gaining coding experience” at a software-engineering internship, you can program websites of your own. Instead of “working in a collaborative environment” in an office job all summer, you can work with others to manage the clients of your lawn-cutting business.

This summer will be unconventional. It just might show prospective employers more about you than an internship ever would.

—Cal Nagusky, The Ohio State University, finance

Ari Armstrong:

Hundreds of thousands of children who normally attend Colorado’s schools now are stuck at home because of COVID-19. Governor Jared Polis recently extended school closures through April, and various districts quickly announced they’d stay physically closed through the school year as they ramp up online learning.

“Everyone is homeschooling now,” perhaps you’ve heard. Sure, students are schooling at home. But this crisis schooling looks hardly anything like regular homeschooling. Indeed, most families who normally homeschool have radically changed their routines during this crisis. So parents should not judge normal homeschooling by the very unusual conditions this crisis has created.

Now that I’ve started “homeschooling” my son, the very term strikes me as misleading and even silly. Although my son is old enough for kindergarten in the Fall, we’ve decided to go the homeschool route. So I have joined various local homeschooling Facebook groups and started taking my son to homeschool co-ops. Prior to this emergency, only a fraction of what we did took place in the home.

Tony Room:

More than 2,100 U.S. cities are anticipating major budget shortfalls this year and many are planning to slash programs and cut staff in response, according to a survey of local officials released Tuesday, illustrating the widespread financial havoc threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.

The bleak outlook — shared by local governments representing roughly 93 million people nationwide — led some top mayors and other leaders to call for greater federal aid to protect cities now forced to choose between balancing their cash-strapped ledgers and sustaining the public services that residents need most.

“There’s no question that the coronavirus pandemic has had, and will have, a major impact on cities of all sizes,” said Clarence Anthony, the executive director of the National League of Cities.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

Logan Wroge:

Gomez Schmidt has said that as a board member, she wants to prioritize choosing a new elementary reading curriculum, increasing trust and transparency, and effectively managing the budget.

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.

Heather Osbourne:

Austin school district officials on Friday deployed more than 100 WiFi-equipped buses to apartments and neighborhoods across Austin to help students with online learning during the coronavirus pandemic.

Officials on Friday said the 110 buses were funded by a $600,000 grant through Kajeet, a wireless provider operating on the Verizon and Sprint LTE wireless networks.

The buses were placed in areas of Travis County where students have no internet access, officials said. A total of 500 buses were equipped with routers through the grant, according to the district.

Students who live at the locations listed below can access the free WiFi on their school computers weekdays from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., officials said.

Aron Chen:

Online education is becoming a common model of teaching in China as education institutions ranging from primary schools to universities remained physically closed since January in order to contain the spread of the Covid-19

However, it has also brought dishonest behaviors such as class skipping and exam cheating to a new level, as a vibrant industry of professionals-for-hire is gaining popularity in China.

“Cheating online during the Covid-19” has become somewhat of a top trending keywords in Chinese search engine Baidu. A search on Baidu for “paying professional to take online exams” can return multiple platforms for potential customers to choose from. “Test-taking services”, “paper-writing”, “take Online courses for you,” one advertisement from a platform called “Dabai” seen by PingWest, claimed.

Wisconsin institute of law & liberty:

Further Empower Parents and School Leaders

1.    Ensure accountability on schools – As stories appear that school districts are dropping the ball and failing to educate students, state policymakers must make it abundantly clear that school districts must use tax dollars to educate students.

2.    Oversight of federal stimulus dollars – The federal CARES Act will soon allocate over $200 million for Wisconsin K-12 education to Governor Evers and local school districts. This influx in funding needs to be allocated in a collaborative and transparent manner that helps families, teachers, and school leaders continue to provide education in this difficult environment.

3.    Increase virtual course access – SB 789 (Darling / Thiesfeldt) would better prepare families for the fallout of COVID by allowing any student to take up to 2 courses at any other school, including virtual courses. The bipartisan bill, already approved in the Assembly, awaits a vote in the Senate.

The free market coalition of Wisconsin stands ready to assist you in these unprecedented, challenging times. Thank you for considering our recommendations.

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 Young:

Studying is an unpleasant task for most people. Students procrastinate on preparing for an exam until a last minute cram. Professionals avoid taking the training they need to get ahead in their profession. Tests make people so anxious they change careers altogether.

If you can learn to enjoy studying, however, you’ll unlock a much larger world of opportunities. Not just in school and classes, but in life.

Those who deeply enjoy learning new things can add new hobbies, accelerate their career and develop new points of pride and confidence. That can’t happen, however, if the thought of studying hard to learn something fills you with so much dread that you only stick to easier things.

Logan Wroge:

In the four weeks since Dane County schools closed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, the Madison School District has distributed 58,424 free meals to students.

But the number of lunches and breakfasts picked up each day at sites across the district is significantly less than the 12,241 students on free and reduced-price lunch who attend Madison schools, making up nearly half the student body.

Last week, the average number of meals distributed each day was 3,637, according to the district. But that figure combines breakfast and lunch, both of which are distributed at the same time for free to families who drive to a pickup site during lunchtime. That means only about 1,818 students get food each day.

Steve Youngbauer, the food and nutrition services director for the district, said he doesn’t have data on why there’s a mismatch in the numbers, but believes there may be several factors that contribute to it.

“There is a gap there for folks who are eligible for benefits and folks that are actually participating,” he said.

Annysa Johnson:

Milwaukee voters overwhelmingly approved an $87 million referendum to support their public schools, according to election results Monday.

The referendum, the first for Milwaukee Public Schools in more than two decades, passed with about 78% of the vote in a chaotic — and historic — election conducted during a global pandemic that dramatically curtailed in-person turnout.

It represents a lifeline for the state’s largest and arguably poorest school district, which the Wisconsin Policy Forum has said faced an uncertain future without painful cuts and a significant infusion of cash from the state or local property taxpayers.

Related: Is the MPS Tax & Spending Increase Referendum Good for Milwaukee?

We (voters in #MKE) just gave Milwaukee Public Schools $87 million annually…forever.

“no MPS employee is required to work during the shutdown.”

“pay at their rate on the regular schedule.”

How are our children, #Milwaukee? https://t.co/ohG7UktCfH

— Shaun Luehring (@shaunluehring) April 14, 2020

The Capital Times:

Scott Girard:

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Logan Wroge:

Scott Girard:

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

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.

April, 2020 election results.

Vanessa Thorpe:

An urgent call is to go out to children’s television broadcasters this weekend, backed by major names in British entertainment, politics and technology. Writer and performer Stephen Fry, best-selling author Cressida Cowell and businesswoman Martha Lane Foxare joined by former children’s television presenter Floella Benjamin as signatories to a letter, carried in today’s Observer, that urges all leading streaming, network and terrestrial children’s channels to make one simple change to boost literacy among the young: turn on the subtitles.

If English-language subtitles were to be run along the bottom of the screen for all programming, they argue, reading levels across the country would automatically rise. Longstanding international academic research projects prove, they say, that spelling, grammar and vocabulary would all be enhanced, even if children watching TV are not aware they are learning.

The campaign aims to improve reading ability across the English-speaking world and has won backing from former President Bill Clinton, who said: “Same-language subtitling doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. It’s a small thing that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

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

Madeline Peltzer:

As colleges across the country have sent students home and moved classes online due to COVID-19, many institutions find themselves in a tough spot: how to appease distraught students while remaining afloat financially.

On Tuesday, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that because of the pandemic, the University of Wisconsin-Madison expects to lose $100 million by June, a loss of about 3.2 percent of UW-Madison’s $3 billion budget. The figure includes reimbursements given to students for room and board after the school closed its campus, hired professional cleaners, and purchased the technology needed for distance learning.

“Financially, many colleges have been struggling, facing a perfect storm which is going to be even more difficult now”

In Wisconsin’s neighboring state, the University of Minnesota stands to lose an estimated $315 million from its $3.8 billion budget, according to the Associated Press. The financial losses stretch to universities in all parts of the country, as the University of California-Berkeley said it will lose $100 million, at least. Nearby San Jose State University in California stands to lose an estimated $16 million by the end of May. And Clemson University in South Carolina is estimated to lose about $20 million from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Greenville News. Meanwhile, the University of Maine lost $12.8 million after it issued refunds to students for unused room and board.

Kelsey J. Griffin:

Nearly 200 third-year Harvard Law School students signed a letter to Law School administrators Thursday asking for the school to publicly advocate for an emergency diploma privilege — a policy granting graduating students their law licenses without requiring the bar examination.

The letter asked the Law School to take four specific actions on behalf of its students. These requests include issuing a public statement supporting the emergency diploma privilege across the United States; sharing the students’ letter with other law schools; sending a statement supporting the privilege to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; and hosting a virtual town hall for students to discuss their needs with the administration.

Donna C. Saadati-Soto, a co-author of the letter, said she believes it would be unfair to ask students to sit for the multi-day exam this summer since the ongoing coronavirus pandemic limits the ability of some students to prepare over the coming months.

“I intended to sit for the California bar exam that was set to happen in July,” she said. “There’s no way that folks are going to be able to sit for a July 2020 administration of the exam.”

Saadati-Soto said that several states have already postponed their exams in light of the COVID-19 crisis and associated social distancing restrictions. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts announced Monday it would postpone its July 28 and 29 exam until an undetermined date in the fall.

Ross Anderson:

There have recently been several proposalsfor pseudonymous contact tracing, including from Apple and Google. To both cryptographers and privacy advocates, this might seem the obvious way to protect public health and privacy at the same time. Meanwhile other cryptographers have been pointing out some of the flaws.

There are also real systems being built by governments. Singapore has already deployedand open-sourced one that uses contact tracing based on bluetooth beacons. Most of the academic and tech industry proposals follow this strategy, as the “obvious” way to tell who’s been within a few metres of you and for how long. The UK’s National Health Service is working on one too, and I’m one of a group of people being consulted on the privacy and security.

But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.

First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.

Chris Stuart:

They want me to tell you a few things, so here goes.

I renounce every critique I’ve ever made about the American public education system. Our public schools are the best in the world if you remove the children who aren’t white. The test scores don’t lie when white kids pass them. Unfortunately, the tests don’t tell us anything meaningful about nonwhite people.

Our nation’s teachers are faultless heroes. Their unions are freedom fighters. If there are racialized outcomes it is because children are too poor to learn, their parents too irresponsible to teach them, and their politicians refuse to provide schools more money to deal with them.

If we really want better outcomes we will split them into small cohorts and send them with extra funds to white schools where they can learn how to be fully human.

I regret having promoted the idea that there was more to the story than that. 

Also, can we acknowledge there is only one way to do school? It has to be state-delivered through local school districts with board members selected through low-turnout elections that are dominated by public employee unions. That worked so well before the anti-democratic reformsters started pushing the idea that parents should “vote with their feet” and that their “money follows the child.”

Let’s get back to good. Back to the time when public schools worked for everyone.

Logan Wroge:

Anna Hauser’s son Xavier typically has a team of 15 people caring for and educating him throughout a school day at Madison’s East High School.

But with schools closed statewide to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus, the 14-year-old freshman, who has spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy making it impossible for him to walk or talk, hasn’t been getting in-person services such as physical therapy he would typically get at school.

Hauser, who has two other children — ages 7 and 11 — at home, is finding YouTube math videos to keep her oldest child educationally engaged and doing the stretches a physical therapist would normally provide for him.

“They’re just stressed because life is so much different,” Hauser said of her children. “We live in a little two-bedroom apartment. Nobody has any room to breathe.”

Almost a million Wisconsin school children are out of class following an order that shuttered all schools by March 18, forcing families to adapt work schedules, child care arrangements and learning opportunities.

Tawnell D. Hobbs:

About 26 million public-school students, just over half in the U.S., are considered low-income and rely on free or reduced-price meals at school. In recent years, school districts and government agencies have increased focus on feeding students, even providing them dinner after school. Many school leaders say their jobs extend beyond education to making sure students are fed and receive proper care.

The Ferguson-Florissant district said April 5 that one of its bus drivers tested positive for the coronavirus and died that day. Another bus driver, who died the day prior after a prolonged illness, had symptoms associated with the virus. Four other employees in the district have tested positive.

The drivers last worked in the district on March 20. District officials said they don’t believe that students or families came in contact with the drivers or the other employees who tested positive. The district, which serves a mostly poor student body in the St. Louis metro area, said it is seeking safer alternatives for food service and hopes to have something in place this week. One idea being considered is cooperating with neighboring districts in a regional food operation to limit staffing and reduce contact.

Tom Fairless and Jason Douglas:

When the crisis is over, “it will be very hard for any government not to increase spending on health,” and to fund new areas such as medical research and vaccine production, said Mr. Travers.

A similar shift happened after the depravations of World War II, when countries like the U.K. pushed up taxes to finance sweeping new social-safety nets, including universal health-care programs.

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.

Joel Kotkin:

Recreating the Conditions for Autocracy

Throughout history, crises – like the Covid-19 pandemic – have been ideal opportunities for expanding centralized control of life, ostensibly for our own good. We are already seeing the potential rise of a new police state and in some countries, such as France, a rising incidence of informers, conspiracy theories, and even vigilantism.

Propaganda, relentless and clever, is critical for creating any kind of police state. The green movement and supporters of unlimited authoritarian steps to address the pandemic can now rely on the mainstream media’s often hysterical and innumerate reporting to provide political leaders with a rationale for uber-control.

Expertise and Oligarchy

A scientifically-based crisis offers an ideal terroir for the promotion of oligarchy. The current approach to reducing climate-altering emissions offers enormous opportunities not only for expanded government but also for Wall Street and the large tech firms to profiteer on our energy “transition.” This illustrates sociologist Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,”  articulated in the early 20^th century, that the more complex the issue, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions.

Like the pandemic, climate change is an extraordinarily complex issue that has been promoted by consistent exaggeration and predictions of catastrophe. Alarmed by the threat of imminent doom from a changing climate, some progressive pundits openly favor replacing democracy with a global “technocracy” that would preempt popular control and allow experts to implement policies of their own design.

The problem here lies with the notion of an “expert” class, which likes to see itself as “scientific” and unencumbered by prejudice. But having a PhD does not suppress the human desire for unbound power and influence. As the “experts” grow in power, as James Burnham noted, they see themselves as responsible not to the public, but to others in their peer group from whom they seek approval and support.

In this and other crises, we need to remind ourselves that enforced orthodoxy among “experts” – which we often seek – can prove very dangerous. After all, we have had so many miscalls from our cognitive betters on everything from “peak oil” and dietary advice to policy toward Syria and the Soviet Union. Facing pressure from the virus’s spread, there is already danger of embracing the same kind of centralized groupthink practiced so disastrously in China.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

My recent email to the Madison School Board and District Chief Financial Officer:

I hope that you, your families and colleagues are well.

I write to see if anyone has modeled the implications of a property tax base drop on the proposed 2020 referendum? Madison’s property tax base has increased substantially over the past decade, somewhat due to a significant federal taxpayer ($38B+) electronic medical record backdoor subsidy.

How might a construction slow down and declining property values due to a recession/deep downturn affect the proposed tax & spending increases?

I further wondered if the looming substantial federal funds might be applied to replace part or all of the planned property tax based referendum?

Finally, I was part of the group that reviewed Infinite Campus (and other similar systems) years ago. Some time ago, the District completed a teacher, staff and parent usage study. Has that been updated? Please forward the % of teachers who use IC daily, weekly and monthly along with the % of parents, staff and students for similar time frames.

Best wishes,

Jim

Heather MacDonald:

As American unemployment mounted by the millions in March and April, the dance of the college diversity deans kept up its usual brisk pace. On April 1, Harvard University announced that its acting associate dean for inclusion and belonging was moving on to Denison University. But the Harvard associate deanship will not be vacant for long. On May 1, the current head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus will step into the Harvard position, to direct the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team within the Dean of Students Office; the Office of BGLTQ Student Life; the Office of Diversity Education and Support; the College’s Title IX Office; the Women’s Center; and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Elsewhere, campus diversocrats enjoyed similarly enviable mobility while the rest of the country was shutting down. The vice president for inclusion and diversity at George Mason University will become chief diversity officer at the University of South Carolina at Columbia on June 15. The former occupant of the South Carolina position decamped to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 15 to serve as its community and equity officer. On March 1, a former associate vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Iowa became associate vice president for inclusive excellence at Georgia Southern University. The first diversity, equity, and inclusion librarian at the University of Florida assumed her position in February.

Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right.

Manner Thelua:

A large number of artifacts held in Western museums and libraries are known to have been appropriated over the ages through conquest and colonialism. The looting of African objects anthropologists, curators and private collectors took place in war as well as in peaceful times. It was justified as an act of benevolence; as saving dying knowledge.

Across Europe, Museums are rethinking What To Do With Their African Art Collections. Big royal statues from the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, are pictured in 2018 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. 

While it appears that more artifacts will be making their way to their home countries, it’s unlikely that this will lead to empty shelves in European museums anytime soon. It’s estimated that 90 to 95 percent of sub-Saharan cultural artifacts are housed outside Africa.

The issue of repatriating museum objects has become an increasingly critical one in the museum sector. It was given additional weight due to a report commissioned by the president of France Emmanuel Macron in 2018.

Scott Girard:

MTI says going through an entire school year with another interim is unacceptable, though they understand that will be required for a period of time “and want clarity around who will fill that position immediately.”

“However, there are too many critical issues facing our schools, staff, students, and community for us to have another year without a permanent leader in place,” the letter states. “While it is difficult to predict what the future holds and what the new ‘normal’ will be, we know that our public schools will be a critical part of the recovery efforts in Madison. A permanent superintendent is necessary for that work to move forward effectively.”

[Madison School District superintendent-hire Gutiérrez rescinds acceptance]

The union also shared members’ feedback on key characteristics desired in a new superintendent, which include advancing work around racial equity, maintaining high expectations for everyone in schools, making staff feel respected and supported, being present in schools on a regular basis, proposing fewer initiatives and top-down mandates and having a strategic plan to build trust in the community — specifically between educators and administration.

“We are happy to continue this conversation with you and look forward to continuing to collaborate as we serve the students and families of the Madison public schools,” the letter states.

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

First Inspires:

Renewable sources of energy are everywhere, all the time. Working together in the 2020 season of FIRST^® Robotics Competition, INFINITE RECHARGE^SM, we can support boundless innovation and create a society that’s empowered, inspired, and hopeful. Kickoff and game reveal are January 4, 2020. 

Matt Stoller:

In Cantillon’s day, the basis of money was gold, so he wrote about what happened when a nation-state discovered a gold mine in its territory. Increasing the amount of gold in the realm would not just increase price levels, he observed, but would change who had wealth and he didn’t. As he put it, “doubling the quantity of money in a state, the prices of products and merchandise are not always doubled. The river, which runs and winds about in its bed, will not flow with double the speed when the amount of water is doubled.”

Cantillon went on to discuss how money would flow, basically noting that rich people near the mine would spend it on 18th century luxuries like servants and meat pies, prompting a general rise in prices. Eventually the money would get out to the populace, but until it did, working people would have to pay higher prices without access to the new money that mine owners had. So there would be inflation, with uneven distribution of purchasing power. 

There’s also a China angle. Cantillon noted that a kingdom discovering gold would in the long-run erode its own manufacturing base, that the non-neutrality of money also had geopolitical consequences. 

Here’s how he put it:

Vicki Porter Adams:

Infoworld, 1981.

Luca Vebber:

For example, bureaucrats published an entirely new licensing scheme for “real estate appraisal management companies.”[2] That rule has been in the works for almost two years, did we really need to wait until the middle of a healthcare emergency to publish it? I am willing to make the bold prediction that our state would survive just fine without it for another month or two without this new license. This week, DATCP announced a 20% across the board fee increase on labs that test food, water and milk.[3] Their rationale? The fees had not been increased since 2008, so it was time to raise them. Why on earth would anyone think this is a good idea in the middle of the current emergency?

There are other reasons why Wisconsin should press “pause” on all non-essential regulatory changes. Mainly, the lack of transparency and oversight. As Wisconsinites worry about their families and ensuring they can put food on the table, they should not also be expected to maintain a robust oversight over an ever-growing regulatory behemoth.

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

Rob Low:

In an interview with the Problem Solvers, Wallin said, “I find it hard to believe with all the things going on in our communities, the only way to resolve a situation like this was to handcuff a father in front of his daughter.”

The sign at Donelson Park said “Closed” but in smaller print reads, “in groups of no more than 4 persons, parks remain open for walking, hiking, biking, running and similar activities.”

Chris Rickert:

Exercise is a good thing!

Alexandra Deligiorgi:

Poststructuralist relativism, following the Nietzschean critique of Western rationalism, denounces the quest for truth as a quest to legitimize various claims on the level of universal human value, by covering up the indirect coercion of their discourse or imagery. Using perspectivism as an argument against philosophical grounding of various patterns and schemes, post-modern thinkers, under the influence of Poststructuralist relativism, try to depart from the cognitivist tradition by transforming philosophical thought to an edifying discipline (Rorty) or learning (Lyotard) liberated from a theory of knowledge, and giving into a discourse of literary or prosy character. I argue that post-modern perspectivism and the individualistic or collectivistic logic which nurtures its scope can be transcended through construction of hyperperspectivistic prisms based on alogic of interrelation animated by the interdisciplinarian spirit prevailing in the field of modern science. This latter serves as the leading thread for the foundation of a new canonicity which, without losing its historical and cultural character, can make claims to truth and validity of general acceptance. The hyperspectivistic canonicity deriving from such an interrelational logic is in a position to animate a new educational model capable of overcoming both idealistic and romantic versions of Bildung.

Chris Baraniuk:

On 3 June, 2017, FBI agents arrived at the house of government contractor Reality Leigh Winner in Augusta, Georgia. They had spent the last two days investigating a top secret classified document that had allegedly been leaked to the press. In order to track down Winner, agents claim they had carefully studied copies of the document provided by online news site The Intercept and noticed creases suggesting that the pages had been printed and “hand-carried out of a secured space”.

In an affidavit, the FBI alleges that Winner admitted printing the National Security Agency (NSA) report and sending it to The Intercept. Shortly after a story about the leak was published, charges against Winner were made public.

Jon Hilsenrath:

Student debt has become a heavier burden for households, and since 2007 it has tripled to $1.5 trillion, with large exposures among young individuals, according to Fed data.

“We were talking about, when this is over, we want to downsize, maybe move into a townhome, being way more conservative in terms of major purchases and spending and start building savings,” Heather Schmiege, 41 years old, said of a conversation she recently had with her husband.

Both have student loans, in addition to a mortgage and two car payments. The Tallahassee couple makes enough with two jobs to cover the bills with a bit left over, but the crisis and recent Florida hurricanes have made them wary of risk.

Congress, concerned that delinquencies could rise if unemployment skyrockets—as happened after the last economic downturn—granted a reprieve for student-loan borrowers as part of the recent economic-rescue package.

The law will allow most of the 43 million Americans with federal student loans to suspend their monthly payments, interest free, for six months. Since the federal government is the nation’s primary student lender, the program effectively shifts the student debt fallout from the crisis to Washington.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

My recent email to the Madison School Board and District Chief Financial Officer:

I hope that you, your families and colleagues are well.

I write to see if anyone has modeled the implications of a property tax base drop on the proposed 2020 referendum? Madison’s property tax base has increased substantially over the past decade, somewhat due to a significant federal taxpayer ($38B+) electronic medical record backdoor subsidy.

How might a construction slow down and declining property values due to a recession/deep downturn affect the proposed tax & spending increases?

I further wondered if the looming substantial federal funds might be applied to replace part or all of the planned property tax based referendum?

Finally, I was part of the group that reviewed Infinite Campus (and other similar systems) years ago. Some time ago, the District completed a teacher, staff and parent usage study. Has that been updated? Please forward the % of teachers who use IC daily, weekly and monthly along with the % of parents, staff and students for similar time frames.

Best wishes,

Jim

Scott Girard:

Staff began working on the new curriculum adoption last year, following a 2018 needs assessment that showed a “need for materials K-5 that have a structured phonics component, are standards aligned and are more culturally and linguistically responsive, historically accurate and inclusive,” according to Monday’s presentation.

The steps since have included forming focus groups made up of staff and families, a pilot in five kindergarten classrooms and regular Review Committee meetings.

Staff plan to soon begin a request for proposals process and implement sample lessons in selected grades later this year. In December 2020 or January 2021, they expect to make a recommendation to the School Board and have a board vote, with implementation that fall following staff training.

Kvistad told the board staff had learned from the last materials adoption a decade ago, noting that “materials are different now,” as is support for teachers.

“We found ourselves moving too fast, I think, around implementation that we couldn’t learn from what we did and adjust moving on,” she said.

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.

Logan Wroge:

On March 31, Gutierrez sent a letter to Reyes letting her know he was rescinding his acceptance of the job and explaining what led to his decision.

Most board members didn’t find out until a week later during a closed session Monday night, LeMonds said. Gutierrez’s decision was publicly announced after the closed session.

Castro said it was “definitely jarring” to hear Gutierrez choose to remain superintendent in Seguin, Texas. But Castro added he understood where the lifelong Texan was coming from.

“I can’t imagine the conflicting emotions he was feeling when the community that he’s in now was in a crisis and really needed important, stable leadership,” Castro said.

In the letter, Gutierrez said his choice to back out of becoming superintendent of Wisconsin’s second-largest school district, which was “to be the pinnacle of my career,” was not without “interminable personal conflict and grief.”

But the experience leading the 7,500-student Seguin Independent School District through the pandemic has changed how he perceives his job, Gutierrez said in the letter.

“The sudden necessity of coordinating in a manner that not only educates but saves and sustains lives has changed my role as superintendent of a small school district from a title and a job to something far more personal; we have become an interdependent family,” Gutierrez wrote.

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

David Blaska:

A jogger found Beth Potter the morning of March 31 lying aside a trail in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. She was clothed only in pajamas and socks on a 30-degree night, not yet dead. Her husband, Robin Carre, lying nearby only in his underwear, was already gone.

Two good, community-minded Madison liberals, trying to live their sense of social justice. (Mr. Carre’s letter supporting the liberal WI Supreme Court candidate.) How had they failed their adopted daughter and her minority-race boyfriend? Or did their Madison progressivism fail them?

Police found .357 SIG shell casings around the bodies, “indicating a likelihood that the victims had been shot at that location,” according to the criminal complaint. Both had been shot point-blank in the head. A resident nearby heard gunshots at about 11 p.m. the night before. 

Beth Potter and Robin Carre, it appears, had been dragged out of bed, taken to the heavy woods of the arboretum, and executed point blank. For money.

The criminal complaint cites an informant overhearing a conversation in ceramics class (no less!) at Madison West high school between one of the defendants, Khari Sanford, and the murdered couple’s adopted daughter (who has not been charged as of this writing),  “of how they could get money” — that her parents were wealthy. (The criminal complaint names the second defendant as Alijah J. Larrue.)

Jacob Kastrenakes:

Google’s chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. “Privacy may actually be an anomaly,” Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn’t even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. “In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.”

Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that’s been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. “It’s the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity,” Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views — “I don’t want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it” — but overall, he believes “it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy.”

Though Cerf’s comments may echo concerns over NSA surveillance, he appears to be interested primarily in privacy as it relates to social networks like Facebook. “Our social behavior is also quite damaging with regard to privacy,” Cerf says. He gives an example how a person could be exposed doing something that they wanted to keep secret by being tagged in the background of a stranger’s photo — a photo they never expected to be caught in. “The technology that we use today has far outraced our social intuition, our headlights. … [There’s a] need to develop social conventions that are more respectful of people’s privacy.”

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

Emma Charlton:

Getting infected by COVID-19 isn’t just a worry for the elderly.

That’s one of the first findings about the virus in the US, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

While fatalities were highest in people over 85 years old, catching COVID-19 can result in hospitalization and admission to an intensive care unit for a range of ages, it said. Of the more than 500 people known to be hospitalized, 18% were 45-54 years and 20% were aged 20-44 years.

Jerry Saltz:

The title of this essay isn’t mine. “The Last Days of the Art World” was the title my editor gave to another essay I wrote, last week, about the last day that I spent in New York art galleries before they shuttered for the foreseeable future. I thought it was too sensationalistic and untrue. I freaked out, scared, and asked him to change it. But less than seven days later, I am seeing his dark light and thinking there may be more to that bleak prediction than I wanted to believe at first.

Why didn’t I see it that way originally? In large part, I think, it’s because I’ve watched the art world go through episodes like this before — not pandemics, of course, but contractions and crises of various kinds, which each have shaped, not destroyed, the community I love. I thought, “Don’t be a disasterist; we’ll see what happens.” In particular, I’m a true believer from one particular former bygone world. I came of age during the last years of the smaller, nonprofessional, non-moneyed 1970s art world, where there were no such things as stable careers, sales, art fairs, big audiences, and auctions. This world ran on the desire and passion of semi-outlaws, vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, creeps, geniuses, hangers-on, exiles, gypsies, and aristocratic bohemians. It was a world before the one we know now that has grown so large, hyperactive, circuslike, top-heavy, and professional — all seasoned with obscene amounts of money, however concentrated it is in the hands of a lucky, mostly white 1,500 people.

Dan Friedman:

I had high hopes about the potential impact of being a Data Scientist. I felt every company should be a “data company”. 

My expectations did not meet reality.

Where did my expectations come from? 

I attended a 12-week data science bootcamp in mid-2016. 11 of the 12 weeks’ focus were on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). At this time, ML & AI news mentions had hit an all-time high. Tesla was paving the way in self-driving cars, and even older behemoths like General Motors (GM) invested over a billion dollars in an AI company to stay at the frontier of automotive tech. At the consumer level, headphones emerged that used AI to automatically translate your words to someone else as you speak, and an AI beat the world’s best esports team.

I figured I’d spend most of my time buried in code and data to find hidden patterns, implement machine learning models in production and optimize them. Executives would likely rely on me to help inform the product roadmap based on insights in data, and I would be highly valued.

However, practically none of that happened.

CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic:

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act provides $2.2 trillion of relief for those impacted by COVID. Of this, CARES allocates about $30 billion for K-12 schools and higher education institutions. Soon, Wisconsin will need to make decisions on how to spend the huge influx of federal funds on its education.

Analysis: WILL’s CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic explain the two main pots of money in the CARES Act that Governor Tony Evers and local school districts can soon access from the U.S. Department of Education. Szafir and Sobic make recommendations on how Wisconsin policymakers can tailor the federal money to meet the needs of our state during the COVID crisis. Opportunities exist to immediately do the following:

• Provide teachers with resources for improved distance learning

• Defray the cost of online education to schools and low-income families

• Encourage summer learning camps and literacy programs so students are more prepared for 2020-2021 school year

• Purchase supplies to sanitize and clean school buildings

• Help graduating high school seniors who have to take remedial college courses next year

Why It Matters: Schools and communities are facing significant challenges right now. Many Wisconsin schools, across all sectors, were not prepared to switch to distance learning with such short notice. They must work to ensure students will still receive meals and help families access resources like broadband and devices to do schoolwork. These problems jeopardize student learning and risk further widening the racial achievement gap, already the largest in the country. The CARES Act was passed to provide relief and assistance to combat the impact of COVID so the allocation of K-12 dollars must be considered quickly, collaboratively, and transparently.

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:

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Scott Girard:

Logan Wroge:

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Lauren Feiner:

On March 6, New York City high school principal Matt Willie was already preparing for the worst. After watching a news report that said the city’s Department of Education was preparing to close public schools amid the coronavirus crisis, Willie texted his assistant principal: “Prepare for the apocalypse.”

Willie said his school, University Neighborhood High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was about as prepared as he could hope, having started disaster prep about a week before the DOE gave its final judgement. During that time, Willie and his staff took inventory of in-school laptops, surveyed students about whether they had devices and internet connections at home (“just in case”) and had already distributed some laptops to students whose parents said they were no longer comfortable sending them to school. 

But when the DOE finally announced school closures, staff still had to scramble. The decision came down on a Friday, upending the school’s plans to ask students to sign out laptops from their third-period teachers.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

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.

James Hankins:

One of the comforts of studying history is that, no matter how bad things get, you can always find a moment in the past when things were much, much worse. Some commentators on our current crisis have been throwing around comparisons to earlier pandemics, and the Black Death of 1347 — 50 inevitably gets mentioned. Please. The Black Death wiped out half the population of Europe in the space of four years. In some places the mortality was far swifter and deadlier than that. The novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, who gave us the most vivid picture of the Black Death in literature, estimated that 100,000 people died in Florence in the four months between March and July 1348. The population of the city in 1338, according to one contemporary chronicler, stood at 120,000.

Boccaccio at the time was a city tax official and saw the whole thing at ground level. Every morning bodies of the dead—husbands, wives, children, servants—were pushed out into the street where they were piled on stretchers, later on carts. They were carried to the nearest church for a quick blessing, then trundled to graveyards outside the city for burial. As the death toll rose, traditional burial practices were abandoned. Deep trenches were dug into which bodies were dumped in layers with a thin covering of soil shoveled on top. Boccaccio writes that “no more respect was accorded the dead than would today be shown to dead goats.”

Evan Wyloge:

For the past few weeks, state health department officials have been working with an expert task force of physicians, researchers and mathematicians from local universities, to try to predict how the novel coronavirus spreading across the world might progress locally.

The group of specialists provided three reports to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, as of the end of last week, and Gov. Jared Polis presented some of the findings of the experts during a press conference Friday, March 27. Polis relayed some stark estimates during the press conference, with possible COVID-19 deaths in Colorado ranging from 900 to 33,200.

Logan Wroge:

“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”

Peter Greene:

It made sense for states to cancel the big end-of-year standardized reading and math test even before it became obvious that many students will never be back to school this spring to take the tests. In this extraordinary year, the tests were never going to supply valid data that could be compared to other years.

Now that this year looks to be a “short” year for students, the same argument should be made for next year’s test as well. If (please, God) students go back to school next fall, most will be starting out with less preparation than any class in recent memory. Not only will they have been shorted academic content, but primary students who haven’t been in a classroom in over half a year will not easily slip back into a school routine in just a day or two. In other words, next year will also be a short year. The Big Standardized Tests would once again be a waste of time, time that could be better spent on instruction.

But for the past 20 years, the Big Standardized Test has been the center of accountability for school districts, individual schools, and classroom teachers. With the test on hold, this is the perfect time to revisit accountability tools for education.

Thi My Lien Nguyen:

In February, before the COVID-19 pandemic locked down cities and closed borders, I spent four days with about 50 mathematicians at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in the Black Forest of southern Germany. Most weeks of the year the institute hosts small gatherings focused on different areas of mathematics. I planned to insinuate myself among the professional mathematicians: break bread with them, take a far-back seat at their lectures, eavesdrop on their hallway conversations, and try to figure out how a close gathering like this one promotes mathematical discovery.

There’s no easy way to get to Oberwolfach. I arrived on a Monday by the recommended route, which is to fly to Frankfurt, then take a two-hour train trip south to the hamlet of Wolfach, then a 30-minute cash-only taxi ride along the river Wolf. Eventually I spied the institute itself, perched midway up a steep hill and backed by an expanse of evergreen forest.

Remoteness is the point.

Suzan Clark:

The FBI and a Philadelphia-area prosecutor are looking into whether a school district broke the law when it remotely activated cameras on school-owned laptops and watched students in their homes.

The parents of 15-year-old Blake Robbins have filed a lawsuit against Harriton High School of the Lower Merion School District, alleging their son’s privacy was violated.

The teenager said he found out about the remote surveillance when he was confronted by his assistant principal at the Rosemont school.

His suit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that school vice principal Lindy Matsko on Nov. 11 cited a laptop photo in telling Blake that the school believed he was engaging in improper behavior. He and his family have told reporters that an official mistook a piece of candy for a pill and thought he was selling drugs.

Davide Castelvecchi:

After an eight-year struggle, embattled Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has finally received some validation. His 600-page proof of the abc conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in number theory, has been accepted for publication.

Acceptance of the work in Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) — a journal of which Mochizuki is chief editor, published by the institute where he works at Kyoto University — is the latest development in a long and acrimonious controversy over the mathematicians’ proof.

Two other RIMS mathematicians, Masaki Kashiwara and Akio Tamagawa, announced in Japanese the publication at a 3 April press conference in Kyoto. The paper “will have a big impact”, said Kashiwara. When asked how Mochizuki reacted to news of the paper’s acceptance, Kashiwara said, “I think he was relieved.”

Jesse Stiller:

A New York university was given access to the parody account of a student at the college who used the account to make fun of the school. 

A Twitter account under the name @SUNYGeneeso that was operated by student Isaiah Kelly, according to Business Insider, had been using the handle to poke fun at the college for its handling of recent events on campus, which included a power failure and the library being closed due to an asbestos infection.

Stephen Mihm:

The coronavirus has already dealt a vicious blow to key sectors of the U.S. economy. If the pandemic drags on into the fall, though, it’s likely to devastate yet another area that has so far escaped with minimal damage: higher education.

The problems confronting the nation’s colleges and universities long predate today’s crisis. But if current trends continue, the pandemic is likely to act as a catalyst for a historic reckoning that may transform the delivery of higher education in this country.

It’s common knowledge that the cost of attending both public and private institutions has grown far faster than the rate of inflation over the past 40 years. Since 1980, the sticker price of tuition, room and board has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Michael Elsen-Rooney:

Lorenzo F. Manuali:

We’re living in a state of war. It’s beyond stressful for everyone.

The link between heightened chronic stress and a weakened immune response is well-established in psychological literature. Citing one professor of infectious disease, a recent Wall Street Journal article warned readers, “The more you stress about the virus, the more likely you are to suffer from it.” Seriously. The chronic inflammation and high cortisol levels stress causes can erode the body’s ability to rapidly marshal the immune system and even activate latent viruses.

Students are no exception — certainly not to stress nor to its negative effects.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has imposed chronic stress on all of us — stress from leaving campus early, being quarantined in a room, seeing constant reminders of a seemingly omnipresent threat splayed on every TV screen and newspaper, or living with the threat that the virus is posing to us and our loved ones. This is to say nothing of students for whom the ramifications of COVID-19 have caused disproportionate stress. For some, life at home is unstable; for others, mental illness has been exacerbated, and for yet others, low-income or first-generation status poses additional challenges that the rest of us can only imagine.

Annysa Johnson:

As part of its plan, MPS intends to provide grade-level content aligned to state standards that students and families can access online. But the work will be voluntary and not used as part of the students’ grades. While many teachers likely will continue to interact with students online, they will not be required to do so, at least for now.

“We are not requiring them. But that’s what good educators are doing, and we’re seeing that,” Bronaugh said. “And we just want to be able to enhance that as much as possible and support them.”

MPS board members approved a plan that requires most staff to be paid through April 30, but it does not require them to work during that time, though many have continued to do so. Board President Larry Miller said Friday that issue would be revisited at the April 23 board meeting.

Is the MPS Tax & Spending Increase Referendum Good for Milwaukee?

Logan Wroge:

Madison students will have flexibility in their virtual school day schedule, teachers will hold remote office hours, and assessments during online learning will not “harm” a students’ grades.

After three weeks out of class following an order for all Wisconsin schools to close to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, the Madison School District on Monday is launching its virtual learning plan designed to supplement missed classroom time, which could last until the end of the school year.

But when the district’s 27,000 students make the switch to virtual school, things will look quite different, from the number of hours a day spent learning to how students interact with teachers.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

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.

Steven Davidoff Solomon:

My family has been forced into a social experiment. One of our daughters is in second grade at a private religious school. Her twin sister, who has special needs, attends a public school. Can you guess which one went online immediately?

You no doubt guessed right. Almost all Bay Area private schools went online within two days of the March 17 lockdown. One daughter has a full day of school, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., including physical education and art. The other daughter’s public school initially gave us a list of things to do—mostly a list of websites, including GoNoodle (which is excellent for getting kids to jump up and down).

It’s not mainly a problem of resources. The private school went online in two days with Zoom. I’m teaching all my law-school classes online. New York, the country’s biggest school system, is going online. Why not Berkeley? One teacher wrote a parent I know that Berkeley isn’t moving online “because of equity issues.” Ann Marie Callegari, the district’s supervisor of family engagement and equity, confirmed that in an email to me: “The answer to your question of course is Yes! There are existing inequities in our educational system and right here in Berkeley that will only be exacerbated by going fully online.”

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.

Stephanie Hanes:

Jessica Calarco has been thinking a lot recently about the importance of school.  

This isn’t just because the sociology professor has been learning firsthand, like so many millions of other parents around the country, how life works without school. (For her, it involves new locks on the office door to keep her 5- and 2-year old from interrupting the Indiana University classes she is now teaching by Zoom.) 

No, for Professor Calarco, the new life of trying to get a preschooler to do worksheets while a toddler runs amok in the background has brought up a host of concerns about what this unprecedented moment in American education might mean long term – particularly for disadvantaged students. 

Scott Bauer:

A 16-year-old Wisconsin high school sophomore who had symptoms of the coronavirus and posted about it on social media was ordered by a sheriff’s deputy to delete the posts and threatened with being taken to jail, her attorney said Friday.

The teenager is a student in the Westfield School District in Marquette County. Her attorney, Luke Berg, wrote to both the county sheriff and district administrator, who called the posts a “foolish means to get attention,” asking for apologies. The girl also should be permitted to post on social media again without fear of being charged or taken to jail, said Berg, an attorney with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Sarah Cook:

1A widely used digital television service in Kenya includes Chinese state television in its most affordable package while omitting international news outlets.2 Portuguese television launches a prime-time “China Hour” featuring content from Chinese state media.3 Chinese diplomats intimidate a cable executive in Washington, DC, to keep New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV), a station founded by Chinese Americans who practice Falun Gong, off the air.4 And a partly Chinese-owned South African newspaper abruptly ends a writer’s column after he discusses repression in China’s Xinjiang region.5

These examples, which have come to light over the past three years, illustrate the various ways in which Chinese Communist Party (CCP) media influence—in the form of censorship, propaganda, and control over content-delivery systems—extend beyond the borders of mainland China to reach countries and audiences around the globe.

Associated Press:

A former University of Southern California admissions worker who offered to get unqualified students from China into the school agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to wire fraud, prosecutors said.

Hiu Kit David Chong, 36, of Arcadia was an assistant director in USC’s Office of Graduate Admissions.

Chong acknowledged in the plea agreement that from 2008 to 2016, he “caused false college transcripts with inflated grades, phony letters of recommendation and fraudulent personal statements to be placed in the students’ admissions packets,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Jill LePore:

This week the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, announced—and, in the blink of an eye, opened—the National Emergency Library, a digital collection of 1.4 million books. Until June 30th, or the end of the national emergency in the United States (“whichever is later”), anyone, anywhere in the world, can check books out of this library—for free. As Brewster Kahle, the digital librarian at the Internet Archive, wrote in an online announcement, if you can afford to buy books, please buy books! Bookstores still need your business. But, by God, if you can’t afford them, or if the books you need aren’t in any bookstore, and, especially, if you are one of the currently more than one billion students and teachers shut out of your classroom, please: sign up, log on, and borrow!

Meanwhile, not to be sneezed at is the sheer pleasure of browsing through the titles. “How to Succeed in Singing.” “Interesting Facts about How Spiders Live.” “An Introduction to Kant’s Philosophy.” Those are all from 1925. Nearly all the books in the collection come from the last century or so. I looked up “Proust,” which brought up four hundred and forty-eight titles. You can read Beckett on Proust, or Bloom on Proust, or just “On Proust.” I found about a hundred more books about moose, mainly children’s books, including a Dr. Seuss book, “Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose,” but also an illuminating natural history from 1955, “North American Moose” (“the first comprehensive book of its type”), by a curator from the Department of Mammalogy at the Royal Ontario Museum. I did also look up books with the word “virus” in the title. Blech. I do not recommend this search. Still, if you sort the virus books by reverse publication date, and only look at the jackets, you get a freaky little mini-history of the visual iconography of virality. It passes the time.

Madison School District:

We are committed to providing robust learning experiences for our students of MMSD during this time of school closure. Our instructional leaders are working to provide a virtual learning experience for our students that incorporates family engagement, limited screen time, and student overall health and emotional wellness.

We recognize the impact that these unusual circumstances are having on all of us. We encourage our students and families to continue to find and create moments of familiarity and maintain other routines as much as possible, including communicating with friends, and staying active.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

Rob Copeland:

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

Marion Fourcade & Henry Farrell:

GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we’ve so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus’s challenge to democracy.

In a democracy, citizens need to be able to vote, politicians to deliberate, and people to move about, meet, and act collectively. Democratic politics is a mixture of mass involvement and endless meetings. All this is hard when people can be infected with a potentially deadly virus if someone simply coughs nearby. The obvious answer might seem to be to move democracy to the internet, but some parts of democracy translate badly to an online world, while others are already being undermined by emergency powers (for example, Hungary’s parliament just passed a law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree) and by the rise of digital surveillance.

If people have to vote in person, they might catch coronavirus from queuing, pressing buttons, or handing ballots to election officials. No wonder 14 US presidential primaries have been postponed so far. But not postponing elections in the midst of the crisis has been just as controversial, since the resulting vote is likely to see a dramatic reduction in turnout (as did France’s first round municipal elections, and as is feared in the Polish presidential election this May).

David Blaska:

We are in the midst (and we hope, not the beginning) of a history-making coronavirus pandemic that could well change America forever, in ways not yet apparent. Will distance learning become the new normal? America work from home? Sporting events in front of the cameras only? Has the simple handshake gone the way of the spittoon? 

In my youth, we thought we would never see as much change as our grandparents, who were 18 years old when the Wrights took flight. Now I realize my generation has seen as much history as they. We admire the scenery of a chosen street in Prague using Google Earth and peered down from the moon. We have put a birth date on the universe’s origin and mapped out genomes, the building blocks of life. We had our own wars but different, against stateless terrorists.

Pardon, therefore, this Old Settler if he recounts a little history of his own. It is of the quotidian kind but so was The World of Yesterday, a Jewish kid growing up in pre-WW1 Vienna. (We’ll concede Stefan Zweig has greater literary merit.) But in many ways, so much remains the same.

Eli Lake:

For years, we civil libertarians were told that our concerns about the secret court that oversees the FBI’s applications to monitor U.S. citizens were overblown. So what if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved more than 99% of all applications. The bureau and Justice Department must follow an onerous process, we were assured, that protects innocent citizens from being snooped on by their government.

Those assurances, as it turns out, were not very reliable. On Tuesday, the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a new report that found systematic errors of fact in the FBI’s applications for warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The memo does not speak to the materiality or significance of those errors — but they are startling nonetheless.

Out of 42 applications, the report says, 39 included major defects. All told, the inspector general uncovered 390 deficiencies, including “unverified, inaccurate, or inadequately supported facts, as well as typographical errors.”

The memo follows the report Horowitz issued in December that reviewed four FISA warrants for Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2106 presidential campaign. The bureau suspected him of being a Russian agent, but the report found that it repeatedly relied on an opposition research dossier to persuade the secret court to renew the surveillance warrant even after agents knew the dossier was riddled with errors. Rules that have been in place for nearly 20 years to verify the accuracy of facts presented in the warrant and include exculpatory information, known as the Woods procedures, were ignored.

The December report was a black eye for the bureau. It prompted one judge on the surveillance court to reprimand the agents involved in the Page applications, temporarily barring them from appearing before it.

Those applications were so troubling that Horowitz launched an audit of how the FBI was complying with its own rules in all FISA applications between October 2014 and September 2019. His conclusion is straightforward. “We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the report says.

The Woods procedures are crucial because the surveillance court is unlike other U.S. courts. For obvious reasons, it does not operate under the adversarial system, whereby a lawyer representing the suspected spy or terrorist can challenge the government’s evidence. Instead, the court itself is supposed to provide special scrutiny to the prosecution’s case — but as the Page fiasco showed, it is in no position to do so.

Boston Globe:

Students of all ages are navigating uncharted territory during an unprecedented time in history as the coronavirus crisis forces schools to close and students to adjust to new and uncertain routines. Facing a migration to virtual learning environments, the loss of access to critical in-school resources, and the disruption of their social lives, students may be feeling more disconnected than ever. 

Join reporters from the Boston Globe in a weekly virtual town hall organized in collaboration with area students. These virtual forums will create space for students to share their experiences, connect with peers, pose questions to an adult support network, and offer their own suggestions and ideas on how they would like to see their schools and communities support them at this time.

Yuan Yang, Nian Liu, Sue-Lin Wong and Qianer Liu:

Three days after the Chinese government locked down Hubei, the province at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, a local government official more than 1,000km away received data from telecoms carriers alerting her to a list of people who had left Hubei and entered her town.

The data included traces of the estimated locations of users’ mobile phones, showing that many had driven back along the highways from Hubei to Guangdong province in southern China, where the official works in a small town. The location data helped the official’s team “more or less” pin down everyone who came back from Hubei, she said. 

But for another Guangdong town, the information it was able to get hold of was much less comprehensive.

“We did identify one man from Hubei on the list who was high-risk. We searched everywhere for him but just couldn’t track him down,” a second official told the Financial Times, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Gregory Kaebnick:

This is where Fauci shines. He’s showing us how to be not just trustworthy but actually trusted.

The role is still fundamentally about providing accurate information. Fauci is fighting the outbreak with “the sledgehammer of truth,” as the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty put it—helping everyone to understand the real dimensions of the problem in spite of widespread misinformation and politics-driven fact-spinning.

But what makes him so helpful and credible has to do with how he provides the information, and what’s especially powerful about his approach is that he’s more or less the opposite of a sledgehammer. He is grounded in humility and humanity: he uses plain language; he admits uncertainties and failings; he seems to be at pains to say that he has a special perspective, “as a scientist,” rather than the only possibly useful view; he refuses to make the science overtly political; he is gracious and cautious when offering corrections.

In the midst of this transformation, what it means to be an expert has also changed. At one time, one could qualify as an expert just by being particularly smart or well educated about a technical topic and having been anointed as an expert by other experts, like university officials or political leaders. Think of 1950s scientists and doctors whose lab coats signified their training and the respect and deference they deserved.

Today, more is required. To qualify as an expert is to meet the criteria for a special social role, and nowadays, having the requisite knowledge, ability and recognition is only part of what one needs. Credentials alone no longer make one credible.

This is where Fauci shines. He’s showing us how to be not just trustworthy but actually trusted.

The role is still fundamentally about providing accurate information. Fauci is fighting the outbreak with “the sledgehammer of truth,” as the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty put it—helping everyone to understand the real dimensions of the problem in spite of widespread misinformation and politics-driven fact-spinning.

But what makes him so helpful and credible has to do with how he provides the information, and what’s especially powerful about his approach is that he’s more or less the opposite of a sledgehammer. He is grounded in humility and humanity: he uses plain language; he admits uncertainties and failings; he seems to be at pains to say that he has a special perspective, “as a scientist,” rather than the only possibly useful view; he refuses to make the science overtly political; he is gracious and cautious when offering corrections.

Rather different than “we know best“.

“The last shall be first and the first shall be last”. – duckduckgo links.

Scott Girard:

Strehlow said the school has offered her cohort three options: submit the edTPA to Pearson as they would normally; submit the edTPA to UW and receive approval from the school; or come up with an alternative self-assessment with the UW staff to demonstrate their fitness for licensure. She is planning to submit her edTPA to Pearson as she would have anyway, because she’s heard that will be necessary if she ever plans to teach outside of Wisconsin.

Owenby said students are working with their partner teacher on the transition to online learning, and Strehlow said she and her partner teacher at Lincoln are doing their best to collaborate as they work in an unfamiliar setting.

“Still trying to navigate a place where we can slowly start to become those lead teachers, but also at the same time this is brand new territory for everybody,” Strehlow said. “It’s just like, ‘Oh my gosh, we just need to figure out what’s going to happen Monday.

Jeremy Lott:

School is out for the year in most locales. More innovative districts are retooling like crazy and trying to do online classes. Parents are looking for cheap or free resources to do the job and keep their kids occupied during our enforced isolation.

Now that we’re out the money and have to take care of the kids, reassessment is going to happen.

In short, we are all homeschoolers now. Expect that to be much more the case next school year, as enough parents who were forced to try it either a) like it and decide to keep this knowledge train rolling or b) don’t believe the schools are safe enough to send their kids back into and so suck it up.

This will create knock-on problems for public schools certainly, and also for private schools.

Kids go to school for six-plus hours a day, but a lot of that time is wasted. In most cases, you could run through the lessons in about two hours. Parents are seeing that now.

CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic:

SB 789, which improves upon the outdated “Part-Time Open Enrollment” program — allows any elementary, middle, or high school student to take up to two courses at any other school, including public, public charter, and private. And this happens all without the student ever dis-enrolling from their school. This could allow students to take courses at any nearby school “in-person” — or at a school across the state “virtually.” SB 789, led by Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt, received bipartisan support in its passage in the Assembly and now awaits a vote in the Senate.

Even before COVID, Wisconsin had a course access problem. Too many students in rural and urban K-12 schools simply do not have access to important courses. 60% of public high schools in Wisconsin do not offer intro computer science. Surveying AP courses offered at all traditional Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) high schools, 95% do not offer computer science, 84% do not offer economics, and 84% do not offer physics. In Northeastern Wisconsin, a survey of high schools found that 100% do not offer Spanish or economics, and 78% do not offer government or computer science. All of this is directly related to Wisconsin’s K-12 educational woes — struggling urban and rural schools, major racial achievement gaps, and too many graduates not equipped for the workforce.

---

Related: credit for non-MMSD courses.

Robert Wright:

Many colleges and universities will evidently have to tighten their belts for some time. Counterintuitively, it would be the lack of resources rather than a surfeit of them that could spur positive change among our very costly but not very effective schools.

Business, education, and policy leaders tend to think in terms of inputs. Achieving goal X will require inputs that cost at least a certain amount. That common approach, which often spends more than anticipated for something less than the stated goal, will be forestalled for the foreseeable future. Budgets will be tight at public and private schools (the former due to state government budget cuts and the latter due to endowment and donation losses because of the stock market crash). Planned educational “essentials” like rock climbing walls, expanded sports stadiums, and new buildings for administrators will have to be put on hold and possibly canceled altogether.

If, as seems likely, a recession or depression hits, student applications may well increase. They have in previous downturns because people who are out of work have a lower opportunity cost of time. But schools shouldn’t count on revenues increasing since many applicants will need more financial aid than they previously would have. In addition, universities that are reliant on foreign students (who often pay full tuition) will be stressed due to travel restrictions and cautious parents keeping their children closer to home.

On the plus side, biology and nursing departments and medical schools may find themselves flush with grants and donations—but likely at the expense of other programs. Universities may urge private donors left on the fence by the stock market crash to donate to promote public health education and research, money that pre-COVID-19 would have gone to general, or other specific, ends.

Matthew Prince:

Since launching 1.1.1.1, the number one request we have received is to provide a version of the product that automatically filters out bad sites. While 1.1.1.1 can safeguard user privacy and optimize efficiency, it is designed for direct, fast DNS resolution, not for blocking or filtering content. The requests we’ve received largely come from home users who want to ensure that they have a measure of protection from security threats and can keep adult content from being accessed by their kids. Today, we’re happy to answer those requests.

Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. 1.1.1.1 for Families leverages Cloudflare’s global network to ensure that it is fast and secure around the world. And it includes the same strong privacy guarantees that we committed to when we launched 1.1.1.1 two years ago. And, just like 1.1.1.1, we’re providing it for free and it’s for any home anywhere in the world.

More, here.

Mackenzie Hawkins:

In place of the standing-room-only budget meetings normally held in the Board of Alders Chamber, New Haven residents filled the city’s Zoom budget meeting to capacity on Monday. While the venue was different, this year’s budget negotiations featured a recurring theme: that Yale fails to meet its moral — and financial — obligations to the Elm City.

Amid the COVID-19 public health crisis, New Haven’s annual budget negotiations labor on. Mayor Justin Elicker said last week that the novel coronavirus outbreak will affect the budget process and outcome in ways yet to be determined, as the pandemic has put additional pressure on a city already in fiscal crisis. At Monday’s public hearing, scores of New Haven residents — some of whom are affiliated with the University — identified another strain on the municipal budget: Yale. Many said that COVID-19 has only exacerbated existing issues in the city, underscoring that today’s problems are symptoms of Yale’s long-standing failure to adequately contribute to New Haven.

“Our communities have always been in crisis,” West Haven resident Briyana Mondesir said. “Right now, we are just in a deeper and more widespread sense of emergency.”

Halimah Marcus:

TC: The familiar is always comfortable, but we need to make a distinction between what is actually desirable and what is simply what we’re accustomed to; sometimes those are the same, and sometimes they are not. The people who are the happiest with the status quo are the ones who benefit most from it, which is why the wealthy are usually conservative; the existing order works to their advantage. For example, right now there’s a discussion taking place about canceling student debt, and a related discussion about why there is such a difference in the type of financial relief available to individuals as opposed to giant corporations. The people who will be happiest to return to our existing system of debt are the ones who benefit from it, and making them uncomfortable might be a good idea.

Josh Gerstein:

A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of secret surveillance warrants has found widespread problems with the law enforcement agency’s process for ensuring that all claims it makes to judges to get the warrants are backed up by facts.

The finding of broader failings in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program came in a review launched by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz after an earlier inquiry found numerous errors in applications for surveillance for former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

In a bid to assess whether the faults in the Page’s surveillance process were an aberration or a chronic problem, Horowitz’s audit team zeroed in on 29 applications for surveillance on U.S. citizens or green-card holders over a five year period and whether the so-called “Woods procedures” for justifying an application were properly followed.

Karen Swallow Prior :

Before she was a writer, Jane Austen was a reader. A reader, moreover, within a family of readers, who would gather in her father’s rectory to read aloud from the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and William Cowper—as well as, eventually, Jane’s own works-in-progress.

Not surprisingly, then, in Austen’s novels, the act of reading is a key indication of how a character should initially be judged, and of major turning points in her development. For Austen, the way a character reads is emblematic of other forms of interpretation: One’s skills in comprehending written language are linked to one’s ability to understand life, other people, and oneself.

Characters’ choices of books are a frequent target of Austen’s satire. Persuasion, for example, opens with a vignette that might otherwise seem insignificant: the reading habits of the protagonist’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, who “for his own amusement, never took up any book” except one—the record of British families that contains his own lineage. In Pride and Prejudice, the insufferable clergyman Mr. Collins chooses to orate from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women one afternoon because (as he piously proclaims) he abstains from novels. This episode clearly represents what Henry Tilney, Catherine Morland’s love interest in Northanger Abbey, means when he says, “The person … who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” On the other hand, Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe takes great pleasure in novels—but not high-quality ones. Accordingly, Isabella’s character turns out to be as excessive, hyperbolic, dramatic, and deceptive as the Gothic tales she recommends to Catherine.

Concepción de León

When the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins’s short stories were published in 2016, nearly 30 years after her death in 1988, they were called a “revelation.” The stories, deeply moving and autobiographical, had been locked in a trunk untouched for decades, along with a trove of other work, until Collins’s daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, took on the task of bringing them to light.

At first, Ms. Collins said, she thought no one would publish these “literary short stories by an unknown dead black woman.” But in 2016, Ecco released them in a collection titled “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” which was met with widespread acclaim. Elizabeth Alexander, in the book’s introduction, compared finding Collins’s stories to discovering Atlantis.

The revival of Collins’s work is part of a larger trend of recently released titles by authors who were previously marginalized or entirely lost to history. Some of these books are being published for the first time ever (like “Romance in Marseille,” by Claude McKay, and “Barracoon,” by Zora Neale Hurston), while others are being resurfaced for new generations, such as “The Street,” by Ann Petry.

Matthew Syed:

Our world has changed immensely in the last few weeks but amid the upheaval and distress, there are reasons to believe we can emerge from the crisis with some human qualities enhanced, writes Matthew Syed.

A few years ago, Michael Michalko, a former US army officer, came up with a fascinating idea to sharpen creativity. He called it “assumption reversal”. You take the core notions in any context, subject, discipline and then, well, turn them on their head.

So, suppose you are thinking of starting a restaurant (obviously not possible right now!). The first assumption might be: “restaurants have menus”. The reversal would be: “restaurants have no menus”. This provokes the idea of a chef informing each customer what he bought that day at market, allowing them to select a customised dish. The point is not that this will turn out to be a workable scheme, but that by disrupting conventional thought patterns, it might lead to new associations and ideas.

Or, to take a different example, suppose you are considering a new taxi company. The first assumption might be: “taxi companies own cars”. The reversal would be: “taxi companies own no cars”. Twenty years ago, that might have sounded crazy. Today, the largest taxi company that has ever existed doesn’t own cars: Uber. Now we are living through a disruption (you might even call it a reversal) of unprecedented scale.