City of Madison attempt to remove ‘Police free schools’ street mural blocked by protesters

Elizabeth Beyer & Emily Hamer:

West Dayton Street outside of the Madison School District administration building became the latest field where protesters and city employees faced off in a battle of wills Friday morning.

The city’s Streets Division crew attempted to remove a mural on the road that read “Police free schools,” which was painted onto the asphalt by Madison youth in June, when a group of demonstrators arrived to protect the work.

The paint-removal process stopped partway through the “P” in “Police” due to concerns for the safety of both the city workers and the protesters, City of Madison streets and recycling coordinator Bryan Johnson said in a statement.

According to Johnson, the city wants to remove the painting on the street because it causes a traffic hazard by covering the double yellow traffic lines and obscuring the pedestrian crossings.

“It is already apparent that this will be an expensive project as removing paint from just one street is expected to cost approximately $8,000,” Johnson said. “The Streets Division will continue to work on ways to address safety issues in the areas where streets have been painted.”

Madison Deputy Mayor Katie Crawley said methods of keeping the city streets safe while compromising with the protesters will be revisited and discussed with city staff and others.

Starting this fall, the Madison School District will no longer station police officers at any of the city high schools after a unanimous vote by the School Board at the end of June to cancel its contract with the Madison Police Department. The motion went before the Madison City Council in July, which upheld the decision.

Former Madison SRO: Removing police from schools unlikely to reduce arrest disparity

Shezad Baloch:

Corey Saffold served as a school resource officer for four years at Madison West High School. We asked about the implications of the end of the SRO program and removal of Madison police officers from the schools. Now the head of security at Verona Area School District, he repeatedly said he is only speaking on behalf of what he experienced as an individual.   

Madison365: When and where did you serve as a School Resource Officer? 

Corey: Madison West High School. I served for four years. The Madison Police Department only allows their officers to work four years then they like to give somebody else a chance to get in. There isn’t any good reason behind it. I think the reason is that there are other officers that like the schedule (of working in a school) and they try to get in there too.  In my opinion, if he or she is doing good then the SRO should stay there. This is how most other police districts do it, but Madison police do not. After four years he or she comes out, which I don’t think is smart but nonetheless their officers are out of schools now. So again, it doesn’t matter.  

Madison365: What were the key responsibilities of SROs and what sort of education and training did you get to fulfill these responsibilities?

Corey: The responsibilities are varied and it really depends on the type of system you are operating in. So when I was an SRO I really focused on education. Key responsibility for me was educating students that got into legal trouble, instead of charging them or punishing them. So my responsibility was a little different. I did that as cases naturally came to me. If there was a student that stole from the Co-op right around the corner I would immediately put a plan in place or they would pay for whatever it was. Then I would educate them on why this behavior cannot continue because my key responsibility was to think of any and every opportunity to respond restoratively. 

Madison365: Did you get training to do this or is it your own way of working?

Corey: No. It is really my own way of working. There is not much training that comes with having the desire to do restorative practices. It is up to the individual officer. Either you have the desire or you don’t. Which is why the success of the School Resource Officer program depends on three things—the culture of the police department, the program that is set up for the officer to work within, and the individual officers him or herself. The reason is that the individual officer has to really focus on restorative practices. He or she should have a desire to do everything in his power or her power to avoid arresting and citing students. Now there are going to be some instances that rise to the level where you have to arrest and give citations, but for the most part, you should be able to work around that, but that’s going to depend on that individual officer wanting to accomplish that, wanting to do it. 

Madison365: Are SROs sufficiently trained for healthy and appropriate interventions? Can they identify a problem when it is to do with mental health rather than criminal behavior?

Corey: The police department in general receives training like trauma-informed care or mental health training. I don’t know that there is anything separate that the SROs receive to work in the high schools. That’s why the vetting process for SROs is crucial, because you really have to pick a person that already has that understanding and training. The training you are referring to really is a department-wide training and officers receive it through the department, not necessarily because he or she is an SRO.

Madison365: What would you say will be the biggest challenges facing Madison high schools now that SROs are no longer being used?

Corey: I don’t know that there will be a problem. Once schools are back in session, things may start off normally, with the exception of COVID-19 or you may see a need to call the police. If a large incident arises and those extra resources like the social workers, counselors, behavior specialists, etc., need help, police will need to be called. That may happen on occasion and there isn’t anything unusual about that. The problem is now you don’t have that officer in school that has relationships with students.  The officer that responds could really listen to administration and really try to figure out restorative practices for the students, or he or she could not. Now you don’t know what type of response you’ll get, whereas if you have an officer in the school you know what their response would be. Hopefully, you have a good one that works with the administration. In Madison, they will argue that the presence of an officer in school is too traumatic based on the current climate of policing in our country, and I totally understand that. So it really is a hard question to answer.  All we can do is wait and see.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

The Virus May Strike Teachers Unions

David Henderson:

If you have school-age children, you may be wondering if they’ll ever get an education. On Tuesday the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest education union, threatened “safety strikes” if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. Some state and local governments are insisting that public K-12 schooling this fall be conducted online three to five days a week and imposing stringent conditions on those students who actually make it to the classroom.

Yet there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education….

“An emphasis on adult employment“. (2009!)

Put down the banjo, Timmy: study finds learning music won’t make children smart

Jack Dutton:

But after analysing data from 54 studies conducted on 6,984 participants between 1986 and 2019, Dr Sala’s team found music training was ineffective at enhancing cognitive or academic skills, regardless of the skill type, participants’ age and duration of music training.

The authors found studies with high-quality design, such as those which used a group of active controls – children who did not learn music but instead learned a different skill, such as dance or sports, for example – showed no effect of music education on cognitive or academic performance.

“Our study shows that the common idea that ‘music makes children smarter’ is incorrect,” said Dr Sala, the lead author.

How I Wrote, Crowdfunded, and Independently Published a Book in 2020

Blake Boles:

In May 2020 I independently published my fourth book, Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School? This was the third time I’ve self-published, and I feel like I now have a strong grasp of the process. This blog post documents the entire 17-month process of writing, crowdfunding, and launching the book into the world.

If you’re thinking about writing your own book or self-publishing, then you’ll find clear utility in this article. (Also see my 2012 post on the subject.) If not, you may simply enjoy reading a walk-through and post-mortem of my creative process.

Viewpoint Diversity Gets a Boost as Families Flee Public Schools

JD Tuccille:

Earlier this year, The New York Times looked at different editions of the same public-school textbooks published in California and Texas and found them spun in opposite directions to suit the ideological tastes of the dominant political factions in those states. It was a handy summary of the long-raging curriculum wars that have seen politicians and activists battling to present their preferred interpretations of the world to the captive audiences in America’s classrooms.

Those are wars which many families will escape this fall as the pandemic and school closures push parents to assume responsibility for teaching their own children and, not incidentally, to pass along their own views and not those prepackaged by government officials. For all the damage COVID-19 and the fumbling human responses to the virus are doing, viewpoint diversity may actually get a boost.

America’s public-school textbooks, the Times story explained, reflect the country’s polarization.

“The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides,” Dana Goldstein wrote for the Times in January of this year. “Classroom materials are not only shaded by politics, but are also helping to shape a generation of future voters,” she added.

Former Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes: August 3, 2013

“The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”

Civics: What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?

John Kass:

It is happening in newsrooms in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. And now it’s coming for me, in an attempt to shame me into silence.

Here’s what happened:

Last week, with violence spiking around the country, I wrote a column on the growing sense of lawlessness in America’s urban areas.

In response, the Tribune newspaper union, the Chicago Tribune Guild, which I have repeatedly and politely declined to join, wrote an open letter to management defaming me, by falsely accusing me of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.

Newspaper management has decided not to engage publicly with the union. So I will.

For right now, let’s deal with facts. My July 22 column was titled “Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: An overwhelming sense of lawlessness.”

It explored the connections between soft-on-crime prosecutors and increases in violence along with the political donations of left-wing billionaire George Soros, who in several states has funded liberal candidates for prosecutor, including Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

Soros’ influence on these races is undeniable and has been widely reported. But in that column, I did not mention Soros’ ethnicity or religion.

I Went to Disney World

Graeme Wood:

Earlier this month, Walt Disney World began reopening, following almost four months of closure due to the pandemic. I flew to Orlando to experience the magic. The week I arrived, Florida had registered the highest single-day case count of any state thus far. In Orlando’s airport, I felt a vague sense that Floridians considered such statistics a source of secret pride, as if they had set a record for fattest alligator or ugliest serial killer or most senior citizens in a golf cart. The airport where I had started my day, in Connecticut, had required masks, and everyone wore them. Here in Florida, some passengers went totally unmasked, but most wore masks in a defiant fashion, either slung under their chin or with their nostrils gaping out over the top, sucking and spewing potentially viral particles with every breath. A friend who lives a couple of hours away in St. Petersburg likens this latter style to “wearing a condom that covers only the shaft.”

Disney World is in Florida only in the sense that Vatican City is in Italy, or the Principality of Monaco is in France. All the land that touches Disney World is Florida, but it is its own polity, with its own infrastructure, its own transportation, and, to a surprising extent, its own laws and regulations. Florida law applies, of course, but on Disney property—which covers more than 25,000 acres, about 50 times the size of Monaco—you can go weeks without seeing an employee of the local, state, or federal government. When you are at the Disney parks and resorts, you see no letter carriers, no police officers, no city bus drivers—just tens of thousands of Disney employees (always called “cast members”), who recognize no authority higher than Walt Disney (1901–66), the eternal líder máximo.

When you arrive in Orlando, your transit through Florida lasts only minutes. You emerge from the miasma of the airport and reach a check-in counter for the “Magical Express,” a free direct bus to Disney World. The counter resembles the passport-control desk of a benevolent and well-run nation, perhaps Norway or Japan. Upon reciting your name and confirmation number, you cease interacting with non-Disney entities for the rest of your stay. The woman who welcomed me—through a properly worn mask and face shield, plus a layer of plexiglass—gave me a pleasant wave as I walked up. On a typical day before the pandemic, I was told by another tourist, thousands of people would pass through this check-in area. Today there was no line at all.

Harvard, Hong Kong, and China

Harry Lewis:

But Hong Kong was a free city. I lectured on liberal education at universities there and advised Hong Kong U on its Common Core curriculum. I made friends there, and the academics took seriously their mandate to make the “two systems” philosophy work. Occasionally some stooge of the mainland government would make his presence known at a talk I was giving, but for the most part the audience behaved the way I expect college audiences to behave.

Then came the passage a few weeks ago of the “The Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” (Link here to a Canadian site with the English language text of the law.) It is impossible to overstate the scope and significance of this law. The four offenses are described as “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorist activities,” and “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security,” each with a broad definition and a broadening rider, for example: “A person who incites, assists in, abets or provides pecuniary or other financial assistance or property for the commission by other persons of the offence under Article 22 of this Law shall be guilty of an offence.” Penalties are up to life imprisonment. The whole law is to be administered by a special force, not by Hong Kong police. 

And there is more. Companies that violate the law can be shut down. Turning in others may lighten your sentence. You don’t have to be in Hong Kong to commit an offense under the law. In fact, most ominously, “This Law shall apply to offences under this Law committed against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”

The Rise of Synthetic Audio Deepfakes

Nisos:

Can Audio Deepfakes Really Fake a Human?

Audio deepfakes are the new frontier for business compromise schemes and are becoming more common pathways for criminals to deceptively gain access to corporate funds. Nisos recently investigated and obtained an original attempted deepfake synthetic audio used in a fraud attempt against a technology company. The deepfake took the form of a voicemail message from the company’s purported CEO, asking an employee to call back to “finalize an urgent business deal.” The recipient immediately thought it suspicious and did not contact the number, instead referring it to their legal department, and as a result the attack was not successful.

Nisos investigated the phone number the would-be attacker used and determined it was a VOIP service with no owner registration information. It was likely simply acquired and used as a “burner” for this fraud attempt only. While there was no actual voicemail message associated with the number, we made no attempt for live contact with the owner of the phone number for legal reasons.

Wisconsin High Performance School Deserts

Jessica Holmberg & Will Flanders:

Educational quality varies extensively across the state of Wisconsin. While some students have ready access to high-performing public, private, and charter schools, many areas of the state are high-performing school deserts—where families have few high-performing school options to help push their child forward. In this study, WILL utilizes statistical analysis and our new school mapping tool to locate the areas of Wisconsin where these deserts exist. We identify areas with no high-performing schools by looking at WILL’s performance rankings, which place schools on a level playing field with respect to demographics. Using this metric, we find that Wisconsin still has a long way to go in ensuring that all its children have access to a rigorous education.

Wisconsin has 134 ZIP codes with up to 40,112 school-age children with no high-performing school options within 10 miles. 134 ZIP codes across 49 counties have no high-performing school options—public, charter, or private—within 10 miles. High performing school deserts represent regions of the state lacking educational equity and opportunity.

High-performing school deserts are most common in rural areas. While urban schools are often the focus of education policy makers, this report sheds light on the many rural regions of Wisconsin without high-performing school options. Shawano County (11) and Langlade County (7) lead the way with the most ZIP codes without easy access to high-performing schools. Another eight Wisconsin counties have four or more ZIP codes without high-performing school options.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

How ‘Nice White Parents’ illustrates a powerful way of covering school inequality

Alexander Russo:

Over the few days, the political right has been in an uproar over Nice White Parents, the Chana Joffe-Walt-reported and -hosted podcast that premiers today, via Serial and the New York Times.

“Disintegrationists are now claiming that if you are a good parent who wants to educate your child in the best possible way, you are inherently racist because you are exacerbating racial inequality,” tweeted Ben Shapiro. “This holds only if you are white.”

The response is perhaps understandable, given the show’s inflammatory name given to the series and and promotional copy blaring that “if you want to understand what’s wrong with our public education system, you have to look at what is arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents.”

However, it’s progressive parents who should feel targeted. They’re the ones being scrutinized here. To understand why American schools are so broken and uneven, as Joffe-Walt reports it, we have to look closely at the beneficiaries of the system, those who make and shape the rules, whose preferences influence policy and worry politicians — and those who have the option to move or pay for private school if they are not pleased.

In big cities like New York City, the “nice white parents” are likely to be liberal.

Taxpayers have funded Madison’s K-12 school district well above most other public schools. Yet, we recently expanded our least diverse schools – despite space in nearby facilities.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

It’s official: Madison school district won’t have sports in fall; eyes spring opportunity

Jon Masson:

Madison Metropolitan School District athletic directors made it official Wednesday night that the district won’t offer fall sports and won’t offer sport-specific virtual or in-person coaching during the traditional fall dates.

In addition to not holding any fall athletics in person, the district is discouraging students from gathering outside of school grounds to train through Oct. 30.

The expected announcement came during a districtwide virtual meeting broadcast on YouTube on Wednesday night.

The district will look to provide opportunities in the spring based on WIAA guidance for schools that cannot play fall sports and that reflects the district’s school model and public health guidance, according to a release from the school district.

Majority of surveyed rural Wisconsin schools say masks not mandated, lean to reopening in fall

Logan Wroge:

A majority of rural Wisconsin school districts surveyed earlier this summer said they wouldn’t require students and staff to wear face masks and are leaning toward reopening school buildings in some capacity for the fall.

The Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance sent a survey to the organization’s 157 members in June to gauge what the school districts were planning for the new school year in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Kim Kaukl, executive director of the organization.

Seventy rural school districts the Alliance represents responded. Wisconsin has 421 school districts.

“In talking with my (superintendents) and looking at the results, I think there’s so much uncertainty right now,” Kaukl said. “I think everybody understands face-to-face is the best, but we also have to look at the health and safety for our students, our staff and our parents. That really puts a lot of our folks in a quandary.”

Kaukl cautioned plans within the districts could have changed since they responded to the survey, especially because the bulk of responses were returned between mid-June and early July, when positive coronavirus cases in Wisconsin began to grow.

Americans Aren’t Making Babies, and That’s Bad for the Economy

Peter Coy:

Pandas and white rhinos aren’t the only creatures that are unsuccessful at mating in captivity. The folk wisdom that humans will copulate when left with nothing else to do—dubbed the blackout babies theory—surfaces regularly in the immediate aftermath of disasters, but the baby boom never materializes.

The Covid-19 pandemic spawned predictions that stay-at-home orders would eventually deliver a baby bump. Yet far from having more children than usual, Americans are expecting fewer.

In bedrooms across the U.S., couples are making decisions that, in the aggregate, could prove as consequential for the long-term health of our economy as those taken by policymakers in Washington. Fewer children now means fewer consumers, workers, and taxpayers in the future. In other words, a smaller economy than otherwise—though also a smaller environmental footprint, which brings its own rewards.

‘I Wish You Bad Luck.’ Read Supreme Court Justice John Roberts’ Unconventional Speech to His Son’s Graduating Class

Katie Reilly:

Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

New report shows arrests, citations at MMSD high schools in 2019-20 remain disproportionate

Scott Girard:

A new report from the Madison Metropolitan School District shows that police interactions with students continued recent trends in 2019-20, with few citations and arrests but Black students making up a disproportionate number of those.

While the data come with caveats — most notably that the in-person school year was three months shorter than normal because of the COVID-19 pandemic — the report outlines statistics for Madison Police Department officers responding to each of the four comprehensive high schools, including interactions with students that resulted in arrests and citations.

The numbers were low compared to the student population, but among those who were arrested or cited, a disproportionate number were once again Black students. The data include incidents involving the school resource officers stationed at each of the four schools as well as officers who responded to a school campus for a call.

The report, which covers Sept. 1, 2019, through March 13, 2020, comes about a month after the School Board voted unanimously to end the more-than-20-year-old SRO program amid a nationwide reckoning with systemic racism, especially in policing. Board member Ali Muldrow cited the ongoing disparities ahead of her vote.

“Over the course of the entire lifespan of this program of policing in schools, a majority of students every year to be arrested in school are African American children,” Muldrow said June 29. “Policing in schools has had an impact in terms of racial profiling within education.”

2005: Gangs & School Violence Forum.

1995-2006: Police Calls – Madison Schools.

This May Be The Worst Season Of Summer Melt In Memory. Here’s How Some Colleges Are Fighting It.:

Chronicle:

[T]thousands of students [are] reconsidering their college plans, in what many enrollment officials fear will be the worst season of “summer melt” in memory. Some are finding that they can no longer afford their first choice; others are questioning whether an online or hybrid education is worth the price of an in-person one. Some are staying home out of concerns for their health, or the health of family members.

In a national survey conducted this spring, one in six high-school seniors who before the pandemic expected to attend a four-year college full time said that they will choose a different path this fall. A majority expected either to take a gap year or enroll part time in a bachelor’s program (35 percent each), while smaller percentages planned to work or attend a community college.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Goldman Warns the Dollar’s Grip on Global Markets Might Be Over

John Ainger and Liz McCormick:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. put a spotlight on the suddenly growing concern over inflation in the U.S. by issuing a bold warning Tuesday that the dollar is in danger of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency.

With Congress closing in on another round of fiscal stimulus to shore up the pandemic-ravaged economy, and the Federal Reserve having already swelled its balance sheet by about $2.8 trillion this year, Goldman strategists cautioned that U.S. policy is triggering currency “debasement fears” that could end the dollar’s reign as the dominant force in global foreign-exchange markets.

While that view is clearly still a minority one in most financial circles — and the Goldman analysts don’t say they believe it will necessarily happen — it captures a nervous vibe that has infiltrated the market this month: Investors worried that this money-printing will trigger inflation in years ahead have been bailing out of the dollar and piling furiously into gold.

“Gold is the currency of last resort, particularly in an environment like the current one where governments are debasing their fiat currencies and pushing real interest rates to all-time lows,” wrote Goldman strategists including Jeffrey Currie. There are now, they said, “real concerns around the longevity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency.”

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

Emily Hanford:

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn’t read very well.

“There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me,” she said. “When a teacher would dictate a word and say, ‘Tell me how you think you can spell it,’ I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, ‘How do they even know where to begin?’ I was totally lost.”

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn’t make sense to her, and she doesn’t remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text. 

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. “Words were like pictures to me,” she said. “I had a really good memory.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

I Survived Cancellation at Princeton

Joshua Katz:

Now is the time to debate with renewed vigor existential questions of what counts as justice and how to fashion an equitable society. But the stifling of dissent is impeding the search for answers and driving people who disagree still further apart. Because students like to push boundaries and professors like to argue, colleges and universities are a crucible.

Take the university where I teach, Princeton. The campus—or at least the online campus, in the age of the coronavirus—has been in uproar since early July over a letter of demands to the administration signed by hundreds of my faculty colleagues, and especially over my response to that letter. I was immediately denounced on social media and condemned publicly by my department and the university president. At the same time, the university spokesman announced ominously that the administration would be “looking into the matter further.” On July 14, the Journal’s editorial board commented: “Princeton is demonstrating how a lack of leadership enables the cancel culture.”

“spending more money than ever with absolutely no idea what the result will be”

Betty Peters, via a kind email:

America will, I expect, be spending more money than ever with absolutely no idea what the result will be.  And what about the families, the parents and children–who have no real choices because the various governors are making “shooting from the hip” decisions that affect all citizens.  Even  church schools have no choices as long as Covid 19 rules.  In AL parents don’t know day to day whether a teacher or student will be diagnosed with covid and the school (or daycare) will be shut down for 2 weeks. 

The only real solution is homeschooling with a competent parent or parent substitute.  But how many families can fit into this scenario?  Churches are being shut down so how can their school umbrellas work, much less their schools? 

I welcome ideas and prayers.  I have a 5 year old grandson so I do have skin in the game.  But all of us have “skin in the game of education” because we care about the children of today who will be the citizens and parents and government of tomorrow.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 202
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Madison Superintendent hire Carlton Jenkins tells Black leaders he’s ‘ready to go to work’

Logan Wroge:

Former School Board member James Howard, who also served as president, said the district’s No. 1 challenge is the low reading outcomes for Black children, where only 9% of scored proficient on a state assessment.

“Before our kids can succeed academically … we have to do something about our reading scores,” Howard said.

Jenkins said if the “collective wisdom” of the community, the district and the university can’t change the outcomes for students of color “then I think we have to blame ourselves,” adding accountability starts with him.

“This is one time we don’t have a honeymoon period. We got to get to work,” he said.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

US universities announcing online Fall 2020

Kmjn.org

A list of four-year universities in the United States who’ve announced that their fall 2020 undergraduate classes will be taught all or almost all online, sorted by date of announcement.

There’s variation within the plans in the list. Some are exclusively online, while others plan to have a limited number of in-person courses, e.g. science labs. Also, some universities plan to have the dorms and on-campus services open at reduced capacity, while others plan to have the campus mostly closed.

May 5 – California State University system: “our planning approach will result in CSU courses primarily being delivered virtually for the fall 2020 term, with limited exceptions”.

June 11 – University of California Irvine (Irvine, CA): “Almost all undergraduate courses will be delivered in a remote format in the fall quarter. A few exceptions are being evaluated, and consist of specialized upper-division labs, specific clinical and experiential courses, and some design courses in Engineering.”

June 15 – Harvard University (Cambridge, MA): “regardless of where our students are living, whether on campus or at home, learning will continue to be remote next year, with only rare exceptions” (Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes the undergraduate college).

Why Australia is doubling fees for arts degrees

Alisa Purbasari Horton:

That’s supported by a survey conducted by The University of Melbourne investigating the experiences of first-year students between 1994 and 2014. When students were asked their main reason for enrolling, intrinsic interest in their subject consistently ranked highest, ahead of improving job prospects. In 1994, 94% considered interest in their field as an important reason to study, a figure that went up to 96% in 2014.     

“I think the idea that you can persuade the student who is interested in philosophy to go and become an engineer is just not how this is going to work,” says Joel Barnes, a public history researcher at University of Technology Sydney. Then there are also reasons beyond interest and job prospects that go into a student’s choice to pick a field of study. For example, those with learning disabilities may face additional challenges if they were forced to pick courses that don’t correspond with how they learn best, or isn’t taught in a way that is conducive to their learning. 

Sheehy points out that prior education reforms in Australia made law degrees more expensive, yet universities continue to see a consistent increase in law graduates. Conrad Liveris, a labour market economist, told ABC News that while the change may prompt more students to at least think about studying job-ready courses, “whether they continue with that is another thing”.   

Some Countries Reopened Schools. What Did They Learn About Kids and Covid?

Eric Niler:

But the question of how likely children are to spread it to teachers, staff and other students still hasn’t been settled. One large new study from South Korea found children under the age of 10 appear to not transmit the virus very well. While it’s not exactly clear why, the pediatric infectious disease experts contacted by WIRED say that it’s perhaps because young children expel less air that contains the virus and are shorter, so any potential respiratory droplets are less likely to reach adults. A study published in April by researchers at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston suggests that younger kids haven’t developed the molecular keys that the virus exploits to enter the body and wreak havoc on the respiratory system, microscopic structures known as ACE2 receptors.

But older students are more like adults in their ability to transmit the virus, according to the South Korea study, which makes school opening decisions tougher. Should administrators allow only elementary students to attend in person, while middle and high schoolers stay online at home? If they do, will younger children be able to keep their masks on all day or stay six feet apart? What about the psychological effects of continued isolation on teens, who many parents believe are already racking up too much screen time during the pandemic shutdown and now are facing months of online learning?

The CDC announced school reopening guidelines on Thursday that call for officials to reopen classrooms this fall, based on the idea that children do not become as sick from Covid-19 and are less likely to spread it as adults, and to belay any emotional and psychological harm from the disruption of schools staying closed. The agency issued these new guidelines after President Donald Trump attacked initial rules that called for desks being set 6 feet apart, staggered lunches, and temperature screenings, as being too costly and burdensome.

Dimitri Christakis helped draft a separate set of reopening guidelines for US schools in a report for the National Academy of Sciences released July 15. It says schools should take steps to reopen for younger students in grades K-5 and those of all ages who have special needs. Christakis says that with appropriate social distancing, hand-washing and protective masking, the risk to teachers, staff and students in a school can be reduced.

“With those additional precautions, primary school teachers should feel comfortable going to school,” says Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. “Those are the kids for which in-person learning is so important. We should prioritize these kids.”

At the same time, Christakis admits there are still some unknowns about transmission among school-age children. “We don’t have the answer to what extent children transmit the virus in general, and in particular in a school setting,” he says. “This is called the ‘novel coronavirus’ for good reason. It is acting very differently than most respiratory viruses and many other coronaviruses. Children appear to be less affected directly, and potentially less likely to transmit.”

Mayor Walsh, give Brenda Cassellius a chance to lead Boston Public Schools

Joan Vennochi:

Can this superintendent be saved?

As she marks her first anniversary as head of Boston Public Schools, Brenda Cassellius is getting a lesson in the local version of “trauma-informed teaching.” This learning strategy is supposed to take trauma into account and help students get past it. But here, it means a superintendent is put through the trauma of being undermined by various interest groups, and then by a mayor who caves into them. The lesson ends with the scuttling of a feather-ruffling proposal in favor of the status quo.

For Cassellius, trauma came in the form of a scathing letter from an association that represents the city’s high school leaders, complaining bitterly about a still-in-the-works reform plan. Mayor Martin J. Walsh then used the very public platform of a radio show to tell Cassellius to meet with the complainers. A summary of unflattering findings of a survey from an association representing principals of Boston’s K-8 schools was also obtained by the Globe.

The New Accountability Assignment

Michael Petrilli:

The spring of 2020 will forever be known as the season when tens of millions of American families took a crash course in homeschooling. Eventually we’ll learn whether this mass experiment in “remote learning” leads to durable changes in the U.S. education system, such as more students taking some of their courses online or opting out altogether from school as we know it. In the meantime, the massive digital footprint this experiment has created can provide fresh insights into how students spend their days. Here’s one project we could launch immediately: Let’s start collecting information about the assignments schools are asking pupils to complete and use that information, in addition to test scores and survey results, to evaluate educational quality.

It’s no secret that for years now, policymakers, researchers, and educators have been searching for additional school-quality measures to accompany standardized test scores. The quest for valid and reliable indicators has included a range of options, such as chronic absenteeism rates and access to challenging coursework. Some of this is wrongheaded and merely an attempt to avoid public oversight. It may well be an attempt to go back to the days when schools were judged by the size of their budgets or credentials of their teachers, rather than the outcomes of their students. As my colleague Chester E. Finn, Jr. has argued, tests may be the messengers, but accountability itself is the message that so many in education really want to shoot.

Regardless, it is certainly the case that data from large-scale testing is far from perfect, and that supplementing it with other strong performance measures could do a lot of good. For one, it could counteract some of the perverse incentives built into our current approach, especially the narrow focus on English language arts and math instruction. And the added metrics might get closer to the kinds of information that parents say they value. For example, some states and scholars have embraced school climate surveys, the most comprehensive of which poll parents, teachers, and students about their experiences, academic and otherwise. Several instruments have shown promise and can reliably identify which schools are nailing it with student engagement.

The Brave New World of Chemical Romance

Brian Gallagher:

Love drugs harken back to fairytale fantasies about potions and spells, but the notion isn’t purely fiction. The authors of Love Drugs—Julian Savulescu, an Oxford philosopher, and Brian Earp, a Yale doctoral candidate in philosophy and psychology—make plain that our brain’s love, lust, and attachment systems can be affected by real-life neuro-technologies. With cogent arguments, vivid experimental detail, and engaging storytelling, the authors show that chemical interventions to foster, enhance, and diminish love will only become more sophisticated as scientists discern the biochemical nature of the romantic bond.

Aficionados of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Brave New World will find Love Drugs both entertaining and sobering. In fact, Love Drugs was almost titled Brave New Love. “There is a part of me that still prefers Brave New Love,” Earp says. “I think a lot of people think this is a pro-love drugs book. We tried not to do that. This is not ‘science will fix all of our problems.’ A title like Brave New Love says, ‘There’s a real danger here.’ Maybe if I could wave a magic wand I’d go back to Brave New Love. But it is what it is.”

I was excited to speak to Earp, a research fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford. I first learned of him in 2011 from YouTube. At the time, Earp was getting his master’s degree in psychology at Oxford, which was where philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris happened to be giving a talk on his then-new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Earp, skeptical of the ostensible novelty of his thesis, incisively asked him to defend it. The recording of the exchange has almost 2 million views. In our conversation, Earp didn’t disappoint. He was as thoughtful and careful and smart in his responses to me as I expected him to be.

Commentary on The taxpayer supported Madison School District’s online Teacher Effectiveness

Emily Shetler:

Almost immediately after the Madison School District joined other districts across the country in announcing a return to online instruction instead of bringing students back to the classroom for the fall semester, posts started popping up on Facebook groups, Craigslist, Reddit and the University of Wisconsin-Madison student job board seeking in-home academic help.

Parents taxed by trying to do their own jobs from home while monitoring their children’s school work are looking for tutors, nannies, even retired teachers to help them navigate what could be several more months of virtual education.

“I think one of the important things that everyone needs to understand is right now, parents are in just an untenable position, all the way around, every parent,” said Madeline Hafner, executive director of the Minority Student Achievement Network Consortium at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

Many families are teaming up with neighbors to pool resources and form “learning pods” for the school year. But research indicates when families can afford to do so turn to tutoring and educational services in their homes, it can affect the academic success of all students.

Mike, who asked for his last name to be withheld, was initially considering forming a learning pod with a small group of neighbors and hiring a teacher to help with virtual learning through the 2020-2021 school year.

But now he is planning to take his children out of MMSD and renting a house in Columbia County where he can send his children to in-person classes before returning to Madison next June. Otherwise, his family will adopt “some sort of home school curriculum.” 

Ann Althouse:

But if it’s hard to figure out, then the least privileged families — the ones the experts are supposedly so concerned about — will be impaired in doing what they might be able to do on their own to close the achievement gap. The experts are working hard to drive home the message that you can’t do it, that your kids are losing out, that you need the public schools, and that those other people over there — the privileged people — are taking advantage again and their advantage is your disadvantage.

IN THE COMMENTS: ellie said:

I am a homeschool mom who normally utilizes a cooperative. We cannot meet in our building this year due to covid. I’ve set up a “pod” in my home. It was easy. All the moms got together and talked over what our kids needed for the year, then we divided the classes. Each mom took what they were good at or could reasonably handle. No money involved at all for us. We set a schedule for 2 days a week, and the other days, work is assigned for home.

“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 202
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” (1) – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus

Taxpayers have spent millions on Infinite Campus:

Integration separates us from the competition. We are not just an SIS, we are an LMS, food service, district communicator, finance, human resources, and much more…all within a single product.

2012 (!) Madison School District Infinite Campus Usage Memorandum.

Across our middle and high schools, a number of you have utilized the Infinite Campus grade book.
Parents,guardians and other youth service providers appreciate the information regarding student progress. This year, the MMSD opened an online student enrollment option for families. The feedback is clear, a high percentage of MMSD families utilize Infinite Campus. The Research and Evaluation Department has analyzed the number of Infinite Campus grade book entries in all of our schools and it is evident to me that we have yet to reach our full implementation by having all teachers using the Infinite Campus grade book and consistently updating student progress. Therefore, it is my expectation that all teachers follow the below guidelines as we enter the 12-13 school year.

Notes and links on the Madison School District and Infinite Campus.

(1) via Logan Wroge’s recent Madison School Board Summary.

Madison School District to use some federal COVID-19 relief funds for online math instruction (Fall 2020 Referendum tax & Spending increase plans continue)

Logan Wroge:

The Madison School District will spend close to $500,000 out of the $8.2 million the district estimates it will receive from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to shore up its mathematics instruction for elementary and middle school students.

Using CARES Act money, the district plans to:

• Purchase $143,808 in individual math kits for elementary students;

• License for one year at $211,750 for all elementary students learning math;

• License the i-Ready platform for one year at $122,190 for middle school mathematics.

According to memos on the online platforms, i-Ready and DreamBox will be core teaching components to “hybrid and virtual learning environments.”

Middle schools have been using i-Ready for the past two years, but the use expanded in the spring when the platform’s developer allowed all Madison students to access it, according to a memo.

“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” said a memo on the purchase of elementary math kits. “Purchasing the students kits will provide essential resources to all students to engage in online learning with lessons provided by their teacher.”

The $2 trillion CARES Act included $30.7 billion for K-12 and higher education institutions to respond to the financial constraints and needs of the pandemic.

The School District expects to receive funds from two pots of money for K-12 schools. Kelly Ruppel, the district’s chief financial officer, said the district estimates it will be able to use $8.2 million of the $9.1 million slated to go to Madison, depending on how much private schools within the district boundaries are eligible to receive.

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 202
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

WILL questions racially separated Madison west high school meetings on race

Benjamin Yount:

“It is head-spinning that a public school in Wisconsin would adopt racial segregation as a tool to confront racism in the twenty-first century. It is an affront to the hard-fought progress our country has made,” Esenberg said. 

The letter explained further: “By associating racial segregation with ’emotional safety and security,’ the school communicated to students and families that racial integration somehow detracts from ’emotional safety and security.’ That is the polar opposite of the message that should be communicated right now,” the letter stated.

“West’s broad classification of all students into ‘white students’ and ‘students of color’ undoubtedly alienated many students who do not fit neatly into these racial categories. If the goal is for students of different races and ethnicities to ‘build empathy and community for each other’ and to “make individual and collective connections,” racial segregation is the worst possible model; only an integrated discussion would allow students to hear and learn from each other,” Esenberg wrote.

Australian regulator says Google misled users over data privacy issues

Paulina Duran, Nikhil Nainan:

The move comes as scrutiny grows worldwide over data privacy, with U.S. and European lawmakers recently focusing on how tech companies treat user data.

In court documents, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) accused Google of not explicitly getting consent or properly informing consumers of a 2016 move to combine personal information in Google accounts with browsing activities on non-Google websites.

“This change … was worth a lot of money to Google,” said commission chairman Rod Sims. “We allege they’ve achieved it through misleading behaviour.”

The change allowed Google to link the browsing behaviour of millions of consumers with their names and identities, providing it with extreme market power, the regulator added.

“We consider Google misled Australian consumers about what it planned to do with large amounts of their personal information, including internet activity on websites not connected to Google,” Sims said.

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

Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek to Dismantle the “Western Nuclear Family”

Bradley Thomas:

One of the most oft-cited and criticized goals of the Black Lives Matter organization is its stated desire to abolish the family as we know it. Specifically, BLM’s official website states:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

This idea isn’t unique to BLM, of course. “Disrupting” the “nuclear family” is a commonly stated goal among Maxist organizations. Given that BLM’s founders have specifically claimed to be “trained Marxists,” we should not be surprised that the organization’s leadership has embraced a Marxian view of the family.

But where does this hostility toward the family originate? Partly, it comes from the theories of Marx and Engels themselves, and their views that an earlier, matriarchal version of the family rejected private property as an organizing principle of society. It was only later that this older tribal model of the family gave way to the modern “patriarchal” family, which promotes and sustains private property.

Clearly, in the Marxian view, this “new” type of family must be opposed, since the destruction of this family model will make it easier to abolish private property as well.

Early Family Units in Tribal Life

Frederick Engels’s 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State provides a historical perspective of the Marxian view of the development of the modern Western family unit and its relation to property rights. (Engels, of course, was the longtime benefactor of and collaborator with Marx.)

In reconstructing the origins of the family within a Marxian framework, Engels traces back to the “savage” primeval stage of humanity that, according to his research, revealed a condition in which “unrestricted sexual intercourse existed within a tribe, so that every woman belonged to every man, and vice versa.”

Under such conditions, Engels explained, “it is uncertain who is the father of the child, but certain, who is its mother.” Only female lineage could be acknowledged. “[B]eing the only well known parents of younger generations,” Engels explained, women as mothers “received a high tribute of respect and deference, amounting to a complete women’s rule [gynaicocracy].”

Furthermore, Engels wrote, tribes were subdivided into smaller groups called “gentes,” a primitive form of an extended family of sorts.

“The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”

Edgewood College reinstates terminated faculty following appeals process

Yvonne Kim:

Edgewood College has reinstated the positions of all six Edgewood College professors who were initially terminated in May.

One anonymous professor and English and ethnic studies professor Huining Ouyang learned this week that the Board of Trustees decided to rescind their termination notices, while communications professor Bonnie Sierlecki had not yet directly heard the results of her appeal at the time of publication. Though Ouyang plans to return to the college, both she and Sierlecki cited opaque and confusing communication from administrators throughout the appeals process. 

They were among six faculty whose positions were eliminated May 27 as a step to meet “changing student needs.” Though the three others have since left the college, the Board decided to rescind all six terminations “in order to allow for a review of the entire process” and work toward a more comprehensive growth strategy, according to an email from Board chairwoman Lucy Keane to the Academic Rank Committee on Thursday.

“The Board felt that the best opportunity for those groups to work together was to move the focus away from a decision made in the past and put our focus and attention in the future,” Keane said in the email. “We look forward to a time of healing and for our new President to use this new-found time and space in a constructive way.”

How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation

Zack Stanton:

Schools across the U.S. are closed because of the coronavirus, and unlikely to reopen safely anytime soon. Parents are exhausted from constant, round-the-clock care while trying to work from home; some have chosen to leave their jobs, or switch to part-time work, just to take care of their kids. And kids themselves are slipping behind academically.

Now comes the bad news: We haven’t seen the worst of it yet.

When the economist Betsey Stevenson looks at the pandemic-era economic crisis, she sees a long-simmering child care crisis that has suddenly surged to the foreground of people’s lives—and whose true scope we’ve barely begun to reckon with. Its potential to inflict lasting damage to the economy is enormous, and it’s getting short shrift in the recovery plans coming out of Washington.

“The work of recovering from it will not end just because we have a vaccine,” says Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan and former member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “We are making choices right now about where we will be as an economy in 20 years, in 30 years, based on what we do with these kids.”

Among those most likely to be affected are working mothers, who shoulder an outsize share of child care responsibilities, and have suddenly had far more work dropped in their laps. Women already need to make difficult choices between work advancement and their family roles, which can bring down their incomes over time; Stevenson expects the crisis to make that conflict sharply worse: “The impact of the child care crisis on women’s outcomes is going to be felt over the next decade.”

Analysis: Michigan Teachers Union & Its Health Insurance Trust Raked In at Least $11 Million in Small Business Bailout Money

Mike Antonucci:

When I wrote that the National Education Association and its state affiliates were big business, I got it only half-right. It turns out they are small business, too.

Under public pressure, the federal government released a partial list of fund recipients from the Paycheck Protection Program, a project created as part of a package of economic relief for businesses suffering under COVID-19 shutdowns. Managed by the Small Business Administration, the program is “designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll.” If the money is used for that purpose, the low-interest loan will be forgiven.

The definition of “small business” turned out to be an expansive one. It didn’t take reporters long to discover that 16 billionaires received the loans, as well as the Catholic Church and, even worse, charter schools.

It’s this last group that led to breathless stories in The New York Timesand The Washington Post, but both newspapers failed to notice that another group also took advantage of government largesse: labor unions.

Unions and their subsidiaries on the government’s list received a minimum of $26 million and may have gotten as much as $51 million. By far the largest recipients among those unions were the Michigan Education Association and the health insurance subsidiary it created, the Michigan Education Special Services Association. They received a combined minimum of $11.4 million.

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

Cancel culture takes the fun out of life, says comedian John Cleese

Rollo Ross:

Cleese last month called the BBC “cowardly and gutless” for temporarily taking down an episode of “Fawlty Towers” that made fun of Germans and World War Two and also featured a character using a racial slur.

Cancel culture “misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun,” Cleese told Reuters, referring to the trend in which people are ostracized because of behavior or remarks seen as objectionable.

“Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they’re not funny. Funniness is about people who don’t do that, like Trump,” he said, referring to the U.S. president.

With most UW classes still online this fall, students hold out hope for reduced tuition

Kelly Meyerhofer:

As University of Wisconsin System students grapple with the realization that most of their classes will again be online this fall, many hold out hope for some form of tuition relief to offset what they see as an inferior learning experience.

UW-Madison student Brielle Schnowske enrolled in five courses this fall semester, two of which include a weekly face-to-face discussion. The rest of the incoming senior’s coursework will be online, which she described as the “right call” to limit the spread of COVID-19. But like most every college student, she wants a break in tuition because she said her online classes this spring were nowhere near the quality she experienced in her face-to-face classes.

“I think one of the biggest parts of college is obviously meeting people in class and engaging with others, but also being able to talk to the professor before or after lecture to ask questions,” she said. “I think that adds a lot to the experience, because otherwise I feel like I could have been doing online classes that are way cheaper somewhere else.”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Joel Kotkin Q&A on ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism’

Carl Cannon:

Let’s start at the beginning, Joel. In talking about your new book, “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class,” do you literally fear that liberal capitalism is losing out to economic “feudalism”? And please put that word feudalism in a modern context for our readers.

The parallels are striking. In the long centuries after the feudal era — let’s say starting around 1200 ACE — there was a slow, but gradual rise of upward mobility and growing power to the middle class. In the 20th century this progress was extended to the working class. Despite its many crises, liberal capitalism provided a better way of life and higher expectations not only for Americans, but also Europeans, Japanese, east Asians, including China, Canada, Australia and even some developing countries.

That progress stalled in the 1970s in the West, as wealth began to concentrate in fewer hands and income growth all but ended for the vast majority. Instead, we see the rise of two classes that parallel the feudal structure. One is the oligarchy, notably in Silicon Valley, and the other is a modern version of the clerisy; one replicates the military aristocracy that rose after the end of the Roman Empire; the other, the powerful priesthood of the Catholic Church. Meanwhile the middle class, what I call the property-owning yeomanry, has declined while the ranks of the new serf class — essentially those with no hope of achieving property ownership or a shot to move into the middle class — have expanded.

This is the essence of neo-feudalism.

You sound the alarm about the fate awaiting the “global” middle class, but the book’s epicenter is in California. You have a contrarian opinion of the prevailing view, which was recently expressed this way by progressive writers Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira: “Cali­fornia is the future of American politics.” Apparently, you no longer believe that’s something to celebrate. 

I have lived in California for nearly a half century. When I came here, it was the land of opportunity. Sure, there was poverty but also a lot of upward mobility. People came here to make their lives better. Now California suffers large-scale middle- and working-class out-migration and the highest poverty rate, adjusted for costs, of any state. Inequality, as James Galbraith and others have found, is about as steep as anywhere.

Our once-dynamic politics are frozen in place. California’s thriving two-party system morphed into a one-party state dominated by tech oligarchs, public employees, and green activists. The state’s Republican Party, which once loomed over the nation, has withered into a small Trumpist cult with perhaps 40% support at best.

China drafts new rules to ensure foreign teachers protect national ‘honour’

Nathan VanderKlippe:

China is sweeping foreigners into its demands for political conformity with a draft policy for international teachers that mandates ideological training sessions, prescribes a new tracking system to monitor conduct and threatens to punish those accused of damaging the country’s dignity.

The draft policy, released Tuesday for a month of comment, formalizes expectations for foreign teachers who work in China, many of whom have already been instructed to avoid classroom discussion of subjects the Chinese Communist Party considers sensitive – forbidden topics that include the Tiananmen Square massacre, the status of Taiwan and the mass incarceration of Uyghurs.

In doing so, education authorities have made clear new political oversight requirements for international schools in China, where dozens of institutions are backed by Canadian provinces.

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Education is an important component of Canadian trade with China and a key sector for foreign passport holders in the country; between 30 and 40 per cent of the international work force in China is employed in education, according to China Services International, a state-backed foreign recruitment firm.

Rutgers English Department to deemphasize traditional grammar ‘in solidarity with Black Lives Matter’

Alex Frank:

The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of “anti-racist” directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.

The initiatives were spelled out by Rebecca Walkowitz, the English Department chair at Rutgers University, and sent to faculty, staff and students in an email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

Walkowitz sent the email on “Juneteenth,” which celebrates the commemoration of emancipation from slavery in the United States.

Titled “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” the email states that the ongoing and future initiatives that the English Department has planned are a “way to contribute to the eradication of systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color.”

One of the initiatives is described as “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”

It is listed as one of the efforts for Rutgers’ Graduate Writing Program, which “serves graduate students across the Rutgers community. The GWP’s mission is to support graduate students of all disciplines in their current and future writing goals, from coursework papers to scholarly articles and dissertations,” according to its website.

Teaching Isn’t About Managing Behavior

Christopher Emdin:

In the fall of 2001, armed with an undergraduate science degree and a rushed teaching credential, I stood in front of a sea of Black and brown middle-school students in the Bronx and announced that I was their teacher. On the first day of school, I told them, “This is my class. I am going to be teaching you science and math. You will listen, you will work hard, and you will be respectful.” I had practiced these lines in the mirror for weeks. My shoulders were back, my hands were in my pockets, and my teacher scowl had been perfected. Everything I had been told about how to teach—that success was only attained in a quiet, contained classroom, and you had to be tough to maintain it—was contained in those few lines.

A few weeks later, I was walking the aisles of the classroom while my students were working quietly on math problems, when loud sirens began to penetrate the walls. Thinking it was just another police car or ambulance, I yelled at my students to focus. In that moment, ensuring that they were not yielding to distractions was my biggest concern. But the sirens persisted for longer than usual. Students looked up at me with concern; my brows tightened in a scowl that forced their eyes back to their notebooks. I knew that no math was happening, but as long as no eyes were lifted from the page, I felt successful. Then the phone rang.

Laws Protecting Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity Against Employer Retaliation: Cross-Cutting Questions

Eugene Volokh:

Before I get into the specifics of the various state and local statutes, let me flag some questions that different legislatures have answered differently (and, in some instances, that some legislatures haven’t expressly addressed).

[1.] Criminal Liability, Civil Liability, or Both?

Some of the statutes expressly provide for civil liability, some for criminal liability, and some for both. But courts generally treat these sorts of criminal statutes as also generating a private right of action, either as a matter of statutory interpretation or as an application of the “wrongful discharge in violation of public policy” tort.

[2.] Coverage for Existing Employees or Also for Applicants?

Some of the statutes expressly cover all employer decisions. Others only cover discharge or discipline of current employees rather than refusal to hire applicants. Note, though, that the California Supreme Court has read its statute as covering discrimination in hiring, even though the statutory text refers just to actions with regard to “employee[s].”

[3.] Application Only to Established Policies, or Also to Individual Employment Decisions?

Some of the statutes expressly cover all employer actions, but others cover only policies restricting speech. Such policies need not be published ones; an accepted course of conduct would suffice.[1]

The question is whether the statutes that ban speech-restrictive “polic[ies]” should also apply to individual incidents of discrimination, animated by an employer’s concerns at that moment rather than by some coherent general plan. The Louisiana Supreme Court has answered the question yes, holding that the ban on enforcing any “rule, regulation or policy” restraining political activity extends to individual firing decisions made even without any express policy. “[T]he actual firing of one employee for political activity constitutes for the remaining employees both a policy and a threat of similar firings.” On the other hand, the California Supreme Court has defined “policy” as “[a] settled or definite course or method adopted and followed” by the employer, and a California federal district court has specifically concluded that an individual retaliatory decision does not suffice to show the existence of a “rule, regulation, or policy.”

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

Clifton Mark:

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

How Iceland Got Teens to Say No to Drugs

Emma Young:

The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.”

If it was adopted in other countries, Milkman argues, the Icelandic model could benefit the general psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of kids, not to mention the coffers of healthcare agencies and broader society. It’s a big if.

“I was in the eye of the storm of the drug revolution,” Milkman explains over tea in his apartment in Reykjavik. In the early 1970s, when he was doing an internship at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, “LSD was already in, and a lot of people were smoking marijuana. And there was a lot of interest in why people took certain drugs.”

Independent Madison charter Milestone Democratic School designed ‘by youth, for youth’

Logan Wroge:

In 2017, Anderson and a partner approached the UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity about starting an independent charter. The school’s design team was formed the next year, and Milestone received approval from the System in 2019 to open as Madison’s third independent charter.

Independent charters are tuition-free, public schools authorized by government entities other than school districts and not under the supervision of local school boards. The other two in Madison are One City Schools and Isthmus Montessori Academy.

For 2020-21, Milestone is seeking a minimum enrollment of 30 students across grades seven through 12 and has a cap of 64 students in total, said Anderson, who will serve as an adviser. So far, fewer than 20 students are going through the enrollment process.

The first day of school is Aug. 27, but enrollment can happen throughout the school year, he said.

Despite its remote start, Milestone recently signed a five-year lease to take over the former Madison Media Institute building, 2758 Dairy Drive, on the city’s Southeast Side.

Milestone Democratic School operates on less than half the per student taxpayer funds (redistributed state and federal tax funds) as the Madison School District, which deeply harvests local property taxes.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed (independent) Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

A Culture Canceled

Chris Arnade:

The current debates over cancel culture are odd because few involved in them have been canceled, or risk being canceled, while entire institutions are indeed being canceled. Institutions that serve and amplify the interests of the working class, such as local newspapers, unions, and churches.

The death of local journalism is at least acknowledged by those involved in the debate as a problem. They are rightly concerned that newspapers focusing on local news being replaced by far away conglomerates hurts “left-behind” communities since it closes a forum where their issues could be heard, elevated, and addressed.

Getting less attention is the death of churches and unions. Lower income neighborhoods are littered with boarded up versions of both, a result of America’s embrace of a noxious mix of centralized economic power and de-centralized personal freedom.

Both are essential in giving power to the working class, providing them communities where they can go to be heard, and have any needs acknowledged, and perhaps brought to a higher authority to be solved.

In churches it is the prayer request that is the opportunity to ask for help. In an evangelical church in Tulsa I heard newer immigrants ask for prayers about help untangling the endless documents needed to become a citizen. In Dubuque I listened to a man ask for prayers for his car troubles that becomes a conversation about financial advice. In Reno a prayer for a sick relative turned into a discussion about healthcare. After church is over, all are surrounded by other congregants offering tangible advice and help drawn from their own experiences

US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning

Andrew Jack:

Jackson Butler received an unexpected boost this week after growing frustration that his final year at Georgetown University would be largely taught online with limited access to its Washington DC base.

“It’s very clear we’ll have a diminished experience,” he said. “There will be no extracurricular activities and we won’t be able to access resources on campus.”

But after organising a petition of 2,000 students accusing Georgetown of “highway robbery” for maintaining its tuition fees at nearly $58,000 a year, the university backed down and offered a 10 per cent discount.

The Digitized Culture Wars

LM Sacasas

“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.”

— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971)

The logic of the analogy is, of course, straightforward. Digital media has dramatically enhanced the speed, scale, and power of the tools by which the culture wars are waged and thus transformed their norms, tactics, strategies, psychology, and consequences.

Culture war skirmishes now unfold at a moments notice. The lines of battle form quickly on social media platforms. Tens of thousands of participants, not all of them human, are mobilized and deployed to the front. They work at scale, often in coordinated actions against certain individuals, working chiefly to discredit and discomfit, but also to confuse, incite, exhaust, demoralize. The older, perhaps always idealistic aims of persuasion and refutation are no longer adequate to the new situation. Moreover, skirmishes that become pitched battles spill out indefinitely, becoming black holes of attention, which become massive drains of resources and energy.

Along these lines we can see that the power of digital media lies in their immediacy and scale, but also in their ability to widen the war. Direct mail may have targeted you, but social media involves you directly in the action. Take up your memes, comrades. We are no longer mere spectators of battles waged for our allegiance by elite warriors of the political and intellectual classes. In the digitized front, we are all armed and urged to join the fray. The elites themselves quickly become the victims of the very cultural warfare they had once stoked to their advantage.

Digitization also yields total culture war. No aspect of our experience goes untouched. This is a consequence of both the wide-scale distribution of the weapons of cultural warfare but also of how these same tools erode the older, always tenuous divide between public and private life. Now, the culture wars are total in the sense that they are all-encompassing and unrelenting. It’s not so much that we’re always on the front lines, it’s that the front lines are always with us. And while it is true that the culture wars have always involved public debate of private matters, the digitized culture wars swallow up even more aspects of private life.

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

Paul Graham:

One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.

I think that you’ll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society. [1]

Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points. Anyone who’s been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that the quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.

The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.

The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They’re careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.

The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don’t care much about rules and probably aren’t 100% sure what the rules even are.

And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.

When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it’s the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.

Families deserve financial support for at-home schooling

Will Flanders:

The debate over how, and if, school will resume in-person this fall is taking center stage in communities across the country. Many major districts have already announced they intend to remain closed, at least to start the school year. And in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction’s guidelines for reopening account for wide array of school options, from full in-person instruction to fully virtual.

Every school and school district will have to make the best decision possible given their circumstances and the threat of the virus. But if the 2020-21 school year is to look like the spring of 2020 —with widespread building closures and instruction occurring virtually — parents deserve access to at least some of the money dedicated towards schools each year.

Evidence is growing that the time out of school is exacerbating existing educational gaps for low-income and minority students. In Los Angeles, data analysis from the spring has found that Black, Latino and low-income students were less likely to participate in online learning activities than their peers. In Texas, when students were doing online coursework, math progress decreased by 56% from January to the end of semester for pupils in low-income ZIP codes.

The Models Were Wildly Wrong about Reopening Too

Phillip Magness:

Most of the United States entered into a tepid reopening from the COVID lockdowns in mid-May. Although the reopening process has advanced through an interminable succession of bureaucratic phases with most of the country remaining under varying degrees of restriction as of mid-July, the reopening process has remained under sustained criticism from the media and a segment of the epidemiology profession since the moment it started.

Back on May 24th the epidemiology team at Imperial College London (ICL) published a study that expanded on their now-notorious COVID-19 model. Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson both cited the apocalyptic projections of this report and its lead author Neil Ferguson back in March to justify their decisions to lock everything down.

The follow-up ICL paper from May attempted to model the effects of reopening in 5 US states: New York, Massachusetts, California, Washington, and Florida. In all five cases, the Imperial College team predicted an aggressive rebound of COVID-19 fatalities under even the most modest relaxation of stay-at-home policies and practices.

To illustrate this pattern, the ICL team presented three scenarios based on the expected change in human mobility in each state after the lifting of lockdown restrictions. The first scenario kept the lockdowns in place, assuming that mobility would remain constant at its severely reduced post-lockdown rate. Under the other two scenarios, the ICL team assumed a 20% and 40% increase of mobility corresponding with the reopening process.

Most Americans say social media companies have too much power, influence in politics

Monica Anderson:

A majority of Americans think social media companies have too much power and influence in politics, and roughly half think major technology companies should be regulated more than they are now, according to a new Pew Research Center survey that comes as four major tech executives prepare to testify before Congress about their firms’ role in the economy and society.

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

Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

Fawkes:

2020 is a watershed year for machine learning. It has seen the true arrival of commodized machine learning, where deep learning models and algorithms are readily available to Internet users. GPUs are cheaper and more readily available than ever, and new training methods like transfer learning have made it possible to train powerful deep learning models using smaller sets of data.

But accessible machine learning also has its downsides as well. A recent New York Times article by Kashmir Hill profiled clearview.ai, an unregulated facial recognition service that has now downloaded over 3 billion photos of people from the Internet and social media, using them to build facial recognition models for millions of citizens without their knowledge or permission. Clearview.ai demonstrates just how easy it is to build invasive tools for monitoring and tracking using deep learning.

So how do we protect ourselves against unauthorized third parties building facial recognition models to recognize us wherever we may go? Regulations can and will help restrict usage of machine learning by public companies, but will have negligible impact on private organizations, individuals, or even other nation states with similar goals.

Civics: Twitter says it’s cracking down on QAnon conspiracy theory

Zen Soo;

Twitter says it is cracking down on accounts and content related to QAnon, the far-right U.S. conspiracy theory popular among supporters of President Donald Trump.

The measures include banning accounts associated with QAnon content, as well as blocking URLs associated with it from being shared on the platform. Twitter also said that it would stop highlighting and recommending tweets associated with QAnon.

“We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm,” the company said in a tweet late Tuesday.

Accounts that are “engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension” will be suspended permanently, Twitter said.

Notes and links on the first amendment.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 schools may receive an additional $3.9M in redistributed federal tax dollars amidst fall 2020 referendum plans

Logan Wroge:

The Madison School District is eligible for up to $3.9 million.

It’s the only district in Dane County that is eligible for money from this specific pot in the CARES Act.

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 202
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

La La Land Congress Wants To Give Billions To Public Schools To Stay Closed

Joy Pullman:

When schools shut down this spring, Congress sent them $31 billion — nearly half its annual schools outlay — for sanitation and online learning, even though students weren’t in schools to theoretically contaminate them and online learning barely happened for millions of children. The vast majority of this money has not even reached schools yet.

Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reportsthat education special interests are demanding, through their Democrat representatives, nearly half a trillion in additional deficit spending for the fall without requiring schools to operate. Yes, you read that right: Democrats want nearly $430 billion extra to put kids in the equivalent of Khan Academy online math lessons. Did I mention that Khan Academy is free? And that the ask to duplicate it is 600 percent more than annualfederal spending on K-12?

“There is absolutely no way that federal funds included in the next COVID relief package…will reach schools in time to open in August and September,” notes Inez Feltscher. “Due to bureaucratic inertia and the requisite multiple rounds of paperwork, new federal COVID-response funds are unlikely to reach schools before 2021.”

Even though schools haven’t spent a fraction of their existing coronavirus loot, Republicans are also on board with larding on more. They merely want to inflate federal K-12 spending by 150 percent, $105 billion. In case you were concerned that Congress isn’t spending the next generation’s money fast enough while neglecting to ensure schools prepare the nation’s young to gratefully contribute to their country, WSJ reports neither side will even require schools to operate to have their federal funds increased by several magnitudes:

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

The Latest in School Segregation: Private Pandemic ‘Pods’

Clara Totenberg Green:

As school districts across the nation announce that their buildings will remain closed in the fall, parents are quickly organizing “learning pods” or “pandemic pods” — small groupings of children who gather every day and learn in a shared space, often participating in the online instruction provided by their schools. Pods are supervised either by a hired private teacher or other adult, or with parents taking turns.

At face value, learning pods seem a necessary solution to the current crisis. But in practice, they will exacerbate inequities, racial segregation and the opportunity gap within schools. Children whose parents have the means to participate in learning pods will most likely return to school academically ahead, while many low-income children will struggle at home without computers or reliable internet for online learning.

As a social emotional learning specialist, I know how important connection, community and socialization are for children and adults. I also know that parents are being crushed under the weight of having to simultaneously parent, work, and teach their children. Nowhere is the anxiety, fear and devastation that is gripping our country more evident than in our education system. The appeal of learning pods is immense. For parents who need to work and can’t supervise their children’s learning, joining a pod may feel like the only way they can educate their kids and keep their jobs.

Based on what I’ve seen online, the learning pod movement appears to be led by families with means, a large portion of whom are white. Paradoxically, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a national reckoning with white supremacy, white parents are again ignoring racial and class inequality when it comes to educating their children. As a result, they are actively replicating the systems that many of them say they want to dismantle.

Take the school where I work, a racially and economically diverse public elementary school in the heart of Atlanta. It’s a gentrifying school within a gentrifying neighborhood. The building is bordered by half-a-million-dollar homes on one side, and low-income apartments on the other, where a large portion of our Black students live.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

The fashionable alternative to reopening schools defies logic

Karol Markowicz:

As New York City schools grapple with how to handle a virus that has an under 1 percent infection rate in children, parenting boards frequented by the educated, monied-but-not-so-monied-as-to-send-their-kids-to-private-school set, are forming ‘pods’. A ‘pod’ will be a small group of children, usually no more than five, who will meet at each other’s homes in lieu of traditional schooling in September. You, and four other families in your same tax bracket, will hire a teacher to educate the five children in the pod. Parenting boards are overwhelmed with requests for these tutors. The families will agree to only interact with each other: an absurd and impossible promise that will surely be broken. 

We’re in a time where there is a ‘right’ opinion on everything, and every other opinion is stupid and likely racist. The right opinion right now is that it would be just crazy to open schools in New York City in the fall. This is despite the fact that every other country is opening schools and New York’s governor is on a prolonged victory tour on late night television for his celebrated handling of the COVID crisis…which resulted in the death of 32,000 New Yorkers. 

If you’re a parent who is pushing to open schools, well, you don’t care about the lives of teachers. Those sending their kids to private schools which plan to open must love their kids less than the podders. Pods have become the only acceptable way to educate your children this fall.

Americans tune in to ‘cancel culture’ — and don’t like what they see

Ryan Lizza:

Age is one of the most reliable predictors of one’s views. Members of Generation Z are the most sympathetic to punishing people or institutions over offensive views, followed closely by Millennials, while GenXers and Baby Boomers have the strongest antipathy towards it. Cancel culture is driven by younger voters. A majority (55%) of voters 18-34 say they have taken part in cancel culture, while only about a third (32%) of voters over 65 say they have joined a social media pile-on. The age gap may partially explain why Ernest Owens, a millennial journalist, responded to Obama’s criticism with a New York Times op-ed that amounted to a column-length retort of “OK, boomer.”

The poll also suggests that the public at large is more forgiving than the gladiators on social media. When asked about controversial or offensive statements from public figures, the longer ago the comment was made the less likely it mattered. Fifty-four percent said that a problematic statement made a year ago was likely to “completely” or “somewhat” change their opinion of the person, versus 29% who said it would “change a little bit” or “not change at all.”

For statements as far back as 15 years ago the results were almost reversed: 26% said there would be a change versus 53% who said there would be little or no change.

Civics: a tale of two arsonists

Washington Free Beacon:

Mattis and Rahman are high achievers: He is a Princeton and NYU Law grad with a corporate legal job, and she graduated from Fordham Law after spending a summer in “occupied Palestine.” These credentials, of course, didn’t protect them from federal charges after they lobbed Molotov cocktails into an NYPD patrol car, but their defenders now cite them in pleas for leniency and special treatment, both in the courtroom and in the press.

Both were bailed out, with Rahman’s release guaranteed by an Obama-administration alumna who called Rahman her “best friend.” The duo have received friendly coverage in the Intercept, CNN, and NPR. All emphasized the young lawyers’ sterling credentials, echoing a letter signed by hundreds of NYU alumni in their defense.

Compare that with the story of Isaiah Willoughby, a Washington resident now facing federal charges for attempting to burn down a Seattle police station. Willoughby is a former foster kid and a small-time entrepreneur who once ran a quixotic campaign for city council. He also has a rap sheet a mile long.

Willoughby’s case, unlike that of his well-heeled counterparts, has received little attention in the liberal media. He remains in federal lockup, according to Bureau of Prisons records.

Our view—and the Justice Department’s—is that the cases deserve equal treatment.

It is telling that the anti-police left has made Mattis and Rahman their leniency cause célèbre, citing their elite credentials while crowing simultaneously about inequity in the criminal justice system.

PC Culture is Destroying Creative Freedom

SG Cheah:

Totalitarian regimes — from Germany’s Third Reich to the Soviet Union to Communist China— have consistently imposed censorship on the freedoms of thought and expression of their citizens. And today, we can witness the same pattern repeated here in America through “cancel culture.”

Hailing from a country where freedom of speech is widely prohibited, I can tell you this: once you have lived for years under conditions of censorship and you now have complete freedom of expression, you do not want to go back to censorship. And yet here I am, watching as America falls more and more into self-censorship. 

Self-Censorship in America

Censorship starts when we don’t allow others around us to speak as they want. The recent resignation of opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss from the New York Times illustrates this growing problem of censorship through the pressure of the online mob. As she stated in her open letter of resignation, the Twitter mob has become the ultimate arbiter in what can and can’t be expressed openly.

Milwaukee schools with approved plans will be allowed to reopen this fall

Alison Dirr, Annysa Johnson and Genevieve Redsten:

Schools in the city of Milwaukee that have approved plans will be allowed to reopen in the fall under a new order the city’s Health Department expects to issue either this week or next.

Limits on capacity and a focus on ensuring that necessary accommodations are made for people who are high risk will be part of the order, Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik said during a virtual news conference Tuesday.

The announcement comes after private school leaders and the advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin said they were blindsided after the city changed the metric for reopening, effectively barring them from returning to schools until the city reached Phase 5 of its reopening plan.

The confusion frustrated schools that had been investing time and money into ways to open safely and left parents with uncertainty weeks before schools began.

WILL Urges Madison West High School to Reconsider Racially Segregated Group Discussions

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, via a kind email:

Madison West High School students were separated by race for group discussions
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter to administrators at Madison West High School urging the school to reconsider a series of school-sponsored racially segregated Zoom discussions. In recent weeks, West High School hosted virtual discussions on race and current events where students were segregated into one for white students and one for students of color. The discussions may violate federal law.

The Quote: WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg said, “It is head-spinning that a public school in Wisconsin would adopt racial segregation as a tool to confront racism in the twenty-first century. It is an affront to the hard-fought progress our country has made. Madison West ought to reverse course immediately and reject this unmistakably bad idea.”

Background: Madison West High School recently hosted “virtual discussion spaces” on race and current events for students and staff. But the high school took the unusual step of segregating the discussions by race: one for “white students” and one for “students of color.” An email from school officials encouraged students to “Please join the Zoom space where you most closely identify.”

These racially segregated discussion groups may constitute a federal Title VI violation. Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 generally prohibits “discrimination” “on the ground of race, color, or national origin” in federally funded programs, including schools. The Department of Education’s implementing regulations further make clear that schools covered by Title VI may not “[s]ubject an individual to segregation or separate treatment in any matter related to his receipt of any service … or other benefit.”

WILL intends to closely monitor this situation and hopes for a prompt response from Madison West High School administrators.

Madison West High School notes and links:

English 10

Small Learning Communities

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

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Commentary on Madison’s Taxpayer Supported K-12 Schools, parents and online learning

Scott Girard:

Harper and other parents who spoke with the Cap Times in the days following the decision said they hoped for more direct interaction with teachers and that the schedule or plans for their students could be communicated a week or two at a time.

During a press conference following the virtual plan announcement, Belmore said MMSD is “working really hard” on how to make the experience better this fall. Assistant superintendent for teaching and learning Lisa Kvistad said they would provide professional development focused on “multiple areas,” and hoped staff would be able to have more live instruction or availability along with projects or assignments for students on their own time.

“We learned a lot from the surveys from parents, teachers and staff about how to make virtual learning more robust when we go back in the fall,” Kvistad said. “So we’re designing clearer roles and responsibilities, we’re looking at how to manage and organize adults in the building to provide rigorous support, we are talking about how to pay attention to the social-emotional wellness of children … and we are also planning on how we can support teacher teams as they work together and deliver synchronous and asynchronous learning to students during the course of the week.”

Kerry Zaleski and Abdul Thoronka moved their incoming sixth-grader to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy for the year because “the infrastructure and everything is already there,” but their incoming sophomore daughter will remain at East High School. Thoronka was briefly laid off from his job in the spring, as well, so he was able to help his then-fifth-grader through learning, while their daughter was able to remain mostly independent.

It would be useful to evaluate teacher, parent and student use of the District’s portal: Infinite Campus…..

Private Schools Are Adapting to Lockdown Better Than the Public School Monopoly

Corey DeAngelis:

More than 120,000 American schools have closed since March, a change affecting more than 55 million students. As we approach August, an intense debate about reopening schools has been brewing. One side argues that schools should reopen so that families can return to work and children can receive the education taxpayers have paid for. The other side says that schools cannot reopen safely without $116 billion more in federal funding, on top of the $13 billion already allocated to states to reopen schools.

This debate wouldn’t be so contentious if we funded students instead of school systems. The funding could follow children to wherever their families feel they would receive an effective education, be it a district-run school, a charter school, a private school, or a home setting. In that situation, if an individual school decided not to reopen—or if it reopened unsafely or inadequately—families could take their children’s education dollars elsewhere.

That is how food stamp funding currently works. If a neighborhood grocery store refuses to reopen, it may be inconvenient, but families wouldn’t be devastated; they could take their money elsewhere. Imagine if you were forced to pay your neighborhood Walmart the same amount of money each week regardless of whether they provided your family with any groceries. The store would have little incentive to reopen in an effective or timely manner.

It sounds absurd. But you have essentially just imagined today’s compulsory K–12 school system.

And it’s even worse than that. Even if the institution were required to provide goods and services through online or other platforms, it would still have weak incentives to get things right, because families would still be powerless.

Race, Postoperative Complications, and Death in Apparently Healthy Children

Olubukola O. Nafiu, MD, FRCA, MS, Christian Mpody, MD, PhD, MPH, MBA, Stephani S. Kim, MPH, PhD, Joshua C. Uffman, MD, MBA, Joseph D. Tobias, MD:

OUND: That African American (AA) patients have poorer surgical outcomes compared with their white peers is established. The prevailing presumption is that these disparities operate within the context of a higher preoperative comorbidity burden among AA patients. Whether these racial differences in outcomes exist among apparently healthy children (traditionally expected to have low risk of postsurgical complications) has not been previously investigated.

METHODS: We performed a retrospective study by analyzing the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program–Pediatric database from 2012 through 2017 and identifying children who underwent inpatient operations and were assigned American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status 1 or 2. We used univariable and risk-adjusted logistic regression to estimate the odds ratios and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of postsurgical outcomes comparing AA to white children.

Schools Are Closing Not Because They Should, But Because They Can

Auguste Meyrat:

Nevertheless, studies show that children, and even the teachers, are not seriously threatened by COVID, such that they have more of a chance of dying from the seasonal flu. As White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany stated, “The science is very clear on this…the science is on our side here. We encourage our localities & states to just simply follow the science. Open our schools.” Indeed, the political leaders and unions calling for school closings are largely following their feelings, not science. Not even a majority of the public supports this, as shown in a recent Gallup poll.

Additionally, the online model for learning simply doesn’t work as well as face-to-face instruction, and American students are falling behind. While the hope is that today’s tech-savvy youth will log in to their computers, watch their video lectures, and create amazing projects with peers using Zoom, the reality is that most kids rarely log in to do anything yet receive a passing grade anyway.

Another year of this, explains Joy Pullmann, will set American “kids back in math by a year or two … [and] will short our economy tens of trillions of dollars.” In today’s world, the American economy will not be able to compete with the rest of the world with an undereducated workforce with insufficient math or reading skills.

The scientific data and the “essential” nature of a good education in today’s economy are the likely reasons other countries have already opened their schools. Not only are nations that took a more laissez-faire response to COVID-19 doing this — countries like Sweden — but also ones that took stricter measures like France, Taiwan, Germany, South Korea, and even Canada. Somehow, proponents of school closures have to believe that U.S. students are more at risk than their neighbors up north.

Commentary on 2020 K-12 Governance and opening this fall.

A Taxonomy of Fear

Emily Yoffe:

We live in a time of personal timorousness and collective mercilessness. 

There might seem to be a contradiction between being fearful and fearless, between weighing every word you say and attacking others with abandon. But as more and more topics become too risky to discuss outside of the prevailing orthodoxies, it makes sense to constantly self-censor, feeling unbound only when part of a denunciatory pack. 

Institutions that are supposed to be guardians of free expression—academia and journalism in particular—are becoming enforcers of conformity. Campuses have bureaucracies that routinely undermine free speech and due process. Now, these practices are breaching the ivy wall. They are coming to a high school or corporate HR office near you.

The cultural rules around hot button issues are ever-expanding. It’s as if a daily script went out describing what’s acceptable, and those who flub a line—or don’t even know a script exists—are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, no matter how benign their intent. Naturally, people are deciding the best course is to shut up. It makes sense to be part of the silenced majority when the price you pay for an errant tweet or remark can be the end of your livelihood.

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is working to launch a university that would rival Stanford and MIT and funnel tech workers into government work

Katie Canales:

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to help funnel tech talent into government work.

According to a report from OneZero’s Dave Gershgorn, Schmidt is teaming up with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work to form a federal commission and kick off a university called the US Digital Service Academy that would train new classes of coders for the US.

The school would offer degrees and coursework for digital skills such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. According to the report, the new academy has the backing of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, an agency launched by Congress in 2018 to help the US prioritize artificial intelligence in response to China’s advancement in that arena.

The organization voted unanimously Monday to recommend the university to Congress. Commissioner and former head of the Federal Communications Commission Mignon Clyburn also emphasized during the Monday hearing the need for inclusion when recruiting students to the school.

Data Visuslization Catalogue

Dataviz:

The Data Visualisation Catalogue is a project developed by Severino Ribecca to create a library of different information visualisation types.

Originally, this project was a way for me to develop my own knowledge of data visualisation and create a reference tool for me to use in the future for my own work. However, I felt it would also be beneficial to both designers and also anyone in a field that requires the use of data visualisation.

Each visualisation method was added bit-by-bit, as I individually researched each method, to find the best way to explain how it works and what it is best suited for.

Most of the data visualised in the website’s example images is dummy data.

Civics: Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

Nikita Stewart:

But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color.

“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement.

The group is also talking to city leaders about replacing Ms. Sanger’s name on a street sign that has hung near its offices on Bleecker Street for more than two decades.

The actions thrust Ms. Sanger onto a growing list of historical figures whose legacies are being re-evaluated amid both widespread protests against systemic racism and a pandemic that has exposed racial and economic inequalities in health care services.

Notes and links on Margaret Sanger.

Colleges Face A No-Win Dilemma: To Cut Or Not to Cut Tuition?

Chronicle:

Amid all the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic for higher education, two things are becoming clear. Most students yearn to come back to campus in the fall, in spite of the risks. And if, instead, students wind up receiving online instruction come September, they don’t want to pay full tuition.

These two factors are driving the decision-making of millions of students and their families. In response, many institutions are frantically making elaborate and expensive plans to open up classrooms and dorms, in part because they feel like they have to. Surveys show that an overwhelming majority of students don’t want to pay full cost for another semester of Zoom meetings, and that some incoming freshmen who have been admitted to colleges that choose to extend online learning into the fall might defect to colleges that decide to open their campuses. Substantially fewer students equals plunging tuition revenue, which equals financial disaster at a time when many colleges are already at the fiscal brink.

Colleges that are going with online instruction are playing it safe with the virus, but running the risk of losing enrollment — and tuition revenue — to institutions that promise a semester with dorms and classmates and maybe even a little fun.

Boy, 16, was given estrogen for behavioral disorder while in L.A. juvenile hall, suit alleges

James Queally:

A 16-year-old boy being held at a Los Angeles County juvenile hall developed enlarged breasts after he was prescribed estrogen to treat a behavioral disorder, a move that baffled doctors who said the treatment defied medical logic, according to a lawsuit filed last month.

The teen, whose identity is being withheld because of his age, was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, two days after he was arrested and housed at Eastlake Juvenile Hall in June 2019, the lawsuit said. Medical records reviewed by The Times show that the teen’s testosterone levels were “slightly high” when the doctor who diagnosed him prescribed daily doses of estrogen.

Estrogen regulates the development of female sexual characteristics and reproduction. Men produce the hormone at much lower levels.

A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention.

Jodi Cohen:

One afternoon in mid-June, Charisse* drove up to the checkpoint at the Children’s Village juvenile detention center in suburban Detroit, desperate to be near her daughter. It had been a month since she had last seen her, when a judge found the girl had violated probation and sent her to the facility during the pandemic.

The girl, Grace, hadn’t broken the law again. The 15-year-old wasn’t in trouble for fighting with her mother or stealing, the issues that had gotten her placed on probation in the first place.

She was incarcerated in May for violating her probation by not completing her online coursework when her school in Beverly Hills switched to remote learning.

Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it’s impossible to determine how unusual Grace’s situation is. But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Why our public health leaders didn’t push face masks early and are now regretting it

Andy Larsen:

In a recent Pew survey of American adults, 65% said they wore a mask all or most of the time when inside of stores or businesses. However, only 44% said they thought that all or most of the people in their community wore a mask.

Why are so many Americans not wearing one? To answer that question, I’m going to ask another.

Do you remember the book “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About?”

Written and self-published by Kevin Trudeau, it was a compendium of alternative medicine that was wildly popular in the mid-2000s. My family had a copy, and we certainly weren’t alone. In one three-week period in 2005, it was outsold only by the latest “Harry Potter” book, reaching No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list for weeks.

What To Read Instead Of ‘White Fragility’

Mark Hemingway:

First, an accusation of racism is made. It goes without saying that it is accurate – how could it not be, when virtually every institution and norm in modern America is an instrument of white supremacy?

At this point, a lot of people merely yield or acquiesce to the will of their accuser out of misplaced guilt or fear of the reputational harm that comes with being branded a racist. If you are foolhardy enough to raise questions of the accuser about the veracity of the complaint, or are merely confused about what’s being alleged, a discussion will not ensue. There will be variations of the same theme: “I AM TIRED. AND EXHAUSTED trying to explain your white privilege to you. DO THE WORK.”

What does “do the work” even mean? Well, if you want to go down the academic rabbit-hole from which this emerged, in neo-Marxian critical theory argot the term of art is “praxis.”

In his late-phase Marxism, Jean Paul Sartre defined “praxis” as the transformation of the world in accordance with a specific ideological end. So when you’re told “do the work,” leftists don’t mean any kind of personal development that would allow for unique circumstances, individual understanding, and personal agency. They have a very specific program in mind for you to follow.

Carthage College proposal to lay off faculty draws protest from students

Daphne Chen:

Citing rising costs and changing student interests, Carthage College announced plans to eliminate up to 20% of faculty and restructure 10 academic departments last week, blindsiding some students who said the move “betrays” the institution’s identity as a liberal arts college.

Carthage Provost David Timmerman called the move “difficult but necessary.”

“Student interest is shifting, and they’ve been voting with their feet for the last 10 years,” Timmerman said. “In some cases, some departments have had higher numbers of faculty needed than students.”

Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

Hope Mahood:

University life is going to look very different this fall, and as faculty scramble to work social distancing into their “campus culture,” students will be left paying the price for a half-baked education.

With exceptions for science labs, fine arts studios and a few small tutorials — Ontario’s university courses will run online this fall, either asynchronously through pre-recorded lectures and Powerpoints or through the video conferencing app Zoom. And tuition fees won’t be going down a cent.

The schools claim that, despite these changes in delivery, they will still provide “exceptional education and engaging experiences” and the calibre of their courses will remain the same. But who are they kidding?

Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

“And it turns out I was right — the ‘two-thirds’ claim is not true. Not even close.”

Unherd:

We know that political bias warps cognition, sometimes catastrophically, and this is, I think, an example of that in action. Lepore read Feldman’s research and she misunderstood part of it, despite being an exceptionally intelligent person. Like many other Left-leaning Democrats, she is convinced that police brutality is a huge, under-acknowledged problem in the United States, and she therefore jumped to the conclusion that this wildly inflated ‘two-thirds’ figure was plausible.

The staff at the New Yorker who read her piece also, we must assume, considered it to be plausible. The sentence was printed and, as of the time of writing, has not been corrected. There has been no uproar on social media. I reached out to both the New Yorker and Feldman for comment, and have not received replies.

A small, troubling example of the effect of political bias on journalism.

Harrison Bergeron University

William Jacobson:

Yesterday I posted about the proposed elimination of “blind auditions” for symphony orchestras, so that race and gender could be used as selection criteria to help diversify orchestra musicians. It would be the elimination of what previously was a meritocracy:

For decades leading symphony orchestras have used “blind auditions” to hire musicians. That is, the musicians are not seen at all, only their music is heard. That way, implicit or explicit racial, ethnic, or gender bias cannot enter into the hiring decision, only the quality of the music. It is as close to a pure meritocracy as I can imagine….

The desire to move away from “blind auditions” hurts people who otherwise would have been chosen based on the quality of their music, or in other contexts, their academic performance on standardized tests and other objective measurements….

I mentioned in that regard that this overt intent to discriminate was, in campus-speak, called “equity,” which is the opposite of equal opportunity:

On campus, this is called “equity,” a euphemism for racial, gender and other discrimination. It’s the opposite of equal opportunity, it’s demanding equal results even if it means discriminating against some people on the basis of race, ethnicity or other immutable factors. It’s the core driving the “antiracism” movement on campus. When campus activists and administrators say “equity” (as opposed to “equality”), what they really mean is discrimination based on race to achieve a desired racial outcome.

As mentioned previously, the suggested Cornell summer reading and discussion topic is How to Be AntiRacist, which seems to be the roadmap used to develop the proposed compulsory racial activism for faculty, students, and staff. Here’s a key concept from How to Be AntiRacist:

A new intelligentsia is pushing back against wokeness

Batya Ungar-Sargon:

William Lloyd Garrison, one of the United States’ most important abolitionists, lived with a bounty on his head for much of his life. His newspaper, The Liberator, advocated for an immediate end to slavery, and he faced down a lynch mob more than once for his writing. One of his avid readers was a formerly enslaved person who went by the name of Frederick Douglass. “His paper took its place with me next to the bible,” Douglass wrote of The Liberator in his memoir.

The two met at an abolitionist meeting in 1841 after Douglass stood up and described to the white crowd what it was like to live as someone else’s property. It was a powerful address, though Douglass, only three years removed from slavery, was so nervous he later couldn’t remember what he had said. Garrison became his mentor, retaining Douglass as a representative of the Anti-Slavery Society, publishing Douglass’s work, encouraging his book and sending him around the country to speak about the evils of slavery.

But the two had a bitter falling out in 1847 over the United States Constitution. Garrison believed that the document was pro-slavery, “the formal expression of a corrupt bargain made at the founding of the country and that it was designed to protect slavery as a permanent feature of American life,” writes Christopher B. Daly in “Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism.”

Douglass initially agreed. But by the time he published “My Bondage and My Freedom,” he had reconsidered, and believed that “the constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, it is, in its letter and spirit, an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence, as the supreme law of the land.”

Reinforcement Learning Under Moral Uncertainty

Adrien Ecoffet, Joel Lehman:

An ambitious goal for artificial intelligence is to create agents that behave ethically: The capacity to abide by human moral norms would greatly expand the context in which autonomous agents could be practically and safely deployed. While ethical agents could be trained through reinforcement, by rewarding correct behavior under a specific moral theory (e.g. utilitarianism), there remains widespread disagreement (both societally and among moral philosophers) about the nature of morality and what ethical theory (if any) is objectively correct. Acknowledging such disagreement, recent work in moral philosophy proposes that ethical behavior requires acting under moral uncertainty, i.e. to take into account when acting that one’s credence is split across several plausible ethical theories. Inspired by such work, this paper proposes a formalism that translates such insights to the field of reinforcement learning. Demonstrating the formalism’s potential, we then train agents in simple environments to act under moral uncertainty, highlighting how such uncertainty can help curb extreme behavior from commitment to single theories. The overall aim is to draw productive connections from the fields of moral philosophy and machine ethics to that of machine learning, to inspire further research by highlighting a spectrum of machine learning research questions relevant to training ethically capable reinforcement learning agents.

Watertown School District looks to open Sept. 1 with face-to-face learning

Ed Zagorski:

Imagine a world where Johnny needs a ride every morning and afternoon to and from Webster Elementary School to alleviate the number of children on the school buses.

And once Johnny arrives at the his elementary school, he must wait for a a teacher or another staff member to takes his temperature. If his temperature is 100 degrees or higher or if Johnny exhibits any symptoms related to COVID-19, he will be escorted to an isolation area to return home. If Johnny’s temperature is normal, he may be allowed to visit his locker at the beginning and end of the school day.

If he grows thirsty before his first class, he won’t need to pull down his face mask to sip from the blubber. He and his classmates are only allowed to fill their water bottles there.

If he needs to talk to his teacher before class begins, it will most likely be through a plastic partition keeping him and his teacher at a safe distance from each other.

These possibilities may became a reality if a draft by Watertown Unified Schools District Administrator Cassandra Schug passes the full school board at its next meeting July 27.

Is College Still a Good Investment?

Kaitlin Pitsker
:

A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggested that the value of a college education has declined. Is college still worth the cost? For the average person, college is still overwhelmingly a good decision. But like any investment, there are risks. The potential negative consequences are greater now than they were for previous generations. Not only are you taking time out from the labor market, but you’re paying more to attend college. Plus, many students are taking out debt that’s nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. But the biggest risk is not graduating, because you still have the debt but don’t have a degree.

Do workers who graduate with a bachelor’s degree still out-earn workers without a college degree? Yes, but the price of attending college has gone up, so the net return of a college degree has gone down a little bit. Still, over a lifetime, college graduates earn about $900,000 more relative to high school graduates. Even if you discount that figure to take into account the types of students who go to college, the “opportunity cost” of not being in the labor force and other factors, the net value of a college degree is still about $350,000 over your lifetime compared with a high school degree.

GPT-3

Slogancontagion:

I don’t know why nobody is talking about this, but AIDungeon’s ‘Dragon’ model is the largest version of GPT-3 retrained on text adventure game logs. But here’s the thing, all you have to do is select the fantasy mode and say “You, in order to kill the evil dragon menacing the kingdom of Larion, decide to head to the all-knowing Oracle who answers questions with depth and precision”. I’ve been spamming it with psychopharmacology and front-end web dev questions for the past 3 days, I’m using the 7 day trial but for $6/wk, it’s worth it.

Here’s everything I’ve tested it on, with the full text dump in pastebin below. I started with general knowledge questions, then got down to poetry. If you’re only interested in the latter then scroll a quarter of the way down.

Notes and links on GPT-3.

Nordic Study Suggests Open Schools Don’t Spread Virus Much

Kati Pohjanpalo and Hanna Hoikkala:

Scientists behind a Nordic study have found that keeping primary schools open during the coronavirus pandemic may not have had much bearing on contagion rates.

There was no measurable difference in the number of coronavirus cases among children in Sweden, where schools were left open, compared with neighboring Finland, where schools were shut, according to the findings.

Commentary on 2020 K-12 Governance and opening this fall:

Unfortunately, the Madison School District announced Friday it will offer online classes only this fall — despite six or seven weeks to go before the fall semester begins. By then, a lot could change with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dane County recently and wisely implemented a mask requirementfor inside buildings that aren’t people’s homes. That should help ease the spread of COVID-19, making it safer for in-person classes.

The AAP recently stressed that “the preponderance of evidence indicates that children and adolescents are less likely to be symptomatic and less likely to have severe disease resulting” from COVID-19. They also appear less likely to contract and spread the infection.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Middleton-Cross Plains School District extends contract for police in schools

Emily Hamer:

Breaking away from Madison’s recent decision to remove police officers from its schools, the Middleton-Cross Plains School Board on Monday voted to extend its contract for school resource officers.

Citing the need for relationship building between officers and students and protection from school shootings, the board voted unanimously to re-approve the contract with the Middleton Police Department. But board members said the district would conduct a “comprehensive evaluation” of the program.

The board had already approved on June 22 contracts with Middleton and the village of Cross Plains to continue stationing officers at Middleton High School and Kromrey and Glacier Creek middle schools. Middleton officers have been at the high school and Kromrey for some 30 and 20 years, respectively.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides. (

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020
6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020
Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

Commentary on the Madison School District’s hiring and lay-off policies

Logan Wroge:

The district is proposing qualifications include: scores on the state’s Educator Effectiveness evaluation, cultural competency, experience, academic credentials and certifications, proficiency in a second language, and seniority.

Several board members said elevating qualifications as a determining factor — instead of having layoffs based solely on seniority as they are now — would allow the district to better retain teachers of color hired in recent years, break the status quo and promote racial justice.

Board member Ali Muldrow said she’s heard from a lot of people who are “deeply critical of this decision.”

Under a seniority-based system, though, she said “people of color are the last hired and the first fired.”

Teachers unions in largest districts call on Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to require schools start virtually

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Commentary on K-12 Governance and fall 2020 plans.

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

For My Son To Be An Engineer, I Have To Pay An Oklahoma Public College To Push Segregation

Jenni White:

Although American colleges and universities once turned out thinkers bright enough to put men on the moon, they have rapidly descended from citadels of knowledge into crybaby kingdoms where emotional identity is prized and knowledge is rarer than gold.

Since pulling our kids out of public elementary to homeschool them, sending them to leftist colleges wasn’t at the top of our list of desires as parents. After years of studying public education and witnessing firsthand the indoctrination happening even at the elementary level, we didn’t want our kids participating in the nonsense that has become higher ed if we could avoid it.

Unfortunately, since electrical engineers are rarely apprenticed, college became a necessary evil for our oldest son, so he enrolled at a local university. Obvious problems began early.

The hoops he had to jump through to get enrolled in classes with the toothless specter of COVID-19 hovering were ridiculous. He was told he had a scholarship, but it took nearly a month of emails and phone calls ping-ponging him between numerous people to find out exactly what that was and how it would be applied to his tuition.

The number of virus-related emails have been obnoxious, and even though Oklahoma has relatively few COVID-19 cases and very few deaths, he’ll be required to wear a mask on campus in any “common spaces” for the foreseeable future.

K-12 Tax, Referendum & Spending Climate

Rebecca Martinson:

Every day when I walk into work as a public-school teacher, I am prepared to take a bullet to save a child. In the age of school shootings, that’s what the job requires. But asking me to return to the classroom amid a pandemic and expose myself and my family to Covid-19 is like asking me to take that bullet home to my own family.

I won’t do it, and you shouldn’t want me to.

I became an educator after a career as a nurse. I teach medical science and introduction to nursing to 11th and 12th graders at a regional skills center that serves students from 22 different high schools in 13 different school districts.

My school district and school haven’t ruled out asking us return to in-person teaching in the fall. As careful and proactive as the administration has been when it comes to exploring plans to return to the classroom, nothing I have heard reassures me that I can safely teach in person.

What scientists know about the inner workings of the pathogen that has infected the world

Mark Fischetti:

In the graphics that follow, Scientific American presents detailed explanations, current as of mid-June, into how SARS-CoV-2 sneaks inside human cells, makes copies of itself and bursts out to infiltrate many more cells, widening infection. We show how the immune system would normally attempt to neutralize virus particles and how CoV-2 can block that effort. We explain some of the virus’s surprising abilities, such as its capacity to proofread new virus copies as they are being made to prevent mutations that could destroy them. And we show how drugs and vaccines might still be able to overcome the intruders. As virologists learn more, we will update these graphics on our Web site