Today I issued a statement on the need for our School District to focus on reopening our public schools, not renaming them. To address inequities, we need to get our kids back in the classroom. pic.twitter.com/nHnauVZzFe

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) October 16, 2020

Related: Frustrated Middleton-Cross Plains parent group calls (school board) recall effort a ‘last resort’.

Recall Mount Horeb School Board Member Leah Lipska.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees). Run for office. Spring 2021 elections: Dane county executive.

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

Annysa Johnson, Samantha West and Alec Johnson:

Enrollment in Wisconsin public schools fell by 3% this year, the largest dip in decades, and private schools that accept taxpayer-funded vouchers saw an increase, though not as much as last year.

In all, according to new data released Thursday by the state Department of Public Instruction, public schools enrolled 818,922 full-time equivalent students in the current school year, down more than 25,000 students, based on the headcount taken in late September. Private voucher schools added 2,577 students for a total of 45,954.

Because school funding is tied to enrollment, the shifts will be costly for many districts around the state at a time when they are spending millions more on expenses related to the coronavirus pandemic. In all, nearly a third of the state’s 421 public districts will see a decline in their state aid totaling more than $23 million this year, losses that will continue because schools are funded in part on a three-year rolling average.

“There will be significant, long-term structural effects on school districts’ finances,” said Dan Rossmiller of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. 

K-12 Tax, Referendum and budget climate: Madison School District enrollment drops by more than 1,000 students

A substantial 2020 tax and spending increase referendum is on Madison school district voter ballots this fall.

Elizabeth Beyer:

She said the curriculum offered to students was not intended to be delivered digitally and her children now have online meetings with their teachers for five hours each week compared to 30 hours of live teaching prior to the pandemic.

“We need to give parents options so those who feel safe sending their children to the school should have that option, teachers who feel they can teach in the classrooms better than they can virtually should have that option, and the school board has not given us that option,” she said.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees). Run for office. Spring 2021 elections: Dane county executive.

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

Joanne Jacobs:

In the name of “linguistic justice,” college writing instructors have agreed that teachers should “stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm,” writes Matthew Stewart, associate professor of humanities and rhetoric at Boston University, on the Martin Center blog.

The executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest and most important association of college-level writing teachers, has approved “demands” by six professors, writes Stewart. CCCC is closely associated with the National Council of Teachers of English, an even larger group predominantly made up of middle and high school teachers.

The CCCC statement, written in academic/woke English with a “cain’t” here and a “respeck” there, includes:

Teachers (must) develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!

. . . teachers STOP telling Black students that they have to ‘learn standard English to be successful because that’s just the way it is in the real world.’ No, that’s not just the way it is; that’s anti-Black linguistic racism.

In short, writes Stewart, the CCCC has declared that teaching black students standard English is racist and therefore “destructive and injurious.”

Laura Waters:

This isn’t new news but it’s also not good news.  Pew Charitable Trusts updated its pension study to include 2018 data, and NJ comes in dead last among the 50 states.  NJ only has 38 cents set aside for each dollar it owes.  That means that 62 cents of every dollar owed is an unfunded liability – a debt that the state owes to retirees that will have to be paid off.

Even broke IL comes in better than NJ.  The national funding average is 70.7%, so NJ is a huge outlier when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility.  All of this shows why Gov. Murphy’s making a record $4.7 billion payment into NJ’s broken and unreformed pension system is throwing $4.7 billion of good money after bad.  The governor is borrowing $4.5 billion to help him make this payment, which only increases NJ’s overall debt load, but $4.7 billion is still only 78% of the required payment, so NJ’s unfunded pension liabilities will also increase.  What a waste of money that is much needed elsewhere during these COVID-stressed times!  

Philip Sprincin:

What has San Francisco done with this wealth? Not much. The Municipal Transportation Agency (“Muni”), which runs the busses and metro, has struggled with failure after failure this year. The housing shortage in the city is so bad that it is driving people to live in cars and even boats. Homelessness is up 14 percent in the past 6 years. Dirty streets, with needles and worse on the sidewalks, were an issue in last year’s mayoral race. A city seemingly rich enough to pave its roads with gold finds them covered in trash.

San Francisco has squandered its fortune. Proclaiming itself a “Transit First” city, density and geography make it one of the U.S. cities best suited for public transport. The city could have used its $23 billion excess to build dozens of miles of subway. Instead, it dug just 1.6 miles of the Central Subway, still not open. San Francisco did build a downtown train station, the Salesforce Transit Center, billed as the “Grand Central of the West”—except that it didn’t fund a tunnel to the station, so no trains go there yet, only busses.

San Francisco politicians also claim to care about affordable housing. Even at the inflated rate to build such housing in the Bay Area—up to $700,000 per unit—$23 billion could have built 33,000 units in the past 20 years. The total number of subsidized units in the city was only about 33,000 in 2018, and just 3,741 of them came from city programs like public housing or the mayor’s office. The rest came from federal, state, or private investment.

Scott Girard:

The leadership of the Madison charter school signed the lease Aug. 28 after a search for new space, and D’Abell recalled the busy weekend of preparing the building while also communicating with parents about where the year would begin.

“We didn’t know where we were going to be,” D’Abell said during a recent interview in his office. “We looked at potentially having school in Penn Park, at least when it was still warm, and having tents. We looked at mobile classrooms.”

One City first opened in 2015 offering preschool and 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten. It now has students from age 2 through second grade, split between two sites. The new Coyier Lane building is set up for 101 students in grades K-2, with 40 of them learning remotely.

For D’Abell’s first year on the job, a new building combined with setting up instruction during a pandemic has kept him busy.