For a research project
1.Which belief, currently deemed true by scientific consensus, is most important for teachers & faculty at schools of ed to know?
2.Which belief, currently deemed false by scientific consensus, is nevertheless often believed by Ts & faculty at schls of ed?

— Daniel Willingham (@DTWillingham) December 15, 2020

2010: When A stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.

Wisconsin’s only teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading results.

2004: “Madison schools distort reading data” by Mark Seidenberg.

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

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

MTEL & Wisconsin

Wisconsin “Foundation of Readings” teacher content knowledge examination results.

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

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

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Scott Girard:

“The problem was we could not get the teachers to commit to the coaching.”

Since their small success, not much has changed in the district’s overall results for teaching young students how to read. Ladson-Billings called the ongoing struggles “frustrating,” citing an inability to distinguish between what’s important and what’s a priority in the district.

“The superintendents have been so bogged down with stuff like the (school resource officers), too many fights at Cherokee — whatever’s made the newspaper has been where all the energy has gone,” she said. “The assumption was that the people in the classroom knew exactly what they were doing, and we don’t need to be on top of that.”

“So much of what we talk about in Madison in terms of disparities stems from the crisis of literacy that we have,” Kramer said. “When students don’t read at grade level, they are much more likely to become disengaged at school. If they get to middle school and they’re reading below grade level, it’s so easy to become disengaged, to be discouraged.”

“It’s easy to pay lip service to a fundamental change like shifting toward research-backed literacy methods, but Dr. Jenkins is doing much more than paying lip service as near as we can tell,” he said. “This feels real, it doesn’t feel like Madison’s usual talking about it and forming a task force and having a series of meetings and producing a report. We’ve had decades of that kind of inaction.”

Yet, deja vu all around Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2004: “Madison schools distort reading data” by Mark Seidenberg.

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

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

MTEL & Wisconsin

Wisconsin “Foundation of Readings” teacher content knowledge examination results.

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

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

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Scott Girard:

The biggest exception to the enrollment decline in the public school sector were districts with an established virtual charter school option, the study found. Those districts saw an enrollment increase of approximately 4.5%, the study found.

“Districts that have these schools that have some experience with conducting virtual education was appealing to some families,” Flanders said.

The state Department of Public Instruction hasn’t released final numbers for homeschooling in the 2020-21 school year, but as of August, students with homeschooling requests compared to one year earlier was more than double, up to 2,792 from 1,279 the year before.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Nader Issa:

Half of the jobs, which pay $15 an hour, include supervising students in classrooms where teachers are remote, monitoring social distancing and masking and conducting health screenings.

Chicago Public Schools is looking to hire 2,000 new employees to take on pandemic-related duties and fill in gaps in staffing once schools return in-person in January, a plan that’s drawing a rebuke from the teachers union and that signifies one of the major challenges of reopening the third-largest district in the nation during a public health emergency.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Freedom of the Press Foundation:

Based on the comprehensive data compiled by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation and Committee to Protect Journalists, our new report shows that there have been at least 117 verified cases of a journalist being arrested or detained on the job in the United States in 2020. The Tracker is also still investigating more than a dozen additional reports of arrests or detentions.

The numbers are staggering. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019. In just one week, from May 29 – June 4, more reporters were arrested in the U.S. than in the previous three years combined. Arrests occurred in more than two dozen cities across the country. And more than 36% of the arrests were accompanied by an assault: journalists were beaten, hit with rubber bullets or other projectiles or covered in chemical agents, like tear gas or pepper spray.

The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Devi Shastri:

Victor Davis Hanson:

Bouts of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.

America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made such inroads into and inside government and the establishment as during the past decade.

Ivan Hernandez, David Silverman & Mesmin Destin:

Students from lower-socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds have unique background-specific strengths that they have acquired from their lived experiences. We test the hypotheses that guiding students toward recognizing the strengths that they have derived from their specific background and experiences will promote their positive understandings of their identities and have positive implications for their academic motivation and psychological well-being. Specifically, we present evidence indicating that a brief experimental paradigm guiding students to reflect on their background-specific strengths leads lower-SES college students (Study 1; N = 186), as well as Black and Latinx middle school students from lower-SES backgrounds (Study 2; N = 912), to endorse the idea that they are assets to their schools and society because of their backgrounds and increases their inclinations to persist in the face of academic difficulty. These psychological consequences were significantly associated with middle school students’ end-of-term grades (Study 2).

Bill Glauber:

“We can pick and choose what we actually restore,” said Terra Gillis, an assistant. “Col. Hegg and Forward are both very positive influences. … We immediately wanted to work on them.”

If all goes well, the restoration will be completed in the spring.

The intention is to have the statues back in place by the summer.

Peter Van Buren:

If Bernie Sanders accomplished anything sacrificing his self-respect to become the Democratic Party’s prison girlfriend, it was to elevate racism, the fate of the Rust Belt, and economic inequality to front-page stories. The problem is that as long as racism, the fate of the Rust Belt, and economic inequality are separate topics talked about by different people in different ways, nothing will ever change.

One of the reasons economic inequality has ramped up has been the clever division of the people impacted. Poor people of color are victims of racism while poor white people are too lazy to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Encourage the POC to feel jealous of the chances the dumb whites throw away like empty PBR cans. Get the white folks to believe the POC live off handouts. Blacks vote for Dem candidates who say they’ll help but don’t; poor whites elect Trump who promises not to and doesn’t.

Poor whites make good copy. There’s a new book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America.” There’s also a new movie out of an old book, Hillbilly Elegy. National Review has its own white trash story up and the MSM has made parachuting elite columnists into the Heartland to write thought pieces into a sub-genre that could sit aside Business and Sports on the masthead. Whatever all those writers think their point is, their point ends up being that poor whites are very different from poor blacks.

The fascination with writing about white trash arises because poor white people are a stand-in for poor blacks. Kinda by proxy, the way the movie M*A*S*H* set in Korea was actually a criticism of America’s war in Vietnam. White liberals can say anything they want about Appalachians, stuff they can’t get away with saying about blacks. That avoids anyone seeing that the story is all the same story, just whitewashed with claims of racism.

Terry Jeffrey:

“Tuition increased substantially between 1995 and 2017, and that increase put upward pressure on borrowing,” said the CBO. “(Some research indicates that the expansion of the federal student loan programs has induced colleges and universities to increase tuition.) For example, the average published in-state tuition — also known as the sticker price — for public, four-year undergraduate institutions increased by 120 percent (adjusted for inflation) over that period. The average published tuition for not-for-profit private institutions increased by 76 percent.”

“The increase in students’ ability to borrow may have induced colleges to increase their tuition,” said the report.

So, federal student loans caused money to flow as follows: Jim worked as an auto mechanic and, along with millions of other hardworking non-college-educated Americans, paid federal taxes. The federal government took some of that money and sent it to Harvard and other colleges in the form of student loans. The government attributed these loans to people like Jill — the sister Jim did not know — as payment for their tuition.

Adrienne Bernhard:

Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world.
T
The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.

But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.

Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).

An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.

Tobi Cohen:

With the advent of social media, none of us can take our privacy for granted. The Privacy Commission of Canada says it’s critically important to teach students how to protect their privacy, exercise control over their personal information and respect the privacy of others.

By the time children start school, most have already figured out how to turn on the tablet, find apps on Dad’s smartphone and search the favourites tab for their preferred websites. But they still have a lot to learn about staying safe online.

The risks associated with connecting to the Internet have grown exponentially in recent years. From cyberbullying, sexting and child luring, to tracking, hacking and email scams, the threats can be daunting for many adults, let alone children and teens. At the same time, personal information has become a hot commodity as businesses seek to monetize our data. It has become difficult to discern who is processing our information and for what purposes and everyone, regardless of age, must weigh the benefits and risks of each product and service they use, each time they use it.

.@MMSDschools and @UWMadEducation announce a 14-member early literacy task force focused on analyzing approaches to teaching reading “toward the goals of improving reading outcomes and reducing achievement gaps.” More details at a 1 p.m. press availability. Members: pic.twitter.com/mPDoVmDrTF

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) December 14, 2020

Yet, deja vu all around Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2004: “Madison schools distort reading data” by Mark Seidenberg.

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

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

MTEL & Wisconsin

Wisconsin “Foundation of Readings” teacher content knowledge examination results.

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

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

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Megan Brenan:

• 34% say their mental health is excellent, down from 43% in 2019

• Democrats, frequent churchgoers show least mental health change

• Reports of physical health stable, slightly more positive than mental health

Americans’ latest assessment of their mental health is worse than it has been at any point in the last two decades. Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults rate their mental health positively, representing a nine-point decline from 2019.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Joanne Jacobs:

Two boys were shot and killed at a mall in Sacramento, writes Darren Miller, a high school math teacher. One was a former student; the other is a current student of another teacher.

He asked his colleague if the boy had been a “face” or a “rectangle.”

His school uses Zoom for online classes.

Like the opening of the Brady Bunch, each participant gets a rectangle; either the participant’s name is shown, or if the participant has activated a web cam, the rectangle is filled with the video of the the participant (usually just their face). For a variety of reasons we cannot require students to turn on their cameras, and most choose not to, so Zoom classes can feel like talking to a wall of black rectangular bricks with names on them.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Bill Minser, Regis Miller and more:

I found last Sunday’s State Journal editorial, “Fauci sends a message to schools,” disingenuous and dangerous.

Schools should have opened in September.

Commentary.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Brian Riedl:

Kevin Williamson:

Biden wants a little welfare for the affluent in the form of a $10,000 college-loan giveaway accomplished through legislation, while the Democrats’ Left wants a lot more welfare for the wealthy in the form of a $50,000 student-loan giveaway accomplished through unilateral executive action.

And welfare for the wealthy is precisely what is in question here: The majority of student debt is held by relatively high-income people, poor people mostly are not college graduates, and those who attended college …

Izabella Kaminska:

When you’re on a plane, do you think about its aerodynamics? When you look at a mountain, do you think about how precisely it was formed? Do you always notice how the music you are listening to is structured? If the answer to all these is yes, you could be what Simon Baron-Cohen calls a hyper-systemiser.

People who are that way inclined have a hard-wired compulsion to seek out patterns in their surroundings, following a simple “if this and that then this” algorithm. It is through this process of endless iterative discovery and experimentation that such minds eventually stumble upon new inventions, pushing human evolution forward, and in many cases changing the world forever. Today, these nerdy brain types are commonly associated with autism. But while society views that condition as a disorder, Baron-Cohen — a clinical psychologist based at the University of Cambridge — argues that its connection with systemising techniques and influence on human invention should not go unnoticed.

“Those humans who had minds with a systemising mechanism in overdrive were — and are — central to the story of invention,” he writes.

Reddit users, with their systemising minds, took less than 48 hours to pinpoint the monolith that appeared in the Utah desert

Baron-Cohen anchors his theory in the story of young “Al”, also known as Thomas Alva Edison, whose endless compulsion to tinker with things brought us a slew of 19th-century inventions — among them, most famously, the lightbulb. He contrasts this with the story of another young boy named Jonah, now in his 40s, who is similarly plagued by a compulsive pattern-recognising mind. Unlike Edison, Jonah is diagnosed with autism, and his life is a lonely one because he cannot easily fit in with others or succeed at getting a job.

What differentiates the two, Baron-Cohen contends, is how their conditions were treated by family, society and the medical establishment.

Choose life!

Frederick Studemann:

In many ways this is nothing new. Booksellers have always played a role as tastemakers and influencers. Keeping loyal customers up to date with new titles and ideas for further reading via newsletters and mailshots is a long-established practice. But the realities of the pandemic forced an upgrade. Similarly, publishers sped up a move to digital platforms for the promotion of books, and cultivation and curation of reading communities.

The pandemic has also spurred attempts to provide a viable alternative to Amazon. Bookshop.org was conceived in the US before the pandemic with the aim of offering book buyers an online service that could match the scale of stock available on Amazon with the personalised service and sense of community typically associated with smaller retailers. In turn, independent booksellers would get a share of the business. Covid-19 turned an idea that struggled to raise funding from investors and expected to take a while to establish itself into a rapid success story that has since expanded into the UK and is now looking to move into continental Europe.

Erin Richards:

Ruby Rodriguez remembers the days when English class meant walking to her desk, talking to friends and checking the board.

Now class begins when her classmates’ names appear online. She sits alone at the dining room table, barefoot and petting the family dog. It’s her freshman year at St. Anthony High School, a private Catholic school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She doesn’t know what her classmates look like, since nobody ever turns on their cameras.

After schools in Milwaukee went remote last March, Ruby and her friends in eighth grade at St. Anthony’s middle school missed their graduation ceremonies and parties. Her close friends attended different high schools, mostly other private schools that offered in-person instruction. St. Anthony, like many schools in urban areas, including Milwaukee Public Schools, started the fall semester online for pandemic safety reasons.

Blog:

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.  Open Syllabus helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books.  It supports students and lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields.  It creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use open licenses.  It supports work on aligning higher education with job market needs and on making student mobility easier.  It also challenges faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data resource.

Laura Moser:

So begins this apology from Lily Eskelsen García—the president of the National Education Association—for remarks that outraged disabilities advocates and special-needs parents. In a lively speech at a Campaign for America’s Future gala in October, where she was accepting a Progressive Champion Award (just wait, because that detail is about to seem funny), Eskelsen García was running through a rapid-fire list of teachers’ sundry responsibilities when she produced a few infelicitous phrases:

We serve kids a hot meal. We put Band-Aids on boo-boos. We diversify our curriculum instruction to meet the personal individual needs of all of our students—the blind, the hearing-impaired, the physically challenged, the gifted and talented, the chronically tarded and the medically annoying.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Joshua D. Kertzer:

Political scientists often criticize psychological approaches to the study of politics on the grounds that many psychological theories were developed on convenience samples of college students or members of the mass public, whereas many of the most important decisions in politics are made by elites, who are presumed to differ systemati- cally from ordinary citizens. This paper proposes an overarching framework for thinking about differences between elites and masses, presenting the results of a meta-analysis of 162 paired treatments from paired experiments on political elites and mass publics, as well as an analysis of 12 waves of historical elite and mass public opinion data on foreign policy issues over a 43 year period. It finds political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

UW-Madison’s students will be more closely monitored next semester.

A mobile app called “Safer Badgers” will be students’ and employees’ “key to campus,” representing a “significant change from the fall semester,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank wrote in a Friday email.

All students living in the Madison area, including those who live off-campus and have only online classes, will be denied entry to campus buildings unless they are up to date on a twice-weekly COVID-19 test requirement.

Graduate students and employees must test regularly, though how often it’s required will depend on their job and how often they are on campus.

Scott Girard:

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

David Blaska:

First get rid of the police, then figure out how to make schools safe. That’s Madison’s mad formula for its public schools, courtesy of Freedom Inc. and Progressive Dane (and its amen corner at The Capital Times). Parents, not so much.

After booting the school resource police officers last Spring the board began studying What Do We Do Now?! The school safety committee has issued its recommendations. They amount to creating another committee to do what the first committee could not. The lead recommendation:

▪ Create a superintendent advisory committee to develop a plan to enhance youth and community roles in school safety.

As Madison schools’ safety and security committee considers recommendations, some want more time.

Chronicle:

The figure is startling. This year, 21.7 percent fewer high-school graduates went straight to college compared with 2019, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. As year-to-year changes go, that’s huge.

Don’t stare only at that top-line number, though. Look at the comparisons between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. You’ll see further evidence that the pandemic has hit low-income students, especially those from urban high schools, the hardest.

The report, released on Thursday, provides an early look at how Covid-19 has affected the high-school graduating class of 2020. Earlier this fall, the research center released a series of reports examining enrollment outcomes at two- and four-year colleges, the most recent of which showed a 13-percent decline in the number of first-time freshmen nationally.

Charlie Savage:

The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show.

But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather, according to letters produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Tim Levin:

And according to NYU marketing professor, entrepreneur, author, and podcaster Scott Galloway, the pandemic has accelerated changes that were already brewing in higher education, making the sector more ready for major change than nearly any other industry.

“Education, other than maybe healthcare, is more ripe for disruption than any other $100 billion-plus industry in the US,” Galloway said at Insider’s virtual “Access, Equity, and the Future of Education” event Wednesday.

College tuition rates have skyrocketed — far outpacing the rate of inflation — and acceptance rates have plummeted, Galloway noted, while the quality of education students receive and the outcomes they can expect after graduation haven’t improved accordingly. All the while, compensation for administrators and faculty has grown, Galloway said.

Susan Landau:

The tools are so effective that they have largely automated the business of unlocking phones. That’s a big change from the mid 2000s. Jonathan Zdziarski, an Apple forensics expert, used to teach FBI technologists how to access data from iPhones on a bespoke basis. But law enforcement soured on that approach later in the decade, and investigators sought solutions that essentially were “push a button, data appears,” Zdsiarski told me on Listening In. Achieving that ease of search may have driven the past decade’s fights over locked phones. That is, the security protections that Apple and Google (Android’s developer) put in place to protect customer data on the phones made it harder for everyone, including law enforcement, to access private data on the phone. That’s a security improvement. But the security improvement comes with a downside: It makes it harder to have the push-and-data-appears solutions that law enforcement seems to prefer. Even when law enforcement could breach phones on an individual basis using techniques like those taught by Zdziarski, the encryption systems imposed a barrier to what law enforcement really wanted: speed and ease of search.

The widespread adoption of MDFTs changes that equation. The Upturn report shows that companies like Cellebrite and GrayShift (maker of the GrayKey tool) provide push-and-data-appears capability—but at a cost. Since 2015, Las Vegas’s police department has spent more than $640,000 on MDFTs; Miami’s police department, more than $330,000; state agencies in Michigan, more than $1 million; and Indiana State Police, more than $510,000. Put another way, Apple’s and Google’s security protections appear to be good enough to thwart casual criminals. But they don’t appear to keep out anyone with a large enough budget to pay for MDFTs.

That seems to change the going dark premise. Law enforcement has long warned that the consequences will be the increasing inability of law enforcement to investigate serious crimes. But Upturn’s report shows that maybe the problem is different: The issue is not law enforcement’s inability to get into locked phones but, rather, who can pay to enable law enforcement access.

Till von Wachter:

Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career development. The literature finds large initial effects on earnings, labor supply, and wages that tend to fade after ten to fifteen years in the labor market, and that are accompanied by changes in occupation, job mobility, and employer characteristics. Adverse initial labor market entry also has persistent effects on a range of social outcomes, including timing and completed fertility, marriage and divorce, criminal activities, attitudes, and risky alcohol consumption. There is also evidence that early exposure to depressed labor market lowers health and raises mortality in middle age, patterns accompanied by a reopening of earnings gaps.

Joseph Da Costa:

Madison school officials plan significant changes in reading and literacy instruction. District administrators presented the proposed changes to school board members at a recent Board of Education meeting and signaled a shift toward phonics and the science of reading.

MMSD’s Chief of Elementary Schools, Carletta Stanford, acknowledged, “We know that what we’ve done in the past has not exactly hit the mark for where we want to be in terms of closing gaps.” 

During the meeting Stanford explained recent research and discussed the expert advice that is helping school officials guide the pivot to a more science-based approach to literacy. Stanford referenced specific research findings stating that “early intervention is critical” and there needs to be “intentionality in explicit reading instruction.”

Lisa Kvistad, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching & Learning, told board members the district plans to “move forward now that we’ve gone through the data” and called the planned changes “an equity imperative.”

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Matt Schudel:

Walter E. Williams, an economist and writer who was one of the country’s leading Black conservative public intellectuals, known for his outspoken views that included opposition to the minimum wage and affirmative action programs in colleges, died Dec. 2 in Arlington, Va. He was 84.

The death was confirmed in a statement by George Mason University, where he had taught since 1980. According to university spokesman Michael Sandler, Dr. Williams taught a graduate course in microeconomics on GMU’s Arlington campus that ended at 10 p.m. on Dec. 1. Several hours later, police found him unresponsive in his car in a university parking lot. He reportedly had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Dr. Williams was a provocative scholar and writer who challenged orthodox ideas on economics, race relations and the role of government. He often held verbal sparring matches on television with such figures as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks.

Jay be Olson & Amir Raz:

Social psychologists, placebo scientists, and consumer researchers often require deception in their studies, yet they receive little training on how to deceive effectively. Ineffective deception, however, can lead to suspicion and compromise the validity of research. The field of magic offers a potential solution; magicians have deceived audiences for millennia using a variety of robust techniques. As former professional magicians, we propose the Swiss cheese model of deception and argue that deception should be subtle yet elaborate. Subtle deception involves techniques such as fake mistakes, planted assumptions, and convincers. Elaborate deception involves layering many of these techniques rather than relying on a single cover story. We have demonstrated the potency of these principles by making participants believe implausible ideas, such as that a machine is controlling their mind or that the placebo they consumed was a psychedelic drug. These principles can help researchers reduce demand characteristics, improve blinding, and increase the generalisability of studies that require deception.

Rick Karle:

All has he ever wanted was a chance.

And if he was given that chance, they’d never forget him.

They said Jake Pratt of Vestavia Hills would never contribute.

They said he’d never make his high school football team.

They said he’d never graduate from high school.

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

They said he’d never get his driver’s permit.

They said he’d never graduate from college.

Jake Pratt has proven them all wrong, and now I have the pleasure of announcing some big news! Jake has landed a job at UPS!!!

Smith College Alums:

Recently, a White staff member at the College began posting inflammatory videos to a YouTube account, the first of which has amassed––at the time of this writing–– fifty-five thousand views. We have provided a link to a Vimeo here, so as to avoid contributing additional views––and therefore YouTube ad revenue––to the staff member in question. These videos expound at length, though with little actual detail, on various complaints about this staff member’s conditions of employment, largely relating to the College’s recent efforts to implement implicit bias and anti-racist training as a means of embracing equity and inclusion both on and off campus.

As a group of Smith College alums who share these values of equity and inclusion, we feel called to voice our support for the College’s ongoing commitment to anti-racist work. This work has been reaffirmed and refocused in recent months for members of the broader Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color (BIPOC) Smith community, for whom this is only the latest of many well-documented and ongoing instances of racism, silencing, and disenfranchisement. While applicable to the entire Smith Community, this work is of the utmost importance for current students and staff, whose immediate safety and wellbeing during an already difficult semester have been compromised by the overt resentment and ire expressed by this community-facing member of the Smith staff, and by the national attention it has garnered.

We applaud the creation of the employee White Accountability Group, as we recognize the importance of spaces for White staff to learn and address their biases together. We were also gratified to read President McCartney’s October 29th letter, written in response to the aforementioned video, affirming the College’s commitment to racial justice, equity, and inclusion.

Benjamin Yount:

The data as it is currently released makes comparisons between districts all but impossible because districts have discretion on creating exclusions from the school-level spending,” Flanders wrote. “DPI includes a list of recommended exclusions, but districts have the freedom to disregard this advice, either including some of the costs as school-level costs or excluding even more spending. Given DPI’s track record of opposition to any sort of reform, it may be the case that opaqueness is attractive.”

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

John Wisely:

Three Catholic high schools are suing the state in federal court, saying Michigan’s most recent order banning in-person learning violates their First Amendment right to practice their faith.

Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Robert Gordon on Monday extended by 12 days a previous order banning in-person learning at high schools, colleges and universities. Gordon said the order is necessary to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Preschools, elementary and middle schools and boarding schools are allowed to offer in-person learning under the order.

The three high schools — Everest Collegiate High School and Academy in Clarkston, Fr. Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor and Lansing Catholic High School — along with the Michigan Association of Non-Public Schools say they should be allowed to do the same, noting they use rigorous safety protocols and their infection rates are very low.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Scott Carlson:

Start early and get to Thanksgiving. That was the goal for a range of colleges that held in-person classes in the fall despite the pandemic.

But how many got to the end of the semester in a healthy financial condition? Many colleges enrolled significantly fewer students than they would have in a typical year, cutting into tuition revenue at a time when higher education was already desperate to attract bodies. And although getting to the end of the semester prevented institutions from having to issue refunds on room-and-board fees, occupancy was down in residence halls across the country. And then there were the financial hits from canceling fall athletics, buying personal protective equipment for faculty and staff members, and retrofitting buildings for spread-out classes.

A new survey conducted by The Chronicle and two other organizations sheds some light on the financial challenges that colleges face as they approach a spring semester that might be even tougher to pull off than the fall.

Many of the surveyed institutions — particularly small private colleges — offered high discount rates and saw significant declines in net-tuition revenue. Smaller institutions and those with lower graduation rates were also more likely to lose value on their endowments.

Hannah Natanson:

More evidence emerged this week that online school is taking its worst academic toll on Virginia’s most vulnerable students, as superintendents in the state — facing mounting pressure to reopen schools — took tentative steps toward in-person instruction.

Loudoun County Public Schools went the furthest, welcoming back more than 7,300 elementary school students this week. Other Northern Virginia districts are moving more slowly: Arlington Public Schools said it would return thousands of elementary and middle school students early next year, while Alexandria City Public Schools outlined plans to send some students with disabilities and English-language learners back into school buildings in late January — followed in early February by kindergartners through fifth-graders.

These developments come as schools in the D.C. region, and nationwide, are beginning to gather and publish data on students’ grades for the first full semester of online learning. Early analysis highlights steep drops in academic performance among low-income students and children of color in the Washington area.

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Hank Berrien:

A group of Wisconsin parents, along with School Choice Wisconsin, is suing the city of Racine after the city closed its schools, defying a Wisconsin Supreme Court restraining order preventing the city from closing the schools.

The sequence of events preceding the lawsuit included Dottie-Kay Bowersox, the City of Racine Public Health Administrator, issuing a public health order on November 12 in which she required all schools within the jurisdiction of the Racine Public Health Department to close their buildings while urging them to switch to virtual learning from Nov. 27, 2020, through Jan. 15, 2021.

Bowersox stated, “We’re concerned that, again, individuals will not be responsible. They will interact with individuals outside their home. They’ll go to gatherings and such. They won’t be masked. They won’t keep social distancing, and they won’t stay home when they’re ill.”

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Heather MacDonald:

The United States is being torn apart by an idea: that racism defines America. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in late May 2020 catapulted this claim into national prominence; riots and the desecration of national symbols followed. Now, activists and their media allies are marshaling a more sweeping set of facts to prove the dominance of white supremacy: the absence of a proportional representation of blacks in a range of organizations. That insufficient diversity results from racial bias, claim the activists, and every few days, the press serves up another exposé of this industry or that company’s too-white workforce to drive home the point.

In one short stretch during the summer of 2020, the Wall Street Journal ran stories headlined “Wall Street Knows It’s Too White” and “A Decade-Long Stall for Black Enrollment in M.B.A. Programs.” The Los Angeles Times asked: “Why are Black and Latino people still kept out of the tech industry?” In another article, the Times documented its own “painful reckoning over race.” The New York Times pumped out news features and op-eds alleging racism in food journalism, Hollywood, publishing, and sports management, among other professions. The Chronicle of Higher Education painstakingly reported on protests against alleged racial bias in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, citing, for example, charges that black scientists are constantly “attacked by institutional and systemic racism.” All the articles invoked employment ratios as proof of racism.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Justin EH Smith:

This much is all true: I believe that “quality television” is in fact of extremely low quality, that “YA literature” is not literature, that “OA literature” as it were looks more and more like YA with each passing year, that superhero movies are of course not cinema and that no self-respecting adult should ever watch them, except perhaps as an expression of love to some li’l tyke in their lives. If we were living in a culture dominated by grown-ups, Martin Scorsese would be considered the purveyor of middle-brow forgettable fare rather than the gold standard of sophistication, and at least the childless among us would not even have to be aware of Spider-Man’s existence.

Charles Hilu:

“I’m just a simple physical scientist. The way I’ve always approached my life is to tell the truth and try to do what is morally right,” Abbot wrote in an email to The College Fix. Abbot is (and it looks like he will continue to be) a professor of geophysical science at the university.

After Abbot cut a series of videos in which he listed his specific grievances with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, “58 students and postdocs of the Department of Geophysical Sciences, and 71 other graduate students and postdocs from other University of Chicago departments,” published a letter calling for Abbot to be sanctioned, according to a petition in support of the professor.

“The contents of Professor Dorian Abbot’s videos threaten the safety and belonging of all underrepresented groups within the department and serve to undermine Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives,” the letter stated.

Kathryn Dill:

When New York University moved many classes online amid the pandemic, a group of third-year film and drama students at the school took things into their own hands. Reluctant to tackle a semester of what they labeled “Zoom Shakespeare” and “Zoom Treasure Island,” they began researching where to live and work together inexpensively. “We wanted to create an environment where we [could] riff off each other,” said Marina Fess, an acting major.

The students organized a creative collective in Vermont without oversight or advice from professors or NYU, which isn’t awarding academic credit for the three-month stint.

Many students elsewhere also took action, choosing either to postpone college or interrupt their studies to work as proofreaders, long-distance tutors, campaign volunteers, researchers and DoorDash delivery people. Some are pursuing passions like drone piloting.

During Covid, the decision to take a gap year or semester before or during college is complicated. With many school policies in flux, tuition refunds or credits aren’t always a given and students who have secured scholarships may be hesitant to defer. At some schools, students who take time off may risk losing the chance to enroll whenever they like, and could have to resubmit financial aid applications the following academic year. Finding gap-year activities also is harder now. Even part-time jobs can be tough to land and the pandemic has suspended or limited many traditional pursuits, like travel or international volunteer programs.

Larry Kuehn:

The exposés of abuse by social media corporations like Google and Facebook have finally brought attention to the dangers of monopolies over our communications. The way these monopolies have been colonizing public education has, however, gone almost unnoticed. This is rampant privatization sneaking in as essential to “21st Century learning.”

The top five global capital corporations are technology platforms—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Platforms are a host for a variety of services and uses. All of the big five platform corporations have become too large in a short period of time to have any significant competition outside of this group. They compete against one another, adding services to secure their monopoly by offering users everything they do online.

If a new service is developed that seems to be gaining users, or that competes with an element of their platform, it is purchased and integrated into the platform—avoiding new competitors. Alternatively, they use their massive resources to develop a comparable app and push the potential competitor aside.

Christopher Bedford:

USA Today uses left-wing college interns to censor news media and opinion articles they disagree with, working hand in glove with unaccountable social media giants to suppress it. Newspapers earn a lot of money performing this task for Facebook and its related companies, and are proud of the job they do to police public speech, even bragging about it publicly on social media platforms.

If you begin to feel an intense and crushing feeling of dread at this reality, don’t be alarmed. That indicates only that you are still sane.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease retracted on Tuesday the 1951 paper by professor Benjamin Glover in what some scholars see as part of an emerging trend re-examining past academic work considered to be racist, sexist or homophobic by today’s standards.

Most retractions come up soon after publication, stem from technical errors or plagiarism and endure a drawn-out process in which researchers defend or attack the paper in question over a period of months or even years.

The retraction of Glover’s article, “Observations on Homosexuality Among University Students,” comes nearly 70 years after publication. The paper is now marked with the scientific version of a scarlet letter because it supported what are now “long discredited beliefs, prejudices and practices.”

Adrienne Bernhard:

The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.

But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.

Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).

An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.

Christopher Rufo:

San Diego Unified School District is forcing teachers to attend “white privilege” training, in which teachers are told “you are racist” and “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.”

The training begins with a “land acknowledgement,” in which the teachers are asked to accept that they are colonizers living on stolen Native American land. Then they are told they will experience “guilt, anger, apathy, [and] closed-mindedness” because of their “white fragility.”

After watching clips of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, the trainers tell the teachers: “you are racist,” “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies,” and that they must commit to becoming “antiracist” in the classroom. They must submit to the new racial orthodoxy.

The teachers are told that they are part of an oppressive white power structure. The trainers claim that “white people in America hold most of the [power]” and that white teachers have an “ability to thrive” that is “being preserved at every level of power.”

Wisconsin State Journal:

The nation’s top infectious disease expert just urged schools to reopen.

We hope school officials in Madison and across Wisconsin were listening — those who have kept most of their students at home for online learning during the pandemic.

School officials should be ready to open for the second semester in late January, at least for elementary school students. Districts also should share their plans with the public. School officials always can push back their opening dates based on what’s happening in their communities. Not every school and situation is the same.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday that in-person classes should be “the default position.”

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Scott Girard:

The group tasked with recommending policy changes for Madison schools without police officers stationed there wants more time.

But it’s also approaching a deadline of sorts, as Madison Metropolitan School District staff soon will begin building the 2021-22 budget, which could include funding toward any of the Safety and Security Ad Hoc Committee’s recommendations.

The 29-member committee held its latest meeting Thursday evening, where members discussed a policy proposal from Freedom Inc., the value of proactive versus reactive strategies and the importance of a multifaceted approach to student safety at school. It will meet again Dec. 10, initially expected to be its final meeting, but could continue to convene in the future based on members’ requests.

The School Board unanimously approved removing police officers from schools this summer amid a nationwide reckoning with police mistreatment of minorities. It was a sudden shift for a district that has had an officer stationed in each of its four comprehensive high schools for more than two decades, but one that came after years of activism from a group of local youth of color.

Notes and links.

Robby Soave:

The Chicago Teachers Union, which represents more than 28,000 educators in the nation’s third largest city, tweeted on Sunday: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.”

That was the entire tweet; the union provided no additional comment or clarifying statement. There was no acknowledgment that many people who argue schools should reopen are doing so in good faith. A spokesperson for the union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

To say that sexism, racism, or any other -ism is at the “root” of the (thus far unsuccessful) reopening push is absurd and insulting. Stressed-out parents who want to send their kids back to the classroom are not motivated by animus toward teachers, and they are certainly not motivated by animus toward women or minorities. Indeed, many people who want schools to reopen are women and minorities. Pandemic-related closures have disproportionately affected inner-city families that rely on public education. Young kids of color are some of the hardest hit. More than 800,000 women have dropped out of the work force during the pandemic, in large part because they now have to take care of their kids.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Phillip W. Magness:

Biographers of John Maynard Keynes have a peculiar habit of treading very lightly around their subject matter’s involvement in the eugenics movement. The oversight is not for want of evidence.

In one of his last public appearances before his death in 1946, the famed British economist described eugenics as the “most important, significant, and I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.” Keynes’s remarks, delivered at a dinner gala of the British Eugenics Society, followed an 8-year stint as an honorary vice president of the organization. It was the last of many such eugenic organizations in which Keynes served as an officer or adviser – a record that dates back to his time as a student at Cambridge. 

Overt nods to eugenic theory also appear throughout Keynes’s writings, including several of his most famous writings. As I documented earlier this year in a longer article with James Harrigan, Keynes’s famously utopian essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” was written as part of a multi-year dialogue with the novelist H.G. Wells on applying eugenic tools to social design.

WLWT5:

As winter sports begin across Ohio, officials with the Ohio High School Athletic Association have released requirements for players and coaches amid the coronavirus pandemic. Wrestling began its season Thursday amid the pandemic under a new set of guidelines and rules to help prevent the spread of the virus. In a heavy-contact sport like wrestling, OHSAA officials are trying their best to implement rules for players and coaches. Click here for a full list of wrestling requirements and recommendations. Among the new rules is student-athletes are permitted to wrestle, but must refrain from handshakes before and after the match. Wrestlers are also required to wear facial coverings off the mat when not actively competing or warming up.Equipment should not be shared. If equipment needs to be shared, OHSAA mandates the proper sanitation between use. Student-athletes must also sanitize their hands before and after warmups, at all timeouts and period breaks any time they leave the competition or practice mats. All those on the team bench also need to observe social distancing of 6 feet. Another big change comes from officiating. To conclude the end of match procedure, the official may point to the winning wrestler while raising his or her own arm (with open hand) having the requisite wristband color (red/green) of the winning wrestler.Click the below links for the COVID-19 individual sport recommendations:

Jack Wrenn:

What was Brown’s basis for these accusations?

In an interview with The Brown Daily Herald, University Spokesperson Brian Clark said the University evaluated a variety indicators, including:

1 indications of building access,

2 indications of accessing private electronic services,

3 indications of accessing secure networks, and

4 reports from community members.

The mechanics of that last indicator are pretty self-explanatory, but what about the others? Canvas doesn’t Want To Know Your Location. In this post, I’m going to break down the technical mechanisms behind each of these indicators.

For the most part, I do not have insider knowledge on how Brown reached its decisions. Rather, I’m going to consider each of the indicators Brian Clark named, and describe the technical mechanisms to which Brown could have availed itself to generating location data.

Dale Halling:

“Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.” Calvin Coolidge

In the United States, we tend to study the Constitution to secure and understand our freedoms. This is a bit strange as our freedom throughout history has been secured mainly by property rights. This was understood by the founders and many others.

There is a “diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate…. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”[1] James Madison’s Federalist p.10

“The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.” John Locke

“No other rights are safe where property is not safe.” Daniel Webster

“Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.” Calvin Coolidge

Joel Kotkin:

Yet the era of global kumbaya, ended by Trump, is not likely to return. It has become painfully obvious that ‘free trade’, as carried out by our own companies, benefited the already affluent at the expense of most people. As the liberal New Statesman has put it succinctly, ‘the era of peak globalisation is over’. The pandemic has shattered the global village, weakening both economic and political ties between countries, including within the European Union. When Trump lambasts free trade and China, he may alienate much of the corporate elite, but his message appeals to people and communities that lost, according to one labour-backed group, 3.4million jobs between 1979 and 2017 to the Middle Kingdom.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Adam Garfinkle:

Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is changing what, how, and why we read, and in turn what, how, and why we write and even think. Harold Innis noted in 1948, as television was on the cusp of revolutionizing American life, that “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances,” and it’s clear we are stumbling through another such episode. Such disturbances today are manifold, and, as before, their most critical aspects may reside in alterations to both the scope and nature of literacy. As with any tangle between technology and culture, empirical evidence is elusive, but two things, at least, are clear.

For one, the new digital technology is democratizing written language and variously expanding the range of people who use and learn from it. It may also be diffusing culture; music and film of all kinds are cheaply and easily available to almost everyone. In some respects, new digital technologies are decreasing social isolation, even if in other respects they may be increasing it. Taken together, these technologies may also be creating novel neural pathways, especially in developing young brains, that promise greater if different kinds of cognitive capacities, albeit capacities we cannot predict or even imagine with confidence.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Alex Thompson & Theodoric Meyer:

JEFF ZIENTS, the man tapped to lead the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response, “fell in love with” the culture at the management consulting firm Bain & Company. He later founded his own private equity firm, Portfolio Logic. He joined the board of Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. One chief executive on Obama’s Jobs Council remarked that he thought Zients, then a top Obama aide, was a Republican.

That was the Jeff Zients people read about on Wikipedia. At least, until a few months ago.

The Democratic consulting firm Saguaro Strategies scrubbed those details from Zients’ page this summer and fall as he became a more important figure on Biden’s team and was tapped to co-chair the transition. The firm — which made the edits using the easily decipherable username “Saguarostrat” — corrected some inaccuracies but its overall goal was to portray Zients as more progressive and remove or massage anything that could be politically damaging.

At the top of the section about Zients’ role in advocating for the Trans-Pacific Partnership which faced left-wing opposition, the firm included Zients’ argument that it was “the most progressive trade agreement there’s ever been.” His amorous quotes about Bain were deleted and replaced with a description of the company as a “management consulting firm that provides advice to public, private, and non-profit organizations.”

They added that Zients left Facebook “over differences with company leadership over governance and its policies around political discourse” although Zients has never said that publicly. The transition team has declined several of POLITICO requests for interviews with Zients about why he left Facebook.

Isaiah Mitchell:

Amid falling satisfaction with K-12 education and a doubling of American parents that planned to home-school their children this year, the home school advocacy group Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) expects high withdrawal numbers this semester according to Texas Education Agency (TEA) data collected in a release this week.

Because the TEA has not yet released data on withdrawals for the fall 2020 semester, THSC relies on a strong spike in the use of its withdrawal tool to interpret the data.

“While hard numbers showing the growth of homeschool withdrawals in Texas are not yet available for the fall of 2020, all available indicators point towards record breaking growth,” the release reads.

After reporting a 400 percent increase compared to last year in parents using THSC’s withdrawal tool in August, the group’s report shows an equivalent jump for September. Usage of the tool spiked in July — along with state coronavirus infection numbers — with a 1,700 percent jump from July 2019.

Karen Hao:

On the evening of Wednesday, December 2, Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, announced via Twitter that the company had forced her out. 

Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. She also cofounded the Black in AI affinity group, and champions diversity in the tech industry. The team she helped build at Google is one of the most diverse in AI, and includes many leading experts in their own right. Peers in the field envied it for producing critical work that often challenged mainstream AI practices.

A series of tweets, leaked emails, and media articlesshowed that Gebru’s exit was the culmination of a conflict over another paper she co-authored. Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, told colleagues in an internal email (which he has since put online) that the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication” and that Gebru had said she would resign unless Google met a number of conditions, which it was unwilling to meet. Gebru tweeted that she had asked to negotiate “a last date” for her employment after she got back from vacation. She was cut off from her corporate email account before her return.

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

Scott Girard:

Madison Teachers Inc. filed its second grievance against the Madison Metropolitan School District this year on Wednesday.

The complaint filed with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) comes after the district sent out a Nov. 30 communication stating “the MMSD Board of Education, MTI and the trades have ratified the agreement to increase base wages by 0.50%.” MTI executive director Ed Sadlowski said MTI and the trades group did not ratify the base wage increase at that level and called the communication “union-busting.”

“They falsely stated and interfered with the union that MTI had ratified the agreement,” Sadlowski said in an interview.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday or Thursday.

Despite the complaint, the union’s leadership is still hopeful district officials and School Board members will reconsider a budget decision from earlier this fall and give staff a full cost-of-living base wage increase of 1.81%. As approved, the budget authorizes district staff to negotiate up to just 0.5%, less than the state-mandated maximum of a 1.81% base wage increase.

The board fully funded longevity increases — known as “steps and lanes” — but MTI said that wouldn’t apply to every staff member, while base wage would increase everyone’s pay.

An emphasis on adult employment.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

The Markup:

The fruits of web scraping—using code to harvest data and information from websites—are all around us.

People build scrapers that can find every Applebee’s on the planet or collect congressional legislation and votes or track fancy watches for sale on fan websites. Businesses use scrapers to manage their online retail inventory and monitor competitors’ prices. Lots of well-known sites use scrapers to do things like track airline ticket prices and job listings. Google is essentially a giant, crawling web scraper.

Scrapers are also the tools of watchdogs and journalists, which is why The Markup filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this week that threatens to make scraping illegal.

The case itself—Van Buren v. United States—is not about scraping but rather a legal question regarding the prosecution of a Georgia police officer, Nathan Van Buren, who was bribed to look up confidential information in a law enforcement database. Van Buren was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which prohibits unauthorized access to a computer network such as computer hacking, where someone breaks into a system to steal information (or, as dramatized in the 1980s classic movie “WarGames,” potentially start World War III).

Lei Luo  1 , Dan Liu  2 , Xinlong Liao  1 , Xianbo Wu  2 , Qinlong Jing  1 , Jiazhen Zheng  2 , Fanghua Liu  1 , Shigui Yang  3 , Hua Bi  1 , Zhihao Li  2 , Jianping Liu  1 , Weiqi Song  2 , Wei Zhu  1 , Zhenghe Wang  2 , Xiru Zhang  2 , Qingmei Huang  2 , Peiliang Chen  2 , Huamin Liu  2 , Xin Cheng  2 , Miaochun Cai  2 , Pei Yang  2 , Xingfen Yang  2 , Zhigang Han  1 , Jinling Tang  4 , Yu Ma  1 , Chen Mao  2:

Results: Among 3410 close contacts, 127 (3.7% [95% CI, 3.1% to 4.4%]) were secondarily infected. Of these 127 persons, 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical. Compared with the household setting (10.3%), the secondary attack rate was lower for exposures in health care settings (1.0%; odds ratio [OR], 0.09 [CI, 0.04 to 0.20]) and on public transportation (0.1%; OR, 0.01 [CI, 0.00 to 0.08]). The secondary attack rate increased with the severity of index cases, from 0.3% (CI, 0.0% to 1.0%) for asymptomatic to 3.3% (CI, 1.8% to 4.8%) for mild, 5.6% (CI, 4.4% to 6.8%) for moderate, and 6.2% (CI, 3.2% to 9.1%) for severe or critical cases. Index cases with expectoration were associated with higher risk for secondary infection (13.6% vs. 3.0% for index cases without expectoration; OR, 4.81 [CI, 3.35 to 6.93]).

MADISON HAHAMY & ROSE HOROWITCH:

Faced with financial uncertainty brought by the coronavirus pandemic, the University hurriedly drafted a faculty buyout retirement plan, which a faculty working group has now responded to with a list of concerns — the most notable being that the plan was developed without faculty consultation.

In August, University Provost Scott Strobel announced the retirement plan, which offers tenured faculty age 70 or older payment equal to $200,000 if their yearly salary is equal to or greater than $200,000. If their salary is less than $200,000, faculty members can receive a payment of 125 percent of this year’s salary up to $200,000. To receive the compensation, faculty have to retire by the end of June 2021. 177 faculty members are eligible for the compensation, provided they sign on by Feb. 28, 2021. 

But in creating the plan, the administration did not consult any faculty members. The Inter-school Faculty Working Group’s response to the plan cited financial complications for the faculty that choose to retire under the plan as well as the implications of asking faculty to quickly make a clean break with their longtime place of work.

Declan Leary:

In the general chaos of the summer of 2020, it was a typical moment. At the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, a band of activists—primarily from indigenous-rights groups—had slung ropes around the neck of a statue of Christopher Columbus and pulled it down by force.

The moment meant different things to different people. For the woke left, it was another culture war victory in the age of 1619 and BLM—a small and long-delayed comeuppance for the colonial oppressors. For the right, it was the latest advance in the onslaught of the cultural arsonists—as cities were burning and statues falling down, it seemed that little would survive the spontaneous rage inspired by the death of George Floyd in that same city just two weeks before.

Hannah Cox:

Elizabeth Beyer:

Under Freedom Inc.’s proposal the committee would have complete decision-making power over school safety and accountability policies within the district; oversee all district investigations of student, parent or family member complaints against school staff; and establish a process to protect students against retaliation after filing a complaint, among other measures.

Freedom Inc. is also seeking a monthly written report from the district on crimes or incidents that took place on school property and were reported to law enforcement or observed by school staff; the number of times law enforcement were called to district schools; and the number of arrests made by law enforcement, among other data.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Jonathan Kay:

“You have continued to stand as an individual that seems to turn a blind eye to the stuff that’s going on, as a black woman that is in the [college] administration,” said the first-year Haverford College student. “I came to this institution”—and here she pauses for a moment, apparently fighting back tears—“I expected you, of any of us, to stand up and be the icon for black women on this campus… So, I’m not trying to hear anything that you have to say regarding that, due to the fact that you haven’t stood up for us—you never have, and I doubt that you ever will.”

The school-wide November 5th Zoom call, a recording of which has been preserved, was hosted by Wendy Raymond, Haverford’s president. At the time, the elite Pennsylvania liberal arts college was a week into a student strike being staged, according to organizers, to protest “anti-blackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” During the two-hour-and-nine-minute discussion, viewed in real time by many of the school’s 1,350 students, Raymond presented herself as solemnly apologetic for a litany of offenses. She also effusively praised and thanked the striking students for educating her about their pain, while “recognizing that I will never understand what it means to be a person of color or be black or indigenous in the United States. I am a white woman with considerable unearned privilege.”

Aran Ali:

In the last few decades, young adults have faced harsh economic realities—from the financial crisis in 2008 to this year’s global pandemic, both triggering catastrophic losses in jobs and financial stability.

And while the widespread effects of COVID-19 have yet to be fully captured, young adults are already now living with their parents to a greater degree than witnessed in 120 years—surpassing even the Depression-era generation.

Thomas Astebro, Serguey Braguinsky and Yuheng Ding:

We document that since 1997, the rate of startup formation has precipitously declined for firms operated by U.S. PhD recipients in science and engineering. These are supposedly the source of some of our best new technological and business opportunities. We link this to an increasing burden of knowledge by documenting a long-term earnings decline by founders, especially less experienced founders, greater work complexity in R&D, and more administrative work. The results suggest that established firms are better positioned to cope with the increasingburden of knowledge, in particular through the design of knowledge hierarchies, explaining why new firm entry has declined for high-tech, high-opportunity startups.

Walter Williams:

Several years ago, Project Baltimore began an investigation of Baltimore’s school system. What it found was an utter disgrace.

In 19 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, out of 3,804 students, only 14 of them, or less than 1%, were proficient in math.

In 13 of Baltimore’s high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math.

In five Baltimore City high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math or reading.

Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma—a fraudulent high school diploma.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District scored the lowest in the nation compared to 26 other urban districts for reading and mathematics at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels.

A recent video captures some of this miseducation in Milwaukee high schools: In two city high schools, only one student tested proficient in math and none are proficient in English.

Yet, the schools spent a full week learning about “systemic racism” and “Black Lives Matter activism.” By the way, a Nov. 19 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article asks: “How many Black teachers did you have? I’ve only had two.” The article concludes, “For future Black students, that number needs to go up.”

A great quote from the just passed Walter Williams:
“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”
-Walter E. Williams https://t.co/PXGncVztM1

— John Fund (@johnfund) December 2, 2020

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Adam Schuster:

Hundreds of billions of dollars in pension debt are dragging residents — and government at every level — under water.

It seems not only unfair, but also unreasonably costly, to force hundreds of millions of Americans to shoulder a burden that has nothing to do with them.

Only 4 percent of Americans working in the private sector have access to a defined-benefit pension plan as their sole form of retirement security. The rest of us must rely on some combination of 401(k)s, hybrid plans, or Social Security.

Yet the country is sitting on more than $4.7 trillion in public-pension debt at the state and local level.

To understand the problem, look no further than Illinois — Land of Lincoln and home to the nation’s worst state pension problem.

Here, politicians have made promises that they could never afford to keep. This has led to higher taxes, a constantly growing state debt load, diminished government services, and public-sector retirements that could run dry before many workers hang up their hats.

Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire:

Together, led by federal policy elites, Republicans and Democrats espoused the logic of markets in the public sphere, expanding school choice through publicly funded charter schools. Competition, both sides agreed, would strengthen schools. And the introduction of charters, this contingent believed, would empower parents as consumers by even further untethering school enrollment from family residence.

The bipartisan consensus also elevated the role of student tests in evaluating schools. The first President Bush ushered in curricular standards in 1989 when he gathered the nation’s governors, including Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for a meeting in Charlottesville, Va. In a decade, George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation mandated accountability testing nationwide, tied to the standards that his father and Mr. Clinton had promoted.

The law was then modified under the Obama administration; still, the core logic of test-based accountability as a solution to closing the achievement gap was preserved. Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s education secretary, who was cool to teachers unions and spoke the language of markets, even threatened to withhold federal funds from California in 2013 if it didn’t test all its students.

Ms. DeVos, a critic of what she calls “the overreach of the federal government in education,” displayed no interest in this neoliberal compromise. Instead, she spent much of her time crusading for religious schools.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Natasha Singer:

At Farmington Central Junior High in rural Illinois, classes still start at 8 a.m. But that’s about the only part of the school day that has not changed for Caitlyn Clayton, an eighth-grade English teacher tirelessly toggling between in-person and remote students.

At the start of the school day, Ms. Clayton stands in front of the classroom, reminding her students to properly pull their masks over their noses. Then she delves into a writing lesson, all the while scanning the room for possible virus threats. She stops students from sharing supplies. She keeps her distance when answering their questions. She disinfects the desks between classes.

Then in the afternoon, just as her in-person students head home, Ms. Clayton begins her second day: remote teaching. Sitting in her classroom, she checks in one-on-one via video with eighth graders who have opted for distance learning. To make sure they are not missing out, she spends hours more recording instructional videos that replicate her in-person classroom lessons.

Wall Street Journal:

As with environmental and immigration policy, President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to bring sweeping changes to education and to reverse some of the civil rights-related moves made under President Trump.

The current education secretary, Betsy DeVos, sought to bolster school-choice programs, proposed cuts to public-school funding and called for swift school reopenings during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has said he wants to expand resources for public schools and has pledged to appoint a teacher to head the Education Department.

“The DeVos administration has basically chosen to side on the powerful and not the vulnerable, not the marginalized,” said Arne Duncan, former President Barack Obama’s education secretary. “That’s going to fundamentally change.”

A spokeswoman from the Education Department, Angela Morabito, defended the department’s current policies, especially on school choice, saying: “There is no one less powerful and more marginalized than the student trapped in a failing, government-assigned school with no way out.”

Karol Markowicz:

“Why is my school closed, Mommy?” asks the sweet fictional child who has stopped going to school for no apparent reason. “I haaaaaaaaate Zoom,” screams the real child rolling on the floor, while his teacher repeatedly asks little Sally to mute herself and little Billy to put his shirt back on.

In-person school may be back for elementary students in the Big Apple beginning Dec. 7, but this remains a hard moment for parents and kids. While the media have published a slew of articles on how to talk to your kids about the election, racism and other tough topics, none has addressed how to help kids understand why school inexplicably opens and closes, on the whims of politicos beholden to teacher unions.

Let me take a shot at a sample “lesson plan.”

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Madison School District’s Co-Chief of Schools for elementary education, Dr. Tremayne Clardy, was named a finalist in the Verona Area School District superintendent search Monday.

Clardy is one of four candidates that will participate in the next step in the interview process to become the new superintendent, according to a release by the Verona school district.

“Verona is a special area and a special place that I can see myself in, that feels like home. It’s a place I feel like I can lead and live and grow within the community,” Clardy said.

Kery Murakami:

While President-elect Biden’s choice to chair his Council of Economic Advisors, Cecilia Rouse, didn’t call for canceling student debt, she expressed awareness of the impact debt has on borrowers in a 2007 research paper.

Rouse, in a paper co-authored with Jesse Rothstein, now a public policy and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that holding student debt made it more likely for students to choose high-paying careers and eschew lower-paying ones like teaching.

In the study, Rothstein and Rouse, who is now dean of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, examined students at an anonymous university that had stopped giving out loans and only gave students financial aid through grants.

They found that every $10,000 in debt reduces by 5 to 6 percent the chances that a student at the university would take a job at a nonprofit, in the government or in education.

“Overall, it appears that college debt affects post-graduation employment decisions: students with more debt are less likely to accept jobs in low-paying industries and accept higher paying jobs more generally,” the study found.

Sarah Mitchell:

Of all the debates in education, none are quite as absurd as the reading wars. On the one hand there are those who advocate for a phonics-based approach to reading instruction in the early years – making sure children understand sound-letter relationships so they can read words accurately without guessing from the context or pictures.

On the other hand are those who advocate a “whole of language” approach, saying the best way for children to learn whole words is to encounter them in meaningful contexts – meaning kids should be immersed in authentic literature from the get-go.

The reading wars are bizarre because the evidence behind how reading should be taught is so one-sided. Overwhelmingly it tells us that phonics must be explicitly and systematically taught within a literacy program that also develops language and reading habits.

Study after study shows that if phonics is not taught properly, student outcomes suffer across the board. Students with additional learning needs – particularly dyslexia – are further disadvantaged.

Study after study highlights the ineffectiveness of whole-of-language programs such as Reading Recovery – which is why it is no longer supported by the NSW government.

This does not mean that phonics and authentic literature experiences are mutually exclusive. But it does mean they need to be sequential. Children won’t learn to read simply by being read to, or with only incidental teaching of letters and sounds. Phonics is the foundation upon which future literacy skills are built.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Vote Pattern Analysis:

In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny. 

This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.

With this report, we rely only on publicly available data from the New York Times to identify and analyze statistical anomalies in key states. Looking at 8,954 individual vote updates (differences in vote totals for each candidate between successive changes to the running vote totals, colloquially also referred to as “dumps” or “batches”), we discover a remarkably consistent mathematical property: there is a clear inverse relationship between difference in candidates’ vote counts and and the ratio of the vote counts. (In other words, it’s not surprising to see vote updates with large margins, and it’s not surprising to see vote updates with very large ratios of support between the candidates, but it is surprising to see vote updates which are both). 

Aram:

Today, I want to address an issue with statements involving chance. To demonstrate, let’s first consider a statement that doesn’t involve chance:

“A cubic die tossed onto a flat surface will come to rest on one of its six sides.”

This claim can be empirically tested, with various dice and surfaces. If any one of our experiments results in the die spinning endlessly on a corner, we will have disproven the claim. We may have to refine the claim’s conditions; for instance, by requiring the presence of gravity. Nonetheless, it’s fairly clear what it means for the statement to be true or false. Now let’s try to make a claim involving probability:

“If a pair of standard dice are thrown, the probability of their face-up sides summing to nine will be one in nine (about 0.11 or 11%).”

What does it mean for this statement to be true? Unlike the first statement, this one doesn’t specify which result we’ll actually see. How can we possibly hope to test it, or to make use of its information?

The mathematician’s multiverse

Within the realm of abstract mathematics, we’re free to model probability in a way that fits our intuitions. Imagine a multiverse containing an infinity of possible worlds, whose total measure is 100%. Define the probability of an event, such as that of rolling a nine, to be the measure assigned to the subset of worlds in which the event actually occurs.

Bruce Vielmetti:

A violent arrest of an unarmed man in West Allis — made possible by a secret police spy plane with night vision — is now the subject of a civil rights lawsuit on claims of excessive force.

Reynaldo Narvaez, 22, drove away from police early one morning in 2018 and thought he’d lost them when he parked the car in an alley and walked away.

But police were waiting for him, at rifle point. According to Narvaez, he was then beaten, stomped and Tased, despite immediately raising his hands and kneeling after the first command to do so. The attacks left him unconscious and he was taken to a hospital.

The same aerial surveillance that led police to Narvaez recorded his arrest, video that could become key evidence if the case ever goes to a ju

WATCH: Can Schools Keep Parents in the Dark? https://t.co/EAJB1m80C8

— Alliance Defending Freedom (@AllianceDefends) November 30, 2020

Gloria Reyes:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 1, 2020

Madison School Board President Gloria Reyes Will Not Seek Re-election

Statement by Gloria Reyes

I am announcing today that I will not seek re-election to the Madison School Board. This has been a difficult decision. I’ve made it after much consideration, consultation with my family, and as always with the future of our Madison Schools and our students uppermost in my mind.

As a Board member, I have always felt that our MMSD community deserved every ounce of energy I have. I’ve given that. Now, I have taken on a big, important, new job. While my new employer is fully supportive of my public service, I believe my focus must turn completely to serving our Briarpatch youth and families.

It has been an honor to serve alongside my fellow board members, who have supported my leadership and who are steadfast and thoughtful public servants. We have accomplished a great deal together. Although there are challenges ahead, the District is in a strong place: a respected, effective leader as Superintendent and continued investment from our community thanks to two successful referenda this fall. This Board will lead us into a bright future.

During my three years on the Board, we have gone through significant changes, leaving us open for opportunities to make even more change happen. We have begun to build a new normal, where black excellence is not just words we say but is incorporated into all we do; where inclusion and equity brings justice to those most vulnerable in our communities; a new normal where we close achievement gaps. We must continue on this path.

I would like to thank all those who have supported me on this journey and who came together to elect the first Latina to the Madison School Board. It was your support and your commitment that kept me resilient and resolute in making decisions based on what was best for our students and school community.

Thank you for standing alongside me, holding me accountable, and pushing me as an elected leader to grow, to learn, and to have the courage to make tough decisions.

It is my firm belief that public schools are the foundation of a city’s success. Throughout this journey, I have learned that our Madison Public Schools are at the center of our City, an engine that drives excellence, that creates promise, and that highlights who we want to be as a community.

I will continue to support youth and our community in my new position, I will continue to work with the MMSD, and I will always be a champion for Madison Public Schools.

# # #

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Will Flanders:

Flying under the radar amidst the continuing pandemic is the news that the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) finally released school-level spending data for Wisconsin’s public schools. Required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), DPI appears to have dragged its feet as long as possible before providing this information to families and taxpayers. The data shows us that contrary to popular belief, there is little correlation between spending and student outcomes.

The data is broken down into several bins. The most important are the federal and state/local bins. These show (appropriately enough) the amount of spending from each level of government that has been allocated to each school. The other bins are the same across schools. These are the amount of federal and state/local funds that are sent to the district office and the district’s Local Education Agency (LEA). An example of how this data looks from one Milwaukee School, the Milwaukee Sign Language Academy, is presented below.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Glenn Geher:

Academic publishing is famously brutal. You might have a great manuscript that is under review then is rejected based on comments of one anonymous reviewer who thinks that you use too many exclamation points. Or a reviewer who is bitter because you didn’t cite his particular work. Or a reviewer who didn’t really read the manuscript and who goes on to criticize your work for neglecting some important statistical process that you, in fact, implemented plainly and correctly. 

Adam Rogan:

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).

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Joselle Kehoe:

When I first became fascinated with mathematics’ tightly knit abstract structures, its prominence in physics and engineering reassured me. Mathematics’ indisputable value in science made it clear that my preoccupation with its intangible expressions was not pathological. The captivating creative activity of doing mathematics has real consequences.

During my graduate school years, I began to consider that the appearance of reality actually depended on the kind of mathematics we use to see it. Was it possible that the use of mathematical ideas, like a lens, could bring some aspects of the world into sharp focus while blurring others to the point of invisibility? A new mathematics, whose development is being led by author and theoretical physicist David Deutsch, may actually highlight what mathematics can do to help us “see” our reality, and maybe even tell us something about how the process works. Deutsch is best known for his pioneering work on the quantum theory of computation, where some of the more mysterious quantum phenomena are harnessed to dramatically enhance computation. While his new mathematics is related to the quantum theory of computation, it is also distinct from it. He calls the new mathematics constructor theory: a theory designed to tell us, in the most general sense, what is and is not possible in the physical world.

Deutsch has discussed constructor theory before. An unexpected early success of the theory, he has said, has provided a new foundation for information theory. Information theory involves the quantification of information. But perhaps most relevant to this discussion is that information theory equates abstract things such as words, coded data and algorithms with physical things such as like electric signals, chemical exchanges and molecular coding. Since they are all information, the employment of information theory is transdisciplinary. Just a few of the disciplines included in its range of application are physics, electrical engineering, linguistics and neurobiology. The processing of information, expressed in the formalism of mathematics, captures the action of many kinds of systems.

Kara Grant:

Even after his classes went online last spring, William Scott Molina, a 31-year-old student at San Diego State University, thought his remote learning experience was going just fine. As required in one of his online courses, he downloaded and began using the Respondus LockDown Browser, custom software that prevents students from venturing outside of their testing page to ward off cheating.

Molina didn’t think much of the company until he started using its monitoring software for a business administration course over the summer and his webcam became a device to observe, record and study him during an exam.

By the end of the semester, Molina was the subject of multiple cheating accusations that consumed his academic life.

In the swift and chaotic pivot to virtual test-taking, companies like Respondus — along with competitors including Honorlock, ProctorU and Proctorio — have stepped in to help schools keep watch on students. Because the new digital tools are required in certain courses, students are being forced to subject themselves to surveillance inside their own homes and open themselves up to disputes over “suspicious activities,” as defined by an algorithm.

The Economist:

Around the world covid-19 has messed up children’s education. They began to be shut out of classrooms all the way back in February. Even in countries where schools have stayed open, lessons and tests have been disrupted. Some countries pressed ahead with national exams (see article) this year. A few others, including Britain, France and Ireland, cancelled them all. They came up with new ways of awarding grades instead. The fact that big exams have proved so vulnerable to disruption has led to new questions about their usefulness. Are there better ways of measuring what children have learned?

Exams have plenty of problems. They are often unreliable; a study in Israel found that test-takers’ performance can be affected by smog. Many children find them stressful. Plenty of places run them badly. School-leavers in China are often set questions that require them to parrot propaganda. Poorly written test papers in developing countries lead to wild swings in pass rates. Countries, including Algeria and Ethiopia, have resorted to shutting down the internet at exam time to prevent cheating.

Douglas Heingartner:

A new study has found that popular forms of spiritual training — such as mindfulness, meditation, and energy healing — correlate with both narcissism and “spiritual superiority.”

An implicit feature of spiritual training is that it allows its adherents to distance themselves from their egos, and thereby from things such as the need for social approval or success. By encouraging self-compassion and non-judgmental self-acceptance, spiritual training should presumably make people less concerned with such things.

But as a new paper explains, spiritual training may have the opposite effect. Namely, spiritual training might in fact enhance people’s need to feel “more successful, more respected or more loved,” as the authors Roos Vonk and Anouk Visser write.

Byron Tau:

A new survey found widespread concern among Americans about government tracking of their whereabouts through their digital devices, with an overwhelming majority saying that a warrant should be required to obtain such data.

A new Harris Poll survey indicated that 55% of American adults are worried that government agencies are tracking them through location data generated from their cellphones and other digital devices. The poll also found that 77% of Americans believe the government should get a warrant to buy the kind of detailed location information that is frequently purchased and sold on the commercial market by data brokers.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that several U.S. law-enforcement agencies are buying geolocation data from brokers for criminal-law enforcement and border-security purposes without any court oversight.

Federal agencies have concluded that they don’t require a warrant because the location data is available for purchase on the open market. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that a warrant is required to compel cellphone carriers to turn over location data to law enforcement, but it hasn’t addressed whether consumers have any expectation of privacy or due process in data generated from apps rather than carriers.