Sarah Carr:

Yet Daniel’s progress came to an abrupt halt after Medford schools closed down in mid-March in response to the spread of COVID-19. The tutoring came to an end. The intensive, small group classes in reading disappeared, as did all meaningful instruction, from what Ronayne could tell. Daniel, who is being referred to by his middle name to protect his privacy, did meet online with his teacher and classmates about twice a week starting in April, his mother says. But it was always an informal meeting focused on weekend activities and other non-academic concerns — gatherings that, Ronayne says, Daniel’s teacher referred to as “circle time.”

When Ronayne complained about the absence of any reading instruction, school staff referred her to a class website with some generic exercises — a worksheet introducing multi-syllable words, for instance. Medford Public Schools’ director of pupil services, Joan Bowen, acknowledges that Medford, along with districts across Massachusetts, initially used many independent learning activities because “we thought it was a short-term closure.” Bowen says state guidelines initially asked schools not to teach new material, and the district’s online learning instruction became more rigorous over the course of the spring.

Ronayne says teaching did ramp up, except for what her son needed: real-time reading instruction. By May, Medford school officials say, they had created detailed remote learning plans for every student who receives special education services. “They were very specific to the individual student,” Bowen says. The school district, however, does not comment on individual students.

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

New Jersey Left Behind:

This is a petition circulating among Montclair parents who oppose the district’s decision to begin the school year remotely, despite 70% of parents voting for an “in-person hybrid model.” At the bottom of the petition, signatories ask that district personnel, not MEA (Montclair Education Association, the teachers union) fulfill requests under the Open Records Act “in order to ensur[e] transparency.” This request suggests a concern that MEA may be less than forthright in supplying public records on negotiations between union leaders and district leaders re: school reopenings.

Many families across our district are deeply frustrated, even devastated, that Montclair Public Schools (MPS) began the 2020-21 school year remotely. According to the district survey sent out to evaluate the virtual model, more than half of responding parents had no confidence that remote learning had a positive effect on their childs’ education. Furthermore, the top three biggest obstacles cited for remote learning were: missing friends (78%) missing teachers (60%) and disengagement with remote learning (58%). The current remote model fails to address any of these concerns.

The fact that ventilation systems need repair does not mean we should wait to start in-person schooling. A total of 434 districts in New Jersey are hybrid as of September 2. Public schools in neighboring towns are already providing or pivoting back to in-person learning using creative alternatives (e.g. Glen Ridge, Cedar Grove). We have shared with Dr. Ponds the 29-page district-wide proposal that provides detailed school maps, equipment lists and budgets (available on our website).

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

Veronica Barassi:

Tracking the health of the unborn and women is certainly not new, yet with the use of pregnancy apps, this surveillance and tracking has reached a new level. These apps are enabling a situation whereby corporations have access to a grab bag of personal data on the unborn, including not only health markers like weight and heart rate, but also cultural background, the parents’ thoughts, family ties, and family medical history, to name a few.

Once a baby is born, parents might use baby trackers or wearables to manage the baby’s routine and record sleep times, feeds, and bowel movements. Again, documenting these behaviors is not new. Families of newborns have historically jotted this information in journals. When my first daughter was born, my mother showed me the journal that she kept of me as a newborn. Written in black ink on yellow pages and in my mother’s familiar handwriting, there was a list of feeding times, naps, and diaper changes. She kept the journal in a drawer of her study and no one outside our family had access to it. Consequently, even if the tracking of the baby, like the tracking of the unborn, has always existed, baby apps — with their charts, reports, and interactive elements — have greatly transformed this historical practice and given it a new datacentric dimension.

I remember being especially fascinated by one user who wrote how upset she was about losing her “kick count data” and ended her comment with an angry, “Shame on you!”

As one respondent — the mother of a 13-year-old and a 6-month-old baby — told me when I was conducting research for Child | Data | Citizen, a three-year-long research project that explores the datafication of childhood in the era of big data and artificial intelligence, data tracking was key to the “running of her family life,” and she was particularly grateful for a baby-tracking app. “I love data when it comes to work,” Katie told me. “I love data when it comes to everything, because it gives you information and you can plan. I also use self-tracking apps for fitness for the same reasons.”

Peter Bale:

We’ve grown used to corporate responsibility extending to social and environmental issues but there may be risks to us all when that gets stretched to free speech and who can have a platform on otherwise blind global services.

Amazon’s decision to expel the communications service Parler from its Amazon Web Services cloud platform is a step further than Twitter permanently suspending Donald Trump from its service over his incitement of the mob that broke into the US Capitol last week.

Apple and Google have joined in, removing or threatening to remove Parler from their app stores unless it controls threats and incitement in conversations it hosts. By doing so, they are effectively nullifying the fast-growing network promoted to those on the right who believe their free speech rights are threatened by Twitter and Facebook.

“This episode is…a reminder of the immense power that the social media platforms have as gatekeepers of public discourse. That power should trouble you even if you agree with the platforms’ decisions as to Trump,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University said on Twitter @jameeljaffer.

Laura Bauer & Judy Thomas:

Taken into foster care, through the eyes of a child

Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home. By Shelly Yang | Neil Nakahodo

For the past year, The Kansas City Star has examined what happens to kids who age out of foster care and found that, by nearly every measure, states are failing in their role as parents to America’s most vulnerable children.

Roughly 23,000 kids across the country are churned out of the system every year, and their lives highlight a distinct path traveled by many:

Taken from an unstable home. Terrified by their first contact with the state. Emotionally and cognitively damaged in care as they are moved from home to home. Robbed of an education equal to their peers. Turned out to the streets unprepared to stand on their own. And changed for life.

“We are sending more foster kids to prison than college,” said Brent Kent, who spent the past 3½ years helping Indiana foster children transition into adulthood. “And what do we lose as a result? Generations of young people.

“I think as a society we view foster children the same way that we might view offenders coming out of prison or addicts in recovery. We forget that they are just children, that they were put in foster care and removed from their families through no fault of their own.”

As part of its investigation, The Star surveyed nearly 6,000 inmates in 12 states — representing every region of the country — to determine how many had been in foster care and what effect it had on their lives.

Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care. Some spent the majority of their childhood in strangers’ homes, racking up more placements than birthdays.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Ken Mayer watched on TV earlier this month as a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, killing a police officer, pillaging the hallowed halls of democracy and delaying the process of certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The UW-Madison political science professor had previously described how Trump critics’ feared this could happen — how Trump posed a threat to democracy — in a January 2019 syllabus for his class on the American Presidency.

A student enrolled in the course at that time considered Mayer’s description of Trump as biased and inflammatory. She posted the document to Facebook, which went viral, prompting stories in conservative media and a letter from a Republican lawmaker who leads the Assembly’s higher education committee.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed Mayer for brainwashing students during a segment of his show called “Campus Craziness.” To Carlson’s millions of viewers, Mayer was just the latest example of liberal indoctrination of students on a college campus.

A few thoughts. Grateful for the @UWMadison, @donmoyn, and students backing me throughout.https://t.co/BLDOcUWCwU

— Ken Mayer (@uwkenmayer) January 17, 2021

Gavri Birnbaum:

I am biomedical scientist considering a switch to computational biology (specially computational immunology). I would love to get to a point that I can get a job in it in the next 6 months. Any tips will be much appreciated.

amuz view from above:

Rosa Parks.

Eran Bendavid Christopher Oh Jay Bhattacharya John P.A. Ioannidis:

Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a non‐significant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, e.g., the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95CI ‐5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden, and +13% (‐12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.

Conclusions

While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.

Applied Divinity Studies:

As Milton Friedman put it, the promise of liberal capitalism is to put “freedom before equality”, and still “get a high degree of both”. And yet, throughout Covid, we’ve had neither liberty nor prosperity. Instead, liberalism has resulted in twin failures:

• Authoritarian lockdowns and coercive quarantines dramatically outperformed voluntary social distancing. [2]

• Our leading institutions failed, first to take Covid seriously, then to promote the use of masks, then to enable distribution of the vaccine. In fact, they worked actively against these causes. [3]

Perhaps worst of all, the US did not even perform well with regards to individual liberties. Though we were able to avoid truly coercive quarantines, we did deploy numerous lockdowns, shutdowns and curfews. And yet, as our Covid cases continue to rise, it appears that we’ve gotten the worst of both worlds.

These points present a serious crisis for the US. More broadly, they threaten the continued dominance of liberalism as our default political ideology.

As in all crises, these weaknesses have not been a discovery, so much as as the revelation of open secrets. In 1992, Fukuyama’s The End of History claimed:

Amsterdam Stories:

The immediate victims of this situation (which happened throughout all major Dutch cities) were children and bikers, confined to narrow, dangerous streets, full of traffic. The consequences were brutal:

“The number of traffic casualties rose to a peak of 3,300 deaths in 1971. More than 400 children were killed in traffic accidents that year”, reads this Guardian article.

The decrease of bike usage in the Netherlands is clear in the next graphic:

Matthew Lesh:

A review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press (September 4, 2018) 352 pages.

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.

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

Cathy Young:

While Ngo (with whom I was on friendly terms for a period of time) started out as a solid reporter on culture-war issues, his recent work can certainly be criticizedas biased and often sloppy, and he can be faulted for getting too close to extreme elements on “his” side. But the same charges can be directed at many journalists on the left. And there is certainly nothing about Ngo’s Twitter presence to justify his banning.

Meanwhile, activists in Portland have been mobbing a bookstore for carrying Ngo’s new anti-Antifa book, Unmasked, in its online catalogue.

In recent months, attempts to de-platform or punish “harmful” speech have targeted criticism of violence and looting related to anti-racism protests, as well as arguments that troubled teens are being too readily steered toward medical gender transition. In such a climate, calls to de-platform “dangerous” expression can easily lead to a disastrous shrinking of space for much-needed open discourse and dissent.

Some argue that such concerns are misplaced and frivolous when far-right terrorism remains a clear and present danger. Adam Serwer, a writer for The Atlantic, summed up this view in a sarcastic tweet:

Joanne Jacobs:

Parents and students called for schools to reopen at Thousand Oaks Elementary in Berkeley, where Kamala Harris once attended. Photo: Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group

In ultra-liberal Berkeley, parents protested school closures at an elementary school that was supposed to open this week, reports John Woolfolk in the San Jose Mercury News.

Wednesday was supposed to be the day Jessica Brown’s first-grader, Isaiah, would return to the classroom for the first time since the coronavirus shuttered schools across California last March.

It dawned instead with Isaiah outside a closed Berkeley elementary campus with his mother, sister and dozens of other frustrated parents and kids, scribbling out letters to school officials and even Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who once attended district schools, urging reopening.

“Enough is enough!” said Brown. “We’ve seen solutions work in other places as well as in private schools. If they can do it, why can’t we?”

In a December survey, 40 percent of parents were ready to return to in-person learning, 20 percent were unsure and 40 percent wanted students to stay online, for now.

Kristie Kahl:

The decline in total testosterone was observed even among men with normal body mass index.

From 1999 to 2016, testosterone levels have declined in adolescent and young adult men (AYA), according to results presented at the 2020 American Urological Association Virtual Experience1.

“Overall male testosterone decline can be attributed to multiple etiologies. The United States has an aging population with older males exhibiting lower testosterone levels. Furthermore, overall population has an increase in comorbidities, including diabetes, which may have cause this testosterone decrease nationally,” Soum Lokeshwar, MD, MBA, incoming urology resident at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, said during a press briefing.

“However, most of these explanations for testosterone deficiency may be attributed to age. This time-dependent decline in testosterone has not been investigated in adolescent and young adult males,” added Lokeshwar, who was at the University Of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, at the time of the study.

Shaun Walker:

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump’s social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there.

“Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. “There can be no consent to censorship.”

Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:

This entry explores the topic of free speech. It starts with a general discussion of freedom in relation to speech and then moves on to examine one of the first and best defenses of free speech, based on the harm principle. This provides a useful starting point for further digressions on the subject. The discussion moves on from the harm principle to assess the argument that speech can be limited because it causes offense rather than direct harm. I then examine arguments that suggest speech can be limited for reasons of democratic equality. I finish with an examination of paternalistic and moralistic reasons against protecting speech, and a reassessment of the harm principle.

Matthew Stewart:

Alan Jacobs’ new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, is a coaxing argument to read “old books that come from strange times.” Readers of his previous works The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and How to Think will not be surprised that Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor University, brings intellectual heft to the self-help genre.

Jacobs focuses on why we ought to pay attention to old books. There is no surprise in learning that such reading makes us deeper, fuller persons, and more humble. Ex post facto moralizing comes easily; working to see things through the eyes of those who lived before us, to understand the confines and dilemmas that they faced, to acknowledge their inability to foresee all consequences—this takes patience, effort, and good will. Reading old books develops “personal density” and provides “a balm for agitated souls.”

The book’s timeliness is without question. The past is currently under siege. Reading lists at universities are undergoing another round of scrutiny primarily trained on old texts. Freshman common readings are almost always new books chosen for their immediate relevance. The default position of too many students toward old books is suspicious, even dismissive, though studies continue to find students to be worryingly unacquainted with the history that produced these books.

What Jacobs does not confront directly, however, is the threat posed by a progressive ideology that constantly devalues the past. What holds sway in the academy today is a rejection of the old, with little desire to preserve much of the past.

Related: Chronological Snobbery.

Alec Johnson:

Data from the Waukesha School District shows students have been struggling in the district’s hybrid learning model, with about 30% of high school students failing at least one class during the first quarter last fall.

The data, which came from an open records request submitted by parent Rebecca Flaherty, was sent to a reporter by the Wisconsin Achievement Partnership, a group of parents pushing for five-days-a-week in-person instruction. 

It showed 27.73% of district’s high school students in the current school year had a failing grade in at least one class and GPAs had dipped significantly at the district’s five high schools (West, North, South, Engineering Prep and Health Academy). 

Broken down by school, almost 49% of students failing at least one class are juniors at Waukesha South High School. The data also showed that, for example, average GPA at Waukesha North High School dropped about a half a point — from 3.003 to 2.641 — from the first quarter of the 2019-20 school year to the first quarter of 2020-21.

In the first quarter of the 2019-20 school year, 269 high school students failed at least one class. That number ballooned to 982 during the first quarter of the 2020-21 school year, a 265.1% increase.  

“We have been aware of the data and collaborating together as adults in the system to help kids succeed in multiple learning models,” Waukesha School District Superintendent James Sebert said. “We believe that getting back into school five days a week will be helpful in increasing engagement levels and academic performance.” 

The district’s middle and high school students will begin in-person learning, five days a week beginning Jan. 26.

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

Deven Carlson:

Approximately 85,000 Ohio students use interdistrict open enrollment to attend a neighboring school district. Titled Open Enrollment and Student Diversity in Ohio’s Schools, this new report examines whether these student transfers are creating more diverse schools, or possibly worsening segregation.

To assess this question, Dr. Deven Carlson of the University of Oklahoma compares current segregation levels across Ohio’s 600 plus school districts to a counterfactual in which all students attend their home district (i.e., no open enrollment). Based on his analysis of Ohio Department of Education data for the 2012–13 to 2017–18 school years, the following findings emerge.

Ohio school districts are highly segregated by race. As of 2017–18, 70.0 percent of Black students would need to change districts to achieve an even distribution (that is, each district’s enrollment would reflect the state average of Black students). Segregation levels in Ohio are higher than the national average where 61 percent of Black students would need to relocate.

The Economist:

That should make doing something easier, as officials know where to concentrate resources. Yet their efforts are failing. After some years of fewer killings, last year was “extraordinarily tough”, he says. Chicago saw over 770 murders, 50% more than in 2019, and around 3,000 people shot and wounded. Carjackings more than doubled. Eddie Bocanegra, who works with young men most at risk, says killers, many of them teenagers, have grown more ruthless. He describes a victim shot 21 times with an automatic rifle. He blames increased violence on more lethal weaponry, including magazines that hold dozens of rounds.

Akiyoshi KITAOKA, Professor, Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka, Japan studying visual perception, visual illusion, optical illusion, trompe l’oeil, 3D, etc.

Hannah Bailey:

Donald Trump’s controversial removal from social media platforms has reignited debate around the censorship of information published online. But the issue of disinformation and manipulation on social media goes far beyond one man’s Twitter account. And it is much more widespread than previously thought. 

Since 2016, our team at the Oxford Internet Institute has monitored the rapid global proliferation of social media manipulation campaigns, which we define as the use of digital tools to influence online public behaviour. In the past four years, social media manipulation has evolved from a niche concern to a global threat to democracy and human rights.

Our latest report found that organised social media manipulation campaigns are now common across the world — identified in 81 countries in 2020, up from 70 countries in 2019. The map below shows the global distribution of these 81 countries, marked in dark blue.

GianCarlo Canaparo:

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Jan. 12 in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, a case that will decide whether public universities that infringe their students’ First Amendment right to free speech can be held accountable for it.

The case was brought by Chike Uzuegbunam, who was a student at Georgia Gwinnett College from 2013 to 2017. While there, he converted to Christianity, a decision that he said “brought me so much joy and purpose that I wanted to share my faith with as many people as possible.”

He tried to do that by having one-on-one conversations with students in a large plaza on campus where many other student groups and activists do the same.

Campus police told him he had to stop and move instead to a “free speech zone.” He did, but police quickly stopped him again, saying that his speech constituted “disorderly conduct,” which the college defined as any speech that causes students subjective discomfort.

The police threatened to prosecute Uzuegbunam if he continued, so he stopped.

John Ashmore:

Is an Easter Egg essential? Is five miles away local? Can I sit on a park bench?

These are just a few in a long line of silly arguments and non-stories about whether someone has precisely followed the Government’s rather imprecise Covid regulations. Some have taken to calling this ‘Scotch Egging’ in honour of the ludicrous, protracted debate over what constitutes a “substantial” pub meal.

This week’s Scotch Egging is a row over whether Boris Johnson’s recent bike ride around the Olympic Park was really ‘local’, given that it took place seven miles from Downing Street. In a similar vein, Derbyshire Police got themselves into a stink by fining two women £200 for driving five miles for a walk around a reservoir. The absurdity of that story was compounded by an officer apparently telling one of the women that her peppermint tea was “classed as a picnic” – if this is a police state, then it’s quite a silly one.

Ryan Tracy and Jeff Horwitz:

State attorneys general said in a lawsuit earlier this month that a 2018 business agreement between two digital advertising giants, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, was an illegal price-fixing deal. Lawmakers are calling for further investigation. The companies say it was above board.

The Wall Street Journal viewed part of a recent unredacted draft version of the lawsuit, which elaborates on allegations in the redacted complaint filed in a Texas federal district court.

Ten Republican attorneys general, led by Texas’ Ken Paxton, say Google gave Facebook special terms and access to its ad server, a ubiquitous tool for allocating advertising space across the web. This and other conduct by Google, they allege in the final lawsuit, harms competition and deprives “advertisers, publishers and consumers of improved quality, greater transparency, increased output and/or lower prices.”

Previously unreported details from the draft, including contract terms and company documents, shed light on the legal battle ahead and the relationship between two tech giants who have called each other competitors even as they hold an ever-widening share of the digital advertising market.

Many taxpayer supported k-12 School Districts use Google and Facebook services, including Madison.

Chronicle:

Several years ago, The Atlantic published a history of authors’, readers’, and reviewers’ gripes about book reviews. Reviews, the genre’s critics have charged over the centuries, are unsatisfying — too nice, too bland, too nepotistic. And while those barbs were levied at the literary book review, academics who work in book-intensive fields will likely find they resonant.

In general, academic book reviews are derivative works with a utilitarian purpose. They’re supposed to summarize scholarly books’ contributions, evaluate their worth, and situate them within a broader academic landscape. They can weigh heavily on tenure committees, depending on the discipline. And they consume a significant share of journals’ page counts. In its December 2020 issue alone, Perspectives on Politics, the journal that carries book reviews for the American Political Science Association, published over 80 reviews (not counting review essays, symposia, or author-meets-critics dialogues).

Given the amount of scholarly attention, resources, and energy that reviews command, it’s worth asking if they’re worth it. Looking at the state of academic book reviewing, it’s possible, even probable, that we should jettison such reviews in favor of other ways of linking books back to the scholarly conversation.

The target of my criticism is the standard book review: the standalone, capsule review of a scholarly volume published in an academic journal running about 500 to 1,000 words. That’s different from a “review essay,” which can run to thousands of words and cover one, two, or many books, or a review symposium, in which several authors discuss a single book. It’s also a form apart from the sorts of reviews for general audiences one encounters in major newspapers and magazines or in dedicated periodicals like The New York Review of Books.

Key finding: “aggregate COVID-19 incidence among general population in counties where K–12 schools offer in-person education (401.2 per 100,000) was similar to that in counties offering only virtual/online ed (418.2 per 100,000).” Cc: @DeAngelisCorey https://t.co/q2cGnLorCV

— Lindsey Burke (@lindseymburke) January 14, 2021

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

Colin Dickey:

In his 1964 Harper’s Magazine article on fact-checking, “There Are 00 Trees in Russia,” Otto Friedrich related the story of an unnamed magazine correspondent who had been assigned a profile of Egyptian president Mohamed Naguib. As was custom, he wrote his story leaving out the “zips”—facts to be filled in later—including noting that Naguib was “such a modest man that his name did not appear among the 000 people listed in Who’s Who in the Middle East” and that he elected not to live in the royal palace, surrounded “by an 00-foot-high wall.” The editor then sent the article to a fact checker in Cairo to fill in the zips. No answer came and, with the deadline looming, the editor, fuming, rewrote the story so the facts weren’t needed. A week later, the magazine received a telegram from the fact checker:

Am in jail and allowed to send only one cable since was arrested while measuring fifteen foot wall outside farouks palace and have just finished counting thirtyeight thousand five hundred twentytwo names who’s who in mideast.

Friedrich’s anecdote reveals the great truth of fact-checking: while facts are sacred to writers, readers, and, above all, editors, they are sometimes more work than they’re worth. The importance of fact-checking—particularly when it comes to inconsequential detail—is based on the long-held theory that if you’re fastidious about the little things, the reader will trust you with the big things. But the history of fact-checking suggests that too often, the accumulation of verifiable minutiae can become an end unto itself.

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.

Degree Query:

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.”

So wrote John Cage, composer, teacher, and lifelong student. And he had a point. If everybody in your class reads the same book, what hope is there of a chance encounter between two random texts?

Thanks to the Open Syllabus Project, you can now access the reading lists of more than 2,500 colleges around the country. Whatever subject you’re studying, it is now easy to diversify your reading without straying from reputable sources. Or, if you can’t enroll in college right now, create your own reading list for a bit of home-schooling.

Degree Query was curious what the landscape of American college books looks like. What are the texts that are informing tomorrow’s society? We used Open Syllabus to identify the most commonly assigned college books in every state, overall, and in five core subjects: Political Science, Business, Computer Science, Economics, and (of course) English Literature.

Martin Kleppman:

Censorship resistance

When we think of censorship, we think of totalitarian states exercising violent control over their population, crushing dissent and stifling the press. Against such an adversary, technologies that provide censorship resistance seem like a positive step forward, since they promote individual liberty and human rights.

However, often the adversary is not a totalitarian state, but other users. Censorship resistance means that anybody can say anything, without suffering consequences. And unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who say and do rather horrible things. Thus, as soon as a censorship-resistant social network becomes sufficiently popular, I expect that it will be filled with messages from spammers, neo-nazis, and child pornographers (or any other type of content that you consider despicable). One person’s freedom from violence is another person’s censorship, and thus, a system that emphasises censorship resistance will inevitably invite violence against some people.

I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case. If we want technologies to help build the type of society that we want to live in, then certain abusive types of behaviour must be restricted. Thus, content moderation is needed.

The difficulty of content moderation

If we want to declare some types of content as unacceptable, we need a process for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable material. But this is difficult. Where do you draw the line between healthy scepticism and harmful conspiracy theory? Where do you draw the line between healthy satire, using exaggeration for comic effect, and harmful misinformation? Between legitimate disagreement and harassment? Between honest misunderstanding and malicious misrepresentation?

Hacker News:

My kids are in lockdown homeschooling, and sitting in on some of the live lessons you can see the cracks – very slow, kids moving at different paces, and much much harder for teacher to see who is keeping up and not.

Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at “proper” university.

Eugene Volokh:

After the Capitol was stormed by a mob fired up by President Trump, Facebook suspended his account, arguing that it was used “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.” Twitter, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence,” has done the same, blocking Mr. Trump from using its platform to communicate to his more than 80 million followers.

What should we think about the power of such private corporations — and of the companies’ immensely wealthy owners — over American political speech?

Daniel Bennett:

Nobody likes to lose. But Americans will need to get better at losing if we want to maintain our system of government in the years ahead. And Christians of all people should model losing well, based in our commitment to Christ’s victory through the cross and what we are told in Scripture about our nature as losers in the eyes of the world.

Neither Americans in general nor Christians in particular have demonstrated an ability to be good sports in defeat this week, though. When Congress certified the results of November’s presidential election, formally naming Joe Biden the winner, dozens of representatives and several senators objected to the results of the election in a number of states. These were unsupported claims with no chance of changing the outcome, but they did turn what is usually a formal and boring process into a partisan frenzy, and perhaps a litmus test for Republicans running for national office in 2022 and 2024.

Ever since the election concluded in November, there have been allegations that the election was taken from President Donald Trump. The president has long perfected the image of being a winner, and some Trump voters could not believe it was possible for him to lose. The only explanation was an insidious plot to steal the election and subvert the will of the American people. Fighting these results therefore became a matter of standing up for America itself.

Dean Mosiman:

Hotels, restaurants, taverns, gyms, live entertainment venues, movie theaters, and some retail establishments, as well as properties located in specific geographic locations such as State Street or Capitol Square damaged by summer protests, were impacted most, Drea said. Some businesses, such as grocery or liquor stores, have maintained strong sales, she said.

“Recent property tax data shows the success of our business community was driving the increase in Madison’s tax base prior to the pandemic,” said Zach Brandon, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce. “When our businesses struggle, it affects our ability to fund city services. This is another example of why our local leaders need to take concrete steps to build public confidence and help businesses recover.”

Jennifer Brown:

The number of young people in Colorado’s youth corrections system because they killed someone jumped by 32% in the past fiscal year, an alarming increase that coincides with the system’s largest spike in youth violent crime in a decade.

Even more startling: In the past four years, the number of youth in the Colorado Division of Youth Services for the offenses of homicide and manslaughter has risen by 141%.

While 41 young people were held for homicide or manslaughter in the past fiscal year, there were 17 incarcerated for those crimes in 2017. Those numbers don’t include teens who were tried in court as adults and sent to the adult prison system.

The increase is a “reflection, unfortunately, of access to handguns on the street and an increase in youth violence,” said Anders Jacobson, division director.

Armand A. Fusco, Ed.D.:

Part 2 stressed 11 lessons to be learned for the new Madison Literacy Task Force, but the same would be true for any reading task force or advisory group especially when Part 1 is included.

It’s should be clear from the first two parts that a great deal of research and information has been done relating to reading, so a logical question to ask is whether this trove of data has improved reading after decades of efforts? It was answered rather shockingly and disappointing during a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers, “At National Literacy Summit, State Education Chiefs Warn of Reading Stagnation, ”(Kevin Mahnken), T74, 01/27/2020:

An edit of the results follow and reveals, in summary, that credible reading research is apparently ignored by too many educators and that’s the main reason why reading results are disastrous; yet, schools supposedly are about learning and growing. The Summit information indicates it is not happening with the most critical skill required for academic success impacting minorities the most—literacy. Actually, it’s very hard to believe that this is still a crisis issue in this, the 21st century.

“Reading instruction in American schools is so rife with poor curriculum and pedagogical dogma that a prominent academic likened it to ‘the equivalent of chemistry departments teaching alchemy.’ We’ve had about 130 years of bad practice…

Note: Imagine of medical field had 130 years of bad practice for patients, or the corporate world doing the same? Heads would role! There would be and have been consequences, but not in education.

The roundtable discussion addressed the causes — from poorly prepared teachers to inadequate guidance on curriculum — of the well-documented stagnation in reading achievement across the United States.

Note; How can this happen when teacher preparation institutions must be accredited from an independent group, but not necessarily an unbiased group, involved in a rather rigorous process? There is only one answer and that is that the standards being used are inadequate and/or poorly followed; further, the independent group is also biased since they come from the same education society.

Related: The Reading Rat Race Series Part 2: The Reading Champion: 11 Lessons for Madison’s Literacy Task Force

Inside Education Column: Madison’s Literacy Task Force: Reading Renaissance or Recycling?

President-Elect Biden:

President-elect Biden is calling on Congress to ​provide $170 billion — supplemented by additional state and local relief resources — for K-12 schools and institutions of higher education. These resources will help schools serve all students, no matter where they are learning, and help achieve President-elect Biden’s goal to open the majority of K-8 schools within the first 100 days of his Administration.

Provide $130 billion to help schools to safely reopen.​ Schools need flexible resources to safely reopen and operate and/or facilitate remote learning. The president-elect’s plan will provide $130 billion to support schools in safely reopening. These funds can be used to reduce class sizes and modify spaces so students and teachers can socially distance; improve ventilation; hire more janitors and implement mitigation measures; provide personal protective equipment; ensure every school has access to a nurse; increase transportation capacity to facilitate social distancing on the bus; hire counselors to support students as they transition back to the classroom; close the digital divide that is exacerbating inequities during the pandemic; provide summer school or other support for students that will help make up lost learning time this year; create and expand community schools; and cover other costs needed to support safely reopening and support students. These funds will also include provisions to ensure states adequately fund education and protect students in low-income communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19. Districts must ensure that funds are used to not only reopen schools, but also to meet students’ academic, mental health and social, and emotional needs in response to COVID-19, (e.g. through extended learning time, tutoring, and counselors), wherever they are learning. Funding can be used to prevent cuts to state pre-k programs. A portion of funding will be reserved for a COVID-19 Educational Equity Challenge Grant, which will support state, local and tribal governments in partnering with ​teachers, parents, and other stakeholders to advance equity- and evidence-based policies to respond to COVID-related educational challenges and give all students the support they need to succeed.​ ​In addition to this funding, schools will be able to access FEMA Disaster Relief Fund resources to get reimbursed for certain COVID-19 related expenses and will receive support to implement regular testing protocols.

Madison has received substantial new federal taxpayer funds during the past 12 months.

Jon Miltimore:

n Monday, Facebook blocked former presidential candidate Ron Paul from his own page. The move came hours after the longtime congressman and libertarian hero shared an article he wrote criticizing Twitter and Facebook for banning President Donald Trump from their platforms.

“Last week’s massive social media purges – starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets – was shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas,” Paul wrote. “The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two ‘offending’ Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.”

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook (and instagram) services, including Madison.

Christopher Kuhagen and Alec Johnson:

Is your school district in person, hybrid (mix of in person and virtual) or completely virtual?

Check out our list, which we will update as changes happen during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Districts are listed alphabetically and include those in the Journal Sentinel and its suburban coverage area in southeast Wisconsin.

A majority of the districts that have in-person or hybrid learning offer a virtual option for students who prefer this model. Our list doesn’t account for classes within schools that may be quarantined. This list will be updated as we know more. Email reporters Christopher Kuhagen at christopher.kuhagen@jrn.com or Alec Johnson at alec.johnson@jrn.com with any details about your district.

Margaret MacMillan:

So why do history faculties, which accept the need to study other great forces in history, such as changes in the means of production or systems of belief, shy from war? I suspect that horror at the phenomenon itself has affected universities’ willingness to treat it as a subject for scholarship. Years ago, when I proposed a new course on war and society, an education consultant asked me, “Why don’t you call it peace studies?”

I have since met with incomprehension, even hostility, when I have pointed out that wars can bring unintended benefits. However much I say that we would not choose to make war in order to improve our societies, I am charged with loving war. Yet nobody would say that the study of imperialism, racism or famine means that we think those are good things.

Jessie Hellmann:

A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that in-person classes at K-12 schools do not appear to lead to increases in COVID-19 when compared with areas that have online-only learning.

The CDC study noted that in the week beginning Dec. 6, coronavirus cases among the general population in counties where K-12 schools opened for in-person learning were similar to rates in counties that were online only.

“CDC recommends that K-12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely,” the authors of the report wrote.

As of Dec. 7, about 62 percent of K-12 school districts were offering either full or partial in person-learning, but reports of outbreaks at schools have been limited, according to the CDC.

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.

Jarrett Stepman:

“Critical race theory and its parent, critical theory, are rooted in a worldview that wants to dismantle social and governmental norms,” Butcher said.

While racism and other prejudices still and will continue to exist, Butcher said this does not mean that we don’t have to ignore the intolerance and “dogmas” of critical theory.

“Critical theory is not a sympathetic perspective with policy goals that lead to racial reconciliation, freedom, and opportunity,” Butcher said. “It’s talking about subjugation and retribution.”

Proponents of critical theory, Butcher explained, even acknowledge that their ideas counter the values of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, which were essential elements of the American founding.

These ideas are not just consigned to the margins of academia, however, as explained by Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at Discovery Institute and fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Instead, they have become pervasive in countless private and governmental institutions.

Rufo conducted research into human resource departments and governmental agencies that have become increasingly reliant on critical race theory.

Tyler Cowen:

Another problem is what my colleague Bryan Caplan has labeled “the idea trap.” Social science research indicates that in troubled times people are more likely to turn to bad ideas. The distressed German economy of the 1920s and early 1930s, for example, helped to breed support for the Nazis.

More recently, the global economy has been very much a mixed bag since the financial crisis of 2008. So people might begin to embrace worse ideas, which in turn will breed subsequent volatility. Such a cycle can worsen over time, and a ragged recovery from the Covid-19 deep recession could exacerbate this dynamic. It simply isn’t good for decision-making if everyone is feeling frazzled and stressed.

Wisconsin Institute for Law and liberty:

Notice of Claim asserts racial quotas violate the law, Constitution

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a Notice of Claim, Wednesday, putting the City of Madison on notice that an ordinance and resolution creating the new Police Civilian Oversight Board imposes unconstitutional racial quotas. WILL represents seven Madison residents challenging Madison’s decision to require nine members of the eleven-member Police Civilian Oversight Board to belong to specific racial groups – a clear violation of the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination.

The Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “While it may represent the current zeitgeist, the City of Madison’s decision to insert racial quotas and classifications into law violates the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination and equal protection before the law. The City of Madison may think they are advancing racial progress, but this policy is, in effect, cloaking deeply regressive policies of racial discrimination.”

Gulbahar Haitiwaji:

The man on the phone said he worked for the oil company, “In accounting, actually”. His voice was unfamiliar to me. At first, I couldn’t make sense of what he was calling about. It was November 2016, and I had been on unpaid leave from the company since I left China and moved to France 10 years earlier. There was static on the line; I had a hard time hearing him.

“You must come back to Karamay to sign documents concerning your forthcoming retirement, Madame Haitiwaji,” he said. Karamay was the city in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang where I’d worked for the oil company for more than 20 years.

“In that case, I’d like to grant power of attorney,” I said. “A friend of mine in Karamay takes care of my administrative affairs. Why should I come back for some paperwork? Why go all that way for such a trifle? Why now?”

The man had no answers for me. He simply said he would call me back in two days after looking into the possibility of letting my friend act on my behalf.

My husband, Kerim, had left Xinjiang in 2002 to look for work. He tried first in Kazakhstan, but came back disillusioned after a year. Then in Norway. Then France, where he had applied for asylum. Once he was settled there, our two girls and I would join him.

Bari Weiss:

Thought comes before action. Words come before deeds. Media that profits from polarization will stoke it. Lies — maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble — create a lying world.

I’ve known this for a while. It’s why I left The New York Times. And it is why, as much as I miss doing journalism, I’ve been cautious at every next step. 

Hate sells, as the journalist Matt Taibbi has convincingly argued, and as anyone looking at Twitter trending topics over the past few years can see. If Americans are buying rage, is there a real market for something that resists it? 

Hate sells and hate also connects. Communities can grow quite strong around hatred of difference, and that’s exactly what’s happened to the American left and the right. It is painful to resist joining a mob when that mob includes most of your friends. It feels good, at least in the short term, to give in.

So part of my hesitation about what comes next is that I have been unsure about who will have the strength to stand apart from the various tribes that can give their members such pleasure of belonging. It is hard to know how to build things that are immune to these dangerous forces when the number of the people who are — or appear to me — immune to it is so very small

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

Sumantra Maitra:

Whatever the result of the massive Twitter purge, it made one thing clear to the world. Carl Schmitt’s most important and controversial aphorism, “sovereign is he who decides the exception” is still timeless.

In the American republic, the sovereign is not the state, which has hollowed out. The sovereign now is the group of neo-feudal oligarchs, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, who now decide and control who can speak, see, learn, and buy, and what and when. Give them an army of their own like the East India Company, and the American state is over.

This is an accelerationist’s dream, and a centrist and moderate’s nightmare. The question at the heart of the debate within conservatism, of “who holds the real power,” was settled for good as the tech purge rolled.

After the reprehensible violence at the most respected state symbol of the American republic, tech companies and corporates took the fight to the other half of the populace. This is not just about banning President Trump as an individual or deleting his tweets from the official POTUS account. This is about choosing sides and flying a flag of war.

Economist:

LYING DRUNK in a field outside the Austrian city of Innsbruck in 1971, inspiration struck Douglas Adams, a science-fiction writer. He looked at his copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe”, and then up at the stars, and came up with the idea for a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. It would be a (fictional) mixture of travel book and encyclopedia, but with an absurd-seeming twist: instead of being written by experts, anyone could contribute.

Adams played his idea for laughs. But today it looks as prescient as it was funny. On January 15th Wikipedia—“the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”—will celebrate its 20th anniversary. It will do so as the biggest and most-read reference work ever. Wikipedia hosts more than 55m articles in hundreds of languages, each written by volunteers. Its 6.2m English-language articles alone would fill some 2,800 volumes in print. Alexa Internet, a web-analysis firm, ranks Wikipedia as the 13th-most-popular site on the internet, ahead of Reddit, Netflix and Instagram.

Emily Zanotti:

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union refused to return to classrooms Monday, even though Chicago Public Schools officially reopened to some in-classroom learning. Now, the city says teachers who called in sick without an excuse will be considered “absent without leave” for each day they refuse to turn up and may not be paid for their time.

CTU has resisted a return to classrooms nearly since in-person learning was suspended back in March of 2020, at the start of the nationwide coronavirus pandemic. As Chicago officials neared a decision on returning to in-classroom learning, at least part-time, and for a select number of students — preschool-aged students and students who require one-on-one instruction, including “severe” special needs students — CTU even went so far as to suggest forcing teachers back into classrooms was “racist” and sexist.”

Late last week, CTU issued a new series of demands, telling Chicago Public Schools that “no teacher should be required to teach in person until all school employees have had the opportunity to get vaccinated, or until the city’s positivity rate falls to 3 percent and its rate of new cases falls below 400 per day,” according to The New York Times, and informed CPS that teachers would not show up to work on Monday if their demands were not met.

Scott Girard:

Most children are better-served by in-person education, Navsaria said, with benefits coming from “just being around other people,” but there is a “balance” to strike with the health of the community. Pointing to guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, Navsaria said it’s good to operate with a goal of being in-person, but only when the mitigation strategies mentioned in that guidance can be implemented.

“I think it’s really important that people not just stop before reading the ‘ifs,’” he said.

Madison’s well funded K-12 schools remain closed while many nearby organizations are either fully or partially open.

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.

Chris Rickert:

“Overall the responses (the survey) elicits do indeed raise genuine concerns that are consistent with the rise of cancel culture in America and higher education more generally,” said UW-Madison political science professor emeritus Donald Downs, who was not involved in the survey.

Matthew Mitnick, chair of UW-Madison student government, Associated Students of Madison, did not respond to requests for comment. Jacob Broehm, ASM press officer, said the group has no position on the survey’s findings.

Questions over free speech are not new to UW-Madison, where students and faculty have long leaned left.

The university was a leader in the “speech code” movement of the 1980s, when universities adopted rules against speech or other types of expression on campus that could be perceived as discriminatory, insensitive or racist but were otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

A federal court struck down UW-Madison’s student speech code in 1991, and the UW-Madison Faculty Senate rescinded the faculty code in 1999.

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

Elizabeth Beyer:

“I think it is becoming a little too precise to say that adding one title in an otherwise completely perfect document should be sufficient to overcome the nomination,” she said.

Hendricks-Williams has worked in Gov. Tony Evers’ Milwaukee office and as an assistant director of teacher education at the state Department of Public Instruction.

The commission cleared all seven candidates to appear on the Feb. 16 primary ballot. The others are Jill Underly, superintendent of Pecatonica School District; Joe Fenrick, a Fond du Lac high school science teacher; Steve Krull, principal of Milwaukee’s Garland Elementary School and former Air Force instructor; and Troy Gunderson, Viterbo University professor and former superintendent of the School District of West Salem.

Will the DPI continue their elementary reading teacher mulligan policy?

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 Greenwald:

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.

The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.

Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.

It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

Karen Yeung:

Chinese leaders have urged law enforcement officials to tighten their hold to ensure social stability as the world enters a “turbulent period” and the global pandemic causes “chaos in the West”. At the annual meeting of the Communist Party body overseeing justice, prosecutorial and police agencies in Beijing on the weekend, the leaders said the country was facing rapidly evolving global risks due to the once-in-a-century pandemic. “As changes to the world structure accelerate, China’s rule is in sharp contrast with the turmoil in the West,” a statement from the Central Political and Legal Work Conference said. “At the same time … the world has entered a period of turbulent change. Political and legal work is facing new risks and challenges.”

Katherine Boyle:

I am sitting in a hospital bed in the town where I grew up. Twenty-four hours prior, I gave birth to my husband’s and my first child, surrounded by nurses and residents wearing Covid masks. Before leaving a hospital with a baby in tow, you are visited by about 53 specialists who cycle through the maternity ward: pediatricians, anesthesiologists, audiologists, midwives and a flurry of nurses schooled in swaddling and burping. And though no one tells you there will be a quiz at the end of your son’s first day on earth, a very nice young woman comes into your room to assess your “education.”

“I’m the education specialist! There are no right answers,” she says, signaling there are definitely wrong answers. But as she begins her survey of what we’ve learned, it becomes clear that there are surprising answers that don’t make much sense outside of our virus-ravaged world.

Where do you live? required a bit of an explanation. We were Covid refugees just in from fiery California, squatting in the downstairs bedroom of my mother’s house. When it became clear that California would adopt another aggressive lockdown save for Michelin-starred restaurants, we made the wise decision to decamp from San Francisco to Northern Florida and begin an experiment in intergenerational living that society abandoned decades ago.

Do you have a pediatrician? Yes, the medical school classmate of my childhood best friend. My husband’s experience of my hometown is that, despite housing a college with 50,000 students, everyone seems to know each other. The doctor who delivered our son has known me since I was five. The nurse who ensured our baby was feeding properly happened to be an elementary school friend. Though the hospital system has roughly 8000 employees (a third of whom seem to moonlight as lactation consultants), everything about the experience felt parochial –- as though we had moved into a ready-made community.

Reasonable Theology:

We often settle for reading about the works of Augustine, Calvin, or other “old books” rather than reading the works themselves.

C.S. Lewis recommended the reading of old books in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.

The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

Francesco Agostinelli:

What are the effects of school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic on children’s education? Online education is an imperfect substitute for in-person learning, particularly for children from low-income families. Peer effects also change: schools allow children from different socio-economic backgrounds to mix together, and this effect is lost when schools are closed. Another factor is the response of parents, some of whom compensate for the changed environment through their own efforts, while others are unable to do so. We examine the interaction of these factors with the aid of a structural model of skill formation. We find that school closures have a large and persistent effect on educational outcomes that is highly unequal. High school students from poor neighborhoods suffer a learning loss of 0.4 standard deviations, whereas children from rich neighborhoods remain unscathed. The channels operating through schools, peers, and parents all contribute to growing educational inequality during the pandemic.

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.

Birgit Jennen and Ania Nussbaum:

Donald Trump received unexpected backing from Germany and France after the U.S. president was shut off social media platforms including Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., extending Europe’s battle with big tech.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies.

“The chancellor sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic,” Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin. Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.”

The German leader’s stance was echoed by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who said that the state and not “the digital oligarchy” is responsible for regulations, calling big tech “one of the threats” to democracy.

Europe is increasingly pushing back against the growing influence of big technology companies. The European Union is currently in the process of setting up regulation that could give the bloc power to split up platforms if they don’t comply with rules.

Luke Matthews:

Students who assumed their teacher ‘on the older side’ wouldn’t be familiar with the latest cheating methods were caught red handed when he devised a brilliant method to catch them out.

A pupil in the engineering class explained that when they all sat down to take their final exam, about half the class left the room to use the bathroom during the test – far more than the usual.

The student said they assumed the vast majority were looking up answers on their phone, which ‘irritated me’ but they stayed focused and made their way through the paper.

After leaving the exam hall, the pupil remembered there was one particular question that wasn’t related to what they had all been taught in class, which had two parts – the Mirror UK reports.

Part A was ‘fairly easy’ but they had no idea how to do part B, so they simply left it blank as it only accounted for 5 marks out of 100.

Mary Ann Nicholson is running for Dane County Executive. She recently published her K-12 positions:

Further, my heart goes out to students and parents/guardians throughout Dane County this week. From those in MMSD learning they won’t have the option of going back in-person for third quarter to those receiving news from medical advisory task forces/School Boards/administration that they may now go back.

According to medical experts, here and across the U.S., COVID-19 research** indicates:

Transmission rates in schools is almost ZERO

Transmission is occurring primarily in households from a positive family member

I understand it is a confusing, frustrating and emotional time for students and parents/guardians.

It is my hope that I can give a voice to all those who feel like they are not being heard. I want to build trust. I want to build up ALL citizens of Dane County. I will do my best to make sure your voices are heard.

Nicholson is running against incumbent Joe Parisi. The election is scheduled for Tuesday, April 6, 2021.

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:

A number of the staff respondents expressed concerns for their safety in regard to class size, ventilation and PPE, lack of district evidence that a safe return is plausible, the high number of COVID-19 cases in Dane County and a lack of detailed policies and procedures for returning.

“Our numbers in Dane County do not support a safe return. Our classes are too large to be able to space them out according to guidelines,” one staff member wrote in response to the survey.

District staff also noted a desire for widespread vaccination before returning to classrooms. Gov. Tony Evers said Monday the public won’t be able to receive the vaccine until June.

Madison Teachers Inc. issued a separate survey ahead of the district’s decision last week that asked members if they were ready to return to in-person learning for the third quarter and an overwhelming majority indicated they felt it was too soon to reopen classrooms.

“They asked a different question than us,” Jenkins said, “They asked a question about teachers feeling comfortable coming back, we asked how many felt like they could come back. It was different, from our survey to their survey, and anytime you have two different surveys, researchers will tell you, it is about the question: Was it the same, was it the same intent? And no it wasn’t.”

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.

Yvonne Kim:

The nonpartisan Thompson Center published a report Thursday characterizing University of Wisconsin-Madison students’ views on free speech as “troubling” and recommended increased First Amendment education on college campuses.

The Thompson Center, named after former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, and the UW Survey Center surveyed 530 undergraduate students, primarily between the ages of 18 to 23, on topics about free speech. Sixty-three percent of respondents agreed to some degree that “the government should be able to punish hate speech,” 53% agreed the government should restrict the speech of “racially insensitive” persons and 35% agreed that a public university should be able to revoke invitations for guest speakers whose speech may be offensive.

Women and liberal respondents were much more likely to support restrictions on speech than men and conservative respondents, respectively.

“These results show that many students find it difficult to distinguish between, on the one hand, the moral concerns of speech or activities that are contested or even detestable and, on the other, the long run value derived from free speech and religious liberty,” the report said. “The results are troublesome for an institution like UW-Madison, which must cultivate an unfettered marketplace of ideas and instantiate and inculcate those values among its students.”

The Thompson Center and its faculty advisory board crafted and approved the survey, which was administered at the Survey Center. Ryan Owens, the Thompson Center’s director, said the report’s findings seem in line with general trends in society, where he said he sees a trend toward increased intolerance “across the board.”

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

MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY

This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.

Jack Phelan:

This post is about the video processing and distribution side of a recent live-streamed stage production To Be A Machine, and its new German-language Austrian version Die Maschine in Mir. In a future post, I’ll go into more detail about the cameras, video capture and live-streaming.

If a live-streamed theatre production about Transhumanism that uses 100+ iPads with custom app and media distribution server, an automated video processing pipeline hacked together with Python, FFmpeg and some off-the-shelf web apps, all developed in a couple of months during a pandemic sounds interesting to you, then read on!

This was my only live theatre project that wasn’t cancelled in 2020. It went ahead because of clever, reactive writing, careful planning and liberal use of tools and technology.

2020 was not the year to expect work in theatre, yet somehow along came To Be A Machine (version 1.0) in August. A clever stage adaptation by Dead Centre of Mark O’Connell’s 2017 non-fiction book that The Guardian described as “a captivating exploration of transhumanism features cryonics, cyborgs, immortality and the hubris of Silicon Valley.”

BBC:

New pathways for achieving your life milestones

Terms of Service Didn’t Read:

We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E.

Terms of service are often too long to read, but it’s important to understand what’s in them. Your rights online depend on them. We hope that our ratings can help you get informed about your rights. Do not hesitate to click on a service below, to have more details! You can also get the ratings directly in your browser by installing our web browser add-on:

Harvard:

This course is a variant of Harvard University’s introduction to computer science, CS50, designed especially for lawyers (and law students). Whereas CS50 itself takes a bottom-up approach, emphasizing mastery of low-level concepts and implementation details thereof, this course takes a top-down approach, emphasizing mastery of high-level concepts and design decisions related thereto. Ultimately, it equips students with a deeper understanding of the legal implications of technological decisions made by clients.

Through a mix of technical instruction and discussion of case studies, this course empowers students to be informed contributors to technology-driven conversations. In addition, it prepares students to formulate technology-informed legal arguments and opinions. Along the way, it equips students with hands-on experience with Python and SQL, languages via which they can mine data for answers themselves.

Jonathan Leaf:

In August 2019, the New York Times magazine published the “1619 Project.” This series of essays and articles provided readers with many “facts” that they may not have known: that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery; that Abraham Lincoln was a racist; that America’s foundational premise was “slavocracy;” that present-day American wealth is a direct consequence of slavery; and that the essential pattern of our history is not one of unprecedented growth in freedom and democracy but institutional hatred and oppression of blacks.

If you were unfamiliar with these facts, there is good reason—none are true. As National Association of Scholars president Peter W. Wood reveals in 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, the larger purpose of the Times’s project appears to have been to promote racial grievances and resentment. Most damningly, Wood points out that a Times fact-checker who contacted a radical historian to weigh the claim that the revolution was fought to protect slavery was told that this was nonsense. But the paper ignored that input, and 1619’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, herself recently said that the project was not intended to serve as history (after nearly a year of claiming the opposite).

Wood’s 1620 is an extraordinary book. Readers looking for a polemic should be forewarned: it is a learned and thoughtful investigation of the topic, and Wood goes to considerable lengths to give a hearing to Hannah-Jones’s assertions. In doing so, he systematically demolishes all but one of them.

National Geographic:

Jason McLellan was wandering around a ski shop of Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort, waiting for his new snowboarding boots to be heat-molded to his size-nine feet, when his smartphone rang. It was Barney Graham, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center.

Two days earlier, the World Health Organization had announced that several unidentified pneumonia-like cases had been reported in Wuhan, China. People were fatigued and feverish, with dry coughs and headaches. These symptoms weren’t unusual for early January, but some people were short of breath, and a few felt like they’d been hit by a train.

Graham told McLellan, a structural virologist at the University of Texas at Austin, that the ailment appeared to be a beta-coronavirus, meaning it fell into the genus of viruses that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). He asked McLellan: “Are you ready to get back in the saddle?”

Govind:

The 2020s will be the beginning of the consolidation, monopolization and the bureaucratization of the Internet. Govts, media, non techies have finally realized the Interent’s ability for construtive destruction of existing monopoloies and power structures and are seeking to restrain it to hold on to their monopoly.

What prompted me to write this was the complete de-platforming of Parler. Yes, it is a clusterfack filled with crazy manicas, but that is besides the point. The point was how quickly Big Tech swooped-in, co-ordinated and killed off Parler like a pack of wolves hunting down a rabbit. The takedown was swift and immediately effective , and extremely chilling.

We know how much of a monopoly Google and Facebook / Twitter are when it commes to communication. They control 90% of the ad-revenue, or even more, have the biggest media platforms on the world and pretty much is the only conduit to the rest of the world.

What is more scaries is the ability of Amazon/AWS to cut off access to running your servers on the internet. This is even more chilling and dangerous.

See, outsourcing your skill and ability to maintain servers, datacenters, to AWS is like outsourcing your manufacturing to China. Once you lose, you probably wont re-learn it in time and by then, your business might no longer exist.

Post 1970s , NASA lost the blueprints and ability to engineer an engine like the Rocketdyne F-1. When SpaceX and the rest of the companies tried to reverse-engineer the F1 and build a massive engine like it from scratch, it almost proved nigh on impossible and took more than a decade (I think they still havent made an engine as powerful as a single F-1).

AWS, Google, MSFT, FANG now make the majority of the internet’s hardware, communication AND SOFTWARE. If the BIG TECH majority even find you a threat, not only will they cut off your ability to communicate, or deploy to a server across the world, but even prevent you from writing software in the First place.

Twitter deletes China embassy’s Xinjiang ’emancipation’ tweet.

First amendment:

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, or that would prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.

Scott Williams:

A teacher at Burlington High School has been pulled out of the classroom after allegations that he directed students to watch a video baselessly questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Jeff Taff, a social studies teacher, also told students that he was traveling this week to Washington D.C. In an online lesson plan shared on social media, he claimed he was “standing up for election integrity.”

It was not immediately clear whether Taff was part of a demonstration Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol that turned violent, led to four deaths and delayed Congress’s confirmation of Joe Biden’s election win.

Taff could not be reached for comment.

Axios:

As the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low, new technologies promise to radically change how we have babies.

Why it matters: The demand for assisted reproductive technology like IVF is likely to grow as people delay the decision to have children. But newer advances in gene editing and diagnostic testing could open the door for a revolution in reproduction, raising ethical questions we haven’t begun to answer.

By the numbers: New data from the CDC indicates the U.S. had just 58.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in 2019, a 1% decline from the previous year and the lowest level since 1984.

Choose life. US abortion data:

In 2018, 619,591 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. Among 48 reporting areas with data each year during 2009–2018, in 2018, a total of 614,820 abortions were reported, the abortion rate was 11.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 189 abortions per 1,000 live births.

Albert Fox Cahn:

We don’t need a cutting-edge surveillance dragnet to find the perpetrators of this attack: They tracked themselves. They livestreamed their felonies from the halls of Congress, recording each crime in full HD. We don’t need facial recognition, geofences, and cell tower data to find those responsible, we need police officers willing to do their job.

It’s hard to state just how jarring the images from the Capitol were. Not the violence from the Republican rioters, but the passivity, even complicity, of the police. After a quarter century of activism, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen protesters of color and progressives arrested, beaten, and worse.

People speaking out against injustice are met with brutality as a matter of course. But while millions of Americans face violence for protesting legally, white conservatives can break the law with impunity. That’s the failure we witnessed:not the angry mob but cooperative cops who were willing to look the other way or even pose for coup selfies.

This is nothing new in American history, but it’s rarely been captured so vividly. This is our history, same as the countless officers who turned a blind eye, or even lent a hand, to the racist lynch mobs of the past. This is the same racism that fueled the targeting of BIPOC communities for so many generations. And it should also be a moment of reckoning for American police, not a moment to give them greater deference and power.

AMS:

The 2020 Mathematical Art Exhibition was held at the Joint Mathematical Meetings held in Denver, CO. Here on Mathematical Imagery is a selection of the works in various media, including recipients of the 2020 Mathematical Art Exhibition Awards: “Suspended Helical Stair,” by Mark Donohue (California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA), awarded Best textile, sculpture, or other medium; “A Unit Domino,” by Douglas McKenna (Mathemaesthetics, Inc., Boulder, CO), awarded Best photograph, painting, or print; and “Computational Wings,” by David Bachman (Pitzer College, Claremont, CA), Honorable Mention. The award “for aesthetically pleasing works that combine mathematics and art” was established in 2008 through an endowment provided to the American Mathematical Society by an anonymous donor who wishes to acknowledge those whose works demonstrate the beauty and elegance of mathematics expressed in a visual art form.

WILL:

SUMMARY JUDGMENT HEARING TO DETERMINE FATE OF VACANT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

The News: Attorneys from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) will participate in a summary judgment hearing, Monday, in a rural school choice case before the Shawano County Circuit Court. WILL represents Shepherd’s Watch, a Mattoon-based Christian community group, attempting to purchase a vacant school building. The Village of Mattoon and the Town of Hutchins are in a legal dispute with the Antigo School District over ownership of the vacant elementary school in Mattoon, Wisconsin.

Monday’s summary judgment hearing will occur at 10:30 am, in-person, before Shawano County Circuit Court Judge William F Kussel Jr.

This sidebar was included in the Saturday 9 January 2021, Wisconsin State Journal. I was unable to find the information on their website. Madison’s well funded K-12 schools remain closed.

Belleville: Has been using hybrid model all year, and that will continue with an option for families to go online only.

Grades 3-4,7, 9 and 12 return on Jan. 19; grades 5-6, 8, and 10-11 return Jan. 25.

DeForest: School board takes up plan for in-person learning Jan. 11.

Cambridge: Grades 6-12 will return to all in-person learning, with an option for families to go online only, on Jan 25.

Grades K-5 are currently all in person, with an option for families to go online only.

Deerfield: In-person hybrid will begin for grades 4K-2 on Jan. 26; grades 3-6 will return on Feb. 2; grades 7-8 will return on Feb. 9; grades 9-12 will return on Feb. 16 with an option for families to go online only.

Marshall: In-person hybrid will begin for grades K-2 on Jan. 19; grades 3-4 will return on Jan. 26; grades 5-6 will return on Feb. 2; grades 7-8 wilt return on Feb. 15; grades 9-12 will return on Feb. 22 with an option for families to go online only.

Middleton-Cross Plains: In-person hybrid begins for grades PK-4 on Feb. 1. Grades 5-8 will return on Feb. 22 and grades 9-12 will return on March 11, contingent upon Feb. 8 school board vote. Families will have an option to go online only.

Monona Grove: In-person hybrid begins for students in grades 4K-2 Jan. 25; hybrid for grades 3-5 starts Feb. 8. School Board takes up plan for grades 6-12 Jan. 13.

Mount Horeb: in-person hybrid begins for grades 3-5 on Feb. l; middle school will return on Feb. 15; and high school will return on Feb. 22. Grades K-2 have been in hybrid of virtual and in person since Nov. 16. Families will have an option to go online only.

Oregon: In-person hybrid will begin for grades 3-6 on Jan. 19; grades 7-12 will return on Feb. 8. Families will have an option to go online only. Grades K-2 began in-person hybrid instruction in September.

Stoughton: In-person hybrid will begin for grades 3-5 on Jan 25;grades 6 and 9 will return on Feb. 1; and grades 7-8 and 10-12 will return on Feb. 8. Families will have the option to go online only. Grades 4K-2 began in-person learning in / November.

Sun Prairie: In-person hybrid will begin for grades 3-5 on Jan. 25; grades 6-12 will return on Feb. 22. Families will have an online-only option. In-person hybrid began for grades K-2 earlier in the school year.

Verona: In-person hybrid will begin for grades 3-5 on Jan. 26; grades 6-12 will return on Feb. 9. Families will have an online-only option. In-person hybrid began for grades K-2 earlier in the school year.

Waunakee: School board takes up plan for grades 5-12 Jan. 11. in-person hybrid began for grades K-4 earlier in the year. All grades have the option to go online only.

Wisconsin Heights: In-person hybrid wilt begin for grades 3-5 on Jan. 25; grades 6-12 wilt return on Feb. 16. Families will have an online-onty option. In-person hybrid began for grades PK-2 earlier in the school year.

ARMAND A. FUSCO, ED.D.:

As the newly appointed Literacy Task Force begins its quest to unravel why 20 years of efforts to improve reading were mired in a whirlpool of disastrous reading results to determine what went wrong (so that past mistakes are not repeated) there are critical lessons for learning from the Reading Champion. This is critical because Part 1 of this reading series provided the information that was available to a previous task force to improve reading outcomes that were piled sky high and available at no cost; but, obviously, they were not viewed as lessons to be learned to promote success. Worse yet, there were a number of districts with successful reading turnarounds to copy from (available at no cost); but no lessons were learned.

Lesson #1:
Learn from successful reading outcomes of other schools, districts and states; past failure to do so is probably the biggest mistake that has to be learned.

One such example of success involved not just a district but the entire state. However, improvement may be applauded, but only because the rest of the nation did not do as well in comparison. Although Madison has been crowned as having the largest achievement gap in the U.S., CT had that distinction (and still is at the top) as a State because of the significant disparities in scores of minorities as will be seen in the results to follow. It’s also an example of how the use of average or total scores hide lots of shameful disparities until disaggregated.

Since 1992, Connecticut has had the highest reading achievement scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading exam and it is the most improved state in reading scores. As a result of being “crowned the reading champion,” the National Education Goals Panel commissioned a study to determine what Connecticut was doing right that could account for its success. The report, Exploring High and Improving Reading Achievement in Connecticut, looked at a variety of statewide factors.

Before getting to the findings of the study, just how well did Connecticut perform on the 1998 assessment? In grade 4, it had the highest average score for public school students with 46% scoring at or above proficiency. However, in spite of the constant improvement, only 55% of Whites, 17% of Hispanics, and 13% of Blacks achieved at or above proficiency. In Connecticut’s major cities, only 21% achieved at the proficiency level or above (compared with 25% nationally) which means that 79% scored at the basic level or below. Rural towns did much better with students scoring 57% at or above proficiency. What is also significant is that grade 4 scores improved while national scores stayed rather stable.

In grade 8, 42% scored at or above proficiency with 50% of Whites, 16% of Hispanics, and 10% of Blacks scoring at that level; the scores were lower than those in 4th grade. In the major cities, only 20% scored at proficiency or above (compared with 29% nationally), and in the rural towns 50% scored at that level.

Related: Inside Education Column: Madison’s Literacy Task Force: Reading Renaissance or Recycling?

Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times, and Jeff Kao:

In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.

The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of COVID-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information.

Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.

They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”

Jill Tucker:

Many parents and public officials throughout California supported pushing the state’s 1.4 million teachers and other education workers toward the front of the vaccine line, believing that would finally allow schools to reopen.

But the state teacher’s unions — as well as San Francisco’s — have said vaccinations won’t be enough and are calling for additional measures not endorsed by public health experts as necessary for students and staff to safely return to the classroom.

Instead of reopening, it’s looking more likely that many, if not most classrooms will remain in virtual mode for months, if not until the fall, despite the vaccine.

With an ongoing case surge, hospitals overflowing with patients and more than 350,000 dead in the country, fear remains strongly embedded in the debate over reopening schoolseven as a growing chorus of parents and policymakers are calling for classrooms to bring back kids.

Jordyn Noennig:

The Burlington Area School District has placed a teacher on administrative leave after he told students he would travel to Washington, D.C., to stand up for “election integrity” and shared voter fraud conspiracy theories in class. 

A parent identified the teacher as Jeff Taff, who teaches modern American history and modern world history at the high school. 

Burlington parent Jon Phetteplace said his sophomore son is in Taff’s American history class. On Wednesday, after riots took place in the U.S. Capitol, his son approached him with an email from the teacher about how he was going to Washington, D.C. 

“I am sorry; but standing up for election integrity and our right to vote in FAIR elections is too important for me to NOT be there,” the email from Taff said.

Eric Dolan:

Human memory is prone to error — and new research provides evidence that anger can increase these errors. The new findings have been published in the scientific journal Experimental Psychology.

“My interest in the impact of anger on misinformation came from both real-world experience and research,” said study author Michael Greenstein, an assistant professor at Framingham State University.

“From the real-world side, there’s this phrase that people say — ‘don’t get emotional.’ That phrase is somewhat often used to describe anger and the idea that when you’re angry you’ll make poor decisions, which would also imply poor memory use.”

“From the research side, anger is an interesting emotion because it somewhat defies traditional classifications in that it’s a ‘negative’ emotion, but it impacts cognition in a lot of ways that are more similar to ‘positive’ emotions.”

Not a surprise, but the Facebook comments on @MMSDschools‘ post about the decision to remain virtual are hotly divided between people supporting the decision and others saying the decision is a failure: https://t.co/MnD2Q3W3qj

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) January 8, 2021

Commentary one and two.

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.

UPI:

A prominent U.S. doctors’ group reaffirmed its recommendation this week that having kids physically in school should be the goal, while also outlining safety protocols needed to allow schools to be open.

In its COVID-19 guidance for safe schools, the American Academy of Pediatrics listed measures communities need to address.

These include controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the community, protecting staff and students in schools and coordinating closely with local and state health experts.

“New information tells us that opening schools does not significantly increase community transmission of the virus. However, it is critical for schools to closely follow guidance provided by public health officials,” said Dr. Lee Beers, new president of the AAP.

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.

Michael Lind:

What has made California so repulsive that many of its star companies and most talented individuals are making like East Germans trying to scramble over the Berlin Wall? We can begin with the squalor of San Francisco with its streets littered with needles and human feces and its public parks turned into homeless encampments. Though the crisis of public order is usually blamed on low-density zoning restrictions, the homeless tend to be drug addicts or the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, not working-class people and professionals priced out of local home ownership. Meanwhile, a wave of woke education policy aimed at the ritual leveling of Bay Area’s few actual meritocratic institutions—like San Francisco’s sole merit-based STEM high school—augurs poorly for the prospects of the children of tech workers whose parents can’t afford private schools.

Until now, many tech employers have relied on the H-1B visa program to provide them with a steady stream of college-educated indentured servants and allow California industry to be decoupled from public education in California and the country as a whole. In the event of a new travel-freezing pandemic, or immigration restrictions more stringent than those the Trump administration managed to impose, the tech oligarchs might find themselves reliant on an innumerate and semiliterate workforce emerging from public schools and universities which have lowered standards in the name of radical-left conceptions of social justice.

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

Carmen Sanchez & David Dunning:

This study assessed the degree to which the racial composition of one’s neighborhood was related to the racial socialization messages parents communicated to their children in a sample of 307 African American families. Linear regression analyses were conducted. Neighborhoods were classified as predominantly African American, predominantly European American, or racially integrated. Even after controlling for parents’ education, mental health, and family income, parents in predominantly European American and racially integrated neighborhoods gave more preparation for bias messages than those in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Parents of boys conveyed more cultural empowerment messages in racially integrated and predominantly European American neighborhoods than in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Older girls were more likely to receive egalitarian messages than older boys. African American parents may use more empowerment and preparation for bias messages when they feel their children are culturally isolated or likely to experience racial discrimination.

Charles Bremner:

Nearly half of French secondary school teachers are avoiding or downplaying subjects such as sexuality, the Holocaust and evolution to avoid angering Muslim pupils, a survey suggests.

Questioned in December, two months after a teacher in the outskirts of Paris was beheaded by a young jihadist, 49 per cent of teachers said they had steered clear of subjects that upset pupils to avoid creating a “scene”.

Samuel Paty, 47, was killed by a terrorist after he showed pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a lesson on freedom of expression.

The Ifop study, published in Charlie Hebdo yesterday, showed self-censorship by teachers had risen by 13 percentage points since a similar poll two years ago. In areas with high.

Benjamin Yount:

Wisconsin schools saved about $40 million by not being open last spring, but a new report says no one is sure where the money went. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty looked at the data included in the coronavirus report issued by the state’s Department of Public Instruction last month. 

“The report asks for costs and savings in five categories: utilities, transportation, food service, personnel, contract terminations, and a catch-all ‘other’ bucket,” WILL Director of Research Will Flanders wrote. “By far the biggest savings came from transportation costs. When schools are shut down, obviously most kids are no longer being transported, leading to a savings statewide of more than $34 million.”

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.

Aaricka Washington:

Indianapolis Public Schools swore in two new board members and two incumbents Monday night, strengthening support for the district’s controversial charter-friendly partnerships. 

All four of the new and reseated board members have the backing of pro-school choice political action committees.  

The addition of Kenneth Allen and Will Pritchard, the return of Diane Arnold and Venita Moore, and the loss of longtime district critic Elizabeth Gore strengthen the pro-charter forces on the board. 

The board chose Evan Hawkins, a Marian University administrator and an IPS parent, as its president. Hawkins has been endorsed by Stand for Children, a charter school advocate organization. Moore will serve as the board vice president and Susan Collins will continue as secretary. 

In his remarks, Allen drew from Martin Luther King Jr.  “He was noted as saying any one of us can be great, because any one of us can have the capacity to serve,” Allen said.

Martin Center:

In 2021, more universities should adopt the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—especially here in North Carolina. The Chicago Principles go beyond merely legal protection for free speech. They demonstrate a university’s commitment to the importance of free and open inquiry, robust debate, and unfettered freedom of thought to the university’s mission of preserving, discovering, and transmitting knowledge.

The statement reads, in part:

Because the University is committed to free and open inquiry in all matters, it guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.

This should be a bedrock principle at all institutions of higher learning, because without this commitment true academic freedom and discovery are impossible.

The Chicago Principles are needed now more than ever—to push back against the cancel culture, bias response teams, and self-censorship that plague university campuses. The Chicago Principles are a first step to real renewal at our colleges and universities.

AP News:

The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, today filed a reply brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the case of Dr. Mukund Vengalattore v. Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Education. NCLA’s client, Dr. Vengalattore, was a tenure-track physics professor at Cornell University when a Title IX investigation launched by a false accusation ruined his promising career. NCLA seeks to reverse the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, which dismissed the case against Cornell and the Dept. of Education without ruling on the substance of the claims presented by Dr. Vengalattore.

Will Flanders and Jessica Holmberg:

On Dec. 30, amidst the holiday hubbub, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released the results of a statewide survey of school districts regarding their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey, mandated by the legislature last April, is a window into how all 421 districts in the state responded to the pandemic, including decisions to shut down and the biggest challengers they faced.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the survey is the portion which deals with additional costs and savings to school districts during the pandemic. In light of efforts by DPI to increase funding by an additional $1.6 billion for the 2021–23 budget, it is particularly important to see what sort of stewards of taxpayer money districts have been this year.

The report asks for cost and savings in five categories: utilities, transportation, food service, personnel, contract terminations, and a catch-all “other” bucket. The Figure below reports the net savings and costs across the state in each of the main buckets. By far the biggest savings came from transportation costs. When schools are shut down, obviously most kids are no longer being transported leading to a savings statewide of more than $34 million.

Other substantial savings came from Personnel costs. The $10.6 million in savings here one presumes may come partially from a lack of a need for substitutes, who are generally paid on an “as needed” basis. The only main bucket for which we see a cost increase is for food services, which increased by approximately $6.3 million. This likely results from the logistical challenges of continuing to provide free and reduced meals during the pandemic. These buckets result in a net savings of $40 million.

Despite the aggregate savings statewide, costs and savings varied substantially by district. The table below shows the top five saving and spending districts. Districts with the largest savings appear to have gotten the bulk of it through reduced transportation costs. As a district that shut down, for instance, Milwaukee saved more than $5 million in this category. At the other end of the spectrum are districts that spent more on food services. Racine lists an increase there of $1.9 million. Curiously, some of the largest spending districts, including Racine, report no savings on their transportation budgets despite being shut down. Given that other districts were able to get out of at least a portion of their transportation spending, this suggests either that bad contracts were made by the district, or that they are not fully reporting the money they saved.

DPI Survey .xlsx file.

A few Madison responses:

• # of Breakfasts provided March 12, 2020 to June 30, 2020: 228,327; 228,848 lunches
• Utility spending -$389,000
• Transportation spending -$2,000,000
• Food service spending +$1,264,705
• Personnel spending +$2,300,000
• +$974,000 – excess emergency resources including Wi-Fi hotspots, virtual curriculum and platforms, safety equipment, health supplies, and IT infrastructure.
• 2020-2021 planned food service spending increase: $4,000,000
• $3,200,000 declining enrollment exemption. $275,000 in categorical per pupil aid. $500,000 loss in student fees collected. $2,300,000-$4,900,000 local funds for additional expenditures related to safety, virtual curricular materials, health supplies, PPE, building modifications, technology needs. Plan to use CARES Act – ESSER/GEER to cover $1,500,000 of food service and $7,000,000 for safety, virtual curricular materials, health supplies, PPE, building modifications and technology needs in addition to the local funds.

Amanda Gordon:

“Anyone with money is fleeing New York and coming here,” said Guy Clark, an agent with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “It’s a seller’s market like I’ve never experienced.”

Some of the migration is paired with job relocation, as Wall Street firms and hedge funds set up bases in the Sunshine State. Others are pandemic refugees looking to flee Covid hotspots or take advantage of Florida’s lack of a state income tax. And some are billionaires increasing their footprints, such as Steve Wynn’s purchase of an additional Palm Beach home for $18.4 million last month, or Robert F. Smith’s $48.2 million acquisition of two properties in North Palm Beach.

Devi Shastri:

State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor announced a year ago that she would not seek another term. Gov. Tony Evers named Taylor as his replacement in the post in 2018, when he was elected governor. This is the first open race for the position in 20 years.

Troy Gunderson, Viterbo University professor and former superintendent of the School District of West Salem.

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

Jonathan Chait:

In the dozen years since Barack Obama undertook the most dramatic education reform in half a century — prodding local governments to measure how they serve their poorest students and to create alternatives, especially charter schools, for those who lack decent neighborhood options — two unexpected things have happened. The first is that charter schools have produced dramatic learning gains for low-income minority students. In city after city, from New York to New Orleans, charters have found ways to reach the children who have been most consistently failed by traditional schools. The evidence for their success has become overwhelming, with apolitical education researchers pronouncing themselves shocked at the size of the gains. What was ten years ago merely an experiment has become a proven means to develop the potential of children whose minds had been neglected for generations.

And yet the second outcome of the charter-school breakthrough has been a bitter backlash within the Democratic Party. The political standing of the idea has moved in the opposite direction of the data, as two powerful forces — unions and progressive activists — have come to regard charter schools as a plutocratic assault on public education and an ideological betrayal.
The shift has made charter schools anathema to the left. “I am not a charter-school fan because it takes away the options available and money for public schools,” Biden told a crowd in South Carolina during the Democratic primary, as the field competed to prove its hostility toward education reform in general and charters in particular. Now, as Biden turns from campaigning to governing, whether he will follow through on his threats to rein them in — or heed the data and permit charter schools to flourish — is perhaps the most unsettled policy mystery of his emerging administration.

To head the Department of Education, Biden floated the names of fierce critics of charter schools, including the ex-president of the country’s largest teacher union and the former dean of the Howard University School of Education, who has called urban charters “schemes” that are really all about controlling urban land. Then, in a surprise move, Biden formally tapped Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s education chief — a nonideological pick who offends neither the party’s opponents of reform nor its remaining defenders. For policy experts and parents alike, it is baffling that Biden’s finalists ran the full gamut from charter hatred to moderation — a bit like if the job of national security adviser were down to a bake-off between John Kerry and Attila the Hun. It’s a clue that whatever Biden’s formulations on the campaign trail, he may yet refrain from dismantling the education legacy of the president he once served.

The achievement gap between poor Black and Latino students in cities and rich white students in suburbs represents a sickening waste of human ability and is a rebuke to the American credo of equal opportunity. Its stubborn persistence has tormented generations of educators and social reformers. The rapid progress in producing dramatic learning gains for poor children, and the discovery of models that have proved reliable in their ability to reproduce them, is one of the most exciting breakthroughs in American social policy. For many education specialists, the left’s near abandonment of charter schools has been a bleak spectacle of unlearning — the equivalent of Lincoln promising to rip out municipal water systems or Eisenhower pledging to ban the polio vaccine. Just as the dream is becoming real, the party that helped bring it to life is on the verge of snuffing it out.

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 and Stefano Esposito:

About 40% of Chicago Public Schools teachers and staff who were expected to report to schools Monday for the first time during the pandemic didn’t show up for in-person work, officials said Tuesday, accusing the Chicago Teachers Union of pressuring its members to defy the district’s orders.

In all, about half of teachers and three-quarters of school-based support staff in preschool and special education cluster programs returned to classrooms as expected, accounting for 60% of those 4,400 employees scheduled to go back to specific schools, the district announced. Officials didn’t immediately provide data on another estimated 1,400 employees that were supposed to return but work at more than one school. The first two days after winter break last school year saw about 83% of employees present.

In a sign of the increasing tension between the school system and the teachers union, CPS CEO Janice Jackson said Tuesday that the number of employees who reported to work was “significant considering the fact that they were pressured by the union not to return.”

Those who didn’t show up and elected to continue teaching remotely were sent emails telling them their absence was unexcused. Jackson said those who continue to ignore their orders will face progressive discipline according to the union contract, but that it’s in nobody’s interest to fire teachers.

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.

Dan Bauman:

Molly Beck, Mary Spicuzza and Bob Dohr:

Wisconsin lags nearly all of its Midwest counterparts in getting its health care workers and first responders vaccinated against COVID-19 and has received fewer doses than other states of its size. 

The state is 10th lowest out of 12 states in the Midwest in getting a first dose of the vaccine to its residents on a per capita basis, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Wisconsin is 10th lowest in terms of how much vaccine has been distributed, per capita.

Miller did not answer multiple questions Monday about the low Midwest ranking of the state’s plan to distribute COVID-19 vaccinations. A spokeswoman for Evers referred questions to DHS.

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.

Classic:

Extra vaccines left available after the scheduled people get their shots. They go bad in an hour or so.

There's a scramble to find people to vaccinate. Bureaucrats in charge of the facility warn everyone not to get a vaccine out of turn (or else).

Vaccines spoil.

— John Robb (@johnrobb) January 5, 2021

Perry Stein and Laura Meckler:

Hours before the mayor was to make an announcement, she said she needed more time.

The city spent the next five months trying to bring students and teachers back to classrooms. A combination of mismanagement by the mayor and her aides and intransigence from the District’s teachers union combined to thwart every move, according to interviews with city officials, union leaders, educators and activists. The city kept changing its plan, and the union kept changing its demands. A lack of trust on both sides fueled failure at every turn.

As urban school districts across the country struggled with classroom reopening plans, a close look at the District’s experience shows how hard it has been to develop workable strategies — and how much power teachers wield, particularly when they have a strong union behind them.

The District’s impasse meant it squandered the chance to give its most vulnerable children classroom time while infection rates were low. Now the earliest any students will have face-to-face instruction will be February.

While teachers worked to persuade parents that reopening was dangerous and the District’s plan inadequate, the city did little to sell either the urgency of going back or the details of its plan to the general public.

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.

Deanna Fisher:

In the battle of local juridictions versus teachers’ unions over school reopening, the unions are glorying in their upper hand while the students sit at home.

After years and years of catering to the teachers’ unions, the bureaucracy that is purportedly in charge lacks the spine to force the issue. The teachers’ union, loving the fact that their members can collect a full paycheck without ever setting foot inside a classroom, has shifted their own goalposts repeatedly. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (one of the more prominent teachers’ unions) said last September that the AFT would support requiring teachers to be vaccinated once it was available, after their own demands asserted that a vaccine was necessary in order for teachers to be back in the classroom. (She also demanded a ton more money for schools to cover everything from PPE to more teachers, of course.)

Well, now Weingarten is happy sing a different tune. Because her goal isn’t actually to educate children, it’s to keep the union members happy.

This is bad science on the part of Weingarten.

The simple truth is that even when they are infected, children simply do not pass on the infection at high rates. 

The standard that Weingarten requires means that EVEN AFTER IMMUNIZATION, teachers would not accept opening schools! https://t.co/Sdc92GD1dk

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) January 4, 2021

As vaccine rollout continues – though not as quickly, as organized, or as strategized as anyone would like – the Chicago Public Schools would like to begin re-opening schools for pre-kindergarten and special education students. The teachers’ union has already made their feelings known about it – from a beach in Puerto Rico, even! But even that glaring hypocrisy isn’t going to keep the unions and the aldermen of Chicago that they have apparently bought from protesting about students returning to the classroom.

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.