Damon Beres:

It’s a cliché of digital life that “information wants to be free.” The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities—the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments—are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don’t cater to their needs. For the past year, they’ve once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Actthat provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.

Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility—by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example—that it’s even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

William Jacobson:

In Colorado in 2021, legislation was passed banning the use of American Indian mascots, broadly defined. Now the law is being challenged in a lawsuit filed on November 2, 2021, on behalf of the Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) and individuals by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which summarizes the case on its website:

Peter Salmon:

In April 1945, a newsreel film entitled German Atrocities appeared in British cinemas. Having been spared graphic images during most of the war, this was, for most British civilians, their first encounter with the horrors of the concentration camps. After watching footage of emaciated bodies and piled-up corpses, the 24-year-old Philippa Foot told her mentor, the philosopher Donald MacKinnon: “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.” These were acts, Foot felt, that were undeniably evil, and if philosophy was unable to identify them as such, then there was a major problem with philosophy.

And there was indeed a problem. The moral philosophy taught at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s pictured the world as value free. According to the influential AJ Ayer, all ethical statements, since they can never be empirically tested, are meaningless. 

Foot had studied at Oxford with three other remarkable women: Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley, each of whom was to devote themselves to arguing with the Oxford tradition, be it through novels, academic papers, books or radio broadcasts. 

Benjamin Lipscomb’s new group biography, The Women Are Up to Something, is a fascinating exploration of their life and thought. They each tackled moral philosophy in ways as distinct as their backgrounds and beliefs. Bringing together Murdoch, “a bohemian novelist and spiritual seeker,” Anscombe, “a zealous Catholic convert and mother of seven,” Foot, “an atheistic daughter of privilege,” and Midgley, “a stay-at-home mother who finally wrote the first of her 16 books in her 50s” (59 to be precise), Lipscomb paints a vivid portrait not only of them as people, but also a moment in British philosophy too often told through the male line.

Alex Tabarrok:

Matt Yglesias has an excellent post on schooling and politicsemphasizing three points.

First, there is a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) nonsense which the schools are using to train teachers and administrators.

Second, at the same time the school administrators/teacher’s unions are generally ignoring the very real cost to children and parents of the school closures, including the costs of a widening racial gap.

Third, the schools are stigmatizing testing under the guise of promoting equity but in reality because the teacher’s unions know that when you test children you learn that not all teachers are equally capable.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Frederick M. Hess

Key Points

• This report examines how media covered the critical race theory (CRT) debate in schooling through an analysis of all news articles published between September 2020 and August 2021 by four major newspapers and three major education press outlets.
• Coverage largely ignored bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity. This was mentioned in fewer than 10 percent of articles.
• News accounts also rarely mentioned concerns about CRT-aligned practices, such as segregated, race-based affinity spaces or the promotion of “anti-racist” racial stereotypes.
• Instead, most coverage focused on whether schools should discuss racism and slavery, even though few (if any) critics have adopted this position. The result has been a misleading, slanted, and dismissive caricature of sober concerns.

Sarah Schwartz:

Two of the nation’s most popular early literacy programs that have been at the center of a debate over how to best teach reading both faced more new critiques in the past few weeks, receiving bottom marks on an outside evaluation of their materials.

EdReports—a nonprofit organization that reviews K-12 instructional materials in English/language arts, math, and science—published its evaluation of Fountas and Pinnell Classroom Tuesday, finding that the program didn’t meet expectations for text quality or alignment to standards. The release comes on the heels of the group’s negative evaluation last month of the Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, another popular early reading program.

Together, the two reports received the lowest ratings EdReports has given for K-2 curricula in English/language arts, and they’re among the three lowest for ELA in grades 3-8.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Elle Reynolds:

“Systemic racism” and “equity,” Fuller noted, have become catchall phrases that aren’t backed by facts. “Everything is ‘equity’: hashtag, buzzword, catchall, equity. But if you say you’re against it, who wants to say they’re against equity?”

“The problem with ‘systemic racism’ in ACPS is that it is so often used as rhetoric, yet nobody ever points to actual data or specific examples. In fact, everything about ACPS points to the contrary,” Fuller said. “It’s almost like ‘systemic racism’ is being used as a shield to protect the failure of leadership to the point that nobody can challenge their decisions for fear of being labeled a racist. It has a definite chilling effect, but people see right through it.”

Fuller recalled deciding she had had enough of ACPS’s agenda when, watching a school board meeting, she observed members of the board and the superintendent wearing “We’re on an antiracist journey” T-shirts. “Who is ‘we’? Do I need ACPS to teach me and my kids not to be racist? Or is that my job and the job of my faith community?” she asked. “Even better, why don’t we just teach our students to love all people?”

Fuller and another concerned ACPS parent, Elizabeth Seltzer, started a Facebook group called “Agenda Free ACPS” for others who share their concerns.

Christian Shepherd:

It is hard to avoid the history of concentration camps when describing the system of maximum-security “re-education” facilities that the Chinese Communist party has built since 2017 in Xinjiang.

The tragedies of the Boer war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulags are illustrative context but also only partial analogues. While some forms of 20th-century repression remain, the modern world of high-tech surveillance has created new forms of control.

Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, writes that he had these “continuities and ruptures” in mind when describing Xinjiang’s system of mass internment in his book, In the Camps.

In this intimate, sombre and damning account of the forces that led China to intern and “re-educate” more than 1m Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim people in Xinjiang, Byler argues that the camp system is, at minimum, of a scale and degree of cruelty beyond all obvious contemporary parallels.

Lisa Bannon and Andrea Fuller:

Over the past decade, the University of Southern California has used a for-profit company to help enroll thousands of students in its online social-work master’s program.

The nonprofit school used its status-symbol image to attract students across the country, including low-income minority students it targeted for recruitment, often with aggressive tactics. Most students piled on debt to afford the tuition, which last year reached $115,000 for the two-year degree. The majority never set foot on the posh Los Angeles campus but paid the same rate for online classes as in-person students.

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed is backing the effort to recall three school board members, saying she is supporting “the parents’ call for change.”

Breed’s endorsement Tuesday of the recall of board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and commissioner Alison Collins counters critics who have argued the recall is a Republican-led effort to dismantle a progressive school board. If a majority of voters in a February special election support the recall of any of the three, Breed would appoint replacements until the next regular election in November.

“Sadly, our school board’s priorities have often been severely misplaced,” Breed said in a statement. “During such a difficult time, the decisions we make for our children will have long term impacts. Which is why it is so important to have leadership that will tackle these challenges head on. … Our kids must come first.”

She noted that the recall was a grassroots effort “led by parents.”

Marc Thiessen:

It’s not just Loudoun County. In 2019, Virginia state superintendent of public instruction James F. Lane sent a memo to all school districts promoting critical race theory training materials, and declaring “CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of race, racism, inequity, and the dynamics of power and privilege in schooling.” And as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo points out, “Right now, on its website, the Virginia Department of Education recommends ‘Critical Race Theory in Education’ as a ‘best practice’ and derives its definitions of ‘racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘education equity’ explicitly from ‘critical race theory.’”

This is true in other states as well. In New York City, school administrators were required to undergo training sessions where they learned that “objectivity” and “individualism” were elements of “white-supremacy culture.” In California, students as young as six are being taught CRT-inspired lessons in white privilege and structural racism.

Anne Saker:

Children got fatter through the coronavirus pandemic, worsening a generational weight problem and raising their risk for COVID-19, says a patient study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center released Tuesday.

The 10-year tracking study found the percentage of children at unhealthy weights rose from 35% to 36.4% from 2011 to 2020. But in the pandemic’s first year, that fraction soared to 39.7%, the study found.

MSF:

“They are playing now, they smile and befriend each other, they seem like any other young people,” says Julie Melichar, humanitarian affairs officer on board MSF’s search and rescue vessel Geo Barents. “But they are no longer just children or teenagers – not after what they have been through.”  

Melichar is talking about the youngest survivors rescued by MSF in our most recent mission in the central Mediterranean, when teams saved 367 people in less than two days. More than 40 per cent of them were under the age of 18 and 140 of them were travelling alone.   

Such a high number of young people risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea – considered to be the world’s deadliest migration route – is alarming in itself. But travelling without a parent or trusted adult makes unaccompanied minors one of the most vulnerable groups of people on the move.

Pano Kanelos:

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of fiveAmerican PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

Dan Lennington:

The deal’s plan to spend hard-earned tax dollars in the name of equity undermines America’s foundational principle of equality.

Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration have embarked together on an ambitious racial-equity agenda. With a goal of eliminating racial disparities — real or perceived, past or present — the equity agenda wields explicit racial discrimination as a tool to equalize racial outcomes. Put more bluntly, the equity agenda gives tax dollars to racial minorities because they are non-white. In previous political generations, this would have been called “reparations.” But today, it’s simply “equity.”

So far, the equity agenda has been expensive: Democrats and President Biden have spent (or attempted to spend) billions of dollars on race-based handouts in the areas of farmer loan forgiveness, COVID relief for restaurants, mortgage assistance, and a small-business credit initiative, just to name a few. Senator Schumer even recently proposed racial preferences for minority-owned marijuana businesses, and Representative Maxine Waters has proposed a $5,000 grant for any non-white first-time homeowner.

Through all this, however, Republicans have opposed, or at least remained on the sidelines of, the equity agenda.

Until now.

Last week, 17 Republican senators, including Majority Leader McConnell, voted to move forward with the bipartisan infrastructure deal. This deal, however, is tainted with race-based equity spending. Politicians of all political viewpoints should pause before supporting such spending, even in the name of bipartisanship, as such equity policies are fraught with legal risks and moral pitfalls.

In one such provision, the infrastructure bill includes $2.75 billion for “broadband inclusion” by adopting the so-called Digital Equity Act. This bill, dreamed up by Senators Portman (R., Ohio), Murray (D., Wash.), and King (I., Maine), proposes two grant programs with explicit racial preferences.

WILL:

The News: Governor Tony Evers signed public school spending transparency legislation (AB 378 / SB 373) into law, Friday, initiating a new process to shed more light on how public schools spend public dollars. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) supported the bipartisan legislation to establish a commission of public-school representatives to determine how to collect and display the information online.

The Quote: WILL Director of Education Policy, Libby Sobic, said, “WILL is proud to work with Senator Felzkowski and Representative Magnafici to craft and champion legislation to create much-needed transparency about public school funding. For the first time, the public will be able to determine just how taxpayer funds are allocated and whether it is benefitting our students and teachers.”

Josh King, a parent from Oregon, Wisconsin, said, “As a parent and a proud family member to many lifelong public school teachers, this legislation is an important first step to create a benchmark in transparency about school funding. This will help parents to engage schools on resourcing agreed upon priorities.”

Jonathan Kay:

Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read.

The pandemic has been a challenging period for Canadian universities, as the adoption of virtual classrooms has caused some families to wonder whether the traditional bricks-and-mortar education model is worth the price. Many Canadian schools are financially dependent on foreign students, an income source that’s now  in flux thanks to COVID. In April, Laurentian University in Ontario declared itself insolvent, cut dozens of programs, and laid off about 100 professors—an unprecedented development.

And yet none of these issues is listed on the October 27th Universities Canada meeting agenda. Laurentian University isn’t mentioned at all, in fact. And the only substantive reference to the COVID pandemic consists of an aside to the effect that “women are disproportionately being impacted negatively during the pandemic.” Instead, all of the agenda’s main action items are dedicated to social justice. 

The first item updates attendees on Universities Canada’s multi-year effort to draft a statement on “Social Impact Principles.” A subsequent action item details the “Scarborough National Charter,” a documentaimed at “mov[ing] from rhetoric to meaningful concrete action to address anti-Black racism and to promote Black inclusion.” There’s also a related item titled “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” under which members were asked, by formal motion, to affirm their commitment to an affirmative-action doctrine known as “Inclusive Excellence.”

Matthew Wilson:

A 19-year-old high school graduate who had the end of his senior year forced online by COVID-induced shutdowns on Tuesday defeated an incumbent school board member in New Jersey.

Nicholas Seppy, a 2020 graduate of Egg Harbor Township High School in South Jersey’s Atlantic County, upset Terre Alabarda for a seat on the township’s school board by an overwhelming 17-point margin.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting as of Wednesday afternoon, Seppy had received 4,042 votes to Alabarda’s 2,830.

After initially closing their doors in March 2020, Egg Harbor Township School District forced most of its students into entirely online learning or hybrid learning models with limited components of in-person instruction for most of the 2020-21 school year.

Theodore W. Gray and Jerry Glynn:

Jerry: I have young students who reach for their calculators to get the answer to 5×6. 

My response, when I see that, is to explain that such behavior is socially unacceptable, sort of like picking your nose.  Many people will see this and think the student must be brain damaged.  It’s a social problem, not a mathematical one. 

Theo: I agree that the problem lies with the other people more than with the students.  The most profound engine of civilization is the inability of a larger and larger fraction of the population to do the basic things needed to survive.  Many people fail to realize this. 

Jerry: I don’t understand that statement at all.  It must be very significant. 

Theo: In a society where everyone knows how to hunt, grow food, and make shelter, and knows these things well enough to survive, no one has time for much of anything else–even for perfecting one or the other of these basic skills.  In early tribal societies, some people were undoubtedly better at one thing than another, to the point where they would probably have had a hard time outside the group.  The best arrow makers probably weren’t very good at weaving shoes, and would have had a lot of blisters without some help from the shoe weavers. 

Few people would argue that people who are bad at weaving shoes are somehow inadequate, but it’s surprising how strongly people feel this way about “modern” skills such as the ability to add well.

Logan Rude, Brad Hamilton

More than 600 students did not show up for classes on Tuesday, the district said, more than one-third of the total 1,717 students enrolled at East. As of noon, 277 were excused and 325 had not shown up and were not excused, though secretaries were still updating records at that time.

During Monday’s lunch hour, more than 15 police responded to break up a set of fights that broke out near school grounds. Eight students were pepper-sprayed as police tried to break up the fights.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds told News 3 Now that an estimated 90% of behavioral issues at the high school have happened during the school’s open lunch period when students can leave campus. Just over two weeks ago, fights involving more than 100 students and parents broke out in a crowd around lunchtime.

MMSD modifies East High School safety plans following student fights and citations

additional Commentary:

The teachers cannot be happy with the situation. I can’t imagine teaching at East High School. I picture the teachers all afraid of the students and the students knowing it and the worst of them exploiting it.

I’m seeing at least 2 comments that say it’s not just Madison and linking to this WaPo article from a couple weeks ago, “Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out”:

Elizabeth Beyer and Chris Rickert:

The Madison School Board’s decision to remove school resource officers, or SROs, from the high schools came amid the racial reckoning following the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, sometimes-destructive social justice protests in Downtown Madison, and a years-long campaign to get rid of SROs that included shouting down School Board meetings and demonstrating outside the School Board president’s home by the local group Freedom Inc. and its allies.

“Even with SROs we still had people bring weapons and threaten to bring weapons to school and we still had fights,” said Allen, the student body president. “It wasn’t like their presence prevented any of that. The East student body in general still does not want SROs in our school.”

In other words, everything but discipline

Ambulances respond to school yard brawls because Madison outlawed discipline

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Parents Defending Education:

We asked all organizations the following questions:

1. As the [state association] has not yet commented on the National School Board Association’s September 29 letter to President Biden that requested federal intervention in local school board issues – which likened civic participation to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and cited the Patriot Act – Parents Defending Education would like to know whether your organization was involved in the creation of this letter and whether you agree with its substance and tone. If not, have you contacted the NSBA to let them know?
2. Can you please tell us how, going forward, your organization defines “intimidation,” harassment,” and “threat”?
3. Finally, do you plan to report individuals in your state to the U.S. Department of Justice – or do you believe that concerns can be adequately managed by local and state law enforcement?

This list will be updated as responses are received.

Monica Velez:

Seattle Public Schools has canceled classes for all students on Friday, citing large numbers of staff taking leave, according to an email officials sent families Tuesday.

“We are aware of an unusually large number of SPS staff taking leave on Friday, and do not believe we have adequate personnel to open schools with the necessary environment for high-quality learning,” the email said. 

The missed day will be added to the end of the school year, officials said.

Tunku Varadarajan:

What’s the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution? The First, which guarantees the freedoms of religion, speech and assembly? If you favor gun rights, perhaps the Second? Criminal-defense lawyers might be inclined to invoke the Fifth. Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick make a case for an amendment that isn’t even in the Bill of Rights—the 14th, ratified in 1868.

That amendment, among its other provisions, bars states from abridging “the privileges or immunities” of citizens or depriving any person of life, liberty or property “without due process of law.” It’s best known for guaranteeing to all persons “the equal protection of the laws.”

The 14th Amendment “not only changed the structure of our federalism, but it extended the protection of fundamental rights,” Mr. Barnett says. Before its ratification, the Supreme Court had held in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) that the Bill of Rights didn’t limit states’ authority. That started to change in 1897, as the court “incorporated” various rights, holding that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause obligates the states to respect them.

Marianne Goodland:

At stake in the state’s second-largest school district: control of the board by candidates backed by teachers’ unions or those supported by conservative causes.

Incumbents who chose not to run again held two of the three seats on this year’s ballot and had been backed by the union in past elections.

Unofficial results show the Jeffco Kids slate of Danielle Varda (District 1), Paula Reed (District 2) and Mary Parker (District 5) winning by comfortable margins. The slate was backed by the Jefferson County Education Association and the Colorado Education Association, as well as from an independent expenditure committee (IEC), Students Deserve Better, funded by CEA and several other teachers’ unions along the Front Range. IECs are allowed to collect unlimited contributions but are forbidden by state law from coordinating with candidates they support.

Varda won over Jeffrey Wilhite, Reed defeated Therese Shelton and David Johnson, and Parker defeated Kathy Miks.

The Jefferson County GOP endorsed Shelton, Miks and Wilhite.

Brooke Williams, president of the Jeffco Education Association, told Colorado Politics “Voters showed they trust the educators in the classroom. I’m very excited because these are the candidates who will help unite our community for our students’ future…they’re going to be focused on our students, expanding career and technical education programs and career opportunities, what our students need and what educators need to improve education in Jeffco and give students the best possible experience.”

:

Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”

This broad rethinking of work and human capital development is occurring while 10.4 million jobs sit unfilled and more than 8.4 million unemployed individuals look for work. There is a clear disconnect, but the ultimate outcome is far from clear.

As Bob Dylan asks in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “…something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

But even without this clarity, reassessment has an upside.

It’s an opportunity to expand two promising approaches to education, training, and hiring that prepare young people and adults for jobs and careers in this new world of work: career pathways programs and skill-based hiring.

This reassessment is a form of creative destruction, or the process through which new approaches replace existing ones made obsolete over time. What emerges is a social capital development narrative, an account that chronicles how individuals acquire knowledge and relational networks—or social capital—that help them succeed and flourish.

Why are we reassessing work in America? By my count, there are at least six reasons.

Gillian Tett:

The consequences are laid out in an astonishing documentary, Found, that I watched last weekend at its New York premiere. The film echoes themes raised by movies such as Ricki’s Promise and One Child Nation about the tangled nature of Chinese adoption. However, it starts with the movie’s director, Amanda Lipitz, discovering that her niece, an adopted Chinese girl called Chloe, has decided to use the DNA testing service 23andMe to get information about her genetic heritage.

When Chloe gets the results, she discovers — to her great shock — that she has two cousins, Lily Bolka and Sadie Mangelsdorf, living in the US who were also adopted as Chinese babies, seemingly without any roots. Their three American families are very different and live hundreds of miles apart (one is Jewish, another evangelical Christian and the third Catholic). But the teenagers bond and, armed with their DNA results, decide to head to China to look for their birth mothers.

To help them in this detective work, they hire a Beijing company called My China Roots, which was set up a decade ago by Huihan Lie, a Dutchman of Chinese heritage. Lie originally created his company to serve the overseas descendants of Chinese families who emigrated from their homeland because of political persecution or economic hardship. (Lie’s own family moved from Fujian and Jinmen to Indonesia a couple of generations ago, before going to the Netherlands.) “The overwhelming majority [of Chinese] left for non-pleasant reasons. Whether poverty or political it was never pleasant,” he explained to the FT in 2014.

Today, the onset of DNA testing has created a new entrepreneurial niche: My China Roots also places ads on social media in China asking mothers who gave up their babies years ago to come forward and submit DNA. This is then matched against databases such as 23andMe to help children who are looking for their birth mothers, and, if both sides want to be connected, identify them.

Matthew Yglesias:

The last few years have seen a demagogic conservative push against the use of “critical race theory” in schools. This effort has featured some obvious villains, including policy entrepreneurs exploiting the issue for gain and racist parents getting mad about children learning the story of Ruby Bridges. 

If you are so inclined (and many progressives are), you can point to the bigots and the opportunists and dismiss the whole thing as fake or a “moral panic.” 

But I think we’ve seen that this is electorally unconvincing. Beyond that, though, I’d say that it’s substantively unconvincing. The country was roiled by a huge racial reckoning last year, and the truth is that there have been changes. Some of those changes have been positive, some have been negative, and some are things adults love to fight about but that aren’t actually very important for children. And it’s worth trying to understand and evaluate those changes.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

PDE:

Coventry Public Schools in Rhode Island have been using Panorama Education surveys for students in the 3rd grade and up across the district. (Rhode Island is one of the states that contracted with Panorama Education statewide; an “annual climate survey” is given to students in every district.) Coventry Public Schools cite Panorama by name in their district strategic plan. That plan also states the district’s intent to increase Social Emotional Learning (SEL) measures in the early learning environment for students across the board.

From the Rhode Island Department of Education website:

In 2021, a new “Cultural Awareness & Action” section allows space for students, staff, and families to respond to a series of questions about discussing and confronting issues of race, ethnicity, and culture.

Panorama’s SEL Learning guide is here.

Below is Coventry’s strategic plan entitled, “Equity and Excellence.”

Mike Antonucci:

Officers of a 190-member support staff union in New York allegedly whisked away more than $112,000 in dues, according to a fidelity bond claim filed by New York State United Teachers and obtained by the Albany Times Union.

Union representatives of the tiny BOCES Rensselaer-Columbia-Greene Special Support Services Federation stand accused of writing themselves checks, attending AFT conferences they couldn’t legitimately afford, and holding “holiday parties that no one attended.”

Where the dues were spent make for great headlines, but the key aspect of the incident is how such a small local union had access to so much money.

It is standard practice for school districts to extract all levels of union dues — national, state and local — from each members’ paycheck, then deliver that lump sum to the local union. The local union then keeps its share, and passes the rest to the state union. The state union keeps its share and passes the rest to the national union. So, for a period of time the local union holds a full amount of dues.

Alexander Nazaryan:

The father was furious. “Figure it out, or get off the podium,” he shouted at school board members in Loudoun County, Va.

He was not irate about critical race theory, which would come to dominate the state’s gubernatorial race, with the Northern Virginia exurbs at the center of that battle over how to teach history in schools. His anger did not stem from debates about which bathrooms transgender students should use. Those heated battles were still months away. It was January 2021, and what the screaming father wanted was more immediate and concrete.

He sought the end of remote learning.

“It’s not a high bar,” he shouted at the school board members sitting before him. “Raise the freaking bar.”

Remote learning had relegated children across Virginia — and much of the rest of the country — to attend classes via Zoom since the previous March, when the coronavirus had first transformed living rooms and bedrooms into the new American classroom. Parents struggled to balance the demands of work while also playing the new role of remote learning instructor.

Robert Maranto and James Paul:

Key Points

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement requirements for job applicants seeking university faculty posts seem increasingly common.
• Proponents claim these requirements create a more inclusive academy. Critics claim they amount to political correctness loyalty oaths. Yet, until now, no one has conducted an empirical investigation of their prevalence or how these requirements vary across academic disciplines, geographic regions, type of faculty position, and university prestige.
• Prestigious universities are significantly more likely to have DEI requirements than nonprestigious universities. Perhaps surprisingly, these statements are as prevalent in STEM fields as in the humanities and social sciences, once controls are accounted for.
• Regular faculty posts are more likely to require DEI statements than adjunct and postdoc positions. Relative to other regions, jobs in the West are most likely to require DEI statements.

Detroit News:

Forming a bureaucracy to encourage diversity by means other than affirmative action exemplifies the trend of bloated university administrations which makes going to college more costly for students.

In 2003, there were no UM employees with diversity titles. The next year, 15 employees were added with that title. Now it’s 76. 

Yet black students still remain at just 5 percent of the student population; Hispanic students are 6 percent.

Eli Lake:

Durham’s indictment says Danchenko’s lies “deprived FBI agents and analysts of probative information” “that would have, among other things, assisted them in evaluating the credibility, reliability, and veracity” of the dossier. Again, Durham portrays the FBI as the victims of the Clinton campaign’s efforts.

It’s a fair point as far as it goes. But FBI agents were able to discern that Steele’s information was worthless without the benefit of knowing Danchenko’s relationship to Dolan. They reached this conclusion over the course of four interviews with Danchenko in 2017. Nonetheless, much of the media treated Steele’s allegations as a credible part of an epic FBI investigation until Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that he had no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election.

In this respect, the real victim of these Democratic Party deceptions was not the FBI, but the American public. That’s why Durham’s investigation, now in its third year, remains not only relevant but vital.

Agence France-Press:

A citizen journalist jailed for her coverage of China’s initial response to Covid in Wuhan is close to death after going on hunger strike, her family said, prompting renewed calls from rights groups for her immediate release.

Zhang Zhan, 38, a former lawyer, travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the chaos at the pandemic’s centre, questioning authorities’ handling of the outbreak in her smartphone videos.

She was detained in May 2020 and sentenced in December to four years in jail for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a charge routinely used to suppress dissent.

She is now severely underweight and “may not live for much longer”, her brother Zhang Ju wrote last week on a Twitter account verified by people close to the matter.

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

Diana Kwon:

With cryo-EM, scientists make a 3D image by taking 2D pictures of lots of isolated molecules in different configurations, and merging the results. With cryo-ET, by contrast, they take multiple snapshots of a single chunk of material, teeming with molecules, from many different angles, allowing the surroundings to be kept intact.

It’s like having a photo of a whole crowd, rather than one person’s headshot. This is why Wolfgang Baumeister, a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, who is one of the pioneers of the technique, and his colleagues have dubbed it “molecular sociology”.

And this is how proteins live, after all. “Proteins are social — at any given time a protein is in a complex with about ten other proteins,” says Villa. After viewing such interactions with cryo-ET, “I could not stomach the thought of myself studying another protein in isolation,” she adds.

Wisconsin State Journal:

But the open seat on the Madison School Board was created when the board president retired after being taunted in foul ways outside her private home. Can you blame her? A school board member in Beaver Dam similarly resigned this fall, citing safety concerns for his family.

Madison’s schools were closed most of last year to in-person instruction, which frustrated many parents and students. Most other districts found ways to safely educate their children in person despite the virus.

Since police officers were pulled from Madison’s high schools, troubling violence has occurred. Property taxes are up 9%. Achievement gaps persist.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Elizabeth Beyer:

Police responded to an active fight involving dozens of students outside school property at around 11:37 a.m.More than 15 officers were dispatched to the scene and the incident remains an open and active investigation, Madison Police officer Ryan Kimberley said in a statement. 

Interim Principal Mikki Smith declined to comment and instructed staff who were on scene not to speak with reporters. But in an email to parents later in the day, Smith said some students “engaged in an altercation outside of the building” shortly before lunch. 

“Around this time, a student pulled a fire alarm, sending a large number of students outside and into the area where the fights were occurring,” the note read. “This caused the altercations to escalate. East staff responded immediately, and we did request additional support from the Madison Police Department. At this time, we also had some parents arriving at school, adding to the number of people outside the building.”

The school was put on a lockout to ensure that whatever was happening outside did not come inside the building, Smith continued. All exterior doors were locked and no one was allowed to enter or exit the school, and staff members were stationed around the building to monitor the exterior doors. School administration said the lockout lasted approximately 10 minutes, though some students said it lasted much longer. 

Police used pepper spray to break up the fights, and students who were sprayed were cared for by emergency responders and the school nurse. Five students were taken to a hospital after being sprayed. Their conditions were not immediately available.

Christian Fuller, 16, a junior at East, said he saw a fight break out by the tennis courts behind the school around 11 a.m.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Ryan Lanier:

In one of the most stunning examples of relief fund abuse, the Whitewater, Wis., school board voted to allocate 80 percent of its $2 million Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) grant toward the construction of synthetic turf fields for football, baseball, and softball. When asked why the funds should be used for athletic fields instead of educational projects, Whitewater High School Athletic Director Justin Crandall told the school board that he did not envision the district as one “that would go to a referendum for turf fields.” Rather than put Crandall’s theory to the test, the school board decided instead to bill the American people for the projects. 

In South Texas, the McAllen Independent School District Board of Trustees allotted $4 million in ESSER relief funds to facilitate the expansion of the city-owned Quinta Mazatlan nature center. Although the district cited the “rare opportunity” provided by “an authentic science lab right here in our backyard,” the proposal received heavy criticism from district parents. One parent, Tory Guerra, rightfully questioned how the sanctuary was related to student recovery. Because the project won’t be completed until 2024, she observed, “half the kids won’t even get to reap the benefit” of the nature center. 

In Douglas County, Colo., the school board spent $800,000 on Edgenuity, an online learning platform, in a no-bid “emergency” procurement. Rather than use local teachers, the platform utilized pre-recorded classes for students to watch. After a period of delays that was “nothing short of chaos,” students were finally able to begin using the online platform at the end of August. Teachers and students were highly critical of the program. One student’s grandmother reported that her grandchild had four different teachers in five days, while another parent described it as “a bait-and-switch.” The district stopped using Edgenuity several weeks into the school year but did not receive a refund.

Garion Frankel:

At face value, these numbers are absurd. Even more infuriating is the fact that state education agencies and school boards are sitting on what they have already been allocated. While some of the early stimulus rounds were spent on PPE and cleaning supplies, the money from the American Rescue Plan is still just sitting there — and it’s billions of dollars. Many districts plan on waiting until as late as 2028 to dip into these funds.

But this isn’t anything new. Since 1960, public education spending per student has increased by 280%, yet test scores have only increased by modest margins at best. It’s become abundantly clear that throwing seemingly endless amounts of money at public schools does nothing for those who the institution is designed to serve: students.

Families are tired of the politics, the drama, and the wasted investments. Their anger is righteous and justified. But if we want these feelings to translate into meaningful policy, the country must get behind education savings accounts(ESAs).

Related: Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district plans an 8.9% (!) property tax increase during the 2021-2022 budget, after receiving $70M (!) in redistributed federal taxpayer and borrowed funds.

Barbara Davidson:

School Tour Examines Shift in How Young Students are Taught to Read

The Knowledge Matters Campaign is excited to announce an upcoming visit to school districts across the state of Massachusetts that have recently adopted new English language arts/literacy curriculum designed to improve reading outcomes.

These districts are pioneers, since each is an early mover in shifting away from use of curriculum that has earned growing critique for weak alignment to research on how kids learn to read. The visit to Massachusetts will capture and highlight what motivated these forward-looking districts to make this shift, and how they went about the change, in hopes that they can serve as models for the field.

The campaign – whose motto is to “find the good and praise it” – garners national awareness for the importance of building students’ background knowledge of the world through highquality literacy instruction. Since 2018, over 20 districts across the country whose implementation of high-quality, knowledge-building curricula is considered praiseworthy have been visited as part of the Knowledge Matters School Tour

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela:

he last post Glenn Youngkin shared on his website before winning the Virginia governor’s race was a list of 15 purported “lies” told by his opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Eleven concerned schools, and Youngkin’s rebuttals mostly centered on a promise core to his campaign: He would make “parents matter” in the educational decisions that affect their children. Some dismissed this strategy — which evolved from less-controversial talking points, such as raising teacher pay and protecting free speech, to proclamations about banning critical race theory — as purely symbolic. Barack Obama called it “fake outrage” intended only to boost ratings; commentators insisted that anger over education was “phony,” “hysterical nonsense” and a “manufactured culture war.”

To be sure, invoking the fraught realms of school and family reliably inflames voters; it’s a political strategy almost as old as the modern school system. In the early 1940s, the superpatriotic American Legion warned parents of the “sinister” aims of a popular textbook series that centered “social problems” to purportedly brainwash children into becoming vengeful communists. In the 1960s, opponents of sex education argued that courses designed by “secular humanists” would turn children against their parents and into pleasure-seeking, long-haired protest marchers. Just a few years later, the curricular boogeyman was a social studies program that supposedly threatened to destroy children’s love of country and family by suggesting that non-Western cultures — or even the animal kingdom — could offer insight into American society. The culprits were a consistent but varied cast of “educationists,” villainized as both incompetent and malevolent: Bloated bureaucrats and lazy union hacks freeloading off tax-funded salaries coexisted with scheming teachers and pointy-headed professors intent on corrupting children with leftist ideologies or sexual perversion.

Hindsight makes clear that these hypotheses were outrageous. But while it’s important to debunk the racism, sexism and homophobia driving these moral panics, it’s just as important to understand why they took hold. During these and countless other “classroom wars,” including Virginia’s contest this past week, schools become sites of such intense controversy precisely because they reflect larger social transformations. Seismic events such as the Great Depression, a world war and the civil rights struggle — or, today, a pandemic and a major reckoning around structural inequality — do change the experience of education. The resulting unease primes people, especially parents, to believe outlandish theories about the nature of these changes and what they represent, and to seize upon curricular issues as a concrete way to exert control over larger, inchoate and often unsettling social and political shifts. School issues, then, are no mere cipher for “real” concerns: They’re central to contemporary political culture, in Virginia and beyond.

Commentary.

Marguerite Roza and Hannah Jarmolowski:

Educational equity has been this administration’s priority from the outset, and last week’s executive order reiterates that. So, it is noteworthy that there are four federal provisions already on the books that could—if implemented with fidelity—make a real impact on financial equity in schooling.

Financial equity can be measured both across districts and within districts by comparing fair distribution of dollars across schools. Here, we focus on within-district financial inequities that have frustrated federal lawmakers for decades.

The federal government tightly controls the 10% of school funds from federal coffers, but it’s been more challenging to address inequities stemming from the 90% from state and local sources. Each district decides how to allocate these funds across schools, and examples abound of districts that shortchange some schools at the expense of others with greater needs.

As shown below, there are four federal provisions (accumulated over three administrations) with potential to work together toward fostering equity. But thus far, none of these provisions has been fully implemented by every state, and one seems to have been ignored completely.

Salena Zito:

On the morning of Election Day in western Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf mentioned on a local radio show that his wife had submitted his mail-in ballot for him — a direct violation of Pennsylvania election law punishable by up to either a year in prison or a $1,000 fine — or possibly both.

Had the progressive Democrat signed the voting bill that passed this summer, H.B. 1300, any member of his household could have dropped it off for him. Moreover, it would have established early in-person voting and required signature verification of mail-in ballots.

When he vetoed the bill, Wolf said at the time it was because it “restricted the freedom to vote.”

This story will last a day or two in the local news. What reporters and elected officials will miss about this moment is where the seed is planted in the public psyche — just one more snippet of information adding to their dissatisfaction with the party in power. It is one of many signs collected over many years that insiders like Wolf are detached from the people they govern.

Their detachment is not just geographical but cultural, and it is not limited to politics. For decades, the nation’s cultural curators have operated through corporations, national sports organizations, Hollywood, academia, the national news media. More and more, they have become detached from the people who buy, watch, or are educated by them.

In Wolf’s case, he spent the last two years telling his constituents he knew better on everything, especially regarding his secretive, autocratic handling of the pandemic and his controversial moves regarding business waivers and nursing homes. He allowed only “life-sustaining sectors of the economy” to stay open, yet he initially allowed his family’s cabinet business to remain open. His former health secretary, Rachel Levine, now a prominent member of the Biden administration, made decisions that turned Pennsylvania nursing homes into coronavirus death traps, then removed her mother from a personal care facility .

Their “do as I say not as I do” attitude led to last Tuesday’s reaction, but that wasn’t the first instance. Before that, there was a referendum this spring that curtailed the governor’s emergency powers. Last fall, Democrats lost state House and Senate seats even though they had expected to take over both chambers. They were once again handed defeats in last Tuesday’s elections in places they were supposed to win.

This trend is certainly not limited to Pennsylvania — and it has not always favored Republicans. In 2006, Republicans were wildly out of step with their constituents. Democrats such as Rahm Emmanuel wisely understood that and recruited Democratic candidates who could win in conservative districts. They hired ad-makers like Steve McMahon at Purple Strategies, who created a “We share your values” messaging, appealing to the independent, Republican, and Democratic voters. They won big in that year’s midterm elections.

I have argued for years that the conservative-populist coalition was born in 2008 when John McCain became the Republican nominee. These voters either stayed home or voted against their interests for Barack Obama because of his candidacy’s historic and aspirational nature.

By 2009, their breakaway began, and the anti-establishment Tea Party movement was born. The 2010 midterm elections demonstrated the coalition’s strength, but it felt the same way toward Mitt Romney as it had for McCain — nice guy but didn’t inspire them. Obama became the first president ever reelected with fewer popular votes and a smaller percentage than his first election.

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MIT, like many universities, has recently turned hostile to free speech, free expression, open scientific inquiry, and viewpoint diversity.  For example, in October 2021, MIT canceled the speaking invitation of leading geophysicist Dorian Abbot for expressing the view, regarded as simple common sense by most Americans, that personal identity should not supersede merit. The barrage of negative press and public outrage resulting from MIT cancelling Dr. Abbot led MIT faculty chair Lily Tsai in November 2021 to poll the faculty on two questions:

•  60% responded “Yes” to “Do you feel on an everyday basis that your voice, or the voices of your colleagues are constrained at MIT?” 
•  83% responded “Yes” to “Are you worried given the current atmosphere in society that your voice or your colleagues’ voices are increasingly in jeopardy?” 

That a large majority of MIT faculty feels that their voices are constrained at MIT reveals a crisis demanding decisive action. The MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), a chapter of the national Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA), was formed to call for such action, beginning by investigating the current climate on campus, and recommending how MIT can restore free speech, open scientific inquiry, and a tolerance for viewpoint diversity.

Minneapolis parents have taken their frustrations with the school district’s level of illiteracy to the superintendent’s house pic.twitter.com/dSVOLyoUDa

— Beth Hawkins (@beth_hawkins) November 7, 2021

Seth

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Michael Edge Jeanna Neefe Matthews

Advocates of transparency in science often point to the benefits of open practices for the scientific process. Here, we focus on a possibly underappreciated effect of standards for transparency: their influence on non-scientific decisions. As a case study, we consider the current state of probabilistic genotyping software in forensics.

This story is a good example of the feelings-first, fear-amplifying journalism that has characterized schools coverage from the Times and others. https://t.co/GuN4OMpCEQ

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) November 6, 2021

Lindsay Paterson

Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how inequality operates and is reproduced. The present analysis uses social surveys of children aged 10 to 11 years in Britain between 1947 and 2012 to assess whether the social-class distribution of intelligence has changed. The main conclusions are that, although children’s intelligence relative to their peers remains associated with social class, the association may have weakened recently, mainly because the average intelligence in the highest-status classes may have moved closer to the mean.

Brad Polumbo:

Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later. 

We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

The picture painted by this comparison is one of working-class destruction.

Joanne Jacobs:

Shane Trotter was an eager beaver when he began teaching high school 10 years ago. He was working in what was considered the best school in a “destination district.” But his students were unprepared to take notes or write short responses on tests, he writes in Quillette.

I’d spend entire classes explaining what I wanted to see in the short answer responses. We’d practice writing the “who, what, where, when, and why this concept is important.” But little changed.

. . . Over half of my students would have failed if I gave them the grade they earned. But the unwritten, yet well-communicated, rule was that teachers should never fail a student if it could be helped. The onus was on the teacher to hound students for late assignments and find a way to bump them to a C.

Students had no incentive to work hard because they knew they’d pass, Trotter writes. “In most on-level classes, any student can get a B without the inconvenience of learning anything.”

Under pressure, he “eliminated homework, allowed test retakes, gave fill-in-the-blank notes, graded essays at a 5th grade level, gave test reviews that were basically the test, and intentionally made tests easy,” he writes. “Students might have learned more if they’d been allowed to fail.”

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Derek Thompson:

Like many new ideas, Fast Grants is an innovation embedded in a critique of the status quo.

Most scientific funding in the United States flows from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This funding is famously luxurious; the NIH and NSF allocate about $50 billion a year. It is also infamously laborious and slow. Scientists spend up to 40 percent of their timeworking on research grants rather than on research. And funding agencies sometimes take seven months (or longer) to review an application, respond, or request a resubmission. Anything we can do to accelerate the grant-application process could hugely increase the productivity of science.

Signatories: 1,105 as of November 5, 2021

California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most when schools fail to teach their students. As textbooks and other teaching materials approved by the State would have to follow this framework and since teachers are expected to use it as a guide, its potential to steal a promising future from our children is enormous.

The proposed framework would, in effect, de-mathematize math. For all the rhetoric in this framework about equity, social justice, environmental care and culturally appropriate pedagogy, there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology. A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math—as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math. The proposed framework:

• Promotes fringe teaching methods such as “trauma-informed pedagogy.” [ch. 2, p. 16]
• Distracts from actual mathematics by having teachers insert “environmental and social justice” into the math curriculum. [ch. 1, p. 35]
• Distracts from actual mathematics by having teachers develop students’ “sociopolitical consciousness.” [ch. 2, p. 39] 
• Distracts from actual mathematics by assigning students—as schoolwork—tasks it says will solve “problems that result in social inequalities.” [ch. 7, p. 29] 
• Urges teachers to take a “justice-oriented perspective at any grade level, K–12” and explicitly rejects the idea that mathematics itself is a “neutral discipline.” [ch. 2, p. 29] 
• Encourages focusing on “contributions that historically marginalized people have made to mathematics” rather than on those contributions themselves which have been essential to the academic discipline of mathematics. [ch. 2, p. 31]
• “Reject[s] ideas of natural gifts and talents” and discourages accelerating talented mathematics students. [ch. 1, p. 8]
• Encourages keeping all students together in the same math program until the 11th grade and argues that offering differentiated programs causes student “fragility” and racial animosity. [ch.1, p. 15]
• Rejects the longstanding goal of preparing students to take Algebra I in eighth grade, on par with high-performing foreign countries whose inhabitants will be future competitors of America’s children—a goal explicitly part of the 1999 and 2006 Math Frameworks. [ch. 9, p. 43]

We, the undersigned, disagree. Mathematics is a discipline whose language is universally accessible with good teaching. The claim that math is not accessible is an insult to the millennia of non-Western mathematicians and erases the contributions of cultures around the world to mathematics as we now know it. Large numbers of students in developing countries are currently succeeding in advanced mathematics, and American industries have been put in the position of having to encourage them to come to the United States to work.

K-12 Math links:

“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

Connected Math.

Singapore Math

Math forum

Joe Setyon:

Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas found this out the hard way. When Solas emailed the principal of her daughter’s public school earlier this year, asking for the kindergarten curriculum, she was stonewalled. Then, she got hit with a bill from the school district for $74,000. Solas, who the Goldwater Institute is defending in court, was even sued by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public sector teachers union, all because she thought she had a right to know what her daughter would be taught about America. 

“Parents have enough on their hands raising their children—it’s a full-time job,” said Sandefur. “They shouldn’t have to fight self-righteous administrators and scheming special interests just to find out what their kids are being taught in classrooms that their tax dollars pay for.”

It would have been easy for Solas to give up. But she didn’t. 

“Nicole won’t be bullied, intimidated, or silenced. She’s still fighting for her daughter—and for all our children,” Sandefur said. “And she’s showing parents across the country that they’re not alone.

Solas, this year’s recipient of the Goldwater Institute Freedom Award, offered a roadmap for all Americans interested in battling the growing wokeness in our schools. “You will be retaliated against,” she said, adding, “Embrace dissent.”

Adam Harris:

And it’s not all about CRT. Although that fight has garnered a lot of attention, the current animus toward school boards, and the members who sit on them, goes back to the start of the pandemic, when many schools shut down, prompting intense anger from some parents. Pamela Lindberg, a six-year Robbinsdale, Minnesota, school-board member, was on the receiving end of some of that ire. This past summer, on July 19, at the close of the board’s regularly scheduled meeting, Lindberg announced that she was resigning. “I will not continue to accept that hateful and disrespectful behavior with my service to the community,” she said. “The hate is too much. I no longer feel respected nor effective.”

Lindberg is one of the dozens of school-board officials who have left their positions in the past year. In Minnesota, nearly 70 members have resigned or retired since August 2020—a typical year would see fewer than 20 such departures, according to the Minnesota School Boards Association. In Wisconsin, three board members left the Oconomowoc Area School Board in unison, calling the board’s work “toxic and impossible to do.” And in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a board member who had voted twice in favor of requiring masks for children resigned after receiving several threats and observing a vehicle idling outside his home late at night.

School-board meetings, once ho-hum affairs punctuated by lengthy conversations over public-works projects and curricula, and presentations about the successes of local students, have, over the past 20 months, become one of the most prominent outlets where people feel they can voice their opposition to everything including masks, vaccine mandates, and equity initiatives. From 2006 to 2020, Ballotpedia, which tracks elections, covered an average of 23 recall efforts against 52 school-board members each year; this election, they tracked 84 efforts against 215 officials.

And school-board elections are typically low-turnout events. But that was not the case this go-round. When Wendy Francour, who faced a recall in Mequon-Thiensville, was first elected in 2014, she received 2,300 votes—this year she received nearly 6,800. These elections are disproportionately attended by interested parties such as parents and teachers, a slice of the public but not one broadly representative of the larger public’s interests. But this year’s turnout numbers suggest a wider swath of people were motivated to vote on education—an issue that, though important, rarely polls highly among voters’ most pressing concerns.

Matthew Levey:

Roosevelt Montás’s memoir-cum-paean to the classics, is a timely and much-needed book. Montás directed Columbia’s Core Curriculum program for a decade. In an era when dismissing the canon signals a concern for the less privileged, Montás argues that restoring the great writers and thinkers to the pantheon is critical. “Far from a pointless indulgence for the elite,” he writes, “liberal education is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down.”

At the root of the decline of the liberal arts, Montás sees “a crisis of consensus among academic humanists about what things are most worth knowing.” He blames university leaders, “reluctant to reveal the values [they] hold” for fear of being judged “morally corrupt” or “complicit in larger systems of exclusion or exploitation” for failing their students. He acknowledges that “dead white men” influence the humanities but properly notes “the problems of representation . . . must be solved by means other than the abandonment of the textual traditions that underpin contemporary life.”

“Free” is at the root of the Latin word liber in liberal arts. You can’t define the liberal arts with a bumper sticker, but for Montás, his freedom certainly wasn’t free. He arrived in New York as a 12-year-old, joining his mother, who earned $3.36 an hour at a garment factory in Brooklyn. He moved frequently, used savings from his summer job to help pay the security deposit on their home, and treasured a gold-leafed copy of Plato’s Dialogues he found in the garbage next to his Queens apartment. Six years after leaving a rural town in the Dominican Republic, speaking not a word of English, Montás found himself standing before Columbia’s majestic Low Memorial Library, at the start of his freshman year.

While conservatives despair at Shakespeare’s cancellation and progressives demand ever-more gender- and race-based studies, Columbia University remains a bastion of liberal arts education, requiring four liberal arts classes grounded in the Western tradition, regardless of a student’s major, social status, or race. Whether they hope to become physicists or poets, students must share the experience of struggling with life’s fundamental questions, gaining an understanding of how writers from the ancient past to the present have been in dialogue with each other, pushing society to define a life worth living. Leading the class he once took, Montás now asks his students to consider, like Socrates, if there is an idea for which they are willing to die. That’s a question that shouldn’t be confined to classrooms.

New York City mayor-elect Eric Adams, who has noted how badly our schools fail to teach black boys to read, might consider paying Montás a visit. One thing Adams could learn from Columbia’s Core for literary instruction is the importance of internal coherence—all art, music, and literature is a reaction of the present generation to the ones that preceded it. Too often, our current curricula pretend that one story is just as good as another, failing to build students’ background knowledge and worsening the comprehension challenges for less privileged kids.

Matt Burgess:

Christian Landgren’s patience was running out. Every day the separated father of three was wasting precious time trying to get the City of Stockholm’s official school system, Skolplattform, to work properly. Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his children needed in their gym kit was a hassle, then working out how to report them as sick was a nightmare. Two years after its launch in August 2018, the Skolplattform had become a constant thorn in the side of thousands of parents across Sweden’s capital city. “All the users and the parents were angry,” Landgren says.

The Skolplattform wasn’t meant to be this way. Commissioned in 2013, the system was intended to make the lives of up to 500,000 children, teachers, and parents in Stockholm easier—acting as the technical backbone for all things education, from registering attendance to keeping a record of grades. The platform is a complex system that’s made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent. The only problem? It doesn’t work.

The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. Parents and teachers have complained about the complexity of the system—its launch was delayed, there have been reports of project mismanagement, and it has been labelled an IT disaster. The Android version of the app has an average 1.2 star rating.

On October 23, 2020, Landgren, a developer and the CEO of Swedish innovation consulting firm Iteam, tweeted a hat design emblazoned with the words “Skrota Skolplattformen”—loosely translated as “trash the school platform.” He joked he should wear the hat when he picks his children up from school. Weeks later, wearing that very hat, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “From my own frustration, I just started to create my own app,” Landgren says.

Wenbin Fang:

Fast forward to 2016 and I found that I was consuming more information from podcasts than from other media formats like TV, YouTube videos, or news websites. To be precise, I spent five-plus hours per day listening to podcasts when I was writing code, commuting to work, working out in the gym, grocery shopping, and so on.

Basically, whenever my hands and eyes were busy but my mind was free, I would listen to podcasts.

Podcasts just make knowledge accessible, like Wikipedia. There are tons of podcasts on the Internet that cover basically every topic!

As of September 2021, there are over 2.6 million publicly accessible RSS-based podcasts and more than 113 million episodes on the Internet.

Amazing: teacher union president @rweingarten — who demands kids stay in masks all day at school including while outside — got caught partying with NY politicos in an *indoor* “packed room” all night in a Puerto Rico ballroom with no mask, and justifies it this way: pic.twitter.com/AJjEa1MLKb

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 6, 2021

James Gordon.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

The Economist:

America has a maths problem. Its pupils have ranked poorly in international maths exams for decades. In 2018, American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. American adults ranked fourth-from-last in numeracy when compared with other rich countries. As many as 30% of American adults are comfortable only with simple maths: basic arithmetic, counting, sorting and similar tasks. American employers are desperate for science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills: nuclear engineers, software developers and machinists are in short supply. And while pupils’ maths scores are bad enough now, they could be getting worse. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (naep), a national exam, 13-year-old pupils’ scores dropped five points in 2020 compared with their peers’ in 2012. The status quo does not add up. But teachers and academics cannot agree on where to go next.

K-12 Math links:

“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

Connected Math.

Singapore Math

Math forum

Update on the state of Wisconsin’s school-board recalls (second most in the nation). 26 seats targeted in 12 districts. 5 resignations, 7 petition drives underway. pic.twitter.com/RXtIIgHSey

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) November 5, 2021

Assumption rot: the US supply chain has a basic level of security and there are people both ‘willing and able’ to make sure it does. https://t.co/CmkqQATJcF

— John Robb (@johnrobb) November 6, 2021

One could apply the same analysis to our long term, disastrous reading results and the Governor’s teacher mulligans.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Tyler Cowen:

Among the big losers will be the American upper middle class, especially those with jobs connected to information technology and those who can work from home. They will face much more competition in the labor market than before. They may have some natural advantages of education and cultural fluency, but they are not in general smarter or harder-working than much of the rest of the world.
In other words: If you have had a relatively comfortable job during the pandemic, it might now be time to worry.

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Alec Johnson:

A few weeks after a parent filed a federal lawsuit against the Waukesha School District over the district’s COVID-19 protocols, the district has filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The district’s attorneys, Joel Aziere and Jennifer Williams, filed the motion Oct. 29 in the U.S. Eastern District of Wisconsin. They argued that the suit does not belong in federal court and that “federal court has no jurisdiction over the pleaded state tort claims.”

“The court should not allow itself to be used for political and publicity purposes. As such, the motion to dismiss should be granted in its entirety,” Aziere and Williams said.

The lawsuit was filed Oct. 5 by attorney Frederick Melms on behalf of parent Shannon Jensen and other parents and K-12 Waukesha School District students. It argues for class-action status and seeks a court order requiring the district to comply with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 guidelines. Kirk Bangstad’s Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC is helping to fund the lawsuit.

Ian Prior:

It all started in February 2019 when Loudoun County made national news after the president of the Loudoun County NAACP claimed that students at Madison Trust Elementary were instructed to pretend to be slaves during a gym class activity. This exercise was presented to the media as a “runaway slave game.”

The school was quick to issue an apology and then-Superintendent Eric Williams said the school system would take corrective action, which included hiring “[a]n outside expert [to] conduct an equity audit,” requiring all teachers to receive “cultural competence and implicit bias training,” and creating a new position related to “equity and cultural competence.”

LCPS immediately began taking action. In April 2019, it hired The Equity Collaborative, a consulting firm in California that specializes in critical race theory. LCPS paid that company $422,000 to conduct focus groups, coach and train teachers, and produce an “equity assessment.” That assessment was supposedly submitted to LCPS on June, 6, 2019. The report was titled: “Initial Report – Systemic Equity Assessment: A Picture of Racial Equity – Challenges and Opportunities in Loudoun County Public School District.”

On May 22, 2019, prior to the equity assessment release, the Loudoun NAACP filed a complaintwith the Virginia attorney general alleging systemic racism at LCPS. On September 9, 2019, the Loudoun NAACP supplemented its complaint by submitting the $422,000 equity assessment.

JD Tuccille:

Americans have shifted back to favoring a more hands-off approach for government in addressing the nation’s problems after a rare endorsement of a more active role last year,” Gallup reported in mid-October. “Last year marked only the second time in Gallup’s 29-year trend that at least half of Americans endorsed an active role for the government on this item,” the polling firm added. Before the pandemic, Americans supported activist government for only a brief while after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks before returning to a preference for “fewer government services and lower taxes.” That’s happening once again.

On the national scene, that preference may be reflected in weak support for the multi-trillion-dollar spending schemes stalled in Congress. “A plurality (32%) of Americans think the bills would hurt people like them if they became law,” finds a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll.

McAuliffe, Murphy, and other political hopefuls are floundering in a country that’s losing its tolerance for imperious officials. Voters are by no means unified in what they want, and it’s not at all obvious that they voted on the same issues this week. But it’s clear that most people have moved beyond the crisis climate that drove them to cut a lot of slack for government during the worst days of COVID-19.

Panicked Americans surrendered a lot of power during the pandemic. Now they want their country back.

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health mandates, outcomes and litigation.

University of Utah:

“The results suggest it is possible for schools to operate safely and in-person without increasing case rates in the community,” says Richard Nelson, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at University of Utah Health and co-senior author with Westyn Branch-Elliman, M.D., of the VA Boston Healthcare System. “But the flip side is true, too. In some areas, in-person school did appear to be a source of community spread.”

The researchers analyzed data gathered during the 12 weeks from July to September 2020 by region, and categorized them as the Northeast, Midwest, South, and Mountain West. The Pacific West was not included because nearly all public schools were virtual. The study found that:

• In every region analyzed, COVID-19 cases increased during the weeks following the start of school.
• The South was the only region where case rates were higher in counties with in-person or hybrid school as compared to counties with virtual learning, after controlling for other contributing factors.
• In all other regions, community case rates during the period following school opening were similar regardless of whether school was virtual, hybrid, or in-person.

“We know that cases increased substantially last fall throughout the country,” Nelson says. “In some areas of the country, school mode was a contributing factor to those increasing rates, whereas in other areas it was not.”

McAuliffe’s mistake was thinking Randi Weingarten has as much influence with Virginia voters as she has with the CDC. pic.twitter.com/5N7ipOhE6I

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) November 3, 2021

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Governor Evers:

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE:
I am vetoing Senate Bill 454 in its entirety.

The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan for each pupil in five-year-old kindergarten to second grade who is identified as at-risk. It would also mandate the Department of
Public Instruction establish and maintain lists of approved fundamental skills screening
assessments, universal screening assessments, and diagnostic assessments on its Internet site
based on alignment with model academic standards in reading and language arts, and a mandatory minimum sensitivity rate and specificity rate.

Further, this bill would mandate a school board, for
each school and the district, or operator of an independent charter, to annually submit a report to
the Department regarding the number of pupils identified as at-risk, the names of reading assessments used, and the number of pupils five-year-old kindergarten to second grade who receive
literacy interventions, all information which the Department would have to then annually compile
and report to the Legislature. The bill provides no additional funding to implement its new mandates
for additional testing or to address staffing or other resource needs necessary for implementation
Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the prior two years have been especially challenging for
our kids, parents, and schools. We must work–and quickly-to address reading proficiency and
increase literacy success for every kid in our classrooms. I have advocated for some time, including during my time on the Read to Lead Task Force, for increased efforts at the state level to support our kids and our schools so we can ensure every student’s success. This dialogue, however, must be based on proven, evidence based practices, and cannot be independent from discussions about
the state’s obligation to provide meaningful, sustainable support for our classrooms and our
schools.

I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to fundamentally overhauling Wisconsin literacy
instruction and intervention without evidence that more statewide, mandatory testing is the best
approach for our students, and without providing the funding needed for implementation. This bill
ultimately reduces valuable instruction time while asking schools to strain their existing resources,
instead of providing necessary funding to support the work educators, administrators, and staff are
currently doing to support reading and literacy for our students

Referencing the Read to Lead Task Force in light of Mr. Evers subsequent use of teacher mulligans is rather fascinating.

Molly Beck:

In Wisconsin, fourth graders are on average not scoring high enough to be considered proficient in reading, according to their most recent performance measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.

About 35% of the Wisconsin fourth grade students who took the test scored at or above proficient in reading — a proportion that has barely changed since 1992 when the test was first administered.

LaKeeshia Myers on AB446

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

🚨Hey parents!!! You have options when it comes to your child’s education! Don’t settle!

I’m a 5th grade teacher in a private Catholic classical school. Here is what I use to teach American history the right way 🇺🇸 #classicaleducation pic.twitter.com/bhzDPldEb9

— Chelsea Niemiec (@classicalchels) November 4, 2021

Alexander Russo:

Why did you decide to open the story with the scene of officers pressuring Principal Garrett to deliver her students to them?

MK: We decided to open the story in this chaotic moment because it was so compelling. So fast paced, and so riveting, we figured it wouldn’t lose any readers. Plus, it puts the children right at the center, which they absolutely should be. We chose to use Garrett as the main perspective because she was the one adult who touched almost every moment of this incident — from gathering the children to watching them get taken away in handcuffs. Also, she was the one who was most concerned about the children, she was their principal.

What’s been the biggest response/reaction to your piece — and how does it compare to previous stories you’ve done?

MK: The response has been overwhelming. In a good way. Emails have flooded our inboxes. This is by far the biggest reach I’ve ever had with a story. But what is most striking to me is that we’ve gotten NOT ONE negative email. No one criticized the work or told us we had it wrong. It’s been all support and outrage over the story. Which is striking to me in this day and age. I found it fascinating and hopeful that readers were united on this story, and no one felt we were unfair or slanted.

“What is most striking to me is that we’ve gotten NOT ONE negative email. No one criticized the work or told us we had it wrong.”

Anya Kamenetz:

Instead, the parents she talks to are upset that their children are still struggling, socially and emotionally as well as academically. She likens extended remote schooling to a form of “solitary confinement.” Fights are breaking out at school. Bus driver shortages have parents summoned to pick their kids up unpredictably. There are substitutes covering classes.

Justice, of Moms for Liberty, agrees that school closures are probably parents’ top issue. “I think definitely COVID restrictions,” were top of mind, she says. “There were schools in Virginia that never opened or were only opened partially. Parents have watched their children stagnate.”

School closures lasted longer in the United States than in most high-income countries, and much longer in blue jurisdictions than in red ones. Virginia had the seventh-fewest days of in-person learning last year among the 50 states, according to thewebsite Burbio. New Jersey was 10th.

NPR’s recent polling with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 69% of parents were concerned that their children had missed learning during remote schooling, and the available evidence suggests that those concerns are justified.

Rodrigues is an executive committee member of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. She points out that in New Jersey, where the Republican candidate far outperformed expectations, anti-woke school board activists haven’t been much of a factor. Nor are parents for the most part opposed to masks or vaccines. They’re just fed up. “Folks like me have been saying for the past 18 months, you are underestimating the level of anxiety, fear and, frankly, the erosion of the relationship that schools have come to rely on when it comes to parents and families right now,” she says.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Jacey Fortin:

If everything had gone according to plan, California would have approved new guidelines this month for math education in public schools.

But ever since a draft was opened for public comment in February, the recommendations have set off a fierce debate over not only how to teach math, but also how to solve a problem more intractable than Fermat’s last theorem: closing the racial and socioeconomic disparities in achievement that persist at every level of math education.

The California guidelines, which are not binding, could overhaul the way many school districts approach math instruction. The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school and tried to promote high-level math courses that could serve as alternatives to calculus, like data science or statistics.

The draft also suggested that math should not be colorblind and that teachers could use lessons to explore social justice — for example, by looking out for gender stereotypes in word problems, or applying math concepts to topics like immigration or inequality.

Just read this NYT piece on proposed California state education standards that demand that teachers change curriculums to bring racial identity politics into everyday math lessons. So I click the draft standards and the first section cited this CRT paper. https://t.co/tGoJ3nmsB9 pic.twitter.com/qCTEtqzG3T

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 6, 2021

K-12 Math links:
“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Discovery+math

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/pdf/2009/05/wollack_fishwmc2009.pdf

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Connected+math

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=singapore+math

Math forum
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Math+forum+audio+video

Mike Antonucci:

In a much-disputed action, the local’s board of directors voted 7-4 on Oct. 25 to approve a memorandum of understanding that gave the state union authority over most of its finances and operations.

The story was first reported by Jared Foretek of InsideNoVa.com.

“Specific concerns regarding the management and government of the PWEA have risen to the level where abuses or the perception of abuses must be addressed, so as to ensure that no state or federal laws are violated, or ethics are impinged,” reads the memo obtained by InsideNoVa.com.

Those concerns apparently involve alleged financial mismanagement and a hostile workplace created by local President Maggie Hansford. She was elected in August 2020 but was the subject of two unsuccessful recall attempts this year.

“After five Board members, two committee chairs, several committee members and the long-time PWEA receptionist have left their posts due to the mistreatment and bullying tactics of President Hansford, a majority of the Board feels that there needs to be some guardrails put in place,” reads a letter posted on the union’s Facebook page by the local’s board majority.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

In January 2021, I signed a contract @nytimes to publish an oped about how Tyson needed to vaccinate meat processing workers. After I informed Tyson of the oped (it had been fact-checked, translated into Spanish & the photos edited) it was suddenly killed. Nice PR story today. pic.twitter.com/INvYbqRoTp

— Alice Driver (@reporterdriver) November 4, 2021

Chuck Ross:

House Republicans are requesting information from U.S. attorneys’ offices regarding their involvement with the Biden administration’s effort to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent letters to all 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices Monday asking for information about discussions authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland to address what he called a “disturbing trend” of violence at school board meetings. On Oct. 4, Garland directed the FBI, U.S. attorneys, and the Justice Department’s civil rights and national security divisions to join local law enforcement officials to discuss strategies to prevent the violence.

Garland’s action came days after the National School Boards Association called on President Joe Biden to deploy the FBI to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism. The association was in contact with the White House and Department of Education in the weeks leading up to the letter, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The timeline has raised questions about whether the association and White House colluded to draft the letter as a predicate to forming a federal task force to scrutinize the meetings.

CBS 4

The family of an 80-year-old man, who was beaten to death outside the state Capitol, wants answers after learning the suspect was out on a $0 bond at the time. The case is more common than you might think.

A months-long investigation by CBS4 found, this year alone, more than 4,000 defendants in felony cases have received $1 or $2 bonds, if any at all. Most of them are getting Personal Recognizance or PR bonds that allow defendants to get out without posting bond. They just have to promise to return for their next court appearance. Some of them, like Stephanie Martinez, are leaving court only to be re-arrested for worse crimes.

New Business Item 39:

The NEA will, with guidance on implementation from the NEA president and chairs of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Caucuses:

A. Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) — what it is and what it is not; have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric; and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members.

B. Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.

C. Publicly (through existing media) convey its support for the accurate and honest teaching of social studies topics, including truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history, such as slavery, and the oppression and discrimination of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other peoples of color, as well as the continued impact this history has on our current society. The Association will further convey that in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.

D. Join with Black Lives Matter at School and the Zinn Education Project to call for a rally this year on October 14—George Floyd’s birthday—as a national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression. Followed by one day of action that recognize and honor lives taken such as Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and others. The National Education Association shall publicize these National Days of Action to all its members, including in NEA Today.

E. Conduct a virtual listening tour that will educate members on the tools and resources needed to defend honesty in education including but not limited to tools like CRT.

F. Commit President Becky Pringle to make public statements across all lines of media that support racial honesty in education including but not limited to critical race theory.

NBI has been modified by its mover.

David Ronfeldt:

What I mean by brain-boxing (or thought-boxing, or mind-boxing) is that an oldster’s thinking about the world gets increasingly boxed within a frame. What they think, and how they think, about the world — their world — gets increasingly fixed, enclosed, boundaried. Their scripts run within that frame, those boundaries. The well-boxed brain rarely goes looking for new ideas and topics to think about; it prefers reassurance and reinforcement about what’s already in the box. It’s another way oldster’s become set in their ways. The aging mind may not exhibit brain-washing, but brain-boxing is another story. 

In sum, mental glitching, thought scripting, and frame boxing are the three major ways that cognitive deterioration shows up in the aging mind. Of course, there are ways to limit, avoid, and counteract them. Glitching, if it’s serious enough, can be treated with medications and therapies. Scripting and boxing can be side-stepped by thoughtfully making sure to engage in diversified activities, not getting stuck in ruts. 

But there are also ways to worsen them.

Dave Cieslewicz

And the third issue that hurt the Dems was education. They’re badly misreading and misplaying this whole issue of Critical Race Theory, The official party line is that CRT isn’t taught in the public schools, that it’s just some obscure graduate school seminar topic. But that’s nowhere near true. While something called CRT is not taught in schools, some of the concepts are most definitely there. 

Moreover, the reaction among voters isn’t necessarily based on what’s actually being taught to their kids. I agree that Republicans are making more of that than it is. Instead, it’s a more general reaction against the concepts of CRT that voters hear about in news outlets or in mandatory training programs at work or from their college aged kids or in other places. The idea that people should be designated as oppressors or oppressed based solely on their skin color is out there, the Democrats are associated with it — and people hate it. 

As CNN commentator Chris Cillizza put it yesterday, “Youngkin has molded a debate mistake by McAuliffe (“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” the Democrat said) into a broader indictment of woke culture, critical race theory and perceived overreach by the government in regard to Covid-19 mitigation measures in schools.”

The Democrats can still pull themselves out of this nose dive. They can pass the infrastructure bill tomorrow and some form of the social/climate bill whenever they can pull the votes together. The economy should be humming a year from now as the supply chain gets sorted out and COVID retreats even further. Wages are going up faster than prices. We can hope that inflationary pressures are mostly due to that supply chain bottleneck. And, assuming there are no new terrorist attacks born there (a big assumption), Afghanistan will be a distant memory

Joanne Jacobs:

When schools closed and classes went online, parents were asked to be much more involved in their children’s education, writes Robby Soave on Reason. Parents trying to earn a living, supervise remote lessons, provide tech support, coach and tutor their children were under tremendous stress.

Some of them did not like what they saw, and have questions about the curriculum. Now schools have reopened — though constant COVID-19 induced closures continue to cause frustrations — and parents are suddenly being told that they shouldn’t be so involved, that it’s the job of school boards and government officials to educate the kids.

Van Jones, a CNN analyst and McAuliffe supporter, made a similar point: “You’ve got a lot of parents who just spent a year home schooling their kids and forced to do so. To tell those people ‘look, we don’t care what you think about education,’ that is a big insult,” he said.

In exit polls, one-third of Virginia voters said the economy and jobs was the top issue, and one quarter said it was education. Both groups voted for Youngkin.

Matt Zalaznick:

A small but growing number of districts are mandating vaccines for eligible students as the COVID delta variant disrupted the beginning of yet another school year.

Though a handful of states have barred schools from requiring the COVID vaccine, administrators and school boards in several communities have decided mandates are the best way to keep students healthy and in school. Here’s a look at where districts have taken action on vaccines:

ARIZONA: The Phoenix Union High School Districtrequires students who participate in sports and select extra-curricular activities to be vaccinated or test weekly for COVID-19.

Kathy Johnson Bowles:

This institution charges $50,000 for tuition. We have 2,000 students. That’s $100 million. Where is it? What did the administration do with all that money? Can someone just explain it to me?”

All across the country parents, students, alumni, faculty and staff concerned about and frustrated by the price of education utter similar statements. But the fact is that not all students (and in some cases, not even a majority) pay the full price of tuition.

Wait, what? Yes, the math is correct, but the numbers in the equation are incorrect. Why? Two words: discount rate.

In 2020 the National Association of College and University Business Officers surveyed 361 private nonprofit colleges and universities and found tuition was discounted an average of 53.9 percent for first-time, full-time, first-year students in 2020-21. Meaning: a tuition price of $50,000 is an average of $26,950 per student after discounts (scholarships). The purpose of a discount rate is to net the budgeted revenue and yield the number of students an institution can accommodate, and make sure each student is willing and able to continue for all four years.

Related: Financial Aid Leveraging

NY Post:

After weeks of stonewalling, the city’s Department of Education finally had to make public the 2021 school year enrollment figures but was still shifty. 

With an Oct. 31 deadline to report the numbers to the state Education Department, the DOE announced a total of 938,000 students enrolled, compared with 955,000 last year.

Mike McIntire and Michael H. Keller:

Harold Brown’s contribution to the local treasury began as so many others have in Valley Brook, Okla.: A police officer saw that the light above his license plate was out.

“You pulled me over for that? Come on, man,” said Mr. Brown, a security guard headed home from work at 1:30 a.m. Expressing his annoyance was all it took. The officer yelled at Mr. Brown, ordered him out of the car and threw him to the pavement.

After a trip to jail that night in 2018, hands cuffed and blood running down his face onto his uniform, Mr. Brown eventually arrived at the crux of the matter: Valley Brook wanted $800 in fines and fees. It was a fraction of the roughly $1 million that the town of about 870 people collects each year from traffic cases.

Elissa Nadworny:

Enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities is on track to fall by another nearly 500,000 undergraduate students this fall, continuing the historic drops that began with the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to new data out Tuesday.

The decline of 3.2% in undergraduate enrollment this fall follows a similar drop of 3.4% the previous year, the first fall of the pandemic, according to the research from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The numbers are from a preliminary data set representing 8.4 million undergrad and graduate students from about 50% of U.S. colleges. The numbers show there are now 240,000 fewer undergraduates enrolled this fall compared with the same time last year, and if that rate of decline holds up for the rest of the colleges, that could translate into almost a half-million fewer undergraduate students.

“It’s very frightening,” says Doug Shapiro, who runs the nonprofit research center. “Far from filling the hole of last year’s enrollment declines, we are still digging it deeper.”

If these preliminary numbers hold up, Shapiro says the last two years of undergrad decline, totaling more than 6%, would be the largest two-year decrease in at least half a century.

Kevin Mooney:

Four taxpayers in Pennsylvania have decided enough is enough after footing the bill for a school board attorney who told them that the school system could limit their First Amendment rights.

The taxpayers filed a free speech lawsuit in federal court that could set a precedent for invalidating policies that shield both school administrators and elected officials from public criticism. 

“Our lawsuit seeks case precedent to establish that citizens cannot be censored or intimidated by government officials for exercising their First Amendment rights at a school board meeting,” Simon Campbell, a former member of the Pennsbury School Board, told The Daily Signal.

In their suit, Campbell and three other taxpayers whose children are or were enrolled in Bucks County’s Pennsbury School District ask the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to strike down school board policies used to “censor” citizens who dissent. 

The Institute for Free Speech, a Washington-based nonprofit law firm, represents the four plaintiffs. Their suit names Pennsbury School Board officers and other members as well as the board’s lawyers and current and former district officials. 

Michael Clarke, an attorney for the Pennsbury School District who is among the defendants, is on record informing parents and other residents that they “don’t have First Amendment rights” during the “public comment” section of a school board meeting, according to the suit filed Oct. 1.

John Hindraker:

Critical Race Theory has become the number one political issue in the U.S. So, needless to say, it is the top issue in school board elections that are taking place across the country. Thus, in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts, the administration emailed talking points to school board members, telling them how to answer questions about CRT from concerned parents. No doubt many other districts have done the same. Remarkably, this particular email included no fewer than six attachments with talking points on CRT. 

These six pro-CRT missives are pretty much interchangeable, although they come from a variety of sources: the school district itself; Education Minnesota, the teachers’ union (this one includes an attack on American Experiment); the Minnesota School Boards Association; the University of Minnesota; the Minnesota Association of School Administrators; and the Council of the Great City Schools. 

These six sets of talking points exemplify the liberal orthodoxy on CRT: It doesn’t exist, and it’s awesome! They assert that CRT is found only in law schools (parenthetically, if that is true it is a serious problem in itself) and certainly isn’t taught in K-12 classrooms.

Oh my God she’s amazing. No wonder the Media Party ignored her. pic.twitter.com/DHpDLv38Mb

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) November 3, 2021

about 5:30:

Our children are going to get a good education, because education lifted my father out of poverty, education lifted me out of poverty, education will lift us all out of poverty. We must have marketable skills because our children should not just survive but thrive – and will create generational wealth.

"Instead of trying to elevate all of our students they want quotas and so that means we're going to sacrifice the Asians for the black kids. Now who's going to benefit from that? That's not living in harmony." – Winsome Sears campaigning against racial preferences in education. pic.twitter.com/amS5BCgI0W

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 3, 2021

WILL:

Federal law grants all parents the right to “observ[e] classroom activities” in public schools.

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter, on behalf of a parent, to Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD) Superintendent, Dr. Bethany Ormseth, urging the district to allow parental classroom observation as provided by federal law and school-board policy. WILL represents a parent concerned that persistent classroom disruptions may be causing a drop in her son’s academic performance.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “Public school classrooms should not be a ‘black box.’ Parents have the right to know what is being taught in classrooms, and federal law specifically gives parents the right to observe classrooms in person. Kenosha schools should reverse course, and view parents as partners in the education of children.”

Background: WILL represents the mother of a student at Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum (KTEC), a public charter school in the Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD). This parent is concerned about her son’s poor grades, particularly in light of reports of regular classroom disruptions, including use of profane language, racial epithets, physical altercations, and property damage.

AP:

Megan Kuehn said the recall group’s messaging wasn’t clear “on what they stood for.” 

“If it was about academic performance, we could have handled this in a more constructive way instead of wasting taxpayer’s money on a recall election in the middle of everything,” Kuehn said.

Each of the incumbents won over 58% of the votes in their races, according to unofficial results posted by the district Tuesday.

Robert Zimmerman:

Today I am instead going to provide an example of a public school doing right by its students. On Saturday I was invited to watch as an afterschool engineering group, run by John Morris, the Engineering & Mathematics teacher at Casa Grande Union High School in Arizona, went out to launch model rockets that they had built themselves.

The launch to the right was the first of the day. The rest of the post below is image oriented, to give you a feel of what it involved in teaching young high school students how to make and launch small rockets. That activity, while involving relatively simple engineering, provides them the right grounding for learning how to work hard, make sure they do the work right, and learning that failure is really only a step towards success.

Scott Girard:

Madison Metropolitan School District high school students got a higher percentage of A grades in the 2020-21 pandemic school year than they did during the 2018-19 school year, new data show.

The data provide another measure of academic progress during one of the most challenging years in education in recent memory. It’s a valuable piece of a complex puzzle that also includes statewide student assessments.

Those, however, were difficult to evaluate for last school year, with 13% of eligible students statewide not participating, including 50.3% on English Language Arts in MMSD. State officials stressed during a media call following the public release of the assessment results that they should be considered with the necessary caveats.

MMSD provided its response to a June 15records request Monday, Nov. 1. The district charged $427.92 to locate and compile the records, which also included attendance and suspension data.

The percentage of A grades received rose from 42.9% in 2018-19 to 44.7% in 2020-21. In 2019-20 the percentage had dipped to 21.7% of grades received, but that was mostly a result of the change in systems at the end of the school year.

But there were significant differences among the schools.

At West, for example, 49.6% of grades given in 2018-19 were As. That rose to 51.3% in 2020-21.

At East, the percentage went from 39.4% of grades given as As in 2018-19 to 40.6% in 2020-21. Similarly, at La Follette, 38.2% of grades given in 2018-19 were As, with a jump to 40.3% in 2020-21.

Memorial fell in the middle, with 42.2% of grades given in 2018-19 being As and 44.5% of grades given in 2020-21 being As.

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]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

James Freeman:

The story of the Covid era is largely about a political class imposing one burden after another on the young for the theoretical benefit of the old, with little effort to conduct serious calculations of risks and costs. Kids who were never in great danger from the virus have been forced into isolation and quarantine, forced to suffer lost educational and cultural opportunities, and forced to accept an expanded federal debt burden that will haunt them through their taxpaying lives. Many children remain masked all day thanks to edicts from politicos with hardly a care for the long-term consequences to mental health or development.

Now we have Sen. Bernie Sanders (socialist, Vt.), who has been an elected official for nearly 40 years, preparing to add to the federal debt burden once again but claiming that his massive new program is for the children. Mr. Sanders is on the brink of achieving his dream of a federal universal pre-kindergarten program. No doubt it will be costly for taxpayers, but parents should not assume it will benefit their kids.

Like everything else in the pending reconciliation bill, the highly consequential details remain hidden from the public. Reporting on the back-room negotiations for the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar plan, the Journal’s Andrew Duehren, Kristina Peterson and Natalie Andrews write that the next draft “is still set to include several party priorities, such as universal prekindergarten.” They add that according to a source, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told House Democrats on Tuesday that Congress was on “the verge of something major.”

Phillip Magness:

Is the school choice movement historically tainted by racism? American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten described vouchers in 2017 as “slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” Historian Nancy MacLean recently depicted vouchers as a product of an unholy alliance between economist Milton Friedman and segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education.

According to this narrative, vouchers came out of the “Massive Resistance” program of Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., who sought to circumvent Brown by rerouting education funding to private schools in 1950s Virginia. Friedman, the story goes, opportunistically assisted the segregationists in creating a voucherlike tuition-grant system that allowed white parents to transfer children out of integrated schools and into private “segregation academies.”

These critics have their history backward. As early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration. Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes and began attacking school choice as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.

The overlooked story of Virginia’s racist antivoucher movement traces its origins to Charlottesville’s Venable Elementary School in 1958. Facing court-ordered integration from an NAACP lawsuit, Venable closed its doors for the fall semester and transferred its white student body to a makeshift network of private classrooms.

Wall Street Journal:

Students with disabilities, in foster care, or in families making no more than 200% of the income cap for reduced-price lunches—nearly $100,000 for a family of four—would be eligible. Individuals or businesses that donate to the scholarship funds would receive a tax credit equal to their donation. The legislation allows up to $500 million in credits in the first year. No Democrat voted for the legislation.

The partisan opposition is a shame. A poll sponsored by the American Federation for Children in June reported that 74% of voters support school choice, including 70% of Democrats. The pro-school-choice Mackinac Center last year found 49% of likely Michigan voters—55% of parents—in favor of tax-credit scholarships. Only 34% were opposed.

The bills meet growing demand fueled by parental frustration with public schools that has increased during the pandemic. At least 60% of Michigan public-school students started last school year hybrid or remote. In math and reading, Michigan K-8 students “appeared not to make normal progress towards learning goals,” reports Michigan State’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative.

Families have flocked to charters and private schools or teaching at home. In Michigan the share of households with school-age children that are home-schooling jumped to 11% from 5% from spring to fall of 2020, according to the Census Bureau. A report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found a 1.45% increase in the state’s charter enrollment from 2019-20 to 2020-21—and a nearly 5% decrease for traditional district schools, a loss of some 64,000 students.

The state already has nearly 300 charter schools and allows some students to attend out-of-district public schools. But a Blaine Amendment in the state constitution has barred the state from offering vouchers or education savings accounts for private K-12 schools. Five families are challenging this provision in a lawsuit. The scholarships differ from vouchers because public funds don’t go directly to students, and unions will sue to block them. But giving students more choice is still worth the legislative effort.

Andrew Rotherham:

Here’s an update on NEA membership post-Janus. It’s down, substantially. Roughly nine percent over the past decade. So that’s something to think about while everyone waits for votes to be counted in Virginia to see if education really impacted the race as much as partisans hope or fear.

This membership trend is not unexpected. The Janus case ended mandatory union membership for public employee unions. Here’s a Bellwether deck with background and pre-decision context on the case.

A lot of people seem to have lost interest in Janus. Some seemed to expect that the court would rule against the unions in Janus on a Monday and by Friday the teachers unions would be in bankruptcy. If you think that you’re confusing the NEA with the NRA.

So now you hear a lot about how Janus really had no effect. This is wrong, too.

Janus introduced a set of constraints that are going to depress membership and revenue for the teachers unions and weaken them over time, but it’s a slow process. There are revenue offsets the unions can avail themselves of in the short term, there is still litigation about the boundaries of the case, as with any big SCOTUS decision, for instance what counts as an opportunity to leave a union. There is inertia. It will hit different states or locals differently, and both the NEA and AFT are confederations of affiliates. It will hit NEA and AFT differently. People are still learning about their options and as they see peers exercise them (and realize savings) it will be a contagion. (I haven’t followed it closely since the pandemic but it seems like some of the efforts to catalyze leaving by teachers have lost steam over the past few years.) It’s also harder now for the unions to recruit new members recusing join is an option in more places.

Peter Betkowitz:

In mid-October, Aaron Sibarium reported in the Washington Free Beacon that Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik pressured Colbert — a second-year student who is part Cherokee and is a member of both the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) and the Federalist Society — “to apologize for a ‘triggering’ email in which he referred to his apartment as a ‘trap house,’ a slang term for a place where people buy drugs.” On Sept. 15, Colbert (he requested anonymity in the original version of the article for fear of retaliation) had used the NALSA listserv to email members an invitation to a Sept. 17 Constitution Day party organized in collaboration with the Federalist Society. In addition to using the term “trap house” — which has become common slang beyond its original meaning as a spot for doing drugs — Colbert wrote that Popeye’s chicken would be served. “Within minutes,” according to Sibarium, “the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term ‘trap house’ indicated a blackface party.”

Cosgrove and Eldik hastily summoned Colbert. At their Sept. 16 meeting, Eldik informed Colbert that his membership in The Federalist Society compounded the “trap house” offense and his mention of fried chicken, both of which invoked racial stereotypes. “The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities,” according to Eldik. “That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities.”

The aim of the meeting convened by the law school officials and of their subsequent communications with Colbert, however, was not merely informative. Cosgrove and Eldik urged Colbert to issue an apology, ominously suggesting that failure to do so would harm his reputation and interfere with his application to the bar. Eldik went so far as to draft an apology for Colbert; it was addressed to black law students, acknowledged “any harm, trauma, or upset” caused by his email, and stated that Colbert would “actively educate myself so I can do better.” After Colbert declined to send the ghost-written plea for forgiveness, Cosgrove and Eldik sent an email to all members of the second-year class that accused Colbert of using “racist language” and condemned his invitation “in the strongest possible terms.”

The Yale Law Journal should “not accept at face value the recommendations of YLS’s fringe advocacy groups,” one editor said. “A good rule of thumb for whether to invite a speak[er]: If that presentation were leaked, how would it reflect on the journal and its reputation?”

Marc Joffe:

Spiraling federal budget deficits since the beginning of this century — and projected to continue for as far as the eye can see — are undermining America’s economic future. Contrary to popular wisdom on the right, the practice of persistently spending more money than the federal government collects is a bipartisan convention.

As the country enters uncharted territory for its debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio, there are serious risks, especially from inflation, which the Federal Reserve may think is needed to finance the nation’s nearly $29 trillion mountain of debt.

According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, the ratio of publicly held federal debt increased from 32% of GDP in 2001 to 102% today, and is expected to hit 202% in the next 30 years.

While it may be convenient to blame Democrats for this rapid accumulation of debt, Republicans bear a large share of responsibility. After President Bill Clinton and Congressional Republicans partnered to balance the budget in the late 1990s, federal budget deficits returned under President George W. Bush.

Hillfaith:

This will undoubtedly come as a shock to a lot of folks reading this post, but an examination at the history of college and university education reveals that Christianity played the key role in the history and development of higher education in the Western world, according to J. Warner Wallace in his latest book, “Person of Interest.”

Wallace is the former Los Angeles Police detective who specialized in cracking murder cases that had defied being solved for decades. He got so good at it that he was often featured on NBC’s “Dateline” new feature program. He’s now the founder and president of coldcasechristianity.org and one of Christianity’s most effective apologists.

With “Person of Interest,” Wallace sets out to demonstrate that without depending on the New Testament scriptures, Jesus is the dominant personality in all human history. That’s saying something, but Wallace does it and in the process compiles an amazing amount of historical facts that demonstrate the profound influence Jesus and Christianity have had on the world we live in today.

Higher education is one of the areas that Wallace focuses on and it is fascinating to see and read these facts, which are rarely, if ever, mentioned in classrooms today. The truth is Christianity sparked “a movement driven by ‘People of the Book’ who wanted to share their book with others. This revolution initiated a series of events that led directly to the creation of humanity’s greatest educational institution, the modern university,” Wallace writes.

Very early in the history of the church, Christian leaders began emphasizing the importance of teaching men and women to read, so they could read and study the Word of God, in both the Old and New Testaments.

“It wasn’t long before Christian students were being taught more than theology and godly living. Ignatius of Antioch [a student of John the Apostle] encouraged teachers in Christian communities to ‘bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and teach them the Holy Scriptures and also trades, that they may not indulge in idleness,’” according to Wallace.

Robby Soave:

But it was substantially misreported in order to fit a conservative social agenda. Anyone on the right who makes a habit of complaining—often justifiably—about the mainstream media gullibly succumbing to viral stories that fit their priors ought to denounce this as well.

Smith, the father, was arrested for loudly protesting at a school board meeting on June 22. Cops bloodied him, placed him in handcuffs, and charged him with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct. When it later emerged that Smith was angry with district officials because he thought they weren’t doing anything about his daughter’s rape, he became a conservative folk hero, and was interviewed repeatedly by right-leaning media. The Daily Wire led the charge, seizing on an opportunity to embarrass both the mainstream media and the federal government for portraying hostile parents as akin to “domestic terrorists.”

The Daily Wire‘s interview with Smith portrayed the idea that the daughter’s assailant was “gender fluid” as central to the story. The implicit idea is that the perpetrator wore a skirt in order to gain access to the women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School and carry out the attack. Over the summer, Loudoun County approved a new policy making it easier for transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their choice, and thus a connection was established between this policy and what happened to Smith’s daughter.

That policy wasn’t actually implemented until August, it turns out. But even if the school had begun enforcing it before that, there’s no reason to think the assailant’s actions had anything to do with accommodations for trans people.

That’s because the assailant and the victim had a relationship, and had met in the bathroom for sexual activity previously. According to The Washington Post: