Civics: TVs and newspapers spread rumors in the last 5 years, without any proof

Idelber Avelar:

It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was the greatest journalistic collapse of the 21st century. We are not talking about a factual error by the news anchor at 11 pm or three poorly scored stories in the print newspapers.

It took five years of daily coverage on CNN and MSNBC and hundreds of stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post about something that proved to be a hoax, a ghost, a poorly told story whose incongruities have accumulated until it completely collapsed: the Russiagate, the so-called “Russian interference in the 2016 elections”, the result of “Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin”.

Let’s get to the facts.

NPR covers a Rhode Island Mom

Joe Setyon:

But instead of reporting on these events, The Public’s Radio told a different tale, reporting uncritically and at length on a new proposed “anti-racism” policy adopted by the district, portraying Solas and the Goldwater Institute as impediments to that policy and grossly mischaracterizing the Institute’s work to promote academic transparency and school choice. Their journalistic malpractice wasn’t for lack of information: Goldwater Director of National Litigation Jon Riches gave an extensive interview to the article’s author, Alex Nunes, who chose to quote neither from Solas nor from Riches.

One would think a journalist might understand better than most the importance of public records requests to enable the public to keep account of what its government is up to. Public records laws are a crucial tool to help reporters—and citizen activists—uncover truths about their governments, whether they be details about taxpayer-funded expenditures or information about what children are learning in public school classrooms.

Instead, Nunes depicted Solas as a nuisance whose requests imposed a “burden” on local government employees, while also quoting a “racial justice” advocate who attacked Solas’ motives. This framing portrays the government as an entity that should selectively choose what public records should be made available based on the subject of the request or the motivations of the requester, neither of which is an appropriate basis under the law.

Why we must shed old fears of changing school boundaries to help poor and minority kids

Jay Matthews:

Educators and community leaders who wanted to help low-income students no longer tried to move them into better schools. Instead, they focused on improving schools in impoverished neighborhoods. Their work has been at the center of my reporting. They have had successes, but news of their progress has spread slowly.

Ignoring the segregated state of our education systemhas led some people to assume it is a natural situation — that perhaps there’s nothing wrong with students attending schools full of other students who look like themselves.

The lines that divide: School district boundaries often stymie integration

Nothing challenges such thinking more effectively than a new study by Tomás Monarrez and Carina Chien of the Urban Institute, titled “Dividing Lines: Racially Unequal School Boundaries in US Public School Systems.”

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Most of us probably don’t know — like I didn’t, before reading the think tank’s report — that if you study the history of school boundaries that divide neighborhoods by income and ethnicity, many reflect the redlining maps issued by a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), in the 1930s and 1940s. Scholars disagree over whether President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who founded the agency as a New Deal initiative, can be blamed for making neighborhoods look bad on those maps, but there is little doubt that labeling some areas as “hazardous” for mortgage loans hurt the local schools.

Monarrez and Chien say they found more than 2,000 pairs of neighboring public schools that “are vastly different in terms of the racial and ethnic composition of the population living on either side of the boundary.”

Full report.

Madison has not addressed boundaries for decades. Yet, we recently expanded our least diverse schools, despite space in nearby facilities.

Jefferson Middle School teacher on leave after planned reenactment lesson

Scott Girard:

A Jefferson Middle School teacher is on administrative leave after planning a Colonial-era reenactment lesson that asked students “to assume stereotypical roles which brought racialized harm,” according to an email from the school’s principal.

The incident comes 10 months after officials in the nearby Sun Prairie Area School District apologized to parents for a middle school lesson that asked students to consider a question of how they would punish a slave under Hammurabi’s code in ancient Mesopotamia.

Other lessons around the country asking students to assume the role of slaveholders or slaves have drawn criticism in recent years, with parents expressing concerns that rather than imparting empathy, the lessons are traumatizing for students of color.

In some of the most extreme cases, students have been grouped based on their race and told to treat each other as if they were in their roles in situations like a slave trading exercise. A 2019 Education Week article mentioned two then-recent incidents, one in which a fifth-grade class held a “slave auction” and another with a fourth-grade class sending students “back to the plantation” in a game about the Underground Railroad.

Maxine McKinney de Royston, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Curriculum and Instruction, said innovative classroom activities are important for teachers to try, but that they must be thought through and consider what the learning goals are. Even role-playing and reenactments from times of slavery can be OK, she said, but “context matters” in considering when that is appropriate, and there are important safeguards for teachers to put in place in classrooms.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

NFL Marks Taiwan as Part of China

Josh Christenson:

The NFL released a marketing map that designated Taiwan as part of China, a further sign American sports leagues are more than willing to appease the hardline regime in order to pursue business opportunities.

The map, which introduced markets for 18 NFL teams in eight countries, shows Taiwan unlabeled and colored in as part of China. The erasure of Taiwan comes two months after President Xi Jinping gave a speech in October calling for the “reunification” of the island nation with China, whether in a “peaceful manner” or by “firm will.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court to Hear WILL Challenge to Dane County Health Orders (without elected official votes)

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Supreme Court granted a motion to bypass in Becker v. Dane County, meaning the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear and decide the case brought by two Dane County residents and a Dane County business challenging the authority of the county health officer to issue sweeping orders without approval by the Dane County Board. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed this case in January 2021 in response to a series of emergency orders from Public Health of Madison and Dane County (PHMDC) that restricted and regulated life and commerce in Dane County.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court will schedule oral arguments at a later date.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, said, “This case presents the Court with an opportunity to clarify that local health officers cannot unilaterally issue orders that restrict daily life without approval from a legislative body. The Dane County Board cannot pass the buck and allow an unelected health officer to issue whatever orders she sees fit.”

Background: WILL filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in November 2020 challenging the legal authority of Dane County’s health department to issue sweeping emergency orders that restrict life and commerce in Dane County. WILL argued the orders are an overreach of the legal authority granted to local health officers and an unlawful delegation of authority from local elected bodies. In particular, WILL argued the new restrictions were not voted on by the Dane County Board.

Allison Garfield, Jessie Opoien and Scott Girard:

“This case presents the court with an opportunity to clarify that local health officers cannot unilaterally issue orders that restrict daily life without approval from a legislative body. The Dane County Board cannot pass the buck and allow an unelected health officer to issue whatever orders she sees fit,” said WILL deputy counsel Luke Berg in a statement.

Mandates, litigation/lawfare and the taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Department.

First Book: Sending Pornography to PK-12 Classrooms

The Locke Society:

While many organizations and news outlets were shocked over a reporter saying “someone needs to create porn for children,” the reality is that pornographic/erotic materials are disturbingly already in PK-12 classrooms across the country. First Book is providing CRT/”social justice” books along with books vividly detailing oral sex, anal sex, masturbation, watching/searching for pornography, and more. With a network of over 500,000 teachers, and having a presence in schools in every state across America, First Book is an organization you should know and monitor. Through their partnerships with various organizations, they are able to provide books at extremely reduced prices, and in some cases for free, by having corporate donors, unions, or other organizations provide First Book gift cards to educators.

Some examples of these disturbing books that First Book is possibly sending to your child’s classroom or school library include the following:

“For over 18 months, the Fairfax County School Board has focused on every political issue of the day,” O’Neal Jackson said. “In turn, [it] has not focused on what’s best for our students and families in Fairfax County.”

Alex Nester:

Parents in Virginia’s largest school district collected enough signatures to recall a school board member who ignored parental concerns and kept schools closed during the pandemic.

Open FCPS Coalition, a bipartisan group of parents, on Wednesday filed with a county circuit court a petition to recall school board member Laura Jane Cohen. The group accuses Cohen of ignoring studies that showed reopening was safe and keeping students isolated from peers for more than a year was harmful for their mental health.

Republican candidates swept Virginia’s statewide elections in November, victories many attributed to parents’ frustration with school closures. But that momentum may not be enough to recall Cohen, who was not up for reelection this cycle. A local attorney backed by left-wing megadonor George Soros quashed Open FCPS Coalition’s attempt to recall a school board member.

In a statement Thursday, Open FCPS Coalition founder Dee O’Neal Jackson said the 8,000 signatures gathered show the group’s mission resonates with the community.

“For over 18 months, the Fairfax County School Board has focused on every political issue of the day,” O’Neal Jackson said. “In turn, [it] has not focused on what’s best for our students and families in Fairfax County.”

A judge will verify the authenticity of the signatures and decide whether to hold a trial and special election to replace Cohen. The coalition also wants to recall at-large school board member Abrar Omeish, who in May came under fire after she in two social media posts referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Many elite liberals now feel, as I do, that long school closures in blue metropolitan areas were a disastrous mistake.

Michelle Goldberg:

In August, Los Angeles Magazine profiled Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of that city’s teachers union, who insisted that there was no such thing as pandemic-related learning loss. “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables,” she said. “They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest.”

Even now, the teachers union in Portland, Ore., is proposing that high school students go remote every Friday, arguing that students and educators are both overwhelmed. “There needs to be some kind of relief valve somewhere and this provides some of that for educators,” a union negotiator was quoted saying in The Oregonian.

What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast

Alison Gopnik:

The great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget used to talk about “the American question.” In the course of his long career, he lectured around the world, explaining how children’s minds develop as they get older. When he visited the U.S., someone in the audience was sure to ask, “But Prof. Piaget, how can we get them to do it faster?” 

Today it’s no longer just impatient Americans who assume that faster brain and cognitive development is better. Across the globe, as middle-class “high investment” parents anxiously track each milestone, it’s easy to conclude that the point of being a parent is to accelerate your child’s development as much as possible. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools.

Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons

Jon Mcloone:

Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.

At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.

Much of this blog could be summed up with two answers: (1) free, open-source software can be very good, but it isn’t good at doing what we are trying to do; with a large fraction of the reason being (2) open source distributes design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task, but large-scale, unified design needs centralized control and sustained effort.

I came up with 12 reasons why I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. I would be interested to hear your views in the comments section below the blog.

Civics: New Google Drive policy could make your files inaccessible — what you need to know

Tom Pritchard:

Google announced this change in a blog post, revealing that restrictions may be put in place on files that violate Google’s Terms of Service or abuse program policies. While the owner will still have full access, this move means sharing privileges will be revoked — even if someone already has a link.

According to Google file owners will receive an email when files are restricted. Not only does that alert them to the fact it’s happened, it will also give them the opportunity to appeal the decision and request a review.

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

Houston School Board Governance Changes

Sam González Kelly, Alejandro Serrano:

Incumbents lost two of the four runoff elections for the Houston ISD board Saturday night, clearing the way for two new conservative trustees in the state’s largest public school district. The results mark the end of campaigns politicized by clashes over cultural talking points in what are traditionally viewed as nonpartisan races.

Pastor Kendall Baker beat Trustee Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca by less than 100 votes to win the seat in District 6. In District 7, Trustee Anne Sung lost to former PTO President Bridget Wade.

Baker and Wade both garnered support from prominent Texas Republicans and spoke out in their campaigns against mask mandates and critical race theory in education.

About 5,300 people, less than 7 percent of registered voters, participated in the District 6 runoff, while over 12,400 people, about 12 percent of registered voters, turned out for the District 7 election, according to Harris County election statistics.

Loudoun County paid at least $500,000 to be twice delivered suggestions about “social emotional learning.”

Matt Taibbi:

In preparation for today’s forthcoming story, A Culture War in Four Acts: Loudoun County, Virginia. Part Two: ‘The Incident,’ TK News sent Freedom of Information requests to the county on several questions. Concerned with the issue of when the controversial “Equity Collaborative” was hired, we asked for “procurement or purchasing process documents, stakeholder emails and communique leading to the hiring of ‘The Equity Collaborative’ as consultant or business partner for any role by Loudoun County School District/County.” We’ve enclosed documents we received in response here. 

A lot of these had already been made public in stories like this one from the Washington Free Beacon, but there is some new information, and what we did get raised some new questions. There’s still no record of how the Collaborative came to win the original Equity Assessment contract, and the chronology in which the firm submitted a formal bid for further work only after it had already won a no-bid, $500,000 contract remains, to say the least, confusing. A number of documents are listed as having been re-submitted, and it’s not easy to sort out when the originals were produced.

Included here is the firm’s original “Equity Assessment,” its “Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism,” a “Comprehensive Equity Plan,” and pay stubs for several additional rounds of equity coaching. 

A great deal of vitriol has been spent in Loudoun litigating the question of whether the arrival of the “Equity Collaborative” was triggered by the “runaway slave game” incident (see today’s forthcoming story) or whether there was a pre-existing relationship with the soon-to-be-infamous consultancy. The county insists the assessment was already in the works, and records do reveal that as far back as the previous summer, on August 20, 2018, the county spent $6000 on an “Equity Leadership Team Planning Meeting Facilitation” with the Collaborative, indicating an existing relationship.

However, sources both inside and outside the school system insist the bulk of that money was for normal teaching and support services mainly geared toward the county’s Spanish-speaking minority. There were still sizable allocations for items like “Instruction Facilitator, Equity and Culturally Responsive” ($339,516), “Equity Training Across Departments” ($72,000), and “Diversity Interview Panels” ($50,000), among other things, but there are mixed reports on what the rest of those line items mean. 

More TK, as we say around here. Part 2 of the Loudoun series will be out momentarily. In the meantime, here are the EC docs:

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Test results in American schools plummeted during the pandemic

The Economist:

“A school district where one-quarter of students were black spent, on average, 10 more weeks in the classroom than one where three-quarters of students were black.”

recent working paper by a group of researchers led by Emily Oster, of Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at the results of standardised tests taken by children in grades three to eight (aged roughly eight to 13). The tests, which vary slightly between states, assessed pupils’ grasp of maths and English. The researchers examined 12 states, comparing the results of tests taken in 2019, before lockdowns, with those taken in 2021. They found a 14 percentage-point drop in the pass rates for maths and a six-point drop for English.

Scores in English and maths were falling even before the pandemic(although researchers cannot agree on why). To isolate the effect that remote schooling had on childrens’ performance the authors built a statistical model. For each district the model contained information on the amount of time that pupils spent attending school in person. It also contained information on covid-19 cases, the racial composition of the district and the number of pupils who were eligible for reduced-price lunches (a proxy for income).

The authors found that, even when controlling for these other factors, the amount of in-person schooling in a given school district had a big impact on pass rates. The results suggested that moving from fully virtual to fully in-person lessons counteracted the drop in scores by around ten percentage points for maths, and just over three percentage points for English. In both subjects, the detrimental effect of virtual schooling was largest in poorer areas, where students are more likely to lack the space for undisturbed study or the technology to access online lessons.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Princeton Commencement Speech: 1913

You, enlightened, self-sufficient, self-governed, endowed with gifts above your fellows, the world expects you to produce as well as to consume, to add to and not to subtract from its store of good, to build up and not tear down, to ennoble and not degrade. It commands you to take your place and to fight your fight in the name of honor and of chivalry, against the powers of organized evil and of commercialized vice, against the poverty, disease, and death which follow fast in the wake of sin and ignorance, against all the innumerable forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man, and unleash the passions of the beast. There comes to you from many quarters, from many voices, the call of your kind. It is the human cry of spirits in bondage, of souls in despair, of lives debased and doomed. It is the call of man to his brother … such is your vocation; follow the voice that calls you in the name of God and of man. The time is short, the opportunity is great; therefore, crowd the hours with the best that is in you.

Civics: Boston Police Bought Spy Tech With a Pot of Money Hidden From the Public

Shannon Dooling and Christine Willmsen:

A WBUR investigation with ProPublica found elected officials and the public were largely kept in the dark when Boston police spent $627,000 on this equipment by dipping into money seized in connection with alleged crimes.

Also known as a “stingray,” the cell site simulator purchased by Boston police acts like a commercial cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to it. Once the phones connect to the cell site simulator’s decoy signal, the equipment secretly obtains location and other potentially identifying information. It can pinpoint someone’s location down to a particular room of a hotel or house.

While this briefcase-sized device can help locate a suspect or a missing person, it can also scoop up information from other phones in the vicinity, including yours.

The Boston police bought its simulator device using money that is typically taken during drug investigations through what’s called civil asset forfeiture.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

Kate Marino:

For all the hype that wage growth has received this year, pay isn’t keeping up with price growth. Real earnings, or wage growth less inflation, turned sharply negative the last two months, after eeking out gains over the summer, consumer price data out Friday show.

Why it matters: That’s an erosion of spending power, which is a bummer. But for the time being, it takes the edge off worries of a wage-price spiral, which happens when higher wages fuel inflation, which fuels the need for even higher wages — and so on. 

  • The most recent data, of course, doesn’t tell us where we’re headed. “But you can try to extrapolate based on trends … and it seems like this fear of a wage-price spiral might not play out if wages aren’t actually keeping up with inflation,” Megan Greene, chief economist at the Kroll Institute and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, tells Axios. 

The big picture: Wage growth and price inflation are closely intertwined, but like the proverbial chicken and egg, experts have different views on what causes what.

‘15 minutes to save the world’: a terrifying VR journey into the nuclear bunker

Julian Borger:

The VR simulation has been developed by a team from Princeton, American and Hamburg universities, based on extensive research, including interviews with former officials, into what would happen if the US was – or believed itself to be – under nuclear attack. They have called their project the Nuclear Biscuit, after the small card bearing the president’s launch authorization codes.

Over the past few days, it has been tried out in Washington by nuclear weapons experts and former officials (the researchers would not say whether any serving decision-makers had a go).

“You walk into that simulation and come out a changed person,” Richard Burt, who was the US chief negotiator in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, said after his turn.

Wisconsin K-12 Practice vs Governance Climate

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Mandates, Quality of life and outcomes

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health.

Civics: Portland

Nate Hochman:

For seven months, Dylan Carrico Rogers slept in his bike shop with a shotgun. TriTech Bikes, located in the Montavilla neighborhood of northeast Portland, Ore., where Rogers grew up, had been battered by three break-ins, two nearby shootings, and countless instances of vandalism. Portland’s serially understaffed police force was nowhere to be found. And in the face of $25,000 of stolen bike parts, TriTech’s insurance company was ready to jump ship. “They said, ‘if you claim another one, we’re just gonna drop you,’” Rogers told National Review. “So I’m paying $1,200 every three months to be told that I have to replace [everything] on my own dime. And then at the same time, the cops don’t show up. So we’re just in a free-for-all.”

The lifelong Portland resident finally packed up and left in August. By that point, he said, the building landlord “told me that it wasn’t worth it anymore.” The graffiti, property damage, constant break-ins, and unattended-to police reports were just no longer worth the investment. “He tore up a three-year lease. The building’s vacant now,” Rogers said. The gloomy metropolis of 660,000, perched at the northwestern tip of Oregon, is not quite the anarchic dystopia that it is occasionally made out to be in some corners of conservative media. But in the wake of spasms of political violence, a slashed law-enforcement budget, a wave of early police retirements, and punitive lockdown measures that have devastated small businesses such as TriTech, it’s inching ever closer to genuine lawlessness.

This is the Portland way of life. “You have people that are just blatantly taking advantage of the fact that there are no police officers,” Rogers said. “I mean, this has spread everywhere now. It’s not just the Portland bike shops. Grocery-store workers are getting attacked, because we have drug addicts that are literally walking in and doing these blitz raids.”

So, What’s Web3?

Tante:

Let’s talk Web3. If you skipped the Technology part, welcome back. Let’s try to summarize what Web3 actually is. Web3 isn’t a clearly defined set of technologies or protocols or workflows, but Web2.0 wasn’t either really. Just like Web2.0 Web3 has certain technological foundations and assumptions but is just as much an aspirational term, a set of overlapping visions, ideologies and goals. In a lot of ways Web3 is doing something and calling it Web3. But with all the contradictions and unclarity a few things are foundational to Web3.

Let’s try a quick first attempt of a description:

Web3 is a blockchain based backend and infrastructure layer on top of existing network technologies that aims at restructuring the internet in a radically decentralized and individual way. Services required for individuals to be able to act within that new infrastructure (like identity management, content storage, etc.) are provided by decentralized smart contracts or services built on them. While frontends to use the Web3 Internet still look similar to current ones (browser based apps) they no longer get their content from centralized servers but from blockchain based content providers giving individuals enforceable ownership of the data and content they create or buy.

Web3 is not intended for you to throw your browser away. In fact many things are not supposed to change: You can for example write a comment under someone’s blog article. But that comment will not live on the server of that person but is stored in a blockchain and attached to one of your identities meaning that it can never be fully deleted. The original post might no longer show it but it’s still there and linked to the original content.

Civics: Jerry Brown on advice to Gavin Newsom on California’s crime, budget and more

Elex Michaelson:

Nearby properties are full of cows and not many people. 

“It is rather conservative, most people here voted for Trump, voted for the recall are not vaccinated. But, they are good neighbors,” Brown said. 

Despite the remote environment, Brown is constantly on Zoom calls and staying up with the news. 

“I’m not just here chasing the cows or the elks away,” he joked. 

He serves as chair of the California-China Climate Institute and chair of the Oakland Military Institute, a school he founded.

Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem

Erica Klarreich:

The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science.

The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what “long” means for each color.)

This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

“Sometimes there’s these very basic-looking questions where we really don’t understand almost anything,” said Jacob Fox of Stanford University. “I think this was one of those questions that really surprised a lot of people, how little we understood.”

Civics: Hong Kong Court Sentences Jimmy Lai to Prison Over Tiananmen Vigil

Vivian Wong & Austin Ramzey:

A Hong Kong court on Monday sentenced the former media mogul Jimmy Lai and seven other prominent pro-democracy activists to prison for their roles last year in trying to commemorate Beijing’s June 4, 1989, crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.

The sentences — between four months and 14 months — were the latest example of the wide-ranging crackdown on dissent and free speech in the city, a former British colony that once had significantly stronger civil liberties than the rest of China. While this case was not prosecuted under a stringent national security law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing last year, several of the defendants, including Mr. Lai, also face separate charges under that law.

Mr. Lai and the other activists — including Chow Hang-tung, Gwyneth Ho and Lee Cheuk-Yan — gathered on June 4 last year in Victoria Park before an annual vigil organized by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, a pro-democracy group. The alliance had hosted those vigils, a potent symbol of Hong Kong’s differences from the rest of China, in the park for three decades. But the government banned the gathering last year, citing the coronavirus pandemic, and again this year.

Cultures Where Men and Women Don’t Speak the Same Language

Richard Brooks:

For example,  in the following cultures, men and women really do speak different languages (at least some of the time).

Chukchi

Chukchi is an endangered language spoken by 5,000 people in East Siberia.  Traditionally, the Chukchi herd reindeer and hunt for seals and whales.

The Chukchi language is made up of two gender-based dialects, one for men and one for women. The differences between the two dialects are mostly phonetic. For example, women typically substitute the ts sound for ch and r. So “ramkichhin,” which means “people,” is pronounced as written by men and as “tsamkitstsin” by women.

At the same time, the differences aren’t quite as simple as just swapping one consonant for another, which is why scholars refer to Chukchi as having two separate, but still mutually intelligible, gender dialects [PDF].

President Daniels responds to Chinese student’s harassment

Mitch Daniels:

December 15, 2021
Dear Purdue students, staff and faculty,

Purdue learned from a national news account last week that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of freedom and others martyred for advocating it, was harassed and threatened by other students from his own home country. Worse still his family back home, in this case China, was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police.

We regret that we were unaware at the time of these events and had to learn of them from national sources. That reflects the atmosphere of intimidation that we have discovered surrounds this specific sort of speech.

Any such intimidation is unacceptable and unwelcome on our campus.

Purdue has punished less personal, direct and threatening conduct. Anyone taking exception to
the speech in question had their own right to express their disagreement, but not to engage in the actions of harassment which occurred here. If those students who issued the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action. Likewise, any student found to have reported another student to any foreign entity for exercising their freedom of speech or belief will be subject to significant sanction.

International students are nothing new at Purdue University, which welcomed its first Asian admittees well over a century ago. We are proud that several hundred international students, nearly 200 of them Chinese, enrolled again this fall.

But joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of its rules and values, and no value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression. Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Mitch

Civics: “the County Board doesn’t have the power to end the mask mandate”

Emily Hamer:

The mask resolution, which was authored by conservative-leaning Sup. Jeff Weigand, 20th District, would urge Public Health Madison and Dane County director Janel Heinrich to pull back the masking order until the county gets more feedback on whether residents want the mandate in place.

It also seeks a public hearing on the mask order, an explanation from Heinrich to the County Board of the justification for it, and a consensus from both the County Board and public on whether the order should be in place.

Sup. Yogesh Chawla, 6th District, said he thinks next month’s meeting will be a good opportunity for Public Health to explain to residents why masking is an important way to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Mandates and the Dane County Madison Public Health Department.

Civics: The FBI Said It Busted A Plot To Kidnap Michigan’s Governor. Then Things Got Complicated.

Ken Bensinger & Jessica Garrison:

In early March, federal prosecutors took the unusual step of securing an indictment against their own informant, accusing him of illegally buying a high-powered sniper rifle from a man he met at church and then reselling it for a profit. Robeson acquired the gun on Sept. 26, just 11 days before the FBI’s takedown in the kidnapping case.

Even before Robeson was indicted on the gun charge, prosecutors appear to have gone to some lengths to keep his involvement out of the kidnapping case’s public record. The original charging papers, for example, cite a different informant who attended a June gathering of militants in Dublin, Ohio, but make no reference to the fact that Robeson had helped organize the event or that he was in the meetings as well.

As part of their trial strategy, defense attorneys in the kidnapping case plan to call Robeson as a witness. They say he can shine a light on what the government did to drag targets into the alleged plot and on the FBI’s conduct overall.

If that happens, his testimony could put prosecutors in the unusual and awkward position of having to discredit their own confidential informant.

That case carried over many of the tactics that were successfully used against young, disaffected Muslims in cases that Chambers had helped bring, at times over the strenuous objections of defense lawyers.

In one instance, a 21-year-old man in Detroit was approached online by two undercover operatives pretending to be Muslim women looking for love, one of whom repeatedly attempted to convince him to consider martyring himself in an act of terrorism.

In a second investigation, three young Somali American men were contacted on Facebook and other platforms by a series of people posing as ISIS recruiters, converts to Islam, individuals in Somalia, and flirtatious women, among other personas. After nearly two years, one of the men agreed to travel to Somalia using money provided by an undercover agent and was arrested at the airport.

All the men eventually pleaded guilty and received lengthy prison sentences.

What a Brazilian state can teach the world about education

The Economist:

hen amaury gomes began teaching history in Sobral in the mid-1990s, its schools were a mess. The city of 200,000 people lies in Ceará, a baking-hot north-eastern state that has one of Brazil’s highest rates of poverty. When local officials ordered tests in 2001 they found that 40% of Sobral’s eight-year-olds could not read at all. One-third of primary pupils had been held back for at least a year. Staff were not always much better, recalls Mr Gomes. He remembers a head teacher who signed documents with a thumbprint, because she lacked the confidence even to scribble her own name.

These days Mr Gomes is the boss of a local teacher-training college, and his city gets visitors from across Brazil. In 2015 Sobral’s primary-school children made headlines by scoring highest in the country in tests of maths and literacy, a milestone in a journey begun almost 20 years before. The pandemic has thrust the city back into the spotlight as a model for educators seeking to reboot schooling after lengthy closures. In November ambitious officials from other parts of Brazil trooped into Mr Gomes’s college, the first group since the start of the pandemic to attend one of the tours Sobral offers to curious outsiders.

Success stories are important to Brazil’s beleaguered educators, now more than ever. Before the pandemic only about half of children could read by the time they finished primary school, compared with nearly three-quarters in other upper-middle-income countries. In 2017 the World Bank warned that it could take 260 years before Brazil’s 15-year-olds are reading and writing as well as peers in the rich world. Since then many Brazilian pupils have missed around 18 months of face-to-face lessons as a result of school closures (most schools have now reopened). Few countries kept classrooms shut for as long. Data from São Paulo suggest that during this period children learned less than a third of what they normally would have, and that the risk of pupils dropping out tripled.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

“The implications for funding pensions and public education could become dire, and make living in shrinking states even less attractive for younger people”

The Economist:

This means that states are competing for a limited resource: the people that comprise their tax base. And many states are losing the fight. Between 2019 and 2020, 24 lost more Americans than they gained. Over the past decade, Illinois, Mississippi and West Virginia saw their populations decline. The implications for funding pensions and public education could become dire, and make living in shrinking states even less attractive for younger people, who will finance those debts. Growing states such as Texas and Florida will have an economic advantage.

They will also influence the country’s politics. Texas, Florida, Colorado, Montana, Oregon and North Carolina all gained population, and therefore congressional seats, while seven states, including New York and California, lost seats. According to the 2020 Census, the South now has ten of the country’s 15 fastest-growing cities with a population of 50,000 or more. Some 62% of Americans now live in the West and the South, compared with 48% in 1970. The share residing in the Midwest and Northeast has fallen from 52% to 38% over the past 50 years. The impact of these shifts will cascade: congressional seats, federal funding and electoral-college votes are all apportioned to states based on population size.

The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School

David Zweig:

The debate over child masking in schools boiled over again this fall, even above its ongoing high simmer. The approval in late October of COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds was for many public-health experts an indication that mask mandates could finally be lifted. Yet with cases on the rise in much of the country, along with anxiety regarding the Omicron variant, other experts and some politicians have warned that plans to pull back on the policy should be put on hold.

Scientists generally agree that, according to the research literature, wearing masks can help protect people from the coronavirus, but the precise extent of that protection, particularly in schools, remains unknown—and it might be very small. What data do exist have been interpreted into guidance in many different ways. The World Health Organization, for example, does not recommend masks for children under age 6. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recommends against the use of masks for any children in primary school.

Seen in this context, the CDC has taken an especially aggressive stance, recommending that all kids 2 and older should be masked in school. The agency has argued for this policy amid an atmosphere of persistent backlash and skepticism, but on September 26, its director, Rochelle Walensky, marched out a stunning new statistic: Speaking as a guest on CBS’s Face the Nation, she cited a study published two days earlier, which looked at data from about 1,000 public schools in Arizona. The ones that didn’t have mask mandates, she said, were 3.5 times as likely to experience COVID outbreaks as the ones that did.

How COVID-19 Ushered In A Wave Of Promising Teacher Pay Reforms

Chad Aldeman and Katherine Silberstein:

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of school districts have broken from tradition to offer pay outside of the rigid step-and-lane salary schedules. In particular, many districts are now offering flat-dollar raises or non-recurring bonuses, incentives to address long-standing recruitment and retention issues, or compensation to shape teacher behavior in other ways such as getting vaccinated.

It’s possible that these reforms are only temporary. The fall of 2021 was a remarkably tight labor market, especially for “low-skill” workers like instructional aides and bus drivers. Or, districts may be so flush with one-time federal relief funds that they’re simply trying to spend their money quickly.

Still, it’s a promising sign that districts are being nimble with their funds at a time that calls for fast thinking, and some of these innovations in teacher pay may live on beyond the pandemic if district leaders find them effective. In this piece, the authors outline the types of innovations popping up, explain why they matter, and highlight some of the districts trying them.

What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

Melanie Mitchell:

Remember IBM’s Watson, the AI Jeopardy! champion? A 2010 promotionproclaimed, “Watson understands natural language with all its ambiguity and complexity.” However, as we saw when Watson subsequently failed spectacularly in its quest to “revolutionize medicine with artificial intelligence,” a veneer of linguistic facility is not the same as actually comprehending human language.

Natural language understanding has long been a major goal of AI research. At first, researchers tried to manually program everything a machine would need to make sense of news stories, fiction or anything else humans might write. This approach, as Watson showed, was futile — it’s impossible to write down all the unwritten facts, rules and assumptions required for understanding text. More recently, a new paradigm has been established: Instead of building in explicit knowledge, we let machines learn to understand language on their own, simply by ingesting vast amounts of written text and learning to predict words. The result is what researchers call a language model. When based on large neural networks, like OpenAI’s GPT-3, such models can generate uncannily humanlike prose (and poetry!) and seemingly perform sophisticated linguistic reasoning.

But has GPT-3 — trained on text from thousands of websites, books and encyclopedias — transcended Watson’s veneer? Does it really understand the language it generates and ostensibly reasons about? This is a topic of stark disagreement in the AI research community. Such discussions used to be the purview of philosophers, but in the past decade AI has burst out of its academic bubble into the real world, and its lack of understanding of that world can have real and sometimes devastating consequences. In one study, IBM’s Watson was found to propose “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations.” Another study showed that Google’s machine translation system made significant errors when used to translate medical instructions for non-English-speaking patients.

Civics: Shaun visited a plant nursery last week, now he’s quarantined in an Adelaide medi-hotel

Rebecca Opie and Imogen Hayne:

That night he received the text message that no one wants to receive. 

“At about 11.30 that night I got a text message from SA Health saying that I’d been to a potential exposure site for the Omicron strain,” Mr Ferguson said. 

As per the instructions, Mr Ferguson immediately got tested but what followed from then was a whirlwind of uncertainty. 

An SA Health employee called him the next day and told him he could isolate at home with his husband and, that if he tested negative, he could be released out of isolation after seven days as he had been fully vaccinated. 

“After five minutes [the employee] came back and said, ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve given you some false information, because it’s the Omicron variant they are not necessarily happy for you to be isolating at home with your husband and they are going to consider putting you in a medi-hotel’,” Mr Ferguson said. 

He was then told to wait for another phone call from SA Health.

For and Against Lotteries in Elite University Admissions

Sam Enright:

People sometimes suggest replacing the admissions systems of highly selective universities with lotteries (their names often rhyme with Palcolm Sadwell). The proposal is that universities would mark a pool of students as ‘good enough’ and then students from that pool would be accepted at random. Here are some arguments for and against this idea, inspired by Julia Galef’s unpopular ideas seriesI don’t agree with all these arguments (or even fully endorse any); the point here is just to categorise the arguments worth considering on both sides.

Parents of the social media generation are not OK

Samantha Murphy Kelly:

“You can offer tools to parents and you can offer them insights into their teen’s activity, but that’s not as helpful if they don’t really know how to have a conversation with their teen about it, or how to start a dialogue that can help them get the most out of their time online,” Vaishnavi J, Instagram’s head of safety and well-being, told CNN Business this week.

Meanwhile, members of Congress have shown rare bipartisanship by uniting in criticizing tech companies on the issue. Some lawmakers are now pushing for legislation intended to increase children’s privacy online and reduce the apparent addictiveness of various platforms — though it remains unclear when or if such legislation will pass.

For some parents, these changes aren’t coming quick enough. Unsure what else to do, parents feel they have to go it alone, whether that means pushing for changes in their school districts or looking for advice from peers on some of the same social networks they feel have caused their families pain.

WHO reiterates warning against Covid boosters for healthy people as U.S. weighs wide distribution of third shots

Robert Towey:

  • The WHO strongly opposes the widespread rollout of booster shots, asking that wealthier nations instead give extra doses to countries with minimal vaccination rates.
  • The U.S. has already administered over 2 million boosters nationwide, according to the CDC.
  • An advisory panel to the FDA unanimously recommended boosters on Friday for anyone 65 and older.

Where are the students? For a second straight year, school enrollment is dropping

Anya Kamenetz:

The troubling enrollment losses that school districts reported last year have in many places continued this fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt public education across the country, an NPR investigation has found.

We compiled the latest headcount data directly from more than 600 districts in 23 states and Washington, D.C., including statewide data from Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama. We found that very few districts, especially larger ones, have returned to pre-pandemic numbers. Most are now posting a second straight year of declines. This is particularly true in some of the nation’s largest systems:

New York City’s school enrollment dropped by about 38,000 students last school year and another 13,000 this year.

In Los Angeles, the student population declined by 17,000 students last school year, and nearly 9,000 this year.

In the Chicago public schools, enrollment dropped by 14,000 last year, and another 10,000 this year.

The intellectual freedom that made public colleges great is under threat

Keith Whittington

Faculty members at public universities are under fire in numerous states: They face a serious and growing threat to the academic freedom that lets them choose their research topics and determine what happens in their classrooms without politicians looking over their shoulders.

Across the nation, state legislatures are proposing laws to limit the teaching of certain viewpoints on campus, curb the tenure system or otherwise blur the already thin line between higher education and state politics. If states continue down this path, they will undercut the excellence of their own institutions of higher education, some of which currently can be counted among the best universities in the world. They could send these institutions into a downward spiral, as the gap expands between the intellectual freedom secured at private universities and what is on offer at public universities.

Teachers are afraid of hybrid learning

Michael Pershan:

I’ve been puzzled by reports that some teachers and their unions, even after being fully vaccinated, are reluctant to return to in-person teaching. (For example, in Portland.) 

My wife and I are both teachers. We’ve both been teaching in-person all year, and recently got our second shots. Over dinner a few nights ago we were hashing this out. If you’re vaccinated, why wouldn’t you want to come back? If we take these teachers/unions at their word, it’s all about lingering safety concerns. Or is it just trying to hold on to the “perk” of working from home for a bit longer?

I bumped into an elementary teacher friend yesterday who I admire a great deal. She has been fully vaccinated and I know she cares a lot for her students. She understands that vaccines are effective. She works hard for kids. Still, she’s praying that they don’t return in-person. And she even said she has colleagues who are afraid of getting their shots, for fear that they will have to come back to schools. This is seemingly crazy — sure, ventilation is awful in a lot of places, but are they less safe than not being vaccinated?

But after talking to my friend, I think I understand the situation much better: teachers are scared of hybrid teaching. There are safety concerns, but they aren’t the primary source of anxiety. After talking with teachers on twitter about this last night, I think I got some confirmation of this line of thought. And while this theory has the downside of not taking union rhetoric at face value, it does have the benefit of being an entirely reasonable concern about working conditions. It is not a crazy thing for teachers or their unions to worry about.

Is Hybrid Learning Killing Teaching?

Robert Pondisco:

A lot of us have been confused, angry, and frustrated by the reluctance of some teachers, and particularly their unions, to resume in-person instruction. It defies not just sciencebut common sense, and feels like an exercise in shifting the goalposts or flexing political muscles. No in-person class until teachers are vaccinated. Or until kids are vaccinated. No, until everyone’s vaccinated and Covid-19 is eradicated. Then and only then will it be “safe” to return to something approximating normal schooling.

Over the weekend, a New York math teacher named Michael Pershan tweeted an astute observation, later expanded into a blog post, which suggests one possible cause of many teachers’ reluctance to resume in-person instruction: It’s less that they’re scared of Covid. They’re scared of hybrid teaching. And this, Pershan argues persuasively, is “an entirely reasonable concern about working conditions.”

“I bumped into an elementary teacher friend yesterday who I admire a great deal. She has been fully vaccinated and I know she cares a lot for her students,” Pershan writes. “She understands that vaccines are effective. She works hard for kids. Still, she’s praying that they don’t return in-person. And she even said she has colleagues who are afraid of getting their shots, for fear that they will have to come back to school. This is seemingly crazy—sure, ventilation is awful in a lot of places, but are they less safe than not being vaccinated?”

What’s actually happening, Pershan posits, is that the response to the pandemic has made teaching much more difficult and a lot less satisfying, and this is manifesting itself in a reluctance to further entrench the practices that are making teachers miserable, specifically having to simultaneously teach students in class and online. His blunt but accurate observation (just ask a teacher who is doing it) is that this common form of hybrid teaching “hardcore sucks.”

For a significant percentage of teachers, in-person schooling for the foreseeable future is going to mean hybrid instruction, with some combination of “roomies and Zoomies.” It’s certainly not going away in the current school year and maybe not the next one either, owing to parental choice and CDC guidelines. Even where in-person instruction is currently an option, a significant percentage of parents don’t want their kids back in physical school buildings, and health guidelines make it all but impossible for most schools to fit a full complement of students in a classroom without violating social distancing requirements. For the time being, this makes a certain amount of hybrid learning inevitable, which materially alters the act of teaching.

Public officials’ Covid ratings down; dip in support for mandates

Monmouth Poll:

A majority of Americans say they feel “worn out” by how Covid has impacted their daily lives, and nearly half feel “angry” about it. And the public’s exasperation may also be having an impact on how they view their political leaders’ handling of the pandemic, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon‐muth”) University Poll. Support for face mask and workplace vaccine mandates has also declined since the fall when the delta variant started to dominate.

Six in ten Americans feel worn out by pandemic-related changes they have had to make to their daily lives over the past 20 months. This includes 36% who feel worn out a lot and 24% who feel worn out a little. The poll also finds that nearly half of the public feels angry about how Covid has impacted their daily lives – 24% a lot and 21% a little. Republicans (64%) are no more likely than Democrats (63%) to say they feel at least a little worn out by pandemic-related changes to their lives, but they are much more likely to report feeling angry (63% and 34%, respectively).
Looking at both feelings simultaneously, just over one-third (36%) of the country reports being both worn out and angry. Another 25% feels worn out but not angry and 9% feels angry but not worn out, while 30% say they don’t feel either way about Covid-driven changes to their daily lives. Other than partisan-related variations in these results, there are few significant demographic differences in reports of being either worn out or angry due to the pandemic. However, adults under 55 years old (74%) are somewhat more likely than those aged 55 and older (63%) to say that they feel either or both of these negative emotions.

Civics: Borderless Media Consumption: Geoblocking reform – FUEN sits at the table with film and TV industry

Fuen:

It’s a nuisance for many: While one can move through Europe seemingly without borders when travelling (if there is not a pandemic) and in online shops, the country barrier often falls when accessing films and television offers – “no access”, it is then said, or the offer is not available for selection at all. This is what is known as geoblocking: multimedia content on the internet is only accessible regionally, usually within the borders of a country. If you want to stream the German “Tatort” in the media library in Denmark, you are left out in the cold. Even with paid platforms such as Netflix, the offer varies greatly from country to country: while viewers in Germany, for example, have access to 43.1% of the films available online in the EU, in Slovenia it is only 0.3%.

Technically, this works via the IP address, which assigns users to a country like a postal address. If you dial in from the “wrong” country, i.e. one that is not activated for the use of the content, the block takes effect.

This is problematic for all multilingual people who like to consume media in a language other than their mother tongue, but especially for members of national minorities and language communities: they often speak a language that is the majority language in another European country. Borders have shifted in Europe over the course of history, but languages have mostly remained – accordingly, today one finds many such language communities speaking a language other than the majority dominant national language. Many millions of people live in Europe who have a mother tongue that is recognised in their country but is a minority language. To cite just one of many examples: South Tyrol, which belongs to Italy, has 500,000 German-speaking inhabitants.

Districts Are Screening for Racial Biases During Teacher Job Interviews. Here’s How

Madeline Will:

Teachers’ racial biases result in lowered expectations for students of color, discriminatory disciplinary practices, and curricula that don’t represent students’ cultures. But what if districts could screen out people with those biases during the hiring process?

Experts say that school districts are increasingly asking teacher-candidates questions about cultural competency, race, and equity during the application and interview process. And although districts are trying to diversify their teaching force to better match their students, it’s slow work.

“Ultimately, when we’re looking for people to serve our students, my key questions are: Can you teach these students, even if they don’t look like you, [even if] you’re not familiar with their culture? How are you going to teach them as if they were your child, your cousin, your brother, your sister?” said Karen Rice-Harris, the chairwoman for the diversity, equity, and inclusion committee of the American Association of School Personnel Administrators.

Commentary from the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent

Jonah Beleckis:

They’re going to have to get away from the notion that we’re using this money to reward schools that were open for in-person instruction. Maybe we can use that $77 million for after-school programming, for tutoring, for learning loss. That’s what we need to do.

Notes and links on Jill Underly.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

We’ve Been Teaching Reading Wrong for Decades. How a Massachusetts School’s Switch to Evidence-Based Instruction Changed Everything

VICTORIA THOMPSON, ELIZABETH WOLFSON, AND MANDY HOLLISTER:

“Teaching reading is rocket science,” Louisa Moats is well known for saying. It is something we frequently referenced during our guided reading professional development for teachers. Sadly, until we started on our Science of Reading journey two-plus years ago, we had no idea how bereft our instruction was of the benefits of that science.  

Our collective awakening started as a result of listening to Emily Hanford’s podcast, “At a Loss for Words,” in which Hanford reveals that reading instruction in America has led children to read poorly based on a flawed theory of the mechanics of reading. While the three of us had different emotional reactions to hearing it, our powerful common experience was, “We have to do something!” 

The “do something” started with a lot of reading from Google searches, Facebook groups, and blog posts. Then came reflections on our own practices as teachers — practices we’d learned in our teacher prep programs and in professional development sessions in the years that followed — much of which has now been disproven (if, indeed, it was ever actually founded in evidence). As administrators, we came to recognize that we’d passed many of these ill-founded notions on to teachers at our school — and that has produced no small amount of guilt. How could we have taught students to read this way for so many years?!

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

MIT Press to Release Many Spring Titles Open Access

Suzanne Smalley:

The MIT Press, one of the world’s largest university presses, plans to publish its entire slate of spring 2022 monographs and edited collections on an open-access basis. The move is a major development for the larger open-access movement and a model that scholars and librarians say could be revolutionary for cash-strapped libraries, university presses and a dwindling number of humanities scholars.

The plan relies on commitments from more than 160 libraries and consortia whose pledges allowed MIT Press to reach 50 percent of the participation threshold it set against its three-year target. The press has extended a deadline for further commitments from additional institutions to June 30, 2022. MIT Press leaders say enthusiasm for its Direct to Open (D2O) effort, launched in April, has been so strong that they intend to share a white paper in January describing how the model works so other university presses can replicate it.

Amy Brand, director of MIT Press, calls D2O a much-needed alternative to traditional market-based scholarly business models. Monograph sales today are typically in the range of 300 to 500 units, down from 1,500 to 1,700 units per title in the 1990s, meaning that publishing now demands internal subsidies from institutions or philanthropies. Much of this downward trend in purchasing was driven by the increase in scientific journals and the high percentage of acquisition budgets they now account for, Brand said. The desire among librarians to buy digital copies of monographs has only further eroded the sales numbers.

By getting institutions to commit ahead of time to supporting its catalog, MIT Press is able to meet its revenue needs and then allow everyone else to access its work for free. Some observers worried about how the model will endure if a small group of benefactors stops underwriting free access for everyone else. But Brand said the model is not “purely altruistic,” since paying customers will be given access to hundreds of backlist books that are not openly available.

Civics: Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programs

Eva Dou:

These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.

“Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company said in a statement, after The Post shared some of the slides with Huawei representatives to seek comment. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.”

The divergence between Huawei’s public disavowals that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers, and the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on slides carrying the company’s watermark, taps into long-standing concerns about lack of transparency at the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear.

Huawei has long been dogged by criticism that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies.

Woman who attacked Madison teacher gets probation

Chris Rickert:

A woman who attacked a teacher at a Madison elementary school in 2019 pleaded guilty in the case Monday but will avoid a felony conviction if she completes a year of probation and anger-management and parenting classes, and writes a letter of apology to the teacher.

Lacandis Walker, 34, of Madison, told Dane County Circuit Judge Ellen Berz that she didn’t go to Orchard Ridge Elementary on Dec. 11, 2019, looking to get into a fight, but was unhappy with the school’s treatment of her special-needs daughter and felt “brushed off” by the staff member when she got there.

How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis

Stuart Ritchie and Elliot Tucker-Drob:

Intelligence test scores and educational duration are positively correlated. This correlation could be interpreted in two ways: Students with greater propensity for intelligence go on to complete more education, or a longer education increases intelligence. We meta-analyzed three categories of quasiexperimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence, those using compulsory schooling policy changes as instrumental variables, and those using regression-discontinuity designs on school-entry age cutoffs. Across 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the life span and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

Ontario College audit report

Office of the auditor general:

It has been due to a significant reliance on international student enrollment to subsidize the provincial costs of domestic students’ education and colleges’ administrative and capital expenditures. Direct provincial funding per full-time-equivalent domestic public college student in Ontario for 2018/19 was the lowest in Canada.
Between 2012/13 and 2020/21, public colleges experienced a 15% decline in domestic student enrol- ments but a 342% growth in international student enrolments, with 62% (2020/21) of international students coming from India. The decrease in domes- tic students has mainly been due to a change in the demographics of Ontario’s population, and high- school graduates pursuing university over college education. About 30% (104,937) of all (348,350) stu- dents enrolled in public colleges in Ontario in the fall of 2020 were international students.

The increase in international students was influ- enced by prospective students viewing Canada as
an attractive destination to study in and enrolling in Canadian post-secondary institutions as a pathway for immigration. International students in the public college sector contribute to local economies through spending, increase the diversity of colleges and local communities, and can help regions meet future labour demands where the local demographics are unable to meet employer needs

Do we have a representative republic if the representatives get to hide all transactions from the people—and claim that it’s for their own good?

Adam Andrzejewski:

So, why wasn’t transparency already mandated? The California state government has 269,000 employees and a $21 billion payroll. The controller’s office itself has 1,382 employees for a $101 million payroll. 

Since 2005, California invested $1 billion into FI$Cal, an accounting and transparency platform. However, 20 major units of state government will never be in the system or are deferred for years to come.

Last year, our organization filed 40,500 Freedom of Information Act requests — the most in American history. We captured vendor expenditure “checkbooks” in the other 49 states, within 13,000 local governments, and at the federal level. Citizens can see all vendor payments — in addition to 25 million public employee salaries and retirement pension payments — on our website, OpenTheBooks.com.  

It should not take a subpoena or a lawsuit to force open the state payment records. 

Since 2013, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com has invited the California controller to join the transparency revolution and produce line-by-line state spending. Today, our lawyers at non-profit public interest firm Cause of Action, in Washington, D.C. represent us.

How to generate better, cheaper, more abundant random numbers
And why that is important

The Economist:

Randomness valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on random numbers for the generation of unbreakable keys. Better, cheaper ways of generating and handling such numbers are therefore always welcome. And doing just that is the goal of a project with the slightly tongue-in-cheek name of COINFLIPS, which allegedly stands for Co-designed Improved Neural Foundations Leveraging Inherent Physics Stochasticity.

CONFLIPS operates under the aegis of Brad Aimone, a theoretical neuroscientist at Sandia National Laboratories (originally one of America’s nuclear-weapons laboratories, but which has now branched out into other areas, too). Dr Aimone’s starting-point is the observation that, unlike the circuits of digital computers, which will, if fed a given input, respond with a precise and predictable output, the link between input to and output from a nerve cell is more haphazard—or, in the jargon, “stochastic”. He wants to imitate this stochastic behaviour in something less squishy than a nerve cell. By doing so, he thinks he might be able to tune the distribution of digits that a random-number generator spits out, without affecting their underlying randomness.

Where have all the children gone?

Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi

It is easy to get lost in the vast lands of the Navajo Nation, with its mountains, rough terrain, endless desert and long stretches of highway. A quick turn can take a visitor into Utah, New Mexico, Arizona or Colorado.

But in this stretch of land, known as the Four Corners, it is not only the visitors who get lost. This is a place where untold numbers of Navajo students have gone missing from educational systems — their numbers unaccounted for by schools, their attendance records lost to parents and teachers alike. 

Hundreds have fallen off the grid since the start of the pandemic, pulled out of schools by parents who feel angry and unsupported. Many have transferred to other districts, sometimes crossing state lines to do so. Others switched over to homeschooling or dropped out of school altogether. The one constant is that the children are considered missing or unaccounted for.

Teachers shouldn’t have to pass a political test

Samuel Goldman:

What are the characteristics of a good teacher? Many would cite qualities such as mastery of the relevant subjects and high academic standards. Others might stress a positive attitude and engaging classroom manner.

For most people, political opinions are likely to rank low among these priorities. According to a report in EdWeek, though, that’s what an increasing number of public schools are emphasizing. Adopting a practice that’s already widespread in higher education, many districts are now considering applicants’ “cultural competency.” In other words, they’re making progressive political views a requirement of the job.

To be fair, advocates of such efforts don’t see it that way. In their view, interview questions about “diversity, equity, inclusion, empathy, and students’ social-emotional needs” aren’t political at all. They’re baseline ways to ensure teachers are prepared to work with the students particular schools enroll. And that’s a good thing to want to ensure: When around a third of new teachers leave the profession within three years and schools in low-income communities face higher rates of attrition, it’s reasonable to look for evidence at point of hiring that they know what they’re getting into — and have some ideas about how to deal with it.

Another attempt to address Wisconsin‘s long-term disastrous reading results: AB611

Wisconsin Governor Evers recently vetoed AB 446 on a Friday afternoon.

Foundations of Reading; (also MTEL) Wisconsin’s only teacher content knowledge exam requirement, in this case elementary reading.

A Capitol conversation on addressing Wisconsin’s reading challenges. (2011!)

AB611 and those lobbying for and against it.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

New FDA-approved eye drops could replace reading glasses for millions: “It’s definitely a life changer”

CBS News:

A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older.

Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up. The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.

Toni Wright, one of the 750 participants in a clinical trial to test the drug, said she liked what she saw.

“It’s definitely a life changer,” Wright told CBS News national correspondent Jericka Duncan.

Before the trial, the only way Wright could see things clearly was by keeping reading glasses everywhere — in her office, bathroom, kitchen and car. 

“I was in denial because to me that was a sign of growing older, you know, needing to wear glasses,” she said.

“So creating a new agency to oversee two existing agencies that oversee a school board that oversees the school district…..”

Jill Tucker and Annie Vainshtein:

Mayor London Breed is pushing an ambitious school board oversight plan that threatens to withhold city funding from classrooms if Board of Education members don’t change their behavior.

San Francisco classrooms, under a proposed change to city law, could lose millions in city funding each year if school board members continue to micromanage, treat others poorly or persist in chasing short-term political wins, its backers say.

What to Know About the Next Big Supreme Court School Choice Case

Libby Sobic and Anthony LoCoco:

The U.S. Supreme Court recently held oral arguments in Carson v. Makin, a case that challenges Maine’s decision to prevent certain private religious schools from participating in its tuition benefit program for families without access to a local public high school. This case will likely provide guidance as to whether states can continue to ban religious schools from participating in publicly-funded programs on the basis of religious use of funding.

While we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to make its determination, which could be awhile, here are three aspects of the case that Wisconsinites should know:

Wisconsin’s school choice programs are different than Maine’s tuition benefit program. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the parent’s choice for the voucher, even if it is a religious private school, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Wisconsin Constitution because the parent (not the government) is directing the dollars.

Maine’s program, on the other hand, allows parents to direct the funding to some private religious schools but chooses which schools can participate based on the use of religious curriculum. Therefore, Maine’s program is different than Wisconsin’s voucher programs because the state takes an additional step to try to determine whether state funding will be used to promote religious curriculum.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s holding could impact how both states and the federal government allocate funding to non-public schools.

Feds Handcuff Wisconsin From Rewarding In-Person Instruction

Will Flanders:

The decision to remain closed is likely to have long term consequences for the nation.  Standardized test scores fell dramatically this year, even after accounting for the huge number of students who didn’t participate in testing.  In the Spring, WILL estimated an economic cost to the state of more than $7 billion over the lifetime of kids in school today as a result of lost learning.

Apparently, the ED recognizes that a loss of in-person instruction is a problem.  By their very language denying Wisconsin the ability to use the funding in this manner, they admit that keeping students out of classrooms will mean that they need extensive ‘catching up.’ Yet they’ve created a catch-22 situation in which states are unable to incentivize reopening in order to provide funds to schools that failed to do so.

If this option is indeed completely off the table, the legislature should consider some alternative, creative means for these funds. While these funds must be directed to school districts, the state (and districts) could still be creative with how to use these additional funds. Dr. Marguerite Roza, an education funding expert, recently highlighted some possibilities. Among them, paying students to take summer courses to help overcome growing achievement gaps, or providing funds directly to families struggling to purchase school supplies at a time of economic upheaval. Another possibility might be mandating that districts create a supplemental Education Savings Account (ESA) to fund educational opportunities for students that aren’t currently offered in the district.

A Few Addenda to the NY Times Profile of NEA President Becky Pringle

Mike Antonucci:

Sunday’s New York Times featured an 1,800-word profile by Erica L. Green of National Education Association President Becky Pringle under the headline, “New Leader Pushes Teachers’ Union to Take On Social Justice Role.”

The overall tone of the piece is complimentary, and Pringle faced no very challenging questions about her union’s operations or stances over the 21-month COVID pandemic.

That’s the Times‘ prerogative, and there’s no use complaining about its deference to union officers. It has been going on for decades.

Still, I wouldn’t be fulfilling my role as the source of teacher union information that doesn’t come off their press releases and bios if I didn’t mention a few items in the Timesarticle that caught my eye:

* Referencing the American Federation of Teachers, Green wrote, “At the same time, its lack of term limits has made its high-profile leaders more like monarchs — its current president, Randi Weingarten, has served for 13 years.”

Managed by Bots: surveillance of gig economy workers

Privacy International:

PI, Worker Info Exchange, and App Drivers and Couriers Union have teamed up to challenge the unprecedented surveillance that gig economy workers are facing from their employers.

KEY FINDINGS
The picture that WIE’s research paints is one where algorithms are shaping the work experience of drivers, offering them limited visibility or avenues for redress when a decision about them is made.

The process of gathering data from the gig economy platforms may prove time consuming and resource intensive, even though the legal framework is designed to facilitate such requests and make them an easy, accessible tool for everyone to use.

The stories of private hire drivers’ experiences demonstrate the lack of transparency and accountability in the platforms’ decision making process, which has onerous consequences for the workers.

Will 2022 Be the ‘Greatest Year for Education Reform in a Generation’?

Nate Hochman:

The conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, has shaped the way that conservative policy-makers think about education: Workforce preparation, test scores, and other utilitarian concerns are often prioritized over character formation and civic virtue, while the question of what we are teaching our children has taken a backseat to the content-neutral language of school choice and decentralization. This framework, Yuval Levin writes, has “made American education policy awfully clinical and technocratic, at times blinding some of those involved in education debates to the deepest human questions at stake — social, moral, cultural, and political questions that cannot be separated from how we think about teaching and learning.”

All of that is beginning to change. A backlash to critical race theory (CRT) at the grassroots level, with help from activists like Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, has forced the radicalization of the American public-school curriculum to the forefront of the national political conversation. The debates over CRT have also opened up broader questions of what (and how) we teach American students about their country, initiating a serious conservative counteroffensive against the Left’s monopolistic control of American politics and history curricula, with states like Florida and Texas pairing anti-CRT laws with new programs aimed at renewing civic literacy in public education. What began with local, parent-led organizing has grown into a national movement with enormous political momentum.

The anti-CRT backlash “crystallized this feeling that we have an agenda that we can cohere around,” Rufo told National Review. “All of the various threads on conservative education reform can now unite around the framework of critical race theory to make real change and actually get bills passed through state legislatures.” To date, eleven states have enacted bans or restrictions on CRT, and Rufo thinks “we’re going to get another five to ten states passing them in the coming year.”

The Right’s commanding heights have begun to notice, too. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation have thrown their considerable weight behind the anti-CRT project, with Manhattan Institute scholars writing comprehensive model legislation for tackling the ideology — aimed not just at banning CRT itself but also at increasing curriculum transparency, revitalizing civic-literacy standards, and expanding school choice. Conservative scholars have testified before state legislatures to advocate for anti-CRT legislation. At the same time, new think tanks and advocacy groups like the Center for Renewing Americahave coalesced around fighting CRT as a core organizing principle of their mission. “You have think tanks who don’t necessarily agree on every issue, and there’s inter–think tank drama sometimes,” said Rufo. “But on education, we are all on the same page.”

Secret Santas at Madison La Follette High School

Scott Girard:

This year, the program is going to provide gifts for 152 students and siblings, nearly doubling what it provided last year, booster club secretary Sara Gold said. In 2020-21, 60.2% of La Follette’s students were considered “economically disadvantaged,” according to the state Department of Public Instruction, which put it second among the district’s comprehensive high schools, slightly behind East at 61.9%.

“This is just one part of a larger picture of what makes La Follette great and amazing and also the challenges that La Follette faces,” Gold said.

Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice

Cedric Chin:

I want to spend an essay talking about tacit knowledge, and why I think it is the most interesting topic in the domain of skill acquisition. If you are a longtime Commonplace reader, you’ll likely have come across this idea before, because I’ve written about it numerous times in the past. But I think it’s still good idea to dedicate a whole piece to the topic.

The reason I think it’s important to write this piece is because every time I touch on the topic of tacit knowledge, inevitably someone will pop up on Twitter or Hacker News or Reddit or email and protest that tacit knowledge doesn’t exist. I want something to link to whenever I come up against someone who says this, mostly so that I don’t have to repeat myself.

There is one other reason I think it is good to explore what tacit knowledge is: tacit knowledge does exist, and understanding that it does exist is one of the most useful things you can have happen to you. Once you understand that tacit knowledge exists, you will begin to see that big parts of any skill tree is tacit in nature, which means that you can go hunting for it, which in turn means you can start to ask the really useful question when it comes to expertise, which is: that person has it; that person is really good at it; how can I have it too?

Why does Minnesota sometimes get colder than the North Pole?

Ashley Miller:

America’s Siberia. The icebox of the nation. “Unfit for human habitation.”Minnesota’s cold weather is the stuff of legend. “Cold” is a defining feature of the state’s culture.

But how cold is it, really?

That’s what teacher Logan Jensen’s sixth-grade science class wanted to know while recently studying the Earth’s tilt. Specifically, the students inquired why Minnesota is sometimes colder than the icy climate of Santa’s hometown, the North Pole.

So Jensen wrote on their behalf to Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reader-powered reporting project. It is a simple question with a surprisingly complicated answer.

DREAMSTIME / TNSAn aerial view of the North Pole region.

Child care will cost more for many parents

Joanne Jacobs:

President Biden’s ambitious child care plan will be “challenging to implement,” writes Andrew Prokop on Vox.

If the $185 trillion Build Back Better Actpasses, the federal government will subsidize child care, mandate higher pay for child-care workers and fund new facilities.

But the plan could “drive up prices for many parents, and may lead to a shortage of licensed child care options as millions of parents enter an already-crowded market for the first time,” writes Prokop. Middle- and upper-middle-class parents, who’ll have to wait years for a subsidy, will pay a lot more.

The bill includes money for new facilities, but “ramping up supply is easier said than done,” Prokop notes. In addition to expanding space for child care, federal aid will have to fund hiring, training and retaining new staff.

“I’ve looked at a number of government programs over the years and usually I think there’s a way to make them work,” says Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This one I worry about.”

States may opt out rather than pick up some of the costs, starting in 2025. The federal spending ends in 2027, unless a future president and Congress pass a new law extending it.

The “big quit” is an opportunity to fix our broken education system

Bruno V. Manno:

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.

An update on the spring 2022 Madison School Board Election (3 seats)

Scott Girard:

Ananda Mirilli will not run for reelection to the Madison School Board next spring, meaning two of the three seats up for election will not have an incumbent among the candidates.

Cris Carusi previously announced that she would not run for reelection, while board president Ali Muldrow is running for a second term. Carusi, Mirilli and Muldrow are all in the final year of their first three-year term on the School Board.

Mirilli announced her decision in a video posted to Facebook Monday, sharing that the pandemic “took a devastating personal turn” for her, as her daughter’s father died last year and her own mother died six months ago.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Three School Board seats are up for election in April, and if any of them draw more than two candidates, a primary will be held in February. Candidates were able to begin circulating nomination papers in early December, with the number of required signatures due in January.

Janeway has said they joined the race to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker.

Janeway also hopes to focus their campaign on student safety and wellness across the district while exploring ways to get the community involved in area schools to facilitate positive change. They also hope to foster a positive and healthy relationship between the board and school staff by incorporating staff voices in policy decisions.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

Food drive at the recently expanded Madison Van Hise Elementary School

Scott Girard:

In addition to accepting donations at the school through the drive, McGuire said the kindergarten classes went around the Van Hise neighborhood and collected donations from homes on Wednesday. They first put up posters on Dec. 1 alerting residents to their planned collection event, filling up 10 wagons between the three classes.

“We’re just so proud of them,” McGuire said. “And we’re just so proud of our community, too, for being so supportive.”

Madison taxpayers recently funded the expansion of our least diverse schools, including Van Hise and nearby Hamilton middle schools. This, despite space in nearby facilities.

Abolish Yale

Caleb Dunson:

About an hour into the event — when it had gotten sufficiently crowded such that people began to sweat through their suits and dresses — the formal ceremony began. The event’s emcee gave a generic, but thankfully brief, speech about the history of the holiday dinner, then doled out his requisite thank yous to the unknown administrators and sponsors who helped plan the event. He took a moment to note the sheer abundance of food at the dinner — 1,000 shrimp, pounds and pounds of fish, crab, lobster, lamb, turkey and pork and cakes with too many layers to count — all for Yale. Once his speech ended, the Parade of Comestibles began. Dining hall workers, most of whom were Black, marched around Commons carrying the flags of the 14 residential colleges and carrying elegant food displays as a local drumming band, all Black, played triumphant beats. They circled Commons several times touting, among other things, a 10-foot loaf of bread, an ice-sculpted sleigh stuffed with the aforementioned shrimp and a rack of lamb decorated with mint and berries. Students swayed to the beat of the drums, excitedly watching the performance and recording it on their cell phones. 

The food had to go somewhere, so people started taking it by the pound. Students lined up near the meal station back of Commons, waiting to grab entire crabs and lobsters to take home with them. They grabbed turkey legs the size of my forearm and munched away at them too. We all feasted like royalty. 

Just two blocks away, on the city’s Green, homeless people froze and starved in the bitter New Haven night.

I left that dinner feeling disturbed and disheartened. On the walk back to my Old Campus dorm, I realized that I felt this way quite often while at this University. There’s something unsettling about Yale, about the way it operates, about its very existence. And now, having sat with these uncomfortable feelings for a while, I have come to realize that Yale is a problem. To fix it, we must get rid of the University. Completely.

In an interview with the Atlantic, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber answered the question: “Should Princeton exist?” He said, “The idea of a place like Princeton is that you can identify young people who have extraordinary talent and will benefit from an intensive academic experience. Over the space of years and decades, they will blossom in ways we can’t even predict, and they will be able to address problems that matter.” He listed names like Madison, Turing and Sotomayor as examples of the types of world-changers schools like Princeton can produce.

He was hired to fix California schools — while running a business in Philadelphia

Mackenzie Mays:

California’s first superintendent of equity lives in Philadelphia and has a separate job there, more than 2,500 miles away from the schools he advises as one of the highest paid officials in the state Department of Education, according to records and interviews.

Daniel Lee, a psychologist, life coach and self-help author, owns a Pennsylvania-based psychology firm and is the president of the New Jersey Psychological Association’s executive board. He has also been serving as a deputy superintendent for the California Department of Education since July 2020, a role dedicated to the success of children of color that was originally backed by a foundation grant but is now funded by state taxpayers.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who was instrumental in the hiring, has known Lee for more than two decades since they were social workers in Philadelphia and included Lee in his wedding party. The Education Department’s nonprofit affiliate initially hired Lee without publicly posting the job that now pays up to $179,832, and Lee’s 18-page resume shows no prior experience in California or relationships with school districts in the state.

Lee, 51, voted in Philadelphia as recently as November and owns a home there, according to local records.California education and taxpayer advocates questioned why the state hired someone living across the country with other duties to address persistent inequities in the nation’s largest school population. The hiring appears to flout California policy, which allows few exceptions for a state employee to live elsewhere.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

“To Encourage the Others”: Making an Example of the National School Boards Association (NSBA)

Michael Watson:

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) messed up big time. It sent a letter to the Biden administration calling on the Justice Department to investigate protesting parents under the PATRIOT Act, among other federal anti-terrorism laws.

In so doing, the erstwhile representative national association of school board officials exacerbated existing internal disputes over its internal governance, some of which we discussed with the Ohio School Boards Association on the InfluenceWatch Podcast. At the same time, it drew unprecedented scrutiny from opponents of totalitarian COVID restrictions on low-risk children, opponents of left-progressive gender ideology, and opponents of ideologically charged teaching inspired by critical race theory.

That pushback has had consequences. As of writing, activist Corey DeAngelis tallies 18 state associations (including Ohio) that have disaffiliated or ceased paying dues to NSBA, with an additional nine having informally distanced themselves from the national group’s actions.

The decline in revenue has other consequences, as Axios reports:

Keep Distance Education for Law Schools: Online Education, the Pandemic, and Access to Justice

Lael Daniel Weinberger:

While distance education made inroads throughout higher education, law schools kept their distance—until a global pandemic forced them all online for a time. Then the gatekeepers to the profession at the American Bar Association and state bars temporarily dropped their limits on distance learning. Now as American law schools prepare to return to normalcy, should distance learning remain an option? This essay argues that it should because it has potential to improve access to justice: distance education can reduce the costs of law school, increasing the supply of lawyers who can afford to provide less expensive legal services.

Now is the time for legal regulators to make permanent what they allowed temporarily during the pandemic: distance-education-friendly accreditation and bar admission standards.

Teaching Unvaccinated Students Separately? This District Will Be the First to Try It

Catherine Gewertz:

A tiny school district in California is setting up a separate in-person instructional program for its unvaccinated students, courting a showdown with the biggest state in the country and a tussle over the legal limits of how schools can respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

The Alpine Union school district’s plan, the first of its kind in the country, is designed to save its unvaccinated students from losing face-to-face instruction when the state’s K-12 vaccine mandate—also the only one of its kind in the nation—goes into effect, for some grades as early as July.

In this small K-8 district, in the foothills east of San Diego, where “choice” is a rallying cry that dominates the COVID vaccine debate, district leaders estimate that 40 percent or more of the 1,500 students aren’t inoculated against the virus.

Scaling Tacit Knowledge

Nintil:

Nobel Prize winner P.B. Medawar once wrote, in Advice to a Young Scientist, that ‘any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems.’ But what makes a problem “important”? And how do you know it when you see it? The answers don’t come from reading them in a book, or even by explicitly being taught them. More often, they’re conveyed by example, through the slow accretion of mumbled asides and grumbled curses, by smiles, frowns, and exclamations over years of a close working relationship between an established scientist and his or her protege. (Apprentice to Genius)

Ben Reinhardt posted earlier in October the picture below. It shows two ways to “learn a field”: one is the “right one” (talking to people, the outer loop) and another is depicted as a misconception, where one just reads key papers. Learning a field can take multiple meanings, it can be learning the content of the field, learning the social context of the field (what are the active areas of research, key labs, its history), or learning to do research in the relevant field.

As someone who’s an example of being in that inner loop, I thought it’d be worthwhile to engage with this, but over time that ended up growing into a longer and somewhat meandering essay on the nature of tacit knowledge. If you are left wondering what do I really mean, worry not: the conclusion has an enumeration of points I want to make. This essay makes a heavy use of examples and analogies, everything you need is linked from this essay, so you should probably be clicking in all the links! If you want the TLDR now, here it is: Expertise requires acquiring a degree of private and tacit knowledge. Expertise cannot be taught using only explanations. Acquiring expertise can be accelerated by means of being exposed to a large library of examples with context. We are not leveraging this as much as we can and we should experiment more to explore how far this method can get us. What I describe in this post is a hypothesis that is looking to be tested and I offer indirect evidence for why it may work.

Ben is not the only one with a person-first approach to learning: In the same Twitter thread, Alexey Guzey joins Ben with a 90/10 split between talking to people and reading. This is not due to some limitation with the written vs verbal form. There are some people out there like Rob Wiblin that find it hard to read anything at all. Ben and Alexey’s point is very different: Is there knowledge that can only be gained by talking to the experts? Is it faster to gain certain kinds of knowledge by talking to the experts?

How do you solve a problem like misinformation?

Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin West:

Research into propaganda, conspiracy theory, and other distortions of information have a long history spanning multiple disciplines, but the rising tide of distorted and manipulative information has led to an increasingly visible, if still disparate, field of misinformation studies. This emerging field has the potential to inform our understanding of misinformation and the legal options to constrain misinformation and to advance our understanding of collective online behavior (8). Given the urgency and real-world impact of this issue, it is critical that the evolving policies in government and industry are informed by this research but also that the research itself is informed by these policy discussions. Our hope is that eventually, this collective work will make the field of misinformation studies obsolete.

California Eliminates Unconstitutional Law Criminalizing Teaching Trade Skills

Dan King:

After more than four years of litigation, Bob Smith and Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School (PCHS) are free to return to teaching horseshoeing to students who have not completed high school or an equivalent government-mandated exam. Bob and PCHS, who were represented by the Institute for Justice (IJ) in a federal lawsuit to protect the First Amendment right to teach willing students, may again enroll students regardless of their educational status.

How do you solve a problem like misinformation?

Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin West:

Research into propaganda, conspiracy theory, and other distortions of information have a long history spanning multiple disciplines, but the rising tide of distorted and manipulative information has led to an increasingly visible, if still disparate, field of misinformation studies. This emerging field has the potential to inform our understanding of misinformation and the legal options to constrain misinformation and to advance our understanding of collective online behavior (8). Given the urgency and real-world impact of this issue, it is critical that the evolving policies in government and industry are informed by this research but also that the research itself is informed by these policy discussions. Our hope is that eventually, this collective work will make the field of misinformation studies obsolete.

Pennsylvania high court throws out mask mandate for schools

Mark Scolforo:

They upheld a lower-court decision that the mandate was imposed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s acting health secretary without legal authorization. The practical impact of the decision will depend on what the justices say in the written opinion or opinions they will issue in the case and which schools and school districts impose their own masking requirements.

The court took action amid a statewide surge in new infections and hospitalizations. Pennsylvania is reporting an average of 7,571 infections per day, up over 20% in two weeks. Hospitalizations have risen 55% since mid-November, to an average of more than 4,000 per day, and acute-care facilities are becoming overwhelmed.

Wolf press secretary Beth Rementer described the decision as “extremely disappointing.”

Notes and links on “mandates”, including Colorado and Dane County Madison Public Health.

Capita to take on running of UK student exchange programme from British Council

Chris Havergal:

A union has expressed alarm after it emerged that the British Council would be stripped of its role running the UK’s Turing student exchange scheme and replaced by the outsourcing firm Capita.

The Guardian reported that the council – the UK’s international educational and cultural organisation – had been undercut by Capita in a tendering process.

The news came just a few months into the operation of the Turing scheme, which has an annual budget of £110 million and is seeking to send 28,000 students from more than 120 universities overseas this year.

The Turing scheme replaced the UK’s involvement in the European Union’s Erasmus+ exchange, which had been administered in the UK by the British Council since 2014. It had helped run the predecessor Erasmus programme since 2007.

The new contract, which runs from March 2022 to the end of 2023, is for the delivery of the Turing scheme across the four nations of the UK.

Capita will be assisted by organisations including the Association of Colleges, the Sutton Trust, and the Association of Commonwealth Universities, The Guardian reported.

The Diversity Industry

CDR Salamander:

For the last decade and a half or so of DivThu we’ve often discussed the “Diversity Industry” and tried to describe to those who have yet to encounter it, just how large of an industry it is.

Instead of working towards a society that looks past the useless characteristics of race, creed, sex, color or national origin – they work towards division, promote segregation and unequal treatment … on your dime.

Sadly, the commissariat has only gotten larger as they have refined their business model of insertion and growth through threats, etho-masochism, well-meaning useful idiocy, leveraging institutional cowardice, and naked careerism to expand their empire.

Few can or will say no to them, as their track record on cancelling and dissociating those who they consider heretics from their religion and gravy train is impressive.

Thanks to Professor Mark Perry, we have a little snapshot of just one little tributary to their empire – The Ohio State University.

Enjoy it Ohio taxpayers, Ohio State alumni, parents, and students – you’re paying for it.

Civics: “No Qualified Immunity as to Alleged Deliberate Omission of Key Facts from Arrest Warrant”

Eugene Volokh:

Laviage sued Fite for, among other things, false arrest, and the court held that Fite was not shielded by qualified immunity:

The law requires that Fite’s affidavit include enough facts to enable the magistrate to make an independent evaluation that there was probable cause to arrest Laviage. Fite could be liable if he made an intentional omission that results in a warrant being issued without probable cause….

Laviage sufficiently pleads that Fite intentionally wrote a misleading affidavit by excluding the software issues. Laviage was transparent with Fite. He acknowledged the deficiencies and made an effort to correct them. If the omitted fact was included, Laviage pleads factual content that allows the court to reasonably infer that the warrant would have lacked probable cause.

The law requires that Laviage “intentionally and knowingly” not file the reports. Laviage had no intent to conceal. He filed substantively identical reports with the City of Houston. Fite deliberately cross checked the Department’s reports with the City of Houston. Laviage kept Fite appraised of his efforts to correct the software issues but Fite persisted on a fishing expedition.

Taking the facts as plead, the Magistrate Judge could draw a reasonable inference from the circumstances that Laviage did not “intentionally and knowingly” fail to report to the Department. The jury’s decision to throw out the claims illustrates the baseless foundation for the initial charge.

Notes and links on “qualified immunity”.

Controlling the narrative: Parental choice, Black empowerment and lessons from Florida

Denisha Merriweather, Dava Hankerson, Nathaniel Cunneen and Ron Matus:

The shift to an increasingly choice-driven education landscape for Black students in Florida has been driven by Black parents, who have enrolled their children in choice programs in growing numbers and made it so they cannot be ignored politically. “Options make it so that I can have school that works for my child,” said Brandi Evans, who has three children at Icon Preparatory School, a predominantly Black private school, pictured above, that is serving choice scholarship students in Tampa. With education choice, “I get to control the narrative.” PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

It has been 31 years since the first modern private school choice program began in Milwaukee, 29 years since the first charter school opened in Minnesota, and 10 years since Arizona created the nation’s first education savings account program.

Yet in many states, the opportunity for America’s 7.7 million Black public-school students to access these potentially life-changing learning options remains out of reach.

Florida is a notably bright exception.

Florida has more than 600,000 Black students, among the highest number of any state. It has among the most expansive suite of education choice options. And now it has among the highest number of Black students enrolled in those options.

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

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

I have served as a history teacher at Waukegan High School for over ten years.

D60exposed:

“A Decrepit School District Plagued by Corruption and Incompetence Turns to Ideological Indoctrination”

During the summer of 2021, I had enough.

Having witnessed a decade of dysfunction in one of Illinois’ worst public schools and the implementation of their ideological program rooted in Critical Race Theory, I created a blog called Chalkboard Heresy and began speaking out. Over time I revealed my identity, and now I have decided to “blow the whistle” on the entire sham of a system and its ideological agenda. This is the story of one school district in the United States of America.

Commentary on Wisconsin’s K-12 Tax & Spending Growth

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Wisconsin property taxpayers should see one of the smallest increases in years on their December bills, with levies for school districts barely rising, technical college levies declining for only the second time in at least two decades, and a state tax credit rising sharply. Yet even the small uptick in school district levies is surprising given earlier projections that increased state aid and federal pandemic relief would cause taxes to fall.