James Freeman:

Chicago Public Schools canceled classes Wednesday after the teachers union voted late Tuesday to stop providing in-person instruction, citing the latest surge in Covid-19 that has sent cases to record levels in the city.

City leaders called the vote by the Chicago Teachers Union an illegal job action and said teachers who didn’t report to work wouldn’t receive pay. The administration promised to provide parents with a plan later Wednesday for how it would resume operations in the face of the walkout.
Union officials said Wednesday that they were sticking with their demands to stay out of schools to protect members, students and families from the virus but planned to meet with city leaders in the afternoon to continue trying to hammer out an agreement to resume instruction…

The union said in a tweet that 73% of its 25,000 members had voted to resume remote learning.’
Well, here’s to the 27% of union members who voted to put the educational needs of students first and to follow the science. Mr. Barrett reports:

Wall Street Journal:

The political scandal of the year so far is unfolding in plain sight in Chicago, where the teachers union has effectively shut down the public schools. Will this finally cause President Biden to speak up for children? Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is showing the way.

Chicago schools were supposed to be open Wednesday, but they shut down after the Chicago Teachers Union voted against in-person learning. The CTU says it won’t relent until the surge in Covid-19 cases has subsided, or the school district signs an agreement “establishing conditions for return” approved by the CTU.

Even Mayor Lori Lightfoot is unhappy, correctly noting that Chicago’s classrooms are safe and accusing the union of an “illegal work stoppage.” She added that teachers who didn’t show up Wednesday would be put on no-pay status. We’ll see how long that lasts given how powerful the CTU is in Democratic politics.

The CTU action comes as we are learning about the full—and unnecessary—costs inflicted on children in the name of Covid prevention. These include mental-health issues, losing ground academically, and the lack of normal socialization. This damage has all been done even though children remain among the least at risk for a severe case of Covid.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” this weekend, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also emphasized that schools can be opened safely. “We know what works, and I believe even with Omicron, our default should be in-person learning for all students across the country.”

Ann Althouse:

“I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly.”

Said John Abeigon, the Newark Teachers Union president, quoted in “As More Teachers’ Unions Push for Remote Schooling, Parents Worry. So Do Democrats. Chicago teachers have voted to go remote. Other unions are agitating for change. For Democrats, who promised to keep schools open, the tensions are a distinctly unwelcome development”(NYT).

BBC:

The government admits the evidence for using masks in schools to reduce spread of Covid is “not conclusive”.

The uncertainty is acknowledged in a review used by ministers in England to make their decision to introduce face coverings in classrooms.

The government’s own study in the autumn did not provide proof of a statistically significant impact.

The evidence review says other studies have provided mixed results, but taken together suggest they may help.

And the move was backed by the UK Health Security Agency.

The review has only just been published following the announcement on Monday about the return of face coverings in classrooms.

Alana Goodman:

Shareholders in Google and YouTube are pressing the tech giants to disclose any requests they have received from the Biden administration to scrub politically “problematic” information from the platforms, according to a copy of a shareholder proposal obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The National Legal and Policy Center, an ethics watchdog group that holds a voting stake in Google and YouTube’s parent corporation Alphabet, submitted the shareholder proposal to the company this week, following a string of controversies over Google and YouTube’s removal of videos that question the Biden administration’s COVID-19 policies.

The proposed disclosure requirement could shed light on whether the administration has directed tech companies to remove information that it deems misleading, a scenario that raises concerns about government censorship. In July, the White House said it was “in regular touch” with social media platforms to discuss ways to combat “misinformation” online.

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

Keith Whittington:

The Omicron wave of COVID has many institutions scrambling. Depressingly, many are acting as if there have been no advances over the past two years. Despite requiring that everyone on campus be fully vaccinated, including boosters, my own university continues to impose aggressive masking requirements, comprehensive asymptomatic testing, extended isolation for asymptomatic individuals who test positive, and draconian restrictions on normal campus activities. In an effort to create some modicum of quarantine conditions, students are prohibited from leaving the county except when engaged in university approved activities. Some of those decisions are being driven by government policies. Princeton is hardly alone in partying like it is 2020. Enough already.

Two years ago, I thought that even libertarians should endorse some pretty intrusive policies early in the pandemic. When confronted with a novel airborne respiratory infection that was fairly contagious even in asymptomatic stages and frequently fatal and for which there were no effective vaccines or therapies, the government had an important role to play in trying to limit the spread of the disease. But I also warned

The machinery of government can be vastly expanded and strengthened during these periods to the detriment of liberty and civil society in the future. We should be cautious about putting in place anything other than temporary measures for addressing the current crisis. If there are long-term reforms that need to be considered in the aftermath so as to better prepare for future epidemics, there will be time to carefully consider them later.

That was two years ago. The scientific community has responded to the pandemic in incredible ways. Extraordinarily effective tests, vaccines and therapies have been developed at a miraculous rate. The government has responded in pretty terrible ways. Public health officials have demonstrated that they must be kept on a short leash and are too often willing to let their personal political preferences and risk aversion affect their policy judgment. Public health institutions have done more to impede and confuse than to facilitate an appropriate response to the pandemic. The FDA and the CDC are due for some fundamental reform. Executive branch officials have demonstrated that they are more than happy to make policy by arbitrary diktat. Politicians and the media have contributed to polarizing issues that should not be polarized and stoking fear for short-term gain. Goalposts are constantly being moved, when there are any goalposts in evidence at all.

Paul Bedard:

Jeremy took a more libertarian view and countered, “There’s a belief out there that government intervention begets more government interventions. That is, the more the federal government intervenes in society and people’s affairs and creates legislation and bureaucracy, it creates other issues. And so do our crises stem from completely random issues or are these crises the result of intervention. And whether we look at coronavirus, whether we look at the economy, I think there’s evidence that points to government meddling in affairs and in places that they shouldn’t. I’m talking about a deadly gain of function research, we’re talking about decades of, well, not decades, but years of Federal Reserve policies that brought interest rates low to nearly zero and blowing up a bubble.”

Scott Mildred (and others)

Our community didn’t let the district’s tardiness slide without a stern warning. That’s because missing in-person classes for the last week (with two days of online school) badly disrupted people’s lives, especially working parents who don’t have easy options for emergency child care.

The district’s spokesman had told the State Journal on Dec. 20 that moving to online-only learning was not part of the district’s plans for January. Yet an email to parents on the eve of New Year’s Eve informed families that school buildings wouldn’t open the following Monday after all. That left many parents scrambling over the holiday weekend to get time off work, find somewhere safe for their kids to stay, or ask for an impromptu “bring your child to work day.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Alan Borsuk:

This all said, MPS is in a small club of school districts that have switched to all-virtual schooling during the current surge. The vast majority of American schools are staying in-person, even if it’s a struggle.

One board member, Megan O’Halloran, suggested that schools that were reporting comparatively few COVID cases among teachers and students should re-open on Monday (Jan. 10). She said that the MPS COVID “dashboard” indicated more than half of schools would be candidates for re-opening under the standard that has been used of no more than 3% of the school community testing positive. The idea was voted down 8 to 1.

The lack of urgency about student achievement. This very much predates the pandemic and is a broader issue. But it seems relevant to the tepid push for keeping kids in classrooms now. There just aren’t many people who have called publicly for energetic and fresh ways to raise the longstanding and deeply worrisome proficiency of many thousands of Milwaukee children (not only in MPS) when it comes to

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Liberty Justice Center:

– A group of Chicago parents have filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Teachers Union, calling this week’s school closures an “illegal strike” and demanding that teachers return to school for in-person learning. The lawsuit was filed late Thursday by attorneys at the Liberty Justice Center, a national nonprofit law firm that fights for students’ educational rights.

More than 300,000 students were locked out of Chicago Public Schools starting Wednesday after unionized teachers refused to teach in-person. Not only is the strike illegal under Illinois law, it also violates the union’s own contract.

“CTU’s resolution calling members to not show up for work in-person is a strike regardless of what CTU calls it and violates both the collective bargaining agreement with CPS and Illinois law,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. “CTU cannot unilaterally decide what actions should be taken to keep public schools safe, completely silencing parents’ input about what is best for the health, safety, and well-being of their children.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Dana Goldstein and Noam Scheiber:

Few American cities have labor politics as fraught as Chicago’s, where the nation’s third-largest school system shut down this week after teachers’ union members refused to work in person, arguing that classrooms were unsafe amid the Omicron surge.

But in a number of other places, the tenuous labor peace that has allowed most schools to operate normally this year is in danger of collapsing.

While not yet threatening to walk off the job, unions are back at negotiating tables, pushing in some cases for a return to remote learning. They frequently cite understaffing because of illness, and shortages of rapid tests and medical-grade masks. Some teachers, in a rear-guard action, have staged sick outs.

In Milwaukee, schools are remote until Jan. 18, because of staffing issues. But the teachers’ union president, Amy Mizialko, doubts that the situation will significantly improve  and worries that the school board will resist extending online classes.

“I anticipate it’ll be a fight,” Ms. Mizialko said.

She credited the district for at least delaying in-person schooling to start the year but criticized Democratic officials for placing unrealistic pressure on teachers and schools.

“I think that Joe Biden and Miguel Cardona and the newly elected mayor of New York City and Lori Lightfoot — they can all declare that schools will be open,” Ms. Mizialko added, referring to the U.S. education secretary and the mayor of Chicago. “But unless they have hundreds of thousands of people to step in for educators who are sick in this uncontrolled surge, they won’t be.”

The view from Madison, via David Blaska:

Madison Teachers Inc. claims that two-thirds of its members surveyed “either did not support a return to school buildings on January 10 or would only do so if COVID-19 infection rates were stabilizing or decreasing.”

“Not only have we started this school year short-staffed, but we are losing an extraordinary number or staff due to burnout and disrespect from leadership and community stakeholders.”

Disrespect from “community stakeholders?” Whom might that be? Parents? Taxpayers? At least, they have the support of the Madison-area Democratic Socialists. The Far Left group today blamed Covid on capitalism:

Hello comrades,

I am sure you are all thinking about Omnicron and how it yet again illustrates the blatant failings of capitalism, the state, the U.S. healthcare system, and so many other oppressive institutions. … (MTI) is calling on MMSD leadership to make basic commitments to staff members. Please read their statement, sign their petition, and share it.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Josh Gordons Burner:

I’d like to preface this by stating that remote learning was absolutely detrimental to the mental health of myself, my friends, and my peers at school. Despite this, the present conditions within schools necessitates a temporary return to remote learning; if not because of public health, then because of learning loss. 

A story of my day: 

– I arrived at school and promptly went to Study Hall. I knew that some of my teachers would be absent because they had announced it on Google Classroom earlier in the day. At our school there is a board in front of the auditorium with the list of teachers and seating sections for students within study hall: today there were 14 absent teachers 1st period. There are 11 seatable sections within the auditorium … THREE CLASSES sat on the stage. Study hall has become a super spreader event — I’ll get to this in a moment. 

– Second period I had another absent teacher. More of the same from 1st period. It was around this time that 25% of kids, including myself, realized that there were no rules being enforced outside of attendance at the start of the period, and that cutting lass was ridiculously easy. We left — there was functionally no learning occurring within study hall, and health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium. It was well beyond max capacity.

– Third period I had a normal class period. Hooray! First thing the teacher did was pass out COVID tests because we had all been close contacts to a COVID-positive student in our class. 4 more teachers would pass out COVID tests throughout the day, which were to be taken at home. The school started running low on tests, and rules had to be refined to ration. 

– “To be taken at home.” Ya … students don’t listen. 90% of the bathrooms were full of students swabbing their noses and taking their tests. I had one kid ask me — with his mask down, by the way — whether a “faint line was positive,” proceeding to show me his positive COVID test. I told him to go the nurse. One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. There was now a lack of available seats given there was a COVID-positive student within the middle of the auditorium. They’re now planning on having teachers give up their free periods to act as substitute teachers because the auditorium is simply not safe enough. 

– Classes that I did attend were quiet and empty. Students are staying home because of risk of COVID without testing positive (as they should) and some of my classes had 10+ students absent. Nearly every class has listed myself and others are close contacts. 

– I should note that in study hall and with subs we literally learn nothing. I spent about 3 hours sitting around today doing nothing. 

– I tested positive for COVID on December the 14th. At the time there were a total of 6 cases. By the end of break this number was up to 36. By January the 3rd (when we returned from break) the numbers were up to 100 (as listed on the school Google Sheet). Today there are 226. This is around 10% of my school. As of Monday, only 30 of whom were reported to the DOE … which just seems like negligence to me. 

– 90% of the conversations spoken by students concern COVID. It has completely taken over any function of daily school life. 

– One teacher flat out left his class 5 mins into the lesson and didn’t return because he was developing symptoms and didn’t believe it safe to spread to his class. 

I’ve been adamantly opposed to remote learning for a while, and thought that it was overall an unmitigated disaster for the learning and mental health of students. At the present time, however, schools cannot teach and function well enough in person. We must go remote.

Corrinne Hess:

At the urging of Milwaukee Public Schools and area restaurants, a Milwaukee Common Council committee moved forward an ordinance Friday for a city-wide mask mandate.

Under the plan, a face covering would be required for anyone 3 years old and up inside a public building whenever the rate of transmission of the COVID-19 virus is equal to or greater than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents in Milwaukee County as determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Milwaukee has repeatedly hit that mark since the omicron variant reached the city around Thanksgiving. 

On Friday, Milwaukee had more than 1,000 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people and more than 38 percent of people tested for the virus were positive, said city Health Commissioner Kirsten Johnson.

The Public Health and Safety Committee voted 3-2 on the ordinance with two members of the committee, Scott Spiker and Mark Borkowski abstaining, saying they were being expected to make a decision before the details were worked out.

As someone who reported on the VA race, I can tell you without any doubt that school closures, not CRT, were the opening for Youngkin.

I can also say pretty confidently that school closures are going to be a huge part of the Republican effort to win back the suburbs in November.

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) January 8, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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’d really like to know which media outlets Sonia Sotomayor consumes that misled her to believe these wildly false claims about children now hospitalized and intubated due to COVID.

The likely culprits are obvious, but confirmation would be great. She was presumably prepared: https://t.co/cToloyuBaK

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 8, 2022

The Supreme Court (Brittanica)

Joe Kukura:

Hundreds of teachers have signed an online petition saying they won’t work Thursday because of SFUSD’s alleged COVID safety failings, but can you really have a sickout when more than 10% of the staff is already legitimately out sick?

We had heard rumblings early on Wednesday that there was some sort of San Francisco teacher labor action brewing, as Bay City News reportedUnited Educators of San Francisco (UESF) was “holding a briefing at noon Wednesday to discuss the issues related to the COVID surge.” It may or may not be that particular labor action, but the Chronicle is reporting that SFUSD teachers are planning a mass “sickout” for Thursday, January 6, to protest the lack of available testing and precautions they see as inadequate.

The paper notes that the sickout is “not organized by the teachers’ union.”

F H Buckley:

OK millennial, you don’t care for us baby boomers. You complain that we’ve taken all the food off the table and left you the crumbs. You say we cling to our jobs and won’t make room for you. And you especially resent how, throughout, we took ownership of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

In the 1960s we were a youth movement that demanded to be heard. We marched on the Pentagon and occupied college administration buildings. In the 1970s we mellowed, listened to the Band and the Eagles, and read Charles Reich’s “The Greening of America.” In the 1980s we rebounded as yuppies. We became investment bankers and lawyers, and the women among us wore suits with padded shoulders. Thereafter we ascended to political power—not always wisely, truth be told. But our music had lyrics and melodies, and our protest songs took on real injustices. We cemented a civil-rights revolution for women and minorities and left a mark on all succeeding generations.

STOP Award

More than 340,000 Chicago Public School students have been forced to stay home by self-interests who dominate the Chicago Public School system. The failure of Chicago’s leadership to open school even after receiving more than $1.5 billion from the federal government in the past year to ensure they are always open safely to students is outrageous and unacceptable.

But there are thousands of great educators and education providers who can and are ready to help more children get educated. We want to help them, immediately, to take kids in from the Chicago public schools and give them the education they need and deserve, both now and into the future.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Someone just sent a picture of their child’s homework to me. Sorry @GovEvers 🤣💗 pic.twitter.com/Kf8iCOpbJu

— Katie Rosenberg ✌ (@katierosenberg) January 7, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Allison Garfield:

Authored by county Supervisor Jeff Weigand, who represents District 20 just east of Sun Prairie, the resolution has been before the city and county’s joint public health committee twice, once in September and once in December. Most recently, on Dec. 1, the resolution was indefinitely postponed in committee.

But the resolution made its way before the full board for the first time Thursday, much to the chagrin of several supervisors who had been part of its original suspension. Weigand, however, said he was proud the resolution was finally getting the full board’s attention.

Echoing comments made by many in public comment, Weigand argued the public health department hasn’t been transparent with data “to evaluate mask extensions.”

“We have unanswered questions,” he said. “This is far beyond an immediate emergency in which the health department would need to act.”

Dane County Board Chair Analiese Eicher told the Cap Times Thursday before the meeting that public health officials have the statutory authority to help protect the public from public health emergencies. And she said the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be just that.

While 80 people registered to speak during public comment, both in support and in opposition of the resolution, Eicher announced at the beginning of the meeting that 123 people registered in support of the resolution and 547 in opposition, but weren’t speaking at the meeting.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Scott Girard:

It was their temporary classroom for MMSD’s second day of virtual learning amid a delayed return from winter break. Madison offered up her organization’s space on the Capitol Square hours after the district’s Dec. 30 announcement that winter break would be extended through Wednesday, Jan. 6, with virtual learning to close out the week.

By Friday, students were working on their Chromebooks in their own areas of the room. One was going through Spanish lessons with volunteer teacher Mia Hicks while another sat in the corner under a blanket and next to the fireplace on a television working on division problems.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Shannon Proudfoot:

Here is what has particularly chewed me up during this latest round of school closures in Ontario, the province that has deprived its children of education and normalcy more than any other in Canada, and more than virtually any other jurisdiction in the world: it feels like we are all actors in a commercial that says things are basically fine when they are manifestly not.

We are all muddling through a situation that was forced on us, because this is what we need to do for our kids, our jobs and whatever remains of ourselves. But the longer we keep finding a way to soldier through this, the more it feels like we are aiding and abetting the colossal lie that this is okay, that this was a reasonable and necessary choice, that there is not massive damage being sustained by these decisions every day, with the full, horrifying toll unknowable for years.

I gave serious thought to deliberately and completely opting out of “virtual learning” this time around, for reasons both practical and symbolic. On a practical level, my kids hate it—or rather, my incandescently bright Grade 2 student, who has not had a normal school year since she was in junior kindergarten, hates it to the point of tears. Her brother, now in junior kindergarten himself, in what I desperately hoped would be a somewhat normal school year, has yet to learn the hell of online learning.

Mike Antonucci:

The National Education Association has a long tradition of finding hidden cabals behind groups that place themselves in opposition to the union’s agenda. In 2019, I chronicled the history of NEA’s efforts, going as far back as 1998, and its report “The Real Story Behind ‘Paycheck Protection’ — The Hidden Link Between Anti-Worker and Anti-Public Education Initiatives: An Anatomy of the Far Right.” That report featured this elaborate flow chart.

William Briggs:

Stars In Our Eyes
An Appealing Authority

Every kid learns what seems to be, but isn’t, the Appeal to Authority Fallacy early when he asks “Why should I?” and is told “Because I said so.” Only this isn’t a proper fallacy because kids should listen to and honor their parents, and because parents, besides having authority over their children, typically know what’s best for them, and what’s best is in the command, but unspoken. What’s best is in tacit premises behind the father’s “Because”, which turns what might be a fallacy into wisdom.

[Much cutting…]

People are fooled by this simple fallacy, but they are just as easily disabused of it when it is pointed out. Because of this, there is no chapter in this book specifically devoted to the Appeal to Authority. There is another, far better, reason for skipping it, though. That is the existence of a far worse, far more pernicious, and far more destructive fallacy which is a kin to the Appeal to Authority.

This is the Appeal to Non-Authority Fallacy.

A Hole In Many

I shiver when thinking of it. No fallacy is good, of course, but not all fallacies are equal in their pestilential powers. The Ultimate Fallacy has the worst individual consequences, but the Appeal to Non-Authority is the most annoying.

Modern advertising, and, more depressingly, our entire media and governmental apparatus, relies on and seeks out this fallacy. We could even say it is worshiped.

In my Stats 101 class notes Breaking the Law of Averages (a free pdf on my website), I asked this Chapter One homework question (stick with me, here): “Stanford Financial took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal with a picture of golfer Vijay Singh listing his enormous number of tournament wins with the words ‘Vijay Means Victory.’ Given this evidence, what is the probability Stanford Financial won’t lose money on your investment?”

The obvious answer is that you can’t know. Singh’s golfing prowess is irrelevant, inconsequential, incidental to whether gambles (i.e. “investments”) with Stanford Financial will lose or win you money. Logically, they may as well have touted my golf scores, or yours. They may as well in their ad featured a pretty actress and printed the words “This is a pretty actress and we are Stanford Financial”. The logical content would be the same. Which is to say, it would have had none at all. Singh, God bless him, is a Non-Authority on financial matters. Listening to him, as it were, on investments because he is an authority in some sport is insane.

Marty Makary:

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel. 

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door. 

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

This seems like it deserves much more attention:

– the total fertility rate in the US has declined from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.64 in 2020

– half the world’s population lives in countries with below-replacement-level fertility

– China now has a fertility rate even lower than Japan’s pic.twitter.com/CIbazSKue4

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) January 4, 2022

Ellen Townsend:

The rights and needs of young people have been ignored in this crisis and this is a national and global disaster in the making. The future of our youngsters has been sacrificed in order to protect adults which goes against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (article 3) states: “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”. The lockdown measures taken are not proportionate to the risks posed by the virus to young people and below I outline some of the evidence demonstrating the disproportionate impact of lockdowns on young people.Lockdowns deprive young people of the right to education, to normal psychological development, to good mental health and wellbeing.

Lockdowns and school closures disrupt our normal functioning and social interaction – we are fundamentally social beings. For young children, face-to-face play is essential to wellbeing. For some children, playtime at school is the only time they are able to interact with other children.[1] Playing closely with peers protects against mental ill health and without this essential contact young people have felt very lonely[2] [3] and isolated in lockdown with deleterious and long-term impacts on mental health: the impact of loneliness on mental health can be seen up to nine years later.[4] The social and emotional benefits of playing together cannot be understated[5].

Preventing children and adolescents from socialising and attending school will disrupt vital developmental processes that impact on brain development and functioning, especially executive function which is vital for self-control and flexible thinking.[6] For many young children a significant proportion of their life has now been spent in some form of isolation or lockdown. For teenagers, the impact of lack of face-to-face social interaction is particularly worrying since this is a sensitive period of development when peer influence and peer acceptance are especially important.[7] Simply put, adolescence is a vital period in life when the brain undergoes structural and functional changes directly influenced by the social environment, which lockdowns have severely disrupted.[8] Many mental illnesses first appear in the teenage years[9] and lockdowns and school closures have removed many sources of support available to those struggling. Indeed, high quality prospective data indicates that lockdown in March increased the number of young people with diagnosable mental health problems – 1 in 6 in 2020 as compared to 1 in 9 in 2017.[10] This means there is an expanding group of vulnerable young people who will require support.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Betsy McKay, Amy Dockser Marcus, Natasha Khan and Jeremy Page :

Tiny vials of bat saliva in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, collected with help from U.S. government funding, potentially hold clues to the origin of Covid-19 or the next pandemic.

They are now mostly out of reach of U.S. scientists, part of a bitter international controversy that has effectively stalled a high-stakes hunt for the source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 and also made the world less prepared for future health crises.

One fallout from the conflict over the origin of the pandemic is less scientific collaboration and more mistrust between two global powers that must work together with other nations to head off or mitigate the next disaster.

“We are very vulnerable,” said Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome, a London-based charitable foundation that funds health-related research. “I don’t think there is nearly as much cooperation and partnership going on as there was in December 2019.”

The breakdown stems from the early days of the pandemic when U.S.-China relations—already strained over trade and security—plunged to new lows as a lack of transparency from China was exacerbated by finger-pointing from the U.S.

Guilia Heyward:

The possibility of more online school for John Christie’s fourth-grade son, Ian, is enough to bring Mr. Christie to tears.

Mr. Christie said his son, who has been diagnosed with autism, thrived with the schedule that in-person instruction gave him during the fall. But in earlier parts of the pandemic, when school was online, Mr. Christie said, the circumstances were dire for his son and for the family, which tried to assist him with remote school in its Pullman neighborhood on the South Side.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Burbio

Burbio’s tracker shows 5225 schools starting a period of disruption (not offering in-person learning) of one or more days during the week beginning January 2nd,

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Scott Girard:

That percentage is well below the unfilled percentages in the last months of 2021: 49.81% in October, 47.37% in November and 43.56% in December. In its press release Thursday, the district acknowledged that closures of schools or classrooms could still be coming this semester.

Elizabeth Beyer:

“We recognize this week has affected our scholars, families, and staff in many ways,” Jenkins said. “We appreciate our school community’s patience and understanding. Although we prefer our scholars to be connecting in-person with teachers and staff while learning in our classrooms, this necessary pause strengthened our ability to sustain remaining open safely.”

Perspective:

“More than 25,000 students attend MMSD schools and more than 4,000 staff members work in the district. All of the cases over the past week occurred while students and staff were on winter break.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Allison Garfield and Natalie Yahr:

The resolution seeks to dismiss the current emergency order — which was issued by Public Health Madison & Dane County on Dec. 20, 2021 and extends the mask mandate through Feb. 1, 2022 — until public input and “consent of the governed” had been achieved. The previous emergency order had the mask mandate set to expire Jan. 3.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Dale Chu:

To start the year off on an upbeat note, Colorado’s muscular effort to improve K–3 reading curriculum finally appears to be paying off. One of twenty states that passed or recently considered measures related to the science of reading, the Centennial State began cracking down on how its teacher preparation programs cover early literacy. It is now in the process of requiring teachers to demonstrate more in-depth knowledge about reading pedagogy as well as tightening the reins on which reading programs may be used by districts. Last year, barely two in five of the state’s many local districts used reading curricula from the state’s list of approved programs. That has already risen to 63 percent.

The encouraging news can be traced back to Colorado’s READ Act, a major law enacted ten years ago requiring districts to help struggling readers in the early grades. But laws are blunt instruments, particularly when it comes to improving classroom practice, and the READ Act was no exception. Frustrated by the slow rate of progress, lawmakers passed an update to the statute in 2019, which spurred the state to take a more assertive role in compelling districts to pick from the list of state-approved curricula. Notably, Colorado’s four largest districts—Denver, Jefferson County, Douglas County, and Cherry Creek—have all recently publicized plans to adopt new elementary reading programs that adhere to reading science.

The state’s department of education sent out dozens of letters last fall notifying districts that plans for complying with the curriculum requirement must be submitted later this month. Those that don’t risk having their accreditation rating lowered—a toothless consequence by itself but one that could lead to greater sanctions down the road. Colorado districts have long enjoyed wide latitude on their curriculum choices—it’s a “local control” state, after all—so it’s not surprising that some districts have pushed back by playing games or disregarding the state’s directives. But in a foreshadowing of what may be to come, the state’s fifth largest district, Aurora Public Schools, made an abrupt about-face in December after arguing for months that the state’s rules didn’t apply to it. What’s important to understand here is how and why Colorado’s policy is getting results. Other states may have similar laws on the books, but they haven’t yet seen this kind of response. So what’s the secret? Four things come to mind.

Chris Rufo:

Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.

But within a few months, this would all collapse. A chain of events—beginning with the death of George Floyd and culminating with a statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims—would turn the 44-year-old data scientist’s life upside-down. By June 2020, as riots raged across the country, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.

He refused—so they fired him.

I spoke with Kriegman just before Thanksgiving via Zoom. He dialed in from a small, cluttered room in his Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts home, where he lives with his wife and three children. He described his feeling of alienation, then frustration, then moral outrage, as he watched his Reuters colleagues’ behavior following the death of George Floyd. He described the company as a “blue bubble,” where “people were constantly celebrating Black Lives Matter, where it was assumed that everyone was on board.”

Richard Innes:

Results on both state and na.onal tests raise important ques.ons about the general lack of effec.veness of reading instruc.on in Kentucky’s public schools. Evidence from the federal Na.onal Assessment of Educa.onal Progress (NAEP) indicates that many Kentucky teachers struggle to provide effec.ve reading instruc.on.
The dimensions of this problem are enormous. Impacts were examined in a recent Bluegrass Ins.tute report1 that indicates 200,000 of the state’s public school students, about 31% of the total enrollment, are deficient readers.

But, it doesn’t need to be this way. Data from some eastern Kentucky schools – including in Clay County, one of the na.on’s poorest coun.es – indicate that even in schools with large percentages of students from low-income homes, the challenge of overcoming the impact of poverty and achieving effec.ve reading instruc.on can be met.

An analysis tool from the Educa.on Consumers Founda.on reveals that third grade students in several Clay County schools obtain notably beUer outcomes in reading on state tests than many of their fellow students achieve statewide, even including those in wealthier areas.

Clay County elementary schools benefit from an Elgin Founda.on program to improve reading instruc.on. Elgin’s main program is aligned with scien.fic research on reading and addi.onally is supplemented by elements from a program called Direct Instruc.on, which research shows is especially effec.ve for disadvantaged students.
The stellar reading performance of third-graders in the high-poverty pocket of Clay County stands in stark contrast to lots of other Kentucky students in many other areas of the state failing to achieve adequate results. The impact of Elgin’s program in public schools in an area with some of the state’s highest poverty rates is highly noteworthy and earns the program a closer look and considera.on by educators and policymakers for use statewid

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Alex Nester:

“I feel no pain. They can cancel school until June and I’ll be fine,” teaching assistant Derrick Colon replied to a post in the union’s private Facebook page. “Been training for this moment all my life.”

This is the third time in just over two years that tensions between Chicago Public Schools and the teachers’ union have led to school closures.

The union called last week for a two-week return to virtual learning and demanded that all Chicago Public School students return a negative COVID test before doors open for the spring semester. Chicago Public Schools distributed 150,000 tests to students to take and return by December 28—a deadline that was pushed back to January 2 after test kits began piling up at FedEx drop boxes.

Just 21 percent of students in Chicago Public Schools met or surpassed English standards in 2021—7 percent fewer than in 2019. And only 16 percent of students met or surpassed math standards, compared with 24 percent in the year prior to lockdowns, the Sun-Times reported.

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Driven by rising income tax collections, Wisconsin’s state tax burden climbed in 2021 for the first time in a decade. Yet local and federal taxes as a share of income hit all-time lows during the pandemic and the total tax burden for state families and businesses is at its lowest level in at least a half century. Some taxes paid by middle-class families here remain relatively high, however, particularly the property taxes on a typical home.

For the first time in a decade, the state taxes paid by Wisconsin residents and businesses in 2021 grew as a share of income in the state. Yet the historically low levels of federal and local taxes in recent years have meant that the overall tax burden – and related spending on public services – have kept dropping for Wisconsinites.

The increased state tax burden did not result from higher tax rates, but instead reflected factors such as a surge in economic activity as the state emerged from the worst of the pandemic. In fiscal year 2021 (the 12 months ended on June 30), state sales tax revenues rose by more than 9% – the most in 37 years. Corporate income and franchise tax collections rose by 59.2% – the most in our records going back to 1960. Individual income tax revenues for the state rose by 6.2% – the most since 2013. In fact, total state tax collections from all sources grew 9.2% in 2021, the largest annual increase since 1984.

Governor Ducey:

The Governor is creating the Open for Learning Recovery Benefit program to provide relief for parents who may face financial and educational barriers due to unexpected school closures. The program funds up to $7,000 for needs related to Arizona Department of Economic Security- approved child care, school-coordinated transportation, online tutoring and school tuition.

If a school closes for even one day, students and families who meet the income requirements can utilize the Open for Learning Recovery Benefit Program — allowing students to access instruction that best meets their needs.

“In Arizona, we’re going to ensure continued access to in-person learning,” said Governor Ducey. “Everyone agrees that schools should stay open and kids need to be in the classroom. With this announcement, we are making sure parents and families have options if a school closes its doors. Parents are best suited to make decisions about their child’s education. In-person learning is vital for the development, well-being and educational needs of K-12 students. We will continue to work with families, public health experts and school leaders to ensure our kids can stay in the classroom and parents have a choice — always.”

Tara Henley:

For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade.

People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”

Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?

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When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.

Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.

It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.

Douglas Belkin:

K-12 schools around the country are pressing forward with tentative plans to reopen after the holiday break in the midst of a surge in Covid-19 cases. Their biggest challenge: getting enough rapid tests to be able to step up or launch “test-to-stay” strategies.

School-district superintendents are weighing how—and when—to reopen, a decision driven partly by the availability of tests. The superintendents have different appetites for risk, and the level of teacher enthusiasm for returning to the classroom varies. Regional surges in pediatric hospitalizations for Covid-19 are contributing to differences across the country.

In contrast to 2020, there is much broader support to continue school in-person following the grim record of remote teaching on student mental health and learning loss.

Alex Tabarrok:

Emily Oster in The Atlantic:

Many universities have announced a pivot to remote learning for at least part of January, among them UCLA, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan State. The list goes on.

This move—in response to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant—feels like a return to March 2020, when virtually all U.S. universities closed for in-person learning, sending students home for spring break and telling them not to come back. At that point, keeping students away from campus was reasonable. Now, however, this decision is a mistake. It reflects an outmoded level of caution. And it represents a failure of universities to protect their students’ interests.

I agree. Despite being a big fan of online education there is a big difference between online classes developed over many years with substantial funding, like MRU’s classes, and throwing professors into teaching over zoom. College is supposed to be fun. Meeting people is part of the education. Online is great but not for everything.

I would add three points to the those that Oster makes. First, this is where the students are anyway. I gave a talk at UVA recently and everyone was masked according to policy. After the the talk we went to the Corner where the bars and restaurants were packed with unmasked revelers. Mask mandates are pandemic theatre and inconsistent with how much of the country let alone most students are already living. Similarly, going remote is also pandemic theatre and not likely to appreciably reduce interactions in the community at-large.

Dear Parents,

Effective upon our return to school after Christmas break, CCCA will be reverting to our pre-COVID health policy (below in bold). Cases of COVID will be treated as equivalent to all other illnesses for the
purposes of school attendance.

I recognize that this change may come as a surprise to some after almost two years of intensive focus on COVID as a special case deserving of special attention. We currently possess all the mitigation
tools necessary to reclaim our normal lives; please avail yourselves to ——- according to personal preference. All that remains is for us to
choose to move forward.

And let me be clear: this is a conscious choice, made in the knowledge that COVID is not gone and that it will likely continue to make its presence felt at CCCA in the future. However, we cannot allow
ourselves to forgo the higher aims of a Christian, classical education indefinitely via disruptive, rolling classroom shutdowns and we cannot
allow the success of our mission to be contingent upon the ebb and flow of this virus. Maximalist measures intended to prevent transmission of
COVID may or may not have been effective toward their stated ends, but they have unquestionably wreaked havoc across our society. CCCA
is committed to modeling the balance of prudence and resilience that will be necessary to put the crisis phase of COVID behind us.

I understand that some of our families might have concerns with this policy change, and I want to emphasize that we are not throwing caution to the wind. Each CCCA family is obviously free to continue to address COVID issues as their conscience dictates; this is a change in our institutional approach only. We ask that every family adhere scrupulously to the health policy below for the remainder of the school year. We do intend to enforce it.

May grace and perseverance abound!

Happy New Year,
Allison Morgan
水水*

CCCA HEALTH POLICY
SPRING 2022
Students may not attend class with any primary symptoms…..

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Matt Shapiro:

This kind of pronouncement was meant to imply that vaccination rates were responsible for low rates of COVID at Harvard, not the fact that Harvard is in a region that was at a COVID nadir last September.

Now that the region is having a COVID outbreak, Harvard has, despite mandatory vaccines (and mandatory boosters), mandatory indoor masking, and ubiquitous testing, announced they are returning to remote classes. 

We’ve now done this two years in a row. When a COVID surge hits the southern part of the United States, the charts come out showing that the northern states are not having a surge and we attribute that fact to whatever policy metrics are currently being promoted without mentioning that COVID seems to be surging in a seasonal way. In 2020, the explanation was mask mandates and closed schools. However, when I dug into the details, I found that blue and red states had similar mask usage (the bigger difference was between urban and rural use) and pediatric COVID rates consistently reflected the COVID rates in the community regardless of whether schools were open or closed.

These explanations, then and now, feel like partisanship dressed up in charts. This can be most easily seen in Dr Paul Krugman’s assertion that the COVID surge was a political event and that Republicans were to blame.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

This seems like it deserves much more attention:

– the total fertility rate in the US has declined from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.64 in 2020

– half the world’s population lives in countries with below-replacement-level fertility

– China now has a fertility rate even lower than Japan’s pic.twitter.com/CIbazSKue4

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) January 4, 2022

Brett Healy:

Further proving that we have learned absolutely nothing from the last 22 months, both Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) announced plans to scrap students’ return to the classroom following Christmas break.

Neither sounded particularly optimistic that this would be a temporary move.

“While it is our goal to resume in-person learning Monday, January 10, 2022, we will continue to assess the situation and provide updates as new information becomes available,” MPS Superintendent Keith Posleysaid in an email to families Sunday night.

MMSD, meanwhile, has not released any plans to return to in-person learning following an extended break and virtual learning tomorrow and Friday.

Biden: Schools should stay open despite omicron wave

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Scott Girard:

Wednesday’s meeting, which begins at 5 p.m., includes a public comment portion, a chance to summarize written public comments and an “update on safe return to school buildings for in-person learning.” The last item will be a discussion, but will not include a vote of any kind.

Those interested in speaking during the meeting must fill out a registration form on the district’s website, which opens two hours prior to the meeting. Written comments can be submitted at any time.

The meeting will be livestreamed on the board’s YouTube channel.

At Friday’s meeting, which shortly followed a press conference from district administrators and health experts explaining the decision, board members expressed a mix of understanding and urgency to get students back inside buildings.

Multiple board members encouraged administrators to offer a more solid commitment to the hopeful Jan. 10 return.

“We need to be committed to reopening on Monday unless something happens where we can’t because like half our staff are out,” Cris Carusi said. “Every day that we keep kids in virtual learning is a day when mental health issues are going to become worse for our students, is a day when students are more likely to disengage from school and I think is a day that is going to lead to several more days of challenges when kids get back into buildings.”

Parents vs Madison’s K-12 Administration.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Keith E. Whittington:

ABSTRACT: Conservatives in the United States have grown increasingly critical of universities and their faculty, convinced that professors are ideologues from the political left. Universities, for their part, have increasingly adopted a mantra of diversity and inclusivity, but have shown little interest in diversifying the political and ideological profile of their faculties. This essay argues that the lack of political diversity among American university faculty hampers the ability of universities to fulfill their core mission of advancing and dissemination knowledge. The argument is advanced through a series of four questions: Is it true that university faculty are not ideologically diverse? Why might it be true? Does it matter? How might it be fixed.

James R. Flynn⁎, Michael Shayer

The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered. Losses in Nordic nations after 1995 average at 6.85 IQ points when projected over thirty years. On Piagetian tests, Britain shows decimation among high scorers on three tests and overall losses on one. The US sustained its historic gain (0.3 points per year) through 2014. The Netherlands shows no change in preschoolers, mild losses at high school, and possible gains by adults. Australia and France offer weak evidence of losses at school and by adults respectively. German speakers show verbal gains and spatial losses among adults. South Korea, a latecomer to industrialization, is gaining at twice the historic US rate.
When a later cohort is compared to an earlier cohort, IQ trends vary dramatically by age. Piagetian trends indicate that a decimation of top scores may be accompanied by gains in cognitive ability below the median. They also reveal the existence of factors that have an atypical impact at high levels of cognitive competence. Scandinavian data from conventional tests confirm the decimation of top scorers but not factors of atypical impact. Piagetian tests may be more sensitive to detecting this phenomenon.

ABA:

Revised Standard 206 aims to achieve the effective educational use of diversity, the compelling state interest recognized in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), Fisher v. University of Texas, 570 U.S. 297 (2013) (Fisher I), and Fisher v. University of Texas, 136 S. Ct. 2198 (2016) (Fisher II). Subsection (a) outlines three things a law school must provide in service of this goal, related respectively to the student body, faculty and staff, and an inclusive and equitable environment.

Subsection (a)(1) requires a school to provide full access to the study of law and membership in the profession to all persons but focuses particularly on underrepresented groups related to race and ethnicity. This focus acknowledges the unique historical injustices and contemporary challenges faced by those groups. Subsection (a)(2) requires a school to include members of underrepresented groups in its faculty and staff, but again requires a particular focus on underrepresented groups related to race and ethnicity. Subsection (a)(3) requires an inclusive and equitable environment for a larger list of groups.

Subsection (b) indicates that subsections (a)(1) and (2) will be enforced through analysis of data collected by the law school through the ABA Annual Questionnaire (AQ). However, the law school is required to publish the data already collected to ensure public scrutiny of its progress in meeting the Standard.

Subsection (c) focuses on the enforcement of Subsection (a)(3) by requiring an annual assessment of the inclusivity and equity of a law school’s educational environment. The law school is required to provide the results of this assessment (which could be a law school climate survey, the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE), or similar assessment mechanism) to the faculty and to the Council upon request and is required to take concrete actions to address any deficiencies.

Emily Hamer:

Heinrich also said that “while it is challenging to determine exactly where transmission occurred,” her agency was not aware of any deaths from COVID-19 linked to in-person schooling in Dane County “but it appears that there have been a small number of hospitalizations that appear to be linked to in-school transmission.”

Jenkins confirmed that there have been no deaths related to someone getting infected with COVID-19 at school. Stampfli said a few of the district’s students have been hospitalized, but it’s “hard to tell” whether they got infected at school or somewhere else.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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 Unanimously passed 11-0 at the SF Board of Supervisors My resolution to support @Portantino’s SB237 to require screening all students in California for risk of dyslexia in K-2nd grade. Ty @Portantino for your leadership and @GavinNewsom for all your tremendous work!

— Ahsha Safai 安世輝 (@Ahsha_Safai) January 5, 2022

SB237

Wisconsin Governor Evers recently vetoed AB446 on a late Friday afternoon.

Jessica Calefati

AMERICA, WE HAVE A PROBLEM — Results from a standardized test taken by elementary and middle school students earlier this school year paint a bleak picture of the harm the pandemic inflicted on their learning. 

— Performance on the iReady test administered nationally by Curriculum Associates plummeted for all students compared to the last time it was given before the health crisis began. Nearly three million students took the test both times. But achievement among children who attend schools with large proportions of Black and Latino students suffered the most, the data shows. 

— The share of students performing below grade level in math swelled by 17 percentage points among kids who attend mostly Black schools — nearly two-thirds of those learners are now behind — whereas the figure only worsened by 6 percentage points among children who attend mostly white schools. In reading, declines were nearly twice as steep for students at majority Latino schools as they were for children at majority white schools.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/588237-biden-schools-should-stay-open

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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: The Chicago Teachers Union says its planned vote tonight would see members refuse in-person work until Jan. 18 or until the city’s COVID-19 wave falls below the threshold Chicago Public Schools set last year, whichever happens first.

— Nader Issa (@NaderDIssa) January 4, 2022

Maureen Kelleher:

If ever there was a moment to ensure that schools in underserved neighborhoods received gap-filling levels of resources, starting with PPE and moving up to capital spending on long-deferred ventilation upgrades, that moment arrived in March 2020. If ever there was a moment to ensure the most vulnerable children received first dibs on buses to school and tutoring, that moment arrived in September 2021.

So far, CPS has done little-to-nothing to move the equity needle on any of these fronts.

As a longtime observer of the district and a former CPS parent, it amazes me that district and city leaders cannot look at this situation through the eyes of families facing the greatest challenges right now and plan accordingly.

Mike Antonucci:

“Regrettably, the Mayor and her CPS leadership have put the safety and vibrancy of our students and their educators in jeopardy,” according to a CTU press release.

Whether teachers and students are safer at home is a matter for debate, as the current surge occurred while everyone was at home during the winter break. But I’m baffled to understand how shutting down schools is supposed to positively affect everyone’s vibrancy levels.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Pitt.edu

Welcome to Ledger, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of blockchains and cryptocurrencies! In our digital pages, you’ll find high-quality, scholarly research on the uses, implementations, and implications of this burgeoning sector of the technology landscape. First published in 2016, Ledger was, is, and will continue to be a free and open-access academic journal, backed by an open, traceable peer-review process.

Maureen Kelleher:

And that family is…mine. Regular readers here know that I made a case before the school year started for Chicago Public Schools to partner with the Chicago Park District to offer “remote-plus” learning: mostly remote at home but with opportunities for teachers and students to gather in socially distant outdoor spaces.

I wanted this opportunity for my own daughter so much that we left the Chicago Public Schools and joined the Chicago Free School, where students are learning outdoors three days a week, at least through September. The only way I wanted to try hybrid learning was with outdoor classes, and as far as I know, Chicago Free School is the only school in town that is doing it.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with WBEZ’s Curious City about how the new school year has started off for our family. They graciously gave permission for me to share our story as they told it, via Twitter.

Phyllis Jordan:

These are among the findings of a FutureEd analysis of the Covid-relief spending plans of nearly 2,100 school districts and charter school organizations in 48 states, local education agencies serving some 40 percent of the nation’s public-school students.*

The analysis covers districts and charters receiving $46 billion of the $122 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER III) funds under the American Rescue Plan and offers the most comprehensive picture to date of local and regional Covid-relief spending. Burbio, a data service that measures school openings and spending, gathered the local plans from a range of public sources as of Dec. 23 and sorted the proposed spending into more than 100 categories.

The ESSER funding was distributed via the federal Title I aid formula, which supports low-income students. As a result, some school districts serving impoverished communities have received more than $10,000 per student in Covid-relief aid while others have received little or no funding.

Local school districts and charters have wide latitudein using the funds, as long as the spending is geared toward reopening schools safely and helping students recover from the pandemic. States must monitor local spending, and the federal government can audit district and charter school spending, as well.

Kevin Mahnken:

What are the consequences of closing virtually every American school and shifting to online education for months at a time?

It’s a question that education experts have been asking since the emergence of COVID-19, and one whose answers are gradually becoming clearer. With federal sources reporting that 99 percent of students have now returned to classrooms, newly available data are showing how students were affected by spending long stretches of the last two school years at home. And the signs are not good.

Perhaps the most disturbing news yet was found in a working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that state test scores dropped significantly in both reading and math during the pandemic. In a discovery that will reopen questions about the wisdom of keeping schools closed, economist Emily Oster and her co-authors found that learning loss was far worse in districts that kept classes fully remote, and that declines in reading scores were greater in districts serving predominantly poor and non-white students.

Oster, a Brown University professor and popular author, has won both adulation and criticism in the COVID era as an advocate for school reopenings. One study she co-authored, examining the spread of coronavirus in 250 Massachusetts districts last winter, helped persuade officials at the Centers for Disease Control to reduce the recommended social distancing requirement in schools from six feet to three.

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?

Alex Nester:

Chicago teachers are preparing to strike over what they say are unsafe working conditions caused by a spike in coronavirus cases.

The Chicago Teachers Union has scheduled a Tuesday vote to determine whether its 25,000 members will refuse to return to the classroom, WBEZ reported. On Sunday, more than 6,000 union members at a virtual town hall said they would not feel safe resuming classroom instruction following winter break. Chicago schools were set to reopen Monday, though some schools have already moved to remote learning without district approval.

Last week, the union called for two weeks of remote learning unless all students and district staff provided a negative COVID-19 test before returning to school. The district distributed 150,000 at-home tests for students to take over the break and mail in by Dec. 28. This weekend, the district pushed the mail-in deadline to Jan. 6, following reports that tests were piling up in FedEx drop boxes.

The Chicago Teachers Union has repeatedly bucked efforts to resume in-person learning. Last January, the union thwarted Chicago Public Schools’ plan to reopen schools, even though studies found viral spread in school settings to be “extremely rare.” Many teachers who followed the union’s decision to switch to virtual learning were declared absent without official leave and didn’t receive pay.

Last year, the union claimed that the “push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” But studies have shown that black and Latino students have been disproportionately harmed by school closures.

Chicago Public Schools maintains the schools are safe for in-person learning and the strike would put students at “increased health risk.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Collin Anderson:

Roughly a decade before his death in 1996, tech titan David Packard issued a controversial directive to his children. Skyrocketing birth rates, the Hewlett-Packard cofounder wrote, could one day cause “utter chaos for humanity.” As a result, Packard asserted, his multibillion-dollar foundation must hold one priority above all others: population control.

Packard—a Republican who served as deputy secretary of defense under President Richard Nixon—did not see eye to eye politically with his three daughters, one of whom succeeded him as chair of his foundation following his death. His liberal offspring took the billionaire’s desire to curb population growth as a jumping off point. While the foundation is unbound legally to honor Packard’s policy wishes, they found a way to embrace his views and pursue their own liberal activism—through expanded abortion access, a mission toward which they devoted nearly $350 million in the last five years alone, according to a review of the foundation’s financial disclosures.

Those expenditures have allowed Packard’s successors to deliver significant victories in furthering the late billionaire’s anti-natalist agenda. Take, for example, the Food and Drug Administration’s December decision to ease the process for getting a chemical abortion pill. The Packard Foundation played a central role in the deregulation fight, funneling millions to liberal advocacy groups that spearheaded the legal and political push to remove the FDA’s abortion pill barriers. The foundation meanwhile invested millions of dollars into GenBioPro, the only company that makes a generic form of the abortion drug.

In 2017, the Packard Foundation gave$1,000,000 to the Reproductive Freedom Project, a division of the American Civil Liberties Union that works to “ensure that all in our society have access to” abortion. That year, Reproductive Freedom Project attorneys suedthe FDA to challenge its abortion pill restrictions, which required patients to receive abortion pills in person from specialty clinics.

Months later, in 2018, the foundation invested$500,000 in GenBioPro. The Nevada-based private company makes the generic form of mifepristone, an oral drug used to cause an abortion. It invested an additional $1.5 million in GenBioPro in 2019, the same year the company’s generic abortion pill received FDA approval and hit the market.

Notes and links on abortion and declining live births.

Johann Hari:

When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.

Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would.

Marty Makary:

niversities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.

Megan Basham:

Readers of the British newspaper, The Guardian, are accusing the outlet of deactivating an online poll that asked readers to vote on “Person of the Year” after it became apparent that J.K. Rowling would handily win.

“Tell us: who is your 2021 person of the year?” ran the headline, posted on Dec. 15, with the subtitle, “Time Magazine chose billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk – but who would be your choice?” A short time later, when Rowling was far and away in the lead, the voting form disappeared, as did the results. A message in small print stated, “This form has been deactivated and is closed to any further submissions.”

Rowling has been at the center of numerous cancel culture storms this year for her refusal to deny the reality of biological sex. Earlier this month she stirred up controversy by mocking Scotland’s law enforcement policy that allows accused rapists to self-identify as female. “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman,” she tweeted in reference to an article titled, “Absurdity’ of police logging rapists as women.”

As The Daily Wire previously reported, trans activists have retaliated against her refusal to capitulate to their agenda by threatening to send her pipe bombs and publishing her home address on social media. Showing the flair for dark humor that runs through her novels, the world’s richest author wryly joked that she’s received “so many death threats [she] could paper the house.”

The Guardian, which is generally known for being left-of-center, has so far provided no explanation for why it took its poll offline with Rowling firmly in the lead. But that didn’t stop the public from taking to social media to share their suspicions.

Sarah Kliff and Artist Bhatia:

Some said the blood screenings that look for the rarest conditions are good for little more than bolstering testing companies’ bottom lines.

“It’s a little like running mammograms on kids,” said Mary Norton, an obstetrician and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. “The chance of breast cancer is so low, so why are you doing it? I think it’s purely a marketing thing.”

There are few restrictions on what test makers can offer. The Food and Drug Administration often requires evaluations of how frequently other consequential medical tests are right and whether shortfalls are clearly explained to patients and doctors. But the F.D.A. does not regulate this type of test.

Alberto Gutierrez, the former director of the F.D.A. office that oversees many medical tests, reviewed marketing materials from three testing companies and described them as “problematic.”

“I think the information they provide is misleading,” he said.

Will Flanders and Libby Sobic:

In the latest chapter of the seemingly never-ending nightmare of school closures, Milwaukee Public Schools decided Sunday, Jan. 2 to return to virtual instruction for the first week of the spring semester, Jan. 3-7. This follows the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) making a similar decision to delay the start of the semester until January 6th. Both of these delays are planned to be short-term as a result of staffing shortages, but neither district has earned the benefit of the doubt. We find it very likely that this may represent the beginning of a longer-term delay. Only time will tell.

The pandemic has caused many institutions to weigh costs and benefits. But perhaps no institution failed more than the K-12 education system. The long-term consequences of closed schools are profound. WILL estimated an economic cost of more than $7 billion to the state from lost learning—representing lost opportunities for a college education, a good career, and a better life. Even more problematic, the kids facing school closures are the same students who already struggle to keep up academically. A recent Fordham study ranked both districts in the bottom ten when it comes to achievement and growth among disadvantaged students. 

Talk to any educator, and they will tell you that “catching kids up” isn’t as easy as moving through the year’s curriculum faster. It is one of the reasons that Wisconsin’s report card rewards student growth and not just proficiency—arguably to too large of extent. Any return to virtual learning, no matter how short, must acknowledge the costs and disruption of recent experience.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

David Blaska:

Neighbors here on the SW side are outraged that the so-called safety coordinator for our public schools blows off police trying to track down kids showing off their illegal firearms in a stolen car a block away from Madison East high school. Doesn’t return their phone calls. Refuses to share photographic evidence with staff who might be able to prevent harm and hurt. (Related here.)

“I fully expect that administrators are held accountable for their actions,” one neighbor demanded. New to Madison, are we?

That’s the problem. Administrators ARE accountable to the elected school board which has made known its antipathy toward safety in myriad ways. Expelling police from our troubled high schools in June 2020 was only the final battle in the progressive war on discipline, fought in the name of equity, diversity, and inclusion.

In other words, Madison schools’ safety un-coordinator is doing exactly what this school board expects. Three of the 7 school board seats are on the ballot this spring; deadline for declaring candidacy is 5 p.m. Tuesday Jan 4. (See sidebar at right for more info.) Two days hence. Based on the candidates who have already announced, we can expect more of the same.

No one is challenging school board President Ali Muldrow. Only one candidate has announced for the seat held by Ananda Mirilli (a DPI equity bureaucrat). That would be Nichelle Nichols, who performed equity for pay for the Madison Metro School District. Her current job: system leader at the National Equity Project.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

It’s a complaint echoed by parents across the district Monday, on a day most expected to see their children back at school, as they were elsewhere in Dane County (but not in the state’s largest district, Milwaukee, which also went back to online learning temporarily). Several parents said they didn’t object to the move to online school so much as the short notice by the district.

Most students across Dane County, outside of Madison, returned to their classrooms on Monday. Superintendents at several districts said any pivot to online-only learning would hinge on the number of cases and the level of staffing they’re able to provide.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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 

Here's what VASD superintendent Tremayne Clardy told me via email yesterday when I asked about staffing shortages there, as they have returned in-person following winter break: pic.twitter.com/1b0NMXctFG

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) January 4, 2022

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?

David Blaska:

We can draw no conclusion other than that the school district’s head of security sandbagged police in furtherance of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. MMSD describes Aguglia as “committed to teaching and coaching educators in evidence-based critical response with alternative forms of mental health support as a tool to reduce violence in school buildings, promote mental health support as a first response, and minimize reactionary and exclusionary practices, specifically resulting in disproportionate rates of students of color in behavioral referral data and the justice system.”

•   Our question to school board president Ali Muldrow: you’ve already expelled police from school grounds, is Aguglia keeping East high students safe? After all, one-third of the student body sheltered at home after one incident rather than risk further violence.

• Our question to District Attorney Ismael Ozanne: will you charge Aguglia with obstruction of justice?

Committee to Unleash Prosperity

Well, just as we feared: the politicians learned NOTHING from the first rounds of Covid.

So now, with the holiday break over, and time to get kids back in the classroom, and after taxpayers shelled out about $190 billion in ransom payments to the teachers unions to get them to, you know, teach, 2,200 schools are closed today.

And guess what: they are almost all in blue states and blue cities.

Cate Cadell:

China is turning a major part of its internal Internet-data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.

Matt Taibbi:

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump. 

It was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing. 

But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.

Related:

Behind the scenes, there must be HUGE battles going on between the various groups in the Democratic Party. If schools close down, Democrats will lose every election for the next ten years. 

I suspect that the Democrat leaders are making some deals that suburban schools stay open, because they can’t afford to lose the suburbs, but they’ll take the loss in the cities.

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?

Andrew Scurria, Sebastian Pellejero and Soma Biswas:

Puerto Rico’s long history of failing to pay its pension obligations is expected to haunt the U.S. territory even after its bankruptcy ends.

A proposed bankruptcy restructuring under consideration by a federal judge would end defined-benefit retirement programs covering tens of thousands of active teachers and judges in Puerto Rico. The pension benefits public employees have already earned would be honored when they retire, although current workers can’t accrue anything more.

Those measures would help close a roughly $55 billion gap between the retirement benefits owed to public servants in Puerto Rico and the funding set aside to pay them. Active teachers and judges are being shifted under the bankruptcy plan into defined-contribution retirement products akin to 401(k)s, ending the defined-benefit formulas in place when many of their careers began. Retirement ages would be increased, delaying when pensions can be tapped.

Fixing the pensions system in Puerto Rico will continue to burden both its employees and its shrinking base of taxpayers. The bankruptcy plan pays in full the defined benefits accrued over the past few decades, when politicians routinely dispensed pension enhancements and other retirement perks without the proper funding.

Dr. Amesh Adalja:

It was evident almost from day 1 that COVID-19, caused by an efficiently spreading respiratory virus with an animal host, was with us for good. The goal of the public health campaign was not to somehow return the virus magically to bats but to tame the virus and shift its spectrum of illness to the mild side — all the while acknowledging that there would always be a baseline number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Biden faces series of minefields in coming year
Massive sewage spill closes beaches around Los Angeles
By repeatedly counseling the public with these facts early on and coupling it to actionable ways for people to learn how to develop the ability to COVID-19 risk calculate (e.g. get vaccinated, wear masks in high-risk situations, outdoors are safer than indoors, surface transmission is not common) the rise of omicron and the looming ubiquity of infections would not seem so startling.

Scott Girard:

Seventeen months passed between the closure of schools in March 2020 and Gordon Allen’s return to learning inside East High School.

The Madison Metropolitan School District student senate president and East senior, who opted to finish the 2020-21 school year virtually rather than return via the district’s phased-in return to buildings, said this fall has presented some challenges for he and his classmates as they adapt back to the realities of in-person school.

“It’s a challenge to get back into a setting where you have strict deadlines again, it’s challenging to sit in one spot for a long period of time,” Allen said in a recent interview. “It’s a challenge to be around so much social activity when you’re used to being cooped up in your room on a computer.

“All of those were, I think, challenges for a lot of students.”

Despite some of the events that have made headlines this fall, Allen said he’s proud of how they’ve handled that onslaught of challenges, which he said “shows how adaptable and resilient the youth are.”

“We need to give students more credit for how well they navigated the transition back to in-person learning because I think we did pretty well,” he said. “The year 2021, it was a challenge, but we still prevail.”

For students, the year has been a whirlwind of experiences. It began with a continuation of the virtual learning that had begun in March 2020, with no MMSD buildings open except for select students with disabilities until mid-March.

As the district brought students back in phases by grade levels, more than 16,000 students returned in the spring to a hybrid schedule: four days a week for elementary school students and middle and high school students split into two cohorts, each attending two days a week. The rest continued to learn online.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Will Bunch:

By the late 2010s, less than a quarter of American eighth graders scored at or above the “proficient” level in civics, according to a National Assessment of Educational Progress exam in that subject. I guess that jibes: In a world in which a carpenter has no need for biology, why would he need to know how a bill becomes a law, or the role of the Supreme Court? Or why it’s good when the candidate with the most votes wins an election?

The US spends more on education than other countries. Why is it falling behind?

Jasmine Alyce

Ciearra Baker of St. Louis surprised her son and daughter with their own vending machine and starter snacks for the holiday in lieu of toys so that they can start learning how to be “young bosses in the making.” 

“Let’s not handicap these kids making their lives easy. I’m not buying toys my kids most definitely will understand life is not easy and making the right choices with money & etc…,” Baker wrote on Facebook. “So I came up with the idea to invest in vending machine for the kids as Christmas gift #Young bosses in the making”

Wall Street Journal:

This month the CTU asked its members if they’d support a district-wide return to remote learning. The survey also asked what actions they’d participate in to force the Chicago schools to improve health safety measures. Corey DeAngelis, a Cato Institute adjunct scholar who is also national director of research for the American Federation for Children, reported on Twitter that 91% of the union members who responded said they’d participate in a “remote work action”—that is, a strike—if the schools don’t pause in-classroom learning.

This is the same union that last December, in a now deleted tweet, declared that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Not that the Chicago public school system has covered itself in glory. This week it was forced to extend a deadline for returning Covid home tests after the local press ran photos of returned tests piled up at overflowing FedEx dropboxes.

Mr. Martinez says there will be no city-wide move to remote learning, and any switch will be done on a school and classroom basis. In nearly two years of living with Covid, surely we have learned that the cost in lost learning of keeping children at home is exorbitantly high while the risk that they will get seriously ill from Covid is low.

Jim Steele:

Having studied fire ecology for 30 years and knowing her published science, I could only believe she had been corrupted by the need to attract large amounts of funding, and these days that comes to those who blame the climate crisis. And here’s why I now hold that opinion so strongly.

Colorado’s Marshall Fire was a grassfire that happened with temperatures hovering around freezing. All fire experts and fire managers know grasses are 1-hour lag fuels. That means in dry conditions grasses can become flammable within hours. Attempting to link CO₂ global warming, she and other alarmists were now blaming the Boulder area’s grass flammability on the warm dry conditions from July through November. But dry conditions in the past months are totally irrelevant. Those months could have also been cold and wet, but just one day of dry conditions is all that is needed for grasses to burn.

Jonathan Turley:

Now Roberts appears to have responded. His report is striking in its measured and deliberative tone in comparison to the often reckless rhetoric of these politicians. He waited to address the year in review for his court and the 107 district and appeals courts across the country. However, he included the following lines that are clearly directed toward Congress and extreme Democratic groups like Demand Justice:

“Decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence. The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.”

The criticism comes after new polling shows that Roberts is the most popular government official in the country, a fact that led some on the left to express almost apocalyptic alarm.

He is not the only justice who is speaking out to blunt the attacks on the Court. Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer chaffed at the claim that this is a “conservative” court and noted “The chief justice frequently speaks on this subject as well and says, no, no: we don’t look at our rulings from the point of view of our personal ideology.”

Justice Thomas criticized those who seem intent on diminishing the authority or respect for the Court: “the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference…They think you become like a politician. That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently told an audience that “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

Apxap:

Minnesota’s St. Paul Children’s Campus will soon close one of the eastern subway’s only pediatric intensive care units, even as the same hospital prepares to add a new 22-bed inpatient mental health unit for children aged 5 to 18.

Children’s Minnesota – which was established in the capital in 1924 – manages some 380 beds between the St. Paul and Minneapolis sites of its nonprofit hospitals. These hospitals and their state-wide network of clinics, specialty care, and rehabilitation sites form one of the largest stand-alone pediatric health systems in the country, and fundamental changes are underway as that system. is approaching the century.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

California is suffering a major demographic reversal, one that threatens both the state’s economic future and the durability of its progressive model.

The numbers speak for themselves: The Golden State’s population has started declining for the first time, with new data from the state Department of Finance showing a population loss of 173,000 for the year ended July 1, 2021—a number that includes more than 56,500 pandemic related deaths, mostly of older Californians.

Net domestic migration hit a decade-long low, ballooning from a loss of 34,000 in 2012 to 277,000 in 2021. Over the last 10 years, California lost more than 1.625 million net domestic migrants—more than the population of Philadelphia. Altogether, 2.7 million more people—a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego and Anaheim combined—have moved to other states from California than the other way around over the last 20 years, and immigration is no longer making up the difference.

Many in the state’s media and political establishment insist that the demographic decline is a “myth” concocted by red-state haters. It’s not. The state that attracted America’s domestic migrants through the 20th century is losing millions of them in the 21st century.

This isn’t the Rust Belt of the 1970s, but the exodus out of the state and especially its metropolitan areas seems to be accelerating. From 2000 to 2020, Census Bureau estimates indicate that metro Los Angeles has lost 2.2 million net domestic migrants, metro San Francisco 400,000, metro San Diego 200,000 and metro San Jose 400,000—even as the rest of the state saw a net gain of 600,000.

Jaewon King:

Food prices are estimated to rise 5% in the first half of 2022, according to research firm IRI, though the level of increases will vary by grocers and regions.

Mondelez International Inc. MDLZ 0.55% said recently that it was raising prices across cookies, candy and other products sold in the U.S. by 6% to 7% starting in January. General Mills Inc. GIS 0.19% and Campbell Soup Co. CPB -0.32% said their price increases also would take effect in January. Kraft Heinz Co. KHC -0.14% told retailer customers that it would raise prices across many of its products including Jell-O pudding and Grey Poupon mustard, with some items going up as much as 20%, according to a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The increases follow others that food manufacturers imposed in 2021, and are part of what businesses and economists call the highest inflation in decades. Higher wage, material and freight costs are prompting industries from manufacturing to retail to raise prices of goods, creating an environment in which some executives say they have room to charge more.

Eric Berger:

Case counts “are causing a lot of panic and fear, but they don’t reflect what they used to, which was that hospitalizations would track with cases”, said Dr Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

However, other infectious disease experts say that while they are encouraged by data from South Africa showing that its recent Omicron wave was not accompanied by a significant increase in deaths, the virus continues to strain hospitals in the US, therefore the number of Covid cases remains a vital measurement.

The US on Thursday had more than 580,000 new Covid cases, the second time this week that the country has broken its record for daily Covid cases, according to New York Times data. But over the past two weeks, while the number of Covid cases in the United States has increased by 181%, the number of hospitalizations has increased by 19% and the number of deaths has decreased by 5%.

“It seems to be less virulent for two reasons,” said Gandhi. “One, we seem to have so much more immunity in December 2021” than during previous waves, and “there are now five laboratory studies that show that it doesn’t seem to infect lungs very well”.

In reporting data on Covid, health departments should now take the same approach as they do with influenza, Gandhi said. That means releasing hospitalization and death data but not numbers concerning case counts because, like with the flu, it’s not possible to eliminate the virus, therefore we should only focus on its severity, she said.

Emily Rizzo:

The PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia supports schools returning to in-person learning after winter break.

CHOP released a statement Friday explaining the decision.

“Our statement this morning is upon careful review of the data that’s emerging,” PolicyLab Director Dr. David Rubin said in an interview.

Amid the rising rates of transmission among children, Rubin said, the data shows that the omicron variant is milder than earlier coronavirus strains, especially for those who are vaccinated.

“The sheer numbers of children have resulted in some increasing hospitalizations, but a lower proportion of kids are in our intensive care units,” said Rubin.

Children in the ICU are almost exclusively identified as unvaccinated, Rubin added.

The statement is a consensus across clinical and policy lab teams at CHOP, Rubin said, and stressed the need for returning to the classroom. Schools’ decisions to return to buildings should be more based on “an issue of staffing and operational issues and not related to concerns about the severity of the virus,” he said.

Dave Cieslewicz:

And there is a certain amount of Jacobin terror out there. If you’re a young professor looking for tenure, you place your career in peril if you disagree with any of this. If you publish books or edit a newspaper, magazine or website and you publish something that runs counter to the dogma, you can find yourself booted by your own staff. If you run a business, but don’t fall in line, you can be run into the ground by a boycott and a besmirching of your brand. 

That’s why I think it’s so important for liberals, like me, with nothing to lose, to speak up strongly and just say it in clear terms: you do not have to accept critical race theory. It’s okay. You can still call yourself a liberal. You are still a good person. And you are not a racist. 

If enough people say this out loud, then maybe we can make the world safe again for ideas and for classical liberal values. We can end the terror. 

Because my own theory is that the American system contains the means of its own correction. I like Bill Clinton’s formulation: “There’s nothing that’s wrong with American that can’t be fixed with what’s right with America.”

Kali Holloway:

That would explain why CBS News last month posted a tweet that asked, “How young is too young to teach kids about race?” The network had blatantly overlooked the experiences of Black and other nonwhite kids, who mostly learn about racism through firsthand experiences at disturbingly young ages—never at a time of their choosing. “They say, ‘Our children are too young to hear about racism.’ Who is our children?” asked a Black parent named Caron LeNoir in a Washington Post piece that is among the few CRT-focused articles that actually features Black parents’ voices. “I don’t remember a day of my life when I wasn’t taught about racism, or learning about it through just existing.” Black kids are always dealing with the actual consequences of racism. A 2008 Harvard/University of California study found that by the time they’re 4 years old, white kids “express negative attitudes and stereotypes” toward nonwhite kids, while Black and Hispanic kids show no “in-group” bias toward those who look like them. A 2019 study concluded that both Black and white preschoolers have already developed “a strong and consistent pro-White bias.” A whole body of medical scholarship has demonstrated the deleterious impact on Black and other nonwhite kids of not seeing themselves reflected in the world.

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?

Glenn Reynolds:

The “public health” response to COVID has been awful. Ever since cases first appeared in Wuhan, the reaction has been marked by mistakes, reversals, outright lying and even political manipulation. We need a thorough accounting.

Mistakes are forgivable. In the early days, everything we knew came from the Chinese government, and while we now know that Beijing lies about everything, we knew less then. In fact, it not only lied about the disease’s origins, its nature and its spread, it kept the Wuhan airport open for weeks, allowing (deliberately?) the disease to take hold all over the planet before anyone else knew it was coming.

And in a fast-moving situation with imperfect information, mistakes are inevitable and hence forgivable. Nobody’s perfect.

Likewise, reversals aren’t necessarily bad. You make a decision based on what you know. Later you know more, and you change. That’s not just forgivable, it’s laudable: You’re supposed to change your mind when you realize that you were wrong. (Of course, it’s better if you explain why you made the change and if you don’t pretend that your first, incorrect, decisions were based on unshakable and incontrovertible science only to pretend that your new approach is, too.)

Christopher Ferguson:

Dear American Psychological Association:

It is with a heavy heart that I write to officially resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA) at this time effective when my current year’s membership expires. I do so because I increasingly feel the APA has lost its way as either a science organization or an organization representing good clinical practice. Increasingly, I am concerned that its public facing messages are more likely to do harm than good and, as such, I cannot in good ethical conscience continue my membership. I write this in the form of an open letter in hopes my comments may lead to some reflection as well as broader awareness regarding issues facing the APA today.

The problems facing the APA are nothing new. Within my own area of research, the APA has grossly distorted the evidence on “violent” video games for decades, despite repeated cautions from scholars (including, at one point, an open letter by over 200 scholars, as well as a statement of concern from the Society of Media Psychology and Technology). This extends to other public policy statements such as on spanking where the nuances of a complicated and controversial field are flattened into a definitive but ideological stance. Similarly, recent practice guidelines, most notably the guidelines for Men and Boys but also treatment for PTSD, are not well grounded in science and often conflict with scientific data. I worry specifically that these policy statements may do actual harm to clients, particularly that on Men and Boys which has credibly been accused of disparaging more traditional men, and may actually discourage many men and families from seeking treatment they could benefit from.

Logic Matters:

A gentle introduction?

My Category Theory: A Gentle Introduction is intended to be relatively accessible; in particular, it presupposes rather less mathematical background than some texts on categories. The version of January 29, 2018 is x + 291 pp. long, and is very much work-in-slow-progress, at an uneven level. I then had to leave it on the back burner while finishing of IFL2 for the press: but I now hope to return to it.

The current version incorporates a raft of corrections of the previous version, but everything of course still comes with the warning caveat lector. However, although I started writing really as an exercise in getting myself a bit clearer about some basic category theory, I hope that others will find something of interest and use here. Obviously I’d very much welcome comments and corrections.

There are a lot of possible follow-up materials listed here. But if you want something just a step or two up from my notes but still tolerably gentle, let me highlight two books listed below. One is Steve Awodey’s Category Theory (chapters available on his website here). The other is Tom Leinster’s Basic Category Theory.

Lance Morrow:

I once knew a magazine journalist who was addicted to metaphors. He was, so to speak, an alcoholic of metaphors. If he took one sip from the demon rum of analogy, he would be in the gutter by the end of the paragraph. His journalism suffered from what might be called cirrhosis of the prose.

My friend would sit down at his typewriter—this was a long time ago—and set out to tell a seemingly straightforward news story. But in the first or second sentence, his mind would be seized by an image (jaunty, visual, arresting), and pretty soon the seductive analogy would take over the story altogether, hijacking the news report that it was intended merely to embellish.

I thought of him again when I learned that the University of California Irvine has issued an Inclusive Language Guide. In addition to the usual banalities (e.g., “avoid ableist language,” say “folks, team, y’all” instead of “guys” or “gals,” and advance “social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion” with every particle of speech, be it only a “he” or a “she” or a “zhir”), the guide offers this advice: “Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage.” Needless to say, “baggage” is not meant literally.

In his New Year’s message, Yonden Lhatoo demands Western governments free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange before preaching press freedom to everyone else. pic.twitter.com/dVN4NTO7KC

— South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) January 1, 2022

Douglas Hook:

“If we learned anything from this pandemic, it’s the damage that was done to kids should never be repeated,” said Baker on Thursday. “We have the tools and capabilities to keep people safe.”

DESE announced Wednesday that it will send the rapid antigen tests to districts so all teachers and staff can test for COVID before they return to school following the break.

Alex Hammer:

An error-filled letter from a Virginia teachers union president calling for increased protections against the coronavirus was mocked relentlessly on Twitter after an appalled parent took a correction pen to the piece and posted the revised version online.

‘Hey @VEA4Kids, are you going to send out more of these grammar worksheets over break?’ parent Ellen Gallery wrote Thursday morning, in a post that featured the heavily marked-up document sent by Arlington Education Association President Ingrid Grant.

‘My kids and I had a great time spotting errors! Did we find them all?’ the mom quipped.

Gallery, who describes herself as a home-schooling mom, marked up roughly 20 grammatical errors highlighted in green pen in a letter Grant sent to Arlington Schools Superintendent Dr. Francisco Duran to increase the amount of on-site COVID tests for schools in the Virginia district.

The letter was only five paragraphs long.

“An emphasis on adult employment”
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Wall Street Journal:

The year 2021 that ends this week wasn’t the return to normalcy that President Biden promised, but it was invaluable in one respect. This was the year when the conformity that characterizes American politics and media was exposed for its mistakes as never before.

By conformity we mean the progressive political and media consensus that forms quickly around an issue and then reinforces itself no matter the competing arguments or new information. This isn’t a conspiracy in any formal sense; there are no organized calls or Zoom meetings. 

This is about a shared set of political values and preferences that leads people to reach the same conclusions about an event. The reporters and commentators of the major progressive media—the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, theNew York Times, the Atlantic, and more—all then reinforce what they now like to call the “narrative” of a story. 

Politicians and the press feed the narrative with leaks and the stories they pursue—or, as important, what they don’t pursue. Disagreement is rare to nonexistent because the cost can be ostracism or lost careers.

Perell:

This is the opening message of Andre Agassi’s biography, Open. Agassi was the son of a tyrannical father who cared for little beyond creating a tennis champion out of his little boy. Steered by his father’s heavy hand, and often against his will, Agassi rose to be the number one player in the world. To others, the top was an unachievable dream. To Agassi, it was a toxic ball of fire.

The fame, the ridicule, and the decades of living a life he despised caught up to Agassi. His anger became resentment, his resentment became rage, and his rage descended into a decision to dump crystal meth on a coffee table, cut it, and snort the powder up his nostrils with the speed of a U.S. Open serve.

Why did Agassi break under the pressure of discipline? How does his story represent so many of us?

Ronald N. Kostoff, Daniela Calina, Darja Kanduc, Michael B. Briggs, Panayiotis Vlachoyiannopoulos, Andrey A. Svistunov and Aristidis Tsatsakis:

Highlights

•Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities.•Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children.•Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term.•Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children.•High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term).

Abstract

This article examines issues related to COVID-19 inoculations for children. The bulk of the official COVID-19-attributed deaths per capita occur in the elderly with high comorbidities, and the COVID-19 attributed deaths per capita are negligible in children. The bulk of the normalized post-inoculation deaths also occur in the elderly with high comorbidities, while the normalized post-inoculation deaths are small, but not negligible, in children. Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term (a few months), had samples not representative of the total population, and for adolescents/children, had poor predictive power because of their small size. Further, the clinical trials did not address changes in biomarkers that could serve as early warning indicators of elevated predisposition to serious diseases. Most importantly, the clinical trials did not address long-term effects that, if serious, would be borne by children/adolescents for potentially decades.

A novel best-case scenario cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic. The risk of death from COVID-19 decreases drastically as age decreases, and the longer-term effects of the inoculations on lower age groups will increase their risk-benefit ratio, perhaps substantially.

AP Dillon:

“What we’ve seen happen with school boards and parents these past few months reminded me of something that I ran on — and that is the importance of parent voice,” said Truitt.  

“When I declared my candidacy, there were no Critical Race Theory debates, and there was no pandemic, and what I spoke about often on the campaign trail was the need for K-12 education leaders to see parents as consumers,” Truitt said.  

“And in my support of school choice in all of its forms, I have frequently said that the parent is the best person to decide what’s right for their child’s education and that no one cares more about that child than that child’s parents or guardians,” said Truitt. “And to that end, I will, in the New Year, be announcing the formation of a new parent council.”  

Truitt didn’t specify how the new parent council would be set up, but she indicated more details would be coming in the near future.  

North State Journal also touched based with Truitt on the Oct. 4 memorandum issued by U.S. Attorney General directing the FBI to investigate school board protests.  

Garland’s memorandum was based on a Sept. 29 lettersent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) president and CEO. The letter suggested using the Patriot Act and other domestic-terrorist measures to address alleged “violence” and “threats” surrounding school board meetings nationwide.

Gail Heriot:

On September 15, 2021, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a report entitled Racial Disparities in Maternal Health (the “Report”). This Dissenting Statement and Rebuttal (the “Statement”) is a part of that report.

Among other things, the Statement points out several errors in Report. For example, the Report incorrectly states that maternal mortality has increased 50% over the last generation. What has actually happened is that changes in death certificates have caused more deaths to be classified as maternal in nature. The Report also emphasizes the theory that racism plays a prominent role in causing racial disparities in maternal mortality. The Statement points out in response that maternal mortality rates for Hispanic and Asian American mothers are lower than the rate for white mothers. This tends to detract from the theory that racism is what’s causing the disparities.

Gail Heriot:

On September 15, 2021, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a report entitled Racial Disparities in Maternal Health (the “Report”). This Dissenting Statement and Rebuttal (the “Statement”) is a part of that report.

Among other things, the Statement points out several errors in Report. For example, the Report incorrectly states that maternal mortality has increased 50% over the last generation. What has actually happened is that changes in death certificates have caused more deaths to be classified as maternal in nature. The Report also emphasizes the theory that racism plays a prominent role in causing racial disparities in maternal mortality. The Statement points out in response that maternal mortality rates for Hispanic and Asian American mothers are lower than the rate for white mothers. This tends to detract from the theory that racism is what’s causing the disparities.

Aruna Viswanatha and Sha Hua:

In January 2020, Gang Chen and about two dozen other professors and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology traveled to Shenzhen, China, to talk about overlapping university research, visit local companies and interview students interested in studying at MIT.

When Mr. Chen landed back at Boston’s Logan airport, Customs and Border Protection agents pulled him aside, seized his laptop and two cellphones and began asking him what he had been doing in China and why. Mr. Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering and an American citizen, told them he had been collaborating with a Chinese university and that all his research had been conducted in the U.S.

One year later, he was arrested on charges of concealing extensive ties to China in grant applications he had made to the U.S. government. It was one of a string of attention-grabbing cases brought by the Justice Department to address suspicions that the Chinese government was exploiting academic ties to engage in technological espionage.

Since then, the government’s pursuit of academics for alleged lying about their affiliations has faltered. The first such case to go to a jury ended in an acquittal. Out of 24 other cases, nine defendants have pleaded guilty. Charges have been dropped completely in six others, five of which officials said they dismissed because the scientists involved already had been sufficiently punished by being detained or otherwise restricted for a year.

Charles Martin and Ben Popper:

The actual work of software development by vehicle engineers such as Gerding is largely done using C++, which has been the mainstay of the company’s code since its early days. The software reads text-based configuration files. “We invented simple domain specific languages to express those things, such that other engineers in the company who are not software engineers can maybe configure it.”

Flight software for rockets at SpaceX is structured around the concept of a control cycle. “You read all of your inputs: sensors that we read in through an ADC, packets from the network, data from an IMU, updates from a star tracker or guidance sensor, commands from the ground,” explains Gerding. “You do some processing of those to determine your state, like where you are in the world or the status of the life support system. That determines your outputs – you write those, wait until the next tick of the clock, and then do the whole thing over again.”

The control cycle highlights some of the performance requirements of the software. “On Dragon, some computers run [the control cycle] at 50 Hertz and some run at 10 Hertz. The main flight computer runs at 10 Hertz. That’s managing the overall mission and sending commands to the other computers. Some of those need to react faster to certain events, so those run at 50 Hertz.”

There is a wide variety of machines talking to the central flight system. “We have inputs from sensors all over the vehicle, all kinds of different sensors.” Many are measuring internal values critical to the health of the ship and crew. “Temperatures are important. For crewed vehicles, we have oxygen and carbon dioxide sensors, cabin pressure sensors and things like that.” 

Another set of sensors looks externally to aid in navigation and telemetry. “That would be like the IMU, GPS, and star trackers.” Once they are close enough to the space station, they also use laser range finders.

Maddie Hanna and Kristen A. Graham:

In questioning the superintendent of a rural school district, a lawyer for Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman repeatedly asked why the state’s academic standards mattered for students entering certain professions.

“What use would a carpenter have for biology?” asked John Krill of Matthew Splain, superintendent of the Otto-Eldred School District in McKean County and president of the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, one of the plaintiffs. Splain had said his district’s scores on state standardized tests in biology and other subjects were not acceptable.

“What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?” Krill continued.

As lawyers for the plaintiffs objected, asking what the relevance was, Krill said that the trial was about whether Pennsylvania was meeting its constitutional obligation to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of education.

“The question in my mind is, thorough and efficient to what end? To serve the needs of the Commonwealth,” Krill said. “Lest we forget, the Commonwealth has many needs. There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”