Bomb threat at Madison Memorial high and Jefferson middle school

Will ‘woke’ survive the war?

James Macpherson:

Will the West’s obsession with Woke survive war in Europe? Or will Putin’s missiles finally explode the Never-Never Land of unreality in which we have been living?

It’s early days, of course, but so far, the West’s mythical land of prancing unicorns looks bulletproof.

Even as rockets rained down on Ukraine, Western elites worried about how the war would affect LGBTQ people, as if Putin might have developed queer-seeking missiles.

Others voiced concern that grandparents huddled in bomb shelters beneath the pockmarked streets of Kiev might not be social distancing.

The New York Times lamented that few of the Ukrainians fleeing for their lives were wearing masks. They probably weren’t triple-boosted either. And God forbid any of them were shot dead without first using a QR-code to check out.

Meanwhile, former US Secretary of State John Kerry expressed dismay at what he called the ‘emissions consequences’ of war in Europe. He would presumably be far more comfortable with the Russian invasion had their tanks first met strict European emission standards.

The union map of school closings

Steven Malanga:

After two years of fighting Covid, public officials are still debating how schools should respond to the virus. Despite ample data showing that virus transmission in schools has been generally weak and that cases among kids are often mild, governors in some states have been slow to ease restrictions on schools even as they lift them on society in general. This makes the U.S. an outlier. We’ve imposed tougher restrictions on schools, including closures, than have our peer countries. Meantime, state policy has varied widely, with some states offering much less in-person instruction to children than others.

The data can be framed in various ways, but one significant factor is that in places where teachers’ unions are the strongest, schools have been closed the longest. No wonder, then, that for the second straight year, public schools appear to be losing students and, according to a new survey, parents are increasingly embracing school choice.

Many of the world’s richest industrialized countries boast scientific and medical expertise that approaches that of the United States and have grappled with serious Covid outbreaks for as long as America has. Yet according to UNESCO’s latest data, virtually all have closed schools for far less time than the U.S. In France, where the first wave of the Omicron variant crested in December, schools have been closed for an average of 12 weeks throughout the two years of Covid. Spain has shuttered them for 15 weeks. Italy and Germany have been tougher, having closed schools for 38 weeks apiece. The U.K. sits in between those four countries, at 27 weeks. Our neighbor to the north, Canada—increasingly seen amid the truckers’ protests as endorsing among the most restrictive measures—tallied 41 weeks. American schools have lost a staggering 71 weeks of in-person instruction since Covid began.

Country-wide averages can be misleading, as state reactions to Covid have varied widely. A year ago, as vaccines were becoming widely available, an audit of school districts throughout the country discovered wide variations of in-person instruction. The audit gave states a score between one and 100, with one being the least amount of in-person instruction and 100 the most. The lowest states were Maryland (with a score of just 9.8), California (11.1), Oregon, and Washington. Illinois scored marginally higher, at 37.6, in the same range as states like New Jersey and Massachusetts. By contrast, Texas was almost completely back to in-person instruction, with a ranking of 90.8 on the in-person index. Florida came in at 99.9. In all, 15 states, mostly in the South and Central Plains, had returned to in-person instruction 80 percent or more of the time.

Poll: Declining Confidence in California’s taxpayer supported K-12 schools

Howard Blume:

Confidence in California public schools has declined as voters and parents overwhelmingly have concluded that the quality of education worsened during the pandemic, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.

Pollsters asked voters to give schools a letter-grade rating from A to F — essentially the same question asked of voters in a 2011 USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. A decade ago, the results were interpreted as sobering; the numbers are worse now.

Statewide, about 21% of voters give the state’s public schools an A or B; in 2011 it was 27%. Meanwhile, D or F grades statewide rose 15 percentage points in the last decade, from 13% to 28%.

In the city of Los Angeles, 18% of voters give schools an A or B; about 1 in 3 voters give D or F marks to public schools. Comparable figures are not available for 2011.

“The decline is significant,” Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS poll, who has surveyed voters in California for more than four decades. “It could be a long-term trend, but I would certainly think that the impact of COVID has probably contributed to it.”

As in 2011, voters still give their local schools higher marks on average than they give to schools statewide, but the gap has shrunk. Statewide, 35% of voters give an A or B to “the public schools attended by children who live in your neighborhood.” 

The percentage in Los Angeles was 24%. Improving both the perception and reality of L.A schools is part of the agenda laid out in a “100-Day Plan” unveiled Thursday by new L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho.

Dr. Seuss’ Satirical Lesson on Nuclear Armament and the Absurdity of War

Daily fig:

“Many people must be wishing that the secret of atomic fission had never been discovered,”lamented the distinguished critic and philosopher Joseph Wood Krutch“but we are saddled with the atom bomb, and it looks as though we would have to live — or die — with it.” Such existential problems are the subject of The Butter Battle Book (public library), a controversial arms race allegory by Dr. Seuss published in 1984. Full of the famous author’s trademark artwork and whimsical rhymes, the book also contains a stinging satire on nationalism, militarism, and the escalation of violence.

It starts innocently enough. A grandfather takes his grandson for a walk alongside an enormous wall that separates two people. The difference between the groups? Yooks eat their bread with the butter on top — Zooks with the butter on the bottom. The culinary preference is the only discernible difference between the two groups, save for the color of their clothing. But what appears to readers to be a subtle distinction is not insignificant to the characters in the story.

Civics: Accused of extortion, Louisville’s top prosecutor drops charges – but keeps cash

Jacob Ryan:

Two years ago, prosecutors offered a St. Matthews man a deal: give up $380,000 in cash through asset forfeiture, and criminal charges just filed against his family would be dropped.

The case has now been resolved, with no criminal convictions for anyone involved — but police and prosecutors still kept the bulk of the cash.

Patrick Card was arrested in 2019 after the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office and the St. Matthews Police seized marijuana at his house and prescribed pain pills and cash he kept at his parents’ house. Police were serving a domestic violence order on Card after his mother accused him of assaulting her a few days before, a charge that would later be dismissed.

As prosecutors began negotiating to resolve four counts of drug trafficking against Card — the source of what was potentially St. Matthews biggest cash seizure in years — they indicted his mother, father and wife, KyCIR reported in March 2020.

The assistant Jefferson Commonwealth’s Attorney Josh Porter offered Card a plea deal that would reduce his charges and dismiss those against his family if he forfeited the cash. If he chose to fight the seizure, they’d continue criminal cases against his wife, and then 68-year-old mother and 69-year-old father, according to a written plea offer.

Notes on Breaking Up Expensive, Underperforming Schools

Molly Beck:

Darling testified in a recent public hearing on the bill that the overhaul was necessary in her view to address persistently low performance among students, the vast majority of whom are living in poverty.

Darling said 4.2% of MPS students are proficient in math and 7.3% are proficient in English, according to performance on the state’s Forward exam last year.

When considering that 57% of MPS students didn’t take the test, as many were not attending school in person due to the pandemic, about 10% of test-takers were proficient in math and 17% in English — still steep drops from the previous round of tests, and lagging the state.

Darling and Assembly lead author Robert Wittke, R-Racine, testified in the Assembly Education Committee hearing on Feb. 17 they had heard from parents and business leaders that a major change was needed.

Civics: ‘A layer cake of constitutional violations’
A Q&A on the Emergencies Act with Canadian constitutional law expert and professor Ryan Alford

Tara Henley:

Many people in this country are reeling. Parliament has now approved the use of the Emergencies Act, keeping measures in place until mid-March. 

This is an extraordinary development, and one that’s generated many questions from the public. What does it mean to live under the Emergencies Act? Who will it impact? What does it mean for protest movements going forward? And: What does it say about the state of our democracy?

To unpack these questions, I reached out to Ryan Alford. He’s a constitutional law expert, a professor at the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University, and the author of Seven Absolute Rights: Recovering the Historical Foundations of Canada’s Rule of Law. Here, he offers some analysis of this historic moment in Canadian history. 

For people still getting up to speed, what happened last night?

Parliament, as required by the Emergencies Act, met within seven days of the invocation of the act by the government, to confirm that the act should remain in force for a period of up to 30 days. What that means is that one chamber of Parliament has approved the continuing operation on the Emergencies Act; the Senate will need to debate this and vote on this as well. With that approval, the cabinet can continue to issue regulations that have the force of law, without any oversight from Parliament, for 30 days beginning with the proclamation of the Emergencies Act last week.

Looking at how to make writing easier to read

Story by Rebecca Monteleone and Jamie Brew; Design + code by Michelle McGhee

Moreover, the simplicity of readability checkers has enabled their widespread adoption. Military engineers use them to help write technical documents. Governments and doctors use them to guide communication for a general audience. Schools and textbook manufacturers use them to tailor reading assignments to particular grade levels and students.

Readability scores are easy to understand. Many people use these scores to help them write. Some groups that use readability scores are:

  • The military.
  • The government.
  • Doctors.
  • Schools.

To better understand how readability scores work—and how they can fail—let’s look at three representative examples.

To better understand how readability scores work—and how they can fail—let’s look at three representative examples.

Covid lockdowns weren’t needed, finds inquiry in the country that stayed open

Richard orange Malmo:

Recurring lockdowns imposed across Europe to curb Covid-19 were neither “necessary” nor “defensible”, Sweden’s official inquiry into its handling of the pandemic has concluded….

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?

Civics: What to Do If a Cop Tries to Scan Your Face During a Traffic Stop

Mack DeGeurin:

Law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology during investigations has blossomed in recent years thanks in no small part to a boomingsurveillance industry built on the back of an ever-expanding buffet of publicly available biometric data. The limits on where and how that technology can be used though remain legally murky and are constantly evolving. Now, it appears at least some law enforcement agents are flirting with the idea of using facial recognition at otherwise seemingly benign traffic stops, a potential loosening of the tech’s use that has legal and privacy experts on edge.

As first reported earlier this month by Insider’s Caroline Haskins, that hypothetical was floated during a 2021 episode of the Street Cop Training podcast, a program intended for police officers looking to learn new investigative techniques. In the episode, the show’s host, Dennis Benigno poses a scenario to his guest, Nick Jerman.

“Let’s say you are on a traffic stop and we have someone in the car who we suspect may be wanted?” Benigno asked. “How would you go about investigating somebody who you think may be trying to hide their apprehension and hide out who they are?”

Jerman, who had spent the rest of the episode describing ways to use publicly available social media tools to identify potential targets during a police investigation, responded by saying, “there are a couple paid programs you can use, [presumably referring to Clearview AI and apps like it] where you can take their [the driver’s] picture and it will put it [the photo] in.”

“The stage was set in 2009 when Amazon reached into people’s Kindles and removed George Orwell’s 1984”

Schmud:

Such events are rare, but the reality remains: readers have few rights when it comes to reading digital books. It could be argued that our current misinformation epidemic makes access to books more important than ever. But eBook publishers and distributors are arbitrarily restricting access and the corporate benefits of eBook restrictions are dubious.

Ebooks have taken a different path than other small media formats such as music. Without getting into a comparative analysis, I’ll broadly assert that digital music files are generally distributed in a more open format than eBooks. Ebooks from Amazon, the largest retailer in the market, are saddled with digital rights management (DRM). These reader-hostile measures have not translated into adoption.Meanwhile, digital music streaming is booming at the expense of paid music downloading. While downloads are shrinking on platforms like iTunes and Amazon, independent artists are seeing significant growth on sites like Bandcamp. Listeners have a fair choice. They are not locked into an ecosystem. If they choose to buy music, they can listen to it without restriction.

Are Recommendation Letters a Form of Discrimination?

Scott Jaschik:

If you are applying to the University of California, Los Angeles, you can’t submit a letter of recommendation.

The reason is equity, said Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, vice provost for enrollment management. “The caseload for most public school counselors is incredibly heavy,” she said. “Despite their desire to support their senior students, they have many responsibilities.”

She said low-income students “are more likely” to have teachers who are overworked and are teaching under emergency credentialing systems. Copeland-Morgan said that when you consider the context, it is unfair to accept letters, so UCLA has not done so “for decades.”

School readiness losses during the COVID-19 outbreak. A comparison of two cohorts of young children

Meliza González, Tianna Loose, Maite Liz, Mónica Pérez, Juan I. Rodríguez-Vinçon, Clementina Tomás-Llerena , Alejandro Vásquez-Echeverría:

The COVID-19 context has created the most severe disruption to education systems in recent history. Its impact on child development was estimated comparing two cohorts of 4- to 6-year-old Uruguayan children: control (n = 34,355, 48.87% girls) and COVID cohort (n = 30,158, 48.95% girls) assessed between 2018 and 2020 in three waves, by a routinely administered school readiness instrument in public preschools. Ethnicity information is not available. For the COVID cohort, losses were observed in Motor and Cognitive development, Attitudes towards learning, and Internalizing behavior (range 0.13 – 0.27 SD). Losses were less pronounced among children from higher socioeconomic schools. These results extend the literature on the consequences of the pandemic on learning and early child development.

Civics: Missouri Teacher data review

Brian Krebs:

Parson tasked the Missouri Highway Patrol to produce a report on their investigation into “the hackers.”  On Monday, Feb. 21, The Post-Dispatch published the 158-page report (PDF), which concluded after 175 hours of investigation that Renaud did nothing wrong and only accessed information that was publicly available.

Emails later obtained by the Post-Dispatch showed that the FBI told state cybersecurity officials that there was “not an actual network intrusion” and the state database was “misconfigured.” The emails also revealed the proposed message when education department leaders initially prepared to respond in October:

“We are grateful to the member of the media who brought this to the state’s attention,” was the proposed quote attributed to the state’s education commissioner before Parson began shooting the messenger.

The Missouri Highway Patrol report includes an interview with Mallory McGowin, the chief communications officer for the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). McGowin told police the website weakness actually exposed 576,000 teacher Social Security numbers, and the data would have been publicly exposed for a decade.

McGowin also said the DESE’s website was developed and maintained by the Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division (ITSD) — which the governor’s office controls directly.

“I asked Mrs. McGowin if I was correct in saying the website was for DESE but it was maintained by ITSD, and she indicated that was correct,” the Highway Patrol investigator wrote. “I asked her if the ITSD was within the Office of Administration, or if DESE had their on-information technology section, and she indicated it was within the Office of Administration. She stated in 2009, policy was changed to move all information technology services to the Office of Administration.”

“People are easily manipulated by computing”

Daniel Lemire:

People seem to think that if the software requires some document, then surely the rules require the document in question. That is, human beings believe that the software must be an accurate embodiment of the law.

In some sense, software does the policing. It enforces the rules. But like the actual police, software can go far beyond the law… and most people won’t notice.

An actual policeman can be intimidating. However, it is a human being. If they ask something that does not make sense, you are likely to question them. You are also maybe more likely to think that a policeman could be mistaken. Software is like a deaf policeman. And people want software to be correct.

Suppose you ran a university and you wanted all professors to include a section on religion in all their courses. You could not easily achieve such a result by the means of law. Changing the university regulations to add such a requirement would be difficult at a secular institution. However, if you simply make it that all professors must fill out a section on religion when registering a course, then professors would probably do it without question.

Of course, you can achieve the same result with bureaucracy. You just change the forms and the rules. But it takes much effort. Changing software is comparatively easier. There is no need to document the change very much. There is no need to train the staff.

Teacher Union Parent climate commentary

Caroline Downey:

A high-ranking member of one of the largest teachers’ unions in California published a satirical letter Monday mocking parental calls for curriculum transparency, demanding a detailed report of the content and influences children are being exposed to at home.

Owen Jackman, a delegate to the California Teachers’ Union state council and a teacher in Sacramento City Unified School District, wrote a sarcastic Facebook post deriding parent concerns about progressive pedagogy, suggesting that parental rights are equal or subordinate to teachers’ rights in education.

Addressing parents who advocate for their kids at school board meetings as “storm troopers,”

An introduction to educational freedom

C Bradley Thompson

This essay serves as an introduction to yet another series of essays that I will be writing in the weeks ahead, this time on the topic of educational freedom. In my previous 10-part series on the question of rights and education (see hereherehereherehereherehereherehere, and here), I established the moral foundation for thinking about education in a free society. I there explored questions such as:

  • Is there a right to an education?
  • Do parents have an unalienable right to determine how, in what, and by whom their children will be educated?
  • What rights or authority does the government have to educate children?

With this new series, I’d like to turn in the weeks ahead to the institutional question, “who shall educate the children, the State or parents (including their proxies)?” More specifically, I will be concerned to examine the moral and educational status of top-down, government schooling versus bottom-up, parent-chosen schooling.

All of the essays in the series will head toward a twofold conclusion: first, government schooling is immoral and incompatible with a free society; and, second, a free market in education is the only moral system for educating children and the only one compatible with a free society.

I’d like to begin this series with a brief intellectual autobiography on how and why I came to think about these issues and why I care about them so passionately. We might think of this as an exercise in how to think—in principles and on principle—like a Redneck. Welcome to Redneck Logic 101.

Since the day I started kindergarten, I have spent my entire life in school. I attended elementary, middle, and high schools for 14 years! (I know what you’re thinking: the Redneck Intellectual must have, not surprisingly, failed a grade or two. But you would be wrong. Back in the day, Canadian Rednecks had to attend grade 13 if they wanted to go to college. Yes, grade 13! Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.) Then I went off college for four years, then did a master’s degree, then taught for two years at an all-boys boarding school, then went back to graduate school to do a Ph.D., and ever since then I have been a college professor.

I have only been two things in my life: a student or a teacher. I know no other way of life. Learning and teaching is all I know, it’s what I do, and, truth be told, it’s all I care about.

Notes on pro school choice poll results

School Choice Wisconsin:

Wisconsin voters strongly support making all families eligible for the state’s school choice programs and favor ending funding inequities between choice, charter, and traditional public schools. These are among key findings on education issues in a scientific, random sample poll conducted earlier this month by one of the nation’s leading opinion research firms. 

“Parents want more options. They want to be more involved. It’s as simple as that,” said Nic Kelly, President of School Choice Wisconsin. 

The poll showed support for school choice across the political spectrum. While strong Republican support is unsurprising, noteworthy is solid majority support among independents and sizable support among Democrats. 

SCW retained OnMessage Inc. to conduct the poll. The firm’s national recognition includes being named “Pollster of the Year” in 2019 by the American Association of Political Consultants (https://theaapc.org). 

Wisconsin parents have four tax-supported options for enrolling children in K-12 schools. They are: (1) traditional public schools in the district where a family lives; (2) traditional public schools in districts other than where a family lives; (3) public charter schools; and (4) private schools in one of the state school choice programs. All parents may participate in the first three options, while the private choice programs are limited largely to lower income families. 

Taxpayer support of charter schools and choice schools is about 60% of traditional school funding. Students at these schools generally outperform those in traditional public schools on state proficiency exams. Students in choice programs consistently score higher on the college-readiness ACT test. In Milwaukee, the state’s Department of Public Instruction finds that twice as many choice and charter students attend highly-ranked schools when compared with students in the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Commentary

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?

“25% of the institutions produced 71 to 86% of all tenure-track faculty”

Nadia Ramlagan:

The analysis by Aaron Clauset at the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues revealed that only 25% of the institutions produced 71 to 86% of all tenure-track faculty. Between 70 and 90% of professors at these elite schools received their doctorates from other elite schools, while only about 5% received training outside this group.

The researchers also uncovered a systematic bias against women with elite doctorates, who slid further down the hierarchy in their faculty jobs compared with men from the same institutions.

“We can see there is this bias in the system, but we can’t say yet what causes the bias.” Clauset said, speaking to journalists at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting. There are a variety of possible reasons for this that the researchers hope to explore next, to determine whether there might be bias in hiring decisions, or if women are exiting the job pipeline in different ways than men.

Clauset and his colleagues spent three years compiling this massive hiring record, without the aid of any centralized database.”There is no organization that actually tracks faculty placements generally in academia, or even within most disciplines,” said Clauset.

Notes on One City Schools’ Monona Expansion

Elizabeth Beyer:

Caire, UW-Oshkosh and Madison Area Technical College are hashing out a dual enrollment partnership that would allow students to gain college credits while in high school and potentially earn an associate degree, too, which could be used to transfer to a UW campus or an institution outside the System.

The idea may even go beyond dual enrollment, he said, with some students potentially able to earn a bachelor’s degree at the end of five high school years due to the school’s longer, three-semester schedule.

“This will be a revolutionary exercise in education,” he said.

Former Wisconsin governor and current UW System interim President Tommy Thompson, who has been a supporter of Caire and One City for years, was present at the Wednesday signing.

Students in grades 4K-4 are currently learning on the third floor of the new facility, purchased by One City Schools in March through a $14 million donation from American Girl founder and philanthropist Pleasant Rowland. Caire said his plan for the 157,000-square-foot office building, on the campus of WPS Health Solutions in Monona adjacent to South Madison, is to build a full K-12 charter school with an enrollment of nearly 1,000 students by the 2024-25 school year.

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?

Notes on academic veracity

Keith David:

At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel.

Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an advisee of mine for a year already, and I’d come to understand that he was a prodigy. I’d also formed a hypothesis, based on a certain bluntness and lack of social tact he exhibited, that Daniel might be on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum. He seemed weak on interpersonal skills and narrowly, even obsessively, focused on math and science. During his first year of university studies, Daniel had taken a number of upper-level math and physics courses that none of my other advisees had taken, and had earned flat As in almost all of them. His GPA probably would have been a perfect 4.0 if the university had allowed him to take only math and science courses. As it was, it was a 3.85.

At the end of his freshman year, Daniel applied for admission to a competitive honors program that our university runs, but he was rejected. He came to my office to discuss this—or, rather, to complain about it. I soon realized that he was not just disappointed; he was angry. Daniel believed he’d been treated unfairly. He believed he was the victim of reverse racism.

I told Daniel that I understood why he was upset, but I reminded him that the program he’d applied to is highly competitive. The admissions committee presumably received many strong applications. There is always some subjectivity in admissions decisions, I noted, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Subjectivity isn’t the same as unfairness.

Civics: academic freedom

Wisconsin institute for law and liberty:

On Saturday, February 19, 2022, Concordia University Wisconsin suspended Rev. Dr. Gregory Schulz, a full professor of philosophy and Lutheran pastor. At first, Dr. Schulz did not know why he was suspended because the University locked him out of his email account and banned him from campus properties. By Monday, things had become more clear: Concordia’s leadership suspended Dr. Schulz because of an articlehe wrote in Christian News critiquing the University’s recent embrace of “woke-ness” and “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Even though Dr. Schulz’s employment contract with the University guarantees “academic freedom” and “due process,” the University gave him neither freedom nor process. Now, Concordia threatens to terminate Dr. Schulz unless he publicly “recants.”

Civics: Letter From a Young Canadian: Authoritarianism, Media Propaganda and Repression

Rav Arora:

In Canada last week, Trudeau set a historic precedent by declaring a National Emergency on dubious grounds. This act has existed for 34 years without once being invoked, and now the Trudeau government is wielding it as a cudgel against one of the most organized displays of civil disobedience in Canadian history. 

Three weeks prior, the Freedom Convoy rolled out of Vancouver. Media smears proclaimed that they were a Covid convoy spreading a plague across the land, or that they were a band of alt-right white supremacists. Justin Trudeau called them a “small fringe minority” who held “unacceptable views” that “do not represent the views of Canadians.” These remarks seemed to galvanize supporters of the Freedom Convoy. Large demonstrations popped up across Canada, and on January 28th the convoy arrived in Ottawa. Protesters clogged the streets of Canada’s capital, rallying against nationwide vaccine mandates and other Covid restrictions.

On the ground, the reality of the movement starkly clashed with the melodrama of the government’s declaration of a National Emergency: kids jumpingin bouncy castles, crowds merrily singing and dancing (a relief in the bitter cold), protesters hugging police officers, and youth playing street hockey. In one video, a group of Sikh Canadians can be seen preparing traditional Indian meals to feed the truckers (an act of charity known as “seva” in the Sikh tradition), all in the name of national unity and freedom.

In fact, Trudeau’s opponents bear more resemblance to Gandhi’s satyagraha movement than any terrorist faction. The truckers and their supporters were brimming with national pride, and they appeared to be committed to peaceful protest, non-compliance, and civil disobedience. 

Only Trudeau and his media allies’ warped, Machiavellian perception could caricature this diverse coalition as a group of “swastika wavers.”When the media was able to find a handful of protestors donning a Swastika, or spot a couple confederate flags in the convoy, the predictable histrionics ensued, as Liberal and NDP politicians attempted to defame the intentions of the vast majority of those present. 

In a particularly striking example of the disconnect between the dominant media narrative and the reality on the ground, a local gym owner, Soungui Koulamallah, brought his mother, who “watches the news religiously,” to the protests where she was pleasantly surprised by the geniality of the demonstrators:

“I don’t know what they’re talking about in the news — these people are so friendly.”

I spoke to Koulamallah — whose family immigrated from Chad and Haiti — about his experience at the protests.

What is “The Sort of Person Who Has a Position at the University”? – Conversable

Timothy Taylor:

This one-paragraph 1997 short story by Lydia Davis, “A Position at the University,” captures, at least for me, some of the ambivalence involved in identifying myself as an academic–that is, about being “the sort of person who has a position at the university.” Davis wrote: 

I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

The Failure Paradox
Ingenuism Essays

Don Watkins and Robert Hendershott

The safest way to travel is by air—and air travel has never been safer. MIT researchers found that from 1988 to 1997 there was one fatality per 1.3 million passenger boardings globally. From 2008 to 2017 that number had plummeted to one fatality per 7.9 million boardings. 

“The worldwide risk of being killed had been dropping by a factor of two every decade,” says Arnold Barnett, an MIT scholar who has published a new paper summarizing the study’s results. “Not only has that continued in the last decade, the [latest] improvement is closer to a factor of three. The pace of improvement has not slackened at all even as flying has gotten ever safer and further gains become harder to achieve. That is really quite impressive and is important for people to bear in mind.”

In the U.S., the news is even better. There hasn’t been a single fatality from an airline crash in 12 years. 

How is that possible? It’s certainly not that the human beings in the airline industry are infallible, or that their task is an easy one. Instead, the answer comes down to how they’ve dealt with failure: namely, they’ve actively created an environment that allows them, even requires them, to learn from it. 

You’ve probably heard about black boxes, which record data from airplanes so that in the event of a crash, analysts can piece together what went wrong, understand why things went wrong, and develop procedures to avoid repeating the mistakes. But that is only part of the story. According to the Wall Street Journal:

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?

Civics: taxpayer supported non transparency from the US CDC

Sharon Lerner:

The “lab-leak” hypothesis is bolstered by a long history of accidents at facilities that study pathogens and the fact that one such laboratory that specializes in coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, is located in the very city where the pandemic first began. As many have noted, China has not been forthcoming with information that could help us understand the origins of the pandemic, blocking accessto a cave that may hold important clues, taking a database of information about coronaviruses offline, and refusing requests for records from the World Health Organization.

But the U.S. government, which funded some of the coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a New York-based research organization called EcoHealth Alliance, has also withheld information that could provide insight into the origins of the pandemic. The Intercept filed a Freedom of Information Act request in September 2020 for grants the NIH provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At the time, only summaries of the research were publicly available. The NIH initially refused to provide the documents. It was only after The Intercept sued the federal agency that it agreed to provide thousands of pages of relevant materials.

Some of these releases have proven newsworthy. The grant proposals received in an initial batch of documents in September revealed that scientists working under the grant in Wuhan were engaged in what most knowledgeable experts we consulted described as gain-of-function experiments, in which scientists created mutant bat coronaviruses and used them to infect “humanized mice.” The mutant viruses proved more pathogenic and transmissible in the mice than the original viruses. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied that the U.S. had funded gain-of-function work in Wuhan.

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?

‘Why does everything have to involve race?’: Students react to that NPR article about ‘white privilege’ emojis.

Peter Cordi:

NPR recently published an article in which several interviewees share what skin color emojis they use and why they choose that specific color. The article then listed academics’ arguments for why using a yellow emoji is an act of “white privilege.” 

“For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways,” Berlin-based researcher Zara Rahman states in the article. 

Rahman’s academic background includes a stint as a “Non-Resident Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University’s Centre on Philanthropy and Civil Society,” according to the researcher’s website.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Population Changes

Joel Kotkin:

The urban fringe is where the American dream is now being re­discovered. But these fringes remain widely disdained in academia, media, and the planning community. This was most evident during the financial crisis when there were widespread media accounts suggesting, among other things, that the exurbs would become “the next slums,” the equivalent of “roadkill” doomed by changing economics and demo­graphics.5 The New York Times even suggested how to carve up the suburban carcass, with some envisioning that suburban three-car garages would be “subdivided into rental units with street front cafés, shops and other local businesses,” while abandoned pools would become skateboard parks.6 Yet this is exactly what did not happen.

The Exurban Revolution

In the new Urban Reform Institute report, we identified the fifty high­est‑growth large counties in terms of net domestic migration from 2015 to 2019. These areas grew their population at 7.5 times the rate of the country’s other 3,100 counties during this period and gained 1.8 million net domestic migrants. Out of the fifty, all but seven are located in combined statistical areas (CSAs) of more than 500,000 residents. And each of these outer counties are within or close to a two-hour commute time of a central core county. Key areas include Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Orlando.7

The key demographic headed to these places is young people in prime family formation years. From 2015 to 2019, these counties saw an increase in twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds of 12.8 percent, almost four times the 3.4 percent growth rate in the other counties. The high­est‑growth counties also have a far higher rate of school-age children (five- to fourteen-year-olds) per household than the rest of the nation—0.66 compared to 0.43 for the other counties. The highest growth counties have 3.5 times as many school-age children per household than, for example, Manhattan and San Francisco8 and 75 percent more school-age children per household than other counties in the United States.9

This migration is not a repeat of the “white flight” that drove peripheral growth a half century ago. To be sure, during the great mass suburbanization of the mid-twentieth century, many communities—Levittown and Lakewood are well-known examples—excluded ethnic minorities, providing planners and “smart growth” advocates a rationale to claim that single-family neighborhoods are inherently racist ever since.10 This assertion is seriously out of date, however. Over the past decade, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than 4 percent of growth in suburbs and exurbs, while Latinos accounted for nearly half, with Asians, African Americans, mixed race, and other groups making up the balance.11

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?

Madison school governance climate amidst long term, disastrous reading results

David Blaska:

One conclusion from the first debate among candidates for Madison school board: Stop blaming COVID for our failing schools and own up to what we’ve done to our kids. Covid was the cover story school board president Ali Muldrow spun for the on-going chaos in Madison’s classrooms. (Another brawl at East high school Monday 02-21-22.) But that’s progressivism, isn’t it? Always an excuse, always someone else to blame, never taking responsibility. Our schools and the culture at large play identity politics. Making someone else — or history itself — the villain absolves the victim of responsibility for their own actions.

During the on-line debate Sunday night 02-20-22, Blaska the write-in candidate for Muldrow’s seat #4 said kids cannot learn if they do not feel safe. We excerpt from that debate, sponsored by Grandparents United for Madison Public Schools (GRUMPS) and the East Side Progressives. (Hope they’ve recovered from the shock!) Here, Blaska is on the clock for 2 minutes:

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?

Commentary on Wisconsin K-12 Rhetoric

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders

#1 – Wisconsin is 8th in Education Nationwide

Governor Evers made the claim during his state of the state that Wisconsin’s “education system” has moved from 18th to 8th in the nation during his administration, and gave the credit to increased spending in public schools.  His claim appears to come from a report from US News that ranks the 50 states on their overall educational systems. However, a number of large caveats need to be attached to this data.

The report only takes into account three factors: pre-K enrollment, standardized test scores, and graduation rates. One area Wisconsin does do quite well is in the high school graduation rate, and it is without a doubt a credit to the schools around the state that ensure that students achieve high school graduation goals.

But the picture becomes far murkier when it comes to the area of student achievement. On NAEP scores, Wisconsin continues to have among the largest racial achievement gaps in the country. Proficiency rates on the state exam in some districts are below 10%, despite these districts being ranked as “Meeting Expectations” on the state’s report card. These are real problems for which the only solution from the Governor, in general, appears to be spending more money. While it may be possible to craft a metric by which Wisconsin ranks in the top ten on education, large swaths of students throughout the state are not proficient in areas like English and Math. We’re going to hold our applause on student proficiency.

Additionally, the inclusion of pre-K enrollment in this metric is curious in light of the lack of evidence that pre-K makes any appreciable difference in the academic outcomes of students. A recent random assignment study from scholars at Vanderbilt University found that students who participated in state-run pre-K programs had worse outcomes by third grade than those who did not. At the very least, program quality matters, and we shouldn’t assume that simply having more students in pre-K will improve student outcomes.

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?

Civics and we know best: The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects

Apporva Mandavilli:

Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s deputy director for public health science and surveillance said the pandemic exposed the fact that data systems at the C.D.C., and at the state levels, are outmoded and not up to handling large volumes of data. C.D.C. scientists are trying to modernize the systems, he said.

“We want better, faster data that can lead to decision making and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate the lag in data that has held us back,” he added.

The C.D.C. also has multiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important publications, and its officials must alert the Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees the agency — and the White House of their plans. The agency often shares data with states and partners before making data public. Those steps can add delays.

“The C.D.C. is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. “The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the C.D.C.”

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?

Civics: How a Saudi woman’s iPhone revealed hacking around the world

Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing:

Al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent activists, is known for helping lead a campaign to end the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. She was released from jail in February 2021 on charges of harming national security.

Soon after her release from jail, the activist received an email from Google warning her that state-backed hackers had tried to penetrate her Gmail account. Fearful that her iPhone had been hacked as well, al-Hathloul contacted the Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to probe her device for evidence, three people close to al-Hathloul told Reuters.

After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target.

He said the finding, computer code left by the attack, provided direct evidence NSO built the espionage tool.

Civics: a look at Election vote processes

Chris Rickert

Of the nearly 1,400 absentee ballot certificates, maybe 45 or 50 were worth a second look.

Seven of the certificates, printed on the back of the return envelopes containing absentee ballots, lacked a witness address, which should have disqualified the associated ballots immediately. Eight others listed addresses but no ZIP codes, city or state. Some were not dated, or displayed dates that had been crossed out and corrected.

In some cases, clerks corrected the errors; in others, they didn’t. But in all cases, the ballots contained in the envelopes were counted, and the clerks who counted them say the voters who cast them were all eligible to vote.

The mistakes by voters in the Dodge County towns of Herman, Lomira and Rubicon, which went heavily for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, were not surprising. A similar review by the Wisconsin State Journal of thousands of ballots cast in the Democratic stronghold of Madison turned up scores of ballot envelopes in which voters made the same kinds of small errors.

But the reviews suggest that failure to follow the fine print in filling out a government form doesn’t discriminate by party, even as some Republicans in the Legislature are seeking to prohibit clerks from “curing” ballot certificates with incomplete information.

Clerks are allowed to return ballots to voters to correct defects as time allows, although they’re not required to. Since 2016, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has also instructed clerks that they may make minor corrections to witness addresses and initial any changes they make.

“Adults first” policy commentary

Emily Oster:

Local governments are relaxing pandemic restrictions at a dizzying pace, removing mask requirements and vaccine entry rules for businesses. Politicians are generally pushing for a return to normalcy. But for one group, change is not forthcoming: children. The removal of mask mandates in schools is likely weeks, if not months, away in some parts of the country. Quarantine and testing requirements remain in many child-care and school settings, even as they disappear from adult life. My burning question is simply: Why? I can imagine three arguments in favor of a kids-last approach, none of which I find convincing.

First, one could argue that ongoing child-specific restrictions are warranted because children need more protection. This is a hard case to make. Throughout the pandemic, children have been at lower risk of serious illness than adults. In the latest CDC numbers, hospitalization rates for children 0–4 with COVID are estimated at 3.8 per 100,000 and for the 5–11 group at 1 per 100,000. By comparison, the rates in the 18–49, 50–64, and over 65 groups are 3.7, 8.5, and 22, respectively. (The very youngest kids and the 18-49 set have about the same risk, despite only the latter having access to highly effective vaccines.) Long COVID also seems less prevalent among children than adults. Some children are more vulnerable than others, of course, and society owes special attention to high-risk kids. But it doesn’t follow that COVID restrictions for children ought to stay uniformly in place after they’ve been removed for their parents.

A second possible argument in favor of a kids-last policy is that COVID mitigations work better in child settings than in others. The data don’t support this argument, either. Evidence from test-to-stay programs, for example, suggests that more than 97 percent of kids who are exposed to the coronavirus at school and are then required to stay home never end up testing positive. Keeping these kids out of school, then, isn’t meaningfully halting community spread. As for masking,others have made the point that, after two years, we still have paltry proof that face coverings significantly lower case counts at school. Even if you are skeptical of these arguments, masking in school (as practiced) is certainly not more effective than masking in other settings. The largest masking randomized trial, in Bangladesh, found the highest efficacy among older individuals.

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?

Might Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ education mulligans be a 2022 election liability?

Laura Meckler and Matt Viser:

Democratic governors have responded by dropping mask mandates, urging that schools remain open and emphasizing there is a light at the end of the dark covid tunnel. They also are trying to change the subject, with a focus on education investment and recovery and warnings about the consequences if Republicans are elected.

But some Democrats worry that the responses, to date, are insufficient given the hardball politics the GOP is playing on these emotional issues.

“Democrats are giving away one of their greatest assets, and that’s being associated with public education. And giving away that advantage is going to get Democrats’ clocks cleaned this fall,” said Joe DiSano, a Michigan-based Democratic consultant. “We are letting the conservative crazies run ragged on us. We have the ammo to fight back, and we don’t.”

Republicans were buoyed by their unexpected victory in November’s Virginia gubernatorial contest, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won after a campaign defined by education issues. Youngkin criticized pandemic-related school closures and a statewide mask mandate in schools, issues that analysts who studied the race found particularly effective. He also promised to ban teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework for examining the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism and a catchall term that many GOP politicians have embraced to describe various racial equity lessons and initiatives they find objectionable.

Youngkin also effectively seized on a gaffe by his opponent, who said parents should not tell schools what to teach.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll after that election found overwhelming support for parents having a say in what their children’s schools teach. It also found 44 percent of Americans say they trust Democrats more to handle education, barely topping the 41 percent choosing Republicans. That represented a significant weakening in Democrats’ historic advantage.

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?

Minneapolis St. Paul Teachers Vote to Strike

Beth Hawkins:

and narrowly averted a walkout two years before that. Its 2,500 teachers are the best-paid in the state, with an average salary in the 2020-21 school year of $85,457. District officials, who recently announced they would close several schools because of drops in enrollment, have said their hands are tied by a $43 million budget shortfall. 

They also say class-size caps in the current contract have been an impediment to increased enrollment. In the 2020-21 school year, St. Paul Public Schools enrolled 35,000 students. District officials project that next year, the number will drop to 32,000. 

Minneapolis teachers have not struck since 1970, according to media reports. The district has seen a more dramatic drop in enrollment than St. Paul, and taken fewer steps to adjust. In 2016, it had nearly 35,500 students. This year, enrollment is hovering around 29,000. If Minneapolis’ 2,500 educators do walk out, some big questions will be put to the test.

A year ago, the district and the union began negotiating a contract to cover the 2021-23 school years, with any increases in compensation and benefits applying retroactively to June 2021, when the last contract lapsed. The union’s educational assistant chapter is also negotiating a new contract on the same timeline.

Academics & Free Speech

David Smith & Adam Kissel:

So how can elected officials intervene in higher education without compromising academic freedom? Individual academic freedom is an inviolable feature of institutions of higher education because their core purpose includes exposing students to a wide range of competing ideas. This is necessary to develop their critical-thinking skills so that they become citizens who can make up their own minds about disinformation and the truth. When the First Amendment and academic freedom protections for scholars at public universities conflict with the democratic principle of majority rule, free speech and academic freedom win.

Constraints on what a scholar can express are clearly off limits. Also off limits should be any restriction on the ability of scholars to raise external support for their academic endeavors. Provided that the university is satisfied that the external funding leaves the academic freedom of participating faculty uncompromised, external funding can enable minority viewpoints to be heard in environments with strong faculty bias against them.

Commentary on student mask views

Hannah Natanson:

“I see these people just not wearing a mask, or wearing one pulled down, like, under their chin,” said Swan, “and my brain just immediately goes, ‘That person does not share the same ideals as me. We won’t get along.’ ” She added: “They may not be a bad person. They may just be thinking the same things as their parents.”

Youngkin issued his mask-optional order, which aims to give Virginia parents choice over masking in both public and private schools, on his first day in office. A fierce fight ensued: Seventy of 131 Virginia school districts refused to comply and kept their mask requirements, according to a Washington Post analysis, and parents and school officials filed a flurry of lawsuits for and against the order. This week, the Virginia General Assembly narrowly passed — along largely partisan lines — a law that requires all schools to go mask-optional on March 1, ensuring every one of Virginia’s more than 1.8 million public and private schoolchildren will face masking decisions and tensions at school in days to come.

As the adults battle over the merits of masking, Virginia students have been forced to navigate the real-life fallout.

The Washington Post asked parents across the state to share how their children are feeling about school masking policies, garnering nearly 200 submissions from families living in at least 25 school districts.

Additional commentary.

The Index: A book Review

Jennifer Szalai

Dennis Duncan’s entertaining and informative “Index, A History of the” moves from the 13th-century origins of the form to the world of digital search engines.

Before reading “Index, A History of the,” an appealingly titled new book by Dennis Duncan, I had never thought of the index as much more than a tool — a handy list of subjects and proper names, typically at the end of a nonfiction book, guiding me to the page(s) where I might find the information I seek.

There are of course some indexes that make you want to linger; a reader of Martin Amis’s memoir, “Experience,” will find a strikingly long list of curious items nested under “dental problems” (“of animals,” “Bellow on,” “and dentifrice purchase,” etc., etc.). But, Duncan says, we usually turn to an index as a “convenience” and “timesaver.” It’s like a map. In fact, it is a map — an indicator of a spatial relationship. It points (like an index finger) to a place (a page number), showing you the way.

Commentary on Wisconsin K-12 Curriculum and Taxpayer Governance

David Blaska:

Critical race theory denialists trot out the same university professors who promote CRT to confirm that mom and dad are unwitting pawns of the Republican Borg (as the WI State Journal did.) It’s like asking Putin what day he plans to invade. CNN asked a Columbia University professor to put San Francisco voters under the microscope.

“The results in San Francisco may resist simple analysis,” the professor concludes, whose academic speciality is Barack Obama. The learned educator then lapses into simple analysis:

“In San Francisco, deep-pocketed, right-leaning donors shoveled money into the recall, while activists and media outlets began using language that lashed together the disparate dissatisfactions into a coherent message.”

What were the disparate dissatisfactions? (Surely the weaseliest of wordings!) Prof. Hemmer helps by listing them:

  1. Extended pandemic school closures
  2. a ham-handed effort to rename schools commemorating Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, among other figures, in the name of social justice
  3. an attempt to move away from testing and GPA requirements for admission into high-ranking public schools
  4. a growing achievement gap
  5. an enormous budget deficit and, in the case of one school board member,
  6. the use of a racial slur in an anti-Asian rant.

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?

“Competence limited”

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?

Blessed Sacrament sixth-grader Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya wins Madison Spelling Bee

Lucas Robinson:

After a nearly 30-minute back-and-forth with another finalist, Blessed Sacrament sixth-grader Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya walked away a champion at the Madison All-City Spelling Bee Saturday morning.

Aiden, 11, properly spelled “effete” and then “agate” after runner-up Vincent Bautista misspelled “effete” with an “a” at the beginning.

Vincent, a student at St. Maria Goretti School, went word-for-word with Aiden for about a half-hour in an impressive streak of spelling that included “coulrophobia,” “pelisse,” “teraphim” and “ibuprofen.”

“I didn’t really expect it, but I was hoping for it,” Aiden said after the competition.

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?

Parents are overcome by worry despite reassuring medical data that tell us children are very unlikely to be harmed by this virus

Martha Fulford, J. Edward Les and Pooya Kazemi

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 

Throughout North America, it is not uncommon to encounter parents who are absolutely terrified of their children contracting COVID. This is because many parents significantly overestimate the potential harms of COVID to their children.

These parents are overcome by worry despite massive amounts of reassuring medical data that tell us that children are very unlikely to be harmed by this virus.

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of biased and distorted media coverage — coverage that should be deemed misinformation, but which seems to get a free pass from “fact-checkers” and from many in the public.

We are not trying to draw moral or any other equivalencies to misinformation being spread by anti-vaxxers or COVID-deniers. We have many words of reproach for these people, too, but plenty has already been written about them.

Notes on the War on Parents

Glenn Reynolds:

We can learn a couple things from all this.

The first is the brittle, arrogant and defensive response of our ruling class to any kind of political opposition nowadays. What kind of mind turns parents complaining at a school-board meeting into some sort of “domestic terrorism” threat? (The same kind that turns peacefully protesting truckers into “insurrectionists,” I suppose.)

In what previous age of American history would secret targeting and federal investigations of people engaging in a bedrock institution of participatory democracy have been seen as appropriate? Who calls people racist for wanting their kids to learn?

In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.

Tenure at Chatham

Colleen Flaherty:

MacNeil, who chaired the campus committee that ultimately recommended readopting tenure, said not having tenure has impacted Chatham’s faculty diversification efforts, in particular. With diverse faculty candidates in high demand, he said, not having a tenure system puts Chatham at a disadvantage with respect to its peer institutions. Indeed, MacNeil said Chatham is the only university in the New American Colleges and Universities consortium, which it joined in 2020, without a tenure system.

Chatham president David Finegold, who supports the change, agreed with MacNeil, saying, “Across almost all of higher ed, every institution I know is trying to expand the diversity of their faculty. And Chatham is no exception in that. So when you have faculty candidates that have many options from other institutions, you want to give them every reason to choose you.”

Beyond recruitment, MacNeil said discussions with other faculty members revealed that senior professors felt more anxious about not having tenure than more junior ones because they craved more security from the institution around which they’d built their lives.

Commentary on the taxpayer supported Madison K-12 school climate

Nada Elmikashfi:

While all city employees at one time were required to live within the city limits, the residency requirement was eliminated for Madison Metro drivers in the 1980s and in subsequent years for other unionized employees as well. Arguments to keep the requirement were based in part on concerns over a dwindling middle class, while opponents have cited the high cost of living in Madison and the quality of suburban schools.

Dan Rolfs, a community development project manager for the city and a union representative for the Madison Professional and Supervisory Employee Association, told Brogan that members have had concerns about sending their kids to public schools in Madison and were drawn to the new high school facilities of Verona, DeForest and Sun Prairie.

It’s understandable. The resource-rich tech and science labs, professional looking athletic facilities, expansive aquatic centers, and unique greenhouses in these suburban schools would be a draw for any parent. Who doesn’t want the best education for their children? 

According to a 2021 report from the Madison school district, enrollment has been “decreasing slightly since the 2014-15 school year” and the district projects another decrease next school term. Enrollment for 4K-12 in 2021-22 was 25,936 students, down 482 students from 2020-21.

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?

The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

Matthew Yglesias:

People are often misinformed about things. Sometimes they obtain that bad information from false or misleading media coverage; sometimes that media coverage is deliberately false. And there’s a fine line between media coverage that seeks to frame issues appropriately and coverage that’s propagandistic. 

All of this is bad. 

Propagandistic media coverage is bad, spreading false information deliberately or carelessly is bad, misleading people is bad, and it’s unfortunate that voters (and, frankly, elite policymakers) often make important decisions operating under misconceptions. 

That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better — and it is very hard to think of any cure for misinformation that would not be worse than the disease.

Three graduate students file sexual harassment suit against prominent Harvard anthropology professor

Laura Krantz:

Three Harvard University graduate students sued the university on Tuesday, alleging it ignored nearly a decade of sexual harassment and retaliation by a prominent anthropology professor and permitted a system that protects powerful faculty — and the university’s reputation — at students’ expense.

The suit, filed in Massachusetts federal court, alleges that Harvard ignored numerous warning signs, enabling renowned professor John Comaroff to sexually harass one student and damage her career, as well as the careers of two classmates who spoke in her defense.

The case raises larger questions about the potential risks of academic hierarchies that are inherently imbalanced, and in which tenured faculty members hold enormous sway over the careers of graduate students they advise.“This is a case about power,” said Russell Kornblith, an attorney representing the three plaintiffs, Lilia Kilburn, Margaret Czerwienski, and Amulya Mandava. “It’s about the power that the university has to make things right, and it’s also about the power that the university gives graduate student advisers over their graduate students.”

Commentary on Wisconsin Governor Evers’ Curriculum Vetoes

Paul Finland:

On that Friday, Evers vetoed legislation that would have banned Wisconsin’s K-12 schools from teaching students and staff about systemic racism, part of the national Republican effort to prevent any discussion of racial history.

“I object to creating new censorship rules that restrict schools and educators from teaching honest, complete facts about important historical topics like the Civil War and civil rights,” wrote Evers, a former public teacher and state school superintendent.

“I trust parents, educators, and schools to work together to do what is best for our kids — work they have long been doing without political interference and micromanagement from politicians in Madison.”

Other education censorship bills that have not yet reached Evers’ desk — one aimed at public higher education, another at diversity training for state employees — have the same racist undertones as the K-12 measure.

Web3 and wikipedia

Casey Newton

Casey Newton: When did you first suspect that web3 might not, in fact, be going all that great?

Molly White: Towards the end of 2021 I started to see so much web3 hype, everywhere: on social media, in conversations with friends, in technical spaces, in the news. When I went to look up what “web3” even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant. This definitely set off the first alarm bells for me: it’s concerning to me when people are trying extremely hard to get people to buy in to some new idea but aren’t particularly willing (or even able) to describe what it is they’re doing. As I began to pay more attention to the space, I was seeing all of this hype for web3 with all these new projects, but so many of them were just absolutely terrible ideas when you got past the marketingspeak and veneer. Medical records on the blockchain! Fix publishing with NFTs! Build social networks on top of immutable databases! I started my Web3 is Going Great project after seeing a few particularly horrendous ideas, as well as after I began to notice just how frequently these hacks and scams were happening (with huge amounts of money involved).

Database of interesting graphs

House of Graphs:

Most graph theorists will agree that among the vast number of graphs that exist there are only a few that can be considered really interesting.

It is the aim of this House of Graphs project to find a workable definition of ‘interesting’ and provide a searchable database of graphs that conform to this definition. We also allow users to add additional graphs which they find interesting. In order to avoid abuse, only registered users can add new graphs.

How an Academic Urban Legend is Born

Roger Pielke, Jr.

McGreevy included in the body of the story a bit of a disclaimer: “The HSPC said, however, that it “cannot determine where transmission occurred”. In addition 20 per cent of all cases in the State result from community transmission where the source of the infection is not known.” Of the headline, McGreevy told me, “I didn’t write the headline. I don’t know who did. It would have gone through many iterations with sub-editors etc.”

From there, the statistic traveled around the world. On 5 May 2021 a prominent U.S. observer of public health promoted the statistic on Twitter (below), linking to the Irish Times article and elevating the source to an “analysis.” This Tweet was cited on 11 May 2021 by David Leonhardt of the New York Timeswho further elevated the stature of the statistic to being the result of a “study” with apparently more rigor than other such studies: “A study from Ireland, which seems to have been more precise about the definition of outdoors, put the share of such transmission at 0.1 percent.” Of course, there was no such study.

Curious taxpayer supported CDC school mask comments

Ann Althouse

It just doesn’t sound straightforward: “we have deferred our guidance to the local jurisdictions.” That’s a very strange way to put words together — “deferred our guidance.” Does she mean to say “we defer to the local jurisdictions”? “Defer” — when used to mean to submit out of deference — is an intransitive verb. The transitive verb “defer” means to put off to a later date, and they are not putting off their guidance to a later date.

I know that may sound pedantic, but I’m relaying what I researched and figured out after I had the instinctive sense — as a native speaker of English — that something was off.

Civics: Taxpayer Supported Government and the human rights blind spot

Izabella Kaminska:

Herein really lies the problem. Organisations that are connected to any form of civil disobedience, could in theory be deemed terrorist organisations fit for defunding.

Given the long history of civil disobedience being used in America to effect positive social change, whether for civil rights or environmental causes, this has major political — and potentially authoritarian empowering — side-effects.

The rule is also partial to immense political gaming.

Don’t like that the people are forging a powerful political campaign for x or y cause? Just infiltrate their movement with a few destabilizing agent provocateurs, turn it violent, and hey presto – the group gets classified as a terrorist organisation with all its political offshoots defunded. It can never rise as a legitimate political force.

“it was a for vote to put performance over performativeness”

Clara Jeffery:

But let’s review the array of irritants.

Remote learning: Against every other issue I’m about to name, some of which were on a slow boil before the pandemic, you need to understand that SF schools stayed closed until the fall of 2021, longer than most districts in America. Now: SF takes the pandemic damn seriously. Because of the AIDS crisis, because we have a truly multiracial city, because we have a lot of Asian American residents who mask up even in non-pandemic times (thanks to SARS, etc.), we took collective measures early and often to safeguard each other. And we did so across racial and class lines. So, it’s not just that the “schools were closed.” It’s that the board and the district didn’t do much planning back in the summer of 2020 to reopen them or distribute laptops or make substantive contingency plans, and they didn’t make much progress even a year into the pandemic. Parents started freaking out because there was seemingly little effort to even talk about scenario planning. Instead, in interminable Zoom meetings, the board focused on…

School names: The board pushed a risible process to rename 44 schools. Should some schools be renamed to strip enslavers and other terrible people from the walls where our kids are taught? Sure, most San Francisco voters are cool with that, and many are eager for that. But the process was a crowd-sourced embarrassment that placed Dianne Feinstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Paul Revere among the names to be stricken and got many basic facts and even full identities wrong. Nevertheless, the board stood defiant in its defense of this shambolic process, which basically made a mockery out of scholarship. Along the way, it also violated the open meetings law (this will become a theme), triggering a potential lawsuit (ditto).

The murals: For years, there’s been debate about murals in George Washington High School, some of which show Washington standing over Black and Native peoples who are being subjugated. Students protested that the murals were racist. At least at the onset of this debate, most students were probably unaware that the heretofore obscure WPA-era painter Victor Arnautoff, who depicted Washington overseeing these horrors, did so as a way to critique racism and colonialism—a very progressive take for the 1930s. Again, rather than use this as a teaching opportunity, maybe even something to build a curriculum around, the board voted to paint over the murals, then backtracked, then decided maybe they should be covered—at a cost of $815,000. This alienated art historians, the local NAACP, actor Danny Glover, and even Matt Gonzalez, the uber-progressive who ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003. “Don’t whitewash history,” he warned in an op-ed.

Lowell admissions: Lowell is one of the highest-rated public high schools in the country. Admission was determined by “merit,” i.e., GPA. Lowell was also overwhelmingly Asian American (the biggest group) and white. Many people inside and outside the Lowell community had for decades been advocating various ways to make the school more representative of Black and Brown students. This was always going to be a touchy subject because there’s a proud alumni base, and because some kids—particularly Asian American and/or immigrant kids—had been working their asses off for their whole lives to get in, and all that work was for naught when the board decided to assign spots by lottery. More broadly: Is SF school inequity best solved by rearranging one high school? Or would resources and time be better spent on intervention in elementary and middle schools? And does getting rid of “academic merit” admissions for Lowell mean that we should also get rid of audition-based admissions for the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts(a.k.a. SF’s “Fame” school), where Collins’ kids attend? Tl;dr: Reform was always going to be contentious and messy but needed to be public and transparent. Instead the board rammed through a change without allowing for public input, apparently violating state sunshine provisions and triggering more lawsuits.

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 York Times Censoring Wordle

Dalton Cooper:

Word puzzle game Wordle came out of nowhere, skyrocketing in popularity seemingly overnight and becoming a mainstream fad in the process. Its success drew the attention of The New York Times, the award-winning newspaper that’s been in circulation for over 150 years. The New York Times acquired Wordle for a seven-figure sum, and since then, there have been some subtle changes to the game.

Since New York Times‘ acquisition of Wordle, there have been tweaks to the game, not all of which have been popular. Some Wordle players have reported issues with their streaks being broken, and others have discovered that there are now less words that can be guessed than before. It seems that, in total, The New York Times has removed at least six words from Wordle‘s upcoming answers list, as well as 19 words from the game’s list of guesses.

Notes on the returns to Education

Bryan Caplan:

The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.

I took quality control very seriously.  About half a dozen friends gave up whole days of their lives to sit next to me while I gave them a guided tour of the reasoning behind my number-crunching.  Four years before the book’s publication, I publicly released the spreadsheets, and asked the world to “embarrass me now” by finding errors in my work.  If memory serves, one EconLog reader did find a minor mistake.  When the book finally came out, I published final versions of all the spreadsheets underlying the book’s return to education calculations.  A one-to-one correspondence between what’s in the book and what I shared with the world.  Full transparency.

Now guess what?  Since the 2018 publication of The Case Against Education, precisely zero people have emailed me about those spreadsheets.  The book enjoyed massive media attention.  My results were ultra-contrarian: my preferred estimate of the Social Return to Education is negative for almost every demographic.  I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending.  Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math.  Not publicly.  Not privately.  No one cared about my spreadsheets.

The upshot is that I probably could have saved a year of my life. I could have glossed over dozens of thorny issues. Taxes. Transfers. The effect of education on longevity. The effect of education on quality of life. The effect of education on crime. How unpleasant school is compared to work. Instead of reading multiple literatures to extract plausible parameters, I could have just eyeballed and stipulated for every tangential issue. Who would have called me on it?

Notes and commentary.

Madison school district hits ‘pause’ on plan to end standalone honors classes

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district is delaying its plan to eliminate standalone honors classes at its high schools.

The district hasn’t publicly announced the policy shift or if it’s considering scrapping the plan entirely. At its Dec. 6 meeting, school board members were told by Director of Advanced Learning Sharon Alexander that the district was on track to end standalone honors classes for 9th graders starting in the 2022 fall semester and 10th graders in 2023. Isthmus learned the plan was being delayed from a high school teacher in January. It took district spokesperson Tim LeMonds three weeks to confirm what administrators had already told teachers. 

“Standalone and earned honors will still be available for 9th and 10th graders next year,” wrote LeMonds in a Feb. 8 email to Isthmus. “We have put a pause on the removal of standalone honors to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” 

District administrators informed the Madison school board at an April 5, 2021, board meeting they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. These courses are for core subject areas like biology, English, and history. There are no exams or other requirements to get into these classes and any student is allowed to enroll. Instead of standalone honors courses, the district was going to focus exclusively on the “Earned Honors” program. Begun in 2017, this program allows students to receive honors designation in non-honors classes if they complete “predetermined criteria.” 

Administrators at the April 5 meeting enthusiastically endorsed eliminating standalone honors classes. 

“This is an anti-racist strategy. Earned honors supports our commitment to truly becoming an anti-racist institution. It allows us to set a bar of excellence for all of our students, for 100 percent of our students,” said Kaylee Jackson, executive director for curriculum. “[Standalone honors classes] are an exclusionary practice in which only some students within our high schools are receiving this rigorous instruction and capable of receiving honors credit.”

According to the latest data from the district, 41 percent of students in standalone honors classes are students of color. White students represent 43 percent of the total student population in the district, but make up 59 percent of standalone honors classes. 

Most school board members expressed support at the meeting for eliminating standalone honors, although no vote was taken to either move forward or reject the idea. Board member Ananda Mirilli said she was “100 percent behind” the plan, a sentiment echoed by board member Savion Castro.

Chris Rickert:

Under a plan proposed by administrators last year, beginning with the 2022-23 school year, ninth-graders would only be able to earn honors credit through the district’s “earned honors” program, which places all students in the same classes but allows those who want to earn honors credit to do so if they meet a set of criteria showing mastery of the content. The same would apply to 10th-graders beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

The shift away from stand-alone honors classes was pitched by administrators as a way to boost racial equity, as students of color historically have been less likely to take honors-only classes, although they are open to all students. Those racial disparities have been closing in recent years.

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?

The Seductions of Clarity

C. Thi Nguyen:

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early-before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categori-zations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies.

A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind

James O’Brien:

In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong. Perhaps the brain was less complicated than they thought, he said. Perhaps, he said, the brain worked on the same fundamental principles as a simple sand pile, in which avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall — a process he dubbed “self-organized criticality.”

As much as scientists in other fields adore outspoken, know-it-all physicists, Bak’s audacious idea — that the brain’s ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously from the disordered electrical activity of neurons — did not meet with immediate acceptance.

But over time, in fits and starts, Bak’s radical argument has grown into a legitimate scientific discipline. Now, about 150 scientists worldwide investigate so-called “critical” phenomena in the brain, the topic of at least three focused workshops in 2013 alone. Add the ongoing efforts to found a journal devoted to such studies, and you have all the hallmarks of a field moving from the fringes of disciplinary boundaries to the mainstream.

Competitive School Board Races (!) San Francisco & Mount Horeb Incumbents Ousted. Madison?

Jill Tucker & Anni Vainshtein:

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly supported the ouster of three school board members Tuesday in the city’s first recall election in nearly 40 years.

The landslide decision means board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga will officially be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments 10 days after the election is officially accepted by the Board of Supervisors.

The new board members are likely to take office in mid-March. The three were the only school board members who had served long enough to be eligible for a recall.

The recall divided the city for the past year, with a grassroots effort of frustrated parents and community members pushing for the trustees’ removal over the slow reopening of schools during the pandemic and the board’s focus on controversial issues like renaming 44 school sites and ending the merit-based admission system at Lowell High School.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she wasn’t surprised by the results.

“We faced the hardest time of our entire lives as parents and as students in public schools and this Board of Education focused on issues that weren’t about dealing with the immediate crisis of the day, and they didn’t show the leadership that that was necessary and that parents needed to hear, and that kids needed to hear,” said Ronen.

At least a hundred recall backers had gathered in the back room of Manny’s Cafe in the Mission District on Tuesday night.

Elizabeth Beyer:

In an election season heated by controversy surrounding COVID mitigation policy and K-12 curriculum, Dane County’s largest school board race appeared split, with voters pushing through a raft of newcomers while ousting one longtime incumbent and advancing another during Tuesday’s primary election.

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 RSS survey tests statistical skills of MPs

Royal statistical society

A survey by the RSS has found that just over half (52 per cent) of MPs were able to answer a simple probability question correctly, a likely improvement from when politicians were asked the same question ten years ago.

As politicians over the course of the pandemic have dealt with a barrage of statistics, the Society decided to put their statistical skills to the test. A total of 101 MPs were asked the question: if you toss a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads? Just over half, 52 per cent, of MPs gave the correct answer of 25 per cent.

This is a likely improvement from when the RSS polled MPs with the same question ten years ago, when 40 per cent of MPs gave the correct answer.

In this latest survey conducted by Savanta ComRes on behalf of the RSS in late 2021/early 2022, 32 per cent of MPs gave the incorrect answer of 50 per cent, compared to 45 per cent of MPs in the 2011 survey.

Of those asked in the most recent survey, there was a modest estimated difference between MPs from the two main parties. In the survey, 50 per cent of Conservative MPs gave the correct answer, while 53 per cent of Labour MPs were right.

Creator-driven, immersive online experiences are changing the way we learn.

John Keck:

Over the past 2 years, students around the world have been experiencing the absolute horror of online learning. Let’s paint the picture: one insanely boring teacher rambling on (and maybe sharing their screen to show off their rivetingPowerPoint) with any number of students sitting on mute desperately trying to stay awake. There’s little to no engagement, the teachers hate it, the students hate it, and all is wrong with the world (don’t even get me started on Blackboard or Canvas). Luckily, I only had to deal with this for 2 months as I “graduated” grad school on Zoom but more and more classes are being taught in a grid from hell. 

That’s not to say that all traditional online education is bad. Plenty of folks have figured out ways to take lectures and turn them into quality content. Harvard’s CS50 is the prime example of this, combining world-class curriculum with the production quality of a TV show. It’s not a drastic departure from what you’d get in the physical classroom. In fact, Professor Malan teaches the course live on campus as well as distributing it online. The key here is that Malan and his crew believe that the best way to get through to students is engaging (and dare I say fun) content.

Commentary on David Blaska’s 2022 Madison School Board campaign, no links, however

Scott Girard:

Blaska announced his candidacy in a blog post (link!! not present in the article) on Friday. The longtime critic of the Madison School Board wrote that “Madison voters unhappy with the direction of Madison’s public schools ought to be able to register a protest vote.”

He included a list of solutions that is “essentially the same platform we talked up in 2019 and more critical than ever.” The list includes returning school resource officers to the four comprehensive high schools and deploying some to middle schools, abolishing the Behavior Education Program, removing disruptive students and reducing central administration staff.

He also suggests the district “Quit teaching that Madison is institutionally racist, that some kids are implicitly biased, and that success depends on racial ‘privilege,’” and holding the line on property taxes.

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?

The ongoing, long term price of lockdown mandates

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?

Notes on “the Woke Indoctrination Machine”

Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically. 

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

Mothers speak out over sons locked in psychiatric units

Lucy Adams

Three mothers whose sons have been locked in hospital psychiatric units in Scotland for years have spoken to BBC Scotland because they are desperate to get them out.

The three young men did not break the law but have autism and learning disabilities.

The Scottish government said it was unacceptable to hold people with complex needs in hospital when they could be cared for in the community.
Jamie McMahon has autism and has been in locked hospital units for more than five years despite doctors saying it was not appropriate for him.
He was recorded as a delayed discharge in January 2017, meaning he should have been moved into the community, but no appropriate options were found.

Why won’t anyone teach me math?

Abigail Rabieh:

Last July, I decided I wanted to take math in college. My heart was set on it. Did I have any desire to major in math? Absolutely not. Did I need a math class to fulfill a requirement? Nope, I wanted to be a history major. But I enjoyed math in high school, and I wanted to continue to explore the field. I had previously taken classes up to linear algebra, so I selected MAT 202 from the Math Department website.

I took math because I desired to learn. One would think a student like me would thrive in this class, especially at a university that prides itself on enabling students “to pursue multiple interests rigorously and deeply,” as President Eisgruber says on the University website. Unfortunately, it is difficult for students pursuing humanities and social science degrees to explore classes within STEM departments due to the inaccessibility of introductory courses.

Though I passed MAT 202 class just fine, my experience in it was miserable. The way the course was run did not at all set up students to succeed — or even learn math. For example, though we were provided with practice problems to prepare for our exams, we were never given solutions. My class consistently begged my professor for these, yet all he could say was that not providing them was departmental policy, and it was out of his control. 

This begs the question: what interest does a department have in making it impossible to study? Study materials are given so that students can learn the course material and prepare adequately for the exam. Solution sets are part of this: to properly learn, one needs to be able to identify their mistakes and understand why they are wrong. By not supporting students who are making an effort to study, it becomes both extremely difficult to learn material, and demoralizing to even try. This struggle was reflected in our exam averages, which were, respectively, in the 50s, the 60s, and the 30s.

Growing (science) competition means U.S. must decide where to excel, says National Science Board’s Julia Phillips

Jeffrey Mervis:

A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds.

That loss of hegemony raises an important question for U.S. policymakers and the country’s research community, according to NSF’s oversight body, the National Science Board (NSB). “Since across-the-board leadership in [science and engineering] is no longer a possibility, what then should our goals be?” NSB asks in a policy brief that accompanies this year’s Science and Engineering Indicatorsnone, NSF’s biennial assessment of global research, which was released this week. (NSF has converted a single gargantuan volume into nine thematic reports, summarized in The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022.)

NSB’s white paper hints at an answer by highlighting several factors it considers essential for maintaining a healthy U.S. research environment. The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices.

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?

Civics: I turned down $1 million severance in exchange for my voice.

Jennifer Sey:

When I traveled to Moscow in 1986, I brought 10 pairs of Levi’s 501s in my bag. I was a 17-year-old gymnast, the reigning national champion, and I was going to the Soviet Union to compete in the Goodwill Games, a rogue Olympics-level competition orchestrated by CNN founder Ted Turner while the Soviet Union and the United States were boycotting each other. 

The jeans were for bartering lycra: the Russians’ leotards represented tautness, prestige, discipline. But they clamored for my denim and all that it represented: American ruggedness, freedom, individualism. 

I loved wearing Levi’s; I’d worn them as long as I could remember. But if you had told me back then that I’d one day become the president of the brand, I would’ve never believed you. If you told me that after achieving all that, after spending almost my entire career at one company, that I would resign from it, I’d think you were really crazy. 

Today, I’m doing just that. Why? Because, after all these years, the company I love has lost sight of the values that made people everywhere—including those gymnasts in the former Soviet Union—want to wear Levi’s.

My tenure at Levi’s began as an assistant marketing manager in 1999, a few months after my thirtieth birthday. As the years passed, I saw the company through every trend. I was the marketing director for the U.S. by the time skinny jeans had become the rage. I was the chief marketing officer when high-waists came into vogue. I eventually became the global brand president in 2020—the first woman to hold this post. (And somehow low-rise is back.)

Over my two decades at Levi’s, I got married. I had two kids. I got divorced. I had two more kids. I got married again. The company has been the most consistent thing in my life. And, until recently, I have always felt encouraged to bring my full self to work—including my political advocacy. 

That advocacy has always focused on kids.

In 2008, when I was a vice president of marketing, I published a memoir about my time as an elite gymnast that focused on the dark side of the sport, specifically the degradation of children. The gymnastics community threatened me with legal action and violence. Former competitors, teammates, and coaches dismissed my story as that of a bitter loser just trying to make a buck. They called me a grifter and a liar. But Levi’s stood by me. More than that: they embraced me as a hero.

Flyer depicting two Holmen School Board candidates as racist called out by all running

Rick Solem

The trickle down of partisan politics into local elections has reached the school board races.

Part of a conversation Friday on La Crosse Talk PM asked UW-L political science professor, Dr. Anthony Chergosky, his thoughts on how that partisanship is contaminating what are supposed to be nonpartisan races.

Well, 24 hours later, the school board race in Holmen will now have to endure through an ugly incident.

Four people are running for two seats on the Holmen School Board:

Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to stay afloat. Where do they go from here?

Leah Asmelash:

A leading journal of art and culture, The Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers — it created a home for off-beat, quirky writing. When the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada bought the magazine, observers spoke of Las Vegas as a potential new hub for literary arts

Then, in October of last year, the college announced it was shutting the magazine down in early 2022, citing the “financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.” In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts called print publications like The Believer “a financially challenging endeavor.”

The news came months after an incident where the editor in chief exposed himself during a video call with staff and subsequently resigned. Staffers’ complaints about him were also detailed in a Los Angeles Timesreport.

Still, the announcement caused ripples throughout the literary world — Jamison, known for her book of essays, “The Empathy Exams,” tweeted that she was “heartbroken” over the news when it was announced. 

The Believer’s shuttering isn’t isolated. Across the country, universities are slowly, quietly, cutting funding and shutting their literary publications down. Even magazines not connected to universities are closing their doors or changing publication strategies — a trend made worse by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

For a long time, I have been totally mystified by the amount of human capital that is flushed down the toilet by graduate schools.

Ben Kuhn:

Yeah,” he replied morosely, “empathy is really hot right now.”

(If you’re still not convinced, the way you can really tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.)

I’ve been low-key worried about this for a while, but it boiled over recently when Eve offhandedly mentioned a department survey that showed over half of her classmates struggling with depression or anxiety.2

Over half! These are some of the smartest people in their field, who I’m confident would thrive in any normally-supportive (or supportive-at-all) work environment. Instead, they’re riddled with anxiety and depression because they’ve been convinced to tie up their entire identity in being one of the lucky 10%3 that lands a tenure-track research job, then hung out to dry by the gatekeepers they probably thought would help them.

How the hell do people think this is reasonable?

SAT Changes Will Make Exam Shorter, Simpler and Digital

Douglas Belkin:

The digital test will continue to be scored on the 1600-point scale. Students will be able to take the digital exam on their own tablet or laptop or on a device provided to them. The College Board has been hit with security breaches in the Middle East and Asia and said the digital platform will make the test more secure. The new format enables each student to have a unique test form, making it “practically impossible to share answers,” according to the College Board.

Text is not the enemy: How illiterates’ use their mobile phones

Hendrik Knoche & Jeffrey Huang:

Despite 800 million illiterate people worldwide little research has aimed at understanding how they use and appropriate mobile phones. We interviewed illiterate immigrants living in Switzerland to inform the design of phones and applications for illiterate users. We report on their use, coping strategies, and appropriation of mobile devices and other media to manage their lives. We found that text represented a valuable component for managing contacts in current smart phones. We provide design recommendations for mobile phone interfaces for illiterate and semi-literate users.

Open Math Textbook Initiative

American Institute of Mathematics:

To gain our seal of approval an open source mathematics textbook must be able to serve as the primary text in a mainstream mathematics course at the undergraduate level in U.S. colleges and universities. That means that we are not evaluating instructional modules, Java applets, supplementary lecture notes, or other materials that are designed for limited use within a course. Since the minimum length of a traditional course is 10 weeks with 30 hours of class instruction, the books we evaluate must have enough material for that, and most will have more since most college courses are 14 or 15 weeks in length with at least 40 hours of class time.

We are looking for books that we can recommend for consideration to any of our colleagues, books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. Books must be mathematically sound and written in standard English with evidence that they have been proofread and edited. They need not have color, flashy graphics, or ancillary materials. They must have exercises, and though it would be desirable to have short answers to many of the problems, it is not necessary for approval. It would also be desirable to have more complete solutions available—at least to an instructor.

Furthermore, we expect books of the quality we seek to be class-tested. They should have been used (and be in current use) by faculty other than the author. We are certainly interested in fostering the writing of open source books, and so we may encourage people to try out a book that looks promising, but we would not label such a book as having our full recommendation.

Mandatory Retirement and Age, Race, and Gender Diversity of University Faculties

Daniel E Ho, Oluchi Mbonu, Anne McDonough

While many have documented the changing demographics of universities, understanding the effects of prohibiting mandatory retirement (“uncapping”) has proved challenging. We digitize detailed directories of all American law school faculty from 1971–2017 and show that uncapping in 1994 had dramatic effects. From 1971 to 1993, the percent of faculty above 70—when mandatory retirement would typically have been triggered—remained stable at 1%, but starting in 1994, that proportion increased to 14%. We use a permutation test of moving cohorts to show that these increases are attributable to uncapping. Roughly 39% of faculty members would counterfactually have been subject to mandatory retirement. Effects were less pronounced at public schools, which were more likely to have defined benefits retirement plans. Second, we show that schools with the highest proportion of faculty over 70, and thus most impacted by uncapping, also exhibit the slowest integration of female and minority faculty members. Our study highlights crosscutting effects of civil rights laws: preventing age discrimination can have collateral effects on racial and gender integration.

Commentary on Media Veracity

James Freeman:

his was too much even for NPR’s Public Editor Kelly McBride, ostensibly a sort of ombudsman who is not exactly known for blowing the whistle on left-wing bias. Readers will recall Ms. McBride as a willing participant in the disgraceful media blackout of the New York Post’s accurate reporting about Biden family business prior to the 2020 election.

Now Ms. McBride acknowledges that the Totenberg report needs a “clarification.” On Thursday Ms. McBride assessed the Totenberg claims about the Supreme Court:

2022 Write in candidate for the taxpayer supported Madison School Board

David Blaska

David Blaska is running for Madison school board after all. No, his name won’t be on the ballot because he is a write-in for Seat #4. That’s the one occupied by school board president Ali Muldrow.

We were opponents three years ago and Ali (truly a lovely young lady in many ways) beat me handily. Likely will again, since Blaska is a write in this time and is not spending $20,000 like last time. But the only race for the three seats open this April 5 is over at Seat 3between Laura Simkin and a transgendered performance artist who claims to be a blind, black albino with pronouns.

Madison voters unhappy with the direction of Madison’s public schools ought to be able to register a protest vote. Three years ago the Wisconsin State Journal would not endorse Blaska or Muldrow:

Blaska is right that a police officer should stay in each main high school to promote safety, and that disruptive students should be accountable for their actions. But he goes out of his way to provoke Madison liberals and score political points, while offering few solutions.

Few solutions? Still find that inexplicable. Identify, if you can, the solutions the current school board offers or implemented. The school board voted unanimously to defund school resource police officers and is only just now thinking about convening a committee to study (wait for it) … school safety. Meanwhile, riots at East high school, beatings at La Follette, the whacking at West, and teenagers crashing stolen cars and running through back yards.

David Blaska’s solutions …

Are guaranteed to provoke Madison liberals progressives.  Maybe they need a good provoking! It’s essentially the same platform we talked up in 2019 and more critical than ever:

•  Return school resource police officers to the four high schools and deploy some to the middle schools.

•  Abolish Jennifer Cheatham’s dysfunctional Behavior Education Program.

•  Put teachers back in control of their classroom and principals back in charge of their schools.

•  Remove disruptive students.

•  Boil down the 111-page District Safety Plan to the essentials, beginning with: “Call 9-1-1 First, then Contact Parents.”

•  Quit teaching that Madison is institutionally racist, that some kids are implicitly biased, and that success depends on racial “privilege.”

•   Keep schools open.

•  Reduce central administration staff.

•  Hold the line on taxes. Property taxes up 8.9% in one year.

•  Get federal and state governments to abjure race statistics, including the U.S. Census.

•  Seek changes in the state criminal code to make parents criminally liable for the crimes of their minor children.

• Apologize to “Mr. Rob,” the positive behavior coach forced out at Whitehorse middle school for trying to remove a disruptive student who beat him about the face.

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?

Commentary on Wisconsin’s taxpayer supported K-12 Governance model and parents

Will Flanders & Libby Sobic:

Presumably, the Representative was specifically responding to testimony from parents from around Wisconsin in support of AB 963. In an era where parents who attend school board meetings are called potential terrorists by the National Association of School Boards and subjected to monitoring by the federal government, it is more important than ever to enshrine in law the rights that parents have over their children’s education. The bill, supported by WILL, would ensure some very basic parental rights are protected: the right to be notified about violence in schools, the right to review curriculum, and the right to opt their child out of controversial topics are among them. Most of these rights are things that a previous generation never thought would need to be guaranteed: they are common sense. Yet increasingly ‘woke’ education establishment has placed them under threat. The legislature heard from more than 100 parents (in person or via written testimony) angry at this overreach by local schools, and demanding change. According to Representative Snodgrass, though, their only option would be to switch to a different educational model.

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?

Commentary on Parents and Taxpayer supported k-12 Wisconsin schools

DPI Superintendent Jill Underly:

Dear Wisconsin Families and Educators,

I am writing this letter to you as a fellow parent and a former teacher.

Like you, I know what it means to be involved with my children’s education, and I love it. But I look at the way politicians talk about parental involvement, and I don’t recognize it. Family engagement isn’t about yelling at school staff or suing your school board if they don’t do exactly as you demand. It’s also not asking caregivers to homeschool or pay for private tuition if they feel unheard or unseen. Family engagement is about having a real conversation about – and with – our children. Like you, I build relationships with my children’s teachers, I reach out when I need to, and they know they can call if they need to. As a parent, I love my children’s school, and I see the ways our district works to involve all families and the entire community, and how the entire community supports our school. It’s an exchange, because what matters most to all of us is what we all have in common: our children.

Of course, this isn’t what politicians mean when they talk about protecting parental rights when it comes to children’s education. Rather, they’re talking about micromanaging curriculum and preying on our parental emotions during a traumatic time, all with the ulterior motive of placing suspicion on educators by weaponizing lessons about difficult topics, or by placing blame on schools for a pandemic they did not cause but are nonetheless supporting our children through.

As to my fellow educators, you and I all know that this isn’t the first time that politicians in this state have gone after teachers. And as a former civics teacher, I know that teaching the history of this nation cannot – and should not – be done without tackling difficult topics. Families know this and support these opportunities for our schools to engage our children to become critical thinkers and critical consumers of information. We want our students to grow up and be active participants in democracy, and that means they need to know how to examine their past, think critically about their present, and make informed decisions about their future. This critical lens is what makes our democracy stronger, and the only way for our children to engage is through our public schools where this freedom to think critically is encouraged and the skill of thinking critically is actively taught. Teaching is our expertise, and we are happy to learn from parents about your children, just as we hope families are excited to learn the answer to, “What did you do in school today, honey?” when your learner walks through the door.

I’m tired. Like you, I’m tired of the pandemic. I’m getting tired of this winter. And I’m really, really tired of politicians pitting parents against teachers when our children are the ones who get hurt in the end. Because they’re the ones who matter most in this conversation and who matter most for the future of our state. And that conversation – how to best meet the needs of our children and students – is one I’m excited to continue having as a parent and an educator, and to lead as your Wisconsin State Superintendent.

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?

The dangers of high status, low wage jobs

MD Makowsky:

There are many reasons why an industry can become concentrated within a narrow geographic region. Externally generated increasing returns to scale i.e. a firm becomes more productive simply by being near other firms producing the same thing, is an observation that goes all the way back to Alfred Marshall. That’s the story of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, not to mention a million other micro-industries. The story of journalism, however, is different, because it is not the capital or labor market opportunities, but specifically the labor itself that is concentrated in a narrow location. The “Writer living in Brooklyn” Twitter/LinkedIn/Muckrack bio is a cliche at this point for a reason. But why are they all in Brooklyn? And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class who paid full-freight for an English-adjacent degree from an expensive liberal arts college? 

Wages in journalism have gone to hell while, at the same time, there has emerged an extreme upper tail whose public standing achieved escape velocity, allowing them to go independent via Substack and earn vastly higher incomes. These diverging trends have their origin in the same phenomenon: the skyrocketing potential of any one journalist to reach the masses. The power law scale of social networks means every article, post, or tweet has a chance of going viral, and with it the chance to reach tens of millions of eyeballs. Put another way, its gotten easier to reach people, but harder to get paid to reach people. 

There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are. It is also a status that disproportionately recognizes itself. When prominent writers hang out with each other, recognizing the ideas that each carries and communicates to large numbers of people, they reinforce the status that comes with that reach. I’m getting out over my psychological skis a bit here, but I’m willing to wager it feels good, in a way not dissimilar to my research being recognized by my academic peers. With less risk to going beyond my own expertise, I’m willing to argue that the reach, imprint, pageviews, and followers; the eyeballs that your work generates, is the prinicipal source of status within the modern journalist community

More pandemic restrictions damaged democratic freedoms in 2021

The Economist:

Global Democracy continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries on the basis of five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—finds that more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule while just 6.4% enjoy a full democracy. The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.

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?

Civics: A New Dawn for the Working Class?

Joel Kotkin:

The labouring masses are restless, as evidenced by the Canadian trucker strike, union drives in Amazon warehouses in the US and in demonstrations throughout the developing world. More revealing still may be the turmoil in the labour markets, where workers are changing jobs, creating their own and, overall, refusing to return to the structures of the pre-pandemic order.

Once working-class protests were often organised by leftists or even Communists, but many of today’s working-class radical movements take on a different, more populist and distinctly anti-statist character. One can question the positions adopted by protesters, particularly on vaccines, but also recognise that the new wave of working-class unrest, whether in Canada or among the gilets jaunes in France, reflects a deep-seated frustration with diktats issued from above by an increasingly authoritarian state.

Generally, these movements are not embraced but are largely met with disdain and even horror by gentry progressives and their media allies. As Edwin Apontenotes on the Bellows, a widely read Marxist blog, this ‘betrays the left’s allergy to the varied social character of the working class as it actually exists in 2022’.

These protests in the US, Australia and Europe are not led by Marxist intellectuals in quest of a new world order, but by those seeking to restore an increasingly threatened world, where individual workers still possess some power and small independent artisans or merchants can support a middle-class lifestyle. Given the persistent worker shortages and supply-chain issues, workers’ power to disrupt the economy and to push back is greater than at any time in the past half century. 

This new leverage is rooted in demographic trends. The US’s working population – people aged between 16 and 64 – grew by more than 20 per cent in the 1980s. In the past decade, it has grown by less than five per cent. To make matters worse, an estimated one-third of American working-age males are not in the labour force, suffering from high rates of incarceration, and from drug, alcohol and other health issues.

Moms in Middle Age: Rarely Alone, Often Online and Increasingly Lonely

Julie Jargon:

The fact that she home-schools her kids—because her husband traveled frequently when they were young—has made it tougher for her to find friends with similar interests and stances, she said. She doesn’t feel she fits in with the other home-schooling mothers in her area, because she said she feels their views are more conservative than hers.

“It feels strange to think about feeling lonely because I’m never alone,” she said. “There’s always someone around, but I feel like I’m missing that connection with moms who are going through similar things.”

Ms. Reinhardt and a close friend, who has a 6-year-old and another child about to turn 3, watched the TV show “This is Us” together before the pandemic, but as work and life became busier for both, they stopped, figuring they would pick up again later. They haven’t yet.

Maskless students

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?

Commentary on The Education Establishment and Tuesday’s Wisconsin Primary Election

Heather Smith:

School board primary elections are next week, and there is much consternation in the education establishment about the civic engagement of parents who are stepping up to take a more active role in the education of their children.

The pandemic brought to light many things about our school system that served as an education to parents across the state.  To be sure some of those things were positive – many parents developed respect and appreciation for teachers who rose to the unprecedented challenges presented by upending the normal structure of classroom learning.

But there were many troubling discoveries. While the American Society of Pediatrics was strongly recommending in-person learning as vital to education as well as student mental, physical, and emotional health, parents saw their schools rejecting these experts’ advice.

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?

Civics: Newly Declassified Documents Reveal Previously Secret CIA Bulk Collection, Problems With CIA Handling of Americans’ Information

Senator Ron Wyden:

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for new transparency about bulk surveillance conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, following the release of documents that revealed a secret bulk collection program and problems with how the agency searches and handles Americans’ information.

Wyden and Heinrich requested the declassification of a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on a CIA bulk collection program, in a letter sent April 13, 2021. The letter, which was declassified and made public today reveals that “the CIA has secretly conducted its own bulk program,” authorized under Executive Order 12333, rather than the laws passed by Congress.

The letter notes that the program was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.” 

“FISA gets all the attention because of the periodic congressional reauthorizations and the release of DOJ, ODNI and FISA Court documents,” said Senators Wyden and Heinrich in response to the newly declassified documents.  “But what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law.  In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

Wyden and Heinrich called for more transparency from the CIA, including what kind of records were collected and the legal framework for the collection. The PCLOB report noted problems with CIA’s handling and searching of Americans’ information under the program.

Boys and mental health commentary

Andrew Yang:

The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.

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?

Life, School, and the 80:20 Rule

xsrus.com

Most people sense that school today is poor preparation for the world of work. I think there is a fundamental reason why: linearity.

School is a linear system. By that, I mean the material in classes is presented sequentially, in more or less equally-sized chunks. My school called these chunks “units”. In maths, the functions unit came before the differentiation unit, and so on. At the end of a unit there was always a test. Supposedly, the purpose of the test was assessment: tracking students’ progress. But a secondary outcome was standardising the speed of learning. Regardless of whether students forged ahead with the material or hung behind, they all had to take the same test at the same time. The structure of school calcifies the pace of learning, forcing students to march to the regular ring of the bell.

School rewards effort linearly as well. For example, when required to write essays, my school provided us with a mark scheme: a set of criteria which specified what “competencies” we had to demonstrate in order to achieve a certain grade. If you used 10% more “advanced vocabulary words” you’d get into the next grade band. If you only used one or two good transitions you’d fall into a lower grade band. The mark scheme suggested small improvements to make to our writing, which gave small, predictable increases in our grades.