David Blaska:

Look sharp, readers! Make sure car doors are locked and crash air bags working! Tavion J. Flowers, the gift that keeps on taking, is back on the mean streets of Madison! Sprung from the Dane County Jail Monday 02-07-22 for the paltry price of $400.  A week after the 18-year-old’s most recent excellent adventure.

Mr. Flowers was one of the four teenagers — two as young as age 15 — who crashed a stolen car on Mineral Point Road Tuesday 02-01-22 during school hours. Seeing the fleeing boys in her back yard, a likely Mayor Satya-voter invited them in for milk and cookies. Was about to give the boys a lift, seeing that they wrecked their stolen car. Cops got there first. One of the lads was found to possess more sets of car keys than the plaid jacket at the used car lot. At least a couple of products of our public schools were locked and loaded. Madison police say the 16-year old had been adjudicated before. Police identified the oldest of the quartet as our Tavion Flowers.

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?

Kyle Koenen & Lucas Vebber

Recently, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty released Wisconsin Regulation in Focus, a reporti highlighting the scope of Wisconsin’s regulatory state. That report helps call attention to the magnitude of Wisconsin’s regulations, especially when compared with our neighboring states. It also suggests some simple reforms which could be helpful to rein in our ever-growing regulatory state.
This follow up report adds some detail to those reforms while also suggesting some additional ones which could be implemented in order to ensure Wisconsin’s regulatory environment is as efficient and transparent as possible. As discussed herein, we suggest: (1) automatically sunsetting regulations over time; (2) independent reporting on regulations before they’re promulgated; (3) ensuring all new regulations are net-zero in cost by requiring cost savings whenever new costs are imposed; (4) allowing only one rule per scope statement to be promulgated; (5) reforms to the emergency rulemaking process; and (6) changes to public oversight of regulations, making it easier for private individuals to hold government accountable. The following sections of the report describe each of these proposals in greater detail.

Tax Prof:

Jarrett paid income tax for 2019 on new tokens he created through staking. Contending that property that is created—like bread baked by a baker or a novel written by an author—is only taxed when it is sold, Jarrett filed for a refund in August 2020. The IRS ignored Jarrett’s refund claim, forcing him to pursue the matter in federal court. Today, court filings reveal that the government has offered to grant this refund, an early sign suggesting that the IRS will not tax property created through staking until it is sold.

Wisconsin state representative just deleted this tweet. pic.twitter.com/Mj8pEs9afe

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) February 10, 2022

I deleted my Tweet since it was lacking in nuance and easily misinterpreted. I wouldn't want anyone to think that parents do not have a role in their child's public education-I sure did. I encourage all parents to engage in voting for school board, join PTO and meet with teachers

— Rep. Lee Snodgrass (@RepSnodgrass) February 10, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Antonis Adam and Sofia Tsarsitalidou

We use Benford’s law of first digits to determine whether there is evidence of data misreporting in the total COVID19 reported cases across countries. We try to model the differences in the Mean Absolute Deviation of actual data from those predicted by Benford’s law to indicate the factors that lead to data misreporting using regression analysis. Using the Instrumental Variable model ofLewbel (2012) and Settler Mortality as an external instrument for democracy, we show that autocratic countries are more likely to misreport the COVID19 cases.

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?

THURSDAY: Assembly Committee on Education will be hearing testimony on a Parent Bill of Rights. pic.twitter.com/2zPwBJmbwu

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) February 9, 2022

Notes:

Parent Bill of Rights: In recent years, WILL has represented several public-school parents after their local public schools established policies and procedures that undermined the parent’s rights to make decisions about their child’s education, healthcare and overall welfare. AB 963 is a response to this common experience for Wisconsin’s public-school parents.

• Right to review educational materials and access to learning materials: This legislation empowers parents to have access to learning materials used in the education of their child. This is vital as parents continue to engage with their child’s teachers and school administrators.

• Right to determine the names and pronouns used for the child while at school: WILL has two active lawsuits, representing public-school parents, against the Madison Metropolitan School District and Kettle Moraine School District regarding the districts’ policy on gender pronouns and student nicknames. The legislation ensures that parents are not in the dark about serious and important medical decisions regarding their child.

• Right to opt out and be notified about educational topics: This legislation provides parents with options to decide their own child’s educational experience and learning materials based on whether the material violates the parent’s religious or personal convictions.

• Right to be notified about surveys to students: Federal law protects students from being required to participate in any sort of “survey, analysis, or evaluation” that divulges information concerning, among other things, political affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent; legally recognized privileged relationships, such as that between a physician and a patient; and religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or student’s parent.”

• Right to be notified about student safety and incidents of violence: The legislation requires a school to notify parents about security updates, disciplinary actions taken against their child and if crimes or acts of violence occur on school campus.

• Establishes a legal right to direct the education of their child: This legislation creates a legal standard for state infringement on fundamental rights of parents and guardians through specific items enumerated in the bill. It also gives parents and guardians a way to hold the district accountable for their actions by suing the district who fails to comply with this bill.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Blaska:

Spot quiz: What word will not be spoken by any of Madison’s candidates for school board? Time’s up! Groucho Marx’s secret word is “discipline.” Discipline is defined as “training to act in accordance with rules; activity, exercise or a regimen that develops or improves a skill.”

Discipline is the sine qua non (more Latin) of education. Mathematics, language, music, athletics — they’re all disciplines. All have rules that require mastery. All require effort — showing up, paying attention, listening to the one who teaches, doing the work.

Here’s the math: Discipline = Education = Success — never more so in our knowledge-based economy. If Madison’s growing cadre of car thieves has one thing in common, it is they are functionally illiterate. Doing crime is the surest way to fail, but Madison’s Woke progressives would rather play identity politics and guilt-trip history than demand performance.

Which is why the Werkes reminds parents that you do have a choice — if not at the ballot box, you can vote with your feet. The Wisconsin School Choice program (as opposed to the Milwaukee and Racine versions) is open for business until April 21 for enrollment next school year. We count 12 eligible non-public schools here in Dane and Columbia counties. Your child may qualify based on family income. Apply here.

If your family does not qualify, consider a more successful public school. Open Enrollment continues until 4:00 pm April 29.

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?

Emily Hamer:

Madison police were called to respond to a lunchtime fight between East High School students Wednesday off campus, but students began to dissipate just before officers arrived, according to the school’s interim principal.

While only a few students were involved in the physical altercation near the parking lot of Milio’s Sandwiches, 2202 E. Johnson St., roughly 30 students were “actively” watching, East High School interim Principal Mikki Smith said in an email to parents.

“It is critical for students to understand how, being a bystander or goading on participants, is unsafe, unhelpful and can cause the situation to become more volatile,” Smith said

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?

Richard Hanania:

Having mentioned the concept a few times, many have been encouraging me to write a Substack on the feminization of political life and its connection to free speech issues. Noah Carl beat me to it, and the idea has also been picked up by no less an authority than Tom Edsall at the New York Times. I’ve already written about the overrepresentation of women in HR. We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top. 

What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving “young people,” “college students,” and “liberals” are often gendered issues. 

This doesn’t always show up in the data, and many may not want to discuss anything controversial without having numbers they can refer to, lest they be accused of everything they say being a figment of their sexist imagination. Nonetheless, I think that anyone who has spent time paying attention to politics, journalism, or academia, or wherever people debate ideas, will understand what I’m talking about.

NYT:

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who has imposed some of the nation’s most stringent pandemic-related mandates, will no longer require students and school employees to wear masks, signaling a deliberate shift toward treating the coronavirus as a part of daily life.

Mr. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said on Sunday that he would officially announce the elimination of the mandate on Monday afternoon. The new policy will take effect the second week of March, two years after New York and New Jersey became early epicenters of a virus that has since mutated and resurged, killing more than 900,000 peoplenationwide.

The debate over mask wearing in schools has proved one of the most divisive issues in the pandemic, embroiling parents, school boards, teachers and elected officials in caustic clashes over academic loss, protecting public health and individual choice.

Mr. Murphy’s move follows a decision last month by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to rescind his state’s school mask mandate. The Democratic governors of New York and Connecticut also said last week that they were re-evaluating school mask mandates that are soon set to expire.

An average of 78 New Jersey residents died each day from Covid-19 in the last week, contributing to a daily nationwide death toll of 2,600, a per capita rate that far exceeds those of other wealthy nations.

Samuel Benson:

A former law clerk for a potential Supreme Court nominee embarked on a Wikipedia editing spree over the past week, bolstering the page of his former boss while altering the pages of her competitors in an apparent attempt to invite liberal skepticism, according to a statement from his fellow clerks.

After POLITICO began inquiring about the changes on Friday, a group of former law clerks for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson identified the anonymous editor as Matteo Godi, another former Jackson clerk. Godi did not respond to multiple emailed requests or a phone call.

Jonathan Clark:

Such is the case with Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. Esquire recently published an extended interview with McGurl that praised his “lucid and well-argued prose.” The Los Angeles Review of Books referred to his “intellectual fireworks” and “comic bravura.” This praise can only plausibly apply to McGurl’s reputation and professional status as the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford and author of The Program Era, winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. It cannot refer to the text of Everything and Less, a lazy, self-satisfied, and infuriating book, the publication of which is unintentionally revealing of the status games that dominate American literary culture.

Amazon has changed the way books are marketed and sold, capturing enormous market share in the process. It also has growing ambitions as a trade publisher, including, through its Amazon Crossing subsidiary, a large and somewhat quixotic bet that it can grow the market for literature in translation. A book by an award-winning critic like McGurl about the company’s impact ought to be an enticing prospect. One can imagine the following sequence: a short, breezy book proposal, comprised of some familiar critical idioms (“the commodification of experience,” “materialist historiography”) and a

By Lisa Lerer, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Astead W. Herndon

It was Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey who began the effort last fall, weeks after he was stunned by the energy of right-wing voters in his blue state, who nearly ousted him from office in what was widely expected to be an easy re-election campaign. Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphy’s advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.

Republicans excoriated Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles after they were photographed without masks at an N.F.L. playoff game on Jan. 30. (Mr. Garcetti said he held his breath during the photo, creating a “zero percent chance of infection.”)

On Monday, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, called Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan “another Democrat hypocrite” after Ms. Slotkin posted a photo of herself unmasked at an indoor campaign event.

And over the weekend, Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat running for governor, deleted a photograph she had tweeted that showed her smiling, mask-free, in front of a classroom full of children wearing masks at a Georgia school.

“This is the Georgia Stacey Abrams wants,” warned a digital ad with which the campaign of former Senator David Perdue, a Republican running for governor, sought to capitalize on the misstep. “Unmask our kids.”

Tuesday night, Ms. Abrams said she had erred by taking the photograph. “Protocols matter,” she said on CNN. “And protecting our kids is the most important thing. And anything that can be perceived as undermining that is a mistake, and I apologize.”

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?

Peter Guest

Now, documents viewed by Rest of Worldshed light on the reputation management industry, revealing how Eliminalia and companies like it may use spurious copyright claims and fake legal notices to remove and obscure articles linking clients to allegations of tax avoidance, corruption, and drug trafficking. The Elephant case may be one of thousands just like it. 

Metadata, filenames and the inclusion of internal company information, including contact details and references to company policies, suggest the documents originated from within Eliminalia. Alongside names referred to as clients, the documents include URLs that were to be removed or de-indexed on their behalf. Rest of World spoke to several people and media organizations who ran websites listed in the documents and confirmed that they had been approached by people linked to, or directly employed by, Eliminalia. 

Among the thousands of names listed as clients in the documents are the former foreign minister of the Dominican Republic, an individual indicted in Argentina for his role in a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme, and people accused of corruption worldwide, all apparently looking to erase information about themselves from the internet. There are 17,000 URLs that were apparently targeted on clients’ behalf between 2015 and 2019. In at least one case, it appears that Eliminalia may have been hired by a third party reputation managment firm on behalf of a client. It is unclear whether the list represents the entirety of the company’s clients, but it includes individuals and companies from Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and shows the extent to which services of this kind have become a way for wealthy and powerful individuals to control information on the internet.

Marty Makary:

For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.

Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

Jonah McKeown

After a difficult 2020-2021 year for many Catholic schools, enrollment numbers are rebounding nationwide, according to data from the National Catholic Educational Association. 

Overall, enrollment in Catholic schools in the U.S. is up from 1.63 million last year to 1.69 million this year, an increase of more than 3.5%, according to the NCEA. 

Despite the increase, enrollment numbers do not appear to have yet reached 2019 levels, which saw 1.74 million students enrolled.

Philipp Ager, Katherine Eriksson, Ezra Karger, Peter Nencka, Melissa A. Thomasson

During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–19 flu pandemic to assess the long-run consequences of closing schools on children. We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children’s school attendance in 1920, nor on their educational attainment and adult labor market outcomes in 1940. We highlight important differences between the 1918–19 and Covid-19 pandemics and caution against extrapolating from our null effects to modern-day settings.

James Martin:

The components of the red bead experiment include a box of 4,000 wooden beads (800 red and 3,200 white), a paddle with fifty bead size depressions, a second smaller box for mixing the beads, six willing workers, two inspectors who make independent counts, a chief inspector who verifies the counts, an accountant who records the counts and a customer who will not accept red beads. The job is to produce white beads and the standard for each worker is fifty white beads per day.

The daily production operation for each worker includes: 1) poring the beads from the first box into the second box and then back into the first box (to mix the beads), 2) dipping the paddle into the first box without shaking it, 3) carrying the loaded paddle to each inspector for separate counts and then verification, and 4) dumping the day’s work back into the supply box. The six workers perform this operation four times to represent four days’ work. The results of one of Deming’s experiments appear in Table 1.

Anna North:

When Covid-19 first hit, teachers were praised to the skies, recalled Maria Salinas, who teaches fifth grade reading in Florida. “You know: ‘Hey, you guys are doing a good job. It’s so wonderful what you’re doing.’”

Now, she’s hearing the polar opposite: “Teachers are lazy. They don’t want to work.” 

Also a mother of four, Salinas finds herself at the center of an ongoing conflict among parents, lawmakers, and educators in which no one is satisfied and everyone is mad. Parents blame teachers for keeping schools closed. Teachers counter that the blame is misplaced — after all, it’s hardly their fault if a school has to shut down because so many staff are sick. At the same time, teachers have concerns about keeping their own families safe amid an ongoing pandemic, and about the burden society seems to be placing on their shoulders. 

At the core of the conflict is the fact that parents don’t just need school to educate their kids — something that can, in many cases, be accomplished virtually (though some studies suggest that remote learning is less effective than in-person class time). They also need school, controversial though this may be, as a source of child care — it’s a supervised place kids can go while parents work, and at least in the case of public school, it’s free. This is the function that has truly broken down in the pandemic, with hard lockdowns giving way to rolling quarantines and intractable staff shortages that have left working parents constantly on edge, wondering when the next closure notice will send them scrambling for a backup plan.

Andrew Restuccia and Gabriel T. Rubin:

Melanie Kelley, 38 years old, of Denver, has $125,000 in student loans. When the Biden administration’s pandemic-related pause on student-loan payments ends in May, she will owe $1,000 a month.

“It’s become this unmanageable beast for me,” she said. “May isn’t that far away. How am I going to figure this out?” A management consultant, she said she has worked as a DoorDash driver to supplement her income, but her debt has kept her from starting a family or buying a house.

“A lot of people are not going to vote again because they feel like they’re not being heard,” said Ms. Kelley, who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Ms. Kelley is one of around 43 million Americans with student debt. As a candidate, Mr. Biden endorsed canceling $10,000 in student debt per borrower through legislation and proposed forgiving tuition-related federal debt for people who earned undergraduate degrees at public colleges and universities, as well as schools that historically serve Black and minority students.

All told, Americans owe around $1.6 trillion in federal student loans and more than $130 billion in private student loans, according to the data firm MeasureOne.

Anya Kamanetz:

Kerry Dingle is a mother of two. She thinks masks should be optional for kids in schools and child care. And that makes her feel pretty lonely in Silver Spring, Md.

“As soon as you question ‘Is it a good idea to put a 2-year-old in a mask all day?’ you’re suddenly a psychotic, anti-vax right-winger,” she says. “Which really couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Dingle says she loves vaccines and thinks everyone should have them. “And the fact that high-risk people can protect themselves with vaccines and boosters now is fantastic and means that they should do that. And we should stop burdening little kids with protecting other people.”

Her 3-year-old son is in a preschool that mandates masking, although the children are almost always outdoors. “He keeps the cloth mask on, but he sucks on them and he chews holes through them,” she says. “Really, within five minutes of him putting it on, it’s wet.”

Her 6-year-old son, a first-grader, has a tic disorder that she says is exacerbated by a mask. “He makes facial movements that pull it down.” He kept getting in trouble for it until Dingle asked his pediatrician for a letter explaining that, but she says his teachers still correct him all day long.

US Department of Education:

Today, the U.S. Department of Education released updates to the College Scorecard that make the tool more useful for students and families weighing college options. The tool also includes new and updated information that may be beneficial to school counselors, college access providers, researchers, and other critical stakeholders. The Department has improved the College Scorecard interactive web tool, in addition to restoring several metrics that help students gauge how their prospective institution compares to other colleges across costs, graduation rates, post-college earnings, and other metrics. The changes reflect the Department’s priority of supporting and encouraging inclusive, affordable postsecondary programs that provide strong career outcomes for students.

John Phipps:

So it must be explained again: the Uighurs are Turkic Muslims who live in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang; in the past 50 years this region has been transformed from their homeland to one that hosts equal numbers of Han Chinese and Uighur; Uighurs have become second-class citizens; this state of affairs led to dissent, violent protest and may have motivated a handful of terrorist attacks; and the Chinese Communist Party’s response to these attacks was to initiate an enormous state project to destroy the Uighur way of life.

The CCP’s zeal for control has not been limited to China. In 2016 Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman and the author of this bracing new memoir, was living peacefully in Boulogne when she received a phone call from her former employer, a Xinjiang-based oil company. There was a problem with her pension. She would have to come back to sign some papers.

Corbin Faife:

Federal investigators served Google with a geofence warrant as part of an investigation into an attempted arson against a police union headquarters in Seattle during protests of the shooting of Jacob Blake, as shown by documents unsealed today in federal court. 

The attempted arson took place on August 24th, 2020, one day after police officers shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, leaving him paralyzed. Amidst broader protests in Seattle and across the country, two people threw Molotov cocktails at the rear entrance of the headquarters of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG).

While the building sustained little damage, the attack spurred widespread national interest: Seattle police initially posted a $1,000 reward for information, and the FBI later offered up to $20,000 for any tips that would help identify the people involved.

But documents unsealed on February 3rd show that, before offering the reward for information, the FBI also used a controversial search technique known as a geofence warrant to request information from Google about all Android devices that had passed through the area before and after the attack.

“On August 24, 2020, at approximately 11:00 p.m., two unknown suspects intentionally damaged the SPOG building using what I believe to be improvised incendiary devices,” an FBI agent told the court in the affidavit. “Based on the foregoing, I submit that there is probable cause to search information that is currently in the possession of Google and that relates to the devices that reported being within the Target Location.”

Lipis.dev

A curated collection of all country flags in SVG — plus the CSS for easier integration.

Cameron Kaplan:

I didn’t pay for these tests, but they aren’t free. The cost is billed to my health insurance. A few days ago, I received a routine letter from my insurance company summarizing what it paid: $1,140 a month for my daughter’s weekly PCR test. That comes to about $285 per test, 20 times the cost of an at-home rapid test.

Policy makers at both the state and federal levels have opted to finance Covid testing through private health insurance. A California law enacted in November requires insurers to pay for Covid testing without copayments from patients. Insurers must reimburse testing providers, even out-of-network ones, and the state places no restriction on the amount reimbursed.

This gives providers unchecked power to set prices, inflating the societal cost of testing as a tool for controlling the pandemic. Insurance companies will inevitably pass the costs on to policyholders through either higher premiums or reduced benefits.

Let’s revisit the $1,140 per month for testing at my daughter’s preschool. On an annual basis, that would add up to $13,860—a sum that comes close to the $14,974 average yearly expenditure per student in California public schools.

Dale Chu:

Amid the raging culture fires engulfing our politics and schools comes a concerted push among some conservative groups to codify a “parents’ bill of rights.” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy rolled out his proposal last November, as did U.S. Senator Josh Hawley. Although neither measure is likely to get much traction in Congress, at least not before the mid-term elections, kindred efforts are making headway in some states. Florida’s version was signed into law last June, and Texas and Virginia both jumped into the fray in January. A dozen or so states have bills pending. These plans typically include sections on school or curriculum “transparency,” which calls for information about curricula and instructional materials to be posted online or otherwise made accessible to parents and other interested parties.

They run the gamut from painless to preposterous. Some require schools to provide a list of core curricular materials (although this elides the much thornier question of how or whether such materials are used, never mind how they’re likely to be supplemented), or even an inventory of everything in the school library. Others allow parents to opt their children out of any lesson or assignment they find objectionable (giving new granularity to the concept of choice in education). Still others would allow teachers’ professional development sessions to be open to the public (though this would seem to work at cross purposes with pre-pandemic and post-Columbine efforts to “harden” schools). Some would let parents watch videos—livestreamed or recorded—of their children’s classrooms.

The principle of school transparency has undeniable appeal, yet we can’t avoid asking about the motives behind these efforts and wondering whether an unassailable value like transparency is being deployed as a wedge to worsen the politicization of our discourse and fragmentation of our culture.

Operationally speaking, putting into practice the kinds of curriculum transparency imagined in some of these proposals would be incredibly burdensome on teachers, schools, and districts, and strongly opposed by all their organizations. But before getting lost in the challenges of implementation, let’s ask whether the theory of action undergirding curriculum transparency even makes sense as policy.

John Hasnas:

Georgetown University’s law school violated its own speech policy last week when it placed Ilya Shapiro, a newly hired administrator, on leave over a tweet that offended some students. Why do universities make grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech, then fail to honor them? It isn’t so much an issue of ideology as a problem of incentives.

Georgetown’s policy states that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”

Patrick Breyer:

The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence

The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence. 

Chat control 2.0 coming up

A majority of the Members of the European Parliament adopted the chatcontrol regulation on 6 July 2021 allowing providers to scan communications voluntarily. So far only some unencrypted US services such as GMail, Meta/Facebook Messenger and X-Box apply chat control voluntarily. But this is not the end of the story: The European Commission announced that it will propose follow-up legislation that will make the use of chatcontrol mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers. This legislation will be presented an 2 March 2022 and would also apply to so far securely end-to-end encrypted communications services. However, a public consultation by the Commission demonstrated that the majority of respondents, both citizens and stakeholders, were opposed to an obligation to use chat control. Over 80% of respondents opposed its application to end-to-end encrypted communications. As a result, the Commission postponed the draft legislation to Q1 2022.

Yet another picture of an unmasked Democrat surrounded by masked children. This is at a Decatur, Georgia elementary school, where they have a district-wide mask mandate. #gapol #UnmaskOurKids https://t.co/36NRJkNmhV pic.twitter.com/GU7DgL2nIA

— Kelley K 😀 * covid-georgia.com (@KelleyKga) February 5, 2022

Arunk Prasad:

There is a common idea that perfectionism is the need for perfect results: the maximum test score, the flawless recital, the unanimous verdict. But this idea misses the deeper reality. More generally, perfectionism is the tendency to stake your identity on achieving fixed outcomes.

Fixed outcomes vary by person. The perfect performance is the stereotype, but a fixed outcome might be feeling smart, beautiful, and right, or getting that car or job we’ve been craving for so long. Every perfectionist has their own personal ideal.

None of these outcomes are problems. But they become so when they intertwine with our identity and self-worth. If a perfectionist of fame ever feels unknown, then he feels worthless and ashamed.

Hence the perfectionist stakes his identity on achieving his outcomes, meaning his self-worth depends on realizing them. This is a pitiful wager and a poor strategy.

Above all, perfectionism is a tendency, not a law. With practice, we can unlearn it and replace it with far better approaches.

The Economist:

A Big Mac costs £3.59 in Britain and US$5.81 in the United States. The implied exchange rate is 0.62. The difference between this and the actual exchange rate, 0.75, suggests the British pound is 17.1% undervalued

Scott Girard:

Tompkins, who considers himself fortunate to have since found a new job, said he was similarly disappointed to not receive an explanation. He submitted a letter from the pastor of his family church and his reasoning for not getting the vaccine, he said. On appeal, the district asked for “a more in-depth letter” on his reasoning, which he submitted.

He called the district’s lack of clear criteria “deceptive.”

“It was very disheartening and especially considering I was 14 years in the district,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why they were this guarded and not really being transparent with me about what was going on.”

Correction: Britta Hanson is no longer the acting principal of Crestwood Elementary School, though the district’s website still lists her as the principal. The school now has an interim. The article has been updated.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Mildred and Phil Hands:

An outdated state law requires only Madison to elect its School Board members in such an odd way. That law should be changed.

(Interestingly, I saw no inquiry on how the legislation occurred….)

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Elizabeth Beyer:

In solidly Democratic Madison there’s markedly less enthusiasm for running for School Board than in other parts of the state. Of the three seats up for election this year, only one is contested after two incumbents opted not to run again.

Madison School Board President Ali Muldrow, who is up for reelection but is running unopposed, said interest in serving on the board, or any local office, is like the swing of a pendulum based on the political climate. The district hasn’t faced much public outcry over its COVID mitigation or equity policies.

“Madison is a really progressive city. … And I do think progressives are tired,” she said. “Voter engagement is going to matter a lot, and I do think Republicans in more purple parts of the state are going to work really hard this year to establish contrast campaigns.”

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?

Alexander Shur:

In vetoing the critical race theory bill, Evers said he is objecting to creating new censorship rules that would prohibit educators from teaching “honest, complete facts about important historical topics.”

“Our kids deserve to learn in an atmosphere conducive to learning without being subjected to state legislative encroachment that is neither needed nor warranted,” said Evers, a lifelong educator.

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?

“How much ‘wrong’ do you get to be while still holding the default setting for people who represent TheScience?” pic.twitter.com/b0K4Ivuyvm

— Erich Hartmann (@erichhartmann) February 5, 2022

Jay Daigle:

One important thing that I think about a lot, even though I have no formal expertise, is the replication crisis. A shocking fraction of published research in many fields, including medicine and psychology, is flatly wrong—the results of the studies can’t be obtained in the same way again, and the conclusions don’t hold up to further investigation. Medical researcher John Ioannidis brought this problem to wide attention in 2005 with a paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False; attempts to replicate the results of major psychology papers suggest that only about half of them hold up. A recent analysis gives a similar result for cancer research.

This is a real crisis for the whole process of science. If we can’t rely on the results of famous, large, well-established studies, it’s hard to feel secure in any of our knowledge. It’s probably the most important problem facing the entire project of science right now.

There’s a lot to say about the mathematics we use in social science research, especially statistically, and how bad math feeds the replication crisis.1 But I want to approach it from a different angle. Why doesn’t the field of mathematics have a replication crisis? And what does that tell us about other fields, that do?

Valerie Bostwick, Stefanie Fischer, and Matthew Lang:

There exists a long-standing debate in higher education on which academic calendar is optimal. Using panel data on the near universe of four-year nonprofit institutions and leveraging quasi-experimental variation in calendars across institutions and years, we show that switching from quarters to semesters negatively impacts on-time graduation rates. Event study analyses show that the negative effects persist beyond the transition. Using transcript data, we replicate this analysis at the student level and investigate possible mechanisms. Shifting to a semester: (i) lowers first-year grades, (ii) decreases the probability of enrolling in a full course load, and (iii) delays the timing of major choice. (JEL I23, I28)

Will Flanders:

Findings: Counting the Cost: Wisconsin School Closures and Student Proficiency, by Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt, reviewed school closure decisions in the 2020-21 school year and ran an analysis to see their impact on recent Forward Exam data. The findings point towards significant learning loss for students in districts that chose virtual learning over a hybrid or in-person experience. 

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in fall 2020.

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?

TJCX

You could replace the phrase “face masks” with “shrimp gumbo” and that sentence would still be 100% accurate. If all you can tell me about masks is that, combined with other measures, they can slow the spread of COVID-19—that’s not very compelling! Give me a number! Quantify the effectiveness of mask wearing by itself! If you tell me masks reduce my odds of getting COVID by 50%, then of course I’ll wear a mask. But if it’s only 0.05% then maybe I won’t bother. Numbers matter.

But quantitative data alone isn’t enough—good medical communication is also exhaustive. By “exhaustive” I mean that it includes all research on a given topic. Exhaustive communication bolsters your argument (“look at all this data!”) and helps undermine counterarguments (“we know about the conflicting data, but here’s why it doesn’t matter”).

At first glance, this BBC article appears to thoroughly debunk the use of Ivermectin for treating COVID-19. It says that of the 26 “major” Ivermectin trials, one third have statistical errors or indications of fraud, and the other two thirds don’t support the use of Ivermectin.

Anton Jager:

An era of ‘post-politics’ has clearly ended. Yet instead of a re-emergence of the politics of the twentieth century — complete with a revival of mass parties, unions, and workplace militancy — it is almost as if a step has been skipped. Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense.

Days of Reckoning:

The energy side of the crisis, however, requires sweeping restructuring which goes well beyond anything the government or the opposition are currently prepared to countenance – not least because the economic models they operate on are so out of step with the real world that they fail even to understand the problem, still less offer a workable solution.

Why the energy cap failed

The state-imposed energy cap, which is the focus of establishment media attention today, was always the wrong solution to the wrong problem.  As I explained four and a half years ago:

“The energy cap will end up upsetting everyone and solving nothing.  This is because, while the failed quasi-market arrangements are an irritant, they are not the true cause of the problem.  The same arrangements were in place prior to 2008; when complaints about overcharging and switching supplier were limited to the affluent classes.  It isn’t the system that has changed; it is the broader operating environment.

“The harsh reality is this: the cost of energy is rising remorselessly.  The cheap North Sea gas, on which Britain built the current energy infrastructure, is gone.  In its place are increasingly expensive gas imports – something that the eye-wateringly expensive fracking of UK shale deposits is not going to change (assuming there is any gas to recover).  Renewables only appear cheap because of the sleight of hand of measuring cost per Kw/h at the point of generation (rather than the point of use).  None of the infrastructure and balancing costs are included, nor are the inefficiencies and relatively low (25-30 years) lifespans of renewables factored into comparisons with coal, gas and nuclear plants (that last for 50 or 60 years).  Nevertheless, with fossil fuel availability falling, and nuclear having a few popularity problems of its own, renewables are going to become the greater part of our energy mix whether we can afford it or not.

“Here’s where government price caps fall down. One way or another, the energy infrastructure has to be built and maintained. Indeed, if you want the additional energy required for a growing economy, you need to build a lot more energy capacity. Someone has to pay for that. And if we are sticking with the current quasi-market arrangement, that someone is investors. And nothing drives private investors away from a business faster than state-imposed price caps.

Mark Kreidler:

Early in his first quarter at the University of California-Davis, Ryan Manriquez realized he needed help. A combination of pressures — avoiding COVID-19, enduring a breakup, dealing with a disability, trying to keep up with a tough slate of classes — hit him hard.

“I felt the impact right away,” said Manriquez, 21.

After learning of UC-Davis’ free counseling services, Manriquez showed up at the student health center and lined up an emergency Zoom session the same day. He was referred to other resources within days and eventually settled into weekly group therapy.

That was September 2020. Manriquez, now president of the student union, considers himself lucky. It can take up to a month to get a counseling appointment, he said, and that’s “at a school that’s trying really hard to make services available.”

Across the country, college students are seeking mental health therapy on campus in droves, part of a 15-year upswing that has spiked during the pandemic. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in December issued a rare public health advisory noting the increasing number of suicide attempts by young people.

A 58MB PDF [redacted] response to my late November, 2021 request.

I write to request email communication between Public Health Dane County Madison and:

The Madison School District

WEAC

Madison Teachers, Inc.

League of Women voters

For the period July, 2021 to November 26, 2021

Second file

Vince Bielski:

This alternative method of discipline, called “restorative practices,” is spreading across the country – and being put to the test. Many schools are enduring sharp increases in violence following the return of students from COVID lockdowns, making this softer approach a higher-stakes experiment in student safety.

“Kids are getting into more fights and disturbances because they are struggling,” says Yoli Anyon, a professor of social work at San Jose State University. “So schools are relying on restorative practices as a way to help young people transition back to the classroom.”

Long pushed by racial justice groups, the method aims to curb suspensions and arrests that disproportionately affect students of color. It replaces punishment with discussions about the causes and harmful impact of misbehavior, from sassing teachers and smoking pot to fighting (serious offenses like gun possession are still referred to the police). The hope is that students, through apologizing and making amends, will learn from their misdeeds and form healthier relationships with peers and teachers, making school violence less likely as they continue their education.

Notes on Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 Restorative Justice experience.

A month later (11-19-21), he’s walking the hallways of Verona high school with a concealed loaded gun. A school security officer nabbed him. (Attention: Madison public schools!) He was charged with one count of possessing a firearm on school grounds, carrying a concealed weapon and felony bail jumping.

So, how is it he is still recklessly driving the streets of Madison?

As the Werkes reported:

Two days later, a Dane County judge lets Tavion J. Flowers loose on a signature bond and prohibits him from possessing any weapons. Except … except … except … “At the time of his arrest, Flowers was already on a signature bond for a felony theft charge issued in October, which also barred him from possessing any weapons.”

A Madison woman is dead because of Woke justice

Nor was it the maiden voyage for the hit-and-run driver who killed a Madison woman on the East side Saturday 01-29-22. The WI State Journal reports

Rob Jenkins:

iAs if landing a college teaching position wasn’t already difficult enough, the powers-that-be have placed another obstacle in job-seekers’ path: the so-called “Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” better known as the “diversity statement” or “DEI statement.” Many (most?) institutions now require such a document as part of the application packet along with the traditional CV, cover letter, and transcripts.

As a long-time advice columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I frequently hear from academics on the job market. Lately, I’ve been getting emails asking how to write a diversity statement. I fear I’m not much help in that department, partly because I haven’t had any firsthand experience writing such statements but mostly because I find the whole concept not only absurd but incredibly toxic.

Still, I do what I can. I realize this is a hoop academic job-seekers must jump through, whether they agree with the premise or not (and I suspect, from the tone of their emails, that many find it just as objectionable as I do). So I direct them to articles in The Chronicle and elsewhere with titles like “Five Don’ts in Your DEI Statement” and “What Not to Write in Your DEI Statement.”

What is perhaps most striking about these essays and others like them is the focus on what applicants should NOT say. This illustrates perfectly the fundamental problem with diversity statements: Their purpose is to prove a negative—namely, that the writer is not a bigot—apparently by demonstrating to the committee’s satisfaction that he or she has whole-heartedly embraced the DEI agenda.  

James Gordon:

It includes Multicultural Counseling, Incidents of Bias Reporting, the Office of Equal Opportunity, and a Victim’s Assistance Hotline.

Even university staff are taken care of with specific services for employees including the Office of Ombuds, and the Employee Assistance Program.

The roll call continues with a host of departments and programs set up to assist minority students, including Student Diversity Program centers for Asian Pacific, Black/African, and Native Americans.

LGBTQ+ are not forgotten either with various services and cultural resources designated for the community.

Students with disabilities and given their own hotline together with women, through the Women and Gender Advocacy Center.

Campus Reform first reported on the sign.

Peter Shanosky:

Even I got that speech frequently, and I was an underperforming (and often absent) student in a mediocre school. I can only imagine how heavy it was indoctrinated in other districts.

Well, even if it wasn’t implicitly stated, adolescents could get the gist of what was being said: No college means no college-required jobs, which means failure. The obvious conclusion is that non-college careers are failures.

el gato malo

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

because unlike many generals who are mired in the past and determined to fight the last war, ike saw the shape of the war to come for this, not the arms races of great powers, is the threat to the lives and livelihoods of today and it is further reaching and holds the potential to be FAR more terrible.

this is the “tyranny of experts” and the utter dominance of discourse and the foundational freedoms and order of society that it can attain.

Matt Bonesteel:

Penn officials did not respond to a request for comment on either the claims raised in the letter or whether the school planned to mount a legal challenge should Thomas be ruled ineligible for the NCAA championships.

On Tuesday, another group of Penn swimmers released a statement supporting Thomas after an unidentified Quakers swimmer spoke to Fox News about her, claiming she had a “monumental” advantage over her teammates after going through male puberty.

“We want to express our full support for Lia in her transition,” the athletes said in Tuesday’s statement, per ESPN. “We value her as a person, teammate, and friend. The sentiments put forward by an anonymous member of our team are not representative of the feelings, values, and opinions of the entire Penn team, composed of 39 women with diverse backgrounds.”

Associated Press:

 A school board in an affluent Connecticut suburb has rejected a school choice plan that would have had it take in 16 students from the city of Norwalk.

The Darien Board of Education voted 5-4 Tuesday not to participate in a pilot Open Choice program, which was supported by the superintendent of schools and the board’s chairman.

The program, designed to deal with the issue of racial and economic disparities between city and suburban schools, would have allowed up to 16 kindergartners from Norwalk to attend Darien elementary schools in the fall.

“This is our opportunity to show our students we are serious about supporting their voices, that we’re serious about change and that we’re serious about supporting diversity,” School Superintendent Alan Addley told the board.

Opponents cited larger class sizes, uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible financial burden on the town in rejecting the plan.

Los Angeles Times:

After a largely in-person fall term, the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses shifted to remote classes through January as a precaution against the highly contagious Omicron variant. But the return to mostly in-person classes — encouraged by high vaccination rates and signs that the surge has peaked — is anything but smooth.

At UCLA, more than 1,300 people supported a petition urging a boycott of classes Monday and demanding student flexibility to choose between in-person and remote options. Groups representing disability rights advocates, underrepresented students and undergraduate student leadership joined forces to organize a sit-in at the campus administration building and vowed to continue the protest until their demands for online access and educational equity were met.

By early evening, dozens of students sat along a hallway, equipped with blankets, laptops and food; Chancellor Gene Block’s office doors were plastered with fliers accusing UCLA of not caring about Black students or those with disabilities. …

In a statement, UCLA said it recognized the students’ concerns, respected their right to express their views and was “deeply committed” to equity. The campus returned to in-person learning “based on a careful assessment of the current public health situation, including that COVID-19 cases and test positivity rates are rapidly declining on campus and across Los Angeles County, and that many eligible Bruins have received the required boosters,” the statement said.

National Law Journal:

After failures in district courts, a handful of students have taken their COVID-19 tuition refund fights to appellate courts in cases that are being closely watched by the higher education community.

Many of the lawsuits, alleging universities breached contracts by shifting to virtual courses while charging in-person prices, were dismissed by district court judges, though results have been mixed. Claims that survived tended to be those seeking compensation for specific fees, such as student activities promised but not delivered during campus closures, observers say.

No circuit courts have issued decisions on the matters yet, but recent oral arguments hint that the idea schools overcharged for remote learning has weight with some judges, said Stetson University Law School professor Peter Lake.

“If you would have called me a month ago, I probably would have said the general trend is unmistakable, the tuition cases are dying … and the exception would be where there was a very specific promise to a particular class of people to deliver something,” Lake said. “It may well be that the circuit upholds the dismissals … but I’m sensing there could be change.”

“I am noticing that there is a certain amount of energy at this moment that’s gathering around this idea of unjust enrichment,” he said. “That’s why we’re watching the outcome like a hawk in this D.C. case because that could be a game changer.”

Tate Ryan-Mosley:

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold. 

Corsight AI, a facial recognition subsidiary of the Israeli AI company Cortica, purports to be devising a solution for that sort of situation by using DNA to create a model of a face that can then be run through a facial recognition system. It is a task that experts in the field regard as scientifically untenable. 

Corsight unveiled its “DNA to Face” product in a presentation by chief executive officer Robert Watts and executive vice president Ofer Ronen intended to court financiers at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York City on December 15. It was part of the company’s overall product road map, which also included movement and voice recognition. The tool “constructs a physical profile by analyzing genetic material collected in a DNA sample,” according to a company slide deck viewed by surveillance research group IPVM and shared with MIT Technology Review.

This tweet promotes COVID disinformation at least as false and harmful as anything a Rogan guest said, but because authoritarians believe disinformation only comes from independent voices, not large corporations, and it advances rather than questions COVID hysteria, it’s allowed: https://t.co/wGWF2qNOtm

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 4, 2022

Ainsley Erzen:

The 800-meter time that made me a national champion and state record holder was bettered by 85 Iowa boys at a single meet.

An open letter to the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union from one of the state’s top female high school track and soccer athletes:

To the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, 

My name is Ainsley Erzen, and I’m writing to you concerning comments in the Cedar Rapids Gazette that the union needs guidance regarding transgender athletes in sports. 

This summer, I won the girls 800-meter high school national championship in track, and broke the Iowa state record. It was such an honor to represent my state as the first Iowa female high school runner to win a national track title, and so humbling to have my name listed among such talented women as Shelby Houlihan and Joy Ripslinger. I believe this is a prime example of some of my most core beliefs: that if you work hard and put your faith in the Lord, He can, and will, accomplish things within you that you could never even dream of on your own.

That being said, my time of 2:06.52, the time that made me the fastest Iowa high school female 800 runner of all time, the time that earned me the title of national champion, was easily beat by 85 high school boys at the 2021 Iowa high school state track meet alone. Eighty-five. Just in our small state of Iowa. The results of the 2021 Drake Relays proved to be no different, as the last male runner came through the line in a time of 2:03. That same year, a time of 2:13 was enough to make me the 800-meter Drake champion. The slowest boy was easily 10 seconds faster than the first-place girl. But I don’t need to explain this to you. Iowa track officials already know there are huge biological differences between boys and girls. Why else would the 2021 girls blue standard (the automatic qualifying time for the Drake Relays) have been 2:16, while the boys was set 20 seconds faster, at 1:56?

Terry Gross:

The origins here … go back to that summer of 2020. There’s a researcher there named Christopher Rufo, who was then with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. This is in a conservative educational institute centered around the promotion of intelligent design. And Christopher Rufo wrote a series of articles for an online website called City Journal. And in his City Journal articles, he detailed what he described as indoctrination in K-12 schools or in employee training programs in businesses or state agencies, programs that he said were training people to become critical race theorists. 

Those articles caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, and Rufo appeared on his program in early September of 2020. The very next day, he received a phone call from Mark Meadows, then chief of staff for the Trump administration. Apparently, Trump had watched the program that evening. He’d seen what Rufo had to say, and within a matter of days, Rufo was in conversation with the Trump administration on some sort of legislative or executive response. The product of that conversation was Trump’s executive order in late September, where he prohibited any state agency from discussing certain ideas as part of employee training or [training for] a state contractor that wishes to do business with the federal government.

James Causey:

Stop passing kids you know are behind. It sets them up for a lifetime of failure. If they can’t read, nothing else will matter. They will be on the road to dropping out and a life of unemployment or low-paying, dead-end jobs.

In Milwaukee Public Schools, only half of the Black boys who are freshmen today, will walk across the stage in four years. Wisconsin has the highest percentage of Black fourth graders with skills considered below basic — 69%. In reading alone, Black students in Wisconsin trail every other state and the District of Columbia.

Former Milwaukeean, Michael Pratt, who is an educator in Nashville, Tenn., noticed the troubling trend. He conducted his own study, asking boys why they didn’t like to read. Most of them said they didn’t like reading because they didn’t see Black men around them reading. Many didn’t have books in their homes.

Pratt, the son for former acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, said that prompted him to start the grassroots mentorship and reading program he calls “Fatherhood Fridays.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Keith Whittington:

The Academic Freedom Alliance has released a public letter to the Georgetown University Law Center objecting to its treatment of a senior lecturer. Ilya Shapiro was director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. It was recently announced that Shapiro had been appointed to be the executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitutionand a senior lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center. He was to begin his duties on February 1, 2022.

On January 26, Shapiro posted a series of tweets on the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer and President Joe Biden’s declaration that he would be selecting a black woman to fill the spot. Shapiro contended that Biden’s announced limitation on the candidate pool would exclude the person Shapiro thought was “objectively best” for the position and as a consequence the president would be choosing a “lesser black woman” in his stead. Shapiro subsequently deleted the posts and apologized, but a controversy erupted that included demands that he be fired by GULC. The dean of the law school announced that Shapiro would be suspended until an investigation was concluded on whether the tweets had violated any university policies.

William Broad:

Fermat’s last theorem, a riddle put forward by one of history’s great mathematicians, had baffled experts for more than 300 years. Then a genius toiled in secret for seven years to solve it, according to the usual narrative. That shy Englishman, Andrew Wiles, made his feat public in the early 1990s and amassed a glittering array of tributes. In 2016, he won the Abel Prize, math’s top award. It came with a $700,000 purse.

Now, a wealthy Texas philanthropist is recounting how his financial support created a community of Fermat innovators that, over decades, lent moral and mathematical support to Dr. Wiles. That patronage drew top mathematicians to the puzzle after great minds had given up, succeeded in bringing the moribund field back to life, and may have helped make Dr. Wiles’s breakthrough possible.

“We solved the problem,” the philanthropist, James M. Vaughn Jr., 82, president of the Vaughn Foundation Fund, said in an interview. “If we hadn’t put the program together as we did, it would still be unsolved.”

In interviews, top experts described Mr. Vaughn’s foundation and its early financial support as sparks that had lit an intellectual fire, although they stopped short of saying that his backing had been responsible for Dr. Wiles’s Fermat breakthrough. Dr. Wiles did not respond to inquiries.

Recently, Mr. Vaughn gave the University of Texas a collection of 125 rare and foundational books in the history of mathematics, and the gift has prompted him to speak publicly of other foundation projects that have gone largely unheralded.

While gregarious, Mr. Vaughn, heir to a Texas oil fortune, is an extremely private man who has never before claimed publicly that his philanthropy begot the mathematical feat. Even so, he takes immense pride in what he characterizes as his legacy. Mr. Vaughn said that he and his wife had no children and that the Fermat triumph was how he hoped he would be remembered.

Jay’s Blog:

One important thing that I think about a lot, even though I have no formal expertise, is the replication crisis. A shocking fraction of published research in many fields, including medicine and psychology, is flatly wrong—the results of the studies can’t be obtained in the same way again, and the conclusions don’t hold up to further investigation. Medical researcher John Ioannidis brought this problem to wide attention in 2005 with a paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False; attempts to replicate the results of major psychology papers suggest that only about half of them hold up. A recent analysis gives a similar result for cancer research.

This is a real crisis for the whole process of science. If we can’t rely on the results of famous, large, well-established studies, it’s hard to feel secure in any of our knowledge. It’s probably the most important problem facing the entire project of science right now.

There’s a lot to say about the mathematics we use in social science research, especially statistically, and how bad math feeds the replication crisis.¹ But I want to approach it from a different angle.  Why doesn’t the field of mathematicshave a replication crisis? And what does that tell us about other fields, that do?

Why doesn’t math have a replication crisis?

Maybe mathematicians don’t make mistakes

Chris Rickert:

Nearly three weeks after La Follette High School students reportedly beat a special-needs classmate so badly at the Southeast Side school that he could require surgery, police made an arrest in the case Wednesday and anticipate making another one.

Tayshon J. Ross, 17, of Madison, is tentatively charged with felony substantial battery in the Jan. 13 incident, according to police spokesperson Stephanie Fryer.

Police said last month that the 15-year-old victim told them a group of students was making fun of him before the fight and that school surveillance video of the incident shows the victim and another teen preparing to fight one another and several teens punching or attempting to punch the victim.

Tara Westover:

I wrote about these and other experiences in my 2018 memoir, “Educated,” which surprised me by becoming a best seller. My story was one of extremes: born in the mountains of Idaho to Mormon parents who kept me out of school, I had never set foot in a classroom before my first semester of college at Brigham Young University. I graduated in 2008 and won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where I earned a Ph.D.

A curious thing happens when you offer up your life for public consumption: People start to interpret your biography, to explain to you what they think it means. At book signings, in interviews, I’m often told that my story is uplifting, that I am a model of resilience, an “inspiration.” Which is a nice thing to be told, so I say thank you. But every so often someone takes it a bit further, and says something to which I do not have a response. They say, “You are living proof of the American dream. That absolutely anything is possible for anybody.”

Marketwatch

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s name will be displayed on a new building at the National Air and Space Museum and in several additional places throughout the Smithsonian Institution for at least 50 years in exchange for his $200 million donation.

The terms of the agreement, which MarketWatch obtained through a public-records request, do not include a “morals clause,” a provision that would allow the Smithsonian to terminate the naming rights if Bezos’s behavior brought disrepute to the institution. …

Big-dollar donations like this one are typically trumpeted by institutions (this one was covered in major media outlets and came with an inspirational video), but the legally binding contracts that surround the gifts are usually kept private. Bezos’s gift agreement with the Smithsonian offers a rare glimpse into how institutions and their wealthy benefactors engineer a mutually beneficial exchange. …

[T]he requirement to prominently display Bezos’s name for the next 50 years comes as naming rights have been under scrutiny. Most notably, the Sackler family name has been removed from museums and other institutions they helped fund with profits from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, which is now seen as playing a pivotal role in the opioid epidemic that’s killed some 500,000 people since 1999. …

In light of the Sackler controversy, and amid broader debates about the soft power exercised by elite philanthropists, nonprofits are rethinking how to recognize benefactors’ generosity without tattooing themselves in perpetuity with a donor’s name.

Amy Schwabe:

Two years ago, I never thought I would homeschool one of my children.

Of course, two years ago, I never thought that leaving the house with a face mask would become second nature. Or that my grandma would become computer-literate enough to Zoom with me every few weeks. A lot has changed.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my daughter Wendy would have days — in hindsight, too many days — when she begged to stay home from school. She cried nearly every morning, and she seemed to have constant stomachaches and nausea. My husband Jonathan and I spent a year taking her to doctors, scheduling medical procedures and giving her various medications, trying to figure out what was going on with her.

I remember standing over her as she cried in her closet one morning, wondering what I was going to do if she actually refused to go to school. What if she really wouldn’t get up? I couldn’t pick her up and force her into the car, force her into school, force her to learn.

I didn’t have to find out what would happen in that scenario because March of 2020 arrived, and we all stayed home. For months. And a curious thing happened. Wendy stopped getting nauseous. She stopped vomiting. We took her for a follow-up at the doctor, and her acid reflux had improved. Stress and anxiety turned out to be her triggers.

Molly Beck:

Two Republicans running for governor said this week they would sign legislation that dissolves the state’s largest school district while the Democratic incumbent who spent a career in education said the idea would throw Milwaukee’s children into “chaos.”

Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, signaled Tuesday he would not support a package of bills being proposed by Republican lawmakers that would break up Milwaukee Public Schools within two years and replace it with smaller school districts.

The future of Milwaukee’s school district suddenly depends on the outcome of this year’s governor’s race with the Republican field’s top two candidates endorsing an idea that has failed in the past but has new support sprung from scrutiny born during the coronavirus pandemic over how schools are run.

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?

Chester Finn

Monday’s Washington Post featured a long, front-page article by the estimable Laura Meckler titled “Public schools facing a crisis of epic proportions.” In it, she skillfully summarized a laundry list of current woes facing traditional public education:

The scores are down and violence is up. Parents are screaming at school boards, and children are crying on the couches of social workers. Anger is rising. Patience is falling.

For public schools, the numbers are all going in the wrong direction. Enrollment is down. Absenteeism is up. There aren’t enough teachers, substitutes, or bus drivers. Each phase of the pandemic brings new logistics to manage, and Republicans are planning political campaigns this year aimed squarely at failings of public schools.

Public education is facing a crisis unlike anything in decades….

As I’m sure Ms. Meckler would agree, this is a “supply side” lamentation, a catalog of woes as seen from the perspective of those inside the education system. She might instead have written a very different article describing the “crisis” as viewed by consumers of public education. (You know—students, parents, taxpayers, us folks.) Such a piece might have read more like this:

The schools our kids attended were closed so long that students lost whole years of learning. Those from families with limited means lost even more. Those schools were closed far longer than they needed to be, apparently because the adults who work in them didn’t want (or were scared) to return and those running them put their employees’ interests ahead of those of their students and parents. We watched the firemen and nurses and utility workers keep coming to work despite the pandemic. Why not the teachers?

Worse, the closed schools’ failure to supply satisfactory forms of remote instruction meant that millions of children forgot how to study, how to get along with other kids, how to relate to grown-ups outside their families. Idleness, lassitude, and frustration took a toll of their physical and mental health and made life extremely difficult for us parents and other caregivers, including messing up our own work lives. Many of us had no choice but to quit our jobs. No wonder many of us took education into our own hands, seeking out other schools that managed to stay open, getting serious about homeschooling, hiring tutors when we could afford it, and teaming up with neighbors to create quasi-schools. Yes, we’re angry, furious even, and yes, our kids are upset and acting out. And it didn’t get any better when we got them back into school only to discover that, instead of the Three R’s, our schools were obsessing over racial and political issues. No wonder we’re protesting at school board meetings. No wonder a bunch of politicians are using our unhappiness to get themselves elected. And it’s no help at all when folks in Washington seem more interested in sending money and coddling misbehavers than in whether our children are learning. 

Yes, it would have been a very different sort of lamentation. The point, though, isn’t journalism per se. It’s what’s the proper perspective from which to view the semi-meltdown of traditional public education: the system’s perspective or the perspective of those for whose benefit it exists and whose tax dollars pay for it? If the nation is still—or again—at grave risk because its children aren’t learning enough (and in many cases seem not even to be in places of learning), where ought responsibility for the melting be placed?

I’m not exactly saying the public schools had it coming. Nobody (except perhaps the denizens of a mysterious Wuhan laboratory) had any idea what was coming, and nobody is ever fully prepared for a full-scale catastrophe. No giant system that’s been doing the same thing for decades can be expected to turn on a dime. The inertia is profound. And yet, in many ways, the educational failures of the past several years were far worse than they needed to be because of long-standing characteristics of American public education. It’s worth recounting three of those.

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?

“A child who attends a traditional public school in Milwaukee is worth more than $4,000 more in the eyes of government than that same child if they attend the private choice school down the street.”https://t.co/cg2mB7LZ4L

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) February 3, 2022

This is a Renaissance painting.
No, the opposite of a Renaissance.
Dégringolade.
20 years.
2 stalls.
A full press conference.
A toilet paper ribbon.
No scissors.
Idiocratically oblivious pride in this “accomplishment”.
And a model that is being exported all over America. https://t.co/zn4phGBbOF

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) February 3, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Megan Basham:

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

For those not familiar with Stetzer, he’s not just a religious liberal arts professor and this wasn’t just another dime-a-dozen pastorly podcast. To name just a few of his past and present titles in the evangelical world, Stetzer is also the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

In short, when it comes to leveraging high evangelical offices to influence everyday Christians, arguably no one is better positioned than Ed Stetzer. You may not know his name, but if you’re a church-going Protestant, it’s almost guaranteed your pastor does.

Which is why, when Stetzer joined a line of renowned pastors and ministry leaders lending their platforms to Obama-appointee Collins, the collaboration was noteworthy.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

The press response to NEA’s latest survey reinforced the futility of any contrary view, but after a prayer to St. Jude, I note that over the last 3 years about 4.2 million public school employees quit or retired, and we hired about 5.8 million new ones. https://t.co/feAviUrFNV pic.twitter.com/80hyBliPmD

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) February 2, 2022

Economist:

Bad Bunny may not be a household name in the English-speaking world. Yet the Puerto Rican rapper, whose verses are usually in Spanish (and, on one occasion, Japanese), was the most played artist in 2020 and 2021 for listeners on Spotify, the world’s largest music-streaming platform. Such success might have been harder to achieve 30 years ago when English was dominant. In the new digital era, it is becoming ever more common.

Dylan Brogan:

And there is pressure to ignore the realities of missed work: “A kid zones out the entire semester, doesn’t do any work, and we’re being told [from administrators] to get them to quickly make up a couple of assignments and give him a passing grade. It’s a terrible message we are sending.”

…..

“But I don’t believe in pushing back or challenging the administration in order to virtue signal to the community.”

For one veteran teacher at East, that lack of pushback has looked more like a rubber-stamping of whatever the central office is proposing.

“I do think some of them are starting to wake up. I’ve seen Ali Muldrow way more engaged here at East when we needed it; that was appreciated and made a big difference,” says the teacher. “But that kind of involvement by a school board member has been pretty much nonexistent.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

This is a Renaissance painting.
No, the opposite of a Renaissance.
Dégringolade.
20 years.
2 stalls.
A full press conference.
A toilet paper ribbon.
No scissors.
Idiocratically oblivious pride in this “accomplishment”.
And a model that is being exported all over America. https://t.co/zn4phGBbOF

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) February 3, 2022

Wisconsin State Senator Alberta Darling:

Wisconsin has a reputation for reform. It’s time we regain our status as a national leader and innovator for education reform,” Darling said, “We are putting parents and their children firstw , we are going to increase transparency and accountability, and we will be funding students, not systems.”

• Parental Bill of Rights – Establishes several parental rights relating to decisions regarding a child’s religion, medical care, records, and education, and creates a cause of action for the violation of these rights. Allows a parent to bring a suit if those rights are violated.
• School Choice Expansion – Opens school choice to all Wisconsin families by removing state enrollment caps, family income limits, and grade entry points – marking the beginning of true school choice for all our students and families.
• Milwaukee Public School Reform– Establishes by 2024, MPS will be divided into smaller community districts that are more manageable and accountable to parents and their communities. The new community district boundaries will be developed by a commission made up of elected officials with a vested interest in the community, including the Mayor of Milwaukee, the Governor, and the State Superintendent.
• School Accountability Reports – Establishes uniform standards for school accountability reports. Our state’s educational accountability system relies heavily on the state school and district report card. This bill improves the accountability reports to provide a consistent assessment of student success.
• High-Performing Charter Replication and Creation of Statewide Charter Board – Charter schools are public schools that operate with less red tape. This bill will streamline replication for the highest performing charter schools in our state and will increase opportunities for more students and families statewide.
• Property Tax Credit after Virtual School – Increases the school property tax credit for residents of school districts that are closed to in-person instruction for more than 10 days of instruction during the second half of the 2021-22 school year. Many working families were left last minute to find options for their children, and this money will help offset some of those incurred costs.

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?

There is a long line of clear case law, including from the Supreme Court, holding that the First Amendment’s free speech clause is violated when state officials pressure or coerce private actors to censor for them.https://t.co/WOJu9FwB1g https://t.co/GkiRhR6re9

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 2, 2022

Didi Rankovic:

YouTube has a brand new censorship tactic that appears to be affecting small creators – and one that, on the face of it, makes no sense.

Several livestreams posted on Google’s platform last weekend by truckers protesting in Canada have had their audience limited. The reason given to viewers trying to access the videos? They were too popular.

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

Ann Althouse:

Said an unnamed 2021 graduate, quoted in “Remote learning led to rampant cheating at NYC’s Stuyvesant High School” (NY Post). Stuyvesant is a phenomenally elite public high school, with admission based on the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

Also quoted, an unnamed sophomore: “A lot of people didn’t actually learn as much last year because of how easy it was to cheat on things, which is sort of sad. Remote learning changed the playing field. It was closer to [an] honor system, so I felt that most people were more likely to push the rules a bit.”

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?

McNamara Fallacy:

Nonetheless, the United States lost the Vietnam War. How could that have happened?

The US military walked straight into the McNamara Fallacy.

Quantification at War

The McNamara Fallacy is named after Robert McNamara. As U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, McNamara was responsible for organizing American strategy in the Vietnam War.

As a business executive, McNamara had learned to put a priority on quantitative metrics. Following along with the professional culture of scientific measurement established under Frederick Taylor, McNamara decided that he could win the Vietnam War by quantifying it.

McNamara tracked the progress of the war by focusing on the ratio of enemy fatalities to American fatalities. As long as there were more enemy deaths than American deaths, McNamara concluded that the military was on the path to victory.

What McNamara didn’t keep track of was the narrative of the war, the meaning that it had both within the military forces of each side, but also in the civilian populations of the nations involved. Instead, he applied the business aphrorism that you can’t manage what you can’t measure and treated his metrics as if they were in themselves the definition of success. McNamara insisted that if factors could not be quantified, they were not relevant to the management of the Vietnam War.

Stephen Moore:

The tally for how much the federal government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the combined costs of World Wars I and II. The Left is celebrating that politicians in Washington saved us. Really? From what exactly?

Two years later, it is time for an honest assessment. Could things have worsened for the country if the government had spent nothing and done nothing? What would have happened if we had not shut down our businesses? Our churches, schools, and restaurants. Our parks and basketball courts and playgrounds.

Would the public have made worse decisions regarding protecting its health and the health of its families and its employees than the politicians have made?

The Left believes that it was government intervention that saved millions of lives. But even with all the federal spending, some 875,000 (and counting) have perished from the virus. It was politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose awful decision-making contributed to the deaths of thousands of seniors exposed to infected patients in nursing homes. In addition, politicians didn’t shut down the New York subway system for many weeks into the virus, costing thousands more avoidable deaths.

Suppose the government is here to save us. How do we explain the shameful malfeasance of the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, and other government medical agencies and programs that spend roughly half a trillion dollars each year to keep us healthy? All of that money couldn’t stop a virus from wreaking havoc on the country for two years and counting.

Sleepingdog:

Once upon a time, in a country with a proud name of the USSR did not even know about any such-computers. No, of course, suspected that something is. I’ve even for the first time in their lives saw the 1st of September of 1988 – when we, first-graders, a tour of the school and led to a class of computer science. I remember as a teacher is proud to announce something about the only school in the district, which has a computer class … And I, transfixed, staring at the strange mysterious car standing on the desks. And three years later, I, a reading child, took in the library wonderful book called “Encyclopedia professor Fortran”. There’s a comic book tells what komputerom and what they eat, and I finally realized that in a fairy tale, called the computer, I get in this life is not destined.

PDF:

Move to modify the ARPA federal funding plan submitted by DPI on April 1, 2021, as follows:

1. Reduce funding for administrative costs by $662,189, so that $1,200,000 remains for administration of ESSER III.

2. Delete the $600,000 minimum aid proposal provided under DPI’s plan, except increase the minimum aid proposed under DPI’s plan for the state’s residential schools for blind pupils to $300,000, the residential school for deaf pupils to $400,000, the Syble Hopp School operated by the Brown County Children with Disabilities Board to $700,000, and the Lakeland School operated by the Walworth County Children with Disabilities Board to $700,000 (frees up $37,261,355).

3. Delete the provision in DPI’s plan that would allocate the funds earmarked for learning loss using a formula grant process (frees up $77,039,242).

4. Provide a payment of $781 per pupil to Lincoln Academy, a new independent charter school located in Beloit, based on its September, 2021, headcount.

5. Use the amounts resulting from (1), (2), and (3), less the amount in (4) (totaling an estimated $114,642,576), to establish a per pupil minimum grant award of $781 for any local educational agencies (LEAs) that provided in-person instruction in the 2020-21 school year for at least 50% of the total instructional hours offered by the LEA, using the definition of in-person instruction and the data collection methodology under the in-person incentive under the plan for ESSER II funds as modified by the Committee. (A portion of the funds equal to $77,039,242 must be used to address learning loss, and must meet the other requirements for the earmark funds established under federal law.)

Under the Title I Part A formula used to allocate 90% of ESSER III funds, 153 LEAs receive less than $781 per pupil and could be eligible for a portion of this funding depending on the number of in-person instructional hours provided by the LEA.

6. After funding the aid entitlement under (5), allocate any funds remaining according to the methodology used for the in-person incentive funding under the ESSER II plan, as modified by the Committee. Only LEAs that receive less than $781 per pupil under the ESSER III Title I Part A allocation would be eligible to receive funding in this round. (Under this provision, LEAs are eligible to receive aid based on the number of in-person instructional hours provided to pupils in the 2020-21 school year. The amount of aid that will be received by each LEA will be calculated by dividing the number of in-person instructional hours provided by the LEA by the total number of in-person instructional hours provided by all eligible LEAs, with that proportion multiplied by the total amount of available funding.)

Decoding: ARPA: American Rescue Plan.

ESSER III

Without Clear Rules, There’s No Way to Judge How School Relief Funds Are Being Spent. Setting Student Progress as a North Star Would Be a Game Changer

Rick Mayer:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills.

The study, titled “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” said lockdowns in Europe and the U.S. reduced COVID-19 deaths by 0.2 percent.

Shelter-in-place orders were also ineffective, reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%, the study said.

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote in the report, issued Monday.

The study concluded that lockdowns “are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”

“They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy,” the report said.

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?

Urgency of Normal:

In much of the United States, adults have the option of returning to life essentially as we knew it in 2019. However, children continue to experience disproportionate restrictions, and the costs are mounting. 

Youth depression, suspected suicide attempts, drug overdose deaths, and obesity have all risen dramatically during the pandemic. The unintended consequences of pandemic restrictions are now a greater risk to our children than COVID, and we must act on that reality. 

Meanwhile, children’s already-low risk from COVID has become even lower. Vaccines are available to children aged five and up, the Omicron variant is causing milder disease, and vaccines continue to be extremely protective against severe disease in the Omicron era.

Based on a careful review of all of this evidence, we believe it is time to allow children the same return to normalcy that adults have enjoyed. Children’s schools, athletics, and activities should be restored to their 2019 norms. Masks should become optional in US schools (we suggest, by February 15), and we can also return to pre-pandemic norms for quarantines: if you are sick, stay home. 

We can and should protect medically-vulnerable children and adults using focused protection strategies that protect individuals with risk, as we did in the years before COVID, rather than prolonging harmful restrictions on all children.

In order to make these shifts, we must reassure families about the low risk to children from COVID infections in the Omicron era, and also from long COVID. We must also share the best available evidence on the benefits and harms of COVID mitigation measures affecting children, which can reassure families, educators, policymakers, and all who care for children’s well-being about the safety and healthfulness of a return to normalcy for kids.

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?

Zachary Stein:

The need to rediscover and reinvigorate education as the deeper codes and sources of culture is aided by Zak’s skilful reviving of the spirit of John Amos Comenius, an educator of world-historical importance.

But why education exactly? Because education is not just children in uniform with their feet under desks holding pencils expectantly while looking at their teacher. Zak understands Education – as I believe we all should – in the expansive Deweyian sense as a practice of social autopoiesis – the process by which society renews itself, including an intelligent patterning of institutional deaths and cultural births. We are called upon to be enlightened undertakers and visionary midwives.

As this essay reminds us, Education is the means by which we make it possible for new worlds to be born within worlds that are dying. It is in this sense that Zak rightly argues that Education must make history again.

And so, back to the question ‘What am I to do?’ The point of this essay is that this question should be informed, as a matter of urgency, by the deep story of being in a time between worlds. That story comes alive through the way Zak conveys the inspiration of John Amos Comenius, who developed his visions and theories four hundred years ago. It is up to all of us to make sense of what they mean today.

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?

Cori Petersen:

“I want to see parents more involved with the board of education,” said Scarlett Johnson who leads the Mequon-Thiensville parents group and is seeking election to the school board. “And I want to see less ideology in the classroom.”

National School Choice Week is a celebration of parents using publicly funded vouchers to send their children to private schools. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a movement of parents who want more say in directing their child’s public-school education.

When schools went virtual in March 2020, parents became very involved in their children’s education overnight and needed the schools to open up as soon as possible. When Mequon decided to go virtual in the fall of 2020, a group of concerned parents began meeting and held some of the town’s first protests.

Once schools opened in later September 2020, this parent group shifted their attention to curriculum concerns exposed through virtual learning. For instance, in spring 2020, Mequon Thiensville paid $42,000 for Blaquesmith Consulting to bring “The Talk” and “Realizing Our Vision” to the district.

Lao Dongyan:

A township Communist Party Committee secretary in Shandong warned petitioners that there are a hundred ways to “criminalize” them.  The county government head of a certain county in Henan Province was even more aggressive in shouting that those who maliciously return home during the Spring Festival should be isolated and detained.

All of the above, how I wish it was just isolated instances but unfortunately they are not. The township party secretary, who claimed to have a hundred ways to “criminalize” petitioners, must not think what she said was wrong; she only blamed herself for being politically naive and said what they had been doing and for her statement to be accidentally recorded. Indeed, her words reflected reality. Criminal law is full of means to deal with petitioners, including the crime of provocation, extortion and blackmail, as well as the crime of disturbing the working order of state organs. All these pretexts are commonly used in practice.

Benjamin Yount:

It’s the latest snapshot of just how many parents in Wisconsin want to explore educational options for their kids.

Tuesday was the first day for parents to enroll in the state’s Private School Choice Program. By midday, the state’s website crashed because of a flood of applications.

“Due to high volume, the system is temporarily unavailable,” read a note at the Department of Public Instruction’s website.

Jim Bender with School Choice Wisconsin is not surprised.

“We know from talking to schools that interest in the program is very high. Many new parents are seeking options,” Bender said.

Bender said it won’t be known just how many more parents will opt their kids out of traditional public schools until the fall.

But the trend is that more parents will make a choice.

Enrollment figures from last year showed more students enrolled in Wisconsin’s four school choice programs.

While Tuesday brought a flood of parents to Wisconsin’s private school enrollment, next week could see even more parents apply for the state’s  Public School Open Enrollment, which begins next week.

Bender said parents shouldn’t have to wait, either for enrollment periods or overwhelmed websites, to improve their child’s education.

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?

John Torinus:

UW Health, a $3.8 billion health system that operates in several states and earned $550 million in 2021. It contributed $50 million to the mother ship, arguably, an inadequate return to UW Madison, which owns its buildings and receives below market rent.

Quartz, an HMO insurance company operates in four states. It had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2021. Its profits are murky because of payments to a range of owners. This is a non-core asset that could be worth as much as $500 million. What is the university doing in the health insurance business? A spin-out, as already done by Northwestern University, could provide funds for other UW System priorities. One example is the strategically necessary expansion of the engineering facilities at our two flagship campuses.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) manages the university’s intellectual property. It has a long track record and now has assets of a whopping $3.9 billion. It runs as a separate entity. Its financials are not consolidated with UW Madison’s. Its license revenues have fallen off.

UW Madison Foundation, is another separate but related entity with more than $3 billion in assets.

At the system level is another complex of resources including 25 other campuses, other smaller foundations and a rich array of “centers” doing work in strategic academic sectors. All of the above require sophisticated, transparent and accountable governance.

The case can be made that financial oversight of the system as a whole and UW Madison in particular has been lacking. Inadequate governance can lead to problems. For example, some members of the Board of Regents in the past and at present have worked for organizations doing major business with UW Madison. Some UW affiliated board members are paid, others are not. The cross-overs may not rise to the glaring example of the Enron mess uncovered in 2001. But the cross-overs are certainly not transparent.

freespeech@mit:

We, the undersigned MIT faculty members, urge that the Institute improve its written commitment to academic freedom and free expression by officially adopting the Chicago Principles, as articulated in a 2014 University of Chicago report.¹

The Principles, adapted below for MIT (with no changes other than swapping University of Chicago identifiers for MIT identifiers), have been adopted by Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, BU, and 78 other universities and colleges.

If you are an MIT faculty member and wish to add your name to the list of signatories or have any questions, please email freespeech@mit.edu. 

The Chicago Principles (adapted for MIT)

Because MIT is committed to free and open inquiry in all matters, it guarantees all members of the MIT community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn. Except insofar as limitations on that freedom are necessary to the functioning of the Institute, MIT fully respects and supports the freedom of all members of the MIT community “to discuss any problem that presents itself.”

Of course, the ideas of different members of the MIT community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the Institute to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the Institute greatly values civility, and although all members of the MIT community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.

The freedom to debate and discuss the merits of competing ideas does not, of course, mean that individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish. The Institute may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the Institute. In addition, MIT may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the Institute. But these are narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of expression, and it is vitally important that these exceptions never be used in a manner that is inconsistent with the Institute’s commitment to a completely free and open discussion of ideas.

Glenn Reynolds:

It’s not that the problem isn’t noticed — a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 53% of people view the federal deficit and thus the debt as a serious problem, significantly outweighing other more-discussed issues such as climate change, terrorism or racism.

Clive Thompson:

I still do this! Old books are socially and culturally fascinating; they give you a glimpse into how much society has changed, and also what’s remained the same. The writing styles can be delightfully archaic, but also sometimes amazingly fresh. Nonfiction writers from 1780 can be colloquial and funny as hell.

And man, they wrote about everything. Back in those centuries they wrote books about falling in love via telegraph wires, and about long-distance balloon travel. They wrote books that soberly praised eugenics, and ones that inveighed against it. They published exuberant magazines of men’s fashion and books on how to adopt vegetarian diets. The past being the past, there’s a ton of flat-out nativism, racism, and gibbering misogyny — but also people fighting against that, too.

It’s rarely dull.

Still, sifting through old books can be a hassle. You have to go to those search sites and filter for the right vintage (and public domain status). It’s a pain.

Daniel Schmidt:

Last week, University of Chicago administrators informed on-campus students and the Chicago Thinker that unvaccinated students are banned from eating in dining halls—a policy that appears to be inconsistent with city law. After the Chicago Thinker further inquired, the dining policy was reversed with no explanation. It is unclear whether the university ever actually enforced the policy. Currently, the university is ignoring all questions from the Chicago Thinker. 

On January 22, UChicago students living in Liew House, a UChicago dorm community, were informed by a university-employed resident head that unvaccinated students “are not allowed to eat in the dining halls” because “per the Chicago ordinated in place, any unvaccinated individual is not allowed to eat inside a restaurant. This also means that those unvaccinated now have unlimited to go meals.”

Eugene Volokh:

Something Georgetown might want to keep in mind when deciding when Tweets from faculty members are punishable as “discrimination” or “harassment”: D.C., like many jurisdictions, bans employment discrimination based on “political affiliation,” though defined narrowly to refer only to “belonging to or endorsing any political party.” It also bans discrimination in educational programsbased on political affiliation. Unsurprisingly, Georgetown’s antidiscrimination policy covers political affiliation alongside other characteristics.

If Georgetown were to interpret its policies on discrimination and harassment as forbidding tweets that are seen as offensive or derogatory to particular racial groups, then I think it would be bound to apply the same rules to future tweets that are seen as offensive or derogatory to people who belong to or endorse any political party as well. I don’t think the policies should be thus interpreted, and in particular I don’t think the Ilya Shapiro tweet should be seen as violating those policies. But if they are thus interpreted, then that would have to cover future public statements by other Georgetown faculty related to political party (and, of course, religion) as well as race or sex.

UPDATE: I revised this slightly to make clear that I’m talking about how a decision in this case would affect future cases, in which the tweets were seen as offensive or derogatory to, say, Republicans or Democrats. (I thought it was clear at the outset, but some commenters thought otherwise, so I wanted to make sure my point came across.)

Jane Kitchen:

Socially, it wasn’t entirely what I expected. The people at Bryn Mawr were the wealthiest and most liberal I had ever encountered. During my first week on campus, a girl I met suggested over dinner that 9/11 was justified because the United States had meddled in Middle East politics. She went on to say that the 9/11 memorial should be changed so as to show more respect to Muslims. One of the girls in my hall casually mentioned that Michelle Obama had been in a spin class she had taken in the Hamptons that summer. At first, I thought she was kidding. 

I joined a sketch comedy group, which often started meetings by asking members to answer a question. One day, the question was “How is your semester going?” A few people answered directly, and then one girl said “I’m having a great semester, but I totally acknowledge that some students, especially BIPOC students, face a lot of challenges on campus.” Then, every person after her prefaced their answer by saying that students who aren’t white were probably having a worse semester than them.

I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would. It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers. But I made friends, and I loved my classes. I went to parties at nearby colleges, and I was making plans to study abroad in Ireland, which, as someone who had only left my home state twice, was a huge deal for me. 

That was supposed to be in the Fall of 2020, but of course it never happened. I remember talking about the coronavirus on the way home from a party with my friend, a self-professed germaphobe, in January of 2020. She asked if I thought we should be worried. I told her that as a campus we should be more worried about binge drinking, and we both laughed. I thought that would be the end of it. Weeks later, Bryn Mawr announced that my spring semester would be held online. 

The next few months were the worst of my life.

Commentary.

Aaron Sibarium:

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yale University has required all students to mask indoors in public spaces. But it was 9:30 p.m on a Saturday night, and the library was deserted. With no one within at least 150 feet of him, a Yale senior decided to relax with a movie—and without a mask.

It got him reported to the school’s COVID hotline.

According to the Yale senior, another student walked into the library and demanded he mask up. Since he didn’t have one on him, the senior said he would leave. As he was gathering his belongings, the other student pulled out her phone and began filming him. When the senior asked for her name, the student raised her middle finger and stormed off.

Two days later, he received a notice from the Yale administration that he had been reported for violating the school’s “Community Compact,” a set of rules put in place to “promote the health and safety of all community members.” The student was given 24 hours to provide the “Compact Review Committee” with “any relevant information” he would like it to consider during the official “evaluation” of his conduct. He was ultimately found guilty of a violation and threatened with a “public health withdrawal.”

Lee Gaines:

Karla knew something was wrong. Her daughter still couldn’t read by the time she reached the fifth grade.

In early elementary school, Karla’s daughter was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder, among other conditions. Her daughter’s school district in northwest Indiana provided her with special education services under an individualized education program, or IEP, intended to help her progress. 

But Karla said her daughter had failed to make significant academic gains during her fourth grade year. She was concerned the school was missing something.

Karla paid thousands of dollars to have her daughter evaluated by a neuropsychologist. She scored a 91 on a nonverbal intelligence test, which placed her in the average range. That was nearly 50 points higher than what the school reported from its own IQ testing, which placed her in the extremely low range. 

The results validated Karla’s suspicion about her daughter’s potential.

The Consilience Project:

There is no technical “fix” or simple solution for improving the overall tenor and complexity of public communication about facts. There are, however, possibilities for digital technologies to enable educational initiatives of profound depth at massive scale. The same technologies that are now being used to mislead us with facts can be used to help us piece all the facts together and place them in the right context. The now crucial nexus of digital technologies, education, and politics can be reconfigured to allow for widespread learning and mutual understanding. Even though these facts are clear, there is, as always, the question of what we choose to do with them.

MARTIN KULLDORFF AND JAY BHATTACHARYA

With millions of Americans getting infected and over 800,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, most people now realize that Washington’s pandemic policies failed. Lockdowns just postponed the inevitable while causing enormous collateral damage on cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, mental health, education and much else.

So, the blame game is in full swing. At a recent Senate hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci did not even attempt to defend his policies. Instead, he insisted that: “Everything that I have said has been in support of the CDCguidelines.”

Dr. Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has worked closely with the two CDC directors, Drs. Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky, throughout the pandemic, but he is now laying the responsibility on them. He did the same with his former boss, shortly after Dr. Francis Collins resigned as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr. Collins fiercely defended Fauci throughout the pandemic. In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration criticized Fauci’s lockdown strategy, calling for focused protection of high-risk older people while letting children go to school and young adults live near-normal lives. A few days later, Collins—a geneticist with little public health experience—wrote an email to Faucisuggesting a “take down” of the declaration, and characterizing its Harvard, Oxford and Stanford authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci agreed with his boss, but when asked about the incident at the recent Senatehearing, he responded that it “was an email from Dr. Collins to me.” In other words, Fauci himself was just following orders.

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?

Eric Ting:

On Sunday, both politicians — along with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — were photographed posing maskless for photos with Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson at a luxury box at the NFC Championship Game at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

John Cochrane:

To be clear here, Abigail’s point is not whether classical liberalism is true or not. The point is whether a classical liberal may not be appointed to the university of California, no matter his, her, or their scientific accomplishments, or must be made to abjure and deny that political belief as a condition of employment. You can disagree with classical liberals, but you can still agree they may express their political views, and you may agree that they should not be  forced, as a condition of employment,  to abjure their beliefs and associations, to express other beliefs, and to be forced to participate in activities and associations that advance other political views.

Before the twitter mob goes nuts, the point today is the nature of the diversity statement. I’m not arguing against “diversity” either in its plain English sense, or in its current political meaning as a euphemism for racial, gender and sexual-identity quotas. I do, as required by my employer, put quite a bit of thumb on the scale in hiring and appointments.  We’ll argue about that some other day. Jerry too, in addition to being an eminent scientist, describes himself as a liberal, and believes in advancing diversity in academia. But not loyalty oaths.

What is it? 

The university not only requires the statements, but gives

these statements precedence in the hiring process, so that if your statement doesn’t exceed a minimum numerical cutoff for promoting diversity, increasing it in your past, and promulgating it in the future should you be hired, your candidacy is terminated 

My friends (anonymous!) in the UC system report that the criteria are clear and the word is out: Don’t try to be clever. Don’t quote Martin Luther King, on judgement by content of character rather than color of skin. Don’t write vibrant essays on the importance of ideological, political or religious diversity. Don’t quote federal anti-discrimination law, the 14th Amendment, and the UC’s own statements of non-discrimination in hiring. Don’t write about class diversity, diverse experiences of immigrants, such as people born under communism in Eastern Europe or the amazingly diverse experience of the colleague you just hired who came from a small village in China. Don’t write about the importance of freedom of speech, or anti-communist loyalty oaths in the 1950s. Are you thinking of writing about your hilbilly elegy background, your time in the military, your support for gun rights and Trump, and how this background and viewpoint would enrich a faculty and staff that likely has absolutely zero people like you? Don’t bother. We all know what “diversity” means. And, heaven forbid, don’t express distaste for the project. The staff are on to all these tricks, and each of these specifically will earn you a downgrade. For an example of what not to do, see UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge’s (UCLA law) posted diversity statement. Let’s see if he gets that raise.