Lydie A. Lebrun-Harris, Reem M. Ghandour and Michael D. Kogan:

Findings Between 2016 and 2020, there were significant increases in children’s diagnosed anxiety and depression, decreases in physical activity, and decreases in caregiver mental and emotional well-being and coping with parenting demands. After the onset of the pandemic specifically, there were significant year-over-year increases in children’s diagnosed behavioral or conduct problems, decreases in preventive medical care visits, increases in unmet health care needs, and increases in the proportion of young children whose parents quit, declined, or changed jobs because of child care problems.

Rasmussen Reports:

More than half of voters believe cheating affected the 2020 election and an overwhelming majority say the issue of election integrity will be important in the midterm elections.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 83% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the issue of election integrity will be important in this year’s congressional elections, including 62% who say the issue will be Very Important. Only 14% don’t think election integrity will be important in the November elections. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Susan Miller:

Moreover, these strategies usually focus on aspirational goals and avoid the far tougher issue of how to achieve them. The end result of the typical school district strategy process is minimal change and preservation of the poorly performing status quo which fails to adequately prepare students to meet the challenges they will face in the 21st century.

What does an effective strategy process look like?

First, what do we mean by “strategy”? In my work with consulting clients, and I’ve long used the following definition:

“A strategy is a causal theory, based on a set of assumptions, of how to achieve an organization’s critical goals with limited resources, in the face of evolving uncertainty and opposition.”

Plans (plural) implement strategy (singular). And plans are usually adapted along the way to achieve the strategy’s goals.

Establishing the Context: Trends, Uncertainties, and Scenarios

Strategy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rather, it must be based on a set of assumptions about what the future environment could look like. Too many districts base their strategy on an unspoken assumption that the future will be just like today. In contrast, successful strategies (and their associated risk management plans) are designed to achieve critical goals under a wide range of future scenarios.

Scenarios reflect combinations of assumptions about trends and different future outcomes for critical uncertainties. For example, a trend is declining birthrates and the potential number of students. An uncertainty is what percentage of these students will attend district-run versus other types of schools.

Here is a partial list of the trends and uncertainties districts face as they design their strategies:

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?

Jordan Boyd:

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona first commissioned the leaders of the NSBA to write a letter demanding that the Biden administration use domestic terrorism laws to target parents concerned about the indoctrination of their children at schools in early October. The White House also colluded with NSBA President Viola Garcia and CEO Chip Slaven to craft the text of the letter before sending it out without approval from most state school boards associations.

Perry Stein:

Like most of the nation’s school districts, Lewis-Palmer 38 abruptly closed its school buildings and sent students home on March 13, 2020. They learned online for the remainder of the academic year, and teachers quickly saw many students’ progress slow. Children struggled with the coursework and felt depressed and anxious, educators say.

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School system officials surveyed parents in July and determined that more than 60 percent said they were “very likely” to return to in-person learning. Fewer than 10 percent of families said they were “very unlikely” to return. More than 60 percent of teachers, who are not unionized, felt confident the school system could reopen schools safely; just 15 percent disagreed.

So Lewis-Palmer 38 decided to reopen. To craft its plan, local officials used health guidance put forth by the local health department in El Paso County. Case numbers there were far lower than the national averages in August 2020.

Still, the district took liberties. The El Paso Health Department, for example, “strongly encouraged” children 10 and younger to wear masks. Lewis-Palmer decided to require masks only in hallways for this age group, and it allowed them to go maskless in classrooms. Officials relied on a state constitution that gives school boards complete control over their schools.

“We wanted it to be as normal as possible, and children wearing masks is not normal,” said Chris Taylor, president of the Lewis-Palmer school board. “The focus of the board was to give parents as much choice as possible — and children could wear masks if they wanted.”

Lewis-Palmer didn’t entirely escape the covid politics that engulfed school reopenings across the country. Some parents pleaded with the district for stricter mask requirements. Others posted signs that said “free the face” outside the school district’s high schools, where masks were required last academic year.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

John McKenna:

Even before the pandemic hit, 98 percent of US school districts said they didn’t have enough special education teachers to serve all the students who needed their help. During the pandemic, short-handed school districts were even more stretched to provide learning support to students with disabilities. Now, those students are struggling to catch up with where they should be.

In fall 2018, according to the most recent federal data available, there were 6.1 full-time special educators for every 100 students who received special-education services, varying widely by state, from 2.8 in Oklahoma to 12.1 in Washington, D.C. Special education teachers have long described their work as very demanding with little support, high stress, and low pay.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to rapidly shift from traditional in-person teaching to virtual classes on laptops and smartphones in students’ homes. The sorts of services common in special education—additional support within a child’s classroom, and dedicated time with specialists outside the classroom—became difficult, or even impossible, to provide.

Paul Rossi:

Shortly after the publication of my exposé of a BLM at School seminar hosted by the National Association of Independent School (NAIS), the organization scrubbed their storefront website, ceasing to make hundreds of sessions from previous years available as digital downloads.

My article for Legal Insurrection, published this Sunday, March 6th, analyzed several short clips from “Growing Young Voices: Understanding Black Lives Matter for Teachers,” a session originally presented at NAIS’ People of Color Conference (PoCC) in 2019. The presentation had been offered for sale to the public on the NAIS site, but were unavailable on the evening of Thursday, March 10th, four days after the article was released.

On Wednesday, March 9th, Emma-Jo Morris at Breitbart.com published another article exposing more sessions from PoCC 2021. These were not available for purchase online, but I had also reviewed many of them when researching “Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine,” an editorial on PoCC I co-wrote with Brearley dad Andrew Gutmann. Several video clips from PoCC 2021 are also available on Legal Insurrection.

David Blaska:

Were they just hoping problem would go away?

Now the Madison school board is developing a committee to study school safety. NOW? Today? Five months after a widespread brawl at East high school induced one-third of the student body to shelter at home for safety? Two years after defunding school resource police officers? And all the gun incidents and student beatings since?

Now, today, the Madison school board is going to start a 13-member “student safety and wellness committee.” The overly Woke school board that created this undergraduate fight club will appoint the members, led by school board member Ananda Mirilli. Her day job at the Department of Public Instruction is to inject critical race theory into K-12 curriculum statewide.

This committee will address “the root cause of disengagement and violence in schools.” Maybe the committee can team up with Vice President Kamala Harris who is studying the root cause of illegal immigration. Philosophy Lesson 101: Studying the “root cause” of a thing means the studier has no idea what to do about the problem.

Here’s an idea: Until you find the unicorn at the end of the rainbow, how about stopping the violence in the meantime?

The Mirilli committee will “create districtwide policies.” Madison Metropolitan School District already has more policies than an insurance company.

Blaska, your write-in candidate for Seat #4 on the school board, has yer policy right here: put teachers back in control of their classrooms and principals back in charge of their schools. Return the SROs. You are most welcome!

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

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?

Joanne Jacobs:

Luke Rosiak’s new book, Race to the Bottom, blames public schools’ problems on special interests that put ideology before education. Rosiak, who broke the story of how Loudoun County, Va. school officials lied about a bathroom rape, writes in the New York Post about a data-loving dad who was dubbed “Enemy #1” in Loudoun after seeking statistics on teacher effectiveness.

Brian Davison, an operations research specialist, had two children in Loudoun schools back in 2014. He learned that state law required at least 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on the “student growth profile (SGP)” of their students. (Elsewhere, it’s known as “value-added” data.) Teachers don’t like the idea because it can show teacher effectiveness — not just who’s teaching high, middle or low achievers.

Davison asked for a copy of the growth scores from Loudoun and other districts. When districts said “no,” he sued the Virginia Department of Education.

One school board member called him, “Enemy #1,” reports Rosiak.

Elizabeth Beyer:

In the video taken Monday at East and later removed from Facebook, a student verbally confronts another student in a classroom before physically attacking the student, and eventually tackling the student onto a table, which subsequently buckles. Another person is seen in the video attempting to separate the two students, but it’s unclear whether the person who intervened is a student or staff member.

The Wisconsin State Journal viewed the video but did not obtain permission to post it. District spokesperson Tim LeMonds confirmed the altercation and said a teacher was present and on the phone calling for support per district protocol as the incident unfolded.

The formation of a student safety and wellness ad hoc committee meant to address ongoing concerns in buildings across the district was first discussed after a melee outside of East in November drew significant police response and sent students exposed to pepper spray to the hospital.

Luke Berg:

In the past few years, school districts nationwide have quietly adopted policies requiring staff to facilitate and “affirm” gender identity transitions at school without parental notice or consent—and even in secret from parents. Certain groups are telling school boards and administrators that excluding parents from the decision about whether staff will treat their child as the opposite sex is not only best practice but required by law. Neither is true. Such policies fly in the face of how schools treat every other decision of similar significance. 

From a legal perspective, these policies violate parents’ constitutional rights to raise their children. They also conflict with science. Many professionals in the field believe that transitioning at a young age can become self-reinforcing and do long-term harm. And these policies divide children against parents, communicating to kids that their parents’ decisions should not be respected. 

As parents become aware of these policies, some through personal experience, many are wondering what can be done. Fortunately, parents can raise strong objections with their school boards and administrators, which may persuade them to change course. If that doesn’t work, these policies are vulnerable to legal challenge. Finally, there is a relatively simple legislative fix: Lawmakers can, and should, prohibit public schools from taking this major decision out of parents’ hands.

Matt Burr and Beca Enducott:

In a world we anticipate, a world where work never really returns to the office, the most important factors for success will be ample trust, mutually agreed-upon norms, good communication and a strong and validating work culture.

Technical collaboration tools are important too, but not nearly as vital as a good foundation. It might seem daunting to build that foundation on the fly, as we are (sometimes literally) changing the way we work overnight. But a great deal of it is transferable. Every office, physical or otherwise, runs more smoothly when lines of communication are open, when guidelines and rules are clear. Now, we will need to be that much more explicit about articulating those norms.

We also have to normalize the choice we’re making. Organizationally, it’s difficult to let go of the illusion of control an office provides. It’s easy to feel that the work will get done only if we’re all together in one place. It’s not true. When we trust one another and rely on one another to get the work done—the work usually gets done. 

This is a radical adjustment. It is alarming, it is happening fast, but it could also be the start of something revolutionary. We live in a tumultuous moment, but there is a world, perhaps 173 days in the future, where this won’t feel scary anymore. It will just feel . . . normal.

George Will

Today’s festival of offended sensitivities was prefigured in 1991 at a Penn State University branch, when a female English instructor demanded that a reproduction of Goya’s “Naked Maja” (the original is in Madrid’s Prado), which had been hanging there for years, be removed from her classroom.

Her alternative demand was — think about this — that a male nude be placed beside it. To balance the affront?

A campus executive ordered the picture removed because it could contribute to a “chilly” classroom climate, thus violating sexual harassment law. This harbinger of the era of “microaggressions” occurred while Congress was enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1991, adding to existing law a provision for compensatory and punitive damages — not for lost wages because of harassment, but for emotional distress.

Law shapes as well as reflects culture, and Gail L. Heriot of the University of San Diego School of Law argues in her essay “The Roots of Wokeness” that those new Title VII damage remedies propelled the nation’s downward spiral into identity politics, speech regulation and an epidemic of irritability.

After the change, Heriot reports, there was “a dramatic increase in the number of harassment charges filed” and in the monetary stakes. In the final quarter of 1991, the number of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) harassment charges increased 71% over the same period in 1990.

ElinorAmit & Pamela K.Smith

This research shows people are perceived as less powerful when they use pictures versus words. This effect was found across picture types (company logos, emojis, and photographs) and use contexts (clothing prints, written messages, and Zoom profiles). Mediation analysis and a mediation-by-moderation design show this happens because picture-use signals a greater desire for social proximity (versus distance) than word-use, and a desire for social proximity is associated with lower power. Finally, we find that people strategically use words (pictures) when aiming to signal more (less) power. We refute alternative explanations including differences in the content of pictures and words, the medium’s perceived appropriateness, the context’s formality, and the target’s age and gender. Our research shows pictures and words are not interchangeable means of representation. Rather, they signal distinct social values with reputational consequences.

Matt Taibbi:

This weekend I re-read 1984, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of doublethink:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.

In the last weeks, Russia took an already exacting speech environment to new extremes. A law was passed that would impose 15-year prison sentencesfor anyone spreading “fake news” about the Ukraine invasion; access was cut to Facebook and Twitter; stations like Echo Moskvi and TV Rain as well as BBC Russia, Radio Liberty, the New Times, Deutsche Welle, Doxa, and Latvia-based Meduza were effectively shut down; Wikipedia was threatened with a block over its invasion page; and national authorities have appeared to step in to prevent coverage of soldiers killed in the war, requiring local outlets to use terms like “special operation” instead. The latter development is connected to the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issuing a remarkably desperate dictum requiring news outlets to “use information and data received by them only from official Russian sources.”

Russia also appears in the middle of a general crackdown on local media, not so much because those outlets are dissenting, but because they’re more likely to provide indirect evidence of war failures or the effect of sanctions. The desperation to control news has grown to the point where Russian diplomats in foreign countries are pressuring state outlets in countries like Iran to stop using the term “war” to describe what’s going on in Ukraine.

On the flip side, a slew of actions have been taken to crack down on “fake news” and “misinformation” in the West. The big one was the European Union banning RT and Sputnik:

Marie Szaniszlo:

The high wages of teachers in Boston, where nearly 3,000 are paid six-figure salaries, reflects the strength of their union and suggests that a district plagued by “chronic underperformance” may be more geared toward the adults running it than the children it serves, watchdogs say.

A Herald analysis of payroll data found that 2,905 teachers earn more than $100,000 annually, compared to the average per capita income of $44,690 in Boston in 2019, the most recent year for which the U.S. Census Bureau has statistics.

Those teachers earned six figures in a city where 18.9% of the population – about 121,000 of 642,000 people – live below the poverty line, compared to the national average of 12.3%.

David Tuerck, president of the Beacon Hill Institute, which develops economic and statistical models for policy analysis, thinks Boston Public School teachers are overpaid “because of the strength of the teachers unions in Massachusetts.”

Neither Jessica Tang, president of the Boston Teachers Union, nor a spokeswoman for BPS returned calls seeking comment.

Paul Kane:

While Biden won by more than 7 million votes, Republicans scored a net gain of 11 seats in November, in addition to two seats they picked up earlier in 2020, a historic anomaly. Democrats suffered painful losses in the suburbs around Los Angeles and Miami, while Republicans held firm in more than a half dozen seats in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas and Omaha.

Haley Strack:

The survey is the latest result of a years’ long partnership between MCPS and the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium (MAEC), a prominent “antiracist” consulting group. Since 2020, MCPS has diverted nearly $1 million of taxpayer funds to the firm to boost its “antiracist” credentials, according to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education.

Some Montgomery County parents think the district has the wrong priorities.

“They’re spending so much funding on this, and test scores are down,” said former Montgomery County school administrator Dee Reuben. “Parents are livid. I hear this every day—parents are afraid to speak out because they’re afraid of the repercussions that will happen to their kids. Academics is going down the tube, and I think that is a shame considering we were one of the top school systems around—it breaks my heart.”

Montgomery County literacy readiness in 2021 plummeted between 30 and 40 percent depending on grade level. Only 54 percent of MCPS high school students test at or above the proficient level.

Reuben leads United Against Racism in Education, a group made up of Montgomery County parents, teachers, and community leaders who are concerned with the district’s misuse of taxpayer funds to promote critical race theory. United Against Racism in Education is one of several groups across the country that want schools to spend less time pushing “equity” and more time on education.

Dynomight:

In a recent post, Parrhesia suggested that course grades should be 100% determined by performance on a final exam—an exam that could be taken repeatedly, with the last attempt being the course grade. (See also the discussion at r/slatestarcodex.) The idea is that grades are supposed to measure what you know, and if you do well on a final, then you know the material.

Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahaha.

Now, I sympathize with this proposal. I largely agree with the central claim that this would be more accurate than grades based on a mixture of homework and quizzes and whatever.

And yet—I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes. Systems with humans in them behave in funny ways, which means there are other considerations beyond accuracy.

I don’t mean to suggest that things are optimal the way they are. But we should at least understand how they came to be, so let’s follow Chesteron’s fence for a while, shall we?

Jonathan Zimmerman:

With one infelicitous phrase, a professor’s career can spiral toward destruction. This is not new, but it often feels like it’s getting worse.

Witness the fate of the psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, who was suspended last month by Columbia University and terminated from his post as chief of psychiatric services at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. His transgression was a single imprudent tweet about a minor celebrity. “Whether a work of art or a freak of nature she’s a beautiful sight to behold,” Lieberman wrote, extolling the South Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech. Lieberman was commenting on a tweet that described Gatwech as the darkest-skinned person on the planet, according to Guinness World Records. In fact, there is no such measurement, from Guinness or anyone else. Even an Ivy League professor can be duped by bad information.

Amid a tsunami of social media outrage, a familiar ritual played out. Lieberman issued an apology. His tweet was “sexist and racist,” Lieberman wrote, reflecting “prejudices and stereotypical assumptions.” But in our current moment, saying you’re sorry is rarely enough. 

Writing in The New York Times, Lieberman’s Columbia colleague John McWhorter, a linguistics professor, noted that “freak of nature”—the part of the tweet causing the most fury—was offered in praise and that the term is not always used as a pejorative. Yes, the phrase conjures a hateful history of objectifying and reviling Black female bodies, and Lieberman shouldn’t have used it, as McWhorter, who is Black, acknowledged. As is often the case when there’s a racial imbroglio of this type, McWhorter used his considerable platform to urge calm and reflection rather than dismissal and ostracism. I agree. Given the laudatory tone of the tweet, it’s absurd to imagine that Lieberman was demeaning Gatwech. Instead, he seemed to be saying that she’s hot.

Heather Knight:

San Francisco public school officials and board members talk a lot about kids like Royal Holyfield, an 11-year-old Black boy in fifth grade at a Tenderloin elementary school. They talk a lot about equity. They talk a lot about narrowing the persistent achievement gap between Black kids and their white and Asian peers.

But Joan Thomas, Royal’s grandmother, who has raised him since he was 10 days old, thinks it’s just that — a whole lot of talk. And at this crucial moment for the city’s school system, with three new board members sworn in Friday and a new superintendent to be picked this spring, Thomas and other Black families say they’re hoping the district will finally give their kids more support.

Thomas, 62, is charismatic, funny and direct. In October 2020, she invited me to her small apartment in a South of Market affordable-housing complex to see what never-ending Zoom school had done to Royal.

He’d sunk into a deep depression, gained weight and spent long days toggling among distance learning, YouTube videos and his beloved “Fortnite” video game. I thought of the family often afterward, as San Francisco became one of the last urban school districts in the country to reopen, and called Thomas the other day to ask how Royal is doing now that he’s back in the classroom.

“Not great,” Thomas said with a sigh. “He hates school. Some days are almost impossible.”

Hannah Natanson & Rachel Weiner:

A federal judge has denied the request of Fairfax County Public Schools for a stay of his order invalidating the admissions system at prestigious magnet school Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, marking another serious blow for Virginia’s largest school system.

The stay, if granted, would have allowed the school district of 180,000 to proceed with the current admissions system, a “holistic review” process that takes into account factors such as socioeconomic status, for applicants to the Class of 2026.

My recommendation is not to commit this $125M until the US gov can actually make previously funded virus discovery work transparent and accountable.

They can start by looking into the cleavage site insertion communications that are here in the US.

— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) March 12, 2022

The interview.

Laura McKenna:

Parental involvement went beyond homework and mental health. They also marched into school board meetings across the nation, loudly advocating for their positions on masks and curriculum. Their views were felt in the voting booth as the angry parent vote swung state elections, and may also play a critical role in the the midterm elections this November. Parents took the front stage in education politics like never before.

With the pandemic easing — my son went to school without a mask for the first time this week! Woot! — parents are not walking away from schools. Much to the annoyance of some education leaders, parents are demanding a seat at the decision-making table. In the past month, I’ve heard many parents say, “Now what? I want to keep going to school board meetings and demanding meaningful change, but I’m not sure what I should prioritize.” 

Here’s where I come in. 

Last week, I started a niche newsletter for special education parents, called The Great Leap. Next week, I will launch a new one called The Educated Parent — All the education research, advice, and context to help parents become better advocates for their children and all kids. 

I’m arranging the apps and the chairs for a party for educated parents. The wine bottles are uncorked. Hope you join us.

Billy Binion:

The 93-year-old left her Minneapolis condominium in 2010 after a nearby shooting and a disturbing encounter left her uneasy. But she was unable to finance both her new apartment and the property tax on her erstwhile condo, accruing $2,300 in debt.

Over the course of the next five years, the government raised that debt by over 550 percent, tacking on almost $13,000 in additional penalties, fines, and interest. And when Tyler couldn’t pay that, it seized her property, sold it for $40,000—and kept the profit.

Andrea Widburg

In response to the uproar over Florida’s new law holding that public school teachers may not instruct the four- to eight-year-old crowd in the finer points of the LGBT agenda, Governor Ron DeSantis’s spokesperson said the bill is essentially an anti-grooming bill.  That means that those who oppose it are people who want to groom children themselves or just think it’s an okay thing to do.  The outrage at her claim was instant and overwhelming.

The language Democrats find so objectionable states as follows:

So I asked “What’s your single best piece of career advice”?

I got 1,300+ answers.

Here are the 12 best you wish you knew yesterday👇

— Chris Hladczuk (@chrishlad) March 12, 2022

MacIver

It’s been 11 years since Wisconsin Republicans led by Gov. Scott Walker passed collective bargaining reform, and the savings to taxpayers have been piling up ever since.

Known as Act 10, the reforms were designed to permanently solve a financial crisis throughout Wisconsin’s public sector. State government alone was facing a $3.6 billion deficit in its next budget. The situation was even worse for local governments (including school districts). Act 10 required all public employees to begin making contributions towards their own health insurance and pensions.

Using the same methodology that we have always used and the same public data sources, we estimate Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers at least $15.3 billion statewide at the state and local level since 2011.

More Eau Claire Madness: Training teachers to fight religious objections.
Thanks, @iandprior, for sharing this. pic.twitter.com/Brk6D7NB8q

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 11, 2022

More, here

C Bradley Thompson

In the first two essays in this series on the relationship between government and the education of children (“How the Redneck Intellectual Discovered Educational Freedom—and How You Can, Too” and “The New Abolitionism: A Manifesto for a Movement”), I established, first, how and why the principle of “Separation of School and State” is both a logical and moral necessity grounded in the rights of nature, and then I demonstrated how and why America’s government schools should be abolished as logical and moral necessities.

In this essay, I’d like to drill down more deeply into the nature and purposes of government schooling in order to further demonstrate how and why a system of government-run education is anathema to the tradition of American freedom and therefore immoral. Let me be clear (if I haven’t been so already): I regard the government school system to be the single worst and most destructive institution in America. It cannot be “reformed,” and it cannot be tolerated. Period. It must, therefore, be abolished.

To that end, it is important to understand how and why government schooling came to the United States in the first place. Most Americans today assume that the “public” school system is as American as apple pie, that it has been around since the first foundings of Britain’s North American colonies in the seventeenth century or at least since the founding of the United States of American in 1788. But this is not true.

In the longue durée of American history from the early seventeenth century to the present, the government school system is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. A system of nation-wide government schools was not fully implemented in this country until about 100 years ago.

Let’s begin with a brief journey through the early history of American education to see when, why, and how the American people gave up their unalienable right to educate their children and turned it over to government officials.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

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?

R2D3

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learningtechniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.

Naomi Wolf:

I am exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, agreeing with the risktaking of others, who talk about their “courage.” I feel that this is a form of othering that dehumanizes and exploits those speaking out.

It casts the people who do take risks for the wellbeing of others, as being somehow naturally better-fitted for this difficult job than is the speaker. It’s a form of offloading one’s own responsibility guiltlessly onto a subgroup which is assigned the status of somehow liking the battle, or somehow fitted better for combat, by nature, than is the speaker himself.

It’s like all those guys I knew in college who never did the dishes after dinner, because they said they were really bad at it.

I don’t know anyone truly heroic who likes the current battle. But I think that most could not live with themselves if they walked away from doing what they know they can do to help — in a moment in which obvious right and wrong have not been clearer since 1941.

Dr Patrick Phillips — a Canadian ER doctor who spoke out early against the harms of “lockdowns,” when many fellow doctors were silent — said something like, “I realized that many of my peers were silent because they were worried about their careers. But I also realized that if I didn‘t speak out, soon I would have no career worth saving.” And Dr Jay Bhattacharya said, last night on Fox, when he was asked about the Great Barrington signatories having been vilified, smeared, attacked and hounded professionally for 18 months — for having been right about the harms of “lockdowns” — something like: “If I did not speak out, what was the point of my career in public health?”

Channel3000:

The district couldn’t provide any examples of history that would be taught differently. Jackson instead says teachers will use more perspectives when covering a topic.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

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?

Vince Bielski

Des Moines this week suffered its first fatal school shooting – reigniting a controversy in the city after the district removed police officers from its schools last year.

Police say a group of teenagers in vehicles outside Des Moines’ East High School fired multiple rounds onto school property on Monday, killing a 15-year-old boy and critically wounding two female students who were bystanders. Six teenagers, some of them current Des Moines students, have been charged with first-degree murder.

The deadly drive-by shooting now hovers over the decision by Des Moines officials, along with about 30 districts across the country, to exile cops from schools. These moves were part of the “defund the police” movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It’s a movement now reeling in the face of violent crime surging nationwide, punctuated by President Biden’s State of the Union vow last week to “fund the police.”

But in schools, at least, a decision to bring back cops — or “school resource officers,” as they are called — isn’t a slam dunk in places where students of color had been arrested at higher rates than whites.

Kyle Stokes:

The number of students in Los Angeles Unified schools has been falling for years. Now, school district staff fear the drain may be accelerating.

In a new budget forecast Thursday, LAUSD officials predicted that enrollment will decline by 36,000 students — enough to drop enrollment in the nation’s second-largest school district below 400,000 students — by the start of classes in Fall 2023.

That’s an even more pessimistic forecast than the LAUSD officials delivered in December, in which they predicted a 25,000-student drop.

LAUSD officials are more optimistic that the district will have cash to spare over the next three school years, thanks in part to extraordinary COVID-19 relief money from the state and federal government. They now expect to close out the 2023-24 school year with more than $425 million in cash left to spend.

But officials on Thursday warned the sugar rush of pandemic aid will soon wear off, leaving the district to reckon with some of the problems that come with running a growing number of under-enrolled schools. In California, a school’s funding level is closely tied to its enrollment.

“It is very much our intent,” said LAUSD chief financial officer David Hart, “to delve into these numbers to understand what is transpiring with regards to a reduction in our enrollment … and is that by grade, is that by region?”

Two decades ago, LAUSD enrolled more than 737,000 students. But falling birth rates and rising housing costs have eroded that number over the last two decades. Competition between LAUSD campuses and charter schools — publicly funded, privately run, tuition-free schools — has also played a factor, but even charters’ enrollments have been basically flat for the last five years.

Adam Andrzejewski

At OpenTheBooks.com, we believe transparency revolutionizes U.S. public policy and politics. 

As a regular contributor to Forbes since May 2014, I published 206 investigations while writing an estimated quarter million words on the platform. In May 2018, Forbes upgraded my title to senior policy contributor.

Over this nearly eight year period, my articles were a-political and used hard data to fact-check Republicans, Democrats, and unelected bureaucrats. Since 2019, I published 112 articles for 13,031,558 views – an average of 116,353 views per investigation.

Here are three examples of our original reporting:

• The Biden Administration left behind up to 600,000 weapons, 75,000 military vehicles and 16,000 night vision devices in their hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. 
• No, President Donald Trump didn’t drain the swamp – the swamp grew by 50,000 executive agency positions during his four years. 
• In 2004, Dr. Fauci received a permanent pay adjustment for his biodefense work. In other words, Fauci was the top-paid federal employee precisely because he was paid to stop a pandemic.

In 2020, I published 36 investigations at Forbes and the editors chose 26 for special showcase on the platform, a designation called “Editors’ Pick.”

The first piece I published in 2021 broke national news that Dr. Fauci was the most highly compensated federal employee and even out-earned the president, four-star generals, and 4.3 million colleagues. That piece alone has 900,000+ views.

However, none of the 56 articles I published during 2021-2022 received an “Editors’ Pick” designation.

Something changed at Forbes after I wrote about Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Martin Tillier:

The U.S does indeed produce enough oil to meet its own needs. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2020 America produced 18.4 million barrels of oil per day and consumed 18.12 million. And yet that same report reveals that the U.S. imported 7.86 million barrels of oil per day last year.

That happens because of a combination of economics and chemistry. The economics are simple: overseas oil, even after shipping costs, is often cheaper than domestically-produced crude. That is because what oil people call “lifting costs,” the cost of actually getting the oil out of the ground, are so much lower in some other countries. That, in turn, is down to a number of factors. Environmental and other regulations here play a part in that cost differential of course, but, contrary to what some would have you believe, they are far from the be-all and end-all in affecting prices.

Land and lease prices are a big factor, as are labor and other costs. Then there is the fact that so many countries, and Russia is definitely one of them, that see oil exports as an important strategic and geopolitical tool. In those cases, these nations give concessions to ensure that their oil is sold at an advantageous price. Right now, Vladimir Putin is being accused of weaponizing energy supply, but it is something that he and other dictators and human rights abusers have been doing for years to make client nations, including the U.S., ignore who they are and what they do.

Still, the U.S. probably wouldn’t be one of those client nations at all if it weren’t for the chemistry.

Piie.com:

In concert with similar measures in other countries, the restrictions will stem the flow of crucial technology like semiconductors that Russia needs to upgrade and even maintain its military, as well as other strategic industries. Europe, which exports 50 percent more goods and services to Russia than China does, is fully onboard, and countries that go along with such controls will be exempt from many of the new extraterritorial US rules. Accordingly, for the first time since the Cold War, a large coalition of top technology producing countries are coordinating with Washington to impose similar controls on a major economy.

Wisconsin State Journal Commentary

Two other seats on the board are mostly uncontested. Nichelle Nichols, a former Madison School District administrator whom we’ve endorsed in the past for School Board, will do a fine job filling Seat 5. 

For Seat 4, incumbent Ali Muldrow is the only name on the ballot, with conservative agitator David Blaska making a late write-in challenge. Blaska says he wants to provide an outlet for a protest vote. Blaska lost by a wide margin to Muldrow three years ago, when our board passed on endorsing either candidate. This time around, Blaska’s name won’t even be on the ballot. So Muldrow’s reelection is all but assured.

We urge more candidates to run for School Board in future elections. For now, the best choice on the April ballot for the only truly competitive race is Simkin for Seat 3.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

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?

“Heinrich has exercised the powers of a dictatorship in Dane County for 2 years.” — Justice Pat Roggensack during today’s argument. https://t.co/53oA4zbjrz

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 9, 2022

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

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?

Indira Dammu and Bonnie O’Keefe:

Nationwide, English learners (ELs) are a fast-growing and diverse student population in the K-12 public school system. Today, the Southeast region of the U.S. is home to more than 710,000 EL students, who speak about 400 different languages and account for 15% of EL students in the country. This number is quickly increasing as certain states in the region see unprecedented growth in EL enrollment. Despite the trends, state education finance systems in the Southeast have not adapted to support the unique learning needs of EL students.

Bellwether Education Partners’ report, Improving Education Finance Equity for English Learners in the Southeast, examines state funding policy structures and data in nine Southeastern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — and shares a set of policy recommendations based on promising, equitable funding practices. The report includes a supplemental interactive data tool, accessible here.

As the report shows, state school funding systems in the Southeast have a lot of room for improvement in EL policy, but the region also has an important opportunity to be a leader nationally and demonstrate what transformational and equitable funding systems for EL students can look like.

Stephanie Murray:

Problem #3: The way classrooms are structured is stressful for teachers and kids
Possible solution: Offer more flexible ways to teach

Another way to attract more people to education is to re-envision it. “Why do you always have to have one teacher with 25 students? If you have 100 students in fourth grade, rather than having four separate classroom teachers, what if you had four teachers and two paraeducators and an instructional coach – a team that was working with these 100 students in different ways?” asked Mark McDermott, by way of example. Likewise, while remote learning doesn’t work for everyone, some teachers and students prefer it. “How are we opening our field to the people that might want to be a teacher in a less traditional format or modality?” McDermott said.

The static nature of teaching contrasts sharply with other occupations, where people regularly move upward into more senior positions.”

In a similar vein, a recent survey of teachers in Washington, D.C. suggests that more flexible scheduling appeals to many teachers. The profession could also benefit from a more robust career ladder. “To teach in the same classroom for 30 years is a very challenging thing to do,” said Peyton. The static nature of teaching contrasts sharply with other occupations, where people regularly move upward into more senior positions. Creating more opportunities for experienced teachers to take on leadership positions in their schools – as a master teacher of mathematics, for example – can make the profession more appealing.

Ashley Gold:

Ads from Chinese state broadcaster CGTN are running on Meta-owned Facebook, targeting global users with pro-Russian talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Driving the news: Meta said last week it would ban ads from Russian state media and stop recommending content from such outlets. But that hasn’t stopped countries close to Moscow, like China, from using their state channels to buy ads pushing a pro-Russian line.

Hardcore History:

The Atlantic Slave Trade mixes centuries of human bondage with violence, economics, commerce, geo-political competition, liberty, morality, injustice, revolution, tragedy and bloody reckonings. That sounds like a lot, yet this show merely scratches the surface of this enormous subject.

Pat Schneider (2018), dives into a look at the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school proposal (2011).

The book includes several recommendations to improve information exchange around controversial public policies. Talk about the most important.

The most important thing is that we all do our own individual work of understanding our own biases. We all have a role to play in trying to disrupt racism.

For public communicators, I give some specific examples of how you could use Facebook in conjunction with a key influencer to work in collaboration to get in to some of those communities

You’ve also introduced some new work with students.

I developed a class at UW-Madison. It’s a service learning class where we use some of these principles and see how they play out. I tell them: We‘re going to experiment with some different ways of doing things and some of them are going to fail and some of them are going to change the way you think about reporting.

Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school notes and links. (Aborted 5-2 by a majority of the Madison School board). As an aside, I doubt that legacy or independent writers had much influence on this issue vis a vis the entrenched, status quo interests.

Today, via a University of Wisconsin Madison charter school authority (just 2 schools after years…!), Kaleem Caire’s One City institution is rolling – soon expanding in nearby Monona.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard

The mixed recommendation would cost approximately $4 million for its curricular materials, while the single-vendor option would cost approximately $3.2 million, according to the presentation. Board members did not generally make their preferences clear Monday.

“It’s really important that we understand the impact that we’ll be making in this investment and understand how we’re going to be accountable to our community in terms of producing results that demonstrate that this is a shift from what we’ve seen in the past,” board president Ali Muldrow said. “Being able to speak to how we will measure the impact of this investment is really important to me in terms of my ability to vote on these materials.”

The materials selected will be implemented in grades K-5 in the 2022-23 school year.

“I want to pick something where kids are going to love reading every single day and be excited about literacy every single day and grow up to be readers,” board member Cris Carusi said.

The work toward a new curriculum went hand-in-hand with the recent Early Literacy Task Force, a joint effort between MMSD and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education to evaluate how students are taught to read as well as how future teachers learn to teach reading. The group produced a report earlier this year including recommendations for moving forward.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dana Goldstein:

The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“We’re in new territory,” Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic’s toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are “pretty dramatic,” she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

Please get this straight: It wasn't just an awful pandemic that "compounded" an unfortunate situation but also a series of school system actions including prolonged shutdowns, inadequate remote, & failure to prioritize vulnerable kids.
https://t.co/XrST2EyGJ9

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) March 8, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Susan Rigetti:

Back in 2016, I typed up a little guide to studying physics called “So You Want to Learn Physics.” It ended up being pretty popular, so I started working on other guides, including a guide to studying philosophy (“So You Want to Study Philosophy”), which I published in 2021, and this long-awaited guide to studying mathematics, which I am sharing with you today.

I absolutely love mathematics. I think it is the purest and most beautiful of all the intellectual disciplines. It is the universal language, both of human beings and of the universe itself. Sadly, there is all sorts of baggage around learning it (at least in the US educational system) that is completely unnecessary and awful and prevents many people from experiencing the pure joy of mathematics. One of the lies I have heard so many people repeat is that everyone is either a “math person” or a “language person” — such a profoundly ignorant and damaging statement. Here is the truth: if you can understand the structure of literature, if you can understand the basic grammar of the English language or any other language, then you can understand the basics of the language of the universe. That doesn’t mean it’s easy — no, mathematics is an incredibly challenging discipline, and there is nothing easy or straightforward about it — but, honestly, I have yet to find a single topic, discipline, or intellectual pursuit that is easy or straightforward to learn at any advanced level.

The secret to learning math is this: accept that it is a difficult subject and that understanding it is going to be hard, study it in small manageable pieces (like the curriculum I’ve put together here), be patient with yourself and with your study, and work diligently to understand it. I promise you that it is worth every moment, every effort, every precious bit of energy.

My goal here is to provide a roadmap for anyone interested in understanding mathematics at an advanced level. Anyone that follows and completes this curriculum will walk away with the knowledge equivalent to an undergraduate degree in mathematics. This guide only covers an undergraduate mathematics curriculum, because, unlike the fields of physics and philosophy (both of which I have studied at the graduate level), that’s where my math knowledge ends. While I have taken a few graduate courses in mathematics and have studied a handful of topics in mathematics (including differential geometry and logic) at the graduate level, I don’t have enough experience or knowledge to feel comfortable evaluating graduate-level mathematics textbooks, and, as a matter of principle, I won’t recommend or include a textbook in one of my guides that I haven’t studied (whether in full or in part) either on my own or for a course. I’m always learning new things, so if/when that ever changes, I’ll update this guide.

David Lewkowicz:

My daughter’s friend was recently alarmed when she was told that her two-year-old must wear a mask in preschool. Her little girl already struggles to make herself understood, and her mother worries that the mask will make it harder for her daughter to be understood and that she will have trouble telling what her masked peers and teachers are saying.

Now that the face mask has become the essential accoutrement of our lives, the COVID pandemic has laid bare our fundamental need to see whole faces. Could it be that babies and young children, who must learn the meaning of the myriad communicative signals normally available in their social partners’ faces, are especially vulnerable to their degradation in partially visible faces?

Faces are a complex and rich source of social, emotional and linguistic signals. We rely on all of these signals to communicate with one another through a complex and dynamic dance that depends on each partner being able to read the other’s signals. Interestingly, even when we can see whole faces, we often have trouble telling what other people are feeling. For instance, as the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has noted, we can interpret a smile as meaning “I’m happy,” “I like you” or “I’m embarrassed”. So, seeing partially visible faces robs us of a plethora of linguistic signals that are essential for communication.

Michael Thaddeus:

The 100% figure claimed by Columbia cannot be accurate. Among 958 members of the (full-time) Faculty of Columbia College, listed in the Columbia College Bulletin online, are included some 69 persons whose highest degree, if any, is a bachelor’s or master’s degree.¹²

It is not clear exactly which faculty are supposed to be counted in this calculation. The U.S. News methodology page is silent on this point. The instructions for the Common Data Set, which is co-organized by U.S. News and from which it draws much of its data, stipulate that only non-medical faculty are to be counted in collecting these figures. Information on the degrees held by faculty in Columbia’s professional schools is not readily available.

Even following the most favorable interpretation, however, by counting all faculty, both medical and non-medical — and very optimistically assuming that all faculty in the professional schools have terminal degrees — we are still unable to arrive at a figure rounding to 100%, since the 69 faculty of Columbia College without terminal degrees exceed 1% of the entire cohort of 4,381 full-time Columbia faculty in Fall 2020. If we exclude medical faculty as directed by the Common Data Set, then our calculations should be based on Columbia’s 1,602 full-time non-medical faculty in Fall 2020. We conclude that the proportion of faculty with terminal degrees can be at most (1602-69)/1602, or about 96%. To the extent that professional school faculty lack terminal degrees, this figure will be even lower.

Institutions providing a Common Data Set have to divulge, on section I-3 of the form, the subtotals of full-time non-medical faculty whose highest degrees are bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral or other terminal degrees, and likewise for part-time faculty. This makes it possible to check (or at least replicate for non-medical faculty) the percentage stated by U.S. News. If Columbia provided a Common Data Set, like the vast majority of its peers, then the existence of substantial numbers of Columbia faculty without terminal degrees could not have been so easily overlooked.¹³ Columbia’s peers, which acknowledge having faculty without terminal degrees in their Common Data Sets, have been placed at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. 

Most of the 69 Columbia College faculty without terminal degrees in their fields are either full-time renewable lecturers in language instruction or faculty in Columbia’s School of the Arts. Conceivably it might be claimed that, for some reason, these groups should not be counted in the calculation. Such an argument encounters significant difficulties, however. One is that without these groups, it is even harder to arrive at the student-faculty ratio of 6:1 reported by Columbia (see §5 below). More fundamentally, it simply is the case that language lecturers and Arts faculty are full-fledged faculty members. Both groups are voting members of the Faculty of Columbia College, Columbia’s flagship undergraduate school, and also of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.¹⁴

In any case, these 69 persons include some distinguished scholars and artists, and even a winner of the Nobel Prize.¹⁵Columbia would surely be a lesser place without them, even if 100% of its faculty really did then hold terminal degrees.

Scott Girard:

MMSD spokesman Tim LeMonds wrote in an email that the 6.1 FTE cut is a combination of two years of enrollment losses. Last year, enrollment decreased such that West lost three positions, LeMonds wrote, but the school was “allowed to retain those positions due to COVID.”

Based on projections for next year, enrollment will decrease further to the point that another 3.1 FTE will be cut, leaving the school to determine how it would cut 6.1 total. Boran wrote in her letter that West is projected to lose another 60 students going into next school year.

Madison schools’ budget history, including substantial recent referendums and redistributed federal taxpayer funds.

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?

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

The Department of Public Instruction has estimated that expanding school choice will cost taxpayers over $500 million. This DPI estimate rests on faulty assumptions that would not occur in the real world.  If a student whose family is currently paying for private school moved on to the voucher, there are, indeed, some tax implications for both the state and local taxpayers. (For a more in depth explanation, we have previously covered this objection here, and the Badger Institute later voiced similar points here.)

However, the way the voucher programs is currently funded means that if a student moves from a public school to a private school on a voucher, there is actually a resulting savings to local taxpayers. The extent of this savings varies by school district. School Choice Wisconsin has a helpful map using 2016-17 data to show the extent of the savings in every district.

The DPI “cost” is based on the assumption that every student currently enrolled in a private school who qualifies for a voucher, would begin using a voucher. This is not a guarantee.

Here’s why: private schools must identify the number of seats available for students in the voucher program. Some private schools limit choice enrollment due to the low level at which the voucher is funded. This was recently covered when HOPE Christian High Schoolannounced they were closing their doors and focusing on K-8 schools due in large part to the funding gap in the voucher program. Other private schools don’t participate at all for a myriad of reasons, including the extent to which they would be required to comply with state requirements for testing and auditing.

The bottom line is that the scenario DPI lays out—where 100% of current private school kids participate and no current public-school kids do—will not occur in reality, and therefore is a strawman defense of the status quo.

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?

Frederick Hess:

Math is fundamental. This observation is a groan-inducing cliché, but it’s also true. Math matters for employment, financial literacy, and even for navigating evidentiary claims about things like Covid-19 and climate change. Yet math education seems to have gotten sidelined amid broader debates about school culture, civics, and the rest. Lately, when math does come up, it seems like it’s due to efforts to eliminate accelerated offerings or do away with the requirement that students answer questions correctly. And, of course, this is all against the backdrop of the devastating pandemic declines in math performance.

If you’re concerned about this, where can you turn? Well, one place is a recently published book from the inimitable Barry Garelick, a second-career math teacher with a chip on his shoulder and a deep affinity for Mary Dolciani’s classic 1962 math textbook Modern Algebra. Garelick, who readers likely already know from his various books and articles (in fact, he penned one of the more popular Rick Hess Straight Up guest letters last year), has delivered a work that’s filled with bracing, laugh-out-loud takes on math education and the teacher’s lot. Out on Good Behavior: Teaching Math While Looking Over Your Shoulder is delightfully pithy (clocking in at a slender 94 pages) and filled with short chapters that bear titles like “The Prospect of a Horrible PD, a Horrible Meeting, and an Unlikely Collaboration.”

Throughout the volume, Garelick shares stories from his own experience that capture the state of math education and illuminate the frustrations of teaching math today. In one anecdote, Garelick recalls the professional development trainer who excitedly shared that students would be able to get credit on the test for offering a satisfactory explanation, even if they had the wrong answers. That posed a challenge, she cautioned: “Explaining answers is tough for students and for this reason there is a need for discourse in the classroom and ‘rich tasks.’”

When Garelick asked what constituted a “rich task,” she said: “It’s a problem that has multiple entry points and has various levels of cognitive demands. Every student can be successful on at least part of it.”

I quite like Garelick’s take on that indecipherable response: “Her answer was extraordinary in its eloquence at saying absolutely nothing.” I routinely hear from teachers and administrators who really, really wish they were free to say things like that in the course of staff meetings or professional training sessions.

This is the rare text in which an educator calls out the patronizing air of so many reformers and trainers. Recalling one conference where the moderator urged teachers to name their “super power,” Garelick drily asks the reader, “Why is so much PD steeped with the vocabulary that has teachers being ‘rock stars’ or ‘super heroes’?”

MIT Open Courseware

This course is an introduction to the theory that tries to explain how minds are made from collections of simpler processes. It treats such aspects of thinking as vision, language, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, ideals, emotions, and personality. It incorporates ideas from psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science to resolve theoretical issues such as wholes vs. parts, structural vs. functional descriptions, declarative vs. procedural representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models, and logical vs. common-sense theories of learning.

Emma Camp:

A friend lowers her voice to lament the ostracization of a student who said something well-meaning but mildly offensive during a student club’s diversity training. Another friend shuts his bedroom door when I mention a lecture defending Thomas Jefferson from contemporary criticism. His roommate might hear us, he explains.

Josh Blackman:

A group of U.C. Hastings faculty, including Professor Rory Little, sent the following letter to students:

Dear Concerned Students,

We write in our individual capacity and not on behalf of the institution to explain where the Administration’s community email, The College is Committed to Academic Freedom and Free Speech, does not represent our priorities or articulate our commitments to providing you an equitable learning environment.

First and foremost, we condemn the recent comments from Ilya Shapiro regarding President Biden’s commitment to nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court. We find Shapiro’s tweet unequivocally racist and misogynistic. We refuse to remain silent in the face of white supremacy. We wish you did not have to live in a society where vile, hateful, and ignorant speech directed towards communities of color is a regular occurrence.

While the Administration’s statement mentions in passing the pain experienced by communities of color the past two years, it does not discuss the law school’s role in perpetuating the marginalization of our current students. We are aware from conversations with our students of color over the years, and particularly our African American students, that they do not experience UC Hastings as a welcoming learning environment. As professors, we are committed to combating the implicit and explicit messaging UC Hastings students of color too often receive that they are being tolerated instead of embraced and valued. We recognize that these unwelcoming messages are expressed in the doctrines we teach, the context we may fail to provide when teaching them, in the comments made by some community members, and in an environment where so few of UC Hastings faculty and administrators share the life experiences of so many of our students or meaningfully engage in understanding them.

We write to affirm your right to an educational environment where you are nurtured as students and where you can thrive as future lawyers. We strongly believe in the essential value of free speech in an academic setting. We also recognize that context matters because speech does not exist in a vacuum; it happens within the context of unequal power and structural inequalities. Moreover, we understand that statements of commitment to diversity and inclusion ring hollow when salient issues of racial equity are ignored or discounted in the service of prioritizing the ideal of free speech.

Selim Algar:

The city and state teachers unions are suing to block a charter high school from bringing a prestigious international diploma program to the Bronx.

The New York State United Teachers and United Federation of Teachers assert that the establishment of the Vertex Partnership Academies would violate the current state cap of 290 city charter schools.

Their suit contends that the new school — founded by prominent charter advocate Ian Rowe — is trying to “circumvent” the cap by drawing students from two existing charter schools and casting itself as an expansion.

“Put simply, if it looks like a new charter, is held accountable like a new charter, and is structured like a separate and new charter, then it is indeed a new charter and not an expansion,” the lawsuit states.

UFT boss Michael Mulgrew, a staunch opponent of charter schools, echoed that opposition.

Scott Girard:

Despite taking that student into custody, the school received another “threatening call” on Friday, according to an email to Memorial families from principal Matt Hendrickson. The school has received at least one such call each day this week, but police investigations have found none of them to be credible.

“MPD is continuing a very detailed investigation into the origin of every false threat made and detectives have determined there to be no substantiated threat to our school, and all calls have been confirmed as not credible or false,” Hendrickson wrote in his letter.

Both MPD and Hendrickson noted the harm of the calls, including missing class time and mental health issues. On Monday, students evacuated Memorial and neighboring Jefferson Middle School for more than two hours.

“We understand the stress this can create for our community,” Hendrickson said. “Knowing how these situations can bring out many emotions, our teachers will continue their great work in checking-in with our students, and our Student Services team will continue to provide additional support to our staff and students. Students, we are here to support you.”

MPD public information officer Stephanie Fryer wrote in an email to the Cap Times Friday that the department “recognizes the anxiety and stress these types of threats can create in our community.”

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?

Davey Alba

A request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The notice asks the companies to submit “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.

“Technology companies now have the opportunity to be open and transparent with the American people about the misinformation on their platforms,” Dr. Murthy said in an emailed statement. He added: “This is about protecting the nation’s health.”

Magnus Henrekson & Johan Wennström:

• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
• Utilizes official statistics and policy papers
• Examines education trends from the 1960s onward
• Examines the challenges and issues caused by a move to a privatized education system in Sweden

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?

Very rare acknowledge by establishment that its fine with misinformation when it serves its narrative. https://t.co/eoYPvEVBFi

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) March 5, 2022

Not having a stable, two-parent household with a father present is by far the greatest predictor of child poverty – leagues ahead of race and region, and rendering both of those insignificant or close to it in multi-variate models.

That’s the tweet, as the kiddos say. pic.twitter.com/3a0Y6i3PQq

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) March 2, 2022

James Pethokoukis:

Central to that cultural history has also been the notion of meritocracy, going back to the Mandarin bureaucrat-scholars who obtained their positions through the imperial examination system. More recently, China’s communists have attempted to run a more vibrant economy by reintroducing meritocracy — and not just in government. 

As Adrian Wooldridge, author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, recently wrote in Bloomberg Opinion, “Children compete to get into the best nursery schools so that they can get into the best secondary schools and then into the best universities. Examinations regulate the race to get ahead. This examination system, which draws on the tradition of civil service examinations that were administered for more than a thousand years, is now more geared to produce scientists and engineers rather than Confucian officials.”

We need an education system that works for all kids, whatever their background and natural abilities. And by work, I mean maximizes their human potential. And then we can reward that potential by having a society that deeply values achievement. But this is also important: Getting the most out of our best and brightest. I am distressed by growing efforts to undermine gifted education programs across America. When California’s Instructional Quality Commission adopted a new mathematics framework in 2021 that urged schools to do away with accelerated math in grades one through 10, it explained the move this way: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”

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?

Arika Herron:

It was passed by the House last month, 60-37, along largely party lines but the version of the bill that the Senate was considering Monday had been significantly gutted. The list of “divisive concepts” shrank from eight items to three and provisions to allow parents to sue schools over things educators said in the classroom were stripped out. 

Those who opposed the bill said it was a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in Indiana and risked driving teachers — a critical profession already in short supply — out of the field. 

It had been largely opposed by the Black community, which worried that the bill would further limit representation of Black and other people of color in school curricula and result in an incomplete and inaccurate teaching of the country’s difficult history.

“This is a good day for the state of Indiana,” said Garry Holland, education chair of the Indianapolis NAACP, “not to accept that which would cause disenfranchisement of children and teachers.”

The Indiana State Teachers Association, which has led a weeks-long effort to oppose the measure, celebrated its demise in a statement released Monday night.

“Over the past several weeks, ISTA members and public education advocates have shared their stories and voiced their concerns about stifling teachers’ ability to teach and students’ ability to receive an honest education,” said ISTA President Keith Gambill. “Hoosier parents and educators all want our students to succeed, and we’ll continue to be partners in standing up for what’s right for their future.”

As Minneapolis teachers ready themselves to strike with all of the co-opted social justice language that white progressive teachers can summon, here’s something the public rarely gets to see: how they through teachers of color under the bus time and again.

Read…

cc: @keban5 pic.twitter.com/0aSvXDR19p

— Citizen Chris (@citizenstewart) March 4, 2022

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

C Bradley Thompson:

My working thesis is simple: America’s “public” school system is the most immoral and corrupt institution in the United States today, and it should be abolished as soon as possible. It should be broken up for the same reason that chattel slavery was ended in the 19th century: Although obviously different in purpose and in the magnitude of harm to its victims, public education, like slavery, is a form of involuntary servitude. The primary differences are that public schools force children to serve the interests of the State rather than those of an individual master, and public schooling ends after thirteen years.

These are—to be sure—radical claims, but they are demonstrably true, and the abolition of public schools is an idea whose time has come. It is time for Americans to reexamine—radically and comprehensively—the nature and purpose of their disastrously failing (and immoral) public school system, and to launch a new abolitionist movement, a movement to liberate tens of millions of children and their parents from this form of low-grade bondage.

Twenty-first century Abolitionists are confronted, however, by a paradoxical fact: Most Americans recognize that something is deeply wrong with the country’s elementary and secondary schools, yet they support them like no other institution. This phenomenon has been referred to by my colleague Eric Daniels as the “Thompson Paradox,” which says that virtually all Americans recognize that the nation’s education system is failing but they nevertheless think their local school is doing a great job of educating their children. This phenomenon can be seen most clearly amongst Republicans and conservatives in small town America. Mention the possibility of abolishing the public schools and most people look at you as though you are crazy—or worse! And, of course, no politician would ever dare cut spending to our schools and to the “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?

Tate Ryan-Mosley & Sam Richards:

Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Run under a consortium known as Operation Safety Net, the program was set up a year ago, ostensibly to maintain public order as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd’s murder. But an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that the initiative expanded far beyond its publicly announced scope to include expansive use of tools to scour social media, track cell phones, and amass detailed images of people’s faces.

Documents obtained via public records requests show that the operation persisted long after Chauvin’s trial concluded. What’s more, they show that police used the extensive investigative powers they’d been afforded under the operation to monitor individuals who weren’t suspected of any crime.

MIT Technology Review’s investigation includes thousands of documents and more than two dozen interviews with Minnesota state employees, policing experts, and activists. Taken together, they paint a picture of a state operation intent on identifying participants through secretive surveillance operations. Though it was undertaken by nonmilitary governmental agencies using public funds, large swaths of its inner workings have gone undisclosed. We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.

Operation Safety Net (OSN) was announced in February 2021, a month before Chauvin’s trial was set to begin. At a press conference also attended by Hennepin County sheriff David Hutchinson, Medaria Arradondo, then Minneapolis’s police chief, described the effort as a unified command that would enable law enforcement officials to mount a regional response in case protests turned violent.

Publicly, OSN acknowledged that federal agencies would assist in monitoring for threats of violence and activity by out-of-state extremist groups, and that an “intel team” would be established to help share information surrounding these threats. Our investigation shows that federal support for OSN was in fact extensive, involving the US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At least six FBI agents served in executive and intelligence roles for the program.

Jessica Winter:

When my daughter was little, I became fixated on a schoolhouse a few blocks from our apartment—a Tudor-style storybook cottage, with red trim and a brick chimney and a playground all of wood. Its first-floor windows were concealed by tall bushes of a deep impossible green, and everything that a childhood should be was waiting for my daughter behind them, or so I believed. When I went inside, my expectations were met. The children, aged two to six, were serious and serene, occasionally speaking to each other in low, considerate tones. They stacked blocks, strung beads, and arranged letter boards, and of course I had seen these kinds of blocks and beads and boards before, but never these specific, exquisite renderings of them. When it was time for “walking on the line”—a morning custom in which the children followed a line of tape on the floor, around and around, silent and judiciously spaced—I felt overcome by a sense of dazed compliance.

This was our local Montessori school, and I had convinced myself that, with a bit of scrimping and bootstrapping, I could somehow find the money to send my daughter there. I scheduled her required interview; afterward, the director told me, “Oh, she’s a dream,” and in that moment I would have signed a Sea Org contract in exchange for a year of my kid’s enrollment. But when I reviewed the numbers, the following weekend, I concluded that I could pay the tuition only if I went into credit-card debt—and, really, if that qualifies as being able to “afford” something, what can’t you afford? I withdrew her application, and, to self-soothe, I bought a Montessori-ish hundred-piece counting board for her off Amazon. (She barely touched it, and I gave it away after her toddler brother expressed an interest in eating the numbers.)

Nanette Asimov and Bob Egelko

 Thursday upheld a lower court’s order that the prestigious university freeze enrollment at 2020 levels.

In a case that has drawn national attention, the ruling deals a blow to thousands of applicants to the prestigious public university and will cost millions in lost tuition, the university says. The decision favors neighbors who are trying to get the campus to stop adding new students without providing enough housing for them.

The ruling also means UC Berkeley will withhold acceptance letters from more than 5,000 qualified freshman and transfer applicants, not all of whom would have enrolled.

“This is devastating news for the thousands of students who have worked so hard for and have earned a seat in our fall 2022 class. Our fight on behalf of every one of these students continues,” the campus wrote in a statement following the Supreme Court decision.

On a 4-2 vote, in a one-sentence order, the court refused to lift the enrollment freeze ordered by an Alameda County judge and denied review of an appellate ruling requiring the university to conduct further environmental review of an off-campus construction project while it limits incoming enrollment. Justice Goodwin Liu dissented, voting to remove the freeze, and urged a neighborhood group and UC Berkeley to negotiate a settlement.

David Blaska:

It’s heart-breaking, it really is. Two Madison teenagers took different paths. Anthony Chung was a National Merit Scholar at Memorial high school, student representative to the Board of Education, about to graduate from elite Georgetown University. With him in the car the night of 09-12-20 on Mineral Point Road was the former classmate he planned to marry.

Careening at 90 mph on that city street was another Madison high school product. Maurice M. Chandler, then 18. At that young age, he already had seven open felony and misdemeanor cases and had jumped bail seven times. That night Chandler was high on marijuana in a vehicle likely stolen; he was armed with a handgun.

Chandler was out on $100 bail for an armed robbery, ordered by the court to remain at home — not rocketing through a city street at night when he ran a red light and smashed into Chung’s car as it turned left onto Grand Canyon Drive, killing the young man and critically injuring Chung’s girl friend, Rory Demick — herself an honors student.

“The moment that I learned of his death shattered my heart into a million pieces. In that second, as I lay in the ICU with multiple broken bones, my heart hurt more than the rest of my body,” she told the court, as reported by the Wisconsin State Journal.

Just one of the stories of kids gone bad in the Naked City. More and more stories. Which is why David Blaska, your write-in candidate for Seat #4 on the Madison school board, asks the question no one else is asking:

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?

🚨Breaking🚨

State of Kentucky’s Teachers Retirement System was the second-largest shareholder for Sberbank of Russia (The largest bank in Russia).

Their position dropped 95% in value from $13MM to $778K pic.twitter.com/1maUVcM5lH

— Market Sentiment (@mkt_sentiment) March 4, 2022

So, this morning we called the Teachers' Retirement System of KY with questions about the Russian bank thing blowing up Twitter last night.

And it pays to call and ask first.

Anyway, TRS sold its Russian bank holdings Feb. 23. That was dated info posted online. ^JC pic.twitter.com/jkDNiXMdhR

— Bluegrass Politics (@BGPolitics) March 4, 2022

Patrick Mcilheran:

The warden of Wisconsin’s public-school status quo, the Department of Public Instruction, was wrong, when it recently made an absurd estimate about the cost of opening up school choice to all families without regard to income.

More than that, DPI betrayed an arrogance — a presumption that thousands of parents can go right on working a second job, and maybe a third, for being uppity.

To be clear, the DPI was factually wrong.

The agency incorrectly estimated the impact on property taxpayers if Wisconsin ended income limits on its school choice program. Those limits block families making more than three times the poverty line in Milwaukee and Racine or more than 2.2 times the poverty line in the rest of Wisconsin, or about $58,000 for a family of four.

The agency’s estimate, so wrong it’s not worth repeating, rested on laughably unjustifiable assumptions. A colleague and I dissected the DPI’s errors at length in a paper available at the Badger Institute website, but the central error was the DPI’s assumption that every tuition-paying family would right away switch to using the choice program.

Can’t happen. The choice grant, which must be accepted as full payment, is often well below schools’ actual cost, so a school’s ability to take more choice students is limited by its ability to tap outside donors. They need some “private-pay” students to lessen the fundraising load.

And notice what else DPI assumed: Its “baseline,” the status quo, the normal against which it measured impact, assumed tuition-paying families of about 69,000 children statewide should pay taxes to support schools and then go on paying tuition as well to relieve the rest of the state’s taxpayers entirely of the cost of their children’s education.

That is what the parents who pay the tuition for their children to attend the local parochial school, for instance, are doing — they’re easing the taxpayers’ burden. The least the DPI could do is send a thank-you card.

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?

Thomson Reuters:

Sweden should have adopted tougher early measures and the government assumed clearer leadership as COVID-19 hit, though the mostly voluntary no-lockdown strategy was broadly correct, a commission reviewing the country’s pandemic response said on Friday.

Sweden polarized opinion at home and abroad with its handling of the pandemic, opting against the lockdowns implemented by many countries and adopting a largely voluntary approach of promoting social distancing and good hygiene.

The commission — set up by the government under pressure from parliament — said Sweden’s broad policy was “fundamentally correct.”

“It meant that citizens retained more of their personal freedom than in many other countries,” the report says.

But the panel of eight experts, including professors of economics and political science, said the government should have taken clearer leadership and acted sooner when it comes to measures such as capacity limits and masks.

“The Government should have assumed leadership of all aspects of crisis management from the outset,” the commission said in the report. It found the government had too one-sided a dependence on assessments made by the Public Health Agency.

“In February-March 2020, Sweden should have opted for more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures.”

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?

Jack Grove:

About one in 12 PhD students would publish fraudulent results if it helped them to get ahead in academia, a study suggests.

In an international study that surveyed almost 800 doctoral candidates, researchers presented PhD researchers with a scenario in which data had been fabricated and asked whether they would be happy to proceed to publication.

In the first part of the study, involving 440 PhD candidates recruited from social science or psychology departments in Dutch universities, almost all spotted the use of fraudulent data but 8 per cent said they would publish if they felt under pressure to do so, explains the study, published in Frontiers in Psychology.

A replication study involving 198 PhD candidates from the medical and psychology faculties at a Dutch university found similar results, while a third study that polled 127 social science PhD students in Belgium found that 13.4 per cent would publish the dodgy data.

“Many of those we interviewed came up with good arguments for publishing what they knew was fabricated data, such as ‘if this is what it takes to finish my PhD’,” said the study’s lead author, Rens van de Schoot, professor of statistics at Utrecht University.

Gregory Maertz

Wherever Goethe was read, critiqued, and translated, one found the basis of oppositional cultures. This was especially true in Great Britain and New England. Bound by religious heritage and the experience of pilgrimage for intellectual and spiritual enrichment, the British mediators of German culture were, however, divided from their Boston cousins by differences in class and social influence. In New England, descendants of the original Puritans were socially dominant. In Britain, Dissenters from the Anglican majority, Scots Presbyterians, and other sectarians were politically and socially marginalized, as were women, Roman Catholics, and Jews. Nonetheless, members of all these peripheral groups formed the nucleus of the German-trained intelligentsia in Britain.

Moreover, the writings of these outsiders, chiefly translations and criticism, revealed connections between an English-speaking enthusiasm for Goethe, the American effort to declare cultural independence from Great Britain, and the migration of women writers from the margins of cultural life to its center. Margaret Fuller’s (1810–1850) efforts to critique and translate German literature and her emergence as one of the most important literary figures of the time are inseparable. And the arc of her career is similar to that of other Anglophone women writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), Sarah Austin (1793–1867), George Eliot (1819–1880), and Edith Wharton (1862–1937), all of whose mature writings owed something to earlier apprentice work reviewing and translating German literature of the period.

Louis Bonham:

In the last few years, academia has utterly embraced the concept of “equity” as articulated by Ibram X. Kendi; i.e., that if a particular identity group is statistically under- or over-represented in anything, the reason for the imbalance is indisputably systemic discrimination, and thus positive discrimination to correct the imbalance is not only proper but mandatory. Indeed, many universities now require students and faculty to undergo indoctrination in this fallacious tripe and to pledge allegiance to it as a condition of admission/employment. Questioning the wisdom, effectiveness, or legality of “equity” usually results in the cancel culture mobs coming after you, as my friends Dorian Abbot and Gordon Klein can attest.

As a lawyer and longtime student of constitutional law, one of the most disturbing things about academia’s adoption of the Kendian “equity” concept as official policy is that it is so clearly illegal. As Judge James Ho of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has pointed out, decades of settled Supreme Court law establish that discrimination for the “right” reasons is still illegal, especially in the employment context. State law often goes further, such as by prohibiting political discrimination in employment matters. Even where the law allows universities some flexibility (such as in admissions), it does not countenance deliberate discrimination against protected classes, which is what DEI supporters typically demand. Nevertheless, as exemplified by the University of Texas’ feckless President Jay Hartzell, universities are openly adopting DEI programs despite the fact that their stated reasons for doing so squarely violate the law.

Why do they do it? In many cases (such as, in my opinion, that of President Hartzell), it is due to cowardice: administrators are simply afraid of offending the wokesters on campus and would rather meekly surrender to their demands than risk being branded a racist/white supremacist/bigot/etc. In other cases (e.g., adoption of such policies by law schools), those involved know that their actions are illegal (or at least very questionable), but they disagree with the current state of the law and hope to change the law by defying it. And, of course, there is the inherent problem in academia of “whaddaya gonna do about it?” Administrators know that their actions can only be challenged through litigation, which is very expensive and lengthy, and which any potential plaintiff knows will likely result in them being blackballed in academia.

Nevertheless, just as fundamental economic realities exist regardless of contrary wishful thinking, those who have adopted the Kendian concept of “equity” as official policy are learning that the law is not so easily ignored. An excellent example of this occurred last week in the case of Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, where a federal court entered a summary judgment declaring such a Kendian program flatly illegal.

The case arose out of a new admissions program for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”), a highly regarded public high school in affluent Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.. Historically, admission to TJ has been extremely competitive, with applicants having to satisfy certain minimum requirements (such as a minimum core GPA of 3.0 and scores above certain thresholds on three standardized tests) to be eligible to apply for admission. As with many other STEM-focused programs, this merit-based admission process resulted in large numbers of Asian-American students at TJ: the 2020-21 class was 71.79% Asian-American, 18.34% white, 3.05% Hispanic, and 1.77% Black, whereas the overall student population of the area was 36.8% white, 27.1% Hispanic, 19.8% Asian-American, and 10% Black.

Zachary Crockett:

Sometime around 1960, Jarecki developed an obsession with roulette, a game where a little ball is spun around a randomly numbered, multi-colored wheel and the player places bets on where it will land.

Though roulette was considered by many to be purely a game of chance, Jarecki was convinced that it could be “beat.”

He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets — but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced.

Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects — chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces — might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed.

Jason Riley:

Making an enemy of testing and grades is barking up the wrong tree. The test isn’t the cause of these disparities. It’s merely a measure of reality. Eliminating the test will only obscure the learning gap, not erase it. Moreover, lowering standards ultimately harms all groups. Schools that admit less-prepared students won’t want them to struggle—or some racial groups to do better than others—so teachers and administrators will be under pressure to make classes less demanding. You can’t dumb down admissions without also dumbing down the curriculum.

If progressives wanted to do something meaningful about the achievement gap, the focus would be on preparing students for these tests. Black and Hispanic students at high-performing charter schools in New York City are admitted to selective high schools at double the rate of their peers in traditional public schools, yet progressives side with teachers unions to prevent more charter schools from opening. Go figure.

Kelly Meyerhofer

More than 350 students have signed the pledge since the 2020-21 launch, including more than 85% of students enrolled in the master’s degree program for teaching certification at the middle and high school level. School officials expect to support more than 1,000 students over the course of the pilot project.

Jim Bender:

One of the nation’s leading opinion research firms conducted a random, scientific sample poll in February of likely Wisconsin voters. The survey focused largely on education issues. It showed significant support, across the political spectrum, for policies that expand parent options. Respondents also were in broad agreement on what they see as constituting “parent rights.”

“There’s been a parental awakening in Wisconsin.  While voters might be divided on any number of non-education issues, there is substantial agreement when it comes to education,” said Nicholas Kelly, President of School Choice Wisconsin.

A comprehensive summary of poll results can be found here.

Earlier this week SCW highlighted three segments of the poll, as follows:

1. Voters strongly disagree with the statement, by the Vice Chair of the Democratic party, that parents who want “to have a say” in their child’s education should home school or pay tuition at a private school.
2. Voters back current school choice programs. They believe they should be expanded to make all parents eligible.  They believe they should be fully funded.
3. Voters believe parents have clear rights when it comes to their child’s education.

The survey was conducted between February 13th and 16th by OnMessage Inc., a national public opinion research firm. OMI is a national polling firm with decades of experience of public opinion research with regards to school choice issues and more than 30 years of experience in Wisconsin. Within the state, OnMessage has served as lead pollster for candidates at every level of government as well as for numerous non-political clients. In 2019 head OMI pollster Wes Anderson was recognized by the American Association of Political Consultants as “Pollster of the Year”.

If you're a Republican candidate and not saying in every speech, "parents should play the biggest role in public school curriculum," you probably ought to read this poll. pic.twitter.com/at4u61mdTH

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 2, 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?

Rory Linnane:

Did DPI try to make schools look better?

To see how the new formula would change schools’ report card scores, DPI officials ran the new formula on the old 2019 data, which had already been run through the old formula for the 2019 report cards.

After running the numbers, DPI saw that the new formula resulted in lower scores statewide compared to the old formula, with the same 2019 data.

To offset that change, DPI officials changed the numeric goalposts for their standards, so that the same number of schools would meet expectations under both formulas using the same 2019 data.

That way, when people compared a school’s performance over the years, the formula change wouldn’t be as disruptive, DPI said.

The goalposts, also known as cut-scores, were lowered for most performance categories:

Significantly exceeds expectations: stayed the same
Exceeds expectations: moved from 73-82.9 to 70-82.9
Meets expectations: moved from 63-72.9 to 58-69.9
Meets few expectations: moved from 53-62.9 to 48-57.9
Fails: moved from under 52.9 to under 47.9
DPI officials denied any bias in the process. They said they based their changes to the cut-scores based on running the 2019 data through both formulas, before looking at how it would impact 2021 data.

When they ran the 2021 data, it so happened that the same percentage of schools, about 87%, met or exceeded expectations.

What do the report cards actually tell us?

While statewide trends are hard to discern, viewers can still find trends by looking more carefully at report cards for individual districts and schools in various years.

Each report card breaks down a district or school’s standardized test scores for different populations and subject areas, as well as attendance rates and graduation rates.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The request comes after the board voted unanimously to rename James Madison Memorial High School to Vel Phillips Memorial High School, in honor of the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School School, win a seat on the Milwaukee City Council, become a judge in Wisconsin and get elected to statewide office. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.

A committee of community members charged with the task of renaming the high school brought their suggestion before the board’s Operations Work Group in November after a five-month deliberation process. The committee whittled a list of 26 names to four, and finally settled on Phillips in a 10-1 vote in October.

The high school’s name change is the latest of several decisions spurred by Black students pushing for a racial reckoning in Madison. Former Memorial student Mya Berry called on the board to rename the school in August 2020 because James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and the city’s namesake, was a slave owner.

In December 2020 a Madison School Board ad hoc committee, formed to rename Falk Elementary School, voted unanimously to recommend the building be named after Milele Chikasa Anana, a prominent civil rights activist and the first African American to be voted to a public school board in Wisconsin.

Scott Girard:

The only non-unanimous vote came on the instructional time waiver request. Pryor wrote in the memo the district still intends to meet the state’s required hours of instruction for students, but the three-day extension of winter break in early January means the district needs “flexibility to meet the needs of our students.”

“Our weather is unpredictable as well,” MMSD legal counsel Sherry Terrell-Webb told the board. “While we may be OK right now, we can’t calculate in the future we will be, and unfortunately you do have to submit the waiver in a time where right now we may be OK but there is the possibility that we won’t be.”

The district was initially scheduled to return to buildings Jan. 3, but extended winter break through Jan. 5 and moved to virtual instruction Jan. 6 and 7 amid the Omicron surge. Students returned to in-person school on Jan. 10. Those three days, combined with the bad weather day on Feb. 22, meant officials wanted to be on the safe side in case of future closures, though they did not share with the board how close they were to being below the required thresholds.

Wisconsin requires 437 hours of direct instruction in kindergarten, at least 1,050 hours of direct instruction in grades one through six, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades seven through 12.

Board member Cris Carusi was the lone vote against the waiver request, and cited the lost instructional time during the pandemic as a significant concern, despite understanding the need for flexibility.

The attendance waiver rationale cites “some aspects of the law which may be challenging for us to meet.” Those include the statutory definition of truancy referring to a student missing “part of all” of a day, with attendance for virtual learning among elementary students particularly a challenge, according to the memo.

Students are considered “present” for virtual instruction if they do any of the following, the memo states:

• Virtually attend the synchronous, or live, real-time instruction; or

• Complete and submit an asynchronous, or independent learning task assigned by the teacher on the virtual learning platform; or

• Engage in two-way, academically-focused communication (phone call, email exchange, or office hours virtual visit) with a staff member

That makes it “difficult to technically document scholars who miss part of the day,” according to the memo.

Board members Christina Gomez Schmidt and Carusi asked for further discussion on attendance challenges at some point in the future.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sarah Carr

When Ann Civitareale’s father passed away in 2009, she little fathomed that she would spend thousands of her inheritance on medical and educational testing for her two sons. 

Yet the boys, 12 and 14, have struggled with multiple disabilities — including developmental and speech delays and profound challenges learning to read — that she did not feel the schools could sufficiently diagnose.

John Cook:

I’m combining two closely-related but separate skills here. One is the ability to simple calculations. The other is the ability to know what to calculate, how to do so-called Fermi problems. These problems are named after Enrico Fermi, someone who was known for being able to make rough estimates with little or no data.

A famous example of a Fermi problem is “How many piano tuners are there in New York?” I don’t know whether this goes back to Fermi himself, but it’s the kind of question he would ask. Of course nobody knows exactly how many piano tuners there are in New York, but you could guess about how many piano ownersthere are, how often a piano needs to be tuned, and how many tuners it would take to service this demand.

The piano tuner example is more complicated than the kinds of calculations I have to do on Zoom calls, but it may be the most well-known Fermi problem.

In my work with data privacy, for example, I often have to estimate how common some combination of personal characteristics is. Of course nobody should bet their company on guesses I pull out of the air, but it does help keep a conversation going if I can say on the spot whether something sounds like a privacy risk or not. If a project sounds feasible, then I go back and make things more precise.

Stephen B. Billings, Hugh Macartney, Geunyong Park & John D. Singleton:

In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of losing candidates. We find that student test scores in the neighborhood public schools of non-Democratic winners also relatively increase, but this effect is driven by changing student composition, including via the manipulation of attendance zones, rather than improvements in school quality (as measured by test score value-added). Notably, we detect no differential changes when comparing neighborhood or scholastic outcomes between winning and losing Democratic school board candidates. These results suggest that partisan affiliation is correlated with private motivations for seeking public office.

Schmud:

Russia has been at continuous war with Ukraine since 2014. The years between Russia’s initial invasion in Crimea and yesterday’s expansion were filled with relentless cyberwarfare. These attacks have inflicted suffering far beyond the boundaries of the network. Much like the Stuxnet virus deployed by Israel and the United States in Iran, these attacks cause physical harm and in the case of Russia’s incursion, have resulted in the deaths of innocent Ukrainians.

Russia’s actions are inline with the Makarov/Gerasimov approach to conflict. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation armed forces, described warfare as a spectrum of theaters in 2013. The theaters extend beyond land, sea, and air. They include terror, propaganda, economic coercion, and cyberwarfare.

Other hegemonic nations undoubtedly deploy similar tactics. But Russia’s strategy is not only explicit, it is time-tested. Here is Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, a former KGB agent and defector, describing similar Soviet tactics in 1984.

Spencer Kimball:

Pfizer and BioNTech’s two-dose Covid vaccine provided very little protection for children aged 5 to 11 during the wave of omicron infection in New York, according to a study published Monday.

The New York State Department of Health found that the effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine against Covid infection plummeted from 68% to 12% for kids in that age group during the omicron surge from Dec. 13 through Jan 24. Protection against hospitalization dropped from 100% to 48% during the same period.

The study has not yet undergone peer review, the academic gold standard. Due to the public health urgency of the pandemic, scientists have been publishing the results of their studies before such review.

The team of public health officials who conducted the study said the dramatic drop in vaccine effectiveness among children 5 to 11 years old was likely due to the lower dosage they received. Kids in this age group are given two 10-microgram shots, while children aged 12 to 17 receive 30-microgram shots.

The researchers also compared 11 and 12 year olds during the weekend ended Jan. 30. They found the vaccine effectiveness plunged to 11% for the low-dosage group but offered 67% protection to the group that received the higher dose.

“Given rapid loss of protection against infections, these results highlight the continued importance of layered protections, including mask wearing, for children to prevent infection and transmission,” the public health officials wrote in the study.

Cal Newport

Sanderson’s final piece of advice is to break large goals down into manageable pieces. He notes, for example, that the novel he’s currently writing is longer than the entire Hunger Gamesseries combined. This is “a really big book,” he exclaims, before saying he can only tackle an endeavor of this size “word by word.”

He goes on to reveal that he wishes that he had been given a more detailed roadmap when he first set out to be a writer. The experienced novelists that he asked for advice would just tell him to “write.” Better advice, he noted, would have been to setup a practice regime, centered on writing a certain number of complete manuscripts, each of expanding size and ambition, all aimed at developing his chops to the point that he’d be ready to produce something sellable.

A related idea I talk about a lot on my podcastis the importance of creating accurate roadmaps toward these types of goals. Talk to people who have succeed before and have them walk you step-by-step through their story, allowing you to learn what really matters and what doesn’t. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when setting out to do something impressive is creating a story around what activities you want to be important, instead of what actually makes a difference.

Suhail Saqan:

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has grown to be very popular in public-key cryptographic systems, most popularly used in Bitcoin. ECC is based on the algebraic structures of elliptic curves over finite fields and the complexity of the elliptic curves discrete logarithm problem.

ECC incorporates all important asymmetric cryptographic systems features, including encryption, signatures, and key exchange. Because ECC employs fewer keys and signatures for the same degree of security as RSA and enables very quick key generation, key agreement, and signatures, it is considered a natural contemporary successor to the RSA cryptographic systems.

This article aims to explain elliptic curve cryptography and digital signatures used in Bitcoin in detail as simply as possible.