Free Speech?

Susan Svrluga

Concerns about freedom of expression on university campuses around the country are widespread and range across the spectrum. Last month, student protesters disrupted events at Yale Law School on the East Coast and the University of California Hastings College of the Law on the West Coast.

Blue-Collar Workers Make the Leap to Tech Jobs, No College Degree Necessary

Vanessa Fuhrmans and Kathryn Dill:

As the labor market reorders, more Americans are making the leap from blue-collar jobs and hourly work to “new collar” roles that often involve tech skills and come with better pay and schedules.

More than a tenth of Americans in low-paying roles in warehouses, manufacturing, hospitality and other hourly positions made such a switch during the past two years, according to new research from Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm that surveyed 80,000 workers world-wide between August 2020 and March 2022. Many of the new jobs are in software and information technology, as well as tech-related roles in logistics, finance and healthcare. New data from the Current Population Survey and LinkedIn also suggest the pandemic has helped catapult more workers into more upwardly mobile careers.

Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree.

Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.

Civics: When Civil Immunity Becomes Impunity

Alexa L. Gervasi and Daryl James:

Defense attorneys must wait to hear decisions from the bench, but retired prosecutor Ralph Petty avoided the suspense during his career in West Texas. He often knew what judges would say in advance because he wrote the script.

For 20 years, as USA Today reported last year, Mr. Petty spent his days prosecuting criminal cases and opposing prisoners’ appeals for the Midland County District Attorney’s Office. In the evenings he moonlighted as a law clerk for the judges presiding over those same cases. The conflict of interest allegedly allowed Mr. Petty to shape judicial thinking behind the scenes, draft court documents in his favor, gain access to defense materials generally unavailable to prosecutors, and earn more than $250,000 in the process. He did this on hundreds of cases, and without defendants’ knowledge or consent, while county and court officials kept the arrangement quiet among themselves.

St. Paul school board lifts school mask mandate
They will be optional starting Monday.

Eder Campuzano:

Students in St. Paul will no longer be required to wear masks in classrooms, starting Monday, as long as the spread of COVID-19 remains in check.

The school board on Tuesday changed the district’s mask policy, removing the mandate and allowing students and faculty to choose whether or not to don a face covering in public schools.

The resolution passed 6-1 during a sometimes raucous committee of the board meeting as about two dozen demonstrators at times interrupted the proceedings. Board Member Uriah Ward was the lone dissenting vote.

One man repeatedly shouted, “What about the Constitution?” during the proceedings, then retreated to the back of the room to record video of the board meeting.

The new policy requires students, faculty and staff to wear masks inside school buildings only if coronavirus transmission levels reached the highest mitigation tier as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That is, if the county registers more than 200 infections per 100,000 residents in a one-week period and logs more than 20 hospitalizations or if more than 15% of its hospital beds are occupied by COVID-positive patients.

The price of Mandates, continued

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?

Revolt of the Parents, Vol. 3

Wall Street Journal:

America’s fed-up parents on Tuesday sent another set of school board incumbents to the timeout corner to reflect on what they’ve done wrong. This time the elections were in Waukesha, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee. The races were nonpartisan officially, yet it was a win for a slate backed by the state and local GOP.

Three Waukesha school incumbents lost their seats, one in the primary, two on Tuesday. “Our children have endured an awful lot in the past two years navigating a pandemic that unleashed mandates, restrictive rules, remote learning and constant changes to their normal school routine,” one of the winning challengers, Mark Borowski, says on his website. He also criticizes—and he ran against—“equity initiatives” that “infiltrated district curriculum,” while dividing students and “espousing falsehoods about America.”

The incumbents protested that Mr. Borowski and the other challengers were running on national GOP talking points. But the arguments had local resonance.

School Reopening Mess Drives Frustrated Parents Toward GOP

Michael C. Bender:

Democrat Jennifer Loughran spent the pandemic’s early days sewing face masks for neighbors. Last month, as a newly elected school-board member, she voted to lift the district’s mask mandate. That came four months after she voted for the state’s Republican candidate for governor.

After a monthslong political identity crisis, Ms. Loughran decided her opposition to her party’s mask mandates, economic restrictions and school-closure policies outweighed her support for positions on climate change, abortion and gay rights, at least for the moment.

Watching her daughter fall behind in virtual kindergarten, Ms. Loughran had grown so frustrated not knowing when her children would return to the classroom that she joined a group that attracted right-leaning parents in its school-reopening push. She was unhappy that Gov. Phil Murphy didn’t fight to reopen schools sooner, and she associated his fellow Democrats with mask mandates and restrictions.

She hasn’t decided which party to pick this fall in her local House race, a contest expected to help determine control of Congress. “What I do know,” she said, “is that my party-line vote shouldn’t be taken for granted anymore.”

The defection of once-loyal voters like Ms. Loughran—along with disapproval from independents—is among the challenges Democrats face in their bid to retain control of Congress and win state-level races in this November’s midterm elections. These voters say Democratic officials left pandemic restrictions in place too long and mishandled the health crisis, with devastating consequences for their children, while Republicans have generally pushed to minimize school closures and keep the economy open.

“The primary function of teachers today is no longer to be the transmitters of knowledge but to serve as agents of social and political change”

C Bradley Thompson:

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.—Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.”

In this new series of essays, I’d like to show you whatis being taught in America’s twenty-first-century government schools and the philosophy behind it. The portrait that I will present here is not a pretty one, but it is the reality. The simple truth of the matter is that America’s government schools are intellectually bankrupt and morally corrupt. To suggest otherwise is either disingenuous or a form of head-in-the-sand-ism.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote in Beyond Good and Evil that the strength of a man’s “spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’” he could bear. I’m asking you to bear a big dose of truth with this essay, the kind of truth that makes you wince and hurt.

Let’s start at the 30,000-foot level, where we can get a birds-eye view of the main philosophic systems that dominate America’s government schools and drive the content of what it being taught in the classroom.

Officially, America’s schools claim to teach no moral values per se. But that claim is contradicted by the fact that they constantly push moral values such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “tolerance,” moral relativism, and egalitarianism. Such “values” are intended to strip children of any standards or principles they may have previously embraced, so that the teachers can replace the sometimes conservative cultural values of the kids’ parents with the political values of today’s postmodern, cultural Left—namely, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, transgenderism, “social justice,” socialism, etc.

The ultimate aim of Critical Gender Theory is to deconstruct the family and replace it with the State as the primary vehicle for educating children. The specific political goal is to create a new class of the “oppressed.” From this new class of victims will come the new revolutionaries who will keep the revolution alive and move it to the next stage of development. This is the ultimate means by which capitalism is to be dismantled and the State is to become the final arbiter of the principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Fall School Board Elections? Maybe in Virginia

Nick Minock:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin made an amendment to a bill that could put all nine Loudoun County School Board members on the ballot this November. The bill would still need approval from the legislature.

Loudoun County school board members were set to be on the ballot next year, but the Governor’s proposal would move the elections of the school board up a year.

This move comes after the Governor signed an executive order on his first day in office authorizing the Virginia Attorney General to investigate possible wrongdoing by Loudoun County School Board members and the school district regarding sexual assaults that happened in two Loudoun County schools last year.

Civics: “They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left”

David Mamet:

Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?

Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.

Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”

Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.

For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.

Algorithms vs Human Speech

Taylor Lorenz:

As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”

Euphemisms are especially common in radicalized or harmful communities. Pro-anorexia eating disorder communities have long adopted variations on moderated words to evade restrictions. One paper from the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology found that the complexity of such variants even increased over time. Last year, anti-vaccine groups on Facebook began changing their names to “dance party” or “dinner party” and anti-vaccine influencers on Instagram used similar code words, referring to vaccinated people as “swimmers.”

Tailoring language to avoid scrutiny predates the Internet. Many religions have avoided uttering the devil’s name lest they summon him, while people living in repressive regimes developed code words to discuss taboo topics.

Early Internet users used alternate spelling or “leetspeak” to bypass word filters in chat rooms, image boards, online games and forums. But algorithmic content moderation systems are more pervasive on the modern Internet, and often end up silencing marginalized communities and important discussions.

4 Year Degrees Required for Fewer Jobs

Steve Lohr:

As a middle school student in New York, Shekinah Griffith saw a television news report of President Barack Obama visiting an innovative school in Brooklyn. Its program included high school, an associate degree in a technical subject, an internship and the promise of a good job.

“I thought, ‘This is somewhere I need to be,’” Ms. Griffith recalled. “There are not many opportunities like that for people like me.”

She applied, was accepted and thrived in the courses. After school, an internship and an 18-month apprenticeship, she became a full-time employee at IBM at the end of 2020. Today Ms. Griffith, 21, is a cybersecurity technical specialist and earns more than $100,000 a year.

In the last few years, major American companies in every industry have pledged to change their hiring habits by opening the door to higher-wage jobs with career paths to people without four-year college degrees, like Ms. Griffith. More than 100 companies have made commitments, including the Business Roundtable’s Multiple Pathways program and OneTen, which is focused on hiring and promoting Black workers without college degrees to good jobs.How has corporate America done so far? There has been a gradual shift overall, according to a recent report and additional data supplied by the Burning Glass Institute. But the research group’s company-by-company analysis underlines both the potential and the challenge of changing entrenched hiring practices.

A classic education via charters (timely)

Joanne Jacobs:

At Ivywood Classical Academy in Plymouth, Michigan, fourth-graders are studying early and medieval African kingdoms, dynasties of China, Europe in the Middle Ages and the founding and spread of Islam.

Hillsdale-affiliated schools teach the liberal arts, sciences and the “great works of literature, philosophy, politics, and art” and attempt to “lead students toward moral and intellectual virtue,” says the Michigan college.

“Classical education guides us into freedom by making us self-reliant and responsible, capable of governing ourselves and taking part in the self-government of our communities.”

Some private schools also used the curriculum.

Hillsdale, which is affiliated with 24 schools in 13 states, is “pushing the boundaries on the use of taxpayer money for politically tinged education, according to Stephanie Saul in the New York Times.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants 50 new classical charters in the state to teach “informed patriotism.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19

Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore and Casey Mulligan:

Almost exactly two years ago COVID-19 spread to the United States and our federal, state and local governments implemented strategies to mitigate the damage from this deadly virus.

We now know from the responses across countries that the U.S. federal government (and most governments around the world) made many tragic mistakes in responding to Covid 19. But one of the wisest policy decisions was to ultimately let the 50 states and their governors and legislators make their own pandemic response policies. Federalism worked. States learned from one another over time about what policies worked most and least effectively in terms of containing the virus while minimizing the negative effects of lockdown strategies on businesses and children.
In the beginning stages of the pandemic, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity released a widely cited study and early stage report card on how the states were responding to the pandemic, based on how many jobs and how much GDP was lost and how states were performing in terms of reducing Covid infections and deaths.1 This study is an expanded and updated version of that original report card of how the 50 states handled COVID.

The study primarily examined three variables: health outcomes, economic performance throughout the pandemic, and impact on education (i.e., the number of days of schooling that children missed).

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?

More Fakery:

Derek Lowe:

Some years back I wrote about an authorship scam where papers that had already been accepted, but were still at the proof stage, were offered up to people who wanted to become “authors” on them for a fee. Yep, you could bulk up your publication list the easy way, with cash. That one was run out of China, and that country has been the source of hundreds, likely thousands, of such things (here’s an analysis by Elisabeth Bik). But you will probably not be surprised to hear that the same crap has persisted elsewhere. Retraction Watch has been on this story for years, as you could well imagine, and back in December they published this look at a Russian paper mill, “International Publisher LLC”.

This one’s particularly brazen – they post what are basically advertisements for open authorship slots, pointing out to customers that the fees will vary depending on where on the author list you want to appear and on the quality of the journal the paper is slated to appear in. Naturally. This outfit goes around soliciting for new listings as well, alerting actual authors to the chance to add a bit to their own income by including a total stranger or two. As you’ll see from that article, there’s always a list of a couple of hundred article possibilities for you to browse from, and turnover is constant. Here’s a new preprint examining the same people – it examines 1009 offers in the 2019-2021 period that have appeared (and then disappeared) on the site and finds at least 434 papers that have subsequently appeared in the literature that match up with these. (Here’s an article here at Science on this one). Actually, that should be 419 papers, because several of them appear to have been published twice, which sort of fits. The estimate is that these things have brought in over six million dollars during that period.

The Russian faked-authorship industry appears to have sprung up after changes that directly required publications – the more, the better – as a factor for promotion:

Why a slide rule works

John Cook:

Suppose you have two sticks. The length of one is log x, and the length of the other is log y. If you put the two sticks end to end, the combined length is

log x + log y = log xy.

That’s the basic idea behind a slide rule.

The simplest slide rule consists of two bars with numbers marked on each bar on a logarithmic scale, running from 1 to 10 or maybe 1 to 100.

To multiply x by y, line the 1 on the left end of the bottom bar with x on the top bar. Then the number above y on the bottom bar is xy on the top bar.

This works because the 1 of the bottom bar is positioned a distance log x from the 1 on the top bar. The y on the bottom bar is a distance log yfurther to the right, and so it is a distance log x + log y from the 1 on the top, which is marked with log xy.

Here’s an example. Suppose you want to find the circumference of a circle 5000 ft in diameter. The image below shows how you would multiply π times 5000.

Notes on transparency in University of Wisconsin System Admission, and a Governor Evers veto

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Republican lawmakers criticized the Regents’ decision and have pushed for more transparency in the admissions process. They passed a bill requiring UW campuses to rely only on “objective” admissions criteria and publish the criteria on their websites.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill Friday, echoing concerns raised by UW officials that the bill would reduce enrollment and harm workforce development. He also pointed out that nowhere in the bill is the “objective” criteria Republicans want to be used in admissions defined.

Misrepresenting Mises: Quotation Editing and a Rejection of Peer Review at Cambridge University Press

Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie:

The purpose of peer review is to examine the integrity of research, verifying its quality and reliability. This article discusses a failure in basic peer-review mechanisms at the journal Contemporary European History (CEH). In early 2020, the first of the present authors discovered evidence of quotation editing and misrepresentation of original sources in an article about the economist Ludwig von Mises by historian Quinn Slobodian. After the editors of CEH refused multiple attempts to seek corrections, it came to light that similar problems had been flagged during the referee process for Slobodian’s article. Like the correction request after publication, the referee report was ignored by the journal’s editors. This article chronicles the discovery of the misrepresentations, as well as unsuccessful attempts to obtain a correction to the edited quotations from CEH and its publisher Cambridge University Press.

‘So disillusioned”: Mandates, Parents, Students and K-12 Governance

Michael Bender:

Democrat Jennifer Loughran spent the pandemic’s early days sewing face masks for neighbors. Last month, as a newly elected school-board member, she voted to lift the district’s mask mandate. That came four months after she voted for the state’s Republican candidate for governor.

After a monthslong political identity crisis, Ms. Loughran decided her opposition to her party’s mask mandates, economic restrictions and school-closure policies outweighed her support for positions on climate change, abortion and gay rights, at least for the moment.

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?

Inside the vast national experiment in test-optional college admissions

Erin Einhorn:

The daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, and a nearly straight-A student, had her heart set on attending Cornell University, the elite campus in upstate New York where her older cousin was already enrolled.

But her SAT scores were discouragingly low.

“It was humbling,” said Cabrera Orozco, 18, a senior at Sleepy Hollow High School in Westchester County, just north of New York City. “I worked hard throughout all my years in high school, and then one test will determine if I’m good enough for a school. I feel like that’s kind of unfair.” 

What Cabrera Orozco didn’t realize was that the pandemic that had disrupted her high school years led college admissions offices across the country — including Cornell — to waive standardized testing requirements. The change — perhaps the most significant shakeup in college admissions since the SAT and ACT were first widely required more than 50 years ago — has become a large-scale experiment, with high stakes for both colleges and their prospective students. 

“It’s a sea change in terms of how admissions decisions are being made,” said Robert Schaeffer, the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which is critical of the way standardized testing is used. “The pandemic created a natural experiment. Colleges were forced to see how test optional worked.”  

Test-optional and test-blind admissions had begun to gain steam before the pandemic, with proponents arguing that tests hurt the odds of applicants who have traditionally not done as well on them, including students whose first language isn’t English, students whose parents didn’t go to college, Black and Hispanic students, immigrant students and students whose families can’t afford expensive test prep programs.

First Report on Groundbreaking Longitudinal Study of One City Schools Released!

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

Dear Community Members,

In November 2019, the Wisconsin Partnership Program, located within the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, awarded One City Schools a five-year, $1 million grant to support the implementation of our education programs, and the design and launch of a long-term longitudinal evaluation of our organization and schools. We are pleased to share highlights from the first report of the longitudinal study, published by Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and the Center for Research on early Childhood Education (CRECE).

Over the next several years, evaluators will assess the implementation process, outcomes and impact of One City’s organization and schools on children, parents/caregivers, teachers, community partners and systems. The evaluation began in January 2020 and is currently funded through 2024.

We encourage you to review the executive summary of the report, and the initial public announcement of the grant award. Together, they explain the purpose and goals of the evaluation.

The evaluation is designed to (1) inform One City Schools about its areas of strength and need for change and/or improvement, (2) inform the growth and expansion of its schools and educational strategies, and (3) inform the fields of early childhood and K-12 education, nationally and internationally, about the impact and efficacy of One City’s education models and strategies.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The report is a part of a four-year evaluation process, broken up into phases, which began in 2020 and is funded through 2024. UW-Madison researchers in partnership with the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative interviewed teachers, staff, including leadership staff, and families between January 2021 and September; observed preschool and elementary classrooms; sent surveys to staff, teachers and families; and analyzed documents from One City Schools including reports, newsletters and administrative documents to compile the first phase of the report

Scott Girard:

The first recommendation, to “keep innovating, keep dreaming big,” also recognized “that One City has undertaken a critical task of lifting up all children, but particularly Madison’s Black children who have been long underserved by our community.”

“In a short time, One City has mapped a plan for success by thinking outside of the box to create a unique set of schools,” the report states. “These schools are vibrant places that exemplify innovation.”

The areas for improvement are also often challenges for traditional public schools. Staffing, for example, has become a nationwide challenge for schools exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emory, WiFi and student vaccination policies

Madi Oliver:

About 1,300 students’ Wi-Fi was restricted around the week of March 14 because of their failure to comply with Emory University’s booster vaccine requirements, according to Executive Director of Student Health Services Sharon Rabinovitz. The restrictions caused students’ Wi-Fi to slow down and blocked access to nonacademic sites such as social media and video games. 

The consequence motivated over half of the affected students to either submit proof of vaccination or request an exemption, Executive Director for COVID-19 Response and Recovery Amir St. Clair said.

“The WiFi restrictions were a valuable compliance measure to help promote participation,” St. Clair said. “Our hope is that it will continue to have an impact.”

Heresy

Paul Graham:

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.

For example, when someone calls a statement “x-ist,” they’re also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That’s one of the reasons they’re used: to end a discussion.

If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they’re admitting to banning the truth. That’s obvious enough that I’d guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it’s easy to show that they’re mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.

US News Rankings and dubious data

Francie Diep:

Robert Morse, the lead designer of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings methodology, speaks at the professional conference for college data-crunchers every year. And every year, attendees say, his workshop is packed.

“Every time I’ve gone to that session, it’s been standing-room-only and people leaning in the door,” said Jeffrey A. Johnson, director of institutional research and effectiveness at Wartburg College. Conference-goers always ask tough questions, said Todd J. Schmitz, assistant vice president for institutional research for the Indiana University campuses. But Morse’s audience is rapt: “He has this room of 300 people hanging on his every word,” Johnson said.

now ‘unconstitutional’ to require teacher candidates to test for math proficiency

Anonymous:

American architect, writer, and educator Frank Lloyd Wright warned us of the expert when he wrote, “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an Expert”. I share these thoughts not as an expert but rather, as a public-school educator who has not succumbed to the collectivist commitment to mediocrity in Ontario schools. 

This blog is organized around themes related to three pervasive ideologies within Ontario’s education system. These include the myth of academic integrity, the false prophet of equity, and the teacher quality fable. 

The Myth of Academic Integrity

Speak with any educator and all will proclaim their commitment to academic integrity. Yet, evidence of waning academic integrity manifests itself daily. As one example, students who copy, plagiarize, or cheat are no longer punished. Rather, teachers are to inform the student’s parents of this minor transgression, and reverently advise them that the instance will be ignored, and the assignment or test will be omitted in calculating the final grade. 

Aside from snubbing a basic educational value, there are consequences to ignoring cheaters. In fact, Ontario’s education system incentivizes cheaters by allowing them to bypass difficult assignments or tests if they cheat by simply not calculating the grade. The message heard by students? Cheat and we will ensure the assignment never really existed.

Fake jobs for Rutgers MBA’s

Ted Sherman:

On its website, it proclaims its No. 1 ranking this year by Bloomberg Businessweek as the top Public Business School in the Northeast. Fortune bestowed a similar honor in 2021. And U.S. News & World Report rated its MBA program among the top ten for Best Overall Employment Outcomes in the U.S., as well as No. 12 for its Supply Chain Management MBA program.

But in a whistleblower lawsuit filed Friday, a Rutgers administrator charged that the university fraudulently burnished those national rankings by creating totally bogus jobs to show the success its business school graduates had in finding employment.

The lawsuit by Deidre White, the business school’s human resources manager, alleged the program used a temp agency to hire unemployed MBA students, placing them into sham positions at the university itself — for no other reason than to make it appear like a greater number of graduates were getting full-time jobs after getting their Rutgers diplomas.

“The fraud worked,” wrote White’s attorney, Matthew A. Luber of McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton. In the very first year of the scheme, they said Rutgers was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the ‘No. 1′ business school in the Northeast.

Analysis finds average eighth graders may have skills indicative of fifth grade

John Fensterwald:

The analysis, which looks at performance over time, shows that students fell behind each year incrementally even before the pandemic, starting in third grade when tests were first given.

Progress completely stalled last year, when most students were in remote learning. Eighth graders overall scored at the same level that they did when they took the sixth grade test two years earlier.

The state canceled Smarter Balanced tests in the spring of 2020 because of the Covid pandemic, so there are no results from seventh grade for these students.

Progress in math builds on knowledge accumulated in previous years. Missing instruction and skills compound the challenges that elementary and middle school math teachers face moving forward after another disruptive year dealing with Covid variants.

“The results highlight massive gaps in math learning that existed long before pandemic,” said Rick Miller, CEO of the CORE Districts, a multidistrict data and improvement collaborative. “Responding with a one-time fix misunderstands what is happening.” 

The analysis, published in an EdSource commentary, was produced by David Wakelyn, founder of Union Square Learning, a nonprofit with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., that works with education organizations on improvement strategies. Wakelyn formerly was executive director for policy development for The College Board, an education policy adviser to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and program director for the National Governors Association.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Notes on taxpayer supported school food

Scott Girard:

Smith previously worked with the Gary, Indiana and Chicago Public Schools food service systems. She joined the district amid the COVID-19 pandemic and has had a challenging first year. Those challenges have included scrambling as vendors didn’t deliver the expected food on that day’s school menus and dealing with the district’s own staffing shortages.

She hopes those challenges will fade as next year approaches. Smith wants to bring in a variety of initiatives, from scratch cooking to using fresh products grown at schools. The district recently hired a dietitian and is currently seeking an executive chef.

“We are going to make some stuff that really will give people something to talk about,” Smith said.

Smith recently spoke to the Cap Times about what’s on the menu at Madison’s schools.

Elections and taxpayer supported education

Will Flanders:

Obviously, these results have implications for Wisconsin’s upcoming fall elections. Both of the major candidates for governor on the Republican side, Rebecca Kleefisch and Kevin Nicholson, have expressed support for education reform — both on the public school side and in expansion of school choice. The current governor, Democrat Tony Evers, has rejected several pieces of legislation that would have given parents more of a say in the classroom, including a bill that would have required schools to post instructional materialonline for easy accessibility for parents. The dividing line between Evers and the Republican candidates on these issues is quite stark.

Perhaps most importantly, the election returns highlight a growing belief among conservative voters that they can no longer ignore the policies of their local school boards. While laments about the politicization of school board races were widely voiced, many parents would say that school boards have brought this on themselves by politicizing the classroom in ways that are often at odds with the values of the communities in which the schools are located. The pandemic revealed to parents the indoctrination that occurs in many school districts around the country via at-home education. Parents remain angered by what they discovered, and are refusing to return to complacency.

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?

Polish Schools and Ukraine refugees

The Economist:

Yulia bodar’s classroom was once the back bedroom of a large Warsaw apartment. Now it boasts a blackboard, a bright carpet decorated with cartoon animals, and desks at which a dozen small children are learning to write. Her pupils are refugees from Ukraine who have arrived in Poland since Russia invaded their country on February 24th. She is a newcomer herself, having fled western Ukraine with her own two children not long after the bombs began to fall.

Ms Bodar is a teacher at Materynka, a school that teaches the Ukrainian curriculum from several makeshift locations in Poland’s capital. Before the war began it had about 200 pupils, largely children of migrants who had come to Warsaw to work. Now it has around 1,000. Larysa Vychivska, one of its founders, points to a tall stack of forms filled out by newcomers. She says her school is taking in about 20 new pupils each day.

Censoring a free speech survey

David Blaska

Now the Woke posse is trying to hogtie a student surveythat attempts to quantify how free is speech at Wisconsin’s public universities. The interim chancellor at UW-Whitewater resigned rather than have his campus exposed as a cynosure of Leftist groupthink. Student government leaders like the anti-police regime at UW-Madison also want the survey … canceled.

The question arises, what are they afraid of? (Answer: Exposure!) In January 2021, the UW’s Thompson Center found that “undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus … appear to be fairly hostile to First Amendment principles.”  Why? Because “an overwhelming majority of them [75%] identified as politically liberal.”

Sure enough, the Menard Center at UW-Stout was seeded by a donation from Charles Koch. Because conservatives hate free speech, doncha know! The survey’s lead professor tells the Wisconsin State Journal “It might help people to understand the center for me to say I’m a liberal professor being funded by a conservative donor to run a nonpartisan center.” Sorry, professor. Our guess is that it won’t help.

We understand push polling, which telegraphs the answer by the shaping of the question. We ask our platinum subscribers to tell the Werkes if the survey’s questions are biased:

Charcot’s hysteria

MIT Leads the Way in Reinstating the SAT

Jason Riley:

“I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to create an elite law school . . . [and] it’s done this by taking only the best students with the best grades and the best SATs or LSATs, knowing that the result of this will be to exclude to a large degree minorities.”

Scalia said that if Michigan wants to be an elite law school, that’s fine. But there are trade-offs involved if the school also wants to prioritize enrolling some predetermined percentage of underrepresented minorities for aesthetic reasons. “If [racial diversity] is indeed a significant compelling state interest, why don’t you lower your standards?” he asked. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.”

Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.

MIT explained the reversal in a blog post. “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT,” wrote Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions. “Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT⁠is significantly improved by considering standardized testing—especially in mathematics,” he added. Thus, “not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.”

Ukraine Match

Concourse Global:

Concourse is working with secondary school and independent counselors around the globe in assisting students affected by the conflict in Ukraine. Ukraine Match is a free, dedicated Global Match event aiming to bring university options and opportunities to students who are unsure of their academic future.

Fistgate conference and the schools

Mass Resistence

Weekly Standard article on “Fistgate” conference
Warning America about the homosexual agenda in the schools

In July of 2000 — just weeks after it hit the “Fistgate” scandal hit the national news (mostly Fox reporting, particularly Hannity & Colmes, but also other national media) the Weekly Standard published an article about it. Although the Weekly Standard generally seems to shy away from the homosexual issues, then-staff member Rod Dreher thought it was important enough to write about, and apparently the editors agreed with him.

Below is the article that appeared in the magazine:

Experts warned COVID would hurt students’ mental health. Now, teachers are living that reality

Jocelyn Gecker:

“I don’t want to read about another teenager where there were warning signs and we looked the other way,” said Sen. Anthony Portantino, author of a bill that would require all California middle and high schools to train at least 75% of employees in behavioral health. “Teachers and school staff are on the front lines of a crisis, and need to be trained to spot students who are suffering.”

Experts say while childhood depression and anxiety had been on the rise for years, the pandemic’s unrelenting stress and grief amplified the problems, particularly for those already experiencing mental health issues who were cut off from counselors and other school resources during distance learning.

For children, the issues with distance learning were not just academic, said Sharon Hoover, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.

Child abuse and and neglect increased during the pandemic, according to Hoover. For children in troubled homes, with alcoholic or abusive parents, distance learning meant they had no escape. Those who lacked technology or had spotty internet connections were isolated even more than their peers and fell further behind academically and socially.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Madison West high School Curriculum Practice 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?

the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study.

Jessie Singal:

Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn’t genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection. At baseline, 59% of the treatment-naive kids experienced moderate to severe depression. Twelve months later, 56% of the kids on GAM experienced moderate to severe depression. At baseline, 45% of the treatment-naive kids experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Twelve months later, 37% of the kids on GAM did. These are not meaningful differences: The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems. (Though as I’ll explain, because the researchers provide so little detailed data, it’s hard to know exactly how dire the kids’ mental health situations were.) 

If there were improvement, the researchers would have touted it in a clear, specific way by explaining exactly how much the kids on GAM improved. After all, this is exactly what they were looking into — they list their study’s “Question” as “Is gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youths associated with changes in depression, anxiety, and suicidality?” But they don’t claim this anywhere — not specifically. They reference “improvements” twice (see above) but offer no statistical demonstration anywhere in the paper or the supplemental material. I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.

A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection

Beth McMurtrie:

In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. As many as 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.

“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”

“People’s irrational fears are taking over these policy decisions,” says one parent.

Robby Soave:

On March 16, Washington, D.C., became one of the very last major metropolitan areas in the country to finally end mask mandates for students. According to Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, kids who attend D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) no longer have to wear masks.

That’s not always what happens in practice, of course. Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris visitedThomas Elementary School, a public school, and posed for photos with kids. Every single child who participated in the photo op wore a mask, but Harris did not.

Thomas Elementary did not respond to a request for comment about its masking policies, so it’s not clear if the school actually requires masks. If so, the school would hardly be alone in keeping a mask mandate in place. In fact, many of the city’s public charter schools—which are overseen by a school board that is separate from DCPS—have kept mask mandates in place. Indeed, several have no plans to ever end the mandate, a source of tremendous frustration for some parents.

“Our principal told us that right now masks are still required indoors for all students,” says Lindsay Elman, a mother of a child at Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School.

Mundo Verde is one of five D.C.-area foreign language immersion charter schools that run from kindergarten through fifth grade. They are feeder schools for District of Columbia International School (DCI), which teaches sixth through 12th grade. And they are, by and large, keeping mask mandates in place.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The university bureaucracy has been hijacked for political grudge matches and personal vendettas.

Laura Kipnis:

When I read about the downfall of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate” relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi.

The K-12 Price of Mandates

Houman David Hemmati

The evidence now proves (as Dr. Fauci said in the early days of the pandemic) that cloth masks are ineffective, and we now also know surgical masks are minimally protective, while properly fitted N95 masks can protect the wearer against infection. Once we finally reopened schools, we discovered what many of us had been suggesting all along: that there were no meaningful outbreaks that resulted in death or serious illness, even among unvaccinated students and teachers. And we now know that the closures and heavy restrictions imposed on restaurants, businesses, recreational facilities, and the hospitality industry had nowhere near their full intended effects.

Moreover, today we have numerous vaccines available to anyone who wants one, as well as solid clinical evidence of their protective benefits against serious illness or death. We also have information about their lack of protection against infection, and a vast understanding of their risks, all of which empowers individuals to make their own choices. Moreover, we have numerous safe and effective FDA-authorized treatments, including two orally administered outpatient therapies, which can nearly erase the chances of serious illness or death when taken on time. And, thanks to the high infectivity of the Omicron variant, we have exceptionally high rates of natural immunity to the point that we have begun approaching herd immunity.

But the draconian measures we took in the name of “flattening the curve,” “stopping the spread,” and saving lives came with a great cost. We are now only beginning to realize the extent of the devastation caused by the strict COVID lockdowns, school closures, and mandates, nearly all of which failed to have a meaningful impact on the course of the pandemic. We placed millions of people on chronic unemployment and made them dependent on the government for housing, utilities, and food. We caused immeasurable learning loss and psychological harm in children. We caused obesity rates to skyrocket. We canceled countless celebrations and trips, kept millions from seeing their physicians, and induced a permanent sense of paranoia among so many. And we labeled those who dared question these policies as unpatriotic or “domestic terrorists.” In other words, we created enormous harm and division to achieve, at best, a small benefit.

But perhaps the greatest lesson we have learned from this period of our history is that government, and the public health establishment, are not always right, that regular citizens (particularly parents) should be trusted, and that the American people value individual freedom and autonomy above all else.

Literacy Scores by Country, in Reading, Math, and Science

Nathan Yau:

Among 15-year-old students, here’s how 77 countries compare in reading, math, and science. Higher scores are better.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Commentary on K-12 Parental Rights and legacy Governance; “we have the children”

Darlene Click:

As the saying goes, you catch flack when you’re over target. Disney execs boast about secret queer agendas, teachers boast on social media how they will defy parents and, now, that bastion of inane Leftwing propaganda, Salon states parental rights are harming kids.

Across the country, students are struggling to regain a sense of normalcy as they cope with the loss and emotional hardship of the pandemic. This is especially true in Florida and Texas, where there are severe teacher shortages and underfunded public school systems, we parents are concerned for our children’s well-being and futures.

We? we? Who is this “we” that the co-authors, Jane Gray and Jaime Jara, portray themselves as representative of parents everywhere? Was there an election the rest of us missed?

According to their Salon bios, Gray describes first about herself as mother of three children who are cisgender and Jara as mother of a transgender daughter. Both are involved in academia. 

Explains a lot now, doesn’t it?

These two moms, steeped in the jargon of Left Lysenkoism and racialist pedagogy, pen a short rant that takes gaslighting to new levels. Never mind that parents themselves had a front row seat via Zoom of their children’s classrooms during the Wuhan virus lockdowns and grew, rightfully, alarmed. No, none of those parents showing up at school boards demanding to know why their kids are being racially targeted or sexually harassed actually exist (pace AG Garland’s siccing the FBI on parents), or girls and their families trying to save girls’ sports, this is all a great big conspiracy of (cue the screaming horses) RETHUGLICAN POLITICIANS!

“We have the children”.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

My kid’s school installed spyware and I can’t remove it

Ccieve:

My middle schooler goes to Chicago Public Schools. They use Google Classroom for assignments and other communications.

I bought him a Chromebook for schoolwork, but also for other private things. When we logged in, the system installed GoGuardian monitoring software on the Chromebook without notice or permission.

And now I can’t remove it. I wrote to GoGuardian support, and they replied that I had to contact the school or remove my son as a user. The instructions for removing him as a user do not work; on the contrary, I see the message “cps.edu manages this user and may remotely manage settings and monitor user activity” and he can’t be removed.

I did a full factory reset, signed in to his account again, and now the system is once again locked down.

So now I’m in the position where I have to ask permission from a local government entity to please let me install stuff and don’t monitor the computer I bought and paid for.

Does anyone know how to refer these people to law enforcement for prosecution?

Young women are out-earning young men in several U.S. cities

Richard Fry:

The New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles metropolitan areas are among the cities where young women are earning the most relative to young men. In both the New York and Washington metro areas, young women earn 102% of what young men earn when examining median annual earnings among full-time, year-round workers. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area, the median earnings for women and men in this age group were identical in 2019. (For data on earnings and the gender gap for 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, read this Google sheet.)

Overall, about 16% of all young women who are working full time, year-round live in the 22 metros where women are at or above wage parity with men.

Commentary on Competitive school board races

Rory Linnane:

In an emailed statement, the Republican Party of Wisconsin touted “flipping” some school boards to conservative majorities and highlighted Manitowoc as now having a “fully conservative board.”

“Parents are fed up with far-left school boards who have kept students out of the classroom, implemented divisive curriculum, and put teachers unions over kids,” Republican Party of Wisconsin Executive Director Mark Jefferson said in an email.

The strategy from the Democratic Party was more defensive. Rather than backing candidates looking to oust conservative incumbents, the party invested most heavily in supporting their favored incumbents and backing more left-leaning candidates in open races. They didn’t point to any “flips.”

Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, said the party was starting from a better position with the composition of school boards in Wisconsin, due to prior Democratic “wave” spring elections.

“Progressives were coming from a position of extraordinary strength in school board elections,” he said. “Red areas returning to their underlying political makeup represents a kind of progression to the mean rather than a shift.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Civics: Ongoing Decline in Madison School Board Candidates and Voters; Unhealthy

Scott Girard:

This year’s election showed lower interest than recent contested races, in both fundraising for School Board races and voters. The number of votes was less than even last year, which featured two seats up for election with both candidates unopposed. Just over 41,000 people voted in those races.

The 2020 election, which included the Democratic presidential primary and was held in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, featured three seats on the ballot. Two of them were contested, and about 80,000 people voted in those races.

The last time these same seats were all on the ballot, in spring 2019, more than 65,000 people voted in each of the races, all of which featured two candidates on the ballot.

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?

University of Wisconsin “Free Speech” Survey

More, here:

Free speech has become a lighting rod topic on campuses in recent years, with conservatives pushing colleges to crack down on students who disrupt conservative speakers and presentations.

Republicans have also cited concerns about students being “indoctrinated” by liberal professors or feeling too uncomfortable to share their conservative views. GOP lawmakers in Florida passed a law mandating students and staff on public university campuses take a survey about viewpoint discrimination.

That led the state’s faculty union this week to urge campuses to ignore the state-mandated survey. The group argues the questions are leading in nature, asking to what extent respondents agree or disagree with statements such as “I have felt intimidated to share my ideas or political opinions because they were different from those of my colleagues” and “Students at my institution are not shielded from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even deeply offensive.”

UW-Madison professor Michael Bernard-Donals said the System’s survey questions “seem more benign” than Florida’s but the reasons for administering the survey seem to be in response to pressure from the Republican-controlled Legislature. 

“It all seems very McCarthy-like,” he said. 

Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation

Timur Kuran* and Cass R. Sunstein

An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressedperception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. Thedrivingmechanisminvolvesacombinationofinformationaland reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public re- sponses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepre- neurs–activists who manipulate the content of public discourse-strive to trig- ger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risk associated with production, consumption, and the environ- ment, Professors Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cas- cadesandsuggestreformstoalleviatetheirpotentialhazards. Theirproposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better in- sulation against mass demandsfor regulatory change and an easily accessible scientzficdatabasetoreducepeopleSdependenceonpopular (mis)perceptions.

The Currys Plan To Install 150 Libraries In Oakland

Ngozi Nwanji

Stephen and Ayesha Curry are taking action to increase the literacy rate for children through their Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation.

ABC7 reports that the Currys have unveiled the first of 150 Little Town Libraries that will be spread out across Oakland, CA — with an aim to provide 30,000 books to the youth. The libraries are chosen by partners in the community such as Oakland Literacy Coalition, Oakland Public Library, and Black Cultural Zone. First up for the installments was Franklin Elementary.

The power couple’s foundation — launched in 2019 — is all about providing kids and families in Oakland, the Bay Area, and across the U.S. with the resources necessary to excel. Their latest initiative is working to combat the statistic of one in three children reading at grade level by the end of third grade in addition to the low levels of Black and Latinx elementary students reading at grade level. According to the outlet, “only 15.4% of Black and 12.5% of Latino/a elementary students are reading at grade level.”

Always interesting 2022 Madison School Board Election Agitation, via SMS

David Blaska has launched a write-in campaign for this seat, supported by former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

A year ago, school districts got a windfall of pandemic aid. How’s that going?

Marguerite Roza and Katherine Silberstein:

The law gives districts wide latitude and few restrictions, and thus choices are all over the map. One district awards sizable staff bonuses, another remodels a building, and another hires an army of counselors, nurses, and social workers. Some are launching tutoring efforts, while others are investing in professional development or refreshing their curriculum and technology. Atlanta added 30 minutes to the school dayand Boston is running summer recovery courses for teens. Some are doing a bit of everything.

In many regions, the flurry of spending has triggered a corresponding flurry of hiring. Districts are competing for a limited labor pool, and using signing bonuses, retention pay, and other strategies to expand labor rolls to a new and higher level than ever before.

In contrast, some big, urban districts, including those in Minneapolis, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, are using funds to backfill budget gaps (some caused by pre-pandemic overspending or enrollment losses). Instead of launching new programs and hiring new staff, the funds are paying the salaries of staff who’ve been in these districts for years.

In the end, there simply is no “typical” spending profile.

Madison’s well funded k-12 school systems received another $70M in redistributed federal taxpayer funds recently.

Wisconsin DPI Guest Speaker says CRT Is Just the Beginning

MacIver News

Wisconsin public school teachers got a crash course in “A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements” during a professional development meeting in February.

The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) conducts monthly webinars to provide Wisconsin’s public school teachers with advanced training on critical race theory (CRT). CRT is a highly-controversial, divisive, race-based philosophy that liberals fight fanatically to advance while denying it even exists.

In February, DPI brought in Charlene Carruthers for its equity webinar series to talk about social transformation. Carruthers is a community organizer and PhD student at Northwestern University who specializes in “interrogating historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black governance, Black feminist and queer theory,” according to her website.

“We’re going up against 300 years plus, at least of it being a formal state, of white supremacy, of patriarchy and of capitalism,” she told the teachers.

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?

Transcript study suggests rampant grade inflation and watered down high school coursework

Jill Barshay:

Schneider thinks that a lot of so-called rigorous high school classes are now terribly watered down. He pointed to an old 2005 course content study, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. It looked at the actual content and curriculum underneath course titles. Analysts concluded only 18 percent of honors algebra I courses and 33 percent of honors geometry courses actually used a rigorous curriculum. 

“What we found is that the titles and what was being advertised by the schools as an advanced course in these areas really did not pan out when we actually looked at what was being taught,” said NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr at a March 2022 presentation, where she referred to this study. 

NCES is planning to update this course content study in 2024 to see if course content has deteriorated further.

Schneider argues that the nation is pretending to increase science and math (so-called STEM) skills by putting high schoolers in courses with fancy titles. “Simply telling students who have not truly mastered STEM skills that they are “A students” who have finished a rigorous math and science curriculum is not the way to produce that workforce,” Schneider concludes. “If education runs on lies, this is one of the more pernicious lies around.”

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?

“If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood .”

Sunny Labh:

I have been writing about Richard Feynman for quite some time now and if you are reading this you probably already know this thing. One of the reasons why many of my articles are surrounded around the life and work of Richard Feynman is because he had a different, and quite interesting perspective towards life, love, science, teaching, and learning. The man was one hell of a character himself who feared no one.

When it comes to teaching and learning, Feynman was an exemplary personality. He was an impeccable student who taught himself advanced calculus and mastered it by the age of 15. He developed his own mathematical notations and symbols before he entered college. According to physicist Steve Hsu, Feynman was one of the highest scorers from the USA in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, which is one of the toughest math competitions in the world, and the Princeton entrance exams where he scored highest in physics and mathematics. The guy was hell of a genius!

As brilliant as he was as a student, he was an amazing teacher too. His capabilities to simplify complicated phenomena and explain them to general public in a simple and understandable way are not unknown to anyone. His lectures in physics, his literary writings, and recordings are perfect examples of his wit and clarity that he portrayed in his explanations. I have written several stories about the physicist that you can read in my previous publications and my Twitter handle. In this article, however, I shall explain five brilliant study tips that we all can learn from the late physicist. All the below mentioned quotes/lessons are extracted from his books, and interviews. These lessons are not just limited for people in academics but anyone in general who believes that learning is an eternal process.

“You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.”

One City Schools’ Preparatory Academy Enrollment Begins on 4 April, 2022

One City Schools (expanding in Monona…)

Our formal enrollment for Elementary School period for the 2022-23 school year will begin on March 1, 2022 at 8 am. Applications will be accepted for all Elementary grades from 4K through 5th. One City Preparatory Academy enrollment period starts on April 4, 2022 for Sixth grade only for Middle School. Ninth and tenth grade only for High School.

The tragic folly of lockdown

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:

Throughout the pandemic, the media have eagerly compared Covid statistics between different countries. But such comparisons are often deceptive.

Take, for example, the use of Covid case counts. These depend not only on the number of people infected but also on the amount of testing performed. While useful for evaluating whether cases are increasing or decreasing within a particular country, they are deceptive when comparing countries. If we truly wanted to know, it would be easy, through random seroprevalence surveys that measure the proportion of people with antibodies. But not all governments have been eager to conduct these surveys, while some scientists have even got into trouble for doing them.

SCUSD Board of Education Response to Statement by David W. Gordon

Sacramento School District

The district leaders are fiscal stewards who must follow the law and ensure the district remains fiscally solvent, but also that it retains the financial ability to provide programs to lift up our neediest students and afford them maximum opportunity.

In fact, as part of the regular reviews my staff performed of the district’s financial reports over the last few months, we have repeatedly warned that the current improvement in the district’s fiscal position is likely to be temporary. Even with no increases in employee compensation, significant cost growth and revenue losses resulting from enrollment declines will eventually threaten the district’s fiscal solvency.

The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair

Kathryn Paige Harden

MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.

Critics of standardized tests have had plenty of reasons to celebrate lately. More than three-quarters of colleges are not requiring the SAT or the ACT for admission this fall, an all-time high, and more than 400 Ph.D. programs have dropped the GRE, up from a mere handful a few years ago. MIT’s announcement on Monday that it is reinstating a testing requirement for fall 2023 admissions was a major departure from these recent trends. Just as striking, amid the widespread perception of standardized testing as an engine of inequality, was MIT’s rationale: “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider,” MIT’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, wrote, “tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.” Dropping the SAT, it turns out, actually hurts low-income students, rather than helping them.

MIT’s conclusion is counterintuitive because students from richer families, on average, score higher on the SAT and other standardized tests than students from poorer ones. The correlation between family background and SAT performance is from about .25 to .40—that is, meaningful but far from perfect. Still, it’s strong enough that some researchers dismiss standardized tests as nothing more than a proxy for asking, “Are you rich?” (The ACT measures roughly the same skills as the more widely used SAT, and the arguments for and against both tests are similar.)

But the income-related disparities we see in SAT scores are not evidence of an unfair test. They are evidence of an unfair society. The test measures differences in academic preparedness, including the ability to write a clear sentence, to understand a complex passage, and to solve a mathematical problem. The SAT doesn’t create inequalities in these academic skills. It revealsthem. Throwing the measurement away doesn’t remedy underlying injustices in children’s academic opportunities, any more than throwing a thermometer away changes the weather.

The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom

Tanya Lewis:

Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months of 2020 and first months of 2021, compared with the same period in previous years. Hungary, Italy, Spain and Portugal had some of the largest drops: reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4 and 6.6 percent, respectively. The U.S. saw a decline of 3.8 percent, but this was not statistically significant—perhaps because the pandemic’s effects were more spread out in the country and because the study only had U.S. data through December 2020, Aassve says. The findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Birth rates fluctuate seasonally within a year, and many of the countries in the study had experienced falling rates for years before the pandemic. But the declines that began nine months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, were even more stark. “We are very confident that the effect for those countries is real,” Aassve says. “Even though they might have had a bit of a mild downward trend [before], we’re pretty sure about the fact that there was an impact of the pandemic.”

Choose life:

Notes on Yale Law School’s civics climate

John Hindraker:

Yale Law School has long been a disgrace. I was surprised, when I searched for YLS on our site, at how often we have commented on farcical events there. Way back in 2003, we wrote about Yale Law School’s disgusting treatment of military recruiters. That was followed by Yale’s lawsuit trying to have the Solomon Amendment declared unconstitutional. The Solomon Amendment provides that universities that receive federal funding must treat military recruiters in non-discriminatory fashion. The horror! Yale and its fellow left-wing institutions lost 8-0 in the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan was among those leading the anti-military charge.

In 2014, we commented on a pitifully weak op-ed co-authored by the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Provost of Yale Law School complaining about the fact that police officers were not charged with homicide in the Michael Brown (a clear case of self-defense) and Eric Garner cases. 

Then there was the hysterical anti-Brett Kavanaugh letter signed by YLS students, alumni and professors. (“Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. … He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are. . . people will die if he is confirmed.”)

“We have the children”

So said a former Madison School District Administrator some years ago.

Rod Dreher on recent taxpayer supported federal government actions:

I remind you that this very US government policy document actually states that there are “no scientifically sound” reasons to doubt whether hormones and surgery for minors is harmful, and to say, therefore, that children may be removed from their families so that their bodies can be altered by the state.

This is the Democratic Party at work. This is what it means to have a Democratic government. Does having a Republican government mean reversing all of this? One hopes so.

Folks, they really are coming for our children. It’s right there on the government website. They are propagandizing doctors to act as agents of the state in the seizure of kids. Read the document yourself!

California Teachers Association Student Sexual Orientation Clubs

Christopher Tremoglie:

Imagine a scenario in which your child comes home from school and tells you that they now identify as “pansexual.” Or, while telling you about the school day, your child mentions that he or she was told he or she was gay based on a test a teacher gave them. Or you discover he or she was recruited by a teacher to lead a gay and transgender student club but was instructed not to tell any parents because “what happens in the student club, stays in the club.” These are the alarming contents of a packet distributed by the California Teachers Association regarding the formation of gay and transgender clubs in schools.

There’s nothing ‘pro-trans’ about deleting women

What happens when the public lose confidence in academic findings?

Thomas Prosser:

In an important new paper, Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson show that half of the effect size in observational studies, even in conservative estimates, is composed of confounding. In laypeople’s terms, this means that many academic studies considerably overestimate the effect of the variables which they study. Such results erode confidence in academic work, yet there have been a series of these findings. In a 2018 paper, 29 expert teams used a single dataset to analyze whether football referees were more likely to red card dark-skin-toned players, the teams coming to radically different results, none of which could be proved incorrect. Such findings follow the replication crisis. In 2015, researchers replicated 100 leading studies in the field of psychology, finding that only 36% of the replications yielded significant findings. Moreover, the mean effect size in the replications was about half the effect reported in the original studies. In other fields, similar crises followed.   

Within academia, such developments are well known. Yet public awareness is limited and few reflect on practical consequences for politics. Though such challenges do not affect academic confidence in the reality of (say) climate change and Coronavirus, there are significant consequences for policies which address such issues; if scholars worry about findings, how can we be confident that policy interventions are effective? Admittedly, political implications are indirect. Decades ago, postmodern philosophers deconstructed social reality, engendering loss of confidence in liberal democracy among certain intellectuals. Yet this had questionable impact on practical politics. At this time, politicians such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush promoted liberal democracy with an evangelical zeal, reflecting a popular culture in which confidence in democracy remained overwhelming. But recent trends are distinct. Quantitative social scientists now worry about the validity of methods, previous crises of confidence being confined to the humanities.

A court upholds a jury’s $50 million judgment against Oberlin College for defaming a local business.

Thomas Boyd:

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals handed down a long-awaited decision Thursday in the case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College. The court dismissed all of Oberlin’s appellate claims and confirmed the jury’s finding that the college, a small private liberal arts institution in rural Ohio, was liable for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with a business relationship. It then upheld the trial jury’s award to Gibson’s Bakery of $11.1 million in compensatory damages, $33.2 million in punitive damages and $6.3 million in attorneys’ fees.

When the original verdict was issued, Oberlin and much of the academic community, as evidenced by friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case, generally hyperventilated, as though academic freedom were at stake. Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, told a CBS reporter at the time that the jury had inappropriately held the college responsible for the exercise by its students of their First Amendment right to protest. She claimed that the proper question should have been “whether a college should be held liable for the speech of its students.” When confronted by the reporter with Gibson’s lawyer’s point that the First Amendment wasn’t at issue in the trial, she blithely replied that those claims were “misstating what the jury found.” In its ruling, the Court of Appeals agreed with Gibson.

Civics: the politics of privacy and social network battles

Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell

The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending “2-3X more time” on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook’s popularity among young people had plummeted.

Story continues below advertisement

Targeted Victory declined to respond to questions about the campaign, saying only that it has represented Meta for several years and is “proud of the work we have done.”

In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a “back channel” for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm “would definitely want it to be hands off.”

In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app’s purported harms. “Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?” a Targeted Victory staffer asked.

“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’ ” the staffer wrote.

Rather interesting

LinkedIn post.

A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board rejected (2011) Kaleem’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. Consider the implications for the many children…

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Biden Administration Proposes increased Charter School Regulatory Spaghetti

Will Flanders:

Last month, the Biden Administration announced new regulations on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). The CSP is designed to offer a funding source for charter schools to expand access for students to high-quality school options, as well as to help schools fund facilities. The regulations are ostensibly designed to create better oversight. But they are largely based on strawman arguments about charters and will have a chilling effect on one of the most important educational options for families across the U.S.

There are several troubling aspects to the new regulations. Among the most troubling is that charters would be evaluated for funding based on whether they’re located in areas that have excess students in traditional, local schools. This provision shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of charter schools. Charter schools are meant to be much more than an overflow valve for the excess capacity needs of a school district. They’re meant to offer competition to the existing schools by being freed from existing rules that hamper innovation. It is only by offering this competition that charters can work to improve the performance of the district, as traditional schools will be incentivized to improve.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Civics: Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests

William Turton:

Law enforcement around the world routinely asks social media platforms for information about users as part of criminal investigations. In the U.S., such requests usually include a signed order from a judge. The emergency requests are intended to be used in cases of imminent danger and don’t require a judge to sign off on it. 

Hackers affiliated with a cybercrime group known as “Recursion Team” are believed to be behind some of the forged legal requests, which were sent to companies throughout 2021, according to the three people who are involved in the investigation.

Recursion Team is no longer active, but many of its members continue to carry out hacks under different names, including as part of Lapsus$, the people said. 

The information obtained by the hackers using the forged legal requests has been used to enable harassment campaigns, according to one of the people familiar with the inquiry. The three people said it may be primarily used to facilitate financial fraud schemes. By knowing the victim’s information, the hackers could use it to assist in attempting to bypass account security.

K-12 Governance and Election Climate: Wisconsin edition “A lack of accountability should concern us all.”

Bill Glauber:

One panelist from suburban Milwaukee was critical of the amount of time schoolchildren spend on electronic devices, including computers, claiming that it connects students to pornographic images and affects their learning.

Johnson said: “This is their testimony, this is their viewpoint … that is something that should concern parents if that is happening.”

“I think there are good parts of technology and potentially bad parts of technology,” Johnson said. “I think we should make sure that the bad doesn’t come with the good. So I am concerned.”

Johnson said he was prompted to hold the meeting because he has been listening to parents in different formats — “in a completely nonpartisan way,” he said. “It’s interesting how many people that don’t necessarily agree with me on some issues come in here and want to talk about this.”

Asked about what he heard during the session, in which panelists spoke followed by audience members, Johnson said: “I think there’s some real concern about our public school system not listening to parents, not hearing their voices, not hearing their concerns, a lack of accountability. That should concern us all.”

On schools, Johnson said he was concerned “about the influence of national groups, teachers unions, that type of thing, trying to impose their ideology on our children.”

Dylan Brogan:

Every bad change in education over the last 50 years started with university professors,” says Pesta. “And don’t underestimate those teachers unions.” 

But Pesta’s evidence of how Critical Race Theory is taught in Wisconsin public schools mostly came from out-of-context examples from other states. The tenured professor did include in his presentation a February tweet from state Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Appleton) stating that “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.”

Snodgrass later deleted and apologized for the tweet. Another example was from an email sent by the Ozaukee County Democrats: “Public schools have the responsibility of the parents when their children are in their care.” 

A parent from Burlington cited comedian Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, which chronicles his early life growing up in South Africa during apartheid, as evidence that Critical Race Theory is pushed on her kid.

Nice to see STEM folks making it go!

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Notes on Denver’s charter school climate

Chester Finn

It’s no secret that Denver’s latest school board is wreaking havoc on the suite of bold education reforms that the Mile High City was known for over the past two decades. Parker Baxter and Alan Gottlieb recount the sorrowful saga at some length in the latest issue of Education Next.

As they write:

Denver Public Schools’ plunge over three years from one of the nation’s most carefully planned and promising examples of public-education transformation into a district led by a school board in disarray has multiple causes, and there’s plenty of blame to spread around.

Ultimately, however, it is the result of a concerted effort over more than a decade by organized and committed activists, local and national, who have opposed changing the governance and operation of school districts in any significant way. 

The reforms now consigned to (or fast heading toward) the scrap heap took multiple shapes, consistent with the basic principle that comprehensiveness is essential if real change is to occur in something as complex and deeply rooted as public education. They focused chiefly on teacher quality (including a much-discussed merit-linked compensation plan), school accountability, and several forms of choice. For a long time—including fourteen years under superintendents Michael Bennet (now U.S. Senator) and Tom Boasberg—they enjoyed steady hands on the tiller and bipartisan support on the board and in the community. That’s strategically important in blue-ing Denver (and Colorado), and is important everywhere if changes are to endure. (Massachusetts was another long-running example of such support that’s beginning to show signs of unraveling.)

School choice took two important forms in Denver. The first was originally imposed by Colorado’s vigorous and early (third in the country) approach to charter schools, which included backup state authorizing of quality charter applicants rejected by districts. Denver resisted chartering at first—and got overruled more than once—but its twenty-first-century charter strategy was positive until the recent turnabout. As a result, Denver has a fine crop of charter schools—nearly sixty of them, attended by more than a fifth of the city’s pupils—including such highly regarded examples as the eight-campus Denver School of Science and Technology. Charters long benefited from a cooperative relationship with the district, including a unified enrollment system and a shared approach to special education. Now, however, the climate is chilling. Chalkbeat reported a year ago that “The Denver school district once represented fertile ground for charter schools. But shifting politics and declining enrollment mean Colorado’s largest school district is becoming less friendly territory for the independent public schools.”

As Baxter and Gottlieb put it:

Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying.

Rachel Aviv:

In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the “pros of telling”: “no more physical/emotional attacks,” “I get out of this dangerous house,” “the truth is finally out, I don’t have to lie or cover things up.” Under “cons of telling,” she wrote, “damaging mom’s life,” “could go into foster care,” “basically I would probably lose everything.” After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it.

Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the school’s wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the “queen of compartmentalization.” She got A’s, served in student government, played varsity soccer, managed the field-hockey team, and volunteered for the Special Olympics. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hair—“the picture of Americana,” as one friend described her. Mackenzie’s parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Chesterfield, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. But Mackenzie’s friends and teachers noticed that in her mother’s presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. Lisa Smith, the mother of one of Mackenzie’s best friends at Whitfield, said that her daughter once asked why Mackenzie was always injured: “My daughter kind of looked at me funny, and I looked back at her and said, ‘What are you trying to say?’ ”

When Fendell asked Mackenzie about her bruises, Mackenzie offered vague comments about being clumsy. Fendell told her that, if she couldn’t talk about why she was injured, she should write it down. “I don’t ever want to cause her any pain or anything, which is why I’ll probably end up burning this,” Mackenzie wrote in the journal. “I wish that I had the courage to tell someone. Or even to write everything down in here. Because if I’m being honest, there are things that I’m too ashamed to even speak of.”

The Over-the-Top Stress of College Acceptance Season

Jason Gay:

We’re into college acceptance season, when high-school seniors find out which institutions of higher learning have accepted them for enrollment, which have not, and which will ask them to ride that purgatory surfboard called the “wait list.”

It’s a stressful period for many. If you’re a well-organized high-school senior who’s already been accepted early—congratulations, I have no idea what that wonderful feeling is like, but you have my profound admiration and awe.

If you’re sitting there, sweating, panicking, wondering if any school is going to take you, wishing you’d spent a little more time hitting the books—I’ve been there.

If you’re waiting, a couple pieces of advice: