Elizabeth Beyer:

Twenty-five Madison high school seniors have been named semifinalists for the 2021 National Merit Scholarships.

The students join about 16,000 other high school seniors across the country that were named this month as semifinalists for the prestigious scholarship. About 15,000 of semifinalists are named finalists, and about 7,600 of the finalists go on to receive a scholarship.

More than 1.5 million high school juniors from roughly 21,000 schools across the country entered the 2021 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2019 Preliminary SAT National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The test is used to screen initial program applicants. Semifinalists represent less than 1% of high school seniors in the U.S.

Wisconsin’s cut score is 216. Texas is 221, Minnesota 219, California 222 and New York 221….

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]

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

Logan Wroge:

Thirty-eight Madison high school seniors have been named semifinalists for the 2020 National Merit Scholarships.

The students join about 16,000 other high school seniors across the country that were named Wednesday as semifinalists for the prestigious scholarship. About 90% of semifinalists are named finalists, and around half of the finalists go on to receive a scholarship.

The program, now in its 65th year, will award about $31 million in scholarships this spring.

Much more on National Merit scholars, here.

Mr Logan’s article does not include “cut-off scores”.

However, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Andrew Palumbo:

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) recently confirmed to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation that we would end our participation in the National Merit Scholarship program and ceased offering scholarships to recipients of the College Board’s National Hispanic Recognition Program.

Weeks earlier, when we had discussed this move with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a representative of the organization suggested we reconsider. She said that this decision could negatively impact the school’s ability to recruit students who are eligible for other universities’ National Merit Scholarship awards.

Ultimately, this was a consequence that we were willing to accept in order to better align our scholarship offerings with WPI’s institutional goals and values.

Logan Wroge:

Ninety-five Madison area students have been named semifinalists for the 2017 National Merit Scholarships.

They are among approximately 16,000 high school seniors across the country who have qualified as semifinalists. Of these students, about 7,500 will eventually be offered the prestigious scholarship in spring 2017.

Entering its 62nd year, the National Merit Scholarship Program will have about $33 million available for college-bound students. The money is provided by hundreds of businesses and higher education institutions across the country.

Here are the seniors in area high schools that have qualified as semifinalists:

Much more, here.

2017 National Merit cut scores:

Illinois 219
Minnesota 219
Iowa 215
Massachusetts 222
Michigan 216
Texas 220
Wisconsin 215

PDF Program.

2016 Cut-Off Scores (PDF). Wisconsin is 208, Minnesota 214, Illinois 215, Massachusetts is 223, Texas 220 (!) and Alabama is 209 (!)

Revisit College Station, TX, vs Madison. One spends substantially more per student than the other…

Wisconsin State Journal:

There were 54 scholarship recipients in Wisconsin. Local recipients included: Alyssa A. Hantzsch, Baraboo, Baraboo High School; Katarina L. Klafka and Mikko S.R. Utevsky, Madison, East High School; Tristan H. Abbott, Shoshana L. Rudin and Joanna Q. Weng, Madison, West High School; Clare M. Everts and Katherine D. Stein, Madison, Edgewood High School; Winifred B. Hoerr, Madison, St. Ambrose Academy; Eva R. Fourakis and Andrew Gilchrist-Scott, Middleton, Middleton High School; Pratyusha Kalluri, Verona, Madison Memorial High School; and Max W. Molina, Whitewater, Whitewater High School.

Nick Minock:

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is calling on Fairfax County Public School to hand over the school system’s independent investigation into how FCPS handled National Merit commendation notifications to students.

“Our job is to get to the truth,” said Miyares. “As you know, word got out in public reports that they [FCPS] had not notified some of our hardest working students that they were National Merit Award commendations [winners]. A lot of parents had questions. We were first told it was a one-time error at one school, Thomas Jefferson High School. Now we know it expanded to eight different schools, withheld National Merit recognition and our job as the people’s protector in the Attorney General’s office is to get to the truth whether this was withheld on the basis of race or national origin. I’d remind your viewers that Fairfax County schools hired an equity consultant out of Berkeley, California. Paid this person $455,000 worth of work to come up with this equity strategic plan and in the equity strategic plan, it said that they should strive for equal outcomes for every student without exception. And in the same equity strategic plan, it said you had to be willing to treat some students purposefully unequally. Well, we want to determine whether by that definition, treating some students ‘purposefully unequally’ it meant they were withholding National Merit recognition.”

Miyares said that’s the purpose of his investigation.

Aura Nomani

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.

An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards. Since starting as a freshman at the school in September 2019, her son, who is part Arab American, studied statistical analysis, literature reviews, and college-level science late into the night. This workload was necessary to keep him up to speed with the advanced studies at TJ, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as America’s top school.

Last fall, along with about 1.5 million U.S. high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report—but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide—one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements.

James Pethokoukis:

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Nanette Asimov:

Leaked documents from a Bermuda-based law firm, Appleby, show that schools have increasingly turned to secretive offshore investments, which let them swell their endowments with blocker corporations, and avoid scrutiny. (Max Whittaker/The New York Times)
A student discovered in February that the files were accessible to all business school students and employees, and informed the school about the vulnerability. He also downloaded the information and spent months studying financial aid data from 2008 to 2015. The result was a 378-page statistical analysis that revealed the difference between the school’s claim of fairly awarded scholarships and what it had actually been doing.

“All fellowships are need-based,” claims the school’s website, which was updated on Wednesday. Before then, the site included an assurance that the business school “does not offer merit-based scholarships.”

But it does discriminate — often favoring female applicants, international students, and those with backgrounds in finance, says the report by Adam Allcock, a Stanford business school student from the United Kingdom who found and analyzed the data. The school “represents its financial aid system to students as ‘non-merit-based,’ while operating it as ‘merit-based’ by secretly rating students and manually deciding how much (scholarship money) they should receive,” Allcock wrote in the analysis obtained by The Chronicle. He asked that the report not be shared publicly because he has returned the data to the school, which has not disputed its findings.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Two Madison high school students have won Achievement Scholarship awards through the National Achievement Scholarship Program, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced Wednesday.
Alondra P. Harris and Imani Lewis-Norelle, both from East High School, were among about 800 outstanding black American high school seniors who received the awards. Harris’ probable career field is genetics, while Lewis-Norelle chose “activism.”

Wisconsin State Journal, via a kind reader

Seventy-eight students in the Dane County area and 330 students statewide are among about 16,000 high school seniors named 2013 National Merit Semifinalists, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced Wednesday.
Semifinalists represent the top 1 percent of the approximately 1.5 million students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test last year. About 90 percent of semifinalists become finalists who are eligible to receive one of 8,300 college scholarships totaling more than $32 million next spring.
Dane County area semifinalists include:
Belleville: Michelle V. Chalupnik.
Edgerton: Casey N. Grittner.
Lodi: Samuel J. Taylor.
Madison (home school): Peter C. Walker.
Madison Edgewood: Cassidy McDonald, John C. Merfeld, Matthew R. Molina and Kathleen S. Wall.
Madison La Follette: Sarah E. Juhlin.
Madison East: Grace A. Coleman, Theodore D. Huwe, Patrick J. McCarthy, Scout M. Slava-Ross and Amelia L. Soth.
Madison Memorial: Srikar N. Adibhatla, Joel G. Cryer, Leah M. Fulmer, Sophia L. Gerdes, Ogden R. Greene, Charles Z. He, Caroline E. Hornung, Laurel J. Hunt, Matthew J. Lee, Daniel L. Li, Isaiah P. Mitchell, Owen S. Monsma, Rachel A. Mortensen, Aaron T. Senson, Kelly Shen, Thejas S. Wesley, Bethany N. Wolkoff, Edwin Y. Wu and William Xiang.
Madison West: Luella R. Allen-Waller, Madeline M. Batzli, Micah Y. Baum, Cindy T. Cai, Colin E. Davis, Rachel G. Feldman, Zuodian Hu, Amy H. Hua, Colin P. Keating, Rowan R. Meara, Stephen N. Petty Valenzuela, Ari S. Pollack, Oliver S. Redsten, Elizabeth M. Scholz, Ansa E. Seppalainen, Yang Song, Margaret M. Stanger, Claire M. Wang and Joel Q. Weng.
McFarland: Nicholas J. Perkl and Daniel E. Reschke.
Middleton-Cross Plains: Evan L. Bauch, Christie F. Cheng, Elizabeth J. Couser, Christopher J. Eom, Alexander T. Goodsett, Michael P. Hoot, Casey O. Hutchison, Rebecca C. Jin, Suzy Kim, Laura L. Knutsen, Megan A. Phillips, Victoria T. Wang and Kimberli R. Ward.
Monona Grove: Mitchell D. Paull, Karlyn C. Russell, Grant W. Smith and Amelia M. Speight.
Mount Horeb: Laura B. Meeker and Lucy M. Wallitsch.
Portage: Michelle M. Larson.
Reedsburg: James R. Urban.
Stoughton: Timothy A. Tyson.
Sun Prairie: Thomas A. Plagge.
Waterloo: Desiree J. Klein.

Steve Rankin, via a kind reader’s email:

The State Journal demonstrates once again that it values students primarily as athletes. If your gifts lie elsewhere, look for validation elsewhere.
Sunday’s paper devoted pages to the area “athletes of the year” — and that was only to cover spring sports. Every week includes “prep profiles,” again glorifying athletes.
Once a year the paper used to run a feature section on the top 4 percent of Dane County graduating seniors as scholars, but that section has been discontinued.
This year’s National Merit scholars, most of whom were announced to the press in April, are still a secret here. Music and theater are nowhere to be found, even though Madison is home to an entirely student-run orchestra. So kids, be a jock or get out of town!

Kevin Carey:

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on Easter, and I’m standing on a wooden deck in the Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, looking out toward Nob Hill. A man is cooking large slabs of meat on a gas grill as two dozen people mingle with glasses of bourbon and bottles of beer in the cool, damp breeze blowing in off the ocean. All of these people are would-be movers and shakers in American higher education–the historic, world-leading system that constitutes one of this country’s greatest economic assets–but not one of them is an academic. They’re all tech entrepreneurs. Or, as the local vernacular has it, hackers.
Some of them are the kinds of hackers a college dean could love: folks who have come up with ingenious but polite ways to make campus life work better. Standing over there by the case of Jim Beam, for instance, are the founders of OneSchool, a mobile app that helps students navigate college by offering campus maps, course schedules, phone directories, and the like in one interface. The founders are all computer science majors who dropped out of Penn State last semester. I ask the skinniest and geekiest among them how he joined the company. He was first recruited last spring, he says, when his National Merit Scholarship profile mentioned that he likes to design iPhone apps in his spare time. He’s nineteen years old.

Akil Bello & James Murphy:

Community organizations can now distribute waivers; in the past only high school counselors could do so. The waiver system could be more efficient — there is often a rush to get waivers out to seniors at the start of the school year in time for the October exam — and the College Board needs to devise a way to distribute them once an August SAT date begins in 2017, but all in all, the fee waiver program provides a real benefit to low-income students.

So, too, does using the Preliminary SAT-National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) to also identify students who qualify for scholarships designed for students of color and low-income students.

This year the applicant pool of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which provides support for high-performing, low-income students, grew nearly 200 percent as a result of its alliance with the College Board. This, again, is clearly a win. (The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is a funder of The Hechinger Report).

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

So, at about 4:30 in the afternoon on October 18, Dent, age 64, made his way off the porch and to the curb along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the West End of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Soon he could hear the first rumblings of the band.

There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital’s lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state’s largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers—young and old, black and white, old money and no money—crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.

Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South’s signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city’s two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent’s daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa’s daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central’s homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby black elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.

More: Share Six Words on Race & Education.

Related: Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage (18.3%) low income population. Nearby Cherokee Middle School’s low income population exceeds 60%!

Clara Jeffery:

But let’s review the array of irritants.

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Parag Khanna:

Did we realize in the 1990s that it would be us who turned to shit? Here’s what neither political scientists nor geopolitical scholars sufficiently gamed out as it was happening: The wicked brew of trade globalization and outsourced manufacturing, industrial policy fueled technological innovation, and rent-seeking financial capitalism–and how those forces not only accelerated power diffusion globally but also deindustrialization and political polarization at home. 

Fukuyama sought to marry rationalism and freedom, but even as he wrote, the great Anglo-American delegitimation was already underway. Reagan-Thatcherist privatization and deregulation were causing widening inequality, social degeneration, and the dismantling of the utilitarian meritocracy that had served as the bureaucratic backbone of postwar success. Whereas political scientists continue still to mistake the Western strategic community for a political one, the cleavage within the West has long been apparent. Weber’s ideal-type state remained alive and well in democratic technocratic states such as Germany, where the government share of the economy is high, the welfare state is robust, social protections are strong, and infrastructure is world-class. The deepening transatlantic divorce has played out over Iraq and Russia, financial and technological regulation, trade and climate change, and other areas. Even under the Biden administration, the United States and European Union may coordinate more on China and climate, but Europe won’t trust America to lead. Geopolitical allies will remain geoeconomic rivals, jointly pushing for reciprocal access to China’s markets, but competing vigorously for market share for their own firms.

The rise of Asia presents the strongest evidence for geopolitical entropy as the new arc of history, both material and ideational—and China, today’s going concern, is only half the story. First, let’s be clear where Fukuyama was right: China does not present a compelling ideology that other states wish to emulate—even if they could. China has managed economic ascent while clinging to political authoritarianism, reinforcing Huntington’s point that modernization does not mean Westernization. But much as today nobody visits America seeking to copy Washingtonian politics when all they want is to replicate West Coast tech giants, the “China model,” too, is not an off-the-shelf package. China is not exporting its ideology just because others are imitating its supply-led growth, industrial policy, and full-service digital apps. Corrupt regimes don’t need to hold up China as a role model to justify importing its surveillance technologies; they could buy these tools from American or Israeli firms as well. 

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]

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

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Eliana Sauer, a junior at Madison Memorial High School, has long hoped to qualify as a National Merit Finalist, a designation that can unlock thousands of dollars in scholarship money. She took the preliminary SAT, also known as the PSAT, as a sophomore and did well. But only the scores a student receives their junior year are considered in the scholarship award.

Because the Madison School District has been operating online, it didn’t offer the in-person exam to students this year, something Sauer said the district didn’t fully communicate despite families sending multiple inquiries in recent months.

“We had just been banking on that test being offered so when it didn’t happen and there was no communication about it, we were in panic mode,” she said. “It just seems like no one is super interested in helping juniors figure this out besides juniors.”

Julia Carrie Wong:

I wish I could say that the Facebook review board was cosmetic, but I’m not even sure that it’s that deep,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and author of a book on Facebook. “If Facebook really wanted to take outside criticism seriously at any point in the past decade, it could have taken human rights activists seriously about problems in Myanmar; it could have taken journalists seriously about problems in the Philippines; it could have taken legal scholars seriously about the way it deals with harassment; and it could have taken social media scholars seriously about the ways that it undermines democracy in India and Brazil. But it didn’t. This is greenwashing.”

The board’s initial work will be to review appeals of Facebook’s content takedowns, and it will be empowered to overrule decisions made by Facebook’s army of content moderators or executives.

In this way, the board appears designed to address the kind of controversies that Facebook has faced over content with journalistic, historic or artistic merit that nevertheless violates the company’s advertiser-friendly “community standards”, such as the international outcry over its censorship of the “Napalm girl” photograph in 2016 or the years-long legal dispute over its shuttering of the account of a Frenchman who had posted Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World. Other pressing issues that could face the panel include content from anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists or rightwing extremists who have become adept at gaming the platform’s rules.

“Facebook is a company that was made by brilliant engineers, and they were extremely good at that, and then they discovered that they were going to have to make complex decisions that would tax anyone, that were moral, legal, ethical, about privacy,” said Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian and a member of the new oversight board. “Those are decisions that newspaper editors make every day of our lives.”

But Vaidhyanathan argued that such questions are insignificant compared to Facebook’s power to amplify certain content over other content. And while Facebook has said that it may expand the scope of the oversight board’s decision making to other policy areas, it is unlikely that the board’s power will extend to re-tuning Facebook’s algorithms.

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

Victor Davis Hanson:

The harshest critics of the West in general and the United States in particular are the best arguments for it. Take the latest iconic critic, 29-year-old Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She has a predictable list of complaints against America, past and present.

Yet fortunately for her, her paternal grandparents and mother had experienced firsthand the antitheses of mainland America. And thus they were obsessed with what was right, not wrong, with the continental United States — and with getting there as quickly as possible. If they had once been critics of America, such animus was seemingly not great enough to prevent them moving to a place with a different language, ethnic majority, and traditions from those of their home, itself a territory of the U.S.

They apparently assumed that a free-market economy and transparent government gave them economic opportunities unknown in Puerto Rico, an otherwise naturally rich landscape. They wisely stayed in North America, apparently because they felt as supposed minorities that they would have far more cultural, social, political, and economic opportunities than they would as part of the majority in Puerto Rico. The fact that her father was a second-generation immigrant and architect, that AOC herself grew up in affluent Westchester County, that she received scholarships to attend pricey Boston University, and that she was elected to Congress bore out her parents’ correct assumptions of a meritocracy, not a caste state.

Mutatis mutandis, the same could be said of two other chronic ankle-biters of America, newly elected Representatives Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.). Their families correctly (but internally rather than publicly) had apparently once assumed that Muslims and the so-called nonwhite would enjoy a higher standard of living, more religious protection, and greater political freedom as minority citizens of the U.S. than as part of the majority in either Somalia or the Palestinian territories . Omar and Tlaib both know that if they were to redirect commensurate animus to the government and society of Somalia or the Palestinian territories, their freedoms, if not their very lives, would be in danger.

Left unsaid is that their theoretical doppelgängers, would-be Christian emigrants, especially European Christians, would find no such reciprocal tolerance when they reached the Middle East or East Africa (and they therefore do not emigrate to such places). That reality, along with a greater likelihood of personal security and material affluence, is why in a larger sense immigration is always a one-way street: Those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – the non-West — who are fed up always go westward. Very few disenchanted Westerners emigrate in the opposite direction; those who do are usually affluent and retired.

Transfer American paradigms from frigid Minnesota to warm Somalia, and Ilhan Omar would never have left Mogadishu. And put Somalian protocols in play in Minneapolis, and she and her family would never have set foot in America. And the reason she seems unable to acknowledge that simple truth is also Western to the core — once a pampered Westerner gains the leisure, affluence, and security to critique the very system that provided these boons.

“Were the Common Core authors serious about ‘college-readiness,’ they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been publishing impressive student history papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new (CC) standards, to Fitzhugh, enable ‘students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant New Deeper critical analysis of selected test passages.’ They will, however, ‘not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace.’ They are effectively being taught the art of propaganda through multimedia rather than the art of writing from a knowledge base in history….”

Mary Grabar, via Will Fitzhugh:

The word “doing” appears frequently in the NCSS guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s 2012 report, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future,” which was criticized roundly by the National Association of Scholars for using civics education to promote radical activism and anti-Americanism in higher education, instead of providing a knowledge base in history, civics, and geography.

In 2009, when I attended the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, I learned that most of the educators bristled at the idea of following educational “standards.” Most of the sessions involved sharing strategies for formally adhering to standards, while covertly turning students into activists for radical causes. Among these were repeal of immigration laws, statehood for Washington, D.C., and acceptance of Islam as superior to Christianity. Instead of being given a knowledge base in history, civics, and geography, students were emotionally manipulated into being advocates, attending protests, and lobbying legislators.

Flash forward to 2014. Now the objectives of these social studies teachers are the objectives of Obama’s Department of Education. The Common Core “standards” for math and English Language Arts are the law in 45 states. Those for science and social studies have been written, but are still voluntary.

Eschewing traditional forms of knowledge acquisition and writing (the old standards), “The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: State guidance for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics, economics, geography, and history” promote the idea of doing social studies. Yes, “doing.”

The word “doing” appears frequently in the guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s 2012 report, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future,” which was criticized roundly by the National Association of Scholars (myself included) for using civics education to promote radical activism and anti-Americanism in higher education.

In order to advance similar activism, the authors of the K-12 “C3 Framework” caricature traditional education as pouring knowledge into students who are passive vessels. But traditional, classical education, founded on a firm base of knowledge, is the kind that works and best prepares students for adult life. It incorporates three levels of learning outlined by the Atlanta Classical Academy charter school, as taken from their successful petition before the Board of Education:

Grammar Stage (mastery of key foundational facts, rules, and tools, imparted by teachers who are experts in their subject);
Logic Stage (mastery of relationships, categories, and order to create coherent frameworks);
Rhetoric Stage (communication and reasoning).

Notably, Common Core skips the first step, reducing it to a haphazard process of “discovery”—a hallmark of progressive education. The cart is put before the horse through “experiential” learning, where students “practice the arts and habits of civic life.”

There is no sense that students should first acquire a solid foundation of historical knowledge. Rather, students are left to do “inquiry” with “Four Dimensions”: 1) “developing questions and planning inquiries;” 2) “applying disciplinary concepts and tools;” 3) “evaluating sources and using evidence;” and, 4) “communicating conclusions and taking informed action.”

It can hardly be said that children are capable of “taking informed action.” Yet the cover photographs of the report draft (dated April 9, 2013) reveal the authors’ aims by showing children in a public forum, looking at a globe (perhaps plotting their next business move in the “twenty-first century workplace”?), and in a group leaning over plans (mimicking modern-day advertisements of the corporate working world). The final photo shows a street protest with signs saying, “No” to toxic waste.

Such photos belie the authors’ claim that “Advocates of citizenship education cross the political spectrum” and are “bound by a common belief that our democratic republic will not sustain unless students are aware of their changing cultural and physical environments; know their past; read, write, and think deeply; and, act in ways to promote the common good.” Rather, these advocates use children for their own aims, placing adult burdens on them, while denying them a real education.

The Objectives for Second Grade

Age-inappropriateness also becomes evident in a table called “Suggested K-12 Pathway for College, Career and Civic Readiness Dimension 1.” It states that “by the end of grade 2” (emphasis added) the student will construct compelling questions and “explain why the compelling question is important to the student” and “identify disciplinary concepts found or implied in a compelling question.” (A note explains, “Students, particularly before middle school, will need considerable guidance and support from adults to construct questions that are suitable for inquiry.” Of course, they would need “guidance.” That’s where the teacher can impose her own, leading questions.)

The second-grader, furthermore, in a mind-boggling quest, must “make connections between supporting questions and compelling questions” and “identify ideas mentioned and implied by a supporting question” and then “determine the kinds of sources that will be helpful in answering compelling and supporting questions.”

Writing assignments do not follow an age-appropriate progression, either. Dimension 4, “Communicating Conclusions,” calls for second-graders to “construct an argument with reasons” and “present a summary of an argument using print, oral and digital technologies.” High school seniors are to do similar tasks in a slightly more sophisticated form, for example, in constructing arguments, using multiple sources, and acknowledging counterclaims and evidentiary weaknesses.

What can a “college-ready” senior do?

While second-graders are asked to “think like historians,” the high school senior is asked to perform unscholarly tasks, such as presenting “adaptations of arguments and explanations that feature evocative ideas and perspectives on issues and topics to reach a range of audiences and venues outside the classroom using print and oral technologies (e.g., posters, essays, letters, debates, speeches, reports, maps) and digital technologies (e.g., internet, social media, digital documentary).” Even essays and reports get buried amidst posters, social media, and digital documentaries.

The authors refer back to the English Language Arts (ELA) standards for guidance, but these are vague and loose, for example, Standard 7, which “focuses on ‘short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions.” The social studies standards also go back to the ELA’s emphasis on “Speaking and Listening Standards,” wherein “students engage one another strategically using different forms of media given a variety of contexts in order to present their knowledge and ideas.” As if these were really vigorous, the authors cite “examples,” such as participating in a “range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners” and making “strategic use of ‘media and visual display’ when presenting.”

This is hardly preparation for college work in the traditional sense. Traditional work would involve sifting through historical material knowledgeably, and compiling it in the well-reasoned format of a scholarly paper. Were the Common Core authors serious about “college-readiness,” they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been holding contests and publishing impressive student papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new standards, to Fitzhugh, enable “students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant New Deeper critical analysis of selected test passages.” They will, however, “not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace.” They are effectively being taught the art of propaganda through multimedia rather than the art of writing through a knowledge base in history, civics and geography.

The new social studies standards are not surprising, considering the work of social studies teachers behind the scenes at conferences and elsewhere. They now have an administration that supports their radical aims. Consider the members of the “writing team” of this report, including this large majority:

Kathy Swan, lead writer/project director: associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Kentucky, and coauthor of And Action! Doing Documentaries in the Social Studies Classroom. Her research focuses on “standards-based technology integration, authentic intellectual work, and documentary-making in the social studies classroom.”

Keith C. Barton, professor of curriculum and instruction and adjunct professor of history at Indiana University and co-author of Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools and Teaching History for the Common Good.

Flannery Burke, associate professor of history at Saint Louis University who specializes in environmental history, the history of the American West, and gender studies.

Susan W. Hardwick, professor emerita of geography at the University of Oregon and co-host of the Annenberg/PBS series The Power of Place.

John Lee, associate professor of social studies education at North Carolina State University and co-director of the New Literacies Collaborative, http://newlit.org (connected to Linda Darling-Hammond).

Peter Levine, Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University, author of Engaging Young People in Civic Life, and a proponent of left-wing “civic engagement.”

Karen Thomas-Brown, associate professor of social studies and multiculturalism at the University of Michigan-Dearborn with research interests in “neoliberalism and the impact of globalization on the operation of secondary urban centers in developing countries.”

Cynthia Tyson, professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, “where she teaches courses in multicultural and equity studies in education; early childhood social studies; and multicultural children’s literature.”

Bruce VanSledright, professor of history and social studies education at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His research focuses on “doing history.”

Merry Wiesner-Hanks, professor of history, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with a special interest in women’s and gender history.

Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college English for over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., an education reform initiative that offers information and resources for students, parents, and citizens. The motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis.

Pat Schneider:

“I’m an academic,” says Slekar, a Pittsburgh-area native whose mother and grandmother were elementary school teachers and who was a classroom teacher himself before earning a Ph.D. in curriculum from University of Maryland.
“I understand scholarship, I understand evidence, I understand the role of higher education in society,” he says. “When initiatives come through, if we have solid evidence that something is not a good idea, it’s really my job to come out and say that.”
Michael Apple, an internationally recognized education theorist and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. In the face of conservative state legislators’ push to privatize public education, “it is part of my civic responsibility to say what is happening,” says Apple.
“In a society that sees corporations as having all the rights of people, by and large education is a private good, not a public good,” he says. “I need to defend the very idea of public schools.”
Both Apple and Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education at UW-Madison, share Slekar’s concern over the systematic privatization of education and recognize a role for scholars in the public debate about it.
…
A wide-ranging, animated, sometimes loud conversation with Slekar includes familiar controversies hotly debated around the country and in the Wisconsin Capitol, like high-stakes testing, vouchers and Common Core standards. The evidence, Slekar says flatly, shows that none of it will work to improve student learning.
The reform initiatives are instead part of a corporate takeover of public education masquerading as reform that will harm low-income and minority students before spreading to the suburbs, says Slekar, in what he calls the civil rights issue of our time.
A 30-year attack has worked to erode the legitimacy of the public education system. And teachers are taking much of the blame for the stark findings of the data now pulled from classrooms, he says.
“We’re absolutely horrible at educating poor minority kids,” says Slekar. “We absolutely know that.”
But neither the so-called reformers, nor many more casual observers, want to talk about the real reason for the disparities in achievement, Slekar says, which is poverty.
“That’s not an excuse, it’s a diagnosis,” he says, quoting John Kuhn, a firebrand Texas superintendent and activist who, at a 2011 rally, suggested that instead of performance-based salaries for teachers, the nation institute merit pay for members of Congress.

Local Education school academics have long had interactions with the Madison School District. Former Superintendent Art Rainwater works in the UW-Madison School of Education.

Further, this 122 page pdf (3.9mb) includes contracts (not sure if it is complete) between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District between 2004 and 2008. Has this relationship improved achievement?
Related: Deja Vu? Education Experts to Review the Madison School District and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Peter Schrag:

Release of the numbers last month, amplified by an attention-getting analysis authored by retired UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor John Cummins and graduate student Kirsten Hextrum, has sent shock waves around the campus. The department of athletics and its friends are playing full-court damage control.
Sandy Barbour, Berkeley’s director of athletics, acknowledged the problem and promises to turn things around. Early indicators of academic progress in the past year are encouraging, she says, “But, we need to do better.”
A year ago she fired football coach Jeff Tedford, in part, say her friends, because he failed to do enough to help his players succeed academically. In the sports world, the explanation was simpler: Tedford’s three losing seasons. Barbour told me it was some of both: “downward trends” both on the field and in the classroom.
But in the eyes of some Berkeley professors and administrators – and for many beyond the campus – the attention given the new numbers about athletes’ graduation rates seems to raise the specter of older and more fundamental issues.

John Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum (PDF):

This white paper is based on a larger project being conducted with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library. The purpose of the research is to explore the history of the management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley from the 1960s to the present. The project began in 2009 and will include, when completed, approximately 70 oral history interviews of individuals who played key roles in the management of intercollegiate athletics over that period of time – Chancellors, Athletic Directors, senior administrators, Faculty Athletic Representatives, other key faculty members, directors of the Recreational Sports Program, alumni/donors, administrators in the Athletic Study Center and others. The interviews are conducted by John Cummins, Associate Chancellor – Chief of Staff, Emeritus who worked under Chancellors Heyman, Tien, Berdahl and Birgeneau from 1984 – 2008. Intercollegiate Athletics reported to him from 2004 – 2006. A publication of the results is underway and will be co- authored by Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education, a member and two-time national champion of Cal Women’s Crew from 2003 – 2007, and a tutor/adviser in the Athletic Study Center since 2009. This paper addresses administrative and management issues that typically concern those responsible for the conduct of a Division I-A intercollegiate athletics program. It assumes that such a program will continue for many years to come and that it provides important benefits for the Cal community. Its focus is principally with the market driven, multi-billion dollar phenomenon of the big-time sports of Men’s football and basketball, their development over time and their intersection with the academic world. The Olympic or non-revenue sports at UC Berkeley more closely resemble the amateur intercollegiate ideal with high graduation rates and successful programs. Even these sports programs, however, are gradually being pulled into the more highly commercialized model.
In the spring of 1999, a Professor in Ethnic Studies provided passing grades to two football players who did little or no work for his course. The NCAA cited Cal for academic fraud and a lack of institutional control, and placed the department on probation for five years. These kinds of incidents exact an emotional toll on the AD and the senior administration. They are a major embarrassment for the campus and remain so. In the NCAA’s own accounting of schools by major violations in its history, Cal, along with a few other schools including UCLA, with 7, ranks just behind Oklahoma (8) and Arizona State and Southern Methodist University (9). Stanford has none. Future work by these authors will investigate the nature of these violations, the culture that led to them and suggest efforts to mitigate further infractions. This paper primarily addresses the academic issues.
…..
Kasser did complete the Haas Pavilion during his watch despite the conflicts and difficulties associated with it, unquestionably a major accomplishment. He made great strides in addressing the inequities between the Men’s and Women’s programs. He upgraded the coaching in some of the Olympic Sports and his appointment of Ben Braun as the Men’s Basketball coach, who brought an inclusive, team oriented approach to management boosted the morale of the department. Kasser valued the Rec Sports program as part of the merged department and was an excellent public ambassador for Cal.
…..
The graduation rate for UC Berkeley’s revenue generating teams are the lowest in the department. Men’s basketball went four years with none of their scholarship student athletes graduating. This brought down their average to a 58% graduation rate over this eight year period. Football also has sub-par graduation rates. Over the past eight years, football graduation rates have ranged from a high of 72% to a low of 31%. Football has the lowest average team graduation rate with only 50% of their scholarship athletes graduating. The numbers are even more grim when broken down by race. In particular, the black scholarship football players, many of whom are special admits, have gone from a high of 80% to a low of 18%. The NCAA also tracks graduation rates by compiling four-year averages to even-out any anomalies. In this data set, the black graduation rates range from a high of 63% to a low of 30%. Three of the seven four-year averages mark the black graduation rate in the 30s.
…..
With a new Chancellor, a new football coach, a new stadium and high performance center, a larger and more monied conference, the present surely marks a transitional period for intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley. These changes all signal Cal’s continued escalation as a Big-Time sports program, and the difficult dilemmas campus administrators face. To fund an intercollegiate program of this magnitude they cannot alienate a substantial donor base. The recent blowback after the elimination, and subsequent reinstatement of five varsity sports, makes the possibility of cutting sports again as a cost saving measure extremely remote for years to come. Further, the athletic deficit places enormous pressures to win. This increases the temptation to gain an extra edge on the competition whether through newer facilities, higher-paid coaches, or longer practices. All this must be achieved on the backs of student athletes who are enrolled in a full-time course load at one of the most prestigious academic universities in the world. Rather than resolving the dilemma of how to maintain a nearly $70 million per year athletic enterprise while still providing a world-class education for the participants, campus administrators continue to muddle through.

Melissa Korn:

After years of hefty tuition increases, a few colleges are cutting prices and trying to wean families from discounts.
More than a half-dozen schools have slashed their sticker prices starting this fall or next as part of simplifying the college-financing process, which has become a patchwork of aid deals and discounts for families. Administrators say the price cuts could actually make schools money by attracting more new students and helping retain cost-conscious ones.
Published tuition rates have soared in the last decade, but only a small percentage of families actually pays full freight. Between grants to needy students and merit scholarships to entice other desirable candidates, schools these days are giving back nearly 50% of gross tuition revenue in the form of aid and awards, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
Such discounting has become so widespread that many small, private colleges say they are stuck in a vicious cycle: They won’t meet enrollment goals if they charge full price, even to affluent families, but they can’t afford to continue cutting everyone a deal.

Pat Schneider:

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad made the cut Saturday to become one of two finalists for the top job at a school district in suburban Detroit, according to an online report.
Nerad was selected as a finalist for superintendent of the Birmingham Public Schools at a special Saturday session of the School Board, the Birmingham Patch reports.
He apparently made a big impression on school board members in Michigan, particularly with his handling of controversy over the race-based achievement gap in Madison schools.

Much more on Dan Nerad, here.
A few comparisons:
Birmingham’s 2011-2012 budget is $107,251,333 for “more than 8000 students”, or roughly $13,406/student. That is about 10% less than Madison’s $14,858.40/student.
Birmingham’s per capita income is $69,151, more than double Madison’s $29,782. Birmingham’s median household income is $101,529 while Madison’s is nearly half: $52,550.
Birmingham had 6 national merit semi-finalists this past year while Madison featured 41. Michigan’s 209 cut score was identical to Wisconsin’s this past year.
Madison continues to spend more per student than most American school districts.