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Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools

The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system. At Wirepoints, we covered in detail the failures of Illinois education across the state in Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.

The data comes straight from the Illinois State Board of Education.

This column focuses on schools where zero percent of kids are able to read or do math. But we could have just as easily looked at the 622 schools where only 1 out of 10 kids or less can read at grade level. That’s a whopping 18 percent of the state’s 3,547 schools that tested students in 2022.

And only 1 out of 10 kids or less can do math at grade level in 930 schools…that’s more than a quarter of all schools in the state.

Defenders of the current system are sure to invoke covid as the big reason for the low scores. But a look at the 2019 numbers show that the reading and math numbers were only slightly better than they are now.

Take Spry, for example. Just 2 of the school’s 127 students in 2019 could read at grade level before the pandemic. In math, zero students were proficient.

The failure isn’t about money, either. Data from the Illinois State Board of Education shows spending at Spry was already at $20,000 per student before the pandemic. Today it spends $35,600.

Recall charges against 3 Richland School Board members are too egregious to ignore

Tri City Herald:

Audra Byrd and Semi Bird were elected in 2021 on a wave of frustration over the state mask mandate. But there also were parents and citizens who were grateful for the extra caution and protective measures being taken, especially while hospitals were overrun with COVID patients and the death count from the disease continued to climb. The division in the community was reflected at school board meetings, which often turned ugly, exhausting and even frightening. At one point, school officials started making sure there was a security officer attending the meetings just to help keep control. The last thing Richland needs is a repeat of those bitter times. The recall is not about masks and it’s not about how Gov. Jay Inslee managed the pandemic. It’s about how Byrd, Williams and Bird put themselves above the law, and they did it with a vote the public didn’t see coming.

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

Vincent Lloyd:

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts.

Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.

“I was guilty of countless microaggressions.”

Civics: Disinformation recipe; “inconvenient people”

Ann Althouse summarizes:

Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”

NEWS: Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi talk about media’s reaction against Elon Musk for reinstalling freedom of speech on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/RulHPv5DCB

— T(w)itter Takeover News  (@TitterTakeover) February 14, 2023

Using Wisconsin Fund 80 for Child Care

Raising Wisconsin:

More than 50% of Wisconsinites, including 70% of rural residents, live in a child care “desert,” where there is only one licensed available child care slot for three or more children under age 5. In response, communities are using innovative approaches to address their child care needs, including the use of a taxing option through their school district, called Fund 80.

Local school boards can vote to utilize Fund 80 (Community Program and Services) to provide funding support for initiatives and programs that benefit the broader community, like child care.
In order to utilize Fund 80, a school board must establish a Community Service Fund and adopt a budget for it. Any tax necessary to operate the fund is considered an operation levy on the school’s property tax base outside of state revenue caps.

For more information on Fund 80, visit the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website.

IQ tests used to solve this problem

Mike Cernovich:

In the olden days, you didn’t need a college degree to get a real job. You took an IQ test to get a job. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co, the far left wing Supreme Court all but outlawed these tests.

Employers thus started to required university degrees for jobs that a smart and ambitious 19 year old could have begun learning via on-the-job training and mentorship.

All the smart kids were forced to attend college. Most of them realized, “If I am going to go through all this hassle, I may as well sell insurance for State Farm upon graduation.”

Banning IQ tests for jobs, more than any other policy, hollowed out the middle. Millions of smart kids got left behind. We should care not for their sake, but our own.

The Case Against Admissions Selectivity

Frederick Hess:

It’s time to do away with selective college admissions for undergraduate education.

Now, let’s get the caveats out of the way. When it comes to specific training that requires particular skills (as with engineering or the performing arts) or courses of study where social benefit makes the case for some screening (as with nursing programs or the military academies), there’s an obvious case for performance-based selectivity. These are instances where prerequisites and demonstrated performance have an obvious, discernible import. Likewise, when it comes to professional schools or graduate training, that’s a different conversation.

But should we embrace selectivity in undergraduate education writ large? Nah. It’s time for the Stanfords, Swarthmores, and state flagships to show that they’re actually effective at educating students and not just at vacuuming up high-achievers, parking them in lecture halls and TA-led sections for four years, and then handing them off to consulting firms and graduate schools—all while charging students massive sums for the privilege of being selected.

It’s time for colleges to show that they’re effective at educating students, not just vacuuming up high-achievers.

After all, what’s the rationale for allowing these heavily subsidized institutions to pick and choose their student bodies? There are at least four claims that commonly get made, but none are especially persuasive.

Cheating Teachers

Alex Tabarrok

New York’s Regency exam is a statewide system of standardized, exit exams for secondary school students. Traditionally, the exam was graded by teachers from the same school as the student, i.e. the student’s teachers. The exam had two cutoffs, 55 for a “local diploma” and 65 for the higher-level “Regent’s diploma.” The distribution of grades during the home-school grading period shows clear spikes in the number of students just passing the 55 and 65 point cutoffs (and consequent dips in the number of students just failing). From an excellent paper by Dee, Dobbie, Jakob and Rockoff.

Is this altruism on the part of the teachers? Maybe. But the teachers are also graded on the number of their students who pass the exam.

The home-school grading system was dropped around 2011 due to bad publicity about the rampant cheating. It’s quite amazing that not a single good reason has been given for returning to the home-school grading system but the teacher’s union has been pressuring to return to the easier to manipulate system.

Inside the University of Pennsylvania’s Precedent-Setting Effort To Revoke Tenure From Its Most Controversial Professor

Aaron Sibarium:

Wax’s views are undeniably controversial. She said in a 2017 interview that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class. She has arguedthat black poverty is self-inflicted and, in the context of immigration policy, expressed a preference for “fewer Asians,” citing their “indifference to liberty” and “overwhelming” supportfor Democrats. She even invited Jared Taylor, a self-described “white identity” advocate, to speak to her class on conservative thought, saying his views were “well within the subject matter of the course.”

But tenure is intended to protect provocative speech. It came about in the 1920s after many professors were fired for endorsing then-controversial ideas like evolution, atheism, and free love. Robust job security meant academics could speak and teach freely about charged subjects, even if doing so was considered blasphemous.

That’s why Wax’s case has raised alarm about the future of academic freedom and the power of tenure to protect it. Unlike Princeton University’s Joshua Katz, whom the school sacked ostensibly over his consensual relationship with a former student, Wax is under the microscope only for what she’s said. Her dismissal would set a new precedent, signaling that tenured professors can be booted for airing views that students or administrators deem offensive.

“This is a game-changer, because it’s a pure case of speech,” Wax told the Free Beacon. “If they succeed in punishing me for that, it will eviscerate academic freedom as we know it.”

Faculty across the political spectrum echo that warning. Wax’s defenders include the conservative Princeton professor Robert George and the liberal Harvard Law professor Janet Halley, both of whom say Penn is playing with fire. “Statements on issues of law and public policy”—and the act of “inviting a controversial speaker” to class—are “unquestionably protected by academic freedom,” Halley wrote in July on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit that defends faculty speech rights.

George, who cofounded the alliance, said that punishing Wax for either would have a chilling effect. “The message to faculty and students alike will be clear,” he said. “You had better not defy the campus orthodoxies, because if you do, the consequences could be severe.”

Researchers are excited but apprehensive about the latest advances in artificial intelligence.

Chris Stokel-Walker & Richard Van Noorden

Fluent but not factual

Some researchers think LLMs are well-suited to speeding up tasks such as writing papers or grants, as long as there’s human oversight. “Scientists are not going to sit and write long introductions for grant applications any more,” says Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a neurobiologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, who has co-authored a manuscript² using GPT-3 as an experiment. “They’re just going to ask systems to do that.”

Tom Tumiel, a research engineer at InstaDeep, a London-based software consultancy firm, says he uses LLMs every day as assistants to help write code. “It’s almost like a better Stack Overflow,” he says, referring to the popular community website where coders answer each others’ queries.

The school-choice movement, riding a wave of parental rights campaigns, is resurgent

Laura Meckler:

For years, school-choice advocates toted up small victories in their drive to give parents taxpayer money to pay for private school. Now, Republican-led states across the country are leaving the limitations of the past behind them as they consider sweeping new voucher laws that would let every family use public funds to pay for private school.

On Academic Freedom

Bret Devereaux:

This week I want to talk a bit about academic freedom. There has been a lot of discussion lately about academic freedom being under threat. In the latest, Hameline University fired an adjunct instructor of art history for showing (with warning!) a historical painting of the prophet Muhammad, produced as an act of devotion. In a pleasant surprise, nearly the whole of the great and the good of academia lined up to loudly protest; in an unpleasant surprise Hamline University president Fayneese Miller largely told the rest of academia to drop dead. Meanwhile, closer to home, the UNC-system proposed a rule change which would likely block the use of diversity statements in academic hiring or admissions. Controversy there is likely to be more complex, with some seeing this as a political infringement on the traditional prerogative whereby departments chose their members and thus an infringement on academic freedom; alternately others will argue that this actually protects academic freedom since diversity statements can be little more than political litmus tests thinly disguised.¹ Meanwhile in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ‘war on wokeness‘ has extended to laws aimed at constraining the speech of university professors, to the fear and consternation of the academy. DeSantis has argued in court that, “A public university’s curriculum is set by the university in accordance with the strictures and guidance of the State’s elected officials. It is government speech” which does not seem consistent to me with existing supreme court precedent which has tended to find fairly wide free speech rights for professors in their classrooms, though I am not a lawyer. Academic freedom is under attack!

And I don’t mean that last statement facetiously; academic freedom and campus free speech are under attack. But what I want folks to understand is thatacademic freedom has always been under attack: it has always been so.

Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust distorts the historical record in service of a political message.

Amity Shlaes:

The film assigns responsibility for the restriction drive and the 1920s culture of racism to Johnson-Reed’s signatory, Calvin Coolidge. “America must be kept American,” said Coolidge, who had become president on Harding’s sudden death. This line apparently suffices to damn Coolidge in the filmmakers’ eyes, though many of us, even if we express and understand the concept differently, share the sentiment. To buttress its anti-Coolidge case, the film juxtaposes footage of the president with footage of the Ku Klux Klan on the march, of the genuine racist Henry Ford, and of the Landsberg cell where Hitler worked on Mein Kampf. The association between the mild Coolidge and professional race-mongers is crafted so tightly that some in the press, reacting to the Burns film, twinned Coolidge with Ford. An MSNBC reporter claimed that “Henry Ford and President Calvin Coolidge were just a few of the well-known figures who espoused blatant antisemitism.”

In Coolidge’s case, some facts and background are missing. Congress backed Johnson-Reed so overwhelmingly (the vote in the Senate was 69–9) that any presidential veto would have been overridden. As for Japanese exclusion, Coolidge shared the concern about its impact on Japan’s future, even announcing publicly: “If the exclusion provision stood alone I should disapprove it.”

Legacy Media and Colorado’s Woodland Park School District

Spencer Dalke:

After being targeted by a dishonest corporate media smear campaign on behalf of left-wing teachers unions, Colorado’s conservative Woodland Park School Board and parents are fighting back and correcting the record.

Home to Merit Academy, the school chartered by parents for education in valor and responsibility, the Woodland Park School District earned the ire of the propaganda press after it decided against using Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book “Between the World and Me” in its teaching. The book, district leaders said, violated state and local social study standards, which aim to teach kids “so they may become worthy of their ancestors by becoming full members of the American republic … self-reliant citizens who respect the dignity and the rights of their fellow Americans, who love their country, and who cherish our liberties and our laws.”

These standards, of course, cut against left-wing narratives, so MSNBC’s Chris Hayes aimed his fire at the conservative district last week. “Even in states that aren’t laying down edicts about teaching about race, local school boards are pursuing that agenda,” Hayes said, “like in Woodland Park, Colorado, where a school board member grilled a high school teacher about one of the texts taught in a history elective.”

Math Challenges and the Monroe School District Referendum

Luke Berg:

The District’s “Fact Sheet,” under the “How much will it cost?” section, put the following statement in bold and a separate box, indicating that this was the net effect voters needed to know: “A levy rate increase of $.13 would equate to $13 for a $100,000 home and $26 for a $200,000 home.”

Based on these statements from the District, the Monroe Times ran a piece, shortly before the referendum, with a headline emphasizing the net effect to voters: “Taxes to go up just $13 per year on $100k house should referendum pass.”2 The Superintendent spoke to the paper for the piece, and told the paper he “hopes voters see the minimal price hike of taxes and vote ‘yes’”—again, connecting the $.13 mill rate increase to the relevant net effect for voters.
After the referendum passed, taxes increased by much closer to the $199 per $100,000 figure mentioned above. From the tax bills we have reviewed, the net effect was a tax increase of between $160 and $190 per $100,000 in home value (using the 2021 valuations).3 In other words, while there was a small “offset” from the state aid and TIF district, it was nowhere near as large as the District suggested it would be. Voters understandably felt misled, and the District eventually issued an apology, claiming that it made a mistake and that it did not “underst[and] the impact” that “unprecedented increase[s] in valuation” would have on property taxes.

How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science

John Sailer:

At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between “equality” and “equity.” Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun “he” when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a “land acknowledgment” during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.

Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus.

Federal agencies have become too comfortable using disinformation

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

It behooved the United States and China to hold the now-canceled talks, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, postponed because of the balloon incident, for all the reasons that others have said: to allay tensions, to reduce the risk of a military confrontation that neither government wants.

For those who couldn’t figure out why I devoted four columns to the Pentagon UFO debate, this is why. It became clear that, whether from serendipity or design, national security agencies were using UFOs to hide something they didn’t want us to see. That something, it has slowly dribbled out since last May, was Chinese surveillance in U.S. airspace. Suspected Chinese drones have been a sometimes daily presence in U.S. military training sites going back perhaps a decade or more. We learn now of multiple balloon incursions too.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: ?half of the states will have cut rates on income within three years.K-12 Tax & Spending Climate”

Each of these states has at least one neighbor where tax rates have dropped recently, and competition is sustaining the trend. “We were the cool kid on the block 15 years ago when we moved to 5% flat,” said Rusty Cannon, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association, referring to his state’s flat income-tax rate this month. But in the past two years Colorado has adopted a 4.4% top rate on income, and Arizona dropped its rate to 2.5%. “We’re no longer the cool kid on the block at all,” said Mr. Cannon.

The tax-cutting trend took off in 2021 as state revenues boomed, driven by postpandemic reopening, rising stock prices and capital gains, and federal aid. By September 2022, 31 states were outperforming their prepandemic revenue trajectories, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Twenty-one states have cut their income taxes in this period, according to the Tax Foundation, and they’re betting that returning revenue to taxpayers will spur faster economic growth.

A letter to ayate Galleries

Speak-up exercised in an environment where the vast majority just looks the other way! Role model. Chapeau, @Baroness_Nichol https://t.co/s9JpqOHdHX

— Rainer Ohler (@roblagnac) February 12, 2023

Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read

The Free Press:

Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.

But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily causethese structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.

American Public Media’s Emily Hanforduncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

A “science of reading” quiz

Want to test your knowledge of the science of reading? Try the quiz:https://t.co/10n7miXuFW

— Nate Joseph (@NateJoseph19) February 11, 2023

Civics: Spending more for less

BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS and SHARON LURYE:

Yet, believe it or not, Florida’s state budget as measured in the latest proposals from the two governors, is only half the size of New York’s. This is in part a reflection of their tax burden, which in Florida is much smaller. If Florida politicians want to spend more, the state’s economy has to grow more. New York’s politicians can raise income taxes, as they do with great frequency.

Florida has no state income tax, while New York’s top tax rate is 10.9%. In New York City, the top rate is 14.8%, while in Miami it’s zero. Any guess why Ken Griffin moved his Citadel hedge fund to Miami instead of New York when he was looking for an alternative to Chicago? Florida has a 6% sales tax, higher than New York’s, but New York City’s combined state and city sales tax is 8.875%.

One of New York’s biggest budget busters is Medicaid, with 38.6% of the population on the rolls at the end of 2022. The state spent $26.47 billion on the joint state-federal program, or $73.27 billion with the federal contribution. Contrast that with Florida, where 25% of the population is on Medicaid and the cost is about two-thirds less than New York’s. We doubt the quality of medical outcomes is vastly different for Medicaid patients in the two states, despite the disparity in funding.

Thousands of kids are missing from school. Where did they go?

She’d be a senior right now, preparing for graduation in a few months, probably leading her school’s modern dance troupe and taking art classes.

Instead, Kailani Taylor-Cribb hasn’t taken a single class in what used to be her high school since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. She vanished from Cambridge, Massachusetts’ public school roll in 2021 and has been, from an administrative standpoint, unaccounted for since then.

She is among hundreds of thousands of students around the country who disappeared from public schools during the pandemic and didn’t resume their studies elsewhere.

An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data.

In short, they’re missing.

“Missing” students received crisis-level attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools nationwide. In the years since, they have become largely a budgeting problem. School leaders and some state officials worried aloud about the fiscal challenges their districts faced if these students didn’t come back. Each student represents money from the city, state and federal governments.

@GavinNewsom . @TonyThurmond. Barbara Ferrer and @lapublichealth. @UTLAnow. @austinbeutner. You don’t see Florida on this list, do you? A complete and predictable result from California’s COVID policies. pic.twitter.com/cyqWwttKTX
— LA Uprising (@UprisingLa) February 10, 2023

This Private Equity Firm Is Amassing Companies That Collect Data on America’s Children

Todd Feathers:

Vista Equity Partners has been buying up software used in schools. Parents want to know what the companies do with kids’ data

Civics: taxpayer funded disinformation

Matt Taibbi:

The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.

Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about “threats to democracy.” I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time. The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed. This project is about both of those things, too.

Foreign state media is labeled on platforms like Twitter.

I want to put labels on our own propaganda, and need your help to do it.

99% of Big Projects Fail. His Fix Starts With Legos.

Ben Cohen:

One way to learn how the world’s biggest building projects work—or don’t—is to start with some of the smallest building blocks: Legos.

In the 1950s, when Lego decided to make one product the centerpiece of its business, the Danish company went looking for a single toy that could be the foundation of an empire. It picked the colorful plastic bricks that have captured the imagination of children ever since. It was a wise choice. It was also a fitting corporate strategy: Lego turned a small thing into something much bigger.

“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing?” says University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg. “What’s our Lego?”

He understands the power of Legos better than anybody, and not just because he is also Danish. Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.

Captives or Consumers? Public Education Could Be Facing a Major Change

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in the Hill on moves by some states to create greater choice and control for parents over the education of their children. The move to use funding to change the status quo could soon be used in higher education. Not only are alumni beginning to withhold contributions to schools with little or no diversity or tolerance on their faculties, but states could reduce their levels of support.

Here is the column:

What if they offered public education and no one came? That question, similar to the anti-war slogan popularized by Charlotte E. Keyes, is becoming more poignant by the day.

This month, Florida is moving to allow all residents the choice to go to private or public schools. Other states like Utah are moving toward a similar alternative with school vouchers. I oppose such moves away from public schools, but I have lost faith in the willingness of most schools to restore educational priorities and standards.

Faced with school boards and teacher unions resisting parental objections to school policies over curriculum and social issues, states are on the brink of a transformative change. For years, boards and teacher unions have treated parents as unwelcome interlopers in their children’s education.

Higher Education Governance and DIE bureaucracy

Jay Greene:

In the past, state officials refrained from addressing the rise of DEI bureaucracies in public universities, not out of an inability to do so legally but from a conviction that it was somehow inappropriate for them to interfere. DeSantis’s innovation was to recognize that this self-restraint was unnecessary, counterproductive, and based largely on a misunderstanding of what DEI bureaucracies actually are.

DEI units at universities are not faculty, nor are they engaged in the core functions of teaching and conducting research. They are staff with the ostensible purpose of helping welcome students, faculty, and staff from different backgrounds to campus and creating conditions that facilitate their success. DEI staff members develop a set of practices and inculcate related dispositions that university leaders believe are necessary for welcoming diverse groups and ensuring that they thrive. One might say that DEI staff members articulate and enforce a university-approved orthodoxy regarding a set of divisive political concerns.

Mandatory diversity statements are taking hold of academia

The Economist

The university of california, Berkeley is currently advertising for a “director of cell culture, fly food, media prep and on-call glass washing facilities”. Applicants need an advanced degree and a decade of research experience, and must submit a cv, a cover letter and a research statement. They must also send in a statement on their contributions to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Seemingly everyone (this director, the next head of preservation for the library, anyone who dreams of a tenured professorship) must file a statement outlining their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to increasing it and their plans “for advancing equity and inclusion” if hired.

Not long ago, such statements were exotic and of marginal importance. Now they are de rigueur across most of the University of California system for hiring and tenure decisions. Studies claim that as many as one in five faculty jobs across America require them. And government agencies that fund scientific research are starting to make grants to labs conditional upon their diversity metrics and plans.

Proponents argue that such things are needed to advance concepts normally invoked by abbreviation: diversity, equity and inclusion (dei), sometimes with “belonging” appended (deib), or “justice” (deij), or else rearranged in a jollier anagram (jedi). Critics—typically those with tenure rather than those seeking it—think mandatory statements constitute political litmus tests, devalue merit, open a back door for affirmative action, violate academic freedom and infringe on First Amendment protections for public universities. “There are a lot of similarities between these diversity statements as they’re being applied now and how loyalty oaths [which once required faculty to attest that they were not communists] worked,” says Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University. Who is right?

Fewer Black Children are literate in the United States in 2023 than were literate when slavery ended in 1865

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on a recent Madison Early Literacy Summit

Scott Girard:

“Most teachers are still learning how to teach reading from the commercial materials that they’re being supplied,” he said. “These materials are defective. What teachers have traditionally learned from them is poor practices.

“What’s the effect? Some kids are going to learn to read anyway, but for a lot of children it makes it harder to succeed.”

Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, also presented on the changes other states have made to surpass Wisconsin in reading growth over the past three decades.

She showed during her presentation that on the latest “nation’s report card” exam results, while Wisconsin students remained ahead of the national average for reading scores, they were falling behind states like Mississippi, which invested in early interventions for struggling readers in 2013.

“In order for us to improve we have to know where we are,” Burk said. “This is not data-shaming, this is an opportunity for us to learn from where we’ve been, to know where we need to be.”

Burk, noting Mississippi’s rise “wasn’t overnight,” stressed that while funding is important, it has to be targeted at the right things. Once it is, it takes a lot of people to make it effective.

“It’s going to take an interconnected system from policy to practice,” Burk said. “Legislators have the job of passing policy, the rest of us have the job of ensuring that we’re making it work and that we’re actually doing it and implementing it effectively.”

The conversations included state legislators, who attended both events. Sen. John Jagler, R-Watertown, suggested he and his colleagues want to do something about this, but aren’t certain what the state’s role should be and whether they can come to agreement with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Seidenberg said it’s key to not cast blame on anyone in the conversation about what’s happened in the past and instead focus on working together to solve the problem. Hanford, the journalist, suggested state legislators visit schools in Wisconsin “that are making changes and trying to figure it out and start there.”

“Don’t feel like you have to go back to your office and do something today,” Hanford said. “Go learn some more, go give this some more thought. Talk to your colleagues, but go and talk to the educators who are really trying to do something good; they might not be doing the perfect thing, but they’re trying and they’re dealing with what’s hard.

“They can tell you what they need.”

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Report: 23 Baltimore Schools Had Zero Students Proficient in Math

Jonathan Turley:

I recently wrote about how public schools and boards are making the case for school choice advocates with failing scores and rising controversies. The latest shocking statistic was released this week that 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students who tested proficient in math. Those schools include 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three Middle/High schools and two Elementary/Middle schools. The state found that 2,000 students who took the state test could not do math at grade level.

We previously discussed the Baltimore public educational system as an example of where billions of dollars have been spent on a system that continues to have appalling scores and standards. Recent data now offers another chilling statistic: 41 percent of students in the Baltimore system have a 1.0 (D) GPA or less.

We also discussed how a high school student almost graduated near the top half of his class after failing every class but three in four years. He had a 0.13 GPA. His mother objected and went public.

The top spending public school districts are also some of the worst performing school districts. New York topped the per capita spending at $24,040 per kid. Washington, D.C. is close at $22,759. Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts. The total budget for Baltimore public schools is roughly $1.2 billion. That is for a city with a total population of roughly 600,000 (The greater Baltimore metropolitan area is 2.8 million). In 2015, the school population was 84,000 kids.

Civics: How America’s ‘big sort’ will upend politics

Joel Kotkin:

The world may not be turning upside down, but it’s certainly tilting. In the long shadow of the pandemic, with war on the European continent and the West and China entering a new cold war, the “new economy” of bits and bytes that was supposed to connect and shape the world has hit a rough patch. Meanwhile, the much disdained “old” economy of manufacturing, agriculture and energy is thriving.

Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Snap and Google. Last year,…

Civics: Journalists should ‘move beyond’ objectivity to build trust?

Paul Fanlund:

In the end, my position on objectivity comes down to this. First, different experiences and perspectives of journalists should be welcomed and acted upon when debating what to cover and how to approach it.

But once that process moves to a story’s execution, best practices remain the same. At last fall’s Idea Fest, Bernstein described how as a reporter he boldly pursued sources, knocked on doors and voraciously consumed documents, all without preconceptions about where his story would eventually lead.

I don’t think telling readers that journalism needs to move beyond objectivity aligns with that.

Temple Student Strike Turns Ugly as School Ends Some Tuition Aid

Victor Fiorillo:

Here is the relevant part of the message, as posted on Twitter by one Temple University graduate student, who couldn’t be reached for comment:

Dear Temple Student:

As a result of your participation in the TUGSA strike, your tuition remission has been removed for the Spring semester. You now owe the full balance listed in TUpay, which is due by Thursday, March 9.

If your balance is not paid in full by the due date, you will be assessed a $100 late payment fee and a financial hold will be placed on your student account. This hold will prevent future registration.

“Can this possibly be real?” one colleague asked me when she saw the tweet.

It sure is, as Temple officials have confirmed. Many commenters in the Tweet thread suggested that this is downright illegal. And the national coalition Higher Education Labor United put out a statement declaring that “removing tuition remission would destroy [Temple University] — grad workers would be forced to leave en masse. This is an unenforceable and absolutely vile threat. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Way to make it clear WHY [the student union] is striking.”

We reached out to Temple administrators to see if we could sort all this out, and their responses couldn’t have been more straightforward.

Nearly 1,000 Migrant Children Separated From Parents at Border Haven’t Been Reunited, Data Shows

Talal Ansari:

Nearly 1,000 children separated from their parents at the U.S. border under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration haven’t been reunited, federal data shows, despite a multiyear effort to do so.

The federal program has reunited 600 migrant children with their parents, according to numbers released by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday, the second anniversary of the establishment of the Family Reunification Task Force by President Biden soon after he assumed office.

Of the 998 children who remain separated from their families, 148 are in the process of being reunited, DHS said. The task force has also worked with nongovernmental organizations to inform 183 families of the opportunity to reunify.

“We understand that our critical work is not finished,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday.

CDC Director on vaccines for small children

Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Why an Experimental Vaccine was Added to the Childhood Schedule

“The reason ACIP recommended…getting the COVID-19 vaccine on the pediatric schedule, it was ONLY because it was the only way it could be covered in our ‘Vaccines for Children’ program” pic.twitter.com/k1CVf4cv09

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 8, 2023

Notes on Madison’s K-12 Governance Climate

David Blaska:

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Used to be that some fairly accomplished individuals sought to serve in public office. Think of Mary Burke, former executive with the Trek bicycle company, and James Howard, an economist with the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, not that long ago. On the other hand, they hired Jennifer Cheatham!

More.

Scott Girard:

In total, the district took about 14 months from Cheatham’s announcement to find the person that would become its next superintendent, with the pandemic playing a key role in that timeline.

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Kevin Bardosh, Alex de Figueiredo, Rachel Gur-Arie, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, James Doidge, Trudo Lemmens, Salmaan Keshavjee, Janice E Graham, Stefan Baral

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

K-12 tax & spending climate: America’s Quiet Default

Nic Carter:

These purchases, made with dollars summoned out of thin air, come with a giant asterisk – they do not derive from organic demand for our debt. They are only sustainable as long as inflation is tolerably low, which it no longer is (in February, it hit a 40-year high of 7.5%).

The exact explanation for the lost appetite among foreigners for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt is hard to pin down. It may have been a delayed reaction from the 2008 crisis, when the Fed made it clear it had the ability to print unlimited dollars to support domestic markets (at the expense of foreigners). It might have been the aggressive sanctions the U.S. instituted against Russian banks after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 – the most economically powerful nation the U.S. had ever targeted in such a manner.

Previously, sanctions had been reserved for small, economically unimportant nations. At the time, the U.S. threatened to exclude Russia from the SWIFT international transfer system entirely but backed down due to the severity of the measure. Russia took the threat to heart, and its central bank divested most of its U.S. Treasury exposure and set up a SWIFT alternative called SPFS.

Even as the Russians took steps to free themselves from dependence on the dollar system, the U.S. wisely walked back from the brink, realizing that American and European banks were hopelessly intertwined with Russian ones. At the time, President Obama laid out a prescient warning regarding the risk to the dollar system that arbitrary exclusions could pose. In 2015, he cautioned, in the context of unilateral Iran sanctions:

Australia and the US are cracking down on ‘Chinese spies’ in STEM, and Beijing is taking advantage

Wing Kuang

Chinese American physicist Xiaoxing Xi is still haunted by the memory of an early morning in 2015, when a group of FBI officers surrounded his home in Pennsylvania.

The agents pointed guns at his wife and two daughters and then handcuffed him.

The former chair of Temple University’s physics department was charged with leaking sensitive technology to the Chinese government.

Prosecutors accused Professor Xi of secretly sharing the design of a pocket heater for a supercomputer with scientists in China.

Overnight, Professor Xi’s face was splashed across US media and he was branded a “Chinese spy”.

He faced up to 80 years in prison if found guilty.

But just four months later, Professor Xi’s case came to a dramatic turning point.

Before the trial had even kicked off, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped all charges against Professor Xi, with a document filed in court explaining that “additional information came to the attention of the government”.

According to Professor Xi’s lawyer Peter Zeidenberg, the scientist had never shared secret technology with Chinese colleagues.

Same race teachers do not necessarily raise academic achievement

Jeffrey Penney:

Numerous studies have found that students who are of the same race as their teacher experience increased academic achievement. In this paper, I attempt to explain when these benefits occur and which students are most likely to achieve the largest gains. Using exogenous variation in student–teacher matches and classroom composition from Tennessee’s Project STAR experiment, I find that below average achieving students benefit most from having a teacher of the same race, but the benefits from matching can be substantially reduced in smaller classes. Moreover, the effect is decreased in racially homogeneous classes where the teacher is the majority race.

The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good

Vaccination policies have shifted dramatically during COVID-19 with the rapid emergence of population-wide vaccine mandates, domestic vaccine passports and differential restrictions based on vaccination status. While these policies have prompted ethical, scientific, practical, legal and political debate, there has been limited evaluation of their potential unintended consequences. Here, we outline a comprehensive set of hypotheses for why these policies may ultimately be counterproductive and harmful. Our framework considers four domains: (1) behavioural psychology, (2) politics and law, (3) socioeconomics, and (4) the integrity of science and public health. While current vaccines appear to have had a significant impact on decreasing COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality burdens, we argue that current mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and are likely to cause more societal harm than good. Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and well-being. Current policies may lead to a widening of health and economic inequalities, detrimental long-term impacts on trust in government and scientific institutions, and reduce the uptake of future public health measures, including COVID-19 vaccines as well as routine immunisations. Mandating vaccination is one of the most powerful interventions in public health and should be used sparingly and carefully to uphold ethical norms and trust in institutions. We argue that current COVID-19 vaccine policies should be re-evaluated in light of the negative consequences that we outline. Leveraging empowering strategies based on trust and public consultation, and improving healthcare services and infrastructure, represent a more sustainable approach to optimising COVID-19 vaccination programmes and, more broadly, the health and well-being of the public.

Notes on the College Board and Curricular Choices

Florida rejected the last version of the curriculum, which featured topics on “Black Queer Studies,” “‘Postracial’ Racism,” and “the case for reparations.” That framework suggested teens read a text from an academic exponent of critical race theory. “We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think,” Mr. DeSantis said, “but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.”

Even as it deletes this academic theorizing, the College Board denies it’s reacting to Florida’s criticism. The other explanation is that it arrived at a similar conclusion on its own. Mr. DeSantis’s critics have accused him of trying to erase black history, though he was doing nothing of the sort. If the revised AP framework actually was drawn up in December, then the curriculum committee had already decided that none of this nonsense was needed for teaching black history to high-schoolers.

The College Board’s CEO is calling the revised course “an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African-American history.” One thing driving the changes, he said, was that students in the pilot class were engaged by primary sources, but they found the academic theories “quite dense.”

Notes on a new UNC chapel hill school

Ryan Quinn:

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we clearly have a world-class faculty that exists and teaches students and creates leaders of the future,” Boliek said. “We, however, have no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught.”

That interview came two days after his board passed a resolution asking Chapel Hill’s administration to “accelerate its development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership,” with “a goal of a minimum of 20 dedicated faculty members and degree opportunities for undergraduate students.” The evening that passed, the Wall Street Journal editorial board was already praising the university for planning “to build a syllabus free from ideological enforcers.”

“Students will be able to choose the new classes to fulfill university core requirements,” the Wall Street Journal board wrote. “Those who aren’t interested can stay in the existing courses.”

The editorial’s headline and a Fox News chyron during Boliek’s interview were the same: “UNC Takes on the University Echo Chamber.”

Madison is “Moving On From Jenkins”

Dave cieslewicz:

Anybody who serves as Madison Schools Superintendent deserves our thanks. I’ve always thought that it’s the toughest job in Madison, even tougher than being mayor.

Yesterday Carlton Jenkins announced his retirement effective at the end of July, after only three years on the job. Let’s thank him for his service and wish him well on his retirement, but let’s also be clear on what we need in the next superintendent.

I hope the school board looks for five qualities.

First, someone who will care about all the kids and parents in the schools. Jenkins and his predecessor, Jennifer Cheatham, never expressed any interest or concern for the majority of average kids who just want to learn or for the taxpayers who want value for their investment. The district is shedding enrollment in a growing community and we need a superintendent who sees that as the first problem to tackle.

Second, someone who will make school safety and good order a priority. The last two superintendents have been obsessed, not with the racial achievement gap which is real, but with graduate-level race theory. I’ll stop short of calling it Critical Race Theory, but it’s in that ballpark. Jenkins did nothing to improve on the awful Behavioral Education Plan dreamed up by Cheatham. As a result our schools have too much disorder when they don’t have actual violence and teachers are demoralized because they feel helpless to do anything about it.

Third, someone who will be the Luke Fickell of school superintendents. The new Badger football coach is a dynamic guy who is attracting talented players and coaches. Madison is in competition for great teachers. This needs to become a place where those teachers want to be and nobody has more to say about that than the superintendent.

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Evan Gorelick & Janalie Cobb

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The final product is much better than what had been originally proposed. Grudgingly, I thank Ron DeSantis.

Dave Cieslewicz

But having now cleared my throat, I’m glad that DeSantis took on the College Board over its proposed African American Studies AP course. The course materials, which were being piloted in 60 high schools around the country, were extensive, consisting of four units. Only the last unit, which tackled contemporary issues, came in for criticism from DeSantis and others. (You can form your own opinion by reading the proposed study guidance here.)

That last unit deserved a closer look because it did, in fact, present just one side of current debates. For example, it included arguments in favor of reparations for slavery, but no counter arguments. It included a host of hard-left writers, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates, but no moderate or conservative Black thinkers, like John McWhorter, Shelby Steele or Robert Woodson.

DeSantis got his state’s education department to reject the proposed curriculum because of what was in that one unit. They had no objections to the rest. In response to DeSantis and other feedback, those most controversial topics were stripped out, but what remains is still pretty good.

Universities that promote ideological conformity do students a disservice

The Economist:

hen seeking a job to teach in the University of California system, academic excellence is not enough. Applicants must also submit a diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) statement, explaining how they will advance those goals. That sounds fair enough, except that a promise to treat everyone equally would constitute a fail. Meanwhile in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature are trying to ban the teaching of critical-race theory, an approach to studying racism with which they disagree. While this has been going on, a row has broken out (also in Florida) over a new pre-college course in African-American studies. These three developments have one thing in common: they are attempts to win arguments by controlling the institutions where those arguments take place.

Threats to academic freedom in America can come from many directions. Students sometimes object to being exposed to ideas they deem troubling. Some even try to get faculty members fired for allowing such ideas to be voiced. Donors occasionally threaten to withdraw funding, which has a chilling effect on what can be taught. Speakers can be banned. Academics may self-censor, or succumb to groupthink. Occasionally American society demands restrictions on academic freedom, as when professors in the 1950s were asked to take loyalty tests to prove they were not communist sympathisers.

Tech change, learning and adult employment

AI means a brilliant doctor on your phone. Who can diagnose you instantly, for free, privately, using only your locally stored medical records.

Do you think the doctors will be happy about that? Or the lawyers? The artists? The others that AI disrupts?

They’ll fight it. Hard.

— Balaji (@balajis) February 10, 2023

Wisconsin School of Education literacy coursework “landscape analysis”

TPI-US:

In 2022, TPI-US was awarded a contract to conduct statewide literacy coursework, “landscape analysis,” through which TPI-US will invite all 13 University of Wisconsin educator preparation programs to participate in a study of evidence-based early reading instructional practices. Participation by EPPs is an entirely voluntary opt-in, and reports will only be shared with the participating EPP.

For the Wisconsin landscape analysis, TPI-US has been asked to:

Secure voluntary opt-in participation by UW EPPs

Develop a literacy-focused rubric, making sure it’s aligned to relevant WI teacher prep standards, and train review teams

Conduct up to 13 reviews

Provide confidential reports to each participating UW institution

Deliver a roll-up report of overall findings and recommendations to DPI by November 30, 2023, that will not identify individual institutions.

Benefits to UW institutions of participating in the landscape analysis

A confidential, no-cost assessment of reading coursework and training strengths and any potential areas for improvement weaknesses from a respected national organization that is independent and employers reviewers that are literacy and teacher preparation experts.

DPI grants of up to $100k to each participating institution

$50k to the institution at the completion of its landscape analysis

$50k on the adoption of a program improvement plan responsive to findings and recommendations

The Summary Report of findings provided to DPI will be anonymous and identify trends, but not institutions.

Much more in the 3 page pdf document.

Civics: Politics, Elections and Censorship

Roth says that it would not surprise him if “visibility filters” were placed on the accounts of elected officials without their knowledge.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) February 8, 2023

In favor of Democratic Governance at Yale

A Yale College Council referendum, which opened Jan. 30, saw students vote overwhelmingly in favor of more democratic trustee elections.

Over 2,000 students — almost 90 percent of referendum participants — voted in the affirmative to the referendum’s two yes-or-no questions: “Should the board of trustees for Yale Corporation consist of democratically elected trustees?” and “Should students, professors, and staff be eligible to vote for candidates for the board of trustees for Yale Corporation?” Approximately 30 percent of Yale’s undergraduate population voted in the online referendum.

The Yale College Council sent a letter to the Board of Trustees on Feb. 6 with the results of the referendum and several policy recommendations aimed at “achieving democratization.” These recommendations do not directly address the trustee election process. Rather, they are intended to “open the door” to the possibility of achieving democratic trustee elections in the future, according to the letter.

“The connection between Board members and members of the Yale community has dissolved,” the YCC letter reads. “Democratization is something that may take a long time — longer than our time spent here as undergraduates. As members of the Yale College Council, we believe we must restore the link between the Board and the students, faculty and staff at Yale.”

The Yale Corporation, also known as the Board of Trustees, consists of the University President, 10 “successor trustees” appointed by the current Board and six “alumni trustees” elected by University alumni from the broader community. The governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut retain positions on the Board.

Mandatory statements are quickly taking hold of academia

The Economist:

The University of California, Berkeley is currently advertising for a “director of cell culture, fly food, media prep and oncall glass washing facilities”. Applicants need an advanced degree and a decade of research experience, and must submit a CV, a cover letter and a research statement—as well as a statement on their contributions to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Seemingly everyone (this director, the next head of preservation for the library, anyone who dreams of a tenured professorship) must file a statement outlining their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to it and their plans “for advancing equity and inclusion” if hired.

Not long ago, such statements were exotic and of marginal importance. Now they are de rigueur across most of the University of California system for hiring and tenure decisions. Studies claim that as many as one in five faculty jobs across America require them. And government agencies that fund scientific research are starting to make grants to labs conditional upon their diversity metrics and plans.

Ghostwriting Children’s texts…

Julie Jargon:

Seeing a child endure drama over group chats is enough to send parents lunging for their kid’s phone. After all, we have the skills to resolve disputes diplomatically, the words to make it all better. If only we could just…

Nope, don’t even think about it.

Writing texts as your child is a bad idea, and what’s more, texting in momspeak isn’t going to fool kids more accustomed to acronyms and emojis. It also isn’t going to teach kids how to resolve differences themselves, in their own words, as awkward as they might be.

When 13-year-old Hannah Yeatman wasn’t sure how to respond to some friend drama in a group chat, her mother, Lilly Yeatman, offered suggestions. Her wording didn’t fly with Hannah.

“If my mom had sent the message, she would have put in a bunch of punctuation,” says Hannah, a seventh-grader in Los Angeles. “We don’t really do that.”

Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: A Retrospective Overview

Wayne Carlson:

This book was developed in an attempt to maintain in one location the information and references that point to the many important historical developments of the short life of the computer graphics world as we know it.

Job Candidates Punished for “Microaggressions,” Rewarded for “Land Acknowledgement”

John Sailor:

Texas Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences passed a resolution titled “Prioritizing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University.” The motion mandated that faculty search committees require diversity statements and heavily value them in the hiring process. It also called for every faculty search committee to provide “a report on the evaluation of the required diversity statements.” Through a Freedom of Information Act Request, I have acquired these DEI evaluation reports from eight separate faculty searches.

In my latest article for the Wall Street Journal, “How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science,” I unpack these documents and their implications. Simply put, they perfectly illustrate the case against diversity statements. These documents show how the biology department penalizes some job candidates for not adopting the language of identity politics. They also reveal horribly misplaced priorities.

The evaluations are embedded below. Readers are encouraged to peruse the documents for themselves, but a few of the DEI “strengths” and “weaknesses” that the search committees named are worth highlighting here.

Candidates’ weaknesses included:

“Mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally. This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”
“Poor understanding of the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct, which suggested rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.”
“Wasn’t a lot of discussion of the nuances between D, E, and I and how they (inter)related.”
“Didn’t distinguish well between international and domestic students and their DEI needs.”
“Conflation of international with diversity without explaining any subtlety.”
“Diversity was only defined as country of origin and notably never mentioned women.”
“Not during DEI meeting but observed multiple examples of microaggressions towards women faculty, including assuming one junior faculty was a graduate student and minimizing the difficulties of women in the US by comparing to worse situations elsewhere.”

Their strengths, meanwhile, include:

More, here.

The founder of Teenage Engineering opens up to his creative space

Ilenia Martini

In the centre of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town, surprisingly close to the Royal Palace, between charming narrow cobbled streets, stands a beautiful 18th-century building echoing the vision of a classic, elegant Scandinavian architecture. Stepping in Jesper Kouthoofd’s glorious four-metre ceiling height, light-filled apartment, housing large-scale original affresco paintings covering wall after wall, I see a luscious universe with an eclectic colour palette filled with artworks, books, iconic references to the masters of industrial design and, gently taking over like a statement centrepiece, instruments and audio equipment growing into the space in the form of a home studio. Between the apartment’s original features, blending in unpretentiously, some awe-inspiring design objects from Joe Colombo, Virgil Abloh and Arne Jacobsen. Overall, this vast space resembles a symphony produced by an orchestra rather than a flat note. Observing the contrast of bold colours, I think, ”how fitting geometry and organic shapes blend into a recurring home theme.”

Today, living there with his wife and two children, Jesper Kouthoofd, who is not only the co-founder and CEO of Teenage Engineering, the leading Swedish consumer electronics brand, internationally renowned for beautifully designed audio products, but also an exceptionally creative individual brilliant at recognizing the vibrancy of the ebbs and flow of life, turning them into unexpected connections between ordinary things and creative ideas. I had met Jesper a few years back in 2017 at a presentation in Älmhult for IKEA introducing their upcoming collaboration and already back then, the fascination began with this creative entrepreneur who is able to design electronic instruments in such an effortless way that feels everything but intimidating. You know you’re onto something interesting when you are knee-deep in the research process and there’s minimal information about the founders, yet there are millions of likes and a growing number of international artists raving about Teenage Engineering’s first product — the op-1. Fans include Bon Iver, Swedish House Mafia, Thom Yorke, St. Vincent, Bonobo, Reggie Watts — believe me, the list goes on. Although Jesper has had plenty of experience being the spokesperson for the brand, you can understand that I felt intimidated yet extremely curious about his personality and professional background — thankfully we share a love for Italian design which broke the ice as we sat down in his kitchen and started talking. I immediately felt as if for Jesper it’s less about doing more than about doing things more creatively.

Socrates and term papers

Jeremy Tate:

The essay hasn’t been banished from classically minded institutions. Rather, the more personalized, discussion-centric model of instruction by its nature renders essays a secondary tool. Students that skip their homework won’t be able to hide for long when asked to offer an opinion on last night’s reading.

For centuries, the classical curriculum was the norm, rather than the exception. In the modern era, however, the march toward factory-style education replaced the old ways with more specialized studies delivered in lecture form. Perhaps it’s time to rethink this change. The classical method survived as long as it did because it fostered critical-thinking skills that can then be applied to any category of specialized study.

Albany’s war on charter schools is a war on kids

Glenn Reynolds:

Can graft and racial politics save public schools? Just maybe. Let me explain.

Public schools face an exodus of students. Even before COVID, parents were pulling their kids out of failing (and often unsafe) public schools in favor of private schools that cost more money but offered better and safer educations. Other parents were pulling their kids out for homeschooling, which is more work for parents but also can offer better — and certainly safer — education.

This trend put public schools at risk. The parents pulling their kids out were, on average, the parents most interested in their kids’ educations, the parents who’d been most likely to support school funding, to volunteer, to donate and to be voices for public education. With them, the schools not only lost student bodies — a blow in itself since funding depends in part on enrollment — but also vital political and financial support.

Those losses, naturally enough, encourage other parents to pull their kids. As schools lost the kids with the most involved parents — kids who tend to be the better students — even “good” schools faced a reputation hit. The result was a self-reinforcing spiral that in a book a few years back I called a “K-12 implosion.”

As I noted at the time, public schools’ potential salvation lay in charter schools. They’re publicly funded and part of the public-school system, but they have many of private schools’ virtues. To the extent that public schools could attract students to charters over private schools or homeschooling, they were keeping those students in the system and thus preserving funding and parental support.

2022 Taxpayer Funded Madison School District Reading Program Spending

I requested copies of the contracts related to Madison’s latest reading program on May 19, 2022. Curiously, I just received a response to this simple request yesterday – after numerous email and phone followup attempts.

The April, 2022 Madison School Board presentation on the latest reading program – an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results.

The school district’s response follows. Note that the numbers are far from the totals reflected in the Board presentation. I’ve sent a followup requesting the missing information.

PDF document

PDF Document

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Commentary on recent literacy reporting

Shanahan on literacy:

I admire Emily Hanford and her work. I’ve been interviewed several times by her over the years. She always has treated me respectfully. She asks probing questions and relies on relevant research for the most part. In my experience, her quotes are accurate and fitting.

That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with all her views or even how she frames some of her arguments. Nevertheless, in my opinion, she usually gets things right, and I’m sympathetic with most of her conclusions since I believe they’re more in tune with what research reveals about reading instruction than the positions of her supposedly expert critics.

The major thrust of her work (not just the documentaries you note, but also earlier productions) has been that readers must translate print (orthography) into pronunciation (phonology) and that explicit teaching of phonics helps kids learn to do this. She also emphasizes that many schools are not providing such instruction and that many teachers aren’t prepared to teach it. Finally, she’s revealed that the currently most popular commercial reading programs ignore or minimize phonics instruction, and teach approaches to word reading that science has rejected (like 3-cueing, in which students are taught to read words by looking at the pictures or guessing from context).

Those positions are sound; well supported by lots of high-quality research. My disagreements with Ms. Hanford’s work are more around the edges. I think she puts too much emphasis on the motivations of those who’ve advanced theories that don’t stand the test of evidence. Also, her reports tend to imply greater consequences of the problems identified than is prudent (something I might write about soon).

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”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“A better approach, I believe, is for journalists to seek a hypothesis and assemble evidence to test it”

Julia Angwin:

At The Markup we pioneered an array of scientifically inspired methods that used automation and computational power to supercharge our journalism. Reflecting on our work, I came up with 10 of the most important lessons I’ve learned using this approach.

1) Important ≠ secret

In a resource-constrained world, choosing a topic to investigate is the most important decision a newsroom makes.

At The Markup, we developed an investigative checklist that reporters filled out before embarking on a project. Top of the checklist was not novelty, but scale—how many people were affected by the problem we were investigating. In other words, we chose to tackle things that were important but not secret.

For instance, anyone using Google has probably noticed that Google takes up a lot of the search result page for its own properties. Nevertheless, we decided to invest nearly a year into quantifying how much Google was boosting its own products over direct links to source material because the quality of Google search results affects nearly everyone in the world.

This type of work has an impact. The European Union has now passed a law banning tech platforms from this type of self-preferencing, and there is legislation pending in Congress to do the same.

Civics: FTX, political donations and influence

The decision of @RitchieTorres to become some sort of social media star on behalf of DNC talking points – and honestly, that’s how members of Congress have the most influence these days – has obscured how closely involved he was with Sam Bankman-Fried and his guru @SeanMcElwee https://t.co/MQO8j3ytU2

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 6, 2023

Disney has cut an episode of The Simpsons cartoon that refers to “forced labour camps” in China from its streaming platform in Hong Kong.

Chan Ho-him:

The episode, which first aired in October last year during the show’s latest season, was unavailable on the Disney Plus streaming platform in Hong Kong, the Financial Times has learned.

This appears to be the second time an episode from the show, which is produced by the Disney-owned 20th Television Animation, has been omitted from the streaming platform.

Is a ‘DARPA for education’ finally happening?

Javeria Salman:

Hidden in more than 4,000 pages of the omnibus appropriations bill that President Biden signed in December is funding for a key education initiative that advocates have been pushing for decades.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Department of Education’s statistics, research and evaluation arm, received $40 million in new money for research and development, a portion of which must be used to “support a new funding opportunity for quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions.”

While the language may be vague, many advocates see it as a major step toward developing, for education, the federally-funded research and development capabilities that have long existed in other fields.

Going back several administrations, there’s been interest in creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-Ed), akin to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that supports innovations for the military. But the initiative kept getting lost in politics, said Mark Schneider, director of IES.

That changed when the pandemic put schools to the test — one that many failed — and demonstrated how essential education R&D funding is, he said. Covid “shined an incredibly bright light on the systemic failures that education has had,” said Schneider. “The normal processes of education research and teaching and learning were not up to the crisis.”

Charter Schools, Teacher Unions and Politics: New York Edition