🧵: Charcot’s hysteria and the epidemic of ROGD
In the late 1800s, a brilliant neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, triggered an epidemic of hysteria in women of the French upper-middle class. It is one of the best examples of the medical world’s ability to shape mental illness./1
— Mia💚🤍💜 (@_CryMiaRiver) April 8, 2022
“CRT is not taught in schools.” West High School in Madison is teaching the basics of CRT once a month to their entire student body. Called “Regent Pride,” the slides explore the basic tenets of CRT. Multiple concerned parents have contacted me. Thread below: pic.twitter.com/qrsRTe65oU
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) April 8, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
When I read about the downfall of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate” relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi.
WATCH The Atlantic’s @anneapplebaum refuse to answer @RealDSchmidt‘s
University of Chicago event:
question about Hunter Biden’s laptop during @UChicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference!
Robby Soave:
On March 16, Washington, D.C., became one of the very last major metropolitan areas in the country to finally end mask mandates for students. According to Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, kids who attend D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) no longer have to wear masks.
That’s not always what happens in practice, of course. Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris visitedThomas Elementary School, a public school, and posed for photos with kids. Every single child who participated in the photo op wore a mask, but Harris did not.
Thomas Elementary did not respond to a request for comment about its masking policies, so it’s not clear if the school actually requires masks. If so, the school would hardly be alone in keeping a mask mandate in place. In fact, many of the city’s public charter schools—which are overseen by a school board that is separate from DCPS—have kept mask mandates in place. Indeed, several have no plans to ever end the mandate, a source of tremendous frustration for some parents.
“Our principal told us that right now masks are still required indoors for all students,” says Lindsay Elman, a mother of a child at Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School.
Mundo Verde is one of five D.C.-area foreign language immersion charter schools that run from kindergarten through fifth grade. They are feeder schools for District of Columbia International School (DCI), which teaches sixth through 12th grade. And they are, by and large, keeping mask mandates in place.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. As many as 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.
“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”
Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn’t genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection. At baseline, 59% of the treatment-naive kids experienced moderate to severe depression. Twelve months later, 56% of the kids on GAM experienced moderate to severe depression. At baseline, 45% of the treatment-naive kids experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Twelve months later, 37% of the kids on GAM did. These are not meaningful differences: The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems. (Though as I’ll explain, because the researchers provide so little detailed data, it’s hard to know exactly how dire the kids’ mental health situations were.)
If there were improvement, the researchers would have touted it in a clear, specific way by explaining exactly how much the kids on GAM improved. After all, this is exactly what they were looking into — they list their study’s “Question” as “Is gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youths associated with changes in depression, anxiety, and suicidality?” But they don’t claim this anywhere — not specifically. They reference “improvements” twice (see above) but offer no statistical demonstration anywhere in the paper or the supplemental material. I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.
My statement: pic.twitter.com/9y8bRxLkfe
— Daniela Jampel (@daniela127) April 7, 2022
For the big government school union bosses, it has never been about the kids.
It’s always been about wielding political power to benefit the adults. https://t.co/atZZPKpRzx
— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) April 7, 2022
As the saying goes, you catch flack when you’re over target. Disney execs boast about secret queer agendas, teachers boast on social media how they will defy parents and, now, that bastion of inane Leftwing propaganda, Salon states parental rights are harming kids.
Across the country, students are struggling to regain a sense of normalcy as they cope with the loss and emotional hardship of the pandemic. This is especially true in Florida and Texas, where there are severe teacher shortages and underfunded public school systems, we parents are concerned for our children’s well-being and futures.
We? we? Who is this “we” that the co-authors, Jane Gray and Jaime Jara, portray themselves as representative of parents everywhere? Was there an election the rest of us missed?
According to their Salon bios, Gray describes first about herself as mother of three children who are cisgender and Jara as mother of a transgender daughter. Both are involved in academia.
Explains a lot now, doesn’t it?
These two moms, steeped in the jargon of Left Lysenkoism and racialist pedagogy, pen a short rant that takes gaslighting to new levels. Never mind that parents themselves had a front row seat via Zoom of their children’s classrooms during the Wuhan virus lockdowns and grew, rightfully, alarmed. No, none of those parents showing up at school boards demanding to know why their kids are being racially targeted or sexually harassed actually exist (pace AG Garland’s siccing the FBI on parents), or girls and their families trying to save girls’ sports, this is all a great big conspiracy of (cue the screaming horses) RETHUGLICAN POLITICIANS!
“We have the children”.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Among 15-year-old students, here’s how 77 countries compare in reading, math, and science. Higher scores are better.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The evidence now proves (as Dr. Fauci said in the early days of the pandemic) that cloth masks are ineffective, and we now also know surgical masks are minimally protective, while properly fitted N95 masks can protect the wearer against infection. Once we finally reopened schools, we discovered what many of us had been suggesting all along: that there were no meaningful outbreaks that resulted in death or serious illness, even among unvaccinated students and teachers. And we now know that the closures and heavy restrictions imposed on restaurants, businesses, recreational facilities, and the hospitality industry had nowhere near their full intended effects.
Moreover, today we have numerous vaccines available to anyone who wants one, as well as solid clinical evidence of their protective benefits against serious illness or death. We also have information about their lack of protection against infection, and a vast understanding of their risks, all of which empowers individuals to make their own choices. Moreover, we have numerous safe and effective FDA-authorized treatments, including two orally administered outpatient therapies, which can nearly erase the chances of serious illness or death when taken on time. And, thanks to the high infectivity of the Omicron variant, we have exceptionally high rates of natural immunity to the point that we have begun approaching herd immunity.
But the draconian measures we took in the name of “flattening the curve,” “stopping the spread,” and saving lives came with a great cost. We are now only beginning to realize the extent of the devastation caused by the strict COVID lockdowns, school closures, and mandates, nearly all of which failed to have a meaningful impact on the course of the pandemic. We placed millions of people on chronic unemployment and made them dependent on the government for housing, utilities, and food. We caused immeasurable learning loss and psychological harm in children. We caused obesity rates to skyrocket. We canceled countless celebrations and trips, kept millions from seeing their physicians, and induced a permanent sense of paranoia among so many. And we labeled those who dared question these policies as unpatriotic or “domestic terrorists.” In other words, we created enormous harm and division to achieve, at best, a small benefit.
But perhaps the greatest lesson we have learned from this period of our history is that government, and the public health establishment, are not always right, that regular citizens (particularly parents) should be trusted, and that the American people value individual freedom and autonomy above all else.
The New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles metropolitan areas are among the cities where young women are earning the most relative to young men. In both the New York and Washington metro areas, young women earn 102% of what young men earn when examining median annual earnings among full-time, year-round workers. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area, the median earnings for women and men in this age group were identical in 2019. (For data on earnings and the gender gap for 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, read this Google sheet.)
Overall, about 16% of all young women who are working full time, year-round live in the 22 metros where women are at or above wage parity with men.
My middle schooler goes to Chicago Public Schools. They use Google Classroom for assignments and other communications.
I bought him a Chromebook for schoolwork, but also for other private things. When we logged in, the system installed GoGuardian monitoring software on the Chromebook without notice or permission.
And now I can’t remove it. I wrote to GoGuardian support, and they replied that I had to contact the school or remove my son as a user. The instructions for removing him as a user do not work; on the contrary, I see the message “cps.edu manages this user and may remotely manage settings and monitor user activity” and he can’t be removed.
I did a full factory reset, signed in to his account again, and now the system is once again locked down.
So now I’m in the position where I have to ask permission from a local government entity to please let me install stuff and don’t monitor the computer I bought and paid for.
Does anyone know how to refer these people to law enforcement for prosecution?
In an emailed statement, the Republican Party of Wisconsin touted “flipping” some school boards to conservative majorities and highlighted Manitowoc as now having a “fully conservative board.”
“Parents are fed up with far-left school boards who have kept students out of the classroom, implemented divisive curriculum, and put teachers unions over kids,” Republican Party of Wisconsin Executive Director Mark Jefferson said in an email.
The strategy from the Democratic Party was more defensive. Rather than backing candidates looking to oust conservative incumbents, the party invested most heavily in supporting their favored incumbents and backing more left-leaning candidates in open races. They didn’t point to any “flips.”
Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, said the party was starting from a better position with the composition of school boards in Wisconsin, due to prior Democratic “wave” spring elections.
“Progressives were coming from a position of extraordinary strength in school board elections,” he said. “Red areas returning to their underlying political makeup represents a kind of progression to the mean rather than a shift.”
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
This year’s election showed lower interest than recent contested races, in both fundraising for School Board races and voters. The number of votes was less than even last year, which featured two seats up for election with both candidates unopposed. Just over 41,000 people voted in those races.
The 2020 election, which included the Democratic presidential primary and was held in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, featured three seats on the ballot. Two of them were contested, and about 80,000 people voted in those races.
The last time these same seats were all on the ballot, in spring 2019, more than 65,000 people voted in each of the races, all of which featured two candidates on the ballot.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” https://t.co/0ZTc8fznaV pic.twitter.com/pAnEGOlBIh
— Alice Su (@aliceysu) April 6, 2022
Stephen and Ayesha Curry are taking action to increase the literacy rate for children through their Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation.
ABC7 reports that the Currys have unveiled the first of 150 Little Town Libraries that will be spread out across Oakland, CA — with an aim to provide 30,000 books to the youth. The libraries are chosen by partners in the community such as Oakland Literacy Coalition, Oakland Public Library, and Black Cultural Zone. First up for the installments was Franklin Elementary.
The power couple’s foundation — launched in 2019 — is all about providing kids and families in Oakland, the Bay Area, and across the U.S. with the resources necessary to excel. Their latest initiative is working to combat the statistic of one in three children reading at grade level by the end of third grade in addition to the low levels of Black and Latinx elementary students reading at grade level. According to the outlet, “only 15.4% of Black and 12.5% of Latino/a elementary students are reading at grade level.”
Timur Kuran* and Cass R. Sunstein
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressedperception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. Thedrivingmechanisminvolvesacombinationofinformationaland reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public re- sponses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepre- neurs–activists who manipulate the content of public discourse-strive to trig- ger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risk associated with production, consumption, and the environ- ment, Professors Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cas- cadesandsuggestreformstoalleviatetheirpotentialhazards. Theirproposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better in- sulation against mass demandsfor regulatory change and an easily accessible scientzficdatabasetoreducepeopleSdependenceonpopular (mis)perceptions.
“If you’ve had omicron disease in the last two or three months, that really did boost your immune system quite well,” Walensky said, adding that these individuals could wait another two to four months before their second booster.
Here’s the “free speech” survey that is making some heads explode in the University of Wisconsin System: https://t.co/iGLegoHWw9
— Daniel Bice (@DanielBice) April 6, 2022
More, here:
Free speech has become a lighting rod topic on campuses in recent years, with conservatives pushing colleges to crack down on students who disrupt conservative speakers and presentations.
Republicans have also cited concerns about students being “indoctrinated” by liberal professors or feeling too uncomfortable to share their conservative views. GOP lawmakers in Florida passed a law mandating students and staff on public university campuses take a survey about viewpoint discrimination.
That led the state’s faculty union this week to urge campuses to ignore the state-mandated survey. The group argues the questions are leading in nature, asking to what extent respondents agree or disagree with statements such as “I have felt intimidated to share my ideas or political opinions because they were different from those of my colleagues” and “Students at my institution are not shielded from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even deeply offensive.”
UW-Madison professor Michael Bernard-Donals said the System’s survey questions “seem more benign” than Florida’s but the reasons for administering the survey seem to be in response to pressure from the Republican-controlled Legislature.
“It all seems very McCarthy-like,” he said.
Real wages are declining and real disposable income has declined for 7 months in a row. The idea among some folks on here that voters are silly to be concerned about inflation
and that Actually The Economy Is Great But The Media Won’t Tell You is ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/aMfU29GWVc— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 5, 2022
David Blaska has launched a write-in campaign for this seat, supported by former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
I have been writing about Richard Feynman for quite some time now and if you are reading this you probably already know this thing. One of the reasons why many of my articles are surrounded around the life and work of Richard Feynman is because he had a different, and quite interesting perspective towards life, love, science, teaching, and learning. The man was one hell of a character himself who feared no one.
When it comes to teaching and learning, Feynman was an exemplary personality. He was an impeccable student who taught himself advanced calculus and mastered it by the age of 15. He developed his own mathematical notations and symbols before he entered college. According to physicist Steve Hsu, Feynman was one of the highest scorers from the USA in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, which is one of the toughest math competitions in the world, and the Princeton entrance exams where he scored highest in physics and mathematics. The guy was hell of a genius!
As brilliant as he was as a student, he was an amazing teacher too. His capabilities to simplify complicated phenomena and explain them to general public in a simple and understandable way are not unknown to anyone. His lectures in physics, his literary writings, and recordings are perfect examples of his wit and clarity that he portrayed in his explanations. I have written several stories about the physicist that you can read in my previous publications and my Twitter handle. In this article, however, I shall explain five brilliant study tips that we all can learn from the late physicist. All the below mentioned quotes/lessons are extracted from his books, and interviews. These lessons are not just limited for people in academics but anyone in general who believes that learning is an eternal process.
“You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.”
Schneider thinks that a lot of so-called rigorous high school classes are now terribly watered down. He pointed to an old 2005 course content study, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. It looked at the actual content and curriculum underneath course titles. Analysts concluded only 18 percent of honors algebra I courses and 33 percent of honors geometry courses actually used a rigorous curriculum.
“What we found is that the titles and what was being advertised by the schools as an advanced course in these areas really did not pan out when we actually looked at what was being taught,” said NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr at a March 2022 presentation, where she referred to this study.
NCES is planning to update this course content study in 2024 to see if course content has deteriorated further.
Schneider argues that the nation is pretending to increase science and math (so-called STEM) skills by putting high schoolers in courses with fancy titles. “Simply telling students who have not truly mastered STEM skills that they are “A students” who have finished a rigorous math and science curriculum is not the way to produce that workforce,” Schneider concludes. “If education runs on lies, this is one of the more pernicious lies around.”
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Wisconsin public school teachers got a crash course in “A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements” during a professional development meeting in February.
The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) conducts monthly webinars to provide Wisconsin’s public school teachers with advanced training on critical race theory (CRT). CRT is a highly-controversial, divisive, race-based philosophy that liberals fight fanatically to advance while denying it even exists.
In February, DPI brought in Charlene Carruthers for its equity webinar series to talk about social transformation. Carruthers is a community organizer and PhD student at Northwestern University who specializes in “interrogating historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black governance, Black feminist and queer theory,” according to her website.
“We’re going up against 300 years plus, at least of it being a formal state, of white supremacy, of patriarchy and of capitalism,” she told the teachers.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Marguerite Roza and Katherine Silberstein:
The law gives districts wide latitude and few restrictions, and thus choices are all over the map. One district awards sizable staff bonuses, another remodels a building, and another hires an army of counselors, nurses, and social workers. Some are launching tutoring efforts, while others are investing in professional development or refreshing their curriculum and technology. Atlanta added 30 minutes to the school dayand Boston is running summer recovery courses for teens. Some are doing a bit of everything.
In many regions, the flurry of spending has triggered a corresponding flurry of hiring. Districts are competing for a limited labor pool, and using signing bonuses, retention pay, and other strategies to expand labor rolls to a new and higher level than ever before.
In contrast, some big, urban districts, including those in Minneapolis, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, are using funds to backfill budget gaps (some caused by pre-pandemic overspending or enrollment losses). Instead of launching new programs and hiring new staff, the funds are paying the salaries of staff who’ve been in these districts for years.
In the end, there simply is no “typical” spending profile.
Madison’s well funded k-12 school systems received another $70M in redistributed federal taxpayer funds recently.
One City Schools (expanding in Monona…)
Our formal enrollment for Elementary School period for the 2022-23 school year will begin on March 1, 2022 at 8 am. Applications will be accepted for all Elementary grades from 4K through 5th. One City Preparatory Academy enrollment period starts on April 4, 2022 for Sixth grade only for Middle School. Ninth and tenth grade only for High School.
Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:
Throughout the pandemic, the media have eagerly compared Covid statistics between different countries. But such comparisons are often deceptive.
Take, for example, the use of Covid case counts. These depend not only on the number of people infected but also on the amount of testing performed. While useful for evaluating whether cases are increasing or decreasing within a particular country, they are deceptive when comparing countries. If we truly wanted to know, it would be easy, through random seroprevalence surveys that measure the proportion of people with antibodies. But not all governments have been eager to conduct these surveys, while some scientists have even got into trouble for doing them.
MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.
Critics of standardized tests have had plenty of reasons to celebrate lately. More than three-quarters of colleges are not requiring the SAT or the ACT for admission this fall, an all-time high, and more than 400 Ph.D. programs have dropped the GRE, up from a mere handful a few years ago. MIT’s announcement on Monday that it is reinstating a testing requirement for fall 2023 admissions was a major departure from these recent trends. Just as striking, amid the widespread perception of standardized testing as an engine of inequality, was MIT’s rationale: “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider,” MIT’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, wrote, “tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.” Dropping the SAT, it turns out, actually hurts low-income students, rather than helping them.
MIT’s conclusion is counterintuitive because students from richer families, on average, score higher on the SAT and other standardized tests than students from poorer ones. The correlation between family background and SAT performance is from about .25 to .40—that is, meaningful but far from perfect. Still, it’s strong enough that some researchers dismiss standardized tests as nothing more than a proxy for asking, “Are you rich?” (The ACT measures roughly the same skills as the more widely used SAT, and the arguments for and against both tests are similar.)
But the income-related disparities we see in SAT scores are not evidence of an unfair test. They are evidence of an unfair society. The test measures differences in academic preparedness, including the ability to write a clear sentence, to understand a complex passage, and to solve a mathematical problem. The SAT doesn’t create inequalities in these academic skills. It revealsthem. Throwing the measurement away doesn’t remedy underlying injustices in children’s academic opportunities, any more than throwing a thermometer away changes the weather.
Think about this. REALLY think about it https://t.co/UPCD3raCpl
— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) April 3, 2022
The district leaders are fiscal stewards who must follow the law and ensure the district remains fiscally solvent, but also that it retains the financial ability to provide programs to lift up our neediest students and afford them maximum opportunity.
In fact, as part of the regular reviews my staff performed of the district’s financial reports over the last few months, we have repeatedly warned that the current improvement in the district’s fiscal position is likely to be temporary. Even with no increases in employee compensation, significant cost growth and revenue losses resulting from enrollment declines will eventually threaten the district’s fiscal solvency.
Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months of 2020 and first months of 2021, compared with the same period in previous years. Hungary, Italy, Spain and Portugal had some of the largest drops: reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4 and 6.6 percent, respectively. The U.S. saw a decline of 3.8 percent, but this was not statistically significant—perhaps because the pandemic’s effects were more spread out in the country and because the study only had U.S. data through December 2020, Aassve says. The findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
Birth rates fluctuate seasonally within a year, and many of the countries in the study had experienced falling rates for years before the pandemic. But the declines that began nine months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, were even more stark. “We are very confident that the effect for those countries is real,” Aassve says. “Even though they might have had a bit of a mild downward trend [before], we’re pretty sure about the fact that there was an impact of the pandemic.”
Hmm. Young adults assessing the sky-high costs of college, the apparently limited payoffs, the attraction of starting work and making money and building your career instead of taking a bunch of irrelevant classes for four years…
Yale Law School has long been a disgrace. I was surprised, when I searched for YLS on our site, at how often we have commented on farcical events there. Way back in 2003, we wrote about Yale Law School’s disgusting treatment of military recruiters. That was followed by Yale’s lawsuit trying to have the Solomon Amendment declared unconstitutional. The Solomon Amendment provides that universities that receive federal funding must treat military recruiters in non-discriminatory fashion. The horror! Yale and its fellow left-wing institutions lost 8-0 in the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan was among those leading the anti-military charge.
In 2014, we commented on a pitifully weak op-ed co-authored by the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Provost of Yale Law School complaining about the fact that police officers were not charged with homicide in the Michael Brown (a clear case of self-defense) and Eric Garner cases.
Then there was the hysterical anti-Brett Kavanaugh letter signed by YLS students, alumni and professors. (“Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. … He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are. . . people will die if he is confirmed.”)
So said a former Madison School District Administrator some years ago.
Rod Dreher on recent taxpayer supported federal government actions:
I remind you that this very US government policy document actually states that there are “no scientifically sound” reasons to doubt whether hormones and surgery for minors is harmful, and to say, therefore, that children may be removed from their families so that their bodies can be altered by the state.
This is the Democratic Party at work. This is what it means to have a Democratic government. Does having a Republican government mean reversing all of this? One hopes so.
Folks, they really are coming for our children. It’s right there on the government website. They are propagandizing doctors to act as agents of the state in the seizure of kids. Read the document yourself!
Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell
The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending “2-3X more time” on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook’s popularity among young people had plummeted.
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Targeted Victory declined to respond to questions about the campaign, saying only that it has represented Meta for several years and is “proud of the work we have done.”
In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a “back channel” for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm “would definitely want it to be hands off.”
In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app’s purported harms. “Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?” a Targeted Victory staffer asked.
“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’ ” the staffer wrote.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals handed down a long-awaited decision Thursday in the case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College. The court dismissed all of Oberlin’s appellate claims and confirmed the jury’s finding that the college, a small private liberal arts institution in rural Ohio, was liable for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with a business relationship. It then upheld the trial jury’s award to Gibson’s Bakery of $11.1 million in compensatory damages, $33.2 million in punitive damages and $6.3 million in attorneys’ fees.
When the original verdict was issued, Oberlin and much of the academic community, as evidenced by friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case, generally hyperventilated, as though academic freedom were at stake. Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, told a CBS reporter at the time that the jury had inappropriately held the college responsible for the exercise by its students of their First Amendment right to protest. She claimed that the proper question should have been “whether a college should be held liable for the speech of its students.” When confronted by the reporter with Gibson’s lawyer’s point that the First Amendment wasn’t at issue in the trial, she blithely replied that those claims were “misstating what the jury found.” In its ruling, the Court of Appeals agreed with Gibson.
In an important new paper, Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson show that half of the effect size in observational studies, even in conservative estimates, is composed of confounding. In laypeople’s terms, this means that many academic studies considerably overestimate the effect of the variables which they study. Such results erode confidence in academic work, yet there have been a series of these findings. In a 2018 paper, 29 expert teams used a single dataset to analyze whether football referees were more likely to red card dark-skin-toned players, the teams coming to radically different results, none of which could be proved incorrect. Such findings follow the replication crisis. In 2015, researchers replicated 100 leading studies in the field of psychology, finding that only 36% of the replications yielded significant findings. Moreover, the mean effect size in the replications was about half the effect reported in the original studies. In other fields, similar crises followed.
Within academia, such developments are well known. Yet public awareness is limited and few reflect on practical consequences for politics. Though such challenges do not affect academic confidence in the reality of (say) climate change and Coronavirus, there are significant consequences for policies which address such issues; if scholars worry about findings, how can we be confident that policy interventions are effective? Admittedly, political implications are indirect. Decades ago, postmodern philosophers deconstructed social reality, engendering loss of confidence in liberal democracy among certain intellectuals. Yet this had questionable impact on practical politics. At this time, politicians such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush promoted liberal democracy with an evangelical zeal, reflecting a popular culture in which confidence in democracy remained overwhelming. But recent trends are distinct. Quantitative social scientists now worry about the validity of methods, previous crises of confidence being confined to the humanities.
Imagine a scenario in which your child comes home from school and tells you that they now identify as “pansexual.” Or, while telling you about the school day, your child mentions that he or she was told he or she was gay based on a test a teacher gave them. Or you discover he or she was recruited by a teacher to lead a gay and transgender student club but was instructed not to tell any parents because “what happens in the student club, stays in the club.” These are the alarming contents of a packet distributed by the California Teachers Association regarding the formation of gay and transgender clubs in schools.
There’s nothing ‘pro-trans’ about deleting women
A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board rejected (2011) Kaleem’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. Consider the implications for the many children…
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Law enforcement around the world routinely asks social media platforms for information about users as part of criminal investigations. In the U.S., such requests usually include a signed order from a judge. The emergency requests are intended to be used in cases of imminent danger and don’t require a judge to sign off on it.
Hackers affiliated with a cybercrime group known as “Recursion Team” are believed to be behind some of the forged legal requests, which were sent to companies throughout 2021, according to the three people who are involved in the investigation.
Recursion Team is no longer active, but many of its members continue to carry out hacks under different names, including as part of Lapsus$, the people said.
The information obtained by the hackers using the forged legal requests has been used to enable harassment campaigns, according to one of the people familiar with the inquiry. The three people said it may be primarily used to facilitate financial fraud schemes. By knowing the victim’s information, the hackers could use it to assist in attempting to bypass account security.
Last month, the Biden Administration announced new regulations on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). The CSP is designed to offer a funding source for charter schools to expand access for students to high-quality school options, as well as to help schools fund facilities. The regulations are ostensibly designed to create better oversight. But they are largely based on strawman arguments about charters and will have a chilling effect on one of the most important educational options for families across the U.S.
There are several troubling aspects to the new regulations. Among the most troubling is that charters would be evaluated for funding based on whether they’re located in areas that have excess students in traditional, local schools. This provision shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of charter schools. Charter schools are meant to be much more than an overflow valve for the excess capacity needs of a school district. They’re meant to offer competition to the existing schools by being freed from existing rules that hamper innovation. It is only by offering this competition that charters can work to improve the performance of the district, as traditional schools will be incentivized to improve.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
One panelist from suburban Milwaukee was critical of the amount of time schoolchildren spend on electronic devices, including computers, claiming that it connects students to pornographic images and affects their learning.
Johnson said: “This is their testimony, this is their viewpoint … that is something that should concern parents if that is happening.”
“I think there are good parts of technology and potentially bad parts of technology,” Johnson said. “I think we should make sure that the bad doesn’t come with the good. So I am concerned.”
Johnson said he was prompted to hold the meeting because he has been listening to parents in different formats — “in a completely nonpartisan way,” he said. “It’s interesting how many people that don’t necessarily agree with me on some issues come in here and want to talk about this.”
Asked about what he heard during the session, in which panelists spoke followed by audience members, Johnson said: “I think there’s some real concern about our public school system not listening to parents, not hearing their voices, not hearing their concerns, a lack of accountability. That should concern us all.”
On schools, Johnson said he was concerned “about the influence of national groups, teachers unions, that type of thing, trying to impose their ideology on our children.”
Every bad change in education over the last 50 years started with university professors,” says Pesta. “And don’t underestimate those teachers unions.”
But Pesta’s evidence of how Critical Race Theory is taught in Wisconsin public schools mostly came from out-of-context examples from other states. The tenured professor did include in his presentation a February tweet from state Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Appleton) stating that “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.”
Snodgrass later deleted and apologized for the tweet. Another example was from an email sent by the Ozaukee County Democrats: “Public schools have the responsibility of the parents when their children are in their care.”
A parent from Burlington cited comedian Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, which chronicles his early life growing up in South Africa during apartheid, as evidence that Critical Race Theory is pushed on her kid.
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson held a listening session on education in Madison. It got a little weird.https://t.co/YsZSqYOZad pic.twitter.com/nxjVox7Obz
— Isthmus (@isthmus) April 1, 2022
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship pic.twitter.com/UZ0OWJJOy5
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 1, 2022
Nice to see STEM folks making it go!
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
We’re into college acceptance season, when high-school seniors find out which institutions of higher learning have accepted them for enrollment, which have not, and which will ask them to ride that purgatory surfboard called the “wait list.”
It’s a stressful period for many. If you’re a well-organized high-school senior who’s already been accepted early—congratulations, I have no idea what that wonderful feeling is like, but you have my profound admiration and awe.
If you’re sitting there, sweating, panicking, wondering if any school is going to take you, wishing you’d spent a little more time hitting the books—I’ve been there.
If you’re waiting, a couple pieces of advice:
In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the “pros of telling”: “no more physical/emotional attacks,” “I get out of this dangerous house,” “the truth is finally out, I don’t have to lie or cover things up.” Under “cons of telling,” she wrote, “damaging mom’s life,” “could go into foster care,” “basically I would probably lose everything.” After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it.
Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the school’s wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the “queen of compartmentalization.” She got A’s, served in student government, played varsity soccer, managed the field-hockey team, and volunteered for the Special Olympics. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hair—“the picture of Americana,” as one friend described her. Mackenzie’s parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Chesterfield, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. But Mackenzie’s friends and teachers noticed that in her mother’s presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. Lisa Smith, the mother of one of Mackenzie’s best friends at Whitfield, said that her daughter once asked why Mackenzie was always injured: “My daughter kind of looked at me funny, and I looked back at her and said, ‘What are you trying to say?’ ”
When Fendell asked Mackenzie about her bruises, Mackenzie offered vague comments about being clumsy. Fendell told her that, if she couldn’t talk about why she was injured, she should write it down. “I don’t ever want to cause her any pain or anything, which is why I’ll probably end up burning this,” Mackenzie wrote in the journal. “I wish that I had the courage to tell someone. Or even to write everything down in here. Because if I’m being honest, there are things that I’m too ashamed to even speak of.”
It’s no secret that Denver’s latest school board is wreaking havoc on the suite of bold education reforms that the Mile High City was known for over the past two decades. Parker Baxter and Alan Gottlieb recount the sorrowful saga at some length in the latest issue of Education Next.
As they write:
Denver Public Schools’ plunge over three years from one of the nation’s most carefully planned and promising examples of public-education transformation into a district led by a school board in disarray has multiple causes, and there’s plenty of blame to spread around.
Ultimately, however, it is the result of a concerted effort over more than a decade by organized and committed activists, local and national, who have opposed changing the governance and operation of school districts in any significant way.
The reforms now consigned to (or fast heading toward) the scrap heap took multiple shapes, consistent with the basic principle that comprehensiveness is essential if real change is to occur in something as complex and deeply rooted as public education. They focused chiefly on teacher quality (including a much-discussed merit-linked compensation plan), school accountability, and several forms of choice. For a long time—including fourteen years under superintendents Michael Bennet (now U.S. Senator) and Tom Boasberg—they enjoyed steady hands on the tiller and bipartisan support on the board and in the community. That’s strategically important in blue-ing Denver (and Colorado), and is important everywhere if changes are to endure. (Massachusetts was another long-running example of such support that’s beginning to show signs of unraveling.)
School choice took two important forms in Denver. The first was originally imposed by Colorado’s vigorous and early (third in the country) approach to charter schools, which included backup state authorizing of quality charter applicants rejected by districts. Denver resisted chartering at first—and got overruled more than once—but its twenty-first-century charter strategy was positive until the recent turnabout. As a result, Denver has a fine crop of charter schools—nearly sixty of them, attended by more than a fifth of the city’s pupils—including such highly regarded examples as the eight-campus Denver School of Science and Technology. Charters long benefited from a cooperative relationship with the district, including a unified enrollment system and a shared approach to special education. Now, however, the climate is chilling. Chalkbeat reported a year ago that “The Denver school district once represented fertile ground for charter schools. But shifting politics and declining enrollment mean Colorado’s largest school district is becoming less friendly territory for the independent public schools.”
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
—H. L. Mencken
I have thus far attempted in this series of essays to examine 1) the intellectual origins and history of government schooling in America; 2) the nature and purposes of government schooling; and, 3) the moral case for adopting the principle of “Separation of School and State” and with it the need for abolishing America’s government school system.
You are all by now familiar with my judgment on America’s government school system. I consider it to be immoral and anathema to the principles and institutions of a free society. The evidence for my position is overwhelming and the logic is irrefutable.
Still, some of you might not yet be fully persuaded by facts and logic, or at least maybe you can’t give up your attachment (for any one of a number of reasons) to the government schools. Those who know that the government schools are a mess but can’t quite give up their attachment to them do so almost always for sentimental reasons.
Maybe it’s because you’re a product of the government schools (as most of us are), and, well you “turned out ‘ok’ after all.” Or maybe your kids go to a government school and it doesn’t seem all that bad despite the fact that you know that the America’s system of government education is failing nationwide (this phenomenon has been dubbed by others as the “Thompson paradox”). Or maybe you think that the government school system is the one and only institution that holds small-town America together (or what I refer to as “Friday Night Lights” syndrome). Or maybe you hold the cynical view that ordinary Americans don’t love their children enough to do whatever it takes to educate them properly. Or maybe you think (incorrectly) that poor families couldn’t afford to educate their children if there were no government schools. Or, finally, maybe you think that government schooling is a good thing in principle (just like Marxism) but just needs to be “reformed” in practice.
It might also be the case that you’re one of those hard-headed realists who doesn’t like to think in terms of moral principles. Maybe you’re put off by my moralistic rhetoric. Maybe you’re one of those pragmatists, who is only concerned with whether an institution works or does not work. Maybe you just need to see some data.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
A news presenter on Afghanistan’s TOLO TV wept as he read the announcement. Images of girls crying after being turned back from school flooded social media. Aid groups and many others remained baffled.
The Taliban have so far refused to explain their sudden decision to renege on the pledge to allow girls to go to school beyond sixth grade. Schools were supposed to reopen to older girls on Wednesday, the start of the new school year.
The ban caught even the Taliban-appointed Education Ministry unprepared. In many places across Afghanistan, some girls in higher grades returned to schools, only to be told to go home.
The move may have been designed to appease the Taliban’s hard-line base but it came at the expense of further alienating the international community. The world has been reluctant to officially recognize Afghanistan’s new rulers, concerned the Taliban would impose similar harsh measures and restrictions — particularly limiting women’s rights to education and work — as when they previously ruled the country in the late 1990s.
The United Nations children’s agency told The Associated Press on Thursday they were blindsided by the announcement.
“I think that yesterday was a very confusing day for all of us,” said Jeannette Vogelaar, UNICEF’s chief of education in Afghanistan.
As the students filled the room holding signs and loudly protesting, someone passed a folded piece of paper up to me. I didn’t even see who it was. I could feel myself tensing up, and my legs were a bit shaky. It was hard to concentrate in the chaos of what was quickly becoming a volatile event.
The note was typewritten, anonymous, with Jesus’ words from John 15: “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me first. … As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.” Underneath it said, “Keep the faith. Good luck!”
There are a few moments in my legal career where I’ve known God had me somewhere for a particular reason. As I walked out of the Yale Law School classroom, escorted by police officers, I also knew that God had used the student who had written that message to give me courage and inspiration right when I needed it.
I try to say yes to every opportunity to talk about stewarding our freedoms, especially when I have an audience that may disagree with me. I also choose to enter hostile places to demonstrate that Christians not only think deeply about legal and societal issues, but they also engage with civility and not anger. That’s why I readily agreed when I was invited to Yale to participate in a bipartisan panel on the First Amendment.
Consider that in 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population; today the share is under 15 percent. Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas accounted for about 90% of all US metropolitan growth; over that time suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2.0 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million .
The video, “Ten Years on Testosterone,” details the transition of LGBT activist Aydian Dowling through hormone injections. Teachers and administrators at Pearl R. Miller Middle School in Kinnelon, N.J., did not notify parents about the lesson, which included slideshows with definitions of different gender ideologies, beforehand.
“You can build up the courage to stand up for yourself in a way that this is what you want to do with your life,” Dowling says in the video after injecting testosterone.
Dowling later spoke at a school-wide assembly as part of the school’s “Stories Of Adversity & Resilience Program,” about which administrators notified parents ahead of time, giving them the option to opt out their children. Concerned parents flocked to a school board meeting last Thursday, where board members admitted parents should have similarly been informed about the hormone therapy video.
“I felt as if I was blindsided,” Loren Malfitano, whose two sons were shown the video, told the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re learning about this ideology of gender before they even have classes on the actual biologies of males and females.”
Once Congress adopts a bad idea even in an initially worthy cause, it invariably spreads to become a terrible idea. That’s the case with federal “stimulus” checks, which began as Covid relief and now are being proposed to offset the rising price of gasoline.
A trio of House Democrats—Mike Thompson (Calif.), John Larson (Conn.), and Lauren Underwood (Illinois)—have introduced the Gas Rebate Act of 2022 to send Americans a $100 check in any month this year when the national average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon. Dependents will get another $100, so the family of four can fill up that SUV on Uncle Sam’s dime. The national average price has exceeded $4 in recent weeks.
The word “rebate” is a misnomer because this isn’t rebated from any payment to the federal government. It’s a government check to pay for higher gas prices caused in large part by government. Voters are blaming Democratic policies for inflation and for making it harder to produce American oil and gas. With an election coming, and their majority in peril, Democrats are resorting to what they do best: Spending more of your money.
The non-rebate rebate is even worse policy than the gas tax holiday that some states are proposing. Neither addresses the real problem, but at least the tax holiday lets people keep their own money. The rebate idea deserves to die in the crib, but the spectacle of climate-change warriors suddenly trying to subsidize fossil-fuel consumption is almost worth it.
The inflation numbers that people pay the most attention to and the inflation numbers that the Federal Reserve cares about aren’t the same. In the months ahead, those differences could really matter.
Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expect Thursday’s consumer inflation report from the Labor Department will show that overall prices in February rose by 7.8% from a year earlier, their biggest gain since January 1982. Core prices, which exclude food and energy items in an attempt to better capture inflation’s trend, are expected to show a 6.4% rise, which would be the biggest gain since August 1982.
The February reading for the Commerce Department inflation gauge that the Fed watches, and bases its 2% inflation target on, won’t come out until March 31. But it will almost certainly show milder price increases than the Labor Department measure. The January core reading for the Commerce Department measure showed a 5.2% gain from a year earlier, for example, versus the 6% gain the Labor Department showed.
The differences between the two inflation measures largely come down to differences in how they are constructed. The weightings for items in the consumption baskets the Labor Department uses to put together its main inflation indexes are based on surveys of urban consumers and only measure out-of-pocket expenses. The Commerce Department’s indexes are based on the actual expenditures of both urban and rural consumers and includes spending done on the part of consumers, such as employers’ contributions to health insurance.
The demonstrators are calling for a vaccine mandate. In the center of the frame is a counterprotester. He’s conspicuous, wearing a neon vest. He walks through the crowd, holding a placard above his head. As he moves away from the front of the demonstration, a handful of people follow him, including a man wearing jeans and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt. The counterprotester is talking, or maybe shouting. It’s hard to make out what’s said. The man gestures to the counterprotester and takes a few steps toward him.
According to Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas, the first public book burning in recorded history likely occurred in 430 BCE. Because the Sophist philosopher Protagoras questioned the existence of the gods, who had inflicted defeats in war and a devastating pestilence on Athens, his fellow citizens wanted to appease them by incinerating his sacrilegious writings.
Two hundred years after Protagoras’s works were devoured by flames, Chinese scrolls and wooden tablets suffered the same fate during the reign of Qin Shi Huang.In Imperial Rome books were burned assiduously, including many Christian texts, and then pagan texts once the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century. A religion “rent by its own internal battles,” Berkowitz writes, required fiery measures to ensure orthodoxy and a unified church, which “became the model for speech suppression for centuries to come.” And so the pyres continued to blaze, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age, and reaching, shamefully, into our own times.
Fire’s sheer destructiveness and capacity for spectacle make it dear to censors, as exemplified by two of the most infamous cases of book burning in recent centuries. The first comes from the United States, where in 1873 Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to enact laws making it illegal to send lascivious materials through the mail. As a postal inspector, and with the help of mobs associated with his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock claimed to have burned 160 tons of obscene literary material in the forty-year period following passage of the so-called Comstock laws, as well as illustrated playing cards, sex toys, marriage guides, and abortion and birth control devices.
The second example is the notorious Nazi bonfires in 1933 that turned to cinders and smoke hundreds of thousands of books, including “degenerate” works by Marx, Mann, Proust, and Einstein. Both at the time and subsequently, this was so widely condemned that it seemed no one would dare to repeat it, or at least would not film and display it to the world. And yet in Chile, forty years later, that is exactly what happened after the coup against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Watching television in September 1973, I saw soldiers casting books on a smoldering pyre, among which was my own How to Read Donald Duck, an experience that helped convince me, as it has authors over the ages, that it was necessary to go into exile lest I endure the same mistreatment. Heinrich Heine expressed it best in 1823: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” Eight years later, he went into exile in Paris to escape German censorship.
My email exchange today with an NBC News producer wanting to know whether a certain front-page journalist with the world’s most powerful newspapers (NYT & WashPost) should be off-limits from criticism because of the harsh criticisms from the public it provokes: pic.twitter.com/mDv1VLrijm
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 30, 2022
Elizabeth Beyer:
A contract, inked in February with the UW System, greenlit Caire’s 33-year dream of growing One City Schools from early childhood education and elementary to include students through grade 12, roughly a decade after the Madison School Board rejected a similar proposal for a charter school overseen by the Madison School District that would have been called Madison Preparatory Academy.
The Charter School Growth fund, a nonprofit, philanthropic venture capital fund, will contribute $850,000 over the next two years to One City. That along with a recently awarded $900,000 grant to the school from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction through a federally funded program, will total $1.75 million in funds for the opening of the academy over the course of the next two years.
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?
I’m voting for David Blaska. God help me. But God help us all if we continue down the path laid out for us by the current board without at least someone to challenge the status quo.
Postscript: This is not just a Madison problem. Liberal San Francisco voters recently recalled three hard-left school board members for similar issues. And today long-time Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Alan Borsuk reportson what’s going on in Milwaukee’s public schools. To quote part of his story:
Referring to students, (an MPS teacher) went on to say: ”Teachers at Grantosa are in abusive relationships that are only escaped by quitting. … We see the individuals committing these abusive acts return to our classes repeatedly without consequence. We struggle to make contact with parents as many of their phone numbers change weekly.” And when they do make contact, “some teachers are not met with support, but blame and further verbal abuse.”
The letter continued, “Today I have a student who I’ve developed a great relationship with cussed me out and threatened me for stopping her from watching Netflix” in class. The students had found a way to get around the system in place to block that.
. Wisconsin Working Families Party www.
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?
I’ve been teaching college English for more than 30 years. Four years ago, I stopped putting grades on written work, and it has transformed my teaching and my students’ learning. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.
Starting in elementary school, teachers rate student work – sometimes with stars and checkmarks, sometimes with actual grades. Usually by middle school, when most students are about 11, a system of grading is firmly in place. In the U.S., the most common system is an “A” for superior work, through “F” for failure, with “E” almost always skipped.
This system was widely adopted only in the 1940s, and even now, some schools, colleges and universities use other means of assessing students. But the practice of grading, and ranking, students is so widespread as to seem necessary, even though many researchers say it is highly inequitable. For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material. Grades have other problems: They are demotivating, they don’t actually measure learning and they increase students’ stress.
During the pandemic, many instructors and even whole institutions offered pass/fail options or mandated pass/fail grading. They did so both to reduce the stress of remote education and because they saw that the emergency, disruptive to everyone, was disproportionately challenging for students of color. Many, however, later resumed grading, not acknowledging the ways that traditional assessments can both perpetuate inequity and impede learning.
This February, Bruce Harrell, newly installed as mayor of Seattle, made it official that his city has gone into decline. “The truth is the status quo is unacceptable,” he said in his first state of the city address. “It seems like every day I hear stories of longtime small businesses closing their doors for good or leaving our city.” But it’s not just small businesses. In mid-March, Amazon announced that it was abandoning a 312,000-square-foot office space in downtown, citing concerns over crime.
That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.
What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.
Although there was no evidence in 2020 that the Post’s reporting was inaccurate—and even Hunter Biden didn’t deny that the emails were real—Democrats decried the story as Russian “misinformation,” and Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps to prevent users from viewing or sharing it weeks before the election.
Facebook announced that it would be “reducing [the story’s] distribution on our platform” and changed its algorithm to make posts about the article less visible. Twitter locked the Post’s account and barred users from sharing the link, claiming it was “potentially harmful.”
Facebook declined to comment.
Numerous other news outlets have since corroborated the Post’s reporting.
The first point is that human children face a monumental learning task, which has resulted in the evolution of a much longer childhood than that exhibited by other animals. They must acquire and reproduce a very large amount of cultural information and skills related to language, human society (kin and non-kin relationships), subsistence activities (hunting, agriculture, dwelling construction), tool and clothing manufacture and use, ritual observances (to name but a few).
The second point is that innovation is detrimental to the learning process. If (for example) you are learning to use a bow and arrow (an essential tool in many pre-modern societies) you should attend to copying precisely the actions of your elders, who embody several thousand years of experience and innovation. You don’t deviate from their practice, and if (as a novice learner) you try to make changes, they will reprimand you. The ethnographic literature on these kinds of apprenticeship-like processes in cultural transmission is extensive (I recommend David Lancy’s “First you must master pain” as a starting point). Your job as a learner is to acquire all the knowledge you can from your elders, and to practice it until you are perfect, since your survival may depend on it. For younger children, practice takes the form of play, so (for example) young boys in Highland New Guinea play a game where they attempt to shoot an arrow through a rolling cane hoop. Children’s play is often ‘creative’ (a poorly defined term, admittedly), but it is not ‘innovative’. Most play is imitative, it consists of rehearsing skills that have been taught or are in the process of acquisition, such as play-acting adult roles. The BaYaka children used the pipe cleaners to imitate adult adornment (necklaces and bracelets).
I am not exaggerating when I say: ‘your survival may depend on it’. Kirai hunters in New Guinea were taught to hunt wild boar with a bow and arrow. If they succeeded in hitting the animal they are taught to climb a tree as fast as possible, since the boar would not die immediately and would often attack the hunter. Similarly, if you are learning to drive a car, you will fail your test (for good reasons) if you add an innovative element. And would you like to be operated on by a novice surgeon who has this ‘weird new trick’ she’d like to try?
It’s worthwhile to stymie the flow of politics into our classrooms. But the real fallout of our woke-ified teacher-prep programs is simply mediocrity.
My teacher training featured Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets, lectures on acupuncture and essential oils, acrostic poems as final projects, and a solid grounding in critical race theory. Notably lacking was a robust emphasis on teaching, learning, cognitive science, child psychology, behavior management, curriculum, or any other practicalities of the classroom. They were present but secondary to progressive politics.
When I’ve written about my teacher prep before, I’m usually accused of nutpicking — using a fringe example to castigate the many. We assume that prospective teachers go to such programs and learn to, well, teach. Little of the sort happens. The …
Lydie A. Lebrun-Harris, PhD, MPH ; Reem M. Ghandour, DrPH, MPA; Michael D. Kogan, PhD:
Findings Between 2016 and 2020, there were significant increases in children’s diagnosed anxiety and depression, decreases in physical activity, and decreases in caregiver mental and emotional well-being and coping with parenting demands. After the onset of the pandemic specifically, there were significant year-over-year increases in children’s diagnosed behavioral or conduct problems, decreases in preventive medical care visits, increases in unmet health care needs, and increases in the proportion of young children whose parents quit, declined, or changed jobs because of child care problems.
Meaning Study findings point to several areas of concern that can inform future research, clinical care, policy decision making, and programmatic investments to improve the health and well-being of children and their families.
Colleagues & I are writing about the politics of reopening schools for 2020-21 in 5 urban districts. I wanted to share our lit review so far 🧵
(a) You may find it helpful!
(b) Please tell us if we are missing anything!
(c) We think qualitative work can contribute a lot!
1/18 pic.twitter.com/C1IiyLyj32
— Jeremy Singer (@jeremylsinger) March 29, 2022
Emily Burns, with Josh Stevenson, and Phil Kerpen
(Figure 1).The same districts also had 2.5 times higher case rates during the same period as we demonstrated in analysis published on March 9th, 2022.
This result is as important as it was expected. The CDC promised that whatever potential (and willfully ignored) harms might come to children from two full years of forced masking, they must be risked, due to the added safety and schooling that masking would ensure. Neither claim ended up being true. As we demonstrated in our analysis of March 9th, during the January peak of the omicron wave, masked districts had 2.5-fold higher case rates than un-masked districts. Yet, during the same period, as we saw in Figure 1 above, those same schools experienced more than 4-fold higher rates of school disruptions—significantly higher rates of disruption even than their increases in case rates.
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?
Wall Street Journal:Everything you dislike about Congress and more—in 2,727 pages.
The House on Wednesday passed a $1.5 trillion, 2,727-page bill to fund the government this year, and at least the Members don’t have to worry about inflation. They’ve got the government covered.
Perhaps the best that can be said about the spending bill is it could have been worse. Republicans and Democrats agreed to $730 billion in discretionary spending (6.7% increase over last year) and $782 billion for defense (5.6% increase). The bill also includes $13.6 billion in humanitarian and military assistance for Ukraine.
This is better than President Biden’s budget, which sought a 17% increase for non-defense programs and 2% more for defense. Mercifully, the bill doesn’t include $40 billion for the restaurant industry or an extension of the pandemic employee retention tax credit, which many Members of both parties wanted.
Michelle Hackman & Dustin Volz:
A law-enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security participated in a secret bulk surveillance program that collected millions of records about certain money transfers of some Americans without a warrant, according to officials and a U.S. senator.
The surveillance program, overseen by investigators with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, collected records of any money transfer greater than $500 to or from Mexico, Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said in a letter sent to the DHS inspector general. It also collected information on domestic or international transfers exceeding $500 to or from the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.
Officials at the Homeland Security Investigations unit at DHS provided staffers for Mr. Wyden with details about the surveillance activity last month after the senator’s office first contacted the agency seeking information about the previously undisclosed program. The briefing was the first time Congress was made aware of the program’s existence, according to Mr. Wyden’s letter.
“Given the many serious issues raised by this troubling program, I request that you investigate the program’s origins, how the program operated, and whether the program was consistent with agency policy, statutory law, and the Constitution,” Mr. Wyden wrote in his letter to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wyden also asked the inspector general to probe whether Homeland Security Investigations was operating similar programs and to ensure that such activities were subject to congressional oversight.
Justin Lahart and Jon Sindreu:
At the end of 2011, the U.S. public sector had $15 trillion in debt, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, equal to 99% of gross domestic product, a post-World War II record. By last year it had swelled to $30 trillion, or 131% of GDP. In Japan, anemic growth has pushed public debt to a whopping 242% of GDP. In Europe, Britain’s debt load is 156%, and Italy’s is 183%.
Yet the amount of money required to pay interest on this massive pile has fallen across the board. In the U.S., it went from 4.4% of GDP in 2011 to only 3.6% a decade later. Subtracting some types of interest that the government receives, the net figure is an even smaller 2.5% of GDP.
Students at Yale Law School recently disrupted speakers in an example of cancel culture that is common on so many university campuses these days. Now comes a senior federal judge advising his judicial colleagues against hiring the protesting students for clerkships.
The March 10 panel was intended as a debate over civil liberties. It was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society and featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative outfit that promotes religious liberty. The two broadly agree on protecting free speech, despite their differences on other issues.
A hundred or so students heckled and tried to shout down the panel and Federalist Society members in attendance. One protester told a member of the conservative legal group she would “literally fight you, bitch,” according to the Washington Free Beacon, which obtained an audio and videotape of the ruckus. The speakers were escorted from the event by police for their safety. It’s not too much to say that the students were a political mob.
No punishment seems forthcoming from Yale Law School, despite its ostensible policy barring protests that disrupt free speech. But the event prompted Senior Judge Laurence Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to write the following letter to all of his fellow Article III judges last week:
You know, it’s not quite deplatforming, but we’re, there’s no question we’re throttled on Facebook and Twitter. I mean, perfect example. We, every Christmas Eve for years, we used to post a post that I wrote, called Christmas Eve in the Ardennes about U.s. soldiers on Christmas Eve during the Battle of the Bulge, always a huge hit on Facebook. I mean, four, five, 6,000 shares, which for our page is pretty good. All of a sudden, a couple of years ago they started throttling us and now we get 50 shares, 70 shares. They don’t show our stuff to anybody. We have 350,000 followers on Facebook. We’re lucky if they show our content to three or 4,000 people. So there’s deplatforming in a different way.
Coleman (19:07):
So Bill, you know, you’re a lawyer, your background is a securities lawyer, certainly you understand a thing or two about supply and demand and how markets work. Isn’t it astonishing that companies would agree to throttle the sales. And we have to think of every page was a sale for them. Every engagement is a sale for them to their own customers, to their own users, to reduce the options of what they offer to their customers. It seems so counterintuitive to what guys, our age grew up learning about how markets work
Jacobson (19:48):
Well. They’re so big, to them, there’s no market. There really is no alternative to Facebook. There’s not. There are pockets where you can reach a specific audience, but there’s no alternative to Facebook. There’s no alternative to Twitter. There’s just not, I mean, there are, you know, Facebook of course bought Instagram, which might have been a competitor to Facebook. So there’s not, there is no market force here. They can do whatever they want.
And one thing we’ve always covered since day one is this campus culture, this campus anti-free speech culture, cancel culture before they called it cancel culture. and how it has migrated into big tech. All the crazy stuff that you thought was like, so out of line 10, 12 years ago on campus that you read about it, Oberlin college or someplace like that, well guess where those people are working. Now, those students are now in their late twenties and early thirties, and they’re in positions of responsibility at major tech companies. And they’ve brought those campus anti-free speech values to high tech and that’s obvious and to public at the public education….
The educational migration idea also has potential for the U.S., though with additional hurdles. American universities typically offer some tuition aid to foreign students, but they could pledge to do more. Imagine if every school in America offered 10 additional zero-tuition slots a year to students from very poor countries. The strain on the facilities of most schools would be minimal, yet with about 5,000 institutions of higher education in America, that could amount to tens of thousands of new slots for educational migrants.
Given the great and justified interest in helping emigrants from Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries might also consider special programs for Ukrainian students. Millions are leaving Ukraine, and while the charitable response has been impressive, over the longer term these individuals will need to find good jobs. Education is one major step toward this end.
That’s a whole lot of effort to suppress a story that seems to be … true? The New York Times reported March 16 that the emails are part of the evidence in a federal investigation now before a grand jury.
One week into the “Oops, it was real” news cycle, I have now heard all the excuses as to why this actually is an instance of journalism and tech moderation working like they should. It was unverified, I’ve heard. Too close to an election. And even if the emails were real, they may have been obtained illegally — can’t have that!
All of which might sound very reasonable if only my profession had displayed the same caution with stories that made conservatives look bad.
In September 2020 the New York Times revealed all sorts of details from two decades of Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns. It seems possible, even likely, that whoever leaked the information had a legal or fiduciary duty to keep it confidential. Yet the story ran, and as far as I know, Twitter didn’t block it from being shared.
The fact that the now-discredited Steele dossier was unverified did not stop BuzzFeed from publishing it, or the rest of the mainstream media from engaging in an orgy of speculationabout Trump’s connections to Russia. When unverifiable accusations of sexual assault against Brett M. Kavanaugh surfaced, mainstream outlets relaxed their journalistic standards — but were considerably more skeptical when the accused was Joe Biden. Many easily believed misleading videos about Catholic kids at the March for Life, but when Project Veritas releases a new sting video, the instinct is to point out how deceptive edited video can be.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, the difference in mainstream reporting is the difference between can and must. When it comes to stories that flatter Democrats, we often ask “Can I believe it?” If it’s not obviously false, we do. But if the story flatters the right, we are more likely to ask “Must I believe it?” If we can find any reason to disbelieve, we take it — and keep the story off our pages.
The New York Times now admits the story was real. News and social-media companies will pay no price for suppressing vital information in 2020.
Who was the state superintendent who violated state law at the time? Gov. Tony Evers, who led the Department of Public Instruction for a decade before becoming governor in 2019.
WILL previously won its lawsuit after an appeals court ruled Evers’ DPI broke the law, but the court did not resolve the core constitutional questions of religious liberty at stake in the case.
It’s been a long legal journey.
The legal battle goes back some six years, when, in 2016, WILL first took Evers and DPI to court after the agency denied transportation aid to St. Augustine School, a private and independent K-12 school in Colgate.
Wisconsin provides aid to qualifying private school students as long as there is not an overlapping attendance area between private schools that are affiliated with one another, or, more specifically, affiliated with the same sponsoring group.
In this case, DPI and Friess Lake School District (now part of Holy Hill Area School District) denied St. Augustine students busing rights because there is an Archdiocesan Catholic school in the attendance area. But St. Augustine is independent and unaffiliated with the Archdiocese.
The school district and DPI determined the definition of Catholic and withheld government benefits until St. Augustine agreed not to call itself “Catholic.”
Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education. All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements.05 The substance and pace of these courses are both very demanding, and they culminate in long, challenging final exams that students must pass06to proceed with their education.07 In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive.08
To be clear, performance on standardized tests is not the central focus of our holistic admissions process. We do not prefer people with perfect scores; indeed, despite what some people infer from our statistics, we do not consider an applicant’s scores at all beyond the point where preparedness has been established as part of a multifactor analysis. Nor are strong scores themselves sufficient: our research shows students also need to do well in high school and have a strong match for MIT, including the resilience to rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of its resources. That’s why we don’t select students solely on how well they score on the tests, but only consider scores to the extent they help us feel more confident about an applicant’s preparedness09 to not just to survive, but thrive, at MIT.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, many of these oligarchs’ names have disappeared from their previously prominent places on Yale boards and councils. As recently as late February, Aven and Abramov were listed as members of Yale’s President’s Council on International Activities. And then they weren’t.
When asked why the men’s names were no longer publicly displayed, a Yale spokesperson said “both men’s terms expired last year,” apparently unaware of the fact that the terms were not set to expire until June 2022.
For my earlier post on the incident, see here; three follow-ups:
[1.] Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (Berkeley Law)—one of the most prominent liberal constitutional law scholars in the country—and Chancellor Howard Gillman (UC Irvine) had a Washington Post op-ed, “Free speech doesn’t mean hecklers get to shut down campus debate“; an excerpt:
Freedom of speech does not include a right to shout down others so they cannot be heard…. It is profoundly disturbing that some students assert a right to determine what messages are acceptable on a campus and try to deprive others within the community of their right to invite or listen to speakers of their choice.
If such a “heckler’s veto” is allowed, the only speech that occurs will be that which no one cares enough about to shout down. If the Hastings protesters believe that they are entitled to drown out speakers invited by the Federalist Society, then they must accept that nothing prevents Federalist Society members from drowning out speakers that they support. Before too long, no one would be able to hold any events worth attending.
[2.] David Lat had a follow-up, “Free Speech At Yale Law School: One Progressive’s Perspective / You don’t need to be conservative to be troubled by goings-on at YLS.” An excerpt, quoting a progressive student with whom Lat was corresponding [UPDATE: My editing originally edited out the fact that this was a quote from a progressive student; my apologies for the error]:
The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind.
I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia. I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.
If you have followed the news coming out of Yale — and why would you, really? — you would know that it’s one ever more embarrassing thing after another for the seemingly “smart” people at this elite university. Wokeism run amok; overt racism in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”; an uproar over a professor who offered a gentle defense of “culturally appropriative” Halloween costumes; and on and on. Most recently, a couple of weeks ago it was 100 loud law student protesters shouting down a free speech debate while the Dean of the Law School (Heather Gerken) stood by and did nothing.
But if I had to pick the very worst thing about Yale, a good candidate would be how Yale has inflicted its progressive/socialist ideology on its home city of New Haven, Connecticut, to the great harm of New Haven. Unlike many of the events listed above which are frequently in the news, the consequences of these progressive ideas on a city take the form of a gradual decline that can pass unnoticed until one day you stop to take stock. But I was reminded of New Haven’s ongoing Yale-induced tragedy today when I received an email from one of my Yale classmates on the subject of our upcoming 50th reunion. My classmate informs us that Yale has created a “New Haven Fund,” and urges us to make contributions to Yale that will then be designated to go to this Fund. From the email:
During President Trump’s second impeachment trial, Seth Barrett Tillman and I wrote that elected officials, including the President, retained their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. (See here, here, here, and here.) We often quoted from Chief Justice Rehnquist’s classic book about presidential impeachments, Grand Inquests. He observed that, during times of conflict, “[p]rovisions in the Constitution for judicial independence, or provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech to the President as well as others, suddenly appear as obstacles to the accomplishment of the greater good.” Yet, some of our critics argued that elected officials had reduced First Amendment rights, and their speech was subject to the Pickering/Garcetti line of cases. In other words, elected officials would be treated in the same fashion as civil servants.
A loaded 9 mm pistol was found inside a city school this week, renewing cries for police to be allowed back patrolling the hallways.
The gun was found in a storage room at the Young Achievers Science and Math Pilot K-8 School, according to Boston Police investigating the incident.
“If there are armed security at City Hall, the State House and Mayor (Michelle) Wu’s house — not to mention at elite, mostly white universities like Harvard and MIT — then the mayor needs to explain why white adults are protected while children whose only crime is being Black and poor are not,” said the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a vocal leader in Boston for neighborhood rights.
Last November, the principal of the Dr. William Henderson K-12 Inclusion School was beaten unconscious, forcing school officials to cancel classes for several days and to come up with a new plan that would allow for a safe return.
And on March 13 of this year, a girl was brutally beaten at Boston Arts Academy by a group of students who had been threatening to “jump” her, according to police. She was taken by ambulance to Boston Children’s Hospital, where she continued to receive threats via text to hunt her down there, police said.
The girl told officers she was extremely shaken and feared for her life, according to Boston Police, who are also investigating that incident.
Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider
Democrats can reclaim education as a winning issue. They might even be able to carve out some badly needed common ground, bridging the gap between those who have college degrees and those who don’t by telling a more compelling story about why we have public education in this country. But that story must go beyond the scramble for social mobility if the party is to win back some of the working people it has lost over the past few decades.
Schools may not be able to solve inequality. But they can give young people a common set of social and civic values, as well as the kind of education that is valuable in its own right and not merely as a means to an end. We don’t fund education with our tax dollars to wash our hands of whatever we might owe to the next generation. Instead, we do it to strengthen our communities — by preparing students for the wide range of roles they will inevitably play as equal members of a democratic society.
The CDC & teachers' unions did more harm to kids in two years than the virus ever did.
— Meghan Maureen (@Keggs719) March 27, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Home-schooling has grown like never before since the pandemic first upended traditional in-school education at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. The number of U.S. households that were home-schooling doubled at the start of the 2020-21 school year, according to the Census Bureau.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
A Washington school board butted heads over a new student discipline policy that considers a student’s race before deciding on a punishment.
The Clover Park School District debated its new “culturally responsive” student discipline policy. It means student discipline would not be consistent based on conduct. Instead, a school considers a student’s race and background. It would likely offer harsher punishments to white students, even if the conduct is identical to that of a Black or Hispanic student.
The disparate treatment is championed in the name of inclusion. But it’s not just a Clover Park School District controversy.
The culturally responsive policy impacts every Washington school district after Democrats passed a law institutionalizing critical race theory in student discipline.
Of the numerous political battles sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, some of the most bitterly contested have taken place over K-12 education. Schools have been a site of decisive struggles over the norms, values, and policies of the U.S. response to the public health crisis. While teachers collectively fought for stronger COVID mitigation measures, a small but vocal minority of parents confronted school boards in acrimonious meetings, demanding an end to remote instruction and mask mandates. These local skirmishes took place against the backdrop of successive COVID surges and a national media narrative that cast doubt on the usefulness of public health measures. It is impossible to understand the failed U.S. pandemic response, which has left over one million people dead, without understanding the role that schools have played as sites of political contestation. And it is impossible to understand the school reopening debate without understanding one of its main interlocutors: academic economist Emily Oster.
Kim Bojórquez and Bryan Schott
“I think though, at this point, we are doing our best to try to thread a needle … to preserve women’s sports and find a path forward,” she said.
Four-time Badger State Spelling Bee champion Maya Jadhav will go on to represent Wisconsin at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in May.
Jadhav, an eighth-grader from Vishva Home School in Fitchburg, won the competition Saturday against 54 other spellers in grades 4-8 from across the state at the first in-person statewide spelling bee since March 2020. The bee went roughly 25 rounds before Jadhav was declared the champion.
“I feel great. I worked hard and I’m really happy,” she said. “I’m really excited. This year is just to have fun. It’s my last year, so I’m just going to study and try to have fun (at the Scripps National Spelling Bee).”
Jadhav said she studies the spelling of words online using a variety of different programs, and practices language rules and root words, while repeating the words she learns. She plans to travel with her family to the Washington, D.C., area twice in the coming months, for the Scripps National Spelling Bee and for the 2022 Raytheon Technologies Mathcounts Competition.
“I’m amazed at what Maya has done, and it’s never an easy thing. She really works hard,” said Nitin Jadhav, Maya’s parent. “This is her last year, eighth grade, so she has this last chance to go to D.C. She’s looking forward to it, and I’m happy for her. … It’s like she takes us on adventures every year.”
Jadhav won the 2019, 2020, 2021 and now the 2022 Badger State bees but was unable to travel to the national competition in 2020 or 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 national bee was canceled, and the 2021 competition took place. Jadhav came in 12th place in the 2021 national bee.
Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya, of Madison, and Jadhav were the last two students left standing on the stage after about 15 rounds as they grappled with a volley of words such as “ocotillo”, “persiflage” and “etagere”. The two students exchanged words for roughly another 10 rounds. Jadhav won the day with the word “obrotund” in the 25th round.
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?
Benton: So it’s the big academic publishing companies that bought up rights to microfilm that was created 50 or 80 years ago?
Kahle: There’s a play I really want to see put on at the Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square — a two-person play, fictitious, of Binkley meeting Eugene Power.5
Eugene Power started University Microfilms, and Binkley had this dream of microfilm playing a different role. And basically, Eugene Power won — Binkley died. And we ended up with it being a corporation, which then got bought and bought and bought and bought again. And then they think that, if you want to move something to the next medium, you need to go back and get a new license. That transaction cost is so high, right? You don’t do it very often. So things get left behind because of this idea of licensing.
Benton: I wanted to ask you specifically about how you see the role that journalism has played and does play in the Archives’ history.
Kahle: There are two dimensions, right? There’s being a useful tool for journalists, having materials that they want to use. And then there’s documenting the output of journalism, of news. And those are both probably best illustrated with the Wayback Machine.
Being a resource for journalists has been a major goal of ours. We’ve got an internal Slack channel that uses Google Alerts to find uses of the Wayback Machine in news stories, and they come in all the time. I actually find that a useful stream of news to read, because it indicates that the journalist has done some work.
Benton: Journalists’ use of the Wayback Machine reminds me a bit of the way that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was able to gain a certain amount of rhetorical authority by finding all these old clips of politicians saying something six months ago that was the opposite of what he is saying today. Using that archive of video information to build accountability. I think journalists use the Wayback Machine for the same reason. It’s “This company says X now, but only three months ago, on their website, they said Y.”
Kahle: Absolutely. And Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was really inspiring to us. We did a grant-funded program to try to build a tool that would allow anyone to become a Jon Stewart research intern. And that was what became the Television Archive.
We’d been archiving television, and then we wanted to make it available. And so we tried to make it so you could search on what people said and then make clips. And it didn’t happen as much as I thought it would.
So those are tools that we’ve helped make that are useful to journalists. Then there’s trying to archive news. And we’ve really done a lot work to try to make sure that we capture news from around the world. What’s becoming really tricky now is paywalls and robot traps. Newspapers are becoming very sophisticated to try to make sure that people don’t crawl them. They’re employing more and more sophisticated tools.
You have to give the US corporate media credit where it’s due: they are 100% correct that the US faces a *grave* problem of disinformation.
But as this great video shows — by @0rf for @mtaibbi — they’re wrong about the source. It doesn’t come from FB or QAnon but themselves: pic.twitter.com/6doeUVnAAI
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2022
NCLA Takes on U.S. Surgeon General’s Censoring of Alleged Covid-19 “Misinformation” on Twitter
The world’s #1 tennis player, Russia’s @DaniilMedwed, has publicly called for peace and an end to war, but Wimbledon continues to suggest that’s not good enough for him to be allowed to play. He must denounce Putin publicly and vocally, or else be banned:https://t.co/Oj3G1mxNqd
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2022
Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.
What should be done? https://t.co/aPS9ycji37
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022
People used to talk about “resistance” to President Donald Trump. That’s old hat. Now it’s resistance to the woke.
And we’re seeing more and more of that resistance. University of Michigan economics professor Mark J. Perry is working with numerous folks across the nation to file equal-opportunity complaints with the federal Department of Education when colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race and sex.
Perry recounts that in three years of research, he’s found more than 1,200 Title IX and Title VI violations — and continues to uncover more. “The significant and troubling frequency of violations of federal civil rights laws in higher education demonstrates unaddressed systemic sexism and racism that needs greater awareness, exposure and legal challenges,” he writes.
“Typical and frequent” Title IX violations “that have gone unchallenged for many decades,” he says, include “female-only scholarships, fellowships, awards, study spaces, mentoring, tutoring, special freshman orientations, industry meetings, summer STEM programs, summer STEM camps, coding clubs, leadership programs, entrepreneurship programs, gym hours, etc. that operate exclusively for women while illegally excluding and discriminating against boys and men.”
Perry says that “racially segregated or racially preferential” programs and events that violate Title VI have also “become increasingly common in higher education.”
These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes.
So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
Hunter Biden’s lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank “collusion” narrative will be national headline news for weeks.
Middle class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.
In truth, we are about to see a radical reset—of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear.
The world and the United States are furious over hyperinflation that may soon exceed 10 percent per year. We will be lucky if it ends only in recession or stagflation, rather than global depression.
The mess was created by the same apparat who bought into “modern monetary theory.” That silly university idea claimed prosperity would follow vastly expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates at de facto zero levels, running huge annual deficits, piling up unsustainable national debt, and subsidizing workers to stay home.
Natural gas and oil costs are now soaring to unsustainable levels—and to the point where the middle class simply will not be able to travel, keep warm in winter, or cool in summer.
Memorization means purposely learning something so that you remember it with muscle memory; that is, you know the information without needing to look it up.
Every educator knows that memorization is passé in today’s day and age. Facts are so effortlessly accessible with modern technology and the internet that it’s understanding how to analyze them that’s important. Names, places, dates, and other kinds of trivia don’t matter, so much as the ability to logically reason about them. Today anything can be easily looked up.
But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we can look anything up, but it’s knowing what knowledge is available and how to integrate it into our existing knowledge base that’s important.
aper documents differences across higher-education courses in the coverage of frontier knowledge. Comparing the text of 1.7M syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” a syllabus’s relative proximity to old and new knowledge. We show that courses differ greatly in the extent to which they cover frontier knowledge. More selective and better funded schools, and those enrolling socio-economically advantaged students, teach more frontier knowledge. Instructors play a big role in shaping course content; research-active instructors teach more frontier knowledge. Students from schools teaching more frontier knowledge are more likely to complete a PhD, produce more patents, and earn more after graduation.
“Whites Only” – If you think we’ve gotten past the horrifying racial segregation of the 20th Century, think again. @WisconsinDPI promotes “whites only” affinity groups (image below). More examples of how EQUITY leads to segregation @WILawLiberty: https://t.co/AQbl41jQlQ pic.twitter.com/7q0bVFaW8e
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 25, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
According to an email sent to board members Tuesday morning, there are currently 286 students enrolled in online programming, with 150 in third through fifth grades and 136 in grades six to 12. When the school year began, there were about 750 requests for virtual instruction in elementary grades and 452 applications for grades six through 12, with 234 of those offered enrollment.
The email, which Vander Meulen shared with the Cap Times, also outlines future enrollment plans.
Next year, the program will have 100 students maximum in each of fourth and fifth grades, with 150 maximum in grades six to 10. The 100-student maximum will remain for fourth and fifth grades, while the secondary grades will expand by 25 as they add a grade level each of the following two years, with 175 for grades six to 11 in 2023-24 and 200 for grades six through 12 in 2024-25.
Vander Meulen and Gomez Schmidt proposed pushing a vote to at least April 11, giving administrators time to provide further information on how the year has gone and for board members to consider the enrollment information they received earlier that day.
“I want to vote for this program, I just can’t do it yet,” Vander Meulen said.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and literary experiences.
Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners, dragons and wizards – in a modest print run of 1500 copies. Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain, when The Road to Wigan Pier was published that same year. Commissioned for The Left Book Club, it examined the appalling living and working conditions of miners in the North of England.
Vagabondish and restless, Orwell was iconoclastic, eschewed academia and rejected religion. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. Orwell could not have despised this tradition more vehemently, often mocking adherents with jibes such as:
‘In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree.’
Orwell especially doubted the usefulness of this faith to novelists:
Charles Moore: “Hong Kong National Security Bureau ordered Benedict Rogers, of @hk_watch, to take down the website within 72 hours or face a big fine and anything from one year to life imprisonment. Mr Rogers is a British citizen, living in Britain” /https://t.co/AxGXf0f2u6
— Benedict Rogers 羅傑斯 (@benedictrogers) March 22, 2022
What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.
If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime. In 1960, when Richard Nixon chose not to contest an extremely narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, and Nixon partisans didn’t storm the Capitol looking to hang the speaker of the House, 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees. By the time of last year’s insurrection, that proportion had surpassed one-third. Law degrees from Harvard and Yale didn’t keep Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from trying to tear up the Constitution. Americans with college degrees are likelier to vote and otherwise participate in civic life than those without; they’re also likelier to spend hours throwing clever online darts. One study found that college-educated Democrats were more likely to hold false views about their political enemies than those without four-year degrees. More education generally makes people more Democratic, but not more democratic.
We owe our beleaguered children, the victims of our inadequacy, a chance to be better than we are.
The city’s Department of Education is determined to attract families to the public school system — but is bracing for the reality if it can’t.
Schools Chancellor David Banks addressed the City Council’s education committee Monday on the proposed education budget, which accounts for student enrollment predictions and trends. Previously during the pandemic, schools did not lose funding if enrollment dropped.