gao.gov

For millions of students, teachers and their families, the last couple of school years during COVID-19 were rife with challenges that disrupted education. But many teachers nationwide reported having students who never even showed up during the entire 2020-2021 school year. We’ll find out more from GAO’s Jackie Nowicki.

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?

Melissa Korn:

USC Provost Charles F. Zukoski told students and staff at the Rossier School of Education in a letter Wednesday that the school’s dean, Pedro A. Noguera, notified him recently of “a history of inaccuracies in the survey data.”  A school representative declined to comment beyond the letter.

Dr. Zukoski said the school pulled itself from a set of graduate-school rankings that was set to be released in coming days “while we seek to understand the situation further.”

A faculty member familiar with the investigation said the probe is related to whether the school included information about the correct groups of graduate students in its rankings submission. The person said faculty at the education school expressed concern a few years ago about proposed changes to that set of data, which could have artificially inflated average GRE scores.

USC tied at No. 11 in the latest U.S. News & World Report ranking of graduate education schools, released last year. “We rely on schools to accurately report their data and ask academic officials to verify that data,” said Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News & World Report.

USC hired law firm Jones Day to conduct a review of its submissions for the rankings. They interviewed multiple staff and faculty members in recent weeks, according to the faculty member familiar with the investigation.

Dr. Zukoski said USC will release findings from the Jones Day investigation when it is complete, which he expects would happen in the next two weeks. He said the school has already notified the U.S. Education Department and its accreditor of the data inaccuracies.

Rossier’s erroneous U.S. News & World Report submissions are the latest in a string of controversies over college rankings, and highlight the ease with which schools can provide faulty data, accidentally or otherwise.

Elizabeth Beyer

“I do feel like I need more information on how the current program is functioning and the potential consequences of expanding this program by 10 (full-time staff members) with non-reoccurring ESSER funding,” Gomez-Schmidt said.

“I think we’re just creating a problem that a future board in two years is going to have to grapple with,” Carusi said.

Castro said the board would need to revisit those concerns “down the road.”

Pearson said she agreed with the concern regarding the use of one-time ESSER funding to hire for permanent positions but at the same time recognized the need for the early approval to expand the program.

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?

Josh Christensen:

Amid a nearly imperceptible rise in COVID-19 cases, Chicago Public Schools returned to masking kids in K-12 classrooms, and its teachers’ union is still pressing for further COVID restrictions.

The city’s schools were among the last in the nation to drop universal mask mandates for children. Having promised to shift to a “mask-optional” policy on March 14, however, CPS published a flyer that says students must wear masks whenever visiting a school nurse, for at least 10 days after a COVID exposure, and for at least 5 days after a weeklong period of at-home learning. The Chicago Department of Public Health can also require an entire class to mask up at any point, the flyer reads, and CPS “may require masks again if community transmission reaches a moderate or high level.”

The Chicago Tribune first reported the return to masking on Monday, writing that CPS and the city’s health department had ordered parents of elementary school children to mask their children due to a recent classroom exposure.

Studies have shown children are at very low risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. In-school transmission is also “extremely rare,” according to a peer-reviewed study done by the American Academy of Pediatrics in January 2021.

The news comes as the Chicago Teachers Union agitates for a return to universal masking as part of a safety deal it signed with the city in January. Alleged violations of that deal, which ended in a five-day cancellation of classes citywide, prompted the teachers’ union to appeal to the state’s Educational Labor Relations Board. The board declined the union’s request for an emergency injunction but will hear its complaint in June. The safety agreement between the city and teachers’ union expires in August.

The safety agreement states all schools must universally mask students and provide universal testing. Any school may also flip to remote learning provided at least 30 percent of teachers are absent for at least two days or at least 40 percent of students have been told to quarantine by the city’s health department.

Cook County, which encompasses Chicago’s school districts, is at low risk of community spread, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The public health agency recently changed its metrics for tracking community transmission of COVID, opting to give a locality’s hospitalizations more weight than case counts in its recommendations.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Logan Kugler:

Can technology affect human morality?

This is not an esoteric test question from a college philosophy class, but a real, growing concern among leading technologists and thinkers. Technologies like social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence can create moral issues at scale, and technology experts specifically and society generally are struggling to navigate these issues. 

On the one hand, technology can empower us with better information on the consequences of our actions, as when we use the Internet to research how to reduce our environmental footprint. In the past, such information may have been inaccessible or impossible to source, but today we can easily arm ourselves with data that helps us make choices we perceive to be more moral.

On the other hand, technology can bring out our worst behaviors. Social media platforms can serve us content that enrages or depresses us, making it more (or less) likely we will take immoral actions based on our feelings. These platforms also can be used by bad actors to take immoral actions more easily.

Not to mention, technology companies themselves may use their creations in ways that, intentionally or accidentally, cause real harm.

One prominent example of how technology can impact morality is Facebook. The company’s social media platform makes it easier for us to connect with people and issues we care about, which enables us to take moral actions, like supporting a friend having a hard time or raising money for an important cause.

Aaron Sibarium:

“The idea that guilty people shouldn’t get lawyers attacks the legal system at its root,” Andrew Koppelman, a prominent liberal scholar of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said. “People will ask: ‘How can you represent someone who’s guilty?’ The answer is that a society where accused people don’t get a defense as a matter of course is a society you don’t want to live in. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

Anna Nordberg, via a kind reader:

California’s reading scores are dismal, with 68% of fourth-graders reading below grade level. This is the result of the disastrous decision in the 1980s for the state to embrace whole language, the idea that children should learn to recognize words and phrases through context, guessing and memorization. But evidence shows the whole language approach has left millions of kids behind. What children actually need is to be taught how to decode, or sound out, words — a phonics-based approach called structured literacy that requires explicit instruction and works with all students, including those with learning disabilities and second language learners.

The debate over whether children should be taught to read through whole language (rebranded as balanced literacy in the ’90s) or phonics became known as the Reading Wars, turning a complex issue into a catchy cultural meme. Which is depressing, because how we teach kids to read really matters. It can be the difference between an intact, confident child and one who thinks they can’t succeed in school.

One of the biggest challenges, explains Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd and the former state literacy director at the Department of Education in Mississippi, is changing the mindset of a state’s education system. “California has long been a whole language state,” she says, and that’s influenced an entire generation of teachers and administrators.
The first step is teacher knowledge. “All the new curricula in the world doesn’t matter if teachers don’t have the training to pivot during instruction,” says Burk, who oversaw the implementation of Mississippi’s Literacy-based Promotion Act from 2013-2019, which dramatically increased the state’s reading scores. “When a child says, ‘I don’t understand,’ does the teacher have the knowledge to fill the gap?” In Mississippi, Burk ensured that teachers had access to high-quality professional development, and put literacy coaches into the highest need schools.

McCourt School of Public Policy via a kind Deb Britt email:

The one-of-a-kind Certificate in Education Finance (CEF) equips participants with the practical skills they need in strategic fiscal management, policy analysis, and leadership to deploy resources in ways that do the most for students.

WOW: Virginia Tech swimmer Reka Gyorgy says her finals spot was stolen from her by Lia Thomas because of “the @NCAA‘s decision to let someone who is not a biological female to compete.” pic.twitter.com/vrtEfqZ0LW

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) March 20, 2022

Robert Zimmerman:

A major victory for free speech: A federal judge ruled on March 11th that officials at the University of North Texas can be held personally responsible for firing a professor because they did not like his political opinions.

In his 69-page order of March 11, Judge Sean Jordan, of the United States District Court for Eastern Texas, found that university officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” before they fired him for going public with his disagreement with the left-wing concept of “microaggressions.”

The university was claiming qualified immunity for school officials in the case, meaning that the school wanted its officials to be excluded from being held responsible for their actions merely because they were acting in their position as state employees. Jordan denied the claim of qualified immunity and also denied the school’s demand to have the case dismissed outright.

You can read the judge’s order here [pdf].

The background: Hiers, having found flyers in math department’s lounge warning faculty against triggering “microaggessions” in their conversations, responded as shown in the picture above, placing one flyer on the chalk rack of the blackboard and wrote his own opinion of it above.

Ralf Schmidt, the Math department’s head, immediately criticized Hiers for doing this, and within a week fired him without notice.

David Lat:

Not confronting the protesters on March 10 was, I submit, a failure of leadership—but it might have been understandable, in the heat of the moment and the chaos of the situation. A less understandable failure of leadership is not sending out a school-wide email after things calmed down, like the one that Dean David Faigman sent out after a similar event at UC Hastings Law, offering a ringing affirmation of free speech and explaining how the protesters violated university free-speech policies. It’s now more than a week after the event—by the time YLS students return from spring break, more than two weeks after the event—and you have not said anything publicly, despite ample opportunity to do so.

We don’t know each other super-well, so I apologize if this next part is overly familiar, but I think we share something in common: we both want to be liked. This is a common trait, and it’s not always a problem, but it can be when one is a leader or manager. (This is why I’m much happier as a one-man band here at Original Jurisdiction, instead of running Above the Law; I don’t enjoy managing, and my desire to be liked prevents me from doing it as well as I should.)

As the Dean of Yale Law School, you can’t be liked by all people, all of the time. You can be liked by most people, most of the time—and you are—but sometimes you have to anger people, if that’s the price of doing the right thing. And right now, the right thing to do is to make clear to the entire YLS community, liberals and conservatives alike, that they must comply with Yale’s free-speech policies—whether they like it or not.2

There’s been a problem with the intellectual climate at Yale Law School for several years now. Some of it flows from the fact that progressive students (“Progressives”) view those who disagree with them—definitely conservatives, and even some moderates—as bad people (“Bad People”).

Progressives are free to think that their opponents are Bad People. They can exclude them from social gatherings. They can make Bad People feel unwelcome in affinity groups (already happening at YLS, with members of certain affinity groups being forced to choose between affinity-group and FedSoc membership). They can make fun of Bad People with satirical fliers.3

But it’s your job, as the Dean of Yale Law School, to tell Progressives that in an academic community based on free expression, there are limits to how much they can act on the view that their opponents are Bad People.4 Progressives can’t shut down duly organized events because they disagree with the speakers. They can’t weaponize anti-discrimination policies to punish the protected speech of their opponents. They can’t make up and spread liesabout professors with unpopular views (or the students who dare to associate with those professors). It’s your job, as the Dean of Yale Law School, to remind Progressives of all this—even if they complain, call you “complicit,” or say you’re a Bad Person too.

Roni Caryn Rabin

Drug overdose deaths also reached record levels during the first year of the pandemic, with more than 100,000 Americans dying of overdoses during the 12-month period that ended in April 2021, a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous year, according to reports issued in November. The number of deaths from opioids in which alcohol played a role also increased.

Young adults ages 25 to 44 experienced the greatest increases in alcohol-related deaths in 2020, rising nearly 40 percent over the previous year, according to the new report.

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?

By allowing men to compete in women’s sports, the NCAA is destroying opportunities for women, making a mockery of its championships, and perpetuating a fraud.

In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota’s Emma Weyant as the best women’s swimmer in the 500y freestyle. pic.twitter.com/tBmFxFE3q6

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 22, 2022

Elizabeth Beyer:

“include instituting law and order in schools, questioning diversity and equity initiatives in curriculum and promoting charter schools. His viewpoint, an outlier among the predominantly left-leaning board, would create diversity of thought if he is elected, he said.”

I did not see Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results mentioned in this article.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard

In MMSD, 34.9% of students in grades 3-8 scored “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the statewide Forward Exam in 2018-19, the most recent year the exam was given with a high percentage of students participating. If the overall number isn’t bad enough, the results were worse for every non-white group of students other than Asians, who had the same percentage as the district as a whole in those two categories.

Just 10.1% of Black students taking the exam scored above “Basic,” with 58.9% scoring “Below Basic,” the lowest level. For Hispanic students, meanwhile, 16% scored “Proficient” or “Advanced,” with 46.9% scoring “Below Basic.”

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?

Paul Rossi:

Parents at the elite private Westminster Schoolsin Atlanta are rebelling against the imposition of Critical Social Justice on their students. Westminster is a member school of National Association of Independent Schools.

A letter sent to the Internal Revenue Service signed “a Taxpayer” includes a list of 16 partisan incidents the author says qualifies Westminster as an “action organization,” violating the school’s tax-exempt status.

More, here.

Chris Mills Rodrigo:

Multiple covert government surveillance operations hoovering up Americans’ information without oversight have been exposed in the last year. Those not following closely may not have noticed.

Recent revelations about government spying have failed to make a major splash in Congress, the media or public discourse. 

Stories about surveillance have broken through before — perhaps most notably in the case of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency but also in the 1970s when the Senate’s Church Committee investigated abuses by multiple intelligence agencies.

What made those cases so much more salient? And how can privacy advocates get the public’s attention more consistently?

Over the past several months, lawmakers and reporters have revealed that the country’s intelligence agencies have been using broad executive authority and taking advantage of a loophole in the Fourth Amendment to obtain much more data than was previously known.

Three of these major discoveries, all made public by Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office, concern the CIA gathering American data, a defense agency buying consumer data from a third-party broker and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) participating in a program stealthily compiling money transfer records.

There are some major differences between these revelations and ones that have attracted public attention in the past.

Eugene Volokh:

From a decision in D.C. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. by D.C. Superior Court Judge Anthony Epstein, handed down earlier this month but just posted on Westlaw:

The Court grants the District of Columbia’s petition for enforcement of an investigative subpoena to Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook, Inc. ….

Through the Office of the Attorney General (“OAG”), the District has responsibility for enforcing the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (“CPPA”). OAG is investigating whether Meta made any false or misleading public statements about its efforts to enforce its “content moderation policies” prohibiting misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines in Facebook posts.

OAG issued an investigative subpoena to Meta that seeks, among other things [in Request No. 2], the identities of Facebook users that Meta determined violated its content moderation policies for vaccine misinformation through public posts[:]

{Documents sufficient to identify all Facebook groups, pages, and accounts that have violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policy with respect to content concerning vaccines, including the identity of any individuals or entities associated with the groups, pages, and accounts; the nature of the violation(s); and the consequences imposed by Facebook for the violation, including whether content was removed or banned from these sources.}

Meta has refused to disclose this information. The Court concludes that this request for public posts is a reasonable and lawful exercise of the District’s subpoena power and that it is consistent with the federal Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) [details of this omitted -EV] and with the First Amendment

1/Since Sept, we have spent hundreds of hours scouring NAIS and the socials of their admins and discovered bits and pieces that come together to tell an extraordinary story of the coordinated dismantling of private education from inside out. We used THEIR MATERIALS against them.

— UNDERCOVER MOTHER – EXPOSING PRIVATE SCHOOLS (@UndercoverMoth9) March 21, 2022

Madeline Fox:

“I plan to focus on a broad spectrum of issues, including making sure students have access to high quality schools across the state, curriculum transparency and making sure that schools follow the constitution in enacting policies that respect and empower parents and their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their child,” Brewer said.

Even before Brewer was hired, the organization has been working on school issues for years. It supported a legislative effort to create a parental bill of rights that would permit parents to review instructional materials and determine which pronouns are used for their children. And, WILL is currently suing the Madison and Kettle Moraine school districts over guidance to staff to use kids’ preferred pronouns and gender identity without first running it by parents. 

WILL has also been supportive of plans to expand the state’s school voucher programs and create a new body to approve charter schools. It’s intervened in school district battles over masking policies, issues around race and what books are available in school libraries. 

The Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which often champions liberal causes, has also focused more heavily on schools, in large part through the work of its Equal Justice Works Fellow, Elizabeth Lambert, who started a two-year fellowship with the organization in September 2020.

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?

Brian Gonzalez

A token is a non-exploitable identifier that references sensitive data. Tokens can take any shape, are safe to expose, and are easy to integrate. Tokenization refers to the process of storing data and creating a token. The process is completed by a tokenization platform and looks something like this:

1. You enter sensitive data into a tokenization platform.
2. The tokenization platform securely stores the sensitive data.
3. The system provides a token to use in place of your sensitive data.

Scott Girard:

While the walkout was focused on Assad, as Yang continually reminded the group when conversation drifted to other resources and solutions, it also highlighted a larger concern: many of the students there said they couldn’t trust any other adult in the school.

“If you’re not a minority, you wouldn’t understand the impact of having someone that looks like you that’s someone you can go to,” La Follette junior Josepha Da Costa told the Cap Times. “That’s why Coach is so important to us because we have actually built those relationships with him and we see him as someone we can kind of look up to and teach us about ourselves.”

Junior Xodus More described Assad in an interview as “pretty much the only person that kids can go to.”

Multiple staff members spoke to the students during the walkout, offering their ear and a safe place to come and talk. Thompson pointed to The Den, another open walk-in space for students with counselors on hand.

“I’m going to have to work with the counseling team, our student services team to think about how we can be way more present and available to meet your mental health needs,” Thompson 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?

Simpson Street Free Press, via Dylan Brogan:

Ali Muldrow largely defended the Madison school district’s current policies while David Blaska levied broad criticism at the district’s focus on “creating anti-racist school culture and curriculum.”

“If we stopped telling people that Madison is racist, if we stopped teaching that some kids succeed all because of privilege, I think everyone would be better off,” Blaska said at the forum. “Because that’s such a disempowering message to kids.”

‘It’s a good kind of invective’

Blaska supports bringing back school resource police officers to the district’s high schools and laced his argument with jabs like calling East High School, “Fight Club East.” …

Nichols did tend to agree with Muldrow, at least in spirit, on the issues. But she also seemed to recognize that Blaska is raising the same concerns as many parents, minus the conservative blogger’s flare for invective.

More, from David Blaska:

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?

“Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.”
https://t.co/zeKBY8ef57 pic.twitter.com/nVIY4PM4hq

— J Emory Parker 🏳️‍🌈 Subscribe to STAT+ (@jaspar) March 19, 2022

NEO

Remember back when transgender rights was about adults, and there was lengthy screening by the medical and therapy professionals involved to make sure that those adults were not making the choice because of other mental health issues?

Now it’s about keeping kids’ secrets from parents whose rights diminish every day:

“Parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities,” Wisconsin teachers were told in a February training session. “That knowledge must be earned.”

Empower Wisconsin publicized the slide used in the Eau Claire district in western Wisconsin.

Superintendent Michael Johnson defended the training saying the district “has a responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is equitable, safe and inclusive,” reports M.D. Kittle on Wisconsin Spotlight.

“A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent,” reports Kittle. “The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

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?

Boys vs women

If boys win against the fastest women, is it fair for males to compete in female-only athletic events?

I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 20, 2022

Wikipedia:

Civics is the study of the rights and obligations of citizens in society.^[1] The term derives from the Latinword civicus, meaning “relating to a citizen”. The term relates to behavior affecting other citizens, particularly in the context of urban development

Word recently arrived that Don Severson died in December, 2021.

This news appeared a few days after former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz wrote: Madison School Board is Out to Lunch

“I don’t think they understand how dangerous this has become and how it has harmed young students who are just trying to get an education,” Lynn Lee, whose daughter attends East, told the Wisconsin State Journal.

“I feel terrible for the students and the teachers who are continually forced to deal with impossible situations like (Monday’s) and all of the students involved who are not receiving the learning environment they deserve,” he said.

That same State Journal story noted that board President Ali Muldrow and Vice President Savion Castro didn’t respond to the paper’s requests for comment. They won’t even answer questions about why it took so long to do what is essentially nothing. Not exactly models of public servants there.

I met Don early in the schoolinfosystem era. Motivated (highly) and keenly aware of the challenges faced by our well funded K-12 system, Don was always ready with a packet of plans, reports and recommendations. He shied from no meeting, nor from running for elected office.

I often think of Don – and others – when reflecting on civics and what it means to be a citizen.

Rest In Peace.

John McWhorter:

When we expect less of people, it’s often because we think less of them: In 1974, the linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs documented that in rural villages in Madagascar, women were associated more with direct and therefore less refined speech than men. Their culture heavily valued circumlocution — diplomatic, even delicate speech — but it was still considered socially acceptable for women to speak bluntly, sometimes even coarsely, because less was expected of them.

I think of this kind of thing in reference to altering standards of evaluation so that Black and Latino students are represented proportionally in various institutions. These days, one is to think of this sort of thing as equity. The idea seems to be that until there is something much closer to equality — as in equal access to resources — throughout society, we must force at least the superficial justice of equity in sheer percentages.

But too often, the message being communicated to Black and Latino people is that our presence is what matters, not our performance. I am uncomfortable, for example, with the domino-effect elimination of standardized testing requirements in university admissions policies across the country.

According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, around 1,800colleges and universities will not require high school graduates “applying to start classes in fall 2022 to submit ACT/SAT results,” with a list that includes not only U.N.C. and Harvard but also other prestigious public and private institutions, including the University of California, the University of Texas, Yale University and Princeton University. Many of the schools cite the pandemic as the reason for making standardized testing optional, but I don’t buy it. I’ve been in academia long enough and have experienced the decades-long debate over racial preferences long enough to suspect that this is cover for a policy change that some schools wanted to make anyway.

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?

David Blaska:

Blaska’s beef is that ex-mayor Dave accuses Republicans of cynically playing the culture wars purely for political gain while doing exactly that himself.

“Republicans aren’t raising these issues at every opportunity because they really care about kids or parents one way or the other. They’re exploiting these things because they see a hot political issue that they can ride — along with other things like inflation, crime, and immigration — to victories in November.”

Pardon us if we talk about crime and inflation. (What Scott Milfred of the WI State Journal calls “wedge issues.”) Worse, “Republicans don’t care about kids”? That whopper earns the Werkes’ coveted three-exclamation-point outrage: (!!!) When you can’t win on the facts, impugn motive. The Leftward mainstream news media does this all the time, with some version of “Republicans are seeking to capitalize on …” whatever sin against the Republic Democrats commit that day.

→ Read & weep over this local “news” story: Running for school board is a Republican plot.

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?

Governor Hogan;

Governor Larry Hogan today announced the launch of a multi-pronged, first-in-the-nation workforce development initiative to formally eliminate the four-year college degree requirement from thousands of state jobs. Spearheaded by the Maryland Department of Labor and the Maryland Department of Budget and Management (DBM), the state will work with partners to recruit and market these roles to job seekers who are “Skilled Through Alternative Routes” (STARs).

The governor was joined for today’s announcement by Secretary Tiffany Robinson of the Maryland Department of Labor and Byron Auguste, the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit workforce development organization that will work with DBM to specifically identify Maryland “STARs” in the IT, administrative, and customer service sectors.

“Through these efforts we are launching today, we are ensuring that qualified, non-degree candidates are regularly being considered for these career-changing opportunities,” said Governor Hogan. “This is exactly the kind of bold, bipartisan solution we need to continue leading the nation by giving even more Marylanders the opportunities they need to be successful.”

Taylor Kay Lively:

State-level momentum for comprehensive privacy bills is at an all-time high. After the California Consumer Privacy Act passed in 2018, multiple states proposed similar legislation to protect consumers in their states. The IAPP Westin Research Center compiled the below list of proposed and enacted comprehensive privacy bills from across the country to aid our members’ efforts to stay abreast of the changing state-privacy landscape.

The IAPP Resource Center hosts a “US State Privacy” topic page, which provides a curated collection of news and resources covering US state privacy, as well as the US Federal Privacy Legislation Tracker, which includes a list of privacy-related bills proposed in Congress to keep our members informed about developments within the federal privacy landscape.

Alison Dirr:

Donovan said he would want to see Milwaukee police return to school buildings while Johnson said he’d favor having officers outside when schools are letting out.

In response to protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, in June 2020 the MPS board voted unanimously to stop paying Milwaukee police officers to patrol outside its buildings and events. 

MPS ended the practice of posting school resource officers inside buildings in 2016 in response to complaints about police unnecessarily citing and arresting students in situations that could have been handled as school disciplinary matters.

Tyler Cowen:

American society needs a radical move away from credentialism. So it’s a very promising sign that Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has announced that thousands of Maryland state government jobs no longer will require a four-year college degree.

This change will boost opportunity and equity. Maybe it will even start a broader movement, including in the private sector.

David Blaska:

Thanks to the Simpson Street Free Press for hosting a Madison school board debate Thursday 03-17-22. We’ll include the link when it is posted.

Must admit, was taken aback by the Wisconsin State Journal’s question. Reporter Elizabeth Beyer asked Blaska which classrooms are teaching critical race theory?Suppose she wanted your write-in candidate for Seat #4 to rat out “Mr. Burns’ 3rd-period ancient and medieval history class at Memorial; Mrs. Hying’s 4th-period geometry class, Mr. Sorensen’s study hall at Shabazz, the lunch lady at East …

Portraying Blaska as a reincarnation of Tailgunner Joe may be payback for our scolding Ms. Beyer for writing, without a trace of attribution:

“Critical Race Theory, an academic framework that focuses on racism embedded in the nation’s laws and institutions … isn’t taught in any of Wisconsin’s K-12 schools.”

None of them! A flat-out statement of incontrovertible fact! Ms. Beyer’s story that Sunday was in service to the establishment myth that conservatives are politicizing local school board races to build a farm team for higher office. (Blaska is coming for you, Tammy!)

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?

Uchronia:

Uchronia: The Alternate History List is a bibliography of more than 3400 novels, stories, essays, collections, and other printed material involving the “what ifs” of history. The genre has a variety of names, but it is best known as alternate history.

In an alternate history, one or more past events are changed and the subsequent effects on history somehow described. This description may comprise the entire plotline of a novel, or it may just provide a brief background to a short story. Perhaps the most common themes in alternate history are “What if the Nazis won World War II?” and “What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?”

For more information about alternate history and this bibliography, please read the extended introduction.

Ed Treleven:

The civil rights lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, also alleges that a school security official failed to point out the cameras to a state criminal investigator who was searching for hidden cameras at East while investigating an unrelated criminal case that also involved hidden cameras.

The parents, Patanne Coffey and Anna Hauser, also filed an open records lawsuit against the district last year alleging the district was dragging its feet in turning over records about the discovery last year of two cameras that were placed in rooms at East where they would have captured students with disabilities having their clothing changed.

Amy J. Ko, Anne Beitlers, Brett Wortzman, Matt Davidson, Alannah Oleson, Mara Kirdani-Ryan, Stefania Druga

Computer science (CS) is often taught as a utopian discipline, full of powerful abstractions that can transform lives and society for the better. However, as computing has reshaped every part of society in both highly visible and highly invisible ways, it has become clear that the foundational ideas in CS carry explicit values: ones of automation, replacement, standardization, centralization, and amplification. These values have positioned it as a discipline of power, and due to the ignorance with which it is often applied, often one of oppression. In this book, we reconsider the technical and pedagogical foundations of CS and CS education from this lens, and offer teaching methods for secondary education that foster students’ critical consciousness of computing, with the hope of fostering a more equitable, culturally sustaining, and just future of computing.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Three candidates including two incumbents (I) are vying to represent two village of Windsor seats on the DeForest School Board in the April 5 spring election. The top vote-getter will win a three-year term and the second-place finisher a one-year term.

Ilana M. Horwitz

American men are dropping out of college in alarming numbers. A slew of articles over the past year depict a generation of men who feel lost, detached and lacking in male role models. This sense of despair is especially acute among working-class men, fewer than one in five of whom complete college.

Yet one group is defying the odds: boys from working-class families who grow up religious.

As a sociologist of education and religion, I followed the lives of 3,290 teenagers from 2003 to 2012 using survey and interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, and then linking those data to the National Student Clearinghouse in 2016. I studied the relationship between teenagers’ religious upbringing and its influence on their education: their school grades, which colleges they attend and how much higher education they complete. My research focused on Christian denominations because they are the most prevalent in the United States.

I found that what religion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by professional-class parents, for example, do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. In some ways, religion even constrains teenagers’ educational opportunities (especially girls’) by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career.

However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.

Ann Althouse:

You may sacrifice educational and career opportunities if you prioritize parenthood, altruism, and service to God, but you may sacrifice parenthood, altruism, and service to God, if you prioritize educational and career opportunities. 

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Glenn Greenwald:

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word). 

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politicoeditors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

Rasmussen Reports:

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

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

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

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

Meduza

During a live broadcast on Monday evening, March 14, on Channel One Russian state television, a station employee named Marina Ovsyannikova ran out on stage behind the news anchor, unfurled an antiwar sign, and shouted antiwar slogans. Ovsyannikova managed just a few seconds on the air before the transmission cut away to another segment. She was later arrested, held overnight, convicted the following evening of the misdemeanor offense of inciting unpermitted protests in a prerecorded statement that circulated on social media, fined 30,000 rubles (roughly $250), and released. Federal investigators are still reviewing her televised protest and might press separate, possibly felony charges. Meduza spoke to Ovsyannikova’s colleagues and pieced together her story. Though she alone has even dared such a disruption of Russian broadcast television, Ovsyannikova’s personal opposition to the war against Ukraine is not uncommon among those who work for Russian state TV, Meduza learned.

CENSORED: YouTube/Google are offended by my criticism of the Military Industrial Complex and my advocacy for negotiated settlement in Ukraine, because they are the social media arm of that warmongering Power Elite/MIC. pic.twitter.com/tYe714y7cj

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) March 16, 2022

WILL:

This website provides a ‘one-stop-shop’ for information about Wisconsin’s schools. Here, you can view trends in enrollment, proficiency, and a host of other information.

Definitions for Key Terms and an FAQ are provided at the bottom of the page. Please use the district dropdown on the TOP LEFT to select the school district from the menu to view. This information is also available to download. Please select from the menu at the BOTTOM of the informational screen and select either image or PDF.

Susan Miller:

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

What does an effective strategy process look like?

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

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

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

Establishing the Context: Trends, Uncertainties, and Scenarios

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Paul Rossi:

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

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

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

John McKenna:

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

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

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

Perry Stein:

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

Story continues below advertisement

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

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jordan Boyd:

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

David Blaska:

Were they just hoping problem would go away?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Joanne Jacobs:

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

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

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

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

ElinorAmit & Pamela K.Smith

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

George Will

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Burr and Beca Enducott:

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

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

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

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

Luke Berg:

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

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

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

Elizabeth Beyer:

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

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

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

Heather Knight:

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Zimmerman:

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

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

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

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

Dynomight:

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

Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahaha.

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

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

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

Haley Strack:

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kane:

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

Marie Szaniszlo:

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Taibbi:

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Binion:

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

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

Laura McKenna:

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

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

Here’s where I come in. 

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

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

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

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

— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) March 12, 2022

The interview.

Hannah Natanson & Rachel Weiner:

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

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

Andrea Widburg

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

The language Democrats find so objectionable states as follows:

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

I got 1,300+ answers.

Here are the 12 best you wish you knew yesterday👇

— Chris Hladczuk (@chrishlad) March 12, 2022

Naomi Wolf:

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

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

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

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

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

R2D3

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

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

C Bradley Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 11, 2022

More, here

MacIver

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

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

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

Piie.com:

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

Martin Tillier:

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

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

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

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

Adam Andrzejewski

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

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

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

Here are three examples of our original reporting:

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

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

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

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

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

Kyle Stokes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vince Bielski

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

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

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wisconsin State Journal Commentary

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 9, 2022

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Indira Dammu and Bonnie O’Keefe:

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

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

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

Hardcore History:

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

Ashley Gold:

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

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

Stephanie Murray:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve also introduced some new work with students.

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Lewkowicz:

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

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

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

Susan Rigetti:

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

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

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

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

Dana Goldstein:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) March 8, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Michael Thaddeus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Girard:

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Josh Blackman:

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

Dear Concerned Students,

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

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

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

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

Emma Camp:

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

MIT Open Courseware

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

Frederick Hess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

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

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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