Davey Alba

A request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The notice asks the companies to submit “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.

“Technology companies now have the opportunity to be open and transparent with the American people about the misinformation on their platforms,” Dr. Murthy said in an emailed statement. He added: “This is about protecting the nation’s health.”

Scott Girard:

Despite taking that student into custody, the school received another “threatening call” on Friday, according to an email to Memorial families from principal Matt Hendrickson. The school has received at least one such call each day this week, but police investigations have found none of them to be credible.

“MPD is continuing a very detailed investigation into the origin of every false threat made and detectives have determined there to be no substantiated threat to our school, and all calls have been confirmed as not credible or false,” Hendrickson wrote in his letter.

Both MPD and Hendrickson noted the harm of the calls, including missing class time and mental health issues. On Monday, students evacuated Memorial and neighboring Jefferson Middle School for more than two hours.

“We understand the stress this can create for our community,” Hendrickson said. “Knowing how these situations can bring out many emotions, our teachers will continue their great work in checking-in with our students, and our Student Services team will continue to provide additional support to our staff and students. Students, we are here to support you.”

MPD public information officer Stephanie Fryer wrote in an email to the Cap Times Friday that the department “recognizes the anxiety and stress these types of threats can create in our community.”

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?

Selim Algar:

The city and state teachers unions are suing to block a charter high school from bringing a prestigious international diploma program to the Bronx.

The New York State United Teachers and United Federation of Teachers assert that the establishment of the Vertex Partnership Academies would violate the current state cap of 290 city charter schools.

Their suit contends that the new school — founded by prominent charter advocate Ian Rowe — is trying to “circumvent” the cap by drawing students from two existing charter schools and casting itself as an expansion.

“Put simply, if it looks like a new charter, is held accountable like a new charter, and is structured like a separate and new charter, then it is indeed a new charter and not an expansion,” the lawsuit states.

UFT boss Michael Mulgrew, a staunch opponent of charter schools, echoed that opposition.

Magnus Henrekson & Johan Wennström:

• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
• Utilizes official statistics and policy papers
• Examines education trends from the 1960s onward
• Examines the challenges and issues caused by a move to a privatized education system in Sweden

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?

Arika Herron:

It was passed by the House last month, 60-37, along largely party lines but the version of the bill that the Senate was considering Monday had been significantly gutted. The list of “divisive concepts” shrank from eight items to three and provisions to allow parents to sue schools over things educators said in the classroom were stripped out. 

Those who opposed the bill said it was a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in Indiana and risked driving teachers — a critical profession already in short supply — out of the field. 

It had been largely opposed by the Black community, which worried that the bill would further limit representation of Black and other people of color in school curricula and result in an incomplete and inaccurate teaching of the country’s difficult history.

“This is a good day for the state of Indiana,” said Garry Holland, education chair of the Indianapolis NAACP, “not to accept that which would cause disenfranchisement of children and teachers.”

The Indiana State Teachers Association, which has led a weeks-long effort to oppose the measure, celebrated its demise in a statement released Monday night.

“Over the past several weeks, ISTA members and public education advocates have shared their stories and voiced their concerns about stifling teachers’ ability to teach and students’ ability to receive an honest education,” said ISTA President Keith Gambill. “Hoosier parents and educators all want our students to succeed, and we’ll continue to be partners in standing up for what’s right for their future.”

James Pethokoukis:

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Not having a stable, two-parent household with a father present is by far the greatest predictor of child poverty – leagues ahead of race and region, and rendering both of those insignificant or close to it in multi-variate models.

That’s the tweet, as the kiddos say. pic.twitter.com/3a0Y6i3PQq

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) March 2, 2022

Very rare acknowledge by establishment that its fine with misinformation when it serves its narrative. https://t.co/eoYPvEVBFi

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) March 5, 2022

Jessica Winter:

When my daughter was little, I became fixated on a schoolhouse a few blocks from our apartment—a Tudor-style storybook cottage, with red trim and a brick chimney and a playground all of wood. Its first-floor windows were concealed by tall bushes of a deep impossible green, and everything that a childhood should be was waiting for my daughter behind them, or so I believed. When I went inside, my expectations were met. The children, aged two to six, were serious and serene, occasionally speaking to each other in low, considerate tones. They stacked blocks, strung beads, and arranged letter boards, and of course I had seen these kinds of blocks and beads and boards before, but never these specific, exquisite renderings of them. When it was time for “walking on the line”—a morning custom in which the children followed a line of tape on the floor, around and around, silent and judiciously spaced—I felt overcome by a sense of dazed compliance.

This was our local Montessori school, and I had convinced myself that, with a bit of scrimping and bootstrapping, I could somehow find the money to send my daughter there. I scheduled her required interview; afterward, the director told me, “Oh, she’s a dream,” and in that moment I would have signed a Sea Org contract in exchange for a year of my kid’s enrollment. But when I reviewed the numbers, the following weekend, I concluded that I could pay the tuition only if I went into credit-card debt—and, really, if that qualifies as being able to “afford” something, what can’t you afford? I withdrew her application, and, to self-soothe, I bought a Montessori-ish hundred-piece counting board for her off Amazon. (She barely touched it, and I gave it away after her toddler brother expressed an interest in eating the numbers.)

Tate Ryan-Mosley & Sam Richards:

Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Run under a consortium known as Operation Safety Net, the program was set up a year ago, ostensibly to maintain public order as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd’s murder. But an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that the initiative expanded far beyond its publicly announced scope to include expansive use of tools to scour social media, track cell phones, and amass detailed images of people’s faces.

Documents obtained via public records requests show that the operation persisted long after Chauvin’s trial concluded. What’s more, they show that police used the extensive investigative powers they’d been afforded under the operation to monitor individuals who weren’t suspected of any crime.

MIT Technology Review’s investigation includes thousands of documents and more than two dozen interviews with Minnesota state employees, policing experts, and activists. Taken together, they paint a picture of a state operation intent on identifying participants through secretive surveillance operations. Though it was undertaken by nonmilitary governmental agencies using public funds, large swaths of its inner workings have gone undisclosed. We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.

Operation Safety Net (OSN) was announced in February 2021, a month before Chauvin’s trial was set to begin. At a press conference also attended by Hennepin County sheriff David Hutchinson, Medaria Arradondo, then Minneapolis’s police chief, described the effort as a unified command that would enable law enforcement officials to mount a regional response in case protests turned violent.

Publicly, OSN acknowledged that federal agencies would assist in monitoring for threats of violence and activity by out-of-state extremist groups, and that an “intel team” would be established to help share information surrounding these threats. Our investigation shows that federal support for OSN was in fact extensive, involving the US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At least six FBI agents served in executive and intelligence roles for the program.

C Bradley Thompson:

My working thesis is simple: America’s “public” school system is the most immoral and corrupt institution in the United States today, and it should be abolished as soon as possible. It should be broken up for the same reason that chattel slavery was ended in the 19th century: Although obviously different in purpose and in the magnitude of harm to its victims, public education, like slavery, is a form of involuntary servitude. The primary differences are that public schools force children to serve the interests of the State rather than those of an individual master, and public schooling ends after thirteen years.

These are—to be sure—radical claims, but they are demonstrably true, and the abolition of public schools is an idea whose time has come. It is time for Americans to reexamine—radically and comprehensively—the nature and purpose of their disastrously failing (and immoral) public school system, and to launch a new abolitionist movement, a movement to liberate tens of millions of children and their parents from this form of low-grade bondage.

Twenty-first century Abolitionists are confronted, however, by a paradoxical fact: Most Americans recognize that something is deeply wrong with the country’s elementary and secondary schools, yet they support them like no other institution. This phenomenon has been referred to by my colleague Eric Daniels as the “Thompson Paradox,” which says that virtually all Americans recognize that the nation’s education system is failing but they nevertheless think their local school is doing a great job of educating their children. This phenomenon can be seen most clearly amongst Republicans and conservatives in small town America. Mention the possibility of abolishing the public schools and most people look at you as though you are crazy—or worse! And, of course, no politician would ever dare cut spending to our schools and to the “kids.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

As Minneapolis teachers ready themselves to strike with all of the co-opted social justice language that white progressive teachers can summon, here’s something the public rarely gets to see: how they through teachers of color under the bus time and again.

Read…

cc: @keban5 pic.twitter.com/0aSvXDR19p

— Citizen Chris (@citizenstewart) March 4, 2022

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Nanette Asimov and Bob Egelko

 Thursday upheld a lower court’s order that the prestigious university freeze enrollment at 2020 levels.

In a case that has drawn national attention, the ruling deals a blow to thousands of applicants to the prestigious public university and will cost millions in lost tuition, the university says. The decision favors neighbors who are trying to get the campus to stop adding new students without providing enough housing for them.

The ruling also means UC Berkeley will withhold acceptance letters from more than 5,000 qualified freshman and transfer applicants, not all of whom would have enrolled.

“This is devastating news for the thousands of students who have worked so hard for and have earned a seat in our fall 2022 class. Our fight on behalf of every one of these students continues,” the campus wrote in a statement following the Supreme Court decision.

On a 4-2 vote, in a one-sentence order, the court refused to lift the enrollment freeze ordered by an Alameda County judge and denied review of an appellate ruling requiring the university to conduct further environmental review of an off-campus construction project while it limits incoming enrollment. Justice Goodwin Liu dissented, voting to remove the freeze, and urged a neighborhood group and UC Berkeley to negotiate a settlement.

David Blaska:

It’s heart-breaking, it really is. Two Madison teenagers took different paths. Anthony Chung was a National Merit Scholar at Memorial high school, student representative to the Board of Education, about to graduate from elite Georgetown University. With him in the car the night of 09-12-20 on Mineral Point Road was the former classmate he planned to marry.

Careening at 90 mph on that city street was another Madison high school product. Maurice M. Chandler, then 18. At that young age, he already had seven open felony and misdemeanor cases and had jumped bail seven times. That night Chandler was high on marijuana in a vehicle likely stolen; he was armed with a handgun.

Chandler was out on $100 bail for an armed robbery, ordered by the court to remain at home — not rocketing through a city street at night when he ran a red light and smashed into Chung’s car as it turned left onto Grand Canyon Drive, killing the young man and critically injuring Chung’s girl friend, Rory Demick — herself an honors student.

“The moment that I learned of his death shattered my heart into a million pieces. In that second, as I lay in the ICU with multiple broken bones, my heart hurt more than the rest of my body,” she told the court, as reported by the Wisconsin State Journal.

Just one of the stories of kids gone bad in the Naked City. More and more stories. Which is why David Blaska, your write-in candidate for Seat #4 on the Madison school board, asks the question no one else is asking:

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?

🚨Breaking🚨

State of Kentucky’s Teachers Retirement System was the second-largest shareholder for Sberbank of Russia (The largest bank in Russia).

Their position dropped 95% in value from $13MM to $778K pic.twitter.com/1maUVcM5lH

— Market Sentiment (@mkt_sentiment) March 4, 2022

So, this morning we called the Teachers' Retirement System of KY with questions about the Russian bank thing blowing up Twitter last night.

And it pays to call and ask first.

Anyway, TRS sold its Russian bank holdings Feb. 23. That was dated info posted online. ^JC pic.twitter.com/jkDNiXMdhR

— Bluegrass Politics (@BGPolitics) March 4, 2022

Patrick Mcilheran:

The warden of Wisconsin’s public-school status quo, the Department of Public Instruction, was wrong, when it recently made an absurd estimate about the cost of opening up school choice to all families without regard to income.

More than that, DPI betrayed an arrogance — a presumption that thousands of parents can go right on working a second job, and maybe a third, for being uppity.

To be clear, the DPI was factually wrong.

The agency incorrectly estimated the impact on property taxpayers if Wisconsin ended income limits on its school choice program. Those limits block families making more than three times the poverty line in Milwaukee and Racine or more than 2.2 times the poverty line in the rest of Wisconsin, or about $58,000 for a family of four.

The agency’s estimate, so wrong it’s not worth repeating, rested on laughably unjustifiable assumptions. A colleague and I dissected the DPI’s errors at length in a paper available at the Badger Institute website, but the central error was the DPI’s assumption that every tuition-paying family would right away switch to using the choice program.

Can’t happen. The choice grant, which must be accepted as full payment, is often well below schools’ actual cost, so a school’s ability to take more choice students is limited by its ability to tap outside donors. They need some “private-pay” students to lessen the fundraising load.

And notice what else DPI assumed: Its “baseline,” the status quo, the normal against which it measured impact, assumed tuition-paying families of about 69,000 children statewide should pay taxes to support schools and then go on paying tuition as well to relieve the rest of the state’s taxpayers entirely of the cost of their children’s education.

That is what the parents who pay the tuition for their children to attend the local parochial school, for instance, are doing — they’re easing the taxpayers’ burden. The least the DPI could do is send a thank-you card.

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?

Zachary Crockett:

Sometime around 1960, Jarecki developed an obsession with roulette, a game where a little ball is spun around a randomly numbered, multi-colored wheel and the player places bets on where it will land.

Though roulette was considered by many to be purely a game of chance, Jarecki was convinced that it could be “beat.”

He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets — but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced.

Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects — chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces — might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed.

Louis Bonham:

In the last few years, academia has utterly embraced the concept of “equity” as articulated by Ibram X. Kendi; i.e., that if a particular identity group is statistically under- or over-represented in anything, the reason for the imbalance is indisputably systemic discrimination, and thus positive discrimination to correct the imbalance is not only proper but mandatory. Indeed, many universities now require students and faculty to undergo indoctrination in this fallacious tripe and to pledge allegiance to it as a condition of admission/employment. Questioning the wisdom, effectiveness, or legality of “equity” usually results in the cancel culture mobs coming after you, as my friends Dorian Abbot and Gordon Klein can attest.

As a lawyer and longtime student of constitutional law, one of the most disturbing things about academia’s adoption of the Kendian “equity” concept as official policy is that it is so clearly illegal. As Judge James Ho of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has pointed out, decades of settled Supreme Court law establish that discrimination for the “right” reasons is still illegal, especially in the employment context. State law often goes further, such as by prohibiting political discrimination in employment matters. Even where the law allows universities some flexibility (such as in admissions), it does not countenance deliberate discrimination against protected classes, which is what DEI supporters typically demand. Nevertheless, as exemplified by the University of Texas’ feckless President Jay Hartzell, universities are openly adopting DEI programs despite the fact that their stated reasons for doing so squarely violate the law.

Why do they do it? In many cases (such as, in my opinion, that of President Hartzell), it is due to cowardice: administrators are simply afraid of offending the wokesters on campus and would rather meekly surrender to their demands than risk being branded a racist/white supremacist/bigot/etc. In other cases (e.g., adoption of such policies by law schools), those involved know that their actions are illegal (or at least very questionable), but they disagree with the current state of the law and hope to change the law by defying it. And, of course, there is the inherent problem in academia of “whaddaya gonna do about it?” Administrators know that their actions can only be challenged through litigation, which is very expensive and lengthy, and which any potential plaintiff knows will likely result in them being blackballed in academia.

Nevertheless, just as fundamental economic realities exist regardless of contrary wishful thinking, those who have adopted the Kendian concept of “equity” as official policy are learning that the law is not so easily ignored. An excellent example of this occurred last week in the case of Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, where a federal court entered a summary judgment declaring such a Kendian program flatly illegal.

The case arose out of a new admissions program for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”), a highly regarded public high school in affluent Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.. Historically, admission to TJ has been extremely competitive, with applicants having to satisfy certain minimum requirements (such as a minimum core GPA of 3.0 and scores above certain thresholds on three standardized tests) to be eligible to apply for admission. As with many other STEM-focused programs, this merit-based admission process resulted in large numbers of Asian-American students at TJ: the 2020-21 class was 71.79% Asian-American, 18.34% white, 3.05% Hispanic, and 1.77% Black, whereas the overall student population of the area was 36.8% white, 27.1% Hispanic, 19.8% Asian-American, and 10% Black.

Gregory Maertz

Wherever Goethe was read, critiqued, and translated, one found the basis of oppositional cultures. This was especially true in Great Britain and New England. Bound by religious heritage and the experience of pilgrimage for intellectual and spiritual enrichment, the British mediators of German culture were, however, divided from their Boston cousins by differences in class and social influence. In New England, descendants of the original Puritans were socially dominant. In Britain, Dissenters from the Anglican majority, Scots Presbyterians, and other sectarians were politically and socially marginalized, as were women, Roman Catholics, and Jews. Nonetheless, members of all these peripheral groups formed the nucleus of the German-trained intelligentsia in Britain.

Moreover, the writings of these outsiders, chiefly translations and criticism, revealed connections between an English-speaking enthusiasm for Goethe, the American effort to declare cultural independence from Great Britain, and the migration of women writers from the margins of cultural life to its center. Margaret Fuller’s (1810–1850) efforts to critique and translate German literature and her emergence as one of the most important literary figures of the time are inseparable. And the arc of her career is similar to that of other Anglophone women writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), Sarah Austin (1793–1867), George Eliot (1819–1880), and Edith Wharton (1862–1937), all of whose mature writings owed something to earlier apprentice work reviewing and translating German literature of the period.

Jack Grove:

About one in 12 PhD students would publish fraudulent results if it helped them to get ahead in academia, a study suggests.

In an international study that surveyed almost 800 doctoral candidates, researchers presented PhD researchers with a scenario in which data had been fabricated and asked whether they would be happy to proceed to publication.

In the first part of the study, involving 440 PhD candidates recruited from social science or psychology departments in Dutch universities, almost all spotted the use of fraudulent data but 8 per cent said they would publish if they felt under pressure to do so, explains the study, published in Frontiers in Psychology.

A replication study involving 198 PhD candidates from the medical and psychology faculties at a Dutch university found similar results, while a third study that polled 127 social science PhD students in Belgium found that 13.4 per cent would publish the dodgy data.

“Many of those we interviewed came up with good arguments for publishing what they knew was fabricated data, such as ‘if this is what it takes to finish my PhD’,” said the study’s lead author, Rens van de Schoot, professor of statistics at Utrecht University.

Thomson Reuters:

Sweden should have adopted tougher early measures and the government assumed clearer leadership as COVID-19 hit, though the mostly voluntary no-lockdown strategy was broadly correct, a commission reviewing the country’s pandemic response said on Friday.

Sweden polarized opinion at home and abroad with its handling of the pandemic, opting against the lockdowns implemented by many countries and adopting a largely voluntary approach of promoting social distancing and good hygiene.

The commission — set up by the government under pressure from parliament — said Sweden’s broad policy was “fundamentally correct.”

“It meant that citizens retained more of their personal freedom than in many other countries,” the report says.

But the panel of eight experts, including professors of economics and political science, said the government should have taken clearer leadership and acted sooner when it comes to measures such as capacity limits and masks.

“The Government should have assumed leadership of all aspects of crisis management from the outset,” the commission said in the report. It found the government had too one-sided a dependence on assessments made by the Public Health Agency.

“In February-March 2020, Sweden should have opted for more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures.”

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?

Kelly Meyerhofer

More than 350 students have signed the pledge since the 2020-21 launch, including more than 85% of students enrolled in the master’s degree program for teaching certification at the middle and high school level. School officials expect to support more than 1,000 students over the course of the pilot project.

Jason Riley:

Making an enemy of testing and grades is barking up the wrong tree. The test isn’t the cause of these disparities. It’s merely a measure of reality. Eliminating the test will only obscure the learning gap, not erase it. Moreover, lowering standards ultimately harms all groups. Schools that admit less-prepared students won’t want them to struggle—or some racial groups to do better than others—so teachers and administrators will be under pressure to make classes less demanding. You can’t dumb down admissions without also dumbing down the curriculum.

If progressives wanted to do something meaningful about the achievement gap, the focus would be on preparing students for these tests. Black and Hispanic students at high-performing charter schools in New York City are admitted to selective high schools at double the rate of their peers in traditional public schools, yet progressives side with teachers unions to prevent more charter schools from opening. Go figure.

Jim Bender:

One of the nation’s leading opinion research firms conducted a random, scientific sample poll in February of likely Wisconsin voters. The survey focused largely on education issues. It showed significant support, across the political spectrum, for policies that expand parent options. Respondents also were in broad agreement on what they see as constituting “parent rights.”

“There’s been a parental awakening in Wisconsin.  While voters might be divided on any number of non-education issues, there is substantial agreement when it comes to education,” said Nicholas Kelly, President of School Choice Wisconsin.

A comprehensive summary of poll results can be found here.

Earlier this week SCW highlighted three segments of the poll, as follows:

1. Voters strongly disagree with the statement, by the Vice Chair of the Democratic party, that parents who want “to have a say” in their child’s education should home school or pay tuition at a private school.
2. Voters back current school choice programs. They believe they should be expanded to make all parents eligible.  They believe they should be fully funded.
3. Voters believe parents have clear rights when it comes to their child’s education.

The survey was conducted between February 13th and 16th by OnMessage Inc., a national public opinion research firm. OMI is a national polling firm with decades of experience of public opinion research with regards to school choice issues and more than 30 years of experience in Wisconsin. Within the state, OnMessage has served as lead pollster for candidates at every level of government as well as for numerous non-political clients. In 2019 head OMI pollster Wes Anderson was recognized by the American Association of Political Consultants as “Pollster of the Year”.

If you're a Republican candidate and not saying in every speech, "parents should play the biggest role in public school curriculum," you probably ought to read this poll. pic.twitter.com/at4u61mdTH

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 2, 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?

Rory Linnane:

Did DPI try to make schools look better?

To see how the new formula would change schools’ report card scores, DPI officials ran the new formula on the old 2019 data, which had already been run through the old formula for the 2019 report cards.

After running the numbers, DPI saw that the new formula resulted in lower scores statewide compared to the old formula, with the same 2019 data.

To offset that change, DPI officials changed the numeric goalposts for their standards, so that the same number of schools would meet expectations under both formulas using the same 2019 data.

That way, when people compared a school’s performance over the years, the formula change wouldn’t be as disruptive, DPI said.

The goalposts, also known as cut-scores, were lowered for most performance categories:

Significantly exceeds expectations: stayed the same
Exceeds expectations: moved from 73-82.9 to 70-82.9
Meets expectations: moved from 63-72.9 to 58-69.9
Meets few expectations: moved from 53-62.9 to 48-57.9
Fails: moved from under 52.9 to under 47.9
DPI officials denied any bias in the process. They said they based their changes to the cut-scores based on running the 2019 data through both formulas, before looking at how it would impact 2021 data.

When they ran the 2021 data, it so happened that the same percentage of schools, about 87%, met or exceeded expectations.

What do the report cards actually tell us?

While statewide trends are hard to discern, viewers can still find trends by looking more carefully at report cards for individual districts and schools in various years.

Each report card breaks down a district or school’s standardized test scores for different populations and subject areas, as well as attendance rates and graduation rates.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The request comes after the board voted unanimously to rename James Madison Memorial High School to Vel Phillips Memorial High School, in honor of the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School School, win a seat on the Milwaukee City Council, become a judge in Wisconsin and get elected to statewide office. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.

A committee of community members charged with the task of renaming the high school brought their suggestion before the board’s Operations Work Group in November after a five-month deliberation process. The committee whittled a list of 26 names to four, and finally settled on Phillips in a 10-1 vote in October.

The high school’s name change is the latest of several decisions spurred by Black students pushing for a racial reckoning in Madison. Former Memorial student Mya Berry called on the board to rename the school in August 2020 because James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and the city’s namesake, was a slave owner.

In December 2020 a Madison School Board ad hoc committee, formed to rename Falk Elementary School, voted unanimously to recommend the building be named after Milele Chikasa Anana, a prominent civil rights activist and the first African American to be voted to a public school board in Wisconsin.

Scott Girard:

The only non-unanimous vote came on the instructional time waiver request. Pryor wrote in the memo the district still intends to meet the state’s required hours of instruction for students, but the three-day extension of winter break in early January means the district needs “flexibility to meet the needs of our students.”

“Our weather is unpredictable as well,” MMSD legal counsel Sherry Terrell-Webb told the board. “While we may be OK right now, we can’t calculate in the future we will be, and unfortunately you do have to submit the waiver in a time where right now we may be OK but there is the possibility that we won’t be.”

The district was initially scheduled to return to buildings Jan. 3, but extended winter break through Jan. 5 and moved to virtual instruction Jan. 6 and 7 amid the Omicron surge. Students returned to in-person school on Jan. 10. Those three days, combined with the bad weather day on Feb. 22, meant officials wanted to be on the safe side in case of future closures, though they did not share with the board how close they were to being below the required thresholds.

Wisconsin requires 437 hours of direct instruction in kindergarten, at least 1,050 hours of direct instruction in grades one through six, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades seven through 12.

Board member Cris Carusi was the lone vote against the waiver request, and cited the lost instructional time during the pandemic as a significant concern, despite understanding the need for flexibility.

The attendance waiver rationale cites “some aspects of the law which may be challenging for us to meet.” Those include the statutory definition of truancy referring to a student missing “part of all” of a day, with attendance for virtual learning among elementary students particularly a challenge, according to the memo.

Students are considered “present” for virtual instruction if they do any of the following, the memo states:

• Virtually attend the synchronous, or live, real-time instruction; or

• Complete and submit an asynchronous, or independent learning task assigned by the teacher on the virtual learning platform; or

• Engage in two-way, academically-focused communication (phone call, email exchange, or office hours virtual visit) with a staff member

That makes it “difficult to technically document scholars who miss part of the day,” according to the memo.

Board members Christina Gomez Schmidt and Carusi asked for further discussion on attendance challenges at some point in the future.

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?

Sarah Carr

When Ann Civitareale’s father passed away in 2009, she little fathomed that she would spend thousands of her inheritance on medical and educational testing for her two sons. 

Yet the boys, 12 and 14, have struggled with multiple disabilities — including developmental and speech delays and profound challenges learning to read — that she did not feel the schools could sufficiently diagnose.

Schmud:

Russia has been at continuous war with Ukraine since 2014. The years between Russia’s initial invasion in Crimea and yesterday’s expansion were filled with relentless cyberwarfare. These attacks have inflicted suffering far beyond the boundaries of the network. Much like the Stuxnet virus deployed by Israel and the United States in Iran, these attacks cause physical harm and in the case of Russia’s incursion, have resulted in the deaths of innocent Ukrainians.

Russia’s actions are inline with the Makarov/Gerasimov approach to conflict. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation armed forces, described warfare as a spectrum of theaters in 2013. The theaters extend beyond land, sea, and air. They include terror, propaganda, economic coercion, and cyberwarfare.

Other hegemonic nations undoubtedly deploy similar tactics. But Russia’s strategy is not only explicit, it is time-tested. Here is Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, a former KGB agent and defector, describing similar Soviet tactics in 1984.

Stephen B. Billings, Hugh Macartney, Geunyong Park & John D. Singleton:

In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of losing candidates. We find that student test scores in the neighborhood public schools of non-Democratic winners also relatively increase, but this effect is driven by changing student composition, including via the manipulation of attendance zones, rather than improvements in school quality (as measured by test score value-added). Notably, we detect no differential changes when comparing neighborhood or scholastic outcomes between winning and losing Democratic school board candidates. These results suggest that partisan affiliation is correlated with private motivations for seeking public office.

John Cook:

I’m combining two closely-related but separate skills here. One is the ability to simple calculations. The other is the ability to know what to calculate, how to do so-called Fermi problems. These problems are named after Enrico Fermi, someone who was known for being able to make rough estimates with little or no data.

A famous example of a Fermi problem is “How many piano tuners are there in New York?” I don’t know whether this goes back to Fermi himself, but it’s the kind of question he would ask. Of course nobody knows exactly how many piano tuners there are in New York, but you could guess about how many piano ownersthere are, how often a piano needs to be tuned, and how many tuners it would take to service this demand.

The piano tuner example is more complicated than the kinds of calculations I have to do on Zoom calls, but it may be the most well-known Fermi problem.

In my work with data privacy, for example, I often have to estimate how common some combination of personal characteristics is. Of course nobody should bet their company on guesses I pull out of the air, but it does help keep a conversation going if I can say on the spot whether something sounds like a privacy risk or not. If a project sounds feasible, then I go back and make things more precise.

Suhail Saqan:

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has grown to be very popular in public-key cryptographic systems, most popularly used in Bitcoin. ECC is based on the algebraic structures of elliptic curves over finite fields and the complexity of the elliptic curves discrete logarithm problem.

ECC incorporates all important asymmetric cryptographic systems features, including encryption, signatures, and key exchange. Because ECC employs fewer keys and signatures for the same degree of security as RSA and enables very quick key generation, key agreement, and signatures, it is considered a natural contemporary successor to the RSA cryptographic systems.

This article aims to explain elliptic curve cryptography and digital signatures used in Bitcoin in detail as simply as possible.

Cal Newport

Sanderson’s final piece of advice is to break large goals down into manageable pieces. He notes, for example, that the novel he’s currently writing is longer than the entire Hunger Gamesseries combined. This is “a really big book,” he exclaims, before saying he can only tackle an endeavor of this size “word by word.”

He goes on to reveal that he wishes that he had been given a more detailed roadmap when he first set out to be a writer. The experienced novelists that he asked for advice would just tell him to “write.” Better advice, he noted, would have been to setup a practice regime, centered on writing a certain number of complete manuscripts, each of expanding size and ambition, all aimed at developing his chops to the point that he’d be ready to produce something sellable.

A related idea I talk about a lot on my podcastis the importance of creating accurate roadmaps toward these types of goals. Talk to people who have succeed before and have them walk you step-by-step through their story, allowing you to learn what really matters and what doesn’t. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when setting out to do something impressive is creating a story around what activities you want to be important, instead of what actually makes a difference.

Spencer Kimball:

Pfizer and BioNTech’s two-dose Covid vaccine provided very little protection for children aged 5 to 11 during the wave of omicron infection in New York, according to a study published Monday.

The New York State Department of Health found that the effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine against Covid infection plummeted from 68% to 12% for kids in that age group during the omicron surge from Dec. 13 through Jan 24. Protection against hospitalization dropped from 100% to 48% during the same period.

The study has not yet undergone peer review, the academic gold standard. Due to the public health urgency of the pandemic, scientists have been publishing the results of their studies before such review.

The team of public health officials who conducted the study said the dramatic drop in vaccine effectiveness among children 5 to 11 years old was likely due to the lower dosage they received. Kids in this age group are given two 10-microgram shots, while children aged 12 to 17 receive 30-microgram shots.

The researchers also compared 11 and 12 year olds during the weekend ended Jan. 30. They found the vaccine effectiveness plunged to 11% for the low-dosage group but offered 67% protection to the group that received the higher dose.

“Given rapid loss of protection against infections, these results highlight the continued importance of layered protections, including mask wearing, for children to prevent infection and transmission,” the public health officials wrote in the study.

CDPH is refusing to disclose the emails between @CAPublicHealth & @WeAreCTA about K-12 school masking because they “reveal the deliberative process of CDPH leadership.”

Why is CTA involved in the “deliberative process” of school masking policies? What is CDPH hiding? pic.twitter.com/pjbLD0PUQ0

— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) February 28, 2022

.@MMSDschools spokesperson says in statement that Memorial High and Jefferson Middle schools have been evacuated “as a result of a detailed bomb threat.”

“All students and staff are safe.” pic.twitter.com/1MfgSQub2z

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) February 28, 2022

More updates on this week at Memorial High School, per @MMSDschools: pic.twitter.com/nIH7qNKmHG

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) March 2, 2022

Public schools putting out more advertisements for school choice today… pic.twitter.com/VyDOMCLxdD

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 28, 2022

Jacob Ryan:

Two years ago, prosecutors offered a St. Matthews man a deal: give up $380,000 in cash through asset forfeiture, and criminal charges just filed against his family would be dropped.

The case has now been resolved, with no criminal convictions for anyone involved — but police and prosecutors still kept the bulk of the cash.

Patrick Card was arrested in 2019 after the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office and the St. Matthews Police seized marijuana at his house and prescribed pain pills and cash he kept at his parents’ house. Police were serving a domestic violence order on Card after his mother accused him of assaulting her a few days before, a charge that would later be dismissed.

As prosecutors began negotiating to resolve four counts of drug trafficking against Card — the source of what was potentially St. Matthews biggest cash seizure in years — they indicted his mother, father and wife, KyCIR reported in March 2020.

The assistant Jefferson Commonwealth’s Attorney Josh Porter offered Card a plea deal that would reduce his charges and dismiss those against his family if he forfeited the cash. If he chose to fight the seizure, they’d continue criminal cases against his wife, and then 68-year-old mother and 69-year-old father, according to a written plea offer.

Daily fig:

“Many people must be wishing that the secret of atomic fission had never been discovered,”lamented the distinguished critic and philosopher Joseph Wood Krutch, “but we are saddled with the atom bomb, and it looks as though we would have to live — or die — with it.” Such existential problems are the subject of The Butter Battle Book (public library), a controversial arms race allegory by Dr. Seuss published in 1984. Full of the famous author’s trademark artwork and whimsical rhymes, the book also contains a stinging satire on nationalism, militarism, and the escalation of violence.

It starts innocently enough. A grandfather takes his grandson for a walk alongside an enormous wall that separates two people. The difference between the groups? Yooks eat their bread with the butter on top — Zooks with the butter on the bottom. The culinary preference is the only discernible difference between the two groups, save for the color of their clothing. But what appears to readers to be a subtle distinction is not insignificant to the characters in the story.

Howard Blume:

Confidence in California public schools has declined as voters and parents overwhelmingly have concluded that the quality of education worsened during the pandemic, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.

Pollsters asked voters to give schools a letter-grade rating from A to F — essentially the same question asked of voters in a 2011 USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. A decade ago, the results were interpreted as sobering; the numbers are worse now.

Statewide, about 21% of voters give the state’s public schools an A or B; in 2011 it was 27%. Meanwhile, D or F grades statewide rose 15 percentage points in the last decade, from 13% to 28%.

In the city of Los Angeles, 18% of voters give schools an A or B; about 1 in 3 voters give D or F marks to public schools. Comparable figures are not available for 2011.

“The decline is significant,” Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS poll, who has surveyed voters in California for more than four decades. “It could be a long-term trend, but I would certainly think that the impact of COVID has probably contributed to it.”

As in 2011, voters still give their local schools higher marks on average than they give to schools statewide, but the gap has shrunk. Statewide, 35% of voters give an A or B to “the public schools attended by children who live in your neighborhood.” 

The percentage in Los Angeles was 24%. Improving both the perception and reality of L.A schools is part of the agenda laid out in a “100-Day Plan” unveiled Thursday by new L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho.

Steven Malanga:

After two years of fighting Covid, public officials are still debating how schools should respond to the virus. Despite ample data showing that virus transmission in schools has been generally weak and that cases among kids are often mild, governors in some states have been slow to ease restrictions on schools even as they lift them on society in general. This makes the U.S. an outlier. We’ve imposed tougher restrictions on schools, including closures, than have our peer countries. Meantime, state policy has varied widely, with some states offering much less in-person instruction to children than others.

The data can be framed in various ways, but one significant factor is that in places where teachers’ unions are the strongest, schools have been closed the longest. No wonder, then, that for the second straight year, public schools appear to be losing students and, according to a new survey, parents are increasingly embracing school choice.

Many of the world’s richest industrialized countries boast scientific and medical expertise that approaches that of the United States and have grappled with serious Covid outbreaks for as long as America has. Yet according to UNESCO’s latest data, virtually all have closed schools for far less time than the U.S. In France, where the first wave of the Omicron variant crested in December, schools have been closed for an average of 12 weeks throughout the two years of Covid. Spain has shuttered them for 15 weeks. Italy and Germany have been tougher, having closed schools for 38 weeks apiece. The U.K. sits in between those four countries, at 27 weeks. Our neighbor to the north, Canada—increasingly seen amid the truckers’ protests as endorsing among the most restrictive measures—tallied 41 weeks. American schools have lost a staggering 71 weeks of in-person instruction since Covid began.

Country-wide averages can be misleading, as state reactions to Covid have varied widely. A year ago, as vaccines were becoming widely available, an audit of school districts throughout the country discovered wide variations of in-person instruction. The audit gave states a score between one and 100, with one being the least amount of in-person instruction and 100 the most. The lowest states were Maryland (with a score of just 9.8), California (11.1), Oregon, and Washington. Illinois scored marginally higher, at 37.6, in the same range as states like New Jersey and Massachusetts. By contrast, Texas was almost completely back to in-person instruction, with a ranking of 90.8 on the in-person index. Florida came in at 99.9. In all, 15 states, mostly in the South and Central Plains, had returned to in-person instruction 80 percent or more of the time.

James Macpherson:

Will the West’s obsession with Woke survive war in Europe? Or will Putin’s missiles finally explode the Never-Never Land of unreality in which we have been living?

It’s early days, of course, but so far, the West’s mythical land of prancing unicorns looks bulletproof.

Even as rockets rained down on Ukraine, Western elites worried about how the war would affect LGBTQ people, as if Putin might have developed queer-seeking missiles.

Others voiced concern that grandparents huddled in bomb shelters beneath the pockmarked streets of Kiev might not be social distancing.

The New York Times lamented that few of the Ukrainians fleeing for their lives were wearing masks. They probably weren’t triple-boosted either. And God forbid any of them were shot dead without first using a QR-code to check out.

Meanwhile, former US Secretary of State John Kerry expressed dismay at what he called the ‘emissions consequences’ of war in Europe. He would presumably be far more comfortable with the Russian invasion had their tanks first met strict European emission standards.

Molly Beck:

Darling testified in a recent public hearing on the bill that the overhaul was necessary in her view to address persistently low performance among students, the vast majority of whom are living in poverty.

Darling said 4.2% of MPS students are proficient in math and 7.3% are proficient in English, according to performance on the state’s Forward exam last year.

When considering that 57% of MPS students didn’t take the test, as many were not attending school in person due to the pandemic, about 10% of test-takers were proficient in math and 17% in English — still steep drops from the previous round of tests, and lagging the state.

Darling and Assembly lead author Robert Wittke, R-Racine, testified in the Assembly Education Committee hearing on Feb. 17 they had heard from parents and business leaders that a major change was needed.

If Judge Jackson is confirmed the SCOTUS will consist of 4 Harvard Law grads and 4 Yale Law grads, plus 1 Notre Dame Law grad. (Justice Amy Barrett = diversity.) It will have 3 Princeton undergrads, 2 from Harvard, and 1 each from Yale, Georgetown, Holy Cross, and Rhodes College.

— Robert P. George🇻🇦🇺🇸🪕 (@McCormickProf) February 26, 2022

Yet, taxpayers lavishly subsidize the Ivy League.

Story by Rebecca Monteleone and Jamie Brew; Design + code by Michelle McGhee

Moreover, the simplicity of readability checkers has enabled their widespread adoption. Military engineers use them to help write technical documents. Governments and doctors use them to guide communication for a general audience. Schools and textbook manufacturers use them to tailor reading assignments to particular grade levels and students.

Readability scores are easy to understand. Many people use these scores to help them write. Some groups that use readability scores are:

• The military.
• The government.
• Doctors.
• Schools.

To better understand how readability scores work—and how they can fail—let’s look at three representative examples.

To better understand how readability scores work—and how they can fail—let’s look at three representative examples.

Tara Henley:

Many people in this country are reeling. Parliament has now approved the use of the Emergencies Act, keeping measures in place until mid-March. 

This is an extraordinary development, and one that’s generated many questions from the public. What does it mean to live under the Emergencies Act? Who will it impact? What does it mean for protest movements going forward? And: What does it say about the state of our democracy?

To unpack these questions, I reached out to Ryan Alford. He’s a constitutional law expert, a professor at the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University, and the author of Seven Absolute Rights: Recovering the Historical Foundations of Canada’s Rule of Law. Here, he offers some analysis of this historic moment in Canadian history. 

For people still getting up to speed, what happened last night?

Parliament, as required by the Emergencies Act, met within seven days of the invocation of the act by the government, to confirm that the act should remain in force for a period of up to 30 days. What that means is that one chamber of Parliament has approved the continuing operation on the Emergencies Act; the Senate will need to debate this and vote on this as well. With that approval, the cabinet can continue to issue regulations that have the force of law, without any oversight from Parliament, for 30 days beginning with the proclamation of the Emergencies Act last week.

Richard orange Malmo:

Recurring lockdowns imposed across Europe to curb Covid-19 were neither “necessary” nor “defensible”, Sweden’s official inquiry into its handling of the pandemic has concluded….

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?

Schmud:

Such events are rare, but the reality remains: readers have few rights when it comes to reading digital books. It could be argued that our current misinformation epidemic makes access to books more important than ever. But eBook publishers and distributors are arbitrarily restricting access and the corporate benefits of eBook restrictions are dubious.

Ebooks have taken a different path than other small media formats such as music. Without getting into a comparative analysis, I’ll broadly assert that digital music files are generally distributed in a more open format than eBooks. Ebooks from Amazon, the largest retailer in the market, are saddled with digital rights management (DRM). These reader-hostile measures have not translated into adoption.Meanwhile, digital music streaming is booming at the expense of paid music downloading. While downloads are shrinking on platforms like iTunes and Amazon, independent artists are seeing significant growth on sites like Bandcamp. Listeners have a fair choice. They are not locked into an ecosystem. If they choose to buy music, they can listen to it without restriction.

Mack DeGeurin:

Law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology during investigations has blossomed in recent years thanks in no small part to a boomingsurveillance industry built on the back of an ever-expanding buffet of publicly available biometric data. The limits on where and how that technology can be used though remain legally murky and are constantly evolving. Now, it appears at least some law enforcement agents are flirting with the idea of using facial recognition at otherwise seemingly benign traffic stops, a potential loosening of the tech’s use that has legal and privacy experts on edge.

As first reported earlier this month by Insider’s Caroline Haskins, that hypothetical was floated during a 2021 episode of the Street Cop Training podcast, a program intended for police officers looking to learn new investigative techniques. In the episode, the show’s host, Dennis Benigno poses a scenario to his guest, Nick Jerman.

“Let’s say you are on a traffic stop and we have someone in the car who we suspect may be wanted?” Benigno asked. “How would you go about investigating somebody who you think may be trying to hide their apprehension and hide out who they are?”

Jerman, who had spent the rest of the episode describing ways to use publicly available social media tools to identify potential targets during a police investigation, responded by saying, “there are a couple paid programs you can use, [presumably referring to Clearview AI and apps like it] where you can take their [the driver’s] picture and it will put it [the photo] in.”

Scott Jaschik:

If you are applying to the University of California, Los Angeles, you can’t submit a letter of recommendation.

The reason is equity, said Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, vice provost for enrollment management. “The caseload for most public school counselors is incredibly heavy,” she said. “Despite their desire to support their senior students, they have many responsibilities.”

She said low-income students “are more likely” to have teachers who are overworked and are teaching under emergency credentialing systems. Copeland-Morgan said that when you consider the context, it is unfair to accept letters, so UCLA has not done so “for decades.”

C Bradley Thompson

This essay serves as an introduction to yet another series of essays that I will be writing in the weeks ahead, this time on the topic of educational freedom. In my previous 10-part series on the question of rights and education (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), I established the moral foundation for thinking about education in a free society. I there explored questions such as:

• Is there a right to an education?
• Do parents have an unalienable right to determine how, in what, and by whom their children will be educated?
• What rights or authority does the government have to educate children?

With this new series, I’d like to turn in the weeks ahead to the institutional question, “who shall educate the children, the State or parents (including their proxies)?” More specifically, I will be concerned to examine the moral and educational status of top-down, government schooling versus bottom-up, parent-chosen schooling.

All of the essays in the series will head toward a twofold conclusion: first, government schooling is immoral and incompatible with a free society; and, second, a free market in education is the only moral system for educating children and the only one compatible with a free society.

I’d like to begin this series with a brief intellectual autobiography on how and why I came to think about these issues and why I care about them so passionately. We might think of this as an exercise in how to think—in principles and on principle—like a Redneck. Welcome to Redneck Logic 101.

Since the day I started kindergarten, I have spent my entire life in school. I attended elementary, middle, and high schools for 14 years! (I know what you’re thinking: the Redneck Intellectual must have, not surprisingly, failed a grade or two. But you would be wrong. Back in the day, Canadian Rednecks had to attend grade 13 if they wanted to go to college. Yes, grade 13! Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.) Then I went off college for four years, then did a master’s degree, then taught for two years at an all-boys boarding school, then went back to graduate school to do a Ph.D., and ever since then I have been a college professor.

I have only been two things in my life: a student or a teacher. I know no other way of life. Learning and teaching is all I know, it’s what I do, and, truth be told, it’s all I care about.

Caroline Downey:

A high-ranking member of one of the largest teachers’ unions in California published a satirical letter Monday mocking parental calls for curriculum transparency, demanding a detailed report of the content and influences children are being exposed to at home.

Owen Jackman, a delegate to the California Teachers’ Union state council and a teacher in Sacramento City Unified School District, wrote a sarcastic Facebook post deriding parent concerns about progressive pedagogy, suggesting that parental rights are equal or subordinate to teachers’ rights in education.

Addressing parents who advocate for their kids at school board meetings as “storm troopers,”

Daniel Lemire:

People seem to think that if the software requires some document, then surely the rules require the document in question. That is, human beings believe that the software must be an accurate embodiment of the law.

In some sense, software does the policing. It enforces the rules. But like the actual police, software can go far beyond the law… and most people won’t notice.

An actual policeman can be intimidating. However, it is a human being. If they ask something that does not make sense, you are likely to question them. You are also maybe more likely to think that a policeman could be mistaken. Software is like a deaf policeman. And people want software to be correct.

Suppose you ran a university and you wanted all professors to include a section on religion in all their courses. You could not easily achieve such a result by the means of law. Changing the university regulations to add such a requirement would be difficult at a secular institution. However, if you simply make it that all professors must fill out a section on religion when registering a course, then professors would probably do it without question.

Of course, you can achieve the same result with bureaucracy. You just change the forms and the rules. But it takes much effort. Changing software is comparatively easier. There is no need to document the change very much. There is no need to train the staff.

Brian Krebs:

Parson tasked the Missouri Highway Patrol to produce a report on their investigation into “the hackers.”  On Monday, Feb. 21, The Post-Dispatch published the 158-page report (PDF), which concluded after 175 hours of investigation that Renaud did nothing wrong and only accessed information that was publicly available.

Emails later obtained by the Post-Dispatch showed that the FBI told state cybersecurity officials that there was “not an actual network intrusion” and the state database was “misconfigured.” The emails also revealed the proposed message when education department leaders initially prepared to respond in October:

“We are grateful to the member of the media who brought this to the state’s attention,” was the proposed quote attributed to the state’s education commissioner before Parson began shooting the messenger.

The Missouri Highway Patrol report includes an interview with Mallory McGowin, the chief communications officer for the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). McGowin told police the website weakness actually exposed 576,000 teacher Social Security numbers, and the data would have been publicly exposed for a decade.

McGowin also said the DESE’s website was developed and maintained by the Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division (ITSD) — which the governor’s office controls directly.

“I asked Mrs. McGowin if I was correct in saying the website was for DESE but it was maintained by ITSD, and she indicated that was correct,” the Highway Patrol investigator wrote. “I asked her if the ITSD was within the Office of Administration, or if DESE had their on-information technology section, and she indicated it was within the Office of Administration. She stated in 2009, policy was changed to move all information technology services to the Office of Administration.”

Meliza González, Tianna Loose, Maite Liz, Mónica Pérez, Juan I. Rodríguez-Vinçon, Clementina Tomás-Llerena , Alejandro Vásquez-Echeverría:

The COVID-19 context has created the most severe disruption to education systems in recent history. Its impact on child development was estimated comparing two cohorts of 4- to 6-year-old Uruguayan children: control (n = 34,355, 48.87% girls) and COVID cohort (n = 30,158, 48.95% girls) assessed between 2018 and 2020 in three waves, by a routinely administered school readiness instrument in public preschools. Ethnicity information is not available. For the COVID cohort, losses were observed in Motor and Cognitive development, Attitudes towards learning, and Internalizing behavior (range 0.13 – 0.27 SD). Losses were less pronounced among children from higher socioeconomic schools. These results extend the literature on the consequences of the pandemic on learning and early child development.

School Choice Wisconsin:

Wisconsin voters strongly support making all families eligible for the state’s school choice programs and favor ending funding inequities between choice, charter, and traditional public schools. These are among key findings on education issues in a scientific, random sample poll conducted earlier this month by one of the nation’s leading opinion research firms. 

“Parents want more options. They want to be more involved. It’s as simple as that,” said Nic Kelly, President of School Choice Wisconsin. 

The poll showed support for school choice across the political spectrum. While strong Republican support is unsurprising, noteworthy is solid majority support among independents and sizable support among Democrats. 

SCW retained OnMessage Inc. to conduct the poll. The firm’s national recognition includes being named “Pollster of the Year” in 2019 by the American Association of Political Consultants (https://theaapc.org). 

Wisconsin parents have four tax-supported options for enrolling children in K-12 schools. They are: (1) traditional public schools in the district where a family lives; (2) traditional public schools in districts other than where a family lives; (3) public charter schools; and (4) private schools in one of the state school choice programs. All parents may participate in the first three options, while the private choice programs are limited largely to lower income families. 

Taxpayer support of charter schools and choice schools is about 60% of traditional school funding. Students at these schools generally outperform those in traditional public schools on state proficiency exams. Students in choice programs consistently score higher on the college-readiness ACT test. In Milwaukee, the state’s Department of Public Instruction finds that twice as many choice and charter students attend highly-ranked schools when compared with students in the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Commentary

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?

Nadia Ramlagan:

The analysis by Aaron Clauset at the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues revealed that only 25% of the institutions produced 71 to 86% of all tenure-track faculty. Between 70 and 90% of professors at these elite schools received their doctorates from other elite schools, while only about 5% received training outside this group.

The researchers also uncovered a systematic bias against women with elite doctorates, who slid further down the hierarchy in their faculty jobs compared with men from the same institutions.

“We can see there is this bias in the system, but we can’t say yet what causes the bias.” Clauset said, speaking to journalists at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting. There are a variety of possible reasons for this that the researchers hope to explore next, to determine whether there might be bias in hiring decisions, or if women are exiting the job pipeline in different ways than men.

Clauset and his colleagues spent three years compiling this massive hiring record, without the aid of any centralized database.”There is no organization that actually tracks faculty placements generally in academia, or even within most disciplines,” said Clauset.

Wisconsin institute for law and liberty:

On Saturday, February 19, 2022, Concordia University Wisconsin suspended Rev. Dr. Gregory Schulz, a full professor of philosophy and Lutheran pastor. At first, Dr. Schulz did not know why he was suspended because the University locked him out of his email account and banned him from campus properties. By Monday, things had become more clear: Concordia’s leadership suspended Dr. Schulz because of an articlehe wrote in Christian News critiquing the University’s recent embrace of “woke-ness” and “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Even though Dr. Schulz’s employment contract with the University guarantees “academic freedom” and “due process,” the University gave him neither freedom nor process. Now, Concordia threatens to terminate Dr. Schulz unless he publicly “recants.”

Keith David:

At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel.

Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an advisee of mine for a year already, and I’d come to understand that he was a prodigy. I’d also formed a hypothesis, based on a certain bluntness and lack of social tact he exhibited, that Daniel might be on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum. He seemed weak on interpersonal skills and narrowly, even obsessively, focused on math and science. During his first year of university studies, Daniel had taken a number of upper-level math and physics courses that none of my other advisees had taken, and had earned flat As in almost all of them. His GPA probably would have been a perfect 4.0 if the university had allowed him to take only math and science courses. As it was, it was a 3.85.

At the end of his freshman year, Daniel applied for admission to a competitive honors program that our university runs, but he was rejected. He came to my office to discuss this—or, rather, to complain about it. I soon realized that he was not just disappointed; he was angry. Daniel believed he’d been treated unfairly. He believed he was the victim of reverse racism.

I told Daniel that I understood why he was upset, but I reminded him that the program he’d applied to is highly competitive. The admissions committee presumably received many strong applications. There is always some subjectivity in admissions decisions, I noted, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Subjectivity isn’t the same as unfairness.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Caire, UW-Oshkosh and Madison Area Technical College are hashing out a dual enrollment partnership that would allow students to gain college credits while in high school and potentially earn an associate degree, too, which could be used to transfer to a UW campus or an institution outside the System.

The idea may even go beyond dual enrollment, he said, with some students potentially able to earn a bachelor’s degree at the end of five high school years due to the school’s longer, three-semester schedule.

“This will be a revolutionary exercise in education,” he said.

Former Wisconsin governor and current UW System interim President Tommy Thompson, who has been a supporter of Caire and One City for years, was present at the Wednesday signing.

Students in grades 4K-4 are currently learning on the third floor of the new facility, purchased by One City Schools in March through a $14 million donation from American Girl founder and philanthropist Pleasant Rowland. Caire said his plan for the 157,000-square-foot office building, on the campus of WPS Health Solutions in Monona adjacent to South Madison, is to build a full K-12 charter school with an enrollment of nearly 1,000 students by the 2024-25 school 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?

Timothy Taylor:

This one-paragraph 1997 short story by Lydia Davis, “A Position at the University,” captures, at least for me, some of the ambivalence involved in identifying myself as an academic–that is, about being “the sort of person who has a position at the university.” Davis wrote: 

I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

The international schools in Hong Kong are, to put it mildly, a bit upset. pic.twitter.com/2fI1HBS1OX

— Old China Bland (香港) (@OldChinaBland) February 23, 2022

Rav Arora:

In Canada last week, Trudeau set a historic precedent by declaring a National Emergency on dubious grounds. This act has existed for 34 years without once being invoked, and now the Trudeau government is wielding it as a cudgel against one of the most organized displays of civil disobedience in Canadian history. 

Three weeks prior, the Freedom Convoy rolled out of Vancouver. Media smears proclaimed that they were a Covid convoy spreading a plague across the land, or that they were a band of alt-right white supremacists. Justin Trudeau called them a “small fringe minority” who held “unacceptable views” that “do not represent the views of Canadians.” These remarks seemed to galvanize supporters of the Freedom Convoy. Large demonstrations popped up across Canada, and on January 28th the convoy arrived in Ottawa. Protesters clogged the streets of Canada’s capital, rallying against nationwide vaccine mandates and other Covid restrictions.

On the ground, the reality of the movement starkly clashed with the melodrama of the government’s declaration of a National Emergency: kids jumpingin bouncy castles, crowds merrily singing and dancing (a relief in the bitter cold), protesters hugging police officers, and youth playing street hockey. In one video, a group of Sikh Canadians can be seen preparing traditional Indian meals to feed the truckers (an act of charity known as “seva” in the Sikh tradition), all in the name of national unity and freedom.

In fact, Trudeau’s opponents bear more resemblance to Gandhi’s satyagraha movement than any terrorist faction. The truckers and their supporters were brimming with national pride, and they appeared to be committed to peaceful protest, non-compliance, and civil disobedience. 

Only Trudeau and his media allies’ warped, Machiavellian perception could caricature this diverse coalition as a group of “swastika wavers.”When the media was able to find a handful of protestors donning a Swastika, or spot a couple confederate flags in the convoy, the predictable histrionics ensued, as Liberal and NDP politicians attempted to defame the intentions of the vast majority of those present. 

In a particularly striking example of the disconnect between the dominant media narrative and the reality on the ground, a local gym owner, Soungui Koulamallah, brought his mother, who “watches the news religiously,” to the protests where she was pleasantly surprised by the geniality of the demonstrators:

“I don’t know what they’re talking about in the news — these people are so friendly.”

I spoke to Koulamallah — whose family immigrated from Chad and Haiti — about his experience at the protests.

Don Watkins and Robert Hendershott

The safest way to travel is by air—and air travel has never been safer. MIT researchers found that from 1988 to 1997 there was one fatality per 1.3 million passenger boardings globally. From 2008 to 2017 that number had plummeted to one fatality per 7.9 million boardings. 

“The worldwide risk of being killed had been dropping by a factor of two every decade,” says Arnold Barnett, an MIT scholar who has published a new paper summarizing the study’s results. “Not only has that continued in the last decade, the [latest] improvement is closer to a factor of three. The pace of improvement has not slackened at all even as flying has gotten ever safer and further gains become harder to achieve. That is really quite impressive and is important for people to bear in mind.”

In the U.S., the news is even better. There hasn’t been a single fatality from an airline crash in 12 years. 

How is that possible? It’s certainly not that the human beings in the airline industry are infallible, or that their task is an easy one. Instead, the answer comes down to how they’ve dealt with failure: namely, they’ve actively created an environment that allows them, even requires them, to learn from it. 

You’ve probably heard about black boxes, which record data from airplanes so that in the event of a crash, analysts can piece together what went wrong, understand why things went wrong, and develop procedures to avoid repeating the mistakes. But that is only part of the story. According to the Wall Street Journal:

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?

Joel Kotkin:

The urban fringe is where the American dream is now being re­discovered. But these fringes remain widely disdained in academia, media, and the planning community. This was most evident during the financial crisis when there were widespread media accounts suggesting, among other things, that the exurbs would become “the next slums,” the equivalent of “roadkill” doomed by changing economics and demo­graphics.⁵ The New York Times even suggested how to carve up the suburban carcass, with some envisioning that suburban three-car garages would be “subdivided into rental units with street front cafés, shops and other local businesses,” while abandoned pools would become skateboard parks.⁶ Yet this is exactly what did not happen.

The Exurban Revolution

In the new Urban Reform Institute report, we identified the fifty high­est‑growth large counties in terms of net domestic migration from 2015 to 2019. These areas grew their population at 7.5 times the rate of the country’s other 3,100 counties during this period and gained 1.8 million net domestic migrants. Out of the fifty, all but seven are located in combined statistical areas (CSAs) of more than 500,000 residents. And each of these outer counties are within or close to a two-hour commute time of a central core county. Key areas include Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Orlando.⁷

The key demographic headed to these places is young people in prime family formation years. From 2015 to 2019, these counties saw an increase in twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds of 12.8 percent, almost four times the 3.4 percent growth rate in the other counties. The high­est‑growth counties also have a far higher rate of school-age children (five- to fourteen-year-olds) per household than the rest of the nation—0.66 compared to 0.43 for the other counties. The highest growth counties have 3.5 times as many school-age children per household than, for example, Manhattan and San Francisco⁸ and 75 percent more school-age children per household than other counties in the United States.⁹

This migration is not a repeat of the “white flight” that drove peripheral growth a half century ago. To be sure, during the great mass suburbanization of the mid-twentieth century, many communities—Levittown and Lakewood are well-known examples—excluded ethnic minorities, providing planners and “smart growth” advocates a rationale to claim that single-family neighborhoods are inherently racist ever since.¹⁰ This assertion is seriously out of date, however. Over the past decade, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than 4 percent of growth in suburbs and exurbs, while Latinos accounted for nearly half, with Asians, African Americans, mixed race, and other groups making up the balance.¹¹

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?

Peter Cordi:

NPR recently published an article in which several interviewees share what skin color emojis they use and why they choose that specific color. The article then listed academics’ arguments for why using a yellow emoji is an act of “white privilege.” 

“For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways,” Berlin-based researcher Zara Rahman states in the article. 

Rahman’s academic background includes a stint as a “Non-Resident Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University’s Centre on Philanthropy and Civil Society,” according to the researcher’s website.

Sharon Lerner:

The “lab-leak” hypothesis is bolstered by a long history of accidents at facilities that study pathogens and the fact that one such laboratory that specializes in coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, is located in the very city where the pandemic first began. As many have noted, China has not been forthcoming with information that could help us understand the origins of the pandemic, blocking accessto a cave that may hold important clues, taking a database of information about coronaviruses offline, and refusing requests for records from the World Health Organization.

But the U.S. government, which funded some of the coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a New York-based research organization called EcoHealth Alliance, has also withheld information that could provide insight into the origins of the pandemic. The Intercept filed a Freedom of Information Act request in September 2020 for grants the NIH provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At the time, only summaries of the research were publicly available. The NIH initially refused to provide the documents. It was only after The Intercept sued the federal agency that it agreed to provide thousands of pages of relevant materials.

Some of these releases have proven newsworthy. The grant proposals received in an initial batch of documents in September revealed that scientists working under the grant in Wuhan were engaged in what most knowledgeable experts we consulted described as gain-of-function experiments, in which scientists created mutant bat coronaviruses and used them to infect “humanized mice.” The mutant viruses proved more pathogenic and transmissible in the mice than the original viruses. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied that the U.S. had funded gain-of-function work in Wuhan.

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?

Playgrounds closed, so kids bodies’ stagnate.
Schools closed, so their education stagnates.
Libraries closed, so their minds stagnate.
Separated from parents if they fall ill, so their emotions stagnate.

For families, Hong Kong is a city of sadness.

— Old China Bland (香港) (@OldChinaBland) February 23, 2022

David Blaska:

One conclusion from the first debate among candidates for Madison school board: Stop blaming COVID for our failing schools and own up to what we’ve done to our kids. Covid was the cover story school board president Ali Muldrow spun for the on-going chaos in Madison’s classrooms. (Another brawl at East high school Monday 02-21-22.) But that’s progressivism, isn’t it? Always an excuse, always someone else to blame, never taking responsibility. Our schools and the culture at large play identity politics. Making someone else — or history itself — the villain absolves the victim of responsibility for their own actions.

During the on-line debate Sunday night 02-20-22, Blaska the write-in candidate for Muldrow’s seat #4 said kids cannot learn if they do not feel safe. We excerpt from that debate, sponsored by Grandparents United for Madison Public Schools (GRUMPS) and the East Side Progressives. (Hope they’ve recovered from the shock!) Here, Blaska is on the clock for 2 minutes:

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

When an institution like the CDC refuses to release data, it undermines the dignity of the people it serves.

It undermines our ability to adapt and innovate, to discuss policy in light of the latest.

It undermines our open, honest & endless pursuit of answers.

— Alex Washburne (@WashburneAlex) February 21, 2022

Chris Rickert

Of the nearly 1,400 absentee ballot certificates, maybe 45 or 50 were worth a second look.

Seven of the certificates, printed on the back of the return envelopes containing absentee ballots, lacked a witness address, which should have disqualified the associated ballots immediately. Eight others listed addresses but no ZIP codes, city or state. Some were not dated, or displayed dates that had been crossed out and corrected.

In some cases, clerks corrected the errors; in others, they didn’t. But in all cases, the ballots contained in the envelopes were counted, and the clerks who counted them say the voters who cast them were all eligible to vote.

The mistakes by voters in the Dodge County towns of Herman, Lomira and Rubicon, which went heavily for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, were not surprising. A similar review by the Wisconsin State Journal of thousands of ballots cast in the Democratic stronghold of Madison turned up scores of ballot envelopes in which voters made the same kinds of small errors.

But the reviews suggest that failure to follow the fine print in filling out a government form doesn’t discriminate by party, even as some Republicans in the Legislature are seeking to prohibit clerks from “curing” ballot certificates with incomplete information.

Clerks are allowed to return ballots to voters to correct defects as time allows, although they’re not required to. Since 2016, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has also instructed clerks that they may make minor corrections to witness addresses and initial any changes they make.

Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing:

Al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent activists, is known for helping lead a campaign to end the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. She was released from jail in February 2021 on charges of harming national security.

Soon after her release from jail, the activist received an email from Google warning her that state-backed hackers had tried to penetrate her Gmail account. Fearful that her iPhone had been hacked as well, al-Hathloul contacted the Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to probe her device for evidence, three people close to al-Hathloul told Reuters.

After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target.

He said the finding, computer code left by the attack, provided direct evidence NSO built the espionage tool.

Apporva Mandavilli:

Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s deputy director for public health science and surveillance said the pandemic exposed the fact that data systems at the C.D.C., and at the state levels, are outmoded and not up to handling large volumes of data. C.D.C. scientists are trying to modernize the systems, he said.

“We want better, faster data that can lead to decision making and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate the lag in data that has held us back,” he added.

The C.D.C. also has multiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important publications, and its officials must alert the Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees the agency — and the White House of their plans. The agency often shares data with states and partners before making data public. Those steps can add delays.

“The C.D.C. is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. “The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the C.D.C.”

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?

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders

#1 – Wisconsin is 8th in Education Nationwide

Governor Evers made the claim during his state of the state that Wisconsin’s “education system” has moved from 18th to 8th in the nation during his administration, and gave the credit to increased spending in public schools.  His claim appears to come from a report from US News that ranks the 50 states on their overall educational systems. However, a number of large caveats need to be attached to this data.

The report only takes into account three factors: pre-K enrollment, standardized test scores, and graduation rates. One area Wisconsin does do quite well is in the high school graduation rate, and it is without a doubt a credit to the schools around the state that ensure that students achieve high school graduation goals.

But the picture becomes far murkier when it comes to the area of student achievement. On NAEP scores, Wisconsin continues to have among the largest racial achievement gaps in the country. Proficiency rates on the state exam in some districts are below 10%, despite these districts being ranked as “Meeting Expectations” on the state’s report card. These are real problems for which the only solution from the Governor, in general, appears to be spending more money. While it may be possible to craft a metric by which Wisconsin ranks in the top ten on education, large swaths of students throughout the state are not proficient in areas like English and Math. We’re going to hold our applause on student proficiency.

Additionally, the inclusion of pre-K enrollment in this metric is curious in light of the lack of evidence that pre-K makes any appreciable difference in the academic outcomes of students. A recent random assignment study from scholars at Vanderbilt University found that students who participated in state-run pre-K programs had worse outcomes by third grade than those who did not. At the very least, program quality matters, and we shouldn’t assume that simply having more students in pre-K will improve student outcomes.

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?

Emily Oster:

Local governments are relaxing pandemic restrictions at a dizzying pace, removing mask requirements and vaccine entry rules for businesses. Politicians are generally pushing for a return to normalcy. But for one group, change is not forthcoming: children. The removal of mask mandates in schools is likely weeks, if not months, away in some parts of the country. Quarantine and testing requirements remain in many child-care and school settings, even as they disappear from adult life. My burning question is simply: Why? I can imagine three arguments in favor of a kids-last approach, none of which I find convincing.

First, one could argue that ongoing child-specific restrictions are warranted because children need more protection. This is a hard case to make. Throughout the pandemic, children have been at lower risk of serious illness than adults. In the latest CDC numbers, hospitalization rates for children 0–4 with COVID are estimated at 3.8 per 100,000 and for the 5–11 group at 1 per 100,000. By comparison, the rates in the 18–49, 50–64, and over 65 groups are 3.7, 8.5, and 22, respectively. (The very youngest kids and the 18-49 set have about the same risk, despite only the latter having access to highly effective vaccines.) Long COVID also seems less prevalent among children than adults. Some children are more vulnerable than others, of course, and society owes special attention to high-risk kids. But it doesn’t follow that COVID restrictions for children ought to stay uniformly in place after they’ve been removed for their parents.

A second possible argument in favor of a kids-last policy is that COVID mitigations work better in child settings than in others. The data don’t support this argument, either. Evidence from test-to-stay programs, for example, suggests that more than 97 percent of kids who are exposed to the coronavirus at school and are then required to stay home never end up testing positive. Keeping these kids out of school, then, isn’t meaningfully halting community spread. As for masking,others have made the point that, after two years, we still have paltry proof that face coverings significantly lower case counts at school. Even if you are skeptical of these arguments, masking in school (as practiced) is certainly not more effective than masking in other settings. The largest masking randomized trial, in Bangladesh, found the highest efficacy among older individuals.

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?

Laura Meckler and Matt Viser:

Democratic governors have responded by dropping mask mandates, urging that schools remain open and emphasizing there is a light at the end of the dark covid tunnel. They also are trying to change the subject, with a focus on education investment and recovery and warnings about the consequences if Republicans are elected.

But some Democrats worry that the responses, to date, are insufficient given the hardball politics the GOP is playing on these emotional issues.

“Democrats are giving away one of their greatest assets, and that’s being associated with public education. And giving away that advantage is going to get Democrats’ clocks cleaned this fall,” said Joe DiSano, a Michigan-based Democratic consultant. “We are letting the conservative crazies run ragged on us. We have the ammo to fight back, and we don’t.”

Republicans were buoyed by their unexpected victory in November’s Virginia gubernatorial contest, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won after a campaign defined by education issues. Youngkin criticized pandemic-related school closures and a statewide mask mandate in schools, issues that analysts who studied the race found particularly effective. He also promised to ban teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework for examining the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism and a catchall term that many GOP politicians have embraced to describe various racial equity lessons and initiatives they find objectionable.

Youngkin also effectively seized on a gaffe by his opponent, who said parents should not tell schools what to teach.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll after that election found overwhelming support for parents having a say in what their children’s schools teach. It also found 44 percent of Americans say they trust Democrats more to handle education, barely topping the 41 percent choosing Republicans. That represented a significant weakening in Democrats’ historic advantage.

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?

Jennifer Szalai

Dennis Duncan’s entertaining and informative “Index, A History of the” moves from the 13th-century origins of the form to the world of digital search engines.

Before reading “Index, A History of the,” an appealingly titled new book by Dennis Duncan, I had never thought of the index as much more than a tool — a handy list of subjects and proper names, typically at the end of a nonfiction book, guiding me to the page(s) where I might find the information I seek.

There are of course some indexes that make you want to linger; a reader of Martin Amis’s memoir, “Experience,” will find a strikingly long list of curious items nested under “dental problems” (“of animals,” “Bellow on,” “and dentifrice purchase,” etc., etc.). But, Duncan says, we usually turn to an index as a “convenience” and “timesaver.” It’s like a map. In fact, it is a map — an indicator of a spatial relationship. It points (like an index finger) to a place (a page number), showing you the way.

Hannah Natanson:

“I see these people just not wearing a mask, or wearing one pulled down, like, under their chin,” said Swan, “and my brain just immediately goes, ‘That person does not share the same ideals as me. We won’t get along.’ ” She added: “They may not be a bad person. They may just be thinking the same things as their parents.”

Youngkin issued his mask-optional order, which aims to give Virginia parents choice over masking in both public and private schools, on his first day in office. A fierce fight ensued: Seventy of 131 Virginia school districts refused to comply and kept their mask requirements, according to a Washington Post analysis, and parents and school officials filed a flurry of lawsuits for and against the order. This week, the Virginia General Assembly narrowly passed — along largely partisan lines — a law that requires all schools to go mask-optional on March 1, ensuring every one of Virginia’s more than 1.8 million public and private schoolchildren will face masking decisions and tensions at school in days to come.

As the adults battle over the merits of masking, Virginia students have been forced to navigate the real-life fallout.

The Washington Post asked parents across the state to share how their children are feeling about school masking policies, garnering nearly 200 submissions from families living in at least 25 school districts.

Additional commentary.

David Smith & Adam Kissel:

So how can elected officials intervene in higher education without compromising academic freedom? Individual academic freedom is an inviolable feature of institutions of higher education because their core purpose includes exposing students to a wide range of competing ideas. This is necessary to develop their critical-thinking skills so that they become citizens who can make up their own minds about disinformation and the truth. When the First Amendment and academic freedom protections for scholars at public universities conflict with the democratic principle of majority rule, free speech and academic freedom win.

Constraints on what a scholar can express are clearly off limits. Also off limits should be any restriction on the ability of scholars to raise external support for their academic endeavors. Provided that the university is satisfied that the external funding leaves the academic freedom of participating faculty uncompromised, external funding can enable minority viewpoints to be heard in environments with strong faculty bias against them.

Beth Hawkins:

and narrowly averted a walkout two years before that. Its 2,500 teachers are the best-paid in the state, with an average salary in the 2020-21 school year of $85,457. District officials, who recently announced they would close several schools because of drops in enrollment, have said their hands are tied by a $43 million budget shortfall. 

They also say class-size caps in the current contract have been an impediment to increased enrollment. In the 2020-21 school year, St. Paul Public Schools enrolled 35,000 students. District officials project that next year, the number will drop to 32,000. 

Minneapolis teachers have not struck since 1970, according to media reports. The district has seen a more dramatic drop in enrollment than St. Paul, and taken fewer steps to adjust. In 2016, it had nearly 35,500 students. This year, enrollment is hovering around 29,000. If Minneapolis’ 2,500 educators do walk out, some big questions will be put to the test.

A year ago, the district and the union began negotiating a contract to cover the 2021-23 school years, with any increases in compensation and benefits applying retroactively to June 2021, when the last contract lapsed. The union’s educational assistant chapter is also negotiating a new contract on the same timeline.

David Blaska:

Critical race theory denialists trot out the same university professors who promote CRT to confirm that mom and dad are unwitting pawns of the Republican Borg (as the WI State Journal did.) It’s like asking Putin what day he plans to invade. CNN asked a Columbia University professor to put San Francisco voters under the microscope.

“The results in San Francisco may resist simple analysis,” the professor concludes, whose academic speciality is Barack Obama. The learned educator then lapses into simple analysis:

“In San Francisco, deep-pocketed, right-leaning donors shoveled money into the recall, while activists and media outlets began using language that lashed together the disparate dissatisfactions into a coherent message.”

What were the disparate dissatisfactions? (Surely the weaseliest of wordings!) Prof. Hemmer helps by listing them:

1. Extended pandemic school closures
2. a ham-handed effort to rename schools commemorating Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, among other figures, in the name of social justice
3. an attempt to move away from testing and GPA requirements for admission into high-ranking public schools
4. a growing achievement gap
5. an enormous budget deficit and, in the case of one school board member,
6. the use of a racial slur in an anti-Asian rant.

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?

No. The American state prints literally trillions of dollars, and spends more every year. It’s not capital-limited, it’s competence-limited. https://t.co/nTa3HKYgEm pic.twitter.com/OcnNvrFHtg

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) February 20, 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?

Lucas Robinson:

After a nearly 30-minute back-and-forth with another finalist, Blessed Sacrament sixth-grader Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya walked away a champion at the Madison All-City Spelling Bee Saturday morning.

Aiden, 11, properly spelled “effete” and then “agate” after runner-up Vincent Bautista misspelled “effete” with an “a” at the beginning.

Vincent, a student at St. Maria Goretti School, went word-for-word with Aiden for about a half-hour in an impressive streak of spelling that included “coulrophobia,” “pelisse,” “teraphim” and “ibuprofen.”

“I didn’t really expect it, but I was hoping for it,” Aiden said after the competition.

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?

Colleen Flaherty:

MacNeil, who chaired the campus committee that ultimately recommended readopting tenure, said not having tenure has impacted Chatham’s faculty diversification efforts, in particular. With diverse faculty candidates in high demand, he said, not having a tenure system puts Chatham at a disadvantage with respect to its peer institutions. Indeed, MacNeil said Chatham is the only university in the New American Colleges and Universities consortium, which it joined in 2020, without a tenure system.

Chatham president David Finegold, who supports the change, agreed with MacNeil, saying, “Across almost all of higher ed, every institution I know is trying to expand the diversity of their faculty. And Chatham is no exception in that. So when you have faculty candidates that have many options from other institutions, you want to give them every reason to choose you.”

Beyond recruitment, MacNeil said discussions with other faculty members revealed that senior professors felt more anxious about not having tenure than more junior ones because they craved more security from the institution around which they’d built their lives.

Glenn Reynolds:

We can learn a couple things from all this.

The first is the brittle, arrogant and defensive response of our ruling class to any kind of political opposition nowadays. What kind of mind turns parents complaining at a school-board meeting into some sort of “domestic terrorism” threat? (The same kind that turns peacefully protesting truckers into “insurrectionists,” I suppose.)

In what previous age of American history would secret targeting and federal investigations of people engaging in a bedrock institution of participatory democracy have been seen as appropriate? Who calls people racist for wanting their kids to learn?

In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.

Martha Fulford, J. Edward Les and Pooya Kazemi

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 

Throughout North America, it is not uncommon to encounter parents who are absolutely terrified of their children contracting COVID. This is because many parents significantly overestimate the potential harms of COVID to their children.

These parents are overcome by worry despite massive amounts of reassuring medical data that tell us that children are very unlikely to be harmed by this virus.

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of biased and distorted media coverage — coverage that should be deemed misinformation, but which seems to get a free pass from “fact-checkers” and from many in the public.

We are not trying to draw moral or any other equivalencies to misinformation being spread by anti-vaxxers or COVID-deniers. We have many words of reproach for these people, too, but plenty has already been written about them.

Laura Krantz:

Three Harvard University graduate students sued the university on Tuesday, alleging it ignored nearly a decade of sexual harassment and retaliation by a prominent anthropology professor and permitted a system that protects powerful faculty — and the university’s reputation — at students’ expense.

The suit, filed in Massachusetts federal court, alleges that Harvard ignored numerous warning signs, enabling renowned professor John Comaroff to sexually harass one student and damage her career, as well as the careers of two classmates who spoke in her defense.

The case raises larger questions about the potential risks of academic hierarchies that are inherently imbalanced, and in which tenured faculty members hold enormous sway over the careers of graduate students they advise.“This is a case about power,” said Russell Kornblith, an attorney representing the three plaintiffs, Lilia Kilburn, Margaret Czerwienski, and Amulya Mandava. “It’s about the power that the university has to make things right, and it’s also about the power that the university gives graduate student advisers over their graduate students.”

Matthew Yglesias:

People are often misinformed about things. Sometimes they obtain that bad information from false or misleading media coverage; sometimes that media coverage is deliberately false. And there’s a fine line between media coverage that seeks to frame issues appropriately and coverage that’s propagandistic. 

All of this is bad. 

Propagandistic media coverage is bad, spreading false information deliberately or carelessly is bad, misleading people is bad, and it’s unfortunate that voters (and, frankly, elite policymakers) often make important decisions operating under misconceptions. 

That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better — and it is very hard to think of any cure for misinformation that would not be worse than the disease.

Nada Elmikashfi:

While all city employees at one time were required to live within the city limits, the residency requirement was eliminated for Madison Metro drivers in the 1980s and in subsequent years for other unionized employees as well. Arguments to keep the requirement were based in part on concerns over a dwindling middle class, while opponents have cited the high cost of living in Madison and the quality of suburban schools.

Dan Rolfs, a community development project manager for the city and a union representative for the Madison Professional and Supervisory Employee Association, told Brogan that members have had concerns about sending their kids to public schools in Madison and were drawn to the new high school facilities of Verona, DeForest and Sun Prairie.

It’s understandable. The resource-rich tech and science labs, professional looking athletic facilities, expansive aquatic centers, and unique greenhouses in these suburban schools would be a draw for any parent. Who doesn’t want the best education for their children? 

According to a 2021 report from the Madison school district, enrollment has been “decreasing slightly since the 2014-15 school year” and the district projects another decrease next school term. Enrollment for 4K-12 in 2021-22 was 25,936 students, down 482 students from 2020-21.

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 Finland:

On that Friday, Evers vetoed legislation that would have banned Wisconsin’s K-12 schools from teaching students and staff about systemic racism, part of the national Republican effort to prevent any discussion of racial history.

“I object to creating new censorship rules that restrict schools and educators from teaching honest, complete facts about important historical topics like the Civil War and civil rights,” wrote Evers, a former public teacher and state school superintendent.

“I trust parents, educators, and schools to work together to do what is best for our kids — work they have long been doing without political interference and micromanagement from politicians in Madison.”

Other education censorship bills that have not yet reached Evers’ desk — one aimed at public higher education, another at diversity training for state employees — have the same racist undertones as the K-12 measure.

House of Graphs:

Most graph theorists will agree that among the vast number of graphs that exist there are only a few that can be considered really interesting.

It is the aim of this House of Graphs project to find a workable definition of ‘interesting’ and provide a searchable database of graphs that conform to this definition. We also allow users to add additional graphs which they find interesting. In order to avoid abuse, only registered users can add new graphs.

Casey Newton

Casey Newton: When did you first suspect that web3 might not, in fact, be going all that great?

Molly White: Towards the end of 2021 I started to see so much web3 hype, everywhere: on social media, in conversations with friends, in technical spaces, in the news. When I went to look up what “web3” even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant. This definitely set off the first alarm bells for me: it’s concerning to me when people are trying extremely hard to get people to buy in to some new idea but aren’t particularly willing (or even able) to describe what it is they’re doing. As I began to pay more attention to the space, I was seeing all of this hype for web3 with all these new projects, but so many of them were just absolutely terrible ideas when you got past the marketingspeak and veneer. Medical records on the blockchain! Fix publishing with NFTs! Build social networks on top of immutable databases! I started my Web3 is Going Great project after seeing a few particularly horrendous ideas, as well as after I began to notice just how frequently these hacks and scams were happening (with huge amounts of money involved).

Roger Pielke, Jr.

McGreevy included in the body of the story a bit of a disclaimer: “The HSPC said, however, that it “cannot determine where transmission occurred”. In addition 20 per cent of all cases in the State result from community transmission where the source of the infection is not known.” Of the headline, McGreevy told me, “I didn’t write the headline. I don’t know who did. It would have gone through many iterations with sub-editors etc.”

From there, the statistic traveled around the world. On 5 May 2021 a prominent U.S. observer of public health promoted the statistic on Twitter (below), linking to the Irish Times article and elevating the source to an “analysis.” This Tweet was cited on 11 May 2021 by David Leonhardt of the New York Timeswho further elevated the stature of the statistic to being the result of a “study” with apparently more rigor than other such studies: “A study from Ireland, which seems to have been more precise about the definition of outdoors, put the share of such transmission at 0.1 percent.” Of course, there was no such study.

Ann Althouse

It just doesn’t sound straightforward: “we have deferred our guidance to the local jurisdictions.” That’s a very strange way to put words together — “deferred our guidance.” Does she mean to say “we defer to the local jurisdictions”? “Defer” — when used to mean to submit out of deference — is an intransitive verb. The transitive verb “defer” means to put off to a later date, and they are not putting off their guidance to a later date.

I know that may sound pedantic, but I’m relaying what I researched and figured out after I had the instinctive sense — as a native speaker of English — that something was off.

Izabella Kaminska:

Herein really lies the problem. Organisations that are connected to any form of civil disobedience, could in theory be deemed terrorist organisations fit for defunding.

Given the long history of civil disobedience being used in America to effect positive social change, whether for civil rights or environmental causes, this has major political — and potentially authoritarian empowering — side-effects.

The rule is also partial to immense political gaming.

Don’t like that the people are forging a powerful political campaign for x or y cause? Just infiltrate their movement with a few destabilizing agent provocateurs, turn it violent, and hey presto – the group gets classified as a terrorist organisation with all its political offshoots defunded. It can never rise as a legitimate political force.

Clara Jeffery:

But let’s review the array of irritants.

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

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

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

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

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

James O’Brien:

In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong. Perhaps the brain was less complicated than they thought, he said. Perhaps, he said, the brain worked on the same fundamental principles as a simple sand pile, in which avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall — a process he dubbed “self-organized criticality.”

As much as scientists in other fields adore outspoken, know-it-all physicists, Bak’s audacious idea — that the brain’s ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously from the disordered electrical activity of neurons — did not meet with immediate acceptance.

But over time, in fits and starts, Bak’s radical argument has grown into a legitimate scientific discipline. Now, about 150 scientists worldwide investigate so-called “critical” phenomena in the brain, the topic of at least three focused workshops in 2013 alone. Add the ongoing efforts to found a journal devoted to such studies, and you have all the hallmarks of a field moving from the fringes of disciplinary boundaries to the mainstream.

C. Thi Nguyen:

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early-before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categori-zations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies.

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district is delaying its plan to eliminate standalone honors classes at its high schools.

The district hasn’t publicly announced the policy shift or if it’s considering scrapping the plan entirely. At its Dec. 6 meeting, school board members were told by Director of Advanced Learning Sharon Alexander that the district was on track to end standalone honors classes for 9th graders starting in the 2022 fall semester and 10th graders in 2023. Isthmus learned the plan was being delayed from a high school teacher in January. It took district spokesperson Tim LeMonds three weeks to confirm what administrators had already told teachers. 

“Standalone and earned honors will still be available for 9th and 10th graders next year,” wrote LeMonds in a Feb. 8 email to Isthmus. “We have put a pause on the removal of standalone honors to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” 

District administrators informed the Madison school board at an April 5, 2021, board meeting they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. These courses are for core subject areas like biology, English, and history. There are no exams or other requirements to get into these classes and any student is allowed to enroll. Instead of standalone honors courses, the district was going to focus exclusively on the “Earned Honors” program. Begun in 2017, this program allows students to receive honors designation in non-honors classes if they complete “predetermined criteria.” 

Administrators at the April 5 meeting enthusiastically endorsed eliminating standalone honors classes. 

“This is an anti-racist strategy. Earned honors supports our commitment to truly becoming an anti-racist institution. It allows us to set a bar of excellence for all of our students, for 100 percent of our students,” said Kaylee Jackson, executive director for curriculum. “[Standalone honors classes] are an exclusionary practice in which only some students within our high schools are receiving this rigorous instruction and capable of receiving honors credit.”

According to the latest data from the district, 41 percent of students in standalone honors classes are students of color. White students represent 43 percent of the total student population in the district, but make up 59 percent of standalone honors classes. 

Most school board members expressed support at the meeting for eliminating standalone honors, although no vote was taken to either move forward or reject the idea. Board member Ananda Mirilli said she was “100 percent behind” the plan, a sentiment echoed by board member Savion Castro.

Chris Rickert:

Under a plan proposed by administrators last year, beginning with the 2022-23 school year, ninth-graders would only be able to earn honors credit through the district’s “earned honors” program, which places all students in the same classes but allows those who want to earn honors credit to do so if they meet a set of criteria showing mastery of the content. The same would apply to 10th-graders beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

The shift away from stand-alone honors classes was pitched by administrators as a way to boost racial equity, as students of color historically have been less likely to take honors-only classes, although they are open to all students. Those racial disparities have been closing in recent years.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Bryan Caplan:

The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.

I took quality control very seriously.  About half a dozen friends gave up whole days of their lives to sit next to me while I gave them a guided tour of the reasoning behind my number-crunching.  Four years before the book’s publication, I publicly released the spreadsheets, and asked the world to “embarrass me now” by finding errors in my work.  If memory serves, one EconLog reader did find a minor mistake.  When the book finally came out, I published final versions of all the spreadsheets underlying the book’s return to education calculations.  A one-to-one correspondence between what’s in the book and what I shared with the world.  Full transparency.

Now guess what?  Since the 2018 publication of The Case Against Education, precisely zero people have emailed me about those spreadsheets.  The book enjoyed massive media attention.  My results were ultra-contrarian: my preferred estimate of the Social Return to Education is negative for almost every demographic.  I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending.  Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math.  Not publicly.  Not privately.  No one cared about my spreadsheets.

The upshot is that I probably could have saved a year of my life. I could have glossed over dozens of thorny issues. Taxes. Transfers. The effect of education on longevity. The effect of education on quality of life. The effect of education on crime. How unpleasant school is compared to work. Instead of reading multiple literatures to extract plausible parameters, I could have just eyeballed and stipulated for every tangential issue. Who would have called me on it?

Notes and commentary.