Pamela Cotant:

The students succeeded in landing an investment from Shannon McDonough, associate principal at Edgewood High School who was posing as a tycoon searching to invest in businesses and products. The gutter pitch particularly resonated with McDonough because she once got stuck for awhile on her roof after she cleaned her gutters and was unsure how to swing her leg around to get down on the ladder. She didn’t have her phone with her to call for help so she was on the roof for awhile before she “took a leap of faith” and figured out how to make it back down.

Vinay Prasad:

This week, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.

At the time, Americans would have benefited from a broad debate among scientists about the available policy options for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, and perhaps a bit of compromise. The emails tell us why that isn’t what we got.

An email written by Collins, the director of the NIH, which was addressed to Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and several others read:

NSBA:

Better education for every student is a pivotal change that public schools are pursuing. However, the recently released congressionally mandated annual report — the Condition of Education 2020 — painted a very unsettling national picture of the state of education for Black students. The report, prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), aims to use data to help policymakers and the public to monitor educational progress of all students from prekindergarten through postsecondary education in the United States.

The Center for Public Education (CPE) selected relevant data from this report to help school leaders not only monitor the educational progress of Black students, but also rethink what public schools can do better for Black students. We follow the NCES report using the term Black or African American — “a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. Used interchangeably with the shortened term Black.”

The poverty rate is still the highest for Black students

In 2018, nearly one third of Black students lived in poverty (32%), compared with 10% of white students in families living in poverty. The percentage of Black students who lived in households where the highest level of education attained by either parent was a bachelor’s or higher degree was 27%, compared with 69% of Asian students and 53% of white students.

icivics:

Do you want to be the next President of the United States? This refreshed version of Win the White House challenges you to build your campaign and allows you to simulate a presidential election:

• Building arguments to support timely issues that are relevant to you
• Strategically raise funds to support your campaign
• Keeping campaign momentum through targeted media campaigns and personal appearances
• Polling local voters to see what issues resonate

You’ll also meet our new campaign manager, named Ana, who will guide you through the process.

CBS New York:

The city teachers’ union has come out with a stern warning for the incoming mayoral administration — fix the COVID-19 testing problems, or risk having to go back to remote learning.

We’ve seen cases surge in the city, and that’s also been the case at schools. We’ve seen COVID among students, teachers, support staff, and if things don’t improve, it could result in kids having to stay home, CBS2’s Kevin Rincon reported Wednesday.

Elizabeth Beyer:

ast High School administrators hope to head off altercations between students well before they reach the type of brawl that happened last month by facilitating discussion between feuding parties.

The practice school administrators have begun to put in place, known as restorative justice, seeks to bring students together for a mediated discussion to solve their qualms.

Community members, such as Jennifer Conti, who attended a Saturday workshop on the topic, could take part in that process as mediators or advocates after a series of trainings led by the school’s restorative justice coordinator.

“I think (restorative justice and trauma-informed care) are both really important practices,” she said. “They’re crucial mindsets.”

More than a dozen parents, staff and community members gathered in East’s auditorium Saturday morning for a full day of restorative justice and trauma-informed response training. Saturday’s school-based training session was the second of two led by East’s restorative justice coordinator, Ericka Brown, following a series of high-profile fights connected to the school in recent months.

Tom McKay and Dhruv Mehrotra

In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child.

The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was owned and operated by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But these invasive phone-cracking tools are not only being purchased by police departments. Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years.

In March 2020, the North East Independent School District, a largely Hispanic district north of San Antonio, wrote a check to Cellebrite for $6,695 for “General Supplies.” In May, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD near Houston, Texas, paid Oxygen Forensics Inc., another mobile device forensics firm, $2,899. Not far away, majority-white Conroe ISD wrote a check to Susteen Inc., the manufacturer of the similar Secure View system, for $995 in September 2016.

Gizmodo has reviewed similar accounting documents from eight school districts, seven of which are in Texas, showing that administrators paid as much $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology. Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student’s devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches.

Wall Street Journal:

What do Deere & Co. and Columbia University have in common? Their workers are represented by the United Auto Workers and have gone on strike this fall seeking higher compensation. Yet the contrasts are instructive about the state of higher education.

Many Columbia class sections have been canceled since early November, and final grades have been thrown in jeopardy due to a seven-week strike by the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW, which includes 3,000 graduates and undergraduates who assist with teaching, grading and tutoring. Columbia recently told undergrads they could choose to receive a pass-fail in any course this semester in “appreciation of how difficult this term may have been for you.” Many would prefer actual grades.

While workers at companies like Volkswagen and Amazon have rejected unions, Big Labor is winning with university employees. Last week the UAW was recognized as labor representative for 17,000 student researchers at the University of California. About a quarter (100,000) of UAW members are university employees.

Mark Bauerlein:

The latest installment of an ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein. Ashley Berner joins the podcast to discuss the Maine religious school tuition case.

Abigail Shrier

Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.

Documents and audio files recently sent to me, and authenticated by three conference participants, permitted a rare insight into the CTA’s sold-out event in Palm Springs, held from October 29-31, 2021. The “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities,” provided best practices workshops that encouraged teachers to “have the courage to create a safe environment that fosters bravery to explore sexual orientation, gender identity and expression,” according to the precis of a talk given by fifth grade teacher, C. Scott Miller

“How We Run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities”

Several of the workshops advised teachers on the creation of middle school LGBTQ clubs (commonly known as “Gay-Straight Alliance” clubs or “GSA”). One workshop—“Queering in the Middle”—focused “on what practices have worked for successful middle school GSAs and children at this age developmentally.”

But what makes for a successful LGBTQ middle school club? What to do about meddlesome parents who don’t want their middle schoolers participating in such a club? What if parents ask a club leader—point blank—if their child is a member?

“Because we are not official—we have no club rosters, we keep no records,” Buena Vista Middle School teacher and LGBTQ-club leader, Lori Caldeira, states on an audio clip sent to me by a conference attendee. “In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming? We’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they came?’ You know, we would never want a kid to get in trouble for attending if their parents are upset.”

Brianna Provenzano:

TikTok is truly unstoppable: The video-sharing platform just pushed Google aside to become the most popular website in the world, according to web performance and security company Cloudflare’s 2021 Year in Review internet traffic rankings.

TikTok cracked Cloudflare’s list of top 10 sites last year, coming in at seventh in popularity behind the .coms for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon. For 2021, the order of that list is largely unchanged—Amazon jumped up one slot, switching places with Netflix—aside from TikTok’s surge to the top. 

In a blog post, Cloudflare noted that comparing the numbers between the two years could yield potentially misleading results, since the service only culled data from September to December in 2020 (compared to all 12months being accounted for in 2021). According to Cloudflare, TikTok first peaked in the global traffic rankings on Feb. 17, 2021, followed by a few more days in March and June and then, finally, a more permanent stay at the top beginning in late August.

The app’s popularity has surged during the pandemic; while it initially attracted a teenaged audience set on coordinating lip sync and dance videos, TikTok has since piqued the curiosity of users of all ages and demographics, who flock to the app for its cooking hacks, memes, and spirituality content, to name just a few topics.

Tom Foster:

The Texas population grew by about four million people in the past decade—far more than any other state in raw numbers, and enough as a percentage to make it the third-fastest-growing state in the nation over that period, behind Utah and Idaho. Roughly 3,800 more people move here every week than move out of state. Tick down any list of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and Texas shows up again and again. Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio all landed on the list of cities with a population gain of at least 100,000 over the past decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which released its latest data in August. Frisco easily topped the list of large cities, followed by a lot of other suburbs and exurbs, such as New Braunfels, McKinney, and Conroe.

You get the idea: the Texas population is booming.

That growth, of course, has come with plenty of hand-wringing about everything from an overheated housing market to fears of a hostile takeover by liberal coastal elites. News headlines have stoked those worries in the past two years. And then there was Greg Abbott’s 2018 campaign slogan: “Don’t California My Texas.” But perhaps unsurprisingly, partisans may have it wrong.

For one thing, despite all the public focus on Californication, there are intriguing signs that many of the newest arrivals share key characteristics with lifelong Texans. Many are coming for abundant jobs, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a more reasonable cost of living (which may be hard to believe for Texan buyers and renters fretting over the housing market but is a fact).

Robert Pondisco:

In some of his first public comments since being named New York City’s incoming schools chancellor, David Banks has drawn cheers from savvy education observers and literacy experts for remarks critical of “balanced literacy,” the city’s long-standing approach to teaching reading.

“‘Balanced literacy’ has not worked for Black and Brown children. We’re going to go back to a phonetic approach to teaching. We’re going to ensure that our kids can read by the third grade,” Banks told CBS2′s Marcia Kramer. “That’s been a huge part of the dysfunction.”

The incoming mayor seems to agree. “We are in a city where 65% of Black and Brown children never reach proficiency and we act like that’s normal, it’s all right,” said Eric Adams, introducing Banks last week. If the same number of white children couldn’t read proficiently, he said, “they would burn this city down.”

Adams citing this inexcusable failure and Banks laying the blame on “balanced literacy” suggests our new mayor and his hand-picked chancellor understand that equity starts with literacy.

That said, keep the champagne corked for now. This is not the first time New Yorkers have heard the supposed death knell of balanced literacy. Former Chancellor Joel Klein, the first person ever put in charge of the system under mayoral control, became convinced of its shortcomings late in his tenure, and wished in his memoir that he’d acted sooner. “Our ‘balanced literacy’ approach wasn’t all that balanced,” he wrote.

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?

Lydia DePillis

When COVID-19 started sweeping across America in the spring of 2020, Irene Bosch knew she was in a unique position to help.

The Harvard-trained scientist had just developed quick, inexpensive tests for several tropical diseases, and her method could be adapted for the novel coronavirus. So Bosch and the company she had co-founded two years earlier seemed well-suited to address an enormous testing shortage.

E25Bio — named after the massive red brick building at MIT that houses the lab where Bosch worked — already had support from the National Institutes of Health, along with a consortium of investors led by MIT.

Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect coronavirus in 15 minutes and produce a red line on a little chemical strip. The factory where they were planning to make tests for dengue fever could quickly retool to produce at least 100,000 COVID-19 tests per week, she said, priced at less than $10 apiece, or cheaper at a higher scale.

Bosch’s prototype attracted a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, which pitched in $2 million.

Ontario Teachers Union:

The Ontario Divisional Court has ruled that the Ontario College of Teachers shall grant certification to teacher candidates who have not yet passed the Math Proficiency Test but who have otherwise met all other teacher certification requirements.

The Divisional Court found that the Math Proficiency Test had an adverse impact on entry to the teaching profession for racialized teacher candidates and other reasonable alternatives should have been implemented.

“OTF applauds the efforts of the Ontario Teacher Candidates’ Council (OTCC) for pursuing this successful legal challenge. There is no research to suggest that a standardized test would improve student outcomes or enhance teacher pedagogy. Ontario has some of the best educated teachers in the world and this decision reinforces their professionalism,” stated OTF President Chris Cowley.

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

Handwaving Freakoutery:

Somewhere at some point some useful idiot came up with the idea of giving anyone who wants to go to college a loan, regardless of their ability to pay it back, on the understanding that the diploma itself would convey enough value to them that they would be able to earn more and pay back the loan. This useful idiot confused correlation with causation, assigned a value to a piece of paper that the paper didn’t necessarily convey, and presumed that if every person in the country got a college degree they would all get a college level job, everyone would be richer, and everyone could pay back the loan.

This useful idiot did not consider the fact that handing out more degrees does nothing to change the job profile of the United States. The job market still needs just as many garbage men and ditch diggers and baristas today as it did thirty years ago, it’s just now the baristas have college degrees and debt. The federally backed student loan program did achieve its objective. There are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants today who come from poor backgrounds and made their way because of student loans. But because of the way the useful idiot set the program up, their success is on the backs of the rest of the indebted poor.

This useful idiot was not one man, but rather fifty years of all of us, involving dozens of laws and changes to those laws, going back to 1956. Half a century of useful idiots who all confused correlation with causation, building the giant that exists today to eat Millennials and grind their bones to make its bread. But the useful idiots in government who provided a vehicle for permanent debt to acquire a mostly valueless piece of paper are only half of the beast.

Wall Street Journal:

In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.

The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.

That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”

Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works

Matt Welch:

But despite that $197 billion and counting in extra federal COVID funding over the past 21 months, an increasing number of public K-12 schools keep on closing, at least in little spurts. Why? Well, if we’re being a bit catty (if truthful), there has been some opportunistic, last-minute, teacher-friendly days off conjured up near weekends and federal holidays:

But the reality is that the rapid omicron surge in positive cases, especially throughout the Northeast and Midwest, is putting strain on school systems that have not figured out a way to translate money into student testing and emergency staffing capacity.

The school-tracking site Burbio provides a thorough weekly survey of school-closing trends; this weekend’s report shows “an increase in disruptions beginning the week of December 20th as well as in early January.” Details:

Will Flanders & Libby Sobic:

Like an old IPod set on repeat, Milwaukee Public Schools’ attempts to attack and provide misleading data about the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is a song-and-dance that never stops. In their latest salvo against providing families with educational options, the district included information on the “cost” to Milwaukee residents of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) with property tax bills. An image of the mailer appears below.

The information on the cards is accurate, as far as it goes.  But it leaves out key pieces of information which mislead rather than inform about the impact of this program on the city’s residents.

Overview of the MPCP 

The MPCP, founded in 1990, is the nation’s first voucher system for low-income students. Today, students attending a private school on a Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher receive $8,336 per pupil for grades kindergarten through eight, and $8,982 for students enrolled in grades nine through twelve. No public-school student receives funding this low for any students.

In 2021, there were 129 private schools participating in the MPCP with a total enrollment of about 28,770 students. Each one of these 28,000 students live in the City of Milwaukee. With over 100,000 total students in the city of Milwaukee, students participating in the MPCP is still a relatively small percentage of the overall student population. Nevertheless, anti-choice advocates like to claim that the MPCP costs more than it is worth.

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

East High restorative justice workshop seeks to educate community on non-punitive discipline

East High School administrators hope to head off altercations between students well before they reach the type of brawl that happened last month by facilitating discussion between feuding parties.

The practice school administrators have begun to put in place, known as restorative justice, seeks to bring students together for a mediated discussion to solve their qualms.

Community members, such as Jennifer Conti, who attended a Saturday workshop on the topic, could take part in that process as mediators or advocates after a series of trainings led by the school’s restorative justice coordinator.

“I think (restorative justice and trauma-informed care) are both really important practices,” she said. “They’re crucial mindsets.”

More than a dozen parents, staff and community members gathered in East’s auditorium Saturday morningfor a full day of restorative justice and trauma-informed response training. Saturday’s school-based training session was the second of two led by East’s restorative justice coordinator, Ericka Brown, following a series of high-profile fights connected to the school in recent months.

Between 40 and 50 people signed up between both workshops, which included presentations on restorative practices and trauma-informed responses to student behavioral issues, as well as conversation circles for the attendees, in hopes of mitigating conflicts between students or within the community before they reach the schools.

Scott Girard:

One City Schools received a $1 million donation from the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation to support the school as it expands to serve students in grades 4K-12.

“The Frautschi family has a long history of investing in initiatives to make Madison a great city for everyone, dating back to their contributions to downtown and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1900s,” One City founder and CEO Kaleem Caire said in a press release announcing the donation. “We are truly grateful to be a part of Mr. Jerome Frautschi’s extraordinary personal legacy of giving to projects that inspire the heart and art of human kindness, community and innovation in our capital city.”

Renovation of a 157,000-square-foot facility at 1707 W. Broadway in Monona is scheduled to be complete by August 2022. The school announced its plan to move there and an initial $14 million donation from Pleasant Rowland in March.

Notes and links on One City schools (Governor Evers latest budget proposal would have aborted the University of Wisconsin’s charter school authorization authority – thus killing One City).

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?

Tim Cullen:

If any of them say they are dealing with this privately, I say sorry, this was a public game that taught so many bad life lessons to children and adults. The public silence has been deafening. We need more girls playing basketball, and this does not help.

Have the Verona and Janesville superintendents spoken about this? If so, who called who first? These types of issues need the “fresh air” of public discussion.

JD Haltigan:

The latest round of acute COVID hysteria over a new mutant variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (#B11529)was the final nudge I needed to write this post to hopefully help provide insight into the diverse human behavioral and psychological reaction to the pandemic and what such reactions may reveal about individual differences in sensitivity to environmental context. As my scientific work is largely in the field referred to as developmental psychopathology, I draw on concepts and theories that have generated much thinking and research within it. Broadly speaking, developmental psychopathology is an academic field of research and scholarship that examines the development of mental illness symptoms and disorders across the life course and the biological, social, and cultural factors that may give rise to and maintain them. 

Although my initial thinking on the behavioral response to the pandemic centered around a differential susceptibility1 to environmental influences model as possessing significant heuristic and explanatory value, I am now strongly inclined to think the classic diathesis-stress model possesses the most explanatory value (and is the more efficient or parsimonious of the two models) for the marked emergence of anxiety and fear in a distinct class of the population. Although beyond the scope of this piece, it should be noted that these models, as well as other models of the development of psychopathology (e.g., the stress inoculation model), overlap both in terms of the thinking behind them as well as the predictions they make, and thus adoption of one model to explain population-level human phenomena should not be seen as necessarily excluding the others.

Below I discuss the diathesis-stress or dual-risk model of sensitivity to environmental context, how it relates to the pandemic and individual behavioral responses to it, and offer some broader, loosely organized observations with especial reference to a more general conceptual notion of sensory processing sensitivity and “Long COVID”.

John Warner:

As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1]

This is a landmark book. It is a landmark book in both senses of the word: one, a marker by which we can establish a present location, and two, a turning point after which we can see a clear change in trajectory.

At least I hope that’s going to be the case, because Watters’s history of personalized learning reflects Faulkner’s aphorism from “Requiem for a Nun” — “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Better understanding this presence may make for clearer decision making for how we integrate technology into teaching and learning.

Reading Teaching Machines is like donning a pair of glasses that suddenly makes much of the present more explicable. This is why I want to urge people to read this book with all possible haste.

It isn’t even a matter of history repeating itself so much as the forces that have governed the pursuit of a teaching machine being ever-present in education atmosphere where humans and their variable behaviors and specific needs are treated as defects that need remedying. The vision of the creators of these teaching machines suggests that if we could just get everyone with the program (pun intended), we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.

Teaching Machines is several books rolled up into one. It is a history of the teaching machines themselves, including chapters on Sidney Pressey’s “Automatic Teacher” of the late 1920s and early ’30s, B. F. Skinner’s multiple attempts through the 1950s, and the multiple space race-related efforts of the ’60s, as education technologists promised that a device straight out of the Jetsons was always right around the corner.

These teaching machines were by their nature, design and philosophies essentially behavioralist, not at all removed from Skinner’s operant conditioning work with pigeons, the bird that has served as a symbol of Watters’s long-standing work at her Hack Education blog.

The Times:

Amazon quietly removed criticism of President Xi’s books by scrubbing bad reviews, ratings and comments from its Chinese site, it has emerged.

The US retail giant agreed to Beijing’s demand to have anything below a five-star review of Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China removed from Amazon.cn about two years ago, Reuters reported, citing two unidentified sources.

The move is the latest example of western tech companies willing to work with Chinese censors for access to the country’s massive consumer market.

Twitter deplatformed an elected president in one country (the US), then didn’t obey an elected government in another (India).

If transnational actors are inventing their own rules, they should be globally open protocols, not US-controlled corporations. https://t.co/6vlwt0z8Bb

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) December 21, 2021

Freddie deBoer:

Harvard, then, and soon all the rest because of them. I’m not going to rehash all of my SAT stuff here. If you want the litany –

• Your anger at the SATs is actually anger at broader social conditions which the SATs reveal
• None of the arguments against the SAT are correct, or even internally coherent
• Essays, too, are income stratified – because affluent kids actually are better prepared 
• Grades (and all other educational data) are race and income stratified too, because those gaps in preparedness are real, so what the fuck are we even talking about here
• Educational testing is in fact remarkably valid, reliable, and predictive
• Why eventually ability reigns

Here is what I want to say to you: at the end of this process, no matter how you change it, no matter how many statements the schools put out about diversity, no matter how many thumbs you put on all the scales to select for a certain kind of student, at the end of this process are self-serving institutions of limitless greed and an army of apparatchiks who are employed only to protect their interests. That’s it. You can’t make college admissions fair by getting rid of the SAT because colleges admissions can’t be “fair.” College admissions exist to serve the schools. Period. End of story. They always have, they always will. College admissions departments functioned as one big anti-Semitic conspiracy for decades because that was in the best interest of the institution. Guys who the schools know will never graduate but who run a 4.5 40 jump the line because admissions serves the institution. Absolute fucking dullards whose parents can pay – and listen, guys, it’s cute that you think legacies are somehow the extent of that dynamic, like they won’t let in the idiot son of a wealthy guy who didn’t go there – get in because admissions serves the institution. Some cornfed doofus from Wyoming with a so-so application gets in over a far more qualified kid from Connecticut because the marketing department gets to say they have students from 44 states in the incoming class instead of 43 that way, because admissions serves the institution. How do you people look at this world and conclude that the problem is the SAT?

Brad Kirby:

I was born with hearing loss in both ears. Since the age of six, I have worn hearing aids. Being hearing-impaired has been a huge life disadvantage. For example, as a child I couldn’t hear the whistle while trying to play sports, and continued playing until I see people laughing or trying to get my attention. I’ve missed jokes because I couldn’t understand the words being spoken. When I laugh, my hearing aids squeal because my ears move and the gap in my ear canals causes feedback.

I only hear parts of sentences and I am constantly having to process, in a fraction of a second, the sounds of words said, then to mentally match those sounds to words I have heard before, then to put the whole sentence together in my mind just to be able to communicate.

Trying to be “normal” and have a normal life was always my goal. That has been nearly impossible for nearly two years now. In spring 2020, the first face mask mandate due to Covid-19 went into effect. I knew I was in trouble.

Notes and links on taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health mandates, lawsuits and lawfare.

WILL:

The News: A three-judge panel of the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in St. Augustine v. Underly, a lawsuit first filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) in 2016, that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) violated state law when denying transportation benefits to families attending St. Augustine School, an independent Catholic school in Washington County. The case was remanded to U.S. District Court for a determination of damages and of whether an injunction should issue.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Anthony LoCoco said, “The Seventh Circuit’s decision makes clear that government has no business denying students transportation aid on the basis of its own religious judgments. This is a win for private school families across Wisconsin.”

Background: Wisconsin provides transportation aid to qualifying private school students as long as there is not an overlapping attendance area between private schools that are affiliated with one another, or more specifically, affiliated with the same sponsoring group. In this case, DPI and Friess Lake School District (now part of Holy Hill Area School District) denied St. Augustine students busing rights because there is an Archdiocesan Catholic school in the attendance area.

But St. Augustine is independent and unaffiliated with the Archdiocese. In this case, the school district and DPI determined the definition of Catholic and withheld government benefits until St. Augustine agreed not to call itself “Catholic.”

Ethan Bukali:

The district also cited concerns that some students who check out laptops to learn during what was to be the last remote Friday would not return them after the winter break. Vitti said schools would be “operationally challenged” if the laptops are not returned. The laptops, he said, are used for day-to-day instruction and testing. During the remote Fridays, students were able to check out a school laptop on Thursdays, but were required to return them the next Monday.

“The day off also serves as an opportunity to address the culminating challenges we have all experienced regarding COVID and social media threats.” The latter refers to threats the Detroit district, and many across Michigan, have been receiving after the shootings at Oxford High School on Nov. 30 that left four students dead and many others injured.

Rumors of a potential districtwide dismissal had circulated ahead of the official district statement. All school buildings will reopen to students and staff on Jan. 3. 

In late November, before the Thanksgiving break, district officials announced schools would move to remote instruction for three Fridays in December to address concernsabout mental health, COVID cases, and school cleanliness. The district also extended its Thanksgiving break two days.

My overall reaction to Pres. Biden’s speech. It’s much better than I anticipated and very good in parts! 🧵

I liked:
1) No panic. It’s not March 2020. This is the best part of the speech by far. It is a stinging rebuke to some panic mongers in the public health community.
(1/15)

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 21, 2021

Joseph Allen:

The early evidence from outside the United States suggests that kids will remain low risk during the Omicron surge as well. The latest data from South Africa for the week ending Dec. 12 shows that school-age children (5-to-19-year-olds) had the lowest hospitalization of any age group, and even with the Omicron uptick, the hospitalization rate is four to six per 100,000 — higher than one in 100,000 but still quite low. The latest data from Britain is similar. As of Dec. 12, the hospitalization rate for 5-to-14-year-olds is 1.4 per 100,000 — the lowest hospitalization rate of any age group.

The usual caveats apply: This is early data, and hospitalizations lag cases. On the other hand, the trends are encouraging: The wave in Gauteng, South Africa, is already peaking. Additionally, 7 to 15 percent of children were hospitalized with Covid, not for Covid. This is a key distinction. Covid was an incidental discovery because of routine testing during a hospital visit for some other medical reason, or the patients were there for isolation, not treatment. (This has been seen in the United States and Britain, too, where consistently 15 to 20 percent of hospitalizations are incidental.)

Notes and links on taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public mandates, closed schools and litigation.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Madeline Fox:

For most schools, the past two years have brought a complicated weighing of the risks of being in a classroom: in-person versus virtual learning, masks, class sizes, ventilation. But a growing number of schools around the country have sidestepped many of those concerns by leaving the classroom behind.

In La Farge, in the sprawling Kickapoo Valley Forest Reserve, 29 students show up at school each day and, aside from a daily nap, stay outside the whole day, no matter what the weather throws at them.

The Kickapoo Valley Forest School is only in its first year of being a full-day, full-week charter school. Previously, the forest reserve hosted a weekly outdoor learning program for half a day on Fridays. The outdoor education advocacy group Natural Start Alliance tallied 563 outdoor preschools and kindergartens last year, more than double the number in 2017 — including several day care, preschool and elementary-level programs in Wisconsin. 

Each student at Kickapoo Valley Forest School, or KVFS, gets a full rain kit — boots, pants, jacket — and their families are sent extensive guidance on how to layer kids up to keep them warm, even when the temperature falls well below freezing. One student, a 5-year-old named Mia Shird, counted four layers of clothing on a 30-degree day in November.

Camilla Turner:

Oxford dons are furious that a candidate’s “woke score” could be part of the criteria for hiring academics, under new proposals aimed at boosting staff diversity….

Joe Setyon:

But instead of reporting on these events, The Public’s Radio told a different tale, reporting uncritically and at length on a new proposed “anti-racism” policy adopted by the district, portraying Solas and the Goldwater Institute as impediments to that policy and grossly mischaracterizing the Institute’s work to promote academic transparency and school choice. Their journalistic malpractice wasn’t for lack of information: Goldwater Director of National Litigation Jon Riches gave an extensive interview to the article’s author, Alex Nunes, who chose to quote neither from Solas nor from Riches.

One would think a journalist might understand better than most the importance of public records requests to enable the public to keep account of what its government is up to. Public records laws are a crucial tool to help reporters—and citizen activists—uncover truths about their governments, whether they be details about taxpayer-funded expenditures or information about what children are learning in public school classrooms.

Instead, Nunes depicted Solas as a nuisance whose requests imposed a “burden” on local government employees, while also quoting a “racial justice” advocate who attacked Solas’ motives. This framing portrays the government as an entity that should selectively choose what public records should be made available based on the subject of the request or the motivations of the requester, neither of which is an appropriate basis under the law.

Josh Christenson:

The NFL released a marketing map that designated Taiwan as part of China, a further sign American sports leagues are more than willing to appease the hardline regime in order to pursue business opportunities.

The map, which introduced markets for 18 NFL teams in eight countries, shows Taiwan unlabeled and colored in as part of China. The erasure of Taiwan comes two months after President Xi Jinping gave a speech in October calling for the “reunification” of the island nation with China, whether in a “peaceful manner” or by “firm will.”

Idelber Avelar:

It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was the greatest journalistic collapse of the 21st century. We are not talking about a factual error by the news anchor at 11 pm or three poorly scored stories in the print newspapers.

It took five years of daily coverage on CNN and MSNBC and hundreds of stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post about something that proved to be a hoax, a ghost, a poorly told story whose incongruities have accumulated until it completely collapsed: the Russiagate, the so-called “Russian interference in the 2016 elections”, the result of “Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin”.

Let’s get to the facts.

Scott Girard:

A Jefferson Middle School teacher is on administrative leave after planning a Colonial-era reenactment lesson that asked students “to assume stereotypical roles which brought racialized harm,” according to an email from the school’s principal.

The incident comes 10 months after officials in the nearby Sun Prairie Area School District apologized to parents for a middle school lesson that asked students to consider a question of how they would punish a slave under Hammurabi’s code in ancient Mesopotamia.

Other lessons around the country asking students to assume the role of slaveholders or slaves have drawn criticism in recent years, with parents expressing concerns that rather than imparting empathy, the lessons are traumatizing for students of color.

In some of the most extreme cases, students have been grouped based on their race and told to treat each other as if they were in their roles in situations like a slave trading exercise. A 2019 Education Week article mentioned two then-recent incidents, one in which a fifth-grade class held a “slave auction” and another with a fourth-grade class sending students “back to the plantation” in a game about the Underground Railroad.

Maxine McKinney de Royston, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Curriculum and Instruction, said innovative classroom activities are important for teachers to try, but that they must be thought through and consider what the learning goals are. Even role-playing and reenactments from times of slavery can be OK, she said, but “context matters” in considering when that is appropriate, and there are important safeguards for teachers to put in place in classrooms.

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?

Jay Matthews:

Educators and community leaders who wanted to help low-income students no longer tried to move them into better schools. Instead, they focused on improving schools in impoverished neighborhoods. Their work has been at the center of my reporting. They have had successes, but news of their progress has spread slowly.

Ignoring the segregated state of our education systemhas led some people to assume it is a natural situation — that perhaps there’s nothing wrong with students attending schools full of other students who look like themselves.

The lines that divide: School district boundaries often stymie integration

Nothing challenges such thinking more effectively than a new study by Tomás Monarrez and Carina Chien of the Urban Institute, titled “Dividing Lines: Racially Unequal School Boundaries in US Public School Systems.”

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Most of us probably don’t know — like I didn’t, before reading the think tank’s report — that if you study the history of school boundaries that divide neighborhoods by income and ethnicity, many reflect the redlining maps issued by a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), in the 1930s and 1940s. Scholars disagree over whether President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who founded the agency as a New Deal initiative, can be blamed for making neighborhoods look bad on those maps, but there is little doubt that labeling some areas as “hazardous” for mortgage loans hurt the local schools.

Monarrez and Chien say they found more than 2,000 pairs of neighboring public schools that “are vastly different in terms of the racial and ethnic composition of the population living on either side of the boundary.”

Full report.

Madison has not addressed boundaries for decades. Yet, we recently expanded our least diverse schools, despite space in nearby facilities.

COVID panic mongering by Fauci & Collins led countless school districts to shut schoolhouse doors, especially for poor kids who could not afford private school, especially in blue states. The harm to our kids will last a generation. (13/n)https://t.co/SnbJWxQbUd pic.twitter.com/Mw2TnOZSvG

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 20, 2021

The Great Barrington Declaration.

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Supreme Court granted a motion to bypass in Becker v. Dane County, meaning the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear and decide the case brought by two Dane County residents and a Dane County business challenging the authority of the county health officer to issue sweeping orders without approval by the Dane County Board. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed this case in January 2021 in response to a series of emergency orders from Public Health of Madison and Dane County (PHMDC) that restricted and regulated life and commerce in Dane County.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court will schedule oral arguments at a later date.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, said, “This case presents the Court with an opportunity to clarify that local health officers cannot unilaterally issue orders that restrict daily life without approval from a legislative body. The Dane County Board cannot pass the buck and allow an unelected health officer to issue whatever orders she sees fit.”

Background: WILL filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in November 2020 challenging the legal authority of Dane County’s health department to issue sweeping emergency orders that restrict life and commerce in Dane County. WILL argued the orders are an overreach of the legal authority granted to local health officers and an unlawful delegation of authority from local elected bodies. In particular, WILL argued the new restrictions were not voted on by the Dane County Board.

Allison Garfield, Jessie Opoien and Scott Girard:

“This case presents the court with an opportunity to clarify that local health officers cannot unilaterally issue orders that restrict daily life without approval from a legislative body. The Dane County Board cannot pass the buck and allow an unelected health officer to issue whatever orders she sees fit,” said WILL deputy counsel Luke Berg in a statement.

Mandates, litigation/lawfare and the taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Department.

10. Most of the things that would help – free tests, masks, better ventilation – aren’t restrictions. In fact if public health bureaus couldn’t order people around they’d have to find ways to actually implement better public health measures. https://t.co/scacarXDbJ

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 20, 2021

The Locke Society:

While many organizations and news outlets were shocked over a reporter saying “someone needs to create porn for children,” the reality is that pornographic/erotic materials are disturbingly already in PK-12 classrooms across the country. First Book is providing CRT/”social justice” books along with books vividly detailing oral sex, anal sex, masturbation, watching/searching for pornography, and more. With a network of over 500,000 teachers, and having a presence in schools in every state across America, First Book is an organization you should know and monitor. Through their partnerships with various organizations, they are able to provide books at extremely reduced prices, and in some cases for free, by having corporate donors, unions, or other organizations provide First Book gift cards to educators.

Some examples of these disturbing books that First Book is possibly sending to your child’s classroom or school library include the following:

Jon Mcloone:

Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.

At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.

Much of this blog could be summed up with two answers: (1) free, open-source software can be very good, but it isn’t good at doing what we are trying to do; with a large fraction of the reason being (2) open source distributes design over small, self-assembling groups who individually tackle parts of an overall task, but large-scale, unified design needs centralized control and sustained effort.

I came up with 12 reasons why I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model. I would be interested to hear your views in the comments section below the blog.

Alison Gopnik:

The great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget used to talk about “the American question.” In the course of his long career, he lectured around the world, explaining how children’s minds develop as they get older. When he visited the U.S., someone in the audience was sure to ask, “But Prof. Piaget, how can we get them to do it faster?” 

Today it’s no longer just impatient Americans who assume that faster brain and cognitive development is better. Across the globe, as middle-class “high investment” parents anxiously track each milestone, it’s easy to conclude that the point of being a parent is to accelerate your child’s development as much as possible. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools.

Tom Pritchard:

Google announced this change in a blog post, revealing that restrictions may be put in place on files that violate Google’s Terms of Service or abuse program policies. While the owner will still have full access, this move means sharing privileges will be revoked — even if someone already has a link.

According to Google file owners will receive an email when files are restricted. Not only does that alert them to the fact it’s happened, it will also give them the opportunity to appeal the decision and request a review.

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

Michelle Goldberg:

In August, Los Angeles Magazine profiled Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of that city’s teachers union, who insisted that there was no such thing as pandemic-related learning loss. “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables,” she said. “They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest.”

Even now, the teachers union in Portland, Ore., is proposing that high school students go remote every Friday, arguing that students and educators are both overwhelmed. “There needs to be some kind of relief valve somewhere and this provides some of that for educators,” a union negotiator was quoted saying in The Oregonian.

Alex Nester:

Parents in Virginia’s largest school district collected enough signatures to recall a school board member who ignored parental concerns and kept schools closed during the pandemic.

Open FCPS Coalition, a bipartisan group of parents, on Wednesday filed with a county circuit court a petition to recall school board member Laura Jane Cohen. The group accuses Cohen of ignoring studies that showed reopening was safe and keeping students isolated from peers for more than a year was harmful for their mental health.

Republican candidates swept Virginia’s statewide elections in November, victories many attributed to parents’ frustration with school closures. But that momentum may not be enough to recall Cohen, who was not up for reelection this cycle. A local attorney backed by left-wing megadonor George Soros quashed Open FCPS Coalition’s attempt to recall a school board member.

In a statement Thursday, Open FCPS Coalition founder Dee O’Neal Jackson said the 8,000 signatures gathered show the group’s mission resonates with the community.

“For over 18 months, the Fairfax County School Board has focused on every political issue of the day,” O’Neal Jackson said. “In turn, [it] has not focused on what’s best for our students and families in Fairfax County.”

A judge will verify the authenticity of the signatures and decide whether to hold a trial and special election to replace Cohen. The coalition also wants to recall at-large school board member Abrar Omeish, who in May came under fire after she in two social media posts referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state.

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?

Should be taught to all at a young age pic.twitter.com/GlVkjcdhah

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2021

Sam González Kelly, Alejandro Serrano:

Incumbents lost two of the four runoff elections for the Houston ISD board Saturday night, clearing the way for two new conservative trustees in the state’s largest public school district. The results mark the end of campaigns politicized by clashes over cultural talking points in what are traditionally viewed as nonpartisan races.

Pastor Kendall Baker beat Trustee Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca by less than 100 votes to win the seat in District 6. In District 7, Trustee Anne Sung lost to former PTO President Bridget Wade.

Baker and Wade both garnered support from prominent Texas Republicans and spoke out in their campaigns against mask mandates and critical race theory in education.

About 5,300 people, less than 7 percent of registered voters, participated in the District 6 runoff, while over 12,400 people, about 12 percent of registered voters, turned out for the District 7 election, according to Harris County election statistics.

Matt Taibbi:

In preparation for today’s forthcoming story, A Culture War in Four Acts: Loudoun County, Virginia. Part Two: ‘The Incident,’ TK News sent Freedom of Information requests to the county on several questions. Concerned with the issue of when the controversial “Equity Collaborative” was hired, we asked for “procurement or purchasing process documents, stakeholder emails and communique leading to the hiring of ‘The Equity Collaborative’ as consultant or business partner for any role by Loudoun County School District/County.” We’ve enclosed documents we received in response here. 

A lot of these had already been made public in stories like this one from the Washington Free Beacon, but there is some new information, and what we did get raised some new questions. There’s still no record of how the Collaborative came to win the original Equity Assessment contract, and the chronology in which the firm submitted a formal bid for further work only after it had already won a no-bid, $500,000 contract remains, to say the least, confusing. A number of documents are listed as having been re-submitted, and it’s not easy to sort out when the originals were produced.

Included here is the firm’s original “Equity Assessment,” its “Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism,” a “Comprehensive Equity Plan,” and pay stubs for several additional rounds of equity coaching. 

A great deal of vitriol has been spent in Loudoun litigating the question of whether the arrival of the “Equity Collaborative” was triggered by the “runaway slave game” incident (see today’s forthcoming story) or whether there was a pre-existing relationship with the soon-to-be-infamous consultancy. The county insists the assessment was already in the works, and records do reveal that as far back as the previous summer, on August 20, 2018, the county spent $6000 on an “Equity Leadership Team Planning Meeting Facilitation” with the Collaborative, indicating an existing relationship.

However, sources both inside and outside the school system insist the bulk of that money was for normal teaching and support services mainly geared toward the county’s Spanish-speaking minority. There were still sizable allocations for items like “Instruction Facilitator, Equity and Culturally Responsive” ($339,516), “Equity Training Across Departments” ($72,000), and “Diversity Interview Panels” ($50,000), among other things, but there are mixed reports on what the rest of those line items mean. 

More TK, as we say around here. Part 2 of the Loudoun series will be out momentarily. In the meantime, here are the EC docs:

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?

Shannon Dooling and Christine Willmsen:

A WBUR investigation with ProPublica found elected officials and the public were largely kept in the dark when Boston police spent $627,000 on this equipment by dipping into money seized in connection with alleged crimes.

Also known as a “stingray,” the cell site simulator purchased by Boston police acts like a commercial cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to it. Once the phones connect to the cell site simulator’s decoy signal, the equipment secretly obtains location and other potentially identifying information. It can pinpoint someone’s location down to a particular room of a hotel or house.

While this briefcase-sized device can help locate a suspect or a missing person, it can also scoop up information from other phones in the vicinity, including yours.

The Boston police bought its simulator device using money that is typically taken during drug investigations through what’s called civil asset forfeiture.

Princeton commencement speech, 1913 pic.twitter.com/iPNYLt5eF4

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) December 17, 2021

You, enlightened, self-sufficient, self-governed, endowed with gifts above your fellows, the world expects you to produce as well as to consume, to add to and not to subtract from its store of good, to build up and not tear down, to ennoble and not degrade. It commands you to take your place and to fight your fight in the name of honor and of chivalry, against the powers of organized evil and of commercialized vice, against the poverty, disease, and death which follow fast in the wake of sin and ignorance, against all the innumerable forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man, and unleash the passions of the beast. There comes to you from many quarters, from many voices, the call of your kind. It is the human cry of spirits in bondage, of souls in despair, of lives debased and doomed. It is the call of man to his brother … such is your vocation; follow the voice that calls you in the name of God and of man. The time is short, the opportunity is great; therefore, crowd the hours with the best that is in you.

The Economist:

“A school district where one-quarter of students were black spent, on average, 10 more weeks in the classroom than one where three-quarters of students were black.”

A recent working paper by a group of researchers led by Emily Oster, of Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at the results of standardised tests taken by children in grades three to eight (aged roughly eight to 13). The tests, which vary slightly between states, assessed pupils’ grasp of maths and English. The researchers examined 12 states, comparing the results of tests taken in 2019, before lockdowns, with those taken in 2021. They found a 14 percentage-point drop in the pass rates for maths and a six-point drop for English.

Scores in English and maths were falling even before the pandemic(although researchers cannot agree on why). To isolate the effect that remote schooling had on childrens’ performance the authors built a statistical model. For each district the model contained information on the amount of time that pupils spent attending school in person. It also contained information on covid-19 cases, the racial composition of the district and the number of pupils who were eligible for reduced-price lunches (a proxy for income).

The authors found that, even when controlling for these other factors, the amount of in-person schooling in a given school district had a big impact on pass rates. The results suggested that moving from fully virtual to fully in-person lessons counteracted the drop in scores by around ten percentage points for maths, and just over three percentage points for English. In both subjects, the detrimental effect of virtual schooling was largest in poorer areas, where students are more likely to lack the space for undisturbed study or the technology to access online lessons.

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?

Julian Borger:

The VR simulation has been developed by a team from Princeton, American and Hamburg universities, based on extensive research, including interviews with former officials, into what would happen if the US was – or believed itself to be – under nuclear attack. They have called their project the Nuclear Biscuit, after the small card bearing the president’s launch authorization codes.

Over the past few days, it has been tried out in Washington by nuclear weapons experts and former officials (the researchers would not say whether any serving decision-makers had a go).

“You walk into that simulation and come out a changed person,” Richard Burt, who was the US chief negotiator in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, said after his turn.

Kate Marino:

For all the hype that wage growth has received this year, pay isn’t keeping up with price growth. Real earnings, or wage growth less inflation, turned sharply negative the last two months, after eeking out gains over the summer, consumer price data out Friday show.

Why it matters: That’s an erosion of spending power, which is a bummer. But for the time being, it takes the edge off worries of a wage-price spiral, which happens when higher wages fuel inflation, which fuels the need for even higher wages — and so on. 

• The most recent data, of course, doesn’t tell us where we’re headed. “But you can try to extrapolate based on trends … and it seems like this fear of a wage-price spiral might not play out if wages aren’t actually keeping up with inflation,” Megan Greene, chief economist at the Kroll Institute and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, tells Axios. 

The big picture: Wage growth and price inflation are closely intertwined, but like the proverbial chicken and egg, experts have different views on what causes what.

We need an education system that extolls the facts about our nation. We ARE undoubtedly the greatest nation on the planet and in the history of the world. Leaders need to make sure young people know that too. https://t.co/pGbZtXMnFf

— Robin Vos (@repvos) December 17, 2021

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.

Sometimes the best way to evaluate COVID policies and discourse is to tune out the punditry and just spend time looking at CDC data on deaths and hospitalization. Look how few people are dying in a post-vaccine world under 75 and even under 65.https://t.co/kHiNQf9smG https://t.co/7JJmpgOZr4 pic.twitter.com/FCl9HlX07H

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 18, 2021

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health.

Erica Klarreich:

The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science.

The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what “long” means for each color.)

This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

“Sometimes there’s these very basic-looking questions where we really don’t understand almost anything,” said Jacob Fox of Stanford University. “I think this was one of those questions that really surprised a lot of people, how little we understood.”

Richard Brooks:

For example,  in the following cultures, men and women really do speak different languages (at least some of the time).

Chukchi

Chukchi is an endangered language spoken by 5,000 people in East Siberia.  Traditionally, the Chukchi herd reindeer and hunt for seals and whales.

The Chukchi language is made up of two gender-based dialects, one for men and one for women. The differences between the two dialects are mostly phonetic. For example, women typically substitute the ts sound for ch and r. So “ramkichhin,” which means “people,” is pronounced as written by men and as “tsamkitstsin” by women.

At the same time, the differences aren’t quite as simple as just swapping one consonant for another, which is why scholars refer to Chukchi as having two separate, but still mutually intelligible, gender dialects [PDF].

Elex Michaelson:

Nearby properties are full of cows and not many people. 

“It is rather conservative, most people here voted for Trump, voted for the recall are not vaccinated. But, they are good neighbors,” Brown said. 

Despite the remote environment, Brown is constantly on Zoom calls and staying up with the news. 

“I’m not just here chasing the cows or the elks away,” he joked. 

He serves as chair of the California-China Climate Institute and chair of the Oakland Military Institute, a school he founded.

Vivian Wong & Austin Ramzey:

A Hong Kong court on Monday sentenced the former media mogul Jimmy Lai and seven other prominent pro-democracy activists to prison for their roles last year in trying to commemorate Beijing’s June 4, 1989, crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.

The sentences — between four months and 14 months — were the latest example of the wide-ranging crackdown on dissent and free speech in the city, a former British colony that once had significantly stronger civil liberties than the rest of China. While this case was not prosecuted under a stringent national security law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing last year, several of the defendants, including Mr. Lai, also face separate charges under that law.

Mr. Lai and the other activists — including Chow Hang-tung, Gwyneth Ho and Lee Cheuk-Yan — gathered on June 4 last year in Victoria Park before an annual vigil organized by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, a pro-democracy group. The alliance had hosted those vigils, a potent symbol of Hong Kong’s differences from the rest of China, in the park for three decades. But the government banned the gathering last year, citing the coronavirus pandemic, and again this year.

Tante:

Let’s talk Web3. If you skipped the Technology part, welcome back. Let’s try to summarize what Web3 actually is. Web3 isn’t a clearly defined set of technologies or protocols or workflows, but Web2.0 wasn’t either really. Just like Web2.0 Web3 has certain technological foundations and assumptions but is just as much an aspirational term, a set of overlapping visions, ideologies and goals. In a lot of ways Web3 is doing something and calling it Web3. But with all the contradictions and unclarity a few things are foundational to Web3.

Let’s try a quick first attempt of a description:

Web3 is a blockchain based backend and infrastructure layer on top of existing network technologies that aims at restructuring the internet in a radically decentralized and individual way. Services required for individuals to be able to act within that new infrastructure (like identity management, content storage, etc.) are provided by decentralized smart contracts or services built on them. While frontends to use the Web3 Internet still look similar to current ones (browser based apps) they no longer get their content from centralized servers but from blockchain based content providers giving individuals enforceable ownership of the data and content they create or buy.

Web3 is not intended for you to throw your browser away. In fact many things are not supposed to change: You can for example write a comment under someone’s blog article. But that comment will not live on the server of that person but is stored in a blockchain and attached to one of your identities meaning that it can never be fully deleted. The original post might no longer show it but it’s still there and linked to the original content.

Nate Hochman:

For seven months, Dylan Carrico Rogers slept in his bike shop with a shotgun. TriTech Bikes, located in the Montavilla neighborhood of northeast Portland, Ore., where Rogers grew up, had been battered by three break-ins, two nearby shootings, and countless instances of vandalism. Portland’s serially understaffed police force was nowhere to be found. And in the face of $25,000 of stolen bike parts, TriTech’s insurance company was ready to jump ship. “They said, ‘if you claim another one, we’re just gonna drop you,’” Rogers told National Review. “So I’m paying $1,200 every three months to be told that I have to replace [everything] on my own dime. And then at the same time, the cops don’t show up. So we’re just in a free-for-all.”

The lifelong Portland resident finally packed up and left in August. By that point, he said, the building landlord “told me that it wasn’t worth it anymore.” The graffiti, property damage, constant break-ins, and unattended-to police reports were just no longer worth the investment. “He tore up a three-year lease. The building’s vacant now,” Rogers said. The gloomy metropolis of 660,000, perched at the northwestern tip of Oregon, is not quite the anarchic dystopia that it is occasionally made out to be in some corners of conservative media. But in the wake of spasms of political violence, a slashed law-enforcement budget, a wave of early police retirements, and punitive lockdown measures that have devastated small businesses such as TriTech, it’s inching ever closer to genuine lawlessness.

This is the Portland way of life. “You have people that are just blatantly taking advantage of the fact that there are no police officers,” Rogers said. “I mean, this has spread everywhere now. It’s not just the Portland bike shops. Grocery-store workers are getting attacked, because we have drug addicts that are literally walking in and doing these blitz raids.”

I grew up in Rural Appalachia. My high school offered ZERO AP classes. Only my ACT score got me the merit scholarship that enabled me to attend a Top 50 liberal arts college. Ending standardized tests is an elitist ploy to further elite priorities at the expense of merit. https://t.co/7EBwHn1DKw

— Brad Todd (@BradOnMessage) December 17, 2021

Mitch Daniels:

December 15, 2021
Dear Purdue students, staff and faculty,

Purdue learned from a national news account last week that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of freedom and others martyred for advocating it, was harassed and threatened by other students from his own home country. Worse still his family back home, in this case China, was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police.

We regret that we were unaware at the time of these events and had to learn of them from national sources. That reflects the atmosphere of intimidation that we have discovered surrounds this specific sort of speech.

Any such intimidation is unacceptable and unwelcome on our campus.

Purdue has punished less personal, direct and threatening conduct. Anyone taking exception to
the speech in question had their own right to express their disagreement, but not to engage in the actions of harassment which occurred here. If those students who issued the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action. Likewise, any student found to have reported another student to any foreign entity for exercising their freedom of speech or belief will be subject to significant sanction.

International students are nothing new at Purdue University, which welcomed its first Asian admittees well over a century ago. We are proud that several hundred international students, nearly 200 of them Chinese, enrolled again this fall.

But joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of its rules and values, and no value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression. Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Mitch

Emily Hamer:

The mask resolution, which was authored by conservative-leaning Sup. Jeff Weigand, 20th District, would urge Public Health Madison and Dane County director Janel Heinrich to pull back the masking order until the county gets more feedback on whether residents want the mandate in place.

It also seeks a public hearing on the mask order, an explanation from Heinrich to the County Board of the justification for it, and a consensus from both the County Board and public on whether the order should be in place.

Sup. Yogesh Chawla, 6th District, said he thinks next month’s meeting will be a good opportunity for Public Health to explain to residents why masking is an important way to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Mandates and the Dane County Madison Public Health Department.

Chad Aldeman and Katherine Silberstein:

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of school districts have broken from tradition to offer pay outside of the rigid step-and-lane salary schedules. In particular, many districts are now offering flat-dollar raises or non-recurring bonuses, incentives to address long-standing recruitment and retention issues, or compensation to shape teacher behavior in other ways such as getting vaccinated.

It’s possible that these reforms are only temporary. The fall of 2021 was a remarkably tight labor market, especially for “low-skill” workers like instructional aides and bus drivers. Or, districts may be so flush with one-time federal relief funds that they’re simply trying to spend their money quickly.

Still, it’s a promising sign that districts are being nimble with their funds at a time that calls for fast thinking, and some of these innovations in teacher pay may live on beyond the pandemic if district leaders find them effective. In this piece, the authors outline the types of innovations popping up, explain why they matter, and highlight some of the districts trying them.

David Zweig:

The debate over child masking in schools boiled over again this fall, even above its ongoing high simmer. The approval in late October of COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds was for many public-health experts an indication that mask mandates could finally be lifted. Yet with cases on the rise in much of the country, along with anxiety regarding the Omicron variant, other experts and some politicians have warned that plans to pull back on the policy should be put on hold.

Scientists generally agree that, according to the research literature, wearing masks can help protect people from the coronavirus, but the precise extent of that protection, particularly in schools, remains unknown—and it might be very small. What data do exist have been interpreted into guidance in many different ways. The World Health Organization, for example, does not recommend masks for children under age 6. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recommends against the use of masks for any children in primary school.

Seen in this context, the CDC has taken an especially aggressive stance, recommending that all kids 2 and older should be masked in school. The agency has argued for this policy amid an atmosphere of persistent backlash and skepticism, but on September 26, its director, Rochelle Walensky, marched out a stunning new statistic: Speaking as a guest on CBS’s Face the Nation, she cited a study published two days earlier, which looked at data from about 1,000 public schools in Arizona. The ones that didn’t have mask mandates, she said, were 3.5 times as likely to experience COVID outbreaks as the ones that did.

The Economist:

This means that states are competing for a limited resource: the people that comprise their tax base. And many states are losing the fight. Between 2019 and 2020, 24 lost more Americans than they gained. Over the past decade, Illinois, Mississippi and West Virginia saw their populations decline. The implications for funding pensions and public education could become dire, and make living in shrinking states even less attractive for younger people, who will finance those debts. Growing states such as Texas and Florida will have an economic advantage.

They will also influence the country’s politics. Texas, Florida, Colorado, Montana, Oregon and North Carolina all gained population, and therefore congressional seats, while seven states, including New York and California, lost seats. According to the 2020 Census, the South now has ten of the country’s 15 fastest-growing cities with a population of 50,000 or more. Some 62% of Americans now live in the West and the South, compared with 48% in 1970. The share residing in the Midwest and Northeast has fallen from 52% to 38% over the past 50 years. The impact of these shifts will cascade: congressional seats, federal funding and electoral-college votes are all apportioned to states based on population size.

The Economist:

hen amaury gomes began teaching history in Sobral in the mid-1990s, its schools were a mess. The city of 200,000 people lies in Ceará, a baking-hot north-eastern state that has one of Brazil’s highest rates of poverty. When local officials ordered tests in 2001 they found that 40% of Sobral’s eight-year-olds could not read at all. One-third of primary pupils had been held back for at least a year. Staff were not always much better, recalls Mr Gomes. He remembers a head teacher who signed documents with a thumbprint, because she lacked the confidence even to scribble her own name.

These days Mr Gomes is the boss of a local teacher-training college, and his city gets visitors from across Brazil. In 2015 Sobral’s primary-school children made headlines by scoring highest in the country in tests of maths and literacy, a milestone in a journey begun almost 20 years before. The pandemic has thrust the city back into the spotlight as a model for educators seeking to reboot schooling after lengthy closures. In November ambitious officials from other parts of Brazil trooped into Mr Gomes’s college, the first group since the start of the pandemic to attend one of the tours Sobral offers to curious outsiders.

Success stories are important to Brazil’s beleaguered educators, now more than ever. Before the pandemic only about half of children could read by the time they finished primary school, compared with nearly three-quarters in other upper-middle-income countries. In 2017 the World Bank warned that it could take 260 years before Brazil’s 15-year-olds are reading and writing as well as peers in the rich world. Since then many Brazilian pupils have missed around 18 months of face-to-face lessons as a result of school closures (most schools have now reopened). Few countries kept classrooms shut for as long. Data from São Paulo suggest that during this period children learned less than a third of what they normally would have, and that the risk of pupils dropping out tripled.

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?

Ken Bensinger & Jessica Garrison:

In early March, federal prosecutors took the unusual step of securing an indictment against their own informant, accusing him of illegally buying a high-powered sniper rifle from a man he met at church and then reselling it for a profit. Robeson acquired the gun on Sept. 26, just 11 days before the FBI’s takedown in the kidnapping case.

Even before Robeson was indicted on the gun charge, prosecutors appear to have gone to some lengths to keep his involvement out of the kidnapping case’s public record. The original charging papers, for example, cite a different informant who attended a June gathering of militants in Dublin, Ohio, but make no reference to the fact that Robeson had helped organize the event or that he was in the meetings as well.

As part of their trial strategy, defense attorneys in the kidnapping case plan to call Robeson as a witness. They say he can shine a light on what the government did to drag targets into the alleged plot and on the FBI’s conduct overall.

If that happens, his testimony could put prosecutors in the unusual and awkward position of having to discredit their own confidential informant.

That case carried over many of the tactics that were successfully used against young, disaffected Muslims in cases that Chambers had helped bring, at times over the strenuous objections of defense lawyers.

In one instance, a 21-year-old man in Detroit was approached online by two undercover operatives pretending to be Muslim women looking for love, one of whom repeatedly attempted to convince him to consider martyring himself in an act of terrorism.

In a second investigation, three young Somali American men were contacted on Facebook and other platforms by a series of people posing as ISIS recruiters, converts to Islam, individuals in Somalia, and flirtatious women, among other personas. After nearly two years, one of the men agreed to travel to Somalia using money provided by an undercover agent and was arrested at the airport.

All the men eventually pleaded guilty and received lengthy prison sentences.

Samantha Murphy Kelly:

“You can offer tools to parents and you can offer them insights into their teen’s activity, but that’s not as helpful if they don’t really know how to have a conversation with their teen about it, or how to start a dialogue that can help them get the most out of their time online,” Vaishnavi J, Instagram’s head of safety and well-being, told CNN Business this week.

Meanwhile, members of Congress have shown rare bipartisanship by uniting in criticizing tech companies on the issue. Some lawmakers are now pushing for legislation intended to increase children’s privacy online and reduce the apparent addictiveness of various platforms — though it remains unclear when or if such legislation will pass.

For some parents, these changes aren’t coming quick enough. Unsure what else to do, parents feel they have to go it alone, whether that means pushing for changes in their school districts or looking for advice from peers on some of the same social networks they feel have caused their families pain.

Rebecca Opie and Imogen Hayne:

That night he received the text message that no one wants to receive. 

“At about 11.30 that night I got a text message from SA Health saying that I’d been to a potential exposure site for the Omicron strain,” Mr Ferguson said. 

As per the instructions, Mr Ferguson immediately got tested but what followed from then was a whirlwind of uncertainty. 

An SA Health employee called him the next day and told him he could isolate at home with his husband and, that if he tested negative, he could be released out of isolation after seven days as he had been fully vaccinated. 

“After five minutes [the employee] came back and said, ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve given you some false information, because it’s the Omicron variant they are not necessarily happy for you to be isolating at home with your husband and they are going to consider putting you in a medi-hotel’,” Mr Ferguson said. 

He was then told to wait for another phone call from SA Health.

Sam Enright:

People sometimes suggest replacing the admissions systems of highly selective universities with lotteries (their names often rhyme with Palcolm Sadwell). The proposal is that universities would mark a pool of students as ‘good enough’ and then students from that pool would be accepted at random. Here are some arguments for and against this idea, inspired by Julia Galef’s unpopular ideas series. I don’t agree with all these arguments (or even fully endorse any); the point here is just to categorise the arguments worth considering on both sides.

Melanie Mitchell:

Remember IBM’s Watson, the AI Jeopardy! champion? A 2010 promotionproclaimed, “Watson understands natural language with all its ambiguity and complexity.” However, as we saw when Watson subsequently failed spectacularly in its quest to “revolutionize medicine with artificial intelligence,” a veneer of linguistic facility is not the same as actually comprehending human language.

Natural language understanding has long been a major goal of AI research. At first, researchers tried to manually program everything a machine would need to make sense of news stories, fiction or anything else humans might write. This approach, as Watson showed, was futile — it’s impossible to write down all the unwritten facts, rules and assumptions required for understanding text. More recently, a new paradigm has been established: Instead of building in explicit knowledge, we let machines learn to understand language on their own, simply by ingesting vast amounts of written text and learning to predict words. The result is what researchers call a language model. When based on large neural networks, like OpenAI’s GPT-3, such models can generate uncannily humanlike prose (and poetry!) and seemingly perform sophisticated linguistic reasoning.

But has GPT-3 — trained on text from thousands of websites, books and encyclopedias — transcended Watson’s veneer? Does it really understand the language it generates and ostensibly reasons about? This is a topic of stark disagreement in the AI research community. Such discussions used to be the purview of philosophers, but in the past decade AI has burst out of its academic bubble into the real world, and its lack of understanding of that world can have real and sometimes devastating consequences. In one study, IBM’s Watson was found to propose “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations.” Another study showed that Google’s machine translation system made significant errors when used to translate medical instructions for non-English-speaking patients.

Robert Towey:

• The WHO strongly opposes the widespread rollout of booster shots, asking that wealthier nations instead give extra doses to countries with minimal vaccination rates.
• The U.S. has already administered over 2 million boosters nationwide, according to the CDC.
• An advisory panel to the FDA unanimously recommended boosters on Friday for anyone 65 and older.

Madeline Will:

Teachers’ racial biases result in lowered expectations for students of color, discriminatory disciplinary practices, and curricula that don’t represent students’ cultures. But what if districts could screen out people with those biases during the hiring process?

Experts say that school districts are increasingly asking teacher-candidates questions about cultural competency, race, and equity during the application and interview process. And although districts are trying to diversify their teaching force to better match their students, it’s slow work.

“Ultimately, when we’re looking for people to serve our students, my key questions are: Can you teach these students, even if they don’t look like you, [even if] you’re not familiar with their culture? How are you going to teach them as if they were your child, your cousin, your brother, your sister?” said Karen Rice-Harris, the chairwoman for the diversity, equity, and inclusion committee of the American Association of School Personnel Administrators.

Fuen:

It’s a nuisance for many: While one can move through Europe seemingly without borders when travelling (if there is not a pandemic) and in online shops, the country barrier often falls when accessing films and television offers – “no access”, it is then said, or the offer is not available for selection at all. This is what is known as geoblocking: multimedia content on the internet is only accessible regionally, usually within the borders of a country. If you want to stream the German “Tatort” in the media library in Denmark, you are left out in the cold. Even with paid platforms such as Netflix, the offer varies greatly from country to country: while viewers in Germany, for example, have access to 43.1% of the films available online in the EU, in Slovenia it is only 0.3%.

Technically, this works via the IP address, which assigns users to a country like a postal address. If you dial in from the “wrong” country, i.e. one that is not activated for the use of the content, the block takes effect.

This is problematic for all multilingual people who like to consume media in a language other than their mother tongue, but especially for members of national minorities and language communities: they often speak a language that is the majority language in another European country. Borders have shifted in Europe over the course of history, but languages have mostly remained – accordingly, today one finds many such language communities speaking a language other than the majority dominant national language. Many millions of people live in Europe who have a mother tongue that is recognised in their country but is a minority language. To cite just one of many examples: South Tyrol, which belongs to Italy, has 500,000 German-speaking inhabitants.

Monmouth Poll:

A majority of Americans say they feel “worn out” by how Covid has impacted their daily lives, and nearly half feel “angry” about it. And the public’s exasperation may also be having an impact on how they view their political leaders’ handling of the pandemic, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon‐muth”) University Poll. Support for face mask and workplace vaccine mandates has also declined since the fall when the delta variant started to dominate.

Six in ten Americans feel worn out by pandemic-related changes they have had to make to their daily lives over the past 20 months. This includes 36% who feel worn out a lot and 24% who feel worn out a little. The poll also finds that nearly half of the public feels angry about how Covid has impacted their daily lives – 24% a lot and 21% a little. Republicans (64%) are no more likely than Democrats (63%) to say they feel at least a little worn out by pandemic-related changes to their lives, but they are much more likely to report feeling angry (63% and 34%, respectively).
Looking at both feelings simultaneously, just over one-third (36%) of the country reports being both worn out and angry. Another 25% feels worn out but not angry and 9% feels angry but not worn out, while 30% say they don’t feel either way about Covid-driven changes to their daily lives. Other than partisan-related variations in these results, there are few significant demographic differences in reports of being either worn out or angry due to the pandemic. However, adults under 55 years old (74%) are somewhat more likely than those aged 55 and older (63%) to say that they feel either or both of these negative emotions.

Robert Pondisco:

A lot of us have been confused, angry, and frustrated by the reluctance of some teachers, and particularly their unions, to resume in-person instruction. It defies not just science, but common sense, and feels like an exercise in shifting the goalposts or flexing political muscles. No in-person class until teachers are vaccinated. Or until kids are vaccinated. No, until everyone’s vaccinated and Covid-19 is eradicated. Then and only then will it be “safe” to return to something approximating normal schooling.

Over the weekend, a New York math teacher named Michael Pershan tweeted an astute observation, later expanded into a blog post, which suggests one possible cause of many teachers’ reluctance to resume in-person instruction: It’s less that they’re scared of Covid. They’re scared of hybrid teaching. And this, Pershan argues persuasively, is “an entirely reasonable concern about working conditions.”

“I bumped into an elementary teacher friend yesterday who I admire a great deal. She has been fully vaccinated and I know she cares a lot for her students,” Pershan writes. “She understands that vaccines are effective. She works hard for kids. Still, she’s praying that they don’t return in-person. And she even said she has colleagues who are afraid of getting their shots, for fear that they will have to come back to school. This is seemingly crazy—sure, ventilation is awful in a lot of places, but are they less safe than not being vaccinated?”

What’s actually happening, Pershan posits, is that the response to the pandemic has made teaching much more difficult and a lot less satisfying, and this is manifesting itself in a reluctance to further entrench the practices that are making teachers miserable, specifically having to simultaneously teach students in class and online. His blunt but accurate observation (just ask a teacher who is doing it) is that this common form of hybrid teaching “hardcore sucks.”

For a significant percentage of teachers, in-person schooling for the foreseeable future is going to mean hybrid instruction, with some combination of “roomies and Zoomies.” It’s certainly not going away in the current school year and maybe not the next one either, owing to parental choice and CDC guidelines. Even where in-person instruction is currently an option, a significant percentage of parents don’t want their kids back in physical school buildings, and health guidelines make it all but impossible for most schools to fit a full complement of students in a classroom without violating social distancing requirements. For the time being, this makes a certain amount of hybrid learning inevitable, which materially alters the act of teaching.

Michael Pershan:

I’ve been puzzled by reports that some teachers and their unions, even after being fully vaccinated, are reluctant to return to in-person teaching. (For example, in Portland.) 

My wife and I are both teachers. We’ve both been teaching in-person all year, and recently got our second shots. Over dinner a few nights ago we were hashing this out. If you’re vaccinated, why wouldn’t you want to come back? If we take these teachers/unions at their word, it’s all about lingering safety concerns. Or is it just trying to hold on to the “perk” of working from home for a bit longer?

I bumped into an elementary teacher friend yesterday who I admire a great deal. She has been fully vaccinated and I know she cares a lot for her students. She understands that vaccines are effective. She works hard for kids. Still, she’s praying that they don’t return in-person. And she even said she has colleagues who are afraid of getting their shots, for fear that they will have to come back to schools. This is seemingly crazy — sure, ventilation is awful in a lot of places, but are they less safe than not being vaccinated?

But after talking to my friend, I think I understand the situation much better: teachers are scared of hybrid teaching. There are safety concerns, but they aren’t the primary source of anxiety. After talking with teachers on twitter about this last night, I think I got some confirmation of this line of thought. And while this theory has the downside of not taking union rhetoric at face value, it does have the benefit of being an entirely reasonable concern about working conditions. It is not a crazy thing for teachers or their unions to worry about.

Keith Whittington

Faculty members at public universities are under fire in numerous states: They face a serious and growing threat to the academic freedom that lets them choose their research topics and determine what happens in their classrooms without politicians looking over their shoulders.

Across the nation, state legislatures are proposing laws to limit the teaching of certain viewpoints on campus, curb the tenure system or otherwise blur the already thin line between higher education and state politics. If states continue down this path, they will undercut the excellence of their own institutions of higher education, some of which currently can be counted among the best universities in the world. They could send these institutions into a downward spiral, as the gap expands between the intellectual freedom secured at private universities and what is on offer at public universities.

Anya Kamenetz:

The troubling enrollment losses that school districts reported last year have in many places continued this fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt public education across the country, an NPR investigation has found.

We compiled the latest headcount data directly from more than 600 districts in 23 states and Washington, D.C., including statewide data from Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama. We found that very few districts, especially larger ones, have returned to pre-pandemic numbers. Most are now posting a second straight year of declines. This is particularly true in some of the nation’s largest systems:

New York City’s school enrollment dropped by about 38,000 students last school year and another 13,000 this year.

In Los Angeles, the student population declined by 17,000 students last school year, and nearly 9,000 this year.

In the Chicago public schools, enrollment dropped by 14,000 last year, and another 10,000 this year.

Patrick Gillespie and Ignacio Olivera Doll:

“Buy things,” says Marcos Lalanne, a 29-year-old lawyer. “There are things that will keep their value with inflation.”

And for those Americans really frustrated by surging prices, Lalanne offers one more piece of advice: “Come to Argentina to spend your dollars. Here you are very rich.”

Jonah Beleckis:

They’re going to have to get away from the notion that we’re using this money to reward schools that were open for in-person instruction. Maybe we can use that $77 million for after-school programming, for tutoring, for learning loss. That’s what we need to do.

Notes and links on Jill Underly.

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?

Meet UC Berkeley’s new Vice Chancellor of Equity & Inclusion. “[Her] identity is Latina, first born, raised by a single mom,” and she deals with the “emotional toll” of doing DEI-BJ work and “dismantling systems of oppression” through “mindfulness breathing.”

Salary: $325,000. pic.twitter.com/ucSAnyPFAC

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 13, 2021

Notes on student loans.

Eva Dou:

These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.

“Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company said in a statement, after The Post shared some of the slides with Huawei representatives to seek comment. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.”

The divergence between Huawei’s public disavowals that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers, and the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on slides carrying the company’s watermark, taps into long-standing concerns about lack of transparency at the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear.

Huawei has long been dogged by criticism that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies.

Office of the auditor general:

It has been due to a significant reliance on international student enrollment to subsidize the provincial costs of domestic students’ education and colleges’ administrative and capital expenditures. Direct provincial funding per full-time-equivalent domestic public college student in Ontario for 2018/19 was the lowest in Canada.
Between 2012/13 and 2020/21, public colleges experienced a 15% decline in domestic student enrol- ments but a 342% growth in international student enrolments, with 62% (2020/21) of international students coming from India. The decrease in domes- tic students has mainly been due to a change in the demographics of Ontario’s population, and high- school graduates pursuing university over college education. About 30% (104,937) of all (348,350) stu- dents enrolled in public colleges in Ontario in the fall of 2020 were international students.

The increase in international students was influ- enced by prospective students viewing Canada as
an attractive destination to study in and enrolling in Canadian post-secondary institutions as a pathway for immigration. International students in the public college sector contribute to local economies through spending, increase the diversity of colleges and local communities, and can help regions meet future labour demands where the local demographics are unable to meet employer needs

Samuel Goldman:

What are the characteristics of a good teacher? Many would cite qualities such as mastery of the relevant subjects and high academic standards. Others might stress a positive attitude and engaging classroom manner.

For most people, political opinions are likely to rank low among these priorities. According to a report in EdWeek, though, that’s what an increasing number of public schools are emphasizing. Adopting a practice that’s already widespread in higher education, many districts are now considering applicants’ “cultural competency.” In other words, they’re making progressive political views a requirement of the job.

To be fair, advocates of such efforts don’t see it that way. In their view, interview questions about “diversity, equity, inclusion, empathy, and students’ social-emotional needs” aren’t political at all. They’re baseline ways to ensure teachers are prepared to work with the students particular schools enroll. And that’s a good thing to want to ensure: When around a third of new teachers leave the profession within three years and schools in low-income communities face higher rates of attrition, it’s reasonable to look for evidence at point of hiring that they know what they’re getting into — and have some ideas about how to deal with it.

The Economist:

Randomness valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on random numbers for the generation of unbreakable keys. Better, cheaper ways of generating and handling such numbers are therefore always welcome. And doing just that is the goal of a project with the slightly tongue-in-cheek name of COINFLIPS, which allegedly stands for Co-designed Improved Neural Foundations Leveraging Inherent Physics Stochasticity.

CONFLIPS operates under the aegis of Brad Aimone, a theoretical neuroscientist at Sandia National Laboratories (originally one of America’s nuclear-weapons laboratories, but which has now branched out into other areas, too). Dr Aimone’s starting-point is the observation that, unlike the circuits of digital computers, which will, if fed a given input, respond with a precise and predictable output, the link between input to and output from a nerve cell is more haphazard—or, in the jargon, “stochastic”. He wants to imitate this stochastic behaviour in something less squishy than a nerve cell. By doing so, he thinks he might be able to tune the distribution of digits that a random-number generator spits out, without affecting their underlying randomness.

Stuart Ritchie and Elliot Tucker-Drob:

Intelligence test scores and educational duration are positively correlated. This correlation could be interpreted in two ways: Students with greater propensity for intelligence go on to complete more education, or a longer education increases intelligence. We meta-analyzed three categories of quasiexperimental studies of educational effects on intelligence: those estimating education-intelligence associations after controlling for earlier intelligence, those using compulsory schooling policy changes as instrumental variables, and those using regression-discontinuity designs on school-entry age cutoffs. Across 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the life span and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

Suzanne Smalley:

The MIT Press, one of the world’s largest university presses, plans to publish its entire slate of spring 2022 monographs and edited collections on an open-access basis. The move is a major development for the larger open-access movement and a model that scholars and librarians say could be revolutionary for cash-strapped libraries, university presses and a dwindling number of humanities scholars.

The plan relies on commitments from more than 160 libraries and consortia whose pledges allowed MIT Press to reach 50 percent of the participation threshold it set against its three-year target. The press has extended a deadline for further commitments from additional institutions to June 30, 2022. MIT Press leaders say enthusiasm for its Direct to Open (D2O) effort, launched in April, has been so strong that they intend to share a white paper in January describing how the model works so other university presses can replicate it.

Amy Brand, director of MIT Press, calls D2O a much-needed alternative to traditional market-based scholarly business models. Monograph sales today are typically in the range of 300 to 500 units, down from 1,500 to 1,700 units per title in the 1990s, meaning that publishing now demands internal subsidies from institutions or philanthropies. Much of this downward trend in purchasing was driven by the increase in scientific journals and the high percentage of acquisition budgets they now account for, Brand said. The desire among librarians to buy digital copies of monographs has only further eroded the sales numbers.

By getting institutions to commit ahead of time to supporting its catalog, MIT Press is able to meet its revenue needs and then allow everyone else to access its work for free. Some observers worried about how the model will endure if a small group of benefactors stops underwriting free access for everyone else. But Brand said the model is not “purely altruistic,” since paying customers will be given access to hundreds of backlist books that are not openly available.

VICTORIA THOMPSON, ELIZABETH WOLFSON, AND MANDY HOLLISTER:

“Teaching reading is rocket science,” Louisa Moats is well known for saying. It is something we frequently referenced during our guided reading professional development for teachers. Sadly, until we started on our Science of Reading journey two-plus years ago, we had no idea how bereft our instruction was of the benefits of that science.  

Our collective awakening started as a result of listening to Emily Hanford’s podcast, “At a Loss for Words,” in which Hanford reveals that reading instruction in America has led children to read poorly based on a flawed theory of the mechanics of reading. While the three of us had different emotional reactions to hearing it, our powerful common experience was, “We have to do something!” 

The “do something” started with a lot of reading from Google searches, Facebook groups, and blog posts. Then came reflections on our own practices as teachers — practices we’d learned in our teacher prep programs and in professional development sessions in the years that followed — much of which has now been disproven (if, indeed, it was ever actually founded in evidence). As administrators, we came to recognize that we’d passed many of these ill-founded notions on to teachers at our school — and that has produced no small amount of guilt. How could we have taught students to read this way for so many years?!

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?

Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi

It is easy to get lost in the vast lands of the Navajo Nation, with its mountains, rough terrain, endless desert and long stretches of highway. A quick turn can take a visitor into Utah, New Mexico, Arizona or Colorado.

But in this stretch of land, known as the Four Corners, it is not only the visitors who get lost. This is a place where untold numbers of Navajo students have gone missing from educational systems — their numbers unaccounted for by schools, their attendance records lost to parents and teachers alike. 

Hundreds have fallen off the grid since the start of the pandemic, pulled out of schools by parents who feel angry and unsupported. Many have transferred to other districts, sometimes crossing state lines to do so. Others switched over to homeschooling or dropped out of school altogether. The one constant is that the children are considered missing or unaccounted for.

Harvard Graduate School Of Education:

Justice in Schools creates and distributes resources to help educators and policy makers develop their capacity to understandand and challenge dilemmas of educational ethics

Adam Andrzejewski:

So, why wasn’t transparency already mandated? The California state government has 269,000 employees and a $21 billion payroll. The controller’s office itself has 1,382 employees for a $101 million payroll. 

Since 2005, California invested $1 billion into FI$Cal, an accounting and transparency platform. However, 20 major units of state government will never be in the system or are deferred for years to come.

Last year, our organization filed 40,500 Freedom of Information Act requests — the most in American history. We captured vendor expenditure “checkbooks” in the other 49 states, within 13,000 local governments, and at the federal level. Citizens can see all vendor payments — in addition to 25 million public employee salaries and retirement pension payments — on our website, OpenTheBooks.com.  

It should not take a subpoena or a lawsuit to force open the state payment records. 

Since 2013, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com has invited the California controller to join the transparency revolution and produce line-by-line state spending. Today, our lawyers at non-profit public interest firm Cause of Action, in Washington, D.C. represent us.

Chris Rickert:

A woman who attacked a teacher at a Madison elementary school in 2019 pleaded guilty in the case Monday but will avoid a felony conviction if she completes a year of probation and anger-management and parenting classes, and writes a letter of apology to the teacher.

Lacandis Walker, 34, of Madison, told Dane County Circuit Judge Ellen Berz that she didn’t go to Orchard Ridge Elementary on Dec. 11, 2019, looking to get into a fight, but was unhappy with the school’s treatment of her special-needs daughter and felt “brushed off” by the staff member when she got there.

The Assembly Committee on Education is holding a public hearing today on AB611, relating to the licensure requirements for teachers in regard to reading readiness. Similar to AB446 — a literacy bill vetoed by the Gov. — this bill seeks to boost WI’s dismal literacy rates. pic.twitter.com/XLUL9NVXBD

— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) December 14, 2021

Wisconsin Governor Evers recently vetoed AB 446 on a Friday afternoon.

Foundations of Reading; (also MTEL) Wisconsin’s only teacher content knowledge exam requirement, in this case elementary reading.

A Capitol conversation on addressing Wisconsin’s reading challenges. (2011!)

AB611 and those lobbying for and against it.

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?

CBS News:

A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older.

Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up. The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.

Toni Wright, one of the 750 participants in a clinical trial to test the drug, said she liked what she saw.

“It’s definitely a life changer,” Wright told CBS News national correspondent Jericka Duncan.

Before the trial, the only way Wright could see things clearly was by keeping reading glasses everywhere — in her office, bathroom, kitchen and car. 

“I was in denial because to me that was a sign of growing older, you know, needing to wear glasses,” she said.