Ryan Lanier:

In one of the most stunning examples of relief fund abuse, the Whitewater, Wis., school board voted to allocate 80 percent of its $2 million Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) grant toward the construction of synthetic turf fields for football, baseball, and softball. When asked why the funds should be used for athletic fields instead of educational projects, Whitewater High School Athletic Director Justin Crandall told the school board that he did not envision the district as one “that would go to a referendum for turf fields.” Rather than put Crandall’s theory to the test, the school board decided instead to bill the American people for the projects. 

In South Texas, the McAllen Independent School District Board of Trustees allotted $4 million in ESSER relief funds to facilitate the expansion of the city-owned Quinta Mazatlan nature center. Although the district cited the “rare opportunity” provided by “an authentic science lab right here in our backyard,” the proposal received heavy criticism from district parents. One parent, Tory Guerra, rightfully questioned how the sanctuary was related to student recovery. Because the project won’t be completed until 2024, she observed, “half the kids won’t even get to reap the benefit” of the nature center. 

In Douglas County, Colo., the school board spent $800,000 on Edgenuity, an online learning platform, in a no-bid “emergency” procurement. Rather than use local teachers, the platform utilized pre-recorded classes for students to watch. After a period of delays that was “nothing short of chaos,” students were finally able to begin using the online platform at the end of August. Teachers and students were highly critical of the program. One student’s grandmother reported that her grandchild had four different teachers in five days, while another parent described it as “a bait-and-switch.” The district stopped using Edgenuity several weeks into the school year but did not receive a refund.

Garion Frankel:

At face value, these numbers are absurd. Even more infuriating is the fact that state education agencies and school boards are sitting on what they have already been allocated. While some of the early stimulus rounds were spent on PPE and cleaning supplies, the money from the American Rescue Plan is still just sitting there — and it’s billions of dollars. Many districts plan on waiting until as late as 2028 to dip into these funds.

But this isn’t anything new. Since 1960, public education spending per student has increased by 280%, yet test scores have only increased by modest margins at best. It’s become abundantly clear that throwing seemingly endless amounts of money at public schools does nothing for those who the institution is designed to serve: students.

Families are tired of the politics, the drama, and the wasted investments. Their anger is righteous and justified. But if we want these feelings to translate into meaningful policy, the country must get behind education savings accounts(ESAs).

Related: Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district plans an 8.9% (!) property tax increase during the 2021-2022 budget, after receiving $70M (!) in redistributed federal taxpayer and borrowed funds.

Barbara Davidson:

School Tour Examines Shift in How Young Students are Taught to Read

The Knowledge Matters Campaign is excited to announce an upcoming visit to school districts across the state of Massachusetts that have recently adopted new English language arts/literacy curriculum designed to improve reading outcomes.

These districts are pioneers, since each is an early mover in shifting away from use of curriculum that has earned growing critique for weak alignment to research on how kids learn to read. The visit to Massachusetts will capture and highlight what motivated these forward-looking districts to make this shift, and how they went about the change, in hopes that they can serve as models for the field.

The campaign – whose motto is to “find the good and praise it” – garners national awareness for the importance of building students’ background knowledge of the world through highquality literacy instruction. Since 2018, over 20 districts across the country whose implementation of high-quality, knowledge-building curricula is considered praiseworthy have been visited as part of the Knowledge Matters School Tour

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela:

he last post Glenn Youngkin shared on his website before winning the Virginia governor’s race was a list of 15 purported “lies” told by his opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Eleven concerned schools, and Youngkin’s rebuttals mostly centered on a promise core to his campaign: He would make “parents matter” in the educational decisions that affect their children. Some dismissed this strategy — which evolved from less-controversial talking points, such as raising teacher pay and protecting free speech, to proclamations about banning critical race theory — as purely symbolic. Barack Obama called it “fake outrage” intended only to boost ratings; commentators insisted that anger over education was “phony,” “hysterical nonsense” and a “manufactured culture war.”

To be sure, invoking the fraught realms of school and family reliably inflames voters; it’s a political strategy almost as old as the modern school system. In the early 1940s, the superpatriotic American Legion warned parents of the “sinister” aims of a popular textbook series that centered “social problems” to purportedly brainwash children into becoming vengeful communists. In the 1960s, opponents of sex education argued that courses designed by “secular humanists” would turn children against their parents and into pleasure-seeking, long-haired protest marchers. Just a few years later, the curricular boogeyman was a social studies program that supposedly threatened to destroy children’s love of country and family by suggesting that non-Western cultures — or even the animal kingdom — could offer insight into American society. The culprits were a consistent but varied cast of “educationists,” villainized as both incompetent and malevolent: Bloated bureaucrats and lazy union hacks freeloading off tax-funded salaries coexisted with scheming teachers and pointy-headed professors intent on corrupting children with leftist ideologies or sexual perversion.

Hindsight makes clear that these hypotheses were outrageous. But while it’s important to debunk the racism, sexism and homophobia driving these moral panics, it’s just as important to understand why they took hold. During these and countless other “classroom wars,” including Virginia’s contest this past week, schools become sites of such intense controversy precisely because they reflect larger social transformations. Seismic events such as the Great Depression, a world war and the civil rights struggle — or, today, a pandemic and a major reckoning around structural inequality — do change the experience of education. The resulting unease primes people, especially parents, to believe outlandish theories about the nature of these changes and what they represent, and to seize upon curricular issues as a concrete way to exert control over larger, inchoate and often unsettling social and political shifts. School issues, then, are no mere cipher for “real” concerns: They’re central to contemporary political culture, in Virginia and beyond.

Commentary.

Marguerite Roza and Hannah Jarmolowski:

Educational equity has been this administration’s priority from the outset, and last week’s executive order reiterates that. So, it is noteworthy that there are four federal provisions already on the books that could—if implemented with fidelity—make a real impact on financial equity in schooling.

Financial equity can be measured both across districts and within districts by comparing fair distribution of dollars across schools. Here, we focus on within-district financial inequities that have frustrated federal lawmakers for decades.

The federal government tightly controls the 10% of school funds from federal coffers, but it’s been more challenging to address inequities stemming from the 90% from state and local sources. Each district decides how to allocate these funds across schools, and examples abound of districts that shortchange some schools at the expense of others with greater needs.

As shown below, there are four federal provisions (accumulated over three administrations) with potential to work together toward fostering equity. But thus far, none of these provisions has been fully implemented by every state, and one seems to have been ignored completely.

Salena Zito:

On the morning of Election Day in western Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf mentioned on a local radio show that his wife had submitted his mail-in ballot for him — a direct violation of Pennsylvania election law punishable by up to either a year in prison or a $1,000 fine — or possibly both.

Had the progressive Democrat signed the voting bill that passed this summer, H.B. 1300, any member of his household could have dropped it off for him. Moreover, it would have established early in-person voting and required signature verification of mail-in ballots.

When he vetoed the bill, Wolf said at the time it was because it “restricted the freedom to vote.”

This story will last a day or two in the local news. What reporters and elected officials will miss about this moment is where the seed is planted in the public psyche — just one more snippet of information adding to their dissatisfaction with the party in power. It is one of many signs collected over many years that insiders like Wolf are detached from the people they govern.

Their detachment is not just geographical but cultural, and it is not limited to politics. For decades, the nation’s cultural curators have operated through corporations, national sports organizations, Hollywood, academia, the national news media. More and more, they have become detached from the people who buy, watch, or are educated by them.

In Wolf’s case, he spent the last two years telling his constituents he knew better on everything, especially regarding his secretive, autocratic handling of the pandemic and his controversial moves regarding business waivers and nursing homes. He allowed only “life-sustaining sectors of the economy” to stay open, yet he initially allowed his family’s cabinet business to remain open. His former health secretary, Rachel Levine, now a prominent member of the Biden administration, made decisions that turned Pennsylvania nursing homes into coronavirus death traps, then removed her mother from a personal care facility .

Their “do as I say not as I do” attitude led to last Tuesday’s reaction, but that wasn’t the first instance. Before that, there was a referendum this spring that curtailed the governor’s emergency powers. Last fall, Democrats lost state House and Senate seats even though they had expected to take over both chambers. They were once again handed defeats in last Tuesday’s elections in places they were supposed to win.

This trend is certainly not limited to Pennsylvania — and it has not always favored Republicans. In 2006, Republicans were wildly out of step with their constituents. Democrats such as Rahm Emmanuel wisely understood that and recruited Democratic candidates who could win in conservative districts. They hired ad-makers like Steve McMahon at Purple Strategies, who created a “We share your values” messaging, appealing to the independent, Republican, and Democratic voters. They won big in that year’s midterm elections.

I have argued for years that the conservative-populist coalition was born in 2008 when John McCain became the Republican nominee. These voters either stayed home or voted against their interests for Barack Obama because of his candidacy’s historic and aspirational nature.

By 2009, their breakaway began, and the anti-establishment Tea Party movement was born. The 2010 midterm elections demonstrated the coalition’s strength, but it felt the same way toward Mitt Romney as it had for McCain — nice guy but didn’t inspire them. Obama became the first president ever reelected with fewer popular votes and a smaller percentage than his first election.

Derek Thompson:

Like many new ideas, Fast Grants is an innovation embedded in a critique of the status quo.

Most scientific funding in the United States flows from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This funding is famously luxurious; the NIH and NSF allocate about $50 billion a year. It is also infamously laborious and slow. Scientists spend up to 40 percent of their timeworking on research grants rather than on research. And funding agencies sometimes take seven months (or longer) to review an application, respond, or request a resubmission. Anything we can do to accelerate the grant-application process could hugely increase the productivity of science.

Joanne Jacobs:

Shane Trotter was an eager beaver when he began teaching high school 10 years ago. He was working in what was considered the best school in a “destination district.” But his students were unprepared to take notes or write short responses on tests, he writes in Quillette.

I’d spend entire classes explaining what I wanted to see in the short answer responses. We’d practice writing the “who, what, where, when, and why this concept is important.” But little changed.

. . . Over half of my students would have failed if I gave them the grade they earned. But the unwritten, yet well-communicated, rule was that teachers should never fail a student if it could be helped. The onus was on the teacher to hound students for late assignments and find a way to bump them to a C.

Students had no incentive to work hard because they knew they’d pass, Trotter writes. “In most on-level classes, any student can get a B without the inconvenience of learning anything.”

Under pressure, he “eliminated homework, allowed test retakes, gave fill-in-the-blank notes, graded essays at a 5th grade level, gave test reviews that were basically the test, and intentionally made tests easy,” he writes. “Students might have learned more if they’d been allowed to fail.”

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Brad Polumbo:

Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later. 

We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

The picture painted by this comparison is one of working-class destruction.

Lindsay Paterson

Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how inequality operates and is reproduced. The present analysis uses social surveys of children aged 10 to 11 years in Britain between 1947 and 2012 to assess whether the social-class distribution of intelligence has changed. The main conclusions are that, although children’s intelligence relative to their peers remains associated with social class, the association may have weakened recently, mainly because the average intelligence in the highest-status classes may have moved closer to the mean.

This story is a good example of the feelings-first, fear-amplifying journalism that has characterized schools coverage from the Times and others. https://t.co/GuN4OMpCEQ

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) November 6, 2021

Michael Edge Jeanna Neefe Matthews

Advocates of transparency in science often point to the benefits of open practices for the scientific process. Here, we focus on a possibly underappreciated effect of standards for transparency: their influence on non-scientific decisions. As a case study, we consider the current state of probabilistic genotyping software in forensics.

Minneapolis parents have taken their frustrations with the school district’s level of illiteracy to the superintendent’s house pic.twitter.com/dSVOLyoUDa

— Beth Hawkins (@beth_hawkins) November 7, 2021

Seth

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

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?

www

MIT, like many universities, has recently turned hostile to free speech, free expression, open scientific inquiry, and viewpoint diversity.  For example, in October 2021, MIT canceled the speaking invitation of leading geophysicist Dorian Abbot for expressing the view, regarded as simple common sense by most Americans, that personal identity should not supersede merit. The barrage of negative press and public outrage resulting from MIT cancelling Dr. Abbot led MIT faculty chair Lily Tsai in November 2021 to poll the faculty on two questions:

•  60% responded “Yes” to “Do you feel on an everyday basis that your voice, or the voices of your colleagues are constrained at MIT?” 
•  83% responded “Yes” to “Are you worried given the current atmosphere in society that your voice or your colleagues’ voices are increasingly in jeopardy?” 

That a large majority of MIT faculty feels that their voices are constrained at MIT reveals a crisis demanding decisive action. The MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), a chapter of the national Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA), was formed to call for such action, beginning by investigating the current climate on campus, and recommending how MIT can restore free speech, open scientific inquiry, and a tolerance for viewpoint diversity.

Signatories: 1,105 as of November 5, 2021

California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most when schools fail to teach their students. As textbooks and other teaching materials approved by the State would have to follow this framework and since teachers are expected to use it as a guide, its potential to steal a promising future from our children is enormous.

The proposed framework would, in effect, de-mathematize math. For all the rhetoric in this framework about equity, social justice, environmental care and culturally appropriate pedagogy, there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology. A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math—as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math. The proposed framework:

• Promotes fringe teaching methods such as “trauma-informed pedagogy.” [ch. 2, p. 16]
• Distracts from actual mathematics by having teachers insert “environmental and social justice” into the math curriculum. [ch. 1, p. 35]
• Distracts from actual mathematics by having teachers develop students’ “sociopolitical consciousness.” [ch. 2, p. 39] 
• Distracts from actual mathematics by assigning students—as schoolwork—tasks it says will solve “problems that result in social inequalities.” [ch. 7, p. 29] 
• Urges teachers to take a “justice-oriented perspective at any grade level, K–12” and explicitly rejects the idea that mathematics itself is a “neutral discipline.” [ch. 2, p. 29] 
• Encourages focusing on “contributions that historically marginalized people have made to mathematics” rather than on those contributions themselves which have been essential to the academic discipline of mathematics. [ch. 2, p. 31]
• “Reject[s] ideas of natural gifts and talents” and discourages accelerating talented mathematics students. [ch. 1, p. 8]
• Encourages keeping all students together in the same math program until the 11th grade and argues that offering differentiated programs causes student “fragility” and racial animosity. [ch.1, p. 15]
• Rejects the longstanding goal of preparing students to take Algebra I in eighth grade, on par with high-performing foreign countries whose inhabitants will be future competitors of America’s children—a goal explicitly part of the 1999 and 2006 Math Frameworks. [ch. 9, p. 43]

We, the undersigned, disagree. Mathematics is a discipline whose language is universally accessible with good teaching. The claim that math is not accessible is an insult to the millennia of non-Western mathematicians and erases the contributions of cultures around the world to mathematics as we now know it. Large numbers of students in developing countries are currently succeeding in advanced mathematics, and American industries have been put in the position of having to encourage them to come to the United States to work.

K-12 Math links:

“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

Connected Math.

Singapore Math

Math forum

Wenbin Fang:

Fast forward to 2016 and I found that I was consuming more information from podcasts than from other media formats like TV, YouTube videos, or news websites. To be precise, I spent five-plus hours per day listening to podcasts when I was writing code, commuting to work, working out in the gym, grocery shopping, and so on.

Basically, whenever my hands and eyes were busy but my mind was free, I would listen to podcasts.

Podcasts just make knowledge accessible, like Wikipedia. There are tons of podcasts on the Internet that cover basically every topic!

As of September 2021, there are over 2.6 million publicly accessible RSS-based podcasts and more than 113 million episodes on the Internet.

Matt Burgess:

Christian Landgren’s patience was running out. Every day the separated father of three was wasting precious time trying to get the City of Stockholm’s official school system, Skolplattform, to work properly. Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his children needed in their gym kit was a hassle, then working out how to report them as sick was a nightmare. Two years after its launch in August 2018, the Skolplattform had become a constant thorn in the side of thousands of parents across Sweden’s capital city. “All the users and the parents were angry,” Landgren says.

The Skolplattform wasn’t meant to be this way. Commissioned in 2013, the system was intended to make the lives of up to 500,000 children, teachers, and parents in Stockholm easier—acting as the technical backbone for all things education, from registering attendance to keeping a record of grades. The platform is a complex system that’s made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent. The only problem? It doesn’t work.

The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. Parents and teachers have complained about the complexity of the system—its launch was delayed, there have been reports of project mismanagement, and it has been labelled an IT disaster. The Android version of the app has an average 1.2 star rating.

On October 23, 2020, Landgren, a developer and the CEO of Swedish innovation consulting firm Iteam, tweeted a hat design emblazoned with the words “Skrota Skolplattformen”—loosely translated as “trash the school platform.” He joked he should wear the hat when he picks his children up from school. Weeks later, wearing that very hat, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “From my own frustration, I just started to create my own app,” Landgren says.

Matthew Levey:

Roosevelt Montás’s memoir-cum-paean to the classics, is a timely and much-needed book. Montás directed Columbia’s Core Curriculum program for a decade. In an era when dismissing the canon signals a concern for the less privileged, Montás argues that restoring the great writers and thinkers to the pantheon is critical. “Far from a pointless indulgence for the elite,” he writes, “liberal education is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down.”

At the root of the decline of the liberal arts, Montás sees “a crisis of consensus among academic humanists about what things are most worth knowing.” He blames university leaders, “reluctant to reveal the values [they] hold” for fear of being judged “morally corrupt” or “complicit in larger systems of exclusion or exploitation” for failing their students. He acknowledges that “dead white men” influence the humanities but properly notes “the problems of representation . . . must be solved by means other than the abandonment of the textual traditions that underpin contemporary life.”

“Free” is at the root of the Latin word liber in liberal arts. You can’t define the liberal arts with a bumper sticker, but for Montás, his freedom certainly wasn’t free. He arrived in New York as a 12-year-old, joining his mother, who earned $3.36 an hour at a garment factory in Brooklyn. He moved frequently, used savings from his summer job to help pay the security deposit on their home, and treasured a gold-leafed copy of Plato’s Dialogues he found in the garbage next to his Queens apartment. Six years after leaving a rural town in the Dominican Republic, speaking not a word of English, Montás found himself standing before Columbia’s majestic Low Memorial Library, at the start of his freshman year.

While conservatives despair at Shakespeare’s cancellation and progressives demand ever-more gender- and race-based studies, Columbia University remains a bastion of liberal arts education, requiring four liberal arts classes grounded in the Western tradition, regardless of a student’s major, social status, or race. Whether they hope to become physicists or poets, students must share the experience of struggling with life’s fundamental questions, gaining an understanding of how writers from the ancient past to the present have been in dialogue with each other, pushing society to define a life worth living. Leading the class he once took, Montás now asks his students to consider, like Socrates, if there is an idea for which they are willing to die. That’s a question that shouldn’t be confined to classrooms.

New York City mayor-elect Eric Adams, who has noted how badly our schools fail to teach black boys to read, might consider paying Montás a visit. One thing Adams could learn from Columbia’s Core for literary instruction is the importance of internal coherence—all art, music, and literature is a reaction of the present generation to the ones that preceded it. Too often, our current curricula pretend that one story is just as good as another, failing to build students’ background knowledge and worsening the comprehension challenges for less privileged kids.

Adam Harris:

And it’s not all about CRT. Although that fight has garnered a lot of attention, the current animus toward school boards, and the members who sit on them, goes back to the start of the pandemic, when many schools shut down, prompting intense anger from some parents. Pamela Lindberg, a six-year Robbinsdale, Minnesota, school-board member, was on the receiving end of some of that ire. This past summer, on July 19, at the close of the board’s regularly scheduled meeting, Lindberg announced that she was resigning. “I will not continue to accept that hateful and disrespectful behavior with my service to the community,” she said. “The hate is too much. I no longer feel respected nor effective.”

Lindberg is one of the dozens of school-board officials who have left their positions in the past year. In Minnesota, nearly 70 members have resigned or retired since August 2020—a typical year would see fewer than 20 such departures, according to the Minnesota School Boards Association. In Wisconsin, three board members left the Oconomowoc Area School Board in unison, calling the board’s work “toxic and impossible to do.” And in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a board member who had voted twice in favor of requiring masks for children resigned after receiving several threats and observing a vehicle idling outside his home late at night.

School-board meetings, once ho-hum affairs punctuated by lengthy conversations over public-works projects and curricula, and presentations about the successes of local students, have, over the past 20 months, become one of the most prominent outlets where people feel they can voice their opposition to everything including masks, vaccine mandates, and equity initiatives. From 2006 to 2020, Ballotpedia, which tracks elections, covered an average of 23 recall efforts against 52 school-board members each year; this election, they tracked 84 efforts against 215 officials.

And school-board elections are typically low-turnout events. But that was not the case this go-round. When Wendy Francour, who faced a recall in Mequon-Thiensville, was first elected in 2014, she received 2,300 votes—this year she received nearly 6,800. These elections are disproportionately attended by interested parties such as parents and teachers, a slice of the public but not one broadly representative of the larger public’s interests. But this year’s turnout numbers suggest a wider swath of people were motivated to vote on education—an issue that, though important, rarely polls highly among voters’ most pressing concerns.

Joe Setyon:

Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas found this out the hard way. When Solas emailed the principal of her daughter’s public school earlier this year, asking for the kindergarten curriculum, she was stonewalled. Then, she got hit with a bill from the school district for $74,000. Solas, who the Goldwater Institute is defending in court, was even sued by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public sector teachers union, all because she thought she had a right to know what her daughter would be taught about America. 

“Parents have enough on their hands raising their children—it’s a full-time job,” said Sandefur. “They shouldn’t have to fight self-righteous administrators and scheming special interests just to find out what their kids are being taught in classrooms that their tax dollars pay for.”

It would have been easy for Solas to give up. But she didn’t. 

“Nicole won’t be bullied, intimidated, or silenced. She’s still fighting for her daughter—and for all our children,” Sandefur said. “And she’s showing parents across the country that they’re not alone.

Solas, this year’s recipient of the Goldwater Institute Freedom Award, offered a roadmap for all Americans interested in battling the growing wokeness in our schools. “You will be retaliated against,” she said, adding, “Embrace dissent.”

Amazing: teacher union president @rweingarten — who demands kids stay in masks all day at school including while outside — got caught partying with NY politicos in an *indoor* “packed room” all night in a Puerto Rico ballroom with no mask, and justifies it this way: pic.twitter.com/AJjEa1MLKb

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 6, 2021

James Gordon.

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

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

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

The Economist:

America has a maths problem. Its pupils have ranked poorly in international maths exams for decades. In 2018, American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. American adults ranked fourth-from-last in numeracy when compared with other rich countries. As many as 30% of American adults are comfortable only with simple maths: basic arithmetic, counting, sorting and similar tasks. American employers are desperate for science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills: nuclear engineers, software developers and machinists are in short supply. And while pupils’ maths scores are bad enough now, they could be getting worse. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (naep), a national exam, 13-year-old pupils’ scores dropped five points in 2020 compared with their peers’ in 2012. The status quo does not add up. But teachers and academics cannot agree on where to go next.

K-12 Math links:

“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

Connected Math.

Singapore Math

Math forum

Update on the state of Wisconsin’s school-board recalls (second most in the nation). 26 seats targeted in 12 districts. 5 resignations, 7 petition drives underway. pic.twitter.com/RXtIIgHSey

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) November 5, 2021

Assumption rot: the US supply chain has a basic level of security and there are people both ‘willing and able’ to make sure it does. https://t.co/CmkqQATJcF

— John Robb (@johnrobb) November 6, 2021

One could apply the same analysis to our long term, disastrous reading results and the Governor’s teacher mulligans.

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

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?

Tyler Cowen:

Among the big losers will be the American upper middle class, especially those with jobs connected to information technology and those who can work from home. They will face much more competition in the labor market than before. They may have some natural advantages of education and cultural fluency, but they are not in general smarter or harder-working than much of the rest of the world.
In other words: If you have had a relatively comfortable job during the pandemic, it might now be time to worry.

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

McAuliffe’s mistake was thinking Randi Weingarten has as much influence with Virginia voters as she has with the CDC. pic.twitter.com/5N7ipOhE6I

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) November 3, 2021

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

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?

University of Utah:

“The results suggest it is possible for schools to operate safely and in-person without increasing case rates in the community,” says Richard Nelson, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at University of Utah Health and co-senior author with Westyn Branch-Elliman, M.D., of the VA Boston Healthcare System. “But the flip side is true, too. In some areas, in-person school did appear to be a source of community spread.”

The researchers analyzed data gathered during the 12 weeks from July to September 2020 by region, and categorized them as the Northeast, Midwest, South, and Mountain West. The Pacific West was not included because nearly all public schools were virtual. The study found that:

• In every region analyzed, COVID-19 cases increased during the weeks following the start of school.
• The South was the only region where case rates were higher in counties with in-person or hybrid school as compared to counties with virtual learning, after controlling for other contributing factors.
• In all other regions, community case rates during the period following school opening were similar regardless of whether school was virtual, hybrid, or in-person.

“We know that cases increased substantially last fall throughout the country,” Nelson says. “In some areas of the country, school mode was a contributing factor to those increasing rates, whereas in other areas it was not.”

JD Tuccille:

Americans have shifted back to favoring a more hands-off approach for government in addressing the nation’s problems after a rare endorsement of a more active role last year,” Gallup reported in mid-October. “Last year marked only the second time in Gallup’s 29-year trend that at least half of Americans endorsed an active role for the government on this item,” the polling firm added. Before the pandemic, Americans supported activist government for only a brief while after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks before returning to a preference for “fewer government services and lower taxes.” That’s happening once again.

On the national scene, that preference may be reflected in weak support for the multi-trillion-dollar spending schemes stalled in Congress. “A plurality (32%) of Americans think the bills would hurt people like them if they became law,” finds a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll.

McAuliffe, Murphy, and other political hopefuls are floundering in a country that’s losing its tolerance for imperious officials. Voters are by no means unified in what they want, and it’s not at all obvious that they voted on the same issues this week. But it’s clear that most people have moved beyond the crisis climate that drove them to cut a lot of slack for government during the worst days of COVID-19.

Panicked Americans surrendered a lot of power during the pandemic. Now they want their country back.

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health mandates, outcomes and litigation.

Ian Prior:

It all started in February 2019 when Loudoun County made national news after the president of the Loudoun County NAACP claimed that students at Madison Trust Elementary were instructed to pretend to be slaves during a gym class activity. This exercise was presented to the media as a “runaway slave game.”

The school was quick to issue an apology and then-Superintendent Eric Williams said the school system would take corrective action, which included hiring “[a]n outside expert [to] conduct an equity audit,” requiring all teachers to receive “cultural competence and implicit bias training,” and creating a new position related to “equity and cultural competence.”

LCPS immediately began taking action. In April 2019, it hired The Equity Collaborative, a consulting firm in California that specializes in critical race theory. LCPS paid that company $422,000 to conduct focus groups, coach and train teachers, and produce an “equity assessment.” That assessment was supposedly submitted to LCPS on June, 6, 2019. The report was titled: “Initial Report – Systemic Equity Assessment: A Picture of Racial Equity – Challenges and Opportunities in Loudoun County Public School District.”

On May 22, 2019, prior to the equity assessment release, the Loudoun NAACP filed a complaintwith the Virginia attorney general alleging systemic racism at LCPS. On September 9, 2019, the Loudoun NAACP supplemented its complaint by submitting the $422,000 equity assessment.

Alec Johnson:

A few weeks after a parent filed a federal lawsuit against the Waukesha School District over the district’s COVID-19 protocols, the district has filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The district’s attorneys, Joel Aziere and Jennifer Williams, filed the motion Oct. 29 in the U.S. Eastern District of Wisconsin. They argued that the suit does not belong in federal court and that “federal court has no jurisdiction over the pleaded state tort claims.”

“The court should not allow itself to be used for political and publicity purposes. As such, the motion to dismiss should be granted in its entirety,” Aziere and Williams said.

The lawsuit was filed Oct. 5 by attorney Frederick Melms on behalf of parent Shannon Jensen and other parents and K-12 Waukesha School District students. It argues for class-action status and seeks a court order requiring the district to comply with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 guidelines. Kirk Bangstad’s Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC is helping to fund the lawsuit.

Governor Evers:

TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE:
I am vetoing Senate Bill 454 in its entirety.

The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan for each pupil in five-year-old kindergarten to second grade who is identified as at-risk. It would also mandate the Department of
Public Instruction establish and maintain lists of approved fundamental skills screening
assessments, universal screening assessments, and diagnostic assessments on its Internet site
based on alignment with model academic standards in reading and language arts, and a mandatory minimum sensitivity rate and specificity rate.

Further, this bill would mandate a school board, for
each school and the district, or operator of an independent charter, to annually submit a report to
the Department regarding the number of pupils identified as at-risk, the names of reading assessments used, and the number of pupils five-year-old kindergarten to second grade who receive
literacy interventions, all information which the Department would have to then annually compile
and report to the Legislature. The bill provides no additional funding to implement its new mandates
for additional testing or to address staffing or other resource needs necessary for implementation
Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the prior two years have been especially challenging for
our kids, parents, and schools. We must work–and quickly-to address reading proficiency and
increase literacy success for every kid in our classrooms. I have advocated for some time, including during my time on the Read to Lead Task Force, for increased efforts at the state level to support our kids and our schools so we can ensure every student’s success. This dialogue, however, must be based on proven, evidence based practices, and cannot be independent from discussions about
the state’s obligation to provide meaningful, sustainable support for our classrooms and our
schools.

I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to fundamentally overhauling Wisconsin literacy
instruction and intervention without evidence that more statewide, mandatory testing is the best
approach for our students, and without providing the funding needed for implementation. This bill
ultimately reduces valuable instruction time while asking schools to strain their existing resources,
instead of providing necessary funding to support the work educators, administrators, and staff are
currently doing to support reading and literacy for our students

Referencing the Read to Lead Task Force in light of Mr. Evers subsequent use of teacher mulligans is rather fascinating.

Molly Beck:

In Wisconsin, fourth graders are on average not scoring high enough to be considered proficient in reading, according to their most recent performance measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.

About 35% of the Wisconsin fourth grade students who took the test scored at or above proficient in reading — a proportion that has barely changed since 1992 when the test was first administered.

LaKeeshia Myers on AB446

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

🚨Hey parents!!! You have options when it comes to your child’s education! Don’t settle!

I’m a 5th grade teacher in a private Catholic classical school. Here is what I use to teach American history the right way 🇺🇸 #classicaleducation pic.twitter.com/bhzDPldEb9

— Chelsea Niemiec (@classicalchels) November 4, 2021

CBS 4

The family of an 80-year-old man, who was beaten to death outside the state Capitol, wants answers after learning the suspect was out on a $0 bond at the time. The case is more common than you might think.

A months-long investigation by CBS4 found, this year alone, more than 4,000 defendants in felony cases have received $1 or $2 bonds, if any at all. Most of them are getting Personal Recognizance or PR bonds that allow defendants to get out without posting bond. They just have to promise to return for their next court appearance. Some of them, like Stephanie Martinez, are leaving court only to be re-arrested for worse crimes.

Chuck Ross:

House Republicans are requesting information from U.S. attorneys’ offices regarding their involvement with the Biden administration’s effort to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent letters to all 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices Monday asking for information about discussions authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland to address what he called a “disturbing trend” of violence at school board meetings. On Oct. 4, Garland directed the FBI, U.S. attorneys, and the Justice Department’s civil rights and national security divisions to join local law enforcement officials to discuss strategies to prevent the violence.

Garland’s action came days after the National School Boards Association called on President Joe Biden to deploy the FBI to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism. The association was in contact with the White House and Department of Education in the weeks leading up to the letter, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The timeline has raised questions about whether the association and White House colluded to draft the letter as a predicate to forming a federal task force to scrutinize the meetings.

In January 2021, I signed a contract @nytimes to publish an oped about how Tyson needed to vaccinate meat processing workers. After I informed Tyson of the oped (it had been fact-checked, translated into Spanish & the photos edited) it was suddenly killed. Nice PR story today. pic.twitter.com/INvYbqRoTp

— Alice Driver (@reporterdriver) November 4, 2021

Mike Antonucci:

In a much-disputed action, the local’s board of directors voted 7-4 on Oct. 25 to approve a memorandum of understanding that gave the state union authority over most of its finances and operations.

The story was first reported by Jared Foretek of InsideNoVa.com.

“Specific concerns regarding the management and government of the PWEA have risen to the level where abuses or the perception of abuses must be addressed, so as to ensure that no state or federal laws are violated, or ethics are impinged,” reads the memo obtained by InsideNoVa.com.

Those concerns apparently involve alleged financial mismanagement and a hostile workplace created by local President Maggie Hansford. She was elected in August 2020 but was the subject of two unsuccessful recall attempts this year.

“After five Board members, two committee chairs, several committee members and the long-time PWEA receptionist have left their posts due to the mistreatment and bullying tactics of President Hansford, a majority of the Board feels that there needs to be some guardrails put in place,” reads a letter posted on the union’s Facebook page by the local’s board majority.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Jacey Fortin:

If everything had gone according to plan, California would have approved new guidelines this month for math education in public schools.

But ever since a draft was opened for public comment in February, the recommendations have set off a fierce debate over not only how to teach math, but also how to solve a problem more intractable than Fermat’s last theorem: closing the racial and socioeconomic disparities in achievement that persist at every level of math education.

The California guidelines, which are not binding, could overhaul the way many school districts approach math instruction. The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school and tried to promote high-level math courses that could serve as alternatives to calculus, like data science or statistics.

The draft also suggested that math should not be colorblind and that teachers could use lessons to explore social justice — for example, by looking out for gender stereotypes in word problems, or applying math concepts to topics like immigration or inequality.

Just read this NYT piece on proposed California state education standards that demand that teachers change curriculums to bring racial identity politics into everyday math lessons. So I click the draft standards and the first section cited this CRT paper. https://t.co/tGoJ3nmsB9 pic.twitter.com/qCTEtqzG3T

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 6, 2021

K-12 Math links:
“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Discovery+math

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/pdf/2009/05/wollack_fishwmc2009.pdf

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Connected+math

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=singapore+math

Math forum
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Math+forum+audio+video

Anya Kamenetz:

Instead, the parents she talks to are upset that their children are still struggling, socially and emotionally as well as academically. She likens extended remote schooling to a form of “solitary confinement.” Fights are breaking out at school. Bus driver shortages have parents summoned to pick their kids up unpredictably. There are substitutes covering classes.

Justice, of Moms for Liberty, agrees that school closures are probably parents’ top issue. “I think definitely COVID restrictions,” were top of mind, she says. “There were schools in Virginia that never opened or were only opened partially. Parents have watched their children stagnate.”

School closures lasted longer in the United States than in most high-income countries, and much longer in blue jurisdictions than in red ones. Virginia had the seventh-fewest days of in-person learning last year among the 50 states, according to thewebsite Burbio. New Jersey was 10th.

NPR’s recent polling with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 69% of parents were concerned that their children had missed learning during remote schooling, and the available evidence suggests that those concerns are justified.

Rodrigues is an executive committee member of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. She points out that in New Jersey, where the Republican candidate far outperformed expectations, anti-woke school board activists haven’t been much of a factor. Nor are parents for the most part opposed to masks or vaccines. They’re just fed up. “Folks like me have been saying for the past 18 months, you are underestimating the level of anxiety, fear and, frankly, the erosion of the relationship that schools have come to rely on when it comes to parents and families right now,” she says.

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

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?

Alexander Russo:

Why did you decide to open the story with the scene of officers pressuring Principal Garrett to deliver her students to them?

MK: We decided to open the story in this chaotic moment because it was so compelling. So fast paced, and so riveting, we figured it wouldn’t lose any readers. Plus, it puts the children right at the center, which they absolutely should be. We chose to use Garrett as the main perspective because she was the one adult who touched almost every moment of this incident — from gathering the children to watching them get taken away in handcuffs. Also, she was the one who was most concerned about the children, she was their principal.

What’s been the biggest response/reaction to your piece — and how does it compare to previous stories you’ve done?

MK: The response has been overwhelming. In a good way. Emails have flooded our inboxes. This is by far the biggest reach I’ve ever had with a story. But what is most striking to me is that we’ve gotten NOT ONE negative email. No one criticized the work or told us we had it wrong. It’s been all support and outrage over the story. Which is striking to me in this day and age. I found it fascinating and hopeful that readers were united on this story, and no one felt we were unfair or slanted.

“What is most striking to me is that we’ve gotten NOT ONE negative email. No one criticized the work or told us we had it wrong.”

New Business Item 39:

The NEA will, with guidance on implementation from the NEA president and chairs of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Caucuses:

A. Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) — what it is and what it is not; have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric; and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members.

B. Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.

C. Publicly (through existing media) convey its support for the accurate and honest teaching of social studies topics, including truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history, such as slavery, and the oppression and discrimination of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other peoples of color, as well as the continued impact this history has on our current society. The Association will further convey that in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.

D. Join with Black Lives Matter at School and the Zinn Education Project to call for a rally this year on October 14—George Floyd’s birthday—as a national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression. Followed by one day of action that recognize and honor lives taken such as Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and others. The National Education Association shall publicize these National Days of Action to all its members, including in NEA Today.

E. Conduct a virtual listening tour that will educate members on the tools and resources needed to defend honesty in education including but not limited to tools like CRT.

F. Commit President Becky Pringle to make public statements across all lines of media that support racial honesty in education including but not limited to critical race theory.

NBI has been modified by its mover.

David Ronfeldt:

What I mean by brain-boxing (or thought-boxing, or mind-boxing) is that an oldster’s thinking about the world gets increasingly boxed within a frame. What they think, and how they think, about the world — their world — gets increasingly fixed, enclosed, boundaried. Their scripts run within that frame, those boundaries. The well-boxed brain rarely goes looking for new ideas and topics to think about; it prefers reassurance and reinforcement about what’s already in the box. It’s another way oldster’s become set in their ways. The aging mind may not exhibit brain-washing, but brain-boxing is another story. 

In sum, mental glitching, thought scripting, and frame boxing are the three major ways that cognitive deterioration shows up in the aging mind. Of course, there are ways to limit, avoid, and counteract them. Glitching, if it’s serious enough, can be treated with medications and therapies. Scripting and boxing can be side-stepped by thoughtfully making sure to engage in diversified activities, not getting stuck in ruts. 

But there are also ways to worsen them.

NY Post:

After weeks of stonewalling, the city’s Department of Education finally had to make public the 2021 school year enrollment figures but was still shifty. 

With an Oct. 31 deadline to report the numbers to the state Education Department, the DOE announced a total of 938,000 students enrolled, compared with 955,000 last year.

Kathy Johnson Bowles:

This institution charges $50,000 for tuition. We have 2,000 students. That’s $100 million. Where is it? What did the administration do with all that money? Can someone just explain it to me?”

All across the country parents, students, alumni, faculty and staff concerned about and frustrated by the price of education utter similar statements. But the fact is that not all students (and in some cases, not even a majority) pay the full price of tuition.

Wait, what? Yes, the math is correct, but the numbers in the equation are incorrect. Why? Two words: discount rate.

In 2020 the National Association of College and University Business Officers surveyed 361 private nonprofit colleges and universities and found tuition was discounted an average of 53.9 percent for first-time, full-time, first-year students in 2020-21. Meaning: a tuition price of $50,000 is an average of $26,950 per student after discounts (scholarships). The purpose of a discount rate is to net the budgeted revenue and yield the number of students an institution can accommodate, and make sure each student is willing and able to continue for all four years.

Related: Financial Aid Leveraging

Matt Zalaznick:

A small but growing number of districts are mandating vaccines for eligible students as the COVID delta variant disrupted the beginning of yet another school year.

Though a handful of states have barred schools from requiring the COVID vaccine, administrators and school boards in several communities have decided mandates are the best way to keep students healthy and in school. Here’s a look at where districts have taken action on vaccines:

ARIZONA: The Phoenix Union High School Districtrequires students who participate in sports and select extra-curricular activities to be vaccinated or test weekly for COVID-19.

Joanne Jacobs:

When schools closed and classes went online, parents were asked to be much more involved in their children’s education, writes Robby Soave on Reason. Parents trying to earn a living, supervise remote lessons, provide tech support, coach and tutor their children were under tremendous stress.

Some of them did not like what they saw, and have questions about the curriculum. Now schools have reopened — though constant COVID-19 induced closures continue to cause frustrations — and parents are suddenly being told that they shouldn’t be so involved, that it’s the job of school boards and government officials to educate the kids.

Van Jones, a CNN analyst and McAuliffe supporter, made a similar point: “You’ve got a lot of parents who just spent a year home schooling their kids and forced to do so. To tell those people ‘look, we don’t care what you think about education,’ that is a big insult,” he said.

In exit polls, one-third of Virginia voters said the economy and jobs was the top issue, and one quarter said it was education. Both groups voted for Youngkin.

Dave Cieslewicz

And the third issue that hurt the Dems was education. They’re badly misreading and misplaying this whole issue of Critical Race Theory, The official party line is that CRT isn’t taught in the public schools, that it’s just some obscure graduate school seminar topic. But that’s nowhere near true. While something called CRT is not taught in schools, some of the concepts are most definitely there. 

Moreover, the reaction among voters isn’t necessarily based on what’s actually being taught to their kids. I agree that Republicans are making more of that than it is. Instead, it’s a more general reaction against the concepts of CRT that voters hear about in news outlets or in mandatory training programs at work or from their college aged kids or in other places. The idea that people should be designated as oppressors or oppressed based solely on their skin color is out there, the Democrats are associated with it — and people hate it. 

As CNN commentator Chris Cillizza put it yesterday, “Youngkin has molded a debate mistake by McAuliffe (“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” the Democrat said) into a broader indictment of woke culture, critical race theory and perceived overreach by the government in regard to Covid-19 mitigation measures in schools.”

The Democrats can still pull themselves out of this nose dive. They can pass the infrastructure bill tomorrow and some form of the social/climate bill whenever they can pull the votes together. The economy should be humming a year from now as the supply chain gets sorted out and COVID retreats even further. Wages are going up faster than prices. We can hope that inflationary pressures are mostly due to that supply chain bottleneck. And, assuming there are no new terrorist attacks born there (a big assumption), Afghanistan will be a distant memory

John Hindraker:

Critical Race Theory has become the number one political issue in the U.S. So, needless to say, it is the top issue in school board elections that are taking place across the country. Thus, in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts, the administration emailed talking points to school board members, telling them how to answer questions about CRT from concerned parents. No doubt many other districts have done the same. Remarkably, this particular email included no fewer than six attachments with talking points on CRT. 

These six pro-CRT missives are pretty much interchangeable, although they come from a variety of sources: the school district itself; Education Minnesota, the teachers’ union (this one includes an attack on American Experiment); the Minnesota School Boards Association; the University of Minnesota; the Minnesota Association of School Administrators; and the Council of the Great City Schools. 

These six sets of talking points exemplify the liberal orthodoxy on CRT: It doesn’t exist, and it’s awesome! They assert that CRT is found only in law schools (parenthetically, if that is true it is a serious problem in itself) and certainly isn’t taught in K-12 classrooms.

Kevin Mooney:

Four taxpayers in Pennsylvania have decided enough is enough after footing the bill for a school board attorney who told them that the school system could limit their First Amendment rights.

The taxpayers filed a free speech lawsuit in federal court that could set a precedent for invalidating policies that shield both school administrators and elected officials from public criticism. 

“Our lawsuit seeks case precedent to establish that citizens cannot be censored or intimidated by government officials for exercising their First Amendment rights at a school board meeting,” Simon Campbell, a former member of the Pennsbury School Board, told The Daily Signal.

In their suit, Campbell and three other taxpayers whose children are or were enrolled in Bucks County’s Pennsbury School District ask the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to strike down school board policies used to “censor” citizens who dissent. 

The Institute for Free Speech, a Washington-based nonprofit law firm, represents the four plaintiffs. Their suit names Pennsbury School Board officers and other members as well as the board’s lawyers and current and former district officials. 

Michael Clarke, an attorney for the Pennsbury School District who is among the defendants, is on record informing parents and other residents that they “don’t have First Amendment rights” during the “public comment” section of a school board meeting, according to the suit filed Oct. 1.

Elissa Nadworny:

Enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities is on track to fall by another nearly 500,000 undergraduate students this fall, continuing the historic drops that began with the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to new data out Tuesday.

The decline of 3.2% in undergraduate enrollment this fall follows a similar drop of 3.4% the previous year, the first fall of the pandemic, according to the research from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The numbers are from a preliminary data set representing 8.4 million undergrad and graduate students from about 50% of U.S. colleges. The numbers show there are now 240,000 fewer undergraduates enrolled this fall compared with the same time last year, and if that rate of decline holds up for the rest of the colleges, that could translate into almost a half-million fewer undergraduate students.

“It’s very frightening,” says Doug Shapiro, who runs the nonprofit research center. “Far from filling the hole of last year’s enrollment declines, we are still digging it deeper.”

If these preliminary numbers hold up, Shapiro says the last two years of undergrad decline, totaling more than 6%, would be the largest two-year decrease in at least half a century.

Mike McIntire and Michael H. Keller:

Harold Brown’s contribution to the local treasury began as so many others have in Valley Brook, Okla.: A police officer saw that the light above his license plate was out.

“You pulled me over for that? Come on, man,” said Mr. Brown, a security guard headed home from work at 1:30 a.m. Expressing his annoyance was all it took. The officer yelled at Mr. Brown, ordered him out of the car and threw him to the pavement.

After a trip to jail that night in 2018, hands cuffed and blood running down his face onto his uniform, Mr. Brown eventually arrived at the crux of the matter: Valley Brook wanted $800 in fines and fees. It was a fraction of the roughly $1 million that the town of about 870 people collects each year from traffic cases.

Oh my God she’s amazing. No wonder the Media Party ignored her. pic.twitter.com/DHpDLv38Mb

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) November 3, 2021

about 5:30:

Our children are going to get a good education, because education lifted my father out of poverty, education lifted me out of poverty, education will lift us all out of poverty. We must have marketable skills because our children should not just survive but thrive – and will create generational wealth.

"Instead of trying to elevate all of our students they want quotas and so that means we're going to sacrifice the Asians for the black kids. Now who's going to benefit from that? That's not living in harmony." – Winsome Sears campaigning against racial preferences in education. pic.twitter.com/amS5BCgI0W

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 3, 2021

WILL:

Federal law grants all parents the right to “observ[e] classroom activities” in public schools.

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter, on behalf of a parent, to Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD) Superintendent, Dr. Bethany Ormseth, urging the district to allow parental classroom observation as provided by federal law and school-board policy. WILL represents a parent concerned that persistent classroom disruptions may be causing a drop in her son’s academic performance.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “Public school classrooms should not be a ‘black box.’ Parents have the right to know what is being taught in classrooms, and federal law specifically gives parents the right to observe classrooms in person. Kenosha schools should reverse course, and view parents as partners in the education of children.”

Background: WILL represents the mother of a student at Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum (KTEC), a public charter school in the Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD). This parent is concerned about her son’s poor grades, particularly in light of reports of regular classroom disruptions, including use of profane language, racial epithets, physical altercations, and property damage.

AP:

Megan Kuehn said the recall group’s messaging wasn’t clear “on what they stood for.” 

“If it was about academic performance, we could have handled this in a more constructive way instead of wasting taxpayer’s money on a recall election in the middle of everything,” Kuehn said.

Each of the incumbents won over 58% of the votes in their races, according to unofficial results posted by the district Tuesday.

Robert Zimmerman:

Today I am instead going to provide an example of a public school doing right by its students. On Saturday I was invited to watch as an afterschool engineering group, run by John Morris, the Engineering & Mathematics teacher at Casa Grande Union High School in Arizona, went out to launch model rockets that they had built themselves.

The launch to the right was the first of the day. The rest of the post below is image oriented, to give you a feel of what it involved in teaching young high school students how to make and launch small rockets. That activity, while involving relatively simple engineering, provides them the right grounding for learning how to work hard, make sure they do the work right, and learning that failure is really only a step towards success.

Scott Girard:

Madison Metropolitan School District high school students got a higher percentage of A grades in the 2020-21 pandemic school year than they did during the 2018-19 school year, new data show.

The data provide another measure of academic progress during one of the most challenging years in education in recent memory. It’s a valuable piece of a complex puzzle that also includes statewide student assessments.

Those, however, were difficult to evaluate for last school year, with 13% of eligible students statewide not participating, including 50.3% on English Language Arts in MMSD. State officials stressed during a media call following the public release of the assessment results that they should be considered with the necessary caveats.

MMSD provided its response to a June 15records request Monday, Nov. 1. The district charged $427.92 to locate and compile the records, which also included attendance and suspension data.

The percentage of A grades received rose from 42.9% in 2018-19 to 44.7% in 2020-21. In 2019-20 the percentage had dipped to 21.7% of grades received, but that was mostly a result of the change in systems at the end of the school year.

But there were significant differences among the schools.

At West, for example, 49.6% of grades given in 2018-19 were As. That rose to 51.3% in 2020-21.

At East, the percentage went from 39.4% of grades given as As in 2018-19 to 40.6% in 2020-21. Similarly, at La Follette, 38.2% of grades given in 2018-19 were As, with a jump to 40.3% in 2020-21.

Memorial fell in the middle, with 42.2% of grades given in 2018-19 being As and 44.5% of grades given in 2020-21 being As.

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

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

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

James Freeman:

The story of the Covid era is largely about a political class imposing one burden after another on the young for the theoretical benefit of the old, with little effort to conduct serious calculations of risks and costs. Kids who were never in great danger from the virus have been forced into isolation and quarantine, forced to suffer lost educational and cultural opportunities, and forced to accept an expanded federal debt burden that will haunt them through their taxpaying lives. Many children remain masked all day thanks to edicts from politicos with hardly a care for the long-term consequences to mental health or development.

Now we have Sen. Bernie Sanders (socialist, Vt.), who has been an elected official for nearly 40 years, preparing to add to the federal debt burden once again but claiming that his massive new program is for the children. Mr. Sanders is on the brink of achieving his dream of a federal universal pre-kindergarten program. No doubt it will be costly for taxpayers, but parents should not assume it will benefit their kids.

Like everything else in the pending reconciliation bill, the highly consequential details remain hidden from the public. Reporting on the back-room negotiations for the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar plan, the Journal’s Andrew Duehren, Kristina Peterson and Natalie Andrews write that the next draft “is still set to include several party priorities, such as universal prekindergarten.” They add that according to a source, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told House Democrats on Tuesday that Congress was on “the verge of something major.”

Phillip Magness:

Is the school choice movement historically tainted by racism? American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten described vouchers in 2017 as “slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” Historian Nancy MacLean recently depicted vouchers as a product of an unholy alliance between economist Milton Friedman and segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education.

According to this narrative, vouchers came out of the “Massive Resistance” program of Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., who sought to circumvent Brown by rerouting education funding to private schools in 1950s Virginia. Friedman, the story goes, opportunistically assisted the segregationists in creating a voucherlike tuition-grant system that allowed white parents to transfer children out of integrated schools and into private “segregation academies.”

These critics have their history backward. As early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration. Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes and began attacking school choice as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.

The overlooked story of Virginia’s racist antivoucher movement traces its origins to Charlottesville’s Venable Elementary School in 1958. Facing court-ordered integration from an NAACP lawsuit, Venable closed its doors for the fall semester and transferred its white student body to a makeshift network of private classrooms.

Wall Street Journal:

Students with disabilities, in foster care, or in families making no more than 200% of the income cap for reduced-price lunches—nearly $100,000 for a family of four—would be eligible. Individuals or businesses that donate to the scholarship funds would receive a tax credit equal to their donation. The legislation allows up to $500 million in credits in the first year. No Democrat voted for the legislation.

The partisan opposition is a shame. A poll sponsored by the American Federation for Children in June reported that 74% of voters support school choice, including 70% of Democrats. The pro-school-choice Mackinac Center last year found 49% of likely Michigan voters—55% of parents—in favor of tax-credit scholarships. Only 34% were opposed.

The bills meet growing demand fueled by parental frustration with public schools that has increased during the pandemic. At least 60% of Michigan public-school students started last school year hybrid or remote. In math and reading, Michigan K-8 students “appeared not to make normal progress towards learning goals,” reports Michigan State’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative.

Families have flocked to charters and private schools or teaching at home. In Michigan the share of households with school-age children that are home-schooling jumped to 11% from 5% from spring to fall of 2020, according to the Census Bureau. A report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found a 1.45% increase in the state’s charter enrollment from 2019-20 to 2020-21—and a nearly 5% decrease for traditional district schools, a loss of some 64,000 students.

The state already has nearly 300 charter schools and allows some students to attend out-of-district public schools. But a Blaine Amendment in the state constitution has barred the state from offering vouchers or education savings accounts for private K-12 schools. Five families are challenging this provision in a lawsuit. The scholarships differ from vouchers because public funds don’t go directly to students, and unions will sue to block them. But giving students more choice is still worth the legislative effort.

Hillfaith:

This will undoubtedly come as a shock to a lot of folks reading this post, but an examination at the history of college and university education reveals that Christianity played the key role in the history and development of higher education in the Western world, according to J. Warner Wallace in his latest book, “Person of Interest.”

Wallace is the former Los Angeles Police detective who specialized in cracking murder cases that had defied being solved for decades. He got so good at it that he was often featured on NBC’s “Dateline” new feature program. He’s now the founder and president of coldcasechristianity.org and one of Christianity’s most effective apologists.

With “Person of Interest,” Wallace sets out to demonstrate that without depending on the New Testament scriptures, Jesus is the dominant personality in all human history. That’s saying something, but Wallace does it and in the process compiles an amazing amount of historical facts that demonstrate the profound influence Jesus and Christianity have had on the world we live in today.

Higher education is one of the areas that Wallace focuses on and it is fascinating to see and read these facts, which are rarely, if ever, mentioned in classrooms today. The truth is Christianity sparked “a movement driven by ‘People of the Book’ who wanted to share their book with others. This revolution initiated a series of events that led directly to the creation of humanity’s greatest educational institution, the modern university,” Wallace writes.

Very early in the history of the church, Christian leaders began emphasizing the importance of teaching men and women to read, so they could read and study the Word of God, in both the Old and New Testaments.

“It wasn’t long before Christian students were being taught more than theology and godly living. Ignatius of Antioch [a student of John the Apostle] encouraged teachers in Christian communities to ‘bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and teach them the Holy Scriptures and also trades, that they may not indulge in idleness,’” according to Wallace.

Marc Joffe:

Spiraling federal budget deficits since the beginning of this century — and projected to continue for as far as the eye can see — are undermining America’s economic future. Contrary to popular wisdom on the right, the practice of persistently spending more money than the federal government collects is a bipartisan convention.

As the country enters uncharted territory for its debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio, there are serious risks, especially from inflation, which the Federal Reserve may think is needed to finance the nation’s nearly $29 trillion mountain of debt.

According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, the ratio of publicly held federal debt increased from 32% of GDP in 2001 to 102% today, and is expected to hit 202% in the next 30 years.

While it may be convenient to blame Democrats for this rapid accumulation of debt, Republicans bear a large share of responsibility. After President Bill Clinton and Congressional Republicans partnered to balance the budget in the late 1990s, federal budget deficits returned under President George W. Bush.

Peter Betkowitz:

In mid-October, Aaron Sibarium reported in the Washington Free Beacon that Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik pressured Colbert — a second-year student who is part Cherokee and is a member of both the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) and the Federalist Society — “to apologize for a ‘triggering’ email in which he referred to his apartment as a ‘trap house,’ a slang term for a place where people buy drugs.” On Sept. 15, Colbert (he requested anonymity in the original version of the article for fear of retaliation) had used the NALSA listserv to email members an invitation to a Sept. 17 Constitution Day party organized in collaboration with the Federalist Society. In addition to using the term “trap house” — which has become common slang beyond its original meaning as a spot for doing drugs — Colbert wrote that Popeye’s chicken would be served. “Within minutes,” according to Sibarium, “the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term ‘trap house’ indicated a blackface party.”

Cosgrove and Eldik hastily summoned Colbert. At their Sept. 16 meeting, Eldik informed Colbert that his membership in The Federalist Society compounded the “trap house” offense and his mention of fried chicken, both of which invoked racial stereotypes. “The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities,” according to Eldik. “That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities.”

The aim of the meeting convened by the law school officials and of their subsequent communications with Colbert, however, was not merely informative. Cosgrove and Eldik urged Colbert to issue an apology, ominously suggesting that failure to do so would harm his reputation and interfere with his application to the bar. Eldik went so far as to draft an apology for Colbert; it was addressed to black law students, acknowledged “any harm, trauma, or upset” caused by his email, and stated that Colbert would “actively educate myself so I can do better.” After Colbert declined to send the ghost-written plea for forgiveness, Cosgrove and Eldik sent an email to all members of the second-year class that accused Colbert of using “racist language” and condemned his invitation “in the strongest possible terms.”

The Yale Law Journal should “not accept at face value the recommendations of YLS’s fringe advocacy groups,” one editor said. “A good rule of thumb for whether to invite a speak[er]: If that presentation were leaked, how would it reflect on the journal and its reputation?”

Andrew Rotherham:

Here’s an update on NEA membership post-Janus. It’s down, substantially. Roughly nine percent over the past decade. So that’s something to think about while everyone waits for votes to be counted in Virginia to see if education really impacted the race as much as partisans hope or fear.

This membership trend is not unexpected. The Janus case ended mandatory union membership for public employee unions. Here’s a Bellwether deck with background and pre-decision context on the case.

A lot of people seem to have lost interest in Janus. Some seemed to expect that the court would rule against the unions in Janus on a Monday and by Friday the teachers unions would be in bankruptcy. If you think that you’re confusing the NEA with the NRA.

So now you hear a lot about how Janus really had no effect. This is wrong, too.

Janus introduced a set of constraints that are going to depress membership and revenue for the teachers unions and weaken them over time, but it’s a slow process. There are revenue offsets the unions can avail themselves of in the short term, there is still litigation about the boundaries of the case, as with any big SCOTUS decision, for instance what counts as an opportunity to leave a union. There is inertia. It will hit different states or locals differently, and both the NEA and AFT are confederations of affiliates. It will hit NEA and AFT differently. People are still learning about their options and as they see peers exercise them (and realize savings) it will be a contagion. (I haven’t followed it closely since the pandemic but it seems like some of the efforts to catalyze leaving by teachers have lost steam over the past few years.) It’s also harder now for the unions to recruit new members recusing join is an option in more places.

Robby Soave:

But it was substantially misreported in order to fit a conservative social agenda. Anyone on the right who makes a habit of complaining—often justifiably—about the mainstream media gullibly succumbing to viral stories that fit their priors ought to denounce this as well.

Smith, the father, was arrested for loudly protesting at a school board meeting on June 22. Cops bloodied him, placed him in handcuffs, and charged him with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct. When it later emerged that Smith was angry with district officials because he thought they weren’t doing anything about his daughter’s rape, he became a conservative folk hero, and was interviewed repeatedly by right-leaning media. The Daily Wire led the charge, seizing on an opportunity to embarrass both the mainstream media and the federal government for portraying hostile parents as akin to “domestic terrorists.”

The Daily Wire‘s interview with Smith portrayed the idea that the daughter’s assailant was “gender fluid” as central to the story. The implicit idea is that the perpetrator wore a skirt in order to gain access to the women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School and carry out the attack. Over the summer, Loudoun County approved a new policy making it easier for transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their choice, and thus a connection was established between this policy and what happened to Smith’s daughter.

That policy wasn’t actually implemented until August, it turns out. But even if the school had begun enforcing it before that, there’s no reason to think the assailant’s actions had anything to do with accommodations for trans people.

That’s because the assailant and the victim had a relationship, and had met in the bathroom for sexual activity previously. According to The Washington Post:

James Freeman:

President Joe Biden appeared to fall asleep on Monday at an international gathering to discuss the climate issue he describes as an existential threat to the world. But back in the U.S. the remaining so-called moderate Democrats in Congress are the ones who seem to be asleep as they prepare to vote for an existential threat to private preschools and day care.

Given the multitrillion-dollar bundle of government interventions Mr. Biden is attempting to enact, it’s not surprising that even highly consequential items are getting lost in the legislative shuttle without serious debate.

Last week White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted a comment calling the emerging reconciliation bill a grab bag of “ill-designed” programs.

Now Doyle McManus writes in the Los Angeles Times that the current draft includes “many, many ideas — maybe too many for one piece of legislation” and adds: The product is what aficionados call a “Frankenbill,” an awkward creation stitched together from scraps of this and that. (The term refers to the gothic monster, not the former senator from Minnesota.)

It isn’t a thing of beauty… But it’s undeniably big…

Here’s Youngkin’s riff on education got the biggest cheers. Watch it here: pic.twitter.com/T8D6xCKhMu

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) November 2, 2021

.@AFTunion President @rweingarten is speaking at McAuliffe’s rally now #vagov pic.twitter.com/Kj2C55Iw5X

— Julia Manchester (@JuliaManch) November 1, 2021

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

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

James Hankins:

In 2020 the American educational system was attacked by two viruses: Covid-19 and an unusually virulent strain of hyper-progressive ideology. Many parents and educators have been shocked and disoriented to find that institutions they trusted appear to have been taken over by zombie Marxists, filled with self-righteous anger. Unless they are from “URMs” (under-represented minorities), their children are likely to be told that their heritage makes them racist, the spawn of oppressors, and that they need to renounce their “white privilege” or be made outcasts in their own schools. They are being taught to despise their own country as well as the literature, philosophy, and arts of the Western tradition. Even mathematics teaching now has to be filtered through a social justice lens.  

But every crisis is also an opportunity, as activists on the left frequently remind us. There are even grounds, dare one say it, to have hope for the future. Both the health crisis and the ideological crisis of American education have left the radical progressives’ near-monopoly of K-12 schooling considerably weaker than in pre-Covid times. It is now exposed as never before to competition from innovators who are introducing new ways to learn. Some of these innovators are giving us new ways to connect with older and sounder educational traditions, the very traditions hyper-progressives have been aiming to poison or supplant.

There is no doubt that the part of K-12 public education controlled by the teacher’s unions—the schools directly supervised by public school districts—took a serious hit after 2019. Exact numbers are hard to verify, but the trend is clear. According to figures supplied by National Center for Education Statistics, run by the Department of Education, the total enrollment in K-12 public education grew gradually from about 47 million in 2000-01 to more than 50.33 million in 2019. Since 2019 it has dropped by over two million. The actual number of students lost by unionized public schools is probably closer to 2.5 million, since public charter schools have markedly increased their share of enrollments since 2019—the only part of the public system to experience growth. Public charters are also the one part of the public school system that has demonstrated a commitment to in-person teaching during the pandemic. In the last fourteen years (the only period for which statistics are available), public charter school enrollment increased by more than three times, growing from less than 2.1% of all public school students in 2005 to 6.5% in 2019. For the school year 2020-21, the National Alliance for Public Charters (NAPC) reports an increase of about 240,000 new students, a year-over-year increase of about 7%. This represents a doubling of the rate of increase over the previous period.

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

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

Dorian Abbot:

I am a professor at the University of Chicago. I was recently invited to give an honorary lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lecture was canceled because I have openly advocated moral and philosophical views that are unpopular on university campuses.

Here are those views:

I believe that every human being should be treated as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means evaluating people for positions based on their individual qualities, not on membership in favored or disfavored groups. It also means allowing them to present their ideas and perspectives freely, even when we disagree with them.

I care for all of my students equally. None of them are overrepresented or underrepresented to me: They represent themselves. Their grades are based on a process that I define at the beginning of the quarter. That process treats each student fairly and equally. I hold office hours for students who would like extra help so that everyone has the opportunity to improve his or her grade through hard work and discipline.

Similarly, I believe that admissions and faculty hiring at universities are best focused on academic merit, with the goal of producing intellectual excellence. We should not penalize hard-working students and faculty applicants simply because they have been classified as belonging to the wrong group. It is true that not everyone has had the same educational opportunities. The solution is improving K-12 education, not introducing discrimination at late stages.

Douglas Belkin:

The last school-board meeting before Election Day capped what has become one of the most vitriol-filled political contests in Douglas County in years, and is one of hundreds of school-board elections across the country that have turned into hard-fought political battles. Many of the elections set for Tuesday have become proxies for the larger culture war over masking mandates and the teaching of tenets of critical race theory.

In Loudoun County, Va., a school-board member resigned following threats of violence to her and her family. Florida districts are considering shortening public-comment periods at meetings, and in Kentucky a school board has asked parents to communicate through emails after board meetings became rowdy. Little of the contention is tied to the local issues such as building maintenance and teacher pay that usually animate school-board elections.

Across the 23 states that allow recalls for school-board members, 84 campaigns are targeting 215 board members, about four times greater than the 15-year average, according to Ballotpedia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization based in Wisconsin.

Jason Riley:

During a recent appearance on “The View,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on the national debate over teaching racial propaganda to schoolchildren. In the process, she made a broader point about the mindset of a previous generation of black people when it came to dealing with racial adversity.

“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice,” said Ms. Rice, a product of segregated Birmingham, Ala. “But they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ ” Ms. Rice said that blaming whites today for past racism strikes her as unproductive. You don’t help black kids by making “white kids feel guilty for being white.”

The contrast with the current woke approach to racial inequality is stark. In that earlier era, there was an expectation among blacks that advancement would take place despite racial barriers, that discrimination was no excuse for not trying. The generations that produced such civil-rights luminaries as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that whites had a role to play in changing a fundamentally racist system. Yet they also understood that blacks had a role to play, and they were willing to hold black people accountable for their behavior.

Dan Luu:

People frequently¹ think that I’m very stupid. I don’t find this surprising, since I don’t mind if other people think I’m stupid, which means that I don’t adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I’m stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I’m stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides.

I don’t know why this one example sticks in my head but, for me, the most memorable example of other people thinking that I’m stupid was from college. I’ve had numerous instances where more people thought I was stupid and also where people thought the depths of my stupidity was greater, but this one was really memorable for me.

Back in college, there was one group of folks that, for whatever reason, stood out to me as people who really didn’t understand the class material. When they talked, they said things that didn’t make any sense, they were struggling in the classes and barely passing, etc. I don’t remember any direct interactions but, one day, a friend of mine who also knew them remarked to me, “did you know [that group] thinks you’re really dumb?”. I found that really delightful and asked why. It turned out the reason was that I asked really stupid sounding questions.

In particular, it’s often the case that there’s a seemingly obvious but actually incorrect reason something is true, a slightly less obvious reason the thing seems untrue, and then a subtle and complex reason that the thing is actually true². I would regularly figure out that the seemingly obvious reason was wrong and then ask a question to try to understand the subtler reason, which sounded stupid to someone who thought the seemingly obvious reason was correct or thought that the refutation to the obvious but incorrect reason meant that the thing was untrue.

Matt Welch:

The progressive journalist Zaid Jilani, who lives in northern Virginia and teaches part time there, retorted on an episode of The Fifth Column podcast Wednesday that Toobin’s vision bore no resemblance to what he’s experienced on the ground.

“Those debates actually have been happening for a number of months, before this all became like a national thing,” Jilani said. “There were debates about some of the selective high schools, and…should they use testing to get people in, should it be a holistic process. There were debates about curriculum, there were debates about COVID and masking. And I don’t think at any point in those debates did any white supremacists show up. I didn’t see anyone in a Klan hood.”

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Patrick Toomey:

The Supreme Court denied cert this morning in our case seeking public access to legal opinions issued by the country’s secret surveillance court. Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor dissented, writing, “If these matters are not worthy of our time, what is?”

Siddhesh:

People

The class divide seems to be lesser in general. People in lesser paying jobs, like say waiters, are less timid and subservient than in India. (This is a good thing!) They’re not afraid to raise their voices if needed. In general, you can tell that they have boundaries that should not be crossed.

People liberally carry coffees and soda cans to drink into flights. I’ve never seen this before. Is it even allowed in India?

Watchmen and policemen are heavily, scarily equipped.

Apparently it’s perfectly normal to walk around shirtless on campus. I’ve seen shirtless guys walking, jogging, and cycling in broad daylight. I wish I had that kind of confidence. It makes me question whether there is or isn’t an explicit law against this in India, not that it matters too much either way.

I noticed this in my first week here because the difference was striking: when you look at people, they just somehow seem a bit more free and confident. It’s hard to explain how, but you can tell. And they look very, very confident especially when driving cars. There’s a swagger to it all.

I don’t know how many people will agree, but striking up a conversation with an American stranger is much easier than it is with an Indian stranger. Americans just seem to have that natural conversational flow – I would say that talking is the one thing they’re definitively better at than Indians.
I know that the US has some of the highest obesity rates in the world, but from what I’ve personally seen, it doesn’t seem that way at all. The people that I see day to day are generally extremely fit. (Or is it just students?)

This made me very happy: I’ve seen people reading books – and I mean physical books, not Kindles or iPads – in every place imaginable, from gym treadmills to trains and buses. I once even saw I guy read a book while walking. I hope he didn’t trip.

Bari Weiss:

This “Great Awokening” has been impossible to miss if you consume mainstream news. But you don’t have to rely on your impressions. David Rozado, a computer scientist who teaches at New Zealand’s Otago Polytechnic, created a computer program that trawled the online archives of the Times from 1970 to 2018 to track the frequency with which certain words were used. What he found was that the frequency of words like “racism,” “white supremacy,” “KKK,” “traumatizing,” “marginalized,” “hate speech,” “intersectionality,” and “activism” had absolutely skyrocketed during that time.

His work echoes that of another academic, Zach Goldberg, a PhD candidate in political science at Georgia State University who found that in 2010, the term “white supremacy” was used fewer than 75 times in 2010 in the Washington Post and the New York Times, but over 700 times in 2020 alone; at NPR, it was used 2,400 times. The word “racism” appeared in the Washington Post over 4,000 times in 2020. That’s the equivalent of using it in 10 articles every single day.

What could explain the sudden market for this obsession with race and power?

The reason for this radical shift, despite the media’s fixation on race, has very little to do with it. It has everything to do with class.

Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.

Rohit:

Here are two stories about tacit knowledge.

1. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory hired three fresh PhDs with little nuclear physics background and asked them to go build a nuke, and they did.
2. The DoE in the 1990s realised they didn’t know how to make a particular foam crucial to nuclear warheads, and spent a decade and $70m inventing a substitute– (h/t Leopold)

They pleasingly mirror each other, which is nice for storytelling but kind of a paradox. In one, we spend untold millions in figuring out the smallest moving part to manufacture, and in the other some smart alec fresh faces postdocs made a goddamn nuke.

So which is it, tacit knowledge is impossible to easily replicate or smart folks can just figure stuff out?

The first story. How did they do it?

By Kadjata Bah, Josepha DaCosta and Moises Hernandez

The Kohlenberg paper looks closely at school-to-prison pipelines and uses the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause to emphasize her case. She points out the Constitution “authorizes and mandates Congress to guarantee a meaningful floor of adequate functional literacy instruction nationwide.” During the past few years, federal courts have agreed several times with Kohlenberg’s positions.

Notes and links on AB446.

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

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

Abbi Debelack:

The latest data on testing and proficiency rates for Wisconsin’s children were recently released by the Department of Public Instruction and it is not pretty. Yet despite the alarmingly low test scores, there appears to be little to no outrage by the media and education establishment.

Each year, Wisconsin students, in various grades, take a series of standardized tests to assess their proficiency in a range of different subjects. Test results are a useful tool to track a student’s academic progress and gauge the overall effectiveness of Wisconsin’s K12 education system. The Forward Exam is given to students in grades three through eight and ten. The ACT Aspire test is given in grades nine and ten. The ACT writing test is given in grade eleven and the Dynamic Learning Maps is given to students with cognitive disabilities. This year, the tests were administered to students in the spring. The tests were not administered in 2020 because of COVID-19.

This year, English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency is 27.5%, down 5.4 points or a 16.41% reduction from 2019. Math proficiency is at 27%, down 7 points from 2019 or a 20.59% reduction. These figures look at proficiency rates as a percentage of TOTAL Wisconsin students, not just those tested as Superintendent Underly reported in her press release.

We must point out that this is not a particularly difficult or rigorous grading metric. A student who is graded as being proficient on the Forward Exam means the child is operating at grade level. Let that sink in. Shockingly, less than one-third of Wisconsin students are proficient in math or English Language Arts.

Related: Wisconsin AB446.

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

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

Scott Girard:

As a trail of Lake View Elementary School fifth-graders walked up the hill in the school’s forest Friday afternoon, a classmate’s excited voice rang out in front of them.

“They’re rebuilding it!”

The student was referencing the school’s fort, one of its many learning stations throughout the forest area behind the building on Madison’s north side. On Monday morning, students and staff found a distressing site: the fort had been burned.

:

From Blue Collar to White Collar

I went directly from high school to the workforce after graduating in 1985, holding a series of blue-collar jobs of increasing complexity. In the late 1990s I took my first administrative job, where I applied the interpersonal skills learned in blue-collar roles to white-collar tasks.

Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
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My 20-year administrative career culminated in a decade at the executive level, earning more than many colleagues with master’s degrees—without onerous college debt. My current pursuit of a bachelor’s degree is a bucket-list item funded by company tuition reimbursement.

Such a career trajectory seems unlikely today. Even entry-level jobs require a degree, although I see little evidence that those degrees improve day-to-day skills. Company communications are frequently riddled with cringe-worthy errors. Nor do the college graduates seem to have learned reliability in the university lecture halls, where attendance is optional.

Wall Street Journal:

“Nearly seven decades of Supreme Court precedent have made two things clear: Public schools cannot segregate students by race, and students do not abandon their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” says the suit filed in federal court Tuesday afternoon by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education. The suit says Wellesley Public Schools “is flouting both of these principles.”

Wellesley has promoted “affinity groups” that hold events for specific races. Parents Defending Education alleges these groups are racially exclusionary “by definition and design,” given that “certain Wellesley students” including the plaintiffs’ children “are prohibited from participating in certain school activities because of their race and ethnicity.” The parents say this violates the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The parents group raised similar concerns earlier this year in a complaint to the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, but the agency hasn’t acted. In May Wellesley superintendent of schools David Lussier and director of diversity, equity and inclusion Charmie Curry told us that no students or staff were barred from participating.

But email correspondence obtained by the nonprofit Judicial Watch and cited in the complaint adds credence to the Wellesley parents’ worries. After a March 2021 shooting in Atlanta that killed several Asian women, Ms. Curry promoted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American Community.” A white teacher asked whether it was “appropriate for me to go.” Ms. Curry responded that “this time, we want to hold the space for the Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff.”

Wall Street Journal:

It took a few weeks, but the National School Boards Association has apologized for sending a letter to President Biden suggesting that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might be “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA now admits there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” which could have parents investigated under the Patriot Act for trying to influence what their children are taught.

The retraction comes after tremendous blowback. First came parents at school board meetings with T-shirts saying “Parents are not domestic terrorists.” Then 21 state school board associations distanced themselves from the letter. The Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania state associations cut ties altogether.

It turns out that when Chip Slaven, the NSBA interim executive director and CEO, and president Viola Garcia sent the letter, they did so without consulting their own board. But according to one of Mr. Slaven’s emails, they did work with White House staff.

Jennifer Calfas:

Nearly 40% of U.S. households said they faced serious financial difficulties in recent months of the Covid-19 pandemic, citing problems such as paying utility bills or credit card debt, according to a recent poll. About one-fifth have depleted all of their savings.

U.S. households are struggling in many ways over a year into the coronavirus pandemic, according to the poll conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and National Public Radio.

Nearly 60% of households earning less than $50,000 a year reported facing serious financial challenges in recent months. Of those, 30% lost all of their savings, according to the poll.

The survey questioned about 3,600 adults in August and early September about a variety of potential problems during the pandemic and how the effects have continued in more recent months. In addition to financial concerns, respondents were asked about healthcare, education, child care and personal safety.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Students, parents file lawsuit in federal court against Madison School District, David Kruchten

Seven former East High School students and parents of two current students filed a federal civil lawsuit Friday against the Madison School District and a former teacher recently sentenced to 12 years in prison, for injuries sustained after the teacher planted hidden cameras in their hotel bathrooms.

“The high school girls felt tremendously violated and are still dealing with those emotions,” attorney Jeff Scott Olson said. “What you would expect a responsible school district to do is to be relatively transparent when addressing the situation.”

Instead, Olson said, the school district has structured its internal investigations surrounding the incident to avoid releasing the details to families based on attorney-client privilege.

The district has looked for ways to share as little as possible with them rather than looking for ways to help them heal, Olson said. The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages.

The Wisconsin State Journal filed an open records request for reports from the district’s third-party investigation into two camera incidents, one involving former teacher David Kruchten and a separate discovery that hidden cameras were once installed in an East High School coach’s office, but both requests were denied due to attorney-client privilege. The district spent roughly $38,000 to conduct both internal investigations.

Josh Blackman:

Let’s assume that Justice Barrett is correct and this case is only the first such petition to reach the Court. What happens when the second and third cases are denied? The state of our free exercise clause jurisprudence remains unsettled, and most of the potential litigants will likely get vaccinated, rather than risk losing their jobs.

Matt Welch:

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Since this issue is not going away anytime soon, particularly if Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin upsets Virginia power pol Terry McAuliffe in the governor’s race next week, it’s worth being on the lookout for recurrent media framing devices that distort the depiction of an important set of debates. (K-12 instruction amounts to about 20 percent of all state and local government spending, don’t forget.) The point is not to be steered toward my admittedly idiosyncratic school policy preferences, but rather to become via pattern recognition a more discerning consumer of news.

Here are two of the most common ways the media warp school board politics.

1) Exaggerating the incidence of violence.

On October 22, in an article picked up widely and also adapted by the Associated Press, Minnesota Public Radio made this alarming assertion: “Violent school board meetings and threats toward school board members [in Minnesota] over these issues have caused dozens of board leaders to quit their positions.” Do note the serial pluralization.

Were there really multiple acts of violence, and multiple threats, causing “dozens” of board members to quit, in a state known for its niceness? The 757-word article did not explicitly list any; there was one hyperlink to a June piece that mentioned “someone had recently threatened on a community Facebook page to rush the podium” at one meeting, but no such bum-rush took place.

I was able to find one violent incident in Minnesota, from late September, when two members of the public who were on opposite sides of a school masking policy debate got into a brief scuffle that was broken up by a police officer.

WILL:

A non-profit finally acquired a vacant elementary school in Mattoon, Wisconsin, subject of a lengthy legal dispute over ownership, and intends to start a private choice school in the underserved community. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) represented the non-profit, Shepherd’s Watch, in the legal fight over ownership of the building that concluded earlier this year when the Antigo School Board voted to sell the property to the Village of Mattoon and Town of Hutchins, who in turn sold it to Shepherd’s Watch.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Anthony LoCoco, said, “We are thrilled Shepherd’s Watch finally acquired the empty Mattoon Elementary school and can now work towards opening a private school that offers new options to local families. Rural Wisconsin deserves school choice just as much urban and suburban communities.”

Wade Reimer, President of Shepherd’s Watch, said, “The community of Mattoon and the surrounding area can only benefit from a Christian choice school. The excitement of this potential radiates throughout the community. Shepherd’s Watch continues to pray for leadership and guidance to reach this goal.”

Gijsbert Stoet David C. Geary:

We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science, as well as parental occupations and family wealth. In each country and region, more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation and more girls than boys to a people-oriented occupation. These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women’s empowerment. We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women’s empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in. Implications for better understanding the sources of sex differences in career aspirations and associated policy are discussed.

David Blaska:

Dane County WI has 17 circuit court judges; they are elected in the non-partisan Spring (April 5) elections to six-year terms. Job pays $130,00 annually. (Another 11 court commissioners set initial bail at arraignment court. They are appointed.)

They are largely faceless; they rarely face opposition on the ballot. Not since 2013 has a judgeship been contested. For that reason, they rarely need to campaign, respond to questionnaires, sit for an endorsement interview, debate an opponent.

Five judgeships are on the ballot in the next election on 5 April 2022. Those benches are occupied by Valerie L. Bailey-Rihn, Nicholas McNamara, John Hyland, Stephen Ehlke — and Everett Mitchell. Mitchell is, by reputation, at least, the king of catch and release. Consider this case as Exhibit A:

One defendant at a time. A fellow by name of Sir Emarion M. Tucker this week pled guilty to raping a woman in her southwest side home on 1 September 2018. He also pled out to two unrelated burglary charges committed while he was free on bail. In March 2020, Judge Mitchell agreed to reduce Tucker’s $30,000 bail to $2,000. Tucker was back on the streets.

Two months later, he robbed a woman on Radcliffe Drive on the far west side, struck her in the head and demanded sex. (More here.) Two months after that (July 2020), Tucker robbed and punched a 77-year-old woman and also attempted to steal her car in a parking lot on Cottage Grove Road. A raft of charges were dismissed to get Tucker’s plea. Those include aggravated battery, armed robbery, armed burglary, attempted sexual assault, battery, and child pornography. Two felony bail jumping charges were also dismissed.

Issues and Insights:

According to a recent survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, among 92,000 news consumers in 46 countries, the United States ranked last in terms of media trust at 29%.  Finland received the highest level of trust in the study, at 65%. The United States performed worse than Poland, the Philippines, and Peru.

Here are the trust levels for G-20 countries included in the survey.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Removing police from Madison’s public high schools never made any sense. It was destined for disaster. Today’s news brings evidence that the disaster is upon us. 

On Wednesday afternoon about 100 people brought an altercation that began inside East High School onto a street that borders the school. Ten Madison cops and a supervisor had to respond to quell the situation. To make matters worse, members of the crowd fled the scene after refusing to cooperate with the police. That suggests gang connections or other criminal activity that the perpetrators didn’t want revealed. 

Would it have come to this if the Educational Resource Officer (the bureaucratic title for a cop imbedded in a school) was still there? Of course, there’s no way to be sure, but it’s a fair bet that that officer would have defused the situation long before it became a near riot. 

ERO’s had been in Madison’s high schools for almost three decades and their service had been exemplary. There were no problematic incidents involving them. In fact, most were women or people of color and they served as positive role models.

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

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

Guy Marzorati and Vanessa Rancaño:

San Francisco’s school board has spent the past year in the national spotlight, garnering the attention of pundits from Fox News to the New York Times editorial pages for its controversial decisions on distance learning, school renamings and admissions policies.

The campaign to recall board members Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga, however, has relied on a donor network close to home.

A KQED analysis of campaign filings for the election, slated for Feb. 15, found that at least 76% of the pro-recall cash raised so far is coming from donors in San Francisco.

Opponents of the recall, who haven’t started fundraising, will likely seek to portray the campaign as spearheaded by forces outside of the city — as has been the case in a number of other recent school board protests across the country — said Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University, who reviewed KQED’s findings.

“I suspect they’ll still do that message, but I do think that so far the fact that most of the donations … are coming from people in San Francisco who are individuals will at least be a counterargument to that,” he said.

Dave Cieslewicz:

We owe it to those students — and the taxpayers who will now be paying about 9% more as a result of the new budget — to provide the kind of calm and orderly environment where learning can happen. 

As for the disruptive kids, they need to be removed from class. Then they need to get the services they need, but they should only be allowed back in class when they won’t be messing things up for others. 

If that makes sense to you, then you are out of touch with this school board. There is very little diversity of experience and almost none in perspective on this board. There is, for example, not one school board member who is an employer and who might be concerned about the quality of the work force. There is no school board member who is an advocate for taxpayers or who might be considered a fiscal watch dog. There is no proponent of personal responsibility and not one who would dare question the latest fad coming out of schools of education. 

Look, I’ll be honest. From what I can tell this board actually does represent where the majority of Madison voters are at. Since Trump a lot of liberals have just gone off the deep end, and Madison sure has a lot of liberals. 

But I’m one of those rare liberals who I like to think has kept his head and tried to tether himself to at least some approximation of reality. And — I’m just guessing here — there might be maybe a third or so of Madisonians who agree with me about all this. Maybe not a majority, but certainly a significant minority.

AB446 Legislative links and lobbying information. (League of Women voters is against!)

Speakers, in order:

0.08: Rep. Dave Considine (D-Baraboo) voted No.

4:50: Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Racine) voted Yes.

6:30: Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) voted No.

11:40 Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) voted yes.

14:14 Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du lac) voted yes.

30.08: Rep. LaKeisha Myers (D-Milwaukee) voted no.

39:10 Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) voted no (?).

41:37 Rep. Don Vruwink (D-Milton) voted no.

43:52 Rep. Jonathan Brostoff (D-Milwaukee) voted no.

50:20 Rep. Joel Kitchens (R-Sturgeon Bay) voted yes.

Transcript.

Legislative campaign finance reports. WisPolitics summary.

Much more on our latest attempt to address Wisconsin (and Madison’s) long term, disastrous reading results: AB446.

Our new Washington Post poll shows that EDUCATION is now the No. 1 issue for Virginia voters in the governor’s race, edging out the economy.

In September, education voters favored McAuliffe by 33 points, but now they tilt toward Youngkin by nine points.https://t.co/9JgBtcyTkR

— James Hohmann (@jameshohmann) October 29, 2021

Related: My question to Ben Wikler & Paul Farrow on Our Disastrous Reading Results and the 2022 Wisconsin Governor Race

NBC4:

Students walked out of Loudoun County high schools Tuesday morning over concerns about sexual assaults and the school district’s handling of two reported attacks.

Students walked out of Broad Run High School, Riverside High School and Stone Bridge High School.

“Loudoun County protects rapists,” a group of students chanted outside Broad Run High.

Beth Hawkins:

The number of teachers using curriculum aligned to academic standards has ticked up since 2019, rising more quickly in states that have adopted policies incentivizing the use of high-quality materials than in others, according to a new report from the RAND Corp. Teachers are much more likely to use standards-aligned math curriculum than English language arts, and more likely to use it in elementary and middle school grades than high school, researchers found. 

The results buoy a four-year-old effort by 13 states to push teachers to use higher-quality classroom materials. States belonging to the network, organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers, generally saw quicker adoption of curricula vetted for quality by the nonprofit ratings group EdReports. 

By incentivizing the use of better materials, members of the network hope to influence what is taught, by extension increasing students’ academic achievement. Past research has shown that the mere existence of academic standards has little effect on what happens in classrooms, but early efforts to promote the use of curriculum that conforms to expectations of what students should know at any particular grade level appear promising. 

Just 22 percent of a nationally representative sample of high school teachers surveyed in spring 2021 as a part of RAND’s American Instructional Resources Survey reported using aligned math and reading materials, with more than 70 percent using no curriculum at all or materials that did not conform to state academic standards or were unrated.

Niskanen Center:

We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left. This can be seen in the ideas that floated around the 2020 Democratic primary, which are a preview of coming policymaking attractions. Proposals for free college and student debt relief, Medicare for All, free or nearly free universal child care, and massive subsidies for renters in expensive cities were floated by President Biden’s challengers, and continue to be at the top of the progressive agenda. Indeed, the current vogue for “socialism” on the left is, on closer examination, almost always about socializing these common household expenditures. The traditional socialist call to “seize the means of production” has thus been updated to something closer to “subsidize my cost of living” — a less revolutionary ambition, perhaps, but one that is no less myopic.

The regulatory roots of cost disease explain why fiscal conservatives are poorly served by strategies focused on austerity and direct budget controls. Unless we are able to effect regulatory reforms to subdue costs in diseased sectors, public demand for socializing such costs will prove irresistible. But such socialization will only exacerbate cost disease over time, leading to renewed public demand for increased socialization in a dismal cycle of bloat and waste.

Scott Girard:

Phillips was one of four names under consideration by the committee, which had narrowed an initial list of 24 proposals to a final set: Vel Phillips Memorial High School, Bruce Dahmen Memorial High School, Darlene Hancock Memorial High School and simply Memorial High School.

Throughout the process and Wednesday’s discussion, one of the largest questions facing the committee was whether to name the school after a person at all. While some committee members spoke to the dangers of using any person’s name, given that no person is infallible, others felt strongly that this was an opportunity to make a powerful statement.

“For years to come it can spark change and different things among students and represent something that ‘Memorial High’ simply can’t,” committee chair Julian Walters said.

A vote was first taken on the Memorial High School proposal, but it failed with five voting in favor and six against. Those in support of the Memorial proposal spoke to the public comments in support of that idea and their personal experience hearing from people who supported it.

Ann Bauer:

Since Bettelheim took his life, the Orthogenic School has undergone major changes. Their own Family Handbook makes glancing reference to Bettelheim’s “highly controversial” theories and credits him (briefly) for drawing attention to the problem of autism. In 2014, the school moved from the somber brick buildings where it had been housed for almost 100 years to a sunny campus in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Earlier this year, they announced they are closing their residential program for good.

At some point—I cannot say when, because there were years that went by like dark water—I went to Chicago and visited the site of the old Orthogenic School where Bruno Bettelheim once ruled. A psychiatry fellow I’d contacted showed me around, talking gravely about the bizarrely ignorant methods that had once dominated his field. He showed me the rooms where the children lived, far from their parents, and the courtyard where in Bettelheim’s era there had been a statue in the shape of a mother that he’d encouraged his young male students to urinate on.

I don’t know what I thought I’d find there. Maybe I was looking for the answer to how terribly and repeatedly we as people can get our responses to nature so wrong. The courtyard was empty, brilliantly sunny. The brick buildings were old and graceful, like hallowed monuments to science. I had to remind myself there were decades of abuse, psychological terror, and forced separation from parents within the walls of this place. And for all those years, staff watched and participated without a single one of them speaking out.

Scott Girard:

The board added an addendum to the Behavior Education Plan for grades 4K-5 outlawing out-of-school suspensions beginning Tuesday.

District officials and board members hope the change will keep more students in school, especially the Black students who have been disproportionately disciplined using suspensions.

A presentation last month along with the proposal to eliminate the suspensions showed that in grades 4K-3, 45% of those suspended in 2017-18 were Black, though Black students currently make up just 19% of the overall student population. The number rose to 60% in 2018-19 and 50% in 2019-20.

For fourth- and fifth-grade, it was 50% in 2017-18, 53% in 2018-19 and 60% in 2019-20.

Overall, the total number of out-of-school suspensions in these grades has been relatively small in the district’s overall population — 146 affecting 79 students in 2017-18, 191 affecting 99 students in 2018-19 and 174 affecting 97 students in 2019-20.

While the policy passed unanimously, board member Cris Carusi expressed concerns that the change was coming “at a time when our schools are understaffed” and supports like social workers are busy filling in for others and less able to support students than normal.

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

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

Joanne Jacobs:

People might yell less at school board meetings if they realized they have the power to vote out board members who don’t listen and vote in better ones. But, the system is “rigged,” writes Matthew Ladner on reimaginED.

Unionized employees follow board elections closely, lobbying for their preferred candidates, while most people don’t know there’s an election or who’s running, much less what they stand for.

Ladner favors school choice, so families can find (and afford) the alternative that fits their family’s priorities.

But he also likes a simple, doable idea suggested by Max Eden, an American Enterprise Institute fellow. On-cycle school board elections would boost turnout and “elect governing boards with a stronger claim to community support and democratic legitimacy,” writes Eden.