Sarah Schwartz:

Two of the nation’s most popular early literacy programs that have been at the center of a debate over how to best teach reading both faced more new critiques in the past few weeks, receiving bottom marks on an outside evaluation of their materials.

EdReports—a nonprofit organization that reviews K-12 instructional materials in English/language arts, math, and science—published its evaluation of Fountas and Pinnell Classroom Tuesday, finding that the program didn’t meet expectations for text quality or alignment to standards. The release comes on the heels of the group’s negative evaluation last month of the Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, another popular early reading program.

Together, the two reports received the lowest ratings EdReports has given for K-2 curricula in English/language arts, and they’re among the three lowest for ELA in grades 3-8.

Joe Levin:

Most Texans, however, know him as a coach. He is almost certainly the best in high school football today. He is arguably the greatest of all time. (He might have to settle for second-best when it comes to coaches, at any level, produced by Jefferson, thanks to class of ’61 grad and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jimmy Johnson.) Now 58, Dodge will retire after this season—his eighth at Westlake—and he hopes to capture a third consecutive state title along the way. He’s already won six in his coaching career, and if his team remains undefeated through the playoffs, he’ll retire with a high school win-loss record of 234–72. On paper, the Chaparrals are favored to do just that, led by Clemson-bound Cade Klubnik, the nation’s top high school quarterback and the latest in a line of Dodge-mentored signal-callers that includes NFL players Chase Daniel and Sam Ehlinger, along with former Alabama star Greg McElroy.

Tommy Mysk:

Nearly every modern smartphone is equipped with an accelerometer, which as the name implies, is a sensor that measures acceleration. It’s most commonly used for detecting the device’s orientation. It’s also found many other uses, whether as a game controller in racing games, as a pedometer for counting daily steps, or to detect falls as seen in the Apple Watch. There also have been some research to develop novel accelerometer applications: estimating heart rate, breathing rate, or even as a rudimentary audio recorder using just the accelerometer. Currently, iOS allows any installed app to access accelerometer data without explicit permission from the user. Curious apps might be able to learn a lot about users through the accelerometer and without their knowledge or permission.

Robin Lake:

What happened during the past 20 months should have been entirely predictable for anyone who was advocating for students and families before the pandemic struck.

A rigid system designed for sameness cracked under the pressure of a crisis. Despite the exhaustive work of many well-meaning people, schools and school systems were largely unable to meet individual student needs. Children who had already been struggling were subjected to even more hardship. People were rightly outraged that some students did not have access to Wi-Fi and portable devices. To many, such inequities were enough to cause them to first call for schools to remain open, then for them to remain closed.

But where was the outrage over unequal access to technology before the pandemic struck? Why were people not furious over the decades of research that shows historically marginalized students — Black, Hispanic and low-income, in particular — are taught by less effective teachers? Or the large and persistent gaps in academic outcomes by race and income?

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

Michael Petrilli:

And as both Ross Douthat and David Brookshave pointed out, while Virginia second graders are nowhere close to being force-fed CRT, recent years have brought an aggressive shift in how progressives talk about race and racism, and that has inevitably been filtering into the schools. Indeed, Rick Hess has documented many examples just from the Commonwealth of Virginia. In Loudoun County, for instance:

…“anti-racist” trainings taught teachers to reject “color blindness,” address their “Whiteness (e.g., white privilege),” and recognize that “independence and individual achievement” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism” (as is a commitment to “self-expression, individual thinking, personal choice”).

Nobody knows for sure how prevalent this sort of woke training and curriculum is. But even if a school system hasn’t adopted the (CRT-inspired) 1619 Project, or put Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo on their summer reading lists, it’s not hard to imagine well-meaning teachers making questionable statements in the classroom. As Andy Rotherham told The 74, “right now there is enormous demand but little quality control in the [diversity, equity and inclusion] industry, and teachers are freelancing. That’s a bad mix. This is complicated, and you don’t want teachers using whatever they found on Pinterest last night or just learned at a one-hour workshop.”

Just last week my own eighth grade son came home (from a Maryland public school) with a history assignment that listed “white supremacy??” among a number of “American values.” In my opinion, this is an inflammatory and wrongheaded way to address America’s history of slavery and racial discrimination. My point isn’t to debate that particular assignment but to illustrate how pervasive this sort of thing may be. As John McWhorter wrote in the New York Times this week, “if it’s not critical race theory, it’s critical race theory-lite.”

Times-Mirror:

A group of Loudoun residents seeking the ouster of five school board members filed a petition with the Loudoun County Circuit Court on Tuesday to have Chair Brenda Sheridan of the Sterling District removed from office, according to a press release issued that day.

Ian Prior, executive director of Fight for Schools — the organization behind the effort — said the group has collected 1,217 signatures from Sterling residents calling for Sheridan’s removal.

Damon Beres:

It’s a cliché of digital life that “information wants to be free.” The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities—the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments—are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don’t cater to their needs. For the past year, they’ve once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Actthat provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.

Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility—by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example—that it’s even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

Blueprint Labs:

Parents increasingly rely on data-driven measures of school quality to choose schools, while districts use the same information to guide policy. School quality information often comes in the form of “school report cards” like New York City’s School Quality Snapshot and “school finder” websites, like GreatSchools.org. These school ratings are highly consequential, influencing family enrollment decisions and home prices around the country. State and district restructuring decisions, such as school closures or mergers, also turn on these measures. In short, school performance measures matter.

Our study examines the predictive validity of alternative school performance measures to show how they can be improved in districts that use centralized assignment to match students to schools. Using data from New York City and Denver, we show that a new approach that harnesses student data from centralized assignment, which we call a risk controlled value-added model (RC VAM), improves upon conventional methods. We also study a range of other value-added models. In practice, analysts may not have the data required to compute RC VAM and not all districts assign seats centrally. Our study sheds light on approaches that might best serve as performance measures in the absence of ideal data.

The validity of school ratings is important to both policymakers and parents, who rely on them for consequential decisions. Inaccurate measures of school quality can unfairly reward or punish schools erroneously deemed to be more or less effective. For organizations that engage in the provision of quality measures, the methods developed in our study offer a new tool that can provide fairer assessments of school effectiveness.

A look at how different NYC middle schools contribute to student math achievement, by sector https://t.co/N0Czx6F0v5 pic.twitter.com/aqDSot6RA3

— Matt Barnum (@matt_barnum) November 9, 2021

Isaac Schultz:

The publisher Springer Nature was forced to retract over 40 papers from its Arabian Journal of Geosciences after realizing they were nothing more than garbled jargon. This is just the latest in a series of shoddy research papers getting past the publisher.

First reported by research journal watchdog Retraction Watch, the slew of retractions comes on the heels of other issues at the publisher, where hundreds of papers were previously flagged with “expressions of concern” for research integrity breaches. 

The retraction notice on one of papers reads as follows: “The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher have retracted this article because the content of this article is nonsensical. The peer review process was not carried out in accordance with the Publisher’s peer review policy. The author has not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction.”

The journal is intended for geoscience research; discussion of volcanoes, soils, and rocks are par for the course. But these questionable papers’ topics were further afield, with many discussing sports, air pollution, child medicine, and combinations of the aforesaid. 

Some titles of the farkakte research: “Simulation of sea surface temperature based on non-sampling error and psychological intervention of music education”; “Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball”; “The stability of rainfall conditions based on sensor networks and the effect of psychological intervention for patients with urban anxiety disorder.” A complete list of the retracted papers can be found here.

Ross Douthat:

The plans for the University of Austin, a start-up universityfounded under the banner of free inquiry and “the fearless pursuit of truth” and promising an undergraduate college by 2024, were greeted with a fair amount of skepticism by the journalists and academics in my Twitter feed this week.

The new university has a notable group of intellectuals on its board of advisers, and a distinguished former college president at its helm, and it’s beginning at a time when elite academia seems like it could use some shaking up. On the one hand their rapacious business dealings (like charging insane prices for not- particularly-valuable degrees), hedge-fund habits and administrative bloat make our leading universities seem like the most corporate and cynical of American institutions. At the same time they suffer from a self-inflicted McCarthyism, a climate of increasing ideological conformism punctuated by cancellation controversies and policed by diversity-equity-inclusion loyalty oaths.

Altogether, then, a sector seemingly in need of novelty and new experiments, ideally in the name of some sort of higher academic values. But people who care about academia are also subject to its ideological-professional pressures and unlikely to welcome certain kinds of criticism. So the fact that the University of Austin was announced with an essay on my former colleague Bari Weiss’s extremely popular but also extremely polarizing Substack, and offered in its initial literature a sharp-elbowed critique of progressive conformity in higher ed, was enough to guarantee a reflexively hostile response.

In fairness, not all of these insta-critiques read as ideological talking points or defenses of guild hierarchies. A few were more substantive, pointing to the tensions inherent in the new project, should it actually get off the ground. For instance, the tension between the desire to promote great academic seriousness and the culture-war flag-waving that might be necessary to rally donor support. Or again, the tension between the desire to restore older modes of liberal education and the internet-era impulse to offer something novel, an unbundled academic experience, some sort of Substack U.

But one issue that kept coming up deserves particular attention: the sheer financial and logistical challenge of getting a new university going. This issue was cited by critics as proof that the project would inevitably end up as a diploma mill or grift, while friendlier voices cited it as reason that the figures involved in the new university should be trying to strengthen existing institutions instead.

David Blaska:

Let’s have no more nonsense that critical race theory is not being taught in our schools. Looking at you, John Nichols, for writing “CRT is nothing more than dishonest right-wing talking points.”

Prof. John McWhorter of Columbia University would disagree. First, let’s define our terms. No, it isn’t about teaching the history of slavery or racial oppression. McWhorter defines CRT as “See[ing] white people as potential oppressors and black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system.”

“It is a prescription,” adds columnist Bret Stephens of New York Times, “not for genuine dialogue and reform, but for indoctrination and extirpation [BLASKA: aka: cancel culture] based on a relentless form of race consciousness that defies the modern American creed of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” In a country with 60 years of affirmative action and twice electing a black President!

This “critical approach has trickled down,” McWhorter writes, “into … education-school pedagogy and administration … and from there migrated … into the way they wind up running schools.” (Jennifer Cheatham, anyone?) McWhorter cites examples from California, Oregon, and Virginia, no less.

Our WI DPI is high on CRT!

Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction is no outlier. Some examples:

Philip Mousavizade

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges.

According to eight members of the Yale faculty, this administration size imposes unnecessary costs, interferes with students’ lives and faculty’s teaching, spreads the burden of leadership and adds excessive regulation. By contrast, administrators noted much of this increase can be attributed to growing numbers of medical staff, and that the University has proportionally increased its faculty size.

“I had remarked to President Salovey on his inauguration that I thought the best thing he could do for Yale would be to abolish one deanship or vice presidency every year of what I hoped would be a long tenure in that position,” professor of English Leslie Brisman wrote in an email to the News. “Instead, it has seemed to me that he has created one upper level administrative position a month.”

In an email to the News, University spokesperson Karen Peart pointed out that while the University’s managerial staff has increased over the last two decades, so too has the faculty, which has grown by 54 percent. She further noted that the Yale School of Medicine has grown its clinical practice in recent years, which required the recruitment of new staff and “has been vital to the city and state during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Aldeman:

Education finance is a messy topic for journalists, and the data are far from easily digestible. Reporters may default to the scarcity narrative because it seems like a safe and tidy way to reference the larger challenges associated with school finance (including inequities, debates on how to spend funds, frustration with low outcomes, labor demands, etc.). Plus, it fits with a near-constant stream of advocacy from the education establishment for more funding.

While these issues are always difficult to explain, this last year has made issues of education finance and economics especially hard to neatly summarize.

At the same time school leaders are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re also facing potentially destabilizing enrollment declines and a tumultuous labor market. And yet, with strong funding increases in recent years and the largest-ever federal investment in K-12 schools, districts also have more resources at their disposal than ever before. But too often that’s not being reported as it should be.

As such, reporting on school spending strictly through a lens of scarcity can lead the public astray and produce headlines that get repeated despite being downright wrong.

Reporting on school spending strictly through a lens of scarcity can lead the public astray and produce headlines that get repeated despite being downright wrong.

Peter Salmon:

In April 1945, a newsreel film entitled German Atrocities appeared in British cinemas. Having been spared graphic images during most of the war, this was, for most British civilians, their first encounter with the horrors of the concentration camps. After watching footage of emaciated bodies and piled-up corpses, the 24-year-old Philippa Foot told her mentor, the philosopher Donald MacKinnon: “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.” These were acts, Foot felt, that were undeniably evil, and if philosophy was unable to identify them as such, then there was a major problem with philosophy.

And there was indeed a problem. The moral philosophy taught at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s pictured the world as value free. According to the influential AJ Ayer, all ethical statements, since they can never be empirically tested, are meaningless. 

Foot had studied at Oxford with three other remarkable women: Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley, each of whom was to devote themselves to arguing with the Oxford tradition, be it through novels, academic papers, books or radio broadcasts. 

Benjamin Lipscomb’s new group biography, The Women Are Up to Something, is a fascinating exploration of their life and thought. They each tackled moral philosophy in ways as distinct as their backgrounds and beliefs. Bringing together Murdoch, “a bohemian novelist and spiritual seeker,” Anscombe, “a zealous Catholic convert and mother of seven,” Foot, “an atheistic daughter of privilege,” and Midgley, “a stay-at-home mother who finally wrote the first of her 16 books in her 50s” (59 to be precise), Lipscomb paints a vivid portrait not only of them as people, but also a moment in British philosophy too often told through the male line.

William Jacobson:

In Colorado in 2021, legislation was passed banning the use of American Indian mascots, broadly defined. Now the law is being challenged in a lawsuit filed on November 2, 2021, on behalf of the Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) and individuals by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which summarizes the case on its website:

Samuel Robinson:

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed several Republican-sponsored bills Friday that would have granted tax credits for contributions to scholarship programs that could be used for nonpublic schooling.

The governor had promised last month to veto the proposed scholarship program that Democratic critics said would have incentivized sending kids to private schools.

Republican supporters of the bills say they want Michigan parents to be able to use money from wealthy donors to help meet the educational needs of their children, including the use of alternative and nonpublic programs.

But Democrats see the legislation as an attempt to implement a voucher program that wouldn’t line up with the state constitution, which requires Michigan to maintain and support a system of free, public elementary and secondary schools.

Though Whitmer vetoed the bills — Senate Bills 687 and688 and House Bill 5405 — a petition initiative based on the legislation that would allow public funding to be steered to private schooling is currently in the works.

The Let MI Kids Learn ballot committee could get the proposal to the Republican-led legislature for it to adopt without Whitmer’s approval with just over 340,000 signatures.

Aaron Sibarium:

Nearly a fifth of university jobs require diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements that press applicants to express and expound upon their commitment to diversity, according to a new study from the American Enterprise Institute.

The study, from the Educational Freedom Institute’s James D. Paul and the University of Arkansas’s Robert Maranto, is the first to empirically estimate the prevalence of diversity statements in higher education, which they say may narrow the research questions that academics feel comfortable addressing.

Using a representative sample of 999 job postings, the study found that 19 percent require a diversity statement; that the statements are significantly more common at elite schools than non-elite ones; and that jobs in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are just as likely as jobs in the social sciences to require a diversity statement from applicants.

The last finding surprised Paul, the director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute, who told the Washington Free Beacon it was a testament to the sway of DEI ideology in academia. He and Maranto had hypothesized that the more empirical a field, the less likely it would be to use “soft” criteria when evaluating applicants. But when they actually ran the data, that hypothesis collapsed.

Alex Tabarrok:

Matt Yglesias has an excellent post on schooling and politicsemphasizing three points.

First, there is a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) nonsense which the schools are using to train teachers and administrators.

Second, at the same time the school administrators/teacher’s unions are generally ignoring the very real cost to children and parents of the school closures, including the costs of a widening racial gap.

Third, the schools are stigmatizing testing under the guise of promoting equity but in reality because the teacher’s unions know that when you test children you learn that not all teachers are equally capable.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Frederick M. Hess

Key Points

• This report examines how media covered the critical race theory (CRT) debate in schooling through an analysis of all news articles published between September 2020 and August 2021 by four major newspapers and three major education press outlets.
• Coverage largely ignored bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity. This was mentioned in fewer than 10 percent of articles.
• News accounts also rarely mentioned concerns about CRT-aligned practices, such as segregated, race-based affinity spaces or the promotion of “anti-racist” racial stereotypes.
• Instead, most coverage focused on whether schools should discuss racism and slavery, even though few (if any) critics have adopted this position. The result has been a misleading, slanted, and dismissive caricature of sober concerns.

Sarah Schwartz:

Two of the nation’s most popular early literacy programs that have been at the center of a debate over how to best teach reading both faced more new critiques in the past few weeks, receiving bottom marks on an outside evaluation of their materials.

EdReports—a nonprofit organization that reviews K-12 instructional materials in English/language arts, math, and science—published its evaluation of Fountas and Pinnell Classroom Tuesday, finding that the program didn’t meet expectations for text quality or alignment to standards. The release comes on the heels of the group’s negative evaluation last month of the Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, another popular early reading program.

Together, the two reports received the lowest ratings EdReports has given for K-2 curricula in English/language arts, and they’re among the three lowest for ELA in grades 3-8.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Elle Reynolds:

“Systemic racism” and “equity,” Fuller noted, have become catchall phrases that aren’t backed by facts. “Everything is ‘equity’: hashtag, buzzword, catchall, equity. But if you say you’re against it, who wants to say they’re against equity?”

“The problem with ‘systemic racism’ in ACPS is that it is so often used as rhetoric, yet nobody ever points to actual data or specific examples. In fact, everything about ACPS points to the contrary,” Fuller said. “It’s almost like ‘systemic racism’ is being used as a shield to protect the failure of leadership to the point that nobody can challenge their decisions for fear of being labeled a racist. It has a definite chilling effect, but people see right through it.”

Fuller recalled deciding she had had enough of ACPS’s agenda when, watching a school board meeting, she observed members of the board and the superintendent wearing “We’re on an antiracist journey” T-shirts. “Who is ‘we’? Do I need ACPS to teach me and my kids not to be racist? Or is that my job and the job of my faith community?” she asked. “Even better, why don’t we just teach our students to love all people?”

Fuller and another concerned ACPS parent, Elizabeth Seltzer, started a Facebook group called “Agenda Free ACPS” for others who share their concerns.

Christian Shepherd:

It is hard to avoid the history of concentration camps when describing the system of maximum-security “re-education” facilities that the Chinese Communist party has built since 2017 in Xinjiang.

The tragedies of the Boer war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulags are illustrative context but also only partial analogues. While some forms of 20th-century repression remain, the modern world of high-tech surveillance has created new forms of control.

Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, writes that he had these “continuities and ruptures” in mind when describing Xinjiang’s system of mass internment in his book, In the Camps.

In this intimate, sombre and damning account of the forces that led China to intern and “re-educate” more than 1m Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim people in Xinjiang, Byler argues that the camp system is, at minimum, of a scale and degree of cruelty beyond all obvious contemporary parallels.

MSF:

“They are playing now, they smile and befriend each other, they seem like any other young people,” says Julie Melichar, humanitarian affairs officer on board MSF’s search and rescue vessel Geo Barents. “But they are no longer just children or teenagers – not after what they have been through.”  

Melichar is talking about the youngest survivors rescued by MSF in our most recent mission in the central Mediterranean, when teams saved 367 people in less than two days. More than 40 per cent of them were under the age of 18 and 140 of them were travelling alone.   

Such a high number of young people risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea – considered to be the world’s deadliest migration route – is alarming in itself. But travelling without a parent or trusted adult makes unaccompanied minors one of the most vulnerable groups of people on the move.

Anne Saker:

Children got fatter through the coronavirus pandemic, worsening a generational weight problem and raising their risk for COVID-19, says a patient study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center released Tuesday.

The 10-year tracking study found the percentage of children at unhealthy weights rose from 35% to 36.4% from 2011 to 2020. But in the pandemic’s first year, that fraction soared to 39.7%, the study found.

Matthew Wilson:

A 19-year-old high school graduate who had the end of his senior year forced online by COVID-induced shutdowns on Tuesday defeated an incumbent school board member in New Jersey.

Nicholas Seppy, a 2020 graduate of Egg Harbor Township High School in South Jersey’s Atlantic County, upset Terre Alabarda for a seat on the township’s school board by an overwhelming 17-point margin.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting as of Wednesday afternoon, Seppy had received 4,042 votes to Alabarda’s 2,830.

After initially closing their doors in March 2020, Egg Harbor Township School District forced most of its students into entirely online learning or hybrid learning models with limited components of in-person instruction for most of the 2020-21 school year.

WILL:

The News: Governor Tony Evers signed public school spending transparency legislation (AB 378 / SB 373) into law, Friday, initiating a new process to shed more light on how public schools spend public dollars. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) supported the bipartisan legislation to establish a commission of public-school representatives to determine how to collect and display the information online.

The Quote: WILL Director of Education Policy, Libby Sobic, said, “WILL is proud to work with Senator Felzkowski and Representative Magnafici to craft and champion legislation to create much-needed transparency about public school funding. For the first time, the public will be able to determine just how taxpayer funds are allocated and whether it is benefitting our students and teachers.”

Josh King, a parent from Oregon, Wisconsin, said, “As a parent and a proud family member to many lifelong public school teachers, this legislation is an important first step to create a benchmark in transparency about school funding. This will help parents to engage schools on resourcing agreed upon priorities.”

Marc Thiessen:

It’s not just Loudoun County. In 2019, Virginia state superintendent of public instruction James F. Lane sent a memo to all school districts promoting critical race theory training materials, and declaring “CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of race, racism, inequity, and the dynamics of power and privilege in schooling.” And as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo points out, “Right now, on its website, the Virginia Department of Education recommends ‘Critical Race Theory in Education’ as a ‘best practice’ and derives its definitions of ‘racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘education equity’ explicitly from ‘critical race theory.’”

This is true in other states as well. In New York City, school administrators were required to undergo training sessions where they learned that “objectivity” and “individualism” were elements of “white-supremacy culture.” In California, students as young as six are being taught CRT-inspired lessons in white privilege and structural racism.

Theodore W. Gray and Jerry Glynn:

Jerry: I have young students who reach for their calculators to get the answer to 5×6. 

My response, when I see that, is to explain that such behavior is socially unacceptable, sort of like picking your nose.  Many people will see this and think the student must be brain damaged.  It’s a social problem, not a mathematical one. 

Theo: I agree that the problem lies with the other people more than with the students.  The most profound engine of civilization is the inability of a larger and larger fraction of the population to do the basic things needed to survive.  Many people fail to realize this. 

Jerry: I don’t understand that statement at all.  It must be very significant. 

Theo: In a society where everyone knows how to hunt, grow food, and make shelter, and knows these things well enough to survive, no one has time for much of anything else–even for perfecting one or the other of these basic skills.  In early tribal societies, some people were undoubtedly better at one thing than another, to the point where they would probably have had a hard time outside the group.  The best arrow makers probably weren’t very good at weaving shoes, and would have had a lot of blisters without some help from the shoe weavers. 

Few people would argue that people who are bad at weaving shoes are somehow inadequate, but it’s surprising how strongly people feel this way about “modern” skills such as the ability to add well.

Dan Lennington:

The deal’s plan to spend hard-earned tax dollars in the name of equity undermines America’s foundational principle of equality.

Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration have embarked together on an ambitious racial-equity agenda. With a goal of eliminating racial disparities — real or perceived, past or present — the equity agenda wields explicit racial discrimination as a tool to equalize racial outcomes. Put more bluntly, the equity agenda gives tax dollars to racial minorities because they are non-white. In previous political generations, this would have been called “reparations.” But today, it’s simply “equity.”

So far, the equity agenda has been expensive: Democrats and President Biden have spent (or attempted to spend) billions of dollars on race-based handouts in the areas of farmer loan forgiveness, COVID relief for restaurants, mortgage assistance, and a small-business credit initiative, just to name a few. Senator Schumer even recently proposed racial preferences for minority-owned marijuana businesses, and Representative Maxine Waters has proposed a $5,000 grant for any non-white first-time homeowner.

Through all this, however, Republicans have opposed, or at least remained on the sidelines of, the equity agenda.

Until now.

Last week, 17 Republican senators, including Majority Leader McConnell, voted to move forward with the bipartisan infrastructure deal. This deal, however, is tainted with race-based equity spending. Politicians of all political viewpoints should pause before supporting such spending, even in the name of bipartisanship, as such equity policies are fraught with legal risks and moral pitfalls.

In one such provision, the infrastructure bill includes $2.75 billion for “broadband inclusion” by adopting the so-called Digital Equity Act. This bill, dreamed up by Senators Portman (R., Ohio), Murray (D., Wash.), and King (I., Maine), proposes two grant programs with explicit racial preferences.

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed is backing the effort to recall three school board members, saying she is supporting “the parents’ call for change.”

Breed’s endorsement Tuesday of the recall of board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and commissioner Alison Collins counters critics who have argued the recall is a Republican-led effort to dismantle a progressive school board. If a majority of voters in a February special election support the recall of any of the three, Breed would appoint replacements until the next regular election in November.

“Sadly, our school board’s priorities have often been severely misplaced,” Breed said in a statement. “During such a difficult time, the decisions we make for our children will have long term impacts. Which is why it is so important to have leadership that will tackle these challenges head on. … Our kids must come first.”

She noted that the recall was a grassroots effort “led by parents.”

Lisa Bannon and Andrea Fuller:

Over the past decade, the University of Southern California has used a for-profit company to help enroll thousands of students in its online social-work master’s program.

The nonprofit school used its status-symbol image to attract students across the country, including low-income minority students it targeted for recruitment, often with aggressive tactics. Most students piled on debt to afford the tuition, which last year reached $115,000 for the two-year degree. The majority never set foot on the posh Los Angeles campus but paid the same rate for online classes as in-person students.

Jonathan Kay:

Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read.

The pandemic has been a challenging period for Canadian universities, as the adoption of virtual classrooms has caused some families to wonder whether the traditional bricks-and-mortar education model is worth the price. Many Canadian schools are financially dependent on foreign students, an income source that’s now  in flux thanks to COVID. In April, Laurentian University in Ontario declared itself insolvent, cut dozens of programs, and laid off about 100 professors—an unprecedented development.

And yet none of these issues is listed on the October 27th Universities Canada meeting agenda. Laurentian University isn’t mentioned at all, in fact. And the only substantive reference to the COVID pandemic consists of an aside to the effect that “women are disproportionately being impacted negatively during the pandemic.” Instead, all of the agenda’s main action items are dedicated to social justice. 

The first item updates attendees on Universities Canada’s multi-year effort to draft a statement on “Social Impact Principles.” A subsequent action item details the “Scarborough National Charter,” a documentaimed at “mov[ing] from rhetoric to meaningful concrete action to address anti-Black racism and to promote Black inclusion.” There’s also a related item titled “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” under which members were asked, by formal motion, to affirm their commitment to an affirmative-action doctrine known as “Inclusive Excellence.”

Pano Kanelos:

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of fiveAmerican PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

Logan Rude, Brad Hamilton

More than 600 students did not show up for classes on Tuesday, the district said, more than one-third of the total 1,717 students enrolled at East. As of noon, 277 were excused and 325 had not shown up and were not excused, though secretaries were still updating records at that time.

During Monday’s lunch hour, more than 15 police responded to break up a set of fights that broke out near school grounds. Eight students were pepper-sprayed as police tried to break up the fights.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds told News 3 Now that an estimated 90% of behavioral issues at the high school have happened during the school’s open lunch period when students can leave campus. Just over two weeks ago, fights involving more than 100 students and parents broke out in a crowd around lunchtime.

MMSD modifies East High School safety plans following student fights and citations

additional Commentary:

The teachers cannot be happy with the situation. I can’t imagine teaching at East High School. I picture the teachers all afraid of the students and the students knowing it and the worst of them exploiting it.

I’m seeing at least 2 comments that say it’s not just Madison and linking to this WaPo article from a couple weeks ago, “Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out”:

Elizabeth Beyer and Chris Rickert:

The Madison School Board’s decision to remove school resource officers, or SROs, from the high schools came amid the racial reckoning following the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, sometimes-destructive social justice protests in Downtown Madison, and a years-long campaign to get rid of SROs that included shouting down School Board meetings and demonstrating outside the School Board president’s home by the local group Freedom Inc. and its allies.

“Even with SROs we still had people bring weapons and threaten to bring weapons to school and we still had fights,” said Allen, the student body president. “It wasn’t like their presence prevented any of that. The East student body in general still does not want SROs in our school.”

In other words, everything but discipline

Ambulances respond to school yard brawls because Madison outlawed discipline

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

Parents Defending Education:

We asked all organizations the following questions:

1. As the [state association] has not yet commented on the National School Board Association’s September 29 letter to President Biden that requested federal intervention in local school board issues – which likened civic participation to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and cited the Patriot Act – Parents Defending Education would like to know whether your organization was involved in the creation of this letter and whether you agree with its substance and tone. If not, have you contacted the NSBA to let them know?
2. Can you please tell us how, going forward, your organization defines “intimidation,” harassment,” and “threat”?
3. Finally, do you plan to report individuals in your state to the U.S. Department of Justice – or do you believe that concerns can be adequately managed by local and state law enforcement?

This list will be updated as responses are received.

Monica Velez:

Seattle Public Schools has canceled classes for all students on Friday, citing large numbers of staff taking leave, according to an email officials sent families Tuesday.

“We are aware of an unusually large number of SPS staff taking leave on Friday, and do not believe we have adequate personnel to open schools with the necessary environment for high-quality learning,” the email said. 

The missed day will be added to the end of the school year, officials said.

Tunku Varadarajan:

What’s the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution? The First, which guarantees the freedoms of religion, speech and assembly? If you favor gun rights, perhaps the Second? Criminal-defense lawyers might be inclined to invoke the Fifth. Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick make a case for an amendment that isn’t even in the Bill of Rights—the 14th, ratified in 1868.

That amendment, among its other provisions, bars states from abridging “the privileges or immunities” of citizens or depriving any person of life, liberty or property “without due process of law.” It’s best known for guaranteeing to all persons “the equal protection of the laws.”

The 14th Amendment “not only changed the structure of our federalism, but it extended the protection of fundamental rights,” Mr. Barnett says. Before its ratification, the Supreme Court had held in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) that the Bill of Rights didn’t limit states’ authority. That started to change in 1897, as the court “incorporated” various rights, holding that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause obligates the states to respect them.

Marianne Goodland:

At stake in the state’s second-largest school district: control of the board by candidates backed by teachers’ unions or those supported by conservative causes.

Incumbents who chose not to run again held two of the three seats on this year’s ballot and had been backed by the union in past elections.

Unofficial results show the Jeffco Kids slate of Danielle Varda (District 1), Paula Reed (District 2) and Mary Parker (District 5) winning by comfortable margins. The slate was backed by the Jefferson County Education Association and the Colorado Education Association, as well as from an independent expenditure committee (IEC), Students Deserve Better, funded by CEA and several other teachers’ unions along the Front Range. IECs are allowed to collect unlimited contributions but are forbidden by state law from coordinating with candidates they support.

Varda won over Jeffrey Wilhite, Reed defeated Therese Shelton and David Johnson, and Parker defeated Kathy Miks.

The Jefferson County GOP endorsed Shelton, Miks and Wilhite.

Brooke Williams, president of the Jeffco Education Association, told Colorado Politics “Voters showed they trust the educators in the classroom. I’m very excited because these are the candidates who will help unite our community for our students’ future…they’re going to be focused on our students, expanding career and technical education programs and career opportunities, what our students need and what educators need to improve education in Jeffco and give students the best possible experience.”

:

Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”

This broad rethinking of work and human capital development is occurring while 10.4 million jobs sit unfilled and more than 8.4 million unemployed individuals look for work. There is a clear disconnect, but the ultimate outcome is far from clear.

As Bob Dylan asks in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “…something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

But even without this clarity, reassessment has an upside.

It’s an opportunity to expand two promising approaches to education, training, and hiring that prepare young people and adults for jobs and careers in this new world of work: career pathways programs and skill-based hiring.

This reassessment is a form of creative destruction, or the process through which new approaches replace existing ones made obsolete over time. What emerges is a social capital development narrative, an account that chronicles how individuals acquire knowledge and relational networks—or social capital—that help them succeed and flourish.

Why are we reassessing work in America? By my count, there are at least six reasons.

Gillian Tett:

The consequences are laid out in an astonishing documentary, Found, that I watched last weekend at its New York premiere. The film echoes themes raised by movies such as Ricki’s Promise and One Child Nation about the tangled nature of Chinese adoption. However, it starts with the movie’s director, Amanda Lipitz, discovering that her niece, an adopted Chinese girl called Chloe, has decided to use the DNA testing service 23andMe to get information about her genetic heritage.

When Chloe gets the results, she discovers — to her great shock — that she has two cousins, Lily Bolka and Sadie Mangelsdorf, living in the US who were also adopted as Chinese babies, seemingly without any roots. Their three American families are very different and live hundreds of miles apart (one is Jewish, another evangelical Christian and the third Catholic). But the teenagers bond and, armed with their DNA results, decide to head to China to look for their birth mothers.

To help them in this detective work, they hire a Beijing company called My China Roots, which was set up a decade ago by Huihan Lie, a Dutchman of Chinese heritage. Lie originally created his company to serve the overseas descendants of Chinese families who emigrated from their homeland because of political persecution or economic hardship. (Lie’s own family moved from Fujian and Jinmen to Indonesia a couple of generations ago, before going to the Netherlands.) “The overwhelming majority [of Chinese] left for non-pleasant reasons. Whether poverty or political it was never pleasant,” he explained to the FT in 2014.

Today, the onset of DNA testing has created a new entrepreneurial niche: My China Roots also places ads on social media in China asking mothers who gave up their babies years ago to come forward and submit DNA. This is then matched against databases such as 23andMe to help children who are looking for their birth mothers, and, if both sides want to be connected, identify them.

Detroit News:

Forming a bureaucracy to encourage diversity by means other than affirmative action exemplifies the trend of bloated university administrations which makes going to college more costly for students.

In 2003, there were no UM employees with diversity titles. The next year, 15 employees were added with that title. Now it’s 76. 

Yet black students still remain at just 5 percent of the student population; Hispanic students are 6 percent.

Robert Maranto and James Paul:

Key Points

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement requirements for job applicants seeking university faculty posts seem increasingly common.
• Proponents claim these requirements create a more inclusive academy. Critics claim they amount to political correctness loyalty oaths. Yet, until now, no one has conducted an empirical investigation of their prevalence or how these requirements vary across academic disciplines, geographic regions, type of faculty position, and university prestige.
• Prestigious universities are significantly more likely to have DEI requirements than nonprestigious universities. Perhaps surprisingly, these statements are as prevalent in STEM fields as in the humanities and social sciences, once controls are accounted for.
• Regular faculty posts are more likely to require DEI statements than adjunct and postdoc positions. Relative to other regions, jobs in the West are most likely to require DEI statements.

Alexander Nazaryan:

The father was furious. “Figure it out, or get off the podium,” he shouted at school board members in Loudoun County, Va.

He was not irate about critical race theory, which would come to dominate the state’s gubernatorial race, with the Northern Virginia exurbs at the center of that battle over how to teach history in schools. His anger did not stem from debates about which bathrooms transgender students should use. Those heated battles were still months away. It was January 2021, and what the screaming father wanted was more immediate and concrete.

He sought the end of remote learning.

“It’s not a high bar,” he shouted at the school board members sitting before him. “Raise the freaking bar.”

Remote learning had relegated children across Virginia — and much of the rest of the country — to attend classes via Zoom since the previous March, when the coronavirus had first transformed living rooms and bedrooms into the new American classroom. Parents struggled to balance the demands of work while also playing the new role of remote learning instructor.

Mike Antonucci:

Officers of a 190-member support staff union in New York allegedly whisked away more than $112,000 in dues, according to a fidelity bond claim filed by New York State United Teachers and obtained by the Albany Times Union.

Union representatives of the tiny BOCES Rensselaer-Columbia-Greene Special Support Services Federation stand accused of writing themselves checks, attending AFT conferences they couldn’t legitimately afford, and holding “holiday parties that no one attended.”

Where the dues were spent make for great headlines, but the key aspect of the incident is how such a small local union had access to so much money.

It is standard practice for school districts to extract all levels of union dues — national, state and local — from each members’ paycheck, then deliver that lump sum to the local union. The local union then keeps its share, and passes the rest to the state union. The state union keeps its share and passes the rest to the national union. So, for a period of time the local union holds a full amount of dues.

Diana Kwon:

With cryo-EM, scientists make a 3D image by taking 2D pictures of lots of isolated molecules in different configurations, and merging the results. With cryo-ET, by contrast, they take multiple snapshots of a single chunk of material, teeming with molecules, from many different angles, allowing the surroundings to be kept intact.

It’s like having a photo of a whole crowd, rather than one person’s headshot. This is why Wolfgang Baumeister, a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, who is one of the pioneers of the technique, and his colleagues have dubbed it “molecular sociology”.

And this is how proteins live, after all. “Proteins are social — at any given time a protein is in a complex with about ten other proteins,” says Villa. After viewing such interactions with cryo-ET, “I could not stomach the thought of myself studying another protein in isolation,” she adds.

PDE:

Coventry Public Schools in Rhode Island have been using Panorama Education surveys for students in the 3rd grade and up across the district. (Rhode Island is one of the states that contracted with Panorama Education statewide; an “annual climate survey” is given to students in every district.) Coventry Public Schools cite Panorama by name in their district strategic plan. That plan also states the district’s intent to increase Social Emotional Learning (SEL) measures in the early learning environment for students across the board.

From the Rhode Island Department of Education website:

In 2021, a new “Cultural Awareness & Action” section allows space for students, staff, and families to respond to a series of questions about discussing and confronting issues of race, ethnicity, and culture.

Panorama’s SEL Learning guide is here.

Below is Coventry’s strategic plan entitled, “Equity and Excellence.”

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

Agence France-Press:

A citizen journalist jailed for her coverage of China’s initial response to Covid in Wuhan is close to death after going on hunger strike, her family said, prompting renewed calls from rights groups for her immediate release.

Zhang Zhan, 38, a former lawyer, travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the chaos at the pandemic’s centre, questioning authorities’ handling of the outbreak in her smartphone videos.

She was detained in May 2020 and sentenced in December to four years in jail for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a charge routinely used to suppress dissent.

She is now severely underweight and “may not live for much longer”, her brother Zhang Ju wrote last week on a Twitter account verified by people close to the matter.

Matthew Yglesias:

The last few years have seen a demagogic conservative push against the use of “critical race theory” in schools. This effort has featured some obvious villains, including policy entrepreneurs exploiting the issue for gain and racist parents getting mad about children learning the story of Ruby Bridges. 

If you are so inclined (and many progressives are), you can point to the bigots and the opportunists and dismiss the whole thing as fake or a “moral panic.” 

But I think we’ve seen that this is electorally unconvincing. Beyond that, though, I’d say that it’s substantively unconvincing. The country was roiled by a huge racial reckoning last year, and the truth is that there have been changes. Some of those changes have been positive, some have been negative, and some are things adults love to fight about but that aren’t actually very important for children. And it’s worth trying to understand and evaluate those changes.

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?

Eli Lake:

Durham’s indictment says Danchenko’s lies “deprived FBI agents and analysts of probative information” “that would have, among other things, assisted them in evaluating the credibility, reliability, and veracity” of the dossier. Again, Durham portrays the FBI as the victims of the Clinton campaign’s efforts.

It’s a fair point as far as it goes. But FBI agents were able to discern that Steele’s information was worthless without the benefit of knowing Danchenko’s relationship to Dolan. They reached this conclusion over the course of four interviews with Danchenko in 2017. Nonetheless, much of the media treated Steele’s allegations as a credible part of an epic FBI investigation until Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that he had no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election.

In this respect, the real victim of these Democratic Party deceptions was not the FBI, but the American public. That’s why Durham’s investigation, now in its third year, remains not only relevant but vital.

Wisconsin State Journal:

But the open seat on the Madison School Board was created when the board president retired after being taunted in foul ways outside her private home. Can you blame her? A school board member in Beaver Dam similarly resigned this fall, citing safety concerns for his family.

Madison’s schools were closed most of last year to in-person instruction, which frustrated many parents and students. Most other districts found ways to safely educate their children in person despite the virus.

Since police officers were pulled from Madison’s high schools, troubling violence has occurred. Property taxes are up 9%. Achievement gaps persist.

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

Police responded to an active fight involving dozens of students outside school property at around 11:37 a.m.More than 15 officers were dispatched to the scene and the incident remains an open and active investigation, Madison Police officer Ryan Kimberley said in a statement. 

Interim Principal Mikki Smith declined to comment and instructed staff who were on scene not to speak with reporters. But in an email to parents later in the day, Smith said some students “engaged in an altercation outside of the building” shortly before lunch. 

“Around this time, a student pulled a fire alarm, sending a large number of students outside and into the area where the fights were occurring,” the note read. “This caused the altercations to escalate. East staff responded immediately, and we did request additional support from the Madison Police Department. At this time, we also had some parents arriving at school, adding to the number of people outside the building.”

The school was put on a lockout to ensure that whatever was happening outside did not come inside the building, Smith continued. All exterior doors were locked and no one was allowed to enter or exit the school, and staff members were stationed around the building to monitor the exterior doors. School administration said the lockout lasted approximately 10 minutes, though some students said it lasted much longer. 

Police used pepper spray to break up the fights, and students who were sprayed were cared for by emergency responders and the school nurse. Five students were taken to a hospital after being sprayed. Their conditions were not immediately available.

Christian Fuller, 16, a junior at East, said he saw a fight break out by the tennis courts behind the school around 11 a.m.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.