Corporate Doublespeak
(via 1984 – war is peace, freedom is slavery)

‘Scanning is privacy’
‘Censorship is free speech’
‘It’s your data, but we own it”

Example:https://t.co/d5KGXwsVQ0

— John Robb (@johnrobb) August 20, 2021

Shoshana Wodinsky:

According to Diachenko, the dataset came from the Terrorist Screening Center(TSC), an FBI-led federal collective responsible for maintaining the thousands of records in the government’s no-fly list—a subset of the FBI’s much, much largerterrorist watchlist. The TSC includes “select international partners,” according to the FBI. Diachenko says the IP address linked to the leaked database was based in Bahrain.

In a nutshell, the no-fly list is exactly what it sounds like: a list of people who are branded by the federal government as potential terrorist threats and barred from boarding any planes heading into, out of, or within the U.S. as a result. 

This appears to be the list—or a portion of the list—that Diachenko stumbled onto in his initial research. While he couldn’t say for sure whether the entire list was exposed in the leak, he was able to find about 1.9 million records detailing individuals’ no-fly statuses, full names, citizenship, genders, passport numbers, and more.

“I do not know how much of the full TSC Watchlist it stored,” he wrote, “but it seems plausible that the entire list was exposed.”

This suicide letter (in Chinese, but you can machine translate) by a Chinese middle schooler deserves to be read widely. It reveals much about the intra-family dynamics in many Chinese families where the only child is not a child but the objectification of parental desires… https://t.co/0j0kTjLL4E

— Dali L. Yang (@Dali_Yang) August 18, 2021

Miranda Spindt and Will Flanders:

For example, The New York State Association of Independent Schools states in their Manual for Evaluation and Accreditation that “The issues of equity, justice, and anti-bias are integrated into the educational program.” Similarly, The Association of Independent Schools in New England state in their handbook, under teaching and curriculum criteria, “The school’s teaching practices, curriculum and broader educational program reflect a commitment to social justice, inclusivity and diversity, as appropriate to its mission.”

As advocates for school choice as an avenue for parents to escape the ideological tilt of traditional public schools, we were curious to see the extent to which these agendas were making their way into Wisconsin’s private schools, particularly those participating in the state’s major school choice programs. Under state law, there are eight accreditors that are allowed to be utilized by private schools participating in Parental Choice. After researching the accreditation criteria and guiding principles of these eight, we found only one that appears to even approach a CRT standard.
The Independent Schools Association of Central States (ISACS), in their diversity statement, says that they will “require and support the work of each ISACS school to provide an equitable, affirming, safe, and just environment”. They add in their standards for membership that schools will provide this environment by “taking into account cultural, learning, and social-emotional needs.” While words like “equity” have become buzzwords in their CRT movement, we must caution that this is weak evidence of CRT even within ISACS. In Wisconsin, only 12 schools are accredited by ISACS and none of them participate in the state parental choice programs.

Jason Bedrock and Ed Tarnowski:

With 18 states enacting seven new educational choice programs and expanding 21 existing ones, 2021 has rightly been declared a “breakthrough year” for school choice. In the wake of all this progress, the one question we at EdChoice are most frequently asked is: how many students are newly eligible to receive a voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or K–12 education savings account?

Estimating Student Eligibility in Educational Choice Programs

Estimating the number and percentage of students eligible for a given educational choice program may seem straightforward, but it’s not so simple. For example, when a state makes multiple categories of students eligible (e.g., low-income, foster care, or special needs), even if it were easy to calculate the number of students in each category, it’s impossible to precisely determine the number of students who are in multiple categories. Without accounting for the overlap, adding up the number of students eligible for each category would produce an overcount.

Moreover, just because a child is eligible for a scholarship does not mean she is guaranteed access to a scholarship. That’s why it’s important to look at the maximum participation, or the number of scholarships that are actually funded. For example, the state of East Freedonia might have a universal school voucher program for which every one of its 2 million K–12 students is eligible, but if the program is capped at 50,000 vouchers, then its level of maximum participation is only 2.5 percent.

Another complicating factor is that that the limitations on participation are not always set in terms of number of scholarships. This is particularly the case with tax-credit scholarship programs, which often have a total credit cap (which may or may not be reached) and give scholarship-granting organizations discretion in terms of scholarship size. Under a given total credit cap, a larger average scholarship size will translate into fewer scholarships granted overall.

Given all of the above complications, we must make reasonable assumptions to produce realistic estimates. When calculating income eligibility, we will assume that the distribution of students is even across the distribution of families. (In reality, lower-income families are more likely to have more children than higher-income families, so this assumption will produce a conservative estimate.) For new tax-credit scholarship programs, we will assume that the total credit cap is reached and that the average scholarship size is equal to the maximum amount allowed. For new programs, we will also assume that scholarship-granting organizations will use the maximum allowed administrative expenses, but we will not factor this in for expanded programs. Finally, we will assume that the most recent quantity of scholarships actually issued was the previous maximum level of participation in order to calculate the new level of maximum participation.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Joseph Bernstein:

In the run-up to the 1952 presidential election, a group of Republican donors were concerned about Dwight Eisenhower’s wooden public image. They turned to a Madison Avenue ad firm, Ted Bates, to create commercials for the exciting new device that was suddenly in millions of households. In Eisenhower Answers America, the first series of political spots in television history, a strenuously grinning Ike gave pithy answers to questions about the IRS, the Korean War, and the national debt. The ads marked the beginning of mass marketing in American politics. They also introduced ad-industry logic into the American political imagination: the idea that the right combination of images and words, presented in the right format, can predictably persuade people to act, or not act.

This mechanistic view of humanity was not without its skeptics. “The psychological premise of human manipulability,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.” To her point, Eisenhower, who carried 442 electoral votes in 1952, would have likely won even if he hadn’t spent a dime on TV.

What was needed to quell doubts about the efficacy of advertising among people who buy ads was empirical proof, or at least the appearance thereof. Modern political persuasion, the sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote in his landmark 1962 study of propaganda, is defined by its aspirations to scientific rigor, “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.” Customers seek persuasion that audiences have been persuaded.

And, advocating censorship;

Some demographic differences that existed on these questions in 2018 have now largely disappeared. Three years ago, older Americans and those with less education were more likely than younger and more educated adults, respectively, to say the U.S. government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if means limiting some freedoms. Now, Americans across nearly all age groups are fairly evenly divided between the two views. Similar changes have occurred when it comes to Americans’ educational background.

Women still tend to be more open than men to the idea of both the government and tech companies taking action to restrict false information online, though both groups have become a bit more supportive of the government taking such steps.

Jacob Jackson:

So, the authors factored in an adjustment for housing prices. With that adjustment, their analysis showed that, as cities get bigger, the housing costs increase at a faster rate than lower-decile income. 

“For the lower decile, there is no proportional increase in wealth. So, the city is not increasing economic benefit, but it’s not decreasing it either,” says Kempes. “However, since costs do go up, the experience of the poorest individuals gets worse.”

Across the world, civilization is undergoing rapid urbanization. More than half the world’s humans currently live in urban settings, and in the coming decade, researchers predict the number of megacities — those with 10 million people or more — will quadruple. “There is an urgent need for a quantitative and predictive theory for how larger urban areas affect a wide variety of city features, dynamics, and outcomes,” write the authors.

Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad:

Later in 2020, Fauci participated in a second noble lie. In December, he explained in a phone interview with then–New York Times reporter Donald McNeil that he had been moving the target estimate for herd immunity based in part on emerging studies. But he also said:

When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.

In his own words, he “nudged” his target range for herd immunity to promote vaccine uptake. Even though his comments were made to influence public actions to get more people vaccinated (a noble effort), the central dilemma remains: Do we want public health officials to report facts and uncertainties transparently? Or do we want them to shape information, via nudges, to influence the public to take specific actions? The former fosters an open and honest dialogue with the public to facilitate democratic policymaking. The second subverts the very idea of a democracy and implies that those who set the rules or shape the media narrative are justified in depriving the public of information that they may consider or value differently.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Noah Diekemper and Will Flanders:

A new poll of likely Democratic Primary voters in Milwaukee County provides an interesting window into the divides over school choice and the Democratic coalition. The poll, commissioned by Milwaukee Works, a 501c4 organization with a focus on good governance in Milwaukee, asked respondents about a variety of issues, but school choice and charter schools – and the demographic breakdown in responses – provides a valuable view into the divides on education reform.

The majority of Democrat primary voters polled are opposed to the concepts of private school choice and charter schools. Just 37% support the concept of vouchers, while 35% support charter schools. 54% of white Milwaukee Democrats polled stated their opposition to public charter schools; and for school voucher programs the opposition was an overwhelming 62%. But 52% of African American respondents support school voucher programs, compared to a mere 30% who oppose (18% were “not sure”). And public charter school support captured a plurality of 44%, compared to 31% who again oppose (25% this time were “not sure”).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Emily Cadman:

Take the Flower District in Manhattan, which once stretched from Broadway to 6th Avenue between 23rd and 33rd streets in the Chelsea neighborhood, but has since largely been reduced to 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. As in many other parts of the city, typical lots in Chelsea go 100 feet deep, but the majority of these buildings — a mix of pre-war townhouses dwarfed by new glass towers like the hip Moxy hotel — don’t stretch back that far because they require light and air at the back. That leaves secret courtyards inside many city blocks, many of them overgrown, inaccessible spaces, notwithstanding the occasional private garden.

Deoni, S., Beauchemin, J., Volpe, A., D’Sa, V.

Since the first reports of novel coronavirus in the 2020, public health organizations have advocated preventative policies to limit virus, including stay-at-home orders that closed businesses, daycares, schools, playgrounds, and limited child learning and typical activities. Fear of infection and possible employment loss has placed stress on parents; while parents who could work from home faced chal-lenges in both working and providing full-time attentive childcare. For pregnant individuals, fear of at-tending prenatal visits also increased maternal stress, anxiety, and depression. Not surprising, there has been concern over how these factors, as well as missed educational opportunities and reduced interaction, stimulation, and creative play with other children might impact child neurodevelopment. Lev-eraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance com-pared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconom-ic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19 pandemic is signifi-cantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.
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George Soros:

I find it particularly disturbing that so many Chinese people seem to find his social-credit surveillance system not only tolerable but attractive. It provides them social services free of charge and tells them how to stay out of trouble by not saying anything critical of Mr. Xi or his regime. If he could perfect the social-credit system and assure a steadily rising standard of living, his regime would become much more secure. But he is bound to run into difficulties on both counts.

Joy Powers:

Over the last two years, there’s been a sharp rise in property taxes throughout Wisconsin, and in Milwaukee, many homeowners have been feeling the pinch. There are a variety of reasons for these rising taxes, which the Wisconsin Policy Forum outlines in its new report, “What’s driving property tax increases?”

“The big factor that we’re seeing that is sort of making up the difference is referenda that are approved by voters to increase taxes and funding for education,” says Jason Stein, research director for the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

According to the report, school referenda added about $136 million in new property taxes statewide on to 2020-2021 tax bills. And, municipalities and counties throughout Wisconsin added an additional $89.5 million to tax bills in 2020-2021 to make debt payments.

David Kramer:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that it has produced a fusion reaction in the laboratory that yielded more energy than was absorbed by the fuel to initiate it.

Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 10¹⁶ watts of power.

The shot, which occurred on 8 August, demolished the facility’s previous record yield of 170 kJ, observed in February, and was 25 times as high as the best results obtained just a year ago. “Everyone has a spring in their step,” says NIF director Mark Herrmann. The results have not yet been peer reviewed.

Rina Chandran:

Concerns that digital IDs and databases can be used to target people

• Aid groups, government agencies responsible for securing systems
• Rights groups advising activists on how to delete digital trails

Thousands of Afghans struggling to ensure the physical safety of their families after the Taliban took control of the country have an additional worry: that biometric databases and their own digital history can be used to track and target them.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of “chilling” curbs on human rights and violations against women and girls, and Amnesty International on Monday said thousands of Afghans – including academics, journalists and activists – were “at serious risk of Taliban reprisals”.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google (YouTube), Facebook (instagram) and similar services, including Madison.

NEW today from @WisPolicyForum: in light of Wisconsin SB 119, recently vetoed by Gov. Evers, we looked at what was happening with police spending and staffing levels prior to the pandemic. We found that even in good economic times, hundreds of WI PDs were lowering their budgets pic.twitter.com/MHH03tmVbD

— Ari Brown (@AriB83) August 18, 2021

NEW: WILL Asks Wisconsin Supreme Court to Strike Down Dane County Universal Mask Order

Details –> https://t.co/UGHrlAQkGf

Filing –> https://t.co/tT89x5yaug pic.twitter.com/WFi6DMfsfJ

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) August 18, 2021

Milwaukee County COVID Data

Dane County (Madison) COVID Data

“However, Evers cannot issue a statewide mask mandate without legislative approval, following a 4-3 state Supreme Court ruling issued in March”

"Last time it was schools, this time it is masks, next time it could be vaccine passports and permanent masking. Dane County's power is not unlimited, and its residents deserve protection from these unchecked mandates."https://t.co/WqmyjRwx0B

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) August 19, 2021

Brian Ray:

There were an estimated 4.5 to 5.0 million homeschool students in grades K-12 in the United States during March of 2021 (roughly 8% to 9% of school-age children). There were about 2.5 million homeschool students in spring 2019 (or 3% to 4% of school-age children) [note 1]. The homeschool population had been growing at an estimated 2% to 8% per annum over the past several years, but it grew drastically from 2019-2020 to 2020-2021.

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district has repeatedly refused to release a report detailing its own investigation into whether district policies were followed during a field trip to Minneapolis in December 2019, when hidden cameras were found in the hotel bathrooms of students. Those events would lead a month later to the arrest of East High educator and trip chaperone David Kruchten. But the district, without explanation, recently released the full report of its internal investigation to Isthmus as part of an open records request related to another hidden camera incident at East. 

In spring 2020, the district paid private attorney Malina Piontek roughly $8,000 to conduct the independent administrative review of how the district responded to events during the field trip to Minnesota. Isthmus reported in March 2021 that the district cited “attorney-client privilege” in keeping the full report secret — a move that angered parents and open government advocates. Even school board members weren’t allowed to read it. Only a two-page summary was released publicly, finding “no failure on the part of district staff” to follow district policy. It also determined that statutory requirements for mandatory reporting of child abuse were met. 

Unlike the summary of the internal investigation, the full report states that mandatory reporting requirements on child abuse didn’t need to be met: “Based on the present facts, there was no sexual abuse or exploitation warranting” district employees to follow mandatory reporting laws, it says. The full report also notes that “due to the trauma experienced by the EHS students, a determination was made not to interview students for this review.” 

Isthmus asked the district why it released the full report now after months of refusing requests from parents, the media, and school board members. We also asked who made the decision not to interview affected students or their parents and whether district officials agreed with Piontek’s claim that mandatory reporting laws didn’t need to be followed because hidden cameras found in the hotel bathrooms of students doesn’t fit the legal definition of child abuse. 

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds has refused to answer these questions and has uncharacteristically not responded to several requests for comment.

Additional commentary:

The district had also rejected open records requests from the State Journal for the full report regarding the second East High camera incident, also citing attorney-client privilege.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

How are things going for students/parents/teachers who stayed in remote learning? Curious about LAUSD, but also anyone’s experience in anywhere. Please ID school w a little abt your situation for context. On-the-record unless u say otherwise: howard.blume@latimes.com

— Howard Blume (@howardblume) August 18, 2021

The WHO admonishes the US as it plans booster shots.

“We’re planning to hand out extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets, while we’re leaving other people to drown without a single life jacket.” https://t.co/I0va3OSNiL

— Hannah Kuchler (@hannahkuchler) August 18, 2021

Ann Althouse quotes:

“Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders.”

Britanica: Accountability, principle according to which a person or institution is responsible for a set of duties and can be required to give an account of their fulfilment to an authority that is in a position to issue rewards or punishment. Despite the apparent precision of this definition, controversy has arisen about the exact meaning of accountability.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Silvanus Thompson:

I read “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson and it’s still to this day my inspiration for explaining complex technical topics to lay people. It’s a fantastic book, and even if you know math you must read it if you want to understand how to teach complexity to others.

Tami Luhby:

In fact, compensation is now lower than it was in December 2019, when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University. 

The Employment Cost Index — which measures wages and salaries, along with health, retirement and other benefits — fell in the last quarter and is 2% below its pre-pandemic trend, when taking inflation into account. (Wages and salaries are growing at a faster pace than benefits.)

“The hot economy is heating prices more than it is heating wages,” said Furman.

Tech Transparency Project:

With data from Facebook, Google, and Amazon going back to 2015, this tool provides the most comprehensive historical look at tech company giving to nonprofits to date.

Some caveats: The database includes U.S. organizations that the three tech companies have voluntarily disclosed funding between 2015 and 2021, and it may not capture the full extent of Big Tech-funded groups. In the future, however, TTP plans to expand this database with additional details culled from media reports and nonprofit IRS 990 forms as well as other sources. TTP also plans to add information about Apple-funded groups.

The database includes 2021 disclosures by Google and Facebook, but not by Amazon, which has yet to release its list of third-party funding recipients this year. TTP will update the database with new company disclosures as they become available.

Shannon Whitworth:

My problems with the letter are legion, particularly as an African American man myself. The one that stands out for me is that this does absolutely nothing to advance the causes of people of color. In fact, it would diminish the credibility of any movement on top of creating resentment and division by making such a preposterous demand. And threatening people into compliance is a low-percentage shot at gaining unity.

No person of color is well-served by removing the need to compete, strive, and continually improve oneself to achieve. A better time would be spent improving their math skills. Moreover, telling Black people that the only way to score a touchdown is to have the referees remove the other players from the field is not only insulting but conditions everyone to see blacks and other people of color as intellectually and academically subpar.

The great Black abolitionist, Fredrick Douglass, once famously wrote that if the Black man cannot stand on his own two feet, then let him fall. The point is well-taken for people of any race, color, or creed. Much better to fail on one’s own as a grownup than to be fed, groomed, excused, and lavished with affection like someone else’s pet.

The irony of this relentless push for equity is how dehumanizing it really is. Nothing in a person’s life experience matters except the color of their skin or where their parents were from. History—a factor over which we have no control—determines whether someone is oppressed or is an oppressor and how they deserve to be treated by society in perpetuity. It no longer matters how hard a person has worked, how they treat other people, or what choices they have made in life. The whole of a person is being reduced to a couple of boxes to check on a form. It is a tortured form of reasoning to conclude that this is progress toward a more humane society.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Persistence and Retention Report:

The Persistence and Retention report series examines first-year persistence and retention rates for beginning postsecondary students. Persistence rate is measured by the percentage of students who return to college at any institution for their second year, while retention rate represents the percentage of students who return to the same institution. Students attaining a credential in their first year are accounted for in persistence and retention rates. The report is designed to help institutions understand trends and patterns in this important early success indicator, and identify disparities by institutional type, state, degree level, starting enrollment intensity, major field, and student demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and race and ethnicity.

Shant Mesrobian:

The news was predictably met with a firestorm of controversy. In America’s post-Trump environment, vague and ill-defined references to “extremism” and “hate” have become all too common tools for stigmatizing vast swaths of the political spectrum and stifling what many consider to be legitimate forms of political speech and activity. And for many, the initiative sounded too much like a decisive step toward the dystopic, authoritarian idea of a “social credit score” in which citizens’ access to basic consumer and financial services would be based on evaluations of their private behavior or beliefs. And it was also just another example in what has now become a familiar and chilling series of censorious actions taken by America’s largest and most powerful tech platforms toward individuals and groups found to be expressing ideas that sit outside of the mainstream consensus, whether it’s YouTube’s routine removal of videos found to be deviating from whatever happens to be the current (and always shifting) scientific consensus or Amazon’s newly-adopted policy of banning of books that deviate from progressive beliefs about transgenderism or anything found to be promoting “hate speech.”

But this latest PayPal initiative is also part of a broader and unmistakeable pattern that’s been developing over the past few years. It’s one where Big Tech companies have sought to deal with the public’s concern over their massive, unprecedented, and unaccountable power over Americans’ speech and the country’s flow of news and information by entering into partnerships with America’s elite, highly influential civil society sector of media, academic, non-profit, policy, and advocacy organizations.

Aaron Churchill, via a kind reader:

Many teachers are paid according to salary schedules that reward seniority and degrees earned, the result of state laws that require school districts to follow this rigid compensation scheme. Unfortunately, this method fails to acknowledge other factors that legitimately should influence teachers’ wages, including their classroom effectiveness, professional responsibilities, or demand for their labor.

But what if these constraints were loosened, so that school leaders could pay teachers in a more flexible way? A recent study by Yale University’s Barbara Biasi looks at what happened in Wisconsin after lawmakers passed reforms via Act 10 in 2011 that allowed districts to ditch the traditional salary schedule and adopt flexible pay policies. Roughly half of Wisconsin’s districts leveraged these new autonomies to negotiate salaries with each employee, much like many businesses do. The other half maintained a traditional seniority- and credentials-based salary schedule that applied to all teachers.

Her analysis reveals several eye-opening findings about the Wisconsin districts that switched to a flexible pay structure. These districts:

Offered higher salaries to early career teachers. To give an example, Green Bay—a flexible pay district, post Act 10—paid teachers with less than five years of experience anywhere between $42,000 and $55,000 per year. In contrast, Madison, a district that stuck with a traditional salary schedule, set salaries for less experienced teachers within a narrower range of around $38,000 to $45,000. The higher salary ceiling in flexible pay districts allowed them to attract talented early career teachers (see next point).

Attracted high-performing teachers, especially younger ones. Flexible pay districts drew teachers with significantly higher value-added scores, especially among those with less experience. The same was not true for traditional pay districts. They didn’t experience an influx of highly effective teachers. The analysis also indicates that teachers with lower value-added scores were more likely to exit flexible pay districts. Due to these entrances and exits, flexible pay districts saw an increase in the overall quality of their instructional staff.

Rewarded instructional quality. In flexible pay districts, a one standard deviation increase in teachers’ value-added scores was associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent higher salary. No such correlation between wages and value-added existed among traditional pay districts. Even though Wisconsin districts didn’t receive value-added scores during this time period—those were calculated by the author—they were still able to identify quality teachers and modestly boost their pay.

Increased performance among all teachers in the district. In addition to improvements linked to teacher mobility, the new compensation structure incentivized higher performance among all educators in the district. After the switch to flexible pay, the average value-added score of teachers in flexible pay districts rose more rapidly than in traditional pay districts. The prospect of higher wages under a system that rewards performance and effort, rather than longevity, could explain those results.

Moved the needle on student achievement. Given all this, it’s not surprising to see students reaping the benefits. In Wisconsin’s flexible pay districts, student achievement on state exams rose by 0.06 and 0.05 standard deviations in reading and math, respectively—which, according to the author, is equivalent to about one-third of the effect of class size reductions. In traditional pay districts, however, achievement was flat. The bottom line, as Biasi puts it: “These tests indicate that changes in the composition and effort of teachers in flexible pay districts following the change in pay schemes led to a sizable increase in students’ test scores.”

Emily Jashinsky;

The fluidity of gender is predicated on the fluidity of truth, which itself demands moral relativism. This is the postmodern muddle. Alongside failed wars, a Great Recession, and ambient tech addiction, it’s the world our experts hath wrought. It’s the only world Gen Z knows.

“Euphoria’s” dreamy purple haze depicts the pain of the “America Without Family, God, or Patriotism,” described in a 2019 Atlantic headline.

“In 1998,” Derek Thompson wrote, “The Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked several hundred young Americans to name their most important values. Work ethic led the way—naturally. After that, large majorities picked patriotism, religion, and having children.”

“Twenty-one years later,” Thompson continued, “the same pollsters asked the same questions of today’s 18-to-38-year-olds—members of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Today’s respondents were 10 percentage points less likely to value having children and 20 points less likely to highly prize patriotism or religion.”

They’re also “less likely to trust authorities, or companies, or institutions,” Thompson added. But that’s good news—our authorities, companies, and institutions are not to be trusted. They lied to us about Afghanistan to protect and further their failed strategy. They lied to us about Wall Street. They lied to us about Silicon Valley. They lied to us about opioids. What’s worse, they destroyed our faith in reality itself.

Common Sense Wisconsin:

Among the policies the POWER paper recommends:

Promoting the existing open enrollment process to inform parents of their options

Providing curriculum transparency so parents can enroll or transfer with full understanding of what’s being taught

Eliminating the per-pupil funding disparities between choice, charter and brick and mortar students

Expanding school choice to all areas of the state and eliminating the income limits for participants

Permitting alternative licensure, and loan forgiveness/reduced tuition for Education students who teach in Wisconsin

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Russell Brandom:

Researchers at AlgorithmWatch say they were forced to abandon their research project monitoring the Instagram algorithm after legal threats from Facebook. The Berlin-based project went public with the conflict in a post published Friday morning, citing the platform’s recent ban of the NYU Ad Observatory. 

“There are probably more cases of bullying that we do not know about,” the post reads. “We hope that by coming forward, more organizations will speak up about their experiences.”“THE COMPANY CANNOT BE TRUSTED”

Launched in March 2020, AlgorithmWatch provided a browser plug-in that would allow users to collect data from their Instagram feeds, providing insight into how the platform prioritizes pictures and videos. The project published findings regularly, showing that the algorithm encouraged photos that showed bare skin and that photos showing faces are ranked higher than screenshots of text. Facebook disputed the methodology but did not otherwise take action against AlgorithmWatch for the first year of the project.

In May, researchers say Facebook asked to meet with the project leaders and accused them of violating the platform’s terms of service. Another objection was that the project violated the GDPR, since it collected data from users who had not consented to participate.

Thomas Frank:

The significance of liberal hysteria goes beyond this, however. The Trump era began with outrage at ‘populists’ who didn’t listen to the highly educated and were bringing authoritarianism to America. It has ended in a resounding professional-class triumph in which powerful corporations constantly tell the world what noble antiracists they are… in which the news media is not only post-objective but actively on a crusade to suppress the ideological Other… and in which tiny political missteps not only get people fired but sometimes bring them under a crushing hailstorm of public humiliation.

In the supreme irony of our times, many of the same liberals who were so concerned about Trumpist authoritarianism four years ago have enthusiastically accepted a system of social media censorship in which ideas that contradict the findings of established authorities are in certain cases banished from the public sphere. And they are slowly but clearly coming round to the administration’s proposal to turn the government’s surveillance powers on what is called ‘domestic extremism’. It was fears of Trumpist authoritarianism that made this new, liberal authoritarianism possible.

“What we saw Wednesday was…nothing new— the maintenance of white supremacy just has new packaging.” Thanks @ToneMSN for letting my write about the audacity that was last week’s committee hearings on Critical Race Theory. https://t.co/jsg0M9LOcg

— Nada Elmikashfi (@nadaelmikashfi) August 16, 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]

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

American School District Panel:

A total of 292 district leaders from school districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) took the third survey of the American School District Panel between June 1, 2021 and July 2, 2021. This tool presents weighted survey results that are nationally representative of school districts in the United States.

Angeline Terry

A review of Milwaukee County pension payouts since 2016 shows the infamous “backdrop” payment passed 20 years ago has cost taxpayers another $58 million, increasing the total bill to $354.4 million, an analysis by Urban Milwaukee has found. But some 800 veteran employees who are still eligible for the backdrop and have yet to retire could increase the total cost to at least $460 million.

These massive costs are the result of legislation passed by the Milwaukee County Board, which awarded lucrative pension sweeteners for non-union (and later union) employees in 2000 and 2001 respectively. The package included a 25% bonus that allowed veteran employees to collect as much as 100% of their final average salary in a pension and an added backdrop which gave eligible employees a generous lump-sum payment. To date 144 employees have gotten a back drop of at least $400,000, with seven getting more than $900,000 and a lucky 14 getting more than $1 million — all in addition to a monthly pension payment.

Jay Greene & James Paul:

The promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses has become a central concern of higher education. However, high DEI staffing levels suggest that these programs are bloated relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus. The authors’ research suggests that large DEI bureaucracies appear to make little positive contribution to campus climate: Rather than being an effective tool for welcoming students from different backgrounds, DEI personnel may be better understood as a signal of adherence to ideological, political, and activist goals. In light of these findings, state legislators and donors who fund these institutions may wish to examine DEI efforts more closely to ensure that university resources are used effectively.

Pat Droney:

The book tells the story through the eyes of two children after an officer-involved shooting where the children ask their parents why the shooting happened. The book has been a source of controversy as it has been pushed on elementary school students throughout the country.

The book is touted as being about so-called “diversity and inclusion”—at the end of the book, the black boy and white girl reach out to a Middle Eastern student to join their team at recess. However, the book is full of anti-police propaganda.

Bill Dupor:

Although the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act) provided nearly $28 billion to state governments for improving U.S. highways, the highway system saw no significant improvement. For example, relative to the years before the act, the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges was nearly unchanged, the number of workers on highway and bridge construction did not significantly increase, and the annual value of construction put in place for public highways barely budged. The author shows that as states spent Recovery Act highway grants, many simultaneously slashed their own contributions to highway infrastructure, freeing up state dollars for other uses. Next, using a cross-sectional analysis of state highway spending, the author shows that a state?s receipt of Recovery Act highway dollars had no statistically significant causal impact on that state?s total highway spending. Thus, the amount of actual highway infrastructure investment following the act?s passage was likely very similar to that under a no-stimulus counterfactual.

Madison has recently received more than $70M in new, redistributed federal taxpayer and borrowed funds, in addition to ongoing state and local taxpayer funding growth.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Tom Jones:

A parent has filed a federal complaint against her child’s school, alleging it segregated classes based on race.

She said it was a practice put in place by the school’s principal, who thought she was doing what was best for all students.

Atlanta Public Schools confirmed to Channel 2′s Tom Jones that it has wrapped up its investigation into the allegations and has taken action.

Parent Kila Posey still can’t believe a principal thought separating students by race was a good idea.

“We’ve lost sleep like trying to figure out why would a person do this,” Posey said.

She told Jones she was stunned when she learned about classes segregated by race at Mary Lin Elementary School last year.

Katherine Gorka:

Others are engaging because of the content being taught. Whether it’s age-inappropriate sex education, critical race theory, or anti-American history, parents are seeing more of what their children are learning—thanks to COVID’s virtual learning—and they don’t like it. As a result, parents are organizing, speaking out, and pushing back, and they are having a noticeable impact.           

Some of the most effective efforts have begun with individual parents who reached a boiling point and decided to speak out. Mom and investigative journalist A.P. Dillon helped expose critical race theory training in Wake County, N.C., public schools.  Elana Fishbein was a lone parent in Lower Marion, Pa., who objected to content in her children’s curriculum, which, in her words, “described ‘whiteness’ as an entitlement to steal land, garner riches, and get special treatment on equity and race.” That letter reached a national audience when Tucker Carlson invited her onto his Fox News Channel show. 

Andrew Gutmann also made national news when he sent a letter to 650 families criticizing New York City’s Brearley School, which his daughter attended, for its obsession with race and for “desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

John Ashmore:

As our editor-in-chief, Robert Colvile, writes here, the basic issue is that we produce too many graduates, many of whose degrees confer neither a first-rate education, nor higher earnings. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that about 70,000 students a year, roughly one in five, would have been financially better off not going to university. Equally, the ‘graduate premium’ masks a huge amount of divergence between courses and job outcomes. For every high-earning lawyer or doctor there are several grads doing paid jobs they could have got without a degree. 

Given the cost of a three-year BA is approaching £30,000 just for tuition, you could hardly blame students for thinking twice about applying at all. It’s a financial problem for the Government too, as a huge chunk of each year’s cohort will never get round to repaying the cost of their degree, leaving the taxpayer on the hook for the remainder. Little wonder the Intergenerational Foundation called the English system ‘a self-perpetuating debt-generating machine which short-changes young people’. 

The debate on university numbers has understandably tended to focus on ‘Mickey Mouse courses’, with low entry requirements and poor job prospects. Media Studies, perhaps with a unit in ‘Beckhamology’, is the archetypal example. The stock response, which happens to have great merit, is that we need to put more resources into vocational routes for those who are not suited to university.

Max Hodak:

The last 30 years have been an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity for much of the world. It’s easy to miss just how anomalous this is historically. There is absolutely no guarantee that the future will be so bright, and on the contrary, there are now many plausible scenarios in which we head into highly stable dystopias. The most we can do for our children is to prevent this.

This is not my favorite thing I have posted on this site, since as should be clear, CSAM is indefensible, and I know that some will confuse my position as somehow protecting it. And further, given how seats of power all over the world know how valuable it would be to kill strong encryption, it seems foolish to draw attention to myself as being across the table from them. But, given the kind of products I work on, I felt it was important to make a statement of principle here. I believe strongly in these principles, and if we’re not willing to defend our freedom when it is threatened, we don’t deserve to keep it.

Chad Terhune, Robin Respaut & Deborah Nelson:

It took the deadly disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose a deeper, more intractable U.S. public-health crisis: For more than a decade, the world’s richest nation has been losing the battle against diabetes.

Long before the pandemic, Kate Herrin was among the millions of Americans struggling to control their diabetes.

Her problems often stemmed from her government-subsidized medical insurance. Doctors routinely rejected her Medicaid plan, and she repeatedly ran out of the test strips she needed to manage her daily insulin injections. She cycled in and out of emergency rooms with dangerously high blood-sugar levels, or hyperglycemia.

Then COVID-19 hit. Herrin – poor and living alone – rarely left her apartment, ordering fast-food delivery instead of risking the grocery store. She stopped going in for regular lab tests. She had a harder time than ever securing medical supplies. Her health deteriorated further.

Perry Stein:

The evaluation system — one of the first in the nation to tie teacher job security and paychecks to class performance — has been central to the District’s high-profile education efforts over the past decade. It’s one of the more discussed legacies of Michelle Rhee, who gained national recognition as the District’s public schools chancellor from 2007 to 2010.

In 2009, Rhee enacted the evaluation system unilaterally, without engaging the teachers union in negotiations. The implementation of IMPACT led to the firing of hundreds of teachers and heightened tensions between the school system and the union that persist today. The Washington Teachers’ Union has said the evaluation system creates a culture of fear and can be easily weaponized by principals to get rid of teachers they dislike. The union has unsuccessfully attempted to make IMPACT part of the bargaining process.

Frederick Hess:

Despite these numbers, some on the left have decided that the answer is not to insist that schools use the $190 billion in emergency federal COVID school aid to help students catch up and even excel, but to launch a nihilistic crusade in service to a warped mantra of “equity.” This is the same notion of equity that has spurred California’s move to eliminate advanced math instruction and Oregon’s Department of Education urging that teachers learn to abandon “racist” math practices like asking to students “show their work” or worry about “getting the ‘right answer.’” 

What’s going on? To be blunt, too many grownups on the American left have thrown in the towel. Many of the same Democratic leaders who, just a few years ago, were cheering Common Core and Obama’s Race to the Top, now nod along as the woke fringe and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” officialdom insist that schools frequently serve as little more than engines of systemic racism. This line of argument turns out to be surprisingly convenient for Democratic officials, as it permits them to placate the woke base, back away from the kinds of demands that offend their teacher union allies, and suggest that the disappointments of grandiose school reform were a product not of their missteps or excessive faith in bureaucracies but of the public’s own moral failings. 

While it may help Democrats finesse a political squeeze, this tack marks a troubling break with the recent past, when right and left agreed about the perils of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” While the sweeping, bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) born of that consensus proved to be a mess as a statute—undone by unrealistic dictates and its cavalier expansion of the federal footprint—it represented a powerful, shared conviction that America’s schools must strive to educate every child; that every student should (at least!) learn how to proficiently read, write, and do math; and that we must reject those who would set different expectations for students based on their color creed—whether those are fueled by bigotry or misplaced benevolence.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Another fun fact about U.S. military jargon from the data: Right now, there are more words in U.S. military terminology (~26,500) than in the average native English speaker’s active vocabulary (20,000). Milspeak is literally its own language. pic.twitter.com/iQbeiVHyCp

— Elena Wicker (@ElenaWicker) August 14, 2021

Another fun fact about U.S. military jargon from the data: Right now, there are more words in U.S. military terminology (~26,500) than in the average native English speaker’s active vocabulary (20,000). Milspeak is literally its own language. pic.twitter.com/iQbeiVHyCp

— Elena Wicker (@ElenaWicker) August 14, 2021

Heather Curry:

Co-sponsored by more than two dozenstate lawmakers, including state education committee chairs Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt, Wisconsin’s Senate Bill 463 (and its companion version, Assembly Bill 488) would require public schools to disclose to parents and the public a listing of the actual materials making their way in front of students in K-12.  

Adapted from the Goldwater Institute’s modelacademic transparency legislation now advancing in multiple states, the bill would ensure that radical, ideological materials will no longer land on students’ desks without public awareness, and that parents will no longer be expected to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to extract curriculum information through expensive public records requests.

Instead, under the bill, public schools will proactively make this information available to parents, posting online the bibliographic information necessary to identify the specific learning materials used in their classrooms, “including the title and the author, organization or internet address associated with each specific learning material or educational activity.” With these requirements in place, parents will, for the first time, have reliable, easy access to the universe of materials their kids are encountering.

Speaking before the members of the Wisconsin Senate and Assembly Education Committees about the proposed legislation, Goldwater Institute Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg shared the urgent need for, and practical benefits of, restoring transparency to our education system:

Elizabeth Findell & Ben Chapman

“The path for­ward re­lies on per­sonal re­spon­si­bil-ity—not gov­ern­ment man­dates,” Mr. Ab­bott said in a state­ment. “The state of Texas will con­tinue to vig­or­ously fight the tem­po­rary re­strain­ing or­der to pro­tect the rights and free­doms of all Tex­ans.”

NY state guidance for schools is devastating. People will make light of this but I have personally seen the effect of kids faced w a loss of a loved sport or activity. I can’t give specifics but I work on a psych unit.

So damn short sighted. pic.twitter.com/jNlIPMb00C

— Ilana Horowitz (@NYC_essentialSW) August 12, 2021

Matt Ridley:

Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has “come to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China.” Scientific journals derive considerable “income and input” from China, and Western universities rely on Chinese students and researchers for tuition revenue and manpower. All that, Mr. Ridley says, “may have to change in the wake of the pandemic.”

In the U.K., he has also noted “a tendency to admire authoritarian China among scientists that surprised some people.” It didn’t surprise Mr. Ridley. “I’ve noticed for years,” he says, “that scientists take a somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world is.”

He asks: “If you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an ‘intelligent government’?” Science as an institution has “a naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well.” Perhaps that’s what politicians mean when they declare that they “believe in science.” As we’ve seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.

Ongoing data summary:

National Council on teacher quality:

The quality of the teacher workforce is especially important in the early grades, when teachers bear an extraordinary responsibility, building a solid foundation for students in both the knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in later grades, as well as in their future lives.

The past year and a half has laid bare the tremendous challenges teachers face and the essential role they play in supporting students. As the pandemic abates and we reckon with the damage it wrought, we must acknowledge that recovery places unprecedented demands on our education system and its teachers.

Bringing in new teachers who are up to the task requires an understanding of the points along the pathway when we are most likely to lose teaching talent, especially those points at which aspiring teachers of color are lost to the profession.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Applied Divinity Studies:

According to a recent survey from Rethink Priorities, when asked what best describes their current career respondents replied:

• Building flexible career capital and will decide later (18.7%)
• Still deciding what to pursue (17.2%)

I was struck how perfectly this aligns with the optimal solution to the Secretary Problem: given N options, and subject to certain constraints, you should evaluate 37% of them before committing (those two survey responses add up to 35.6%). This is mostly coincidental, but leads to a longer exploration of real-life applications of SP-like dynamics.

Of course, SP is just a toy model. For our use, the two most problematic assumptions are Binary Payoff:the evaluator’s goal is merely to maximize their probability of selecting the best candidate, meaning 2nd best is just as bad as the worst, and No Opportunity Cost: evaluation is treated as free, there’s no cost to making a selection after 100 seeing candidates rather than after 10. I refer to an adjusted SP without these assumptions as the Modified Secretary Problem (MSP).

Deanna Fisher:

Smith’s comments above are bang on the mark. Too many American parents, having taken the time and effort to move into a “good” school district, or after making sure that their child got into the “good” school or “good” program, felt that their work was done. How very, very wrong they were, and it took a pandemic to show them that. When your child is being told not to ask you or tell you about what is happening in their classroom, something has gone horribly wrong.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Christopher Bedford:

Have you tried explaining how your child shouldn’t need to wear a mask in school lately? Or that teachers and other government employees should come back to work like the rest of us did long ago? Good luck. “Put on the mask. Bow to the hat. Or face your punishment.”

Our hero’s reaction is similarly violent, and their story ends differently than any school board or vaccine fight of 2021, but the themes are continuous as ever.

“I am fed to the teeth with elevated themes!” composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart complains in the great historical fiction “Amadeus.” “Old dead legends! Why must we go on forever writing about gods and legends?”

“Because they do,” the wise Baron Van Swieten swiftly replies. “They go on forever; or at least what they represent — the eternal in us.

Unherd:

But according to a new paper by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, this does not paint the full picture. The researchers analysed more than 5 million survey responses by a range of different demographic details, and classed those people who would “probably” or “definitely” not choose to get vaccinated as “vaccine hesitant.”

In some respects the findings are as predicted — for example the paper finds that there is a strong correlation between counties with higher Trump support in the 2020 presidential election and higher hesitancy in the period January 2021 — May 2021. 

But more surprising is the breakdown in vaccine hesitancy by level of education. It finds that the association between hesitancy and education level follows a U-shaped curve with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated. People with a master’s degree had the least hesitancy, and the highest hesitancy was among those holding a Ph.D.

Katharine Dommett:

Digital platforms, such as Google and Facebook, are under increased scrutiny as regards their impact on society. Having prompted concerns about their capacity to spread misinformation, contribute to filter bubbles and facilitate hate speech, much attention has been paid to the threat platforms pose to democracy. In contrast to existing interventions considering the threats posed by interactions between platforms and users, in this article, I examine platforms’ impact on the democratic work of other bodies. Considering the relationship between platforms and the media, I reveal how platforms affect journalists’ ability to advance their democratic goals. Using a case study of journalistic coverage of digital campaigning at the 2019 UK general election, I show how platforms have hindered journalistic efforts to inform citizens and provide a watchdog function. These findings are significant for our understanding of platforms’ democratic impact and suggest policy makers may wish to regulate platforms’ inter-institutional impact upon democracy.

South Kingstown superintendent deleted all her emails b4 resigning in the midst of this CRT scandal and another scandal investigating her for violating FERPA. I guess ur not teaching CRT if u delete all the emails saying you’re teaching CRT. I paid $600 for those deleted emails. pic.twitter.com/eGkMGZbdF0

— Nicole Solas (@Nicoletta0602) August 12, 2021

Alyssa Lyons:

According to Wisconsin’s Policy Forum, virtual charter enrollment rose 84% in 2020-21. Here in Eau Claire that trend holds true. 

Last year, while offering virtual school in addition to the district’s online COVID-19 cohort, the Eau Claire Virtual School had 40 students enrolled in grades four through 12.

This year, now offering K-12, that number has jumped to over 120, and since ECASD is not offering an online cohort for COVID-19 this school year, enrollments could still climb.

“I think this last year has really shown families that there are different learning models and different options. Virtual learning is not for every child, nor every family. And so, in order to be successful, there have to be those supports in place, that learning coach, the ability of the student to be a little more independent. But for the right student, this is a great, a great option for them,” said Laura Schlichting, principal of Eau Claire Virtual School.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Rick Eisenberg:

These things — not “talking about race” or teaching American history in full — are why Americans object to CRT. Proposals to limit curriculum or teaching derived from CRT differ and are of varying merit, but the best of them seek to prohibit schools from advocating for or requiring students to assent to a list of specific propositions, such as claims that individuals by virtue of their race or sex are inherently racist or bear responsibility for actions others committed in the past.

Growing Resistance to CRT

The ACLU letter, hinting at litigation against efforts to reign in the ACLU, is a reaction to both state legislature efforts and a growing rebellion among parents. Wisconsin families aren’t being fooled.

For example, parents in the Mequon-Thiensville school district, one of the highest-performing in the state, have begun an effort to recall the school board. Parent groups are springing up across the state.

One of the main organizers of the Mequon-Thiensville effort, an Hispanic-American mother named Scarlett Johnson, complainsthat “school districts are not forthright about philosophies like Critical Race Theory being taught in the classroom.”

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

datcreativity

It involves thinking of unrelated ideas. People who are more creative tend to think of ideas with greater “distances” between them.

We recommend that you take the test before you learn more about it. You can also read our open-access manuscript in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jon Miltimore:

Weeks later, however, we have an abundance of empirical evidence that show the prognosticators were once again wrong. Cases did not double or quadruple as Ferguson had predicted. Nor did cases “surge,” as many had warned.

On the contrary, cases fell—a lot.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Ed Richards:

All of the financial benefits of being a hospital without any of the responsibilities. So we get women’s hospitals, orthopedic hospitals, etc., sucking the profitable work from community hospitals, without taking any of the burden of community care for the indigent. General hospitals are even allowed to close their ERs in Louisiana.

The hospitals in Louisiana which take indigent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The specialty hospitals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all. They also do little to help the others. Thus Louisiana has a very small number of general beds that are available for COVID patients. It is a real crisis, but it is as much a crisis in health care resources as in COVID. While the Children’s hospitals do have ERs, there are not many of them in Louisiana and there are very few total ICU beds. As another list member observed, you can have all the pediatric ICU beds full and still only have a tiny number of kids who are very sick.

Sean Coughlan, Hannah Richardson and Jeanette Long

Top grades for A-level results for England, Wales and Northern Ireland have reached a record high – with 44.8% getting A* or A grades.

This second year of replacement results after exams were cancelled, has seen even higher results than last year when 38.5% achieved top grades.

Heads’ leader Geoff Barton said it was “comparing apples with oranges” to compare these results with other years.

More than 200,000 students are also getting vocational BTec results.

In Scotland, the pass rates for Highers and Nationals dropped slightly – but scores were still well above pre-pandemic levels.

Christine Amanpour:

AND YET AT THE SAME TIME I THINK WE’VE ALL DONE A DISSERVICE TO THE PUBLIC.

WHEN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT FACE CLOTH COVERINGS, THOSE CLOTH PIECES OF HANG OVER YOUR FACE.

THEY ACTUALLY ONLY HAVE VERY LIMITED IMPACT IN REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF VIRUS THAT YOU INHALE IN OR EXHALE OUT.

AND IN FACT IN STUDIES THAT HAVE BEEN DONE SHOW THAT IF AN INDIVIDUAL MIGHT GET INFECTED WITHIN 15 MINUTES IN A ROOM, BY TIME AND CONCENTRATION OF THE VIRUS IN THE ROOM.

ADD A FACE CLOTH COVERING YOU ONLY GET ABOUT FIVE MORE MINUTES OF PROTECTION.

I’VE BEEN REALLY DISAPPOINTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES IN PUBLIC HEALTH FOR NOT BEING MORE CLEAR ABOUT WHAT CAN MASKING DG OR NOT DO.

ON THE OTHER HAND IF YOU USE THE N95 RESPIRATORS AND FIT THEM FIGHT TO YOUR FACE, YOU CAN ACTUALLY SPEND 25 HOURS IN THAT SAME ROOM AND STILL BE PROTECTED.

Chris Papst:

“My son is really in desperate need of tutoring in math,” Gray told Project Baltimore. “And, how did my son pass if he didn’t know none of this math?”

Now, Project Baltimore has obtained student assessment scores from just one class, in one high school, that show how widespread the problem appears to be.

iReady is a system schools use to measure at which grade level a student is performing. In Baltimore City Schools, iReady assessments are given in math and reading, three times a year, to measure a student’s progress. The scores we obtained show some students are performing 10 grade levels below their age.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Under this bill, faculty and staff will be punished if they don’t comply with the preferred pronouns of students as early as kindergarten.

However, they ARE permitted to hide a child’s gender dysmorphia from their own parents. pic.twitter.com/Jsw8IHmcvr

— Justine Brooke Murray (@Justine_Brooke) August 10, 2021

William Jacobson:

As someone who spent 22 years as a civil litigator prior to joining Cornell Law School, including 13 in Rhode Island, I understand well that lawsuits frequently do not turn out as the plaintiff intended, sometimes catastrophically so. I’m not making a prediction, but I am sounding a warning, that the lawsuit by two RI affiliates of the National Education Association against South Kingstown mother Nicole Solas may turn out to be a historic mistake, one that exposes the unions to punitive damage claims by Solas under the Rhode Island anti-SLAPP statute, as well as intrusive discovery as to union motivations.

The background you probably already know. Solas, a Rhode Island stay-at-home mother, first told her story at Legal Insurrection about her problems getting information about Critical Race and Gender teaching in South Kingstown schools, including the kindergarten to which her daughter was enrolled for fall 2021. (She has since then said she will send her daughter to private school because she fears retaliation against her daughter because of this controversy.)

We have tracked the story since it launched at Legal Insurrection and spread nationally:

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Conor Friedersdorf:

That choice was a disaster. The slogan—shorthand for cutting spending on law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services, or, for more radical proponents, moving toward eventual police abolition—is a political liability, largely due to justified fears that, if implemented, it would lead to many more murders, assaults, and other violent crimes, disproportionately harming victims in America’s most marginalized communities. Yet even as the Democratic Party abandons the slogan, the activist left still clings to it, as if oblivious to its opportunity cost: Namely, the public is open to any number of potential improvements to American policing, but no politically viable reform is getting anywhere near the attention of “defunding.”

Before the public sours on criminal-justice reform more broadly—as it may amid rising fears about crime and disorder in cities—a new focus and rallying cry are needed. And given the spike in homicides that has afflicted the United States during the pandemic, disproportionately killing Black people, there’s an especially strong case for this overdue slogan: Solve All Murders. Precisely because Black lives matter, people who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.

Dan Lennington:

How can parents defend their right to know what is being taught in schools?  

Help is on the way.

Working with Wisconsin legislators, WILL has developed a Classroom Transparency Act. If adopted, this law will require school districts to post instruction materials online for parents and taxpayers. This requirement would go beyond the “official curricula” and require all teaching materials to be posted online.

URGENT: The Classroom Transparency Act will be considered at a public hearing on Wednesday, August 11 at 10am, Wisconsin State Capitol 412 East. Let your voice be heard!

Going further, WILL as created a Parental Rights Notification Form. The goal of this form is to seek transparency from individual teachers. Parents can ask a teacher when divisive concepts are being taught and for information about alternative lessons. The goal of this form is not to object to CRT or CRT-inspired lessons, but simply to learn what is being taught in the classroom. It’s your right to know!

More information about WILL’s Equality Under the Law Project can be found at www.DefendEquality.org, and at the CRT Toolbox here.

If you’d like to seek legal advice from WILL, you may contact a lawyer at this link.

University students may quickly review course syllabi prior to enrolling. K-12 parents and students should have the same experience. The effort is trivial.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Hillary Borrud:

For the next five years, an Oregon high school diploma will be no guarantee that the student who earned it can read, write or do math at a high school level.

Gov. Kate Brown had demurred earlier this summer regarding whether she supported the plan passed by the Legislature to drop the requirement that students demonstrate they have achieved those essential skills. But on July 14, the governor signed Senate Bill 744 into law.

Through a spokesperson, the governor declined again Friday to comment on the law and why she supported suspending the proficiency requirements.

Brown’s decision was not public until recently, because her office did not hold a signing ceremony or issue a press release and the fact that the governor signed the bill was not entered into the legislative database until July 29, a departure from the normal practice of updating the public database the same day a bill is signed.

The Oregonian/OregonLive asked the governor’s office when Brown’s staff notified the Legislature that she had signed the bill. Charles Boyle, the governor’s deputy communications director, said the governor’s staff notified legislative staff the same day the governor signed the bill.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Rasmussen:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters nationwide believe increased government spending leads to inflation. A Scott Rasmussen survey found that only 14% disagree and 27% are not sure.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) of Republicans see a connection between spending and inflation. Democrats, by a 45% to 21% margin, tend to agree. Among Independent voters, 45% believe more government spending leads to inflation while 11% do not.

These numbers help explain why just 22% of voters want Congress and the President to increase federal spending next year. Thirty-nine percent (39%) want spending to be cut and 21% would like it to remain about the same. That finding reflects a marked change from a year ago when just 14% of voters wanted the government to stop spending more money.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Monica Ellwood-Lowe, Ruthe Foushee & Mahesh Srinivasan:

Parents with fewer educational and economic resources (low socioeconomic-status, SES) tend to speak less to their children, with consequences for children’s later life outcomes. Despite this well-established and highly popularized link, less research addresses why the SES “word gap” exists. Moreover, while research has assessed individual-level contributors to the word gap — like differences in parenting knowledge — we know little about how structural constraints that vary according to SES might affect caregivers’ speech. In two pre-registered studies, we test whether experiencing financial scarcity can suppress caregivers’ speech to their children. Study 1 suggests that higher-SES caregivers who are prompted to reflect on scarcity — particularly those who reflect on financial scarcity — speak less to their 3-year-olds in a subsequent play session, relative to a control group. Study 2 suggests that mid- to higher-SES caregivers engage in fewer back-and-forth exchanges with their children at the end of the month — when they are more likely to be experiencing financial hardship — than the rest of the month. These studies provide preliminary evidence that — above and beyond caregivers’ individual characteristics — structural constraints may affect how much parents speak to their children.

Marty Makary and H. Cody Meissner:

“A new research study by one of us and his Johns Hopkins colleagues found that of the $42 billion the National Institutes of Health spent on research last year, less than 2% went to Covid clinical research…

● Of the $42 Billion 2020 NIH annual budget, 5.7% was spent on
COVID-19 research
● Public health research was underfunded at 0.4% of the 2020 NIH
budget
● Only 1.8% of the 2020 NIH budget was spent on COVID-19 clinical
research
● Average COVID-19 NIH funding cycle was 5 months
● Aging was funded 2.2 times more than COVID-19 research
● By May 1, 2020, 3 months into the pandemic, the NIH spent 0.05%
annual budget on COVID-19 research
● Of the 1419 grants funded by the NIH:
• NO grants on kids and masks specifically
• 58 studies on social determinants of health
• 57 grants on substance abuse
• 107 grants on developing COVID-19 medications
• 43 of the 107 medication grants repurposed existing drugs

Emily Oster:

In summary, what does one take from this? When kids get COVID-19, the vast majority of the time you will either not know, or they will have a mild cold-type illness. They can, however, get seriously ill.

None of this is to downplay COVID or up-play it, or any-play it. Kids can get COVID, for sure. A small number of kids do get seriously ill; the risks from serious illness are significantly higher than a common cold or stomach flu. But as hard as it is to acknowledge, the risks are in the range of risks that are inherent in our lives. Any death of a child is an unbelievable tragedy, but we do live with choices that take these risks, whether we acknowledge them directly or not.

Thomas C. O’Brien and Dolores Albarracin:

At a time when pseudoscience threatens the survival of communities, understanding this vulnerability, and how to reduce it, is paramount. Four preregistered experiments (N = 532, N = 472, N = 605, N = 382) with online U.S. samples introduced false claims concerning a (fictional) virus created as a bioweapon, mirroring conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and carcinogenic effects of GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms). We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not. We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience. These findings have implications for science broadly and the application of psychological science to curbing misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Xavier Walton:

“Our children have struggles, and they’re going to overcome them,” said Heidi Simpson, a Pearland ISD parent.

Three Pearland parents have different stories but similar struggles. Special education advocates say the district is failing students who need help most.

“We are greatly concerned,” said Karen Mayer Cunningham, the special education advocate who is representing several parents suing the district. “It’s the obligation, the responsibility, and the duty of the school districts to find locate and assess children with suspected disabilities that may need of special education services.”

KHOU 11 reached out to Pearland ISD for comment. Here part of the district’s response: Due to pending hearings before the Texas Education Agency, the district does not have a statement at this time.

Alina Dizik:

Emily Porche swears by one holdover from her family’s life under lockdown: her children’s learning space.

Ms. Porche initially designed the room as a virtual classroom for her young daughters, but now it is a favorite hangout. With both girls back in school, the hanging chair is a spot for reading and the hand-built desks are used for cursive-writing practice. Having a kid-approved study area has made school assignments less of a chore for Avery, 8, and Hadley, 5, she says.

“Looking past Covid, this is now a space for homework and projects,” says Ms. Porche, owner of an online interior-design company who purchased and renovated a Marietta, Ga., five-bedroom home four years ago for $680,000, according to public records. The classroom-turned-homework space fits the home’s overall modern-classic farmhouse vibe, she adds. It cost her about $3,000.

Wall Street Journal:

Federal student loan payments are set to resume in September, leaving millions of Americans on the hook for payments that were frozen at the beginning of the pandemic. But, how did borrowers become hobbled with more than $1 trillion in federal student debt? Join Wall Street Journal editor Bourree Lam in conversation with reporter Joshua Mitchell, author of “The Debt Trap,” and Andrea Fuller as they break down how student debt swelled over the years and the current plans to provide forgiveness to borrowers.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The state’s $0 increase in each district’s per-pupil spending limit coupled with the district’s unprecedented 3.7% drop in enrollment during the 2020-21 school year could have a long-term negative effect on Madison’s budget, MacPherson said.

A district’s enrollment affects how much money it receives in state aid. Madison could have lost more state funding for next year because of declining enrollment — about 1,000 students, or 3.7% of its student population last year — but it is benefiting from two stopgap exemptions that limit how much aid a district can lose each year.

The district anticipated the first stopgap exemption being only a one-year fix in the 2021-22 budget and going away next year, as well as an anticipated continued decline in enrollment but, “what we didn’t expect was $0 per pupil surviving in the state budget,” MacPherson said in his report.

The Madison School District is set to receive $70.6 million over the course of three ESSER payment installments. The district’s first installment, ESSER I, was approximately $9.2 million and had already been exhausted by the end of the 2020-21 school year. District planning for the use of funds from ESSER II and III had been put on hold as finance officials awaited the outcome of the state budget battle.

The article fails to include total taxpayer spending, (> $20k per student) much less annual growth, in light of declining enrollment.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

The @CityofMequon has been threatening prosecution over this banner supporting the recall election in @mtschools. Apparently “banners” aren’t allowed on public property. This is a First Amendment violation –@WILawLiberty won’t stand for it. Read more here: https://t.co/i6rsegZl8B pic.twitter.com/b7cwA5dy0F

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) August 7, 2021

Dana Goldstein and Alicia Parlapiano:

Solomon is part of a vast exodus from local public schools.

As the pandemic upended life in the United States, more than one million children who had been expected to enroll in these schools did not show up, either in person or online. The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students, according to government data.

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Yet some schooling options did see sizable enrollment increases during the pandemic, DPI data show. Homeschool enrollment increased by 47% in the 2020-21 school year, following several previous years of much more modest increases (see Figure 2).

This enrollment increase was the largest since at least 1984, the earliest year for which data are available, and likely the largest single-year increase ever. While homeschool students still account for a small share of all students in Wisconsin, that share increased from about 2.2% in the 2019-20 school year to about 3.25 % in 2020-21.

Wisconsin charter schools also saw enrollment rise nearly 14% in the 2020-21 school year, after years of remaining roughly flat. This trend appears to have been driven by an explosion of enrollment at virtual charters – not surprising given the widespread shift to remote instruction. Virtual charter enrollment shot up 84% in 2020-21, from 8,696 to 16,020.

These trends appear to have mirrored in large part what took place across the country, according to new data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Additional commentary.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Zaid Jilani:

From school boards to state legislatures, a battle is raging over how public schools should teach students about race and racism in the United States. Much of the debate has centered around opposition to “critical race theory,” which many have pointed out is based on a body of legal scholarship that is rarely, if ever, actually taught at the K-12 level. 

Yet the focus on the term often obscures more than it illuminates. What’s driving concern about what’s being taught to schoolchildren is a new racialism that directly challenges the colorblind approach that has been hegemonic in public schools since the civil rights movement.

Under the colorblind approach, we were taught to view people as individuals, to emphasize our common humanity, and to avoid racial or ethnic generalizations. Under the new racialism, we are told that it is naïve to believe that transcending race is possible in a society where every institution is shaped by past and present racism; therefore, we need to acknowledge, emphasize, and place value on racial categories.

If you want to know how this new racialism manifests in the real world, look no further than Oregon’s Kindergarten 2021 Social Science Standards, which have been updated to integrate “ethnic studies.” Standards like this one lay out the knowledge, skills, and understandings that educators are expected to impart to their students, and teachers use them as a rough guide for composing their lessons for the year. Although Oregon schools are not required to implement these new standards until 2026, they have been approved for classroom use as of March of this year.

Common Sense Institute:

Estimated Expenditures: Homelessness Assistance Programs

Within the Metro Denver region, at least $481.2 million is spent annually on shelters, services, emergency response and healthcare for individuals experiencing homelessness.
In comparison, Colorado spends $324.5 million on the statewide budget of the Department of Public Safety.
Out of the total estimate of $481.2 million, approximately $434 million is spent within the City of Denver, while approximately $15.9 million is spent with the City of Boulder and approximately $7.8 million is spent within the City of Aurora.
For a population ranging from 4,171 to 10,428, these expenditures equate to a range of $41,679 per person to $104,201 per individual experiencing homelessness in the City of Denver.
In comparison, the per-pupil spending in K-12 schools in Denver Public Schools in 2019 was $19,202 for a total school population of 87,644.

William Jacobson:

I expect that news cycle will continue because Solas was just sued by the Rhode Island branches of the largest teachers union in the country, the National Education Association, trying to prevent South Kingstown from providing Solas with information she has requsted, including communcations involving the union or its members.

You can read the full Complaint with exhibits(pdf.), filed in Rhode Island Superior Court, at the bottom of this post. Legal Insurrection is the first to report on the lawsuit.

We will add additional analysis and commentary to this post. My initial take is that this smells collusive. South Kingstown doesn’t want to produce records and the union is helping them out. The lawsuit purports to prevent disclosure of “private” information, but the public records laws and Solas’ requests pursuant to those laws only require the district to produce public records. The district has been very aggressive in asserting exemptions and redacting documents, so the union’s concern and rush to court seems peculiar, at best.

Additional commentary, here.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

William McGurn:

If the land of woke has a capital, it’s San Francisco. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that the City by the Bay has now become ground zero for a revolt by unwoke moms and dads.

Part of this is Asian-Americans awakening to progressive plans to sacrifice their children in the name of equity and diversity. Another part is ordinary citizens pushing back against the dividing of America into white oppressors and nonwhite oppressed. Still another is parents and alumni alarmed by the board’s lowering of standards at one of America’s most elite public high schools by elevating race categories over merit.

In San Francisco these strains have come together in a bid to recall three members of the city’s highly unpopular school board. The targets are President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. To force a recall election, pro-recall forces need 51,325 signatures for each candidate by Sept. 7.

They already have more than half what they need, and say they now have the resources to hire professional signature gatherers for the rest. Polling shows 69% of San Francisco parents back the school-board recall—far more than the 43% in a poll last week who support recalling Gov. Gavin Newsom in the election scheduled for Sept. 14. A recent San Francisco Chronicle headline warns that if there is a recall election, the board members are “in danger.”

Tyler Cowen:

This “head in the sand” approach is highly imperfect. Still, it is preferable to panicking and closing the schools every year.

It is difficult to calculate how many children have died of Covid, but perhaps the best estimate comes from England, where it caused 25 deaths of people younger than 18 in the year ended in March. The final tally is certainly higher in the more populous U.S., but as of July seven states still were reporting zero Covid deaths among children. This recent estimate suggests 358 deaths, though it is based on only 43 states.

Yes, it is worth considering whether school reopenings will lead to unacceptably high levels of Covid in the non-school population. It is also worth pointing out that Covid is spreading very rapidly in states with low vaccination rates — without the schools playing a role. In any case, it does not justify focusing solely on the safety of children in discussions of school reopening.

Economists have long studied the tendency of people to assign more value to a “known life” than to a “statistical life.” When a baby is trapped down a well, for example, many millions of dollars will be spent trying to save her. Her photo will appear on the evening news and on social media. Yet when it comes to saving lives in the aggregate, such as by installing more and better smoke detectors, there is only modest interest.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Christopher Jacobs:

As the nation grapples with an increase in COVID cases due to the spread of the Delta variant, a recent report makes clear one thing policymakers should not do in response: Close down in-person learning.

The study, from the consulting firm McKinsey, shows how school shutdowns and lockdowns set back millions of American students—and hurt the poorest and most vulnerable families hardest. It reiterates how prolonged school closures, instigated by overly cautious politicians at the behest of intransigent teachers’ unions, may have set back an entire generation of American children.

Related:

Thinking about the situation where they live 62% of voters are opposed to re-imposing stricter lockdowns. A Scott Rasmussen national survey found that total includes 34% who favor a further easing of pandemic restrictions and 28% who say no change is needed.

Just 31% think it’s time to impose new lockdowns.

Kristin Tate:

Last week, PayPal announced a partnership with the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center to “investigate” the role of “white supremacists” and propagators of “anti-government” rhetoric, subjective labels that potentially could impact a large number of groups or people using their service. PayPal says the collected information will be shared with other financial firms and politicians. Facebook is taking similar measures, recently introducing messages that ask users to snitch on their potentially “extremist” friends, which considering the platform’s bias seems mainly to target the political right. At the same time, Facebook and Microsoft are working with several other web giants and the United Nations on a database to block potential extremist content.

The actions of these major companies may seem logical in an internet riddled with scams and crime. After all, nobody will defend far-right militias or white supremacist groups using these platforms for their odious goals. However, the same issue with government censorship exists with corporate censorship: If there is a line, who draws it? Will the distinction between mundane politics and extremism be a “I’ll know it when I see it” scenario, as former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described obscenity? If so, will there be individuals able to unilaterally remove people’s effective ability to use the internet? Could a Facebook employee equate Ben Shapiro with David Duke, and remove his account?

The implications of these crackdown efforts will be significantly more broad than just prohibiting Donald Trump from tweeting at 3 a.m. Young people cannot effectively function in society if blocked from using Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Uber, Amazon, PayPal, Venmo and other financial transaction systems. Some banking platforms already have announced a ban on certain legal purchases, such as firearms. The growth of such restrictions, which will only accelerate with support from (usually) left-wing politicians, could create a system in which individuals who do not hold certain political views could be blocked from polite society and left unable to make a living.

Elizabeth Campbell:

The principal at Colleyville Heritage High School posted on social media that he is breaking his silence about racial attacks against him after he was publicly accused at a recent school board meeting of teaching critical race theory by a former school board candidate who called for his firing. 

James Whitfield, who was named Colleyville Heritage High School’s first African-American principal in 2020, posted that during the July 26 board meeting, he was publicly named and accused of teaching critical race theory by a member of the public. He said he does not teach critical race theory and that being publicly named at a board meeting goes against district rules. 

Whitfield said in an interview Tuesday night that he decided to write his Facebook post after the board meeting when Stetson Clark, a former school board candidate who spoke at the meeting, referred to him by name, which is against district rules.
Read more here: https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/education/article253232263.html#storylink=cpy

Kevin Torres:

“Colorado is representative of what we’re seeing across the country – which is families had to make a lot of hard decisions last year and some of them chose to homeschool. Either for family flexibility or disenchantment with how remote school was going or they didn’t like the hybrid model — there are a lot of reasons where homeschooling may have been a better fit during the pandemic,” said Emily Levitt, Vice President of Education for the Sylvan Learning Center in Denver.

When it comes to students who registered in online educational programs in our state, that figure jumped up by 43% over the last year to a whopping 32,000 students.

Wall Street Journal:

Law school was once considered a surefire ticket to a comfortable life. Years of tuition increases have made it a fast way to get buried in debt.

Recent graduates of the University of Miami School of Law who used federal loans borrowed a median of $163,000. Two years later, half were earning $59,000 or less. That’s the biggest gap between debt and earnings among the top 100 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found.

Graduates from a host of other well-regarded law schools routinely leave with six-figure student loans, then fail to find high-paying jobs as lawyers, according to the Journal’s analysis of the latest federal data on earnings, for students who graduated in 2015 and 2016.

When Miami students asked for financial assistance, some graduates told the Journal, school officials often offered this solution: Take more loans.

“I had no work experience, life experience, anything like that before I signed on to this quarter-million-dollar loan,” said Dylan Boigris, a 2016 Miami Law graduate, who began his career making about $45,000 as a public defender. “I thought I would come out making much more than I did.”

Ameillia Wedward and Will Flanders:

As Act 10 reaches its second decade, the 2011 collective bargaining reforms continue to prove their value to K-12 education in Wisconsin. But this does not mean that the reforms are no longer controversial, or that opponents of the law have given hope of a repeal. In such an environment, it is important to continue to highlight the ways in which public sector union reform has mattered for Wisconsin.

New research out this month conducted by Barbara Biasi, professor at the Yale School of Management, does just that. She examines whether rewarding high-quality teachers with higher pay correlates to teacher proficiency thus, increasing student achievement rates in the long run. The results are convincing.

Prior to Act 10 in Wisconsin, collective bargaining kept public school teachers confined to strict pay schemes—favoring seniority instead of work ethic or student outcomes. Using data on Wisconsin teacher workforce both before and after the passage of Act 10 (2007-2015), Biasi found that some districts took advantage to implement pay schemes that reward teacher quality over the number of years they’d worked in the district in the wake of the law. Others did not, and were content to stick with the way pay had worked for generations. Biasi found that effective teachers gravitated toward districts where they could be rewarded. And in turn, using value-added measures of student outcomes, she saw that these districts experienced higher rates of student growth than districts that stuck with outmoded systems of pay.

Daniel Levi:

In a 5-minute YouTube video, BILD editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt said:
“Millions of children in this country, for whom we are all responsible as a society, I would like to say what our Federal Government and our Chancellor have not dare to say so far: We ask your forgiveness. We ask your forgiveness for a year and a half of politics, who sacrificed you.”
To victims of violence, neglect, isolation, emotional loneliness. For politics and media reporting that to this day, like poison, gives you the feeling that you are a mortal danger to our society.” You’re not, don’t let that persuade you. We have to protect you, not you us, “admits BILD editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Joseph Cox:

Google fired dozens of employees between 2018 and 2020 for abusing their access to the company’s tools or data, with some workers potentially facing allegations of accessing Google user or employee data, according to an internal Google document obtained by Motherboard.

The document provides concrete figures on an often delicate part of a tech giant’s operations: investigations into how the company’s own employees leverage their positions to steal, leak, or abuse data they may have access to. Insider abuse is a problem across the tech industry. Motherboard previously uncovered instances at Facebook, Snapchat, and MySpace, with employees in some cases using their access to stalk or otherwise spy on users.

The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties.

Ten percent of all allegations in 2020 concerned misuse of systems, which can include accessing user or employee data in violation of Google’s own policies, helping others to access that data, or modifying or deleting user or employee data, according to the document. In 2019, that figure was 13 percent of all security allegations.

ABC net AU

An Australian doctor is among six professionals being honoured for their work by having Barbie dolls modelled on them.

Kirby White is an Australian doctor based in Victoria who pioneered Gowns for Doctors, an initiative behind surgical gowns that can be washed and reused by frontline workers during the pandemic.

Dr White was inspired to create the gowns after her clinic experienced a shortage just three weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic last year.

The initiative has produced more than 5,000 gowns since a GoFundMe campaign raised more than $40,000 to develop them.

Dr White has already won a Local Hero Award in the Australian of the Year Awards.