Game

Chris Rickert:

East was largely shut down to in-person learning during Kearney’s tenure as principal. Madison high schools were the last in Dane County to welcome back students amid the COVID-19 pandemic when they began reopening to two half-days per student in late April.

Kearney dealt with most of the fallout from two high-profile incidents involving school staff. Business teacher David Kruchten resigned in February 2020 after he was indicted for placing hidden cameras in students’ hotel rooms during class trips. He is expected to plead guilty to a federal charge of attempting to produce child pornography.

Report recommends Madison terminate district employees who OK’d East High hidden cameras
Report recommends Madison terminate district employees who OK’d East High hidden cameras
Elizabeth Beyer | Wisconsin State Journal
A hidden camera was also found in January in a coach’s office at the high school, placed there to catch a custodian suspected of sleeping on the job. An independent investigation recommended staff involved in the incident be fired. District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said Tuesday that “staff who were identified to be directly involved in approving the installation of cameras were either already retired, or have since retired.”

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.

Matt Taibbi:

Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop. 

Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A brief list of just a few recent NPR reports:

“Billie Eilish Says She Is Sorry After TikTok Video Shows Her Mouthing A Racist Slur.” Pop star caught on tape using the word “chink” when she was “13 or 14 years old” triggers international outrage and expenditure of U.S. national media funding. 

“Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work.” White TikTok users dance to Nicky Minaj lyrics like, “I’m a f****** Black Barbie. Pretty face, perfect body,” kicking off “a debate about cultural appropriation on the app.”

“Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing. 

“Broadway Is Reopening This Fall, And Every New Play Is By A Black Writer.” All seven new plays being written by black writers is “a step toward progress,” but critics “will be watching Broadway’s next moves” to make sure “momentum” continues. 

“She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier.” It took Cold Lake First Nations member Danita Bilozaze nine whole months to change her name to reflect her Indigenous identity. 

“Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It’s Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Tom Hanks pushing for more widespread teaching of the Tulsa massacre doesn’t change the fact that he’s built a career playing “white men ‘doing the right thing,’” NPR complains. 

Mixed in with Ibram Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” “National” Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society. Yet without any irony, yesterday’s piece still made deadpan complaint about Shapiro’s habit of “telling [people] what their opinions should be” and speaking in “buzzwords.”

Rachel Aviv:

Suddenly, it seemed as if all relationship structures could—and must—be reconfigured, if there was any hope of producing a generation less damaged than the previous one. In the late sixties, educators in more than thirty German cities and towns began establishing experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies. “There is no question that they were trying (in a desperate sort of neo-Rousseauian authoritarian antiauthoritarianism) to remake German/human nature,” Herzog writes. Kentler inserted himself into a movement that was urgently working to undo the sexual legacy of Fascism but struggling to differentiate among various taboos. In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the “revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and that shatters the basis of our thinking.” A few years later, Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.

In this climate—a psychoanalyst described it as one of “denial and manic ‘self-reparation’ ”—Kentler was a star. He was asked to lead the department of social education at the Pedagogical Center, an international research institute in Berlin whose planning committee included Willy Brandt, who became the Chancellor of Germany (and won the Nobel Peace Prize), and James B. Conant, the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany and a president of Harvard. Funded and supervised by the Berlin Senate, the center was established, in 1965, to make Berlin an international leader in reforming educational practices. Kentler worked on the problem of runaways, heroin addicts, and young prostitutes, many of whom gathered in the archways of the Zoo Station, the main transportation hub in West Berlin. The milieu was memorialized in “Christiane F.,” an iconic drug movie of the eighties, about teen-agers, prematurely aware of the emptiness of modern society, self-destructing, set to a soundtrack by David Bowie.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

The Problem: Current school funding is a complex combination of state, local and federal aid. Funding in districts is largely based on antiquated revenue limits that have cemented in place funding gaps for 25 years. Students are worth more, or less, depending on where they happen to live, or whether they attend a choice or charter school. Even worse, the current funding system utilizes a three-year rolling average of enrollment that allows districts to receive funding for students they no longer educate. This current model is a barrier to reform.

Weighted Student Funding: Wisconsin can fund students, not just buildings and systems. A system of weighted student funding would provide the same level of funding for each student regardless of school sector, or home district. Students would receive extra revenue based on characteristics like poverty, disabilities, and English language learners, but otherwise would be valued the same.

The advantage of this system would be to create a dynamic student-centered funding system that allows for the expansion of new and innovate education models. We can get more money flowing into the classroom and not get bogged down in administrative costs. Finally, weighted student funding would unshackle students and schools from an opaque and complex formula that relies too heavily on the property wealth or poverty of a given community.

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

Independent Institute:

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

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

2007 Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

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.

Kartikay Mehrotra:

At least 100 activists, journalists and government dissidents across 10 countries were targeted with spyware produced by an Israeli company called Candiru, according to cybersecurity researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which tracks illegal hacking and surveillance.

Using a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, cyber operatives operating in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Hungary, Indonesia and elsewhere purchased and installed remote spying software made by Candiru, according to the researchers. The tool was used in “precision attacks” against targets’ computers, phones, network infrastructure and internet-connected devices,” said Cristin Goodwin, general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Security Unit.

Fadeke Adegbuyi:

Hila, and her husband, Ethan Klein, have amassed millions of followers on YouTube over the last decade as the duo behind h3h3 Productions and co-hosts of the H3 podcast. Initially building their audience through comedy sketches and reaction videos, in the past few years their channel has centered around discussions and interviews pertaining to pop culture, politics, and the internet. They’ve also become experts at living life online. Before the big announcement, they had shared their desire to conceive a second child, discussing their struggles with fertility and giving their viewers insight into doctor’s visits and specialist’s advice. In an earlier video, Hila mentioned that they would bypass the customary three-month waiting period before telling people about getting pregnant, intentionally eschewing the taboo of discussing a potential miscarriage—their audience would be the first to know.

Richard Smith:

Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.

Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.

Steven A. Camarota:

The idea that immigration is the solution to the aging of American society has become an article of faith among those arguing for ever-higher levels of new arrivals. They assert that, in societies such as the United States, where fertility rates are low relative to historic patterns, the native population will not supply enough workers to maintain a robust economy and pay for government services, particularly retirement programs. If native-born Americans aren’t going to have enough children to balance the longer-lived elderly population, the argument goes, then our only option is to increase immigration levels.

It’s not a crazy argument; it just happens to be incorrect. In reality, a significant body of research shows that the impact of immigration on population aging is small. While immigration can certainly make our population larger, it does not make us dramatically younger.

And yet, commentators have been making such arguments for years. The late Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer asserted in 1998 that America has been “saved by immigrants” from the kind of aging taking place in other first-world countries. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush famously said that America needed higher levels of immigration to “rebuild the demographic pyramid.” At the data-journalism site FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman has argued that immigration is the “only thing” preventing the country from facing a “demographic cliff.”

Eugene Volokh:

Say the government urges various intermediaries—bookstores, billboard companies, payment processors, social media platforms—to stop carrying certain speech. The government isn’t prosecuting them or suing them, just asking them. (This is in the news both with regard to the Biden Administration “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” and Donald Trump’s lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to the extent they claim government officials’ speech pressured those platforms into blocking him.) Is such government urging constitutional?

[A.] Generally speaking, courts have said “yes, that’s fine,” so long as the government speech doesn’t coercethe intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here’s a sample of appellate cases so holding:

[1.] A New York City official sent a letter urging department stores not to carry “a board game titled ‘Public Assistance—Why Bother Working for a Living.'” The letter said the game “does a grave injustice to taxpayers and welfare clients alike,” and closes with, “Your cooperation in keeping this game off the shelves of your stores would be a genuine public service.” Not unconstitutional, said the Second Circuit in Hammerhead Enterprises, Inc. v. Brezenoff (1983):

[T]he record indicates that Brezenoff’s request to New York department stores to refrain from carrying Public Assistance was nothing more than a well-reasoned and sincere entreaty in support of his own political perspective…. Where comments of a government official can reasonably be interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request, a valid claim can be stated…. [But] appellants cannot establish that this case involves either of these troubling situations.

[2.] The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography sent letters to various corporations (such as 7-Eleven) urging them not to sell pornographic magazines:

The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography has held six hearings across the United States during the past seven months on issues related to pornography. During the hearing in Los Angeles, in October 1985, the Commission received testimony alleging that your company is involved in the sale or distribution of pornography. The Commission has determined that it would be appropriate to allow your company an opportunity to respond to the allegations prior to drafting its final report section on identified distributors.

You will find a copy of the relevant testimony enclosed herewith. Please review the allegations and advise the Commission on or before March 3, 1986, if you disagree with the statements enclosed. Failure to respond will necessarily be accepted as an indication of no objection.

Janan Ganesh:

Europe’s failure to produce a Twitter or Snapchat endears the continent to me. I don’t think I have ever made an Instagram or Facebook post. I found the last of these companies unctuous and megalomaniacal when it was still linked to Barack Obama’s rise, not Donald Trump’s. The value of such outlets to the world’s brutally governed stops me — just — wishing them gone. It is with no tenderness, then, that I wince to hear a US president claim they are “killing people”. Taste matters: half the point of Joe Biden, who used the phrase twice, is to drain public life of its vitriol.

Truth matters even more. The idea that social media is the source of vaccine avoidance evokes the bots-caused-Brexit hype of yesteryear. It is not just hard to stand up. It suggests a political class in gleeful possession of a villain for all seasons. No doubt, great torrents of cant and quackery wash through Facebook. But so do facts about vaccine efficacy and dispenser locations that might otherwise elude millions of users. To a degree that is almost unique on a public policy issue, the site takes an unambiguously pro-vaccine line. The premise that the bad and the good here nets out in favour of the bad is quite the leap. A less esteemed personage than the president might have been invited to make good on the claim.

“that take-up rates might be worse without social media as a source of reassurance among the liberal-minded.”

Devi Shastri:

A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum paints a grim picture of the future of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which was facing mounting financial challenges even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Enrollment was declining. State support per student lagged. Tuition was frozen.

All of these challenges alone painted a worrisome picture of the future of the state’s second-largest campus, which serves one of the most diverse and underserved student populations in Wisconsin.

The pandemic has even further imperiled that future, the report said. The report was commissioned and partially funded by the UWM Foundation.

The analysis, published Thursday, puts data to UWM administrators’ long-standing warnings that they need more support in their effort to maintain the campus, which straddles a dual mission: to provide access to higher education for as many students as possible and to maintain its status as an elite research university.

Parents should *not* sign this. https://t.co/ijubALivme

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) July 21, 2021

“This stuff can unravel so quickly,” Adams says, referring to social order.

His mission is not to let New York go the way of Portland or San Francisco.”https://t.co/MChmElmnn0

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) July 21, 2021

This passage offers a good test of basic numeracy. Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist just failed it. https://t.co/xA1FL9zOs2 pic.twitter.com/pAlLW8HE5v

— JW Mason (@JWMason1) July 19, 2021

Heather Knight:

Siva Raj often receives gifts of thanks when he’s at farmers’ markets collecting signatures to qualify a recall effort of three San Francisco school board members for the ballot. Coffee, doughnuts, cookies, strawberries. “Everything!” he said with a laugh.

But a new memo from a top Bay Area pollster outlining very grim unfavorable numbers for the three board members and strong support for recalling them, particularly among parents of kids in the city’s public schools, proved especially validating.

“It doesn’t surprise us,” Raj said. “On the streets that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Pretty much anyone who is remotely aware of the situation is eager to sign.”

Raj and Autumn Looijen, his partner, launched the recall effort of Commissioners Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga last spring after a dire year of distance learning and a number of sideshows at the board, including renaming 44 schools that weren’t open, and changing the way students are admitted to Lowell High which, like all public middle and high schools in the city, has remained shuttered to the vast majority of kids since March 2020.

The recall campaign has until Sept. 7 to turn over 51,325 valid signatures of San Francisco registered voters to the Department of Elections. So far, they’ve collected about 26,000 through weekend volunteers and are now fundraising to hire professional signature gatherers.

If students return to school like normal or close to it on Aug. 16, the anger may ease. But dropping enrollment numbers and a looming budget crisis for the school district could make the picture even worse.

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 incarceratio

Chris Barianiuk:

“We converted more than 200,000 old emails from former chief editors of Helsingin Sanomat – the largest newspaper in Finland,” she says, referring to a pilot project by Digitalia, a digital data preservation project. The converted emails were later stored in a digital archive.

The US Library of Congress famously keeps a digital archive of tweets, though it has stopped recording every single public tweet and is now preserving them “on a very selective basis” instead.

Could public institutions do some digital data curation and preservation on our behalf? If so, we could potentially submit information to them such as family history and photographs for storage and subsequent access in the future.

Kosonen says that such projects would naturally require funding, probably from the public. Institutions would also be more inclined to retain information that is considered of significant cultural or historical interest.

At the heart of this discussion lies a simple fact: it’s hard for us to know – here in the present – what we, or our descendants, will actually value in the future.

Archival or regulatory interventions could go some way to addressing the ephemerality of data. But that ephemerality is something we will probably always live with, to some extent. Digital data is just too convenient for everyday purposes and there’s little rationale for trying to store everything.

Carly Robinson:

Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which parents of middle and high school students received multiple text messages per week encouraging them to ask their children specific questions tied to their science curriculum. The intervention increased parent-child at-home conversations about science but did not detectably impact science test scores. However, the intervention decreased parent engagement in other, potentially productive, parent behaviors. These findings illustrate that parent engagement interventions are not costless: There are opportunity costs to shifting parental effort.

V. I. Arnold:

I put these problems onto paper in Paris in spring 2004 when Russian Parisians asked me to help their young children gain the thinking culture tra- ditional for Russia.
I am deeply convinced that this culture is most of all cultivated by early independent reflection on simple, but not easy questions similar to those below (problems 1, 3, 13 are the most recommended).

My long experience has shown that, very frequently, dimwits falling at school behind solve them better than A-grade pupils, since – for their survival at the back of the classroom – they must permanently think more than required “for governing the whole Seville and Granada”, as Figaro used to say about himself, while A-graders cannot catch “what should be multiplied by what” in these problems. I have also noticed that five year old kids solve similar problems better than pupils spoiled by coaching, which in their turn cope with the questions better than university students used to swotting who anyway beat their professors (the worst in solving these simple problems are Nobel and Fields prize winners).

Mark Lorch:

Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive Covid-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks. [Videos of the trick have been circulating on TikTok since December and a school in Liverpool, UK, recently wrote to parents to warn them about it.] So how are fruit juices, cola and devious kids fooling the tests, and is there a way to tell a fake positive result from a real one? I’ve tried to find out.

First, I thought it best to check the claims, so I cracked open bottles of cola and orange juice, then deposited a few drops directly onto LFTs. Sure enough, a few minutes later, two lines appeared on each test, supposedly indicating the presence of the virus that causes Covid-19.

It’s worth understanding how the tests work. If you open up an LFT device, you’ll find a strip of paper-like material, called nitrocellulose, and a small red pad, hidden under the plastic casing below the T-line. Absorbed on the red pad are antibodies that bind to the Covid-19 virus. They are also attached to gold nanoparticles (tiny particles of gold actually appear red), which allow us to see where the antibodies are on the device. When you do a test, you mix your sample with a liquid buffer solution, ensuring the sample stays at an optimum pH, before dripping it on the strip.

Tim Odegard

As a result, a push to transform reading instruction is underway in classrooms across the nation. A transformation motivated by an honest acknowledgment of reality – most children in the United States struggle to read. These struggles are not the exception reserved for the minority of kids with a disability – such as dyslexia. No, they are the status quo. And sadly, this has been the case for decades. Sure, we can quibble over tests used to make this claim. But at the end of the day, multiple data sources indicate that most students in the nation struggle to read words strung together into text passages and answer questions about what they read. This is a fundamental problem and one that is largely preventable. Yet, we have not found the collective will to prevent this calamity that breaks parents’ hearts, teachers’ backs and causes untold suffering for children.

To be clear, the reality facing parents as they painfully watch their children struggling to read has not gone unseen. Their pleas for help are palpable, and the desperation of parents in the U.S. has led to laws being passed across the nation in an attempt to help their children. As a result, almost every state in the U.S. now has some form of legislation specifically addressing the needs of students with dyslexia – a trend that alarmed me from the start. I am leery of such laws. However, I am not a skeptic who does not “believe” the overwhelming science indicating that a minority of students have extreme difficulties learning to read and spell. The science in this regard is vast and compelling.

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.

Julia Craven:

Kyla Jenee Lacey: Initially, I was a bit shocked that a group of people would go that far. The work had been used as curriculum at different schools in different parts of the country, as well as different countries. Then I was a bit angered. I have a sensitivity towards my art. And one of the things that angered me the most was them saying that I wasn’t a credible source, and I’m not sure how I’m not a credible source to my own experience.

The poem went viral a few times, and in the very first wave of its virality, a lot of the white people who were upset continuously said, “Well, you need to learn your history. You need to learn your education.” I have a degree in history. That is literally what my degree is in.

Fara Dabhoiwala

In the summer of 1932 Eric Williams arrived in England from the British colony of Trinidad. Like most of the island’s population, his family was so poor that he and his eleven siblings had rarely tasted milk. But from his earliest youth his father, a disillusioned postal clerk, obsessively pressured him to achieve academic success. There were no universities in the West Indies; few Trinidadians progressed beyond primary school, and almost all professions were reserved for whites. Yet Williams won a coveted government scholarship that enabled him to continue studying beyond the age of eleven, then an even rarer bursary to complete his secondary schooling, and finally, after three years of trying, one of the island’s two annual scholarships to a British university. He sailed for Oxford to take an undergraduate degree in history.

Fordham Institute:

Is America a racist country? Or the greatest nation on earth? Or both or neither or some of each?
For the sake of our children’s education (and for any number of other reasons), we need a more thoughtful and balanced starting point for the whole conversation—one that leaves space for nuance, mutual understanding, and hope for the future. Our union is not perfect, but it will become more so if its citizens understand, value, and engage productively with the constitutional democracy in which we all live.

Sadly, far too many young (and not-so-young) Americans have only the haziest grasp of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are essential to informed citizenship, in part because for decades now we have systematically failed to impart them to our children. Culpability for that failure goes far beyond our formal education system, to be sure, but a considerable portion of it does belong there: on our schools, our school systems, and our state K–12 systems, which have focused—and been pressed by Washington to focus—on other priorities.

The consequences of that neglect are now painfully apparent on all sides, including the sorry state of American politics and the sordid behavior of many who would lead us. Rectifying the situation is an enormous project to be pursued on multiple fronts, but schools are an obvious starting point. That’s where we can best begin to inculcate the next generation of Americans with a solid grasp of their country’s past and present, its core principles, and the obligations of responsible citizenship.

The logical starting points for getting that right are the academic standards for civics and U.S. History that have been adopted
by the fifty states and the District of Columbia.

That’s because our federal system of government ensures that states and their subdivisions bear primary responsibility for education, which includes establishing academic standards that spell out the content and skills they want their public schools to teach and their students to learn. These standards are typically organized by subject, though in the realms of civics and history they are sometimes organized under the heading of “social studies.”

We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have been evaluating states’ academic standards for more than two decades. Consequently, we’re well aware that they are just the starting point—statements of aspirations, desired outcomes, and intentions. To get real traction, they must be joined by high-quality instructional materials and pedagogy, sufficient time and effort, and some form of

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 last 48 hours on here have been all about The Vaccine Discourse. Is FB killing people? Is the govt passing the buck? Who even can tell what IS misinformation, and who watches the watchmen, anyway? I’ve spent ~7 years watching the AV movement evolve online and have thoughts

— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) July 18, 2021

James Varney:

“It’s one thing to name a school of politics after Bill Clinton,” Mr. Steinbuch said about the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service. “It’s another thing to name one at a law school after a guy who had so much trouble with his law license.”

Mark Pesce:

A colleague was recently required to spend 10 days in a public-health-mandated quarantine after authorities used credit card receipts to determine he’d visited a location that had also hosted a known coronavirus case.

Had he paid in cash they would never have found him at all because he’d also been slack and not signed into the establishment where he was potentially exposed using the requisite QR code.

Fortunately, they found him. Even more fortunately, he hadn’t been infected. As he waited out his quarantine, he meditated on how he’d been poked by the pointy end of the continuing argy-bargy between public health and personal privacy – realising that his data trail gave anyone who bothered to look a complete snapshot of his private life.

Is there anywhere left to hide, he wondered?

In the years since Eric Schmidt declared “Privacy is dead!”, we’ve endured a continuous digital erosion of our private space. Smartphones tracking our location, apps profiling our interactions, smart speakers feeding our conversations into recommendation algorithms, CCTV cameras running facial recognition – and much, much more. Sometimes it can feel as though the battle for even a little bit of privacy has already been lost.

Curious Notions:

Resources included online minority language newsletters showing months in their mastheads, articles, localization tables (a gold mine), cold contacts with university linguistics departments, YouTube videos, minority language souvenir calendars, Wikipedia pages (especially their foreign language versions), Peace Corps language primers, tourist phrasebooks, and questions and answers posted in online forums.

Dictionaries? Yes and no. We deliberately short shrifted most of the major languages in favor of the exotic, endangered, or just plain dead and buried. Most lexicons for those, such as they exist, aren’t anywhere big enough to accommodate such minutia as Gregorian month names. Or maybe one will throw you a bone for February and April and you’ll need to use those to hopscotch to other sources. Or maybe this other dictionary is just one-way, Abkhaz to Russian, say, and while you may know Russian months, you have three hundred pages of un-selectable image scans from which to pick them out. Ready, set, go.

Certain underlying abilities do help out, like those to read and use non-Roman scripts and transcribe into or out of them. A substantial knowledge base also comes in handy, as you can think of more angles for …

Jordan Weissmann:

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a troubling exposé on the crushing debt burdens that students accumulate while pursuing master’s degrees at elite universities in fields like drama and film, where the job prospects are limited and the chances of making enough to repay their debt are slim. Because it focused on MFA programs at Ivy League schools—one subject accumulated around $300,000 in loans pursuing screenwriting—the article rocketed around the creative class on Twitter. But it also pointed to a more fundamental, troubling development in the world of higher education: For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.

David Pegg and Paul Lewis in London, Michael Safi in Beirut, Nina Lakhani in Ciudad Altamirano:

successful Pegasus infection gives NSO customers access to all data stored on the device. An attack on a journalist could expose a reporter’s confidential sources as well as allowing NSO’s government client to read their chat messages, harvest their address book, listen to their calls, track their precise movements and even record their conversations by activating the device’s microphone.

Reporters whose numbers appear in the data range from local freelancers, such as the Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto, who was murdered by attackers armed with guns one month after his phone was selected, through to prize-winning investigative reporters, editors and executives at leading media organisations.

In addition to the UAE, detailed analysis of the data indicates that the governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia all selected journalists as possible surveillance targets.

It is not possible to know conclusively whether phones were successfully infected with Pegasus without analysis of devices by forensic experts. Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which can detect successful Pegasus infections, found traces of the spyware on the mobile phones of 15 journalists who had agreed to have their phones examined after discovering their number was in the leaked data.

Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters’ sources in jail, and Trump could be even worse

Laura Testino:

When former county school board member David Pickler, an advocate for the suburban school districts remaining separate, tells the story of the merger, he traces it back to the creation of each school system. Each was started around the same time, in the late 1860s after the Civil War. Memphis held more wealth than its surrounding suburbs, which were largely rural and poor. Kids in the suburbs were taught in a handful of one-room schoolhouses.

Most neighboring Southern states passed legislation ahead of the Civil War that prohibited, fined and corporally punished Black people who were learning to read or write and any other person who helped them.

After the war, Memphis became unique in opening its own district, separate from the county, which is how most Tennessee school systems were structured. The separation was motivated by wealth, Pickler said.

“They quite frankly did not want their kids associating with those poor kids out in Shelby County,” Pickler, who is white, said of the creation of the city district.

This separation continued under Jim Crow. Within the two districts, Black students received significantly less, with separate education that was unequal to education for their white peers.

Hart, born in 1971, remembers situating her own family into the Civil Rights Movement. History’s recency suddenly dawned on her.

“One day my mom came home from work and I asked her, had she ever had to drink out of a colored fountain. She said, ‘Yes,’” Hart recalled, “and I almost burst into tears.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Locked out of high school in Memphis, Hispanic boys are working construction jobs and taking pride in helping support their families, reports Chalkbeat’s Ian Round.

Will they return to finish high school diplomas or follow up on plans to attend community college? Probably not, says José Ayala, a college student and a counselor for Streets Ministries.

Ayala told Round that students need to learn about technical colleges and vocational certifications early in high school, before they drop out.

Mila Koumpilova, also a Chalkbeat reporter, looks at how school closures have widened education gaps for Black and Latino boys in Chicago. The pandemic has “has severed precarious ties to school, derailed college plans and pried gaping academic disparities even wider.”

I recommend reading the whole story, which focuses on three high school students whose futures were put at risk.

Thanks to the American Rescue Plan, most families in {city name} will receive monthly#ChildTaxCredit payments. It’s a guaranteed income through December. I joined@mayorsforagi because all Americans deserve an income floor. This is a step in that direction.

— Mayor of Madison (@MayorOfMadison) July 17, 2021

Via Ann Althouse

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.

Matt Jancer:

The Oregon Trail, The Yukon Trail, Number Munchers, Word Munchers, The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, Lemonade Stand, DinoPark Tycoon, Storybook Weaver. All games you played in school, all made by the same state-funded company—the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Never heard of MECC? It went hand in hand with Apple Computer Inc. in its earliest days. Steve Jobs said as much in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution: “One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s.” Apple II’s loaded with MECC games.

Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English.

Jonathan Katz:

I published a new piece yesterday about the crisis surrounding the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. In it, I argue that a U.S. invasion of Haiti would be a colossally bad idea given the destructive history of the unending U.S. interventions in the Black Republic. You can read it here.

The publication in which the piece appears was not where it was originally supposed to run. It was originally commissioned by a different, well-known national outlet. They contacted me last week, within hours of Moïse’s death, and asked me to choose the angle that seemed right to me. The editors seemed strangely hesitant when I suggested the framing, but contracted me anyway to write the piece, so long as I included what they called “nuance.” I had my suspicions about what that meant, but a writer’s got to write (and eat), so I pressed on.

I realized I was in trouble right away when I got back the comments on my first draft. Right off the bat, the editor cast doubt on my use of the “occupation” as a way of describing what the United States did in Haiti between 1915 and 1934. They commented:

“Want to be careful with this word – what was the nature of the occupation? How many troops did we send and what exactly did they do? Eg was it more of a peacekeeping/security assistance force, or what?”

If anyone should have been prepared for that question, it was me, the guy who just spent five years writing a book that is focused in part on how woefully ignorant Americans are of what our country has done in the world, especially in the decades leading up to World War II. But I was somehow not ready to get a comment like that from a senior editor at a major U.S. publication.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school Districts use Google (YouTube) and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Matt Taibbi:

In another ominous development, Politico reported that “Biden-allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee,” were planning to:

Engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

For those who may find such developments concerning, there was solace: at least no one is policing our private thoughts. Those are still our own, correct?

Not quite, learned satirical filmmaker, YouTuber, and journalist Matt Orfalea. He’s been involved in several different slapstick-dystopian stories just in the last month or so, none more absurd than a series of YouTube warnings and strikes he received from YouTube for content not one person ever saw, or could see.

Orfalea was working on a video involving a story covered in this space, YouTube’s demonetization of podcaster Bret Weinstein and its removal of Senate testimony by Dr. Pierre Kory. He uploaded a series of rough cuts to his YouTube channel, but kept them locked and private, as part of his normal routine. Like many YouTube content creators, Orfalea uploads videos but keeps them locked while he applies for monetization. In other words, he’s keeping material private because he’s essentially checking with YouTube to see if there are problems with the content before he makes it public.

At 728 p.m. on June 14th, Orfalea received a warning from YouTube for three of those rough cuts:

If you trust the Biden WH to decree what is “misinformation,” these claims have been deemed as such:

* COVID is transmitted human-to-human (Jan 2020)

* You should wear masks to protect against COVID (March 2020)

* It’s possible COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab (all of 2020).

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 17, 2021

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

Now first, it’s important for streets to run both ways, so I’ll offer that proponents have trouble doing this because many of the most prominent anti-vaxxers do indulge in conspiratorial thinking. Some of it is politically motivated; people may remember that while Trump was president, prominent Democrats expressed their fears about the corruption of the research process based on nothing more than their intuition.

Matt Clancy:

Academic research is a sector where knowledge workers try to innovate – the whole game is trying to push the knowledge frontier outward. Whether or not the system could work better, it certainly does seem to work, generating new and useful knowledge pretty much every day. It’s also a system that’s highly competitive, where thousands of individuals compete with each other for jobs and space in journals. 

And yet, despite strong incentives to use any possible edge to generate new and better research, academics are increasingly forgoing the option to work with their local colleagues. 

Agrawal, McHale, and Oettl (2015) is a study of the changing nature of collaboration in evolutionary biology. They find the the number of distinct institutions represented on evolutionary biology papers has steadily increased from 1.4 to 2.4 over 1980-2005, while the average distance between coauthors on papers has risen from 350 to 550 miles over the same period.

Sheila Dang and Elizabeth Culliford:

In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year.

The biannual report on Twitter’s enforcement of policy rules and the information and removal requests it receives comes as social media companies including Facebook Inc(FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube face government scrutiny worldwide over the content allowed on their platforms.

Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia.

Applied Divinity Studies:

You’ve probably heard of the Rule of 70:

To estimate the doubling time of an exponential function, just divide 70 by the growth rate.

For some rates, this works really well. At 2% annual growth, the rule gives 35 years, and the actual value is 35.003 years. Other times it fails horribly. At 70% growth, the rule predicts doubling in one time step, but it actually takes 1.3.

How does the heuristic perform in general? Not that well. It’s accurate at 2% growth, but then quickly converges to being off by 0.3 timesteps.

Tyne Daile Sumner:

As historian Robin W. Winks observes in his 1987 book Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, many of these were English graduates who could apply literary techniques to intelligence analysis and cryptic expressions.

While it’s hard to think of poets as spies, poetry and surveillance actually use very similar styles of information gathering such as close observation, abstraction, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism. 

Today, we live in an era of unprecedented surveillance. Our personal information is routinely tracked and collected, while sophisticated analytics and algorithmic systems are being designed to predict, influence and ultimately control our choices and behaviour.

And it’s changing the nature of how we see ourselves. The ubiquity of surveillance and social media is challenging the very idea of the private individual as people increasingly adopt public personas. The scholar Julie Cohen described digital culture as bringing about a ‘surveillance-innovation complex’ in which surveillance is now privatised, commercialised and increasingly participatory.

To help us comprehend, and perhaps ultimately better shape, the complex social and technological change we are caught up in, we could do a lot worse than turn to that close cousin of surveillance – poetry.

NY Times:

Long into the night on Wednesday, parents and students waited in line to say their piece about Boston Latin School and who deserves to attend it.

Shirley Chang Wen said she arrived in this country without speaking English, and believed in raising children to work hard and succeed. Why, she asked, shouldn’t they get a spot?

Julia Mejia, a Latina city councilor, said she spent her school years working at a shoe store to help her mother pay the rent, without a spare minute for test preparation. What about students like her?

And Gabby Finocchio, a 2019 graduate who is white, said she was admitted to the school because her parents had time and money to spend on the process. In a more equitable admissions system, she might not get in, she said, but “I’m OK with that.”

After five and a half hours of emotional discussion on Wednesday night, the Boston School Committee voted unanimously to overhaul admissions to the city’s three selective exam schools, opening the way for far greater representation of Black and Latino students.

The new admissions system will still weigh test results and grades, but, following a model pioneered in Chicago, it will also introduce ways to select applicants who come from poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods.

John McGinnis:

American Bar Association is proposing new accrediting standards for law schools that would make them more race-conscious, more politically correct and less intellectually diverse. The proposal should fail on the merits. It’s so bad it should also prompt reconsiderations of the ABA’s role as accreditor of law schools and of the U.S. Supreme Court precedent on racial preferences in law-school admissions.

Having lawyers regulate entrance into their own profession has always been anomalous. The ABA has an abiding interest in making entry more expensive—it decreases competition for its current members. But now the ABA wants to use wokeness to raise operating costs, impose ideological uniformity, and reduce academic freedom. The new standards would require law schools to show continuous “progress” toward diversifying their faculties and student bodies. They would be encouraged to do it on a timetable, as if a school can predict when someone of a particular race who meets often specialized curricular and research needs will show up. The ABA also wants to add new diversity requirements for ethnicity and gender identity.

Support:

Do not distribute content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use google (YouTube) services, including Madison.

Jaclyn Diaz:

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a new bill into law Thursday barring police from lying to underage kids during interrogations.

Commonly used interrogation tactics, such as promising leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists, are banned for suspects under 18 years old under the new law, which goes into effect Jan. 1. 

According to the Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people, those types of interrogation methods have been shown to lead to false confessions. They’ve also played a role in about 30% of all wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA. 

Illinois once was called the “False Confession Capital of the United States,” the organization said, because of a number of high-profile exonerations of people

Sarah Jackson:

Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees for exploiting user data for personal means, according to an advance copy of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination” that Insider obtained. 

The engineer, who is unnamed, reportedly tapped into the data to “confront” a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel. 

Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company’s systems, he had access to “years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on,” according to the book. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book claims, he was also able to see her location in real time. 

Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to “cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers,” the book says.

Tahir Hamut Izgil

If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets. Tahir Hamut Izgil arrived with his family in the United States in 2017, fleeing the Chinese government’s merciless persecution of his people. Tahir’s escape not only spared him near-certain internment in the camps that have swallowed more than 1 million Uyghurs; it also allowed him to share with the world his experience of the calamity engulfing his homeland. The following articles are Tahir’s firsthand account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and of one family’s survival.

Before I met Tahir, I knew his poems. I encountered them soon after I began working as a translator in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region in western China. A close friend there kept telling me that if I really wanted to understand Uyghur culture, I had to read the poetry. Like many Americans, I rarely felt drawn to poetry, but one day, another friend put a sheaf of Tahir’s verses in my hand. Poetry had never affected me so deeply.

Chris Papst:

Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city – freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Patterson. “If almost half of our kids are failing, what options do they have after high school? This is really disheartening. It’s sad to see this.”

On the other end of the chart, 21 percent of city high school students earned a GPA of 3.0 or better; a B average. That’s about half as many who earned below a D. We can also see the district lost 706 high school students during the first three quarters of the year.

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 Simonite:

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. The research project reveals how Google’s service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences—such as whether Beijing’s Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters.

Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. “Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities,” Ochigame says.

Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.

Just like Google’s homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate.

Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals “information borders” created by the way Google’s search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.

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

Rachel Kraus:

Former Google engineer Manu Cornet describes his time at Google in two phases. First, there were “glitches in wonderland.” Then, there was “disillusionment.”

Those two descriptions are actually the sub-headings for Cornet’s two volumes of comics he has published about his former employer, which he called Goomics. Though Cornet was an engineer, he also spent 11 of his 14 years at Google drawing comics about employees, quirks, culture, and, eventually, larger societal and ethical issues facing the company and its workers. Some of those topics included Google contracts with government agencies like ICE, making a search engine for China’s government that complies with censorship laws, and more.

Chronicling those issues allowed Cornet to reflect on his place at Google, and prompted him to make a change. Cornet recently quit, and has taken a new job (at Twitter, a company with whom he says he has fewer ethical qualms). He is now the latest big tech employee — including employees at Facebook and Amazon — to publicly resign from their positions in protest of the company’s overall behavior. 

“As the years passed by there were more and more things to have ethical qualms about that the company was doing at a higher level,” Cornet said. “I had to look at the bigger picture and think that maybe I would be better elsewhere.”

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google Services, including Madison.

This is so completely fucked. Unbelievable https://t.co/dBnoK9XZEG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 15, 2021

It puzzles me how ruthlessly pragmatic, flexible and protean Facebook is with product but how stubborn and inflexible it is on questions like this https://t.co/j8HOU6DuVY

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) July 15, 2021

Alexandra Olins:

On March 11, 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was the first large school district in the country to close. First, we were told there would be no school during the closure because the district couldn’t distribute laptops to everyone — despite being in the tech capital of the country. Next, we heard there would be online class meetings but zero instruction.

For the rest of the school year, my 11-year-old son had four one-hour Zoom check-ins a week. That is all. Like many parents, we wrote off the year and hoped like hell that fall would be better.

Over the summer, SPS asked families to choose between hybrid and remote options for fall. For those ready to send their children back in-person, it felt hopeful. But when former President Donald Trump weighed in to say kids should be 100% in person in fall, SPS — along with hundreds of other districts — reversed course. Despite Seattle having a relatively low number of COVID cases, the district announced plans for 100% remote learning for fall. The hybrid option was off the table.

As fall 2020 wore on, my normally gregarious son became increasingly silent, sedentary, and disengaged during remote school, watching Fortnite on YouTube during “school,” despite my best efforts to stop it (while trying to keep my own job), creating a nasty parent/child dynamic. It soon became clear that SPS had no plan for how — or when — to transition back to in-person school.

Some parents, growing weary of seeing their kids stare into a screen for hours on end, began to ask questions of SPS and the SPS board. We got no answers. And we began to wonder, where was our local paper, the Seattle Times, when it came to covering the impact of prolonged school closures on kids and parents?

As the following months would reveal, the Seattle Times could not — or would not — cover the situation by asking the hard questions about why Seattle started the reopening conversation later than other districts and took so long to reopen. A lifelong Democrat, former teacher, and union member, I became increasingly enraged at both the failure of the school system and the inadequacies of the education team to cover what was happening with the hard questions and critical analysis that the situation demanded.

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.

Liz George:

U.S. Capitol Police will start using Army surveillance equipment to monitor Americans as part of a larger effort to improve security and turn the force into “an intelligence-based protective agency” in the wake of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Last week, the USCP took possession of eight Persistent Surveillance Systems Ground – Medium (PSSG-M) units, fulfilling a request that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved on June 2. The units capture high-definition video and include night vision, but do not feature facial recognition capabilities.

“This technology will be integrated with existing USCP camera infrastructure, providing greater high definition surveillance capacity to meet steady-state mission requirements and help identify emerging threats,” the Pentagon said.

The same technology was used by troops during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to observe large areas day and night.  

The Army will install the units and train Capitol Police on how to operate the systems, the Pentagon said.

In a statement last week, the USCP called the technology “state-of-the-art campus surveillance technology, which will enhance the ability to detect and monitor threat activity.”

Related: drones and US internal security.

Ramona Bessinger:

I have been a public school teacher for the past 22 years, with the past seven in Providence, Rhode Island.  I have had the honor of serving public school children and their families as an English teacher first at the high school level, and currently at the middle school level.

During my career I have always tried to provide the best education for my students. I am designated by the Rhode Island Department of Education a ‘Highly Qualified’ teacher, meaning, I have tenure and experience in my certifications.  I was awarded the English Speaking Union Shakespeare Scholarship for excellence in teaching Shakespeare. I helped implement curriculum and I have hosted multiple student clubs, literary magazines, youth groups and community outreach programs.

I love being a teacher and I care a great deal about my students, almost all of whom are non-white.  This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.

Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, racialized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before.

Ben Zeisloft:

Some Canadian professors are trying to justify recent church burnings in the country by invoking “systemic injustice” and “civil disobedience.” 

Over the past several weeks, several Canadian churches have been torched after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked Native American graves near former residential schools, which as the BBC explains, were intended to assimilate children into Canadian culture.

Many activists across the nation therefore decided to cancel “Canada Day,” with some wearing orange to recall the residential schools’ history. 

The holiday commemorates the formation of Canada into a distinct nation on July 1, 1867, upon which the Canadian colonies were enjoined into a single union within the British Empire.

I have been avoiding Twitter. But this brought me back. Anyone else questioning this statement by the Exec Director of BC Civil Liberties… ? The same person who wants to abolish police. Honest question – how is this not hate and incitement? pic.twitter.com/t7FuXyaHt0

— Darlene Heidemann (@DarHeidemann) July 3, 2021

ncee.org

Since gaining independence in the early 1990s, Estonia has transformed itself into a digital society, which has resulted in a high level of public trust in technology solutions. While Estonia is perhaps best known for its advances in e-governance, which allow Estonians to access nearly all government services online, this commitment to technology applies to education as well. Estonia’s efforts to leverage technology for teaching and learning began in the 1990s with an ambitious programto build up schools’ technology infrastructure, including providing internet access to all schools nationwide. By the early 2000s, Estonia had already met this goal and moved on to developing digital resources for online teaching and learning. Throughout these early years and in the years that followed, as new technologies and digital resources were introduced, Estonia maintained a parallel focus on building digital literacy skills among educators and students. For example, school-based educational technologists—experienced teachers who complete an additional master’s degree to become technology integration specialists—have supported teachers in Estonian schools since 2005. Their focus is on how digital resources can best be used to enhance the curriculum. 

Two government-supported foundations—the Innove Foundation, founded in 2003 to provide implementation support for the Ministry of Education and Research, and the Information Technology Foundation for Education(HITSA), founded in 2013 to promote digital skills development in education—have played key roles in centrally organizing and curating Estonia’s collection of digital resources. These resources, which today form the backbone of Estonia’s jurisdiction-level support for distance learning, are described below.

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ average confidence in major U.S. institutions has edged down after increasing modestly several months into the coronavirus pandemic last year. Currently, an average 33% of U.S. adults express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 institutions, marking a three-percentage-point dip since 2020 and a return to the level seen in 2018 and 2019.

Joshua Coleman:

Many fathers and mothers tell me they feel betrayed by their children’s lack of availability or responsivity, especially those who provided their children with a life they see as enviable compared with their own childhoods. As the University of Virginia sociologist Joseph E. Davis told me, parents expect a “reciprocal bond of kinship” in which their years of parenting will be repaid with later closeness. The University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard told me in an interview that this expectation of reciprocity is fraught because “today, the boundary of parenting is unclear. If receiving shelter, food, and clothing is enough, then most of us should be grateful to our parents, irrespective of how our lives go.” However, if parents are supposed to produce happy adults, then, fairly or not, adult children might hold parents responsible for their unhappiness.

In my experience, part of what confuses today’s parents of adult children is how little power they have when their child decides to end contact. From the adult child’s perspective, there might be much to gain from an estrangement: the liberation from those perceived as hurtful or oppressive, the claiming of authority in a relationship, and the sense of control over which people to keep in one’s life. For the mother or father, there is little benefit when their child cuts off contact. Parents instead describe profound feelings of loss, shame, and regret.

The rules:

Suppress ideas/people considered threats or counter-narrative

(this gets broader and more expansive with time)

Next

Amplify people seen as tribal heroes and ideas pro-narrative

(this gets more sophisticated and scalable with AI/ML).#longnight pic.twitter.com/CPTJbdb7gD

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 14, 2021

Ankush Khardori:

In February, however, the Associated Pressreported that the investigation was “dead,” with no charges to be brought against Trump, and there is no indication the Biden administration will reopen it. This likely has something to do with the fact that a case built largely on the word of Cohen — a notorious liar who did not fully cooperate with prosecutors — would be very risky. Another problem is that a criminal prosecution based on violations of campaign-finance law requires the government to prove the defendant knew his conduct was unlawful, and Cohen could not by himself establish that on the part of Trump, a problem that may similarly complicate Weisselberg’s potential utility as a cooperator against Trump in the pending tax-fraud case.

This dissonance between the confidence in Trump’s criminal exposure expressed by commentators and its reality was conspicuous throughout the Mueller investigation, which proved to be ratings gold for cable news and an incomparable star-making vehicle for lawyers. Mueller’s secretive two-year probe into the Trump campaign and Russian election interference was punctuated by legitimatebombshell developments, and its progression lent itself to endless on-air speculation, as when legal analysts argued that Paul Manafort’s indictment meant that Mueller was “quite likely on the verge of handing down new major indictments” or that, after Manafort’s conviction, there was a good chance he would finally flip on Trump. Hennessey in particular has been calledto the carpet since getting a job in the Biden Justice Department. Most of the hand-wringing was over the top, but for those of us who watched in real time, it was hard to argue with the assessment, contained in a critical National Review article, that she had “repeatedly suggested that [Mueller’s] findings would spell disaster for the Trump White House” — even if the same could be said about pretty much every legal analyst on CNN and MSNBC at the time.

Shannon Whitworth:

School Choice advocates across the nation were given a gem of an opportunity this past year to prove the value of their programs when teachers unions refused to return teachers to classrooms when it was demonstrably safe to do so. In fact, across 30 states nearly 50 school choice bills were introduced this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers showed again on June 18 that he does not care about children’s education — except to the extent that he can continue to bolster Wisconsin’s failed public school establishment — when he vetoed a bill which would have expanded school choice in the state.

The bill would have broadened the income restrictions to three times the poverty level for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which would have increased access for students and parents desperate to get their kids out of failing Wisconsin public schools.

Wisconsin voters should remember that Evers, immediately prior to becoming the state’s highest elected official, was the superintendent of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction for a decade. Presiding over public schools with the worst achievement gap between Black and white students in the nation and a Milwaukee Public School District in which his own agency graded nearly 75% of the schools as failing to meet expectations for over 50,000 children, Evers is also a staunch school choice opponent.

Expanding school choice would not only benefit urban children. According to a study the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty put out last summer, 44,000 rural students in Wisconsin do not live within 10 miles of a high-quality school. By vetoing this bill, Evers has not only failed inner-city Black children, but children in rural Wisconsin.

Evers’ rationale for the veto was that expansion of the choice program would necessarily take funds away from the public school system. This argument has been debunked a myriad of times. In fact, after a student leaves a district, the public school still receives funds for the student for a rolling period of three years. The real question is, why give a school that is continuing to fail children even more taxpayer money? Outside of government, employees must improve their skills and productivity to merit being paid more money by their employer, and our schools should be no different.

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.

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a demand letter, on behalf of a group of concerned parents, to Elmbrook Schools urging immediate action to remove sexually explicit materials available through the district’s online library that violate state law and parents’ constitutional rights. At least three books and ebooks in the Elmbrook School system, which were until very recently available to children as young as 3rd grade, feature graphic instructions on sex acts and the use of online sex apps. The books are still available to 6th graders.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “School districts have an obligation to know if their library collections feature sexually explicit material available to young children. Elmbrook needs to immediately address this content and make clear to District parents that they take this matter seriously.”

Background: Recently, the parent of a sixteen-year-old Elmbrook student used that student’s school-issued Chromebook to access Sora, a school-sponsored app that makes available Elmbrook’s ebook and audiobook collection to students “for all levels – preschool to adult,” and confirmed access to sexually explicit material. Another book is available in a middle school library.

The content that has parents concerned include:

June 30, 2021:

I hope and pray you and your family are well ! This summer is a scorcher’ Here is my brief and candid letter of resignation: “How sad it is to see our beloved Harvard Divinity School in such decline and decay. The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of a talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large. When I arrived four years ago- with a salary less than what I received 15 years earlier and with no tenure status after being a University Professor a( Harvard and Princeton – I hoped and prayed I could still end my career with some semblance of intellectual intensity and personal respect. How wrong I was! With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity: all my courses were subsumed under Afro-American Religious Studies, including those on Existentialism.

American Democracy and The Conduct of Life. no possible summer salary alongside the lowest increase possible every year. Yet I delivered two convocation addresses and one commencemenl speech in four years. I was promised a year sabbalical but could only lake one semester in practice. And to witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvaid administration’s hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting. We all knew the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards. When my committee recommended a tenure review – also rejected by the Harvard adminutration – I knew my academic achievements and student teaching meant far less than their political prejudices. Even my good friends in the Afro-American and African Studies Department were paralyzed, given their close relations to the administration. And after teaching extra courses. including five courses in one year, this silence continued. When the announcement of the death of my beloved Mother appeared in the regular newsletter, I received two public replies (just as that of my colleague Dr. Jacqueline Olga Cooke-Rivers who received none when her blessed Mother died). Any ordinary announcement about a lecture, award or professional advancement receives about twenty replies. This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my Mother’s death constitute an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths. In my case, a serious commitment to Veritas requires resignation – with precious memories but absolutely no regrets.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

Dear School Boards, Administrators, and Concerned Parents of Wisconsin:

It has come to our attention that, in the guise of providing (unsolicited) advice, the Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to district administrators purporting to tell them what the law “requires” that they teach about race and related matters of cultural diversity. If the point of the letter is to simply remind districts of the commonplace: that they should continue to teach American history in full, including things like the existence of slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and the substantial contributions of racial minorities to American culture and success, it is, if unnecessary, unobjectionable. Schools should do all of these things.

But it would be naïve to believe that the ACLU’s objectives are that modest. The “advice” is expressly offered in the context of criticisms of and efforts to restrict the use of concepts derived from Critical Race Theory and adjacent ideologies, clearly implying that state law must somehow “mandate” or limit the restriction of these concepts. It does not.

Let’s begin by defining “Critical Race Theory” and the instructional concepts derived from it. While a full explication of these concepts is not needed for our purposes, what characterizes these concepts is a focus on racial essentialism (the idea that persons are substantially defined by their race), an exaggerated standpoint epistemology (the idea that one’s perspective is substantially formed by his or her race), an emphasis on something called white privilege (the idea that all white persons benefit from a generally undefined “systemic racism”) and the assumption of black oppression (the contention that all black persons are substantially burdened by this systemic racism). They often include concepts of collective guilt or responsibility on the one hand and collective victimhood and entitlement on the other. They are generally combined with a series of contested claims about American history.

These concepts sometimes include the identification of “white” and “black” values and culture, suggesting, for example, that things like “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis,” and “hard work before play” are ‘white.” They are sometimes taught by pedagogical devices that segregate children by race and compel them to repeat or assent to a variety of contested propositions about race and a child’s “role” in “systems” of “racism” and “oppression.” They are often not limited to the provision of information or explanation of a perspective, but include a call for action. These devices may include, for example, requiring a white student to “acknowledge” or “affirm” his or her “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 incarceration.

Scott Girard:

The School Board approved $840,000 in the 2021-22 budget to fund MPA, covering teacher and administrator costs for one year of the program.

Many school districts in Wisconsin and around the country are considering virtual options, an acknowledgement that some parents and families preferred online learning.

Online learning has been around for decades.

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.

Stefanie Warnat-Herresthal et al.

Fast and reliable detection of patients with severe and heterogeneous illnesses is a major goal of precision medicine. Patients with leukaemia can be identified using machine learning on the basis of their blood transcriptomes. However, there is an increasing divide between what is technically possible and what is allowed, because of privacy legislation. Here, to facilitate the integration of any medical data from any data owner worldwide without violating privacy laws, we introduce Swarm Learning — a decentralized machine-learning approach that unites edge computing, blockchain-based peer-to-peer networking and coordination while maintaining confidentiality without the need for a central coordinator, thereby going beyond federated learning. To illustrate the feasibility of using Swarm Learning to develop disease classifiers using distributed data, we chose four use cases of heterogeneous diseases (COVID-19, tuberculosis, leukaemia and lung pathologies). With more than 16,400 blood transcriptomes derived from 127 clinical studies with non-uniform distributions of cases and controls and substantial study biases, as well as more than 95,000 chest X-ray images, we show that Swarm Learning classifiers outperform those developed at individual sites. In addition, Swarm Learning completely fulfils local confidentiality regulations by design. We believe that this approach will notably accelerate the introduction of precision medicine.

The Economist:

TEN YEARS ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The subsequent surge in populism in Europe, the unexpected votes in 2016 for Brexit and then for President Donald Trump in America, and a wave of protests from the gilets jaunes to Black Lives Matter, has made Mr Turchin something of a celebrity in certain circles, and has piqued economists’ interest in the discipline of “cliodynamics”, which uses maths to model historical change. Mr Turchin’s emphasis on the “overproduction of elites” raises uncomfortable questions, but also offers useful policy lessons.

As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows, societies have veered from periods of political stability to instability, often at intervals of about 50 years. Consider America. Every pundit knows that Congress has become gridlocked, with Democrats and Republicans unwilling to compromise with each other. Fewer know that it was also highly polarised around 1900, before becoming more co-operative in the mid-20th century.

What causes these lurches from calm to chaos? Mr Turchin views societies as large, complex systems that are subject to certain patterns, if not laws. That is an entirely different approach from much of academic history, with its preference for small-scale, microcosmic studies, argues Niall Ferguson of Stanford University. In a paper published this year Mr Turchin (with Andrey Korotayev of the Higher School of Economics in Russia) examines the prediction of instability he made in 2010. His forecast model contains many elements, but like Karl Marx Mr Turchin seems to believe that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Where Marx focused on the proletariat, though, Mr Turchin is more interested in the elite—and how its members struggle against each other.

Who counts as the elite, and how competition manifests itself, varies from place to place; one example could be a large number of highly educated folk relative to the number of government offices (and therefore jobs). But a struggle is most likely when economic inequality is high. The rewards for being at the top are then especially lucrative, both in terms of earning power and political influence, and those who miss out feel their loss more keenly. The feeling of resentment is particularly strong among people brought up to believe that they ought to be in the elite. Worse still, societies tend to produce ever more would-be elites, in part because access to education tends to improve over time. Mr Turchin sees all this as a recipe for political chaos. Articulate, educated people rebel, producing a scramble for political and economic power. Elites stop co-operating, counter-elites emerge, and order breaks down.

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 incarcerat

Runa Sandvik:

I have my photograph taken and my fingerprints scanned every time I enter the United States. So do all other foreign nationals. The information is collected under the US-VISIT program. Information such as name, date of birth, gender, and travel document data is recorded as well. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed in November 2014, the Department of Homeland Security released a document containing information collected about me under this program over the last four years.

In addition to photographs, the 21-page document contains entries for every encounter I have had with the agency in that period. Most of these encounters were recorded at airports around the country, but there are also entries for appointments related to immigration and enrollment into the Global Entry program. Along with the Global Entry program, the DHS recently launched a new program that may allow it to collect similar information about US citizens.

David Wallace-Wells

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease.

Yet for a year and a half we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. Children now wear masks at little-league games, and at the swimming pool, and when school reopens in the fall they will likely wear masks there, too. But the kids are not at risk themselves, and never were. Now, thanks to vaccines, the vast majority of their parents and grandparents aren’t any longer, either.

But first: the kids. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes, according to the CDC. Only 331 of those deaths have been from COVID — less than half as many as have died of pneumonia. In 2019, more than 2,000 American kids and teenagers died in car crashes; each year about a thousand die from drowning. More American children die in an average year from RSV — another respiratory ailment, whose prevalence is now growing because 18 months of quarantine have deprived young children of immune exposure — than died in either of the last two years from COVID-19.

Some of these comparisons aren’t so neat, since the extraordinary precautions against COVID-19 prevented significant additional spread (and also suppressed the spread of other diseases). But, last year, fewer kids died of COVID-19 than of heart disease, “malignant neopolasms,” suicide, and homicide — not to mention birth defects, which killed hundreds of times more. All told, 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID over the course of the pandemic; just 0.05 percent of those were under the age of 18, a population that represents more than 20 percent of the country’s population as a whole.

Risk is a tricky thing, the spread of the Delta variant and the complications of “long COVID” both real concerns, and all parents should assess their own comfort, and those of their children, in making plans and taking precautions. But very few of them, two summers ago, were sending their children to parks and pools and camps in masks out of fear of pneumonia or flu. Probably fewer were keeping them home entirely.

This summer, the calculations are very different than they were even last year, when the virus was still spreading wildly in an entirely unvaccinated population. That’s because, in the depths of a pandemic as we were then, individuals are not just individuals but links in a chain of transmission, which is the main reason why, for much of the last 18 months, public-health officials have worried over infections in the young — assuming they would eventually help bring the disease back to those much more vulnerable.

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

Natasha Korecki & Eugene Daniels:

and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

Recent polls suggest that as many as one quarter of parents plan to keep their children home for remote learning this fall.

But the past 18 months suggest that most children would fair very poorly with another year of remote learning.

🧵

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) July 12, 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.

Don Surber:

The parents of 1 in 9 students believe public schools are so terrible that they would rather keep the kids home and teach them themselves.

Well, it is just the white kids, right? They don’t matter because whites will soon be a minority. Black and Hispanic kids will easily displace them in unionized public schools.

The story also said, “The largest increase in homeschoolers was especially notable among minority groups, including black and Hispanic learners.

“In African American households, the proportion of homeschooling quintupled from 3.3% in spring 2020, to 16.1% in fall 2020.

“In Hispanic households, the number of homeschooling households doubled in the same time, from 6.2% to 12.1%.”

You can be darned sure parents aren’t teaching their kids CRT. Why, some may even be reading The Bible.

Liberals are alarmed.

1 in 6 black kids stay at home to learn instead of going to school to be indoctrinated.

PBS reported, “If schools fail to secure the trust of parents, advocates and educators worry that the public education system could see a falloff in enrollment, particularly among families of color. Some advocates also fear that schools faced with a larger proportion of students who are struggling or frequently absent will respond with overly punitive approaches, worsening racial inequality.”

Digital learning and sharing offers plenty of opportunities to grow e-commerce experiences, particularly fast, 2 tap purchases, services, fundraising, donations and contributions.

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 Reports:

At a time when many schools are embroiled in controversy over the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), voters still think it is important that kids learn traditional values in school.

A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 78% of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s at least somewhat important for schools to teach the traditional values of Western Civilization, including 52% who say it’s Very Important. This is virtually unchanged from four years ago, and in line with surveys dating back to 2013.

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.

Jeff Tollefson:

Researchers also point out that a successful ARPA needs a customer for the technologies it develops. In the case of DARPA, the US military was ready to purchase many promising inventions. ARPA-Energy (ARPA-E), which was launched in 2009 under former president Barack Obama to advance low-carbon energy technologies, addressed this challenge by helping grant recipients to develop plans for commercialization from the outset — a model that Bonvillian says DARPA has also now imported.

ARPA-E had the independence it needed to function well, researchers say. Still running today, the agency, housed within the US Department of Energy (DoE), has invested $2.8 billion in nearly 1,200 projects, which have attracted another $5.4 billion in private-sector investments and led to the creation of 92 companies. Last month, one of those companies, 1366 Technologies in Bedford, Massachusetts, announced plans to build a $300-million facility for manufacturing solar cells in India. The company, now known as CubicPV, received $4 million from ARPA-E in 2009 to develop a cleaner, faster, cheaper way to manufacture the silicon semiconductors that go into solar panels.

Here’s the FBI encouraging people to monitor family members for signs of extremism so that they can “report them to the #FBI.” https://t.co/mpC5nJ7N9y

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2021

Ed West:

The protesters themselves tended to come from America’s upper-middle-class, displaying a feverous zeal that felt alarming. And there was no debate to be had about race and policing, opponents simply had to educate themselves.

During those decades of social change, the problem of Left-wing “moral relativism” was often a complaint of conservative commentators, but look today at the young protesters demanding that  “Rhodes must fall” or “black trans lives matters”. They certainly aren’t moral relativists.

Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.

Maya King:

Before Covid-19 forced its students into online classes, Loudoun County’s bimonthly school board meetings were often dry exercises in bureaucratic wrangling: Haggling over AP textbook availability and public construction projects. Poring over budget proposals for custodial supplies and debating about whether to renew the contract for a company supplying milk to cafeterias.

Only a handful of parents showed up on a regular basis, says Julie Garrett, a mother of two school-aged children in the school district. Some, like Garrett, one of the growing numbers of liberal parents in the wealthy Northern Virginia exurb, were committed to helping the district work to overcome its segregationist past.

Dinette Wilford & Bryan Passifiume:

“Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline,” reads a section of an online brief highlighting the ‘vision and goals’ of the updated curriculum.
“However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective.”

Math, it continues, has been “used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges,” and explains that taking a “decolonial” and “anti-racist approach” to teaching math will outline its “historical roots and social constructions” to students.

“The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education,” the brief continues.

Minister Lecce previously announced the new curriculum will bring early math streaming to an end, a practice he says created barriers for racialized and historically marginalized groups.

Teachers will be required to promote cross-curricular learning and human rights to create “anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments.”

The Wisconsin Institute for law & liberty:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court on behalf of a Milwaukee resident challenging a Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) union leave policy. Under this policy, MPS pays public employees full wages and benefits to engage in union-related activities instead of the jobs they were hired for at the school district. This policy amounts to compelled speech because it forces Milwaukee taxpayers to subsidize labor union activities. The policy also violates the Constitution’s requirement that all spending be for a public purpose and not for the benefit of a private entity, like a labor union.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Lucas Vebber, said, “Under the MPS union leave policy, Milwaukee taxpayers foot the bill to pay employees not for the public school jobs they were hired for, but rather to engage in union-related activities. This violates Constitutional safeguards against compelled speech and the requirement that public spending be for a public purpose.”

Background: Milwaukee Public Schools adopted a union leave policy (page 49) that permits MPS employees to use at least ten days per fiscal year for paid union leave. Any MPS employee using union leave is working solely as a “representative” of a labor union for the purpose of participating in “union-related activities.” And under the MPS union leave policy, MPS employees are not restricted from engaging in a variety of political activities including advancing the direct interests of the public employee unions.

The United States Supreme Court recently affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that “[c]ompelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers raises similar First Amendment concerns.” And the Wisconsin Constitution recognizes that the freedom of speech “includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.” The MPS union leave policy amounts to taxpayers subsidizing the speech and activities of labor unions – a form of unconstitutional compelled speech.

During the 2017, 2018, and 2019 school years, MPS spent thousands of dollars paying employees for hundreds of hours working on behalf of labor unions for the labor unions’ private purposes.

“An emphasis on adult employment.”

Tone K. Hermansen, Samuel Ronfard, Paul L. Harris, Imac M. Zambrana:

Children (N = 278, 34–71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.

Children learn about the world in a variety of ways. They can learn by paying attention to what other people do (Hoehl et al., 2019). They can learn from testimony directed toward themselves or toward other people (for reviews: Harris, Koenig, Corriveau, & Jaswal, 2018; Mills, 2013; Sobel & Kushnir, 2013; Tong, Wang, & Danovitch, 2020). And, they can gather evidence through exploration (Bonawitz et al., 2011; Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007; Yu, Landrum, Bonawitz, & Shafto, 2018), experimentation (Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011; Köksal-Tuncer & Sodian, 2018), and question-asking (Callanan & Oakes, 1992; Kurkul & Corriveau, 2017). Children’s ability to learn from these diverse sources of information is one reason they are able to learn so much so quickly. Each of these sources of information can provide children with unique insights about the world. For example, by listening to other people, children can avoid costly mistakes and learn about unobservable scientific and religious phenomena they could not discover on their own (Harris & Koenig, 2006). By tracking statistical regularities young children can quickly build up and revise their understanding of causal structures without relying on other people’s testimony (Bridgers, Buchsbaum, Seiver, Griffiths, & Gopnik, 2016).

Annalisa Barbieri:

The first time I remember someone telling me not to overthink was when I was trying to suss out breastfeeding. “Don’t overthink it,” said my friend, “just go with it.”

“Just going with it” is not something I do. I have to really understand what I’m doing and then I think through almost every possibility and eventuality, like a mind map on steroids. And I plan. When people say things like: “Who could have imagined XYZ would happen?” about some entirely predictable outcome, my most common response is “I could”. I have realised that for most people I am an overthinker, but for me, it is others who underthink. I just think.

Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that my overthinking, like most things, probably started in childhood. I had a loving, noisy but at times unpredictable childhood. Dinner was always on the table at the same time, and it was always delicious. My mother and father were always, physically, where they said they would be. But I grew up in a house where emotions weren’t discussed, they were bottled up, only to explode out in random unpredictable ways – or a silence would ensue for some wrongdoing I had to fathom out all by myself.

Harry Enten:

A look at the data reveals that the vaccine hesitant group, however, are not big Trump lovers. They’re actually likely not to be Republican. Instead, many of them are people who are detached from the political process and didn’t vote for either major candidate in 2020. 

The most recent Kaiser poll helps illustrate that the vaccine hesitant group doesn’t really lean Republican. Just 20% of the group called themselves Republican with an additional 19% being independents who leaned Republican. The clear majority (61%) were not Republicans (41% said they were Democrats or Democratic leaning independents and 20% were either pure independents or undesignated). 

This is very much unlike the vaccine resistant group, of whom 55% are Republican or Republican leaning independents. Just 21% of that group are Democrats or Democratic leaning independents. 

The Kaiser poll points to a larger problem: There isn’t going to be a single ideological message that appeals to a majority of the vaccine hesitant group. They’re of all political stripes.

Andrew Sullivan:

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. 

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism. 

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”). 

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.”

Kelly Field:

George Wilson knew remote learning was not for him. So when his classes went online because of the coronavirus pandemic, Wilson, a then-45-year-old furnace operator in Ohio, did what thousands of men nationwide did last year — he stopped out.

On campus, “I’m a machine,” said Wilson, who is pursuing an associate degree at Lakeland Community College, in Kirtland, Ohio. “I don’t have that same drive at home.”

Wilson is part of an exodus of men away from college that has been taking place for decades, but that accelerated during the pandemic. And it has enormous implications, for colleges and for society at large. 

Last fall, male undergraduate enrollment fell by nearly 7 percent, nearly three times as much as female enrollment, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. The decline was the steepest — and the gender gap the largest — among students of color attending community colleges. Black and Hispanic male enrollment at public two-year colleges plummeted by 19.2 and 16.6 percent, respectively, about 10 percentage points more than the drops in Black and Hispanic female enrollment. Drops in enrollment of Asian men were smaller, but still about eight times as great as declines in Asian women.

Men as a whole aren’t usually the group that comes to mind as needing a leg up. But for colleges, declining male enrollment means less revenue and less viewpoint diversity in the classroom. For the economy, it means fewer workers to fill an increasing number of jobs that require at least some college education, and a future in which the work force is split even more along gender lines. 

In the late 1970s, men and women attended college in almost equal numbers. Today, women account for 57 percent of enrollment and an even greater share of degrees, especially at the level of master’s and above. The explanations for this growing gender imbalance vary from the academic to the social to the economic. Girls, on average, do better in primary and secondary school. Boys are less likely to seek help when they struggle. And they face more pressure to join the work force.

Shalini Shankar:

When the extracurricular industrial complex came to a grinding halt last spring, parents were left scrambling to fill vast hours of unscheduled time. Some activities moved to remote instruction but most were canceled, and keeping children engaged became the bane of parents’ existence. Understandably, screens became default child care for younger kids and social lifelines for older ones.

As American society reopens, going back to our children’s prepandemic activities looks like an enticing way to reintroduce upper-elementary through high-school-age kids to the outside world. For parents with economic means, it’s tempting to return to a full slate of language classes, sports, music lessons and other extracurriculars — a guilt-free plan to keep kids busy with “enriching” activities while we get our jobs done.

But I suggest pausing before filling up their calendars again. We should not simply return children to their hectic prepandemic schedules.

Certainly, some amount of extracurricular activity can offer a welcome break from screens and help children nurture interests. But for Generation Z, the over-scheduling of extracurricular activities has been bad for stress and mental health and even worse for widening racial gaps. Moreover, as I learned when I conducted anthropological research for my book “Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success,” it no longer consistently improves the prospects of the white middle-class kids for whom it was designed.

But what can parents do with our kids instead? The answer is simple, though not easy to carry out: We can teach them (and perhaps relearn ourselves) the value of unstructured time and greater civic participation.

This does not mean we should quit our day jobs and devote ourselves instead to endless hours of building forts and playing games. Exposing children to sports, music, art, programming or dance certainly has benefits — including physical exercise, intellectual stimulation and fun — but there are also good reasons to give children time to be bored. Not least of these is it forces them to figure out a way to entertain themselves.

Anna Soubry:

Re-educated, thankfully, is not some “life change” bible for the bored middle aged. Kellaway was a successful and high-powered woman before she left the Financial Times (and a handsome income) after 32 years and a back catalogue of 1,032 columns. Here she writes with warmth, wit and honesty, turning her real life experiences of teaching in a Hackney school into what I hope will become a serious debate about what education is for.

Kirsty Needham and Clare Baldwin:

A Chinese gene company selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country’s military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, a Reuters review of scientific papers and company statements found.

U.S. government advisors warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analysing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisors said.

Reuters has found that BGI’s prenatal test, one of the most popular in the world, is a source of genetic data for the company, which has worked with the Chinese military to improve “population quality” and on genetic research to combat hearing loss and altitude sickness in soldiers.

Greg Schwartz:

Saudi Arabia is funding a yet-to-be-announced digital news platform, which will have a studio in Washington, D.C., as the kingdom begins a new lobbying effort aimed at the White House and Congress.

The new effort, which had yet to be reported, is being backed by a subsidiary of the Saudi Technology Development and Investment Company, or Taqnia, according to new foreign lobbying disclosures filed with the Department of Justice.

Journalists and presenters involved in the project have past experience at Fox News, Al Jazeera, NBC and Sirius XM satellite radio.

The creation of what one of the documents calls a “news platform” comes as the kingdom has started hiring a new team of lobbyists as the Saudis seek access to President Joe Biden’s administration and the new Congress.

It also arrives almost three years after the death of Washington Post journalist and Saudi royal family critic Jamal Khashoggi. A recent U.S. intelligence report says the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, approved an operation to capture or kill Khashoggi.

Biden, however, opted not to punish the crown prince for his alleged role in Khashoggi’s death.

Black Enterprise:

Zaila Avant-garde of Louisiana just made history as the first African American person to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She claimed her victory in round 18 after she correctly spelled “murraya,” a genius of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees.

As the national champion, Avant-garde is walking away with a $50,000 cash prize, medal, Scripps Cup, the official trophy, and other sponsor prizes. 

The 93rd competition took place at ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida on Thursday evening. Eleven students from seven states and the Bahamas competed during the final event. 

“Zaila demonstrated incredible mastery of the English language with poise and perseverance,” said Adam Symson, president and CEO of The E.W. Scripps Company, in a statement. “The excellence of all of our competitors, their hard work and commitment to learning, and their distinct stories, capture hearts and minds across the globe.”

Launched in 1925, the Scripps National Spelling Bee is the longest-running educational competition in the country, Symson noted. Every year, millions of students across the country come together to compete for the coveted spelling bee title.

Basketball.

Hey guys, anyone wanna see something creepy?

This is the video being shown ton parents and children going back to school in Los Angeles.https://t.co/mpFlCvSETy

— OffGuardian (@OffGuardian0) July 9, 2021

William Jacobson:

On Friday, July 9, 2021, at 3 p.m., U.S. District Court Judge William Young is scheduled to hold a hearing on whether the Boston School Committee improperly concealed anti-white and anti-asian text messages and thereby deceived Judge Young into finding that the “Zip Code Quota Plan” had no racist intent.

We  covered the background to the dispute in a recent post, Leaked School Committee Texts Showing Anti-White Bias May Reopen Boston “Zip Code Quota Plan” Case.

You can read the Memorandum In Support of Motion for Relief From Judgment for the allegations of misconduct (emphasis added):

New evidence, in the form of highly relevant text messages between two members of the Boston School Committee, has recently come to light. These text messages have long been in the possession of the City of Boston, and should be been provided to the Boston Parents in response to its public records request and should have been made a part of the agreed-upon record in this case when the Court originally considered it. But the City, instead, concealed the messages, thereby depriving the Boston Parents and the Court of the opportunity to consider them. The reason for the City’s actions can and must be inferred from the content of the concealed evidence: the text messages show clear racial motivation and anti-White racism on the part of two School Committee members who were leading proponents of the Zip Code Quota Plan. In fact, the content of this previously suppressed evidence is so damning that both members have now been forced to resign.

hese facts are unique. They warrant the relief sought, and they elevate the Boston Parents’ request beyond that of other Rule 60 motions. As this memorandum explains, the Boston Parents timely exercised their rights under state law to obtain copies of these and other text messages exchanged between members of the School Committee during the meeting where the Zip Code Quota Plan was adopted. But when the School Committee responded to that request, it deliberately concealed clearly racist statements, first, by deleting racist portions of text messages from what it claimed was a “transcript” of text messages, and, second, by misrepresenting that it had produced complete records when it knew that it had not. This prejudice was further compounded when neither the City of Boston nor the individual Defendants came clean when it came time to provide this Court with an agreed-upon record. It was only after the Boston Globe published leaked copies of the offensive texts that the City of Boston finally produced them to the Boston Parents, long after this Court issued its decision in this case. That is what prompts this Motion.

When the School Committee lawyers asked for more time to respond, Judge Young denied the request (bold in original):

Curiously Madison has not addressed school boundaries in decades, choosing instead to use taxpayer funds to expand our least diverse schools.

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.

Daniel Gingerich and Jan P. Vogler:

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? We address this question by examining the consequences of the most deadly pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347-1351). Our claim is that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if they impose sufficient loss of life so as to augment the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor repressive regimes (such as serfdom) become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. We test our theory by tracing out the local consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. We find that areas hit hardest by the pandemic were more likely to: (1) adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns; (2) exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics; and (3) have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

Manuela Snoyer:

For the last 20 years, I’ve taught over 2000 children in 3 countries. I pioneered an English language program in an impoverished area is the Middle East. I’ve worked as a public school teacher at some of the highest and lowest performing public schools in all five boroughs. I’ve helped hundreds of parents start microschools (or learning pods) and I’ve tutored 18 subjects to some of the wealthiest families in NYC, San Francisco and Paris to make up for failings in private schools they were paying up to $60,000 a year to attend. Most recently, I founded a virtual learning program to help families through the pandemic and a hotline that served 100,000 families impacted by school closures.

Based on what I’ve observed in my experience in this wide array of educational settings is that that there are thousands of extraordinary people working diligently to fulfill a very unambitious goal. From what I’ve seen, the goal of school is to do an adequate job preparing our future workforce to do jobs that were relevant yesterday. Though more often than not, school is actually still optimized to prepare kids to work in industrialized factories. Or at best, schools may aim to prepare kids for currently relevant jobs in tech which are bound to also be obsolete when they actually join the workforce in 5–10 years, taking our inflexible school system another 100 years to catch up to prepare kids for what were our most needed careers today which by that time will also be obsolete.

Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller:

Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.

Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.

The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data. 

Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master’s program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world’s most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation’s eighth wealthiest private school.

For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid.

Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master’s students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture.

anonymous:

Toward the end of April 2020, a college friend of mine reached out: “Are you looking for work? I work for this essay writing service, and they’re offering referral bonuses to anyone who joins the team.”

He told me he was writing essays for college kids for a website called Killer Papers, and he was making tons of money. The owner had claimed 30 percent sales growth since most students had moved to distance learning.

Just 24 hours later, I had already interviewed and written my first essay: $40 for a three-page “reflection paper” on how COVID had been affecting college students. Fitting.

I got a quick education on what this system for black-market essays really looks like. The overarching stereotype is that privileged sons and daughters of wealthy families use their money to cheat their way out of their work and into a degree. And … sure, this is often true.

Incoming freshman! @WSJ needs your help. We want to see what universities are saying to you in their financial aid letters. You can upload yours and send them to us through the form with this article. Thank you!https://t.co/Cs7A7CNkP6 via @WSJ pic.twitter.com/ZEuZ71o3yt

— Jennifer Forsyth (@ForsythJenn) July 8, 2021

Scott Girard:

The report also pointed to the difficulty in accessing course materials via open records requests, citing expensive costs from certain districts to receive requested materials, including more than $5,000 from the Madison Metropolitan School District and more than $1,000 from the Kenosha Unified School District.

The proposed bill would require districts to post a bibliography-style list of curricular materials generated by outside entities and the full text of materials created by the district or a teacher. The list of materials would have to be posted “prominently” on a school district’s website and be updated at least twice each school year — once before it begins and once in January — starting with the 2022-23 school year.

“Parents from all political persuasions deserve the opportunity to learn what is being taught in their schools,” the report stated.

The report also pointed to the difficulty in accessing course materials via open records requests, citing expensive costs from certain districts to receive requested materials, including more than $5,000 from the Madison Metropolitan School District and more than $1,000 from the Kenosha Unified School District.

The Department of Public Instruction offered a fiscal estimate on last month’s CRT bill, including calling the proposed requirement to post curricular materials a “significant administrative burden on staff.” Sikma said that he believes that while starting the process may take an investment, maintaining the list from year to year shouldn’t require much effort.

“Once they get something like this up and running, it’s a matter of maintaining and it’s always easier to maintain than it is to build from the ground up,” Sikma said. “I’d be really surprised if school districts, individual teachers are so significantly revamping from semester to semester what they’re doing in the classroom that it’d really burden them with additional time.”

2021 Assembly Bill 411

If systems such as “Infinite Campus” were required and used, posting curriculum would occur “automagically” (recognizing nothing is perfect, but we have spent tens of millions on these things….)

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.

Dean Mosiman:

The earlier proposal for one-time payments, which equaled 3.75% of the average annual yearly wage of $70,950 for all permanent general municipal employees, would have cost a total $4.5 million. About 1,400 of the city’s 2,900 employees are classified as general municipal employees. Employees in the city’s police, firefighter and Teamster bargaining units would not have been eligible for the money.

Police and firefighters got raises of 2% in December 2018, 2.5% in June 2019, 3.25% for 2020 and 3.75% for 2021, Schmiedicke said. The Teamsters got hikes of 2% for 2019, 2% in December 2019, 2.5% in June 2020, and 2.5% in June 2021. General municipal employees received increases of 3.25% for 2019, 3.25% for 2020, and nothing for 2021, he said.

Abigail Becker:

But city attorney Michael Haas has said that the resolution doesn’t meet standards outlined in the U.S. Department of Treasury rules on how to use the federal coronavirus relief aid.

Alex Tadel;

How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts.

Alex Tadel;

How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts.