Justin Baer:

The pandemic is accelerating growth in midsize cities, positioning them to lead the charge in the nation’s economic rebound.

Even before Covid-19, these rising stars—such as Greenville, Des Moines, Iowa, and Provo, Utah—had been quietly building out vibrant economies in the shadow of bigger metropolises. During the pandemic, they have drawn workers and businesses with large and affordable homes, ample access to outdoor space and less congestion.

They also have a mix of high-tech jobs and old-line industries, including manufacturing and finance, that turned out to be more resistant to the downturn. They came through the year with fewer job losses and service cuts, and made quicker recoveries.

“They offer a lot of things you can’t really get in the big city,” said Mark Vitner, senior economist with Wells Fargo & Co. “They’re more affordable, and it’s so much easier to live there. And all of these industries are poised to do very well.”

The pandemic-fueled flow of jobs and residents out of New York, San Francisco and other large coastal cities will subside and likely eventually reverse, economists say. But the economies in some of these smaller metro areas have staying power.

In Greenville, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.3% in March, well below the national rate of 6.0% that month, according to the Labor Department. The national unemployment rate rose to 6.1% in April.

Nancy Keates:

Megan Riner was living alone in a tiny studio apartment in Portland, Ore., when the pandemic hit. Working the overnight shift at a television news station made it tough to find friends. After her job went virtual because of Covid, she rarely left her apartment, exacerbating her sense of isolation.

Ms. Riner, 25, decided to leave Portland in July and move back into her old bedroom at her mom’s house in her hometown of Indianapolis. It was a decision that shocked her: All she’d wanted after college was to leave Indianapolis and start an independent life.

More than nine months later, she works in digital media at a call center nearby. She just moved out of her mom’s house into her own apartment that’s less than a mile away, in a building where a good friend from grade school lives. She prefers to stay in Indianapolis rather than resume her old life in Portland sitting in that tiny studio, all alone.

“I feel so much better, just knowing I live near friends and a support system” she says.

Recently, I wrote a response to an attack on private #SchoolChoice in the @WIExaminer. They have chosen to reply to me here with a diatribe that is full of half truths. I’ll go through them in this thread (1/4). https://t.co/aDh7vabtMB

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) May 13, 2021

James Varney:

An occasional interview series with Americans who are challenging the status quo.

Picking fights with lawyers and Green Berets can be a bit risky, and that is doubly true when one of them has extensive experience with totalitarian tactics.

Gordana Schifanelli is a lawyer married to a former Army special forces officer, and what’s more, she grew up in a Communist household in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. All of which makes for a powerful opponent in what has shaped up as a battle on Maryland’s Eastern Shore between forces of wokeness in Queen Anne’s County Public Schools and some concerned parents.

“It’s totalitarian, what they’re doing, so I know it,” she said. “I was in the middle of a NATO bombing and barely survived. Now you want to tell me I’m a racist? Whatever.”

The battle began in June, when Superintendent Andrea M. Kane sent a letter to parents filled with attaboys for environmental improvements in the schools and news about the coronavirus, which had forced them all to close. Sandwiched in between, however, was a lengthy screed about systemic racism, the righteousness of Black Lives Matter and the frightening news that the schools in that sleepy community were infested with racism.

While Ms. Kane, who is Black, voiced her concerns in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Mrs. Schifanelli was appalled on many levels. For starters, who might be responsible for this terrible environment?

“Who’s racist? Where is this racism in our schools? I’m sending my kids into some rampant, festering racist place?” she said. “I think Black parents would also want to know who is being racist at school.”

In addition, Mrs. Schifanelli objected to the lecture from a government worker who she believed should be focused on educating her children rather than broader social issues that her 11-year-old didn’t really understand.

Additional Commentary.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA

They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”

Daniel Greenfield:

In 2018, the Trump administration pulled out of the United Nations Human Rights Council. That same year the administration cut funding to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) which had repeatedly attacked America and the Trump administration.

The administration dismissed these attacks as impotent, but the UN’s human rights apparatus had more power over Americans, including President Trump, than most people realized.

Many Taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Facebook (Instagram) services, including Madison.

Universitaet Mainz:

“However, the most ground-breaking technical achievement of the Roman Empire lies in its water management, particularly its long-distance aqueducts that delivered water to cities, baths and mines,” said Dr. Gül Sürmelihindi from the Geoarchaeology group at Mainz University

Matt Taibbi:

What a difference a decade makes. 

Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept “protected” even from its allies.

The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the “Arab Spring.” 

There was an attempt at a response — companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a “denial of service” attack — but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.

Charles J. Courtemanche, Anh H. Le, Aaron Yelowitz & Ron Zimmer:

This paper examines the effect of fall 2020 school reopenings in Texas on county-level COVID-19 cases and fatalities. Previous evidence suggests that schools can be reopened safely if community spread is low and public health guidelines are followed. However, in Texas, reopenings often occurred alongside high community spread and at near capacity, making it difficult to meet social distancing recommendations. Using event-study models and hand-collected instruction modality and start dates for all school districts, we find robust evidence that reopening Texas schools gradually but substantially accelerated the community spread of COVID-19. Results from our preferred specification imply that school reopenings led to at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities within the first two months. We then use SafeGraph mobility data to provide evidence that spillovers to adults’ behaviors contributed to these large effects. Median time spent outside the home on a typical weekday increased substantially in neighborhoods with large numbers of school-age children, suggesting a return to in-person work or increased outside-of-home leisure activities among parents.

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.

Jason Riley:

What should take priority in K-12 education, the physical safety of students or racial balance in school suspension rates? Barack Obama and Donald Trump had different answers to that question, and it probably won’t surprise you where President Biden comes down.

In 2012, the Education Department released a study showing that black students were more likely than their white peers to be suspended and expelled from school. This disparity was taken as evidence of racial bias, and two years later the department issued threatening “guidance” letters to school districts across the country. The letters essentially warned that schools would face federal civil-rights investigations if black suspension rates didn’t come down. Schools were pressured to discipline students, or not, based on race rather than behavior, and many administrators and teachers obliged.

In New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—the nation’s three largest school systems—reductions in suspensions and expulsions were followed by an uptick in bullying and other disruptive behavior. Students and teachers alike have reported feeling less safe. Fighting, gang activity and drug use have increased. A 2018 study of schools in Wisconsin found that “softer discipline policies, pushed by the Obama administration, are having a negative impact on student test scores.”

The sad irony is that black students, in whose name this was done, were the ones most hurt by racial quotas in school discipline. A 2017 federal survey of school safety by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest percentage of any racial or ethnic group.

Arthur Brooks:

You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.” So wrote Johanna Schopenhauer in a 1807 letter to her 19-year-old son Arthur. “No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”

The two-century-old letter amazes not just for its mix of archaic diction and sick burns, but also because it violates some of humanity’s most basic assumptions about how mothers feel about their children. Motherhood is supposed to bring unparalleled happiness. The Bible, for example, is full of stories of women—Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth—who go from sorrow to joy when God grants them an unexpected child.

In real life, the relationship between happiness and motherhood is more complicated. Raising small children is far from unmitigated bliss. Year after year, surveys that ask mothers what they most want for Mother’s Day find that their No. 1 answer is time alone. As children grow up, mothers’ mixed feelings seem to stick around. Research suggests that plenty of mothers, while perhaps not as up-front as Johanna, feel some resentment toward their adult progeny, especially when the relationship feels unequal. Thankfully, social science also offers clues to how adult children can patch things up and make their moms happier.

Wall Street Journal:

If Texas and California hadn’t joined the United States in the 19th century, he wrote, “it is entirely possible that their dispute would be the source of considerable international tension.” Yet the Constitution is designed to hold the states together despite their political differences by channeling conflict through the federal government. Instead California is trying to interfere directly in Texas policy.

“When they entered the Union, these two behemoths relinquished the full measure of sovereign power that they once possessed,” Justice Alito continued, “but they acquired the right to have their disputes with other States adjudicated by the Nation’s highest court.”

In its brief urging the Court not to adjudicate the dispute, California argued that it could be handled in lower courts, such as if Texas businesses harmed by California’s boycott filed suit. It pointed to precedent that the Supreme Court’s exclusive jurisdiction—known as “original” jurisdiction—over state suits against other states “will not be exerted in the absence of absolute necessity.”

We doubt all Justices who punted on this case are confident in the constitutionality of California’s economic bullying. Yet a sufficient number may believe that this is not yet a moment of “absolute necessity” that compels jurisdiction. The danger is that by failing to take a stand early, the Justices will make such a moment more politically fraught and more likely.

Heather Long:

From Wall Street to the White House, expectations were high for a hiring surge in April with potentially a million Americans returning to work. Instead, the world learned Friday that just 266,000 jobs were added, a massive disappointment that raises questions about whether the recovery is on track.

President Biden’s team has vowed that its massive stimulus package will recover all the remaining jobs lost during the pandemic in about a year, but that promise won’t be kept unless there’s a big pickup in hiring soon. There are still 8.2 million jobs left to recover. At the same time, business leaders and Republicans are complaining that there is a “worker shortage,” and they largely blame the more generous unemployment payments and stimulus checks for making people less likely to take low-paying fast food and retail jobs again. Democratic economists counter that companies could raise pay if they really wanted workers back quickly.

One way to make sense of this weak jobs report is to do what Wall Street did and shrug it off as an anomaly. Stocks still rose Friday as investors saw this as a blip. They think there is just a lag in hiring and more people will return to work as they get vaccinated. And they point out oddball months have occurred before, especially with some weird quirks in the Labor Department’s seasonal adjustments.

Madison schools have substantial tax & spending increase programs underway, despite long term disastrous reading results and declining enrollment.

Karol Markowicz:

The War on Merit in America’s schools is spreading — and threatening to take an ever-bigger toll on kids’ education.

Last week, California’s Department of Education rolled out a draft framework for teaching math to K-12 students. The framework contains 13 chapters, most focused on (no joke) achieving “equity” through mathematics instruction. It would no longer group kids by ability, teach algebra to eighth graders or calculus to high schoolers or refer to gifted children as “gifted.”

California isn’t the only place, of course, that has tried to dumb down school curricula in an effort to treat all kids the same in order to pretend there’s no differences between them.

Every year in New York City, thousands of parents register their kids for the Gifted & Talented test for admission into a G&T program or school. The test is necessary to see if kids will be able to handle the more challenging curriculum. 

Yet this year, the city’s Department of Education scrapped the test; kids apparently will be judged on less objective measures. And Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter similarly wants to ditch the admissions test for the city’s top high schools.

Look: Parents don’t have their kids apply for these programs because they are racist; they do it because they know the regular curriculum their kids get in regular city schools is weak. Math is usually a joke; reading and writing often even more so. A G&T program might mean their kid has to actually try to succeed, instead of just coasting through classes. Yet parents clamoring for more difficult work for their kids get called “racist.”

Not content with removing the G&T test, the DOE is now pushing to get rid of G&T programs themselves. Middle schools have already scrapped “screens,” such as test scores and grades, for admission this year in favor of lotteries. The city’s most competitive (and often best-performing) high schools constantly fear they’ll be forced to water down their standards.

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.

Samantha West:

So, in 2001, Klopke started sending letters to people in the community he thought would be interested in starting a fund, and holding meetings.

Before Klopke and the group even started asking for donations, he remembered, a farmer who lived just north of town handed him $100 or $200 out of the blue, simply telling him to “use this to get the fund going.”

Twenty years later, after Gresham residents like that farmer contributed as little as $5 here or $10 there, the community has raised $1 million for the Gresham Scholarship Fund to help the youngest residents of the small town pay for higher education.

Over time, the scholarship amount awarded has grown, too. When the scholarship was started, awards amounted to $400 per qualifying student. Now, students get $3,250.

Newell Haffner, superintendent of the Gresham School District, said the fund has made a “big impact” in what he called an “economically depressed” area.

Eric Boehm:

The FBI and federal prosecutors have “no authority to continue holding the possessions of some 800 bystanders who are not alleged to have been involved in whatever USPV may have done wrong,” Benjamin Gluck, a California attorney who is representing several of the people caught up in the FBI’s raid of U.S. Private Vaults, tells Reason.

Legal efforts to force the FBI to return the items seized during the March 22 raid have so far been unsuccessful, but at least five lawsuits are pending in federal court.

A federal grand jury indicted U.S. Private Vaults (USPV) on counts of conspiracy to distribute drugs, launder money, and avoid mandatory deposit reporting requirements.

In legal filings, federal prosecutors have admitted that “some” of the company’s customers were “honest citizens,” but contend that “the majority of the box-holders are criminals who used USPV’s anonymity to hide their ill-gotten wealth.”

Patrick Richardson:

One Kansas City-area mom had to fight tooth and nail to get a mask exemption for her children, despite having paperwork showing disturbing changes in their vital signs after just one minute of putting on a mask. USD 229 Blue Valley officials rejected the results on a technicality, but a doctor says the results should have been a red flag that prompted the district to take action.

Julie Myrick, who has both a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old in Blue Valley elementary schools, originally went to the Blue Valley Board of Education asking for mask exemptions for her children, one of whom has asthma and the other struggles with focal epilepsy.

Her 10-year-old was complaining of headaches daily, and her 7-year-old was having daily meltdowns due to fatigue and irritability.

“My initial grievance hearing under SB40 was a request for accommodations to be made for my children who were having difficulty learning due to prolonged mask use and the symptoms they were experiencing with mask usem,” she said in an email. “The hearing officer recommended my request be granted but the BOE did not respond to my individual request but simply voted 7-0 to maintain the current mask policy.”

Myrick said both her children were having adverse reactions to the masks — to include severe headaches daily — but the district was unpersuaded. She was able to secure “unofficial” mask breaks for her children, but that required them — per the district — to go to the nurse’s office, taking them out of class.

Sohrab Ahmari:

’I’m terrified of the woke radicals at my kids’ school”: Rarely a week goes by when I don’t hear some variation on this gripe from fellow parents in New York City. Invariably, they lower their voices, lest prying ears catch them objecting to the official ideology.

These are solidly liberal Manhattanites, mind you. They just don’t want their children being told they carry the ­unwashable stain of racial sin. And they’d ­really rather have their kids master real knowledge, instead of ­being taught to meditate endlessly on their own race, gender and sexuality. 

As the only “out” conservative they know, I’m often the only person these parents can pour out their ­anguish to. And I’m wearying of the job.

I worry just as much about the rise of the woke. Yet I’ve come to view the ambient liberalism these New Yorkers take for granted as a big part of the problem. It doesn’t suffice to overcome wokeness, because it forms people to be selfish and self-maximizing, to avoid deep commitments of any kind.

David Leonhardt:

In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.

Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.

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.

Hannah Natanson:

In pursuit of in-person learning this year, Stephanie Koski of Oregon transferred legal guardianship of her 16-year-old son to his aunt — then sent the teen to live in Texas.

Lyra Elder uprooted her husband, son and daughter from their home outside Portland, Ore., and took them to a cabin in Homer, Alaska, population 5,992 and nicknamed “the end of the road.” And the Metta family traded the suburbs of Doylestown, Pa., for a three-bedroom apartment in the Italian city of Bari, on the Adriatic coast.

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.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

The problem is not density per se but rather the severe overcrowding associated with poverty in high density areas. Overcrowded physical proximity often includes insufficiently ventilated spaces such as crowded public transit, elevators, and employment locations, especially high-rise buildings, which often have windows that cannot be opened. Overcrowded bars, restaurants, and other retail establishments are also a part of the problem. Professor Shlomo Angel head of the New York University Urban Expansion Project at the Marron Institute and the NYU Stern Urbanization Project and principal author of A Planet of Cities and the Atlas of Urban Expansion explains:

It is important to increase density literacy among politicians, professionals, and activists to make it clear that the density that contributed to the pandemic, overcrowded multigenerational housing, mass events, crowded transit cars, or crowded bars and restaurants, is not the kind of density we need to increase to make cities more affordable and to combat climate change. The densification we need involves making room in cities, adding floor space so that more people can occupy the same area without overcrowding.¹

Mixed evidence on lockdowns

Overcrowding intensifies exposure density. Recognizing this, governments imposed lockdowns and social distancing measures intended to reduce crowding and viral transmission. But lockdowns can be effective in some situations and not in others. Social distancing and remote work can readily reduce the exposure density of overcrowded trains, workplaces, elevators, and retail establishments, especially in the densest urban cores. Restaurants and bars were forced to close, and as many employers switched to remote working, fatality rates dropped substantially.

But this approach has exacted a steep cost. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Toronto, suburban rail ridership declined by between 75 and 90 percent compared to the previous year. There has been a precipitous decline in the economies of the central business districts (CBDs) of these metropolitan areas, which have suffered economically more than most of their smaller counterparts. City Journal has reported that, in 2020, “New York City lost 500,000 private-sector jobs. Its office buildings are only 15 percent occupied. Ninety percent of the city’s restaurants failed to pay their December 2020 rent, and 5,000 have shut down altogether. Employment in the city’s arts and entertainment sector has plummeted 66 percent. And, perhaps most alarming: 300,000 New Yorkers from high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the Postal Service.” Rents are now the lowest in a decade.

Liv Finne:

1. Lawmakers are considering three bills to impose Critical Race Training on Washington’s public education institutions.
2. Much of the Critical Race Training curriculum required by these bills is untrue, false, and destructive.
3. Critical Race Trainings require people to publicly profess their racial and sexual identities, and then be labeled as either “oppressors” or “oppressed.”
4. According to Critical Race Training, all white heterosexual men are “oppressors” and certain minority groups are “oppressed.”
5. These bills violate Washington’s Civil Rights Act, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Washington State and U.S. Constitution.
6. The bills violate workers’ First Amendment rights by compelling speech or by suppressing their legitimate views and opinions.
7. Critical Race Training undermines the friendship and trust that make a caring and tolerant society possible and would make the problem of racism worse.

Alina Dizik:

For four years, Maggie Lake imagined descending the majestic hill in the middle of her college campus with her classmates on commencement weekend. But she may need to wait a few more years. Colgate University’s 2020 in-person graduation has been rescheduled twice, this time to 2022.

The administration says they already held a virtual ceremony last May and delaying an in-person one allows alumni, including Ms. Lake, and their families to participate safely. But grads say the special moment is gone—and it feels odd to take time off work to attend your commencement. “We’re past the point of really caring,” says Ms. Lake, 22, an investment banking analyst in Chicago. “It’s kind of just done.”

John Ellis:

An advanced society functions by creating a series of institutions, telling them what it wants them to do, and funding them to do it. Institutions like the police, fire departments, courts and schools do the jobs society creates them to do. But one American institution—higher education—has decided to repurpose itself. It has set aside the job given to it by society and substituted a different one.

Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”

That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.

To keep the merit-based entrance to Boston Exam Schools, a group of Boston parents established BPCAE, a non-profit organization (NPO) in November 2020. BPCAE is a platform for all to maintain academic excellence in Boston Exam Schools. We also focus on enhancing the K-6 grade education foundation for exam schools.

Lawsuit by parents lost in district court, now on appeal. Attorney: “The goal of the Zip Code Quota Plan was to reduce the opportunity for Asian and White students to attend the Exam Schools, by limiting competition for 80 percent of the seats…. The Boston School Committee achieved — indeed, surpassed — its goal. We continue to believe that such racial gerrymandering violates the constitutional right to equal protection.”

Boston parent coalition for academic excellence:

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.

Mary Jacob:

So far, their community remains online, in “the cloud.” But they expect to enlist around 2,000 willing participants (about the size of a small college town) to pack up and move to their yet-to-be-built city. No word yet on where the concept will touch down — but the two hope to land somewhere in the Mediterranean. 

Currently, Brown and Callinan are looking to partner with a country in the region who wants to attract a slice of Silicon Valley and is “down to forge a partnership with them,” Brown told YouTuber Justin Murphy in an interview.

“Whereby they contribute land, perhaps for equity in the project and the terms will obviously be negotiated,” Brown explained. “We are not trying to be a total sovereign nation or something like that. We want to partner with a government and build something really cool that works with us and works for them and is mutually beneficial,” he said, adding that they want a government that will stop blocking people with “dumb regulations.”  

With the backing of angel investor Peter Thiel, who has already invested nearly $9 million in Pronomos Capital— a venture capital that focuses solely on startups like Bluebook Cities — the company is expected to soon morph the online community into a private city reality.

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.

Will Flanders:

It’s seemingly become a bi-annual tradition this time of year for school choice opponents to decry the “growing cost of vouchers” around budget time in Wisconsin. Among the latest attempts is a piece by Ruth Coniff for the Wisconsin Examiner. While this piece gets some facts right about how the program is funded, the overall narrative on the cost to property taxpayers misses some key facts, seemingly in an effort to paint the programs in a negative light. Here, I highlight some of the important issues with the piece.

Funding Students Who Leave the System. Among most voucher opponents, the notion that we should no longer fund schools for students who leave the system seems entirely lost. If a student moves out of one school district to another, we don’t hear complaints from unions about a loss of revenue resulting from the move of that student. Yet, for some reason, private school choice is regularly discussed in that manner, describing choice students as a “revenue loss” to the school district. This is no more logical than arguing that Pick ‘n Save should continue to collect money from me if I decide I’d rather shop at Meijer this week.

Placing the Blame for Tax Increases in the Wrong Place. Coniff seems to see raising property taxes for lost revenue to the voucher program as a necessity. She claims that districts face a Hobson’s choice between cutting programs or raising taxes. In reality, districts regularly have to make adjustments for changing enrollments, particularly in Wisconsin where most districts see continuing declines. If districts choose to raise taxes when a student leaves for choice, they actually end up with more money for each student remaining in public schools. This is because the same amount of revenue is now divided between fewer students.

Jeffrey Denning:

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed–since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources, and institution attended do not explain much of the change. However, we show that grade inflation can explain much of the change in graduation rates. We show that GPA is a strong predictor of graduation rates and that GPAs have been rising since the 1990s. We also find that in national survey data and rich administrative data from 9 large public universities increases in college GPAs cannot be explained by student demographics, preparation, and school factors. Further, we find that at a public liberal arts college, grades have increased over time conditional on final exam performance.

Scott Girard:

“Last fall … MTI brought to our attention the perception MMSD was in breach of our contract because the 2019-2020 contracts given to staff listed salaries the Board had not yet officially voted to accept,” LeMonds wrote. “It was later determined MMSD administration did not have the authority to include expected salary increases in staff contracts prior to the Board approving the budget through an official vote, as was previous practice.”

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.

seii.MIT.edu

We use admis­sions lot­ter­ies to esti­mate the effects of large-scale pub­lic preschool in Boston on col­lege-going, col­lege prepa­ra­tion, stan­dard­ized test scores, and behav­ioral out­comes. Preschool enroll­ment boosts col­lege atten­dance, as well as SAT test-tak­ing and high school grad­u­a­tion. Preschool also decreas­es sev­er­al dis­ci­pli­nary mea­sures includ­ing juve­nile incar­cer­a­tion, but has no detectable impact on state achieve­ment test scores. An analy­sis of sub­groups shows that effects on col­lege enroll­ment, SAT-tak­ing, and dis­ci­pli­nary out­comes are larg­er for boys than for girls. Our find­ings illus­trate pos­si­bil­i­ties for large-scale mod­ern, pub­lic preschool and high­light the impor­tance of mea­sur­ing long-term and non-test score out­comes in eval­u­at­ing the effec­tive­ness of edu­ca­tion programs

Jill Tucker:

When the teachers union over the weekend announced the “exciting news” that San Francisco’s high school seniors will get a chance to go back to classrooms starting Friday, they left out details about the plan, including that students might only be back for just one day.

In addition, the class of 2021 won’t get any in-person instruction while they’re at one of two school sites. Instead, they have “in-person supervision.”

In what some are calling a blatant money grab, the deal between the district and teachers union will bring seniors back “for at least one day before the end of the school year,” so the city’s public schools can qualify for $12 million in state reopening funds.

The last-minute plan for seniors was yet another disappointment for San Francisco families, health officials, political leaders and mental health experts who have argued for the reopening of district schools for months, only to face multiple delays, even as many private school students have been back since the fall. The teachers union, which acknowledged the academic and emotional harm to many students from remote learning, argued it wasn’t safe to return until educators were vaccinated and even then resisted a fuller reopening.

Despite teachers getting priority for vaccinations, the union agreed only to allow a small group of vulnerable middle and high school students to return even as other districts — such as Berkeley and Oakland — brought a larger share of older students back.

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.

Spencer Ackerman:

Former President Donald Trump is one step closer to testifying in a New York lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who claim his bodyguards assaulted them in 2015.

As The Daily Beast previously reported, the activists had gathered outside Trump Tower to protest the Republican candidate’s derogatory comments on Mexican immigrants. On that September day, soon after the demonstrators assembled on Fifth Avenue outside the skyscraper, several members of Trump’s security team allegedly “violently attacked” them and destroyed their protest banners before a crowd that included reporters.

While president, Trump had tried to quash a subpoena that would force him to testify at the civil trial in the Bronx and sit for a videotaped deposition beforehand. In 2019, his lawyers appealed a judge’s order denying his request.

On Tuesday, the state’s Appellate Division dismissed Trump’s appeal as moot.

“This appeal concerning the proper standard for determining whether a sitting President may be compelled to give videotaped trial testimony about unofficial acts in a civil action against him or her is moot given that the rights of parties will not be directly affected by our determination,” the court said in its ruling, “and that there will not be an immediate consequence of the judgment.”

Benjamin N. Dictor, an attorney for the protesters, said: “We are pleased with the Appellate Division’s decision and look forward to presenting Mr. Trump’s testimony at trial, as would be expected from any adverse party in litigation.”

Samantha West:

Experts say educators should only physically restrain or isolate a student as a last resort, when there’s no other way to stop their dangerous behavior, but a new annual state report shows half of Wisconsin schools used those measures at least once last year.

Some schools reported hundreds of incidents of seclusion and restraint; others none. Those with the most incidents tended to be elementary schools that serve a large amount of students with disabilities — but many schools fit that description, yet report rarely or never using the practices.

Officials in districts where schools reported the highest number incidents told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin they try their best not to use seclusion and restraint, but it’s necessary sometimes as they work toward finding a long-term solution to outbursts. And, they say, it doesn’t help that many kids’ mental health needs aren’t being met because of a shortage of services inside and outside of school.

Ian Lovett:

Catholic schools across the country are struggling to keep the doors open, after a pandemic year that left many families unable to pay tuition and the church without extra funds to cover the difference.

At least 209 of the country’s nearly 6,000 Catholic schools have closed over the past year, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. More closures are expected this summer, and some schools have taken to GoFundMe in an effort to stay open.

Nationwide, Catholic school enrollment fell 6.4% at the start of this school year, the largest single-year decline since the NCEA began tracking such data in the 1970s.

Urban dioceses have been hit especially hard: Enrollment in schools run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles was down 12% at the start of this school year. In the Archdiocese of New York, enrollment was down 11%.

Steve Sharp:

The Wisconsin Policy Forum is reporting that Wisconsin’s K-12 school enrollment is down by more than 25,000 students for the 2020-21 school year, one of many far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that may warrant a response from state and local policymakers.

The information is contained in the findings of a new interactive data tool from the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

According to the forum’s data, Watertown went from 3,889 in 2011-12 to 3,296 in 2020-21. In the same period, Fort Atkinson’s district went from 3,000 students enrolled to 2,652; Hustisford from 420 to 364; Dodgeland from 818 to 744; Jefferson from 1,932 to 1,806; Johnson Creek from 653 to 567, Waterloo from 871 to 768 and Janesville 10,325 to 9,574. Lake Mills defied the trend and went from 1,432 to 1,586.

This latest edition of the tool is the third since its 2019 debut. It is located at https://wispolicyforum.org/research/school-datatool/. It was updated with the most recent available data, which goes through the 2019-20 school year in some categories and through 2020-21 in others.

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.

Will Flanders and Libby Sobic:

As is typical of those who oppose school choice, Miller’s piece is full of misconceptions and outright falsehoods that distract from the important goal of ensuring that more kids have access to high quality schools.   Below, we highlight three of the biggest problems with his piece.

Admissions Requirements: “In fact, once a student is selected, families must agree to a strict contract that cannot be legally required at any public school. It requires that parents support enforcement of a strict uniform and behavior code, check off homework nightly, attend parent conferences and spend a certain number of hours in the school. Those terms prevent many low-income families from participating.”

Miller claims that the parental agreement that students at some charter schools must agree to constitutes an admissions requirement.  However, this could not be further from the truth. Many charter schools recognize that parental involvement is key to student success, and strive to make that happen. This vision is shared by the parents of students who choose to attend these schools, and the requirements are far from onerous. What is not mentioned by Miller is that many of the best public schools in MPS—such as Golda Meir or many of the Montessori schools—have strict admissions guidelines that truly close the door on many students.  Indeed, what Miller calls the “beauty and necessity” of public schools in being open to all students is not met by these schools.

The list of entry requirements is extremely long. Students must submit their last two years of report card grades, two recommendations, and FOWARD exam scores to even be considered. We don’t necessarily oppose these measures—there can be value in gearing a learning environment to a certain type of student. But it is the height of hypocrisy for Miller to attack the relatively straightforward agreements required in some charters while ignoring that far stricter rules exist at some schools under MPS’s purview.

Meanwhile, 72 miles west, in Madison:

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Hillary Borrud:

Oregon teachers unions could be on the cusp of winning a state mandate for school boards to negotiate class size limits.

A bill to institute the requirement is under consideration in the state House after passing the Senate.

Adding class size to the list of issues districts must bargain over with unions would increase teachers’ power, in part because it would be another item over which they could strike.

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.

Chris Rickert:

The smaller number of F’s stands in contrast to the experience of almost all of the 15 other school districts completely or predominantly within Dane County. Fourteen districts saw more failing grades once instruction went online; only the McFarland district saw fewer failing grades in fall 2020 than in fall 2019.

Meanwhile, the percentage of students considered “chronically absent” — meaning they missed 16% or more of school days — in the Madison district increased from 21% to 27% of high schoolers from fall 2019 to fall 2020, and from 11% to 22% at the middle school level.

The increase came despite looser online school attendance standards under which students could be marked presentsimply by exchanging messages with “the homeroom teacher and any specials teacher they are scheduled to receive instruction from that day.” Madison is one of eight school districts in Wisconsin with state waivers from enforcing state attendance laws this school year. Three others are also in Dane County: Sun Prairie, Mount Horeb and Middleton-Cross Plains.

…..

Failing a class in high school also will not result in an F on a student’s report card this school year. Instead it’s an “NP,” for “no pass,” and while the student doesn’t receive credit for an NP course, the NP is not factored into the student’s GPA.

In August, the district also implementeda permanent grading change at the high schools that dictates no assignment gets a score of less than 50%, even ones that aren’t turned in. The idea is to avoid overly penalizing students who missed some assignments but proved through others that they understood the material.

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.

Madison schools lower the goal posts, yet again.

Orwell Foundation:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

Jon Garaffa:

‘Formed to meet the increasing demand for unique educational options for students in Texas’

At one online Texas institution, high schoolers learn a high-paying trade, while college is optional.

Texas Virtual Academy at Hallsville offersa tuition-free online schooling program of Hallsville Independent School District and lets students statewide from grades 3 to 12 attend class wherever there is an internet connection.

Students can specialize in one of several career tracks, including health science, information technology, and business, marketing and finance.

They also have opportunities to earn industry-recognized certificates in their field, including Microsoft certifications. Academy high school students also can earn early college credits through a dual-enrollment program at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

Christopher Bennett:

This study examines a diverse set of nearly 100 private institutions that adopted test-optional undergraduate admissions policies between 2005–2006 and 2015–2016. Using comparative interrupted time series analysis and difference-in-differences with matching, I find that test-optional policies were associated with a 3% to 4% increase in Pell Grant recipients, a 10% to 12% increase in first-time students from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds, and a 6% to 8% increase in first-time enrollment of women. Overall, I do not detect clear evidence of changes in application volume or yield rate. Subgroup analyses suggest that these patterns were generally similar for both the more selective and the less selective institutions examined. These findings provide evidence regarding the potential — and the limitations — of using test-optional policies to improve equity in admissions.

Miriam Katawazi:

Ontario teachers’ unions are sounding the alarm after the provincial government announced its holding consultations on whether or not to make online learning options a permanent choice for families once the pandemic ends.

Union leaders and parents voiced their concerns during a news conference on Wednesday, saying the plans will undermine Ontario’s publically funded education system and will harm students.

“Their plan to make online classes permanent means a student could go from Kindergarten to Grade 12 without ever setting foot inside a school,” Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), told reporters.

“They’re planning to make virtual learning permanent while undermining Ontario’s publicly funded education system. It’s a plan that they’re busy working on behind closed doors during a global pandemic.”

According to a confidential presentation by the ministry of education first obtained by The Globe and Mail in March, the government is considering three forms of online school.

Josh Mitchell:

The federal budget assumes the government will recover 96 cents of every dollar borrowers default on. That sounded high to Mr. Courtney because in the private sector 20 cents would be more appropriate for defaulted consumer loans that aren’t backed by an asset.

He asked Education Department budget officials how they calculated that number. They told him that when borrowers default, the government often puts them into new loans. These pay off the old loans, and this is considered a recovery, even though in many cases the borrowers haven’t repaid anything and default on the new loans as well.

In reality, the government is likely to recover just 51% to 63% of defaulted amounts, according to Mr. Courtney’s forecast in a 144-page report of his findings, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“If you accounted this way in the private sector, you wouldn’t be in business anymore,” Mrs. DeVos said in a December interview. “You’d probably be behind bars.”

Lucy Warwick-Ching:

Cramped housing

I absolutely cannot relate to mid career professionals being glad to be at home in their leafy three bedroom houses with gardens, when I have to have mid afternoon calls with the sound of my flatmates frying fish for lunch in the background. — A 20-year-old female reader living in London

The burden of student loans

Student loans feel like a unique problem for our generation. I can’t think of a similarity in the past when youth had such large financial burdens that can’t be discharged in most cases. Not that cancellation is necessarily the right choice. I knew what I signed up for, but what was the alternative, work in a coffee shop while the rest of my generation bettered themselves?

Mortgages and car payments just aren’t comparable to the $100k in loans I’ve been forced to deal with since I was 22. The rest seems similar. We have climate change and equality, my parents generations had communist totalitarian governments, nuclear war and . . . equality. — Matt, who works in Chicago, US

Mismatched ideas

The older generation has never understood that while our pay has increased it has been wiped out by extortionate rise in property prices. The older generation also thinks young people only enjoy spending money on experiences rather than saving money, which is not true. — A 30-year-old engineer living in the UK

Living with uncertainty

Older generations don’t feel the uncertainty we younger generation live with. Now it is more common for us to have more temporary jobs, for example, the gig economy. This uncertainty makes planning for future harder and makes taking risks impossible. — Ahmed, a lecturer living in Egypt

Scrap stamp duty on housing

The government needs to sort out house prices and stop inflating them. It should also scrap stamp duty and introduce annual property taxes instead. — A 25-year-old investment banker living in London

Rory Linnane:

Just over two weeks into a transition back to in-person learning, Milwaukee Public Schools has shut down five full schools and an additional 51 classrooms due to COVID cases. The district has 152 schools.

Under MPS’ plan, classroom closures are triggered by a single positive test, prompting all students in that class to transition to virtual learning for two weeks. Three positive tests in a school trigger a full school closure.

The MPS COVID dashboard showed five school closures as of Friday afternoon:

Academy of Accelerated Learning
Eighty-First Street School
Garland Elementary School
Manitoba School
Milwaukee German Immersion School

The dashboard showed 51 classroom closures at 22 additional schools. MPS spokesperson Earl Arms said some schools may have multiple classroom closures from the same single case if, for example, a student or staff member tested positive after spending time in multiple classrooms.

Efinstitute:

Follow the map.

Jerry Stratton:

There’s an old saying about people who say one thing, and act like they believe the opposite. They obviously don’t believe their own words. They might be lying, but they might also merely believe that only other people ought to follow the rules they make.

They might even believe that everyone, including themselves, should follow the rules—but only in the abstract. Everyone else is always abstract, but they easily come up with specific reasons why they, themselves, should be exempt in this particular case. They have Reasons for not following their own rules, while not recognizing that everyone else will also have Reasons.

This blindness is not uncommon among people in general; the problem with government administrators and government experts is that they actually get to make rules that only other people have to follow. Government “experts” are still trying to bring back the 55 mph speed limit, and repeal the 85th percentile rule1, despite all of the hard evidence about how many lives were lost the last time we tried that. Of course, when they’re on the road, they’ll have good Reasons for exceeding those limits, just like they did the last time around.

Julian Borger:

Richard Nelsson, the Guardian’s information manager and archivist, emailed me a picture of the ad in January. Its existence had been the subject of family myth, but I had never seen it before. Its emotive impact took me by surprise – three lines of anguish, from parents willing to give up their only child in the hope he would be safe. The Nazi annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, had taken place five months before my father’s ad was placed, while the Nuremberg race laws had been imposed in May, stripping Jews of basic rights. Groups of Nazi Sturmabteilung, the brownshirted SA, had free rein in Vienna to beat and humiliate Jews.

My father was identified as a Jew by his classmates and at one point was grabbed by an SA gang, who locked him inside the local synagogue. My grandfather Leo, who owned a radio and musical instrument shop, was summoned to Gestapo headquarters to register. He was ordered, like other Viennese Jews, to get down on his hands and knees and wash the pavement, in front of jeering crowds.

Samuel Axon:

Based on the data from those one million apps, Flurry Analytics says US users agree to be tracked only four percent of the time. The global number is significantly higher at 12 percent, but that’s still below some advertising companies’ estimates.

The data from Flurry Analytics shows users rejecting tracking at much higher rates than were predicted by surveys that were conducted before iOS 14.5 went live. One of those surveys found that just shy of 40 percent, not 4 percent, would opt in to tracking when prompted.

Investable Universe:

Linux Foundation noted in its official AgStack announcement on Wednesday that 33 percent of all food produced is wasted, while nine percent of the people in the world are hungry or undernourished. These societal drivers are compounded with legacy technology systems that are too slow and inefficient and can’t work across the growing and more complex agricultural supply chain. AgStack will use collaboration and open source software to build a 21st century digital infrastructure that it says will be a catalyst for innovation on new applications, efficiencies and scale.

Dana Loesch:

In total, CCAP mentions “equity” 135 times and focuses on behavioral conditioning, not education. Agreeing to CCAP would mean accepting the view that our republic is irrevocably flawed and that the absence of racism is impossible—and that opportunity and resources must be allocated to reflect this disparity. This is what critical race theorists mean by “equity.” Whereas “equality” treats everyone the same regardless the circumstance, “equity” treats everyone differently because of the circumstance.

Southlake parents recognized this danger masquerading as education and clearly articulated their objections based on the publicized facts of the plan.

Comment.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

In a startling new report, Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, announced that allowing white families to adopt Black children from the foster care system “can cause a lot of harm to children of color.” As a result, the agency favors “overhauling” the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which bars racial discrimination in placing a child into an adoptive family. As part of its “long journey toward becoming an anti-racist organization,” Bethany’s leaders now believe a child’s race should be considered “as part of the best interest determination for child placement.”

How the agency arrived at this backward view—that determining the most welcoming, stable and potentially permanent home for a child should involve matching their skin color with that of the adults involved—is worth understanding both because it bodes ill for the tens of thousands of children of all races who need permanent homes and because it demonstrates just how quickly our understanding of discrimination has shifted in recent years.

In 2017, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of two same-sex couples, claiming that by contracting with religious agencies like Bethany that don’t place children with gay couples, the state was engaged in discrimination. While Bethany was only responsible for placing 12 percent of the state’s foster children and there were many other agencies in the state that did serve gay couples and no evidence that any gay couples were unable to adopt in Michigan, the ACLU lawyers maintained that allowing agencies to be exempt from the state’s nondiscrimination rules because of their religious beliefs could be the difference “between a child finding a permanent loving home or staying in the system.” (The Supreme Court will be deciding a similar case this month involving the city of Philadelphia and Catholic Charities.)

Alejandro Lazo and Ian Lovett:

When Siniya Longino arrived for her first day of in-person eighth grade in San Francisco last week, there was only one other student in the classroom. Everyone else was remote, as were all of her teachers. Siniya logs into Zoom on her laptop from her desk to see them.

“I personally would have preferred to stay at home,” Siniya said. “I just feel like there’s no point.”

In San Francisco and Los Angeles, tens of thousands of middle- and high-school students returned to classrooms last week for what some parents are calling “Zoom in a Room.” The unusual model, in which students sit at desks with laptops learning remotely while an adult supervises them, is the latest twist in the slow reopening of public schools here in the nation’s most populous state.

Although it currently has the lowest per capita Covid-19 rate of any state, California has the highest percentage of school districts still entirely virtual, at nearly 13%, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn tracker. The nationwide rate is 4%.

One large California school district, Santa Ana, isn’t opening at all this school year. And while many students across the nation are using computers at least some of the time, the “Zoom in a Room” format in L.A. and San Francisco isn’t common, according to education researchers.

Me2B Alliance:

What you need to know:

• 60% of school apps were sending student data to a variety of third parties, including advertising platforms like Google and Facebook
• On average, there were more than 10 third-party data channels per app
• Public-school apps are more likely to send student data to third parties than private-school apps (67% public vs. 57% of private school apps)
• 18% of public-school apps included very high-risk third parties – i.e., third parties that further share data with possibly hundreds or thousands of networked entities
• Android apps are much more likely than iOS apps to be sending data to third parties, and are much more likely to be sending to high or very high-risk third parties

Me2B Alliance, a non-profit industry group focused on respectful technology, today published a research report to drive awareness to the data sharing practices of education apps associated with schools and school districts. According to the research findings, 60% of school apps were sending student data to a variety of third parties, including advertising platforms like Google and Facebook.

Tim Murtaugh:

Barely a day passes anymore without one or more major corporate news outlets exposing their liberal bias, sometimes by how they frame stories, sometimes by the massive errors they commit, and sometimes by the mistakes they make in groups. In recent weeks there have been a series of glaring examples in which members of the mainstream press have not exactly covered themselves in journalistic glory, and they extend a pattern in journalism that is disturbing.

In the Dallas suburb of Southlake this week, local elections made national news largely because of controversial left-wing attempts to impose critical race theory on public school students. While sounding benign on its face, critical race theory in schools is actually the indoctrination of children with the notion that people are either oppressed or oppressors, depending on the color of their skin.

After the election results were in, NBC News tweeted that the “opponents of anti-racism education” were the winners, adopting the language of the program’s proponents and making those who oppose it seem, well, pro–racism.

NBC favorably referred to critical race theory as a “school diversity plan” rejected by voters in the “wealthy Dallas-Fort Worth suburb,” making sure that readers understood that not only were these people pro-racism, they were also rich, thereby doubling their sins.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Upon further investigation, it was discovered there was evidence a camera may have been installed in the smoke detector with the approval of district staff in September 2019 in an effort to document “an employee discipline issue related to work rule violations,” according to a statement released by the district.

The district hired a third-party investigator, MWH Law Group LLP, upon conclusion of the Madison Police Department investigation into the incident in February. Madison Police determined no crime had been committed. LeMonds said the district will not be releasing the full third-party investigative report, citing attorney-client privilege. 

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Daniel Markovits:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In early-19th-century society—an aristocratic world of inherited wealth—marriage occupied center stage. A good spouse was an all-purpose resource: essential for moving up in the world, as for Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, or for sustaining a dynasty, as for the object of her affections, Mr. Darcy.

School and work were not a path to wealth and status—certainly not for women, nor even for men. Elites were indifferent to education and disdained work. The landed gentry in Pride and Prejudice look down on Elizabeth’s working uncle, no matter that he gets his income from “a very respectable line of trade.” The economic facts on the ground supported their antipathy. The highest-paying jobs tended to be in government. But even at the end of the century, an elite English civil servant made just 17.8 times the median wage, and his American counterpart just 7.8 times. Mr. Darcy’s £10,000 a year from inherited capital was more than 300 times the median wage.

Robert Lee Hotz:

Imagine pigs with human hearts or mice whose brains have a spark of human intelligence. Scientists are cultivating a flock of such experimental creations, called chimeras, by injecting potent human cells into mice, rats, pigs and cows. They hope the new combinations might one day be used to grow human organs for transplants, study human illnesses or to test new drugs.

In the latest advance, researchers in the U.S. and China announced earlier this month that they made embryos that combined human and monkey cells for the first time. So far, these human-monkey chimeras (pronounced ky-meer-uhs) are no more than bundles of budding cells in a lab dish, but the implications are far-reaching, ethics experts say. The use of primates so closely related to humans raises concerns about unintended consequences, animal welfare and the moral status of hybrid embryos, even if the scientific value of the work may be quite high.

“There were lots of breakthroughs in this experiment,” says bioethicist Nita Farahany of Duke University. “A remarkable step has been taken scientifically that raises urgent issues of public concern. We need to figure out what the right pathway forward is to help guide responsible progress.”

Will Flanders and Jessica Holmberg:

For every example like this that generates media coverage, there are probably 10 more that don’t. It is critical that parents are aware of what is being taught in their child’s schools. Children may not always know when they are being indoctrinated, and it can be extremely difficult for parents to discover what is being taught.

For example, WILL conducted an open records investigation into the 10 largest districts in the state asking for any teaching materials which include specified “woke” terms. Unfortunately, we found receiving the relevant information to be a tedious, time-consuming, and costly task. For instance, during a Zoom call with two representatives from Racine School District to discuss the records request, we were told by one representative that she did not “believe teachers would fulfill this request,” that the request would take “thousands of hours of work,” and would have a large location fee associated. In the same call we were also told the district wasn’t teaching any of the requested terms anyway—even sending us the district controversial teachings policy—and that the request included too many teachers to manageably fulfill (17 teachers.) One can only imagine how defeated and unsure a parent would feel after such a call.

Later, after consulting with an attorney at WILL, we informed the district we would pay any associated fees; however, we would not modify the request by reducing the number of teachers as the request fell within the parameters of the law. Within 10 business days, the school district fulfilled the request without payment, including all 17 teachers and included teaching materials that directly contradicted their claim about not teaching any of the requested terms. And although the request was eventually completed it took a lot of time and effort on our end and even required the use of an attorney, something which cannot be expected of any parent.

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.

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

Academic Freedom Alliance:

The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), founded in March by more than 200 faculty across the U.S., announced today the successful conclusion of two cases in which it intervened on behalf of professors facing threats of termination over constitutionally protected speech. Yesterday, the University of San Diego declined to take disciplinary action against Professor Tom Smith over his criticisms of China. Earlier this week, the University of Rhode Island dropped its proceedings against Professor Donna Hughes over her comments about gender and sexuality.

“We can think of no better way to celebrate the two-month anniversary of the AFA’s founding than to have our first two cases resolved successfully,” said Keith Whittington, chair of the AFA’s Academic Committee. “These investigations should never have been launched to begin with, but we are pleased that Professors Smith and Hughes can now move on with their scholarship. These victories seemed unlikely just days ago, and they provide powerful proof of concept for the solidarity and legal defense provided by the AFA.”

Sabrina Tavernise:

How the declining birthrate could profoundly shape the nation’s future.

michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]
A few days ago, the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Sabrina Tavernise about why that is and just how profoundly it could shape America’s future.

It’s Tuesday, May 4.

astead herndon
So Sabrina, when the U.S. government finished counting the American people this time in the census, it found that the American population was growing really slowly. That was a bit surprising to me personally. What’s going on here?

sabrina tavernise
So this is a very interesting and relatively new thing for the United States. We have this extremely slow population increase, which is different for the United States. The United States usually grows really quickly. What we saw with the census data was the second-slowest decade for population growth in American history. That is since 1790, when the United States government started taking the census. So that’s really surprising. We had known that there was some slowdown for some time, but this census data really tells us this is really the new normal in the United States.

astead herndon
So population is growing at a slower rate. How do we explain this?

Abortion notes, links and data. Choose life.

Zoe Kleinman:

There remains “little association” between technology use and mental-health problems, a study of more than 430,000 10 to 15-year-olds suggests.

The Oxford Internet Institute compared TV viewing, social-media and device use with feelings of depression, suicidal tendencies and behavioural problems.

It found a small drop in association between depression and social-media use and TV viewing, from 1991 to 2019, 

There was a small rise in that between emotional issues and social-media use.

Robby Soave:

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidance to help summer camps mitigate their coronavirus risk. Given that summer camps involve both children and the outdoors—two factors that render COVID-19 significantly less worrisome—and will be opening in the wake of widespread vaccination, one might have expected the CDC to depart from its characteristic over-caution.

Nope: This is among the most restrictive, unrealistic guidance the agency has released during the pandemic. It’s more limiting than the CDC’s guidance for vaccinated people exercising outside more generally. If followed, summer campers would be miserable, deprived of physical contact, and in considerable danger of overheating. The government has essentially recommended that summer camps treat kids like prisoners.

Here are just some of the restrictions:

• Everyone at the camp—including staff and every kid over the age of two—must wear masks at all times, unless they are eating or swimming. They should wear two layers of masks, especially when social distancing is difficult, regardless of “whether activities are indoors or outdoors.”
• Campers should be placed in “cohorts,” and their interaction with people outside the cohort must be limited.
• There should always be at least three feet between campers of the same cohort, and six feet between campers of different cohorts. Staff should keep six feet away from campers at all times, whether inside or outside. Distance should be maintained while eating, napping, or riding the bus: The CDC suggests seating kids in alternating rows.
• The use of physical objects that might be shared among kids—toys, art supplies, electronics—should be limited wherever possible.
• Camps should not permit close-contact sports and indoor sports, and should require masks regardless.
• If anyone is curious there are separate restrictions for outdoor gardening.

Nicholas Moellman & Danko Tarabar:

We analyse the role of culture in economic freedom reform and dispersion in an unbalanced panel of up to 80 countries, and in dyadic models with up to 3,003 unique country pairs. We find that a sense of individualism strengthens the effectiveness of democracy in promoting economic freedom within countries over 1950-2015, and that institutional distance between countries increases in their cultural distance, suggesting an important role of culture in determining long-run institutional equilibria. Our results are robust to a large variety of socio-economic controls, measures of institutions and measures of bilateral geographic, economic and demographic distances.

Will Flanders:

Recently, Milwaukee College Prep (MCP) charter schools and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) failed to make an agreement for continued authorization. This ends a ten year relationship between MCP and MPS, and once again highlights the horrific environment for public charters in the city of Milwaukee due largely to the power of teachers unions.

The four MCP schools that are authorized by MPS are some of the highest-performing in the city. The table below shows proficiency in English/Language Arts between MPS and each of the schools on the most recent round of the Forward Exam. MPS proficiency overall remains woeful. Less than 20% of students districtwide were found to be proficient on the exam. In contrast, proficiency rates in MCP charters are far higher–more than double the MPS proficiency rates in all but one case.

Shoshana Wodinsky:

A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positiveplatform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users using Instagram’s own adtech tools. 

The actual idea behind the ad campaign is pretty simple. Because Instagram and Facebook share the same ad platform, any data that gets hoovered up while you’re scrolling your Insta or Facebook feeds gets fed into the same cesspool of data, which can be used to target you on either platform later. 

Across each of these platforms, you’re also able to target people using a nearly infinite array of data points collected by Facebook’s herd of properties. That data includes basic details, like your age or what city you might live in. It may also include more granular points: say, whether you’re looking for a new home, whether you’re single, or whether you’re really into energy drinks.

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

The Capital Times:

Madison has a great public schools system that faces great challenges. A year of pandemic-required distance learning made existing vulnerabilities and inequities all the more serious. Now, as the COVID-19 threat is easing, and as the schools are reopening, it is impossible to avoid the evidence of the work that must be done to address immediate concerns for students who have struggled in this period, as well as longer-term concerns over achievement gaps, curriculum choices and lingering debates over policing and safety.

Yet, as Albert Einstein observed long ago, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

To our view, there is no issue facing the Madison Metropolitan School District that cannot be addressed with dynamic leadership, and we believe the Madison School Board now has just that.

Last week, Ali Muldrow was elected board president and Savion Castro was elected vice president, as the members of the elected body that oversees Madison’s schools embraced the vision laid out by two of this city’s most thoughtful and engaged young leaders.

Muldrow and Castro both have deep roots in Madison. They know the schools well, from personal experience — as MMSD graduates — and from long histories of involvement with education issues.

They are ready to face the challenges, and seize the opportunities, of a moment when so much is up for grabs.

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.

California Department of Education:

The State Board of Education adopted the Mathematics Framework on November 6, 2013. Curriculum frameworks provide guidance to educators, parents, and publishers, to support implementing California content standards.

---

2021 Revision of the Mathematics Framework

The California Department of Education (CDE), Instructional Quality Commission, and State Board of Education have commenced the revision process for the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve (Mathematics Framework). Information and updates concerning the revision of the Mathematics Framework will be posted here.

• Schedule of Significant Events for the 2021 Revision of the Mathematics Framework
  At its meeting on May 7, 2020, the State Board of Education (SBE) revised the Schedule of Significant Events (Timeline) for the 2021 Revision of Mathematics Framework. The Timeline was originally approved by the SBE on May 8, 2019, and was previously revised on September 11, 2019. 

Mathematics Framework First Field Review

Comments were received from February 8 through April 8, 2021.

Public Comment for Draft Mathematics Framework 

At its January 21–22, 2021, meeting, the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) approved the draft Mathematics Framework for public review and comment. The public review and comment period is an opportunity for interested individuals or organizations to provide comments and suggested edits to the IQC. The comment and suggestions received will be reviewed by the IQC/Mathematics Subject Matter Committee at its meeting on May 19–20, 2021, when the IQC is expected to recommend a revised draft for a second public review to take place in June and July, 2021.

Jason Reilly:

Cal­i­for­nia, which is the most pop­u­lous state and cur­rently has the low­est per capita Covid rate in the coun­try, also has the high­est per­cent­age of school dis­tricts that re­main en­tirely vir­tual. Teach­ers unions have used the pan­demic to de­mand more money and more-gen­er­ous ben­e­fits. They know that mil­lions of Amer­i­cans can’t re­turn to work if kids can’t re­turn to schools. For par­ents it’s a dilemma, but unions see it as lever­age. The United Teach­ers of Los An­ge­les re­quested free child care for its mem­bers as a con­di­tion for re­turn­ing to the class­room. Union clout is the main rea­son that Cal­i­for­nia’s per­cent­age of all-vir­tual school dis­tricts is more than three times the na­tional av­er­age.

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.

Elizabeth Hernandez:

Visiting scholar John Eastman laid the groundwork to sue the University of Colorado Boulder on Thursday, filing a legal claim alleging defamation and violation of his First Amendment rights over school leaders’ response to his role in efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election.

The six-page notice of claim, a necessary precursor to suing the university, also alleges breach of contract, and indicates Eastman will seek at least $1.9 million in damages, including nearly $20,000 that remains in a CU research account and $1.85 million in future salary he alleges he can’t earn because of “reputational harm.”

The invention of the internal combustion engine in the 19th century has revolutionized transportation over land, water, and air. Despite their omnipresence in modern day, the operation of an engine may be cryptic. Over the course of this article I’d like to explain the functionality of all the basic engine parts shown in the demonstration below. You can drag it around to see it from other angles:

It’s hard to talk about a mechanical device without visualizing its motion, so many demonstrations in this blog post are animated. By default all animations are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or if you want to save power, you can globally pause them.

An engine like this may seem complicated, but we will build it up from first principles. In fact, we’ll start with a significantly simpler way of generating a rotational motion.

iCivics:

As we approach the end of the 2020-2021 school year, we owe our nation’s civics and history teachers our deepest gratitude. This has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging school years in recent memory for all teachers, but amid cascading social and political crises, it has been particularly challenging for those who teach about our history and system of government. Civics and history teachers deserve special recognition and appreciation for a job well done through such uncertain times. 

Together, iCivics, Facing History and Ourselves, the Bill of Rights Institute, National Constitution Center, the Center for Civic Education, the Ashbrook Center, Generation Citizen, and Mikva Challenge want to send this message of gratitude to civics and history teachers across the nation.

Ellen McCarthy:

Melissa Bernstein creates toys intended to delight and comfort children. They’re seemingly simple, no flashing lights or blaring noises. We’re talking about metal tea sets. Astronaut costumes. Farm-animal magnets. Wooden puzzles. Puppet theaters. The kinds of toys that today’s grandparents would’ve loved when they were children. The kinds of toys that bridge generational gaps, that evoke a feeling of getting back to something.

Joanne Jacobs:

Today, Andrew Libson, a physics teacher at San Francisco’s Mission High School, will be in a San Francisco park teaching children and their parents about circuits.

The district investigated Libson for teaching his students in a park during spring break,  but he received only a slap on the wrist, reports Kate Selig for Mission Local.
“News of the investigation quickly drew widespread blowback on social media from community members.”

In a letter to Libson, Mission High principal Pirette McKamey said he’d violated a health order by teaching students from more than three households.

Libson’s March 29 outdoor learning event over spring break involved 11 students and some of their family members; he led them in an activity about circuits, with Covid safety protocols enforced. The event was entirely optional for students, and students were required to get the consent of their parents before attending.

Mission High reopened on April 26 only for special-needs students.

NY Post Editorial:

On his Facebook page, Ian Serotkin of the Loudoun County School Board explained the “equity” issue involves the current tracking system, which makes it hard for kids to “get to calculus later on if they weren’t sufficiently accelerated in middle school.” But he rightly called the end of all math acceleration until 11th grade “absolutely bananas,” as it just limits how much higher math anyone gets to take. 

That’s progressive “equity” for you: Promote “fairness” not by adding opportunity, but by removing it from those who’ve already done well. Along with all the other garbage the left is pushing on US schools, it’s an invitation for China and other competitors to leave America in the dust.

Noah Rothman:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood described the project as “wrong in so many ways.” Lauded chronicler of the Civil War, James McPherson, called the project a “one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” In these pages, author and University of Oklahoma history professor Wilfred McClay observed that the Project’s claim that America’s capitalistic ethos was an outgrowth of slavery is a byproduct of the project’s reliance on “demonstrably wrong” and long ago discarded academic theories. Its own editors describedthe “goal of the 1619 Project” not as dispassionate history but an effort to “reframe American history” and place slavery “at the very center of our national narrative.”

So, when the Department of Education published guidelines for a new grant emphasizing the “1619 Project” and advising applicants to show how they would teach “systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history” accordingly, there was plenty of room for good-faith objections. But when Sen. Mitch McConnell offered one such objection in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the reaction provoked by his request to avoid promoting a “politicized and divisive agenda” in the classroom was anything but honest.

Sauvik Das:

Don’t wait for the government to fix privacy. Any attempt to curtail and reverse the growing power of surveillance capitalism will have to start from us — the people — through grassroots mobilization.

Why?

Institutions in power do not willingly give up their power — it must be wrested from them. And, make no mistake, unilateral control over the collection and processing of personal data is one of the strongest emergent forms of power in the information age. It is the lifeblood of a trillion dollar global industry.

Sometimes a government that serves the people can be trusted do this wresting, assuming the privacy-violating institution is not the government itself. For example, anti-trust regulation can prevent the formation of exploitative corporate monopolies.

Not so when it comes to the protection of personal data. At least not yet.

Why?

Sean Illing:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

Jude Schwalbach:

The president’s budget request includes significant funding increases for:

• School districts with students from low-income households, increasing Title I funding from $16.5 billion to $36.5 billion.

• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, increasing funding from $12.9 billion to $15.5 billion.
• Head Start, the federal government’s largest preschool program, which would receive $11.9 billion, an increase of $1.2 billion.
• School districts, which would receive an additional $1 billion to increase the number of counselors, nurses, and mental health professionals in K-12 education.
• The federal Pell Grant program, which would see an increase of $400 per grant on average.

This proposal is just one piece of a massive education spending spree that began a year ago and shows no sign of stopping.

Ann Althouse:

There was some concern expressed yesterday over the “remarkable slackening” in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don’t maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don’t worry about it, less population growth is good for the environment. But if you took the other side of that debate… you’d better worry about women declining the option to undertake childbearing and men and women passing on the potentially fulfilling endeavor of child-rearing. It’s terribly expensive!… [Y]ou’re going to have to incentivize reproduction a little bit.

Abortion notes, links and data. Choose life

Jon Levine:

The American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on, and even suggested language for, the federal agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February.

The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post.

The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.

“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as the CDC’s “thought partner.”

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.

Scott Girard:

Both mentioned a few areas of focus for the upcoming year, including most immediately the transition back to in-person learning as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Muldrow noted that the “vast majority of the young people we serve” are not eligible for a vaccine yet, requiring the district to continue to “provide high-quality educational opportunities” while keeping safety top of mind.

“The other thing I think that the board is really starting to think about differently is how we give our students credit for what they’ve learned about and from technology,” she said. “So how do we recognize that our students are coming back to school with all of these skills around the information age that we’ve never given students academic credit for, but that are super relevant to their ability to interact with the job market?”

Broadly, Castro and Muldrow have similar priorities from when they began on the board, including early childhood education, as the district plans a full-day 4-year-old kindergarten pilot program at eight schools next year. They hope it’s one way among multiple strategies to begin to close the longstanding opportunity gaps between students of color and their white peers.

“Making sure that the color of a kid’s skin isn’t a determining factor in whether or not they’re going to be able to read, whether or not they’re going to be perceived as disruptive or talented and gifted,” Muldrow said.

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.

Rory Linnane:

Schlifske also said that Northwestern Mutual will be reaching out to others in the philanthropic and business community to support the goal of an additional 5,000 seats in “high-quality schools” by 2025, as measured by state report cards based on standardized tests and other metrics.

Schlifske’s op-ed specifically criticized MPS board members over the district’s loss of Milwaukee College Prep charter school network. The schools, which have operated under contract with MPS, are moving to a contract with UW-Milwaukee after MPS held back incentive funding.

Milwaukee College Prep is suing MPS over the funding. In addition, losing the network of four high-performing schools will cost MPS revenue.

“Instead of focusing upon improvement and quality outcomes, our community finds itself in a divisive debate over the types of schools students attend,” he wrote in the piece for the Journal Sentinel.

Madison’s business community continues to sleep amidst long term, disastrous reading results

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.

Michael Horn:

That means, as Stephen Covey wrote in one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” beginning “with the end in mind.” Or, as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote in the context of education in “Understanding by Design,” good teachers start with the goals and how they would know if students have met them and then backwards map all the things they need to provide to get to those outcomes.

Although it’s unlikely there will be any consensus across all communities in the country around a central purpose, that’s OK. That’s part of a robust pluralism underlying our democracy that values the fact that students sit in different circumstances and will have different needs.

But clarity in any specific schooling community is critical.

To help school communities think through what’s the purpose of schooling, a little history can help, as the dominant policy rationale for public schools’ purpose in society has changed over time. In “Disrupting Class,” Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and I offered a brief history of these shifts.

Through much of the 1800s, a kind reading of history would say that the central role of public schools was to preserve the American democracy and inculcate democratic values.

Libby Sobic:

As Congress doles out billions of dollars for K–12 schools, charter schools already receive a much smaller portion of the education-funding pie. Currently Congress appropriates $440 million for the CSP, which is just 1 percent of U.S. Department of Education spending on K–12.

However, the CSP has been critical to the growth and sustainability of charter schools throughout many states. For instance, in 2017 Wisconsin received a five-year award of $95 million from the CSP. In the City of Milwaukee alone, seven charter schools were recipients of more than $5 million in CSP grants over the last three years. Elsewhere, in 2020, the Florida Department of Education received a five-year grant of over $78 million in charter funding through the CSP, the California Department of Education received a three-year grant of more than $41 million, and Texas received a five-year grant of $100 million.

These funds are used to plan and implement charter schools with a focus on improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students.

Sophia Perricone:

University of Toledo students are speaking out after the Office of Diversity awarded law professor Lee Strang the 2021 Inclusive Excellence Award.

A current law student who asked to remain anonymous said in his opinion, Strang is not the clear winner.

“His views are not exactly in tune with, I guess you can say, modern diversity and views most professors would hold,” the student said.

And he isn’t alone. Students and alumni on Facebook pointed to an opinion piece written by Strang while at Harvard University in 2003.

In the article, he called homosexuality harmful, writing that “a corrupt society that does not seek to prevent homosexual activity makes it more difficult for us to properly raise our children.”

In a recent statement shared with law students, Strang said he regrets writing portions of past columns and that he wouldn’t make “arguments using this kind of language today.”

Mary Norris:

It’s hard not to mythologize Bryan A. Garner. He is the Herakles of English usage. As a boy growing up in Texas, he lugged Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged) to school one day to settle an argument with a teacher. When he was sixteen, he discovered “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” and swallowed it whole. By the time he was an undergraduate, he knew that he wanted to write a usage dictionary. Instead of going into academia or publishing, the traditional career paths for English majors, he went into law, a field where his prodigious language skills could have broad applications. His first usage dictionary was “Modern Legal Usage,” published in 1987. “Garner’s Modern American Usage” came out in 1998 and is in its fourth edition; with a significant tweaking of the title, it’s now “Garner’s Modern English Usage.” Move over, Henry Fowler.

Garner’s success—he is a highly sought-after speaker among lawyers and lexicographers—has enabled him to indulge his passions as a bibliophile and an antiquarian. A selection of sixty-eight items from the Garner Collection is on view at the Grolier Club (47 East Sixtieth Street, through May 15th), with a sumptuous hardcover limited-edition catalogue that serves as a companion guide. To enter the exhibit, titled “Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar (1713-1851),” via a discreet door on the second-floor landing of a stairwell at the Grolier, is to climb aboard the Grammarama ride at Disneyland for Nerds.

Keith E. Whittington:

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, institutions of higher education in the United States face an existential threat. Even if they can survive their current budget crisis, what kind of institutions will American universities and colleges be in a decade’s time?

One crucial front in the war over the university pits defenders of the free-ranging pursuit of truth against those who would put political limits on such inquiries. For most of higher education’s history, this dispute was between advocates of academic freedom inside the universities and skeptics of it who were outside. On behalf of conventional mores or the community’s political and economic interests, politicians, or donors, took the position that the pursuit of knowledge is all well and good…until it threatens vital orthodoxies. The example of Socrates has always been both an inspiration and a warning. Heterodox gadflies tend to get swatted.

In the 21st century, however, academic freedom’s most determined adversaries are inside rather than outside academia. A growing army on college campuses would like to restrict the scope of intellectual debate by subjecting academic inquiry to political litmus tests. Over the 20th century, American universities’ students and faculty pushed to make them havens for heretics, dissenters, iconoclasts, and nonconformists. In the wake of their success, many scholars now demand that campuses adhere to their own orthodoxies. Until recently I would have said that many students and faculty want the range of intellectual debate on a college campus to be narrower than the offerings in the New York Times’s op-ed pages. But now, of course, the college graduates hired by the Times are scrubbing its op-ed pages of heresies as well.

John Danaher:

I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argument is both simple and complex.

It is simple because in every legal case there is, in essence, one basic type of argument at the core of the dispute between the parties. This argument works from a general legal rule to a conclusion about the application of that rule to a set of facts. Philosophers and logicians would say that the basic form of legal argument is a syllogism: a simple three-step argument involving a major premise (a general principle or rule), a minor premise (a claim about a particular case or scenario) and then a conclusion (an application of the general rule to the particular case). 

Here is a simple conditional syllogism:

Henry Olsen:

President Biden and congressional Democrats seem determined to raise taxes on the rich, especially the rate paid on capital gains. If they’re really serious about this, there’s one sector of American wealth that is undertaxed even by today’s standards: universities and foundations.

The amount of wealth held by major colleges and large grant-making foundations is astounding. The National Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual study found that 107 institutions held endowments of $1 billion or more as of June 30, 2019. Together, these institutions of higher earning held $494 billion in assets, or roughly a tenth of the total net worth of all individual billionaires in the United States combined. The university figure is surely much higher today.

Charitable foundations hold even more wealth. One estimate found they held more than $1 trillionin assets in 2017, with the richest five alone holding nearly $100 billion between them. Given that the stock market has risen more than 50 percent since then, their portfolios should be hundreds of billions of dollars richer. That means America’s charitable foundations and billionaire universities hold at least $1.5 trillion in assets. That’s far more wealth than that of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the founders of Google and Oracle combined.

Philip S. Babcock Mindy Marks:

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

Luke Rosiak:

Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.

Natalie Fallert, EdD, 6-12 Literacy Speech Coordinator, wrote to all middle and high school principals that parents had repeatedly complained that “we are pushing an agenda,” “we are pushing Critical Race Theory (I had to look this one up!),” “we are making white kids feel bad about their privilege,” we are “stereotyping,” “we are teaching kids to be social activists,” and “we are teaching kids to be democratic thinkers and activists.”

The problem was that, for the first time, parents could see what teachers were telling their children thanks to virtual learning, where assignments were visible for at-home learners in a tool called Canvas.

Joanne Jacobs:

The competency marketplace — a digital hub for job seekers, employers and postsecondary skills providers — is taking a step toward reality, writes Paul on The Job.

The idea is the brainchild of author and investor Ryan Craig, writes Fain. It would “allow learners to see the skills or competencies they need to land posted jobs, with the site then offering applicable online courses and programs from featured colleges and other providers. Employers could recruit completers directly from the hub.”

Among those working on the idea are LinkedIn, the  Markle Foundation’s Skillful and Unmudl, writes Fain.

Unmudl features non-degree online and hybrid courses from seven partner community colleges, explains Julian Alssid of SocialTech.ai, a public benefit corporation that created the course marketplace.

Matt Taibbi:

The effort by the “SALT caucus” to hold a $2 trillion relief bill hostage in order to help what they’re calling “struggling families” in the “middle class” is just the latest development in a years-long saga revealing Congress at its phoniest and most shameless.

This issue that “means so much to the American people,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is really a niche matter concerning a sliver of the most well-off Americans in a handful of blue states, who were made the target of a political prank of sorts by the Trump administration in 2017.

There are a lot of people who own homes in blue states, could use the deduction, probably don’t think of themselves as rich, and would balk at the idea that repealing the cap would be a luxury giveaway. The story has been framed in the press as more of an everyman issue, and the fact that most of the money at stake involves people at the very top of the curve has been obscured.

The start of this story was classic Trump. Looking for ways to help pay for his own monster tax break at the end of 2017, the Donald decided to poke Democrats with a long stick, via the cap on the unlimited state and local tax deduction.

Zack Needles:

As Law.com’s Amanda Bronstad reported back in October, judges, faced with a lack of specific written contracts in these cases, have been forced to look to other sources, such as tuition agreements and marketing materials, to determine whether an institution for higher learning had made a pact to provide in-person learning.

“I would have told you 15 years ago these claims have no chance, but today I can’t be that predictive—you may see some judges who think, well, promises were made and representations made, there’s some contract,” Peter Lake, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida, told Bronstad at the time. “My guess is somewhere, someplace, some judges are going to evolve claims against institutions in ways that wouldn’t have been obvious 10 to 15 years ago.”

Josh Mitchell:

hat sounded high to Mr. Courtney because in the private sector 20 cents would be more appropriate for defaulted consumer loans that aren’t backed by an asset.

He asked Education Department budget officials how they calculated that number. They told him that when borrowers default, the government often puts them into new loans. These pay off the old loans, and this is considered a recovery, even though in many cases the borrowers haven’t repaid anything and default on the new loans as well.

In reality, the government is likely to recover just 51% to 63% of defaulted amounts, according to Mr. Courtney’s forecast in a 144-page report of his findings, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“If you accounted this way in the private sector, you wouldn’t be in business anymore,” Mrs. DeVos said in a December interview. “You’d probably be behind bars.”

Mr. Courtney’s calculation was one of several supporting the disclosure in a Journal article last fall that taxpayers could ultimately be on the hook for roughly a third of the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. This could amount to more than $500 billion, exceeding what taxpayers lost on the saving-and-loan crisis 30 years ago.

If Mr. Courtney is right, there are big implications for taxpayers and families alike. While defaulted student loans can’t cause the federal government to go bankrupt the way bad mortgage lending upended banks during the financial crisis, they expose a similar problem: Billions of dollars lent based on flawed assumptions about whether the money can be repaid.

WUWM:

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is set to lose 2,000 students and at least $4 million next year, as charter school network Milwaukee College Prep (MCP) cuts ties with the district.

MPS has contracts with 15 independent charter schools, including the four MCP locations. The charter schools are independently-run but publicly-funded, and are accountable to the MPS Board.

MCP’s departure is one sign of growing tension between MPS and the charter schools under its umbrella.

On a windy day in late April, staff at Milwaukee College Prep’s North Avenue campus are greeting students as they get dropped off at three separate entrances for social distancing purposes.

Someone asked me yesterday why schools aren’t mainly open in San Francisco (despite 30 cases in city of 896K yesterday (& they test), <10 hospitalizations) or California (hundreds of thousand of tests done, 1400 cases in state of 40 million, lowest case rate in nation).

— Monica Gandhi MD, MPH (@MonicaGandhi9) April 27, 2021

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.

Garret Lewis:

Hundreds of parents showed up to the Vail School Board meeting to demand the board make masks optional. The board didn’t want to hear it so they walked out of the meeting before it even began. So the parents, under Robert’s Rules of Order, voted in a new school board. Then, the new members voted to end the mask requirement in Vail Schools. The old school board members revealed exactly who they are and that includes GOP LD 10 Chairman, Chris King.

University of South Australia:

More sleep could offset children’s excess indulgence over the school holidays as new research from the University of South Australia shows that the same decline in body mass index may be achieved by either extra sleep or extra exercise.

The striking new finding is part of a study that shows how children can achieve equivalent physical and mental health benefits by choosing different activity trade-offs across the 24-hour day.

Conducted in partnership with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and supported by the National Heart Foundation of Australia, the team examined the optimal balance between children’s physical activity, sleep, and sedentary time across the 24-hour day to better inform tailored lifestyle choices.

On a minute-for-minute basis, moderate-to-vigorous physical exercise was shown to be 2-6 times more potent than sleep or sedentary time