Jill Tucker:

Viola Buitoni tried to help her son as he grew increasingly detached, the high school junior’s anger flaring, tears flowing as she begged him to do his schoolwork.

Before the pandemic, her son was thriving at San Francisco’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, where he was in the vocal music program and the robotics team.

But after schools closed in March, “everything came tumbling down,” Buitoni said. He has stopped going to Zoom school.

His glazed look scares his mother as she encourages him to do assignments or leave his room. “I can’t,” he responds. “It’s not, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said. “It’s ‘That’s too much effort. I can’t do it.’”

It is an all too common story across the Bay Area as school closures stretch on, with most large districts stuck in 100% online classes heading into a second year.

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.

Kristin Graham:

The Philadelphia School District has pushed back its reopening date for a third time.

Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said Wednesday 9,000 prekindergarten through second-grade students won’t return on Feb. 22 as planned but will instead go back March 1 amid an ongoing building safety dispute between the district and its teachers’ union. Students had been scheduled to return Monday.

The news left him “deeply disappointed,” the superintendent said.

Hite maintains that schools are safe but said he will not bring children back to classrooms that aren’t ready for them. Teachers were due back Feb. 8 but, at the direction of Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan, refused to report to school buildings and have been working from home. City school buildings have been closed since March 2020.

Armand Fusco:

“We’re all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.” (Mignon McLaughlin)

Part 1 last week dealt with the elephants in the school budget in order to understand the dynamics of the budget process. If the budgets were prepared as illustrated and monitored regularly, this article could not have been written.

The first thing to understand is what corruption means in education, and the fact that by definition all corruption is not illegal; as a result, corruption can be found in all schools, it’s only a matter of classification and degree. Further, as will be seen, often it goes on for years meaning that required auditing procedures are totally inadequate to identify school corruption.

Corruption: breach of trust, bribery, crime, crookedness, deceit deception, dishonesty, exploitation, evil, extortion, fraud, graft, malfeasance, nepotism, payoff, profiteering, tainted, unethical, untrustworthy and unscrupulousness.

All of these are unpleasant and nasty words, but all do not mean they are illegal or criminal e.g. nepotism is common in politics, education and elsewhere, but not necessarily illegal unless it violates a policy against it.

For my book, School Corruption: Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust, (published after I retired), I divided “corruption” into three separate categories:

• Cheating and Deceitful Practices—CheDe cheaty). It’s the moral and ethical decay of the school culture.

• Waste and Mismanagement—WhaMi (whammy); sometimes difficult to determine because too often, it is in the eyes of the beholder.

• Fraud and Stealing—FraSte (frosty); encompassing embezzlement and fraudulent activities in which actual dollars are involved.
There is also a credo involved that I developed:

“The Superintendent shall diligently identify opportunities to reduce costs and improve operating efficiency in all areas of district operations. ”

Part 1 School Finance: The Elephants in the School Budget.

Patrick Marley and Molly Beck:

Republican legislative leaders immediately rejected the full proposal because of provisions within it that would roll back policies they enacted under a Republican governor.

“He’s not serious about governing, he’s serious about politics,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told reporters after the budget address.

Vos said the budget proposal was full of “poison pills” that Evers knew would be opposed by Republicans and would likely be ignored while writing the next state budget plan.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, expressed a similar view, writing on Twitter that Republicans would “set Evers’ bad budget aside.”

Meanwhile, Evers concluded his speech by asking GOP lawmakers to end the seemingly permanent standoff between them.

“There’s no time for false promises of hope and prosperity with empty words that you know full well won’t match your actions,” Evers said. “You can disagree with me if you want, but don’t punish the people we serve so you can settle a score no one but you is keeping.”

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 asked about Act 10, I often suggest that interested parties explore the Milwaukee pension scandal. Successful recall elections lead to the first Republican County Executive in many, many years – Scott Walker.

A few links, just before Act 10 require contemplation, as well.

2009 “an emphasis on adult employment” – retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman, speaking at the Madison Rotary Club..

2010, WEAC: Four (State) Senators for $1.57 million (!)

Evan Symon:

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education announced a sweeping overhaul of school security, voting to fire 133 Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) members in favor of school “climate coaches”.

The decision to cut a third of the LASPD force will leave the school district with 211 LASPD officers to keep the peace at schools. The defunded LASPD funds will instead finance “climate coaches”, community members who will work with students to improve school receptivity and address racial bias. For LASPD officers who do stay on the force, the board also ruled that pepper spray could no longer be used against students.

In addition, the $25 million slashed from the LASPD budget last year will go to the Black Student Achievement Plan, a program that will hire more social workers, counselors, and professional development workers, introduce social justice and diversity into class curriculum, and bring a focus on math classes.

The plan for the overhaul has been in the works since last year following the growth of movements wanting to defund the police and bring social justice changes following the death of George Floyd in May 2020. The subsequent protests and riots culminated in many lawmakers and community leaders bringing about significant changes to local law enforcement, such as Los Angeles cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget in November 2020.

But calls for Los Angeles schools to follow suit, led by community and student activists, never materialized last year, partially due to continued COVID-19 related issues. Many were frustrated after other school districts in California, such as Oakland, voted to completely eliminate their school police force. But constant campaigning by the groups finally brought the plan to a vote on Tuesday, with board members overwhelming to vote in favor of the changes after nearly an hour of comments by students and parents.

Policy Exchange:

Britain needs more housing. But, so often, local residents justifiably believe that new housing in their area means a loss of public goods and amenities for them. This has led to a zero sum struggle where the debate is over who ought to be a winner and who ought to be a loser. Policy Exchange’s new paper Strong Suburbs cuts through that false dichotomy, providing a mechanism for local residents to benefit from, and control, new development.

By giving local residents control over the development they see, including its architecture and design, and by giving them a share in the wealth created, the paper shows how we can create more beautiful, walkable, and sustainable neighbourhoods, delivering millions of houses in the areas they are most needed. It lays out how this will benefit people with shorter commutes, larger and more modern fittings and interiors, space for new family members, and better jobs. And it explains how this could add billions to GDP over the coming 15 years, generating outdoor covid-proof jobs at all skill levels.

Sonia Sodha:

Is it deeply offensive to lambast a black or an Asian person for not being “black” or “Asian” enough? Yes. Is it offensive to assume that someone black or Asian criticising the politics of another black or Asian person is motivated by such sentiment? Yes.

Last week, the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien blundered into the latter under the guise of defending his black colleague, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, from the former. Badenoch had tweeted screenshots of two private right-of-reply emails the black journalist Nadine White had sent her, accusing her of “creepy and bizarre” behaviour for putting to her claims made by a source.

This triggered a torrent of abuse directed at White. There is no question that Badenoch has faced unpleasant racism, but that does not excuse her behaviour towards White, a journalist doing her job, nor her undermining the confidential right-of-reply process that is critical to accurate journalism.

That did not stop O’Brien weighing in to try to justify Badenoch’s behaviour. In order to do so, he misrepresented White’s work and conflated her journalism with some of the abuse Badenoch has received on Twitter that has accused her of being a “race traitor”, which has nothing to do with White. All this tends to depict White’s journalism as being motivated by a belief that Badenoch, as a Conservative, isn’t truly black.

He didn’t stop there: he also accused the Labour MP Naz Shah of “straight up racism” for claiming that the home secretary, Priti Patel, was gaslighting ethnic minorities by talking about her own experiences of racism. Again, O’Brien misrepresents what happened to give the impression that Shah’s critique of Patel is motivated by a belief that her politics make her less Asian. What actually happened was that the black MP Flo Eshalomi asked Patel a question that referenced her experiences of anti-black racism and the structural racism of policies such as those behind the Windrush scandal.

UK Department for Education:

Tougher legal measures to strengthen free speech and academic freedom at universities in England have been announced by the Education Secretary today (16 February), to stamp out unlawful ‘silencing’ on campuses.

Following an increasing number of cases of individuals being silenced, the Education Secretary has warned of a ‘chilling effect’ where students and staff feel they cannot express themselves freely.

The proposed measures deliver on a manifesto commitment, and include a new free speech condition placed on higher education providers in order to be registered in England and access public funding. The regulator, the Office for Students, would have the power to impose sanctions, including financial penalties, for breaches of the condition.

The strengthened legal duties would also extend to Students Unions, which for the first time would have to take steps to ensure that lawful free speech is secured for their members and others, including visiting speakers.

Retraction Watch:

A publisher is retracting five papers from one of its conference series after discovering what it says was “clear evidence” that the articles were generated by a computer.

The five papers were published from 2018 to 2020 in IOP Publishing’s “Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science.” According to an IOP spokesperson, the retraction notices will all read:

This article has been retracted by IOP Publishing in light of clear evidence that it was computer generated. IOP Publishing is investigating why this was not identified during the submission and peer review process by the conference. As a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) this has been investigated in accordance with COPE guidelines and it was agreed the article should be retracted.

Here’s the abstract for one of the papers, “Neural Networks Considered Harmful:”

System administrators agree that omniscient modalities are an interesting new topic in the field of complexity theory, and researchers concur. Given the current status of lossless information, experts shockingly desire the visualization of model checking. In this position paper, we use biomorphic information to disconfirm that the little-known random algorithm for the simulation of journaling file systems by Van Jacobson is optimal.

It and the other four papers — “Financial Information Security Using Modular Communication,” “Singular Topoi of Countably Non-local, Continuously Cayley, Maximal Elements and the Continuity of Closed Elements,” “Newton Categories for a Solvable Element,” and “Decoupling Evolutionary Programming from Gigabit Switches in Neural Networks” — show telltale signs of being created by SciGen, “an automatic CS paper generator” developed by graduate students at MIT in 2005, or Mathgen and Physgen, which are similar.

reclaimyourface:

We call on the European Commission to strictly regulate the use of biometric technologies in order to avoid undue interference with fundamental rights.

In particular, we ask the Commission to prohibit, in law and in practice, indiscriminate or arbitrarily-targeted uses of biometrics which can lead to unlawful mass surveillance. These intrusive systems must not be developed, deployed (even on a trial basis) or used by public or private entities insofar as they can lead to unnecessary or disproportionate interference with people’s fundamental rights.

Jonas Vlachos, Edvin Hertegård, and Helena B. Svaleryd:

To reduce the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), most countries closed schools, despite uncertainty if school closures are an effective containment measure. At the onset of the pandemic, Swedish upper-secondary schools moved to online instruction, while lower-secondary schools remained open. This allows for a comparison of parents and teachers differently exposed to open and closed schools, but otherwise facing similar conditions. Leveraging rich Swedish register data, we connect all students and teachers in Sweden to their families and study the impact of moving to online instruction on the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. We find that, among parents, exposure to open rather than closed schools resulted in a small increase in PCR-confirmed infections (odds ratio [OR] 1.17; 95% CI [CI95] 1.03 to 1.32). Among lower-secondary teachers, the infection rate doubled relative to upper-secondary teachers (OR 2.01; CI95 1.52 to 2.67). This spilled over to the partners of lower-secondary teachers, who had a higher infection rate than their upper-secondary counterparts (OR 1.29; CI95 1.00 to 1.67). When analyzing COVID-19 diagnoses from healthcare visits and the incidence of severe health outcomes, results are similar for teachers, but weaker for parents and teachers’ partners. The results for parents indicate that keeping lower-secondary schools open had minor consequences for the overall transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in society. The results for teachers suggest that measures to protect teachers could be considered.

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.

NBC News:

Los Angeles Times:

Schools have been reopening across the country for months now, illustrating that students can return to classrooms with little risk if the proper precautions have been taken. This is especially true of elementary schools, as younger children have been far less likely to be sickened with COVID-19 or to infect others. Reopened schools have not caused infections to surge in outlying communities.

Yet Los Angeles Unified schools — along with many other public schools statewide — have remained closed. Supt. Austin Beutner, who has been struggling with a teachers union unwilling to send educators back into classrooms, couldn’t have opened the schools anyway because the county’s infection rate was too high to meet the state’s stringent standards. But this week, that rate fell to the point where it is officially safe for all elementary schools in the county to open.

And yet Beutner, who is still embroiled in talks with the United Teachers Los Angeles, has no immediate plans to reopen.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Joseph Henrich:

In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read.

The sharpest test of this idea comes from work in economics, led by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann. The historical record, including Luther’s own descriptions, suggest that within the German context, Protestantism diffused out from Luther’s base in Wittenberg (Saxony). Using data on literacy and schooling rates in nineteenth-century Prussia, Becker and Woessmann first show that counties with more Protestants (relative to Catholics) had higher rates of both literacy and schooling. So, there’s a correlation. Then, taking advantage of the historical diffusion from Wittenberg, they show that for every 100-km traveled from Wittenberg, the percentage of Protestants in a county dropped by 10%. Then, with a little statistical razzle-dazzle, this patterning allows them to extract the slice of the variation in Protestantism that was, in a sense, caused by the Reformation’s ripples as they spread outward from the epicenter in Wittenberg. Finally, they show that having more Protestants does indeed cause higher rates of literacy and schooling. All-Protestant counties had literacy rates nearly 20 percentage points higher than all-Catholic counties. Subsequent work focusing on the Swiss Reformation, where the epicenters were Zurich and Geneva, reveals strikingly similar patterns.

The Protestant impact on literacy and education can still be observed today in the differential impact of Protestant vs. Catholic missions in Africa and India. In Africa, regions with early Protestant missions at the beginning of the Twentieth Century (now long gone) are associated with literacy rates that are about 16 percentage points higher, on average, than those associated with Catholic missions. In some analyses, Catholics have no impact on literacy at all unless they faced direct competition for souls from Protestant missions. These impacts can also be found in early twentieth-century China.

The Protestant emphasis on Biblical literacy reshaped Catholic practices and inadvertently laid the foundation for modern schooling.

Analyses of an indigenous population at the junction of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil reveal that the closer a community is to a historical Jesuit mission (which existed from 1609 to 1767), the higher its literacy rate today.

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.

Rebecca Bodenheimer, PhD:

I think we’re at a crucial point in this debate on school reopening right now. Case rates are dropping quickly, the surge is over, and people are starting to get vaccinated — though way too slowly of course. The public health community, including the CDC, have reached consensus that reopening schools is an urgent priority (instead of citing all my sources, I’m going to do more of a free-write here, so feel free to reach out if you want me to cite a source for anything I write here).

This is because the harms of prolonged school closure vastly outnumber the risk of COVID. It’s not only learning loss among public school kids (mostly in urban areas), though that will of course have long-term implications, especially for teenagers who really need to get decent grades to be able to get into college but who are flunking classes at astronomical rates. Remember also that they’ll have to compete against private school kids, who are having a much more normal school year.

More importantly, it’s our our kids’ mental health that’s the real emergency. A few weeks ago the New York Times published a devastating piece about the rise in student suicides in Las Vegas and how that got the superintendent to open schools. All over the country, mental health emergencies and hospital visits by kids are skyrocketing. The prolonged isolation, depression and anxiety that stem from learning by yourself on a computer all day are taking a massive toll on kids who haven’t seen the inside of a school for almost a year!

I just don’t know how anyone can sit by and think this is an acceptable state of affairs for a developed country — it just makes my blood boil to see how little this country cares about kids. All of Europe has done the right thing — schools are last to close, first to open. It’s simply not a political stance in Europe (as it is here) to say we need to reopen schools for the sake of kids wellbeing and emotional and academic development.

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.

Initially puzzled by what you both meant by “FFS”, I see that when it comes to the example of keeping schools open during Covid19, it means “Forever Follow Sweden”.

The disastrous mistake of closing schools is binary (‘open or ‘closed’) & will enduringly stain the “lockdowners”! https://t.co/KeaRKJwtGv

— Michael Levitt (@MLevitt_NP2013) February 16, 2021

Bocar A. Ba, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo and Roman Rivera:

Diversity in policing

In the wake of high-profile police shootings of Black Americans, it is important to know whether the race and gender of officers and civilians affect their interactions. Ba et al. overcame previous data constraints and found that Hispanic and Black officers make far fewer stops and arrests and use force less than white officers, especially against Black civilians. These differences are largest in majority-Black neighborhoods in the city of Chicago (see the Perspective by Goff). Female officers also use less force than male officers. These effects are supportive of the efficacy of increasing diversity in police forces.

Conrad Akunga:

[The Business Of Software, People]

I have been writing software for exactly twenty years now. In the course of this I have learnt very many things, which I hope to journal over time.

One of them is this:

People don’t read instructions

You almost certainly haven’t read the Windows EULA. You haven’t read the iTunes EULA. You haven’t read the Linux GPL, or the licenses of any software.

Don’t worry. This is normal. You are not alone.

The same issue comes into play in our online existence. We heavily use the internet. And thanks to a thing called the GDPR we increasingly see banners like these:

Erasmatazz:

Again, I was disappointed; I am under the impression that nobody ever applied the concepts used in Balance of Power. Indeed, as far as I can tell, in the 34 years since I published that book, there has never been a geopolitical game as sophisticated as Balance of Power. Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have been on the lookout and I have had a number of games referred to me; none of them came close to Balance of Power in algorithmic sophistication.

A Different Perception of Reality

It’s only recently that I have realized just how different is my perception of reality. It is best represented by this classic image from the movie The Matrix:

Dave Huber:

A state representative in New Hampshire is picking up where the former Trump administration left off — he’s introduced legislation which would ban trainings based on critical race theory.

Keith Ammon’s bill (via Christopher Rufo) would prohibit — in state contracts, grants and training programs — the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as “one race or sex [being] inherently superior to another race or sex” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

The bill goes directly to the heart of philosophies espoused by those like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi as it would forbid making “any individual […] feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Alexander Russo:

While some districts remain shuttered, a notable number have been reopened for weeks or even months, though sometimes the kids are learning from teachers who aren’t in the building and other schools have experienced high numbers of quarantine days:

🏆 What Can We Learn From Where the Schools Stayed Open? (New York Times)
🏆 Low attendance, frustrated teachers, confident principals and happy students (Washington Post)
🏆 In some Boston schools, in-person education will resemble remote learning (Boston Globe)
🏆 School systems hire classroom monitors to fill staffing gaps (Washington Post)
🏆 Some Utah schools lost 40% of their in-person days this fall to COVID-19 closures (Salt Lake Tribune)
🏆 How one diocese’s schools remain open for in-person learning (Catholic News Agency)
🏆 Cold won’t stop school on ‘first’ day back for Minneapolis pre-K and kindergarten students(Minneapolis Star Tribune)

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.

Beth LeBlanc:

An Ann Arbor public schools trustee has suggested area physicians pushing for in-person learning options in the district were pushing teachers into risky environments that doctors wouldn’t subject themselves to. 

Area doctors — more than 350 of whom had signed a letter urging the school board to reopen in-person learning — were “positioning themselves as experts in education administration,” said Jessica Kelly, vice president for the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education. 

“Not a single doctor who has signed any letter this year is willing to do themselves what they’re demanding of our teachers,” Kelly said at a Wednesday board meeting. “You will never find an unvaccinated doctor simultaneously addressing 10 or 20 or 30 patients, even through well visits, in a closed room for seven hours straight wearing only a cotton mask.”

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.

Rory PQ:

What is Music Theory?

Music theory is a practice musicians use to understand and communicate the language of music. Musical theory examines the fundamentals of music. It also provides a system to interpret musical compositions.

For example, basic music theory defines the elements that form harmony, melody, and rhythm. It identifies compositional elements such as song form, tempo, notes, chords, key signatures, intervals, scales, and more. It also recognizes musical qualities such as pitch, tone, timbre, texture, dynamics, and others.

Hamilton Nolan:

This month we learned that Tesla, a $400 billion public company run by one of the richest people in the world, has done away with its media relations department—effectively formalizing an informal policy of ignoring reporters. Though we should all be grateful for the chance to hear less about Tesla, we should also recognize this for what it is: one more glaring data point showing that powerful people no longer think they need the mainstream press, especially critical and ethical outlets like the Washington Post. 

This presents a problem. Because the mainstream press still needs powerful people—quite literally, in the case of the Post, as it’s owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, who is no fonder of difficult stories about his companies than any other billionaire. 

We are living through a historic, technology-fueled shift in the balance of power between the media and its subjects. The subjects are winning. The internet in general—and social media platforms in particular—have destroyed one of the media’s most important sources of power: being the only place that could offer access to an audience. When Elon Musk can say whatever he wants to forty million Twitter followers at any time with no filter, it is little surprise that he does not feel compelled to listen to unpleasant questions from some reporter who wants to know why he busts unions and wildly accuses people of pedophilia. 

Dan Goldhaber, Scott A. Imberman, Katharine O. Strunk, Bryant Hopkins, Nate Brown, Erica Harbartkin & Tara Kilbride:

The decision about how and when to open schools to in-person instruction has been a key question for policymakers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The instructional modality of schools has implications not only for the health and safety of students and staff, but also student learning and the degree to which parents can engage in job activities. We consider the role of instructional modality (in-person, hybrid, or remote instruction) in disease spread among the wider community. Using a variety of regression modeling strategies , we find that simple correlations show in-person modalities are correlated with increased COVID cases, but accounting for both pre-existing cases and a richer set of covariates brings estimates close to zero on average. In Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) specifications, in-person modality options are not associated with increased spread of COVID at low levels of pre-existing COVID cases but cases do increase at moderate to high pre-existing COVID rates. A bounding exercise suggests that the OLS findings for in-person modality are likely to represent an upper bound on the true relationship. These findings are robust to the inclusion of county and district fixed effects in terms of the insignificance of the findings, but the models with fixed effects are also somewhat imprecisely estimated.

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.

SCOOP: The principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents this "tool for action," which tells them they must become "white traitors" and then advocate for full "white abolition."

This is the new language of public education. pic.twitter.com/0XA3xUpcuT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 15, 2021

Chris Rickert:

With a second high school set to open in 2022, Sun Prairie officials are redrawing middle and high school boundary lines with an eye toward creating racial and economic balance without forcing too many children to travel longer distances to schools farther from home.

Redrawing public school boundary lines can be a contentious process in any community. In Sun Prairie, it’s the latest challenge for the district of 8,500 students after residents there voted in April 2019 to construct a second high school.

“It has been controversial,” said Kellie Kalberer, who has three students in the district, including a sixth-grade son who will be directly affected by the new lines.

Equitably balanced schools are important, she said, but she’s been frustrated that when it comes to what, specifically, constitutes racial and economic balance, the “School Board hasn’t given them any guidance on what would be an OK range.”

Kaitlin McKinley Becker and Chris Lisinski:

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is operating at a high COVID risk level as cases of the coronavirus continue to surge on campus. That means that the campus is effectively locked down, and a number of restrictions have been placed on students, including limiting who can take walks.

A directive for students to self-sequester has been activated at the encouragement of state public health officials to help mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, according to the school’s website. It expects everyone’s cooperation.

For the foreseeable future, all UMass Amherst classes will take place remotely, and students in dormitories and off-campus housing are instructed not to leave their residences except for meals, COVID testing twice per week and medical appointments.

Christopher Hope:

Ministers will fine universities which stifle freedom of speech and tell heritage groups “public funds must never be used for political purposes” in a major new bid to torpedo efforts at rewriting Britain’s history, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose….

Ian Walsh:

One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.

What?

This has struck me as crazy, because I don’t seem to have childhood amnesia. I didn’t like school, and I remember that almost no kid I ever met, even those who did, preferred school to days off.

But I shrugged until I read this teacher’s account of asking her students how their time off was.

Surprise, almost all of them were happy they had had the pandemic time off.

School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other.

And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.

Stephanie Kraemer:

For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage. A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.

Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). The study, which analyzed how people’s living arrangements differ by religion, also found that U.S. children from Christian and religiously unaffiliated families are about equally likely to live in this type of arrangement.

In comparison, 3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households. In neighboring Canada, the share is 15%.

M Anthony Mills:

Among the more influential truisms about science today is that it is essential for technological — and thus economic — progress. It is fitting, then, that the apparent slowing of American innovation has fueled a debate about the importance of science and the need for the federal government to support it.

Indeed, there is growing interest across the political spectrum in revitalizing American innovation, raising questions about how best to allocate scarce resources. What kinds of research should we support? Who should decide — government or industry or the scientific community? Should we emphasize science or technology? Should we steer research toward solving practical problems or simply leave science free to pursue its own aims?

When asking these questions, we typically take for granted that scientific research is necessary for innovation. But while it may be a truism today, this contention is in fact a modern one, best known from the writings of Francis Bacon. And it rests on an important claim about — and, too often, a misunderstanding of — the relationship between science and technology.

Bacon was among the first thinkers to argue that scientific knowledge should not be pursued as an end in itself but rather as a means to an end — the improvement of the human condition. Science, in other words, is essentially useful, especially by enabling the technological mastery of nature. Such Baconian rhetoric is so familiar to us today that it likely passes unnoticed. Scientists have long invoked the practical fruits of their trade, especially when seeking public recognition or funding for science. As historian of science Peter Dear wrote in The Intelligibility of Nature (2006):

by Laura J. Faherty, Benjamin K. Master, Elizabeth D. Steiner, Julia H. Kaufman, Zachary Predmore, Laura Stelitano, Jennifer T. Leschitz, Brian Phillips, Heather L. Schwartz, Rebecca Wolfe:

In this report, we share insights from a national scan and more than 80 interviews with early adopters of COVID-19 testing in K-12 schools as of December 2020. We describe the characteristics of early adopter schools and districts and their varied approaches to testing. We provide concrete examples of key facilitators of feasible, acceptable, and effective COVID-19 testing. Through ten detailed profiles of schools, districts, and states that have implemented COVID-19 testing in the K-12 setting, we illustrate how these facilitators enabled schools to establish their testing programs.

The experiences of early adopters of COVID-19 testing during the fall 2020 semester show that, despite the absence of a comprehensive national K-12 testing strategy, testing can be effectively integrated into schools’ COVID-19 response plans and can help families and staff feel comfortable participating in in-person instruction. However, even for well-resourced districts and schools, launching a COVID-19 screening testing program was a major undertaking that required access to rapid-turnaround tests, additional staffing or strong partners for logistical support, technical assistance for the design and execution of testing programs, and a strategy for successfully engaging the school community to participate in testing.

Based on these findings, we conclude with several recommendations for school and district leaders and for policymakers to support the implementation of school-based COVID-19 testing programs that can achieve their intended goals.

Madison’s (private, non direct government) One City Schools media coverage.

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.

Alexander Russo:

There are three major school districts in the Minneapolis metropolitan region, together serving more than 100,000 students: Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), St. Paul, and Anoka-Hennepin. Like many other places, the region has seen a sharp decline in education coverage over the past few years.

Journalist Beth Hawkins has watched it all. A parent and veteran education reporter, she’s worked at the MinnPost and now The 74.

In the following interview, Hawkins describes the now-familiar decrease in education coverage and reveals some regrettable aspects to her own work as a MinnPost reporter. But Hawkins also points to a handful of people doing good work, and a few emerging new outlets taking on the education topic in new, different ways.

“They really center the voices of parents and students,” says Hawkins about the newcomers. “They include the official sources that my generation was trained to be so reliant on… but they don’t crowd out the other voices.”

Michael Watson:

But there are many reasons that explain this silence: Tens of thousands of U.S. dollars given to organized institutional “feminism” by Big Labor, especially by government worker unions like the teachers unions that are locking down schools. For example, the National Women’s Law Center, the source of Markowicz’s facts and figures, took $10,000 in 2020 from the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA). In previous years, it has taken funding from other government worker unions and union federations, including the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the Service Employees International Union; and the AFL-CIO.

National Women’s Law Center is far from the only “feminist” or feminist-aligned organization to benefit from Big Labor’s institutional funding. In its 2020 annual report under the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the NEA contributed to a number of Left feminist-aligned groups including the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Democracy Alliance, ProgressNow, State Innovation Exchange, Supermajority, and Women’s March Incorporated.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has likewise contributed to the organized Left-feminist groups who might otherwise object to policies driving millions of women from employment. On its 2020 annual report, AFT reported funding Emily’s List and Women Vote!, two liberal feminist-focused PACs, as well as multi-issue feminism-aligned advocacy groups like MoveOn Civic Action, America Votes, and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

wiseye.

Does the DPI structure and spending practice address our long term, disastrous reading results? Wisconsin students now lag Alabama, a state that spends less and has fewer teachers per student.

The primary election is scheduled for Tuesday, 16 February 2021. The top two candidates will advance to the April, 2021 election.

Seven Candidates vie for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent.

Superintendent candidates defend handling of racist incidents in their school districts.

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

Chris Allnut:

In her first year at the University of Bristol, Saranya Thambirajah has had little contact time for her politics course — but plenty of hands-on experience mobilising protests and organising direct action against the institution’s pandemic response. 

The 19-year-old Londoner is one of the organisers of the 1,800 students on rent strike at the university. Forced into a fortnight of isolation after catching the virus last term, she found she was not so alone when it came to the frustrations she felt towards the university. Now she is part of a growing movement of students across the UK seeking to ensure that they don’t become an afterthought in a higher education system scrambling to cope with waves of lockdown and social distancing.

Thambirajah is now back home, unable to return to university and halfway through a second term of studying without any in-person contact with her tutors. “I barely even know anyone on my course — they’re all just people on a computer screen,” she says.

Apple:

“I was going to the library and bookstores and book fairs in school, and I would see a very specific set of books,” Thomas says. “By the time I got to high school, I started to get really frustrated wondering why there weren’t any books that I was being exposed to that had Black characters, or were by Black authors. I started doing my own research and realized that those books existed — they just weren’t on bestseller lists, or displayed in the library or at the bookstore.”

Matt Taibbi:

This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.

This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.

A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters. They wanted to be in the trenches of information discovery. Audiences were choosing powerful highs over lasting ones.

Moreover, if after publication another shoe dropped in the form of mitigating information, audiences were disinterested, even angry. Those updates were betrayals of the entertainment contract, like continuity errors. Companies soon learned there was a downside to once-mandatory ethical practices. Silent edits at newspapers became common, and old standards like the italicized editor’s note at the bottom of the page letting you know this or that story had been “updated” began to disappear.

Claire Bushey:

According to Garza, when Emanuel rescinded a promised raise, Lewis stood on a flatbed truck outside Garza’s South Side home and told a crowd of 700 to save for a strike.

A year later, with more than 90 per cent support from members, Lewis led the union in its first strike for 25 years. The action enjoyed significant public support, largely because Lewis and her allies shifted the focus from union issues to social problems, such as poverty and racial inequality. The CTU was one of the first US unions to popularise the approach, known as bargaining for the common good.

When teachers in West Virginia, California and Colorado went on strike in 2018 and 2019, and there were walkouts and rallies in another seven states, all wore CTU red.

“‘Red for Ed’ strikes were all about defending education,” says Bob Bruno, a labour professor at University of Illinois-Chicago. “That’s a sea change, and that’s also bargaining for the common good, and again leads back to CTU and Karen Lewis.”

Lewis endured losses, too. The CTU failed to block Emanuel’s plan to close 50 schools, a move she described as “racist” and “classist”. When she contemplated running for mayor against him in 2014, her supporters donned buttons saying, “Run Karen Run”. But she was forced to abandon the plan after a brain cancer diagnosis. She suffered a stroke three years later, followed by a re-emergence of the cancer.

Janet Beer:

It is probably time to say as a sector that although we regret the loss of Erasmus, there were some shortcomings in the organisation of the programme; most notably adherence to the traditional student exchange of a full academic year or semester spent at a partner institution in the EU.

It was therefore short on the flexibility that many of today’s students need, leading many to miss out on the benefits of studying abroad.

So, the government’s replacement Turing Scheme should be welcomed by universities as a moment to offer students new forms of study abroad opportunities. The flexibility in the scheme – revealed by the government today – will give many more students the opportunity to embark on periods of work or study abroad; particularly mature learners, and those with part-time jobs or caring responsibilities.

The whole world

It will also provide funding for study in many countries beyond Europe, which previously was only possible for those students who could fund it themselves. Shorter periods abroad, with dedicated staff support, will allow universities to provide tailored programmes for students who would otherwise not have the social or financial capital to experience studying overseas.

For instance, in 2019 my institution managed to find exceptional funding to support a summer programme for 20 University of Liverpool students to attend the University of Georgia at Athens to discover US culture and history. The fully funded programme was designed specifically for students from postcodes with low participation rates in higher education.

Benjamin Yount:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is releasing a new study that puts the cost for keeping schools closed last spring at over $7 billion. 

Will Flanders, research director at WILL, said the number comes from study after study that shows less time in the classroom as well as a widening achievement gap hurts students in the long run. 

“There are solid studies conducted over a number of years on how much lifetime earning decline from missing a year of school,” Flanders explained. “These have primarily been based on dropouts before COVID, obviously, but they are applicable here. We applied those numbers to the percentage of curriculum that each district says they missed during the spring semester.”

And that’s just from last spring. 

Flanders says many schools in Wisconsin, including the largest district in Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Kenosha kept kids learning from home for most of this year as well. Many of those kids continue to learn from home. 

“This study takes a very conservative approach by accepting the notion that kids are learning at home,” Flanders said. “While we think that such learning is likely to be far more limited than in the traditional environment, we’re only using the percentage of curriculum that school districts admit to having missed out on. The learning loss is actually likely to be far more dramatic than what has been reported here.”

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.

Jonathan Easley and Amie Parnes:

The mixed messaging underscores the tricky politics Biden faces as elected officials clash with teachers unions in Democratic strongholds over how quickly to reopen classrooms.                                                                                                 

Some public health experts are chiding the White House for downplaying analysis from CDC leaders, warning that the apparent tension could undermine the agency’s authority at a pivotal moment for the virus.

“I don’t know if there is a split, but it was alarming last week when the White House implied that the CDC director was speaking in her personal capacity, because when it comes to safety and what is required to reduce or mitigate the spread, that’s a CDC question that should only be answered by the CDC,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“I found that worrisome because we have to affirm and assert CDC’s expertise here. It’s a particularly tricky issue and it’s important to be clear that there is no political interference and that there is no agency more qualified to weigh in on this than the CDC,” she added. 

The Biden administration has made it a point of pride to have science drive their pandemic response after the Trump administration sought to downplay the virus and clashed with its own health experts.

The White House position is that they’re waiting for official CDC guidance on school reopenings, rather than relying on CDC studies or remarks from agency leaders about what the science says.

A White House aide said “there is zero daylight between the CDC and WH on reopening” and that as soon as CDC guidance is released, the White House will “lift it up.” Walensky says the CDC guidance on school reopenings should be out in the next few days.

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.

Lauren Rohr:

Faced with an unexpected surplus after schools shut down last spring, Naperville Unit District 203 plans to repay taxpayers a total of $10 million to help ease the financial burden of the COVID-19 crisis.

The statewide stay-at-home order halted in-person operations from March through the end of the 2019-20 academic year, saving the district money in areas of utilities, transportation, food service and staffing, Chief Financial Officer Michael Frances said.

The reduced expenses resulted in an unplanned budget surplus of about $14 million, he said. The school board this week unanimously approved allocating $10 million of those funds toward providing property owners with a one-time reimbursement.

“I think this is something the board has set as a high priority, looking at just being fiscally responsible with taxpayer dollars,” Vice President Donna Wandke said. “This is something that almost no other school district in the state, or at least the area, has done. It’s really exciting that we have the opportunity to do this.”

Here's the CDC's new guidance for schools: https://t.co/TAGk1B4IuW Masks are key, of course, with as much distancing as possible, cohorts, etc. Limited emphasis on ventilation, but there's lots of good stuff on ventilation at https://t.co/Ph6OcYwF0N https://t.co/eTsBrNcaEq

— Linsey Marr (@linseymarr) February 12, 2021

Riva Tez:

The icky nature of the current moment comes from it falling under the disgracefully false pretense of democracy. Hysteria for more justice conveniently ignores what powers an oligarchy has amassed against any kind of accountability. As our ancestors paid off the Church to repent for their sins, we elect flagrant sinners who strike geopolitical deals with foes, the dollars acting as moral reparations for the bombing of civilians who live too close to an oil supply. Charisma, like Obama had, allows them to publicly get away with it. The famines rage on, the pseudo-wars continue, and yet still the people of the world give up their hard-earned money to an entrenched and entitled elite that role-plays as smiling philanthropists. 

Most voters state that we still live in a democracy, either naively unaware of the shift of power to unelected bureaucrats serving the oligarchy, or deliberately profiting from an oligarchic rule that they believe continues to serve them. This ruling class knows just how to play us, constantly adjusting the frequency of the media’s siren songs so that we never have the bandwidth to think for ourselves. We can’t relinquish the belief that we are all collectively in control, even though reflecting momentarily on that concept should show us how ridiculous it is. Did we see the pandemic coming? Why are the markets booming? Do we have any idea what this year will bring? In those moments, when our lack of agency is flaunted, we do anything to collectively believe it not to be true. We join in the constant applause and laughter, never quite sure who or what it’s directed at.

Those who benefit from being ruling class adjacent choose not to see it. The millions of people who have been indoctrinated to conflate success with ruling-class acceptance, the Ivy League schools, the mainstream press, the awards and the ceremonies, they can’t see it. It’s hard to give up an entrenched reward system with no obvious alternative. Their attention is firmly and deliberately fixed on identity politics, the flames of which are fanned by those who gain from diverting attention away from their own actions. There’s a reason the ruling class screams ‘unity!’ but keeps dividing us over and over: It detracts from their own misgivings and from the many crises they mismanage. There’s a reason those in power rage against real meritocracy: It threatens the money and power that they once acquired and no longer necessarily deserve.

2017: Madison 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.

Jill Tucker:

One of the top-performing public high schools in the country will no longer admit students based on academic performance, ending more than a century of merit-based admissions.

More than seven hours into a marathon meeting Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 5-2 to use the same lottery-based system to assign students to Lowell High as other district high schools instead of maintaining the previous system that used test scores and grades.

Related: English 10.

Joanne Jacobs:

The teachers’ unions have been terrifying members about Covid-19 to keep schools closed, writes Erika Sanzi, a parent of three school-aged children. Weingarten has played a “massive role” in “ensuring that millions of other people’s children have not seen their teachers or classmates in 11 months.”

Weingarten “is part of the reason that so many children are regressing at lightning speed both academically and developmentally,” writes Sanzi. “She is part of the reason that so many adolescents barely leave their beds.” She is “not Glinda the Good Witch.”

Teachers don’t want to be seen as standing in the schoolhouse door. Weingarten is “a keen reader of the political tea leaves and a very good tactician,” writes Andrew Rotherham on Eduwonk. She sees governors, mayors and the “influencer class” shifting support to reopening, now that Trump is gone.

 As the article indicates, Weingarten appreciates that the finances of public education are more fragile than people think and even a modest change in parent behavior as a result of the pandemic experience would create problems that would impact labor.

School enrollment was expected to fall in most parts of the country because of the baby bust. If you keep telling parents schools are unsafe and drive the less nervous to private schools . . . Who are AFT and NEA teachers going to teach?

The Economist:

it was the fifth set of a semi-final at last year’s us Open. After four hours of epic tennis, Roger Federer needed one more point to see off his young challenger, Novak Djokovic. As Federer prepared to serve, the crowd roared in anticipation. At the other end, Djokovic nodded, as if in acceptance of his fate.

Federer served fast and deep to Djokovic’s right. Seconds later he found himself stranded, uncomprehending, in mid-court. Djokovic had returned his serve with a loose-limbed forehand of such lethal precision that Federer couldn’t get near it. The nonchalance of Djokovic’s stroke thrilled the crowd. John McEnroe called it “one of the all-time great shots”.

Applied Divinity Studies:

Blacknews:

Michael, who hails from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, created his current business Eminent Financial Services, Inc. in 2008. What started out as a part-time opportunity to provide income tax preparation services to family, friends, and associates, has now grown into a full-time one-stop shop for small-business owners and the financially underserved. Since its initial opening, Michael Pridgeon through Eminent Financial Services, Inc. has saved clients hundreds of thousands in taxes and has assisted in getting clients closed in over a million dollars in business loans.

Financial tips and other financial educational information provided by general media platforms, usually try to capture the financially affluent audiences that own businesses and/or watch and play tennis or golf. With movements like Support Local, Buy Black, and Black Lives Matter, Michael has observed a dire need for financial literacy and economic empowerment in his community in recent years. As more people are creating businesses or various streams of income, financial literacy is a starting point that should be foundational in everyone’s home, regardless of bank account status or balance. Michael believes that all people should have the means to create wealth for their families. Break the Cycle will be one of the vehicles to achieve this task. As the children develop their knowledge in financial literacy, they will, in due course, create opportunities to put the knowledge to practice in their daily lives. Instead of purchasing candy, students will be able to make the wise decision to save money earned from other sources and invest in owning a candy store.

Parents can also join their children in Break the Cycle. With parental involvement, Break the Cycle hopes to shift the mindsets of the children’s parents by teaching principles of financial literacy that can be transferred to future generations. This program is designed for the entire family. the young, and the not so young. Since a large portion of what children learn comes from parental teachings and influence, Break the Cycle will use that same foundational learning as a conduit to instill financial education into the household.

Washington’s students are falling behind kids in other states. See this map from https://t.co/vxQ80qqE2R. If I were a parent with a child in school, I’d be thinking of moving to a dark-purple state, where the union does not have the power to keep schools closed. #waleg #waedu pic.twitter.com/QqsXf2W04J

— Liv Finne (@livfinne) February 11, 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.

Ezra Klein:

San Francisco is about 48 percent white, but that falls to 15 percent for children enrolled in its public schools. For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country — and many of those private schools have remained open. It looks, finally, like a deal with the teachers’ union is near that could bring kids back to the classroom, contingent on coronavirus cases continuing to fall citywide, but much damage has been done. This is why the school renamings were so galling to so many in San Francisco, including the mayor. It felt like an attack on symbols was being prioritized over the policies needed to narrow racial inequality.

I should say, before going further, that I love California. I was born and raised in Orange County. I was educated in the state’s public schools and graduated from the University of California system, the greatest public university system in the world. I moved back a few years ago, in part because I love California’s quirks and diversity and genius. It’s a remarkable place where tomorrow’s problems and tomorrow’s solutions vie with each other for primacy. California drives the technologies, culture and ideas that shape the entire world. But for that very reason, our failures of governance worry me.

California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, when you factor in housing costs, and vies for the top spot in income inequality, too. There are bright spots in recent years — electric grid modernization, a deeply progressive plan to tax the wealthy to fund poor school districts, a prison population at a 30-year low — but there’s a reason 130,000 more people leave than enter each year. California is dominated by Democrats, but many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there.

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.

Ash Staub:

The terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” have dominated the political lexicon in recent years. Whereas misinformation merely refers to inaccurate or misleading information, the label of disinformation implies an intent to deceive. Both have served as the source of much consternation and hand-wringing from media figures and politicians alike, with countless articles, press segments, academic papers, and political speeches devoted to solving the problem posed by intentionally false or misleading information and “fake news.” For its part, the Biden administration has characterized disinformation as a “threat to our democracy,” going as far as to lay out a road map for how to combat it.

Misinformation and disinformation are natural consequences of our public institutions’ inconsistency and incompetence.

While our inability as a society to agree on basic facts is certainly a problem, what should be self-evident is that misinformation and disinformation naturally abound when there is very little trust in sense-making institutions. If the information sources that are deemed “authoritative” are so often wrong or misleading, and inspire little public confidence, is it any wonder that people turn to alternatives? Misinformation and disinformation are natural consequences of our public institutions’ inconsistency and incompetence.

Furthermore, the escalating war on misinformation and disinformation seems to be less concerned with actually trying to establish authoritative sources of truth as it is with marginalizing facts or narratives that don’t suit the establishment agenda. The labels “misinformation” and “disinformation” are liberally and inconsistently applied to silence dissent and promote certain political interests.

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.

Andrew Michta:

Collectivism in any guise, including its postmodern progressivist variety, has been historically antithetical to a free society.

The idea of the self-constituting citizen, endowed with rights and constrained by law, has been indispensable to the forging of a stable democratic political system in America, legitimizing its institutions and ultimately birthing a cohesive nation bereft of the prerequisite of an underlying common ethnicity. This principle has been the source of America’s unprecedented success for over two centuries.

In contrast, each time in recent history that governments have favored group-based systemic solutions, despotism has followed and, ultimately, the implosion of the state built upon it. And yet this is where America’s elite class seems hell-bent on taking the nation.

The past several decades have witnessed an implacable drive by our leadership class to make group identity the dominant category in our thinking about and practice of politics. Few at the top seem to care how the public is likely to respond to collectivist solutions that not only preference one group of people over another but, in effect, would bury once and for all the quintessentially American assertion that ultimately history can be redeemed only by the individual, for it rests with the content of one’s character and not on government action.

The oligarchization of American elites and the parallel pauperization of the citizenry is the real but uniformly suppressed story behind the country’s ongoing Balkanization, while the preferred narrative has been that alleged racial and gender injustice must be overcome by executive fiat. The relative impoverishment of the American middle class has degraded the power of the citizenry to self-govern and has emboldened an increasingly detached elite to indulge in group-based political experiments, with the reengineering of the nation in accordance with ever-shifting notions of “equity and social justice” the ultimate goal.

Noel Evans:

Math test scores in schools across Wisconsin have been steadily improving, according to a new study.

The study from The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), “Keeping Score: Act 10’s Impact on Student Achievement,” attributes the rise in scores, particularly in the math scores of students from kindergarten through high school, to changes enacted under Act 10.

Approved by state lawmakers in 2011 and signed by Gov. Scott Walker, Act 10 focused on a wide-range of policies to alleviate deficits in the state budget. From an education standpoint, Act 10 cut back the collective bargaining powers of public-sector unions in the state, including teacher unions.

Notes and links on Act 10.

Matt Welch:

“Biden vows to reopen most schools after 1st 100 days on the job,” ran the Associated Press headline on December 8. Advocates of reopening who follow the issue closely could see the potential wiggle room—it’s not the federal government’s call, the full statement was shot through with hedges and conditions, “most” just means 50 percent plus one, etc.

Still, even after the downgrading of most K-12 schoolsto most K-8 schools (sorry, Classes of 2021-24, you’re just hosed), I can’t say I was ready for a goalpost-shift this tectonic:

White House: Our goal is to have 50 percent of schools open by April 30, 2021 — “at least one day per week” pic.twitter.com/7VNpG9i0Sx

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 9, 2021

This is the ground-softening in advance of the Biden administration’s expected guidelines tomorrow to “safely reopen” K-8 schools in the United States, which has had among the lowest percentage of classroom attendance in the industrialized world during these past 11 pandemic-cursed months.

Reopening has become a heated political issue, with labor clashes delaying in-school instruction in Democratic-run big cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Remote and hybrid learning has been statistically brutal on students and their parents, with the former suffering educational setbacks and significant increases in emotional problems, and the latter experiencing a mass dropout of women from the labor force.

Teachers unions and the politicians they support, including Biden, say that more money is needed to safely reopen elementary, middle, and high schools, on top of the $69 billion in additional federal funding they received in two 2020 COVID-relief bills. (The K-12 system typically receives around $40 billion a year from the feds.) Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief package proposal contains $130 billion for pre-college education, and an additional $350 billion in fiscal stabilization for the states. Given that public school spending amounts to around 20 percent of state budgets, it’s safe to assume around $70 billion of that would go to K-12.

Complicating that combined $200 billion ask is the fact that many schools are already open five days a week, without any new checks being written.

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.

Dave Eargle;

I use a variation of Conti and Caroland (2011)’s “memorize the first 100 digits of pi” assignment as an in-class learning activity to teach my infosec students how to cheat, as part of teaching threat modeling. This semester at the beginning was all-remote for me, though, so I modified it for the zoom teaching session. Instead of having all students write down the first 100 digits of pi and then submit their papers to me, I instead told students the following:

Your assignment is to memorize the first 100 digits of pi having been intentionally given so little time to do so that your only chance of completing the assignment is to cheat. I authorize you to cheat on this assignment and only this assignment, but if I catch you cheating, you lose.

It will go something like this (subject to change): at the start of the next class, I will randomly sort the class roster, and then I will go down the list and call on people one at a time to recite to me the first 100 digits of pi. I may ask you to share your screen, and also to pan your camera about the room (be prepared!), simulating what proctor-monitoring software would do. The grading is pass/fail. If we run out of time before you are called on, you pass by default.

Again, I expect you to cheat. How you choose to cheat is entirely up to you. Collaborative cheating is also encouraged, but everyone involved will lose the game if caught. At the completion, I will give you opportunities to share-and-tell your cheating techniques with the class.

The objective of the exercise is to learn how an adversary thinks and operates by deliberately loosening traditional rules and tapping personal creativity. It is an exercise in threat modeling.

I am only permitting you to cheat on this single quiz. You may not cheat on any other assignments for this class.

California Department of Education:

The California Department of Education (CDE), Instructional Quality Commission, and State Board of Education are commencing 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 will be 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.

Select the link below to access an online survey to review and comment on the various sections of the draft Mathematics Framework. The online survey will remain open through April 8, 2021.

• Mathematics Framework Online Survey

CBC:

It’s a career in high demand – but still – many just aren’t turning to the trades as a career choice… Even as we see the government pumping more money into the industry… Students taking trades aren’t always sticking with it. The Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board has a construction academy… And students from there are successfully graduating training programs. CBC’s Amy Dodge has more.

Windsor-Essex electricians and plumbers could be fully qualified to work by the time they are 20 years old. 

That’s if they take advantage of an expanding skilled trades program on which the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board and St. Clair College have been collaborating.

“I was doing work around the house with my mom … it really interested me — hands on work — it would be really cool to help people build houses,” said Kaelyn Kapsalis as she sanded one of her projects in the board’s Construction Academy. 

“It’s like a creation of what you’ve done. You feel good about it,”

Kapsalis doesn’t know what her future holds after Grade 11, but she does know construction will be part of it. She said the apprenticeship hours she’s been logging gives her a head start on everyone else in the trade. 

Jasmine Lane:

I can believe in my students as much as I want, but when I’m ill equipped with the tools to be successful, when administration uses veiled threats about non-contract renewals, when I note that half of my students struggle to read but am answered with “but our graduation rates” we have lost point. Robert Pondiscio wrote that “we nod in earnest agreement that every child must be held to high expectations and deserve to feel safe… but our practices often reveal something less than a warm embrace of those ideals”. This is my experience. When you work with people who think so little of the students you teach, when those students look like and come from the same neighborhood as you, it can almost feel like they might have thought the same were you a student in their class 10 years ago. It’s demoralizing, but I can have standards only to the point that the school culture tolerates my standards. Otherwise I’m the proverbial adversary for administration concerned with graduation rates instead of proficiency and growth, and of students that are used to just getting by. I have felt the crushing weight of mediocrity in a sad and intimate way. 

Laura Miller:

Not long ago, a cognitive neuroscientist decided to perform an experiment on herself. Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the science of reading, was worried—as perhaps you have worried—that she might be losing the knack for sustained, deep reading. She still bought books, she writes in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, “but more and more I read in them rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.” Despite having written a popular book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, celebrating, among other things, the brain’s neuroplasticity—that is, its tendency to reshape its circuitry to adapt to the tasks most often demanded of it—Wolf told herself that it wasn’t the style of her reading that had changed, only the amount of time she could set aside for it. Nevertheless, she felt she owed the question more rigorous scrutiny. Hence the informal experiment.

Patrick Marley:

While the committee has a say in how about $69 million in federal assistance can be spent, far more — $617.5 million — will automatically flow to Wisconsin school districts regardless of whether they are holding in-person education, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

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.

When asked about Act 10, I often suggest that interested parties explore the Milwaukee pension scandal. Successful recall elections lead to the first Republican County Executive in many, many years – Scott Walker.

A few links, just before Act 10 require contemplation, as well.

2009 “an emphasis on adult employment” – retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman, speaking at the Madison Rotary Club..

2010, WEAC: Four (State) Senators for $1.57 million (!)

Recent words:

Brian Reilly:

Former Walker chief of staff Keith Gilkes, who also ran Walker’s successful 2012 recall campaign, argued that Act 10’s influence on Wisconsin’s political landscape has waned in the years since its passage, replaced by the increasing nationalization of politics.

“Yes, Act 10 was impactful in its time. But with time and distance, we’ve moved away from that,” Gilkes said. “We are moving more into a nationalized set of elections where the president is on the ballot for the midterms too. The president is now on the ballot in every election.”

Tyler Cowen:

That question is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one contrasting excerpt:

When I hear laypersons discuss the future of the internet, the most common question is what kind of company or service is coming next…

When I hear internet entrepreneurs discuss the future, the biggest question is what kind of decentralized service or platform might be next.

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.

Leila McNeill:

In 1960, America had a stroke of luck. That was when the application to begin mass-marketing the drug thalidomide in the United States landed on the desk of Frances Oldham Kelsey, a reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration. Today we know that the drug can cause a range of severe congenital deformities and even infant death when taken by pregnant women for nausea. But at the time, thalidomide’s darker effects were just becoming known.

Between 1957 and 1962, the sedative would result in thousands of infants in Canada, Great Britain and West Germany born with serious deformities, including the shortening or absence of limbs. The U.S., however, never had a crisis of thalidomide-linked deformities on that magnitude. Why not?

What stood between the drug and the health of the American public was none other than Kelsey and the FDA. As a medical reviewer, Kelsey had the power to prevent a drug from going to market if she found the application to be lacking sufficient evidence for safety. After a thorough review, Kelsey rejected the application for thalidomide on the grounds that it lacked sufficient evidence of safety through rigorous clinical trials.

Today we take it for granted that the FDA wisely spurned an unsafe drug. But in many ways, Kelsey’s education and experience up to that point made her especially well-suited for her position as a medical reviewer—and, in particular, for the thalidomide application.

Matt Taibbi:

Lorenz was wrong on three counts. One, Andreesson never said the word. Two, the person who did say the word was merely relaying that the Reddit users betting on GameStop “call themselves the ‘retard revolution.’” Lorenz was confusing reporting on speech with actually speaking, the same error that’s led to crackdowns on videographers like Jon Farina and Ford Fischer, punished for shooting raw footage of people saying and doing supposedly objectionable things (a story mostly uncovered by these same media priests).

Thirdly, WTF???? Private utterance of the word “retarded” is news? As Greenwald points out, this would be joke behavior coming from a middle school hall monitor. Such deviance-hunts however are now a central concern of media reporters like Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy of CNN, Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC, and Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel, and Lorenz at the Times. Somebody, somewhere, is saying or thinking a bad thing, and this crew seeks the rot out, with the aim of publicly shaming those individuals.

The subtext isn’t hard to decipher. These people believe bad-think, left unaddressed, results in Donald Trump being elected. Therefore, as Chen and Roose put it in a chat last week, it’s “problematic” to countenance platforms that allow large numbers of people to assemble in non-monitored, “shadow” social networks, where they can spread “misinformation” and wreak, potentially, a “ton of havoc.” Countless stories have been written on the theme of what speech should be “allowed,” as if they are the ones who should be doing the allowing.

This is how we’ve traveled in just two and a half years from banning Alex Jones to calling for crackdowns on all unmonitored or less-monitored spaces, from podcasts to the aforementioned Clubhouse to encrypted platforms like Signal and Telegram to Parler, even to Substack, which ludicrously is beginning to come under fire as a purveyor of unapproved thought.

Emily Hamer & Chris Rickert:

A question asked of sixth-grade students during a school assignment at Patrick Marsh Middle School in Sun Prairie. The correct answer under the Hammurabi’s Code is, “cut off his ear.” 

The Sun Prairie School District said Monday it will not bow to a demand to fire an administrator overseeing the district’s equity work after three middle school teachers gave sixth-graders an assignment on the first day of Black History Month that asked them how they would punish a slave.

In a statement responding to an online open letter and petition, superintendent Brad Saron ticks off initiatives overseen by assistant superintendent for teaching, learning and equity Stephanie Leonard-Witte and says “there is no one more committed to equitable outcomes for students than” she is.

Also Monday, the district provided an update on how it is working to move forward from the incident and promote community healing, but in doing so was accused of overstating its relationship with a local nonprofit focused on racial equity. The nonprofit — YWCA Madison — says it hasn’t been working with the district at all.

The Art of Machinery:

Warning: I don’t think the stuff in this post has any direct practical application by itself (unless you’re a nuclear war survivor and need to reconstruct maths from scratch or something). Sometimes I like to go back to basics, though. Here’s a look at

π

\pi

and areas of curved shapes without any calculus or transcendental functions.

A simple algorithm for calculating

π \pi

Bari Weiss:

One wonders where biracial families are slotted in? Maybe they just said screw it and went with “Latinx?” And did the Jewish lesbians go with the other Jews or with the “LGBTQIA+”? 

If you are relying on the legacy media, like The Washington Post and The New York Times, for your news it’s possible these anecdotes are shocking. But there are hundreds of examples like this. As one New York City mom put it to me: “We could flee our school, but at this point where would we flee to? This is everywhere.” 

I want to say: Yeshiva! Homeschool! Now! Today! 

But she is panicked. And so I listen as she explains their close relationship with the school’s college counselors . . . 

And these are private school parents — parents who can afford to hire out-of-work PhDs to tutor their kids 19th-century style or move to a different state. What of the public schools? 

Consider just a bit of the recent news:

San Francisco’s public schools have not been open since the start of the pandemic but the board just renamed 44 schools — including those named for George Washington (slaveowner; colonizer); Hebert Hoover (“accepting of white supremacy”); John Muir (“racist”). If you are curious about why Dianne Feinstein and Paul Revere didn’t make the cut, spend a few minutes with this google document compiled by the board.

Or if that’s too tedious, just watch this clip from in which one of the board members declares merit “racist” and “Trumpian.” You’ll get the picture real fast:

The Seattle Public Schools are saying that the education system is committing “spirit murder” against black children. The New York City Public schools are telling white teachers they are guilty of the same. Spirit murdering has even made its way into the new administration: Joe Biden’s Deputy Secretary of Education, Cindy Marten, as superintendent of the San Diego Schools, endorsed the idea, as well as the notion that white teachers should undergo “antiracist therapy.”

In the meantime, David Kirkland, the Vice Dean of Equity at NYU Steinhardt Metro Center  has upped the ante, saying that schools are “murdering the bodies of our children.” Watch:

If this is true, the Department of Education should open up an investigation this afternoon. Meantime, I wonder what Michael Steinhardt makes of Kirkland’s claim.

The state of California is about to adopt an Ethnic Studies Curriculum based in Critical Race Theory. North Carolina just did that for its K-12 history standards. I could go on.

And that’s just the ideological takeover. The harm that is being done to children — especially poor and minority children — by the refusal of teachers unions to go back into the classroom despite the guidance of the CDC and the promises of Joe Biden is a generational crime.

Read this Twitter thread from yesterday in Minnesota. It is about a single school district, but it is a microcosm of the whole sordid situation:

The entire education system in American seems like it sliding off its foundation. This is not something that can be fixed by a confrontational PTA meeting or a change.org petition. This is a moldy walls, basement-flooded and roof-caved-in type of deal. It is the kind of circumstance in which you are forced to consider rebuilding a new home entirely.

Manlio De Domenico and Hiroki Sayama:

Complexity science, also called complex systems science, studies how a large collection of components – locally interacting with each other at small scales – can spontaneously self-organize to exhibit non-trivial global structures and behaviors at larger scales, often without external intervention, central authorities or leaders. The properties of the collection may not be understood or predicted from the full knowledge of its constituents alone. Such a collection is called a complex system and it requires new mathematical frameworks and scientific methodologies for its investigation.

Here are a few things you should know about complex systems,

result of a worldwide collaborative effort from leading experts, practitioners and students in the field.

“There’s no love in a carbon atom, No hurricane in a water molecule, No financial collapse in a dollar bill.”

– Peter Dodds

(ELEPHANT— AN ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS THAT IS SLOW TO DO THE RIGHT THINGS AND PROVIDE EFFECTIVE OVERSIGHT)

Armand Fusco:

The term “elephant” (huge, unwieldy, and does what it pleases with no limits) is being used to indicate that the various elements of the budget topics, in most situations, contain far more complexities than can be described generally because they tend to be local issues or considerations. The school budget process is like handling an elephant which is a huge part of schooling, very difficult to do if done right, and it needs a lot of training. The reality is that the budget preparation does not require any specific training or skills and that’s why it should be viewed with so much concern and suspicion. There are finance managers that are trained for schools, but all schools do not employ them. However, the issue is that the Super is responsible for the budget preparation and implementation without having the finance and budgetary training nor is it typically required as part of being certified.

School budgeting is probably the education topic that gets discussed more than any other; and, at the same time, seems so perplexing and confusing to understand because so many elephants roam the process. The purpose of this series is to explain school budget in all of its aspects so that taxpayers and parents can decipher it more easily.

The “anything goes elephant” means that the budget process is done locally and (1) there is no required standard or template that districts must follow; what must be followed are the budget procedures and categories outlined in what is called the School Board Policy Manual ( manual lists all of the policies governing the practices, procedures, and operations of the school system; it’s available for public view on the board’s website). Incidentally, it’s not like reading a book because most policies only take one or two pages (2) there is no limit to what can be included for expenditures other than what taxpayers are willing to pay and (3) there are also other budgetary procedures that are required by the local governing authority such as the need to adhere to specific timelines. Generally, the budgetary process is as follows:

Inside Education 6 continued. the School to Prison Pipeline: Those Who Care!

George Will:

On Feb. 16, a joint committee of the state legislature will decide whether to turn into a legal requirement the State Board of Education’s recommendation that — until a slight rewording — would mandate that all public-school teachers “embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives.” If the board’s policy is ratified, Illinois will become a place congenial only for parents who are comfortable consigning their children to “education” that is political indoctrination, audaciously announced and comprehensively enforced.

Imposing uniformity of thought is the board of education’s agenda for “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading” (CRTL). This builds upon Illinois’ 2015 law requiring teachers to implement “action civics,” which means leading their pupils in activism on behalf of various causes. CRTL would make explicit that only woke causes are worthy causes.

Fortunately, a member of the state legislature’s joint committee, Republican Rep. Steve Reick, is resisting CRTL. He notes that it will further burden teachers with mandates, and diminish teachers’ autonomy and hence job satisfaction, during the state’s teacher shortage: At the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, Illinois schools were short 2,000 teachers. Already mandated teaching subjects include Black history, women’s history, the “history, roles, and contributions of the LGBT community,” anti-bias and anti-bullying, “disability history and awareness,” “social and emotional learning,” “violence prevention and conflict resolution,” and “contributions of a number of defined ethnic groups made to Illinois and the U.S.” Literature, science, writing, arithmetic? Presumably, if there is any spare time.

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.

New York Times:

Wall Street Journal:

Big business has helped Americans weather the pandemic. Retailers stayed open, tech firms made remote work possible, and the pharmaceutical industry is cranking out vaccines. So why did satisfaction with the “size and influence of major corporations” fall 15 points in this year’s annual Gallup poll to a mere 26%?

The collapse came not among Democrats, whose skeptical views were virtually unchanged, but among Republicans. In 2020, 57% of Republicans said they were satisfied with big business. This year the number plummeted to 31%. The likely reason, as NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald points out, is “the culture war reaching the C-suite.”

Put differently, many Fortune 500 firms took the Black Lives Matter protests as an opportunity to pivot hard to the left, ostentatiously endorsing protests even as they sometimes turned violent. Companies from Amazon to Nike donated large sums to progressive activist groups. Managers started to assign polarizing left-wing political texts to employees and adopted new racial hiring preferences. Brands like Coca-Cola and Eddie Bauer boycotted Facebook to try to pressure it to clamp down on political speech.

Gary Kamiya:

Now that the San Francisco school board has decreed that 44 public schools must be renamed because the figures or mythical entities they were named after do not meet our city’s moral standards, the logical next step is to root out offensive street and place names.

To assist in this process, herewith is an initial list of retrograde streets and sites in San Francisco, using the board’s criteria for exclusion. Those included slave-holding and participating in colonialism and genocide. To ensure that the moral quality of the names of our thoroughfares is as high as possible, figures who committed misdeeds outside the board’s criteria are also included, marked with an asterisk.

Matt Welch:

The New York Times on Friday forced out its lead pandemic reporter, 45-year* newsroom veteran Donald McNeil Jr., because the Grey Lady’s management, under public pressure from more than 150 employees, decided that when it comes to speaking certain radioactive words, not only does intent not matter, any utterance is potentially a one-strike offense.

“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn explained bluntly in a memo Friday.

McNeil, 67, went as a representative of the Times on a 2019 trip with American high school students in Peru. There, according to his farewell note to colleagues—which, tellingly, was the first time the context of his career-ending comments had ever been reported during the 8-day life cycle of this journalism-world controversy—McNeil “was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”

After receiving complaints back then from at least six parents or students—one of whom said “He was a racist….He used the ‘N’ word, said horrible things about black teenagers, and said white supremacy doesn’t exist”—the Times “conducted a thorough investigation and disciplined Donald for statements and language that had been inappropriate and inconsistent with our values,” according to a company statement January 28. “We found he had used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.”

Glenn Greenwald:

These examples of journalism being abused to demand censorship of spaces they cannot control are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. And they are not confined to those three outlets. That far more robust censorship is urgently needed is now a virtual consensus in mainstream corporate journalism: it’s an animating cause for them. 

“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism,” complained Ultimate Establishment Journalism Maven Steve Coll, the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Staff Writer at The New Yorker. A New Yorker and Vox contributor who runs a major journalistic listserv appropriately called “Study Hall,” Kyle Chayka, has already begun shaming Substack for hosting writers he regards as unacceptable (Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss). A recent Guardian article warned that podcasts was one remaining area still insufficiently policed. ProPublica on Sunday did the same about Apple, and last month one of its reporters appeared on MSNBC to demand that Apple censor its podcast content as aggressively as Google’s YouTube now censors its video content.

Thus do we have the unimaginably warped dynamic in which U.S. journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them. They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous “disinformation.” And they do it from petty vindictiveness: they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives, no matter how powerless. Whatever the motive, corporate media employees whose company title is “journalist” are the primary activists against a free and open internet and the core values of free thought.

The Economist:

DAUGHTERS HAVE long been linked with divorce. Several studies conducted in America since the 1980s provide strong evidence that a couple’s first-born being a girl increases the likelihood of their subsequently splitting up. At the time, the researchers involved speculated that this was an expression of “son preference”, a phenomenon which, in its most extreme form, manifests itself as the selective abortion or infanticide of female offspring.

Work published in the Economic Journal, however, debunks that particular idea. In “Daughters and Divorce”, Jan Kabatek of the University of Melbourne and David Ribar of Georgia State University, in Atlanta, confirm that having a female first-born does indeed increase the risk of that child’s parents divorcing, in both America and the Netherlands. But, unlike previous work, their study also looked at the effect of the girl’s age. It found that “daughter-divorce” risk emerges only in a first-born girl’s teenage years (see chart). Before they reach the age of 12, daughters are no more linked to couples splitting up than sons are. “If fathers were really more likely to take off because they preferred sons, surely they wouldn’t wait 13 years to do so,” reasons Dr Kabatek. Instead, he argues, the fact that the risk is so age-specific requires a different explanation, namely that parents quarrel more over the upbringing of teenage daughters than of teenage sons.

University of Sydney:

Astronomers have for the first time used distant galaxies as ‘scintillating pins’ to locate and identify a piece of the Milky Way’s missing matter.

For decades, scientists have been puzzled as to why they couldn’t account for all the matter in the universe as predicted by theory. While most of the universe’s mass is thought to be mysterious dark matter and dark energy, 5 percent is ‘normal matter’ that makes up stars, planets, asteroids, peanut butter and butterflies. This is known as baryonic matter.

However, direct measurement has only accounted for about half the expected baryonic matter.

Yuanming Wang, a doctoral candidate in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, has developed an ingenious method to help track down the missing matter. She has applied her technique to pinpoint a hitherto undetected stream of cold gas in the Milky Way about 10 light years from Earth. The cloud is about a trillion kilometers long and 10 billion kilometers wide but only weighing about the mass of our Moon.

The results, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offer a promising way for scientists to track down the Milky Way’s missing matter.

“We suspect that much of the ‘missing’ baryonic matter is in the form of cold gas clouds either in galaxies or between galaxies,” said Ms Wang, who is pursuing her Ph.D. at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.

Tomasz Witkowski:

When white people began visiting the islands of the Pacific Ocean, the native peoples, fascinated by the abundance of good things coming to them, assiduously observed the visitors’ behaviour. They concluded that the great birds in the sky, filled with packing cases bearing the inscription “cargo,” were gifts from the gods. So, they began to imitate the newcomers, building runways in the middle of the jungle, lighting fires based on the pattern of airport landing lights, and constructing small control towers out of wood and bamboo. Then they awaited the benevolence of the gods, but the gods were not compliant. The planes did not land on their runways, despite the enormous effort they had put into building them and the meticulousness with which they copied the buildings and equipment of the white people. Even today, this cargo cult persists in some corners of Oceania.

In a speech delivered at a degree ceremony at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a noted physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1974, compared the social sciences to the cargo cult. Representatives of the social sciences, he argued, imitate the behaviour of other sciences but to no effect. Feynman did not end with this comparison, but added examples from the fields of rehabilitation, psychotherapy, and parapsychology. He stated that despite the enormous effort invested in researching and perfecting teaching methods, students’ results are worse every year. The same goes for criminality and the other problems which the social sciences attempt to resolve. Was Feynman right?

Andy Kessler:

And why push students to think? Preferring to mold students’ politics, teachers ban books—from Homer’s “Odyssey” to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Scarlet Letter”—even Dr. Seuss. Oh, the places you’ll not go! And for as long as I can remember, Brown University has touted its Open Curriculum—students have the “freedom to study what they choose and the flexibility to discover what they love.” That sounds like summer camp, not college.

Government too. Joe Biden is likable enough, but let’s face it, during the primaries he was the compromise, the consolation prize. And now he’s quickly perpetuating mediocrity by proposing $15 minimum wages, $1,400 stimulus checks, and $400 weekly unemployment-check boosts. Yes, the Covid recession requires assistance, but these programs are too broad and will likely lead to permanent welfare-state expansions. Why work when Uncle Sam provides table stakes for mob-trading GameStop and dogecoin?

Redistribution, by definition anti-merit, is about to pick up steam by way of higher tax rates, ending the special rate for capital gains, and maybe adding a wealth tax. Similarly, climate “science” is stealing productive funding. An avowed socialist, mittens and all, is now chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, in whose hands merit will burn while mediocrity flourishes.

The Biden administration constantly points out “firsts”—its gender and racially selected cabinet, vice president and other appointments. Great, but why not say “best” rather than first? And, Obama-like, shouldn’t Mr. Biden be receiving his Nobel Peace Prize this year? Another watered-down accolade. About the only time you hear “great” anymore is with the overused superlative “GOAT”—greatest of all time—applied to athletes to sell overpriced sneakers.

Even with “stakeholder capitalism,” when you actually do well, you’re the problem. Yale law professor Daniel Markovits calls it the “Meritocracy Trap.” He suggests merit widens class divides. Privilege is inherited. Merit is “a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” Ah, tuition dollars at work. Now you’re evil for inventing the future.

Joanne Jacobs:

In a process marked by “ignorance and incompetence,” San Francisco’s school board voted to rename 44 schools, ratifying historical errors and angering parents of “Remote School 1, Remote School 2 and so on,” writes Joe Eskenazi in Mission Local.

The board, which is in no rush to reopen schools, spent five seconds confirming the cancelation of “Abraham Lincoln.” The Great Emancipator isn’t fit to have a school named after him because he supported the transcontinental railroad and the Homestead Act, which opened up the West for settlement, which displaced indigenous peoples.

Dan Lips:

President Biden has proposed $130 billion in new federal funding to help the nation’s schools reopen as part of a $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Congressional leaders have committed to quickly consider the administration’s proposal. But will billions of additional federal funds actually help public schools reopen?

State departments of education currently already have between $53 and $63 billion in unspent federal funds from March and December emergency funding packages, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

State education agencies had $13 billion in unspent CARES Act funding as of November 30th

In March, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which provided $30.75 billion to the U.S. Department of Education for an Education Stabilization Fund. The fund included $16.2 billion for K-12 education, including $13.2 billion for an “Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief” (ESSER) fund.

As of November 30th, state departments of education had only spent $3 billion out of the $12.8 billion in ESSER funds awarded last spring, according to Department of Education data. Only three states (Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri) had spent more than half of their ESSER funding. Eight states had spent less than 10 percent. New York and Vermont had spent less than 1 percent of their funds. Overall, state education agencies had spent less than 25 percent of ESSER funds after the first three months of the current school year.

The table below details CARES Act ESSER funding awards since March and what had been spent as of November 30th.

The Department of Education distributed $54 billion in new funding in January

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.

Conservativewoman.co.uk:

Simon has anxiety issues and finds it embarrassing to have to admit on the group chat, in full view of the rest of the class, that he doesn’t understand. After half an hour, the test finishes; Simon has managed to answer four of the 20 questions. The other 16 he’s left blank. 

The teacher does not go through the test with Simon individually. She does not go through it with the class as a group. Next week, Simon might find out how he did in the test. By which point, he’s either forgotten about it – he is nine years old – or had to move on to a new assignment. Simon types ‘Bye, Miss’ on the group chat, to prove his attendance, and the class ends. 

A ten-minute break. Simon sits in front of his computer, watching clips from the Premier League. Next class: geography. ‘Here, Miss’. Ten minutes later, about 15 of the 20 children have managed to log in. After waiting, with no response, for the remaining five, the teacher decides to start class without them. 

The teacher goes through a slideshow. But neither Simon nor any of his ‘classmates’ are able to see her shared screen. After a long delay, the teacher manages to get her slideshow on the Microsoft Teams window, so everyone who is logged in can see. Simon stares at a diagram of the Earth: crust, mantle, outer core, inner core. Written under the English text, phonetic Arabic in Roman letters for the two children from Syria and one from Iraq in his class who do not speak any English. Simon does not know what it is or why it is there.

The teacher asks the children to identify the parts of the Earth. On the count of 5, they must type in their answers on the group chat. Simon waits until a few children have entered their answers, then he copies what they wrote. As most do.

Despite this, several children still give the wrong answers. Comments in the group chat read ‘miss wot is this’ and ‘miss i dont now’. One child in the group writes ‘PLZ I DONT LIKE THIS’ over and over again throughout the lesson. 

Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, writing on Facebook:

Editor’s note: Until yesterday, with rare exception, I refrained from commenting or interfering in local affairs. I called two people connected to the following.

I was deeply concerned that Madison be prepared for the immunization of teachers and all others connected with the opening of our public schools.

(1) That there be a plan to swiftly distribute the vaccine and teachers and staff know where to go NOW, when for their shots.

(2) That the following, City of Madison, Madison Public Schools, MTI, and Public Health, once they have a plan push to move teachers to the top of the list so we can get our schools opened for the obvious reason- too many kids are falling behind.

We need a quartermaster, an expert in logistics, NOW. Some one may claim that this is being done , but if the two people I spoke with have no knowledge of any such activity, it does not seem plausible.

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.

Greg Ashman:

As yet, it remains to be seen exactly what President Biden has in store for America’s network of charter schools. Following the Democratic Party primaries, the Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce called for accountability for charter schools and a ban on federal funding of for-profit charters—approximately 12 percent of the total. Increasing accountability does not necessarily sound like a hostile act against charters but the taskforce is specific that this will involve “requiring all charter schools to meet the same standards of transparency as traditional public schools, including with regard to civil rights protections, racial equity, admissions practices, disciplinary procedures, and school finances.” For those of us who have followed the charter school debate over the years, this statement appears to be framed with the concerns of these schools’ opponents in mind.

Charter schools are publicly funded institutions that charge no fees and have more flexibility than regular government schools in how they manage their affairs and run their programs. They are similar to free schools and academies in England and the model has been adopted with varying degrees of commitment and success in other parts of the world.

Until recently, there was considerable bipartisan support for charters in the US, but that has begun to wane as charters have been dragged unwillingly into America’s wider culture war.

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.

Isaac Chotiner:

Last month, San Francisco’s Board of Education voted, 6–1, to change the names of forty-four schools, including schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. A committee formed by the board in 2018, in the wake of the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, had determined that any figures who “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” should no longer have schools named after them and had recommended which names should be changed. Washington’s name was struck because he held slaves, Lincoln’s because of his policies toward Native Americans. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s name will be removed from a school, owing to the decision, when she was San Francisco’s mayor, in the nineteen-eighties, to replace a Confederate flag that was part of a Civic Center display and had been taken down by a protester. (A spokesperson for Feinstein said that the city’s parks department replaced the flag “on its own accord.” She later had it replaced with a Union flag.) Some of the committee’s recommendations have received more criticismthan others: Paul Revere Elementary School will be renamed because of his role in the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, an assault on a British fort that the committee claimed, incorrectly, was intended to colonize the Penobscot people.

On Tuesday, I spoke with Gabriela López, the head of the San Francisco Board of Education, about the decision. López, thirty, is a teacher who was elected to the school board in 2018 and chosen as president by her colleagues. In the last several years, San Francisco schools have repeatedly landed in the national news. In October, the school board halted the selective-admissions process at Lowell High School, which is known for its academic strength and has markedly low numbers of Black and Latino students. On Wednesday, the city of San Francisco sued the school board and the district, claiming that they lack a plan to reopen schools. (The superintendent said at a news conference that the school board and the district “absolutely have a comprehensive plan” for reopening.) In my conversation with López, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the controversies around reopening and renaming, including questions about how the committee made its judgments and how to view the legacies of complex historical figures.

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.

Chrissy Clark:

In a 50-50 party split, Senate Democrats shot down an amendment that would withhold taxpayer dollars from schools that refuse to reopen after teachers are vaccinated.

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats nixed a Republican-led amendment to withhold federal dollars from schools that refused to open. The proposed amendment for the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus bailout bill was a watered-down version of the “Put Students First Act of 2021,” which would prohibit federal funding to schools that do not provide an in-person learning option by the end of April.

The bill was introduced by eight Senate Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). In a press statement, Rubio said that Senate Democrats were engaging in a “partisan, anti-science charade” by withholding support from both the amendment and bill.

Emily Reynolds:

The idea that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their specific “learning style” — auditory, kinesthetic, visual or some combination of the three — is widely considered a myth. Research has variously suggested that learners don’t actually benefit from their preferred style, that teachers and pupils have different ideas about what learning styles actually work for them, and that we have very little insight into how much we’re actually learning from various methods.

Despite this evidence, a large proportion of people — including the general public, educators and even those with a background in neuroscience — still believe in the myth. And a new review, published in Frontiers in Education, finds no signs of that changing.

The team looked at articles that focused on belief in learning styles published between 2009 and April 2020. Articles with participant groups that were not made up of educators or trainee educators were excluded from analysis, as were surveys that focused not on whether learning styles actually existed but on other opinions — whether they explain differences in achievement, for example. Data from over 15,000 educators were included in the analysis.

This week we have seen the Biden administration and the CDC back away from opening schools. Why?

— nathan (@wyattsheepie) February 7, 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.

Michael Crichton:

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful — and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing — that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones — the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the “feeble minded.” Francis Galton, a respected British scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken far beyond anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century — “dangerous human pests” who represented “the rising tide of imbeciles” and who were polluting the best of the human race.

The eugenicists and the immigrationists joined forces to put a stop to this. The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded — Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks — and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.

As Margaret Sanger said, “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty … there is not greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles.” She spoke of the burden of caring for “this dead weight of human waste.”

Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.” Theodore Roosevelt said that “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” Luther Burbank” “Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce.” George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

There was overt racism in this movement, exemplified by texts such as “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” by American author Lothrop Stoddard. But, at the time, racism was considered an unremarkable aspect of the effort to attain a marvelous goal — the improvement of humankind in the future. It was this avant-garde notion that attracted the most liberal and progressive minds of a generation. California was one of twenty-nine American states to pass laws allowing sterilization, but it proved the most-forward-looking and enthusiastic — more sterilizations were carried out in California than anywhere else in America.

Jonathan Turley:

Alison Collins, the Vice President of the San Francisco Board of Education, has declared meritocracy to be racist even in the selection of students at advanced or gifted programs. As we have previously discussed, this has been a building campaign in academia as educators and others denounce selection based on academic performance through testing. At issue in San Francisco is Lowell High School where top students were selected through testing and grades.  Most cities have such gifted programs or institutions, though we have discussed calls for the elimination of all gifted and talented programs in cities like New York.  Lowell had a majority of white and Asian students and only two percent of its student body were African-Americans. Collins and other board members want to abolish the merit-based selection in favor of a blind lottery system.

Collins’ remarks from a San Francisco Board of Education public meeting in October 13, 2020 were only recently posted by Sophie Bearman of San Francisco’s online publication Here/Say Media. In the meeting, she declared “When we talk about merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing…those are racist systems.… You can’t talk about social justice, and then say you want to have a selective school that keeps certain kids out from the neighborhoods that you think are dangerous.”

Collins made the statement in support of a resolution, entitled “In Response to Ongoing, Pervasive Systemic Racism at Lowell High School,” authored by Collins, Board President Gabriela Lopez, Commissioner Matt Alexander, and Student Delegates Shavonne Hines-Foster and Kathya Correa Almanza.

Newsweek quotes at least one Lowell teacher who objects to the elimination of the school as a place for top performing students and said that the system is blind on race and designed to reward “the hardest working kids in terms of academics.”

Gifted programs and elite academic schools are designed to allow students to reach their full academic potential with other students performing at the highest level of math and other disciplines. It is often difficult for such students to reach that potential in conventional settings. Teachers have to keep their classes as a whole moving forward in subject areas. That often means that academically gifted children are held back by conventional curricula or lesson plans. Those students can actually underperform due to boredom or the lack of challenging material. Many simply leave the public school system.  Moreover, students tend to perform better with students progressing at their similar level. Teachers can then focus on a lesson plan and discussions that are tailored to students at a similar performance level.

Related: English 10.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron provides a timely read.

Rod Dreher:

Los Angeles Times columnist Virginia Heffernan, who lives in Brooklyn Heights but who lives somewhere rurally to escape Covid, recently had a dilemma: her Trump-loving neighbors did something nice for her. She doesn’t know what the right thing to do about it is.

Now, stop right there. Normal people don’t have this problem. Normal people think, aww, how nice, and start thinking of ways to return the kindness. But normal people are not Harvard-educated New York-based liberal journalists. Hence Heffernan’s revealing column. Excerpts:

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.

It takes a New Yorker to be confronted with someone doing something nice for them, and get suspicious about the angle. More:

The taxes on both medicinal and rec use would generate $165.8 million in a fiscal year.

Around $80 million goes to help equity and inclusion programs including rural schools.

In the end it is dangerous and fiscally irresponsible if we do not legalize adult cannabis use. https://t.co/QOqS359oJF

— Francesca Hong (@FrancescaHongWI) February 7, 2021

John Hindraker:

The thing I will tell you: However bad/sad/depressing I thought it would be, it was worse

Let me start by saying, this is a wealthy district. Maybe one of the top 5 in the state. The parents are almost all white professionals. To be honest, I almost discounted it. I thought, They’re fine! I should be worrying about the families in real need.

Well, they’re not fine.

There were parents who said they’d never seen their kids dark or hopeless or unhappy – and I believe it, their suburb is the Shangri-La of Minnesota – til last year. They described girls who hid in their rooms and cried and boys falling so far behind they might never catch up.

Over and over, because these were nice people, they acknowledged how lucky they are. They said they have money for tutors and electronics and they’re worried about families that don’t.

I believed them. They were measuring their situation against people with less. With nothing.

Still. What surprised me is how money didn’t make this OK. These parents looked terrified. Two of the fathers cried; one turned off his video because he could not keep it together. Two of the mom had outbursts, and I couldn’t blame them. Everything they said was true.

They said our state is way behind not just the world but the country, that we’ve denied children a decent education for a full year. They said their kids are not at risk for Covid; they pointed out that teachers are less likely to be infected in the classroom than the community.

They talked about suicidal kids, their own and others. They talked about promising athletes who couldn’t play sports. They said their kids are being sacrificed.

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.

Althea Nagai:

For the sake of campus diversity, many colleges and universities pass over white and Asian American applicants with better academic preparation, favoring blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics. CEO statistical research (logistic regression analyses) showed that underrepresented minorities (URMs) received significant preference over white and Asian American applicants with the same or better academic credentials.

• Statistically controlling for test scores, grades, in-state residency, gender, and legacy connections, odds ratios1 showed large preferences awarded to blacks over whites in undergraduate admissions at the following universities: The University of Virginia; the College of William and Mary; the University of Wisconsin; the University of Michigan; Miami University-Ohio; and Ohio State. Moderate preferences were awarded at the University of Oklahoma.

• Odds ratios were found to favor Hispanics over whites at many of the same universities, but many were moderate in size.

• Whites also received preference over Asian Americans at several universities.

• At Harvard, being Asian American was the only statistically negative factor among more

than 10 factors considered by the admissions committee.

Racial preference in admissions creates race consciousness and mismatch.

• Admissions committees keep the degree of mismatch secret.

• Mismatched students disproportionately drop out of STEM, change to non-STEM majors,

transfer to other schools, and take longer to graduate.

• The academic disparities from mismatch continue throughout college.

Psychological costs associated with campus diversity and disparities are many.

• Black students experienced greater first-year “grade shock,” greater discounting of

academic feedback, greater alienation, less attachment to the university, and greater

dissatisfaction with their overall college experience.

• Pre-college academic factors were strong predictors of these psychological setbacks.

• Many URMs would have gone somewhere else had they known where they ranked.

In short, where mismatch is significant, those admitted under racial preference programs incur significant costs that flowed from the mismatch in pursuit of racial diversity.

Campus diversity was also correlated with a general sense of campus discontent among non- minority students and faculty, not just URMs.

• Greater campus diversity was correlated with more student unhappiness; less satisfaction with their quality of education; less work effort; and less satisfaction with the college experience.

Kristen A. Graham and Maddie Hanna:

The Philadelphia School District and its teachers’ union on Thursday moved toward a possible showdown over plans to reopen schools next week, with teachers questioning whether it’s safe to return to buildings and Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. saying he expected them to do so.

Days after criticism erupted over the district’s plan to use window fans to improve ventilation during the COVID-19 pandemic, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan called on the city to assign a neutral third party to assess if buildings are ready for reopening Monday.

Hite acknowledged that the expert’s opinion — an option open to the PFT under terms of a reopening agreement signed by the union and district last fall — could “possibly delay” students’ return for in-class instruction. It would be the third such change in reopening plans since last summer.

But, the superintendent said, “it will not delay our expectations for teachers to be in classrooms” on Feb. 8.

Neither Jordan nor Hite has been willing to speculate on what would happen if the two can’t reach agreement on reopening conditions. But Chicago teachers have refused to report to schools over building conditions, forcing the district to scuttle its reopening plans. A strike is possible there.

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.

Tom Knighton:

I’m a homeschooler.

I didn’t want to be, but my local school system managed to screw the pooch so badly at the end of last year with the shutdowns, followed by clear indications they didn’t know what they were doing at the start of this year, so we opted to homeschool out of a sense of self-preservation.

Yet I’ve found there’s a lot of good stuff about homeschooling. I personally handle all the teaching, on top of working, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. My daughter is able to get help with the things she needs help with—and since I’m teaching her, I know what we’re actually trying to do—and she’s able to fly through other things as she’s able. It’s tailor-made for her.

However, not everyone really groks this. Take noted feminist Jill Filipovic, who had to completely step in it earlier this week on Twitter.

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.

Steve Blank:

Today, the fate of the SpaceX Starship offers an example of how government oversight agencies can stifle innovation when they are unable to distinguish between innovation and execution and throw roadblocks in front of the single company that has transformed access to space.

In delaying test launches of the SpaceX Starship, the FAA desired a lengthy investigatory period that created unnecessary roadblocks for a company that for better or worse now wears the mantle of the U.S. national champion for access to space.

While at first glance the FAA/SpaceX dust-up over their rapid rocket development might be looked at as a rich entrepreneur breaking the rules, and a federal agency trying to keep the public safe, it is actually an example of a government organization — the FAA — unable to distinguish between innovation and execution.   

In innovation failure is part of the process. Test rockets blow up, test airplanes may crash. If you do not push the envelope and discover the limits of your design you’re not innovating fast enough or far enough. It goes without saying that you strive to minimize loss of life and property, but the rules governing innovation programs should recognize a heightened need for speed. The U.S. government appreciated this when developing rockets and experimental aircraft in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Both the House and Senate investigations of the FAA’s failures in the Boeing 737 Max crashes found that there were “lapses in aviation safety oversight and failed leadership at the FAA” and called for “consistent oversight to ensure their work to protect the flying public is executed fully and correctly.” This meant the FAA failed to execute their basic mission — to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world. Execution, here, means following known, repeatable processes — in this case monitoring the design of new systems in an aircraft design — something they’ve done for 60-plus years. The goal is for the FAA to ensure aircraft don’t fail by design. For the FAA, risk reduction to protect the flying public is paramount. Failure in execution in monitoring Boeing meant people at the FAA failed to do their job. And two airplanes crashed because of that. 

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.

Rod Dreher:

McNeil conceded in his parting statement that he used the N-word, and explained the context. I think he’s wrong: I think that context is forgivable, if still poor judgment. If he doesn’t believe in the concept of white privilege, so what? One is not allowed to dissent from an ideological idea? As to using “stereotypes about Black teenagers,” what does that even mean?

I am glad that none of my children want to follow their father’s footsteps into journalism. It is a rotten field, ruled by Jacobins, prisspots, overgrown children and zealots. Some of the most interesting journalists I’ve known in my career have been deeply flawed human beings. But they knew how to find a story, and they knew how to tell a story, and they had humanity. These are not commonly distributed gifts. If they failed in some minor way, there would be forgiveness for them, because people gave others grace then, especially if they were a valuable member of the team. There would be no place for men and women like this in what American journalism has become.

A friend asked the other day: why not start a magazine in which the most interesting writers — he mentioned Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but there are many others — who cannot work in contemporary newsrooms because they won’t kowtow to wokeness, write columns? Why not create a magazine, he said, that celebrates writers who are free-thinking, rough around the edges at times, but always interesting?

Good question. Greenwald, Taibbi, and Sullivan are all making a small fortune now on Substack, but if I were a billionaire, I would start that magazine, and screw the quivering mandarins of the journalism industry.

The Times sealed its fate when it committed itself to The 1619 Project — an ideological lie. Of course they’re going to send Donald McNeil packing when he offends Nikole Hannah-Jones and her newsroom mob, and given him no chance for redemption. McNeil won’t be the last one, either (I’m only sorry he didn’t go out with his head held high). This Twilight Zone episode surely captures what it’s like to work at the Timesnow:

David Reaboi:

The most punishing thing Rhodes said in his long-form confession to manipulating and subverting the press is that the journalists he encounters today “literally know nothing.” We need to look at the full quote to appreciate the importance of this to Samuels. Here is Rhodes:

All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing. (emphasis added)

Now let us look at another quote, this one from Samuels himself in an interview given in 2012.

I believe the catastrophe has already happened. The magazine world I entered almost 20 years ago was a rich, commercially-viable world. For a reasonably broad audience of people it was a fun way to spend two hours in the afternoon. That world is gone. The Washington Post hires 26-year-old bloggers to fill the pages that were filled by reporters who had bureaus in Nairobi that were paid for by their newspapers. That entire substructure has now been blown up.(emphasis added)

Rhodes’ insight is, in other words, almost verbatim the complaint Samuels was raising four years ago. Samuels described this shift, rightly, as a “catastrophe.” When he heard Rhodes say the same thing, it was an opportunity to force America to look at the harm done American journalism’s collapse.

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