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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

:

A free resource for parents and students concerned about the negative impact Critical Race Training has on education. Search our database of over 200 colleges and universities to learn more about Critical Race Training on campuses nationwide.

Heather Gillers and Joe Barrett:

Wisconsin businesses benefited from generally looser restrictions on business than in neighbors Illinois and Minnesota after a number of court reversals and legislative challenges to restrictions imposed by Gov. Evers, a Democrat.

That has helped bars and restaurants outside the urban centers like Madison and Milwaukee, where restrictions are tighter, as well as those near the state line. “Our members along the borders are doing very well,” said Pete Madland, executive director of the Tavern League of Wisconsin.

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.

David Leonhardt:

But over the last few weeks, as vaccination has become a top priority, the pattern has changed. Progressive leaders in much of the world are now struggling to distribute coronavirus vaccines quickly and efficiently:

• Europe’s vaccination rollout “has descended into chaos,” as Sylvie Kauffmann of Le Monde, the French newspaper, has written. One of the worst performers is the Netherlands, which has given a shot to less than 2 percent of residents.

• Canada (at less than 3 percent) is far behind the U.S. (about 8.4 percent).

• Within the U.S., many Democratic states — like California, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and tiny Rhode Island — are below the national average. “The parts of the country that pride themselves on taking Covid seriously and believing in government are not covering themselves in glory,” The Times’s Ezra Klein has written.

The success stories

At the same time, there are clear success stories in places that few people would describe as progressive.

Alaska and West Virginia have the two highest vaccination rates among U.S. states, with Oklahoma and the Dakotas also above average. Globally, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have the highest rates. Britain — run by Boris Johnson, a populist Conservative — has vaccinated more than 15 percent of residents.

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.

Kerry Allen:

Akhilesh Sharma:

Twitter may face action if it does not comply with the government’s orders, the centre warned today, stressing that the social media giant “unilaterally unblocked” accounts and tweets – linked to an objectionable hashtag related to the farmers’ protest – despite its order.   

On Monday, more than 250 accounts were blocked for tweeting, or retweeting, with the ‘farmer genocide’ hashtag, and making “fake, intimidatory and provocative tweets” in connection with the ongoing farmers’ protest.  The use of hashtag is part of “motivated campaign to abuse, inflame and create tension in society on unsubstantiated grounds. Incitement to genocide is not freedom of speech; It is threat to law and order,” the government has insisted.

The crackdown came nearly a week after the clashes between Delhi Police and farmers on Republic Day when the city witnessed unprecedented chaos after a massive tractor rally went rogue. Hours later, however, many of these accounts were unblocked. 

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on Sunday had sought “emergency blocking of 257 URLs and 1 Hashtag under section 69 A of the Information Technology Act,” as per an official statement, which said the social media giant “unfortunately chose not to comply with the same till almost the time fixed for the meeting of a committee” the next day at 3 PM. 

Steven Malanga:

After decades of expert predictions that technological change would reshape the nature of employment, in just ten months the Covid-19 economic shutdowns have made full-time corporate employment from home a reality for tens of millions of American workers. Just how many of these workers will remain employed at home after the pandemic ends remains an open question, but it’s clear that many workers have become convinced that there’s little reason to go back to the old model of everyone in the office all the time. In a Gallup poll in the initial stages of the shutdown last April, 46 percent of workers said that they were working full-time out of their homes. Millions have since gone back to the office, but 33 percent of respondents told Gallup that they were still working from home last fall. More to the point, about a third of all those who worked remotely told Gallup that they would like to do so permanently, even after the pandemic. In another poll, taken by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, 29 percent of workers said that they wanted to work permanently from home.

Many of their bosses agree. Fewer than one in five executives recently told PricewaterhouseCoopers that they want to return to pre-pandemic office arrangements. Others said that they expect to have employees working from home at least several days a week. But 13 percent of executives went further: they are ready to ditch the office completely. Behind their attitude is the growing success of remote work. Some 83 percent of executives surveyed said that the shift to at-home work had been successful. More than half claimed productivity had improved. And seven in ten said that their companies would be investing more in tools to support remote work.

The implications for office space in major cities are enormous. In markets like San Francisco and New York, as few as 15 percent of workers have returned to offices. While return rates are higher in markets like Dallas, among big cities nationally the average occupancy rate for offices remains only about 30 percent. The pandemic has begun crushing real estate markets, as firms delay or cancel plans for new space. The official vacancy rate for Manhattan’s office market, for instance, rose to about 15 percent at the end of 2020, up from 10 percent a year ago, though much of the officially “occupied” space is actually empty. Places as different from one another as Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Boston have all seen vacancy rates rise as office leases expire and tenants decide not to renew, or to reduce their space.

Associated Press:

Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.

The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.

The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address delivered Jan. 19. The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies” without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc.

Change is in the air: San Francisco sues its own school district, board over reopening: ‘They have earned an F”.

Lauren Holliday:

Yesterday, I got into a verbal altercation at Starbucks.

An older man, talking very loudly, said something along the lines of “My son is golden because he has a degree from Stanford University.”

This comment really infuriated me because this type of outdated thinking—that a college degree from an elite, pricey university means you’re set for life—must die immediately. It falsely signals to employers that you’re better than the average Jane just because you have a piece of paper. In reality, all it really signals is your family’s socioeconomic status.

So I interjected and said, “Let me guess… You paid for your son’s education.”

“I did,” he said. “My son’s grandfather was Herbert Hoover, and my son’s degree is like gold.”

Free Software Foundation:

Overwhelmingly, students are being required to use tools in the classroom that they are forbidden to study, share, or modify. Not only do programs like Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom invite a potentially malicious third-party into the educational environment, but more importantly, they increase society’s dependence on proprietary software, software that denies its users their freedom.

By contrast, free software is software that respects the freedom of its users. In a perfect fit with the principles of good education and science, free software allows its users to:

Robby Soave:

The San Francisco United School District isn’t quite finished with its renaming binge: The district’s arts department, previously titled VAPA (Visual and Performing Arts), will now be known as the SFUSD Arts Department.

This change has been made in accordance with “antiracist arts instruction,” according to ABC-7 News.

“It is a very simple step we can take to just be referred to as the SFUSD Arts Department for families to better understand who we are,” Sam Bass, director of the SFUSD Arts Department, explained in a memo obtained by the local news network.

Bass did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the memo isn’t widely available. But ABC-7 reported that the decision was made to eliminate VAPA because the department realized acronyms are a symptom of “white supremacy culture.”

The New York Post reported that the memo cites a 1999 paper by Tema Okun. That paper does not specifically say that acronyms are racist, though it does label “worship of the written word” as an aspect of white supremacy. Other purported characteristics of white supremacy are “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” “individualism,” and “objectivity.” (If this list sounds familiar, it’s because the National Museum of African American Arts and Culture got in trouble last year for promoting similar nonsense.) While some acronyms may be confusing to non-native English speakers, it’s quite a stretch to describe them as a function of white supremacy.

Helen Roy:

Nowhere is this mystification more intense than in their approach to the family, where the failures of the modern administrative state are most clear.

Over the course of the 20th century, technocrats oversaw the near total obliteration of domestic life in America. From the very start, the progressive administrative state stood in opposition to the teleology of the family. About the early progressives, Christopher Lasch writes in Haven in a Heartless World: “Educators and social reformers saw that the family, especially the immigrant family, stood as an obstacle to what they conceived as social progress… The family preserved traditions that retarded the growth of the political community and the national state.” 

Influencers of the time believed that the industrial revolution’s dislocation of work from home to the factory should be mirrored socially, and that, ideally, all key functions of the home would transfer to society at large. “Progress” in the social sphere would mean rational, secular homogeneity, because that would be most conducive to advances in science and technology. For those functions most difficult to extract from the home, the experts would intercede, mandating participation in public school, as well as the burgeoning “public health” system and therapeutic state. Family authority dissipated, family responsibilities evaporated, and family relations disintegrated.

Yvonne Kim:

“Families are struggling and we recognize that,” Petersen said. “One of the benefits of the tuition freeze, quite frankly, right now is that for the dollar, there is no better place to get a four-year education — I would argue — in this country than the UW System.”

Instead, he said, “if we’re going to hold the line on tuition, then we have to have appropriate and significant reinvestment back in the UW System.” Higher education may be one of few areas that remains “relatively bipartisan,” and Petersen said he sees no one better than Thompson to bring its case before Evers, a Democrat, and the Republican-controlled Legislature.

The System’s budget proposal is a list of seven initiatives, including expanded mental and behavioral health services, funding for agricultural research and a partnership with the Department of Corrections to expand education and reduce recidivism in prisons. In August, Thompson requested a 3.5% budget increase for the 2021-2023 biennium that, if approved, would equal a $95.7 million increase in System spending.

The System bore the majority of a 5% state budget cut last biennium, and Evers’ next budget is no more auspicious, with an anticipated $373.1 million revenue shortfall based on state agency requests. Evers, who requested in June that agencies not request additional expenditures this biennium, plans to deliver his budget address virtually Feb. 16.

“(The budget) really is focused on being a true solutions partner in the state,” Petersen said. “What I like about this budget is it’s quintessential Tommy Thompson. We’re not gonna spend a dollar unless it’s going toward something that’s going to improve the state of Wisconsin.”

This is what Thompson calls “the new Wisconsin idea,” alluding to the original concept that a UW education should improve lives beyond classroom walls to the boundaries of the state. Every chance he gets, he reminds people that the System is not only a worthy investment — one that returns $23 for every $1 the state invests — but that he wants it to be a problem solver for the state.

Shepherd Barbash:

It is a sad irony that the teaching of science in American schools is so unscientific. In a more rational world, children would learn about nature and a mode of inquiry—the scientific method—that would awaken them to the awe, fascination, and surprise that the universe should inspire. Instead, the chronic problems afflicting K–12 education and the growing politicization of science have pushed us ever further from that ideal.

Science has been misused and poorly taught for centuries. Capitalists in the United Kingdom espoused eugenics, Soviet Communists embraced Lysenkoism, and theists around the world credit the theory of Intelligent Design. The most enduring betrayal of science in the classroom today is biased teaching about the environment. Whereas eugenics was fueled by fear among the rich that the poor would overwhelm them, the fallacies of green education emanate from fear on the left that fossil-fuel companies and capitalism are ruining the planet. This fear has suffused curricula since the 1970s with an ever-growing list of alarms: pesticides, smog, water pollution, forest fires, species extinction, overpopulation, famine, rain forest destruction, natural resource scarcity, ozone depletion, acid rain, and the great absorbing panic of our time: global warming.

The choice and treatment of these topics reflect a worldview that teachers absorb early in their training. The mission of education, they’re told, is not to teach knowledge but to seek justice and make the world a better place. Their task is to show students that we are destroying the environment and to empower them to help save it, primarily through government action.

Katherine Krimmel & Kelly Rader:

We provide and test a theory explaining how and why racial attitudes shape public opinion on government spending in the United States. We hypothesize that many people think the government allocates money unfairly across racial groups, and “inequity aversion” leads them to reject spending as a result. Using data from an original survey, we find support for our theory in the sample as a whole, and within racial, partisan, and ideological subgroups. Indeed, unfairness views are comparable to partisanship in their relationship to opinion on spending. While prior work has shown that whites’ racial attitudes are correlated with opinion on specific government programs, we show they shape opinion about the appropriate level of government spending writ large. We also move beyond the study of white opinion, measuring views of unfairness in the distribution of spending among racial minorities as well.

Daniel Henninger:

In Chicago, the nation’s third-largest system is on the brink of a strike, despite pleas from the city’s progressive mayor, Lori Lightfoot, for the teachers to return. Unions are resisting opening in Los Angeles, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Washington. Michael Mulgrew, head of the teachers union in New York City, says the schools may not open “until September.”

San Francisco’s Board of Education has enough time on its hands to vote 6-1 to cancel the names of 44 Americans from their public schools. On Wednesday, the city sued its own school board for failing to get the schools open. 

Though teaching modes vary by state, what data exist suggests in-person teaching at public schools is below 25%, while it’s about 60% at private schools, which have largely reopened.

At the start of the pandemic, the closures were understandable. They no longer are, with even the oh-so-careful Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying there is scant evidence of significant virus transmission among grade-school-age children.

Some public districts are performing, as are many dedicated teachers. But parents aren’t waiting for the next school-board election to file complaints. They are voting with their children’s feet.

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.

Erin Jane Illman, Steven Snyder:

The reason the classification of hashed values is critically important is because whether or not the information permits access to an online account can be determinative of whether it is personal information for the purposes of some breach notification statutes, as well as the private right of action in CPRA. This argument has already been advanced in California, in Atkinson v. Minted, Inc., 3:20-cv-03869-JS (N.D. Cal. June 2020) (see First Amended Complaint at Par. 13 “Because passwords that are merely ‘hashed’ and ‘salted’ are not encrypted, they ‘can be accessed and used even while […] redacted with different levels of utility based on how much manipulating of the data is done to protect privacy.’ [Citation omitted]. Therefore, at a minimum, the PII disclosed in the Data Breach included user passwords that would permit sophisticated hackers like the Shiny Hunters to access to an online account.”) To understand the implications of these hacks and the potential impact on litigation requires a bit of technical understanding of hashing and why it is used.

A “hash” of a password is the result of a hashing function applied to the password, and it is used to avoid storing a password in plain text while also allowing a quick and easy evaluation of credentials for a site. The hashing function takes the password and scrambles it up with a large number of simple rote operations with the intent to make it impossible to determine the password from the hash even if the hashing function used is known. As an example, consider a simple computer model of a pool table with a perfectly uniform friction surface, the balls racked precisely at one spot on one end and the cue ball place precisely on the spot in the other. Only a few inputs such as the angle and force of the cue stick hitting the cue ball and a few hard-coded laws of physics will determine the final position of all the balls after they come to rest after a new break. However, even if the laws of physics are simple to apply and mechanical, the complexity of the interaction of all the balls means that it would be impossible to discern the input values by looking at the result — in this case the final position of all the balls. For non-trivial inputs where the balls moved significantly, the resulting position of the balls would give absolutely no information about the inputs, even for someone well versed in the laws of physics. Another feature of this example is that when given a precise set of final positions and inputs that purportedly generate them, it would be trivial to confirm by plugging in the inputs and running the model.

David Blaska:

What are we missing here? Madison’s public schools refuse to reopen its 52 school buildings for in-classroom teaching. They’ve been largely shuttered since last March. What teaching remains is conducted on-line, via computer. Madison is expecting four inches of snow today 02-04-21, so classes have been cancelled. 

Huh?!

You heard right. MMSD is canceling on-line classes! Inside! Via computer! Where it is warm and cozy. WHY? Because the weather forecast predicts snow. Outside. In the Great Outdoors.

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.

Armand Fusco:

Last week’s Part 6 looked at the various issues involved with the School to Prison Pipeline (SPP– a term coined early in the early twenty-first century to refer to the policies and practices that directly and indirectly push students out of school and on a pathway to prison resulting from an academic condition of can’t read, can’t learn); and you likely viewed your situation as hopeless especially with six strikes against you, one of which was that you were born into an impoverished neighborhood. As a result, by law you were forced to attend a failing school where you were held in bondage because you had no real option to leave until you could drop out; it’s a sordid condition that you did not create; it was forced on you. It should be against the law, and it may be, but it has not been challenged in the courts.

By any standard of justice, any court action should decide that it’s unconstitutional. School miseducation and educational malpractice should not be forced upon you by lawful means that propelled you unknowingly to get in line for the School to Prison Pipeline; again, something over which you had no control. Therefore, it would not be surprising that you must have felt like no one cared about your plight, but that’s not true because there are advocates who care and they are sincere in wanting to end this tragedy of schooling. Sadly, caring and sincerity does not lead to successful results unless the core problem has been identified; this, as you will see, is something that not a single one done.

The fact is that the School-to-Prison Pipeline “has been a crucial concern of parents, educators, ministers, civil rights activists, lawyers and youth advocates for a number of years.” It started to become a major concern of the research literature and the general public starting around the start of the 21st century. It was due in large part (as will be seen shortly) to the spiraling statistics and the negative impact on children of color like yourself. Some advocates have defined the problem as “a systematic way of syphoning children out of public schools and funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice system.” In addition, a number of civil rights lawyers regard the SPP as a critical civil rights issue.

Nikolas Lanum:

On March 30 of last year, Gov. Brad Little of Idaho signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which made Idaho the first state to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports.

The act, which was supported by Kenyon and her teammate Mary Marshall, was heavily criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union who called on the NCAA to pull all future events from the state.

The act is likely to be reversed due to the Biden administration’s executive order, which is known as the Executive Order on Preventing and Combatting Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.

In a statement, the administration said “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room or school sports.”

John Kass:

Alan MacLeod:

The entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — was mysteriously disappeared from YouTube say conference organizers.  An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

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

Brett Healy:

Freedom, Inc. wants to totally eliminate police departments and free almost everyone from prison

Programming by Freedom, Inc. “politicizes” kids, teaches them to use intimidation tactics and to vandalize public property

The radical non-profit received over $500,000 in grants in 2020 from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families

Freedom, Inc., a Madison-based non-profit with vocal anti-police beliefs, came into the spotlight recently after organizing protests and unrest in Madison last summer. It might have come as a shock to taxpayers when Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Daniel Bice revealed that this same non-profit had received $3.6 million in grants from the state of Wisconsin over the past five years.

With Freedom, Inc. playing a bigger role in public policy debates and protests, we looked for more information on their background, beliefs and tactics in the coverage they have received from the mainstream media. For some reason, the vast majority of the coverage of Freedom Inc. fails to mention their radical beliefs or document their aggressive tactics. So, as a public service, we have put together the information for you.

Freedom, Inc. Wants To Do Away With The Police And Believes Looting Is Justifiable

Freedom, Inc. hasn’t minced words about what they’re fighting for: taking police officers out of our schools, getting rid of police departments altogether, replacing the police with pleasant-sounding “community control,” and releasing almost all people from prison.

Many in the mainstream media have depicted the group and its goals as positive and peaceful. However, the mainstream media has missed or deliberately ignored the real nature of what Freedom, Inc. is trying to accomplish.

“We really want people to understand, we are not saying ‘defund the police’ or ‘abolish prisons’ and then put another system of punishment in place,” said Freedom, Inc.’s Executive Director, M. Adams, on a Facebook livestream in June.

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.

Steven W. Bradley, James R. Garven, Wilson W. Law & James E. West:

As the American college student population has become more diverse, the goal of hiring a more diverse faculty has received increased attention in higher education. A signal of institutional commitment to faculty diversity often includes the hiring of an executive level chief diversity officer (CDO). To examine the effects of a CDO in a broad panel data context, we combine unique data on the initial hiring of a CDO with publicly available faculty and administrator hiring data by race and ethnicity from 2001 to 2016 for four-year or higher U.S. universities categorized as Carnegie R1, R2, or M1 institutions with student populations of 4,000 or more. We are unable to find significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer for new tenure and non-tenure track hires, faculty hired with tenure, or for university administrator hires.

Virtual Learning is canceled for Thursday, February 4, and all MMSD facilities will be closed Thursday due to winter weather.

— Madison Schools (WI) (@MMSDschools) February 4, 2021

Here’s a story on the explanation from @MMSDschools on why today was a snow day but last week was not. This quote more or less sums it up: https://t.co/GrKQHGcqms pic.twitter.com/yzTAF5azZ1

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) February 4, 2021

.@MikeBloomberg isn’t mincing words about the impact of school closures on children and the action needed by @potus.

Nor should he. pic.twitter.com/cTgomJcdJN

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) February 4, 2021

Additional commentary:

An “equity-based decision” was made Wednesday night to cancel online learning and the limited in-person activities at school, such as child care programs in elementary schools, for the next day, said district spokesperson Tim LeMonds.

“(The district) is working hard to strike a balance between ensuring continuity of learning for our students while making sure our student participants in MSCR Cares or in-person special education programming do not fall further behind via not being able to transition to virtual platforms on short notice,” he said.

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.

In October 2020, Yale was sued by the US after a 2-year Civil Rights investigation revealed "long-standing and ongoing" race-based discrimination.

CNN Contributor @AshaRangappa_ deleted records showing Yale's racism.

The Biden DOJ just dismissed the case without explanation pic.twitter.com/h4iYxFflU8

— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) February 3, 2021

Heather Knight:

The fight over reopening San Francisco’s public schools will take a dramatic, heated turn on Wednesday as the city becomes the first in the state — and possibly the entire country — to sue its own school district to force classroom doors open.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera, with the blessing of Mayor London Breed, plans to sue the San Francisco Board of Education and the San Francisco Unified School District for violating a state law compelling districts to adopt a clear plan during the COVID-19 pandemic describing actions they “will take to offer classroom-based instruction whenever possible.”

✏️SCOOP!✏️

It's San Francisco vs. San Francisco. City Attorney @dennisherrera today will sue the San Francisco Unified School District and the Board of Education for failing to craft a plan to reopen its schools. "So far, they have earned an F," he says.https://t.co/BoI95mR8eL

— Heather Knight (@hknightsf) February 3, 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.

Kevin Roose:

The experts agreed that before the Biden administration can tackle disinformation and extremism, it needs to understand the scope of the problem.

“It’s really important that we have a holistic understanding of what the spectrum of violent extremism looks like in the United States, and then allocate resources accordingly,” said William Braniff, a counterterrorism expert and professor at the University of Maryland.

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, suggested that the Biden administration could set up a “truth commission,” similar to the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the planning and execution of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6. This effort, she said, would ideally be led by people with deep knowledge of the many “networked factions” that coordinated and carried out the riot, including white supremacist groups and far-right militias.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Ed Treleven:

An Oregon dance studio that last week drew a 119-count complaint from the joint Madison and Dane County public health department for alleged COVID-19 health order violations is suing the department, joining a lawsuit that challenges Dane County’s indoor gathering limits.

A Leap Above Dance, which faces nearly $24,000 in fines for alleged violations of an emergency order issued by Public Health Madison and Dane County, on Tuesday became a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of two local parents who have children involved in sports teams.

The lawsuit, filed on Jan. 20 by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, challenges the health department’s authority to issue emergency orders to curb the spread of COVID-19 without approval from the Dane County Board. It also questions limits placed on sports in the latest emergency order, No. 12, issued on Jan. 12.

The lawsuit was originally filed directly with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which in December decided 4-3 against taking the case and told plaintiffs to start in circuit court.

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.

Joe Dwinell:

Wealthy residents and businesses are leaving the state at a troubling rate — an exodus that could grow now that working remotely is gaining widespread acceptance, a new Pioneer Institute report states.

Massachusetts has seen a net loss of $20 billion to other states, especially New Hampshire and Florida where taxes are much lower, the report warns.

“COVID has dramatically accelerated working from home and that’s bad news for the state,” said Pioneer Institute Research Director Greg Sullivan, who co-authored the report on “Do the Wealthy Migrate from High-Tax States?”

The Pioneer report found wealthy residents have been packing up and moving out of state over the last 25 years, taking with them much-needed taxable income. The report found that some $20.7 billion in adjusted gross income left Massachusetts between 1993 and 2018.

That news hits as Massachusetts’ Democratic lawmakers have proposed a hike in taxes on the rich to bolster funding for education and transit. Another vote, Sullivan says, is expected to come up again this spring.

He warns the post-pandemic economy will see companies be more mobile and searching for the best deals they can — all while employees could be free to choose where they want to live also.

Sullivan cited Tesla as Exhibit No. 1.

John McWhorter:

Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.

Skeptics have labeled this undertaking “cancel culture,” which of late has occasioned a pushback from its representatives. The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind. Thus a group of linguists in July submitted to the Linguistic Society of America a petition not only to criticize the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker for views they considered racist and sexist, but to have him stripped of his Linguistic Society of America fellow status and removed from the organization’s website listing linguist consultants available to the media. An indication of how deeply this frame of mind has penetrated many of our movers and shakers is that they tend to see this punishment clause as self-evidently just, as opposed to the novel, censorious addendum that it is.

Chrissy Clark:

Democrats are taking the side of the Chicago Teachers Union as it vows to strike. City leadership ordered teachers to return to classroom learning and the ongoing feud is highlighting the burgeoning divide between teacher unions — who wish to keep schools closed — and school administrators — who wish to safely reopen using mitigation strategies.

The White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, is among the most notable Democrats to take the side of the teacher unions that refuse to return to in-person learning. 

The unions and the Biden administration claim that reopening schools is unsafe, despite evidence that in-school transmission of COVID-19 is extremely rare. A peer-reviewed study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that “schools can stay open safely in communities with widespread community transmission.” Other studies have also indicated that schools are not driving coronavirus infections. 

Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also calls on schools to reopen for in-person learning “as safely and quickly as possible.” Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly echoed the CDC guidelines to reopen schools, as well.  

Despite Democrats’ calls for “science” to drive policy, there appears to be another force driving their policy goals — political donations from teacher unions. Here are the Democrats who backed efforts to keep schools closed while taking thousands from teacher unions in the 2020 election cycle: 

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.

Statement by Suzanne Valdez: Departure from KU Faculty Position::

Yesterday, January 28, 2021, I resigned from the University of Kansas as a full-time faculty member. I will no longer be a Full Clinical Professor of Law and the Connell Teaching Chair at the KU School of Law. I have greatly valued teaching, advising, and mentoring a generation of KU Law students for the past 21 years. While at KU, I taught upper level practical skills courses, and I developed the nationally recognized Deposition Skills Workshop. I taught legal and prosecutorial ethics, and I co-authored a law school textbook titled, “Prosecutorial Ethics.” In addition to my teaching and scholarship, I served the university community in many ways, including as University Faculty Senate President, where I advocated for fair and equitable treatment of faculty, staff, and students. For faculty and staff, I spoke out on issues related to racial injustice and gender inequity. For students, I voiced the importance of addressing campus sexual assault in a trauma-informed manner.

Madeleine Brand:

The Centers for Disease Control released a new study that shows little spread of COVID if masks, social distancing and proper sanitation are enforced. Schools would still have to limit indoor athletics and extracurricular activities.

But this week, LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner argued that teachers and other school staff must be vaccinated so in-person classes can resume sooner. The LA teachers union says they can’t return to in-person learning until community spread also drops. The two announcements mean the majority of LAUSD’s 600,000 students may not return to school at all this academic year.

Amber Walker:

I sometimes wonder where I would be today if my kindergarten teacher hadn’t encouraged my mother to have me take the admissions exam for Chicago’s selective elementary schools.

That one test result earned me a coveted spot at Edward W. Beasley Academic Center, one of the city’s gifted and talented elementary programs, where I matriculated to one of the top-performing high schools in the country.

And that, in turn, set the foundation for me to become the first person in my immediate family to graduate from college, earn my master’s degree, travel the world, and earn a decent, fulfilling living. If I have children of my own, they will likely attend high-performing, well-funded community schools.

As an adult covering K-12 education, I find that my experience also shaped my belief that if students, no matter their backgrounds, are treated with dignity and are provided with educational spaces where they feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable, coupled with the tools and resources they need to absorb the curriculum, they will succeed academically.

It is not easy, but it is possible.  I’ve seen glimpses of it during my time learning in, teaching in, and writing about classrooms.

Amber spent a bit of time covering education in Madison.

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.

Annalee Newitz:

If you’ve ever seen a picture of a lost city—maybe in the pages of National Geographic or in the first Tomb Raider movie—you were probably looking at the crumbling temples and immense, empty canals of Angkor, the former capital of the Khmer empire in present-day Cambodia. Thick tree roots have wrapped themselves around massive blocks of stone in its legendary palaces. Flowers grow from cracks in hundreds of ornate towers carved with the Buddha’s serene face. A thousand years ago, Angkor was among the world’s largest cities, with nearly 1 million residents. Today its iconic ruins are as famous as the city itself once was, attracting millions of tourists to Cambodia every year.

Though Angkor has always been widely known in Asia, Europeans became obsessed with it after the French explorer Henri Mouhot claimed he discovered the place in 1860. Mouhot described Angkor as a lost city, its past a fairy tale with no connection to present-day Cambodia. His vision of Angkor captured the Western imagination and popularized a myth about urban life cycles, in which cities follow a linear progression from humble origins to spectacular heights—and then collapse into obscurity. This myth continues to shape public understanding of urbanism a century and a half later. It haunts news stories about “pandemic flight” from Manhattan and San Francisco, and it is the unspoken subtext of anxious questions about whether Detroit and New Orleans, cities battered by economic or ecological catastrophes, are at risk of dying.

Alfred Ng:

Mere hours after supporters of former president Donald Trump forced their way into the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, sleuths, both amateur and professional, took up the task of combing through the voluminous videos and photos on social media to identify rioters. Facial recognition technology—long reviled by police reform advocates as inaccurate and racially biased—was suddenly everywhere.

A college student in Washington, D.C., used facial recognition to extract faces from videos on social media. The Washington Post used facial recognition to count the number of individual faces at the Capitol Building attack, and a researcher from Citizen Lab used it to identify people involved in the riots. And when the FBI posted photos of rioters, looking for help with identification, the Miami Police Department assigned two detectives to scan faces into the department’s Clearview facial recognition app. 

The episode was a reminder that facial recognition software is now ubiquitous in the private and public sectors—a fact that often gets overlooked as cities pass high-profile laws that purport to ban law enforcement from using the technology. The Markup examined 17 bans passed in the past couple of years, speaking with local officials and reading through official documents. In six of those cities, officials either told The Markup or otherwise publicly stated that loopholes in the bans effectively allow police to access information garnered through facial recognition.

The bans in Pittsburgh; Boston; Alameda, Calif.; Madison, Wis.; Northampton, Mass.; and Easthampton, Mass., all have language in their regulations that may allow local police to continue using facial recognition through state and federal agencies or the private sector.

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco’s elite academic public high school would no longer admit students based on top grades and test scores, and instead use a random lottery system for admission, if the school board approves a measure fast-tracked for a vote.

The controversial proposal will head to the school board during a special meeting Tuesday, with a final vote expected a week later. Four school board members — a majority — have already signed onto the effort, meaning it is likely to pass.

For decades Lowell High School — one of the top-performing public schools in the country — has been considered a point of pride for the district and the city, something of a private school experience at a public school price. But the school has come under fire in recent years for its lack of diversity and instances of racism as the country faces a racial reckoning with the past.

The proposal comes less than a week after the board voted Tuesday to rename 44 schools — including Lowell — after determining the names were associated with slavery, oppression, racism and colonization. That vote garnered national headlines and sparked a brutal division in the city over the timing, with many parents criticizing the move as a distraction from reopening schools after 10 months of distance learning.

Related: English 10.

Cori Petersen:

This past fall, many public schools made the decision to go virtual as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this wasn’t the case for most private schools. In fact, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, only 5% of private schools went virtual as of October. This is driving demand for private schools across the country and in Wisconsin.

“I think parents have seen how different schools have responded to the COVID pandemic. Some systems and schools went into a self-protective mode and put student needs in a subordinate place,” said Charles Moore, principal of High Point Christian School in Dane County. “Others stepped into ‘harm’s way’ and delivered in-person education despite the potential dangers.”  

High Point Christian School, with locations in Mount Horeb and Madison, welcomed 57 new families to their school this past fall. Many parents cited their desire for their children to learn in person as the main reason for coming to the school. But as we celebrate National School Choice Week this week, it’s important to consider ways to expand access to the choice programs so that low-income families can send their children to an in-person, private school if they so desire. Reforms that would make choice more accessible are longer enrollment periods, allowing children to enter the parental choice programs at any point in time — no matter what grade they are in — and eliminating enrollment caps. 

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.

CBS2

Classes are canceled for students in the Keystone Oaks School District due to a teachers’ strike that has been authorized by the Keystone Oaks Education Association. 

RELATED: Keystone Oaks Education Association Announces Intention To Strike If New Contract Is Not Reached

Beginning on Monday, February 1, 2021, the strike goes into effect and classes will be canceled until Monday, February 8, 2021, at the latest. 

The Keystone Oaks Education Association, the union representing teachers within the district, and the Keystone Oaks Board of School Directors were unable to reach an agreement by the union’s target date, triggering the strike. 

Negotiations continued through the past week and this weekend. 

While the strike is on, school sports will continue for in-season sports but conditioning for out-of-season sports will not be held. 

Students that attend Parkway West Career & Technical Center will continue attending regular classes.

Eliza Shapiro, Erica L. Green and Juliana Kim:

“For generations, these public schools have failed us and prepared us for prison, and now it’s like they’re preparing us to pass away,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Tennessee. “We know that our kids have lost a lot, but we’d rather our kids to be out of school than dead.”

Jill Tucker:

School board President Gabriela López did not specifically address the problem of learning loss, but she said that parents are doing an amazing job helping their students and that learning has not stopped during the pandemic — rather, it is just different.

“They are learning more about their families and their cultures, spending more time with each other,” López said. “They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure, and the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.”

Yet, San Francisco’s statistics offer confirmation that learning difficulties exist among students, especially those who struggled before the pandemic, district administrators said.

The district has yet to reach an agreement with labor unions on the conditions required to reopen, but it has moved forward with the application to bring the youngest and most vulnerable students back first, with city health department inspections of school sites and classrooms beginning.

Marisa Kashino:

“I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years, but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics. I know right from wrong. I know history. I know power. I am a coward,” she wrote. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

The statement, posted September 3, 2020, went viral immediately, unleashing a tidal wave of Oh, my Gods across the text chains of Krug’s GW colleagues and other academics. “We were all blindsided,” says GW history-department chair Daniel Schwartz. Distraught emails from Krug’s students—less than a week into a virtual semester already upended by the coronavirus pandemic—began piling up in faculty in-boxes. Meanwhile, an online mob went to work churning up old photos of Krug and tanking the Amazon ratings of her book. By the end of the day, a now-infamous video of Krug calling herself “Jess La Bombalera” and speaking in a D-list imitation Bronx accent was all over the internet.

 

The next morning, Schwartz convened an emergency staff meeting on Zoom. The initial shock of their colleague’s revelation had quickly given way to anger, and now the GW professors who logged on were unanimous: The department should demand Krug’s resignation right away. If she refused, they’d call for the university to rescind her tenure and fire her. That afternoon, they issued their ultimatum in a public statement. Five days later, Krug quit.

It was a dizzyingly fast fall for a woman who’d been among the most promising young scholars in her field. The 38-year-old had a PhD from one of the nation’s most prestigious African-history programs. She’d been a fellow at New York’s famed Schomburg Center, done research on three continents, and garnered wide praise for her book. She’d achieved all of it, as far as her GW colleagues knew, despite an upbringing that was nothing short of tragic. As Krug told it, she’d been raised in the Bronx, in “the hood.” Her Puerto Rican mother was a drug addict and abusive.

The tale was just the latest version of one Krug had been evolving for more than 15 years, swapping varied, gruesome particulars into the made-up backstory (a rape, a paternal abandonment) for different audiences. It was a heart-tugger—and, it turns out, incredibly flimsy. Minimal online sleuthing would have unraveled any of the lies in minutes—something Krug, who was still an undergrad when Facebook debuted, surely knew. But she’d also learned that the harrowing history she’d crafted was a useful line of defense against the kind of probing that could have easily exposed her. After all, who wanted to pry into such a delicate situation?

William McGurn:

Amid all the pain and disruption, a year of coronavirus has given Americans a new respect for those working to keep daily life as normal as possible, from the frontline nurse to the Amazon delivery man. Near the top of this honor roll is an especially unsung hero: the Catholic-school teacher.

The National Catholic Education Association reports that its schools boast a total enrollment of 1,626,291. In ordinary times their teachers do an extraordinary job, especially for their poor and minority students. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor once said, “Catholic schools have been a pipeline to opportunity” for people like her—poor, Latina, raised by a single mom. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, Catholic-school administrators have moved heaven and earth to keep their classrooms open to new generations of Sotomayors.

“The science is clear that there is no substitute for in-person learning, especially for poor and minority children most at danger of falling behind,” says Tom Carroll, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Archdiocese of Boston. “Across the nation, the Catholic school approach is to stay open wherever we are allowed.”

It’s been a roller coaster. During the first days of the lockdowns, many Catholic schools closed forever because of a cash crunch. Kathy Mears, the NCEA’s interim president and CEO, reckons that Covid forced the closure of 107 Catholic schools, though an exact number is difficult because in many cases other factors were also involved.

David Blaska:

Our favorite Madison morning daily newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, wants our public schools open for in-classroom teaching (and, often, learning).

So do the kids. So do their parents. What’s the hold-up? The teachers union, of course. It is always the teachers union.

In sticking their nose above the foxhole here in the occupied territory, the State Journal dares throw nary a pebble at the school yard bully. Not even mentioned, for they fear the reaper. No special interest group wields more political clout hereabouts than the teachers union. None more selfishly protects its privileges than Madison Teachers Inc.

These are the same self-regarding people who say “follow the science” but ignore it when it suits them. School has been virtual and online for 10 months now. Kids are suffering. You wonder why the near doubling in shootings and stolen cars?

That is what Madison Metro Superintendent Carlton Jenkins meant when he said the “metrics surrounding COVID-19 cases in Dane County do not yet support a safe return to school buildings for most students.”

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.

David Mamet:

“We are all, in a sense, fools, since no one person can know everything. We all have to trust others for their expertise, and we all make mistakes,” says Mamet. “The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes, but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected.”

Jon Miltimore:

One prominent study places total pandemic costs at $16 trillion—about four times the federal budget. Americans are suffering from depression at record rates and 150 million people are projected to fall into extreme poverty worldwide. In the US alone, tens of millions of jobs were lost and millions of businesses are closed or on the brink of closure.

One of these businesses is a restaurant owned by a friend of Mamet.

“He is going broke,” says Mamet. “He had seating outside, but winter approaches and heaters are back-ordered until next spring. He is holding on.”

How many people are in this man’s shoes? And for what?

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.

Taxprof:

Professor Joseph A. Petry has won the first round in his $7.9 million lawsuit against the University of Illinois. In a ruling handed down last week, the Illinois Court of Claims denied the University’s motion to dismiss Professor Petry’s lawsuit and held that his claim, including his allegation of lost wages and other damages, “states a cause of action” and can proceed.

The Complaint alleges that the University deliberately breached a resignation agreement it entered into with Professor Petry by continuing an investigation into allegations of misconduct just days after it had agreed to end the investigation. The court’s ruling notes that the University admitted “that it continued the investigation in violation of the Agreement.”

Mikko Silliman, Hanna Virtanen:

In response to recent technological changes and the worsening outcomes of non-college-educated workers (Autor 2019), governments around the world are becoming more interested in whether different types of secondary education (vocational versus general) might play a role in providing young people the skills they need to succeed after they graduate (European Commission 2010, US Department of Education 2013, 2018). In stark contrast to the growing body of evidence on the impact of various fields of study in higher education (Altonji et al. 2012, Hastings et al. 2013, Kirkeboen et al. 2016), there exists a paucity of compelling causal evidence on the impact of secondary-school curricula on labour-market outcomes (Altonji et al. 2011, Hampf and Woessman 2017, Hanushek et al. 2011, 2017). 

Understanding the potential consequences of secondary-school curricula is particularly important given that this choice takes place before higher education and, for many people, is the highest level of education before entry into the labour market. Further, the availability of vocational secondary education is one of the largest differences among national education systems (Figure 1).

Christopher Rufo:

Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

The saga began last June, when a group of students launched an anonymous Instagram account, Black at UNIS, which began posting dozens of anonymous and unverified accusations against the school and specific teachers. The accusations ranged from “microaggressions” (one teacher “used to mix up names of Black students”) to “white leadership failure,” such as refusing to hire black teachers and ignoring the bullying of black students. The Instagram campaign demanded that the school “fire the racist principals,” threatened to begin naming their “oppressors,” and pledged a policy of no mercy: “No one is obligated to protect you from those consequences and no one is obligated to forgive you.”

Later in the summer, the anonymous students formalized their demands in an online petition, which was signed by students, alumni, and parents. The petition claims that “for too long, UNIS has carefully curated the illusion of itself as a multicultural utopia while Black students and other marginalized groups suffer from a culture of ignorance and isolation.” The group demanded that the school hire a director of diversity and inclusion, institute mandatory antiracism trainings, “decolonize” the curriculum, create “safe spaces” for minorities, support the “exploration of diverse gender identities,” reject the “Eurocentric focus of mainstream academia,” and push an “agenda of intersectionality.”

The campaign caused an immediate stir among administrators, teachers, and parents. Within days of the Instagram channel’s launch, school executive director Dan Brenner sent an email to parents pledging that UNIS was “committed to creating solutions to ensure an anti-racist environment.” By the end of summer, Brenner had hired a diversity-consulting firm to conduct antiracist trainings, created a student-led antiracist board, began overhauling the academic curriculum to reflect the new orthodoxy, and hired a full-time Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. According to one source within the school, Brenner and the board of trustees “completely caved to pressure from these ‘activists,’ and passively accepted [the] list of their demands without hesitation.”

Tory Linnane:

Former Milwaukee County Supervisor Dan Sebring is planning to sue Milwaukee Public Schools over a policy that allows certain staff members to take up to 10 days of paid leave each year for union activity.   

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative firm representing Sebring, argues the MPS policy violates his freedom of speech by using his tax dollars to support union work he does not agree with. WILL filed a notice of claim Thursday.

Such policies have been challenged by conservative organizations in other states in recent years. In Arizona, the state supreme court upheld a paid release policy for the Phoenix police union as being in the public interest. A case involving the New Jersey teachers union has climbed to the state supreme court. 

In Milwaukee, it appears union members used a combined total of about 330 hours of paid leave for union purposes in the first half of the 2019-20 school year, according to records provided by WILL to the Journal Sentinel. An MPS spokeswoman would not comment on the matter or provide information about hours of paid leave.

lifeplusplus:

Consider searching .edu sites for syllabi – every syllabus I have ever received had the required textbooks on it.

You could also try searching for ISBN’s on university domains, but I imagine this will be less consistent.

My university partnered with Barnes and Noble and published a list of required books per course as a bundle option. If a course catalog is available you can further refine your search based on course numbers (like FIN 4401 or CSE 4096, etc). Look for any partnerships a university has with a bookseller.

Those are some thoughts… good luck!

With the increased use of closed Web portals, whether bespoke (or more likely, OEM rebranded), or third-party, access to basic course information is increasingly difficult, often hitting a password-protected registration wall.

Emailing faculty or departments directly may offer (occasional) success, as can tracking down reader lists at campus bookstore websites.

There seems to have been a brief golden decade of roughly 2002–2012 when handcrafted professor homepages included course lists and syllabi at least at major universities, both public and private. It’s grown markedly worse in recent years.

Open Courseware, under that name frequently, is an exception. M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford, and Cal Berkeley, off the top of my head. CUNY and Columbia likely as well.

Joe Eskenazi:

ese are complex times. Even the question “How are you doing?” is complex. But this is not complex: In a 6-1 vote late Tuesday night, the San Francisco Board of Education decided that it’s okay to name a school after Willie Brown or Philip Burton, but not Abraham Lincoln.

One day after that seven-hour discussion and vote to defrock Lincoln and 43 other namesakes — including George Washington, Paul Revere, and even “El Dorado” and “The Mission” — parents of public school children received an email from the district with the anodyne and innocuous subject line “Considerations & Preparing for In-Person Learning.”

Tucked away into the third paragraph of the email’s third section was this casual declaration: “it is unlikely that we’ll be able to offer most middle and high school students the opportunity for in-person learning this school year.”

But hey: How are you doing?

This was a frustrating moment. Not just because the San Francisco student sitting behind you may be sitting in that chair for a year and a half when all is said and done. If not more.

Armand Fusco:

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRISON AND JAIL INMATES
and other interested stakeholders: families, friends, school officials—locale and state, law enforcement personnel, politicians, ACLU leadership, prison and jail officials, judges, NAACP officials, parent and taxpayer groups, the media, faith professionals, probation officers, and various
organizations wanting to end the pipeline.

Obviously a lot of people and organizations are involved, and they all need to understand how law enforcement neglect & educational malpractice enable your shameful, human tragedy to continue affecting thousands of you boys, mostly of color, who became victims of preventable crime!

I hope you don’t mind that I make this a public letter because I think that you, your parents, and the public deserve to know why you are incarcerated even though to start with the only “crime” you committed was to live in the wrong school district over which you had no control, and located in an impoverished neighborhood where failing schools are located. Then you were forced by law to attend a failing school where you were held in bondage for at least 9 years. The only real way out was to get pushed out because that is what I believe happened to you; and, of course, when you feel like you are being pushed out, you have no real choice but to drop out.

How you ended up occupying a prison cell is what this letter is all about and it has to do with what is known as The School to Prison Pipeline (SPP) that only exists in failing public schools located in the inner cities which you were forced to attend failing schools. What it means is that if you don’t read at grade level by grade 3, and don’t receive effective remediation, whether you like it or not, you become unwilling candidates for the SPP and eventually drop out of school without any skills.

To put it into numbers will highlight the problem. Up to 80% of you are school dropouts or inmates with serious reading deficiencies. To say it another way, 80% of crimes are committed by school dropouts or reading failures; worse, within 5 years, 78% of you return to your prison cells because you committed more crimes. These are earth shocking statistics that should cause an earthquake of concern among school officials and law enforcement officials. However, the evidence suggests that it’s not even causing a ripple; therefore, nothing registers on their radar screens; but as will be seen next week as this article continues, it has caused concerns with many organizations.

You were probably told at some point that your incarceration had to do with discrimination and racism because of your skin color, being poor, hungry, from likely a single family home, and you were probably difficult to teach. All true except for a couple of very, very, very, wrong assumptions, beliefs, and myths.

Myth #1: Your socio-economic conditions (poverty, poor housing, discrimination etc.) and lack of intelligence were the causes for your incarceration. NOT TRUE! They were contributing factors, but not causes.

Part 4: Inside Education, Reading Series, Part 4 Lawsuit Deliverance.

David Brooks:

Private and some public schools are already operating safely all around the country, with little evidence that attendance is spreading the virus.

The third fact is that teachers unions don’t seem to have adjusted to the facts. In Washington, Chicago and elsewhere, unions have managed to shut down in-class instruction. The Chicago public schools union is on the verge of an illegal strike, even though 130 private schools and 2,000 early learning centers have been open safely since the fall.

The Chicago district installed air purifiers in classrooms, conducted ventilation tests, increased rapid testing and held more than 60 meetings with union leaders, but so far the union has been able to keep public schools from reopening.

Mike Insler, Alexander F. McQuoid, Ahmed Rahman and Katherine A. Smith

This work disentangles aspects of teacher quality that impact student learning and performance. We exploit detailed data from post-secondary education that links students from randomly assigned instructors in introductory-level courses to the students’ performances in follow-on courses for a wide variety of subjects. For a range of first-semester courses, we have both an objective score (based on common exams graded by committee) and a subjective grade provided by the instructor. We find that instructors who help boost the common final exam scores of their students also boost their performance in the follow-on course. Instructors who tend to give out easier subjective grades however dramatically hurt subsequent student performance. Exploring a variety of mechanisms, we suggest that instructors harm students not by “teaching to the test,” but rather by producing misleading signals regarding the difficulty of the subject and the “soft skills” needed for college success. This effect is stronger in non-STEM fields, among female students, and among extroverted students. Faculty that are well-liked by students—and thus likely prized by university administrators—and considered to be easy have particularly pernicious effects on subsequent student performance.

Commentary.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Cristina Criddle:

Jane’s Wigderson:

The presentation on the effectiveness of school choice coincides with more good news about more choices for parents who qualify for the state’s Private School Choice Programs. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced Thursday that 29 more schools will be participating in the programs next year:

The Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which allows students residing outside of the city of Milwaukee and Racine Unified School District to participate, has 307 private schools and school systems registered for the 2021-22 school year, an increase of 27 from the previous school year. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which requires students to reside in the city of Milwaukee, has 131 private schools registered for the 2021-22 school year, which is the same as the previous school year. The Racine Parental Choice Program, which requires students to reside in the Racine Unified School District, has 27 private schools registered for the 2021-22 school year, an increase of two from the previous school year.

These programs allow students with qualifying family incomes to attend a participating private schools for children in K4 through high school. The private school receives a state aid payment, or voucher, for each eligible student. The application period for the 2021-22 school year begins February 1, 2021.

The Guardian:

Name: British landmarks.

Age: Ancient.

Be more specific: No.

Appearance: Striking, historic, controversial.

Controversial? You’ll see.

What are we talking about? Plymouth Hoe and Devil’s Dyke in Sussex.

Lovely places. Marvellous views of the sea from the Hoe. And I had a very nice cream tea once near Devil’s Dyke. What a beautiful valley it is. Well, they’re both in big trouble.

With whom? The mighty Facebook, that’s who.

What’s the problem? Facebook’s hate speech algorithm banned local residents who use the social media platform from referring to hoes and dykes.

Why? Don’t play the innocent with me, squire. You know there’s a problem with hoe.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook services (and instagram), including Madison.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown:

Across the country, a flurry of new legislation aims to expand educational options during the pandemic and beyond. Iowa is on its way to passing a major school choice bill backed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds. Nebraska may bring opportunities for homeschooled students to play team sports and participate in public school extracurriculars. Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Washington state are also considering some positive changes.

In celebration of National School Choice Week, here’s a look at some of these reforms.

Iowa

A new proposal from Reynolds establishes school choice in Iowa by granting state scholarships to public school students who want to attend private schools. “We do not believe this is a private vs. public school debate. It is simply a school choice for the parents to choose,” said Anne Rohling, president of St. Albert Catholic School and a strong supporter of the proposal. “Open enrollment in the public schools [has] allowed families the opportunity to seek out the best fit for their children. If this legislation will empower more families to have more choices, then we are in support of it.”

But the bill also faces strong opposition, in and outside the Iowa statehouse. The President of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP “says this could lead to segregation in some Iowa Schools,” reports CBS 2 Iowa. “We agree that parents should have the choice to enroll their child in a private or religious school, but not with public taxpayer funds,” said Council Bluffs Superintendent Vickie Murillo.

Larry Gray, director of the Council Bluffs Heartland Christian School, responded:

Alyssa Fowers:

A better way is to look at the trend among all Americans age 25 or older. In December 2019, 53 percent of these Americans with a high school education or less were employed. By December 2020, that dropped to 48 percent. That means that one out of every 20 has lost employment in the past year. A fifth of those losses occurred in November and December.

[The covid-19 recession is the most unequal in modern U.S. history]

These workers tend to be concentrated in the sort of industries that are most directly affected by government restrictions in response to covid-19, such as eating and drinking places, construction and hotels.

Such restrictions became more common over the winter. In November and December, 13 states and the District of Columbia closed or restricted nonessential businesses, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Seven states and D.C. closed indoor dining in the same time period.

Wall Street Journal:

Until the San Francisco Unified School District board stripped Dianne Feinstein’s name from one of its public schools, we were unaware of the Senator’s service to the Confederacy. While the city’s mayor, she had replaced a vandalized Confederate flag that was part of a historical display outside City Hall. So now it’s goodbye to Dianne Feinstein Elementary School.

The Feinstein purge is among the banishments the board took Tuesday night when it voted 6-1 to rename 44 schools. The most absurd target is Abraham Lincoln, who waged the war that ended slavery. Also canceled were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster and Paul Revere.

The criteria used to come up with the list of villains is whether they had promoted slavery, genocide, the oppression of women or “otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But a name on a school is not a declaration of perfection. And a society that rummages through history to hold those of the past to the woke standards of today will soon have no heroes to honor.

Drew Catt:

We’re used to people freaking out whenever states consider creating private educational choice programs. The common refrain goes, “But it will drain money from our already underfunded public schools. It will break our budgets!” There are a lot of problems with the ethos and the pathos of that response worth digging into another day, but on its face, the data doesn’t back it up.

How much do states actually spend on private school choice programs, and how much is that in the context of total public education spending? This post breaks it down for you and ranks the states from highest spending share to lowest.

(For added context, see the national chart in this year’s edition of The ABCs of School Choice (also visible below), and for a refresher on how the calculations are made, see the inaugural spending share post from 2017.)

1. Florida (1)
ESA, Voucher (2), Tax-Credit Scholarships (2) | $1,146.0 million | 3.66% of Florida’s combined program and public K–12 current expenditures |3.25% of Florida’s combined program and public K–12 total expenditures

2. Wisconsin (3)
Vouchers (4) | $378.3 million | 3.49% of Wisconsin’s combined program and public K–12 current expenditures | 2.89% of Wisconsin’s combined program and public K–12 total expenditures

Zoe Phin:

I’ve seen screenshots of YouTube modifying dislikes of White House videos. I decided I would do a thorough analysis myself. I wrote a script to check video stats every 80 seconds for 24 hours – for all videos on White House’s YouTube channel.

The collected data is archived here and here. The format is space-separated “CSV”, as follows:

SF Chronicle:

For the past year, the shuttered San Francisco schools have been schools in name only, so perhaps it’s fitting that the school board has taken to occupying itself by tinkering with their names. The members of the city’s Board of Education, having largely quit the education business and rebranded themselves as amateur historians, found much of history unfit for the honor of association with their empty classrooms.

The school board voted late Tuesday to rename 44 schools in what is no mere correction of anachronistic monuments to racists and conquistadors. The cleansing extends to fully a third of the district’s campuses, sparing no name that, according to the internet research of the board and its emissaries, “significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as a board resolution put it.

Never mind that the name of the man from whom the board borrowed that phrase, Thomas Jefferson, was deemed no longer suitable for attachment to one of the city’s elementary schools.

Tiney Ricciardi:

While online education has become a necessity of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new survey found most Denver parents feel their children are learning less when seated in front of a computer versus in the classroom.

The survey of 647 Denver parents with school-age kids found 65% said their students were learning less online. That percentage was higher among parents with kindergarteners (80%) and elementary students (69%), while 60% of those with middle and high schoolers reported their students were learning less than if they were attending classes in-person.

On average, 23% of parents said their kids were learning about the same and 5% said they were learning more, according to the survey.

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.

Apple:

Over the past decade, a large and opaque industry has been amassing increasing amounts of personal data.1

A complex ecosystem of websites, apps, social media companies, data brokers, and ad tech firms track users online and offline, harvesting their personal data. This data is pieced together, shared, aggregated, and monetized, fueling a $227 billion-a yearindustry.

This occurs every day, as people go about their daily lives, often without their knowledge or permission.3,4 Let’s take a look at what this industry is able to learn about a father and daughter during a pleasant day spent at the park.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use predatory data mining services, such as Google and Facebook, including Madison.

Cori Petersen:

This past fall, many public schools made the decision to go virtual as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this wasn’t the case for most private schools. In fact, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, only 5% of private schools went virtual as of October. This is driving demand for private schools across the country and in Wisconsin.

“I think parents have seen how different schools have responded to the COVID pandemic. Some systems and schools went into a self-protective mode and put student needs in a subordinate place,” said Charles Moore, principal of High Point Christian School in Dane County. “Others stepped into ‘harm’s way’ and delivered in-person education despite the potential dangers.”  

High Point Christian School, with locations in Mount Horeb and Madison, welcomed 57 new families to their school this past fall. Many parents cited their desire for their children to learn in person as the main reason for coming to the school. But as we celebrate National School Choice Week this week, it’s important to consider ways to expand access to the choice programs so that low-income families can send their children to an in-person, private school if they so desire. Reforms that would make choice more accessible are longer enrollment periods, allowing children to enter the parental choice programs at any point in time — no matter what grade they are in — and eliminating enrollment caps. 

High Point Christian School is part of the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP). This means there are vouchers available for students whose families make below 220% of the federal poverty limit to attend High Point, and other participating schools, at no cost.   

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Scott Girard:

Three Madison Metropolitan School District staff members are vying to be the next Madison Teachers Inc. president.

One week after the most contentious presidential transition in generations, a much friendlier race is playing out with millions fewer voters.

“It is actually a very healthy part of our union to have these sorts of elections and to have these sorts of discussions,” said West High School dean of students Michael Jones, one of the three candidates. “The important thing is that the strength and the health of our union and our education community is there and we’re going to make sure that happens.

“I think we have a mutual respect for each other and an admiration.”

MTI members are voting this week for their choice. The top two vote-getters will advance to a second vote, which will take place next week.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Madison Teachers, Inc. demands virtual start to the school 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.

Emily Hamer:

After backlash from a November social media photo that showed a “thin blue line” flag displayed in the UW-Madison Police Department’s office, Police Chief Kristen Roman has banned officers from using thin blue line imagery while acting in an official police capacity.

Some see the controversial flag as a symbol of solidarity with police, but it has also been flown by white supremacists, including those who stormed the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 in an attempt to overturn the legitimate election defeat of former President Donald Trump. Five people, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer, died in the riot.

In an email to UW-Madison Police staff that was released Tuesday, Roman said the flag has been “co-opted” by extremists with “hateful ideologies.” She said her department needs to distance itself from thin blue line imagery to build trust with the community.

“We must consider the cost of clinging to a symbol that is undeniably and inextricably linked to actions and beliefs antithetical to UWPD’s values,” she said in the Jan. 15 email.

Medical Express:

The results of a study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch may pave the way for a new medicine delivery system that could reduce the incidence of pre-term labor and premature birth by allowing physicians to treat the ‘fetus as the patient’. The study has been published in Science Advances.

It has long been suspected that pre-term labor is triggered by inflammation caused by a sick fetus. A new study by scientists at UTMB has proved the hypothesis by studying several important assumptions about the relationship between the health of a mother and her unborn child.

According to Dr. Ramkumar Menon, a Professor in UTMB’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Cell Biology, his team worked with ILIAS Biologics, Inc., a South Korean biotechnology company, to test their bioengineered exosomes as a delivery system for anti-inflammatory medicine directly to the fetus.

“Exosomes are natural nanoparticles or vesicles in our bodies, and we have trillions of them circulating through us at all times. By packaging the medicine inside a bioengineered exosome and injecting it into the mother intravenously, the exosomes travel through the blood system, cross the placental barrier and arrive in the fetus, where they deliver the medicine,” explains Dr. Menon.

In laboratory tests with mice, there were several steps prior to testing the drug delivery. First, Menon said it was important to prove that fetal cells, specifically immune cells, actually migrated through the mother’s body to her uterine tissues as well as to her, which can cause inflammation, the leading cause of pre-term labor.

Ron Lieber:

Lieber’s guidance attends closely to all of these effects. The book explains in detail how to apply for need-based aid, how to use publicly available data sets (down to columns and rows) to predict the merit aid that students will most likely receive, and how to appeal and bargain for more. Lieber reminds parents that they may be substantially richer than the financial aid officers they are bargaining with, so that both decency and prudence counsel against making entitled demands. He also advises parents on how to save for college: Begin early, use the tax-preferred vehicles that states offer and commit future increases in income to college savings first. Don’t blame yourself if you end up with less than absolutely enough. And, most important, “try not to let the complexity of it all paralyze you into doing nothing at all to get ready.”

Lieber repeatedly visits the hierarchies that dominate both higher education and the jobs that colleges send their graduates to do. Students compete for admission to the most desirable colleges, and schools compete to enroll the most desirable applicants, in an absurdly intense two-way matching system. The engine draws fuel from the fact that hierarchies at work have grown alongside hierarchies in schools, so that it matters both that you go to college and which college you attend.

Benjamin Yount:

There are winners and losers in Wisconsin’s Open Enrollment program, but just who fits in either category may be a bit surprising. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty released its deep dive into the state’s Open Enrollment program last week. The report details a number of positives, a handful of negatives, and some suggestions to make sure that all kids in Wisconsin get a shot at a high quality education. 

The report states there are net winners and net losers in the program. It’s not a reflection on the quality of education, rather it’s WILL’s measure of school districts that gain students through open enrollment and school districts that lose students. 

WILL found that many low-income schools lose both students and state funding because of open enrollment, and that higher income schools usually attract those students. 

“Between 2015 and 2019 the top 15 net winning districts each year saw net increases in enrollment of between 24%- 69%,” the report states. “The top 15 ‘net-losing’ school districts between 2015 and 2019 saw enrollment losses between 13% and 47%.”

WILL’s Jessica Holmberg said the numbers tell only part of the story. 

Alexandre Tanzi and Catarina Saraiva:

That percentage-point rise is nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty since the 1960s. This means an additional 8 million people nationwide are now considered poor. Moreover, the poverty rate for Black Americans is estimated to have jumped by 5.4 percentage points, or by 2.4 million individuals.

The scholars’ findings put the rate at 11.8% in December. While poverty is down from readings of more than 15% a decade earlier, the new estimates suggest that the annual Census Bureau tally due in September will be higher than the last official, pre-pandemic level of 10.5% in 2019.

Max Eden:

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden rescinded the Trump administration’s executive order prohibiting critical race theory (CRT) training for federal agencies and federal contractors. This is a sad reversal for Americans committed to colorblindness in public life. But while the president’s order is binding at the federal level, state legislators still have a say in the matter. They should not shrink from resisting this pernicious philosophy.

Critical race theory understands the world by viewing everything—society, economics, education, family, science—through the lens of “whiteness” and white racism. White people, according to CRT, drift in a kind of amniotic fluid of privilege and unearned gifts based on the brutal ideology of “white supremacy.” Critical race theory includes values such as hard work, objectivity, deferred gratification, family, and respect for the written word as intrinsically racist, and claims that by “centering” these values American culture relentlessly suppresses black achievement while boosting white mediocrity into advancement. The “theory”—unfalsifiable because any argument against it can be dismissed as an expression of “white fragility”—demands that whites relinquish their unearned societal privilege and work to uproot racism from their own minds and from society at large.

CRT training sessions have become standard across academia, public education, corporate America, and government. Highly paid experts in indoctrination conduct multi-day seminars explaining how racist attitudes infect even the purest intentions, and why white employees are and will always be racist.

Maciver News:

Thanks to the hard work of a group of parents from the School District of Waukesha, shocking statistics were discovered around students’ performance in schools with virtual education.

Jan. 27, 2021

Rebecca, Stacy, and Kelly are three mothers concerned with the quality of education their children have been receiving throughout the 2020-2021 school year. After placing pressure on the school administration to release student performance data to them, they took the shocking information to the school board who were surprised by the very high levels of students failing a class. MacIver’s Abbi Debelack talks to the three mothers from the Waukesha School District about the impact virtual learning has had on their children, their frustrations with the strict quarantine guidelines, and how the school administration has sidelined their concerns.

Shannon Whitworth:

School choice is the vehicle which will drive our nation’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods into peace and prosperity, which is why we celebrate this week as National School Choice Week. And the pandemic has only highlighted this by placing a devastating burden on already financially disadvantaged, inner-city families, particularly Black families, with many parents who are unable to work remotely. The final straw for many families, both around the nation and in Wisconsin, has been the unions’ insistence on keeping schools closed for an as-yet undetermined period of time.

So it is no wonder, that when remote learning was proposed for the second half of this school year going into 2021, parents protested in Wisconsin cities such as Racine, Kenosha and South Milwaukee. This phenomenon was seen in cities across the country, with parents protesting in Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City, New York City and Los Angeles. Black parents are coming to see how the teachers union sees their kids:  As pawns.

The teachers union in Milwaukee is more than happy to keep its constituents home and drawing a paycheck from which they will automatically draw their union dues. And the more students they keep trapped in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), the greater number of teachers and staff will still be employed to pay those dues. There is no incentive to reform as long as the gravy train keeps running.

Not to say that MPS provides the best learning environment, either. Some of these schools sound like war zones, with teachers being physically and verbally attacked, and a complete lack of discipline and accountability. If I were a teacher who could draw a paycheck and not have to return to that environment, I wouldn’t be so quick to get back, either.

Andrew Rotherham:

It’s easy to knock (and a favored sport for some) Politico for focusing on horse race politics – but the debate about reopening schools has become horse race politics not substance so this is a pretty good overview:

President Joe Biden’s vow to reopen most schools during his first 100 days is crashing into demands of one of his party’s most powerful constituencies: teachers’ unions. And the friction is creating an early test for the Democratic Party’s commitment to following the advice of scientists when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic.

That about covers it. And already reductionist claims that would have occasioned knowing clucking and tsk tsking had the chronically fact challenged Trump Administration made them are now greeted with crickets. John Bailey unpacks some of the weediness with the Wisconsin study and the idea that all we need is money, for instance, in his indispensable daily Covid newsletter (you can subscribe here).

The bottom line is the White House and CDC are not in the same place on reopening and there are a lot of politics. A few weeks ago such dissonance was seen as an existential threat to the republic, today a shrug. It’s entirely reasonable for political officials to disagree with scientists, we just shouldn’t be so situational about our response to it. And in general, this is not a great look for the sector. Let’s hope the White House is at least getting some concessions on other issues.

Few things:

– Some people are dismissing the calls for ventilation to be a priority. This seems like a mistake given what we know about air quality in schools in general and then also the evidence on ventilation and Covid-19. Arguing against the idea that money is the only thing schools need to reopen is not the same as arguing money doesn’t matter for short and long terms response efforts here.

– Does not seem like we’re doing a good job disentangling a massive Covid-19 testing plan for schools as a confidence building measure versus as a public health strategy. And there is a lot of money in play at a time when equity strategies like targeted tutoring could also use an infusion of billions of dollars. There might be more cost effective ways to build public confidence?

Colleen Flaherty:

Giving just one day’s notice to the faculty governance chairs at its universities, the Kansas Board of Regents voted this week to allow for emergency employee terminations and suspensions. Tenured professors are no exception.

All nine voting regents approved the temporary policy, which takes effect immediately and expires at the end of 2022.

“In light of the extreme financial pressures placed on the state universities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, decreased program and university enrollment, and state fiscal issues,” any employee — including one with tenure — “may be suspended, dismissed, or terminated from employment by their respective university,” the policy says.

Previously, state institutions had to follow a specific process to declare financial exigency in order to shed tenured professors for budgetary reasons. This is consistent with norms established by the American Association of University Professors. Now through the end of next year, declaring exigency is not necessary. Universities only have to develop a policy framework for the board to approve. No existing campus policy hearing procedures need apply to these personnel decisions, either.

Kansas’s six state universities are reeling from a proposal by Governor Laura Kelly to slash state funding to higher education in 2022. The state universities face a 5.5 percent budget cut. This would be the most significant cut since 2009, Kansas State University president Richard Meyers wrote in a campus memo this week.