The Economist:

In 2018 andrea davidson’s 12-year-old daughter, Meghan, announced she was “definitely a boy”. Ms Davidson says her child was never a tomboy but the family doctor congratulated her and asked what pronouns she had chosen, before writing a referral to the British Columbia Children’s Hospital (bcch). “We thought we were going to see a psychologist, but it was a nurse and a social worker,” says Ms Davidson (both her and her daughter’s names have been changed). “Within ten minutes they had offered our child Lupron”—a puberty-blocking drug. “They brought up the drug directly with our child, in front of us, without discussing it with us privately first.” There was no mention of other mental-health issues, which are known to increase the likelihood of gender dysphoria, the feeling that you are in the wrong body. “There was no therapy on offer and we were just brushed aside when we raised it.”

Mark Pesce:

First articulated in a 1965 white paper by Ivan Sutherland, titled “The Ultimate Display,” augmented reality (AR) lay beyond our technical capacities for 50 years. That changed when smartphones began providing people with a combination of cheap sensors, powerful processors, and high-bandwidth networking—the trifecta needed for AR to generate its spatial illusions. Among today’s emerging technologies, AR stands out as particularly demanding—for computational power, for sensed data, and, I’d argue, for attention to the danger it poses.

Unlike virtual-reality (VR) gear, which creates for the user a completely synthetic experience, AR gear adds to the user’s perception of her environment. To do that effectively, AR systems need to know where in space the user is located. VR systems originally used expensive and fragile systems for tracking user movements from the outside in, often requiring external sensors to be set up in the room. But the new generation of VR accomplishes this through a set of techniques collectively known as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). These systems harvest a rich stream of observational data—mostly from cameras affixed to the user’s headgear, but sometimes also from sonar, lidar, structured light, and time-of-flight sensors—using those measurements to update a continuously evolving model of the user’s spatial environment.

Reform Club:

But this rule is exceptionally new. Those curious about the surprising outcomes of previous elections were not starved of explanation as they are today. When Democrats made accusations in 2016 of election interference, they were not, as are Republican accusations today, rejected out of hand. And when they continued making them in 2017, Americans still forbore from dismissing them outright. When they persisted in 2018, and in 2019, I must say I began to feel Democrats had begun to impose rather excessively on our credulity. And when their evidence was officially found wanting, I confess I searched, without success, for some expression of gratitude for their fellow Americans’ years of patient attention. 

But I maintain that we Americans did the right thing: Our countrymen, though of profoundly different opinions, sincerely believed in their cause. We could not do less than to consider their cause on the merits. If a man “was such a rogue,” said Samuel Johnson, “as to make up his mind upon a case without hearing it, he should not have been such a fool as to tell it.” As it proved, the Democrats’ cause proved to be bosh. But no one could have told them so without first having heard them out. We might have hoped they would make their case in less time than the three years they indulged. But a mind is another country, and who can say how long will be the travels through it. And to their credit, Democrats subjected their claims to the crucible of investigation, evidence, and trial, where it was found disproved, publicly and finally. Together, we reached closure. Consensus, it is to be hoped, will follow.

Robby Soave:

Deaths from COVID-19 are overwhelmingly concentrated among the elderly, and thus it would seem obvious that vaccinating older Americans should be a top priority. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released guidance suggesting that millions of essential workers should receive the vaccine before many people 65 and older.

Part of the reason for this, according to a CDC report, is to mitigate and racial and ethnic “health inequities.” Older Americans are disproportionately white, whereas the essential worker category includes a larger percentage of racial minorities and low-income people.

“Older populations are whiter, ” Harald Schmidt, a professor of ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

Namwali Serpell and Maria Tumarkin:

Maria Tumarkin, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and emigrated to Australia as a teenager, everywhere exhibits in her work the hard-­won knowledge that authentic civic-mindedness often produces, and requires, an estrangement from consensus and the deadening language of common sense. Tumarkin’s fourth book, Axiomatic (2019), challenges reflexive frameworks of grief and trauma, offering instead the specificity of individual lives in their entanglement with the lives of others. Such vigilance is a quality Tumarkin shares with the Zambian novelist, critic, essayist, and scholar Namwali Serpell. Author of the critical study Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014); of the novel The Old Drift (2019), a multigeneric, multigenerational exploration of Zambia’s history and future; and, most recently, of Stranger Faces (2020), a series of linked essays, Serpell displays throughout her work a rigorous attention to affect, aesthetics, and ethics, and how they are enmeshed with our individual and collective histories.

Janet Lorin:

Oberlin College, in Ohio, has cut its tuition by $10,000 for all new students. Nearby Denison University is offering an even better deal for Ohio residents: a $100,000 scholarship over four years. And Davidson College, in North Carolina, has frozen its tuition for the first time in a quarter-century.

The Covid-19 pandemic has upended college life — and college finances — for millions. Now, in a sign of what might lie ahead, it also has begun to check the relentless rise in prices that has strained family finances and pushed the nation’s combined student debt to over $1.7 trillion, as admission deans stare down fewer high school graduates.

“The pendulum may be swinging a little bit toward the consumer side,” said Steve Frappier, director of college counseling at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta. “But that’ll also depend on the selectivity of the school and the financial health of the school.”

This year has already been one of unrivaled chaos for admissions offices, with many devising workarounds for students unable to visit campus in person and waiving standardized-test requirements. Freshman enrollment is down 13% this year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which called the decline “unprecedented.”

It’s not yet clear whether large universities with robust endowments and high demand will follow suit. Princeton University in New Jersey cut tuition 10% for undergraduates for the current academic year because the pandemic significantly diminished the student experience. The Ivy League school, one of the richest U.S. universities, is expected to set the 2021-2022 price in April.

Annie Martin:

Morissette has three kids, daughter Onyx Solace, 4, and sons Ever Imre, 9, and Winter Mercy, 16 months, with her husband, Mario “Souleye” Treadway. The couple use unschooling, a type of homeschooling that emphasizes the learner’s interests rather than a set curriculum, to teach their children.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Morissette described her method of unschooling and said it can be a “daunting” experience.

“It’s different for everyone,” the star said. “For us, it’s very child-led, not in that we’re asking them to be parentified or lead the way or anything,”

“We create opportunities for them to learn, little pods of paint and otherwise, and we follow them,” she added. “So they might be interested in something for an hour and a half, and that’s great. They might be interested in something for 30 seconds and then we’re done.”

Morissette said she and her family ascribe to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.

“When someone says, ‘Oh, that person’s so smart,’ it’ll be often answered with, ‘Smart how?’ There’s so many different kinds of smart,” she said.

Nicola Bianchi, Yi Lu and Hong Song:

In this paper, we examine the effect of computer-assisted learning on students’ long-term development. We explore the implementation of the “largest ed-tech intervention in the world to date,” which connected China’s best teachers to more than 100 million rural students through satellite internet. We find evidence that exposure to the program improved students’ academic achievement, labor performance, and computer usage. We observe these effects up to ten years after program implementation. These findings indicate that education technology can have long-lasting positive effects on a variety of outcomes and can be effective in reducing the rural–urban education gap.

Stephen Cohn:

Parents at Verona High School and in the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District are planning separate protests Monday in favor of returning to in-person learning next semester.

A peaceful protest to reopen schools for in-person learning has been scheduled by the Bring Kids Back Verona Area Schools Facebook page. Organizers said they plan to protest Monday night at the district’s next board meeting.

A rally is also scheduled to start at Middleton High School on Monday at 1 p.m. as students, parents and community members are planning to walk to the MCPASD administration building on Park Lawn Place. Organizers told News 3 Now there will be no gathering or speeches scheduled for safety concerns, and face coverings and social distancing will be required.

Along with the protest, more than 200 people have signed on to an open letter to MCPASD’s school board making several requests of the upcoming spring semester. Those requests include the MCPASD Superintendent developing a plan with a timeline giving an option for all grades to return to in-person instruction by the end of next February, as well as asking the board to work with Public Health Madison and Dane County to revise their guidance around distancing that allows a full-day, full-week return to schools for all grades.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Chris Woolston:

During a two-year stint as a postdoctoral researcher in computational micro-biology at the University of Liverpool, UK, Adrian Cazares suffered despite his successes. “I published papers but I wasn’t happy,” he says. “[Postdocs] are under so much pressure all the time. We take it to every part of our lives. It really started to affect my mental health.”

Cazares, who in February started his second postdoc — this one at the European Bioinformatics Institute on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, UK — was one of more than 7,600 researchers in 93 countries who responded to Nature’s first-ever survey of postdoctoral scientists. The self-selecting survey, which ran in June and July, included a series of questions designed to illuminate postdocs’ quality-of-life issues, including -mental health, working hours and experiences of discrimination and harassment (see ‘Nature’s postdoc survey’).

Ross Douthat:

what the slogan implied was often much more dubious: a deference to the science bureaucracy during a crisis when bureaucratic norms needed to give way; an attempt by para-scientific enterprises to trade on (or trade away) science’s credibility for the sake of political agendas; and an abdication by elected officials of responsibility for decisions that are fundamentally political in nature.

The progress of coronavirus vaccines offers good examples of all these issues. That the vaccines exist at all is an example of science at its purest — a challenge posed, a problem solved, with all the accumulated knowledge of the modern era harnessed to figure out how to defeat a novel pathogen.

But the further you get from the laboratory work, the more complicated and less clearly scientific the key issues become. The timeline on which vaccines have become available, for instance, reflects an attempt to balance the rules of bureaucratic science, their priority on safety and certainty of knowledge, with the urgency of trying something to halt a disease that’s killing thousands of Americans every day. Many scientific factors weigh in that balance, but so do all kinds of extra-scientific variables: moral assumptions about what kinds of vaccine testing we should pursue (one reason we didn’t get the “challenge trials” that might have delivered a vaccine much earlier); legal assumptions about who should be allowed to experiment with unproven treatments; political assumptions about how much bureaucratic hoop-jumping it takes to persuade Americans that a vaccine is safe.

Thesephist:

Humans are culture creation machines. We stumble on some idea or thought, share it with other humans, and if the idea sticks and spreads faster than we forget about it, it becomes embedded in the way we do things together in the future. These are your inside jokes, your traditions and your cults. Many such ideas disappear as soon as they come, like fashion trends and popular culture. Some great ones stick around for a while and influence history, like Jazz or the Enlightenment. The few most powerful ones, like religion and democracy, embed themselves into the DNA of civilization, and they become institutions, inseparable from the species that conceived of it in the first place. Institutions are much harder to replace than other kinds of culture, because they go beyond simply being a part of life, and take root as an infrastructural piece of the way we navigate the world. They are fabric, more than threads. These institutions are pieces of culture immortalized. There’s nothing inherently inevitable about them – they are immortalized into humanity by virtue of their staying power in the way we live, and by how effectively they spread themselves amongst our communities.

One important invention of civilization is the university – a place with cultural and economic implications so complex I couldn’t possibly do it justice in one blog post. The university is an invention – there’s nothing fundamentally inevitable about it. The university is also an object of culture – universities play different roles in society and economy and life in different parts of the world, and at different points in history. The university is arbitrary in this way, but it’s also fundamental to the way the world works. The four-year research university has weaved itself deep into the fabric of society, from immigration and visa policies to the way science gets done to the coming-of-age culture in most developed countries. If it’s not an institution of civilization today, it’s rapidly becoming one.

Jonnelle Marte:

Millions of people have moved out of New York City during the pandemic, but at the same time, millions of others with lower incomes have taken their place, according to a study released on Tuesday.

All told, a net 70,000 people left the metropolitan region this year, resulting in roughly $34 billion in lost income, according to estimates from Unacast here, a location analytics company.

About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.

JD Tuccille:

Insisting that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” the Chicago Teachers Union is fighting plans to return children to the city’s public school classrooms. Not only is the union seeking an injunction to keep kids at home, but it says “all options are going to be on the table”—an implied threat of a strike in an already chaotic year—if it’s not happy with the school board’s decision.

Amidst a multitude of such battles across the country, it’s no wonder that families weary of being held hostage to other people’s decisions are abandoning government schools to enroll their kids in private institutions or to teach them at home. That shift is likely to permanently transform education in the United States in a way that lets children experience diverse approaches and viewpoints.

School and union officials in Chicago differ over their reading of public opinion tea leaves. The board points to the 37 percent of students whose families have opted for in-person teaching, while the union flips that around to emphasize that a majority of families want to delay reopening. But both sets of data indicate the same thing: people have different risk tolerances and come to varying conclusions about the right way to educate their children. Uniform, top-down approaches inevitably leave large numbers of them dissatisfied and looking for something that better suits their needs.

Don’t miss @NBFCorp, @HFSCWisconsin, @SchoolChoiceWI, @SchoolChoiceNow, @WILawLiberty‘s School Choice Talent Show! Help us celebrate 2021’s National School Choice Week by joining our talent show contest. Submit before the end of the year. Learn more here: https://t.co/KTyhbNodHr pic.twitter.com/WBlMRXBewq

— No Better Friend Corp. (@NBFCorp) December 17, 2020

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Outlookzen:

There is a common perception that a meritocracy is the most fair way to run society. That because we are avoiding bias and favoritism and picking candidates purely based on their capabilities and achievements, a meritocratic system is the most fair of all. 

Such a belief is hogwash. There’s nothing “fair” about not selecting the surgeon who lost his arm in a car accident, and is now trying desperately to hold on to his career. There’s nothing fair about the fact that some people are born into good circumstances which confer a tremendous headstart in life. There’s nothing fair about the fact that so many of society’s most accomplished individuals grew up in upper-middle-class families that nurtured them, raised them well, and gave them access to highly regarded schools and teachers.

A meritocracy never was, and never will be, “fair”. And that’s the whole point.

Kevin Donnelly:

Teachers should be teachers, not facilitators, when it comes to educating schoolchildren.

NOEL Pearson may not be an educationalist by training but when it comes to his advocacy of Direct Instruction and knowledge about what best works in the classroom, he outshines most academics in teacher training institutes and universities.
Since the late 1960s and early 70s, beginning teachers have been taught that more formal, structured and teacher-directed models of classroom interaction are outdated and ineffective.
In the jargon much loved by academics, teachers are called on to be facilitators and guides by the side. Whether associated with what was known as child-centred learning, or its more recent cousin, personalised learning, the assumption is that children must take control and direct their own learning.
Open classrooms, children working in groups, teachers no longer standing at the front of the room and lots of noise and activity are all manifestations of this progressive and new-age model of classroom interaction.

Memorisation and rote learning are condemned as drill and kill, whole language, where beginning readers are told to look and guess and phonics and phonemic awareness go out the window, reigns supreme and mental arithmetic and reciting poetry are obsolete.

There’s only one problem: what has become the current orthodoxy in teacher education is the least-effective and most costly in terms of energy and time. Best illustrated by a US study titled Project Follow Through that evaluated various models ranging from child-centred to teacher-directed, the most successful method of teaching is Direct Instruction.
The more traditional approach involves carefully structured, highly focused lessons where teachers are in control, where children are given a clear and succinct idea of what needs to be mastered and where there is immediate feedback.

Madison, rhetorically, is contemplating the use of phonics, after decades of disastrous reading results.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Jennifer Chu:

It’s been nearly two years since John Urschel retired from the NFL at the age of 26, trading a career as a professional football player at the height of his game for a chance at a PhD in mathematics at MIT. From the looks of it, he couldn’t be happier.

The former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens is now a full-time graduate student who spends his days in Building 2, poring over academic papers and puzzling over problems in graph theory, machine learning, and numerical analysis.

In his new memoir, “Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football,” co-written with his wife, journalist and historian Louisa Thomas, Urschel writes about how he has balanced the messy, physically punishing world of football, with the elegant, cerebral field of mathematics.

Retraction Watch:

As 2020 was the year of the pandemic, COVID-19 loomed large in the world of retractions, too. According to our tracker in early December, 39 articles about the novel coronavirus have been retracted from preprint servers or peer-reviewed journals so far—a number we’re confident will grow. (That number does not include the retraction of an article from a Johns Hopkins student newspaper claiming that COVID-19 has had “relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”) That’s out of a total of more than 1,650 retractions catalogued to date in 2020. Here are our picks for the most significant pandemic-related retractions:

1The most spectacular flameouts involved a pair of articles that appeared in two of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. Both The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine were forced to remove articles that relied on data from a questionable firm called Surgisphere, which refused to share its results with coauthors and the editors involved. (The Lancet also retracted and replaced an editorial it had published that had cited the ill-fated paper.) Before it was discredited, the paper in The Lancet had tremendous influence, leading to the suspension of clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine. A third, influential Surgisphere study was taken down from the SSRN server at the request of a coauthor. The withdrawal of the preprint, which was about potential benefits of the antiparasitic drug ivermection, received little fanfare, let alone a retraction notice.

Rod Dreher:

The Dalton School is an elite school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that has long prided itself on its “progressive” values. Progress comes at a price: tuition for its K-12 program is over $54,000 a year. Naturally Dalton has been at the forefront of declaring its progressive bona fides over race and “antiracism,” and declaring its own need for more repentance, but now the Bolsheviks within are storming the Winter Palace.

A hundred Dalton teachers are revolting over the school’s plan to reopen, and have issued a set of demands to the school. Some students are joining. What do they want? Gosh, what don’t they want? Excerpts:

Here is a link to the original text of the ransom note, which most of the Dalton faculty have signed. As Scott Johnston, who broke the news on his blog, comments:

The demands for additional staffers alone would add millions of dollars to Dalton’s annual budget. Siphoning off 50% of donations would dry up funding. Eliminating AP classes (referred to as “leveled courses”) would destroy college admissions. It’s not an exaggeration to say these demands, if implemented, would destroy Dalton altogether. According to insiders, much damage has already been done.

Miguel Rochefort:

In 2012, I dropped out of college, where I was studying computer science, after just one semester. I already knew how to program and I thought I’d never need a degree.

Over the years, I found myself complaining a lot about it. I saw many opportunities, especially abroad, that were out of reach because I didn’t have the required papers. I felt ready for graduate school but couldn’t get admitted. I had to work harder to prove myself to employers. Although I never noticed any serious gap in my knowledge, I felt that something was missing. I started to resent my decision.

In June 2020, I attended a virtual Slate Star Codex meetup. As usual, I complained about not having a degree. This is when I first heard about Western Governors University (WGU). Apparently, their online programs had no speed limit and students could graduate as quickly as they could pass all the exams. I was skeptical, so I did some research.

Anne Trafton:

In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to do. The computer code must also be clear enough that other programmers can read and understand it.

In spite of those similarities, MIT neuroscientists have found that reading computer code does not activate the regions of the brain that are involved in language processing. Instead, it activates a distributed network called the multiple demand network, which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.

However, although reading computer code activates the multiple demand network, it appears to rely more on different parts of the network than math or logic problems do, suggesting that coding does not precisely replicate the cognitive demands of mathematics either.

“Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It’s not the same as language, and it’s not the same as math and logic,” says Anna Ivanova, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study.

Evelina Fedorenko, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in eLife. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Tufts University were also involved in the study.

David Folkenflik:

The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags indicating that the man it relied upon for its narrative about the allure of terrorism could not be trusted to tell the truth.

The newspaper has reassigned its star terrorism reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, who hosted the series.

Caliphate relayed the tale about the radicalization of a young Canadian who went to Syria, joined the Islamic State and became an executioner for the extremist group before escaping its hold.

Canadian authorities this fall accused the man, Shehroze Chaudhry, of lying about those activities. He currently faces criminal charges in a federal court in Ontario of perpetrating a terrorism hoax.

“We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet tells NPR in an interview on Thursday. “I think we were so in love with it that when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn’t listen hard enough.”

Hank Adler:

California’s Legislature is considering a wealth tax on residents, part-year residents, and any person who spends more than 60 days inside the state’s borders in a single year. Even those who move out of state would continue to be subject to the tax for a decade—a provision that calls to mind the Eagles’ famous “Hotel California” lyric: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

The California Constitution probably allows a statewide wealth tax on residents, but any effort to create a tax capable of reaching across state borders is likely to run afoul of the U.S. Constitution. Taxing someone who spends only 60 days in the state in any single year—and extending that tax over an ensuing decade—would be something new under the sun.

Each year this tax net would gather up a new crop of taxpayers for the next decade. The range of people it proposes to ensnare is staggering: every student attending college in California, anyone having a major medical procedure at a California hospital and needing an extended in-state recovery period, and those who spend two months in California away from New York or London winters. Under California tax law, there is no distinction between a nonresident from Minnesota and a nonresident from Dubai.

Assembly Bill 2088 proposes calculating the wealth tax based on current world-wide net worth each Dec. 31. For part-year and temporary residents, the tax would be proportionate based on their number of days in California. The annual tax would be on current net worth and therefore would include wealth earned, inherited or obtained through gifts or estates long before and long after leaving the state.

Ernie Smith:

Today in Tedium: A quarter-century ago, one of the first major search engines came to life on the internet as an experiment of sorts—a public test of a server manufacturer’s primary product that anyone with a web connection could take a part in. The experiment, for a time, proved more successful than anyone could have ever imagined. But the problem was, it was an experiment at heart that was never intended to be a business—and that meant better suited companies would eventually topple this innovation. Eventually, it would ensure that this cutting-edge idea would become a part of the past. But nobody is going to encase the innovations of 1995 and 1996 in amber on the internet: Time does not stand still, and neither do web sites, no matter how important they are or once were. But it would sure be nice if we could. It’s with that in mind that I write about AltaVista, Digital Equipment Corporation, web domains, and how important history can turn into the basis of some random company’s crass marketing scheme. Today’s Tedium, in honor of AltaVista’s 25th anniversary this week, laments the loss of its original home to the gods of search engine optimization. Do not expect a backlink.

Sarah Schwartz:

Cueing has, for decades now, been a staple of early reading instruction.

The strategy—which is also known as three-cueing, or MSV—involves prompting students to draw on context and sentence structure, along with letters, to identify words. But it isn’t the most effective way for beginning readers to learn how to decode printed text.

Research has shown that encouraging kids to check the picture when they come to a tricky word, or to hypothesize what word would work in the sentence, can take their focus away from the word itself—lowering the chances that they’ll use their understanding of letter sounds to read through the word part-by-part, and be able to recognize it more quickly the next time they see it.

Inciteful:

Find the most relevant literature, faster

The vast majority of academic search engines focus on “importance” (as measured by number of citations) and keyword matching to retrieve their results. They typically show you stats about who the papers cite and who cites those papers.

But there is value and information in the underlying structure that citations provide and it is almost always ignored. Inciteful flips that on it’s head by making citations the center of it’s search process by:

Kyle Smith:

Jill Biden’s embarrassing 2006 dissertation, which I mocked here and extensively quoted here, is essentially a weakly argued 20,000-word op-ed that offers zero hard evidence for her policy proposals, which are that Delaware Tech (her employer at the time) should beef up its Wellness Center, add a student center, and offer lots of counseling and mentorship to students in order to increase retention rates, which she says were about two-thirds at her institution, about par for community colleges.

Everything is based on anecdotes or soft data, such as the results of insipid surveys she sent out asking Delaware Tech students whether …

Jakub Marian:

We are all familiar with English quotation marks: “these” (double) and ‘these’ (single). The American style (and the prevalent style in the UK up until the beginning of the 20th century) prescribes double quotation marks for non-nested quotations, whereas contemporary British publishers lean towards single quotation marks (where single quotation marks, also called inverted commas, are used almost exclusively in fiction).

Nevertheless, the differences between American English and British English, as interesting as they may be, are not the topic of this article. There are five main types of quotation marks, which could be called English, French, German, Polish, and Swedish, represented by different colours on the map below:

Mackenzie Mays:

California teachers unions are demanding that the Legislature maintain pandemic restrictions on school reopenings and have begun mobilizing against a Democratic bill introduced last week that could force schools to reopen in March.

In separate letters to legislative leaders, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers urge lawmakers to avoid rushing to reopen K-12 schools as Capitol momentum builds to address learning loss and education inequities. Most of the state’s 6 million public schoolchildren remain at home with distance learning.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Jonnelle Marte:

Millions of people have moved out of New York City during the pandemic, but at the same time, millions of others with lower incomes have taken their place, according to a study released on Tuesday.

All told, a net 70,000 people left the metropolitan region this year, resulting in roughly $34 billion in lost income, according to estimates from Unacast here, a location analytics company.

About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.

Edward L. Glaeser:

February 2019 Harris poll found that roughly half of younger Americans would “prefer living in a socialist country.” Millennials may not fully grasp the consequences of the government owning the means of production, but they certainly don’t like how American capitalism is working for them. They have a point. Over the past 40 years, insiders have increasingly captured the American economy—from homeowners opposed to new housing construction near them to incumbent firms that benefit from the overregulation of employment to interest groups that have transformed the federal government into the equivalent of a pension system with a nuclear arsenal. The young are usually outsiders; the bill for the insiders’ triumph has been laid in their laps.

The Covid-19 pandemic reinforces this dynamic. Middle-aged teachers, protected by powerful unions, Zoom their classes from the comfort of their homes, and students get lost in the shuffle. The mortality risk of the disease to the young is tiny; yet they are told to give up the freedom of their youth to protect the rest of us. The irony is particularly bitter because America’s lockdown policies did little to protect the most vulnerable older Americans who live in nursing homes.

Liv Finne:

As reported in The Seattle Times, State Superintendent Reykdal said Washington’s children are receiving a “sh-tty” education right now. This highest education official in Washington state is openly acknowledging that kids are feeling “robbed” of the education we have promised them. The legislature needs to step in and help families with direct educational assistance.

Districts across the state have withdrawn education services from Washington’s families. According to the state superintendent’s office, only five percent of students live in districts where more than 75 percent of their students receive in-person instruction. Most district officials are providing only remote learning, and have shut down the child care services they provided families before the pandemic. To keep food on the table, many working families have been forced to pay for expensive child care.

Let’s review some specifics. In Seattle the average monthly cost of child care is $1,680. A family with two children is paying $3,360 a month for child care. I recently spoke to the father of two girls in the public schools. He and his wife are essential workers. They have been paying child care since the school shut down in March. His savings are being depleted, and his future, and that of his children, are in jeopardy.     

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Wall Street Journal:

Teachers unions have pushed to shut down schools during the pandemic no matter the clear harm to children, just as they oppose charters and vouchers. Now comes a timely study suggesting school choice improves student mental health.

Several studies have found that school choice reduces arrests and that private-school students experience less bullying. One reason is that charter and private schools enforce stricter discipline than traditional public schools. Choice programs also allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools if they are struggling and send them to schools that are safer or a better cultural fit.

The new study in the journal “School Effectiveness and School Improvement” is the first to examine the link between school choice and mental health. The Cato Institute’s Corey DeAngelis and Western Carolina University economist Angela Dills analyze the correlation between adolescent suicide rates and the enactment of private-school voucher and charter programs over the last several decades.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Alix S. Winter, Christine Fountain, Keely Cheslack-Postava, and Peter S. Bearman:

Rates of autism diagnosis in the United States have historically been higher among more advantaged social groups—Whites and those of higher socioeconomic status (SES). Using data from all births in the state of California in 1992 through 2016, we find that these trends reversed during our study period. By 2018, diagnosed autism incidence rates for 3- to 6-y-old children were higher for children of Black and Asian mothers than children of non-Hispanic White mothers and were higher for children of lower SES than of higher SES parents. These reversals point to the fundamental role that access to knowledge and resources plays in driving increased autism prevalence and shifting patterns of autism cases over the past quarter-century.

Julie Reuben:

In 1915, when the American Association of University Professors issued its seminal “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” it identified three areas in which faculty members should enjoy the protection of academic freedom: their scholarship, their teaching, and their actions as citizens. In the century since, almost all analyses of academic freedom have focused on the last category — what the report called “extramural utterances.” We have heard a lot about our rights and responsibilities as citizens, and almost nothing about our rights and responsibilities as experts.

That balance should be reversed. We have fought hard for our speech rights as citizens, but we have assumed, thoughtlessly, that those rights apply when we speak as professionals. We are left without an articulated ethical guide for our actions — and that leaves us vulnerable to academics exploiting their credentials under the guise of academic freedom.

The authors of the 1915 report acknowledged limitations on professors’ freedom in all three areas, which they implicitly viewed as a hierarchy, with research deserving the greatest protection and speech on public matters requiring the greatest care. Since intellectual progress requires open inquiry, they thought faculty members’ research should be unfettered by social convention and received opinion, so long as it conforms to the best methods of scholarship. Teaching should be largely free, although professors had to teach all sides of disputed issues fairly, and sometimes censor themselves in deference to students’ immaturity. Faculty members should have the freedom to engage in public affairs as citizens, but they needed to clearly disassociate their personal views from those of the university where they taught, and to speak in a manner consistent with the character of their profession. …

What are they learning?

To submit a piece of biased, factually incorrect, ideological, or inappropriate curriculum (or lesson plan, homework assignment, school policy, etc) from your school district, you can do so below, or navigate to your school district using the map.

You can submit a link to a school website (or news article about the issue) or upload a digital assignment, picture of a homework assignment, or similar. Your email address is required, but will NOT be published. However, any description or documents you send may appear on this website publicly exactly as you upload them. You must redact any students’ identities from materials you submit, and if the documents you upload mention your identity, you should redact those details if you want to preserve your anonymity.

Scott Girard:

A transatlantic partnership between students from Verona Area High School and Otaniemi Upper Secondary School in Finland resulted in recommendations on a few topics of interest presented Tuesday morning.

The two classes were part of the first “Bridge the Pond” program facilitated by the European Parliament Liaison Office in Washington, D.C. Students met in small groups over the past month to discuss three central topics: how to make virtual learning better for students, address climate change and improve relationships between the United States and Europe.

An elected official from each country was on the Zoom call Tuesday to hear what the students had determined, as well as representatives from embassies. Democratic State Rep. Sondy Pope, whose district includes Verona, was excited by what she heard.

Eugene Volokh:

The University of Maryland School of Public Policy is apparently about to require faculty members to add a statement to their syllabus; here’s the cover e-mail, which I got from a source that appears to me reliable. (I tried to check with the e-mail’s official sender to confirm its authenticity, and haven’t heard back.)

Dear faculty,

As you know from previous emails and communications, the School of Public Policy has committed to creating a syllabus statement with regard to Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.

The committee working on AR Action 6 has been developing this syllabus statement, which will be mandatory for all syllabi starting in Spring 2021. We have worked with the DIB committee and the Faculty Diversity committee for input and we now seek input from the faculty as a whole. You can view the final draft here.

Michael Conklin:

The U.S. News & World Report provides law school rankings based on a peer score (hereinafter “peer rank”) and an overall score (hereinafter “overall rank”). A law school’s peer rank is generally closely associated with its overall rank. For example, in the 2021 rankings more than 60% of law schools have peer ranks that are within nine places of their overall ranks. A glaring outlier is Howard University School of Law, whose peer rank is forty-six places higher than its overall rank. Even more peculiar is that this peer–overall disparity has existed every year for the last ten years during which it has experienced a gradual upward trend. This Essay analyzes the significance of the peer rank and considers potential explanations for this divergence.

Patrick O’Donnell:

Thousands of Cleveland students aren’t showing up for daily online classes — skipping class, dropped off the rolls, or never enrolled at all, data analyzed by The 74 show.

That means a district with 36,900 students last school year now has about 28,200 attending classes on a typical day, a drop of more than 8,000, the district’s data show.

The 28,200 may be generous.

A few schools marked 100 percent of students present every day this fall – schools that in a normal academic year would have an attendance rate of around 80 percent.

“It’s distressing,” said Kurt Karakul, who heads a partnership between service organizations to help students in one of Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, adding that low attendance and participation in classes make this school year almost a lost year. “I think, unfortunately, there are kids that have sort of just disappeared.”

Ivan Hernandez and Mesmin Destin:

Students from lower-socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds have unique background-specific strengths that they have acquired from their lived experiences. We test the hypotheses that guiding students toward recognizing the strengths that they have derived from their specific background and experiences will promote their positive understandings of their identities and have positive implications for their academic motivation and psychological well-being. Specifically, we present evidence indicating that a brief experimental paradigm guiding students to reflect on their background-specific strengths leads lower-SES college students (Study 1; N = 186), as well as Black and Latinx middle school students from lower-SES backgrounds (Study 2; N = 912), to endorse the idea that they are assets to their schools and society because of their backgrounds and increases their inclinations to persist in the face of academic difficulty. These psychological consequences were significantly associated with middle school students’ end-of-term grades (Study 2).

Freedom of the Press Foundation:

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is releasing a report on the unprecedented number of journalists arrested in the United States this year.

Based on the comprehensive data compiled by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation and Committee to Protect Journalists, our new report shows that there have been at least 117 verified cases of a journalist being arrested or detained on the job in the United States in 2020. The Tracker is also still investigating more than a dozen additional reports of arrests or detentions.

The numbers are staggering. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019. In just one week, from May 29 – June 4, more reporters were arrested in the U.S. than in the previous three years combined. Arrests occurred in more than two dozen cities across the country. And more than 36% of the arrests were accompanied by an assault: journalists were beaten, hit with rubber bullets or other projectiles or covered in chemical agents, like tear gas or pepper spray.

The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Mike Antonucci:

Lily Eskelsen García, the former president of the National Education Association, continues to emerge as the odds-on favorite to be Joe Biden’s choice for U.S. secretary of education. As a union officer, Eskelsen García was a doctrinaire liberal Democrat and she certainly would be as a cabinet officer.

There was a time when she held views on a wide range of issues that appear to be anathema to both her and her allies today.

In 1996, Eskelsen García was term-limited out as president of the Utah Education Association, but was elected that same year to a seat on the nine-member NEA Executive Committee. Achieving high-ranking national union office seemed to set her firmly on that career path. However, Eskelsen García had even greater ambitions.

In August 1997, she decided to run for Congress in Utah’s 2nd District. She took a leave of absence both from teaching and her NEA position. By her own admission, she announced her run more than a year in advance in order to head off any Democratic challengers in a primary. In that, she was successful. She won the party’s nomination in 1998 unopposed.

Her adversary in the general election was incumbent Rep. Merrill Cook, a first-term Republican. Running as a Democrat in Utah requires moderate views, but even so, some of Eskelsen García’s positions would raise liberal eyebrows.

She told the Deseret News that she wanted more deficit reduction. “I like the capital gains tax cut and child credits,” she said.

For a research project
1.Which belief, currently deemed true by scientific consensus, is most important for teachers & faculty at schools of ed to know?
2.Which belief, currently deemed false by scientific consensus, is nevertheless often believed by Ts & faculty at schls of ed?

— Daniel Willingham (@DTWillingham) December 15, 2020

2010: When A stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.

Wisconsin’s only teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading results.

2004: “Madison schools distort reading data” by Mark Seidenberg.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

MTEL & Wisconsin

Wisconsin “Foundation of Readings” teacher content knowledge examination results.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Scott Girard:

“The problem was we could not get the teachers to commit to the coaching.”

Since their small success, not much has changed in the district’s overall results for teaching young students how to read. Ladson-Billings called the ongoing struggles “frustrating,” citing an inability to distinguish between what’s important and what’s a priority in the district.

“The superintendents have been so bogged down with stuff like the (school resource officers), too many fights at Cherokee — whatever’s made the newspaper has been where all the energy has gone,” she said. “The assumption was that the people in the classroom knew exactly what they were doing, and we don’t need to be on top of that.”

“So much of what we talk about in Madison in terms of disparities stems from the crisis of literacy that we have,” Kramer said. “When students don’t read at grade level, they are much more likely to become disengaged at school. If they get to middle school and they’re reading below grade level, it’s so easy to become disengaged, to be discouraged.”

“It’s easy to pay lip service to a fundamental change like shifting toward research-backed literacy methods, but Dr. Jenkins is doing much more than paying lip service as near as we can tell,” he said. “This feels real, it doesn’t feel like Madison’s usual talking about it and forming a task force and having a series of meetings and producing a report. We’ve had decades of that kind of inaction.”

Yet, deja vu all around Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2004: “Madison schools distort reading data” by Mark Seidenberg.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

MTEL & Wisconsin

Wisconsin “Foundation of Readings” teacher content knowledge examination results.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Scott Girard:

The biggest exception to the enrollment decline in the public school sector were districts with an established virtual charter school option, the study found. Those districts saw an enrollment increase of approximately 4.5%, the study found.

“Districts that have these schools that have some experience with conducting virtual education was appealing to some families,” Flanders said.

The state Department of Public Instruction hasn’t released final numbers for homeschooling in the 2020-21 school year, but as of August, students with homeschooling requests compared to one year earlier was more than double, up to 2,792 from 1,279 the year before.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Nader Issa:

Half of the jobs, which pay $15 an hour, include supervising students in classrooms where teachers are remote, monitoring social distancing and masking and conducting health screenings.

Chicago Public Schools is looking to hire 2,000 new employees to take on pandemic-related duties and fill in gaps in staffing once schools return in-person in January, a plan that’s drawing a rebuke from the teachers union and that signifies one of the major challenges of reopening the third-largest district in the nation during a public health emergency.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Ivan Hernandez, David Silverman & Mesmin Destin:

Students from lower-socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds have unique background-specific strengths that they have acquired from their lived experiences. We test the hypotheses that guiding students toward recognizing the strengths that they have derived from their specific background and experiences will promote their positive understandings of their identities and have positive implications for their academic motivation and psychological well-being. Specifically, we present evidence indicating that a brief experimental paradigm guiding students to reflect on their background-specific strengths leads lower-SES college students (Study 1; N = 186), as well as Black and Latinx middle school students from lower-SES backgrounds (Study 2; N = 912), to endorse the idea that they are assets to their schools and society because of their backgrounds and increases their inclinations to persist in the face of academic difficulty. These psychological consequences were significantly associated with middle school students’ end-of-term grades (Study 2).

Victor Davis Hanson:

Bouts of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.

America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made such inroads into and inside government and the establishment as during the past decade.

Devi Shastri:

Freedom of the Press Foundation:

Based on the comprehensive data compiled by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation and Committee to Protect Journalists, our new report shows that there have been at least 117 verified cases of a journalist being arrested or detained on the job in the United States in 2020. The Tracker is also still investigating more than a dozen additional reports of arrests or detentions.

The numbers are staggering. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019. In just one week, from May 29 – June 4, more reporters were arrested in the U.S. than in the previous three years combined. Arrests occurred in more than two dozen cities across the country. And more than 36% of the arrests were accompanied by an assault: journalists were beaten, hit with rubber bullets or other projectiles or covered in chemical agents, like tear gas or pepper spray.

The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Bill Glauber:

“We can pick and choose what we actually restore,” said Terra Gillis, an assistant. “Col. Hegg and Forward are both very positive influences. … We immediately wanted to work on them.”

If all goes well, the restoration will be completed in the spring.

The intention is to have the statues back in place by the summer.

Peter Van Buren:

If Bernie Sanders accomplished anything sacrificing his self-respect to become the Democratic Party’s prison girlfriend, it was to elevate racism, the fate of the Rust Belt, and economic inequality to front-page stories. The problem is that as long as racism, the fate of the Rust Belt, and economic inequality are separate topics talked about by different people in different ways, nothing will ever change.

One of the reasons economic inequality has ramped up has been the clever division of the people impacted. Poor people of color are victims of racism while poor white people are too lazy to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Encourage the POC to feel jealous of the chances the dumb whites throw away like empty PBR cans. Get the white folks to believe the POC live off handouts. Blacks vote for Dem candidates who say they’ll help but don’t; poor whites elect Trump who promises not to and doesn’t.

Poor whites make good copy. There’s a new book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America.” There’s also a new movie out of an old book, Hillbilly Elegy. National Review has its own white trash story up and the MSM has made parachuting elite columnists into the Heartland to write thought pieces into a sub-genre that could sit aside Business and Sports on the masthead. Whatever all those writers think their point is, their point ends up being that poor whites are very different from poor blacks.

The fascination with writing about white trash arises because poor white people are a stand-in for poor blacks. Kinda by proxy, the way the movie M*A*S*H* set in Korea was actually a criticism of America’s war in Vietnam. White liberals can say anything they want about Appalachians, stuff they can’t get away with saying about blacks. That avoids anyone seeing that the story is all the same story, just whitewashed with claims of racism.

Terry Jeffrey:

“Tuition increased substantially between 1995 and 2017, and that increase put upward pressure on borrowing,” said the CBO. “(Some research indicates that the expansion of the federal student loan programs has induced colleges and universities to increase tuition.) For example, the average published in-state tuition — also known as the sticker price — for public, four-year undergraduate institutions increased by 120 percent (adjusted for inflation) over that period. The average published tuition for not-for-profit private institutions increased by 76 percent.”

“The increase in students’ ability to borrow may have induced colleges to increase their tuition,” said the report.

So, federal student loans caused money to flow as follows: Jim worked as an auto mechanic and, along with millions of other hardworking non-college-educated Americans, paid federal taxes. The federal government took some of that money and sent it to Harvard and other colleges in the form of student loans. The government attributed these loans to people like Jill — the sister Jim did not know — as payment for their tuition.

Adrienne Bernhard:

Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world.
T
The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.

But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.

Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).

An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.

Tobi Cohen:

With the advent of social media, none of us can take our privacy for granted. The Privacy Commission of Canada says it’s critically important to teach students how to protect their privacy, exercise control over their personal information and respect the privacy of others.

By the time children start school, most have already figured out how to turn on the tablet, find apps on Dad’s smartphone and search the favourites tab for their preferred websites. But they still have a lot to learn about staying safe online.

The risks associated with connecting to the Internet have grown exponentially in recent years. From cyberbullying, sexting and child luring, to tracking, hacking and email scams, the threats can be daunting for many adults, let alone children and teens. At the same time, personal information has become a hot commodity as businesses seek to monetize our data. It has become difficult to discern who is processing our information and for what purposes and everyone, regardless of age, must weigh the benefits and risks of each product and service they use, each time they use it.

.@MMSDschools and @UWMadEducation announce a 14-member early literacy task force focused on analyzing approaches to teaching reading “toward the goals of improving reading outcomes and reducing achievement gaps.” More details at a 1 p.m. press availability. Members: pic.twitter.com/mPDoVmDrTF

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) December 14, 2020

Yet, deja vu all around Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2004: “Madison schools distort reading data” by Mark Seidenberg.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

MTEL & Wisconsin

Wisconsin “Foundation of Readings” teacher content knowledge examination results.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Megan Brenan:

• 34% say their mental health is excellent, down from 43% in 2019

• Democrats, frequent churchgoers show least mental health change

• Reports of physical health stable, slightly more positive than mental health

Americans’ latest assessment of their mental health is worse than it has been at any point in the last two decades. Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults rate their mental health positively, representing a nine-point decline from 2019.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Joanne Jacobs:

Two boys were shot and killed at a mall in Sacramento, writes Darren Miller, a high school math teacher. One was a former student; the other is a current student of another teacher.

He asked his colleague if the boy had been a “face” or a “rectangle.”

His school uses Zoom for online classes.

Like the opening of the Brady Bunch, each participant gets a rectangle; either the participant’s name is shown, or if the participant has activated a web cam, the rectangle is filled with the video of the the participant (usually just their face). For a variety of reasons we cannot require students to turn on their cameras, and most choose not to, so Zoom classes can feel like talking to a wall of black rectangular bricks with names on them.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Bill Minser, Regis Miller and more:

I found last Sunday’s State Journal editorial, “Fauci sends a message to schools,” disingenuous and dangerous.

Schools should have opened in September.

Commentary.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Brian Riedl:

Frederick Studemann:

In many ways this is nothing new. Booksellers have always played a role as tastemakers and influencers. Keeping loyal customers up to date with new titles and ideas for further reading via newsletters and mailshots is a long-established practice. But the realities of the pandemic forced an upgrade. Similarly, publishers sped up a move to digital platforms for the promotion of books, and cultivation and curation of reading communities.

The pandemic has also spurred attempts to provide a viable alternative to Amazon. Bookshop.org was conceived in the US before the pandemic with the aim of offering book buyers an online service that could match the scale of stock available on Amazon with the personalised service and sense of community typically associated with smaller retailers. In turn, independent booksellers would get a share of the business. Covid-19 turned an idea that struggled to raise funding from investors and expected to take a while to establish itself into a rapid success story that has since expanded into the UK and is now looking to move into continental Europe.

Izabella Kaminska:

When you’re on a plane, do you think about its aerodynamics? When you look at a mountain, do you think about how precisely it was formed? Do you always notice how the music you are listening to is structured? If the answer to all these is yes, you could be what Simon Baron-Cohen calls a hyper-systemiser.

People who are that way inclined have a hard-wired compulsion to seek out patterns in their surroundings, following a simple “if this and that then this” algorithm. It is through this process of endless iterative discovery and experimentation that such minds eventually stumble upon new inventions, pushing human evolution forward, and in many cases changing the world forever. Today, these nerdy brain types are commonly associated with autism. But while society views that condition as a disorder, Baron-Cohen — a clinical psychologist based at the University of Cambridge — argues that its connection with systemising techniques and influence on human invention should not go unnoticed.

“Those humans who had minds with a systemising mechanism in overdrive were — and are — central to the story of invention,” he writes.

Reddit users, with their systemising minds, took less than 48 hours to pinpoint the monolith that appeared in the Utah desert

Baron-Cohen anchors his theory in the story of young “Al”, also known as Thomas Alva Edison, whose endless compulsion to tinker with things brought us a slew of 19th-century inventions — among them, most famously, the lightbulb. He contrasts this with the story of another young boy named Jonah, now in his 40s, who is similarly plagued by a compulsive pattern-recognising mind. Unlike Edison, Jonah is diagnosed with autism, and his life is a lonely one because he cannot easily fit in with others or succeed at getting a job.

What differentiates the two, Baron-Cohen contends, is how their conditions were treated by family, society and the medical establishment.

Choose life!

Kevin Williamson:

Biden wants a little welfare for the affluent in the form of a $10,000 college-loan giveaway accomplished through legislation, while the Democrats’ Left wants a lot more welfare for the wealthy in the form of a $50,000 student-loan giveaway accomplished through unilateral executive action.

And welfare for the wealthy is precisely what is in question here: The majority of student debt is held by relatively high-income people, poor people mostly are not college graduates, and those who attended college …

Erin Richards:

Ruby Rodriguez remembers the days when English class meant walking to her desk, talking to friends and checking the board.

Now class begins when her classmates’ names appear online. She sits alone at the dining room table, barefoot and petting the family dog. It’s her freshman year at St. Anthony High School, a private Catholic school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She doesn’t know what her classmates look like, since nobody ever turns on their cameras.

After schools in Milwaukee went remote last March, Ruby and her friends in eighth grade at St. Anthony’s middle school missed their graduation ceremonies and parties. Her close friends attended different high schools, mostly other private schools that offered in-person instruction. St. Anthony, like many schools in urban areas, including Milwaukee Public Schools, started the fall semester online for pandemic safety reasons.

Laura Moser:

So begins this apology from Lily Eskelsen García—the president of the National Education Association—for remarks that outraged disabilities advocates and special-needs parents. In a lively speech at a Campaign for America’s Future gala in October, where she was accepting a Progressive Champion Award (just wait, because that detail is about to seem funny), Eskelsen García was running through a rapid-fire list of teachers’ sundry responsibilities when she produced a few infelicitous phrases:

We serve kids a hot meal. We put Band-Aids on boo-boos. We diversify our curriculum instruction to meet the personal individual needs of all of our students—the blind, the hearing-impaired, the physically challenged, the gifted and talented, the chronically tarded and the medically annoying.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Blog:

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.  Open Syllabus helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books.  It supports students and lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields.  It creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use open licenses.  It supports work on aligning higher education with job market needs and on making student mobility easier.  It also challenges faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data resource.

Joshua D. Kertzer:

Political scientists often criticize psychological approaches to the study of politics on the grounds that many psychological theories were developed on convenience samples of college students or members of the mass public, whereas many of the most important decisions in politics are made by elites, who are presumed to differ systemati- cally from ordinary citizens. This paper proposes an overarching framework for thinking about differences between elites and masses, presenting the results of a meta-analysis of 162 paired treatments from paired experiments on political elites and mass publics, as well as an analysis of 12 waves of historical elite and mass public opinion data on foreign policy issues over a 43 year period. It finds political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

UW-Madison’s students will be more closely monitored next semester.

A mobile app called “Safer Badgers” will be students’ and employees’ “key to campus,” representing a “significant change from the fall semester,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank wrote in a Friday email.

All students living in the Madison area, including those who live off-campus and have only online classes, will be denied entry to campus buildings unless they are up to date on a twice-weekly COVID-19 test requirement.

Graduate students and employees must test regularly, though how often it’s required will depend on their job and how often they are on campus.

Scott Girard:

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Charlie Savage:

The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show.

But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather, according to letters produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Chronicle:

The figure is startling. This year, 21.7 percent fewer high-school graduates went straight to college compared with 2019, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. As year-to-year changes go, that’s huge.

Don’t stare only at that top-line number, though. Look at the comparisons between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. You’ll see further evidence that the pandemic has hit low-income students, especially those from urban high schools, the hardest.

The report, released on Thursday, provides an early look at how Covid-19 has affected the high-school graduating class of 2020. Earlier this fall, the research center released a series of reports examining enrollment outcomes at two- and four-year colleges, the most recent of which showed a 13-percent decline in the number of first-time freshmen nationally.

David Blaska:

First get rid of the police, then figure out how to make schools safe. That’s Madison’s mad formula for its public schools, courtesy of Freedom Inc. and Progressive Dane (and its amen corner at The Capital Times). Parents, not so much.

After booting the school resource police officers last Spring the board began studying What Do We Do Now?! The school safety committee has issued its recommendations. They amount to creating another committee to do what the first committee could not. The lead recommendation:

▪ Create a superintendent advisory committee to develop a plan to enhance youth and community roles in school safety.

As Madison schools’ safety and security committee considers recommendations, some want more time.

Tim Levin:

And according to NYU marketing professor, entrepreneur, author, and podcaster Scott Galloway, the pandemic has accelerated changes that were already brewing in higher education, making the sector more ready for major change than nearly any other industry.

“Education, other than maybe healthcare, is more ripe for disruption than any other $100 billion-plus industry in the US,” Galloway said at Insider’s virtual “Access, Equity, and the Future of Education” event Wednesday.

College tuition rates have skyrocketed — far outpacing the rate of inflation — and acceptance rates have plummeted, Galloway noted, while the quality of education students receive and the outcomes they can expect after graduation haven’t improved accordingly. All the while, compensation for administrators and faculty has grown, Galloway said.

Till von Wachter:

Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career development. The literature finds large initial effects on earnings, labor supply, and wages that tend to fade after ten to fifteen years in the labor market, and that are accompanied by changes in occupation, job mobility, and employer characteristics. Adverse initial labor market entry also has persistent effects on a range of social outcomes, including timing and completed fertility, marriage and divorce, criminal activities, attitudes, and risky alcohol consumption. There is also evidence that early exposure to depressed labor market lowers health and raises mortality in middle age, patterns accompanied by a reopening of earnings gaps.

Susan Landau:

The tools are so effective that they have largely automated the business of unlocking phones. That’s a big change from the mid 2000s. Jonathan Zdziarski, an Apple forensics expert, used to teach FBI technologists how to access data from iPhones on a bespoke basis. But law enforcement soured on that approach later in the decade, and investigators sought solutions that essentially were “push a button, data appears,” Zdsiarski told me on Listening In. Achieving that ease of search may have driven the past decade’s fights over locked phones. That is, the security protections that Apple and Google (Android’s developer) put in place to protect customer data on the phones made it harder for everyone, including law enforcement, to access private data on the phone. That’s a security improvement. But the security improvement comes with a downside: It makes it harder to have the push-and-data-appears solutions that law enforcement seems to prefer. Even when law enforcement could breach phones on an individual basis using techniques like those taught by Zdziarski, the encryption systems imposed a barrier to what law enforcement really wanted: speed and ease of search.

The widespread adoption of MDFTs changes that equation. The Upturn report shows that companies like Cellebrite and GrayShift (maker of the GrayKey tool) provide push-and-data-appears capability—but at a cost. Since 2015, Las Vegas’s police department has spent more than $640,000 on MDFTs; Miami’s police department, more than $330,000; state agencies in Michigan, more than $1 million; and Indiana State Police, more than $510,000. Put another way, Apple’s and Google’s security protections appear to be good enough to thwart casual criminals. But they don’t appear to keep out anyone with a large enough budget to pay for MDFTs.

That seems to change the going dark premise. Law enforcement has long warned that the consequences will be the increasing inability of law enforcement to investigate serious crimes. But Upturn’s report shows that maybe the problem is different: The issue is not law enforcement’s inability to get into locked phones but, rather, who can pay to enable law enforcement access.

Matt Schudel:

Walter E. Williams, an economist and writer who was one of the country’s leading Black conservative public intellectuals, known for his outspoken views that included opposition to the minimum wage and affirmative action programs in colleges, died Dec. 2 in Arlington, Va. He was 84.

The death was confirmed in a statement by George Mason University, where he had taught since 1980. According to university spokesman Michael Sandler, Dr. Williams taught a graduate course in microeconomics on GMU’s Arlington campus that ended at 10 p.m. on Dec. 1. Several hours later, police found him unresponsive in his car in a university parking lot. He reportedly had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Dr. Williams was a provocative scholar and writer who challenged orthodox ideas on economics, race relations and the role of government. He often held verbal sparring matches on television with such figures as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks.

Joseph Da Costa:

Madison school officials plan significant changes in reading and literacy instruction. District administrators presented the proposed changes to school board members at a recent Board of Education meeting and signaled a shift toward phonics and the science of reading.

MMSD’s Chief of Elementary Schools, Carletta Stanford, acknowledged, “We know that what we’ve done in the past has not exactly hit the mark for where we want to be in terms of closing gaps.” 

During the meeting Stanford explained recent research and discussed the expert advice that is helping school officials guide the pivot to a more science-based approach to literacy. Stanford referenced specific research findings stating that “early intervention is critical” and there needs to be “intentionality in explicit reading instruction.”

Lisa Kvistad, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching & Learning, told board members the district plans to “move forward now that we’ve gone through the data” and called the planned changes “an equity imperative.”

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Rick Karle:

All has he ever wanted was a chance.

And if he was given that chance, they’d never forget him.

They said Jake Pratt of Vestavia Hills would never contribute.

They said he’d never make his high school football team.

They said he’d never graduate from high school.

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

They said he’d never get his driver’s permit.

They said he’d never graduate from college.

Jake Pratt has proven them all wrong, and now I have the pleasure of announcing some big news! Jake has landed a job at UPS!!!

Jay be Olson & Amir Raz:

Social psychologists, placebo scientists, and consumer researchers often require deception in their studies, yet they receive little training on how to deceive effectively. Ineffective deception, however, can lead to suspicion and compromise the validity of research. The field of magic offers a potential solution; magicians have deceived audiences for millennia using a variety of robust techniques. As former professional magicians, we propose the Swiss cheese model of deception and argue that deception should be subtle yet elaborate. Subtle deception involves techniques such as fake mistakes, planted assumptions, and convincers. Elaborate deception involves layering many of these techniques rather than relying on a single cover story. We have demonstrated the potency of these principles by making participants believe implausible ideas, such as that a machine is controlling their mind or that the placebo they consumed was a psychedelic drug. These principles can help researchers reduce demand characteristics, improve blinding, and increase the generalisability of studies that require deception.

Smith College Alums:

Recently, a White staff member at the College began posting inflammatory videos to a YouTube account, the first of which has amassed––at the time of this writing–– fifty-five thousand views. We have provided a link to a Vimeo here, so as to avoid contributing additional views––and therefore YouTube ad revenue––to the staff member in question. These videos expound at length, though with little actual detail, on various complaints about this staff member’s conditions of employment, largely relating to the College’s recent efforts to implement implicit bias and anti-racist training as a means of embracing equity and inclusion both on and off campus.

As a group of Smith College alums who share these values of equity and inclusion, we feel called to voice our support for the College’s ongoing commitment to anti-racist work. This work has been reaffirmed and refocused in recent months for members of the broader Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color (BIPOC) Smith community, for whom this is only the latest of many well-documented and ongoing instances of racism, silencing, and disenfranchisement. While applicable to the entire Smith Community, this work is of the utmost importance for current students and staff, whose immediate safety and wellbeing during an already difficult semester have been compromised by the overt resentment and ire expressed by this community-facing member of the Smith staff, and by the national attention it has garnered.

We applaud the creation of the employee White Accountability Group, as we recognize the importance of spaces for White staff to learn and address their biases together. We were also gratified to read President McCartney’s October 29th letter, written in response to the aforementioned video, affirming the College’s commitment to racial justice, equity, and inclusion.

John Wisely:

Three Catholic high schools are suing the state in federal court, saying Michigan’s most recent order banning in-person learning violates their First Amendment right to practice their faith.

Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Robert Gordon on Monday extended by 12 days a previous order banning in-person learning at high schools, colleges and universities. Gordon said the order is necessary to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Preschools, elementary and middle schools and boarding schools are allowed to offer in-person learning under the order.

The three high schools — Everest Collegiate High School and Academy in Clarkston, Fr. Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor and Lansing Catholic High School — along with the Michigan Association of Non-Public Schools say they should be allowed to do the same, noting they use rigorous safety protocols and their infection rates are very low.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Benjamin Yount:

The data as it is currently released makes comparisons between districts all but impossible because districts have discretion on creating exclusions from the school-level spending,” Flanders wrote. “DPI includes a list of recommended exclusions, but districts have the freedom to disregard this advice, either including some of the costs as school-level costs or excluding even more spending. Given DPI’s track record of opposition to any sort of reform, it may be the case that opaqueness is attractive.”

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

Hannah Natanson:

More evidence emerged this week that online school is taking its worst academic toll on Virginia’s most vulnerable students, as superintendents in the state — facing mounting pressure to reopen schools — took tentative steps toward in-person instruction.

Loudoun County Public Schools went the furthest, welcoming back more than 7,300 elementary school students this week. Other Northern Virginia districts are moving more slowly: Arlington Public Schools said it would return thousands of elementary and middle school students early next year, while Alexandria City Public Schools outlined plans to send some students with disabilities and English-language learners back into school buildings in late January — followed in early February by kindergartners through fifth-graders.

These developments come as schools in the D.C. region, and nationwide, are beginning to gather and publish data on students’ grades for the first full semester of online learning. Early analysis highlights steep drops in academic performance among low-income students and children of color in the Washington area.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Scott Carlson:

Start early and get to Thanksgiving. That was the goal for a range of colleges that held in-person classes in the fall despite the pandemic.

But how many got to the end of the semester in a healthy financial condition? Many colleges enrolled significantly fewer students than they would have in a typical year, cutting into tuition revenue at a time when higher education was already desperate to attract bodies. And although getting to the end of the semester prevented institutions from having to issue refunds on room-and-board fees, occupancy was down in residence halls across the country. And then there were the financial hits from canceling fall athletics, buying personal protective equipment for faculty and staff members, and retrofitting buildings for spread-out classes.

A new survey conducted by The Chronicle and two other organizations sheds some light on the financial challenges that colleges face as they approach a spring semester that might be even tougher to pull off than the fall.

Many of the surveyed institutions — particularly small private colleges — offered high discount rates and saw significant declines in net-tuition revenue. Smaller institutions and those with lower graduation rates were also more likely to lose value on their endowments.

Hank Berrien:

A group of Wisconsin parents, along with School Choice Wisconsin, is suing the city of Racine after the city closed its schools, defying a Wisconsin Supreme Court restraining order preventing the city from closing the schools.

The sequence of events preceding the lawsuit included Dottie-Kay Bowersox, the City of Racine Public Health Administrator, issuing a public health order on November 12 in which she required all schools within the jurisdiction of the Racine Public Health Department to close their buildings while urging them to switch to virtual learning from Nov. 27, 2020, through Jan. 15, 2021.

Bowersox stated, “We’re concerned that, again, individuals will not be responsible. They will interact with individuals outside their home. They’ll go to gatherings and such. They won’t be masked. They won’t keep social distancing, and they won’t stay home when they’re ill.”

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Heather MacDonald:

The United States is being torn apart by an idea: that racism defines America. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in late May 2020 catapulted this claim into national prominence; riots and the desecration of national symbols followed. Now, activists and their media allies are marshaling a more sweeping set of facts to prove the dominance of white supremacy: the absence of a proportional representation of blacks in a range of organizations. That insufficient diversity results from racial bias, claim the activists, and every few days, the press serves up another exposé of this industry or that company’s too-white workforce to drive home the point.

In one short stretch during the summer of 2020, the Wall Street Journal ran stories headlined “Wall Street Knows It’s Too White” and “A Decade-Long Stall for Black Enrollment in M.B.A. Programs.” The Los Angeles Times asked: “Why are Black and Latino people still kept out of the tech industry?” In another article, the Times documented its own “painful reckoning over race.” The New York Times pumped out news features and op-eds alleging racism in food journalism, Hollywood, publishing, and sports management, among other professions. The Chronicle of Higher Education painstakingly reported on protests against alleged racial bias in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, citing, for example, charges that black scientists are constantly “attacked by institutional and systemic racism.” All the articles invoked employment ratios as proof of racism.

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Justin EH Smith:

This much is all true: I believe that “quality television” is in fact of extremely low quality, that “YA literature” is not literature, that “OA literature” as it were looks more and more like YA with each passing year, that superhero movies are of course not cinema and that no self-respecting adult should ever watch them, except perhaps as an expression of love to some li’l tyke in their lives. If we were living in a culture dominated by grown-ups, Martin Scorsese would be considered the purveyor of middle-brow forgettable fare rather than the gold standard of sophistication, and at least the childless among us would not even have to be aware of Spider-Man’s existence.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease retracted on Tuesday the 1951 paper by professor Benjamin Glover in what some scholars see as part of an emerging trend re-examining past academic work considered to be racist, sexist or homophobic by today’s standards.

Most retractions come up soon after publication, stem from technical errors or plagiarism and endure a drawn-out process in which researchers defend or attack the paper in question over a period of months or even years.

The retraction of Glover’s article, “Observations on Homosexuality Among University Students,” comes nearly 70 years after publication. The paper is now marked with the scientific version of a scarlet letter because it supported what are now “long discredited beliefs, prejudices and practices.”

Christopher Bedford:

USA Today uses left-wing college interns to censor news media and opinion articles they disagree with, working hand in glove with unaccountable social media giants to suppress it. Newspapers earn a lot of money performing this task for Facebook and its related companies, and are proud of the job they do to police public speech, even bragging about it publicly on social media platforms.

If you begin to feel an intense and crushing feeling of dread at this reality, don’t be alarmed. That indicates only that you are still sane.

Larry Kuehn:

The exposés of abuse by social media corporations like Google and Facebook have finally brought attention to the dangers of monopolies over our communications. The way these monopolies have been colonizing public education has, however, gone almost unnoticed. This is rampant privatization sneaking in as essential to “21st Century learning.”

The top five global capital corporations are technology platforms—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Platforms are a host for a variety of services and uses. All of the big five platform corporations have become too large in a short period of time to have any significant competition outside of this group. They compete against one another, adding services to secure their monopoly by offering users everything they do online.

If a new service is developed that seems to be gaining users, or that competes with an element of their platform, it is purchased and integrated into the platform—avoiding new competitors. Alternatively, they use their massive resources to develop a comparable app and push the potential competitor aside.

Kathryn Dill:

When New York University moved many classes online amid the pandemic, a group of third-year film and drama students at the school took things into their own hands. Reluctant to tackle a semester of what they labeled “Zoom Shakespeare” and “Zoom Treasure Island,” they began researching where to live and work together inexpensively. “We wanted to create an environment where we [could] riff off each other,” said Marina Fess, an acting major.

The students organized a creative collective in Vermont without oversight or advice from professors or NYU, which isn’t awarding academic credit for the three-month stint.

Many students elsewhere also took action, choosing either to postpone college or interrupt their studies to work as proofreaders, long-distance tutors, campaign volunteers, researchers and DoorDash delivery people. Some are pursuing passions like drone piloting.

During Covid, the decision to take a gap year or semester before or during college is complicated. With many school policies in flux, tuition refunds or credits aren’t always a given and students who have secured scholarships may be hesitant to defer. At some schools, students who take time off may risk losing the chance to enroll whenever they like, and could have to resubmit financial aid applications the following academic year. Finding gap-year activities also is harder now. Even part-time jobs can be tough to land and the pandemic has suspended or limited many traditional pursuits, like travel or international volunteer programs.

Charles Hilu:

“I’m just a simple physical scientist. The way I’ve always approached my life is to tell the truth and try to do what is morally right,” Abbot wrote in an email to The College Fix. Abbot is (and it looks like he will continue to be) a professor of geophysical science at the university.

After Abbot cut a series of videos in which he listed his specific grievances with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, “58 students and postdocs of the Department of Geophysical Sciences, and 71 other graduate students and postdocs from other University of Chicago departments,” published a letter calling for Abbot to be sanctioned, according to a petition in support of the professor.

“The contents of Professor Dorian Abbot’s videos threaten the safety and belonging of all underrepresented groups within the department and serve to undermine Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives,” the letter stated.

Adrienne Bernhard:

The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.

But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.

Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).

An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.

Christopher Rufo:

San Diego Unified School District is forcing teachers to attend “white privilege” training, in which teachers are told “you are racist” and “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.”

The training begins with a “land acknowledgement,” in which the teachers are asked to accept that they are colonizers living on stolen Native American land. Then they are told they will experience “guilt, anger, apathy, [and] closed-mindedness” because of their “white fragility.”

After watching clips of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, the trainers tell the teachers: “you are racist,” “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies,” and that they must commit to becoming “antiracist” in the classroom. They must submit to the new racial orthodoxy.

The teachers are told that they are part of an oppressive white power structure. The trainers claim that “white people in America hold most of the [power]” and that white teachers have an “ability to thrive” that is “being preserved at every level of power.”

Wisconsin State Journal:

The nation’s top infectious disease expert just urged schools to reopen.

We hope school officials in Madison and across Wisconsin were listening — those who have kept most of their students at home for online learning during the pandemic.

School officials should be ready to open for the second semester in late January, at least for elementary school students. Districts also should share their plans with the public. School officials always can push back their opening dates based on what’s happening in their communities. Not every school and situation is the same.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday that in-person classes should be “the default position.”

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

Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Scott Girard:

The group tasked with recommending policy changes for Madison schools without police officers stationed there wants more time.

But it’s also approaching a deadline of sorts, as Madison Metropolitan School District staff soon will begin building the 2021-22 budget, which could include funding toward any of the Safety and Security Ad Hoc Committee’s recommendations.

The 29-member committee held its latest meeting Thursday evening, where members discussed a policy proposal from Freedom Inc., the value of proactive versus reactive strategies and the importance of a multifaceted approach to student safety at school. It will meet again Dec. 10, initially expected to be its final meeting, but could continue to convene in the future based on members’ requests.

The School Board unanimously approved removing police officers from schools this summer amid a nationwide reckoning with police mistreatment of minorities. It was a sudden shift for a district that has had an officer stationed in each of its four comprehensive high schools for more than two decades, but one that came after years of activism from a group of local youth of color.

Notes and links.

WLWT5:

As winter sports begin across Ohio, officials with the Ohio High School Athletic Association have released requirements for players and coaches amid the coronavirus pandemic. Wrestling began its season Thursday amid the pandemic under a new set of guidelines and rules to help prevent the spread of the virus. In a heavy-contact sport like wrestling, OHSAA officials are trying their best to implement rules for players and coaches. Click here for a full list of wrestling requirements and recommendations. Among the new rules is student-athletes are permitted to wrestle, but must refrain from handshakes before and after the match. Wrestlers are also required to wear facial coverings off the mat when not actively competing or warming up.Equipment should not be shared. If equipment needs to be shared, OHSAA mandates the proper sanitation between use. Student-athletes must also sanitize their hands before and after warmups, at all timeouts and period breaks any time they leave the competition or practice mats. All those on the team bench also need to observe social distancing of 6 feet. Another big change comes from officiating. To conclude the end of match procedure, the official may point to the winning wrestler while raising his or her own arm (with open hand) having the requisite wristband color (red/green) of the winning wrestler.Click the below links for the COVID-19 individual sport recommendations:

Phillip W. Magness:

Biographers of John Maynard Keynes have a peculiar habit of treading very lightly around their subject matter’s involvement in the eugenics movement. The oversight is not for want of evidence.

In one of his last public appearances before his death in 1946, the famed British economist described eugenics as the “most important, significant, and I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.” Keynes’s remarks, delivered at a dinner gala of the British Eugenics Society, followed an 8-year stint as an honorary vice president of the organization. It was the last of many such eugenic organizations in which Keynes served as an officer or adviser – a record that dates back to his time as a student at Cambridge. 

Overt nods to eugenic theory also appear throughout Keynes’s writings, including several of his most famous writings. As I documented earlier this year in a longer article with James Harrigan, Keynes’s famously utopian essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” was written as part of a multi-year dialogue with the novelist H.G. Wells on applying eugenic tools to social design.