Logan Wroge:

Three candidates for an open Madison School Board seat aligned on several issues facing the school district while offering their own solutions to other topics during a forum Tuesday.

The trio seeking the board’s Seat 6 — Karen Ball, Christina Gomez Schmidt and Maia Pearson — spoke of rebuilding trust between the community and the Madison School District, identified areas they would cut in a funding shortage, and made their pitches before the Feb. 18 primary.

Ball, director of academic success at Edgewood College, said she wants to ensure an effective transition for the new superintendent and prepare the community for two potential referendums this fall.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Global Gene Editing Regulation Tracker:

Click on a country (eg. Brazil, US) or region (eg. European Union) below to find which human / health products and processes are approved or in development and their regulatory status.

Ben Meyer:

Charlee Krueger finds her backpack and coat, and her mother Renee scrapes ice from the windshield of their car.  By 7 a.m., they’re ready to go.

Charlee is a second grader at Maple Grove Elementary School in the Merrill Area Public School District.

She’s one of just 80 students enrolled in the far-flung school about 15 miles from the city.  She could be one of the final 80 to attend school there, as Merrill contemplates closing it before next year.

The Kruegers used to live on a farm in the country near Maple Grove.  They just moved closer to Merrill, but Charlee still takes a special bus every day to get to the rural school that’s more than just a school.

“If it was necessary, I would find a way to provide transportation to Maple Grove.  It’s that important to me,” Renee says.

Molly Beck:

Gov. Tony Evers’ administration sought to block a journalist from publishing information from a confidential child abuse investigation by threatening prosecution, a rare move that could violate the U.S. Constitution.   

Alvaro de Menard:

I first discovered Fernand Braudel when Tyler Cowen answered the question: “whose entire body of work is worth reading?”, placing him next to people like Nietzsche and Hume. It was good advice.

Braudel starts working on his doctoral dissertation in 1923, at age 21, intending to concentrate on the policies of Philip II of Spain in the form of a conventional history. To support himself, he teaches at an Algerian high school for a decade, then at the university of Sao Paulo until 1937. During this period he keeps up with developments in France, especially Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s Annales School, which focuses on long-term history and statistical data.

In 1934, 11 years after he began, Braudel starts to find quantitative data. Population figures, ship cargoes, prices, arrivals and departures. These will form the basis of his novel, data-driven approach. Five years later, in 1939, he finally has an outline ready.

Then the Nazis capture him. He spends the next 5 years in a POW camp where he writes the first draft of La Méditerranée without access to any materials, mailing notebooks back to Paris. When the war ends, he becomes the de facto leader of the second generation of the Annales School. An additional four years after that, 26 years after he started working on it, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II is published.

Matt Stoller:

It’s always been a bit of a puzzle for me to define just what the Democratic Party is. There are no formal membership dues, and registration varies by state. Candidates can sometimes run for the party nomination without being a member. And that leaves out the actual mechanisms of governance, the think tanks, banks, corporations, and law firms in which the various policy experts work as a sort of shadow government.

One of the better books on the Democratic Party comes from a former Joe Biden staffer, Jeff Connaughton, who coined the term “the blob” to denote the network of lawyers, lobbyists, Congressional staffers, foreign policy experts, podcasters, media figures and pollsters who comprise the groupthink of the Democrats. These people know each other, marry each other, take vacations together, book each other on shows, hire each other, and work together on policies and campaigns. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a community.

But that community, if it becomes immune from external pressure, can become dangerous. And that’s what happened in Iowa. 

There were two parts to the fiasco. The first was the narrow community in Iowa.

The Iowa caucuses are for most of us an experiment in democracy, but for key actors in Iowa the caucuses are a business. Take former Iowa Governor and Obama Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, whose endorsement was highly sought after. Vilsack is now a highly paid dairy lobbyist. Vilsack is well known, but then there are behind the scenes men like Jerry Crawford. 

A lawyer with white hair mowed like a golf-course fairway, Crawford is something of a kingmaker back home in Des Moines. He has shepherded every Democratic presidential nominee in the most important caucus state going back to 1980 — every nominee except for one, that is. Crawford, 65, still blames himself for Clinton’s 2008 third-place finish in the Hawkeye State, from which her campaign never really recovered. He vows that 2016 will be his year to make it right for her. “I’m trying to make amends,” he said.

Crawford was a lobbyist for Monsanto and Exxon. The Democratic Party is riddled with minor ward bosses like Crawford, especially in early states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. It’s not a criticism to observe that these communities have leaders. But of the insularity of the political class has enabled institutional actors within the Democratic Party in Iowa to become fused with corporate power through informal and formal financial and social relationships.

As corporations get more and more concentrated, these relationships eventually wear down the competence of a political apparatus. The night before the caucus, the Iowa Democratic Party head said, “These are probably the most prepared we’ve ever been as a party for these caucuses. We’ve run through a few different scenarios, but I can tell you, we’re ready.”

The rhetoric around a recent Wisconsin education event is informative.

Cassandra Coburn:

Finland’s educational system is routinely praised as among the best in the world, achieving superb results through methods regarded by other scholastic systems as unorthodox. Among the differences that single it out for praise is the delayed start to education, with compulsory schooling beginning with a pre-primary education for children at 6 years old, and full-time schooling only starting at age 7. In contrast to the battery of tests faced by children elsewhere in the world, there is only one mandatory standardised test, taken at age 16. Commentators coo over the low amount of homework pupils are given, and the high regard in which teachers are held. But one of the most surprising—and important—aspects of schooling in Finland doesn’t make it to the headlines: the provision of social and health care for students from within schools themselves. Nowhere is this more crucial than in increasing capacity to help children with mental health disorders.

Elizabeth Dohms:

Late last month, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction took a stand on a long-debated method of teaching reading to students, ruling that phonics has a place in literacy education after all.

An approach that teaches students how written language represents spoken words, phonics got its endorsement from state schools Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor during the 2020 Wisconsin State Education Convention in Milwaukee. Stanford Taylor said reading outcomes are “not where we want them to be,” and that DPI will make efforts to support schools in delivering phonics-based materials.

This announcement has some in the world of education rejoicing, saying this is a step in the right direction. John Humphries is one of them.

Humphries is superintendent of the School District of Thorp, which is about an hour west of Wausau, and educates about 650 students in grades K-12. The district has spent thousands of dollars on new programs, professional development and consultants to steer staff at toward this type of research-based teaching, he said. 

And by the district’s own measurements, it’s working.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner:

Scott Girard:

In November, Memorial High School sophomore Jake Zarov found two of the units in his health class were “kind of problematic.”

One had students counting their calories every day and the other was a measurement of body mass index. The first functioned as “a restriction of how much to eat,” Jake said, while the second “was very inaccurate” and led some students to feel pressured to share their number with peers.

“In the high school setting, that’s going to get public, people are going to share,” he said. “It’s making a number confine you.”

David Blaska:

Board of education president Gloria Reyes demands “the conversation around school discipline needs to be centered on race,” according to the WI State Journal.

Those who counter that school discipline needs to be centered on behavior will be asked to leave the conversation. Maybe the answer is pick out some white kids and toss them out of school. Got to make the numbers work.

So, come clean, Madison teachers. Admit your guilt. Quit suspending kids who shoot a fellow student at Jefferson middle school. Stop picking on the ring leaders of those cafeteria brawls. Allow that girl to wreak havoc at that Whitehorse middle school classroom. Maybe tomorrow she will behave. Got to make the numbers work. Don’t want to wind up like Mr. Rob, an out-of-work pariah. Keep your heads down.

More:

Do you enforce order in your classroom? SHAME! Or do you press the earbuds in tighter and ignore the chaos? GREAT!

You believe adult authority figures have something to teach our young people? REPENT! Or are you doing penance for your complicity in 1619? YOU ARE SAVED!

Demand personal responsibility and academic performance? What are you? A Republican? !!!

Inspire students to work harder to overcome hurdles? How do you light your tiki torches, fella — with kerosene or paraffin?

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Notes and links on previous Superintendent searches.

2013; 2019 Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison experience.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Ken Dilanian:

It was a brazen scheme to steal another company’s product, according to a federal criminal complaint.

University of Texas professor Bo Mao, prosecutors say, took proprietary technology from an American Silicon Valley start-up and handed it over to a subsidiary of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications conglomerate.

But what makes the case against Mao particularly noteworthy is how he was accused of carrying out the theft: By using his status as a university researcher to obtain the circuit board under the guise of academic testing.

Mao, who has pleaded not guilty, is among the latest defendants in a string of U.S. criminal cases alleging Chinese spying in the academic world. In late January, the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department was arrested by FBI agents in his office, charged with lying about a lucrative relationship with a Chinese talent recruitment program. The same day, a former Boston University student was accused of visa fraud after she allegedly failed to disclose her status as a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army.

Halima Gikandi:

It was 5 p.m. on a Thursday in Nairobi, Kenya, and the streets were crowded with people rushing to get home for dinner. But Philemon, a 25-year-old science researcher, was just getting ready for his second job as an academic writer.

Philemon is part of the global industry of contract cheating in which students around the world use websites to commission their homework assignments. He asked that his full name not be used for privacy reasons due to the sensitive nature of his work.

Service providers like Philemon don’t like to call it “cheating” — they prefer the terms “academic writer” and “online tutor.”

“My clients have been coming from various regions in the world,” Philemon said. “I have worked for a client in Australia, in the US. In Kenya? Very rare.”

Philemon began academic writing in 2017 when he was a university student seeking a flexible part-time job. Today, Philemon can make as much as $1,000 a month — as long as he gets good grades for his clients.

Will Fitzhugh:

This Summer, for the seventh year, The Concord Review History Camp will offer a chance for secondary students who qualify, including rising ninth graders, to spend two weeks working with our instructor/coaches on serious history research papers on topics of their own choosing. These papers, when completed, may be submitted for consideration by The Concord Review.

Since 1987, The Concord Review has published 1,362 serious history papers by secondary students from 46 states and 41 other countries. The most recent issue had essays from Hungary, India, Korea, Vietnam, and many U.S. states. 152 of our authors have gone to Harvard, and the work of our authors is recognized by many other highly selective colleges.

The 2020 History Camp will have a day camp in San Francisco from June 8 to June 19, a residential camp in Boston from June 22 to July 3, and a day camp in Seoul from July 22 to July 31. Application available at tcr.org. Send questions to Steven Lee at steven.lee@tcr.org.

Scott Girard:

The contract runs from June 1 to May 31 of the following year.

The agreement would allow Gutiérrez 25 vacation days each year, 10 holidays off and up to 13 personal illness days. It will provide up to $8,500 for moving expenses as Gutiérrez and his family move from Seguin, Texas, and cover “reasonable temporary living expenses” up to Nov. 1, 2020.

Gutiérrez was announced last Friday as the School Board’s choice among its three finalists for the open superintendent position, currently filled by interim Jane Belmore.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Notes and links on previous Superintendent searches.

2013; 2019 Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison experience.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Logan Wroge:

In the first semester of this school year, 1,524 out-of-school suspensions were issued. That’s up from 910 in the fall of 2015 — a 67% increase — and the number of fall semester suspensions has steadily increased during the past five years.

“If we say this is about how black kids behave, I think that that’s a problem,” Muldrow said. “If we say this is about how we interact with black and African American students, then I think we’re having a more accurate conversation.”

Board President Gloria Reyes said the conversation around school discipline needs to be centered on race but added that the good work teachers are doing to support the district’s anti-racism efforts also should be recognized.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Hanna Campbell & Montana Kaimin:

Out of all the students, faculty and staff at the University of Montana, only six students entered a Martin Luther King Jr. Day writing contest. And all of them were white.

The writing contest was sponsored by the University and asked students to write about how they are “implementing Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy here at the University of Montana.” When the University posted an announcement Monday, Jan. 20 with the four all-white winners of the contest on Facebook, over 1,000 comments flooded the post. Many commenters questioned why no one students of color entered the contest and how that could reflect poorly on the University of Montana’s atmosphere.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Day Committee, made up of members of the Black Student Union, the head of the African-American studies program Tobin Miller-Shearer, as well as other community members, developed the idea of the essay contest. According to Miller-Shearer, he wanted the contest to encourage everyone, not just members of the Black Student Union, to further King’s message.

“The intention was to challenge the entire UM community to take King’s actual legacy seriously, rather than to encourage volunteerism as has been done in the past,” Miller-Shearer said in an email.

James S. Bikales and Kevin R. Chen:

Chemistry department chair Charles M. Lieber has been placed on an “indefinite” paid administrative leave after being charged in federal court with failing to disclose funding from the Chinese government, according to University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain.

Lieber was charged with “making materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to U.S. government agencies, according to an affidavit filed Monday. The charges come as both the United States government and Harvard embark upon a campaign to curb “academic espionage,” a process by which researchers funnel academic information to foreign governments.

Lieber reportedly lied to the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health about ties he allegedly had to China’s Thousand Talents Plan, per the affidavit. The TTP was established in 2008 by the Chinese government to attract scientists from across the world. The federal government, however, has designated the program a danger to national security.

Lieber also allegedly led Harvard to inaccurately tell the NIH that he had no affiliation with the TTP.

Rich Kremer:

The share of Wisconsin high school students deemed to be college-ready has declined since the 2014-2015 school year according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. While the state leads most others that test 100 percent of high school students, the data also shows significant gaps in college-readiness based on race and economic status.   

The Wisconsin Policy Forum analyzed ACT data collected by the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) since it began requiring all high school juniors to take the ACT.

The report shows that the state’s composite score — an average of all results — fell slightly last school year to 19.6 compared to the average of 19.8 from the 2017-2018 academic year. The state’s composite ACT score during the 2014-2015 school year was 20. Those numbers are important because ACT scores are one of the factors colleges use when deciding which students to admit. For the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire an ACT composite score of 21-26 is recommended students. For UW-Madison an ACT score of 27-32 is recommended.

The Policy Forum notes, however, that the slight decline in the state’s composite score “is masking potentially significant declines within each subject area that are relevant to students’ ‘college readiness.'”

The ACT sets benchmarks to determine a student’s ability to earn passing grades in English, math, reading and science. In each subject, less than 50 percent of students met the goal. The state’s benchmark scores for reading increased slightly during the last school year over numbers from 2017-2018.

Sarah Darmanjian:

“When enough people who can afford to leave New York State are gone, who will be left to pay for the infrastructure, health care, schools and other necessities?” said Sen. Tedisco. “This is a bi-partisan effort to shine the light on this problem that’s causing people to leave our Upstate communities and to find out why the Empire State is fast becoming the ‘Empty State’ so we can change the agenda to keep them here,” he said.

Roundtable discussions with small businesses, workforce development, health care, education, economic growth and development, manufacturing and technology representatives will be held once data from the questionnaires have been collected.

According to U.S. Census information, N.Y.’s population has steadily decreased over the past 4 years. The Empire Center said they estimate approximately 1.4 million residents have moved out of N.Y. and gone to other states.

Let’s Compare: Middleton and Madison Property Taxes

2019: Madison increases property taxes by 7.2%, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Coursera:

Learn how to think the way mathematicians do – a powerful cognitive process developed over thousands of years.

Mathematical thinking is not the same as doing mathematics – at least not as mathematics is typically presented in our school system. School math typically focuses on learning procedures to solve highly stereotyped problems.

Issues and insights:

If you aren’t already overdosed on irony, apparently an inexhaustible natural resource in Washington, where the “party of the people” seeks to oust arguably only the second populist president in American history, it’s worth mulling the 1970s origins of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

In the wake of Watergate, and Richard Nixon’s use of federal intelligence and law enforcement to hound his political enemies (in the spirit of his immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson), Democratic Sen. Frank Church’s committee found that U.S. covert agencies were engaged in the work of the devil, such as preventing Communists from gaining power in Latin America and the Middle East. Part of the supposed cure was the establishment of an irregular, secret court to facilitate the evaluation of classified materials when the FBI or intelligence community requested warrants to spy on U.S. citizens acting as foreign agents and threatening our national security.

As Kyle Peterson of the Wall Street Journal recently described on Fox News what he called the “irreparably broken” process, whose genesis was a bill written by Sen. Ted Kennedy, “I mean, you have the government going to this court and saying we would like to surveil this person … there’s not an adversarial process; there’s nobody standing up for his rights in front of the court. The judge signs off on it – no accountability whatsoever.”

It is this dangerously dysfunctional, undemocratically insulated institution that is responsible for the country being put through the two-year agony of the Robert Mueller investigation of what we now know to be baseless suspicions of Russian collusion by Trump operatives.

A court set up to prevent our intelligence and law enforcement agencies from being used for politicized purposes actually facilitated exactly that.

Introducing @Faktabaari’s factchecking service in Finland ?? , @Kari_Kivinen gives @FiveNationsNet #5nn delegates a simple checklist to help students spot mis-, dis- & mal-information https://t.co/MhJxM8grfz pic.twitter.com/xe49DKF5hz

— Cllr Ben Miskell (@benmiskell) February 2, 2020

Finnish ?? ?? Headteacher @Kari_Kivinen explaining the distinction between mis-, dis- and mal-information & how he uses it in school. Simply using the term ‘fake news’ in the classroom isn’t helpful #5NN @FiveNationsNet pic.twitter.com/Ef36RkDLPO

— Cllr Ben Miskell (@benmiskell) February 2, 2020

Related: Commentary and Data on Madison’s High School Graduation Data:

In 2017, only 9% of MMSD’s black students met college-readiness benchmarks on the ACT in reading and math. How do we reconcile this with the 65.6% grad rate for black students the following year?

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Cori Petersen:

This week has marked the tenth annual National School Choice Week, a celebration of educational options all over the country, but in Wisconsin, school choice is a much older tradition. Here, 2020 marks the thirty-year anniversary of school vouchers aka the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). As we celebrate this legacy, I sat down with State Senator Alberta Darling, an education reform champion who has been in the fight from the beginning, to talk about her battles in the legislature to expand school choice, what she would do if she were governor for a day, and why school choice is no longer a bipartisan issue.

Darling entered the Wisconsin assembly in a 1990 special election. In 1992 she was elected into the Senate representing the eighth district, which includes part of Milwaukee county and areas to the north and west. Before long, she found herself deep in the weeds of the controversial fight for school vouchers.

Jeff Madrick:

Actually, we can find low income as the main cause of the hardships and damage of poverty by looking at the consequences of current welfare policies themselves. Government programs in which benefits have changed over time provide abundant data for isolating low incomes as a fundamental cause of problems.

Variations in government programs, or the creation of new programs, create what scholars sometimes call natural experiments. This “exogenous” increase in incomes offers an opportunity to measure the consequences of sudden increases in benefits and income compared to periods when funding was lower, or compared to those families who did not get increases.

Two sets of government-expanded income programs offered among the most interesting examples of natural experiments about the impact of money. The benefits of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which are especially helpful for families with children, were generously raised in 1993. The value of the credit increased by 40 percent on average for families with one child and roughly 100 percent for those with two children.

Researchers estimated how much improvement there was for those children in families with significant increases in tax credit income, comparing them to those where incomes didn’t rise as much. Such exogenous increases of income were separated from the effects of other potential coincident factors such as parental behavior or education. There were also increases in the EITC before 1993 and again in 2009 that add to the dataset on these issues. In addition, the state EITCs provided more information for analysis.

The results were a particularly fascinating affirmation that money makes a major difference. The children whose families had significant increases in EITC income as compared to those who did not had higher school grades and results on achievement tests, attended college in greater proportion, and were generally healthier. One study also showed that the birth weight of newborns was higher in these newly better-off families, and the stress level for mothers was also measurably reduced.

Looking back to the early 1970s, Richard Nixon proposed a guaranteed income program in the form of a “negative income tax” in order to continue but streamline the implementation of the War on Poverty. The lower the income of the poor family, the greater the tax refund benefits would be (to a maximum ceiling benefit); benefits would be distributed in the form of cash payments. It was a forerunner of the Earned Income Tax Credit. But in Nixon’s case, even if a family earned no income, it would receive a cash stipend. Opponents were concerned that it would encourage individuals not to work.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

FIRE:

Since 2011, FIRE has named and shamed 65 individual colleges and universities as America’s worst for free speech. Some — we’re looking at you Harvard, DePaul, and Syracuse — are regulars and have appeared four or five times. Others have slunk away in embarrassment after being listed. But all have one thing in common: They had the chance to do the right thing when it came to free speech, but chose otherwise. 

This year’s list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech includes a college that fired a professor over an innocuous joke on social media, another that allowed its student government to flatly reject a student club because of its conservative beliefs, one that unilaterally canceled a faculty-organized lecture, and a college that suspended a librarian for curating a historical display highlighting the university’s own photos of its racist past.

As in previous years, FIRE’s 2020 “worst-of-the-worst” list is presented in no particular order, and both public and private colleges are featured. Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment. Private colleges on this list are not constitutionally required to respect student and faculty speech rights, but explicitly promise to do so.

John Cochrane:

I’m working on an economic view of political polarization. One aspect of that project is the extent to which many institutions in our society have become politicized. Today’s post is one little data point in that larger story. It tells a little story of how to politicize an institution and silence dissenters.

Jerry Coyne reports on the “diversity equity and inclusion statement” required of anyone hired by the University of California, or desiring a raise or promotion. This is a required statement each candidate must write “Demonstrating Interest in and Ability to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” It’s not about whether you are “diverse,” meaning belonging to a racial, gender, or sexual-preference group the University wishes to hire. It is a statement, as it says, of your active participation in a  political movement.

Jerry’s news in this post is that the statements are now being scored numerically, and only the files of those scoring high enough are passed on for scholarly review. Jerry previously posted  here on the case of Abigail Thompson, professor of mathematics at UC Davis, who dared to question diversity statements in a letter to the American Mathematical Society, pointing out that they are political tests

More, here.

Ann Schimke:

About two-thirds of Colorado’s teacher preparation programs, including the state’s two largest, earned low grades for how they cover early reading instruction, according to a new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The report, which is controversial for its reliance on documents such as course syllabi and textbooks, claims to assess whether teacher prep programs adequately cover five key components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Nationwide, about half of traditional teacher prep programs received an A or a B in this year’s report, the third round of evaluations published on the topic since 2013. In Colorado, six of the 19 programs evaluated received an A or B this year, including Adams State University, Colorado State University-Pueblo, Colorado Christian University, Western State University, and both the undergraduate and graduate programs at University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Jon Gabriel:

This week, reporters revealed that the state Department of Education released the personal information of nearly 7,000 families who use Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Worse still, they sent it to Save Our Schools, staunch opponents of the program and educational choice in general.

ESAs enable parents, mostly those who have children with special needs, to direct their taxpayer dollars for specialized educational therapies or curriculum. The accounts help bridge the huge financial gap for families requiring customized assistance in the classroom.

The department released a spreadsheet that included the account balances of every ESA account in the state, along with names, email addresses and the grade in which the student is enrolled. Special needs students even had their disability listed.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

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

Dillon Rosenblat:

The Arizona Department of Education likely violated federal student privacy laws when it released a spreadsheet that inadvertently named every parent with an Empowerment Scholarship Account in the state. The spreadsheet then fell into the hands of a group that opposes expansion of the program.

The Yellow Sheet Report, a sister publication of the Capitol Times, also obtained the spreadsheet through a public records request for documents showing the account balance of every ESA account in the state, and, on the surface, the documents the department provided appear to properly redact personally identifiable information. But when the Yellow Sheet Report highlighted the document, it became clear it was improperly redacted. Copying the entire table into a text reader reveals the redacted portions. 

The likely explanation is that the department blackened the background in columns containing the names and email addresses of nearly 7,000 parents with ESA accounts, but didn’t re-scan the document to ensure the words didn’t show through. 

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

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

Glenn Reynolds:

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!” Those words were thundered by Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his 1963 inauguration speech. But, in fact, the very next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which brought an end to segregation.

Or did it?

Wallace later repented of this phrase, but in 2020, the 1963 George Wallace seems to be getting some traction. Because all over America — and even in Alabama — universities and schools are promoting and endorsing schemes that divide and label students by race.

Chester Finn:

An unhappy episode in Montgomery County, Maryland, (where I live) reminds us that the quest for accountability options other than standardized assessments can open the door to new forms of chicanery.

First, a bit of background. Maryland’s high school graduation requirements include statewide end-of-course exams in science, algebra, English, and government. Students may substitute passing scores on AP or IB exams in several of those subjects, but it’s accurate to say that the Old Line State has stuck with mandatory EOCs even as a number of jurisdictions have backed away from them. Still, there are kids who have trouble passing those exams, and Maryland has long offered a work-around known as the Bridge Plan. Students who twice fail the EOC in a subject can undertake an individual project in that subject, and if they successfully complete it, their exam failure won’t preclude them from graduating. Ten or 11 percent of Maryland diplomas are typically achieved with the help of the Bridge Plan, and in some parts of the state it has become a major highway to the graduation stage: Almost a quarter of the diplomas in Prince George’s County and close to two-fifths of those in the city of Baltimore are Bridge-dependent. Which is to say, sizable fractions of the girls and boys in those jurisdictions would not be graduating from high school if they were actually required to pass the state EOCs.

The Bridge Plan has been controversial for years now and was much debated—and deplored—during my time on the State Board of Education and the Kirwan Commission, the obvious issue being whether kids who graduate with its help are, in effect, getting diplomas they don’t truly deserve because they haven’t actually met the state’s none-too-demanding academic standards in core subjects. Legislators are currently weighing the Kirwan recommendations, and if those get adopted in full, the Bridge Plan will eventually be history, though much finetuning will need to be done by state education officials before new standards and metrics for “college and career readiness” are set for the long haul, and there is certain be continued pressure to allow some sort of workaround.

Travis Kirkwood:

Do humans understand each other? Any honest attempt to answer this question will need to consider some profound and important facts. The question is broad, but worth asking repeatedly. Modern writers and thinkers fail to fully appreciate the merit in marrying science and philosophy, which the great psychotherapists of the 20th century (and many great philosophers before them) did rather admirably. Their writings shed light on the under-explored depths of our humanity. Historically, the inevitable faults of humanness are recurrent; the whims of our finite, imperfect human nature.

Mutual misunderstandings run deep and at times prove to be dangerous. It is neither feasible nor especially useful to pass over the various reasons we fail to understand one another. There is also nothing novel or compelling about listing the countless examples of human misunderstanding such as war, tribalism, and political polarization. It is more useful to proceed with a relatively narrow focus, in an attempt to fully articulate one specific reason why humans do not truly understand one another. That reason is complexity.

In the face of the ineffable complexity of the universe—language, geopolitics, economics, the unique neurophysiology of individuals, the fundamental constituents of matter (quantum physics), and history itself—we are left to navigate oceans of uncertainty. It is therefore true that what we do not know—or cannot know—far outweighs what we do know. We are finite beings in a world of seemingly infinite complexity. It is well beyond our capacity to understand or explain even our own consciousness.

Jordan Bailey:

In 2008, 21-year-old Brandon Brown shot a man in Portland’s Old Port. He was eventually convicted of attempted murder and elevated aggravated assault, and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Now Brown is poised to be the first person in Maine to earn a master’s degree while incarcerated, and may be the first inmate to conduct approved research on fellow inmates for his thesis project.

Brown shot former Marine James Sanders, crippling him, on June 24, 2008, and was sent to Maine State Prison in early 2010. His years of reflection on the crime and its aftermath, and his participation in the University of Maine at Augusta prison college program, led him to an interest in restorative justice and a commitment to education.

He is now the first Maine prisoner to enroll in graduate school and is a few months away from earning a master’s degree from George Mason University. He is researching the stories inmates tell of themselves for themes that might affect their reintegration into society. 

David Dayen:

Attendees at a controversial closed-door policy summit this week at Google headquarters included representatives from a broad section of think tanks and policy shops on the center-left, according to a document obtained by the Prospect. A former Democratic FCC Commissioner and numerous members of consumer, civil rights, and human rights organizations participated in the summit.

The get-together was held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, and the tech giant promised it would be the first of a “series of quarterly policy and product summits.” Top Google lobbyists Karan Bhatia and Mark Isakowitz spoke at the event, as well as other company officials, about products like search, advertising, and artificial intelligence, according to Axios.

Through conferences like this, Google, whose reputation has suffered in Washington amid a backlash against the power and dominance of Big Tech, can play the influence game without technically engaging in lobbying. By bringing together groups that have the ear of policymakers and can present themselves as a nominally independent voice, Google can implant—even if subconsciously—its viewpoints on a host of policy topics. It’s a lobbying event masquerading as a conference, in other words, and could prove more fruitful than direct lobbying.

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

Annysa Johnson:

Fewer than half of high school juniors in Wisconsin are considered college-ready in core subjects, based on the latest round of ACT test results, according to a new analysis released Friday by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

And the percentage of students who met that benchmark has declined in every subject but one since the state began requiring the test in the 2014-15 school year, it said.

According to the report, about 48.7% of students who took the ACT last year were deemed college-ready in English, down from 54% in the 2014-15 school year. Math dropped from 36.2% to 29.2%, and science from 31.7% to 31%, after peaking three years earlier.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Additional Madison notes and links.

“As with other standardized tests — including the Wisconsin Forward Exam and the [NAEP] — the ACT data show significant gaps among students along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines.” https://t.co/VaCLMFVP0i

— Chan Stroman (@eduphilia) February 1, 2020

via Yes, they graduated, but can they read?. Madison school district touts graduation rates, but academic proficiency in question.

Edelman:

Online Survey in 27 markets.

33,000+ respondents.

19 October to 16 November 2018

Libby Emmons and Barrett Wilson:

On Thurs Jan 23, University of Toronto professor of psychiatry Dr. Ken Zucker, a leading international expert on gender dysphoria, and editor-in-chief of Archives of Sexual Behaviour, spoke at McGill University. Dr. Zucker’s presentation was titled, “Children and Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria: Some contemporary research and clinical issues.” 

Inviting Dr. Zucker to speak in an open forum was an act of courage, as he is Canada’s most controversial researcher/clinician in this domain. In a recent column for the National Post on the run-up to this event, I summarized the story of his persecution by hostile trans activists and linked to a more detailed account.

Dr. Zucker’s critics accuse him of practicing “conversion therapy,” by which they mean his objective is to prevent his patients from transitioning. But what Dr. Zucker actually practices, as he explained to me in an interview, is “Developmentally Informed Psychotherapy.” 

In layman’s terms, Dr. Zucker looks at his patients holistically in order to determine if the distress that brought them to his attention is a function of gender dysphoria alone, or gender dysphoria as one of a number of factors, including issues arising out of family dynamics, autism spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety and so on. If in the course of treatment, it becomes clear that finding comfort in his or her natal sex is a reasonable goal for the client, Dr. Zucker offers guidance to that objective. If it becomes clear that only transition will answer to the patient’s need, Dr. Zucker endorses transition, and puberty blockers or hormone therapy as required. 

But any form of traditional psychotherapy is considered to be a form of subversion by many trans activists because trans activists reject assumptions that gender dysphoria is a disorder or even a “distress” requiring psychotherapy. Their watchword is “affirmation,” the assumption that if a young child – even as young as three – says he or she wants to change genders, they know what they want and their wish must be respected, often without any further exploration at all before social transition is encouraged. 

“Watchful waiting”—withholding immediate affirmation, giving the child’s parents and professional observers time to assess the depth and putative permanence of the expressed desire—is also anathema to a small, but vocal group of trans advocates. To these activists, Dr. Zucker’s perspective is superannuated, offensive and, in their discourse, “harmful.” It was a given that the announcement of the event would spark protest. It was just a matter of what kind, and how obstructive it would be.

Scott Girard:

WILL wrote in its December letter that it was representing a group of 15 parents with students in the district and that the guidance “contains certain policies that violate our clients’ constitutional rights as parents.”

“Specifically, the Policy allows children of any age to change gender identity at school without parental notice or consent, prohibits teachers and other staff from notifying parents about this (without the child’s consent), and, in some circumstances, even requires teachers and other staff to actively deceive parents,” the letter stated.

Madison Memorial High School junior Maggie Di Sanza and sophomore Amira Pierotti, who lead the school’s Gender Equity Association, told the Cap Times it’s instead an essential component of protecting students’ rights at a time that could be especially difficult for them, even if their parents are supportive.

“It’s just incomprehensible to me that anyone would target these rights and do it with not a care about the students, about kids,” Amira said. “This (potential lawsuit) isn’t for the betterment of others, this is because you are scared that you don’t know what’s going on with your kids and that you’re afraid they’re trans or gender-expansive because you are transphobic.”

The two students said they began to rally for support of the guidance after WILL’s initial complaint in the fall.

This week, they began circulating a petition to other district schools and creating signage for teachers to put up in their classrooms to reassure students they would support them. Amira said it’s especially important given the statistics of non-binary and gender fluid students being more likely to be kicked out by their parents, report anxiety and consider self-harm.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Natalie Wexler:

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable—and the scores basically stagnant.

Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just a third or so of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as “proficient.” Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

Ed Treleven:

A Madison East High School business and marketing teacher, accused of trying to create child pornography with hidden cameras of unwitting members of the school’s business club, appeared before a packed courtroom in the federal courthouse Thursday, as many of those attending watched in tears.

David M. Kruchten, 37, of Cottage Grove, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday and arrested at his home Thursday morning, didn’t look back at the gallery as marshals brought him into court wearing a green T-shirt, dark gray athletic pants and leg irons to face seven counts of attempting to produce child pornography.

The din of cries and sobs was constant in the small courtroom as dozens of current and recent East students listened while U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Oppeneer ordered Kruchten to remain jailed until at least next Wednesday. Another hearing will be held to decide whether Kruchten can be released until he faces a trial on the charges.

The gallery was filled almost entirely with young women suspecting they may be victims of Kruchten, along with their parents and supporters, according to attendees who declined to be identified.

Through his lawyer, federal defender Joseph Bugni, Kruchten pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Students and parents, some who appeared shaken, left the courthouse without speaking to gathered media after Thursday’s hearing.

Steven Elbow and Scott Girard:

The incident during the two-day trip with 15 students on Dec. 6 to Dec. 8 has roiled the school’s popular business-oriented DECA program, and school district officials have offered counseling and other services to the alleged victims. 

Kruchten was placed on administrative leave after the trip, during which multiple students who were staying at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Minneapolis discovered hidden video recording devices. As of Thursday, he remained employed with the district and on administrative leave.

The charges apparently relate to incidents other than the Minneapolis trip.

A grand jury indictment unsealed by the U.S. Western District Court after his arrest charges Kruchten with seven counts of attempting to produce child pornography. The charges involve seven different victims. Each count carries a penalty of between 15 and 30 years in prison.

Each count charges him with using hidden recording devices. 

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Lyle Jeremy Rubin:

A short answer to these questions can be found in a January 9 posting on Foreign Policy’s website, co-written by two senior fellows at the Middle East Institute, a reputable think tank known for producing bien pensant foreign policy opinion on the Chevron or United Arab Emirates dime, among others. The authors urge more “defense institution-building,” specifically a 60 percent increase in funding for programs like the Ministry of Defense Advisors and Defense Institute of International Legal Studies, venues where U.S. troops would continue to “actively mentor, advise, and train” Iraqi soldiers. The article focuses on military support, but it is likely these upgrades would be accompanied by a U.S. civilian police presence. Advisors to the bipartisan Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States have long pushed for increased police mentorship in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, including the repeal of Section 660, an obscure law that constricts the ability of the U.S. government to train police forces abroad.

Section 660, as it happens, was introduced in 1975, and was designed to prevent the kinds of human rights abuses that plagued mentorship programs in Latin America throughout the Cold War. This brings us to the longer answer to the question about what mental pictures are hidden by Duckworth’s verbiage. It is an answer that Stuart Schrader explores in his recent work of scholarship, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.

Lisa Van Damme:

Years ago, I accompanied an 8th-grade student I had homeschooled as she visited prospective high schools. At one school, the director of admissions welcomed us and then proceeded to assault my student with the information that entry to college had become highly competitive, and she must therefore chart the right course through the right high school to stand even a chance of admission to the better colleges. She then proceeded to sell the school with the following: my student would need to take multiple AP courses—this school offered a wide variety; she would need to complete the IB program—they were honored to be a member school; she would need to be competitive in a sport and ambitious in an extra-curricular activity—they had many from which to choose. As the director mapped out all that my student must do (with the unquestioned assumption that admission to Harvard was her foremost educational goal), I looked over—and saw her wilt.

This was a child of whom I had endless vivid, touching stories from the classroom—stories of her gasping out loud when she was irrepressibly moved by a passage from Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three; stories of her eagerly recreating science lessons at home with her parents as students; stories of her writing with ferocious confidence (though she had previously loathed writing), because, she said, I taught her how. Now, before both our eyes, education was becoming nothing about the development of invaluable, life-long skills, nothing about the discovery of joy and utility in the acquisition of knowledge, nothing about the deepening of a capacity for emotional experience. Admission to high school was about… admission to college, which was about…

The answer to that was nothing more than a vague, unstated apprehension of doom.

Alexis Madrigal::

History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive. The archive is not the library, but something else entirely. Libraries spread knowledge that’s been compressed into books and other media. Archives are where collections of papers are stored, usually within a library’s inner sanctum: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s papers, say, at the New York Public Library. Or Record Group 31 at the National Archives—a set of Federal Housing Administration documents from the 1930s to the ’70s. Usually, an archive contains materials from the people and institutions near it. So, the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford contains everything from Atari’s business plans to HP co-founder William Hewlett’s correspondence.

While libraries have become central actors in the digitization of knowledge, archives have generally resisted this trend. They are still almost overwhelmingly paper. Traditionally, you’d go to a place like this and sit there, day after day, “turning every page,” as the master biographer Robert Caro put it. You might spend weeks, months, or, like Caro, years working through all the boxes, taking extensive notes and making some (relatively expensive) photocopies. Fewer and fewer people have the time, money, or patience to do that. (If they ever did.)

Tyler Cowen:

Why so many of America’s best and brightest college graduates go into management consulting, finance or law school is a perennial question. There are some compelling theories, which I will get to, but first I would like to turn the question around: Why are so many people in top positions, whether in the public or private sector, so old?

I submit that these two trends — and a third, declining productivity growth — are related: Many tasks have become increasingly complex in America, often more complex than people can learn in just a few years. By the time you have experience enough to perform them, you are less interested in taking risks. In your young adventurous years, by contrast, the only jobs you can get are those that don’t reward (or allow) adventure. The result of all this is a less audacious America.

Start with the Ivy Leaguers. I have no rancor against lawyers, financiers or management consultants, but the pursuit of these careers seems like a misallocation of human creativity. Those jobs do not comprise most of the value of the U.S. economy, so why are they such a magnet?

An emphasis on adult employment:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Riley Vetterkind:

Felzkowski and Stroebel say the bill would make it easier for retired teachers to fill workforce shortages in local school districts in order to meet the needs of students. Since 2009-10, the number of Wisconsin teachers has declined by 1,338, or 2.2%, while the number of public school students over the same time frame decreased by 2,269 , or 0.5%, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.

“While I think the teacher shortage has pushed our districts toward really creative solutions, we are reaching a tipping point where even these innovations will not be able to shield a district from feeling the effects of these shortages down the road,” Felzkowski said. “One of the best resources to address this issue is at our fingertips — retired educators.”

But the bill comes with a catch that its authors argue would account for the change and ensure the continued integrity of the Wisconsin Retirement System: Raising the minimum retirement age at which a participant may begin collecting benefits from 55 to 59½. The change would only affect employees under the age of 40 at the time the bill becomes law, and would also exclude protective service occupations, such as police officers and firefighters.

An emphasis on adult employment:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee.

Joanne Jacobs:

In Chicago’s Old Town, children who live north of North Avenue go to top-rated Lincoln Elementary (63 percent white, 14 percent low-income), while those south of the line go to low-rated Manierre (96 percent black, 4 percent, Latino, 93 percent low-income).

“At the end of the 2018–19 school year, not a single eighth grader from Manierre was proficient in reading, compared to 81 percent of Lincoln eighth graders,” writes Tim DeRoche on Quillette. The schools are one mile apart.

In many cities, the best public schools are open to children of affluent families, who pay a premium to live near “good” schools, he writes. Segregation by race and family income is enforced by school districts.

The district spent $19 million to expand Lincoln, when it was overcrowded, so no students would have to be sent to Manierre, writes DeRoche. Now there are some empty seats, but nobody south of the line is admitted.

Manierre has lost students to magnets, charters and private schools. The district had proposed closing it and sending students to another low-performing school in another gang’s neighborhood. That proved politically impossible

Edward Archer:

For most of the past century, the United States was the pre-eminent nation in science and technology. The evidence for that is beyond dispute: Since 1901, American researchers have won more Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics than any other nation. Given our history of discovery, innovation, and success, it is not surprising that across the political landscape Americans consider the funding of scientific research to be both a source of pride and a worthy investment.

Nevertheless, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on the scientific community. He feared that while American universities were “historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,” the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become “a substitute for intellectual curiosity” and lead to “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment…and the power of money.”

Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded and prescient.

My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.

Ian Visits:

Over 3,000 military maps, views and prints collected by King George III have been digitised and published online free to visit by the Royal Collection.

The culmination of ten years of research by Dr Yolande Hodson to catalogue one of George III’s most prized collections, the new website makes these important documents publicly available for the first time and allows them to be explored in minute detail.

No just of considerable academic interest — but just stunning to browse and look at.

David Blaska:

BULLETIN: Channel 3000 is reporting that “Several schools in Madison were on lockout status Wednesday morning because of a shooting, according to the Madison Metropolitan School District. Sennett Middle School, East High School, La Follette High School and Nuestro Mundo Community School were affected.

---

When you don’t have facts or reason, you try to drown out the speaker. Which is what protestors at the WI State Capitol attempted Tuesday (01-28-2020) in Madison as Vice President Mike Pence promoted school choice in the rotunda of the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison WI. 

If you are The Capital Times, servile mouthpiece of the ruling liberal-progressive-socialist hegemony here in Madison — you hurl spittle-flecked diatribe invectives. Only “lackeys” of “the usual cabal of billionaire[s] support school choice, says Dane County’s Progressive Voice.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Leila Fletcher (Madison West High School Senior):

Simpson Street Free Press is invested in and applies the science of reading with our students. We have for decades.

It is true, however, that debates about reading instruction continue. Teachers and reading specialists continually discuss—and dispute—what methods of reading instruction are truly most effective, and ultimately, what method should be used in our schools.

Today, in our country, reading levels continue to decrease; only two-thirds of fourth graders can read at grade level, which leads to high school seniors still unable to meet proficiency. The numbers in Wisconsin are among the worst in the country. And reading results in Madison are at crisis level.

Many experts believe this is a result of the instructional methods that teachers nationwide are instructed in and taught to use. These instructional methods, called the “three-cueing” system, teach students compensation strategies that struggling readers come to depend on after falling behind without having learned to read. All students in three-cueing classrooms are being taught this way, and as reading researcher David Kilpatrick has noted, “[t]he three-cueing system is the way poor readers read.”

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Robby Soave:

The 1619 Project—The New York Times Magazine’s much vaunted series of essays about the introduction of African slavery to the Americas—will now be taught in K-12 schools around the country.

School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York, have decided to update their history curricula to include the material, which posits that the institution of slavery was so embedded in the country’s DNA that the country’s true founding could be said to have occurred in 1619, rather than in 1776.

“One of the things that we are looking at in implementing The 1619 Project is to let everyone know that the issues around the legacy of enslavement that exist today, it’s an American issue, it’s not a Black issue,” Dr. Fatima Morrell, associate superintendent for culturally and linguistically responsive initiatives for Buffalo Public Schools, told Buffalo’s NPR station.

Buffalo teachers and administrators have already begun studying the 1619 material so they can implement it into their curricula. The NPR story correctly notes that the essays examine “lesser-known consequences of slavery,” like “how plantation economics led to modern corporate, capitalist culture.”

Many historians, though, have questioned The 1619 Project’s accuracy. Five of them penned a letter to The New York Times expressing dismay “at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” These historians said the project’s contention that the American Revolution was launched “in order to ensure slavery would continue” was flat-out wrong.

Another historian, Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, has criticized Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, which claimed that modern American capitalism has its roots in plantation slavery. Magness has persuasively argued that this claim lacks verification, and that Desmond relied on bad data about cotton-picking rates in the pre-Civil War south.

“Desmond’s thesis relies exclusively on scholarship from a hotly contested school of thought known as the New History of Capitalism (NHC),” wrote Magness in a second article. “Although NHC scholars often present their work as cutting-edge explorations into the relationship between capitalism and slavery, they have not fared well under scrutiny from outside their own ranks.”

Daniel M. Russell and Mario Callegaro:

In a cheery, sunshine-filled fourth-grade classroom in California, the teacher explained the assignment: write a short report about the history of the Belgian Congo at the end of the 19th century, when Belgium colonized this region of Africa. One of us (Russell) was there to help the students with their online research methods.

I watched in dismay as a young student slowly typed her query into a smartphone. This was not going to end well. She was trying to find out which city was the capital of the Belgian Congo during this time period. She reasonably searched [ capital Belgian Congo ] and in less than a second she discovered that the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is Kinshasa, a port town on the Congo River. She happily copied the answer into her worksheet.

Jim Davies:

ooking around our planet today, it’s hard not to be struck by humanity’s uniqueness. We are the only species around that writes books, runs experiments, and builds skyscrapers. Our intelligence must have also been useful when we were evolving—presumably it helped us to be better hunters and avoid being hunted ourselves, for instance. Perhaps even more importantly, our growing intelligence enabled early humans to compete with each other: We evolved to be intelligent to keep up with everybody else evolving to be intelligent. Smarter people are more attractive to others, and are better at jockeying for status within complex social groups. It is well-known that humans underwent an intelligence arms race that resulted in a rapid growth in cognitive ability. What is less well-known is how the need for women to be able to walk and run helped this boom in smarts.

A lot of our growth in intelligence is due to an increase in brain size. Even when looking at the differences between one person and another, brain size accounts for 16% of the variance in intelligence. A bigger brain might have been the simplest way to make us smarter. As brain sizes grew, so did the pelvises of the women who had to give birth to all of these big-headed babies.

David Blaska:

A crusader has stuck his out out of the foxhole to take on the political correctness that is destroying Madison’s public schools. We introduced him to you Blaska Policy Werkers two weeks ago. He is Peter Anderson, an environmental activist. 

Peter has put up a website called “Durable Justice.” Bookmark it. (We’ll wait. Got it?) Anderson headlines his introductory essay, “Why MMSD has failed to help disadvantaged black students.”

It is essentially the message Blaska has been sounding these past two years and in last year’s campaign for school board. Unlike that unsuccessful candidate, Anderson is not weighed down with Blaska’s conservative activism. In other words, he is a good Madison liberal. (Remains to be seen for how long, but Anderson says his group is looking for a permanent leader). 

Anderson dares to take on the Madison establishment’s cowardice in confronting the school district’s obsession with “racial justice” at the expense of school discipline, personal responsibility, and educational achievement. We excerpt from that essay:

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Notes and links on previous Superintendent searches.

2013; 2019 Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison experience.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Elizabeth Winkler:

Ingrid Daubechies is a woman of formidable firsts: the first tenured female professor of mathematics at Princeton University (1994), the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics (2000) and the first woman elected president of the International Mathematical Union (2011). But she isn’t particularly interested in planting stakes on mathematical territory or laying claim to laurels.

“I feel successful being part of a bigger whole,” she says. “It’s such a man thing to want your effigy. That…

Greg Afinogenov:

At least not in its current form.

Glenn Beaton:

Some 52 years after Martin Luther King Jr’s death and one week after the three-day weekend for which he is now remembered, Harvard says it discriminates against people with bad personalities. After all, what good is knowledge, morality and dreams if you’re no fun?

To the fun-loving bureaucrats running Harvard, personality is measurable by your skin color and your sex life. They believe that good personalities are found in blacks, Hispanics, gays, transgenders, whites and just about everyone else, in roughly that order.

Except Asians. Harvard says Asians have bad personalities. And so to be admitted, Asians need an SAT score about 140 points higher than whites and about 450 points higher than blacks.

You might reasonably ask: How did Harvard decide that Asians have bad personalities?

Plenty of objective personality tests are out there, but Harvard doesn’t use them. It instead uses a subjective evaluation of the applicant by one of those fun-loving bureaucrats. At an in-person interview, the bureaucrat takes note of whether the applicant is Asian has a bad personality.

I suppose it’s a lucky thing for Harvard that Asians have bad personalities. Because otherwise their high merit would get more of them admitted at the expense of lower-merit whites, blacks, Hispanics, gays and transgenders.

Liam O’Connor:

Princeton has little to show for its experiment in “grade deflation,” except inflating grades that continue to lag behind those of its peer institutions. 

I obtained restricted records from the Office of the Dean of the College on 120,000 grades awarded over the past three years at the nation’s top-ranked university. I confirmed their accuracy by comparing them to figures published in a recent memorandum. 

The data are definitive: it’s never been easier to get an A at Princeton.

“Deflation worked, and then, when it went away, it had no long-term effect,” said professor Paul Courant GS ’74, an economist who viewed my statistics and co-authored a prior study on grades at the University of Michigan. 

A- was the median grade in the 2018-2019 academic year. 55 percent of course grades were in the A-range. In 1998, they were 43 percent of course grades, according to a faculty report I acquired from Mudd Manuscript Library.

B-range grades comprised 34 percent, and the C-range comprised six percent. D’s were merely half a percent. A Princetonian’s chance of getting a F was one in a thousand. The remaining four percent went to “passes.”

But the proliferation of A’s isn’t as alarming as the many ways that students who are trying to maximize their grade point averages (GPAs) can game the system. Grades are full of quirks. The problem is that the outside world that assesses students for jobs and scholarships doesn’t seem to know or care about these nuances. 

Patrick Hauf:

The NEA is the largest teachers’ union in the U.S. with more than 3 million members. It collected nearly $400 million from American educators in 2018, according to federal labor filings. The union is also one of the most politically active in the country, spending $70 million on politics and lobbying in 2017 and 2018. Nearly all of the union’s political action committee spending went to Democrats during the midterm cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

US abortion data:

In 2016, 623,471 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 48 reporting areas. The abortion rate for 2016 was 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 186 abortions per 1,000 live births.

Compared with 2015, the total number and rate of reported abortions fell by 2%, and the abortion ratio decreased by 1%. Additionally, from 2007 to 2016, the number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 24%, 26%, and 18%, respectively. In 2016, all three measures reached their lowest level for the entire period of analysis (2007-2016).

Women in their twenties accounted for the majority of abortions in 2016 and throughout the period of analysis. The majority of abortions in 2016 took place early in gestation: 91.0% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions (7.7%) were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer (1.2%) were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation. In 2016, 27.9% of all abortions were early medical abortions (a nonsurgical abortion at ≤8 weeks’ gestation). The percentage of abortions reported as early medical abortions increased 113% from 2007 to 2016, with a 14% increase from 2015 to 2016. Source: MMWR Surveill Summ 2019;68(No. SS-11).

WHO global abortion data.

Courtney Everett:

The Department of Public Instruction recently announced it will endorse ‘explicit phonics instruction.’ A professor joins us to explain these new state standards and what research says about phonics. Plus, we’ll examine how Wisconsin schools are teaching students to read today.

“You know, we talk a lot about how poverty has a huge impact on educational outcomes, which it absolutely does. But what we don’t talk about is the way that educational practices magnify these effects, and the way that we teach kids to read…is a primo example of how policies that we’ve put in place and practices that we use can magnify the existing differences in opportunity.”

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

Larry Alex Taunton:

Seduced by the communist promise of earthly bliss, Muggeridge and his pregnant wife, Kitty, moved to Moscow in 1932. The rumors that Stalinist Russia was anything but a “workers’ paradise” did not dampen their spirits in the least. Shaking the dust of London and the West off of their shoes, they were full of high ideals and naïve optimism upon arrival in the USSR. Muggeridge, working as a correspondent for the prestigious British daily The Manchester Guardian, quickly earned a name for himself among the Moscow bosses as a supporter of the regime. His reports were rapturous tributes to the wonders of Soviet government, economics, agriculture, and arts.

Yet even as he wrote of a communist utopia, Muggeridge was beginning to have doubts — doubts about the veracity of the information the Soviet government spoon-fed the foreign press and which it, in turn, passed on to a naïve Western public. He was also beginning to rethink his understanding of human nature. Foreign journalists working in Stalin’s Russia operated according to the strict dictates of the government — interviews were scripted, travel was restricted, and reports were censored. All the while, the secret police eavesdropped on their conversations, read their mail, noted their associations, and followed their every move. Any journalist who was deemed to be subversive faced, at the very least, harassment and immediate deportation. Consequently, many newsmen, preferring a comfortable existence to disgrace and unemployment, sacrificed journalistic integrity in favor of an amicable agreement with the regime.

According to these rules, journalists would post to their Western editors news items that cast the USSR in a favorable light. In return, the Soviet government would allow them to remain in the country to live a comfortable existence, supplying their guests with such creature comforts as caviar, vodka, and mistresses. Muggeridge was quick to sample any delights offered and, initially, he willingly passed along Soviet propaganda, not the least because he was ideologically predisposed to believe it. Nevertheless, the signs of terror and human degradation steadily gnawed at his conscience. Even the seemingly omnipresent NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) could not hide all of the starving people or quell all of the stories of genocide. Some rumors had it that in the countryside, where no foreigner was permitted without advance application and escort, millions had died.

Nekima Levy Armstrong:

It is an open secret in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities that black and brown children are being left behind within the public school system. The dominant narrative places the blame on poor children of color and their parents, as well as their communities. When racial stereotypes are used as the default to explain away systemic failures, everyone loses; but especially children of color who lag behind their white peers in reading, math and high school graduation rates. They are relegated to the margins of society and the criminal justice system.

We recently celebrated the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work toward a more equitable society. But it seems as if, in the area of education, our city and other cities across the country have gone backward.

Thankfully, some cities are doing a significantly better job than others at closing the opportunity gaps in education — as is made clear in a newly published report by brightbeam, a nonprofit education advocacy organization.

One might expect that politically progressive cities would be leading the way in closing the opportunity gap in education, given the history of racial segregation and oppression in this country, and the rhetoric of progressives about overcoming that history and creating a more just and inclusive society.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

David Jesse:

The squeals of elementary students at recess and the occasional hiss of a tractor-trailer’s tires on the main drag serve as the only soundtrack as a quartet of high school students saunter down a Baldwin street, heading for some fun away from school.

Traffic stops briefly as it leaves town, next to the county courthouse and a gas station at the town’s only traffic signal — a flashing red light.

It’s a stereotypical rural small-town scene.
The skills gap is going to kill rural America. If there’s nowhere for students to get the training they need, they aren’t going to be able to get the jobs they need.

Two hundred miles southeast, on the edge of the University of Michigan campus, it’s louder — a jackhammer pounds away, a steady stream of cars rolls along a nearby street and students crowd sidewalks. A homeless man pleads for help. Inside a coffee shop, one of several within a couple blocks, tables are full of students studying, professors working on plans and townies just sipping a latte.

It’s a stereotypical college town scene.

The towns show little similarity. Ann Arbor is in Washtenaw County, Michigan’s richest county in terms of median household income. Baldwin is in Lake County, Michigan’s poorest.

Washtenaw is Michigan’s most educated county, with the highest percentage of adults with some sort of college degree. Lake County is among Michigan’s least educated, with the second-lowest percentage of college-educated adults.

Meghan Cox Gurdon:

At the British Museum in London, down a long string of galleries filled with Greek antiquities, there is a glass case that contains a glossy black-and-ocher amphora, resembling a jug or vase. The object was made by a craftsman in Athens sometime early in the Golden Age, around 490–480 BC, and it’s decorated with a figure on either side. The first is a musician in long skirts and a checkered tunic shown in full-length profile. We seem to have caught him just as he blows into a reed instrument.

On the other side, a man in pleated robes stands in a position of relaxed command, with one arm thrust out and resting on a tall wooden staff. The man’s mouth is open, and if you look closely, you can see a tiny arc of text springing from his lips. Translated, the words read: “Once upon a time in Tiryns . . .”

This figure is a rhapsode, or “stitcher of songs,” and a kind of living prefiguration of the act of reading aloud. In ancient Greece, a rhapsode did not read from a book, however. He was the book. His memory held, among other works, the two great epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. He would pull them from the shelf and read them aloud, so to speak, when he recited them.

The Homeric tales, loved to this day, are terrific creations. They brim with action, drama, stealth, deceit (and with manifestations of honor and dishonor so distinct from our own as to seem bizarre). The Iliad encompasses the ten years of the Trojan War, when the massed armies of the Greek kingdoms besieged the walled city of Troy. In its verses we meet sulky, ferocious Achilles, noble Prince Hector, handsome Paris, and lovely Helen. The second great Homeric tale, The Odyssey, follows Odysseus, wiliest of the Greeks, over the ten years it takes him after the conquest of Troy to reach his home island of Ithaca and his clever, long-suffering wife, Penelope. During his travels, Odysseus contends with mutinous crewmen, the erotic temptations of Circe and Calypso, and monsters such as the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus and the homicidal Sirens. At one point, Odysseus also has to wrest his men free of the addictive, obliterating pleasures of the lotus flower.

Noah Smith:

A high-profile court case about meritocracy and college admissions has captured much attention. A group called Students for Fair Admissions alleges that Harvard University uses highly subjective personality ratings to penalize Asian applicants. The former tend to outperform white applicants on every measure except for so-called personality, but the number of Asian-American students at Harvard has fallen relative to the Asian-American population, while the number for white students has risen, during the last 25 years. Defenders of the policy, meanwhile, said that the personality ratings are necessary to account for the different challenges students face growing up.

While the case is sensational because of the allegations of racism, fundamentally it’s about a deeper question. Does meritocracy still make sense as a guiding principle for the modern American economic system?

The Foundations of Reading, Wisconsin’s one elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirement is (was) an attempt to improve our K-12 students’ disastrous reading results.

Readers may find the Foundations of Reading results of interest (2.4MB xlsx). (3 February 2020: link updated to remove partial ss identifiers, via a kind DPI message).

The test is based on Massachusetts’ successful MTEL teacher content knowledge examination.

The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by Governor Tony Evers, has granted mulligans to thousands of teachers who failed to pass this reading content knowledge examination.

The information was obtained via an open records request to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

At the Pence rally. A lot of people here with yellow sashes in support of school vouchers. Many nonwhite.

— Rocknrolli OneAndOnly (@RocknRocknrolli) January 28, 2020

.@vp mentions @GovEvers‘s absence and a bill to be reintroduced today by @RepBrostoff to phase out school vouchers in Wisconsin: “I know the governor can’t be here with us today so let’s make sure he hears this, we’re not going to let that happen.”

— Mitchell Schmidt (@schmidtmitchell) January 28, 2020

Molly Beck:

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday gave an election-year defense of President Donald Trump’s education policies — assuring parents at a Capitol rally that under the Republican president, children will not be stuck in poorly performing schools.

Pence and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos turned a state rally promoting alternatives to public schools into a stump speech for Trump, who needs to keep Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes in his corner as he faces reelection and an impeachment trial.

“I’m here in Wisconsin because this is where it all began,” Pence told a crowd of hundreds in the Wisconsin State Capitol’s rotunda, referring to Milwaukee’s private school voucher program — the nation’s first.

The visit to the statehouse — a first for a sitting vice president — put on alert local education officials and public school advocates who see the Trump administration as a threat to public school funding, which they argue has been decimated over the last 10 years by the programs Pence and DeVos promoted.

Mitchell Schmidt:

In a press conference after Pence’s speech, Rep. Jonathan Brostoff, D-Milwaukee, said his bill would phase out vouchers in the state and reinvest in public schools.

“(Pence) has no idea what’s going on here,” Brostoff said. “He represents a complete erosion of one of the most fundamental values and one of the greatest values of this country which is strong public education and that’s certainly a Wisconsin value.”

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, also spoke at the event, with both vowing to uphold the state’s voucher program.

“As long as Republicans control the Legislature, we plan to keep it,” Fitzgerald said.

During his speech, Vos encouraged students participating in the event to cheer for Trump, Pence and DeVos and boo “those who don’t like school choice.”

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin held an event in response to Pence’s visit, where party chairman Ben Wikler called the event a celebration for the attack on public schools by President Donald Trump and his administration.

“Trump and his cronies are sabotaging public education because it’s not their children who go to public school,” Wikler said.

Logan Wroge (fails to compare total spending)

The Milwaukee voucher program started in 1990-91 under former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, who attended Tuesday’s rally.

In the first year, the program enrolled 337 students. Enrollment has grown almost every year. This fall, 28,978 students attended 130 private schools on vouchers in Milwaukee.

Another voucher program in Racine started in the 2011-12 school year, followed by a statewide program in 2013-14 and a fourth for students with disabilities in 2016.

In the Milwaukee, Racine and statewide programs, 42,392 students enrolled in private schools this fall using a voucher, or just under 5% of the total school-aged population.

The use of vouchers, though, has yet to catch on in Madison as only three schools in the city signed up to accept students this school year through the statewide program, which state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said leaves Madison children with “limited choices.”

Scott Bauer:

Vice President Mike Pence touted alternatives to a public school education during a visit Tuesday to the state where the private school voucher program began, stopping in battleground Wisconsin for a noontime celebration in the state Capitol.

Pence, and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos were both briefly drowned out by chants of “shame” from dozens of protesters who gathered one floor down in the Capitol building. The protesters, some carrying signs calling for the separation of church and state, also booed throughout their comments.

School choice — which includes private school vouchers, charter schools and other nontraditional options — has long been an issue that divides Republicans and Democrats, particularly in Wisconsin. Conservatives have championed offering students an alternative to public schools, giving Pence a chance to appeal to Republican voters in a swing state during national school choice week.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Property Academy IB charter school.

Voucher schools spend far less per student than traditional government supported schools. Traditional K-12 School Districts capture local (property), redistributed state and federal funds, while voucher schools largely survive on state taxpayer funds.

Gregorian Guitchounts:

On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding over my dataset on rat brains. I thought of the cold windowless rooms in downtown Boston, home to Harvard’s high-performance computing center, where computer servers were holding on to a precious 48 terabytes of my data. I have recorded the 13 trillion numbers in this dataset as part of my Ph.D. experiments, asking how the visual parts of the rat brain respond to movement.

Printed on paper, the dataset would fill 116 billion pages, double-spaced. When I recently finished writing the story of my data, the magnum opus fit on fewer than two dozen printed pages. Performing the experiments turned out to be the easy part. I had spent the last year agonizing over the data, observing and asking questions. The answers left out large chunks that did not pertain to the questions, like a map leaves out irrelevant details of a territory.

David Blaska:

No wonder Dad is irate!

It’s always the unscripted moments that define a political campaign.

A man known to the national news media only as “Irate Dad” confronts Elizabeth Warren, mother superior of the giveaway state (Big enough to promise everything you want, strong enough to take away everything you’ve earned). The Democrat(ic) presidential candidate wants taxpayers to pick up $640 billion in student loans, thereby removing yet another brake on escalating college tuition costs, subsidizing grievance studies, creating another dependent class, and making fools of people who pay their debts.

What part of ‘Free’ does he not understand?

A man who appears to be in his late 40s approaches candidate Elizabeth Warren in Grimes, Iowa: 

IRATE DAD: “I just want to ask you one question. My daughter’s getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money. She doesn’t have any student loans.” 

WARREN: [nods] “God bless you.”

IRATE DAD: “Am I going to get my money back?”

WARREN: “Of course not.” 

IRATE DAD: “So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed. My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations. I saved my money. He made more than I did, but I worked a double shift, worked extra. My daughter’s worked since she was 10. So, you’re laughing at me.”

WARREN: “No.”

IRATE DAD: “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”

WARREN: “Thank you for your thoughts.”

⇒ Ms. Warren, tell your campaign staff to put Irate Dad down as a Maybe.

Steven Malanga:

Government-union membership fell again in 2019, continuing a decade-long decline. Workers in public-sector unions now number 7.066 million, representing a drop of nearly 100,000 in one year and the smallest government-organized labor membership in 20 years. Since 2009, when the ranks of government-union members peaked at 7.896 million, public-labor groups have lost more than 10 percent of their membership. The percentage of government workers belonging to unions has dropped to 33.6, the smallest proportion of the government workforce since 1978. The most recent numbers illustrate how government unions continue to suffer from the hangover of the recession of 2008-2009, in part because of a slow rebound in government employment during the economic expansion that began in 2010. The numbers may also reflect some losses that unions have suffered in the wake of the 2018 Supreme Court Janus decision, which gave public-sector workers the right to opt out of joining a union or paying fees.

The trends are particularly ominous for public unions because 2019 should have been the year that they started bouncing back. In the tenth year of an economic expansion, state tax and local collections grew robustly, increasing by 9 percent in the second quarter and 5.6 percent in the third quarter, according to government surveys. States and municipalities subsequently hired more workers. The number of local government employees, for instance, jumped by nearly 100,000 in 2019, to 14.573 million. But these gains haven’t translated into increases in union membership, particularly in municipal government, the largest segment of public-sector employment. The total government workforce in America has returned to its pre-financial crash levels, but union headcount has failed to follow suit.

Related: Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Caleb Hampton and Caitlin Dickerson:

A small room. A language barrier. An interrogation after hours of travel. Months spent preparing for a new life overseas, all gone in a blur.

A growing number of Iranian students share this collective memory. Many had secured admission to some of the world’s most prestigious universities. The State Department approved them for entry into the United States after a notoriously grueling, monthslong vetting process and issued them visas to come to the United States.

But when the students reached American airports, Customs and Border Protection officers disagreed and sent them home, some with a five-year ban on reapplying to return to the United States.

Most say they were not told why they were deemed “inadmissible” — a broad label that customs officers have wide discretion to apply. What the students do know is that, at a time of rising diplomatic tensions between the United States and Iran, their plans for the future seem to have evaporated.

Wendy Berliner:

Young children sit cross-legged on the mat as their teacher prepares to teach them about the weather, equipped with pictures of clouds. Outside the classroom, lightning forks across a dark sky and thunder rumbles. Curious children call out and point, but the teacher draws their attention back – that is not how the lesson target says they are going to learn about the weather.

It could be a scene in almost any school. Children, full of questions about things that interest them, are learning not to ask them at school. Against a background of tests and targets, unscripted queries go mainly unanswered and learning opportunities are lost.

Yet the latest American research suggests we should be encouraging questions, because curious children do better. Researchers from the University of Michigan CS Mott Children’s Hospital and the Center for Human Growth and Development investigated curiosity in 6,200 children, part of the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The study is highlighted in a new book by Judith Judd and me, How to Succeed at School. What Every Parent Should Know.

The researchers gauged levels of curiosity when the children were babies, toddlers and preschoolers, using parent visits and questionnaires. Reading, maths and behaviour were then checked in kindergarten (the first year of school), where they found that the most curious children performed best. In a finding critical to tackling the stubborn achievement gap between poorer and richer children, disadvantaged children had the strongest connection between curiosity and performance.

Further, the researchers found that when it came to good school performance, the ability to stay focused and, for example, not be distracted by a thunderstorm, was less important than curiosity – the questions children might have about that storm.

Cori Petersen:

Kenya knew she wasn’t getting a lot out of her education at MPS.

“I always felt disappointed because I wanted a challenge. I wanted to feel like I was learning something,” Kenya said. “I wanted my teachers to care about my education. But they didn’t.”

When she got to eighth grade in Milwaukee, she wanted to attend a better high school and took the entrance exams for prestigious MPS schools like Rufus King and Riverside, but failed. The only options she was left with were schools like North Division and South Division, “Places that you see on the news for fighting,” she said. “Places that aren’t even focused on education anymore.”

Kenya needed another option. So when HOPE Christian Schools gave a presentation to her eighth grade class, she immediately went home and had her mom fill out the paperwork.

“I felt like they spoke to me,” she said. “They said small class sizes. Customized education. They talked about character and values, instilling things in you so you could go out and have a career after your education.”

HOPE made it very clear in their presentation that they focus on getting their students accepted into college, which is something Kenya hadn’t considered before. She had seen her mom struggle to attend college, which in the end didn’t work out. “Something would always stop her from being able to go,” Kenya said. One time her mom’s car was stolen and when they found the car her mom’s backpack with her books and assignments in it was missing from the trunk. “The institution couldn’t do anything for her. She had to withdraw from class,” she said.

Kenya qualified for the MPCP which allowed her to choose the school she would attend. She chose HOPE Christian High School. But when she first got there, it wasn’t easy. “I went from a place where I was basically able to do whatever I want, wear whatever I want, say whatever I want — to a place that has uniforms, that has all these rules, all of these expectations,” Kenya said. “I hadn’t been required to do homework or write papers.”

But Kenya soon realized that HOPE was a place where she could succeed.

Arthur Milikh:

Universities were meant be the one fixed place in democratic society insulated from the ceaseless motion of democratic life, with its petty passions, consumption, and moral and intellectual fashions. They were meant to serve as the guardian of the mind and its greatest fruits. In previous eras, segments of society (especially the clergy and the aristocracy) were devoted to protecting learning and a tradition of books. But democracy does not support such classes, and it was originally hoped that the universities would assume this role. Regrettably, they are no longer animated by their original purpose of serving republican self-government or the freedom of the mind. As such, they must be treated as political entities.

That the freedom of speech is under attack on many campuses should not be surprising, given that the freedom of the mind, of which speech is the expression, is rarely understood as their purpose any longer. Without that purpose, most American universities no longer serve the public good for which they were created and for which they continue to be publicly funded. Their transformation, which in turn has led to the transformation of the nation, has taken place with the unwitting assistance of American taxpayers — and amounts to defrauding the public. If citizens are compelled to pay for others to go to college, it should be to the benefit of the entire nation — forming good citizens and advancing useful sciences, rather than teaching the rising generation that the nation is irredeemably evil. Taxpayers have funded the research, bankrolled the student loans (including generous forgiveness programs), and allowed the universities and their enormous endowments to operate without paying taxes. These funding sources are the operational life blood of universities, but they can no longer be justified. In fact, it seems likely that the nation would be better off if the vast majority of America’s more than 3,000 colleges and universities closed down.

An executive order signed by President Trump on March 21, 2019, gives administrators in 12 executive-branch agencies that issue research grants broad discretion to withhold funding from universities that suppress “free inquiry” and “undermine learning.” This is a worthwhile half-step to chastening them. But given where things stand, bolder, more aggressive action is needed. If the universities are going to be rebuilt, only external force, rather than pleading or slight policy modifications, will work. Success in this could bring generational change.

David Sessions:

This past summer, Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, announced a draconian plan to slash appropriations for the university system by 41 percent. Defending the decision, he repeated a phrase that increasingly accompanies budget cuts: that the university couldn’t continue being “all things for all people.” Dunleavy, who insisted that the state’s deficit be closed without raising taxes, argued that Alaska must “turn the university into a smaller, leaner, but still very positive, productive university in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Pete Buttigieg has made a similar notion the center of his opposition to universal free college in the 2020 Democratic primary. “Americans who have a college degree earn more than Americans who don’t,” Buttigieg said. “As a progressive, I have a hard time getting my head around the idea of a majority who earn less because they didn’t go to college subsidizing a minority who earn more because they did.” Buttigieg has continued to hammer the point that universality equals upward redistribution. Lis Smith, a senior adviser for his campaign, tweeted, “If you think that a worker who didn’t go to college should pay for college for a CEO’s kid, then @PeteButtigieg isn’t your candidate.”

Wall Street Journal:

The nearby table borrowed from our friends at Cornerstone Macro captures the magnitude of the tax increases on labor and investment income that Democratic presidential candidates are proposing. The top marginal federal tax rate on labor is currently about 40% including the Medicare tax.

Eliminating the ceiling for the payroll tax would increase that to above 50% including both the individual and employer shares of the increase. Including both is right economically because it captures the full cost of hiring an additional worker. The much higher top marginal rate for Mr. Sanders in the table is for his Medicare for All tax.

And that’s before the candidates’ proposed income-tax hikes. It’s also before state and local taxes, which in some states could bring the marginal rate north of 60%.

And that’s before the Democratic tax increases on investment income, specifically capital gains. All of the leading candidates want to tax capital gains at the same rate as regular income or higher, which hasn’t been the law since the top individual tax rate on income was 28% after the 1986 Reagan tax reform. Higher taxes on capital reduce investment, which means slower productivity growth and ultimately slower wage growth.

Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

Scott Girard:

Williams then provided the backpack to Creech, and told one of the other officers there was a gun inside. The complaint states Creech found a semi-automatic firearm in the laptop compartment of the backpack. The magazine was loaded but no rounds were housed within the chamber when the gun was found.

Williams faces two counts each of armed robbery with threat of force, felony intimidation of a victim and false imprisonment and one count of possession of a firearm on grounds of a school.

Williams was scheduled for an initial appearance in court Monday afternoon.

2005: Gangs and school violence forum: audio and video.

2017: West High Teacher on our disastrous reading results:

“Here’s my data from this year and this is why I’m here: 

Of the 65 students plus or minus it kind of changes this year 24 of them are regular ed students. 

Another way to say they don’t have an IEP so there is no excuse for that reading intervention in (that group). 

12 of those 24 have been enrolled in Madison School since Pre-K kindergarten or kindergarden. 12 students have been in Madison Schools.”

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

On the first day of National School Choice Week, a new study (here) estimates how further growth of Wisconsin’s parental choice programs could result in $3.2 billion in new economic benefits to Wisconsin over the next two decades. Ripple Effect, authored by Will Flanders, PhD, builds upon a recent study which documented how students in MPCP are more likely to graduate from college to extrapolate the economic gains to Wisconsin if the parental choice programs were expanded.

Broken down, Wisconsin’s cities could expect to see:

• $100 million in economic benefits for Madison

• $75 million in economic benefits for Green Bay

• $60 million in economic benefits for Appleton

• $24 million in economic benefits for La Crosse

Kenya’s Story: These economic gains can be understood through Kenya Green. As a child in Milwaukee, she struggled at Milwaukee Public Schools. By the time she was in eighth grade, she was close to giving up, seemingly forced to attend unsafe, low-performing MPS schools. But through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, she discovered HOPE Christian Schools, which transformed her life. The school gave her the rigorous academics and the structure she needed. After graduating from HOPE, she attended Wisconsin Lutheran College, graduated, got a job, and is now in school to become an aesthetician.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Property Academy IB charter school.

Voucher schools spend far less per student than traditional government supported schools. Traditional K-12 School Districts capture local (property), redistributed state and federal funds, while voucher schools largely survive on state taxpayer funds.

Shanzeh Ahmad:

The four demands are: end zero-tolerance policies, mandate black history and ethnic studies, hire more black teachers and increase funds for counselors in schools instead of police.

There are several ways school communities can take part in the Week of Action, Hagopian said, such as wearing the Black Lives Matter T-shirt, having a school assembly to talk about injustice in schools, or teaching lessons in classrooms that correspond with the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement. The coalition’s website has additional resources.

Hagopian said the four demands are “structural changes that must be in place” in order to create an equitable system. The goal is to be able to have an understanding across the board that there are different identities that exist in society, he said.

In Wisconsin, 2% of teachers and 5% of principals are African American, while 9% of students are African American, according to a report released in November.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Property Academy IB charter school.

Robert Pondisco:

I owe my education career to reader’s workshop, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and its founder Lucy Calkins. I started as a mid-career switcher with a two-year commitment to teach fifth grade in a South Bronx public school. Two things about my school are worth knowing: It was the lowest-performing school in New York City’s lowest-performing district. And we were devoted to Calkins’s Units of Study.

My initial response to the reading and writing “workshop model” Calkins helped make famous and ubiquitous was willing suspension of disbelief. To the degree I remembered learning to read at all, it had nothing in common with how I was expected to teach it. Next came frustration. My “TC” staff developer spoke in inscrutable koans, encouraging me to “be the author of your own teaching.” When I took that advice and gave explicit instruction, however, she shook her head and said, “That’s not teaching, that’s giving directions.” Frustration gave way to exasperation, then resistance, and finally hostility. I left the classroom determined to advocate for curriculum and instruction thanks to Calkins and balanced literacy. My struggling fifth graders needed a lot of things, but not that.

David Lazarus:

Most large companies doing business in California are required by the state’s new privacy law to disclose what they know about customers and how that information is used.

This resulted in fairly straightforward announcements by many businesses.

Then there’s Ralphs, the supermarket chain owned by Kroger.

Customers recently encountered a form at stores spelling out information that may be collected when joining the company’s Ralphs Rewards loyalty program.

The form is eye-opening, to say the least, in laying out the extensive efforts Ralphs says it could take to learn about customers’ lives beyond the supermarket, including your job, your education, your health and your insurance coverage.

While most if not all such corporate disclosures define possible data collection as broadly as possible to err on the side of caution, Ralphs’ form is unusually all-encompassing for a supermarket loyalty program.

“It’s scandalous,” said Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on privacy issues. “Why does a grocer need to know so much about its customers?”

Bryan Caplan:

Suppose you strongly desire to drastically increase the amount of education that people consume.  What should you do?

The obvious answer: Make education completely free of charge – and have the government pay the the entire cost.

I say this obvious answer is obviously right.  As I explain in The Case Against Education, I favor extreme educational austerity, because I think the education system is a waste of time and money.  Nevertheless, given the goal of drastically increasing educational attainment, completely shifting the cost burden from consumers to taxpayers is highly effective.

Yes, there is some “crowding out” – when the U.S. government spends an extra billion dollars on education, consumption of education probably rises by less than a billion dollars.  Still, total U.S. consumption of education has ultimately increased by trillions of dollars as a result of past government subsidies.

This seems undeniable, but Tyler Cowen now suggests that free college is a way to restrain education spending!

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Property Academy IB charter school.

The Portal:

There was however, a remarkable story of science at its both best and worst that had not been told in years. After an initial tussle, we dusted off the cobwebs and decided to reconstruct it raw and share it with you, our Portal audience, for the first time. I don’t think it will be the last as we are now again looking for our old notes to tighten it up for the next telling. We hope you find it interesting, and that it inspires you younger and less established scientists to tell your stories using this new medium of long form podcasting. We hope the next place you hear this story will be in a biology department seminar room in perhaps Cambridge, Chicago, Princeton, the Bay Area or elsewhere. Until then, be well and have a listen to this initial and raw version.

Andrew Kugle:

CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil on Friday asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) about her exchange with a father who accused Warren of hurting people who saved for college.

“For Americans who are in that father’s position, who felt they did the right thing and you’re bailing out those who didn’t, what’s your response?” Dokoupil said.

“Look, we build a future going forward by making it better,” Warren said. “By that same logic what would we have done? Not started Social Security because we didn’t start it last week for you, or last month for you?”

Margaret Hedeman and Matt Kristofferson:

Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course.

Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. But this change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.

This spring, the final rendition of the course will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception. Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.

“I believe that every object I discuss in [“Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present”] (with the possible exception of one truly ghastly painting by Renoir) is of profound cultural value,” Barringer said in an email to the News. “I want all Yale students (and all residents of New Haven who can enter our museums freely) to have access to and to feel confident analyzing and enjoying the core works of the western tradition. But I don’t mistake a history of European painting for the history of all art in all places.”

Chris Dixon:

What else can you do with computers that make commitments? One fertile area being explored is re-architecting popular internet services like social networks and marketplaces so that they make strong, positive commitments to their communities. For example, users can get commitments baked into the code that their data will be kept private and that they won’t get de-platformed without due process. Third-party developers can safely invest in their businesses knowing that the rules are baked into the network and can’t change, protecting them from platform risk. Using the financial features of blockchains, users and developers can receive tokens in order to participate in the upside of the network as it grows.

Jeff Haden:

When you’re trying to learn something new — like, say, making that new sales demo really sing — you need to practice. When you’re trying to gain expertise, how much you practice is definitely important.

But even more important is the way you practice.

Most people simply repeat the same moves. Like playing scales on the piano, over and over again. Or going through the same list of vocabulary words, over and over again. Or, well, repeating anything over and over again in the hopes you will master that task.

Not only will your skills not improve as quickly as they could, in some cases, they may actually get worse.

According to research from Johns Hopkins, “What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.”

Ben Eisen and Laura Kusisto:

The average property tax bill in the U.S. in 2018 was about $3,500, according to Attom Data

Solutions, a real-estate data firm. But many residents in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California had been deducting well over

$10,000 a year. In Westchester County, N.Y., the average property-tax bill was more than $17,000, the highest in the country.

Among the people who are uprooting, many say they had long considered a change. But they saw the tax law as a reason to finally undertake the potentially difficult task of changing their state residency.

“It was another bucket of straw on the back of the camel,” said John Lee, a wealth-management executive and longtime resident of the

Sacramento, Calif., area. Mr. Lee and his wife, Tracy, moved their primary residence last winter to Incline Village, a resort community on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

Let’s Compare: Middleton and Madison Property Taxes

2019: Madison increases property taxes by 7.2%, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Valeria Pavilonis & Matt Kristoffersen:

But conservative professors criticized what they saw as a lack of effort to recruit a faculty body that better represents the nation’s political makeup. Four professors interviewed by the News said that as is, Yale’s climate stifles political discourse. According to a 2017 survey, almost 75 percent of Yale professors said they were liberal. Still, according to University President Peter Salovey, Yale is actively seeking to recruit scholars from a range of backgrounds with different perspectives.

“I think diverse points of view, ideas that challenge the mainstream … represented in a University setting are critical to both providing a great educational environment and also to making headway in scholarship and research,” Salovey said in an interview with the News. “And that diversity of thinking includes, but is not limited to, a range of political opinions.”

The University’s reputation as a liberal school is not new. Conservative pundits often consider Yale to be a perfect atmosphere for “snowflakes” — a term used against students and faculty members who passionately advocate for ideas far to the left of the American political spectrum. And in a 2017 News survey, under 10 percent of Yale faculty respondents identified as conservative. This finding nearly matched nationwide data from a different faculty political opinion poll cited by Inside Higher Ed in 2007 nearly a decade prior.

According to another study conducted by a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and a researcher at Stanford University, academics in the Northeast are polarized even more. The ratio of liberals to conservatives is 28:1 according to this data from 2014.

To prominent history professor Carlos Eire GRD ’79, Yale’s liberal bent can choke productive discussion.

Nikima Levy Armstrong:

In the years leading up to my run, progressives talked a good game about their desire for equity, diversity and inclusion. I watched as they marched in the streets with us during Black Lives Matter protests. They put #BlackLivesMatter signs up in their windows and on their lawns. Some of them helped to shut down streets and freeways; while others wrote op-eds and made passionately-written Facebook posts about the need to challenge injustice and end white supremacy. Their enthusiasm and exuberance in standing for justice seemed authentic, for a while. 

However, all of that excitement and passionate commitment was put to the test when I decided to run for office on a racial justice platform, focused on ending racial disparities, closing the opportunity gaps in public education, and seizing power on behalf of communities of color that are too often marginalized and relegated to second class citizenship.

The lukewarm support that I received from some of the same progressives who had marched with me and shut shit down was like a splash of Minnesota ice cold water in my face, reminding me that things were not quite what they seemed. During my experience, I truly began to pay attention to the hypocrisy between the nice sounding words and actions of many progressives and their failure to fight for systemic changes to laws and policies and indifference to the plight of poor people of color. 

When I put two and two together, it all made sense—people who are living comfortable lives and for whom the system was designed for their benefit will rarely, if ever, make any significant sacrifices that threaten their discomfort, sense of entitlement or political power.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Property Academy IB charter school.

Camilla Turner & Ewan Somerville:

A university cancelled a seminar by a feminist speaker, citing “academic freedom”, following threats of protest from transgender activists.

The University of East Anglia has been accused of “no-platforming” Kathleen Stock, a professor in philosophy at Sussex University, who was due to address academics there next week about philosophical issues surrounding diversity and inclusion.

But she was informed that her seminar has now been postponed in order to respect “the views of members of the transgender community”.

The university also cited “security and health and safety issues” and argued that allowing her talk to go ahead “raised issues of academic freedom”.

Prof Stock, who has been labelled a “Terf” by transgender activists, said she has been effective “no-platformed” by the university.

Terf, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, is generally used as a derogatory term to describe those who believe that “identifying” as a woman is not the same as being born a woman. It can also be used to refer to people who are deemed to hold “transphobic” views.

Prof Stock said she had been told that the university grew concerned after transgender activists threatened to protest at the event.

“I think this is part of a wider pattern where an invitation to speak is given in the normal way, and then senior management panic in response apparently to some kind of protest,” she said.

Annabelle Timsit:

The endless stretch of a lazy summer afternoon. Visits to a grandparent’s house in the country. Riding your bicycle through the neighborhood after dark. These were just a few of the revealing answers from more than 400 Twitter users in response to a question: “What was a part of your childhood that you now recognize was a privilege to have or experience?”

That question, courtesy of writer Morgan Jerkins, revealed a poignant truth about the changing nature of childhood in the US: The childhood experiences most valued by people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s are things that the current generation of kids are far less likely to know.

That’s not a reference to cassette tapes, bell bottoms, Blockbuster movies, and other items popular on BuzzFeed listicles. Rather, people are primarily nostalgic for a youthful sense of independence, connectedness, and creativity that seems less common in the 21st century. The childhood privileges that respondents seemed to appreciate most in retrospect fall into four broad categories:

David Blaska:

This trenchant observation drew a response from one Stan Endiliver, who (contrary to his intention) betrays why virtue-signaling progressives like himself are piping at-risk kids to disaster by playing the victim fife.

MMSD teacher here; relax

1. If you are a parent of a student in MMSD, you have nothing to fear.[Blaska: as long as you stay out of the line of fire.] There are many caring teachers and principals that are doing great things. Our district is not perfect, but we are doing our best to serve all kids …

3. If you are looking to Blaska as a saviour, just move. [Blaska: Which is why Sun Prairie is building a second high school] He has no idea what he is talking about. I am in a MMSD school every day, and have been for 15 years, and his vision of us is ludicrous. Leading kids out of school to squad cars is exactly why we are in the position we are in. We have a lot of kids dealing with real trauma and there are a lot of problems that are rooted in mental health issues. Give the district more resources to heal, and that would be a great place to start. 

5. It all comes to back to race. Have you done your homework on Madison? The zoning? The fact that our schools were only fully integrated in 1983? The days of blindly complying with your teacher are over, but many people would love to go back to the time when it was like that.

I hear teachers say things like “when I was in school, you would never…” well guess what, when we were in school we were being socialized into a white supremacist system. That system is coming down, and this worries a lot of people, whether they consider themselves woke or not. — Stan Endiliver

That system is coming down

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Notes and links on previous Superintendent searches.

2013; 2019 Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison experience.

Chan Ho-him:

Hong Kong’s 145-year-old St Joseph’s College, which houses a declared monument, is set for a HK$500 million (US$64.3 million) facelift for the first time in decades.

The redevelopment plan, which spans 22 years in three phases, involves the building of a new swimming pool, a student dormitory, a new entrance and an innovation and performance hub.

The aided secondary school for boys, located on Kennedy Road in Mid-Levels and operated by the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, has a student population of about 1,000 and was founded in 1875.

The north and west blocks of the college, also known as the “old building” and “old hall” respectively, were built in the 1920s and are the only pre-war constructions within the campus. Because declared monuments are subjected to statutory protection, they will not be touched during the development.

Tom Tiffany:

Innocent men and women were spied on. Several years of private phone, bank, tax, and email records were secretly seized, and a handful of families were subjected to armed pre-dawn raids of their homes simply because they engaged in political speech. To top it off, prosecutors and, even worse, a judge slapped these targets with a gag order to keep them silent. They didn’t want the public to know how far their government would go to undermine voters at the ballot box, and people who believed fervently in a cause.

Much like the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, Wisconsin’s unusual John Doe law gave prosecutors exceptional powers to conduct secret investigations on the thinnest showing of suspicion, with a judge as a one-sided partner. There is no adversarial process to determine probable cause, and the retired judges who presided over the court had no immediate accountability.

No one was ever charged with any crime, but lives were turned upside down and reputations were destroyed as prosecutors illegally leaked private documents to the press. Fortunes were spent on lawyers to defend conduct that, in the beginning and in the end, was legal.

Secrecy and a lack of accountability allowed prosecutors to turn the John Doe law from a useful law enforcement tool intended to protect the reputation of the person being investigated into an abusive weapon. The investigation went on for years, and in a sense it is not over yet. The innocent subjects of that investigation still have not received their property back from snooping bureaucrats and prosecutors. It has been more than six years.

When we learned about the vast abuses by state government officials, I worked with Walker and my legislative colleagues, including some Democrats, to end the abuse. The reforms I authored limited John Doe powers to only those crimes where secrecy really is needed, such as gang-related crimes as to which witnesses may be fearful, crimes involving children, and unsolved murders or possible murders, where the risk of smearing innocent people also is high. We eliminated the unconstitutional gag order against those under investigation and required prosecutors to renew their authority for an investigation every six months before a panel of duly elected judges who might at least be held accountable by voters.

We did that in Wisconsin. Now Congress must act similarly to fix the current FISA warrant process so it cannot be weaponized against our citizens.

FISA.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The tuition freeze has been in place for in-state undergraduates at four-year campuses since 2013 and in 12 of the past 14 years at the two-year campuses. The state budget passed last summer requires tuition remain frozen through the 2020-21 school year.

“We’re exploring a process, and I probably won’t be here in August, but I believe this process will be embraced by the board where they will put forward a tuition increase a year ahead of the implementation,” said Cross, who plans to retire when a new president is expected to begin sometime this summer. “In the coming biennial budget request, you will see the proposed tuition increase as a part of the revenue projections for the coming year.”

The tuition increase, which Cross told lawmakers would be “roughly” inflationary, is far from a done deal.

The regents typically approve their state budget request in August of even-numbered years. The governor and Legislature then take up their request in the first half of the following odd-numbered year by adding or removing items to the agency’s request.

System spokesman Mark Pitsch said Wednesday the regents have made no budget recommendations. Board of Regents president Drew Petersen did not immediately return a call and email seeking comment.

Cross’ hinting of a tuition increase in the next budget cycle would differ from the 2019-21 biennium when the board approved a plan that called for no tuition increases for undergraduate Wisconsin residents.

Jon Aasenden:

The ministry of education in Turkey recently announced that they will be offering Delphi free of charge to their students through a license deal with Embarcadero. An estimated one million students will thus learn object oriented programming through this initiative.

Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s.

Object Pascal as a language (including Freepascal, Oxygene and various alternative compilers) have been fluctuating between #11 and #14 on the Tiobi index for a few years. Tiobi is an index that tracks the use and popularity of languages around the world, and helps companies get an indication of where to invest. And despite what people have been led to believe, object pascal has seen stable growth for many years, and is far more widespread than sceptics would have you believe.

Joel Kotkin:

Not long ago, in our very same galaxy, the high-tech elite seemed somewhat like the Jedis of the modern era. Sure, they were making gobs of money, but they were also “changing the world” for the better.

Even demonstrators against capitalism revered them; when Steve Jobs died in 2011, the protesters at Occupied Wall Street mourned his passing.

Increasingly, Americans no longer regard our tech oligarchs as modern folk heroes; today companies including Google, Apple and Facebook are suffering huge drops in their reputations among the public.

Social justice, for some

The tech oligarchs make a big show of their social “wokeness.” They play up on gender issues, despite a wicked record of sexual harassment at companies like Google and across the “bro culture” of the male-dominated valley.

Worse still are issues of class. The Bay Area, as CityLab put it, has devolved into “a region of segregated innovation” where the rich wax, the middle class declines and the poor suffer increasingly unshakeable poverty. Over the past decades wages for African Americans and Latinos in Silicon Valley have fallen during the boom while much of the work, up to 40 percent, has gone to temporary immigrant workers, the modern-day equivalent of indentured servants.

The Conversation:

We’re in the middle of a teen mental health crisis – and girls are at its epicenter.

Since 2010, depression, self-harm and suicide rates have increased among teen boys. But rates of major depression among teen girls in the U.S. increased even more – from 12% in 2011 to 20% in 2017. In 2015, three times as many 10- to 14-year-old girls were admitted to the emergency room after deliberately harming themselves than in 2010. Meanwhile, the suicide rate for adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.

Rates of depression started to tick up just as smartphones became popular, so digital media could be playing a role. The generation of teens born after 1995 – known as iGen or Gen Z – were the first to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. They’re also the first group of teens to experience social media as an indispensable part of social life.

Of course, both boys and girls started using smartphones around the same time. So why are girls experiencing more mental health issues?

Mining three surveys of more than 200,000 teens in the U.S. and U.K., my colleagues and I were able to find some answers.