School Information System – Page 119 – Curated Education Information

“Truth be told, some in my own Democratic Party have also contributed to the climate of political mistrust and animus. The ranks of election deniers include Georgia’s Democratic candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams, who refused to accept her defeat in 2018. My own press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, tweeted in 2020 that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp ‘stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams.’

“That was wrong, and I’ve asked Karine to apologize at her next press conference. I know she regrets that tweet.

“Worst of all, Hillary Clinton and many others claimed Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was illegitimate and the result of Russian influence. Some in the FBI even lied to a secret surveillance court to spy on a Trump campaign official. That was wrong, and those lies have made it easier for Trump to exploit fears about a politicized ‘deep state,’ as MAGA Republicans call it. I hope that Secretary Clinton will also acknowledge the damage from those versions of the Big Lie.

“Democracy is too important to have a double standard for election denial. And from now on, including next week, I promise to call out members of my own party if they refuse to recognize they have lost an election after all the votes have been counted and confirmed.

“I also can’t absolve myself for sowing doubts about democracy. In my first year as President I referred to election changes being considered in Georgia as ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ and I said the midterm election would be ‘illegitimate’ if laws like that passed.

“Well, the Georgia law did pass, and it looks on the evidence so far that voter turnout in Georgia will set midterm records. I was wrong to use such divisive language, and especially to invoke the shameful era of government racial segregation, to make a partisan point.”

How the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it

Michael Lind:

“On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.

In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.

In isolation, the transgender controversy might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century. But the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions was only the beginning. It was followed by the march through the institutions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) based on “critical race theory” (CRT), a sectarian ideology that holds that all whites and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, no matter how poor and powerless, are “privileged,” while all Black and Hispanic Americans, no matter how rich and powerful, are “marginalized” members of “underserved communities.”

Wikipedia and the online battle over facts

Becky Hogge:

Should it be surprising that a Wikipedia entry titled “2011 Egyptian Revolution” was prepared for publication the day before protests began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square?

An intriguing but inconclusive new book takes a fresh look at the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit through the lens of a single article, and finds reason to question contemporary assumptions about what has been dubbed “the last best place on the internet”.

Heather Ford, a South African internet activist turned academic, has spent 10 years studying the entry covering the Egyptian uprisings on Wikipedia. In the process, she met many of its authors (or “editors”, as they are known on the platform where original research is the equivalent to original sin) — from a Cairo liberal on the inside of events, to an agoraphobic US college graduate for whom stewardship of this slice of history proved “a turning point”.

“Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics”

Josh Guetzkow:

“The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.”

Outsourcing digital education services

Taylor Swaak

The writing was on the wall: The University of Maryland Global Campus was restructuring again.

The vice president for the college’s Digital Teaching and Learning unit had left “cryptically” in February, two UMGC employees told The Chronicle. Around the same time, the fully online university brought in the ed-tech developer LearningMate for about $2 million to move more than 500 undergraduate courses to a universal template — same navigation menus, same discussion-board setup, same grading scale.

When universities can delay and dodge records requests, a new system is needed.

Neetu Arnold:

It is no secret that American higher education is in crisis due to a lack of affordability, growing irrelevance, and the ideological conformity that prevails in today’s classrooms. Less well-known is the pervasive foreign influence, particularly from authoritarian countries, on today’s college campuses. China has its Confucius Institutes (CIs) to project soft power, while Middle East Studies Centers (MESCs) can also facilitate foreign influence. Little from these programs supports American values of natural rights or freedom of thought. In fact, these programs can pose actual national security threats.

The National Association of Scholars’ (NAS) work in documenting foreign influence has resulted in the closure of more than 100 CIs. And we continue to expose universities that refuse to follow their legal obligations to report foreign money, as when Texas A&M failed to disclose $100 million in Qatari and Russian research funds. The use of open-records laws to obtain research contracts and memoranda of understanding has been crucial to our work in this area. But throughout our pursuit of transparency, we have repeatedly encountered serious flaws with open-records laws and how they are implemented on college campuses.

Higher-ed institutions can delay, obfuscate, and outright deny information that is rightfully owed to the public.

Party politics and (school board) elections

UPDATE: We have been told by multiple sources that the Hamilton County (IN) sheriff’s department will begin investigation on Monday.@ChalkboardRev is standing by for a statement from the Ham. Co. Election board. https://t.co/9LonuxEyWG

— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) November 6, 2022

Those teachers REFUSED to return to school after they were prioritized for the vaccine over the elderly.

They would do it again! https://t.co/yQGsKD7bGx

— OregonMammaBear (Roach) (@unheardparent) November 6, 2022

A Radically Different Model of American Education

Dartmouth Review:

Since 2021, the stagnation surrounding American higher education has given way to the first inklings of dynamism with the efforts of the University of Austin (UATX) team to found and accredit a new liberal arts college “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” Like any start-up, UATX has faced detractors, dismissing the university as a pipe-dream, political pet project, or both. Nevertheless, those who question the feasibility of UAustin are sorely misinformed. A Political Economy Project talk on Monday, September 26 by the university’s Chief Academic Officer, Jacob Howland, made clear that UATX has already begun disrupting the American academy.

From its promotional materials and online presence, it is clear that the University of Austin tries to market itself as something altogether different from its competitors. After all, in a country with more than 5,000 institutions of higher education, it is imperative for a school to separate itself from the pack. Nevertheless, Howland clarified that the difference UATX attempts to offer its potential students is a fundamental one. The University of Austin does not seek to reform America’s traditional model of a university but rather upend it.

The changes Howland listed in his talk, entitled “Revitalizing American Higher Education: The Promise of the University of Austin,” are radical.

Illinois has 132,188 public employees who earn over $100,000.

James Reddick and Dina Temple-Raston

According to Open The Books, which focuses on government transparency, the state has 132,188 public employees with salaries and benefits over $100,000. That’s a total cost of $17 billion. The list includes 10 police department leaders and 18 school superintendents with salaries above $300,000 and some 16,592 retirees with six-figure pensions. Five of the top 10 public school employee payouts are for pensions above $330,000 a year.

That’s in a state school system that fails its most vulnerable children. See the National Assessment of Educational Progress, if you dare. In 2020 the average Chicago teacher’s compensation was $108,730 including salary and benefits. Chicago teachers are among the highest paid in the nation, which might be fine if they were also among the highest performing measured by student achievement. But pay for performance is unknown in Springfield.

Giant pensions in some cases outstrip salaries, as politicians know they can increase pension benefits that will be paid long after they leave office. Open The Books says there are “more state police officers retired on six-figure pensions (1,555) than officers currently paid on six-figure salaries (1,540).”

Did a 1930s Wisconsin farmer not realize he helped discover one of the world’s most significant medical breakthroughs?

Doug Moe:

On Oct. 12, a dedication ceremony was held on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus to celebrate a revolutionary discovery that both prolonged human lives and killed rats.

The American Chemical Society, or ACS, bestowed the National Historic Chemical Landmark designation on warfarin, the generic name for a prescription blood thinner that, in a slightly different form, proved to be an enormously effective rodenticide. The ACS established the awards in 1992 to recognize seminal events in the history of chemistry. An ACS board member, Dr. Lisa Balbes, was among several speakers at the dedication ceremony for warfarin, which was first marketed in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

The tyranny of a Covid amnesty: A self-righteous cabal has delivered a public that is sicker and poorer

Mary Harrington:

I spent the last days of innocence before Trump and Brexit heavily pregnant. Like many first-time mums, I read a lot of pregnancy books, but the one I liked most was Expecting Better. Written by Emily Oster, an economist, the book sifts carefully through many of the dire warnings doled out to pregnant women about food, drink, birth choices, and so on, assessing the evidence for each.

On Monday, the same author published an essay arguing for “a pandemic amnesty”. We should, she suggests, move on from the conflict, fear, uncertainty, and doubt that roiled the pandemic years, and focus instead on the urgent issues of today. But while I can understand why Oster might wish to put all the Covid-era bitterness back into a box labelled “the common good”, her effort to do so has not been well received. And this is a consequence of the very policies which Oster would now like everyone to forgive and forget.

Reading avidly in the run-up to my daughter’s birth, it was already clear to me that many of the so-called “mummy wars” are proxies for class issues. Against this emotive backdrop, Oster’s book felt like a refreshing counterbalance. It’s astonishing, in fact, how recently it still felt possible to weigh competing claims on the evidence, and settle on something reasonable. But a great deal has changed since then. And it’s easier to understand why when you consider the difference between trying to settle the “mummy wars” via science and trying to agree upon public health policy during a pandemic.

Civics: Open Source Voting Software

Next week, three towns in New Hampshire will embark on a grand electoral experiment, Click Here and The Record have learned. On November 8, the Granite State will pilot a new kind of voting machine that will use open-source software – software that everyone can examine – to tally the votes.

“There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.”

The software that runs voting machines is typically distributed in a kind of black box – like a car with its hood sealed shut. Because the election industry in the U.S. is dominated by three companies – Dominion, Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic – the software that runs their machines is private. The companies consider it their intellectual property and that has given rise to a roster of unfounded conspiracy theories about elections and their fairness.

Affirmative Action At The Supreme Court: Post-Argument Analysis Of SFFA V. Harvard/UNC

Gail Herriot, Ilya Shapiro, Wai Wah Chin and James Copland

On October 31, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases that challenge the use of racial preferences in higher-education admissions. A group called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina—the nation’s oldest private and public universities, respectively—over their affirmative action policies, which the group contends are unconstitutional because they discriminate against Asian Americans. The challengers argue that the Fourteenth Amendment and the federal law that forbids race discrimination by private educational institutions that receive federal funding require a race-neutral approach to accepting potential students.

In the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, the Supreme Court turned back a constitutional challenge to the use of race in admissions, allowing race to be considered as one of many factors. In 2003, our nation’s highest court in Grutter v. Bollinger again narrowly upheld race-conscious admission practices, if they are “narrowly tailored” to further student-body diversity. The Court noted, however, that public universities’ use of such admissions policies “must be limited in time.”

Why Randi Weingarten Supports Harvard’s Discrimination

Allysia Finley:

You almost have to admire the chutzpah of the teachers unions. Even as they fight to keep poor minority kids trapped in failing public schools, they plead that racial preferences in college admissions are necessary to compensate for these students’ inferior K-12 education. High-achieving Asian-American and white students must be discriminated against to make up for the educational “privileges” that unions deny minorities.

That’s the argument advanced by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in their friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Harvard and the University of North Carolina in cases the Supreme Court will hear on Monday concerning the legality of racial preferences. “Our schools, from K-12 to higher education, still struggle to provide equitable opportunities for students of color,” the NEA laments.

No argument there—but whose fault is that? Perhaps the gravest injustice of our time is the imprisonment of minority kids in substandard public schools. Students’ dismal scores on the Nation’s Report Card last week provided another reminder.

In Illinois 36% of white eighth-graders were rated proficient or better in math, which isn’t anything to brag about. But figures were only 14% for Hispanics and 8% for blacks. Similar or even wider gaps were found in other cities and states. In Los Angeles, 62% of whites scored proficient or higher in fourth-grade reading, compared with only 18% of blacks and 16% of Hispanics.

Unions blame these disparities on racism. “Racial minorities are disadvantaged in the United States—not only by the persistence of de facto segregation in schools—but by overt racial violence and coordinated efforts to stifle recognition of the nation’s shameful history of racial oppression,” says the NEA in its brief, citing state laws that limit the instruction of critical race theory and the “1619 Project.”

Time to Rethink University Accreditation

George Leaf::

Many people believe that if a college or university is accredited, that’s the equivalent of a guarantee of quality. Just as the seal of approval from Underwriters Laboratories (UL) tells consumers that an electric appliance is going to be reliable, so too with college accreditation, which supposedly tells students that a college is of good quality. At least, that’s widely thought to be true.

Like so many other things that are widely thought to be true, the belief that accreditation is a guarantee of educational quality is mistaken. Many Americans holding degrees from accredited colleges learned little or nothing of value and now struggle to repay their loans with mundane jobs that high-school kids could do. Accreditors rarely uncover academic malpractice such as the infamous “paper courses,” for which star athletes at UNC got high grades to help them remain eligible to play.

The belief that accreditation is a guarantee of educational quality is mistaken.A new study done by the Texas Public Policy Foundation should spark debate over the role of accreditation. In it, author Andrew Gillen endeavors to show which of the accrediting bodies appear to do the best job of maintaining sound educational standards and which seem to be failing in that task.

High Expectations

David:

That’s what Twitter is going through right now. Elon Musk is administering shock therapy to a company that’s had one of the most lethargic pace settings in the industry for years on end. To illustrate, we once had a designer at 37signals who had worked at Twitter previously. This person had spent over two years at Twitter and never shipping anything. It was mockups, meetings, and then eventual cancelations that propelled life in the product group at that time. Evidence of a company pace setting so depressingly low as to be scarcely believable.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “They broke the law. They refuse to admit it,”

Dean Mosiman:

“They broke the law. They refuse to admit it,” he said. “But breaking the law, violating the Department of Revenue requirements and violating the Constitution are serious offenses.”

City Assessor Michelle Drea defended the city’s practices.

“We respectfully disagree with this decision,” she said. “We believe it is a flawed decision based on a narrow set of skewed data which does not reflect a districtwide uniformity problem.”

The state’s uniformity clause requires that “all property within a class must be taxed on a basis of equality as far as practicable.”

Civic chat at Madison west high school

The school’s new Sifting and Winnowing Club organized two sessions for their peers to attend in the auditorium Friday to get answers to questions on issues they care about.

Madison School Board member Nicki Vander Meulen and city of Madison District 5 Ald. Regina Vidaver spoke to the first group, while Emerge Wisconsin executive director Arvina Martin and state Rep. Shelia Stubbs, D-Madison, came for the latter event in the afternoon.

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jason Leopold, Katrina Manson, and William Turton

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on legacy media “truthiness”

They won a Pulitzer for covering up the genocide of four million Ukrainians.

They reported that Poland invaded Germany at the outset of WW2.

They helped Castro take power with fawning coverage.

And pushed Vietnam further into war with false coverage.https://t.co/4Cq2AzsHC9 https://t.co/VAeCawI1f3 pic.twitter.com/Y1j8jNzAuJ

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) November 4, 2022

Civics: public vs private security

John Hindraker:

Ilhan Omar exemplifies this more vicious type of hypocrisy. She hates law enforcement and campaigns to defund the police, but when it comes to her own safety? Men with guns. Alpha News reports:

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign recently dropped tens of thousands of dollars on private security services following her calls to defund the police and support for a campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, federal filings show.

According to Federal Election Commission records, the campaign spent $27,081.14 on “security services” between July and September, the highest quarter to date.

Before the third quarter, her campaign paid roughly $83,000 to private security firms between May 2019 and July this year, according to a review of federal filings.

The Latin School of Chicago in Shambles

Florian Sohnke:

Yet nine months ago, 15-year old Nate Bronstein ended his life as a result of cruel and vicious cyberbullying from numerous classmates while attending the Latin School of Chicago. The child-perpetrators, a number of which were privileged children of families named in a lengthy lawsuit filed by the Bronstein family, allegedly have officially faced no consequences. And the former Latin School of Chicago Board Chairman David Koo continues to serve as the Board of Trustees Chair for the Shedd Aquarium. It remains unclear as to what David Koo’s role is in this story, but this will come out in the lawsuit.

Beyond the allegations surrounding Mr. Koo and other community members, not only have the kids involved in the matter not faced any consequences which anyone Chicago Contrarian spoke to is aware of, a “narrative” in the community has developed portraying Nate as troubled teen who struggled to form friendships at his “new school,” was prone to emotional outbursts and generally, “did not fit in” with the Latin culture. Of course all of these comments could not be further from the truth. By all accounts, and Chicago Contrarian has spoken with many parents close to the story, Nate presented as a typical teen with plenty of friends.

Nate, Contrarian is told, cracked a lot of jokes and loved to make his friends laugh. In fact, Nate loved sports and often talked about his future. Nate was empathetic, kind, some would say even a mensch (a person with integrity and honor). Nate played basketball at Oz Park and his friends at Francis Parker, his former school, were thrilled to hear that Nate would return to school for the second semester. Regrettably, Nate’s friends never got the chance to welcome him back.

Civics: Taxpayer funded domestic surveillance

An “experienced” analyst working at the National Security Agency developed a surveillance project about a decade ago that resulted in the unauthorized targeting and collection of private communications of people or organizations in the US, newly unearthed documents show.

An investigation into the matter, which hasn’t been previously reported, found that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard” and violated numerous rules and possibly the law, according to a 2016 report by the NSA’s Office of Inspector General. The agency released the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Wisconsin drops from 200 to 186, 2nd worst in Reading (NAEP, African American Students)

Students of all backgrounds are having academic success in Mississippi.

Our state is in the top of the nation in 4th grade reading gains for black students!

Thank you to our teachers, parents, and students for working so hard to get us here. pic.twitter.com/7Jw3wkj47H

— Governor Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) November 4, 2022

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

US legacy media viewers ages 25 to 64

.@FoxNews had more total & 25 to 54 year old viewers than @MSNBC, @CNN, @Newsmax & @NewsNation combined in the evening hours.

Americans turning to Fox News for fair and balanced election coverage. https://t.co/QDNi5AWmq8

— RoadMN 📈 (@RoadMN) November 4, 2022

Expert: It’s time to stop creating ‘superbugs’ in the lab

Saralyn Cruickshank

“What were they thinking?”

It was the first thought to cross the mind of computational biologist Steven Salzberg after reading about a recent controversial Boston University study that combined strains of the virus that causes COVID-19, creating a form of omicron, the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant currently circulating in the U.S., that is significantly more deadly among mouse test subjects.

The study, which caused waves in the media for its creation of a potential “superbug,” also renewed an ongoing debate among scientists about the value of gain-of-function research—studies that artificially enhance a microorganism’s genome to give it advantageous attributes, such as greater transmissibility or virulence. The study’s authors and Boston University argue that the study does not qualify as gain-of-function research, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health is conducting a review of the study documentation to determine if that is indeed the case.

An expert in genomics, Salzberg has studied the genomes of viruses including influenza and SARS-CoV-2, and has written about gain-of-function research in his regular Forbes column since 2014. He says it is clear that the BU study does qualify as gain-of-function research, and, as such, carries tremendous risks. The Hub reached out to Salzberg, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering, computer science, and biostatistics, for his take on the issue and what should be done to curtail the creation of superbugs in the future.

You’ve spoken out against gain-of-function research for many years. What initially made you get involved?

Solutions stories that aren’t puff pieces

Kate Rix:

To give others a better sense of how I approach this kind of reporting, here’s an example of a story I wrote recently about a district in Phoenix where they’ve found ways to bolster the numbers of Black teachers.

The story idea started as I was thinking about missed opportunities to highlight innovation last August, while reporting about a program in Oakland, California, that focuses on young Black boys and men.

One of the program’s pillars is that Black boys and young men need Black male role models as teachers, coaches, and mentors.

There’s a lot of research to back this up. Black kids who have a Black teacher by the third grade are more likely to go to college.

And yet, there aren’t a lot of places where Black and Latino kids are exposed to teachers who look like them.

If having teachers that look like them is so good for kids, who is doing a good job of hiring and retaining teachers of color? Where is progress being made to align teacher workforce ethnicity with student population ethnicity?

Notes on curriculum at New Trier high school

Isabel Dias:

One day leading up to winter break, administrators of the predominantly white New Trier Township High School in the wealthy northern Chicago suburbs announced that “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights” would be the theme for a school-wide topical event known as Seminar Day. One of its main goals was to help “students better understand how the struggle for racial civil rights stretches across our nation’s history.” Feat uring National Book Award winners Colson Whitehead, author of the acclaimed The Underground Railroad, and Andrew Aydin, co-author of the March graphic novel trilogy about civil rights icon John Lewis, there also would be more than 100 elective workshops and group discussions, some led by students, on such topics as racial microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and implicit bias. A few months before the program, parents were encouraged to attend a session devoted to talking about identity and race.

The backlash was swift and intense. A group calling themselves Parents of New Trier started a Facebook page and a website to denounce what they considered to be the “biased, unbalanced, divisive, and costly” program. They urgedorganizers to add more conservatives—including former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who once had compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan—cancel the event, or make it an opt-in day for students. The group even published an annotated version of the speakers’ line-up highlighting such terms as “systemic racism,” “community resistance,” and “Latinos” and described them as “divisive, loaded, biased and in some cases bigoted” language. “If your children attend Seminar Day,” the website suggested, “you may want to encourage them to consider the workshops on comedy, poetry, gospel music, or the Civil War.”

Madison East’s April van Buren shares passion for high school journalism

A St. Louis-area native, van Buren spent five years teaching there and five more in New Mexico before she arrived in Madison and began working at La Follette. Her jobs have included a mix of teaching English, being a school librarian and now teaching a mix of design and technology classes.

At all of her stops, though, journalism was a key component.

“I don’t want to grade essays, I really just have always wanted to be a full time journalism teacher,” van Buren said, “but that’s not very common. They just don’t have schools where there’s enough classes to be full time journalism.

“So being a librarian and a journalism teacher, I absolutely loved.”

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Former Madison Sennett Principal files Grievance

Olivia Herken:

Former Sennett Middle School Principal Jeffrey Copeland has filed a grievance with the Madison School District seeking to overturn his dismissal, even as both sides still won’t say why he was let go.

Copeland was placed on leave Sept. 13, and on Sept. 26, the school district announced that he was no longer an employee. His grievance was filed with the district on Oct. 12, said James Dickinson, one of Copeland’s attorneys.

“Basically, Dr. Copeland is hoping to get reinstated. He would like his job back,” Dickinson said. He said his legal team was working “closely” with the school district’s attorney.

It’s still unclear what led to Copeland’s dismissal, which came just a few days into the school year. This was to be his first year in the district.

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Molly Beck, Alison Dirr, Corrinne Hess and Daniel Bice;

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Milwaukee Election Commission official Kimberly Zapata could face charges accusing her of fraudulently requesting military ballots

A Milwaukee election official could face criminal charges accusing her of fraudulently requesting absentee ballots reserved for members of the military and sending them to a Republican lawmaker known for embracing unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata, 45, of South Milwaukee was fired by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson this week after Johnson discovered she had requested the ballots. Johnson said Zapata’s actions may have been to show voter fraud was possible.

“This has every appearance of being an egregious and blatant violation of trust,” Johnson said. “Election integrity is absolutely integral. It’s absolutely essential.”

Milwaukee County prosecutors are considering charging Zapata with malfeasance in office, a felony, and illegally requesting a ballot, a misdemeanor, a source told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

District Attorney John Chisholm said in a statement his office is reviewing the election fraud allegations and that prosecutors “expect charges to be filed in the coming days.”

Johnson held a news conference Thursday but left before reporters were finished asking questions about the matter.

In 1 classroom, 4 teachers manage 135 kids — and love it

Neal Morton:

The teachers share large groups of students — sometimes 100 or more — and rotate between group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet for two hours of the school day to hash out a personalized program for every student, dictating the lessons, skills and assignments the team will focus on that day.

By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate and greater control over how and what they teach, Mesa’s administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off. This year, the district expanded the concept to a third of its 82 schools. The team-teaching strategy is also drawing interest from school leaders across the U.S., who are eager for new approaches at a time when the effects of the pandemic have dampened teacher morale and worsened staff shortages.

“The pandemic taught us two things: One is people want flexibility, and the other is people don’t want to be isolated,” said Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s teachers college, who helped design the teaching model.

ASU and surrounding school districts started investigating team teaching about six years ago. Enrollment at teacher preparation programs around the country was plummeting as more young people sought out careers that offered better pay, more flexibility and less stress.

Team teaching, a concept first introduced in schools in the 1960s, appealed to ASU researchers because they felt it could help revitalize teachers. And it resonated with school district leaders, who’d come to believe the model of one teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom to many kids wasn’t working.

Civics: press freedom and the legacy media

Issues and insights:

The problem is that dumping “old-style neutrality” hasn’t made news coverage more accurate, it’s just led the news media even further into the swamp of hysterical partisanship.

It’s left them prone to hoaxes and forced them to issue countless retractions and corrections. Any story that makes Republicans look bad gets paraded around before lifting a fact-checking finger — from Russia collusion to Jussie Smollet to the supposedly racist Catholic schoolboys.

Immediately after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the press jumped to the conclusion that his attacker was some sort of MAGA nutjob. He’s hardly that.

Just as bad, the non-neutral, truth-seeking press does its level best to keep the public in the dark about any scandals (Hunter Biden, anyone?) and crises that make Democrats look bad — a challenge that gets harder by the day.

Truth, it turns out, now matters far less to the “truth-seeking” press than ever.

Consider the recent string of events involving President Biden.

In the span of a few days, he called Kamala Harris a “great president,” got disoriented at an event on the White House lawn, claimed that his student loan giveaway was a law passed by Congress not his own executive order, misstated the name of Britain’s new prime minister, suffered another embarrassing teleprompter failure, appeared to nearly drift off into sleep during a TV interview, got confused about how to exit a stage he’d climbed up just moments before.

A neutral press would be demanding answers from the White House about Biden’s condition. They’d be talking to experts about the grave risks of having a president suffering from dementia in charge. They’d have their pollsters ask the public about its concerns with Biden’s mental health. (Something our Issues & Insights/TIPP has done).

Instead, reporters are feverishly sweeping Biden’s rapid deterioration under the rug. Indeed, if it weren’t for conservative news outlets, the public would have virtually no idea of how disturbing Biden’s decline has become.

They did the same thing with John Fetterman, the Democrat running for a senate seat in Pennsylvania. Reporters covering Fetterman haven’t been truth-seeking. They’ve been truth-denying about the debilitating effects of the stroke he suffered in May.

How the pandemic sets back children’s learning

Robert Kuttner:

Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things.

I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well children are learning. According to results of national exams released last week, between 2019 and 2022, students in fourth and eighth grade experienced unprecedented declines in math and reduced reading achievement.

Schools and teachers have been whipsawed between concerns for the health of students and teachers and the need to devise some reasonable form of pedagogy. Teachers also suffered. That’s why they are leaving the profession in droves.

A more subtle cost has been on the socialization of young children. Kids born just before the pandemic are now three and four years old, and starting to attend preschool. The results are not pretty.

Advocating Pandemic Accountability

Leslie Eastman:

The only remorse I can sense is the panic of the progressive activists as they see the scale of the retribution for the over two years of bureaucratic bullying and media misinformation that Americans have been treated to. Being sorry for receiving the just punishment to which you are due is NOT remorse.

Real remorse in this instance would be Big Pharma executives issuing heartfelt apologies for asserting the vaccine would stop infection. True regret would be the journalists and entertainers who mocked those who challenged their assertions (correctly), confessing how wrong they were in a sincere manner. Believable contrition would be bureaucrats from all aspects of government that pushed stringent pandemic policies jettisoning any of the current practices related to controlling people…including vaccine mandates.

After Record Year, University-Endowment Returns Drop Into Negative Territory

Juliet Chung & Melissa Korn:

The median result for endowments and foundations in the fiscal year ended June 30 was a 7.8% loss, according to a preliminary estimate by Cambridge Associates—the worst showing since 2009. Some endowment chiefs and advisers said the returns likely would have been even worse if venture-capital and private-equity valuations fully reflected the deep declines in public markets, a potential overhang on future performance.

Surging venture-capital returns boosted large endowments’ returns the prior year, ushering in a raft of expanded financial-aid initiatives and other programs despite the fact that some of the gains were unrealized.

Endowments also help fund faculty salaries and capital projects. “If this continues for another year there will be impacts,” said Margaret Chen, global head of Cambridge’s endowments and foundations practice.

Still, she said endowments were cushioned from steeper losses by diversification in their portfolios, which beyond public and private equity and fixed income often include hedge funds, real estate, private credit and cash. A benchmark portfolio made up of 70% global stocks and 30% Bloomberg Aggregate bond index lost 13.8% for the period, according to Cambridge.

“The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers.”

Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M. D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance A. Lindsay and Nicholas W. Papageorge,

Leveraging the Tennessee STAR class size experiment, we show that Black students randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in grades K–3 are 9 percentage points (13 percent) more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points (19 percent) more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who are not. Black teachers have no significant long-run effects on White students. Postsecondary education results are driven by two-year colleges and concentrated among disadvantaged males. North Carolina administrative data yield similar findings, and analyses of mechanisms suggest role model effects may be one potential channel.

Americans’ Confidence in Higher Ed Drops Sharply

Karin Fischer

Public confidence in higher education’s ability to lead America in a positive direction has sunk steeply in recent years, falling 14 percentage points just since 2020.

Two years ago, more than two-thirds of Americans said colleges were having a positive effect on the country, according to a survey conducted by New America. In the most recent version of the survey, released Tuesday, barely half agreed.

Why U.S. Public Debt Matters

Matt Hornbach

As U.S. Public Debt continues to break records, should investors be concerned by the amount debt has risen? Or are there other, more influential factors at play?

Commentary on status quo K-12 governance in Wisconsin

Molly Beck:

“The proposal appears to be largely more of the same with some targeted funds at special education,” Bender said of Evers’ proposal. “After surprisingly vetoing bills on reading improvement last year, a bit unexpected that there are not more resources aimed at improving not only the low proficiency rates, but the nation’s worst racial gaps in the country.”

“It does appear that Evers keeps the automatic increase for private school choice and charter schools, but that does nothing to close the large gap between the sectors,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Michels did not answer questions from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Michels’ plans for schools, including whether he would sign a budget that would raise revenue limits, or whether he would increase funding for school districts’ special education costs.

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, and Carlo Wix:

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Why talent sorting in Germany is flawed

Simon Grimm:

German academia doesn’t have world-class universities and is self-avowedly egalitarian.
Without a clear top university, many talented students instead enter highly competitive medical schools to prove their ability.
But, as argued here, medical school is a bad default choice for these students if you care about accelerated scientific, material, and moral progress. This is for four reasons:
1. Entering many different universities instead of one top college, talented students do not generate and thus do not profit from local agglomeration effects.
2. Medical students aren’t allowed the intellectual flexibility to explore ideas and projects independently.
3. Medical school takes six years, offering no intermediate degree. This locks in students’ choice of study, even if they change their minds.
4. Lastly, practicing medicine offers small impact at the margin (i.e., talented medical students can’t add much to an already highly advanced medical system).
Instead, talented individuals could study subjects and enter jobs that allow them to do much more good.

Math education outcomes: credit card edition

We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify the cross-subsidy from naive to sophisticated consumers in retail financial markets. Using granular data on the near universe of credit card accounts in the United States, we find that sophisticated consumers profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers who lose money both in absolute terms and relative to classic cards. We estimate an aggregate annual cross-subsidy of $15.5 billion. Notably, our results are not driven by income—while sophisticated high-income consumers benefit the most, naive high-income consumers pay the most. Banks lure consumers into the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable classic cards and bank profits are highest for borrowers in the middle of the credit score distribution. We show that credit card rewards transfer wealth from less to more educated, from poorer to richer, from rural to urban, and from high to low minority areas, thereby widening existing spatial disparities.

Math Forum audio video.

Connected math

Singapore Math

Discovery math

Civics: censorship, disinformation sausage making

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report from New Knowledge says. https://t.co/XTaIV71wdM pic.twitter.com/Urh0wyYuTC

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) November 2, 2022

The parent revolt

Joanna Williams

Education has rarely been a major electoral issue in the US. Yet as we approach November’s Midterms, the state of the nation’s schools now follows closely behind the economy and crime among voters’ key concerns. And parents are worried about far more than falling academic standards. They are angry that teachers are using the classroom to promote their own narrow political views.

Parents opposed to woke indoctrination in schools are organising. They may even prove to be a decisive force in the elections. Parents Unite, set up by New England mothers Ashley Jacobs and Jean Egan, is one of many groups to have emerged in the past couple of years. It brings together parents, teachers and academics concerned with what children are being taught in America’s independent schools. Having grown quickly, the group held its second annual conference in Boston last week, which I was invited to attend. What became clear from listening to the stories of parents was a growing sense of anger that children are being corralled into uncritically accepting highly contested and political ideas. This is an experience common to every type of school, public and independent alike, across the US.

Many of the parents I spoke to talked about lockdown and ‘Zoom school’ as having been pivotal in making them more aware of what their children were being taught. They say they witnessed lessons that push children to see America as a uniquely sinful country, forged solely out of racial discrimination. Parents say that this stepped up a notch in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020, when suddenly a great deal of the school day was taken up by Black Lives Matter activism. A similar story emerges in relation to teaching about sex and gender. Parents are unhappy at the prospect of sending their daughter to school, only for her to return home questioning whether she might actually be a boy. In addition, there is concern that sex education introduces children to provocative and hyper-sexualised content at far too young an age.

Michigan’s Education Failure

Ms. Whitmer says children were out of classrooms only three months, but she may be suffering from her own math deficit. Many of the districts that stayed closed the longest, including Ann Arbor, Lansing, Kalamazoo and Detroit, have large minority populations. During the 2020-2021 school year, Ann Arbor offered in-person instruction a mere 11.4% of the time, according to data-analytics company Burbio, which tracked school shutdowns. Lansing was closed more than Ann Arbor, and in Kalamazoo students learned via Zoom all year.

A study by Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative found that “students in districts that did not offer in-person instruction at any time during the 2020-21 school year were the least likely to achieve a typical year’s growth and the most likely to demonstrate no growth in either year, though performance gaps shrunk substantially once most districts returned to in-person learning in 2021-22. Improvements in growth outcomes between 2020-21 to 2021-22 were consistently larger for students who received in-person instruction in 2021-22.”

In 2022 only 32% of all Michigan fourth graders were proficient in math while 71% achieved only “basic.” The reading numbers were even worse, with 58% of fourth graders at or above basic and only 28% proficient.

Many states closed schools out of caution at the beginning of the pandemic and test scores fell nationwide. But Michigan schools didn’t reopen for longer than many places, and Gov. Whitmer opposed a plan that would have made it a priority to open schools for K-5 students. According to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, by September 2020 only 460,000 public school students (about 35% of the total school population) had a chance to return to classroom learning full time while the rest were stuck with online or hybrid instruction.

The Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship Regime — and Our New Live, Prime-Time Rumble Program

Glenn Greenwald:

The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.

The Consortium of State and Corporate Power

There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and “false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be “disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.

That these groups are funded by the West’s security state, Big Tech, and other assorted politically active billionaires is not speculation or some fevered conspiracy theory. For various legal reasons, they are required to disclose their funders, and these facts about who finances them are therefore based on their own public admissions. So often the financing is funneled through well-established front groups for CIA, the State Department and the U.S. National Security State, such as “National Endowment for Democracy.”

College Major Choices

John Conlon:

Students appear to stereotype majors, greatly exaggerating the likelihood that they lead to their most distinctive jobs (e.g., counselor for psychology, journalist for journalism, teacher for education). A stylized model of major choice suggests that stereotyping boosts demand for “risky” majors: ones with rare stereotypical careers and low-paying alternative jobs…The same model predicts—and the survey data confirm—that students also overestimate rare non-stereotypical careers and careers that are concentrated within particular majors. The model also generates predictions regarding role model effects, with students exaggerating the frequency of career-major combinations held by people they are personally close to.

Taxpayer funded lawfare: DOJ fishing edition

Benjamin Weingarten:

DOJ demanded every scintilla of associated evidence of wrongthink, from notes and research to communications with legislators and other interested parties.

Eagle Forum called on the court to quash the subpoena, arguing not only that complying with it would be excessively costly and complex and that its work was irrelevant to the case — it also threatened Americans’ most fundamental rights.

Eagle Forum’s volunteer general counsel, Margaret Clarke, said that in 45 years advocating for legislation, neither her organization nor its affiliates had ever been subpoenaed for their work. If enforced, she wrote in an affidavit, the subpoena “will have a chilling effect on historically protected Constitutional rights and legislative advocacy.”

The group’s executive director, Becky Gerritson, came to national fame for her impassioned 2013 testimony before Congress about the IRS’s targeting of the Wetumpka Tea Party she then led.

Now combating the apparent malice of another federal agency, she wrote in an affidavit that DOJ’s subpoena was “a form of government harassment and retaliation for simple communications with the public” and “elected officials to carry out our lawful purpose.”

Amid Eagle Forum’s objection to the subpoena and blowback from numerous supportive organizations via amicus briefs, the DOJ backed down. In early October, it told the court it had “narrowed” its mass of requests to one: medical studies or literature referenced in a single section of the law.

Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting

Michael Sender:

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Can Harvard Discriminate by Race Forever?

David Langford, Superintendent, Ingenium Charter Schools:

he Supreme Court Justices exhibited supreme patience Monday in hearing nearly four hours of argument in a pair of major cases involving race and college admissions. But the argument was worth the time, because it exposed some unhappy truths about those who believe in the necessity of discriminating by race.

This means revisiting Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which said schools could use race as one factor in admissions in the name of achieving diversity. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also famously wrote in Grutter that the use of race to achieve diversity probably wouldn’t be needed in 25 years.

That was 19 years ago, and on Monday several Justices pressed the question about when racial preferences would end. Seth Waxman, Harvard’s advocate, admitted that the school is trying hard to get to a race-neutral future but sees no end in sight for preferences.

Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. Solicitor General and an impressive advocate, said explicitly that “I just don’t think it’s tenable to read” Grutter to say the Court had suggested a timetable. She said using race the way the schools do could continue as long as their interest in diversity is “compelling.”

The clear implication is that the schools can discriminate by race for years to come. And anyone who knows anything about the men and women who run today’s universities, and how they believe racism is “systemic” in American life, knows that the schools will never stop using preferences.

Deming and K-12 Schools

In our January 2019 interview podcast, his 8th session with Tripp, Superintendent David Langford reflects on the state of education, the system, and how its set up, including various ways in how schools are working to move from “theory to practice” in their understanding and application of the Deming philosophy.

Highlights include:

The short term thinking which Dr. Deming warned us of, whether looking at profit or test scores

Longer term strategies are sacrificed for short term results

People get creative when driven to “show the numbers”

Civics: The Public Has a Right to Know Who Leaked the Dobbs Draft

Alan Dershowitz:

Justice Samuel Alito stated last week that the leak of his draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization endangered the justices’ lives: “It gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.” A man who was found heavily armed outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh two weeks before the court decided Dobbs has been charged with attempted murder.

The leak constituted “a grave betrayal of trust,” Justice Alito added. So why hasn’t the perpetrator been identified and punished?

One reason is that Chief Justice John Roberts assigned the Supreme Court Marshal’s Office to conduct the investigation. The marshal’s office oversees the Supreme Court police, which provides security for the building and the justices. But it is totally unequipped to conduct an investigation of this magnitude. It has no authority to issue subpoenas or to immunize witnesses to testify. The tools at its disposal are limited to questioning possible witnesses and asking to review telephone and computer records. There is no guarantee that an intensive investigation would find the leaker or leakers, but it is nearly certain that they won’t be found without one. They have a strong incentive not to come forward: No one could trust a lawyer who engineered or collaborated in such a breach.

Why did the chief justice assign the marshal’s office to conduct this investigation? That raises another question: Is the court fully committed to uncovering the truth?

School climate: 2022 election edition

“Perhaps the gravest injustice of our time is the imprisonment of minority kids in substandard public schools… The real culprits are union collective-bargaining agreements and state laws that put teachers unions’ interests ahead of students’.”https://t.co/P2Qj2XTUA6

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) November 1, 2022

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

$pending a lot more for Madison’s k-12 school district

The new budget totals $597.9 million in spending, up from the $515.7 million spent in 2021-22 and the $482.9 million the year prior. It’s also up from the June preliminary budget, which called for $561.3 million in spending.

The tax rate, however, is down to $9.97 per $100,000 of property value from the $11.40 rate in 2021-22 amid an increase in the tax base and a boost in state aid. That means a reduction of $62.16 on an “average home” in the district.

A significant piece of the spending increase from previous years comes from $42.9 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding plus additional one-time funding from the state and for specific initiatives like mental health.

“We made some really intelligent and thoughtful investments in our buildings, in the safety of our students and our staff using those one-time resources,” board president Ali Muldrow said. “However, in the long-term, I think we have a lot of work ahead of us in that one-time resources have really set us up to be incredibly agile in terms of our next budgets.”

A major initiative in the months since the June preliminary budget vote gave a $5 an hour raise to hundreds of hourly staff members in the district. Board members also expressed an interest in extending that raise to custodial staff, who have asked for such a move since it was given to other hourly staff, but they weren’t able to include it in this version of the budget given its complexity.

Taxpayers are spending $23,449 per student (25,497 enrolled via the DPI website).

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Madison’s taxpayer supported k-12 climate: custodian edition

Olivia Herken:

“This is a very undesirable job. A lot of people try to make it seem like it’s not that difficult until you have to wrap a garbage bag around your hand and fish some kid’s defecation out of a toilet or out of a urinal,” he said.

He described other unpleasant tasks, like scraping tampons off bathroom ceilings, mopping up food after a rowdy lunch hour or unclogging a toilet after a student has shoved an entire roll of toilet paper down the drain.

“Our health is constantly at risk,” he said, adding that was especially true during the height of the pandemic. “You have no idea how afraid we all were.”

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said that the support staff who received the $5 bump — educational assistants, school security assistants, clerical staff and food service workers — were the district’s lowest-paid groups.

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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The US government was able to outsource first amendment violations through the threat of antitrust law enforcement against social media companies.

Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 31, 2022

My Argument Against Racial Preferences Prevails at Cornell Political Union Debate

William Jacobson:

On Monday, October 31, 2022, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument in cases challenging racial preferences in university admissions at Harvard and UNC. Typically referred to as “Affirmative Action,” the universities argue that they must take race into account in making admissions decisions in order to achieve the racially “diverse” student body they say advances their educational missions.

The impact of giving racial preferences is stark, with students of Asian descent losing slots and having to jump hurdles relative to favored racial groups. From the challenger’s Petition asking the Court to take the Harvard case:

Policy, STEM and interests

Kate Kaye:

“Dr. Schmidt has worked across many presidential administrations and with members of congress on both sides of the aisle – his work has and remains bipartisan and focused on supporting the country,” said Tara Rigler, a spokesperson for Schmidt’s new think tank, Special Competitive Studies Project. “He has been asked to serve on federal advisory boards to provide his advice on pressing technology issues before the country. In line with every other private citizen who has, and does serve on these federally appointed boards, he is an advisor, not a federal decision maker.”

The threats posed by an AI-dominant China — from AI-supercharged cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to invasive surveillance tech deployed to monitor marginalized populations and development of fully autonomous weapons — should not be ignored. However, Schmidt’s proposed solution hinges on allocating massive government spending to unregulated AI, some of which could benefit companies he has connections to or directly invests in.

“Conflict of interest [concerns are] right at the center of this — not only with his venture investments,” said Merve Hickok, senior research director and chairwoman of the board for the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a nonprofit AI policy and human rights watchdog.

In response, Rigler said that Schmidt had “complied with all Federal ethics requirements during his service on the DIB and NSCAI.”

To assist in disseminating his ideas in Washington, Schmidt has cultivated a cadre of influential insiders. “When I hear people who know, like Eric, talking about the race with China on the technological side, we’d better get our act together,” former Secretary of State and frequent media commentator Condoleezza Rice said at a D.C. event held in September by SCSP.

Schmidt has spread his message for years among people with direct influence over national security policy and spending.

Notes on Massachusetts Teacher Union Election mailer “truthiness”

Ira Stoll:

The teachers unions are paying to mislead voters about a Massachusetts ballot question that would raise taxes to pay for education and transportation.

Two mailings received by a registered voter in the state make false claims about the initiative while disclosing in small print that they are paid for by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Federation of Teachers Solidarity Fund, and American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts. All five of the “top donors” listed on the mailings that include the factually inaccurate claims are teacher unions or related entities. When we last checked, the unions had put $15.8 million into the tax-increase campaign.

One mailing claims, “The Fair Share Amendment only taxes 4 cents on every dollar earned OVER $1 million a year. For the 1% who make that much money, the first million is free.” It’s not accurate that the first million is “free.” The first million dollars in income is already subject to state and federal taxes. Someone who earns $1 million in 2023 would be subject to 37 percent federal income tax on all income above $578,125 for a single filer, along with an additional 3.8 percent ObamaCare tax on investment income and a 5 percent state income tax. These million dollar earners, in other words, are already facing a marginal tax rate of more than 40 percent.

Two hotly debated lawsuits argue that race-conscious admissions discriminate against white and Asian American applicants.

Helen Santoro

Both cases have been spearheaded by activist Edward Blum, who created Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an organization that represents “more than 20,000 students, parents, and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair”. As the plaintiff in both cases, SFFA argues that, by considering race in their admissions, Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill are discriminating against certain applicants, such as Asian American people. This, the group says, violates a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibiting states from denying anyone equal protection of the law, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, however, argue that affirmative action has helped them to even out the playing field for Black and Hispanic students who have not had the same educational opportunities as others because of systemic racism in the United States.

Colleges can cut costs by getting back to basics

Joanne Jacobs:

In the 1970s, Ohio University employed two faculty members for every non-teaching/non-research staffer, Vedder writes. Today, administrators outnumber faculty — and inflation-adjusted tuition costs have more than tripled. “Students are paying to finance an army of apparatchiks who neither teach nor expand the frontiers of knowledge.”

He especially objects to “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucrats who “reduce freedom of campus expression that is the heart of the intellectually examined life.”

Research is a legitimate university function, but much of it is a pointless waste of resources, Vedder writes. Professors teach less to produce journal articles nobody will read. It would make more sense “to expect all faculty members to carry a full teaching load but to reduce it if outside parties want their research badly enough to buy their time.”

College sports is a money loser at most universities, writes Vedder. There’s no reason “ball-throwing, batting, and kicking contests” have to be affiliated w

Civics: censorship, media and election notes

Greg Piper:

Shortly before Musk took ownership Thursday night, Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on a JTN report about a former Democratic candidate’s sworn affidavit alleging years of illegal ballot harvesting in politically important central Florida, which prompted a state criminal probe.

The warning tells readers the “misleading” content “could lead to real-world harm.” It’s not inherently tied to the report’s web address, but only displays as an interstitial when shared by certain accounts, including those of JTN founder John Solomon and Upward News.

This happened. The Elections Commisariat of the State of California – and many other state government friends controlled by Democrats – *instructed Twitter* to ban @dc_draino

And it did.

Did you know this? pic.twitter.com/CWooKtVU3C
— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) July 29, 2021

Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates split on aid to public schools

Steven Walters:

Public school funding in Wisconsin is at a political crossroads, with the two candidates for governor disagreeing over how state aid should be distributed in the future.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers wants $2 billion more spent on public schools, noting a projected $4.3 billion budget surplus by mid-2023.

His Republican challenger, Tim Michels, vows to “spend as much money as any governor” on K-12 schools, but would do that by removing all limits on the school choice program so that any parent could use a state-issued voucher to send their child to a private school.

In this important controversy, this statistic is important: State government will collect $20.8 billion in general-fund taxes — corporate and personal income taxes, sales taxes, cigarette, alcohol and utility taxes — this year. Of that, $6.6 billion — or almost one-third — will go for K-12 public schools.

Evers also directed $90 million in federal Covid relief to public schools, bringing total state aid for public schools to $6.7 billion this year, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. That’s an 11 percent increase over three years.

Four issues frame the controversy over state aid to K-12 schools:

Baltimore County school board race heats up with endorsements, warnings

Kristen Griffith:

There are four contested races on the fall ballot, while three candidates are running unopposed. Meanwhile, the terms of four appointed members on the 11-member board are expiring later this year; their replacements will be appointed by the next governor, likely in January. Early voting has started and Election Day is Nov. 8.

Among the conservative contenders, none has drawn as much attention as Maggie Litz Domanowski, a mother of three children now enrolled in county schools whose past social media comments have come under scrutiny. She is running in council District 3 against retired educator Diane Jean Young.

Former state Sen. Jim Brochin recently endorsed Young, citing her experience as an educator and her volunteer work as a court appointed special advocate in Baltimore County. He also accused Domanowski of backing Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, who claimed falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Anyone who aligns with Cox “is a nonstarter and should not be part of any part of leadership,” Brochin said.

Domanowski did not answer a question from The Banner about whether she supports Cox, but did say she will work with and support whoever becomes the next governor.

As a senator, Brochin passed a bill that allowed board members to be elected instead of exclusively appointed. He described himself as a “very conservative Democrat” who voted with Republicans 40% of the time in the state Senate. He said Young’s more than two decades working in the Baltimore City and county school systems make her particularly qualified to serve on the board.

Domanowski has been endorsed by two Republican County Council members seeking reelection, Wade Kach and David Marks; state Del. Kathy Szeliga, who represents Baltimore and Harford counties; and U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, a social conservative who represents Maryland’s 1st District and is running for a seventh term.

Iowa Academic Standards Hold Teachers Hostage

Joye Walker:

I retired more than a year ago, giving me many months to process the discomfort I felt in my last few years of teaching. It was a difficult time for many reasons, but one big reason stands out: a problematic curriculum that holds teachers hostage.

The Iowa Academic Standards is a set of “Clear and rigorous learning standards educators use to ensure all students are college, career, and future ready.” They are “required for all students by state law.” (https://educateiowa.gov/iowa-academic-standards)

While the intentions of the Standards are admirable, the administration of actually delivering a curriculum that satisfies these Standards is fraught with problems. Teachers are required by state law to deliver a curriculum that consists of topics strictly outlined by grade level in the Iowa Academic Standards. Teaching math is an art that requires great flexibility on the part of teachers. Most administrators do not understand what is involved in teaching mathematics or how mathematics should be taught. Within a single classroom, students demonstrate a wide range of abilities and degrees of mastery of content previously taught to them. Teachers are faced with the monumental task of figuring out how to present content in order to bring each student forward in learning new concepts.

The Iowa Academic Standards consist of some major content domains, and within each domain are found specific standards. This is a simplistic view of school mathematics. It implies that mathematics can be reduced to a finite list of topics to be taught at each grade level. Realistically, mathematics is a complex intertwining of all math and other studies learned since elementary school, including reading, science, and social studies. Mathematics builds upon previously learned skills, including reading skills, language skills, computational skills, and logic skills. At any given grade level, the Iowa Academic Standards are written with the assumption that all students have some mastery of previously taught math standards. The reality is that no two students are at the same place in terms of concept mastery, in any given classroom. The skill of teaching is to bring students along, weaving previously learned skills and concepts with new ones.

Notes on out of school Madison k-12 suspensions

In 2021-22, there were 1,714 out-of-school suspensions (OSS) given to 766 students in grades 6-8. That was up from the 986 given to 529 students in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 school year, and most significantly from the 1,459 given to 714 students in the last fully in-person school year, 2018-19.

OSS dropped at both the high school and elementary school level, the latter aided by an October 2021 change to the BEP that forbade suspensions as a punishment for students in grades 4K-5.

Among high schools, there were just 12 more OSS in 2021-22 than 2019-20, despite an extra three months of in-person instruction. The 909 suspensions last year was well below the 1,303 given out in the 2018-19 school year.

In-school suspensions (ISS), meanwhile, were down at all levels of schools with fewer students involved. The largest drop from 2018-19 came at the high school level, which went from 1,286 ISS then to 320 last 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”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]