The Assembly Committee on Education is holding a public hearing today on AB611, relating to the licensure requirements for teachers in regard to reading readiness. Similar to AB446 — a literacy bill vetoed by the Gov. — this bill seeks to boost WI’s dismal literacy rates. pic.twitter.com/XLUL9NVXBD

— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) December 14, 2021

Wisconsin Governor Evers recently vetoed AB 446 on a Friday afternoon.

Foundations of Reading; (also MTEL) Wisconsin’s only teacher content knowledge exam requirement, in this case elementary reading.

A Capitol conversation on addressing Wisconsin’s reading challenges. (2011!)

AB611 and those lobbying for and against it.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

CBS News:

A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older.

Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up. The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.

Toni Wright, one of the 750 participants in a clinical trial to test the drug, said she liked what she saw.

“It’s definitely a life changer,” Wright told CBS News national correspondent Jericka Duncan.

Before the trial, the only way Wright could see things clearly was by keeping reading glasses everywhere — in her office, bathroom, kitchen and car. 

“I was in denial because to me that was a sign of growing older, you know, needing to wear glasses,” she said.

Jill Tucker and Annie Vainshtein:

Mayor London Breed is pushing an ambitious school board oversight plan that threatens to withhold city funding from classrooms if Board of Education members don’t change their behavior.

San Francisco classrooms, under a proposed change to city law, could lose millions in city funding each year if school board members continue to micromanage, treat others poorly or persist in chasing short-term political wins, its backers say.

Libby Sobic and Anthony LoCoco:

The U.S. Supreme Court recently held oral arguments in Carson v. Makin, a case that challenges Maine’s decision to prevent certain private religious schools from participating in its tuition benefit program for families without access to a local public high school. This case will likely provide guidance as to whether states can continue to ban religious schools from participating in publicly-funded programs on the basis of religious use of funding.

While we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to make its determination, which could be awhile, here are three aspects of the case that Wisconsinites should know:

Wisconsin’s school choice programs are different than Maine’s tuition benefit program. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the parent’s choice for the voucher, even if it is a religious private school, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Wisconsin Constitution because the parent (not the government) is directing the dollars.

Maine’s program, on the other hand, allows parents to direct the funding to some private religious schools but chooses which schools can participate based on the use of religious curriculum. Therefore, Maine’s program is different than Wisconsin’s voucher programs because the state takes an additional step to try to determine whether state funding will be used to promote religious curriculum.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s holding could impact how both states and the federal government allocate funding to non-public schools.

Will Flanders:

The decision to remain closed is likely to have long term consequences for the nation.  Standardized test scores fell dramatically this year, even after accounting for the huge number of students who didn’t participate in testing.  In the Spring, WILL estimated an economic cost to the state of more than $7 billion over the lifetime of kids in school today as a result of lost learning.

Apparently, the ED recognizes that a loss of in-person instruction is a problem.  By their very language denying Wisconsin the ability to use the funding in this manner, they admit that keeping students out of classrooms will mean that they need extensive ‘catching up.’ Yet they’ve created a catch-22 situation in which states are unable to incentivize reopening in order to provide funds to schools that failed to do so.

If this option is indeed completely off the table, the legislature should consider some alternative, creative means for these funds. While these funds must be directed to school districts, the state (and districts) could still be creative with how to use these additional funds. Dr. Marguerite Roza, an education funding expert, recently highlighted some possibilities. Among them, paying students to take summer courses to help overcome growing achievement gaps, or providing funds directly to families struggling to purchase school supplies at a time of economic upheaval. Another possibility might be mandating that districts create a supplemental Education Savings Account (ESA) to fund educational opportunities for students that aren’t currently offered in the district.

Mike Antonucci:

Sunday’s New York Times featured an 1,800-word profile by Erica L. Green of National Education Association President Becky Pringle under the headline, “New Leader Pushes Teachers’ Union to Take On Social Justice Role.”

The overall tone of the piece is complimentary, and Pringle faced no very challenging questions about her union’s operations or stances over the 21-month COVID pandemic.

That’s the Times‘ prerogative, and there’s no use complaining about its deference to union officers. It has been going on for decades.

Still, I wouldn’t be fulfilling my role as the source of teacher union information that doesn’t come off their press releases and bios if I didn’t mention a few items in the Timesarticle that caught my eye:

* Referencing the American Federation of Teachers, Green wrote, “At the same time, its lack of term limits has made its high-profile leaders more like monarchs — its current president, Randi Weingarten, has served for 13 years.”

Privacy International:

PI, Worker Info Exchange, and App Drivers and Couriers Union have teamed up to challenge the unprecedented surveillance that gig economy workers are facing from their employers.

KEY FINDINGS
The picture that WIE’s research paints is one where algorithms are shaping the work experience of drivers, offering them limited visibility or avenues for redress when a decision about them is made.

The process of gathering data from the gig economy platforms may prove time consuming and resource intensive, even though the legal framework is designed to facilitate such requests and make them an easy, accessible tool for everyone to use.

The stories of private hire drivers’ experiences demonstrate the lack of transparency and accountability in the platforms’ decision making process, which has onerous consequences for the workers.

Nate Hochman:

The conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, has shaped the way that conservative policy-makers think about education: Workforce preparation, test scores, and other utilitarian concerns are often prioritized over character formation and civic virtue, while the question of what we are teaching our children has taken a backseat to the content-neutral language of school choice and decentralization. This framework, Yuval Levin writes, has “made American education policy awfully clinical and technocratic, at times blinding some of those involved in education debates to the deepest human questions at stake — social, moral, cultural, and political questions that cannot be separated from how we think about teaching and learning.”

All of that is beginning to change. A backlash to critical race theory (CRT) at the grassroots level, with help from activists like Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, has forced the radicalization of the American public-school curriculum to the forefront of the national political conversation. The debates over CRT have also opened up broader questions of what (and how) we teach American students about their country, initiating a serious conservative counteroffensive against the Left’s monopolistic control of American politics and history curricula, with states like Florida and Texas pairing anti-CRT laws with new programs aimed at renewing civic literacy in public education. What began with local, parent-led organizing has grown into a national movement with enormous political momentum.

The anti-CRT backlash “crystallized this feeling that we have an agenda that we can cohere around,” Rufo told National Review. “All of the various threads on conservative education reform can now unite around the framework of critical race theory to make real change and actually get bills passed through state legislatures.” To date, eleven states have enacted bans or restrictions on CRT, and Rufo thinks “we’re going to get another five to ten states passing them in the coming year.”

The Right’s commanding heights have begun to notice, too. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation have thrown their considerable weight behind the anti-CRT project, with Manhattan Institute scholars writing comprehensive model legislation for tackling the ideology — aimed not just at banning CRT itself but also at increasing curriculum transparency, revitalizing civic-literacy standards, and expanding school choice. Conservative scholars have testified before state legislatures to advocate for anti-CRT legislation. At the same time, new think tanks and advocacy groups like the Center for Renewing Americahave coalesced around fighting CRT as a core organizing principle of their mission. “You have think tanks who don’t necessarily agree on every issue, and there’s inter–think tank drama sometimes,” said Rufo. “But on education, we are all on the same page.”

Scott Girard:

This year, the program is going to provide gifts for 152 students and siblings, nearly doubling what it provided last year, booster club secretary Sara Gold said. In 2020-21, 60.2% of La Follette’s students were considered “economically disadvantaged,” according to the state Department of Public Instruction, which put it second among the district’s comprehensive high schools, slightly behind East at 61.9%.

“This is just one part of a larger picture of what makes La Follette great and amazing and also the challenges that La Follette faces,” Gold said.

Cedric Chin:

I want to spend an essay talking about tacit knowledge, and why I think it is the most interesting topic in the domain of skill acquisition. If you are a longtime Commonplace reader, you’ll likely have come across this idea before, because I’ve written about it numerous times in the past. But I think it’s still good idea to dedicate a whole piece to the topic.

The reason I think it’s important to write this piece is because every time I touch on the topic of tacit knowledge, inevitably someone will pop up on Twitter or Hacker News or Reddit or email and protest that tacit knowledge doesn’t exist. I want something to link to whenever I come up against someone who says this, mostly so that I don’t have to repeat myself.

There is one other reason I think it is good to explore what tacit knowledge is: tacit knowledge does exist, and understanding that it does exist is one of the most useful things you can have happen to you. Once you understand that tacit knowledge exists, you will begin to see that big parts of any skill tree is tacit in nature, which means that you can go hunting for it, which in turn means you can start to ask the really useful question when it comes to expertise, which is: that person has it; that person is really good at it; how can I have it too?

Ashley Miller:

America’s Siberia. The icebox of the nation. “Unfit for human habitation.”Minnesota’s cold weather is the stuff of legend. “Cold” is a defining feature of the state’s culture.

But how cold is it, really?

That’s what teacher Logan Jensen’s sixth-grade science class wanted to know while recently studying the Earth’s tilt. Specifically, the students inquired why Minnesota is sometimes colder than the icy climate of Santa’s hometown, the North Pole.

So Jensen wrote on their behalf to Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reader-powered reporting project. It is a simple question with a surprisingly complicated answer.

DREAMSTIME / TNSAn aerial view of the North Pole region.

Joanne Jacobs:

President Biden’s ambitious child care plan will be “challenging to implement,” writes Andrew Prokop on Vox.

If the $185 trillion Build Back Better Actpasses, the federal government will subsidize child care, mandate higher pay for child-care workers and fund new facilities.

But the plan could “drive up prices for many parents, and may lead to a shortage of licensed child care options as millions of parents enter an already-crowded market for the first time,” writes Prokop. Middle- and upper-middle-class parents, who’ll have to wait years for a subsidy, will pay a lot more.

The bill includes money for new facilities, but “ramping up supply is easier said than done,” Prokop notes. In addition to expanding space for child care, federal aid will have to fund hiring, training and retaining new staff.

“I’ve looked at a number of government programs over the years and usually I think there’s a way to make them work,” says Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This one I worry about.”

States may opt out rather than pick up some of the costs, starting in 2025. The federal spending ends in 2027, unless a future president and Congress pass a new law extending it.

Bruno V. Manno:

Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”

This broad rethinking of work and human capital development is occurring while 10.4 million jobs sit unfilled and more than 8.4 million unemployed individuals look for work. There is a clear disconnect, but the ultimate outcome is far from clear.

As Bob Dylan asks in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “…something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

But even without this clarity, reassessment has an upside.

It’s an opportunity to expand two promising approaches to education, training, and hiring that prepare young people and adults for jobs and careers in this new world of work: career pathways programs and skill-based hiring.

This reassessment is a form of creative destruction, or the process through which new approaches replace existing ones made obsolete over time. What emerges is a social capital development narrative, an account that chronicles how individuals acquire knowledge and relational networks—or social capital—that help them succeed and flourish.

Why are we reassessing work in America? By my count, there are at least six reasons.

Scott Girard:

Ananda Mirilli will not run for reelection to the Madison School Board next spring, meaning two of the three seats up for election will not have an incumbent among the candidates.

Cris Carusi previously announced that she would not run for reelection, while board president Ali Muldrow is running for a second term. Carusi, Mirilli and Muldrow are all in the final year of their first three-year term on the School Board.

Mirilli announced her decision in a video posted to Facebook Monday, sharing that the pandemic “took a devastating personal turn” for her, as her daughter’s father died last year and her own mother died six months ago.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Three School Board seats are up for election in April, and if any of them draw more than two candidates, a primary will be held in February. Candidates were able to begin circulating nomination papers in early December, with the number of required signatures due in January.

Janeway has said they joined the race to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker.

Janeway also hopes to focus their campaign on student safety and wellness across the district while exploring ways to get the community involved in area schools to facilitate positive change. They also hope to foster a positive and healthy relationship between the board and school staff by incorporating staff voices in policy decisions.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Scott Girard:

In addition to accepting donations at the school through the drive, McGuire said the kindergarten classes went around the Van Hise neighborhood and collected donations from homes on Wednesday. They first put up posters on Dec. 1 alerting residents to their planned collection event, filling up 10 wagons between the three classes.

“We’re just so proud of them,” McGuire said. “And we’re just so proud of our community, too, for being so supportive.”

Madison taxpayers recently funded the expansion of our least diverse schools, including Van Hise and nearby Hamilton middle schools. This, despite space in nearby facilities.

Caleb Dunson:

About an hour into the event — when it had gotten sufficiently crowded such that people began to sweat through their suits and dresses — the formal ceremony began. The event’s emcee gave a generic, but thankfully brief, speech about the history of the holiday dinner, then doled out his requisite thank yous to the unknown administrators and sponsors who helped plan the event. He took a moment to note the sheer abundance of food at the dinner — 1,000 shrimp, pounds and pounds of fish, crab, lobster, lamb, turkey and pork and cakes with too many layers to count — all for Yale. Once his speech ended, the Parade of Comestibles began. Dining hall workers, most of whom were Black, marched around Commons carrying the flags of the 14 residential colleges and carrying elegant food displays as a local drumming band, all Black, played triumphant beats. They circled Commons several times touting, among other things, a 10-foot loaf of bread, an ice-sculpted sleigh stuffed with the aforementioned shrimp and a rack of lamb decorated with mint and berries. Students swayed to the beat of the drums, excitedly watching the performance and recording it on their cell phones. 

The food had to go somewhere, so people started taking it by the pound. Students lined up near the meal station back of Commons, waiting to grab entire crabs and lobsters to take home with them. They grabbed turkey legs the size of my forearm and munched away at them too. We all feasted like royalty. 

Just two blocks away, on the city’s Green, homeless people froze and starved in the bitter New Haven night.

I left that dinner feeling disturbed and disheartened. On the walk back to my Old Campus dorm, I realized that I felt this way quite often while at this University. There’s something unsettling about Yale, about the way it operates, about its very existence. And now, having sat with these uncomfortable feelings for a while, I have come to realize that Yale is a problem. To fix it, we must get rid of the University. Completely.

In an interview with the Atlantic, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber answered the question: “Should Princeton exist?” He said, “The idea of a place like Princeton is that you can identify young people who have extraordinary talent and will benefit from an intensive academic experience. Over the space of years and decades, they will blossom in ways we can’t even predict, and they will be able to address problems that matter.” He listed names like Madison, Turing and Sotomayor as examples of the types of world-changers schools like Princeton can produce.

William Jacobson:

My presentation at the Parents Unite conference: “Framing the narrative, I think at this stage, is really counter-framing the narrative, because we are up against an extremely organized and well-funded movement to push euphemistically called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ and race-based teaching throughout education.”

Mackenzie Mays:

California’s first superintendent of equity lives in Philadelphia and has a separate job there, more than 2,500 miles away from the schools he advises as one of the highest paid officials in the state Department of Education, according to records and interviews.

Daniel Lee, a psychologist, life coach and self-help author, owns a Pennsylvania-based psychology firm and is the president of the New Jersey Psychological Association’s executive board. He has also been serving as a deputy superintendent for the California Department of Education since July 2020, a role dedicated to the success of children of color that was originally backed by a foundation grant but is now funded by state taxpayers.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who was instrumental in the hiring, has known Lee for more than two decades since they were social workers in Philadelphia and included Lee in his wedding party. The Education Department’s nonprofit affiliate initially hired Lee without publicly posting the job that now pays up to $179,832, and Lee’s 18-page resume shows no prior experience in California or relationships with school districts in the state.

Lee, 51, voted in Philadelphia as recently as November and owns a home there, according to local records.California education and taxpayer advocates questioned why the state hired someone living across the country with other duties to address persistent inequities in the nation’s largest school population. The hiring appears to flout California policy, which allows few exceptions for a state employee to live elsewhere.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Michael Watson:

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) messed up big time. It sent a letter to the Biden administration calling on the Justice Department to investigate protesting parents under the PATRIOT Act, among other federal anti-terrorism laws.

In so doing, the erstwhile representative national association of school board officials exacerbated existing internal disputes over its internal governance, some of which we discussed with the Ohio School Boards Association on the InfluenceWatch Podcast. At the same time, it drew unprecedented scrutiny from opponents of totalitarian COVID restrictions on low-risk children, opponents of left-progressive gender ideology, and opponents of ideologically charged teaching inspired by critical race theory.

That pushback has had consequences. As of writing, activist Corey DeAngelis tallies 18 state associations (including Ohio) that have disaffiliated or ceased paying dues to NSBA, with an additional nine having informally distanced themselves from the national group’s actions.

The decline in revenue has other consequences, as Axios reports:

Lael Daniel Weinberger:

While distance education made inroads throughout higher education, law schools kept their distance—until a global pandemic forced them all online for a time. Then the gatekeepers to the profession at the American Bar Association and state bars temporarily dropped their limits on distance learning. Now as American law schools prepare to return to normalcy, should distance learning remain an option? This essay argues that it should because it has potential to improve access to justice: distance education can reduce the costs of law school, increasing the supply of lawyers who can afford to provide less expensive legal services.

Now is the time for legal regulators to make permanent what they allowed temporarily during the pandemic: distance-education-friendly accreditation and bar admission standards.

Catherine Gewertz:

A tiny school district in California is setting up a separate in-person instructional program for its unvaccinated students, courting a showdown with the biggest state in the country and a tussle over the legal limits of how schools can respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

The Alpine Union school district’s plan, the first of its kind in the country, is designed to save its unvaccinated students from losing face-to-face instruction when the state’s K-12 vaccine mandate—also the only one of its kind in the nation—goes into effect, for some grades as early as July.

In this small K-8 district, in the foothills east of San Diego, where “choice” is a rallying cry that dominates the COVID vaccine debate, district leaders estimate that 40 percent or more of the 1,500 students aren’t inoculated against the virus.

Nintil:

Nobel Prize winner P.B. Medawar once wrote, in Advice to a Young Scientist, that ‘any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems.’ But what makes a problem “important”? And how do you know it when you see it? The answers don’t come from reading them in a book, or even by explicitly being taught them. More often, they’re conveyed by example, through the slow accretion of mumbled asides and grumbled curses, by smiles, frowns, and exclamations over years of a close working relationship between an established scientist and his or her protege. (Apprentice to Genius)

Ben Reinhardt posted earlier in October the picture below. It shows two ways to “learn a field”: one is the “right one” (talking to people, the outer loop) and another is depicted as a misconception, where one just reads key papers. Learning a field can take multiple meanings, it can be learning the content of the field, learning the social context of the field (what are the active areas of research, key labs, its history), or learning to do research in the relevant field.

As someone who’s an example of being in that inner loop, I thought it’d be worthwhile to engage with this, but over time that ended up growing into a longer and somewhat meandering essay on the nature of tacit knowledge. If you are left wondering what do I really mean, worry not: the conclusion has an enumeration of points I want to make. This essay makes a heavy use of examples and analogies, everything you need is linked from this essay, so you should probably be clicking in all the links! If you want the TLDR now, here it is: Expertise requires acquiring a degree of private and tacit knowledge. Expertise cannot be taught using only explanations. Acquiring expertise can be accelerated by means of being exposed to a large library of examples with context. We are not leveraging this as much as we can and we should experiment more to explore how far this method can get us. What I describe in this post is a hypothesis that is looking to be tested and I offer indirect evidence for why it may work.

Ben is not the only one with a person-first approach to learning: In the same Twitter thread, Alexey Guzey joins Ben with a 90/10 split between talking to people and reading. This is not due to some limitation with the written vs verbal form. There are some people out there like Rob Wiblin that find it hard to read anything at all. Ben and Alexey’s point is very different: Is there knowledge that can only be gained by talking to the experts? Is it faster to gain certain kinds of knowledge by talking to the experts?

Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin West:

Research into propaganda, conspiracy theory, and other distortions of information have a long history spanning multiple disciplines, but the rising tide of distorted and manipulative information has led to an increasingly visible, if still disparate, field of misinformation studies. This emerging field has the potential to inform our understanding of misinformation and the legal options to constrain misinformation and to advance our understanding of collective online behavior (8). Given the urgency and real-world impact of this issue, it is critical that the evolving policies in government and industry are informed by this research but also that the research itself is informed by these policy discussions. Our hope is that eventually, this collective work will make the field of misinformation studies obsolete.

How Reserve Currencies Have Evolved Over 120 Years via @VisualCap
#GlobalSystem #Velsig pic.twitter.com/Mm1WJfWwVF

— Velina Tchakarova (@vtchakarova) December 11, 2021

Reserve Currency notes and links.

Dan King:

After more than four years of litigation, Bob Smith and Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School (PCHS) are free to return to teaching horseshoeing to students who have not completed high school or an equivalent government-mandated exam. Bob and PCHS, who were represented by the Institute for Justice (IJ) in a federal lawsuit to protect the First Amendment right to teach willing students, may again enroll students regardless of their educational status.

Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin West:

Research into propaganda, conspiracy theory, and other distortions of information have a long history spanning multiple disciplines, but the rising tide of distorted and manipulative information has led to an increasingly visible, if still disparate, field of misinformation studies. This emerging field has the potential to inform our understanding of misinformation and the legal options to constrain misinformation and to advance our understanding of collective online behavior (8). Given the urgency and real-world impact of this issue, it is critical that the evolving policies in government and industry are informed by this research but also that the research itself is informed by these policy discussions. Our hope is that eventually, this collective work will make the field of misinformation studies obsolete.

Mark Scolforo:

They upheld a lower-court decision that the mandate was imposed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s acting health secretary without legal authorization. The practical impact of the decision will depend on what the justices say in the written opinion or opinions they will issue in the case and which schools and school districts impose their own masking requirements.

The court took action amid a statewide surge in new infections and hospitalizations. Pennsylvania is reporting an average of 7,571 infections per day, up over 20% in two weeks. Hospitalizations have risen 55% since mid-November, to an average of more than 4,000 per day, and acute-care facilities are becoming overwhelmed.

Wolf press secretary Beth Rementer described the decision as “extremely disappointing.”

Notes and links on “mandates”, including Colorado and Dane County Madison Public Health.

Chris Havergal:

A union has expressed alarm after it emerged that the British Council would be stripped of its role running the UK’s Turing student exchange scheme and replaced by the outsourcing firm Capita.

The Guardian reported that the council – the UK’s international educational and cultural organisation – had been undercut by Capita in a tendering process.

The news came just a few months into the operation of the Turing scheme, which has an annual budget of £110 million and is seeking to send 28,000 students from more than 120 universities overseas this year.

The Turing scheme replaced the UK’s involvement in the European Union’s Erasmus+ exchange, which had been administered in the UK by the British Council since 2014. It had helped run the predecessor Erasmus programme since 2007.

The new contract, which runs from March 2022 to the end of 2023, is for the delivery of the Turing scheme across the four nations of the UK.

Capita will be assisted by organisations including the Association of Colleges, the Sutton Trust, and the Association of Commonwealth Universities, The Guardian reported.

CDR Salamander:

For the last decade and a half or so of DivThu we’ve often discussed the “Diversity Industry” and tried to describe to those who have yet to encounter it, just how large of an industry it is.

Instead of working towards a society that looks past the useless characteristics of race, creed, sex, color or national origin – they work towards division, promote segregation and unequal treatment … on your dime.

Sadly, the commissariat has only gotten larger as they have refined their business model of insertion and growth through threats, etho-masochism, well-meaning useful idiocy, leveraging institutional cowardice, and naked careerism to expand their empire.

Few can or will say no to them, as their track record on cancelling and dissociating those who they consider heretics from their religion and gravy train is impressive.

Thanks to Professor Mark Perry, we have a little snapshot of just one little tributary to their empire – The Ohio State University.

Enjoy it Ohio taxpayers, Ohio State alumni, parents, and students – you’re paying for it.

Eugene Volokh:

Laviage sued Fite for, among other things, false arrest, and the court held that Fite was not shielded by qualified immunity:

The law requires that Fite’s affidavit include enough facts to enable the magistrate to make an independent evaluation that there was probable cause to arrest Laviage. Fite could be liable if he made an intentional omission that results in a warrant being issued without probable cause….

Laviage sufficiently pleads that Fite intentionally wrote a misleading affidavit by excluding the software issues. Laviage was transparent with Fite. He acknowledged the deficiencies and made an effort to correct them. If the omitted fact was included, Laviage pleads factual content that allows the court to reasonably infer that the warrant would have lacked probable cause.

The law requires that Laviage “intentionally and knowingly” not file the reports. Laviage had no intent to conceal. He filed substantively identical reports with the City of Houston. Fite deliberately cross checked the Department’s reports with the City of Houston. Laviage kept Fite appraised of his efforts to correct the software issues but Fite persisted on a fishing expedition.

Taking the facts as plead, the Magistrate Judge could draw a reasonable inference from the circumstances that Laviage did not “intentionally and knowingly” fail to report to the Department. The jury’s decision to throw out the claims illustrates the baseless foundation for the initial charge.

Notes and links on “qualified immunity”.

Denisha Merriweather, Dava Hankerson, Nathaniel Cunneen and Ron Matus:

The shift to an increasingly choice-driven education landscape for Black students in Florida has been driven by Black parents, who have enrolled their children in choice programs in growing numbers and made it so they cannot be ignored politically. “Options make it so that I can have school that works for my child,” said Brandi Evans, who has three children at Icon Preparatory School, a predominantly Black private school, pictured above, that is serving choice scholarship students in Tampa. With education choice, “I get to control the narrative.” PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

It has been 31 years since the first modern private school choice program began in Milwaukee, 29 years since the first charter school opened in Minnesota, and 10 years since Arizona created the nation’s first education savings account program.

Yet in many states, the opportunity for America’s 7.7 million Black public-school students to access these potentially life-changing learning options remains out of reach.

Florida is a notably bright exception.

Florida has more than 600,000 Black students, among the highest number of any state. It has among the most expansive suite of education choice options. And now it has among the highest number of Black students enrolled in those options.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

D60exposed:

“A Decrepit School District Plagued by Corruption and Incompetence Turns to Ideological Indoctrination”

During the summer of 2021, I had enough.

Having witnessed a decade of dysfunction in one of Illinois’ worst public schools and the implementation of their ideological program rooted in Critical Race Theory, I created a blog called Chalkboard Heresy and began speaking out. Over time I revealed my identity, and now I have decided to “blow the whistle” on the entire sham of a system and its ideological agenda. This is the story of one school district in the United States of America.

Anyone who tried to warn that sustained school closings were severely harming children in all sorts of ways (physically, intellectually, mental health) and that those harms were being ignored was accused of being indifferent to COVID deaths, often by liberals with no kids: https://t.co/AFaEDlpxSW

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 9, 2021

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Wisconsin property taxpayers should see one of the smallest increases in years on their December bills, with levies for school districts barely rising, technical college levies declining for only the second time in at least two decades, and a state tax credit rising sharply. Yet even the small uptick in school district levies is surprising given earlier projections that increased state aid and federal pandemic relief would cause taxes to fall.

100% correct; the government has demonstrated their complete incompetence in every product or service they create or manage —- which is the opposite of the wildly competitive private sector. pic.twitter.com/eQQ5INl4xK

— jason@calacanis.com (@Jason) December 7, 2021

“Our students have a right to public education… That right should not be conditioned on the medical decision to receive a vaccine created last year for a disease that is not life-threatening for the overwhelming majority of children.” – Board approved letter from @clovisusd. pic.twitter.com/J4wcM4WYB0

— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) December 11, 2021

Michelle Fulcher:

The emergency is over,’ according to Governor Jared Polis, who explained on Colorado Matters on Friday that vaccines have changed the COVID-19 landscape, rendering masks useful but not required in the state’s fight against the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, Colorado continues to see a rise in hospitalizations and deaths among unvaccinated patients. With the state’s healthcare system overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients and staffing shortages, public health officials are worried another surge of infections may overwhelm already overworked hospitals and medical staff. And the emergence of the omicron variant in the state has introduced more uncertainty into the fight against the pandemic.

The Governor spoke about why he favors vaccination over mask mandates, despite many metro counties having implemented their own mandates to help control the spread of the virus. “Public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job,” the Governor said.

Meanwhile, Dane County / Madison continues to operate under “mandates” that have not been voted on by elected officials.

James Walsh:

Now we’re at this point where we may have the highly infectious Delta, which surely is causing very serious illness and deaths, up against one that is likely much more infectious and transmissible, and at the same time all of our early evidence suggests it may cause much less severe illness.

Sumantra Maitra:

So, what are Rufo’s theory and strategy? In the most important parts of the speech, Rufo discussed what he thought was “the Achilles heel of this cultural revolution”:

Critical theory… is entirely a creature of the state. It was born, and nurtured, and raised within publicly financed and publicly subsidized universities and it now survives only in this vast constellation of publicly supported and publicly subsidized bureaucracy; It also gives us a tremendous opportunity because what the public giveth the public can take [ ] away… We should never fight directly. It’s very hard. We should fight indirectly, in a more sophisticated way, to start slowly chipping away at these bureaucracies and institutional powers.

Rufo may be the most intellectually coherent and theoretically sound activist in the right to right of center, since perhaps Phyllis Schafly. And one can be thoroughly curious to find out that his strategy verges on a mix of libertarianism with political reaction—a sort of libertarianism that seeks to further reactionary aims. Perhaps that is why he constantly refers to his strategy as “counterrevolution,” and not “reaction,” as reaction might have a negative connotation in American politics.

Consider his strategy for freeing the country’s institutions—including higher education—from the pernicious ideology of critical theory. First, he argues that the right should “cripple the critical ideologies within the federal agencies through executive order; defund the left by blocking, delaying, and stalling federal grants that support the critical ideologies in universities, schools, and nonprofits; force all agencies to run any identity-based programs through OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] and strangle them in red tape.”

The fundamental aim would be to disrupt any federal financing of the cultural revolution for four or eight years, during which time Congress could pursue a longer-term strategy to destroy centralization. However one may wish to label this strategy, it is not “reactionary;” reactionary policies, tend to heavily focus on wielding state power. And Rufo’s goal is to take away the federal government’s power, not transfer it to another political party.

Member (and former President) of the SF school board thinks merit-based admissions are “segregationist”.

Meanwhile her kids go to a special magnet school for children gifted in the arts.

Utter hypocrisy. https://t.co/k6L2OwJg9E

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) December 9, 2021

Ann Althouse:

“There are a bunch of comments on the Internet about how, ‘Oh, these girls are just letting this happen. They should just boycott or protest.’ At the end of the day, it’s an individual sport. If we protest it, we’re only hurting ourselves because we’re going to miss out on all that we’ve been working for.” 

Women, being fake? That’s an old sexist stereotype — female guile and deceit. 

And speaking of old patterns… feminism always steps back politely and allows others to go first. Young girls get the message: Don’t be mean. No one will love you if you are mean. 

ADDED: Surely, Lia Thomas has read this news — the news that these teammates are 2-faced, fake friends. Here’s a test of femaleness, just a thought experiment, not a real, proposed test: Did Thomas break down and cry? Did Thomas confront the teammates in an emotional outburst?: How could you treat me this way? Lying to my face! I thought you were my friends!

Aaron Garth Smith:

Preliminary data on the 2019-2020 school year released by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that the state of New York now spends more than $30,000 per K-12 student, further entrenching its position as the most expensive public education system in the country. Despite this new public school spending milestone, falling enrollment and dissatisfied parents indicate education dollars aren’t doing enough to help kids.

All told, New York spends $30,772 per student each year. This number doesn’t account for recent influxes of cash including $13 billion in federal COVID-19 pandemic relief and $3 billion in state dollars for last school year that taxpayers are footing the bill for. New York City schools will get roughly half of this total windfall, amounting to billions in additional funding for the embattled school district.

For perspective, this means that a typical classroom of 20 students costs New York taxpayers $615,000 each year. Yet, some still claim public education isn’t adequately funded and that high-performing charter schools like Success Academy drain funding from public schools.

Boaz Barak, Edith Cohen, Adrian Mims and Jelani Nelson:

We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States. All of us have first-hand experience of the role that clear mathematical thinking has played in advancing information technology and American economic competitiveness. We all also share the urgent concern that the benefits of a robust mathematical education, and the career opportunities it opens up, should be shared more widely between students of all backgrounds, regardless of race, gender, and economic status. We fully agree that mathematics education “should not be a gatekeeper but a launchpad.”

However, we are deeply concerned about the unintended consequences of recent well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education, particularly the California Mathematics Framework (CMF). Such frameworks aim to reduce achievement gaps by limiting the availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers. While such reforms superficially seem “successful” at reducing disparities at the high school level, they are merely “kicking the can” to college. While it is possible to succeed in STEM at college without taking advanced courses in high school, it is more challenging. College students who need to spend their early years taking introductory math courses may require more time to graduate. They may need to give up other opportunities and are more likely to struggle academically. Such a reform would disadvantage K-12 public school students in the United States compared with their international and private-school peers. It may lead to a de facto privatization of advanced mathematics K-12 education and disproportionately harm students with fewer resources.

Aaron Garth Smith:

Preliminary data on the 2019-2020 school year released by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that the state of New York now spends more than $30,000 per K-12 student, further entrenching its position as the most expensive public education system in the country. Despite this new public school spending milestone, falling enrollment and dissatisfied parents indicate education dollars aren’t doing enough to help kids.

All told, New York spends $30,772 per student each year. This number doesn’t account for recent influxes of cash including $13 billion in federal COVID-19 pandemic relief and $3 billion in state dollars for last school year that taxpayers are footing the bill for. New York City schools will get roughly half of this total windfall, amounting to billions in additional funding for the embattled school district.

For perspective, this means that a typical classroom of 20 students costs New York taxpayers $615,000 each year. Yet, some still claim public education isn’t adequately funded and that high-performing charter schools like Success Academy drain funding from public schools.

K-12 spending will likely rise for the foreseeable future, but this trend is nothing new. A recent analysis by Reason Foundation reveals that between 2002 and 2019, New York’s inflation-adjusted public education revenue skyrocketed by $12,068 per pupil, or 68%. This is by far the highest growth rate in the country.

So where exactly are all of these additional dollars going? Not school choice, since New York does not allow programs such as education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarships that empower families with options outside of public schools. And they’re certainly not spent on New York City’s charter schools, which receive an estimated 19% less per student than traditional public schools, according to a study published by the University of Arkansas.

Madison spends more than most K-12 school districts.

Emily Hamer:

Public Health Madison & Dane County said it believes Dane is the only county in the state to still have a mandate.

Weigand and Rockwell said Public Health should explain what goals need to be met for the mask mandate to be lifted. They’re encouraging residents to share how masking has affected their families, businesses and schools.

“The citizens of Dane County deserve a forum to express their thoughts on this public policy issue,” Weigand and Rockwell said in a statement. “Whether one supports or opposes the mask mandates, the people should have the right to share their thoughts with Dane County’s elected officials.”

WMC Foundation PDF:

When it comes to education funding in Wisconsin, both Republicans and Democrats have made it a priority. The most recent State Budget approved spending $14.2 billion in state tax dollars on K-12 education – roughly 36 percent of the general fund budget.

s spending has continued to climb in recent years, educational outcomes have not. The most recent data available for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a bleak outlook for students. Only 41 percent of eighth graders and 45 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math in 2019, according to the NAEP tests.50
In reading, 39 percent of eighth graders and 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient.

Looking to the state’s Forward Exams, it appears the COVID-19 pandemic made a bad situation even worse. The Forward Exam tests proficiency for grades 3-8 in Wisconsin.

In the 2016-17 school year, 44.4 percent of students were proficient in English Language Arts. That number has dropped in subsequent years and hit a low of 33.7 percent in 2020-21.51 In math, 42.8 percent of students were proficient in the 2016-17 school year. The number went up and down slightly the next two years, but then dropped significantly to 33.6 percent in 2020-21.

The proficiency problems continue into and past high school. The latest data from the University of Wisconsin-System shows many students are not ready for college. Even though a four-year college degree is pushed as a one-size-fits-all answer for success in this country, Wisconsin schools are not always preparing students for this next step.

According to the UW-System, nearly one in five freshmen were required to take remedial math education in 2017. That number was over 20 percent from 2007 to 2013. In English, 6.3 percent of UW-System freshmen were required to take remedial education, though that number peaked at 9.9 percent in 2012.

s Wisconsin businesses struggle with a growing workforce shortage, poor outcomes in education are a big concern. Throughout the dozens of interviews conducted for Wisconsin 2035, a number of themes developed on how to improve the K-12 education system in the state.

Business leaders urged local school districts to keep the focus on core subjects like reading, writing and math with an added focus on STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – programming. Many, in fact, expressed concerns that subjects outside the core curriculum could be a distraction for students. They also pushed back at the one-size-fits-all approach to students and their potential success. Instead, they argue the curriculum should prepare students best for college OR a career – especially given so many rewarding careers in Wisconsin do not require a four-year degree.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Elizabeth Beyer:

Madison School Board member calls for action on COVID-19 paid time off for teachers, staff

A Madison School Board member is calling for the full board to address a lack of access to COVID-19 sick leave for district teachers and staff during the next board meeting.

As district policy stands, teachers and staff must use paid time off (PTO) and sick leave to cover COVID-related absences, including a required quarantine period if a teacher or staff member is identified as a close contact to a COVID-19 case, board member Nicki Vander Meulen said in an interview Thursday.

Vander Meulen said she sent an email to the full board and district administration six weeks ago asking the board to include the topic in its regular monthly meeting, but nothing came of her request. She re-sent the email in December and asked that the subject be added to the agenda in time for the board’s Dec. 13 meeting.

“One, that’s a safety risk because people can’t afford to miss work,” she said. “Two, it affects our Black, brown and disabled staff because majority of them are either hourly workers or in a position as an hourly worker with less access to time off and less access to sick days.”

Vander Meulen brought the subject up at Monday’s Instruction Work Group meeting and was told by district human resources staff that teachers and staff are using their personal time off to cover COVID-related absences.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Joseph Bernstein:

However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality.

Abigail Shrier:

Why am I unwilling to back down? Why wouldn’t I prostrate myself before the petulant mobs who insist that my standard journalistic investigation into a medical mystery—specifically, why so many teen girls were suddenly identifying as transgender and clamoring to alter their bodies—makes me a hater? Why on earth would I have chosen to write this book in the first place and am I glad that I wrote it?

You don’t have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective and unwilling to back down.

If you’re here, you no doubt are familiar with at least some of the unpleasantness you encounter whenever you deviate from the approved script. So, again, what’s it like to be the target of so much hate? It’s freeing. That’s what I’d like to talk about tonight.

As an undergraduate studying philosophy, I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering whether my will was free. This is the metaphysical question of whether anyone can be said to have acted ‘freely.’ And most of the philosophers seemed to agree that our will wasn’t all that free. The hard determinists painted a world in which every human action was ultimately explicable by the wave function of elementary particles, ultimately leading neurons to fire—setting off of axonal conduction well beyond our control and none of which we directed.

The Economist:

Parents seeking government money to send their children to religious schools have won a string of victories at America’s Supreme Court. The dollars began flowing in 2002, when the justices let states provide parents with vouchers for religious schooling. In 2017 the court said states may not exclude church-based preschools from grants for playground resurfacing. And in 2020, in Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue, parents persuaded the high court that their state must provide tuition assistance for students to attend religious schools if they also offer these funds for secular private schools.

James Freeman:

Since the start of the pandemic, some media folk have continued to insist on making obscene comparisons between the number of Americans who have died with Covid and the number of Americans killed in various wars, as if it’s irrelevant whether one dies at age 80 or age 18. But there is one way in which Covid really is similar to combat. In both cases, aging policy makers demand disproportionate sacrifices from the young. 

Fortunately children age 0 to 17 in the U.S. are always at comparatively low risk of death relative to their elders. When children have died in 2020 and 2021, the website of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 99% of cases the kids have died from something other than Covid.

Joanne Jacobs:

San Francisco hoped to close achievement gaps by adopting a new, detracked math curriculum that delays algebra till 9th grade, writes Joe Hong on CalMatters. Results are mixed, at best.

California’s proposed new math frameworkrecommends all districts follow San Francisco’s policies, citing the reforms as a success story, writes Hong. It’s complicated.

Fewer students are failing algebra — but the district dropped an end-of-course exam, making it easier to pass.

More students are taking AP statistics in 12th grade, but fewer qualify for AP calculus.

Joselyn Marroquin, a freshman at Lincoln High, is taking algebra and geometry in the same year, so she can take calculus in 12th grade. Her grandfather, who wants her to go to UCLA, paid $850 for her to take algebra in summer school, so she could handle the double load. Many families can’t afford that.

“It has led to even worse inequities and driven them underground,” said Elizabeth Statmore, a math teacher at the district’s Lowell High, the city’s top performing public high school. “People with means started finding other ways to get ahead.”

“Some schools offer a summer geometry course for which low-income students get priority enrollment,” writes Hong. “At other schools, students can take a one-year class that combines Algebra 2 and Precalculus.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Students made far below-average progress in the Honolulu, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Baltimore, and Salt Lake City metro areas, as well as Scranton, Harrisburg, Ogden (UT), Portland (ME), Tulsa and Knoxville, the analysis concluded.

In addition to academic growth, SLAM looks at growth for disadvantaged students, improvement in achievement over time and high school graduation rates. Viewers can go to the interactive site and give more weight to other factors. Do you think graduation rate should be more heavily weighted? Progress for lower-income students? Change the weighting and see the results.

Eduwonk:

Denis Doyle has passed. I didn’t know him really well but was fortunate enough to cross paths from time to time around various things. He was early to the leverage that data provided in education and built, with others, a company around that – Schoolnet. A few things stand out. First, his mind. You run into smart people in this sector all the time, and then you run into *smart* people in this sector. He was the latter. A real intellect, polymath, and curious person. Second, he was funny. He was kind, but he was hilarious. And finally, upon his passing, it was noteworthy the number of people who said things like, “a real mentor to me.” People spend a lot of time worrying about impact and legacy. People calling you out as a mentor, it seems to me, is impact and legacy.

Kevin Collier:

China-based propagandists created an elaborate online disinformation campaign this year centered on an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the public about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook researchers said Wednesday.

Going by the name Dr. Wilson Edwards, the persona wrote on Facebook that the U.S. was putting undue political pressure on the World Health Organization to blame China for the coronavirus. But Edwards isn’t a real person, which Switzerland’s embassy in Beijing made clear in August.

Facebook researchers said they found evidence that the person was the creation of a Chinese cybersecurity company.

Although the character got little attention in the West, he was credulously cited in Chinese state-sponsored media as a whistleblower on world health policy.

Facebook said it had traced that account’s creation to Sichuan Silence Information Technology, a company in central China. According to its website, Silence was founded in 2000 and offers a wide range of information security services — and it counts China’s Ministry of Public Security among its customers. An inquiry sent to an email address on the company’s website bounced back as undeliverable. 

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in an email that “China has shown a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude from the very beginning” in global efforts to research the origins of Covid-19, but did not address specifics about the Facebook account.

Chris Rickert:

The mother of the victim, identified only as “Erin” in the WMTV-TV news report, said the school did not call police about the attack. LeMonds said that was accurate but that the school called the victim’s parents, who came to the school and called police themselves. He said the school would have called police if the parents hadn’t.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Rebecca Diamond and Enrico Moretti

Low-income families who live in the most affordable commuting zone enjoy a level of market-based consumption measured in real terms that is 74% higher that of families with the same income who live in the least affordable commuting zone.
We estimate that the elasticity of overall market consumption with respect

Justin Haskins:

Based on tax data from 2017 and 2018, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced taxes for the vast majority of filers, led to substantial improvements in upward economic mobility, and disproportionately benefited working- and middle-class households, many of which experienced tax cuts topping 18 percent to 20 percent.

William Briggs:

This is update CIX.

Let’s summarize, shall we?

My first post on the panic was 27 January 2020: “Taleb Chastises Calm Journalist, Advises Precautionary Panic To Coronavirus“. Taleb almost at once became a shrinking, shrieking hersteric. Which I should have, but did not see, would have become the default position among Experts and rulers almost planetwide.

My second post was on 3 February 2020: “Unnecessary Panic Over Coronavirus?” Note the question mark, which left room for uncertainty, which at that time still existed. Health theater had already begun, and was laughable even then.

There was lots of uncertainty at the start. Would this bug stay in China, have just one wave, and so on. Many on our side bought the Chinese propaganda and panicked, and became just as hersterical as Taleb. This was exasperating. Our own Moldbug said, “In the next few months, you or someone you love will drown of a cough.” (He’s still at it, by the way.)

The word “exponential” was on everybody’s fingertips. Twitter became idiotic, with those on the right advocating panic, and those on the left screaming racism. 

This was just silly, so, for fun and instruction only, since I did not guess the size of the resulting panic, I posted on 13 February 2020 some R code I had been using to post projections on Twitter. This became Update I. This used only the data available at the time, and common models on pandemics. Exponential forever was impossible, but you could hardly get anybody to understand that.

I had no sense the entire world would retreat toward effeminacy, and so didn’t take these models seriously. Except to smack those who kept screaming doom. Even as early as February people thought this is the end. There were “sober” predictions of billions-with-a-B dead.

By 3 March, and Update III, we had Blue Cheka warning about farts. That update also showed what happened seasonally with flu, including the season leading into the Hong Kong fly pandemic of 1968.

We pointed out that there were many other pandemics, like the Asian Flu in 1957 and the Hong Kong, and others, which were much deadlier, and with no panics. Back then, the CDC had these historical events on their web page, saying each killed “up to four million” globally. They’ve since removed the “up to”. You have to laugh.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health.

Open Record:

It’s a FOX6 investigation that sparked change before it even went to air. Thousands of tax dollars poured into a school program — but was it for the kids or a school leader’s relationship? In this episode of Open Record, FOX6 Investigator Amanda St. Hilaire explains how she came upon AVID and the Wauwatosa School District. Amanda breaks down what AVID is and why a seemingly conflict of interest raised red flags. You’ll hear how the district responded, what the school board is doing about the issue, and what prompted Amanda to show up at a recent school board meeting

Florian Sohnke:

In Chicago, those days are long gone and the latest example of the lack of academic standards in Chicago’s hopelessly failing public schools is unfolding now at Steinmetz College Prep. Steinmetz has adopted a “zero grade” policy.

Located in Chicago’s Northwest Side Belmont Cragin neighborhood, the principal at Steinmetz is Mr. Jaime Jaramillo. A man with close to two decades in education, Jaramillo has served as principal at Steinmetz for three-and-a-half years. Over this time period, Steinmetz has seen little improvement in overall achievement scores so it is surprising Jaramillo would support a policy which lowers expectations for students.

Trotted out in front of the Steinmetz Local School Council in September, Jaramillo glibly explained the change was inspired by COVID realities, the necessity to accommodate students’ “challenges and circumstances,” and the desire to achieve “equity.”

Prior to “equity grading,” student grades existed on a 100-point scale, with A, B, C, and D 10-points apart. Grades beneath 59 were deemed failing, and those students who failed to turn in assignments altogether would receive a zero until the assignment was completed for partial credit.

Under Jaramillo’s new “equity” grading” system, students who fail to turn in an assigned tasks will receive a minimum grade of 45 percent; those who undertake a reasonable attempt would automatically receive a minimum grade of 50.

Just out today: @OhioState has a small army of 132 “diversicrats” at an avg. salary of $77,000 and total est. payroll cost of $13.4M, which would cover in-state tuition for 1,120 students https://t.co/C80vP05kvJ @jennsmola @CollegeFix @FreemanWSJ @stevenfhayward @charliekirk11 pic.twitter.com/piuXgBy4Rv

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) December 6, 2021

Media corporations meeting in secret with WH officials to discuss how to present a more optimistic view of Biden’s economic policies seems to me to be a bit like . . . . . . state TV.

But I’m glad (and unsurprised) to hear from CNN that the “conversations have been productive.” https://t.co/l9fsiV4ph6

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 7, 2021

Kelly Meyerhofer:

UW-Madison, other UW campuses want test-optional admissions extended 2 more years

The standardized test, a well-established college admissions requirement dreaded by many high school students, could be considered optional for another two years at all University of Wisconsin System campuses.

System officials are asking the UW Board of Regents this week to extend the current test-optional policy through the 2024-25 school year. The policy was implemented just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic when many students were unable to take the test because of extremely limited testing site availability.

Eric Kelderman:

The legacy of legendary academic prankster Alan Sokal lives on. In April 1996, the journal Social Text published an article by Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, that he later revealed to be entirely a joke.

His article was lauded by conservative critics of higher education for its sendup of the progressive political views taking hold in academe. It also raised a host of deep questions about not only the direction of scholarly inquiry but also the integrity of the peer review process.

AWF Edwards:

But now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him. It has removed from the Hall a stained-glass window commemorating him, one of a set of six installed to celebrate him, Crick, Venn, Chadwick and two other distinguished college figures, Sir Charles Sherrington and George Green. It has done so because of accusations that Fisher was a proponent of eugenics.

The college council stated its intentions last June:

Sir Ronald Fisher was a student, Fellow and President of Caius. His contribution to science, through his work on statistics and genetics, was fundamental to fields as wide ranging as clinical trials in medicine through to increased production in agriculture. However, while Fisher was at Cambridge [as a student] he became the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society and his interest in eugenics stimulated his interest in both statistics and genetics. He was a prominent proponent of eugenics, both in his scientific work and his public pronouncements throughout his career.

Fisher was the inspiration for the whole set of the six windows in Hall. His was the first to be suggested. The chosen design — the Latin Square from the dust-jacket of his book The Design of Experiments — set the tone for the rest. In particular, with this pattern in the lower window of an embrasure there was a need for something compatible in the upper window. The choice was not difficult: the three-circle logic diagram of John Venn, one of Fisher’s predecessors as President. These two windows were installed in time for the celebration of the centenary in 1990 of Fisher’s birth. They were much admired, and pressure for a further four soon mounted. The whole set was the work of Maria McClafferty, chosen on the strength of her rose window in Alexandra Palace, London.

After School Alliance:

Student-centered, active, and engaging learning experiences that build on young people’s interests, while developing their skills and knowledge, are
at the heart of high-quality afterschool programs. Young people of all ages can benefit from these experiences, however, there is increasing attention
on adolescence as a critical time for exposure to these types of learning opportunities. In addition to a period during which significant neurobiological and social and emotional growth occurs,1 adolescence is a time when young people discover their interests and passions as they begin on their path toward adulthood. Creating new and engaging learning opportunities for middle and high school students can help them find their inspiration, gain skills that will benefit them in and outside of the classroom, and play an active role in designing their own learning journey to reach their full potential.

Afterschool programs can provide older youth with opportunities to explore their interests and participate in activities that also allow them to earn credits toward their graduation requirements. These credit-for-learning opportunities can cover a wide range of content—from students earning physical education credits through a local YMCA to taking part in a boat-building course
for elective math or science credit. Credit-for-learning programs are a valuable resource to provide unique, challenging, and compelling learning opportunities that individualize knowledge acquisition and complement school day lessons for middle and high school youth.

“Expanded Learning Opportunities (ELOs)— our credit-for-learning programs—allow students to bring their full identities into school, for a unique, personalized learning experience. As students progress through their education, they become curious and develop interests. ELOs provide students with the opportunity to pursue interests both inside and outside the school setting that often evolve into career pathway goals after graduation.”

Wall Street Journal:

The last few years have seen a proliferation of “open letters” by academics in politics and the humanities in favor of progressive causes. The hard sciences are different, and when mathematicians, physicists and engineers speak up to defend the integrity of their fields, Americans should pay attention.

The latest example is a new public statement from hundreds of the country’s top quantitative scientists warning about the assault on math in schools. “We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States,” the statement begins. The social-justice wave of 2020 accelerated efforts to eliminate standardized testing and lower standards in math to give the appearance that achievement gaps don’t exist.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Aaron Ter:

Discrimination. Censorship. Elizabethtown College is quickly gaining a reputation for disregarding student rights. FIRE recently covered the college’s hosting of a racially segregated event. Now add to the college’s missteps its refusal to approve a student group’s guest speaker because of the speaker’s political views.

On Oct. 5, FIRE wrote privately to Etown, calling on the college to recommit to its strong promises of free expression after it notified the campus chapter of a student organization, Turning Point USA, that it could not host conservative political commentator Joe Basrawi. 

The college ignored our letter, just as it remained silent when we called out its decision to endorse racial segregation. If Etown won’t defend its actions to FIRE, the college at least owes its student body and the public an explanation for why it continues to trample on the rights it promises — or that it is required by federal law to respect, as in the case of nondiscrimination on the basis of race — to its students.

Alex Nester:

A top Democratic economist says the rise of “antiracist” math curricula is a national security threat.

Larry Summers, a Harvard economist who led the National Economic Council under former president Barack Obama, shared a letter on Monday signed by almost 600 academics that condemns the rise of woke math initiatives in K-12 schools. The letter says the initiatives have devalued foundational math courses such as algebra and limited advanced math courses “to reduce achievement gaps.” Summers calledrigorous math instruction “an economic and a national security imperative,” noting that “in China, math standards are not subject to continued erosion by social justice warriors who can’t themselves define exponential growth or solve quadratic equations.”

Radical education activists want to purge math curricula of allegedly racist practices, which include showing your work and arriving at the right answer. Democratic donors have played a role in propagating this now-popular trend in math education, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bankrolled A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, the nonprofit behind a curriculum that asks teachers to observe how math “is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

Proponents of “antiracist” curricula often push to eliminate advanced math classes in order to reduce achievement gaps for underprivileged students. The coalition behind the open letter, k12mathmatters, says this misguided approach diminishes “access to skills needed for social mobility.”

Haze Fan, a member of Bloomberg’s Beijing bureau, is still detained in China one year on, with no information forthcoming on her case https://t.co/xMu32Rk1sV via @bpolitics

— Rosalind Mathieson (@RosMathieson) December 7, 2021

Pew Research:

That framing is dramatically different from the coverage of the first few months of the Trump administration four years earlier. Then, 74% of all stories were oriented around his character and leadership, compared with only about one-quarter (26%) framed around his ideology and policy agenda. Another significant difference in their coverage is that while the negative Biden stories modestly outnumbered the positive ones, negative stories about Trump exceeded positive ones by four-to-one.

One new element of this year’s study – in Part 2 of this report – is a survey component that measures Americans’ exposure to and sense of news coverage during this early time period, how that differs by media diet, and how it compares with the analysis of media content in Part 1. For example, while the topic of the economy was covered most heavily by outlets with a left-leaning audience, a large majority of Americans, regardless of their media diet, report hearing a lot about the passage of the economic stimulus bill in the news. At the same time, the public’s sense of news coverage of the Biden administration is more positive than the study of the news coverage reveals: 46% of U.S. adults say that the early coverage they’ve seen about the Biden administration offered mostly positive assessments, far more than the 14% who say they’ve seen mostly negative ones.

Kaylee McGhee:

Conservatives must make education a policy priority — not only because it will help us win elections, as we saw in Virginia last month, but because education lays the very foundation for this movement and what it’s trying to do, which is to preserve the principles that founded this nation and the documents in which they are described.

A coalition of conservatives published a strategy this week that will help us do just that. Led by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and the Heritage Foundation, the signatories laid out a three-pronged plan: First, state legislators need to pass legislation that rejects the toxic racialism found in critical race theory. Second, the states must increase transparency regarding the curricula taught in public schools so that parents can be as involved as possible. And third, lawmakers need to expand school choice and give parents the power to pull their children out of the public school system if that’s what they would prefer.

Scott Girard

McFarland School District students considered close contacts of a person who tests positive for COVID-19 are no longer required to quarantine.

The School Board unanimously approved the change to COVID-19 protocols Monday. For most schools in Dane County, students who are considered close contacts and are unvaccinated are required to quarantine for 14 days from exposure or receive a test one week after exposure to allow them to return a few days earlier.

In a letter to Dane County school superintendents last month, Public Health Madison & Dane County director Janel Heinrich encouraged districts to continue quarantine practices.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health.

Wei Shan and Juan Chen:

On the internet, one may get the impression that the Chinese youth is increasingly nationalistic and hostile towards the West. But this is an oversimplification. Multiple national sample surveys find that Chinese youth are adopting Westernised values, with a greater preference for individualism and self-expression, and are less nationalistic. Yet, they are far from embracing Western democracy, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the recent Tokyo Olympics, Chinese netizens — many of whom belong to the post-1990s/2000s generations — caught international attention when they flooded a Japanese athlete’s social media account with hateful messages after he defeated his Chinese opponent. Likewise, Chinese netizens also rebuked a Taiwanese star who referred to Taiwanese athletes as “national players”. Such cases demonstrate the aggressive nationalistic sentiments of part of the Chinese youth known as the  “Little Pinks”.

To get a full picture of Chinese youths, we examined the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) and World Values Survey (WVS). Both surveys have been conducted in China for over a decade and give insights into generational changes.

Values and political orientation

Perhaps the most striking generational change is that younger generations in China are turning more individualistic. In Confucian culture and Leninist tradition, the state is viewed to be responsible for individuals’ well-being. In turn, individuals are expected to prioritise collective interests over their personal interests.

In the past four decades, however, rapid economic development has transformed Chinese society. The last four waves of the ABS survey, carried out from 2002 to 2015, reveal that the younger generation is more likely to place individual interests before collective interests.

The Public Domain Review:

At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Find here, in this advent-style calendar, our top pick of what lies in store for 2022. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights!

Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. Newly entering the public domain in 2022 will be: works by people who died in 1951, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America); works by people who died in 1971, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia); and works published in 1926 (and all pre-1923 sound recordings), for the United States.

Owen Thompson:

Racial segregation can occur across educational programs or classrooms within a given school, and there has been particular concern that gifted & talented programs may reduce integration within schools. This paper evaluates the contribution of gifted & talented education to racial segregation using data on the presence and racial composition of gifted & talented programs at virtually all US elementary schools over a span of nine school years. I first show that, consistent with widespread perceptions, gifted & talented programs do disproportionately enroll white and Asian students while Black, Hispanic and Native American students are underrepresented. However, I also show that accounting for the within-school racial sorting caused by these programs has little or no effect on standard measures of overall racial segregation. This is primarily because gifted & talented programs are a small share of total enrollments and do enroll non-negligible numbers of under-represented minority students. I also estimate changes in race-specific enrollments after schools initiate or discontinue gifted & talented programs, and find no significant enrollment changes after programs are eliminated or initiated. I conclude that gifted & talented education is a quantitatively small contributor to racial segregation in US elementary schools.

“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

WILL:

It is still not possible to infer fraud solely from these unlawfully cast votes or failure to maintain voter rolls.

There isn’t much, if any, evidence that these voters did anything intentionally wrong. In many instances, they seem to have relied on the advice of election officials. It is unclear whether, had these ballots been disqualified, the results of the election would have changed. And we do believe that a coordinated effort to exploit the weaknesses created by this failure to follow the law would likely have resulted in some discernible anomaly.

We found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found limited instances where ineligible persons voted or attempted to cast ballots. We found no evidence of more than one vote being cast in the name of the same voter. And our analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.

We found no evidence of significant problems with voting machines.

Donald Trump won communities that used Dominion voting machines with 57.2%, an increase from 2016. WILL’s review found that jurisdictions that used Dominion voting machines had no effect on the expected vote total.

Kvistad noted that MMSD completed a report similar to this one in 2011, but said it ended up “on a shelf.” This time, she said, the district has “got to do something different,” 

12 Slide Presentation (PDF):

Charge to the Task Force:

1. Reviewing and becoming familiar with the best evidence about the most effective ways to teach literacy in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade – and developing future teachers who can better teach literacy in schools.

2. Identifying how literacy, especially early literacy, is currently taught across MMSD and analyzing achievement data for MMSD students with respect to literacy.

3. Examining how literacy, especially early literacy, is being taught to teacher education students at UW-Madison’s School of Education and analyzing what these future teachers are currently learning about literacy.

4. Making recommendations to MMSD and the UW-Madison School of Education about steps to be taken that can strengthen literacy instruction in the Madison Schools and UW-Madison’s teacher education programs.

2021 Literacy Task Force Report (104 Page PDF):

MMSD’s most recent K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation was released a decade ago and many of the challenges identified in that report persist. The district has worked to provide coherent literacy instruction through adopting curricular approaches, creating professional learning opportunities, utilizing various forms of assessment, and adopting new tools and materials for teachers. An infrastructure was created to support these efforts, which relies heavily on instructional coaches to support teachers as they implement core practices at the school level. Other organizational contexts which contribute to the district’s current state of student literacy outcomes were also reviewed by the Task Force. Finally, it is of note that under the leadership of Dr. Carlton Jenkins, MMSD is using literacy at every level as an equity strategy to ensure all MMSD students receive high-quality, grade level instruction.

The evidence presented in this report paints a relatively consistent picture of literacy outcomes in MMSD. In analyzing the student outcomes across selected student demographic groups some troubling patterns are evident, presented below as three considerations:

Consideration 1. There are stark race and ethnicity differences in students’ outcomes in literacy from early elementary through high school. In particular, Black and Hispanic students’ level of proficiency and college readiness lags behind that of their White and Asian counterparts. Given their share of the population, White students are overrepresented among students who test as both proficient/advanced and college ready.

Consideration 2. As with race/ethnicity, there are also troubling outcome disparities across ELL and non-ELL students, low-income and non-low-income students, and special education and non-special education students that are consistent in each of the years measured.

Consideration 3. The overall patterns of grades 2, 4, 8, and 11 from year-to-year do not show significant increases in proficiency rates, indicating a need to strengthen core instruction for all students and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.

Scott Girard’s commentary notes:

Kvistad noted that MMSD completed a report similar to this one in 2011, but said it ended up “on a shelf.” This time, she said, the district has “got to do something different,” hoping that the task force group and partnership with UW-Madison will keep everyone involved accountable.

“We could have all stayed in the task force for a really long time talking,” she said. “But we actually have to go to action. And that’s why the charts were in there and the commitment to … the joint partnership.”

Diamond said the “high-level investment” from Jenkins and School of Education dean Diana Hess will help move the recommendations forward.

“Some of the things that are being recommended are enhancements of activities that are already underway, doing things in ways that are more productive, more focused, not necessarily creating things whole cloth,” he said. “And so I think a lot of the foundation is already there.”

More:

‘Recognize reading as a right for all children’

The first of the report’s 28 recommendations calls to “explicitly state and recognize reading as a right for all children.”

The language is reminiscent of a Michigan court case in which seven Detroit students brought a federal court case against the governor claiming that their inadequate education violated their rights under the 14th Amendment.

The report, however, makes clear that it uses the phrase “to describe a moral imperative,” and it “is not meant to be interpreted as a legal statement.”

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Ed Treleven:

An 18-year-old La Follette High School student accused of bringing a loaded gun to the Madison school last week was charged Monday with two gun possession-related charges, and also faces six additional new unrelated criminal cases.

The seven new cases against Marquan Webb, of Madison, brings to 11 the number of criminal cases Webb now faces, charges that include burglary, fraudulent credit card use, identity theft, driving a vehicle without owner’s consent, misappropriating identification, theft, battery, criminal damage to property and criminal trespass.

Three of the cases are misdemeanors, and the rest are felony cases.

The criminal complaint related to the incident at La Follette charged Webb with possession of a firearm on school grounds, possession of a firearm by a person previously adjudged delinquent as a juvenile, resisting police, two counts of felony bail jumping and two counts of misdemeanor bail jumping.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Joanne Jacobs:

Public school enrollment fell 3 percent last year and it’s down again this year in major cities, writes Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab.

Fadumo D. Kahin, right, dressed her family in Highwood Hills Elementary’s school color — orange — to protest the school’s possible closure at an Oct. 28 St. Paul School Board meeting. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle/Sahan Journal

A few districts are downsizing to match the fall in per-pupil revenue, but federal Covid aid is allowing districts to keep “under-enrolled schools open and fully staffed in the hopes that students come back.” That’s a dangerous gamble.

Beth Hawkins tells a tale of two cities on The 74.

Already losing students before the pandemic, Minneapolis Public Schools’ enrollment fell by more than 12 percent since fall of 2019-20. St. Paul has lost almost 10 percent.

Harold Hutchison:

The lawsuit filed Nov. 17 by two public interest law firms against the Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin over the clandestine social transition of a 12-year-old girl marks the latest in a series of cases where school officials allegedly initiated social gender transitions without parental consent.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, one of the public-interest firms suing the Waukesha-area school district, is also involved in litigation against the Madison Metropolitan School District. But one attorney involved in the litigation tells the Daily Caller News Foundation that policies and guidelines that are prompting schools to carry out clandestine transitions are in place across the country.

dailycallerlogo
“[T]his sort of thing is metastasizing like a cancer underneath the surface around the country,” Vernadette Broyles, president and general counsel of the Child and Parent Rights Campaign, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Broyles represents Jeff and January Littlejohn in a lawsuit that alleges that Leon County Schools in Florida began helping their daughter transition without their consent after their daughter experienced gender dysphoria during the spring and summer of 2020.

Mrs. Littlejohn told the DCNF she emailed her daughter’s math teacher, explaining that they “weren’t affirming at home,” but that they “didn’t feel like we could stop our daughter from using a nickname.”

Kevin Rector, Richard Winton:

“The fact that this has happened, her being shot and killed in her own home, after giving, sharing, and caring for 81 years has shaken the laws of the Universe,” declared Oprah Winfrey, expressing her grief over Avant’s killing to her 43 million Twitter followers. “The world is upside down.”

While overall city crime rates remain far below records set during the notorious gang wars of the 1990s, violent crime has jumped sharply in L.A., as it has in other cities. Much of the violence has occurred in poor communities and among vulnerable populations, such as the homeless, and receives little attention. 

However, since the start of the pandemic and more rapidly in recent months, crime has crept up in wealthier enclaves and thrust its way to the center of public discourse in L.A. — against a backdrop of COVID-19 angst, evolving political perceptions of what role police and prosecutors should play in society and, now, a holiday season upon which brick-and-mortar retailers are relying to stay afloat.

Some wonder if this could be a turning point for California, which for decades has been at the center of the movement for criminal justice reform, rolling back tough sentencing laws and reducing prison populations.

Matthew DeFour:

“I’m surprised it’s taken this long to get it, and it’s unfortunate board members have to see it in the news,” former Madison School Board president Gloria Reyes told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We need to be transparent about these issues even if we don’t have all the answers.”

Releasing the report also would have reassured families the district was addressing their concerns transparently and expeditiously. Now the students are suing the district and Kruchten for the psychological damage his actions caused.

Even though the district accidentally released the full report, it continues to deny requests for the same record, as well as a $30,000 third-party review of another hidden camera incident in an East High locker room. The locker room cameras were supposedly put in place to catch a custodian napping on the job, but they were in a location where special needs students changed clothes.

Joel Kotkin:

When we think of oppressive regimes, we immediately think of the Stalinist model portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the heavy-handed thought control associated with Hitler’s Reich or Mao’s China. But where the old propaganda was loud, crude and often lethal, the contemporary style of thought control takes the form of a gentle nudging towards orthodoxy – a gentle push that gradually closes off one’s critical faculties and leads one to comply with gently given directives. Governments around the world, including in the UK, notes the Guardian, have been embracing this approach with growing enthusiasm.

Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge. It now has widespread public supportand has influenced everything from health warnings for cigarettes to calorie counts for fast food. Yet nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote the ‘right behaviour’. 

Tech firms, both in the US and China, already use messaging nudges to ‘control behaviours’. They use their power to purge their platforms of the wrong messages, as both Facebook and Twitter did when they censored the New York Post’s pre-election story about President Biden’s dissolute son, Hunter. Meanwhile, these same firms blocked the account of Donald Trump, Biden’s admittedly awful predecessor, on the grounds that he was fostering ‘violence’ – and they did so while tolerating open calls for mayhem and killing from leftists and foreign governments.

Free speech is clearly not a high priority in Silicon Valley. ‘Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment’, Twitter’s new head Parag Agrawal said in a November 2020 interview. ‘Our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.’

Sadly, the ability of Agrawal and other oligarchs to shape opinion may only be in its infancy. Nearly half of US adults now get their news through Facebook or Google and for young people social media are even more important. Millennials in both the United States and the UK are almost three times as likely to get their information from these platforms as they are from print, television or radio.

Samuel Veissière and Julius Grey:

In a recent open letter signed by the executives of the Students’ Society of McGill University and seven student associations, a group of students demanded that Philip Carl Salzman be stripped of his emeritus status for publishing views with which they disagreed, and further demanded “an immediate, transparent, and student-centred overhaul of McGill’s Statement of Academic Freedom, enshrining the university’s commitment to inclusivity in teaching and research in policy.”

We agree that inclusivity and diversity in teaching, research, policy, scholarship, communication and knowledge translation are the core, inalienable principles without which free inquiry, open dialogue and the pursuit of truth cannot be carried out. These principles extend far beyond the mission of the university, and define the very fabric of democracy and freedom our societies have attained through long and difficult struggles for civil rights. We note that academics and public intellectuals, through their courage to dissent and question what is taken for granted, have historically played a crucial role in the advancement of such freedoms and civil rights. But we insist that inclusivity must begin with a commitment to a broad diversity of thought, methods, opinions, theoretical interests and political views, as well as an openness to tolerate dissent, disagreements and debate.

Daniel Estevez:

The recordings follow the usual observing cadence of Breakthrough Listen, described in Section 2.1 in this paper. Six scans of 5 minutes each are done. The primary target (in this case Voyager 1) is observed in three of the scans, called ON scans. In the three other scans, called OFF scans, other targets or the empty sky are observed. The ON and OFF scans alternate, starting with an ON scan. The goal of this schedule is to discard as local interference signals that are present both in an ON and OFF scan.

I think that these recordings have not been published yet in the Breakthrough Listen open data archive. I guess they will be published at some point when the data is curated.

The files I used are from compute node BLC23, which processed the data in a 187.5 MHz window around the frequency 8345.21484375 MHz. A total of 24 compute nodes were used in this observation to cover the span between 7501.5 and 11251.5 MHz approximately (a few of the 187.5 MHz windows were duplicated into two nodes).

Good Optics:

A few years ago at a party I was explaining some interpretive debate about Marx to a friend. Marx, I was saying, might have believed A, or he might have believed B, and there is evidence on both sides. My friend objected: what does it matter? Surely we should talk about whether A or B (or neither) is correct, not about which of them a guy from the Rhineland who died almost 150 years ago believed. 

Prima facie, this is a pretty good objection. It is a good objection because a lot of people who study the history of ideas don’t seem to realize that it is an error to believe something merely because someone whom you consider to be wise believed it. 

But I think the history of ideas is worth studying. Some of the reasons for this are pretty complicated (see here and here), but two are simple:

Bismee Taskin:

The Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police has busted a “module” that has allegedly been taking online IT certification exams on behalf of students and professionals aiming to boost their career prospects in IT companies. So far, the police have arrested three people in connection with the money-for-marks scheme.

According to the police, the masterminds of the high-tech cheating racket are a father-and-son duo, Rajesh Kumar Shah and Deep Shah, who run an IT coaching institute in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The two allegedly hired a Delhi-based technical expert, Aklakh Alam, to take the exams remotely for clients.

“We received intel that several services are available on the dark web, in which hackers claim they can get the desired score by hacking into the device used by the examinee,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) K.P.S. Malhotra told ThePrint. Another police source said that the accused charged around Rs 9,000-10,000, and gave exams for about 200 clients.

The caveat that the Feds are placing on 5% of this big pot of money is a big deal. It will be very interesting to see what response there is from Republican legislative leaders. https://t.co/Kt7Dfy48TZ

— Alan Borsuk (@alanjborsuk) December 6, 2021

Richard Phelps:

Given the enormity of the public and private investment in US higher education, of course we should evaluate its effectiveness. But, how?

It is claimed that over 200 higher education institutions administer the one-size-fits-all Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). When administered pre-post—that is, near the beginning and then again near the end of a student’s program—the difference in scores on equivalent forms of the same test (i.e., the “gain score”) represents how much students have learned in that program. Or does it?

Everyone knows that any one test cannot be valid in all contexts. Administering an advanced calculus exam to kindergarteners would not tell us much, for example, nor would administering it as a college exit exam for art majors. College students study a wide variety of topics.

According to the CLA’s owner, the Council for Aid to Education (CAE),

One of the unique features of CLA+ is that no prior knowledge of any specific content area is necessary in order to perform well on the assessment.

Given that much of a student’s time in college is devoted to accumulating knowledge of specific content, this seems problematic. And according to cognitive scientists, it is. “Higher-order” skills, such as lateral thinking and experimentation, depend on the accumulation of a critical mass of knowledge. Content-free or generic skills do not exist.

If not from cognitive scientists, then, where does the belief in generic skills come from? Ed schools. The cynic in me wants to classify this as another attempt by US educators to hide from meaningful measurement. One of them might say, however, that factual content is readily available just a mouse click away on the internet. Such is true, but only in isolated, disaggregated forms.

Look beyond the college promotional froth about building better citizens, molding character, and teaching “higher-order skills,” such as “reasoning, critical reading and evaluation, and critique.” One will find remaining the more measurable and unfairly derogated benefit of “recall of factual knowledge,” which the CLA eschews.

Emily Hamer:

Janeway said they were “very ignited by” the posts. Janeway wants to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders that they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker.

“I go back to school on Tuesday and on Thursday, and I will be face to face with kids who use they/them pronouns,” Janeway said. “I have nothing but an urge and an inspiration to stand up for them.”

Janeway is a prominent activist who used to go by Andi, but recently changed their first name to Shepherd.

Walters, 55, is a mother of three who has experience teaching photography and art, including a program for children at risk. She ran for lieutenant governor in 2014 as a Democrat. She said safety in schools is her biggest priority.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Christopher F. RufoJames R. CoplandJohn Ketcham;

The purpose of this policy document is to ensure public transparency in schools’ instructional, training, and learning materials; and to give parents and students reasonable access to review such materials.
SECTION 2. TRANSPARENCY IN TRAINING AND CURRICULUM
A. The governing body of a public school, including public charter schools, shall ensure that the following information is displayed on the school website in an easily accessible location:

Tutanota:

As “amazingly specific” judges the German news magazine Die Zeit the coalition plan for a ‘right to encryption’.

Consequently, the coalition agreement was met with great approval, especially among net activists. The website Netzpolitik.org sees “many good and exciting promises,” but it is now a matter of implementation. And members of the Chaos Computer Club point out the great similarities between the new coalition paper and a formulation aid from the hacker association.

Taken together, the coaliation agreement signals a change in politics in Berlin. The former government led by the conversatives CDU/CSU repeatedly pushed for more surveillance, but fortunately, the new one plans to take a different road.

Rebecca Smith and Andrea Fuller:

Professional degrees like dentistry and veterinary medicine are leaving many students with immense college debt, threatening the outlook for fields that provide essential public services, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data.

Sara Jastrebski finished her veterinary studies at the University of Pennsylvania in May with about $400,000 in student debt, including more than $30,000 in loans from prior studies elsewhere.

Now working as an associate veterinarian for about $100,000 a year, Dr. Jastrebski, 29 years old, said she loves being a vet but is haunted by the tremendous cost of her education. “It doesn’t dominate my thoughts, but it’s always there,” she said.

In addition to programs for veterinarians and dentists, chiropractic medicine, physical therapy and optometry produced graduates with some of the worst combinations of high debt and modest beginning paychecks, according to newly released data from the U.S. Department of Education.

Students pursuing professional programs can take out loans to cover all their school costs and living expenses under a federal loan program called Grad Plus.

David Blaska:

Yet students of color continue to be disproportionately disciplined. “The simple fact is this: black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids,” acknowledges John McWhorter, in his book Woke Racism.

You want “equity”? According to MMSD data from 2017-18, 59% of disciplinary actions were taken against boys, even though they account for 49% of enrollment. To play their game: Why are Madison schools biased against boys? Professor McWhorter, himself black, argues:

To insist that bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white boys, is to espouse harming black students [who are left] not only improperly educated but beaten up.

Trouble at school? School district teachers and staff must navigate a 111-page school safety plan. Its flow chart is no help; it’s a bewildering corn maze of 23 possible action steps that begin with “Notify Central Office.” Try to find “call the cops” despite the mandate of state law to report serious threats.

Time and again, the school district pulls the rug out from under disciplinarians. The most tragic example is the white “positive behavior coach” beaten by an unruly black student at Whitehorse middle school in 2019. He did everything by the book. He still got the hook.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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

Glenn Greenwald:

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

Markus Strasser:

;DR: I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing “insights” from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry.

Batya Ungar-Sargon:

The documents revealed a serious breach of journalistic ethics, though by no means Chris Cuomo’s worst. His coverage of the pandemic included staging a fake emergence from quarantine, and turning interviews with his brother, then governor, into a family joshing session, even as his brother was overseeing the deaths of 20,000 elderly and developmentally disabled New Yorkers through an edict that forced the COVID-positive back into nursing homes. 

There’s a deeper truth here about the interconnection of our political and journalistic elites. Because Chris Cuomo using his journalistic star power to protect his brother, who was using his political star power to harass and grope women and sentence seniors and the developmentally disabled to death, is not an aberration of how these two sectors of America’s elites operate. It is instead a perfect literalization of the role our elite chattering class plays consolidating the power of its chosen celebrity politicians.

Dave Cieslewicz

That one demonstrated some of the dysfunction of the district. Their spokesperson denied that anything had happened at the school because, technically, the incident, which involved students enrolled at West, occurred on a sidewalk that wasn’t part of school property.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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.

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