Matthew Ingram:

Just after the report was published, the Times revealed that a previous version had been shelved, because it showed one of the top links on the site was to a story that said a doctor died from the COVID-19 vaccine, a report from the Chicago Tribune that was circulated widely by anti-vaccination groups and pages. Facebook said this piece of data was left out because it was still tweaking the way in which its systems reported views of content—housecleaning, a Facebook spokesman called it—but the fact that the only post that got removed was a story that became hugely popular with anti-vax disinformation groups seemed more than a little suspicious, especially since Facebook has been the subject ofsome harsh criticism from President Joe Biden about exactly this kind of content.

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

Katherine Spitz:

It has been brought to our attention that a geometry teacher at Rufus King High School, Kara Grier, issued a survey on the first day of classes asking students about their vaccination status and demanding that those who were not vaccinated provide the teacher with reasons why they are not. The teacher specifically designated this as a “required” question using a red asterisk, meaning that the survey would not be considered “completed” unless the question was answered:

Michael Lewis:

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Why this stumbling in the fog? It may seem like we’re drowning in data: Dashboards and charts are everywhere. However, not all data is equal in its power to illuminate, and worse, sometimes it can even be misleading.

Few things have been as lacking in clarity as the risks for children. Testing in schools is haphazard, follow-up reporting is poor and data on hospitalization of children appears to be unreliable, even if those cases are rare. The Food and Drug Administration has asked thatvaccine trials for children aged 5 to 11 be expanded, which is wise, but why weren’t they bigger to begin with?

While the pandemic has produced many fine examples of research and meticulous data collection, we are still lacking in detailed and systematic data on cases, contact-tracing, breakthrough infections and vaccine efficacy over time, as well as randomized trials of interventions like boosters. This has left us playing catch-up with emerging threats like the Delta variant and has left policymakers struggling to make timely decisions in a manner that inspires confidence.

To see the dangers of insufficient data and the powers of appropriate data, consider the case of dexamethasone, an inexpensive generic corticosteroid drug.

In the early days of the pandemic, doctors were warned against using it to treat Covid patients. The limited literature from SARS and MERS — illnesses related to Covid — suggested that steroids, which suppress the immune system, would harm rather than help Covid patients.

Caldron pool:

Around 50 South Australian residents have installed the new Home Quarantine SA app as part of the trial which will assist the government in monitoring compliance with the state’s mandatory isolation requirements.

iTnews reports: “The app will allow trial participants to ‘confirm their location with regular check-ins’ through a live face check-in feature that uses facial recognition and location verification.”

Individuals will be sent random location checks which they will be required to respond to within a 15-minute time frame to prove they are at their registered quarantine address by showing their face alongside current geolocation data.

SA Premier Steven Marshall said if the trial proves successful the app could provide “more options for home quarantine for returned South Australians.”

Matt Ferraro:

But first: How is this even possible?

Let’s focus on the 2D image before talking about the hologram.

The physical phenomenon we’re looking at is called a caustic.

Dan Lennington:

Why would SCOTUS overturn CDC’s ban on evictions? Because the CDC doesn’t have that power. Regardless of personal politics, no one should want agencies to exercise powers they don’t have. If you like the ban, here are some questions to ponder from SCOTUS:

Additional commentary here.

Chia C. Wang, Kimberly A. Prather,, Josué Sznitman, Jose L. Jimenez, Seema S. Lakdawala, Zeynep Tufekci, Linsey C. Marr:

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted controversies and unknowns about how respiratory pathogens spread between hosts. Traditionally, it was thought that respiratory pathogens spread between people through large droplets produced in coughs and through contact with contaminated surfaces (fomites). However, several respiratory pathogens are known to spread through small respiratory aerosols, which can float and travel in air flows, infecting people who inhale them at short and long distances from the infected person. Wang et al.review recent advances in understanding airborne transmission gained from studying the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections and other respiratory pathogens. The authors suggest that airborne transmission may be the dominant form of transmission for several respiratory pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, and that further understanding of the mechanisms underlying infection from the airborne route will better inform mitigation measures.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Anna Staver & Grace Deng:

Maybe the parents don’t want kids coming from outside the district. Maybe the schools are worried about test scores. Or maybe they see a single, African American parent and make assumptions about her family without knowing the full picture.

School choice advocates agree with Brittman. And that’s why they want to mandate open enrollment across Ohio.

“If people want to see systematic racism at work look at the map of districts that do and don’t allow it,” Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer said. “It is the most racist policy in Ohio, and it is perpetuated by the public school system.”

Mike Antonucci:

The combined annual incomes of the National Education Association and its state affiliates as of Aug. 31, 2019, was $1,663,883,934. That was an increase of $45,727 from the previous year, or 0.003 percent.

That’s not to say there was no effect whatsoever. Thirty-one state affiliates lost members that year, and 24 saw a reduction in revenues. But there is no consistent correlation between membership levels or revenues and states where there were either #RedforEd protests or agency fee laws.

All the financial information comes from the unions’ annual disclosure reports for the Internal Revenue Service detailing their income and expenditures. These are public records, but the pandemic created a long delay before the IRS made many of them available.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Edward Snowden:

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn’t matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however… As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but…

Chhantyal:

1. Code Complete (2nd edition) by Steve McConnell
2. The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Sussman and Abelson (free ebook)
4. The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
5. Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein
6. Design Patterns by the Gang of Four
7. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
8. The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks
9. The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth
10. Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman
11. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
12. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
13. Effective C++ by Scott Meyers

‘”Yeah, I didn’t find the CDC’s statement entirely accurate.”

Wenseleers, one of first scientists to formally calculate the transmission advantage of the alpha and delta variants over the original versions of SARS-CoV-2@NPR corrects @CDCgov misinfo:https://t.co/aBgJXjvZjA

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) August 11, 2021

Harvard school Of Education

Why is this research being conducted?

This study examines the impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19; also called SARS-CoV-2) pandemic on literacy environment in the home. We are looking for parents with children under the age of 11 to complete this one-time questionnaire. We expect about 750 adults to participate in this study.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Karen Pearlman:

At least 24 students from the Cajon Valley Union School District in El Cajon and 16 parents are stranded in Afghanistan after taking a summer trip abroad.

They are among thousands of individuals waiting to leave the country amid political unrest caused by the U.S. military pullout after 20 years of occupation. The U.S. government is accelerating efforts to rescue Americans as the Taliban takes over the country.

Cajon Valley Supt. David Miyashiro told school district board members via text message Tuesday that he and other Cajon Valley staff met virtually with U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) and his staff about the situation.

Miyashiro said that the families are on special visas for U.S. military service and that the Department of Defense considers them allies. He said that the district was able to provide information on the families and that government officials are working to locate the children and their families. He said he was encouraged by the assistance.

Francis Dinkelspiel:

An Alameda County judge has ordered UC Berkeley to freeze its enrollment at 2020-21 levels going forward until the university redoes a supplemental environmental impact report (SEIR) for a complex on Hearst Avenue that includes housing and a new academic building for the Goldman School of Public Policy. The freeze will take effect in 2022-23.

The order to freeze enrollment comes a little more than a month after Judge Brad Seligman ruled that UC Berkeley abused its discretion when it failed to study the impacts of increasing its enrollment by 33.7%, or 11,285 students, from 2005 to 2020. That was just one of the deficiencies in the supplemental environmental impact report for what is called the Upper Hearst Project, the judge ruled.

Helena Holmlund, Mikael Lindahl and Erik Plug:

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent’s schooling on child’s schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies.

Jacob Silverman:

Of all the transparency organizations, hackers, whistleblowers, and leakers that have emerged since WikiLeaks stopped publishing data in December 2018 (before resuming in August), ­­DDoSecrets stands apart, not just for its collaborative discipline, technical sophistication, and a wide network of sources, but also for its lack of ego and aggressive commitment to transparency. That alchemical combination doesn’t mean the group is without internal disagreements or public criticism—indeed, its growing prominence and willingness to push the envelope of what it publishes seem to earn the organization enemies wherever it goes: In February, Gab CEO Andrew Torba said that “mentally ill tranny demon hackers” were attacking his company—an absurd description that DDoSecrets members, many of whom are trans or queer, have reappropriated. (Emma Best, perhaps the collective’s most prominent representative, briefly added the phrase “Demon Hacker” to their display name on Twitter.)

In the murky world of hacked and leaked materials, which often contain personal or sensitive information, DDoSecrets has had to grapple with thorny questions: What should be published? Who can the group trust? And how can transparency work survive when tech companies are ready to cooperate with government investigators in preserving official secrecy and criminalizing investigative journalism? Distributed Denial of Secrets is still figuring that out.

Freddie deBoer:

Do school expenditures determine student performance? Are our educational gaps resource gaps? I would have thought that I could confidently answer with a no and not be challenged, at this point. People have regressed spending by countries, states, and districts on outcome metrics for a long time, and they pretty much universally show that there is no relationship between spending and success as defined in traditional terms. Neither countries that spend more nor states that spend more consistently outperform their stingier counterparts. We haven’t been able to make real causal statements, but in education we almost never can, nor is it easy to do so at the scales we’re talking about here. Perhaps the most commonly-cited review comes from the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek1, who is a zealous advocate of teacher quality measures (and their nastier consequences) and who since the 1980s has been a loud voice saying that we can’t spend our way out of our problems. In the intervening decades this view has become the conventional wisdom. But lately, there’s been a growing sense that it’s wrong.

I doubt that anyone would object to the claim that the United States has been trying to spend its way out of educational inequality for decades. Though you sometimes hear, absurdly, that we are “defunding” education, we are spending as much as we ever have, in inflation-adjusted dollars, and that is significantly more than we spent for the great bulk of the history of public education. And this funding increase has been steered in dominant majorities towards “need,” which means poorer schools and disproportionately higher-minority schools2. It’s typical for left-leaning people to lament that poor districts are broadly underfunded relative to others, but it’s hard to justify this belief. Part of the perception problem is that people are operating in a local-spending dominant mindset, when that reality doesn’t really exist anymore.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Joanne Jacobs:

Is meritocracy, like the ancien regime in the 18th century, heading for the guillotine?,” asks Kay S. Hymowitz in a review of Adrian Wooldridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.

Meritocracy is a radical idea, Wooldridge argues.

The idea that rulers should be the most worthy, not the sons and grandsons of the powerful, was first advanced by Plato. The guardians of his Republic — “men of gold” — would be those “with natural talents, pedigree be damned,” Hymowitz writes.

“The only other proto-meritocratic social order came from Asia” where the Chinese allowed those who passed a series of exams to become mandarins serving the emperor (who inherited the title).

Elsewhere, nobles or church elders sometimes helped “a few exceptional low-born strivers” rise to prominence, Woodridge notes. The nobles needed smart bureaucrats to do the work. (I highly recommend Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who became one of the most powerful men in England under Henry VIII.)

John McWhorter:

And a crude performance at that. The students essentially demanded that an irrational, prescientific kind of fear — that a person can be meaningfully injured by the dead — be accepted as insight. They imply that the rock’s denotation of racism is akin to a Confederate statue’s denotation of the same, neglecting the glaringly obvious matter of degree here — as in, imagine pulling down a statue upon finding that the person memorialized had uttered a single racist thing once in his or her life.

We are to pretend these students are engaged in something called critique. Interesting, though, that the root of that word, “krei,” originally referred to making distinctions, as did the root of the word science as in knowledge. These students are implying instead that on race matters, the advanced way is to resist distinguishing.

The philosopher George Santayana analyzed criticism as “dividing the immortal from the mortal part of the soul,” as in isolating for posterity that which is true, essential. These students’ critique suggests, among other things, that something that hurts you makes you weaker. Is that really what we want to classify as truth — essence? How can the same people who would lustily insist that Black people are strong get behind having a rock removed from their sight because of something some boob wrote about it some 100 years ago?

The true fault here lies with the school’s administration, whose deer tails popped up as they bolted into the forest, out of a fear of going against the commandments of what we today call antiracism, which apparently includes treating Black people as simpletons and thinking of it as reckoning.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Selim Algar:

“Sadly, since the onset of the pandemic, our school roster has declined by 120 students who have left our school,” Garraway wrote.  “We will miss them!  Due to the drastic decline in our numbers, our budget to pay teacher salaries was drastically reduced.”

The school had 345 kids in 2018-2019, the school year before the pandemic hit, and is slated to enroll around just 225 students this upcoming year, according to the principal’s note.

PS 118’s kindergarten enrollment has plunged by more than 50 percent over the last two years, going from 76 in 2019 to just 37 last year.

School sources said some families have abandoned the city outright while others are opting for local parochial or private schools with consistent full-time schooling.

Ashish Valentine:

James Loewen, a renowned sociologist, public educator and racial justice activist, died on Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was the author of several books, including the best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me. He was 79. 

His death was confirmed by Stephen Berrey, a peer and professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan. He says Loewen had been diagnosed with bladder cancer about two years ago.

Loewen was born Feb. 6, 1942, in Decatur, Ill., and based his career on dispelling commonly held myths about racial progress in American history. His goal was to give the public historical tools that he hoped would help people achieve concrete change towards racial justice in the present. 

Loewen told NPR’s Gene Demby in an interview in 2018 that he decided to write his first high school text about race and history when he asked a class of students at Tougaloo College, a historically Black university near Jackson, Miss., what they knew about Reconstruction.

Joel Hruska

The rise of the internet permits the use of new types of nonfinancial customer data, such as browsing histories and online shopping behavior of individuals, or customer ratings for online vendors.

The literature suggests that such non-financial data are valuable for financial decision making. Berg et al. (2019) show that easy-to-collect information such as the so-called “digital footprint” (email provider, mobile carrier, operating system, etc.) performs as well as traditional credit scores in assessing borrower risk. Moreover, there are complementarities between financial and non-financial data: combining credit scores and digital footprint further improves loan default predictions. Accordingly, the incorporation of non-financial data can lead to significant efficiency gains in financial intermediation.

Michael Shellenberger:

Rather than address racial disparities the governor’s appointees are lowering educational standards for all children. Most nations, including developing ones like Zimbabwe, require students to have three or more years of algebra, and require students seeking science and technology careers to have five. But the governor’s appointees on the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission recently recommended that public school students should take the same math classes in middle school through their sophomore year of high school instead of allowing high-achieving students to take advanced or even traditional math courses starting in the sixth grade.

People rightly worry about the cost, but there is plenty of money. California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and highest sales tax in the United States. It spends significantly more than other states on homelessness and mental illness. We have a $80 billion budget surplus. And yet we have the worst outcomes.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Michael Shellenbergersschsh

Rather than address racial disparities the governor’s appointees are lowering educational standards for all children. Most nations, including developing ones like Zimbabwe, require students to have three or more years of algebra, and require students seeking science and technology careers to have five. But the governor’s appointees on the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission recently recommended that public school students should take the same math classes in middle school through their sophomore year of high school instead of allowing high-achieving students to take advanced or even traditional math courses starting in the sixth grade.

People rightly worry about the cost, but there is plenty of money. California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and highest sales tax in the United States. It spends significantly more than other states on homelessness and mental illness. We have a $80 billion budget surplus. And yet we have the worst outcomes.

Emily Files

Hamilton Superintendent Paul Mielke believes his district is following CDC recommendations.

“It still came across as a ‘recommend’ and we are strongly recommending [masks,]” Mielke says. “So we’re actually matching their language. If they would have said schools should mandate, we would have looked at that.”

Still, Mielke says the masking decision was one of the hardest he’s had to make. He usually favors local control. But this situation puts him in an awkward position.

“People feel very strongly both ways on this, so I think no matter what decision we would have made, we would have had some families looking at other options, educationally,” Mielke says. “That’s why we tried to come up with an in-between.”

The compromise he came up with was to put a “trigger” in place to require masks if community case numbers reach a certain level. As the more contagious delta variant circulates, the Hamilton district and most other school districts already have a high amount of COVID transmissionwithin their boundaries.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

John Tierney:

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world.

Marilyn Anderson Rhames:

Overall, 31% of all K-12 parents were frustrated by the pressure to fit in or conform in the public school where their oldest child attends. However, evangelical Christian parents were no more frustrated than their non-evangelical counterparts. Frustration over having to conform to the secularism of public schools was also not statistically different for white evangelical Christians compared to evangelicals of color (which includes Black, Latinx, Asian, and biracial groups). Race did, however, have some association with frustration about pressure to fit in, with Black parents, overall, 12 percentage points less likely to be frustrated about such pressure than white parents.

Religious bias

Only 8% of all K-12 parents thought religious bias was a problem in the public school that their oldest child attends. Considering the headline-making culture wars and litigation that have taken place between evangelical Christians and public school administrators involving such issues as school prayer and religious clubs, one might assume that evangelicals made up the majority of that 8%. Surprisingly, however, evangelical parents were no more frustrated by religious bias in public schools than were non-evangelical parents. This was true for parents on all points of the ideological spectrum; that is, extremely conservative, moderate, and extremely liberal parents were all statistically identical to each other as it pertained to their perceptions of religious bias in public schools.

Parents with a high school education or less, however, were 5.4 percentage points more likely than more educated parents to be frustrated by religious bias in public schools. The cause of this is unknown; perhaps less educated parents feel misunderstood more often in academic settings and see their religious beliefs as a factor in that disconnection.

Rice University:

Over 90% of the positive infections came from a single test provider; three-quarters of the positive tests were from people who reported no symptoms; the positive results were widely scattered across various groups in our population, with only one potential cluster that seemed more likely to be associated with their proximity to a particular testing location; and over 90% of the reported infections were for people who were fully vaccinated.

We then reviewed the detailed data and noted some very unusual patterns in the results that suggested there was a possible issue with a testing provider rather than a broader campus outbreak. When we consulted with that provider, we learned that they had begun using a different protocol than they had previously used at Rice, resulting in significant differences in how test results are decided. This change in testing protocol had not been disclosed to Rice. We asked that they immediately revert to their prior testing protocol and they have done so.

Contrast the experience of schoolchildren in the Netherlands—no mask mandates or distancing for kids <12, ever—to the widespread US belief that we absolutely must mask kindergartners all day in school for their safety.

You owe it to yourself to read the entire thing, I promise. pic.twitter.com/QrLaJSRph5

— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) August 23, 2021

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

William Park:

Perhaps because we do not have equivalent cultural idioms, “speak” seems to work. In real conversations between a negotiator and person in crisis, when the negotiator says “speak” (“I wanna come down and I wanna speak to you…”) they get their desired response. In some cases, the person in crisis interrupts the negotiator to begin talking. Despite being near-synonyms, one word is loaded with context that makes it ineffective in these scenarios, while the other is free of those associations.

Being willing

Mediators have also found power in words to turn around someone who is disengaged. These professional facilitators might assist in business negotiations, family grievances or disputes between neighbours. They are experts in making sure conversations reach as positive a conclusion as possible. In the UK, for example, all people in child custody disputes must first attempt to reach an agreement through a family mediation service.

Zack Whittaker:

But critics have argued that geofence warrants are unconstitutional because the authorities compel Google to turn over data on everyone else who was in the same geographic area.

Worse, these warrants have been known to ensnare entirely innocent people

TechCrunch reported earlier this year that Minneapolis police used a geofence warrant to identify individuals accused of sparking violence in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd last year. One person on the ground who was filming and documenting the protests had his location data requested by police for being close to the violence. NBC News reported last year how one Gainesville, Fla. resident whose information was given by Google to police investigating a burglary was able to prove his innocence thanks to an app on his phone that tracked his fitness activity.

Although the courts have yet to deliberate widely on the legality of geofence warrants, some states are drafting laws to push back against them. New York lawmakers proposed a bill last year that would ban geofence warrants in the state amid fears that police could use these warrants to target protesters — as what happened in Minneapolis.

Cahn, who helped introduce the New York bill last year, said the newly released data will “help spur lawmakers to outlaw the technology.”

John Naughton:

Which brings us back to my conversation with that former cabinet minister. At the root of his invincible complacency that it was OK for the state to monitor citizens – and to build and maintain databases of very sensitive information about them – was that it would all happen under legally accountable oversight. Underpinning that was confidence in the permanency of liberal democracy as a rock-solid system of governance. What we have learned since Snowden is that it’s actually much more fragile than we realised and that it depends on political leaders who respect norms and conventions (what Peter Hennessy famously called the “good chap” theory of governance). Those comfortable assumptions were exploded by Trump in 2016 and by Boris Johnson in 2019. And anyone who still believes the state can be trusted to respect the privacy of its citizens (or, in the case of the UK, its subjects) simply hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been going on.

Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman:

All three of us are mathematicians who came to the United States as young immigrants, having been attracted by the unmatched quality and openness of American universities. We came, as many others before and after, with nothing more than a good education and a strong desire to succeed. As David Hilbert famously said, “Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.” Having built our careers in US academia, we are proud to call ourselves American mathematicians.

The United States has been dominant in the mathematical sciences since the mass exodus of European scientists in the 1930s. Because mathematics is the basis of science—as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics—US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage. But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.

First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system. Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.

Steven Potter:

A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found huge increases in student enrollment in virtual charter and homeschooling last year. We discuss what that means for students, parents and school districts.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

New Civil Liberties Alliance:

Strangely, despite solid scientific evidence, GMU continues to refuse to recognize that Covid-19 vaccination is medically unnecessary for ALL students, faculty, and staff with naturally acquired immunity demonstrated with antibody testing. At times GMU officials have appeared to deny that such a thing as naturally acquired immunity exists. This refusal is particularly odd, as the efficacy of the very vaccines GMU wishes to mandate are measured against levels of natural immunity acquired by those who have recovered from Covid-19.  For this reason, NCLA continues to explore litigation against GMU. We also welcome hearing from others on public-university campuses in Virginia—particularly tenured faculty—who have naturally acquired immunity backed by antibody testing and whose schools are similarly disregarding the scientific facts surrounding naturally acquired immunity.

NCLA filed Professor Zywicki’s complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia on August 3, 2021, challenging GMU’s “reopening policy.” The policy, announced June 28, requires all faculty and staff members, including those who can demonstrate natural immunity through recovery from a prior Covid-19 infection, to disclose their vaccination status as “a prerequisite for eligibility for any merit pay increases,” unless they obtain a religious or medical exemption. On July 22, GMU emailed the policy to students and employees and threatened disciplinary action—including termination of employment—against any who do not comply with the vaccine mandate. The university’s website describing its vaccination policy reiterated this threat.

NY Times:

An analysis by N.W.E.A., a nonprofit that provides academic assessments, for example, found that Latino third graders scored 17 percentile points lower in math in the spring of 2021, compared to the typical achievements of Latino third graders in the spring of 2019. The decline was 15 percentile points for Black students and 14 percentile points for Native American students, compared with similar students in the past. As Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times describes the situation, the pandemic amplified disadvantages rooted in racial and socioeconomic inequality, transforming an educational gap into a gulf.

A sobering report by the consulting firm McKinsey sounds a similar alarm. Among other things, it notes that the pandemic has widened existing opportunity and achievement gaps and made high schoolers more likely to drop out. As the authors say: “The fallout from the pandemic threatens to depress this generation’s prospects and constrict their opportunities far into adulthood. The ripple effects may undermine their chances of attending college and ultimately finding a fulfilling job that enables them to support a family.” Unless steps are taken to fill the pandemic learning gap, the authors say, these people will earn less over their lifetimes. The impact on the U.S. economy could range from $128 billion to $188 billion every year as the cohort enters the work force.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Cory Doctorow:

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

Stephanie Lee:

A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data.

According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. A seemingly cheap and effective method to fight fraud, it was adopted by at least one insurance company, tested by government agencies around the world, and taught to corporate executives. It made a splash among academics, who cited it in their own research more than 400 times.

The paper also bolstered the reputations of two of its authors — Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist at Duke University — as leaders in the study of decision-making, irrationality, and unethical behavior. Ariely, a frequent TED Talk speaker and a Wall Street Journal advice columnist, cited the study in lectures and in his New York Times bestseller The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves.

Years later, he and his coauthors found that follow-up experiments did not show the same reduction in dishonest behavior. But more recently, a group of outside sleuths scrutinized the original paper’s underlying data and stumbled upon a bigger problem: One of its main experiments was faked “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” three academics wrote in a post on their blog, Data Colada, on Tuesday.

The researchers who published the study all agree that its data appear to be fraudulent and have requested that the journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retract it. But it’s still unclear who made up the data or why — and four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

Katyanna Quach

Prosecutors said ShotSpotter picked up a gunshot sound where Williams was seen on surveillance camera footage in his car, putting it all forward as proof that Williams shot Herring right there and then. Police did not cite a motive, had no eyewitnesses, and did not find the gun used in the attack. Williams did have a criminal history, though, having served time for attempted murder, robbery, and discharging a firearm when he was younger, and said he had turned his life around significantly since. He was grilled by detectives, and booked.

Crucially, Williams’ lawyers – public defenders Lisa Boughton and Brendan Max – said records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. ShotSpotter strongly insisted it had not improperly altered any data to favor the police’s case, and said that regardless of the initial real-time alert, its evidence of the gunshot was the result of follow-up forensic analysis, which was submitted to the courts.

Lucy McBride:

A recent peer-reviewed study in Britain of nearly 260,000 children (1,700 of whom showed symptoms) reminds us that for most kids, a coronavirus infection will manifest as the common cold—if anything. Also reassuring is that only 4.4 percent of children diagnosed with COVID-19 in this study had symptoms after 28 days (and 1.8 percent after 56 days). Probably not surprising to any parent, about 1 percent of kids in this study who had upper-respiratory symptoms and tested negative for COVID-19 also had lingering symptoms at 56 days—a reminder that COVID-19 is only one potential cause for a child’s malaise.

Abundant evidence indicates that coronavirus transmissions rates in schools are roughly equal to or less than those of the surrounding community. In other words, educational settings are not inherently dangerous for younger children. This should reassure parents and policy makers who are nervous about sending them back to the classroom.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The fiscal insanity at Chicago Public Schools continues. Officials there plan to hire another 2,000 part-time and full-time workers this coming school year, never mind the district has racked up the biggest pension debt of any school district in the country. Moody’s already puts CPS’ pension shortfall at $22.8 billion, more than any other school district in the country.* More workers mean more salaries and even more pension debts. 

To make matters more insane, those same officials warn the school district could lose up to 100,000 students this coming school year – about 29% of the district total – as a result of the multi-pronged crises facing Chicago. Those student losses would be on top of the 95,000 the district already lost between 2000 and 2021.

It’s madness any way you slice the numbers, making it clear Mayor Lori Lightfoot and city leaders either don’t understand or don’t care about Chicago’s finances.

A March 2019 Moody’s report laid out for Lightfoot just what a mess she was inheriting when she took over as Mayor. That report showed City of Chicago debts consumed more of city revenues than any other major city in the country, by far. About 32% of the city’s budget was consumed by fixed costs including debt repayments, retiree health obligations and pension contributions – and 57 percent when Moody’s added in the additional amounts Chicago should have been contributing to pensions, called the tread water gap, simply to keep its debts from getting larger that year.

Asra Nomani & Erin Wilcox:

It was clear that the new standards were aimed at a particular result: dramatically reducing the number of qualified Asian American students admitted to TJ. In response, a multicultural coalition of concerned parents and families came together to combat the new racist standards. These brave parents held protests in front of the school, carrying signs written in Hindi, Bengali and Chinese. We warned that the slippery new standards were not only designed to actively discriminate against Asian American students, but would also end up watering down the school’s long-standing commitment to achievement through hard work and merit.

One coalition member, Himanshu Verma, an immigrant from India, TJ dad and founder of a data analytics firm, crunched the demographic data and projected the revised standards would lead to a drastic decrease in Asian American students admitted to TJ. He was correct. School district officials announced that, as a result of their new admissions system, they slashed the percentage of Asian students admitted to TJ to 54 percent this year from 73 percent last year. The percentage of Blacks and Hispanics increased — as it did for White students.

Will Flanders and Rick Esenberg:

In the modern information environment, it is challenging to find any source of objective information. On no issue is this more true than with the COVID-19 pandemic. On one side are those wedded to “the science” until it disagrees with their preconceived notions about what policy ought to be. On the other side are those who, rightfully skeptical of government, reject most all information that makes the case that COVID-19 is still a major problem. We are a polarized country and the most engaged people tend not to want to hear – or reward – nuance. But there are times when a rigorous examination of the facts compels a nuanced conclusion. Let’s take a look at the most recent COVID numbers in Wisconsin.

1. Vaccines DO provide protection

Some have noted that the data shows coronavirus rates are increasing most rapidly among the vaccinated. This is true, but what does it mean? It is still the unvaccinated that are driving the continuance of the pandemic. Recently, the Department of Health Services put out a chart that shows the rate of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts in the state. That chart is reproduced below.

David Zweig:

Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms. Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit. To date, the highly transmissible Delta variant has not led them to change this calculus. (Many experts I spoke with told me that while the Delta variant represents a major and concerning new development in the Covid pandemic, it probably shouldn’t change our thinking on a mask requirement for schools.)

Here in the United States, the message looks different. On July 9, a little more than a month after the study was published, the CDC released updated guidance for schools, including the recommendation that masks should be worn indoors by all individuals (age 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated. Ten days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics took the guidance a step further and said that everyone in school over age 2 should wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. (The CDC later matched the AAP’s guidance.)

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

How naïve is the lay American to believe that illiteracy is not intentional in govt schools—it’s why most politicians privately school and restrict constituent choice—literate people are “unmanageable and of no value to their master”—politicians lose control when voters can read. pic.twitter.com/9gG8ePRbsv

— Marilyn Muller (@1in5advocacy) August 20, 2021

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

There is an entire generation of writers and pundits (most of them still active, by the way) whose fundamental contribution to American thought is perfectly captured here:

Give war a chance.

Check the map.

It’s far away. https://t.co/R5kTiKBklN

— Megan K. Stack (@Megankstack) August 20, 2021

Robin Hanson:

Here is my related hypothesis: we now put more weight on many smaller lower-noise status markers, instead of fewer bigger noisier markers. In particular, we put more weight on markers of connections to statusful people and institutions.

For example, early in ancient empires, many rose in status via winning military battles, or perhaps by building new trading regimes. But later in such empires, status was counted more in terms of your connections to other statusful people. Which led to neglect of military success, and thus empire collapse.

So early on, ambitious soldiers tried to figure out how to win battles, and to get involved in promising battles. But it was hard to guess just how to do this, and outcomes were noisy functions of efforts. So no one could be very sure of their future status, or with whom to associate to gain status. But later on, ambitious soldiers would need to come from the right family, and make good new social connections. So they worked to make sure they wore the right clothes, went to the right events, flattered the right people, joined the right groups, and so on. In this world, they could more easily see who was higher status.

Wilfred Reilly:

A remarkable aspect of today’s culture war debates, across a whole range of topics, is the fact that many massively popular positions bear no resemblance to measurable truth. Many core claims of Black Lives Matter (BLM), the “systemic racism” school of sociological thought, the Stop AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Hate movement, and, for that matter, QAnon and election fraud devotees on the political right, don’t gel at all with empirical facts. Often this is no accident. Many activists and a surprising number of academics and media figures seem to have returned to the ancient idea that truth is relative, and hard data of the Bureau of Justice Statistics variety are less valuable than individual “lived experience.” Others, so far as I can tell, simply lie to facilitate personal or political goals. The trend is a dangerous one: People who fear nonexistent demons are also likely to propose costly and unnecessary witch hunts. In the face of the new Hounds of God, empiricism must again be defended.

It is simply not debatable that the claims of many popular modern movements are far removed from reality. BLM’s contentions about a near-genocide of African Americans directed by police may be the best example of this. To give only two famous examples out of dozens, Black Trans Lives Matter activist Cherno Biko stated on prime-time television in 2015 that an innocent Black person is “murdered” by American police “every 28 hours,” while star attorney Benjamin Crump hinted at an even higher total in a 2019 book he titled Open Season: The Legalized Genocide of Colored People.

These sorts of claims have become conventional wisdom on the political left. A well-run and large-N study from the Skeptic Research Center in February 2021 found that 54% of Americans who “identify as very liberal” believe that the average number of unarmed Black men killed annually by U.S. police is somewhere between “about 1,000” and “more than 10,000.” A major empirical survey conducted by the political scientist Eric Kaufman in April 2021 found that 80% of African Americans and 60% of educated white liberals believethat more young Black men die annually at the hands of police than in car wrecks.

Patrick Reilly:

An Oklahoma mother of 11 flew to Afghanistan earlier this month to rescue 10 members of the country’s all-girls robotics team, and is hoping to save more as the Taliban takes power in Kabul.

Allyson Reneau, a 60-year old Harvard graduate with a Masters degree in international relations and US space policy, took it upon herself to try and save members of the Afghan Girls Robotic Team, according to NBC.

She flew into Qatar on Aug. 9 after making a “Hail Mary” call to a former roommate at the US Embassy there to help get the girls from the advancing Taliban, known for their oppressive treatment of women.

Reneau had been in contact with the team — made of girls ages 16 to 18 — since 2019 when she worked on the board of directors for Explore Mars and met the girls when they attended the organization’s annual Humans to Mars conference.

The team was hailed in Western media as the future of the war-ravaged country, as well as a shining example of how women’s rights had improved after the US invaded following 9/11.

Merve Emre and Len Gutkin:

That the academic humanities have been in “crisis” since the 2007-9 recession is a piece of received wisdom that The Chronicle, along with academic journals like Profession and national newspapers like The New York Times, has had a hand in consolidating. And no one would deny that hiring has been severely constrained — in some fields, all but eliminated — over the last decade or so. But at its most provocative, crisis talk goes beyond a jobs report; it is concerned, for better or for worse, with questions of meaning, legitimacy, and mission. 

In Permanent Crisis, just out from the University of Chicago Press, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, professors of German, respectively, at Ohio State University and the University of Virginia, suggest that today’s preoccupation with crisis in the humanities is historically and conceptually overdetermined, less a response to current material realities than baked into the modern humanities’ self-conception. For the authors’ purposes, the humanities in their current institutional form are a product of the German-language universities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, rather than the terminus of a lineage from the Renaissance or antiquity. Germanophone humanists established a set of binaries that continue to structure the modern humanities, “pitting the utilitarian, technical, and vocational rationality of the sciences against the disinterested, liberal, and critical humanities.”

Perhaps the earliest articulation of this worldview appeared in Friedrich Schiller’s 1789 University of Jena lecture, “What Is Universal History and Why Study It?” As Reitter and Wellmon summarize, Schiller “used the study of history to consider a … threat facing the university: an instrumental and utilitarian relationship to education and knowledge among students — and faculty.” Against the so-called Brotgelehrter — which Reitter and Wellmon translate as “careerist scholar” — Schiller counterpoised the truly “philosophical mind.” Put schematically: The human sciences would become the repository for a set of idealist impulses thought to countervail the alienating rationality of industrial modernity.

We talked recently with Reitter and Wellmon about the history of crisis talk, the lessons of Max Weber, the humanities outside the university, and whether the current crisis might truly be different from past ones, after all. This discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

Corporate Doublespeak
(via 1984 – war is peace, freedom is slavery)

‘Scanning is privacy’
‘Censorship is free speech’
‘It’s your data, but we own it”

Example:https://t.co/d5KGXwsVQ0

— John Robb (@johnrobb) August 20, 2021

Jason Bedrock and Ed Tarnowski:

With 18 states enacting seven new educational choice programs and expanding 21 existing ones, 2021 has rightly been declared a “breakthrough year” for school choice. In the wake of all this progress, the one question we at EdChoice are most frequently asked is: how many students are newly eligible to receive a voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or K–12 education savings account?

Estimating Student Eligibility in Educational Choice Programs

Estimating the number and percentage of students eligible for a given educational choice program may seem straightforward, but it’s not so simple. For example, when a state makes multiple categories of students eligible (e.g., low-income, foster care, or special needs), even if it were easy to calculate the number of students in each category, it’s impossible to precisely determine the number of students who are in multiple categories. Without accounting for the overlap, adding up the number of students eligible for each category would produce an overcount.

Moreover, just because a child is eligible for a scholarship does not mean she is guaranteed access to a scholarship. That’s why it’s important to look at the maximum participation, or the number of scholarships that are actually funded. For example, the state of East Freedonia might have a universal school voucher program for which every one of its 2 million K–12 students is eligible, but if the program is capped at 50,000 vouchers, then its level of maximum participation is only 2.5 percent.

Another complicating factor is that that the limitations on participation are not always set in terms of number of scholarships. This is particularly the case with tax-credit scholarship programs, which often have a total credit cap (which may or may not be reached) and give scholarship-granting organizations discretion in terms of scholarship size. Under a given total credit cap, a larger average scholarship size will translate into fewer scholarships granted overall.

Given all of the above complications, we must make reasonable assumptions to produce realistic estimates. When calculating income eligibility, we will assume that the distribution of students is even across the distribution of families. (In reality, lower-income families are more likely to have more children than higher-income families, so this assumption will produce a conservative estimate.) For new tax-credit scholarship programs, we will assume that the total credit cap is reached and that the average scholarship size is equal to the maximum amount allowed. For new programs, we will also assume that scholarship-granting organizations will use the maximum allowed administrative expenses, but we will not factor this in for expanded programs. Finally, we will assume that the most recent quantity of scholarships actually issued was the previous maximum level of participation in order to calculate the new level of maximum participation.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Miranda Spindt and Will Flanders:

For example, The New York State Association of Independent Schools states in their Manual for Evaluation and Accreditation that “The issues of equity, justice, and anti-bias are integrated into the educational program.” Similarly, The Association of Independent Schools in New England state in their handbook, under teaching and curriculum criteria, “The school’s teaching practices, curriculum and broader educational program reflect a commitment to social justice, inclusivity and diversity, as appropriate to its mission.”

As advocates for school choice as an avenue for parents to escape the ideological tilt of traditional public schools, we were curious to see the extent to which these agendas were making their way into Wisconsin’s private schools, particularly those participating in the state’s major school choice programs. Under state law, there are eight accreditors that are allowed to be utilized by private schools participating in Parental Choice. After researching the accreditation criteria and guiding principles of these eight, we found only one that appears to even approach a CRT standard.
The Independent Schools Association of Central States (ISACS), in their diversity statement, says that they will “require and support the work of each ISACS school to provide an equitable, affirming, safe, and just environment”. They add in their standards for membership that schools will provide this environment by “taking into account cultural, learning, and social-emotional needs.” While words like “equity” have become buzzwords in their CRT movement, we must caution that this is weak evidence of CRT even within ISACS. In Wisconsin, only 12 schools are accredited by ISACS and none of them participate in the state parental choice programs.

This suicide letter (in Chinese, but you can machine translate) by a Chinese middle schooler deserves to be read widely. It reveals much about the intra-family dynamics in many Chinese families where the only child is not a child but the objectification of parental desires… https://t.co/0j0kTjLL4E

— Dali L. Yang (@Dali_Yang) August 18, 2021

Shoshana Wodinsky:

According to Diachenko, the dataset came from the Terrorist Screening Center(TSC), an FBI-led federal collective responsible for maintaining the thousands of records in the government’s no-fly list—a subset of the FBI’s much, much largerterrorist watchlist. The TSC includes “select international partners,” according to the FBI. Diachenko says the IP address linked to the leaked database was based in Bahrain.

In a nutshell, the no-fly list is exactly what it sounds like: a list of people who are branded by the federal government as potential terrorist threats and barred from boarding any planes heading into, out of, or within the U.S. as a result. 

This appears to be the list—or a portion of the list—that Diachenko stumbled onto in his initial research. While he couldn’t say for sure whether the entire list was exposed in the leak, he was able to find about 1.9 million records detailing individuals’ no-fly statuses, full names, citizenship, genders, passport numbers, and more.

“I do not know how much of the full TSC Watchlist it stored,” he wrote, “but it seems plausible that the entire list was exposed.”

Jacob Jackson:

So, the authors factored in an adjustment for housing prices. With that adjustment, their analysis showed that, as cities get bigger, the housing costs increase at a faster rate than lower-decile income. 

“For the lower decile, there is no proportional increase in wealth. So, the city is not increasing economic benefit, but it’s not decreasing it either,” says Kempes. “However, since costs do go up, the experience of the poorest individuals gets worse.”

Across the world, civilization is undergoing rapid urbanization. More than half the world’s humans currently live in urban settings, and in the coming decade, researchers predict the number of megacities — those with 10 million people or more — will quadruple. “There is an urgent need for a quantitative and predictive theory for how larger urban areas affect a wide variety of city features, dynamics, and outcomes,” write the authors.

Joseph Bernstein:

In the run-up to the 1952 presidential election, a group of Republican donors were concerned about Dwight Eisenhower’s wooden public image. They turned to a Madison Avenue ad firm, Ted Bates, to create commercials for the exciting new device that was suddenly in millions of households. In Eisenhower Answers America, the first series of political spots in television history, a strenuously grinning Ike gave pithy answers to questions about the IRS, the Korean War, and the national debt. The ads marked the beginning of mass marketing in American politics. They also introduced ad-industry logic into the American political imagination: the idea that the right combination of images and words, presented in the right format, can predictably persuade people to act, or not act.

This mechanistic view of humanity was not without its skeptics. “The psychological premise of human manipulability,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.” To her point, Eisenhower, who carried 442 electoral votes in 1952, would have likely won even if he hadn’t spent a dime on TV.

What was needed to quell doubts about the efficacy of advertising among people who buy ads was empirical proof, or at least the appearance thereof. Modern political persuasion, the sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote in his landmark 1962 study of propaganda, is defined by its aspirations to scientific rigor, “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.” Customers seek persuasion that audiences have been persuaded.

And, advocating censorship;

Some demographic differences that existed on these questions in 2018 have now largely disappeared. Three years ago, older Americans and those with less education were more likely than younger and more educated adults, respectively, to say the U.S. government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if means limiting some freedoms. Now, Americans across nearly all age groups are fairly evenly divided between the two views. Similar changes have occurred when it comes to Americans’ educational background.

Women still tend to be more open than men to the idea of both the government and tech companies taking action to restrict false information online, though both groups have become a bit more supportive of the government taking such steps.

Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad:

Later in 2020, Fauci participated in a second noble lie. In December, he explained in a phone interview with then–New York Times reporter Donald McNeil that he had been moving the target estimate for herd immunity based in part on emerging studies. But he also said:

When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.

In his own words, he “nudged” his target range for herd immunity to promote vaccine uptake. Even though his comments were made to influence public actions to get more people vaccinated (a noble effort), the central dilemma remains: Do we want public health officials to report facts and uncertainties transparently? Or do we want them to shape information, via nudges, to influence the public to take specific actions? The former fosters an open and honest dialogue with the public to facilitate democratic policymaking. The second subverts the very idea of a democracy and implies that those who set the rules or shape the media narrative are justified in depriving the public of information that they may consider or value differently.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Noah Diekemper and Will Flanders:

A new poll of likely Democratic Primary voters in Milwaukee County provides an interesting window into the divides over school choice and the Democratic coalition. The poll, commissioned by Milwaukee Works, a 501c4 organization with a focus on good governance in Milwaukee, asked respondents about a variety of issues, but school choice and charter schools – and the demographic breakdown in responses – provides a valuable view into the divides on education reform.

The majority of Democrat primary voters polled are opposed to the concepts of private school choice and charter schools. Just 37% support the concept of vouchers, while 35% support charter schools. 54% of white Milwaukee Democrats polled stated their opposition to public charter schools; and for school voucher programs the opposition was an overwhelming 62%. But 52% of African American respondents support school voucher programs, compared to a mere 30% who oppose (18% were “not sure”). And public charter school support captured a plurality of 44%, compared to 31% who again oppose (25% this time were “not sure”).

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Brian Ray:

There were an estimated 4.5 to 5.0 million homeschool students in grades K-12 in the United States during March of 2021 (roughly 8% to 9% of school-age children). There were about 2.5 million homeschool students in spring 2019 (or 3% to 4% of school-age children) [note 1]. The homeschool population had been growing at an estimated 2% to 8% per annum over the past several years, but it grew drastically from 2019-2020 to 2020-2021.

NEW: WILL Asks Wisconsin Supreme Court to Strike Down Dane County Universal Mask Order

Details –> https://t.co/UGHrlAQkGf

Filing –> https://t.co/tT89x5yaug pic.twitter.com/WFi6DMfsfJ

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) August 18, 2021

Milwaukee County COVID Data

Dane County (Madison) COVID Data

“However, Evers cannot issue a statewide mask mandate without legislative approval, following a 4-3 state Supreme Court ruling issued in March”

"Last time it was schools, this time it is masks, next time it could be vaccine passports and permanent masking. Dane County's power is not unlimited, and its residents deserve protection from these unchecked mandates."https://t.co/WqmyjRwx0B

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) August 19, 2021

NEW today from @WisPolicyForum: in light of Wisconsin SB 119, recently vetoed by Gov. Evers, we looked at what was happening with police spending and staffing levels prior to the pandemic. We found that even in good economic times, hundreds of WI PDs were lowering their budgets pic.twitter.com/MHH03tmVbD

— Ari Brown (@AriB83) August 18, 2021

Rina Chandran:

Concerns that digital IDs and databases can be used to target people

• Aid groups, government agencies responsible for securing systems
• Rights groups advising activists on how to delete digital trails

Thousands of Afghans struggling to ensure the physical safety of their families after the Taliban took control of the country have an additional worry: that biometric databases and their own digital history can be used to track and target them.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of “chilling” curbs on human rights and violations against women and girls, and Amnesty International on Monday said thousands of Afghans – including academics, journalists and activists – were “at serious risk of Taliban reprisals”.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google (YouTube), Facebook (instagram) and similar services, including Madison.

David Kramer:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that it has produced a fusion reaction in the laboratory that yielded more energy than was absorbed by the fuel to initiate it.

Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 10¹⁶ watts of power.

The shot, which occurred on 8 August, demolished the facility’s previous record yield of 170 kJ, observed in February, and was 25 times as high as the best results obtained just a year ago. “Everyone has a spring in their step,” says NIF director Mark Herrmann. The results have not yet been peer reviewed.

Joy Powers:

Over the last two years, there’s been a sharp rise in property taxes throughout Wisconsin, and in Milwaukee, many homeowners have been feeling the pinch. There are a variety of reasons for these rising taxes, which the Wisconsin Policy Forum outlines in its new report, “What’s driving property tax increases?”

“The big factor that we’re seeing that is sort of making up the difference is referenda that are approved by voters to increase taxes and funding for education,” says Jason Stein, research director for the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

According to the report, school referenda added about $136 million in new property taxes statewide on to 2020-2021 tax bills. And, municipalities and counties throughout Wisconsin added an additional $89.5 million to tax bills in 2020-2021 to make debt payments.

George Soros:

I find it particularly disturbing that so many Chinese people seem to find his social-credit surveillance system not only tolerable but attractive. It provides them social services free of charge and tells them how to stay out of trouble by not saying anything critical of Mr. Xi or his regime. If he could perfect the social-credit system and assure a steadily rising standard of living, his regime would become much more secure. But he is bound to run into difficulties on both counts.

Deoni, S., Beauchemin, J., Volpe, A., D’Sa, V.

Since the first reports of novel coronavirus in the 2020, public health organizations have advocated preventative policies to limit virus, including stay-at-home orders that closed businesses, daycares, schools, playgrounds, and limited child learning and typical activities. Fear of infection and possible employment loss has placed stress on parents; while parents who could work from home faced chal-lenges in both working and providing full-time attentive childcare. For pregnant individuals, fear of at-tending prenatal visits also increased maternal stress, anxiety, and depression. Not surprising, there has been concern over how these factors, as well as missed educational opportunities and reduced interaction, stimulation, and creative play with other children might impact child neurodevelopment. Lev-eraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance com-pared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconom-ic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19 pandemic is signifi-cantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.
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Emily Cadman:

Take the Flower District in Manhattan, which once stretched from Broadway to 6th Avenue between 23rd and 33rd streets in the Chelsea neighborhood, but has since largely been reduced to 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. As in many other parts of the city, typical lots in Chelsea go 100 feet deep, but the majority of these buildings — a mix of pre-war townhouses dwarfed by new glass towers like the hip Moxy hotel — don’t stretch back that far because they require light and air at the back. That leaves secret courtyards inside many city blocks, many of them overgrown, inaccessible spaces, notwithstanding the occasional private garden.

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district has repeatedly refused to release a report detailing its own investigation into whether district policies were followed during a field trip to Minneapolis in December 2019, when hidden cameras were found in the hotel bathrooms of students. Those events would lead a month later to the arrest of East High educator and trip chaperone David Kruchten. But the district, without explanation, recently released the full report of its internal investigation to Isthmus as part of an open records request related to another hidden camera incident at East. 

In spring 2020, the district paid private attorney Malina Piontek roughly $8,000 to conduct the independent administrative review of how the district responded to events during the field trip to Minnesota. Isthmus reported in March 2021 that the district cited “attorney-client privilege” in keeping the full report secret — a move that angered parents and open government advocates. Even school board members weren’t allowed to read it. Only a two-page summary was released publicly, finding “no failure on the part of district staff” to follow district policy. It also determined that statutory requirements for mandatory reporting of child abuse were met. 

Unlike the summary of the internal investigation, the full report states that mandatory reporting requirements on child abuse didn’t need to be met: “Based on the present facts, there was no sexual abuse or exploitation warranting” district employees to follow mandatory reporting laws, it says. The full report also notes that “due to the trauma experienced by the EHS students, a determination was made not to interview students for this review.” 

Isthmus asked the district why it released the full report now after months of refusing requests from parents, the media, and school board members. We also asked who made the decision not to interview affected students or their parents and whether district officials agreed with Piontek’s claim that mandatory reporting laws didn’t need to be followed because hidden cameras found in the hotel bathrooms of students doesn’t fit the legal definition of child abuse. 

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds has refused to answer these questions and has uncharacteristically not responded to several requests for comment.

Additional commentary:

The district had also rejected open records requests from the State Journal for the full report regarding the second East High camera incident, also citing attorney-client privilege.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

How are things going for students/parents/teachers who stayed in remote learning? Curious about LAUSD, but also anyone’s experience in anywhere. Please ID school w a little abt your situation for context. On-the-record unless u say otherwise: howard.blume@latimes.com

— Howard Blume (@howardblume) August 18, 2021

The WHO admonishes the US as it plans booster shots.

“We’re planning to hand out extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets, while we’re leaving other people to drown without a single life jacket.” https://t.co/I0va3OSNiL

— Hannah Kuchler (@hannahkuchler) August 18, 2021

Ann Althouse quotes:

“Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders.”

Britanica: Accountability, principle according to which a person or institution is responsible for a set of duties and can be required to give an account of their fulfilment to an authority that is in a position to issue rewards or punishment. Despite the apparent precision of this definition, controversy has arisen about the exact meaning of accountability.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Shant Mesrobian:

The news was predictably met with a firestorm of controversy. In America’s post-Trump environment, vague and ill-defined references to “extremism” and “hate” have become all too common tools for stigmatizing vast swaths of the political spectrum and stifling what many consider to be legitimate forms of political speech and activity. And for many, the initiative sounded too much like a decisive step toward the dystopic, authoritarian idea of a “social credit score” in which citizens’ access to basic consumer and financial services would be based on evaluations of their private behavior or beliefs. And it was also just another example in what has now become a familiar and chilling series of censorious actions taken by America’s largest and most powerful tech platforms toward individuals and groups found to be expressing ideas that sit outside of the mainstream consensus, whether it’s YouTube’s routine removal of videos found to be deviating from whatever happens to be the current (and always shifting) scientific consensus or Amazon’s newly-adopted policy of banning of books that deviate from progressive beliefs about transgenderism or anything found to be promoting “hate speech.”

But this latest PayPal initiative is also part of a broader and unmistakeable pattern that’s been developing over the past few years. It’s one where Big Tech companies have sought to deal with the public’s concern over their massive, unprecedented, and unaccountable power over Americans’ speech and the country’s flow of news and information by entering into partnerships with America’s elite, highly influential civil society sector of media, academic, non-profit, policy, and advocacy organizations.

Persistence and Retention Report:

The Persistence and Retention report series examines first-year persistence and retention rates for beginning postsecondary students. Persistence rate is measured by the percentage of students who return to college at any institution for their second year, while retention rate represents the percentage of students who return to the same institution. Students attaining a credential in their first year are accounted for in persistence and retention rates. The report is designed to help institutions understand trends and patterns in this important early success indicator, and identify disparities by institutional type, state, degree level, starting enrollment intensity, major field, and student demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and race and ethnicity.

Shannon Whitworth:

My problems with the letter are legion, particularly as an African American man myself. The one that stands out for me is that this does absolutely nothing to advance the causes of people of color. In fact, it would diminish the credibility of any movement on top of creating resentment and division by making such a preposterous demand. And threatening people into compliance is a low-percentage shot at gaining unity.

No person of color is well-served by removing the need to compete, strive, and continually improve oneself to achieve. A better time would be spent improving their math skills. Moreover, telling Black people that the only way to score a touchdown is to have the referees remove the other players from the field is not only insulting but conditions everyone to see blacks and other people of color as intellectually and academically subpar.

The great Black abolitionist, Fredrick Douglass, once famously wrote that if the Black man cannot stand on his own two feet, then let him fall. The point is well-taken for people of any race, color, or creed. Much better to fail on one’s own as a grownup than to be fed, groomed, excused, and lavished with affection like someone else’s pet.

The irony of this relentless push for equity is how dehumanizing it really is. Nothing in a person’s life experience matters except the color of their skin or where their parents were from. History—a factor over which we have no control—determines whether someone is oppressed or is an oppressor and how they deserve to be treated by society in perpetuity. It no longer matters how hard a person has worked, how they treat other people, or what choices they have made in life. The whole of a person is being reduced to a couple of boxes to check on a form. It is a tortured form of reasoning to conclude that this is progress toward a more humane society.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Tech Transparency Project:

With data from Facebook, Google, and Amazon going back to 2015, this tool provides the most comprehensive historical look at tech company giving to nonprofits to date.

Some caveats: The database includes U.S. organizations that the three tech companies have voluntarily disclosed funding between 2015 and 2021, and it may not capture the full extent of Big Tech-funded groups. In the future, however, TTP plans to expand this database with additional details culled from media reports and nonprofit IRS 990 forms as well as other sources. TTP also plans to add information about Apple-funded groups.

The database includes 2021 disclosures by Google and Facebook, but not by Amazon, which has yet to release its list of third-party funding recipients this year. TTP will update the database with new company disclosures as they become available.

Tami Luhby:

In fact, compensation is now lower than it was in December 2019, when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University. 

The Employment Cost Index — which measures wages and salaries, along with health, retirement and other benefits — fell in the last quarter and is 2% below its pre-pandemic trend, when taking inflation into account. (Wages and salaries are growing at a faster pace than benefits.)

“The hot economy is heating prices more than it is heating wages,” said Furman.

Silvanus Thompson:

I read “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson and it’s still to this day my inspiration for explaining complex technical topics to lay people. It’s a fantastic book, and even if you know math you must read it if you want to understand how to teach complexity to others.

Aaron Churchill, via a kind reader:

Many teachers are paid according to salary schedules that reward seniority and degrees earned, the result of state laws that require school districts to follow this rigid compensation scheme. Unfortunately, this method fails to acknowledge other factors that legitimately should influence teachers’ wages, including their classroom effectiveness, professional responsibilities, or demand for their labor.

But what if these constraints were loosened, so that school leaders could pay teachers in a more flexible way? A recent study by Yale University’s Barbara Biasi looks at what happened in Wisconsin after lawmakers passed reforms via Act 10 in 2011 that allowed districts to ditch the traditional salary schedule and adopt flexible pay policies. Roughly half of Wisconsin’s districts leveraged these new autonomies to negotiate salaries with each employee, much like many businesses do. The other half maintained a traditional seniority- and credentials-based salary schedule that applied to all teachers.

Her analysis reveals several eye-opening findings about the Wisconsin districts that switched to a flexible pay structure. These districts:

Offered higher salaries to early career teachers. To give an example, Green Bay—a flexible pay district, post Act 10—paid teachers with less than five years of experience anywhere between $42,000 and $55,000 per year. In contrast, Madison, a district that stuck with a traditional salary schedule, set salaries for less experienced teachers within a narrower range of around $38,000 to $45,000. The higher salary ceiling in flexible pay districts allowed them to attract talented early career teachers (see next point).

Attracted high-performing teachers, especially younger ones. Flexible pay districts drew teachers with significantly higher value-added scores, especially among those with less experience. The same was not true for traditional pay districts. They didn’t experience an influx of highly effective teachers. The analysis also indicates that teachers with lower value-added scores were more likely to exit flexible pay districts. Due to these entrances and exits, flexible pay districts saw an increase in the overall quality of their instructional staff.

Rewarded instructional quality. In flexible pay districts, a one standard deviation increase in teachers’ value-added scores was associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent higher salary. No such correlation between wages and value-added existed among traditional pay districts. Even though Wisconsin districts didn’t receive value-added scores during this time period—those were calculated by the author—they were still able to identify quality teachers and modestly boost their pay.

Increased performance among all teachers in the district. In addition to improvements linked to teacher mobility, the new compensation structure incentivized higher performance among all educators in the district. After the switch to flexible pay, the average value-added score of teachers in flexible pay districts rose more rapidly than in traditional pay districts. The prospect of higher wages under a system that rewards performance and effort, rather than longevity, could explain those results.

Moved the needle on student achievement. Given all this, it’s not surprising to see students reaping the benefits. In Wisconsin’s flexible pay districts, student achievement on state exams rose by 0.06 and 0.05 standard deviations in reading and math, respectively—which, according to the author, is equivalent to about one-third of the effect of class size reductions. In traditional pay districts, however, achievement was flat. The bottom line, as Biasi puts it: “These tests indicate that changes in the composition and effort of teachers in flexible pay districts following the change in pay schemes led to a sizable increase in students’ test scores.”

Emily Jashinsky;

The fluidity of gender is predicated on the fluidity of truth, which itself demands moral relativism. This is the postmodern muddle. Alongside failed wars, a Great Recession, and ambient tech addiction, it’s the world our experts hath wrought. It’s the only world Gen Z knows.

“Euphoria’s” dreamy purple haze depicts the pain of the “America Without Family, God, or Patriotism,” described in a 2019 Atlantic headline.

“In 1998,” Derek Thompson wrote, “The Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked several hundred young Americans to name their most important values. Work ethic led the way—naturally. After that, large majorities picked patriotism, religion, and having children.”

“Twenty-one years later,” Thompson continued, “the same pollsters asked the same questions of today’s 18-to-38-year-olds—members of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Today’s respondents were 10 percentage points less likely to value having children and 20 points less likely to highly prize patriotism or religion.”

They’re also “less likely to trust authorities, or companies, or institutions,” Thompson added. But that’s good news—our authorities, companies, and institutions are not to be trusted. They lied to us about Afghanistan to protect and further their failed strategy. They lied to us about Wall Street. They lied to us about Silicon Valley. They lied to us about opioids. What’s worse, they destroyed our faith in reality itself.

Common Sense Wisconsin:

Among the policies the POWER paper recommends:

Promoting the existing open enrollment process to inform parents of their options

Providing curriculum transparency so parents can enroll or transfer with full understanding of what’s being taught

Eliminating the per-pupil funding disparities between choice, charter and brick and mortar students

Expanding school choice to all areas of the state and eliminating the income limits for participants

Permitting alternative licensure, and loan forgiveness/reduced tuition for Education students who teach in Wisconsin

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Angeline Terry

A review of Milwaukee County pension payouts since 2016 shows the infamous “backdrop” payment passed 20 years ago has cost taxpayers another $58 million, increasing the total bill to $354.4 million, an analysis by Urban Milwaukee has found. But some 800 veteran employees who are still eligible for the backdrop and have yet to retire could increase the total cost to at least $460 million.

These massive costs are the result of legislation passed by the Milwaukee County Board, which awarded lucrative pension sweeteners for non-union (and later union) employees in 2000 and 2001 respectively. The package included a 25% bonus that allowed veteran employees to collect as much as 100% of their final average salary in a pension and an added backdrop which gave eligible employees a generous lump-sum payment. To date 144 employees have gotten a back drop of at least $400,000, with seven getting more than $900,000 and a lucky 14 getting more than $1 million — all in addition to a monthly pension payment.

American School District Panel:

A total of 292 district leaders from school districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) took the third survey of the American School District Panel between June 1, 2021 and July 2, 2021. This tool presents weighted survey results that are nationally representative of school districts in the United States.

“What we saw Wednesday was…nothing new— the maintenance of white supremacy just has new packaging.” Thanks @ToneMSN for letting my write about the audacity that was last week’s committee hearings on Critical Race Theory. https://t.co/jsg0M9LOcg

— Nada Elmikashfi (@nadaelmikashfi) August 16, 2021

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Thomas Frank:

The significance of liberal hysteria goes beyond this, however. The Trump era began with outrage at ‘populists’ who didn’t listen to the highly educated and were bringing authoritarianism to America. It has ended in a resounding professional-class triumph in which powerful corporations constantly tell the world what noble antiracists they are… in which the news media is not only post-objective but actively on a crusade to suppress the ideological Other… and in which tiny political missteps not only get people fired but sometimes bring them under a crushing hailstorm of public humiliation.

In the supreme irony of our times, many of the same liberals who were so concerned about Trumpist authoritarianism four years ago have enthusiastically accepted a system of social media censorship in which ideas that contradict the findings of established authorities are in certain cases banished from the public sphere. And they are slowly but clearly coming round to the administration’s proposal to turn the government’s surveillance powers on what is called ‘domestic extremism’. It was fears of Trumpist authoritarianism that made this new, liberal authoritarianism possible.

Russell Brandom:

Researchers at AlgorithmWatch say they were forced to abandon their research project monitoring the Instagram algorithm after legal threats from Facebook. The Berlin-based project went public with the conflict in a post published Friday morning, citing the platform’s recent ban of the NYU Ad Observatory. 

“There are probably more cases of bullying that we do not know about,” the post reads. “We hope that by coming forward, more organizations will speak up about their experiences.”“THE COMPANY CANNOT BE TRUSTED”

Launched in March 2020, AlgorithmWatch provided a browser plug-in that would allow users to collect data from their Instagram feeds, providing insight into how the platform prioritizes pictures and videos. The project published findings regularly, showing that the algorithm encouraged photos that showed bare skin and that photos showing faces are ranked higher than screenshots of text. Facebook disputed the methodology but did not otherwise take action against AlgorithmWatch for the first year of the project.

In May, researchers say Facebook asked to meet with the project leaders and accused them of violating the platform’s terms of service. Another objection was that the project violated the GDPR, since it collected data from users who had not consented to participate.

Jay Greene & James Paul:

The promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses has become a central concern of higher education. However, high DEI staffing levels suggest that these programs are bloated relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus. The authors’ research suggests that large DEI bureaucracies appear to make little positive contribution to campus climate: Rather than being an effective tool for welcoming students from different backgrounds, DEI personnel may be better understood as a signal of adherence to ideological, political, and activist goals. In light of these findings, state legislators and donors who fund these institutions may wish to examine DEI efforts more closely to ensure that university resources are used effectively.

Pat Droney:

The book tells the story through the eyes of two children after an officer-involved shooting where the children ask their parents why the shooting happened. The book has been a source of controversy as it has been pushed on elementary school students throughout the country.

The book is touted as being about so-called “diversity and inclusion”—at the end of the book, the black boy and white girl reach out to a Middle Eastern student to join their team at recess. However, the book is full of anti-police propaganda.

Bill Dupor:

Although the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act) provided nearly $28 billion to state governments for improving U.S. highways, the highway system saw no significant improvement. For example, relative to the years before the act, the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges was nearly unchanged, the number of workers on highway and bridge construction did not significantly increase, and the annual value of construction put in place for public highways barely budged. The author shows that as states spent Recovery Act highway grants, many simultaneously slashed their own contributions to highway infrastructure, freeing up state dollars for other uses. Next, using a cross-sectional analysis of state highway spending, the author shows that a state?s receipt of Recovery Act highway dollars had no statistically significant causal impact on that state?s total highway spending. Thus, the amount of actual highway infrastructure investment following the act?s passage was likely very similar to that under a no-stimulus counterfactual.

Madison has recently received more than $70M in new, redistributed federal taxpayer and borrowed funds, in addition to ongoing state and local taxpayer funding growth.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Katherine Gorka:

Others are engaging because of the content being taught. Whether it’s age-inappropriate sex education, critical race theory, or anti-American history, parents are seeing more of what their children are learning—thanks to COVID’s virtual learning—and they don’t like it. As a result, parents are organizing, speaking out, and pushing back, and they are having a noticeable impact.           

Some of the most effective efforts have begun with individual parents who reached a boiling point and decided to speak out. Mom and investigative journalist A.P. Dillon helped expose critical race theory training in Wake County, N.C., public schools.  Elana Fishbein was a lone parent in Lower Marion, Pa., who objected to content in her children’s curriculum, which, in her words, “described ‘whiteness’ as an entitlement to steal land, garner riches, and get special treatment on equity and race.” That letter reached a national audience when Tucker Carlson invited her onto his Fox News Channel show. 

Andrew Gutmann also made national news when he sent a letter to 650 families criticizing New York City’s Brearley School, which his daughter attended, for its obsession with race and for “desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Tom Jones:

A parent has filed a federal complaint against her child’s school, alleging it segregated classes based on race.

She said it was a practice put in place by the school’s principal, who thought she was doing what was best for all students.

Atlanta Public Schools confirmed to Channel 2′s Tom Jones that it has wrapped up its investigation into the allegations and has taken action.

Parent Kila Posey still can’t believe a principal thought separating students by race was a good idea.

“We’ve lost sleep like trying to figure out why would a person do this,” Posey said.

She told Jones she was stunned when she learned about classes segregated by race at Mary Lin Elementary School last year.

John Ashmore:

As our editor-in-chief, Robert Colvile, writes here, the basic issue is that we produce too many graduates, many of whose degrees confer neither a first-rate education, nor higher earnings. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that about 70,000 students a year, roughly one in five, would have been financially better off not going to university. Equally, the ‘graduate premium’ masks a huge amount of divergence between courses and job outcomes. For every high-earning lawyer or doctor there are several grads doing paid jobs they could have got without a degree. 

Given the cost of a three-year BA is approaching £30,000 just for tuition, you could hardly blame students for thinking twice about applying at all. It’s a financial problem for the Government too, as a huge chunk of each year’s cohort will never get round to repaying the cost of their degree, leaving the taxpayer on the hook for the remainder. Little wonder the Intergenerational Foundation called the English system ‘a self-perpetuating debt-generating machine which short-changes young people’. 

The debate on university numbers has understandably tended to focus on ‘Mickey Mouse courses’, with low entry requirements and poor job prospects. Media Studies, perhaps with a unit in ‘Beckhamology’, is the archetypal example. The stock response, which happens to have great merit, is that we need to put more resources into vocational routes for those who are not suited to university.

Max Hodak:

The last 30 years have been an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity for much of the world. It’s easy to miss just how anomalous this is historically. There is absolutely no guarantee that the future will be so bright, and on the contrary, there are now many plausible scenarios in which we head into highly stable dystopias. The most we can do for our children is to prevent this.

This is not my favorite thing I have posted on this site, since as should be clear, CSAM is indefensible, and I know that some will confuse my position as somehow protecting it. And further, given how seats of power all over the world know how valuable it would be to kill strong encryption, it seems foolish to draw attention to myself as being across the table from them. But, given the kind of products I work on, I felt it was important to make a statement of principle here. I believe strongly in these principles, and if we’re not willing to defend our freedom when it is threatened, we don’t deserve to keep it.

Frederick Hess:

Despite these numbers, some on the left have decided that the answer is not to insist that schools use the $190 billion in emergency federal COVID school aid to help students catch up and even excel, but to launch a nihilistic crusade in service to a warped mantra of “equity.” This is the same notion of equity that has spurred California’s move to eliminate advanced math instruction and Oregon’s Department of Education urging that teachers learn to abandon “racist” math practices like asking to students “show their work” or worry about “getting the ‘right answer.’” 

What’s going on? To be blunt, too many grownups on the American left have thrown in the towel. Many of the same Democratic leaders who, just a few years ago, were cheering Common Core and Obama’s Race to the Top, now nod along as the woke fringe and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” officialdom insist that schools frequently serve as little more than engines of systemic racism. This line of argument turns out to be surprisingly convenient for Democratic officials, as it permits them to placate the woke base, back away from the kinds of demands that offend their teacher union allies, and suggest that the disappointments of grandiose school reform were a product not of their missteps or excessive faith in bureaucracies but of the public’s own moral failings. 

While it may help Democrats finesse a political squeeze, this tack marks a troubling break with the recent past, when right and left agreed about the perils of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” While the sweeping, bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) born of that consensus proved to be a mess as a statute—undone by unrealistic dictates and its cavalier expansion of the federal footprint—it represented a powerful, shared conviction that America’s schools must strive to educate every child; that every student should (at least!) learn how to proficiently read, write, and do math; and that we must reject those who would set different expectations for students based on their color creed—whether those are fueled by bigotry or misplaced benevolence.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Perry Stein:

The evaluation system — one of the first in the nation to tie teacher job security and paychecks to class performance — has been central to the District’s high-profile education efforts over the past decade. It’s one of the more discussed legacies of Michelle Rhee, who gained national recognition as the District’s public schools chancellor from 2007 to 2010.

In 2009, Rhee enacted the evaluation system unilaterally, without engaging the teachers union in negotiations. The implementation of IMPACT led to the firing of hundreds of teachers and heightened tensions between the school system and the union that persist today. The Washington Teachers’ Union has said the evaluation system creates a culture of fear and can be easily weaponized by principals to get rid of teachers they dislike. The union has unsuccessfully attempted to make IMPACT part of the bargaining process.

Chad Terhune, Robin Respaut & Deborah Nelson:

It took the deadly disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose a deeper, more intractable U.S. public-health crisis: For more than a decade, the world’s richest nation has been losing the battle against diabetes.

Long before the pandemic, Kate Herrin was among the millions of Americans struggling to control their diabetes.

Her problems often stemmed from her government-subsidized medical insurance. Doctors routinely rejected her Medicaid plan, and she repeatedly ran out of the test strips she needed to manage her daily insulin injections. She cycled in and out of emergency rooms with dangerously high blood-sugar levels, or hyperglycemia.

Then COVID-19 hit. Herrin – poor and living alone – rarely left her apartment, ordering fast-food delivery instead of risking the grocery store. She stopped going in for regular lab tests. She had a harder time than ever securing medical supplies. Her health deteriorated further.

Another fun fact about U.S. military jargon from the data: Right now, there are more words in U.S. military terminology (~26,500) than in the average native English speaker’s active vocabulary (20,000). Milspeak is literally its own language. pic.twitter.com/iQbeiVHyCp

— Elena Wicker (@ElenaWicker) August 14, 2021