Natasha Korecki & Eugene Daniels:
and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.
David Wallace-Wells
This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease.
Yet for a year and a half we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. Children now wear masks at little-league games, and at the swimming pool, and when school reopens in the fall they will likely wear masks there, too. But the kids are not at risk themselves, and never were. Now, thanks to vaccines, the vast majority of their parents and grandparents aren’t any longer, either.
But first: the kids. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes, according to the CDC. Only 331 of those deaths have been from COVID — less than half as many as have died of pneumonia. In 2019, more than 2,000 American kids and teenagers died in car crashes; each year about a thousand die from drowning. More American children die in an average year from RSV — another respiratory ailment, whose prevalence is now growing because 18 months of quarantine have deprived young children of immune exposure — than died in either of the last two years from COVID-19.
Some of these comparisons aren’t so neat, since the extraordinary precautions against COVID-19 prevented significant additional spread (and also suppressed the spread of other diseases). But, last year, fewer kids died of COVID-19 than of heart disease, “malignant neopolasms,” suicide, and homicide — not to mention birth defects, which killed hundreds of times more. All told, 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID over the course of the pandemic; just 0.05 percent of those were under the age of 18, a population that represents more than 20 percent of the country’s population as a whole.
Risk is a tricky thing, the spread of the Delta variant and the complications of “long COVID” both real concerns, and all parents should assess their own comfort, and those of their children, in making plans and taking precautions. But very few of them, two summers ago, were sending their children to parks and pools and camps in masks out of fear of pneumonia or flu. Probably fewer were keeping them home entirely.
This summer, the calculations are very different than they were even last year, when the virus was still spreading wildly in an entirely unvaccinated population. That’s because, in the depths of a pandemic as we were then, individuals are not just individuals but links in a chain of transmission, which is the main reason why, for much of the last 18 months, public-health officials have worried over infections in the young — assuming they would eventually help bring the disease back to those much more vulnerable.
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).
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.
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
I have my photograph taken and my fingerprints scanned every time I enter the United States. So do all other foreign nationals. The information is collected under the US-VISIT program. Information such as name, date of birth, gender, and travel document data is recorded as well. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed in November 2014, the Department of Homeland Security released a document containing information collected about me under this program over the last four years.
In addition to photographs, the 21-page document contains entries for every encounter I have had with the agency in that period. Most of these encounters were recorded at airports around the country, but there are also entries for appointments related to immigration and enrollment into the Global Entry program. Along with the Global Entry program, the DHS recently launched a new program that may allow it to collect similar information about US citizens.
TEN YEARS ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The subsequent surge in populism in Europe, the unexpected votes in 2016 for Brexit and then for President Donald Trump in America, and a wave of protests from the gilets jaunes to Black Lives Matter, has made Mr Turchin something of a celebrity in certain circles, and has piqued economists’ interest in the discipline of “cliodynamics”, which uses maths to model historical change. Mr Turchin’s emphasis on the “overproduction of elites” raises uncomfortable questions, but also offers useful policy lessons.
As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows, societies have veered from periods of political stability to instability, often at intervals of about 50 years. Consider America. Every pundit knows that Congress has become gridlocked, with Democrats and Republicans unwilling to compromise with each other. Fewer know that it was also highly polarised around 1900, before becoming more co-operative in the mid-20th century.
What causes these lurches from calm to chaos? Mr Turchin views societies as large, complex systems that are subject to certain patterns, if not laws. That is an entirely different approach from much of academic history, with its preference for small-scale, microcosmic studies, argues Niall Ferguson of Stanford University. In a paper published this year Mr Turchin (with Andrey Korotayev of the Higher School of Economics in Russia) examines the prediction of instability he made in 2010. His forecast model contains many elements, but like Karl Marx Mr Turchin seems to believe that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Where Marx focused on the proletariat, though, Mr Turchin is more interested in the elite—and how its members struggle against each other.
Who counts as the elite, and how competition manifests itself, varies from place to place; one example could be a large number of highly educated folk relative to the number of government offices (and therefore jobs). But a struggle is most likely when economic inequality is high. The rewards for being at the top are then especially lucrative, both in terms of earning power and political influence, and those who miss out feel their loss more keenly. The feeling of resentment is particularly strong among people brought up to believe that they ought to be in the elite. Worse still, societies tend to produce ever more would-be elites, in part because access to education tends to improve over time. Mr Turchin sees all this as a recipe for political chaos. Articulate, educated people rebel, producing a scramble for political and economic power. Elites stop co-operating, counter-elites emerge, and order breaks down.
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 incarcerat
Recent polls suggest that as many as one quarter of parents plan to keep their children home for remote learning this fall.
But the past 18 months suggest that most children would fair very poorly with another year of remote learning.
🧵
— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) July 12, 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.
The parents of 1 in 9 students believe public schools are so terrible that they would rather keep the kids home and teach them themselves.
Well, it is just the white kids, right? They don’t matter because whites will soon be a minority. Black and Hispanic kids will easily displace them in unionized public schools.
The story also said, “The largest increase in homeschoolers was especially notable among minority groups, including black and Hispanic learners.
“In African American households, the proportion of homeschooling quintupled from 3.3% in spring 2020, to 16.1% in fall 2020.
“In Hispanic households, the number of homeschooling households doubled in the same time, from 6.2% to 12.1%.”
You can be darned sure parents aren’t teaching their kids CRT. Why, some may even be reading The Bible.
Liberals are alarmed.
1 in 6 black kids stay at home to learn instead of going to school to be indoctrinated.
PBS reported, “If schools fail to secure the trust of parents, advocates and educators worry that the public education system could see a falloff in enrollment, particularly among families of color. Some advocates also fear that schools faced with a larger proportion of students who are struggling or frequently absent will respond with overly punitive approaches, worsening racial inequality.”
Digital learning and sharing offers plenty of opportunities to grow e-commerce experiences, particularly fast, 2 tap purchases, services, fundraising, donations and contributions.
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.
At a time when many schools are embroiled in controversy over the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), voters still think it is important that kids learn traditional values in school.
A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 78% of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s at least somewhat important for schools to teach the traditional values of Western Civilization, including 52% who say it’s Very Important. This is virtually unchanged from four years ago, and in line with surveys dating back to 2013.
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.
Here’s the FBI encouraging people to monitor family members for signs of extremism so that they can “report them to the #FBI.” https://t.co/mpC5nJ7N9y
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2021
Researchers also point out that a successful ARPA needs a customer for the technologies it develops. In the case of DARPA, the US military was ready to purchase many promising inventions. ARPA-Energy (ARPA-E), which was launched in 2009 under former president Barack Obama to advance low-carbon energy technologies, addressed this challenge by helping grant recipients to develop plans for commercialization from the outset — a model that Bonvillian says DARPA has also now imported.
ARPA-E had the independence it needed to function well, researchers say. Still running today, the agency, housed within the US Department of Energy (DoE), has invested $2.8 billion in nearly 1,200 projects, which have attracted another $5.4 billion in private-sector investments and led to the creation of 92 companies. Last month, one of those companies, 1366 Technologies in Bedford, Massachusetts, announced plans to build a $300-million facility for manufacturing solar cells in India. The company, now known as CubicPV, received $4 million from ARPA-E in 2009 to develop a cleaner, faster, cheaper way to manufacture the silicon semiconductors that go into solar panels.
The protesters themselves tended to come from America’s upper-middle-class, displaying a feverous zeal that felt alarming. And there was no debate to be had about race and policing, opponents simply had to educate themselves.
During those decades of social change, the problem of Left-wing “moral relativism” was often a complaint of conservative commentators, but look today at the young protesters demanding that “Rhodes must fall” or “black trans lives matters”. They certainly aren’t moral relativists.
Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.
Tone K. Hermansen, Samuel Ronfard, Paul L. Harris, Imac M. Zambrana:
Children (N = 278, 34–71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.
Children learn about the world in a variety of ways. They can learn by paying attention to what other people do (Hoehl et al., 2019). They can learn from testimony directed toward themselves or toward other people (for reviews: Harris, Koenig, Corriveau, & Jaswal, 2018; Mills, 2013; Sobel & Kushnir, 2013; Tong, Wang, & Danovitch, 2020). And, they can gather evidence through exploration (Bonawitz et al., 2011; Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007; Yu, Landrum, Bonawitz, & Shafto, 2018), experimentation (Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011; Köksal-Tuncer & Sodian, 2018), and question-asking (Callanan & Oakes, 1992; Kurkul & Corriveau, 2017). Children’s ability to learn from these diverse sources of information is one reason they are able to learn so much so quickly. Each of these sources of information can provide children with unique insights about the world. For example, by listening to other people, children can avoid costly mistakes and learn about unobservable scientific and religious phenomena they could not discover on their own (Harris & Koenig, 2006). By tracking statistical regularities young children can quickly build up and revise their understanding of causal structures without relying on other people’s testimony (Bridgers, Buchsbaum, Seiver, Griffiths, & Gopnik, 2016).
The Wisconsin Institute for law & liberty:
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court on behalf of a Milwaukee resident challenging a Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) union leave policy. Under this policy, MPS pays public employees full wages and benefits to engage in union-related activities instead of the jobs they were hired for at the school district. This policy amounts to compelled speech because it forces Milwaukee taxpayers to subsidize labor union activities. The policy also violates the Constitution’s requirement that all spending be for a public purpose and not for the benefit of a private entity, like a labor union.
The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Lucas Vebber, said, “Under the MPS union leave policy, Milwaukee taxpayers foot the bill to pay employees not for the public school jobs they were hired for, but rather to engage in union-related activities. This violates Constitutional safeguards against compelled speech and the requirement that public spending be for a public purpose.”
Background: Milwaukee Public Schools adopted a union leave policy (page 49) that permits MPS employees to use at least ten days per fiscal year for paid union leave. Any MPS employee using union leave is working solely as a “representative” of a labor union for the purpose of participating in “union-related activities.” And under the MPS union leave policy, MPS employees are not restricted from engaging in a variety of political activities including advancing the direct interests of the public employee unions.
The United States Supreme Court recently affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that “[c]ompelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers raises similar First Amendment concerns.” And the Wisconsin Constitution recognizes that the freedom of speech “includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.” The MPS union leave policy amounts to taxpayers subsidizing the speech and activities of labor unions – a form of unconstitutional compelled speech.
During the 2017, 2018, and 2019 school years, MPS spent thousands of dollars paying employees for hundreds of hours working on behalf of labor unions for the labor unions’ private purposes.
“An emphasis on adult employment.”
Dinette Wilford & Bryan Passifiume:
“Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline,” reads a section of an online brief highlighting the ‘vision and goals’ of the updated curriculum.
“However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective.”
Math, it continues, has been “used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges,” and explains that taking a “decolonial” and “anti-racist approach” to teaching math will outline its “historical roots and social constructions” to students.
“The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education,” the brief continues.
Minister Lecce previously announced the new curriculum will bring early math streaming to an end, a practice he says created barriers for racialized and historically marginalized groups.
Teachers will be required to promote cross-curricular learning and human rights to create “anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments.”
Before Covid-19 forced its students into online classes, Loudoun County’s bimonthly school board meetings were often dry exercises in bureaucratic wrangling: Haggling over AP textbook availability and public construction projects. Poring over budget proposals for custodial supplies and debating about whether to renew the contract for a company supplying milk to cafeterias.
Only a handful of parents showed up on a regular basis, says Julie Garrett, a mother of two school-aged children in the school district. Some, like Garrett, one of the growing numbers of liberal parents in the wealthy Northern Virginia exurb, were committed to helping the district work to overcome its segregationist past.
The first time I remember someone telling me not to overthink was when I was trying to suss out breastfeeding. “Don’t overthink it,” said my friend, “just go with it.”
“Just going with it” is not something I do. I have to really understand what I’m doing and then I think through almost every possibility and eventuality, like a mind map on steroids. And I plan. When people say things like: “Who could have imagined XYZ would happen?” about some entirely predictable outcome, my most common response is “I could”. I have realised that for most people I am an overthinker, but for me, it is others who underthink. I just think.
Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that my overthinking, like most things, probably started in childhood. I had a loving, noisy but at times unpredictable childhood. Dinner was always on the table at the same time, and it was always delicious. My mother and father were always, physically, where they said they would be. But I grew up in a house where emotions weren’t discussed, they were bottled up, only to explode out in random unpredictable ways – or a silence would ensue for some wrongdoing I had to fathom out all by myself.
A look at the data reveals that the vaccine hesitant group, however, are not big Trump lovers. They’re actually likely not to be Republican. Instead, many of them are people who are detached from the political process and didn’t vote for either major candidate in 2020.
The most recent Kaiser poll helps illustrate that the vaccine hesitant group doesn’t really lean Republican. Just 20% of the group called themselves Republican with an additional 19% being independents who leaned Republican. The clear majority (61%) were not Republicans (41% said they were Democrats or Democratic leaning independents and 20% were either pure independents or undesignated).
This is very much unlike the vaccine resistant group, of whom 55% are Republican or Republican leaning independents. Just 21% of that group are Democrats or Democratic leaning independents.
The Kaiser poll points to a larger problem: There isn’t going to be a single ideological message that appeals to a majority of the vaccine hesitant group. They’re of all political stripes.
We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.
This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.
The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).
A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.”
Re-educated, thankfully, is not some “life change” bible for the bored middle aged. Kellaway was a successful and high-powered woman before she left the Financial Times (and a handsome income) after 32 years and a back catalogue of 1,032 columns. Here she writes with warmth, wit and honesty, turning her real life experiences of teaching in a Hackney school into what I hope will become a serious debate about what education is for.
When the extracurricular industrial complex came to a grinding halt last spring, parents were left scrambling to fill vast hours of unscheduled time. Some activities moved to remote instruction but most were canceled, and keeping children engaged became the bane of parents’ existence. Understandably, screens became default child care for younger kids and social lifelines for older ones.
As American society reopens, going back to our children’s prepandemic activities looks like an enticing way to reintroduce upper-elementary through high-school-age kids to the outside world. For parents with economic means, it’s tempting to return to a full slate of language classes, sports, music lessons and other extracurriculars — a guilt-free plan to keep kids busy with “enriching” activities while we get our jobs done.
But I suggest pausing before filling up their calendars again. We should not simply return children to their hectic prepandemic schedules.
Certainly, some amount of extracurricular activity can offer a welcome break from screens and help children nurture interests. But for Generation Z, the over-scheduling of extracurricular activities has been bad for stress and mental health and even worse for widening racial gaps. Moreover, as I learned when I conducted anthropological research for my book “Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success,” it no longer consistently improves the prospects of the white middle-class kids for whom it was designed.
But what can parents do with our kids instead? The answer is simple, though not easy to carry out: We can teach them (and perhaps relearn ourselves) the value of unstructured time and greater civic participation.
This does not mean we should quit our day jobs and devote ourselves instead to endless hours of building forts and playing games. Exposing children to sports, music, art, programming or dance certainly has benefits — including physical exercise, intellectual stimulation and fun — but there are also good reasons to give children time to be bored. Not least of these is it forces them to figure out a way to entertain themselves.
George Wilson knew remote learning was not for him. So when his classes went online because of the coronavirus pandemic, Wilson, a then-45-year-old furnace operator in Ohio, did what thousands of men nationwide did last year — he stopped out.
On campus, “I’m a machine,” said Wilson, who is pursuing an associate degree at Lakeland Community College, in Kirtland, Ohio. “I don’t have that same drive at home.”
Wilson is part of an exodus of men away from college that has been taking place for decades, but that accelerated during the pandemic. And it has enormous implications, for colleges and for society at large.
Last fall, male undergraduate enrollment fell by nearly 7 percent, nearly three times as much as female enrollment, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. The decline was the steepest — and the gender gap the largest — among students of color attending community colleges. Black and Hispanic male enrollment at public two-year colleges plummeted by 19.2 and 16.6 percent, respectively, about 10 percentage points more than the drops in Black and Hispanic female enrollment. Drops in enrollment of Asian men were smaller, but still about eight times as great as declines in Asian women.
Men as a whole aren’t usually the group that comes to mind as needing a leg up. But for colleges, declining male enrollment means less revenue and less viewpoint diversity in the classroom. For the economy, it means fewer workers to fill an increasing number of jobs that require at least some college education, and a future in which the work force is split even more along gender lines.
In the late 1970s, men and women attended college in almost equal numbers. Today, women account for 57 percent of enrollment and an even greater share of degrees, especially at the level of master’s and above. The explanations for this growing gender imbalance vary from the academic to the social to the economic. Girls, on average, do better in primary and secondary school. Boys are less likely to seek help when they struggle. And they face more pressure to join the work force.
Zaila Avant-garde of Louisiana just made history as the first African American person to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She claimed her victory in round 18 after she correctly spelled “murraya,” a genius of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees.
As the national champion, Avant-garde is walking away with a $50,000 cash prize, medal, Scripps Cup, the official trophy, and other sponsor prizes.
The 93rd competition took place at ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida on Thursday evening. Eleven students from seven states and the Bahamas competed during the final event.
“Zaila demonstrated incredible mastery of the English language with poise and perseverance,” said Adam Symson, president and CEO of The E.W. Scripps Company, in a statement. “The excellence of all of our competitors, their hard work and commitment to learning, and their distinct stories, capture hearts and minds across the globe.”
Launched in 1925, the Scripps National Spelling Bee is the longest-running educational competition in the country, Symson noted. Every year, millions of students across the country come together to compete for the coveted spelling bee title.
Saudi Arabia is funding a yet-to-be-announced digital news platform, which will have a studio in Washington, D.C., as the kingdom begins a new lobbying effort aimed at the White House and Congress.
The new effort, which had yet to be reported, is being backed by a subsidiary of the Saudi Technology Development and Investment Company, or Taqnia, according to new foreign lobbying disclosures filed with the Department of Justice.
Journalists and presenters involved in the project have past experience at Fox News, Al Jazeera, NBC and Sirius XM satellite radio.
The creation of what one of the documents calls a “news platform” comes as the kingdom has started hiring a new team of lobbyists as the Saudis seek access to President Joe Biden’s administration and the new Congress.
It also arrives almost three years after the death of Washington Post journalist and Saudi royal family critic Jamal Khashoggi. A recent U.S. intelligence report says the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, approved an operation to capture or kill Khashoggi.
Biden, however, opted not to punish the crown prince for his alleged role in Khashoggi’s death.
Kirsty Needham and Clare Baldwin:
A Chinese gene company selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country’s military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, a Reuters review of scientific papers and company statements found.
U.S. government advisors warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analysing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisors said.
Reuters has found that BGI’s prenatal test, one of the most popular in the world, is a source of genetic data for the company, which has worked with the Chinese military to improve “population quality” and on genetic research to combat hearing loss and altitude sickness in soldiers.
Hey guys, anyone wanna see something creepy?
This is the video being shown ton parents and children going back to school in Los Angeles.https://t.co/mpFlCvSETy
— OffGuardian (@OffGuardian0) July 9, 2021
On Friday, July 9, 2021, at 3 p.m., U.S. District Court Judge William Young is scheduled to hold a hearing on whether the Boston School Committee improperly concealed anti-white and anti-asian text messages and thereby deceived Judge Young into finding that the “Zip Code Quota Plan” had no racist intent.
We covered the background to the dispute in a recent post, Leaked School Committee Texts Showing Anti-White Bias May Reopen Boston “Zip Code Quota Plan” Case.
You can read the Memorandum In Support of Motion for Relief From Judgment for the allegations of misconduct (emphasis added):
New evidence, in the form of highly relevant text messages between two members of the Boston School Committee, has recently come to light. These text messages have long been in the possession of the City of Boston, and should be been provided to the Boston Parents in response to its public records request and should have been made a part of the agreed-upon record in this case when the Court originally considered it. But the City, instead, concealed the messages, thereby depriving the Boston Parents and the Court of the opportunity to consider them. The reason for the City’s actions can and must be inferred from the content of the concealed evidence: the text messages show clear racial motivation and anti-White racism on the part of two School Committee members who were leading proponents of the Zip Code Quota Plan. In fact, the content of this previously suppressed evidence is so damning that both members have now been forced to resign.
hese facts are unique. They warrant the relief sought, and they elevate the Boston Parents’ request beyond that of other Rule 60 motions. As this memorandum explains, the Boston Parents timely exercised their rights under state law to obtain copies of these and other text messages exchanged between members of the School Committee during the meeting where the Zip Code Quota Plan was adopted. But when the School Committee responded to that request, it deliberately concealed clearly racist statements, first, by deleting racist portions of text messages from what it claimed was a “transcript” of text messages, and, second, by misrepresenting that it had produced complete records when it knew that it had not. This prejudice was further compounded when neither the City of Boston nor the individual Defendants came clean when it came time to provide this Court with an agreed-upon record. It was only after the Boston Globe published leaked copies of the offensive texts that the City of Boston finally produced them to the Boston Parents, long after this Court issued its decision in this case. That is what prompts this Motion.
When the School Committee lawyers asked for more time to respond, Judge Young denied the request (bold in original):
Curiously Madison has not addressed school boundaries in decades, choosing instead to use taxpayer funds to expand our least diverse schools.
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.
Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller:
Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.
Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.
The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.
Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master’s program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world’s most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation’s eighth wealthiest private school.
For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid.
Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master’s students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture.
For the last 20 years, I’ve taught over 2000 children in 3 countries. I pioneered an English language program in an impoverished area is the Middle East. I’ve worked as a public school teacher at some of the highest and lowest performing public schools in all five boroughs. I’ve helped hundreds of parents start microschools (or learning pods) and I’ve tutored 18 subjects to some of the wealthiest families in NYC, San Francisco and Paris to make up for failings in private schools they were paying up to $60,000 a year to attend. Most recently, I founded a virtual learning program to help families through the pandemic and a hotline that served 100,000 families impacted by school closures.
Based on what I’ve observed in my experience in this wide array of educational settings is that that there are thousands of extraordinary people working diligently to fulfill a very unambitious goal. From what I’ve seen, the goal of school is to do an adequate job preparing our future workforce to do jobs that were relevant yesterday. Though more often than not, school is actually still optimized to prepare kids to work in industrialized factories. Or at best, schools may aim to prepare kids for currently relevant jobs in tech which are bound to also be obsolete when they actually join the workforce in 5–10 years, taking our inflexible school system another 100 years to catch up to prepare kids for what were our most needed careers today which by that time will also be obsolete.
Daniel Gingerich and Jan P. Vogler:
Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? We address this question by examining the consequences of the most deadly pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347-1351). Our claim is that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if they impose sufficient loss of life so as to augment the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor repressive regimes (such as serfdom) become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. We test our theory by tracing out the local consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. We find that areas hit hardest by the pandemic were more likely to: (1) adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns; (2) exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics; and (3) have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.
Toward the end of April 2020, a college friend of mine reached out: “Are you looking for work? I work for this essay writing service, and they’re offering referral bonuses to anyone who joins the team.”
He told me he was writing essays for college kids for a website called Killer Papers, and he was making tons of money. The owner had claimed 30 percent sales growth since most students had moved to distance learning.
Just 24 hours later, I had already interviewed and written my first essay: $40 for a three-page “reflection paper” on how COVID had been affecting college students. Fitting.
I got a quick education on what this system for black-market essays really looks like. The overarching stereotype is that privileged sons and daughters of wealthy families use their money to cheat their way out of their work and into a degree. And … sure, this is often true.
Incoming freshman! @WSJ needs your help. We want to see what universities are saying to you in their financial aid letters. You can upload yours and send them to us through the form with this article. Thank you!https://t.co/Cs7A7CNkP6 via @WSJ pic.twitter.com/ZEuZ71o3yt
— Jennifer Forsyth (@ForsythJenn) July 8, 2021
The report also pointed to the difficulty in accessing course materials via open records requests, citing expensive costs from certain districts to receive requested materials, including more than $5,000 from the Madison Metropolitan School District and more than $1,000 from the Kenosha Unified School District.
The proposed bill would require districts to post a bibliography-style list of curricular materials generated by outside entities and the full text of materials created by the district or a teacher. The list of materials would have to be posted “prominently” on a school district’s website and be updated at least twice each school year — once before it begins and once in January — starting with the 2022-23 school year.
“Parents from all political persuasions deserve the opportunity to learn what is being taught in their schools,” the report stated.
The report also pointed to the difficulty in accessing course materials via open records requests, citing expensive costs from certain districts to receive requested materials, including more than $5,000 from the Madison Metropolitan School District and more than $1,000 from the Kenosha Unified School District.
The Department of Public Instruction offered a fiscal estimate on last month’s CRT bill, including calling the proposed requirement to post curricular materials a “significant administrative burden on staff.” Sikma said that he believes that while starting the process may take an investment, maintaining the list from year to year shouldn’t require much effort.
“Once they get something like this up and running, it’s a matter of maintaining and it’s always easier to maintain than it is to build from the ground up,” Sikma said. “I’d be really surprised if school districts, individual teachers are so significantly revamping from semester to semester what they’re doing in the classroom that it’d really burden them with additional time.”
2021 Assembly Bill 411
If systems such as “Infinite Campus” were required and used, posting curriculum would occur “automagically” (recognizing nothing is perfect, but we have spent tens of millions on these things….)
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.
The fintech company Greenlight says that its app and debit card for kids is a financial literacy tool that gives parents “superpowers” to set strict controls on their children’s spending. Parents can use the app to pay allowances, choose which stores the connected debit cards work at, set spending limits, and receive instant notifications whenever their child makes a purchase.
But there’s one thing Greenlight makes it very hard for parents to control: What the company does with the mountains of sensitive data it collects about children.
Greenlight reserves the right to share that personal information—including names, birth dates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles—with “ad and marketing vendors,” “insurance companies,” “collection agencies,” and the catch-all category of “other service providers,” according to its privacy policy. Greenlight’s policy also says that it can use the data it collects to deliver “tailored content” advertisements, a kind of marketing that youth privacy and education advocates say is particularly manipulative and damaging for childre
How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts.
How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts.
The earlier proposal for one-time payments, which equaled 3.75% of the average annual yearly wage of $70,950 for all permanent general municipal employees, would have cost a total $4.5 million. About 1,400 of the city’s 2,900 employees are classified as general municipal employees. Employees in the city’s police, firefighter and Teamster bargaining units would not have been eligible for the money.
Police and firefighters got raises of 2% in December 2018, 2.5% in June 2019, 3.25% for 2020 and 3.75% for 2021, Schmiedicke said. The Teamsters got hikes of 2% for 2019, 2% in December 2019, 2.5% in June 2020, and 2.5% in June 2021. General municipal employees received increases of 3.25% for 2019, 3.25% for 2020, and nothing for 2021, he said.
But city attorney Michael Haas has said that the resolution doesn’t meet standards outlined in the U.S. Department of Treasury rules on how to use the federal coronavirus relief aid.
The study also found a significant racial difference in the percent of students getting full-time, in-person instruction: nationally an average of 75% of non-Hispanic white students were getting in-person instruction as of April versus 63% of Black students and 59% of Hispanic students. In 43 states, access to in-person learning was higher for non-Hispanic white students compared to those of color.
The highest racial disparities were in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where on average, students of color were 21% and 23% less likely to have access to in-person instruction. In Wisconsin students of color were 12.9% less likely to receive full-time, in-person instruction. That was a bigger gap then all but 13 states in the nation.
This, too, may largely reflect different approaches to social distancing. Urban areas like Milwaukee, with high percentages of minority students, were often more careful to restrict social distancing, given statistics showing a higher incidence of COVID-19 among Black and Hispanic families, and were slower to return to in-person instruction.
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).
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.
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
“There is this saying that MMSD has kind of always wanted to do it the MMSD way, whatever that means,” Nichols said. “Sometimes, you’re trying to find a balance of the things that are important to our Madison school district and our educators and at the same time wanting to push sometimes in a different or new direction.
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.
Why is it always, “Make sure you go to college,” and never “Make sure you go to trade school?”
Most high school students are funneled into two- or four-year universities. Little thought is given to other paths toward adulthood, and schools and parents often fail to present alternative options.
The allure of a college degree has tarnished the reputation of trade schools.
COVID-19 hammered most professional sectors but many trade jobs saw double or triple growth. During the economic downturn, trade labor continued expanding despite a volatile world. The pandemic revealed just how much rests upon the shoulders of skilled trade workers.
For students who may not know what they want to do, or if they merely want to try something other than college, trade school offers promise. Many trade workers collect far higher salaries than college-educated young adults and, in some other countries, trade school is popular and encouraged.
One reason high school conversations rarely gravitate to trade school is, in part, because of the stigma that comes with not attending college. But forgoing college does not equate to failure; in some cases it means better pay and better work-life balance down the line.
.@voxdotcom That’s because they are.
— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) July 15, 2014
We use Laplace’s equation to model any physical phenomenon where a scalar field is allowed to relax over time and we’re only interested in the final state.
George Zacharopoulos, Francesco Sella & Roi Cohen Kadosh:
Formal education has a long-term impact on an individual’s life. However, our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education, such as in mathematics, is currently poor but is highly relevant given the extant differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in opportunities to access education. Here we examined whether neurotransmitter concentrations in the adolescent brain could classify whether a student is lacking mathematical education. Decreased γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) concentration within the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) successfully classified whether an adolescent studies math and was negatively associated with frontoparietal connectivity. In a second experiment, we uncovered that our findings were not due to preexisting differences before a mathematical education ceased. Furthermore, we showed that MFG GABA not only classifies whether an adolescent is studying math or not, but it also predicts the changes in mathematical reasoning ∼19 mo later. The present results extend previous work in animals that has emphasized the role of GABA neurotransmission in synaptic and network plasticity and highlight the effect of a specific lack of education on MFG GABA concentration and learning-dependent plasticity. Our findings reveal the reciprocal effect between brain development and education and demonstrate the negative consequences of a specific lack of education during adolescence on brain plasticity and cognitive functions.
2007 Math Forum
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.
I would start with what I expect students to know. They should be able to write very well, have a basic understanding of economics and public policy, and a decent working knowledge of statistical reasoning. I would give a degree to students who demonstrated “B-grade” competence in all of these areas; what now goes for passing C-minus work wouldn’t cut it.
Most important, the people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors. So students would have to acquire a genuine general knowledge base, not just memorize what is supposed to be on the exam.
Next, each student would have the equivalent of a GitHub certification page. If you learned three programming languages, for example, or won a prize in a science fair, that would go on your page as a credential. But it would not count as a credit toward graduation. Some students could finish their degrees in a year or two even if their pages were not adorned with many accomplishments, while others might fill their pages but get no degree.
White Girls Need Not Apply: more race discrimination from @MMSDschools and @CityofMadison. Mentoring programs, swag bags, personal development, college readiness – “applications are open for Black/brown girls”https://t.co/tYOQrcyQiU. Reject discrimination – embrace equality. pic.twitter.com/3UlpWG3l5W
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) July 6, 2021
The committee that will make recommendations on renaming James Madison Memorial High School already has its hands full as its first meeting approaches.
The Citizens’ Naming Committee will convene virtually at 5 p.m. Wednesday to begin the next step in the renaming process, 10 months after the School Board received a proposal from a Memorial graduate to rename the school for Vel Phillips, a Wisconsin woman who achieved many firsts for Black women in the state.
The 12-person committee will discuss a variety of procedural topics like its meeting schedule and the process for reviewing the list of 24 proposed names at its first meeting. Members will also review the public comment received to date.
As of July 2, those comments covered 88 pages and featured a mix of support for and opposition to the renaming, illustrating that whatever happens, some will be unhappy with the outcome.
Mya Berry began pushing for a new name at the school when she was a student at Memorial in 2017, but her petition went nowhere. This time, however, the School Board agreed to consider it after two elementary schools recently received new names that honor local Black women.
The renaming now comes amid a political battle over how we consider our country’s history. Fights over toppled statues of confederate generals and debates over what should be taught in schools are raging around the country, making any discussion like this a potential lightning rod for criticism.
“How sad that our city has fallen victim the left’s agenda,” wrote one commenter. “Re-naming a school for what purpose? Madison is no longer the Madison I called home.”
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.
Facebook just warned me that I may have been subjected to extremist content and asked me to report anyone I may know that is becoming an extremist,” tweeted Ms. Boebert. “I have more than 200 coworkers I need to report.”
Others, including Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, took a dig at the tech giant by adding sarcastic frames to their Facebook profile photos with the message, “Exposing Friends to Extremist Content.”
Mr. Massie said Facebook “ran out posts to show me after they filtered out the content from my friends on vaccine reactions, alternate Covid treatments, election investigations, and extremist patriotic programming.
Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook (and instagram) services, including Madison.
Public schools are teaching kindergarteners that “whiteness” is the devil and lures children with the promise of “stolen land, stolen riches, [and] special favors.”
David French believes that state legislation banning this abuse is “un-American” and a “threat” to democracy. pic.twitter.com/B17FZESVqC
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 5, 2021
Was this media and activist frenzy organic, or itself astroturf?
Maybe it’s just coincidence, but shortly before the mid-June frenzy, a large coalition of over 300 progressive educational and union groups, over a dozen major left-leaning foundations and a parade of affiliated “influencers,” rolled out a CRT Messaging Guide with talking points identical to those repeated almost daily by teachers unions, in major newspapers, on MSNBC and CNN, and in digital media.
Whether the Message Guide was a script being read from, or simply reflected a coalescing of tactics and talking points, its appearance reflects how organized the messaging against parents has become.
Read the Messaging Guide below. It will all sound very, very, familiar.
I would start with what I expect students to know. They should be able to write very well, have a basic understanding of economics and public policy, and a decent working knowledge of statistical reasoning. I would give a degree to students who demonstrated “B-grade” competence in all of these areas; what now goes for passing C-minus work wouldn’t cut it.
Most important, the people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors. So students would have to acquire a genuine general knowledge base, not just memorize what is supposed to be on the exam.
Next, each student would have the equivalent of a GitHub certification page. If you learned three programming languages, for example, or won a prize in a science fair, that would go on your page as a credential. But it would not count as a credit toward graduation. Some students could finish their degrees in a year or two even if their pages were not adorned with many accomplishments, while others might fill their pages but get no degree.
My imaginary school would not have many assistant deans, student affairs staff or sports teams. The focus would be on paying more money to the better instructors. There would be plenty of humanities classes, primarily aimed at helping students learn how to write well, but the topics might range from Dante to hip hop. Students would have the option of living on campus but not be required to do so, much as they do at my current employer, George Mason University.
ANTONIE VAN LEEUWENHOEK, a 17th-century Dutch businessman and scientist, was inordinately proud of his clean teeth. Every morning he scrubbed them with salt before rinsing his mouth with water. After eating, he carefully cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. Few people his age, he remarked in a letter in 1683 (when he was 50), had such clean and white teeth. Yet when he looked closely, he found “there remains or grows between some of the molars and teeth a little white matter”—now called dental plaque.
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As an expert microscopist who had observed tiny organisms in water a few years earlier, van Leeuwenhoek wondered whether they might also be present in this white matter. A microscope showed that it did indeed contain “many very small living animals, which moved very prettily”. His drawings of them, which he sent to the Royal Society in London, are considered the first definitive evidence of bacteria.
Few people suspected that such micro-organisms might cause disease. At the time, doctors followed the doctrine of Hippocrates, believing disease was caused by an imbalance of the “humours” within the body (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Epidemic diseases, meanwhile, were attributed to miasma, the “bad air” given off by swamps or decomposing matter. Suggestions that disease might be transmitted by tiny living things were rejected by doctors. But the advent of the microscope showed these tiny creatures existed. Robert Hooke, an English scientist, published depictions of mucor, a microbial fungus, in the 1660s, and van Leeuwenhoek spotted what are now called protozoa and bacteria. Could the idea that tiny organisms caused disease have caught on in the late 17th century?
This notion, now known as germ theory, was only embraced in the second half of the 19th century. In the 1840s Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, realised the importance of hand-washing and sterilisation of surgical instruments, but was ignored. In the 1850s John Snow traced cholera deaths in London to a neighbourhood water pump. Louis Pasteur demonstrated in the 1860s that fermentation and putrefaction depended on living micro-organisms that could be killed by heating. Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, then convincingly showed that using antiseptics to sterilise surgical instruments and clean wounds saved lives.
Jordan Smith:
William Thompson, a professor emeritus of criminology and law at the University of California, Irvine, lives in University Hills, an on-campus residential community that affords, as he says, “poorly paid academics” in an area with high housing costs the ability to live near work. He was outside one day a few years ago when he was approached by a neighbor, another member of the university faculty, who had a story for him. She’d been walking her dog without a leash — which is generally against the law in Orange County, where Irvine is located — when she got stopped and cited for the misdemeanor offense. She expected to go to court to pay a fine (a first offense is $100), but when she got there, she found out it wouldn’t be that simple. Instead, she was told that to make the infraction go away, she would have to give up a DNA sample.
This was not the first time Thompson had heard a story like this. Thompson has been a DNA wonk for decades and has written extensively about issues with DNA analysis and the human factors, including biases, that can impact forensic sciences. As something of a go-to guy on campus where issues related to DNA are concerned, he’d been hearing similar stories from students. It wasn’t surprising that students occasionally found themselves sideways with the law for low-level issues like minor pot possession. “That kind of stuff,” he said. “Most of these minor cases would be settled by people showing up, pleading guilty, paying the fine.”
That began to change in 2007, when the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, or OCDA, started compiling its own DNA database. “Now students are coming in and saying, ‘Well, I went in to pay my $100. I didn’t want to hire a lawyer. I didn’t want to tell my family about this. So I was going to go pay my fine, but they wouldn’t let me,’” Thompson said. Instead, prosecutors were threatening to up a simple pot possession charge to “possession with intent to sell” unless the student agreed to surrender a DNA sample. He says students would ask, “Is this fair, professor, that they’re threatening to prosecute me for a felony, for something that’s not a felony, in order to get me to give my DNA?”
States have long maintained DNA databases containing the profiles of people convicted of felony crimes as well as unknown profiles developed from crime scene evidence. But those systems are created by legislation, strictly regulated, and publicly funded. They typically link up to the Combined DNA Index System, a nationwide network administered by the FBI that was built with the goal of helping to solve and deter crime.
Madison: Have you been driven nuts by this right-wing college town blogger? https://t.co/dfjyU9p1TM
— Jason Joyce (@jjoyce) July 5, 2021
.@wortnews obtained David Blaska's application under an open records request for all applications to the Madison police civilian oversight board.
In it, he writes "Blaming police for crime has to be the ultimate galactic joke."
Read: https://t.co/GVGKuTtkFl pic.twitter.com/7FNxtprq3U
— chali (@chalipittman) July 6, 2021
“One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.”
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.
And Haidara’s manuscripts were precious for what they said more broadly about Africa’s history. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who visited Timbuktu and Haidara in 1996, explains that Hegel, Kant, and other Enlightenment philosophers contended that Africa had no tradition of writing, and therefore no history and no memory.
“And unless you have those, you are not a civilization, which was a pernicious argument that provided justification for the slave trade,” Gates said in a recent interview. “The absence of writing, of books, was seen as a reflection of the subhuman position of the Africans. So the presence of these books had high, high stakes, going back to the 18th century. Kant and Hegel and Hume did not know anything about this.”
Over nine traumatic months, Haidara and his team rescued 350,000 manuscripts from 45 different libraries in and around Timbuktu and hid them in Bamako, more than 400 miles from the AQIM-controlled north. There were many close calls, including one involving Haidara’s nephew, Mohammed Touré, a 25-year-old curator at the library. One night when he was leaving work with a trunk full of manuscripts destined for hiding, Touré came face-to-face with Oumar Ould Hamaha, one of AQIM’s most inflexible zealots.
// John Lewis to offer basic literacy and numeracy classes to young staff
// Dame Sharon White said young staff members have been “completely failed” by the education system
John Lewis Partnership chair Sharon White has said the company will provide basic literacy and numeracy classes to young staff because they have been “completely failed” by the education system.
White criticised the UK’s education set-up and said that some of the 16 year olds at John Lewis did not have “functional literacy and numeracy” skills.
She also warned that children who are less academically inclined are not always able to reach their full potential.
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.
Here are the slides of my talk “The dawn of formalized mathematics” from the 8th European Congress of Mathematics, which is taking place online and in Protorož, Slovenia, from June 20 to 26, 2021:
It’s been a banner year for school choice in the states, and legislatures aren’t finished expanding scholarship and education savings account programs (ESAs). In four state budgets that passed in the last two weeks, lawmakers included provisions that give families more educational opportunities.
In New Hampshire last week, Republican lawmakers approved Education Freedom Accounts, which students can use toward such expenses as private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks and technology. Scholarship funds are available to families earning up to 300% of the federal poverty line at an average of $4,600, the state per-pupil funding amount for public school students. The state Education Department estimates the program could save the state at least $360 million over a decade.
On Wednesday Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed a budget that includes an expansion of a high-demand state tax-credit scholarship program. The GOP Legislature pushed the measure, but Mr. Wolf will now share the political credit. The Educational Improvement Tax Credit cap will rise by $40 million to $175 million for K-12 scholarships, enough to fund an estimated 13,000 more students. The expansion “shows that the commonwealth is placing the focus on children, not on any one educational model,” said state Sen. Scott Martin.
Ohio lawmakers packaged several school-choice provisions into their budget that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed Wednesday. These include funding for high-performing charter schools and higher scholarship values for the state’s voucher program. The Legislature also created a new K-12 ESA program, which offers students a modest $500.
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.
Guardianship, the legal process of taking away an adult’s rights to make life decisions, is intended to protect vulnerable people from neglect and abuse.
In Richmond, VCU Health System and other health care providers have used the process to remove poor patients from hospital beds, sometimes against the wishes of family members, with the help of a local law firm.
A year-long Richmond Times-Dispatch investigation has found that what happens to the patients after they’re discharged is left up to a system that fails to provide the one justification for the power it wields – protection.
ISABEL VAN BRUGEN AND JAN JEKIELEK
PolitiFact, for example, on May 24 quietly retracted a September 2020 fact check that labeled a Hong Kong virologist’s claim that COVID-19 originated in a lab as inaccurate and a “debunked conspiracy theory.”
“The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous,” the now-archived fact check previously said. “We rate it Pants on Fire!”
In an updated editor’s note, PolitiFact explained why it removed the label.
“When this fact-check was first published in September 2020, PolitiFact’s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed,” the note said. “For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review. Currently, we consider the claim to be unsupported by evidence and in dispute.”
Separately, the Washington Post quietly walked back its claims regarding the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
The paper in February 2020 published an article claiming the idea was a “conspiracy theory” that had been “debunked.” The article attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who called for an investigation into the origins of the CCP virus.
Some reporters have said that they disregarded the lab leak theory because Republicans were largely the ones promoting the idea.
Weinstein described the phenomenon as “a headlong rush, by all of those who had gotten the story wrong to explain themselves—and their explanations made less than no sense.”
And, censorship at Linkedin: Yes, I have been locked out of Linked In and my account has been shut down. #censorship in the time of COVID. I have had to submit copies of my driver’s license and Linked In will now make a determination about reactivating my account.
So I took the test. Or to put it more accurately, I tried to see if I knew what my grandfather had learned, giving myself a pass on Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet and Oregon’s congressional delegation from the ’40s. I’m sure timing had something to do with it — the fact that these pages fell into my life at the end of a hard year, one in which our ability to govern ourselves and to call ourselves united regularly seemed in doubt — but the exercise felt, well, meaningful. Present was the genius of the system of government whose birth we celebrate this weekend but also its gaps and flaws, the manifest truth that the circle of rights has never been fully inclusive. Between the lines was sacrifice — with my grandfather as a proxy for what generations have been willing to undergo to call themselves Americans.
The White House has published its Strategyfor fighting domestic terrorism, defined in terms laid out by the Patriot Act but augmented by a slurry of new jargon: there are now Domestic Violent Extremists (DVEs), Racially Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVEs), and Militia Violent Extremists (MVEs). All this based on a broad claim that extremist violence is a growing and escalating threat. This Strategy calls for the government:
The Sprawl
As envisioned, this effort is almost designed to sprawl. The Capitol Event (alternatively described as a riot, insurrection, or coup attempt) has become the equivalent of 9/11. This event, in combination with online and media claims of a rapid rise in domestic extremism, is being used as the critical justification of this war—even though, according to the Anti-Defamation League, deaths from extremist violence are at the lowest level since 2004.
Driven by political and online factors and without a basis in hard-eyed analysis, this effort will seek to justify itself by expanding its definition of extremism to include incidents and actions far less dramatic than deadly violence.
What should parents do when a policy that is good for society seems bad for their kids? I feel genuine sympathy for anyone concerned for their child’s future, but complaining about a loss of privilege comes across as tone deaf.
At Eton, attended by 20 UK prime ministers including the current one, the number of Oxbridge offers dropped from 99 in 2014 to 48 this year. At King’s College, Wimbledon, offers have fallen by nearly half in two years to 27, The Sunday Times reported in February. Both schools still sit near the top of the national league tables for total offers. But their students are finding it harder to get in, rankling parents who shell out up to £28,000 a year for day school or £44,000 for boarding.
The anger of wealthy, mostly white parents about losing the advantages they expected to be able to buy their children is part of a broader pattern of status anxiety among some sections of the British and American upper classes. It is out of step with reality: children from such backgrounds will typically enjoy greater opportunitiesand financial security throughout their lives.
Nevertheless, the potency of this anxiety was on display in the US during 2019’s “Varsity Blues” admissions scandal when actors and private equity giants were jailed for trying to buy their kids into Yale and Stanford, among others, with faked entrance test results and counterfeit athletic skills.
“When you have something that is very valuable to people, the system gets distorted,” says Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap. “Attending these universities makes a difference in people’s income and status . . . The parents see how much it costs them to live in the neighbourhoods they live in and send children to private schools, and they realise that their children will be in the same bind.”
Robert Wright & Connor Echols:
This week Peter Beinart, writing in the New York Times, took aim at one of the Blob’s favorite terms: the “rules-based order.” The Biden administration often invokes the term, typically in reference to the threat allegedly posed to that order by China. The problem, Beinart notes, is that no one ever bothers to explain what rules constitute the order—what rules America is supposedly abiding by while its adversaries violate them. “Since the ‘rules-based order’ is never adequately defined, America’s claim to uphold it can never be disproved,” Beinart writes.
This sort of skepticism about boilerplate “rules-based order” rhetoric has been growing lately, and that’s a welcome development in foreign policy discourse—maybe even a sign that the Blob’s days of hegemony are numbered. The trend dates back to the Trump administration, when observers noted that some of the Blobsters most loudly complaining about Trump’s failure to uphold the “rules-based order” had championed things like invading and bombing countries in violation of international law. When Biden took office, and staffed his foreign policy team with exactly this kind of rules-based-order scold, it was an open invitation for Beinart and other Blob critics to turn up the heat.
And yet—so much more heat is needed! The average member of the foreign policy establishment, to say nothing of the average American voter, has no idea how hypocritical America’s sermons about following the rules look from abroad. As it happens, an object lesson in this hypocrisy took shape on the same day Beinart’s piece was published, when the US Justice Department announced that it had disabled 36 Iran-linked websites. Let’s take a look at this exercise in American rules enforcement and try to imagine how it might look from perspectives other than America’s. Three kinds of rules, in particular, are implicated in the Justice Department’s website takedown:
Matthew Mitchell doesn’t want my phone number. He knows that if he got it, he could hack into my digital life. “It’s just easier for everybody,” he says as we begin our interview. “I’m not going to let you expose yourself.”
This is not a boast. Mitchell, who is in his forties, wants me to grasp how easily I can be hacked, spied on and have my civil liberties breached. He’s only agreed to video-chat with me from New York if I download a little-known encrypted communications app, Wire.
When I do, Mitchell tells me about his fear of governments and law enforcement aided by powerful tech companies and why he wants to help fight back.
A security researcher by day, Mitchell also co-hosts “crypto parties”. The grassroots movement began in 2012 and consists mainly of technologists leading free workshops that teach people how to use the internet anonymously. (The “crypto” in this case refers to the online anonymity you learn to achieve; the “party” is a matter of personal definition.)
Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Donald Trump’s social media suspension, Apple and Amazon’s kneecapping of Parler, the removal of real raw footage from the January 6th riots, and others.
This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes.
Profiled in this space two weeks ago, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying — both biologists — host the podcast DarkHorse, which by any measure is among the more successful independent media operations in the country. They have two YouTube channels, a main channel featuring whole episodes and livestreams, and a “clips” channel featuring excerpts from those shows.
Between the two channels, they’ve been flagged 11 times in the last month or so. Specifically, YouTube has honed in on two areas of discussion it believes promote “medical misinformation.” The first is the potential efficacy of the repurposed drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. The second is the third rail of third rails, i.e. the possible shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.
Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google (YouTube) services, including Madison.
Penelope Green:
In 2008, she graduated from the College of San Mateo, a two-year community college in Silicon Valley, along with her younger brother, Stoyan. With scholarships from the San Mateo Rotary Club, among other awards, they were both accepted at Berkeley, where Boryana earned a degree in economics. She worked as an account manager at Brocade, a software company, before joining Tesla in 2011.
When society wants to encourage something, the government serving it subsidizes that activity. Conversely, when it wishes to discourage an activity, often it taxes it. Thus we have high taxes on cigarettes and alcoholic beverages to help curb lung cancer and alcoholism. And we give subsidies to universities because we think doing so will help produce a better society —higher incomes, more enlightened leaders, greater opportunities for individuals to advance themselves financially and maybe even spiritually, etc. Universities allegedly reek with positive spillover effects.
But then there is Yale University. We give it all sorts of subsidies despite the fact that it is one of the greatest private concentrations of wealth on the planet, with at least $2.5 million dollars of endowment for every student attending providing about $100,000 income annually or roughly $300 daily per student (whether school is in session or not) in investment income to educate each of the 12,000 students enrolled. Donations to the school are tax deductible. The school’s earnings (including capital gains) from the over $30 billion endowment are not taxable as they are for private individuals. To be sure, the U.S. recently imposed an endowment tax on ultra-rich schools like Yale, but still the tax benefits of its university status far exceed the costs.
What sort of oversight is there of this highly favored institution? How transparent is its decision making process? Recent articles by two fine graduates of the Yale Law School (typically rated as the nation’s finest), Lanny Davis (Wall Street Journal) and Glenn Reynolds (New York Post) suggest the governance of Yale probably more closely resembles that of, say, Belarus, than it does of a typical U.S. governmental body or publicly traded U.S. corporation. The Board of Trustees of Yale is elected theoretically at least in part by university alumni, but in reality the only candidates considered for election are selected by the board itself, and candidates are not allowed to campaign or provide alumni with detailed information about their lives or their positions of interest to the Yale community.
Until recently, it was possible for alumni to petition to be on the ballot, and occasionally there would be contested elections, but Yale’s anti-democratic aristocrats have put a stop to that, changing the rules to allow voting only for the two Board-approved candidates who are forbidden to really campaign. And this is at a university that openly allows public inspection of its Board minutes only after 50 years. And one that still has “secret societies” like Skull and Bones for the most elite amongst the elite kids populating the place.
WILL:
The News: The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously declared that an order from the City of Racine’s public health officer closing all schools, public and private, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is invalid and lacked proper legal authority. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on November 19, on behalf of a group of parents, schools, and membership associations. The Court granted WILL’s original action and issued a temporary injunction blocking the City of Racine’s school closure order before it could go into effect on November 27.
Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “The Court determined, once again, that a local public health officer violated the law when it ordered all schools in her jurisdiction closed. This marks another important case reminding public officials that emergencies do not override the rule of law.”
Background: The City of Racine Public Health Department issued an order on November 12, closing all school buildings in the City of Racine, private and public, from November 27 to January 15, as a means of addressing COVID-19. When Racine issued this order, WILL had already filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court challenging Dane County’s school closure order and obtained an order enjoining it.
WILL filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on November 19, on behalf of a group of parents, schools, and membership associations and similarly earned a temporary injunction blocking Racine’s school order while the Court decided the challenge to Dane County.
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).
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.
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.
[edit: existing polygenic screening companies might not read enough genes to do this. Although it would be easy to offer a more complete service that reads most genes, banning the more complete version might be one way regulators could prevent this otherwise hard-to-prevent thing.]
What about IQ? There are definitely scientists who have figured out how to do polygenic analyses to predict a modest amount of variation in IQ, though I don’t know if their algorithms are public, and they’re certainly not convenient for amateurs to use. If you had them, would they work? Gwern has done some calculations and finds that with ten embryos (a near-best-case scenario of what you’re likely to get from egg extraction) and modern (as of 2016) polygenic scoring technology, you could get on average +3 IQ points by implanting the smartest. If polygenic scoring technology reached the limits of its potential (might happen within a decade or two) you could get +9 IQ points. Embryos from the same parents only vary a certain amount in IQ, and about half of IQ variation is non-genetic, so you can’t work miracles with this (if you want to know how to work miracles, read the rest of Gwern’s article).
The police are attempting to use YouTube’s stringent copyright system to keep people from posting recordings of encounters with law enforcement.
In a video posted Thursday by the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), a community organization dedicated to defunding the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy David Shelby pulled out his phone and began playing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” during an encounter. He openly admitted, “it can’t be posted to YouTube.”
“Are we having a dance party right now?” APTP’s policy director James Burch asked in the video, which is posted on YouTube.
“Are you playing pop music to drown out the conversation?” the person recording asked. You can record all you want, I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.
Vivian Wang and Alexandra Stevenson:
The Hong Kong government has issued hundreds of pages of new curriculum guidelines designed to instill “affection for the Chinese people.” Geography classes must affirm China’s control over disputed areas of the South China Sea. Students as young as 6 will learn the offenses under the security law.
Lo Kit Ling, who teaches a high school civics course, is now careful to say only positive things about China in class. While she had always tried to offer multiple perspectives on any topic, she said, she worries that a critical view could be quoted out of context by a student or parent.
A display at the Hong Kong Museum of History on Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997.
Ms. Lo’s subject is especially fraught; the city’s leaders have accused it of poisoning Hong Kong’s youth. The course had encouraged students to analyze China critically, teaching the country’s economic successes alongside topics such as the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Officials have ordered the subject replaced with a truncated version that emphasizes the positive.
“It’s not teaching,” Ms. Lo said. “It’s just like a kind of brainwashing.” She will teach an elective on hospitality studies instead.
“Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door, the girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She’s been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she was and when and where she’s going. Eve. You all know all about Eve.”
— Addison DeWitt, All About Eve (1950)
Over the seven months that I’ve been writing at Original Jurisdiction, I have covered some of the most prominent figures in the legal profession, including leading judges, law firm partners, in-house lawyers, and law professors. Who has been the best for ratings?1
According to the list of my most popular posts, none other than Amy Chua. She’s the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School (YLS), although she’s most famous not as a legal academic but as the author of a controversial, bestselling parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She also happens to be the wife of another longtime YLS faculty member, Jed Rubenfeld (and some refer to them collectively as “Chubenfeld”).
Over the past few weeks, articles about Chua have appeared in multiple major news outlets. Right now, it seems that every journalist in the country is chasing Amy.
Why is this 58-year-old law professor back in the headlines, more than a decade after the viral Wall Street Journal op-ed that propelled Tiger Mother onto the bestseller list? To catch up, check out my earlier story on Chua, or read this CliffsNotes version:
Nicole Solas is the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, mother of a child entering kindergarten in the fall who has been targeted by the School District, School Committee, and Rhode Island School Superintendents Association, after she filed a large number of public records requests regarding Critical Race and Gender teaching in the elementary school.
Solas first told her story in an op-ed at Legal Insurrection, and her story went national with multiple media appearances, including on Fox and Friends, and Tucker Carlson. Here are our posts about her story:
My 2009 copy of Why Don’t Students Like School by Dan Willingham is among the most dog-eared and annotated books I own. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit (2006) and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion (2010), I’m hard-pressed to think of another book in the last twenty years that had a greater impact on my teaching, thinking, or writing about education. I’m clearly not alone: Dan’s book has been translated into thirteen languages.
A second-edition has just been published. There’s plenty of new and refreshed material, but the strength of the book—its proof point, actually—is how much has not changed from its first printing. Willingham set out to put between two covers a set of enduring principles from cognitive science (“People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers”; “factual knowledge precedes skill”; “proficiency requires practice,” et al.) that can reliably inform and shape classroom practice—a rich vein of ore that Willingham began to mine in his “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” columns for The American Educator starting nearly twenty years ago. His many admirers will appreciate the opportunity to refresh their familiarity with the book. But the primary beneficiaries may be younger teachers who might be encountering it for the first time.
I recently talked to Dan about his masterful and accessible book, its origin and impact, the importance of explaining the findings of cognitive science to teachers, and the decision to bring out a second edition. Here’s our conversation, edited for concision:
Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most people today more-or-less know what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life—being in some kind of school (the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”). Beyond that age there is of course the proverbial worker, in modern stories usually an office worker, who is often so inert that he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality (that forces him out of his inertia, and in doing so the story begins).
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos’s office in Memorial Stadium, you can hear heavy machinery ripping up a sidewalk to make room for a new $155 million indoor training facility. But that’s not the biggest change to campus Moos will oversee this year.
The university is angling hard to be at the front of the pack in persuading recruits it can help them take advantage of a new era of compensation for college athletes that is dawning.
Nebraska will be among the first states to permit college athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness. The state’s law does not take effect until July 1, 2023, but allows universities to give their athletes the right to monetize their names before then, at the school’s discretion.
Moos is using his discretion to start immediately. Laws in at least six states will take effect on July 1 that allow athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness, beginning a new era of compensation for college athletes.
The movement for academic equity — that is, for equal outcomes — is splitting the Democratic coalition, warns David Frum in The Atlantic.
Eighty-three percent of Americans support testing for entry into honors programs, he writes, citing a PDK poll. Yet, “blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost all of its forms.”
Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.
Underpinning our vast and simple-seeming digital networks are technologies that, if they hadn’t already been invented, probably wouldn’t unfold the same way again. They are artifacts of a very particular circumstance, and it’s unlikely that in an alternate timeline they would have been designed the same way.
The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention.
The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to deploy liveried planes, trucks, people, and drop-off boxes, creating a single point-to-point delivery system. Instead, they settled on the equivalent of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.
Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.
Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.
“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.
The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.
The estimable National Student Clearinghouse recently released data on spring 2021 enrollments. The press accounts stressed continuing decline; total numbers were down 3.5% from spring 2020 to spring 2021. By exploring the NSC website in greater detail, I learned that since spring 2011, total enrollment has fallen over 14 percent. In 2011, there were about 63 college students for every 1,000 American population; now there are less than 51, a decline of nearly 20 percent. As colleges shrink in immediate importance in people’s lives, support for colleges wanes.
Yet the aggregate numbers disguise a striking additional trend: the decline in male enrollment is dramatically greater than that for women. In the 2020-21 year, for example, the number of women enrolled declined by nearly 203,000, but the male decline was nearly double that, over 400,000. In the 2011-21 decade, spring enrollment for men fell strikingly more than 18%, nearly double the female decline.
If recent trends continue, we will soon reach a milestone: there will be more than three female students for every two male ones. Girl students may find it hard to get dates with guys!! Ironically, the reverse was the case a half century earlier; almost 60% of students in the 1969-70 school year were male. At that time, the burning issue was: should elite Ivy League schools admit female students! They did, and the number of all-male schools is approaching zero.
A handful of teams from the Seattle area and another from southeastern Washington state made a strong showing in the finals this month of the American Rocketry Challenge, the world’s largest student rocket contest.
Competition concluded on June 20 and a virtual awards ceremony was held on Monday. The Argonauts, a team from WISE Camps in Bellevue, Wash., finished eighth among the 100 best teams in the country. Five other Seattle-area teams also placed in the finals:
Several online media outlets in Hong Kong took down opinion articles and videos from their websites or said they would move out of the city after one more columnist of the Apple Daily was arrested at the airport on Sunday.
Stand News, a pro-democracy news outlet, said in a statement that it had temporarily removed commentaries written by its bloggers and readers from May this year and before until it had decided whether it was appropriate to publish them again.
It said it had decided to stop accepting monthly sponsorship from readers and to shelve older commentaries. It added that it had enough money to run for another nine to 12 months and maintain its current editorial guidelines.
The news outlet said six of its directors, including barrister Margaret Ng, singer Denise Ho and columnist Joseph Lian, have accepted recommendations to resign. Two founding directors, Tony Tsoi and chief editor Chung Pui-kuen, will stay on,
The Supreme Court extended its protection of student speech to social media on Wednesday, by an 8-1 ruling that a Pennsylvania school district overstepped its authority by punishing a high-school cheerleader who used a vulgar word on Snapchat when she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading team.
The court said there are some occasions when schools can reach beyond campus to regulate student speech, mentioning bullying and cheating as subject to discipline whether they occur in the classroom or in cyberspace.
But the court has long held that even on campus, students retain First Amendment rights to speak on controversial matters so long as they don’t cause a substantial disruption. Beyond school grounds, administrators’ power to punish students diminishes further still, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court.
In this instance, “the school’s interest in teaching good manners is not sufficient, in this case, to overcome [the student’s] interest in free expression,” Justice Breyer wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Sun Prairie School Board members who questioned district administrative team decisions to end “high stakes summative” semester and final exams on Monday, June 21 were cautioned to remember board governance procedures and reminded it was not an area over which the board could take action.
The questioning of administrators began during the board’s discussions surrounding the handling of COVID-19. Board member Alwyn Foster questioned the decision to end final exams, and heard more than he was expecting in response from Stephanie Leonard-Witte, the Sun Prairie Area School District Assistant Superintendent for Teaching, Learning & Equity.
“During COVID we said no finals, and now that we have built, I’ll say, better and more current assessment strategies, we just won’t be re-instituting finals as we move forward,” Leonard-Witte said.
“If you do an assessment of best practice — like what’s best for kids in learning — there is very little out there that would support final full summative assessments,” Leonard-Witte said.
“Best practice is that kids have assessment throughout the semester, throughout the quarter, that builds on itself. So they’re committing that knowledge more to, I would say, a working knowledge, as opposed to cramming for a test the night before,” Leonard-Witte added. “So I would say it’s a practice that’s been outdated for a bit and we’re taking the opportunity now to not reinstate something that isn’t supported as best practice in most of the research around assessment.”
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.
The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.
In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.
My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.
Marguerite Roza, Director of the Edunomics Lab and Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and national expert on school finance, has some suggestions for how districts should spend their collective $125 billion in federal stimulus funds through the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan. (For individual district allocations, see here.) Notably, Roza is focused on key components that “buy back time” for students and accelerate learning, an approach aligned with JerseyCAN’s online hub, released last week, that showcases best practices for school districts.
What is your district doing with its money? Is it using these funds efficiently, equitably, and in the best interest of students? During this time of reckoning with the academic toll of Covid-19, there’s never been a better time to advocate for your child’s education!
MIT:
MIT and Harvard University have announced a major transition for edX, the nonprofit organization they launched in 2012 to provide an open online platform for university courses: edX’s assets are to be acquired by the publicly-traded education technology company 2U, and reorganized as a public benefit company under the 2U umbrella.
The transaction is structured to ensure that edX continues in its founding mission, and features a wide array of protections for edX learners, partners, and faculty who contribute courses.
In exchange, 2U will transfer $800 million to a nonprofit organization, also led by MIT and Harvard, to explore the next generation of online education. Backed by these substantial resources, the nonprofit will focus on overcoming persistent inequities in online learning, in part through exploring how to apply artificial intelligence to enable personalized learning that responds and adapts to the style and needs of the individual learner.
The nonprofit venture will be overseen by a board appointed by MIT and Harvard, and its future work will draw on ideas from current edX partners, as well as MIT and Harvard faculty.
Behold the highest-resolution image of atoms ever seen. Cornell University researchers captured a sample from a crystal in three dimensions and magnified it 100 million times, doubling the resolution that earned the same scientists a Guinness World Record in 2018. Their work could help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries.
The researchers obtained the image using a technique called electron ptychography. It involves shooting a beam of electrons, about a billion of them per second, at a target material. The beam moves infinitesimally as the electrons are fired, so they hit the sample from slightly different angles each time—sometimes they pass through cleanly, and other times they hit atoms and bounce around inside the sample on their way out. Cornell physicist David Muller, whose team conducted the recent study, likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and the targets are individual atoms. Though Muller cannot see the targets, he can see where the “dodgeballs” end up, thanks to advanced detectors. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of electrons, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be.
Learning to program is—for many practical, historical, as well as some vacuous reasons—a rite of passage in probably all computer science, informatics, software engineering, and computer engineering courses. For many decades, this skill would reliably set computing graduates apart from their peers in other disciplines. In this Viewpoint, I argue that in the 21stcentury programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Accordingly, I propose that computing students should be encouraged to contribute code to open source software projects through their curricular activities. I have been practicing and honing this approach for more than 15 years in a software engineering course where open source contributions are an assessed compulsory requirement.2 Based on this experience, I explain why the ability to make such contributions is the modern generalization of coding skills acquisition, outline what students can learn from such activities, describe how an open source contribution exercise is embedded in the course, and conclude with practices that have underpinned the assignment’s success.
Programming skills nowadays are only a part of what a software developer should know. This is the case for two reasons. First, practices have advanced well beyond the chief programmer/surgeon model popularized by Fred Brooks in the 1970s,1to include work on orders of magnitude larger systems, advanced tooling, pervasive process automation, as well as sophisticated teamwork, workflows, and management. Second, industrial best practices have homogenized with those followed by large and successful open source software projects. Businesses have assimilated and contributed many open source development practices. This has made the corresponding knowledge and skills portable between volunteer projects and enterprise ones.
Consequently, instruction must move from a course’s educational laboratory to an organizational setting. By contributing to open source projects, students acquire in practice a formidable range of skills, knowledge, and experiences, allowing them to work productively as modern well-rounded developers rather than as the lone-wolf coders portrayed by Hollywood. The most difficult skills to acquire in a traditional programming assignment are the following social and organizational skills.
Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.
Pulitzer Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates took to her popular Twitter account on Thursday to poke fun at the list, which was developed by the school’s Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center.
“What is strange is that while the word ‘picnic’ is suggested for censorship, because it evokes, in some persons, lynchings of Black persons in the US, the word ‘lynching’ is not itself censored,” Oates said in one post.
“Picnic” disappeared from the online Oppressive Language List sometime last week as reports of its existence spread, according to reports.
The university-sponsored website previously said the word “has been associated with lynchings of Black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating.”
Facing the task of helping more than 70,000 students recover from the pandemic as state lawmakers are poised to hold education funding flat, Milwaukee School Board members Thursday approved a tight annual budget and historic temporary infusion of federal stimulus dollars.
Board members directed funding toward several new programs, including more trades courses and a major expansion to the district’s Black and Latino Male Achievement program to offer mentorship and other support for female and LGBTQIA+ students of color.
Students and community leaders had asked for some additional changes. At a rally Wednesday night, students with Leaders Igniting Transformation called for more mental health services and less spending on security. Though the district previously cut contracts with police, the district still employs 274 safety assistants.
Speaking outside the district’s central offices, MPS student Soleil Harvey said she had been involved in conflicts that ended in suspensions and expulsions and left underlying issues unresolved.
Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. Since the murder of George Floyd last year, critical race theory’s key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income programs and racially segregated vaccine distribution.
The ideology has sparked an immense backlash. As Americans have sought to understand critical race theory, they have discovered that it has divided Americans into racial categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” and promotes radical concepts such as “spirit murder” (what public schools supposedly do to black children) and “abolishing whiteness” (a purported precondition for social justice). In the classroom, critical race theory-inspired lessons have often devolved into race-based struggle sessions, with public schools forcing children to rank themselves according to a racial hierarchy, subjecting white teachers to “antiracist therapy,” and encouraging parents to become “white traitors.”
Pupil absences as a result of coronavirus have tripled in English secondary schools indicating the worst disruption to education since March, as the Delta variant first identified in India continued to spread across the county, new data showed.
About 4.2 per cent of older students from state schools were absent on June 17 because of the virus, up from 1.4 per cent the previous week, according to figures from the Department for Education published on Tuesday.
Teacher unions have called on government for improved safety measures and more freedom to respond to outbreaks, warning that the interruption to learning could deteriorate further to levels of last winter, when up to 9-11 per cent of pupils were off for Covid-related reasons as the second wave peaked.
“We are now seeing the effect of the spreading Delta variant on national figures, and absences from school are only likely to continue rising in the coming weeks, along with obvious disruption to pupils’ education,” Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said.
In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano, Shi had detected the genome of a new virus, called SHC014, that was one of the two closest relatives to the original SARS virus, but her team had not been able to culture it in the lab.
Baric had developed a way around that problem—a technique for “reverse genetics” in coronaviruses. Not only did it allow him to bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code, but he could mix and match parts of multiple viruses. He wanted to take the “spike” gene from SHC014 and move it into a genetic copy of the SARS virus he already had in his lab. The spike molecule is what lets a coronavirus open a cell and get inside it. The resulting chimera would demonstrate whether the spike of SHC014 would attach to human cells.
If it could, then it could help him with his long-term project of developing universal drugs and vaccines against the full spectrum of SARS-like viruses that he increasingly considered sources of potential pandemics. A SARS vaccine had been developed, but it wasn’t expected to be very effective against related coronaviruses, just as flu shots rarely work against new strains. To develop a universal vaccine that will elicit an antibody response against a gamut of SARS-like viruses, you need to show the immune system a cocktail of spikes. SHC014 could be one of them.
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
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.
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.
At 3 o’clock one day last week, Senator Mike Gravel, carrying a briefcase, a shav ing kit and a clean suit, left Friendship International Air port near Baltimore on a plane to Los Angeles.
After a fund‐raising speech that night for a California Representative, Senator Gra vel, an Alaska Democrat, boarded a return flight to Washington, arriving at 6:30 the next morning, just in time for a shower, a shave and 15 minutes of picketing the White House to protest the planned nuclear test on Amchitka Island in the Aleu tians.
He could not stay in front of the White House any longer because he had to drive to Warrenton, Va., for a lecture that afternoon and be back in time for a flight to Canton, Ohio, for an eve ning speech to a county Democrat committee.
On March 13, 2020, the public school district where I teach announced that all classrooms and buildings would be closed for two weeks. Then two weeks turned into two months, and two months turned into over a full year without in-person instruction. My school serves a diverse population of low-income students in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is impossible to overstate the severity of this disruption caused by school closures for these students, many of whom did not have a computer or internet at home when virtual learning began. Online, my students got only a fraction of the regular curriculum. Kids who had once loved the social aspects of school were left with only the parts of school they hated, and students with disabilities who depended on school for daily living needs were cut off from a vital service.
“Public health” and “the safety of our children” came to mean students Zooming from homeless encampments, experiencing severe abuse, regressing academically, falling into depression, going hungry, struggling through catastrophic learning loss, and, in the saddest cases, not making it through the year alive. Despite consistent evidence that schools were not sites of high transmission for COVID-19, many teachers failed to put aside baseless fears about classroom superspreading and rampant infection. As a result, many of the most vulnerable children in our society suffered outrageous hardships, while their affluent peers attended private schools in person. We’ve all been told that school closures and lockdowns were mandated by science, but what if these mandates were immoral? What if they were based on a series of lies? In fact, what if the entire rationale for most restrictions was actually rotten to the core?
We’re watching the mainstream pandemic narrative starting to unravel. While the Senate and House intelligence committees investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2, many reporters are openly wondering why they initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as “misinformation.” Few in media consider the possibility that their approach to the theory was not an anomaly, but rather a long-established pattern of journalistic dereliction of duty. For the public, these renewed questions about the virus (and their hard-to-face answers) speak to a deep sense that something is amiss in the story we’ve been told by major media outlets. But gain-of-function research is just the tip of the iceberg.
Since YouTube is the dominant video platform, a lot has already been said about its copyright claims system. Most of that has had to do with questions about what constitutes fair use (in movie reviews, for instance). Google’s AI is mostly trained to recognize the presence or non-presence of content in your video, not whether or not your use is fair (something that varies between jurisdictions, by the way). But what I’m going to discuss here is much more clear-cut: the performance of public domain music.
While there’s certainly artistic merit in new compositions, there are also a lot of us who enjoy performing existing classical music. Luckily for us, there’s lots of that in the public domain. The boundaries of what’s fallen out of copyright depend on the country, but virtually everything published in the nineteenth century and earlier is free for everyone to use.
Unfortunately, Google seems not to be aware of this fact. Recently, I uploaded a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury to YouTube, and it instantly got hit by four copyright claims. I went to go contest them — something I’ve done before for this kind of thing, and always with success for public domain music — but that really shouldn’t be necessary. Trial was first published in the 1870s. Gilbert and Sullivan died in 1911 and 1900, respectively. As far as I know, this opera isn’t under copyright anywhere in the world.
Of course, while the music is definitely in the public domain, new recordings can definitely be under copyright. If I’d uploaded a copyrighted D’Oyly Carte Company performance of Trial, I’d expect a copyright claim — it’d be totally justified. But that’s not what I did! In fact, the recording I uploaded was an entirely new one (in which I was myself involved). Maybe it got confused with another performance? Nope! YouTube flagged four segments as using the melody of “copyrighted” songs — but all the compositions on which I had supposedly infringed were just numbers from Trial!
So the AI is good. It correctly identified what I was using, and that I’d uploaded a new recording using a melodies from Google’s database of copyrighted compositions. The only problem is that these melodies aren’t copyrighted.
Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google services, including Madison.
Since I first started working on my website at age fourteen, the site has gone through many revisions, and hopefully changed for the better. This blog was originally dynamically served using a Python/Flask backend, having a custom login system and post “editor” (just an input box). One of the more strange things about my website, though, was how I displayed content.
It was clear to me, even at my young age, that writing raw HTML was suboptimal. Somehow (perhaps through GitHub) I heard about Markdown, and realized that a human-readable markup language was probably a much better way to go. What remained was, of course, rendering the content. The easiest way I found was to just stick a JavaScript script, calling out to marked, to run on page load and convert all the markup into pretty HTML.
This rendering would happen on every page load. Every time I navigated between pages on my site, for a second or two, I’d see the raw, unrendered Markdown that I had written, which would then disappear and be replaced with a proper view of the page’s content. The rendering wasn’t error-proof, either. If my connection was particularly slow (which it was, thanks, Comcast), or if I forgot to disable uMatrix, I would be left having to sift through the frequent occurences of #, _, *… Eventually I realized my mistake, and switched to rendering Markdown on the backend. Now, my content would appear to the user already formatted, and they wouldn’t have to wait for a JavaScript program to finish to read what I had written. All was well.
Robots could be used in schools to take the place of children who cannot attend class in person in South Gloucestershire.
The local authority is considering the use of ‘telepresence’ robots to allow pupils whose special needs prevent them from physically being in school to interact with their classmates and teachers virtually from home.
Such robots sit in classrooms and perform a child’s commands at a distance during the day.
They also translate what is happening, move, organise communication with the class and teachers, and even go with everyone for dinner, according to specialist publication Robotics Tomorrow.
The possibility of introducing the technology in local schools was raised by South Gloucestershire Council’s head of education, Hilary Smith, at a meeting of the local authority’s scrutiny commission on Wednesday, June 23.
Ms Smith said: “One thing that we are looking to do is…using robots for children who can’t be in classroom.
Nearly half of all students thought their degree offered poor value for money this year, according to a survey that sheds light on the scale of student anger with their universities’ response to the pandemic.
Twice as many students thought their courses offered poor value (44%) than in 2019-20, despite pandemic disruption that year, according to the survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank. The increase is thought to reflect a view among students that universities misled them about how much in-person teaching they could expect this year.
This year is the first in which more students felt let down by their courses than were satisfied since the survey began 15 years ago. Students were unhappy with the cost of tuition as well as the lack of contact hours and in-person teaching, commenting that online learning “isn’t worth £9k” and “is extremely different to in-person learning”.
GCSEs and A-Levels next year will be adjusted to make up for the disruption to student learning in England during the pandemic, said the UK education secretary.
Gavin Williamson confirmed government officials were considering “mitigating measures” to grade exams in 2022, after they were cancelled this summer for the second year in a row owing to the coronavirus crisis.
The adjustments, to ensure pupils whose learning has been interrupted by the continued lockdowns are fairly graded, will be “similar” to modifications planned for this year, Williamson told MPs at an education select committee on Wednesday.
The education secretary said he “very much hoped and intended for exams to go ahead in 2022” and that action was needed “to ensure fairness” for pupils whose learning had been halted by the pandemic.