Academic Freedom Alliance:

The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), founded in March by more than 200 faculty across the U.S., announced today the successful conclusion of two cases in which it intervened on behalf of professors facing threats of termination over constitutionally protected speech. Yesterday, the University of San Diego declined to take disciplinary action against Professor Tom Smith over his criticisms of China. Earlier this week, the University of Rhode Island dropped its proceedings against Professor Donna Hughes over her comments about gender and sexuality.

“We can think of no better way to celebrate the two-month anniversary of the AFA’s founding than to have our first two cases resolved successfully,” said Keith Whittington, chair of the AFA’s Academic Committee. “These investigations should never have been launched to begin with, but we are pleased that Professors Smith and Hughes can now move on with their scholarship. These victories seemed unlikely just days ago, and they provide powerful proof of concept for the solidarity and legal defense provided by the AFA.”

Sabrina Tavernise:

How the declining birthrate could profoundly shape the nation’s future.

michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]
A few days ago, the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Sabrina Tavernise about why that is and just how profoundly it could shape America’s future.

It’s Tuesday, May 4.

astead herndon
So Sabrina, when the U.S. government finished counting the American people this time in the census, it found that the American population was growing really slowly. That was a bit surprising to me personally. What’s going on here?

sabrina tavernise
So this is a very interesting and relatively new thing for the United States. We have this extremely slow population increase, which is different for the United States. The United States usually grows really quickly. What we saw with the census data was the second-slowest decade for population growth in American history. That is since 1790, when the United States government started taking the census. So that’s really surprising. We had known that there was some slowdown for some time, but this census data really tells us this is really the new normal in the United States.

astead herndon
So population is growing at a slower rate. How do we explain this?

Abortion notes, links and data. Choose life.

Will Flanders:

Recently, Milwaukee College Prep (MCP) charter schools and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) failed to make an agreement for continued authorization. This ends a ten year relationship between MCP and MPS, and once again highlights the horrific environment for public charters in the city of Milwaukee due largely to the power of teachers unions.

The four MCP schools that are authorized by MPS are some of the highest-performing in the city. The table below shows proficiency in English/Language Arts between MPS and each of the schools on the most recent round of the Forward Exam. MPS proficiency overall remains woeful. Less than 20% of students districtwide were found to be proficient on the exam. In contrast, proficiency rates in MCP charters are far higher–more than double the MPS proficiency rates in all but one case.

Nicholas Moellman & Danko Tarabar:

We analyse the role of culture in economic freedom reform and dispersion in an unbalanced panel of up to 80 countries, and in dyadic models with up to 3,003 unique country pairs. We find that a sense of individualism strengthens the effectiveness of democracy in promoting economic freedom within countries over 1950-2015, and that institutional distance between countries increases in their cultural distance, suggesting an important role of culture in determining long-run institutional equilibria. Our results are robust to a large variety of socio-economic controls, measures of institutions and measures of bilateral geographic, economic and demographic distances.

Robby Soave:

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidance to help summer camps mitigate their coronavirus risk. Given that summer camps involve both children and the outdoors—two factors that render COVID-19 significantly less worrisome—and will be opening in the wake of widespread vaccination, one might have expected the CDC to depart from its characteristic over-caution.

Nope: This is among the most restrictive, unrealistic guidance the agency has released during the pandemic. It’s more limiting than the CDC’s guidance for vaccinated people exercising outside more generally. If followed, summer campers would be miserable, deprived of physical contact, and in considerable danger of overheating. The government has essentially recommended that summer camps treat kids like prisoners.

Here are just some of the restrictions:

• Everyone at the camp—including staff and every kid over the age of two—must wear masks at all times, unless they are eating or swimming. They should wear two layers of masks, especially when social distancing is difficult, regardless of “whether activities are indoors or outdoors.”
• Campers should be placed in “cohorts,” and their interaction with people outside the cohort must be limited.
• There should always be at least three feet between campers of the same cohort, and six feet between campers of different cohorts. Staff should keep six feet away from campers at all times, whether inside or outside. Distance should be maintained while eating, napping, or riding the bus: The CDC suggests seating kids in alternating rows.
• The use of physical objects that might be shared among kids—toys, art supplies, electronics—should be limited wherever possible.
• Camps should not permit close-contact sports and indoor sports, and should require masks regardless.
• If anyone is curious there are separate restrictions for outdoor gardening.

Zoe Kleinman:

There remains “little association” between technology use and mental-health problems, a study of more than 430,000 10 to 15-year-olds suggests.

The Oxford Internet Institute compared TV viewing, social-media and device use with feelings of depression, suicidal tendencies and behavioural problems.

It found a small drop in association between depression and social-media use and TV viewing, from 1991 to 2019, 

There was a small rise in that between emotional issues and social-media use.

Shoshana Wodinsky:

A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positiveplatform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users using Instagram’s own adtech tools. 

The actual idea behind the ad campaign is pretty simple. Because Instagram and Facebook share the same ad platform, any data that gets hoovered up while you’re scrolling your Insta or Facebook feeds gets fed into the same cesspool of data, which can be used to target you on either platform later. 

Across each of these platforms, you’re also able to target people using a nearly infinite array of data points collected by Facebook’s herd of properties. That data includes basic details, like your age or what city you might live in. It may also include more granular points: say, whether you’re looking for a new home, whether you’re single, or whether you’re really into energy drinks.

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

The Capital Times:

Madison has a great public schools system that faces great challenges. A year of pandemic-required distance learning made existing vulnerabilities and inequities all the more serious. Now, as the COVID-19 threat is easing, and as the schools are reopening, it is impossible to avoid the evidence of the work that must be done to address immediate concerns for students who have struggled in this period, as well as longer-term concerns over achievement gaps, curriculum choices and lingering debates over policing and safety.

Yet, as Albert Einstein observed long ago, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

To our view, there is no issue facing the Madison Metropolitan School District that cannot be addressed with dynamic leadership, and we believe the Madison School Board now has just that.

Last week, Ali Muldrow was elected board president and Savion Castro was elected vice president, as the members of the elected body that oversees Madison’s schools embraced the vision laid out by two of this city’s most thoughtful and engaged young leaders.

Muldrow and Castro both have deep roots in Madison. They know the schools well, from personal experience — as MMSD graduates — and from long histories of involvement with education issues.

They are ready to face the challenges, and seize the opportunities, of a moment when so much is up for grabs.

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.

Jason Reilly:

Cal­i­for­nia, which is the most pop­u­lous state and cur­rently has the low­est per capita Covid rate in the coun­try, also has the high­est per­cent­age of school dis­tricts that re­main en­tirely vir­tual. Teach­ers unions have used the pan­demic to de­mand more money and more-gen­er­ous ben­e­fits. They know that mil­lions of Amer­i­cans can’t re­turn to work if kids can’t re­turn to schools. For par­ents it’s a dilemma, but unions see it as lever­age. The United Teach­ers of Los An­ge­les re­quested free child care for its mem­bers as a con­di­tion for re­turn­ing to the class­room. Union clout is the main rea­son that Cal­i­for­nia’s per­cent­age of all-vir­tual school dis­tricts is more than three times the na­tional av­er­age.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

California Department of Education:

The State Board of Education adopted the Mathematics Framework on November 6, 2013. Curriculum frameworks provide guidance to educators, parents, and publishers, to support implementing California content standards.

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2021 Revision of the Mathematics Framework

The California Department of Education (CDE), Instructional Quality Commission, and State Board of Education have commenced the revision process for the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve (Mathematics Framework). Information and updates concerning the revision of the Mathematics Framework will be posted here.

• Schedule of Significant Events for the 2021 Revision of the Mathematics Framework
  At its meeting on May 7, 2020, the State Board of Education (SBE) revised the Schedule of Significant Events (Timeline) for the 2021 Revision of Mathematics Framework. The Timeline was originally approved by the SBE on May 8, 2019, and was previously revised on September 11, 2019. 

Mathematics Framework First Field Review

Comments were received from February 8 through April 8, 2021.

Public Comment for Draft Mathematics Framework 

At its January 21–22, 2021, meeting, the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) approved the draft Mathematics Framework for public review and comment. The public review and comment period is an opportunity for interested individuals or organizations to provide comments and suggested edits to the IQC. The comment and suggestions received will be reviewed by the IQC/Mathematics Subject Matter Committee at its meeting on May 19–20, 2021, when the IQC is expected to recommend a revised draft for a second public review to take place in June and July, 2021.

iCivics:

As we approach the end of the 2020-2021 school year, we owe our nation’s civics and history teachers our deepest gratitude. This has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging school years in recent memory for all teachers, but amid cascading social and political crises, it has been particularly challenging for those who teach about our history and system of government. Civics and history teachers deserve special recognition and appreciation for a job well done through such uncertain times. 

Together, iCivics, Facing History and Ourselves, the Bill of Rights Institute, National Constitution Center, the Center for Civic Education, the Ashbrook Center, Generation Citizen, and Mikva Challenge want to send this message of gratitude to civics and history teachers across the nation.

The invention of the internal combustion engine in the 19th century has revolutionized transportation over land, water, and air. Despite their omnipresence in modern day, the operation of an engine may be cryptic. Over the course of this article I’d like to explain the functionality of all the basic engine parts shown in the demonstration below. You can drag it around to see it from other angles:

It’s hard to talk about a mechanical device without visualizing its motion, so many demonstrations in this blog post are animated. By default all animations are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or if you want to save power, you can globally pause them.

An engine like this may seem complicated, but we will build it up from first principles. In fact, we’ll start with a significantly simpler way of generating a rotational motion.

Elizabeth Hernandez:

Visiting scholar John Eastman laid the groundwork to sue the University of Colorado Boulder on Thursday, filing a legal claim alleging defamation and violation of his First Amendment rights over school leaders’ response to his role in efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election.

The six-page notice of claim, a necessary precursor to suing the university, also alleges breach of contract, and indicates Eastman will seek at least $1.9 million in damages, including nearly $20,000 that remains in a CU research account and $1.85 million in future salary he alleges he can’t earn because of “reputational harm.”

Noah Rothman:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood described the project as “wrong in so many ways.” Lauded chronicler of the Civil War, James McPherson, called the project a “one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” In these pages, author and University of Oklahoma history professor Wilfred McClay observed that the Project’s claim that America’s capitalistic ethos was an outgrowth of slavery is a byproduct of the project’s reliance on “demonstrably wrong” and long ago discarded academic theories. Its own editors describedthe “goal of the 1619 Project” not as dispassionate history but an effort to “reframe American history” and place slavery “at the very center of our national narrative.”

So, when the Department of Education published guidelines for a new grant emphasizing the “1619 Project” and advising applicants to show how they would teach “systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history” accordingly, there was plenty of room for good-faith objections. But when Sen. Mitch McConnell offered one such objection in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the reaction provoked by his request to avoid promoting a “politicized and divisive agenda” in the classroom was anything but honest.

NY Post Editorial:

On his Facebook page, Ian Serotkin of the Loudoun County School Board explained the “equity” issue involves the current tracking system, which makes it hard for kids to “get to calculus later on if they weren’t sufficiently accelerated in middle school.” But he rightly called the end of all math acceleration until 11th grade “absolutely bananas,” as it just limits how much higher math anyone gets to take. 

That’s progressive “equity” for you: Promote “fairness” not by adding opportunity, but by removing it from those who’ve already done well. Along with all the other garbage the left is pushing on US schools, it’s an invitation for China and other competitors to leave America in the dust.

Joanne Jacobs:

Today, Andrew Libson, a physics teacher at San Francisco’s Mission High School, will be in a San Francisco park teaching children and their parents about circuits.

The district investigated Libson for teaching his students in a park during spring break,  but he received only a slap on the wrist, reports Kate Selig for Mission Local.
“News of the investigation quickly drew widespread blowback on social media from community members.”

In a letter to Libson, Mission High principal Pirette McKamey said he’d violated a health order by teaching students from more than three households.

Libson’s March 29 outdoor learning event over spring break involved 11 students and some of their family members; he led them in an activity about circuits, with Covid safety protocols enforced. The event was entirely optional for students, and students were required to get the consent of their parents before attending.

Mission High reopened on April 26 only for special-needs students.

Ellen McCarthy:

Melissa Bernstein creates toys intended to delight and comfort children. They’re seemingly simple, no flashing lights or blaring noises. We’re talking about metal tea sets. Astronaut costumes. Farm-animal magnets. Wooden puzzles. Puppet theaters. The kinds of toys that today’s grandparents would’ve loved when they were children. The kinds of toys that bridge generational gaps, that evoke a feeling of getting back to something.

Sean Illing:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

Sauvik Das:

Don’t wait for the government to fix privacy. Any attempt to curtail and reverse the growing power of surveillance capitalism will have to start from us — the people — through grassroots mobilization.

Why?

Institutions in power do not willingly give up their power — it must be wrested from them. And, make no mistake, unilateral control over the collection and processing of personal data is one of the strongest emergent forms of power in the information age. It is the lifeblood of a trillion dollar global industry.

Sometimes a government that serves the people can be trusted do this wresting, assuming the privacy-violating institution is not the government itself. For example, anti-trust regulation can prevent the formation of exploitative corporate monopolies.

Not so when it comes to the protection of personal data. At least not yet.

Why?

Jon Levine:

The American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on, and even suggested language for, the federal agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February.

The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post.

The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.

“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as the CDC’s “thought partner.”

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Ann Althouse:

There was some concern expressed yesterday over the “remarkable slackening” in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don’t maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don’t worry about it, less population growth is good for the environment. But if you took the other side of that debate… you’d better worry about women declining the option to undertake childbearing and men and women passing on the potentially fulfilling endeavor of child-rearing. It’s terribly expensive!… [Y]ou’re going to have to incentivize reproduction a little bit.

Abortion notes, links and data. Choose life

Jude Schwalbach:

The president’s budget request includes significant funding increases for:

• School districts with students from low-income households, increasing Title I funding from $16.5 billion to $36.5 billion.

• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, increasing funding from $12.9 billion to $15.5 billion.
• Head Start, the federal government’s largest preschool program, which would receive $11.9 billion, an increase of $1.2 billion.
• School districts, which would receive an additional $1 billion to increase the number of counselors, nurses, and mental health professionals in K-12 education.
• The federal Pell Grant program, which would see an increase of $400 per grant on average.

This proposal is just one piece of a massive education spending spree that began a year ago and shows no sign of stopping.

Scott Girard:

Both mentioned a few areas of focus for the upcoming year, including most immediately the transition back to in-person learning as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Muldrow noted that the “vast majority of the young people we serve” are not eligible for a vaccine yet, requiring the district to continue to “provide high-quality educational opportunities” while keeping safety top of mind.

“The other thing I think that the board is really starting to think about differently is how we give our students credit for what they’ve learned about and from technology,” she said. “So how do we recognize that our students are coming back to school with all of these skills around the information age that we’ve never given students academic credit for, but that are super relevant to their ability to interact with the job market?”

Broadly, Castro and Muldrow have similar priorities from when they began on the board, including early childhood education, as the district plans a full-day 4-year-old kindergarten pilot program at eight schools next year. They hope it’s one way among multiple strategies to begin to close the longstanding opportunity gaps between students of color and their white peers.

“Making sure that the color of a kid’s skin isn’t a determining factor in whether or not they’re going to be able to read, whether or not they’re going to be perceived as disruptive or talented and gifted,” Muldrow said.

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.

Rory Linnane:

Schlifske also said that Northwestern Mutual will be reaching out to others in the philanthropic and business community to support the goal of an additional 5,000 seats in “high-quality schools” by 2025, as measured by state report cards based on standardized tests and other metrics.

Schlifske’s op-ed specifically criticized MPS board members over the district’s loss of Milwaukee College Prep charter school network. The schools, which have operated under contract with MPS, are moving to a contract with UW-Milwaukee after MPS held back incentive funding.

Milwaukee College Prep is suing MPS over the funding. In addition, losing the network of four high-performing schools will cost MPS revenue.

“Instead of focusing upon improvement and quality outcomes, our community finds itself in a divisive debate over the types of schools students attend,” he wrote in the piece for the Journal Sentinel.

Madison’s business community continues to sleep amidst long term, disastrous reading results

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

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

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.

Libby Sobic:

As Congress doles out billions of dollars for K–12 schools, charter schools already receive a much smaller portion of the education-funding pie. Currently Congress appropriates $440 million for the CSP, which is just 1 percent of U.S. Department of Education spending on K–12.

However, the CSP has been critical to the growth and sustainability of charter schools throughout many states. For instance, in 2017 Wisconsin received a five-year award of $95 million from the CSP. In the City of Milwaukee alone, seven charter schools were recipients of more than $5 million in CSP grants over the last three years. Elsewhere, in 2020, the Florida Department of Education received a five-year grant of over $78 million in charter funding through the CSP, the California Department of Education received a three-year grant of more than $41 million, and Texas received a five-year grant of $100 million.

These funds are used to plan and implement charter schools with a focus on improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students.

Michael Horn:

That means, as Stephen Covey wrote in one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” beginning “with the end in mind.” Or, as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe wrote in the context of education in “Understanding by Design,” good teachers start with the goals and how they would know if students have met them and then backwards map all the things they need to provide to get to those outcomes.

Although it’s unlikely there will be any consensus across all communities in the country around a central purpose, that’s OK. That’s part of a robust pluralism underlying our democracy that values the fact that students sit in different circumstances and will have different needs.

But clarity in any specific schooling community is critical.

To help school communities think through what’s the purpose of schooling, a little history can help, as the dominant policy rationale for public schools’ purpose in society has changed over time. In “Disrupting Class,” Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and I offered a brief history of these shifts.

Through much of the 1800s, a kind reading of history would say that the central role of public schools was to preserve the American democracy and inculcate democratic values.

Sophia Perricone:

University of Toledo students are speaking out after the Office of Diversity awarded law professor Lee Strang the 2021 Inclusive Excellence Award.

A current law student who asked to remain anonymous said in his opinion, Strang is not the clear winner.

“His views are not exactly in tune with, I guess you can say, modern diversity and views most professors would hold,” the student said.

And he isn’t alone. Students and alumni on Facebook pointed to an opinion piece written by Strang while at Harvard University in 2003.

In the article, he called homosexuality harmful, writing that “a corrupt society that does not seek to prevent homosexual activity makes it more difficult for us to properly raise our children.”

In a recent statement shared with law students, Strang said he regrets writing portions of past columns and that he wouldn’t make “arguments using this kind of language today.”

Mary Norris:

It’s hard not to mythologize Bryan A. Garner. He is the Herakles of English usage. As a boy growing up in Texas, he lugged Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged) to school one day to settle an argument with a teacher. When he was sixteen, he discovered “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” and swallowed it whole. By the time he was an undergraduate, he knew that he wanted to write a usage dictionary. Instead of going into academia or publishing, the traditional career paths for English majors, he went into law, a field where his prodigious language skills could have broad applications. His first usage dictionary was “Modern Legal Usage,” published in 1987. “Garner’s Modern American Usage” came out in 1998 and is in its fourth edition; with a significant tweaking of the title, it’s now “Garner’s Modern English Usage.” Move over, Henry Fowler.

Garner’s success—he is a highly sought-after speaker among lawyers and lexicographers—has enabled him to indulge his passions as a bibliophile and an antiquarian. A selection of sixty-eight items from the Garner Collection is on view at the Grolier Club (47 East Sixtieth Street, through May 15th), with a sumptuous hardcover limited-edition catalogue that serves as a companion guide. To enter the exhibit, titled “Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar (1713-1851),” via a discreet door on the second-floor landing of a stairwell at the Grolier, is to climb aboard the Grammarama ride at Disneyland for Nerds.

Keith E. Whittington:

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, institutions of higher education in the United States face an existential threat. Even if they can survive their current budget crisis, what kind of institutions will American universities and colleges be in a decade’s time?

One crucial front in the war over the university pits defenders of the free-ranging pursuit of truth against those who would put political limits on such inquiries. For most of higher education’s history, this dispute was between advocates of academic freedom inside the universities and skeptics of it who were outside. On behalf of conventional mores or the community’s political and economic interests, politicians, or donors, took the position that the pursuit of knowledge is all well and good…until it threatens vital orthodoxies. The example of Socrates has always been both an inspiration and a warning. Heterodox gadflies tend to get swatted.

In the 21st century, however, academic freedom’s most determined adversaries are inside rather than outside academia. A growing army on college campuses would like to restrict the scope of intellectual debate by subjecting academic inquiry to political litmus tests. Over the 20th century, American universities’ students and faculty pushed to make them havens for heretics, dissenters, iconoclasts, and nonconformists. In the wake of their success, many scholars now demand that campuses adhere to their own orthodoxies. Until recently I would have said that many students and faculty want the range of intellectual debate on a college campus to be narrower than the offerings in the New York Times’s op-ed pages. But now, of course, the college graduates hired by the Times are scrubbing its op-ed pages of heresies as well.

Matt Taibbi:

The effort by the “SALT caucus” to hold a $2 trillion relief bill hostage in order to help what they’re calling “struggling families” in the “middle class” is just the latest development in a years-long saga revealing Congress at its phoniest and most shameless.

This issue that “means so much to the American people,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is really a niche matter concerning a sliver of the most well-off Americans in a handful of blue states, who were made the target of a political prank of sorts by the Trump administration in 2017.

There are a lot of people who own homes in blue states, could use the deduction, probably don’t think of themselves as rich, and would balk at the idea that repealing the cap would be a luxury giveaway. The story has been framed in the press as more of an everyman issue, and the fact that most of the money at stake involves people at the very top of the curve has been obscured.

The start of this story was classic Trump. Looking for ways to help pay for his own monster tax break at the end of 2017, the Donald decided to poke Democrats with a long stick, via the cap on the unlimited state and local tax deduction.

Joanne Jacobs:

The competency marketplace — a digital hub for job seekers, employers and postsecondary skills providers — is taking a step toward reality, writes Paul on The Job.

The idea is the brainchild of author and investor Ryan Craig, writes Fain. It would “allow learners to see the skills or competencies they need to land posted jobs, with the site then offering applicable online courses and programs from featured colleges and other providers. Employers could recruit completers directly from the hub.”

Among those working on the idea are LinkedIn, the  Markle Foundation’s Skillful and Unmudl, writes Fain.

Unmudl features non-degree online and hybrid courses from seven partner community colleges, explains Julian Alssid of SocialTech.ai, a public benefit corporation that created the course marketplace.

Luke Rosiak:

Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.

Natalie Fallert, EdD, 6-12 Literacy Speech Coordinator, wrote to all middle and high school principals that parents had repeatedly complained that “we are pushing an agenda,” “we are pushing Critical Race Theory (I had to look this one up!),” “we are making white kids feel bad about their privilege,” we are “stereotyping,” “we are teaching kids to be social activists,” and “we are teaching kids to be democratic thinkers and activists.”

The problem was that, for the first time, parents could see what teachers were telling their children thanks to virtual learning, where assignments were visible for at-home learners in a tool called Canvas.

Philip S. Babcock Mindy Marks:

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

Henry Olsen:

President Biden and congressional Democrats seem determined to raise taxes on the rich, especially the rate paid on capital gains. If they’re really serious about this, there’s one sector of American wealth that is undertaxed even by today’s standards: universities and foundations.

The amount of wealth held by major colleges and large grant-making foundations is astounding. The National Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual study found that 107 institutions held endowments of $1 billion or more as of June 30, 2019. Together, these institutions of higher earning held $494 billion in assets, or roughly a tenth of the total net worth of all individual billionaires in the United States combined. The university figure is surely much higher today.

Charitable foundations hold even more wealth. One estimate found they held more than $1 trillionin assets in 2017, with the richest five alone holding nearly $100 billion between them. Given that the stock market has risen more than 50 percent since then, their portfolios should be hundreds of billions of dollars richer. That means America’s charitable foundations and billionaire universities hold at least $1.5 trillion in assets. That’s far more wealth than that of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the founders of Google and Oracle combined.

John Danaher:

I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argument is both simple and complex.

It is simple because in every legal case there is, in essence, one basic type of argument at the core of the dispute between the parties. This argument works from a general legal rule to a conclusion about the application of that rule to a set of facts. Philosophers and logicians would say that the basic form of legal argument is a syllogism: a simple three-step argument involving a major premise (a general principle or rule), a minor premise (a claim about a particular case or scenario) and then a conclusion (an application of the general rule to the particular case). 

Here is a simple conditional syllogism:

Josh Mitchell:

hat sounded high to Mr. Courtney because in the private sector 20 cents would be more appropriate for defaulted consumer loans that aren’t backed by an asset.

He asked Education Department budget officials how they calculated that number. They told him that when borrowers default, the government often puts them into new loans. These pay off the old loans, and this is considered a recovery, even though in many cases the borrowers haven’t repaid anything and default on the new loans as well.

In reality, the government is likely to recover just 51% to 63% of defaulted amounts, according to Mr. Courtney’s forecast in a 144-page report of his findings, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“If you accounted this way in the private sector, you wouldn’t be in business anymore,” Mrs. DeVos said in a December interview. “You’d probably be behind bars.”

Mr. Courtney’s calculation was one of several supporting the disclosure in a Journal article last fall that taxpayers could ultimately be on the hook for roughly a third of the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. This could amount to more than $500 billion, exceeding what taxpayers lost on the saving-and-loan crisis 30 years ago.

If Mr. Courtney is right, there are big implications for taxpayers and families alike. While defaulted student loans can’t cause the federal government to go bankrupt the way bad mortgage lending upended banks during the financial crisis, they expose a similar problem: Billions of dollars lent based on flawed assumptions about whether the money can be repaid.

Zack Needles:

As Law.com’s Amanda Bronstad reported back in October, judges, faced with a lack of specific written contracts in these cases, have been forced to look to other sources, such as tuition agreements and marketing materials, to determine whether an institution for higher learning had made a pact to provide in-person learning.

“I would have told you 15 years ago these claims have no chance, but today I can’t be that predictive—you may see some judges who think, well, promises were made and representations made, there’s some contract,” Peter Lake, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida, told Bronstad at the time. “My guess is somewhere, someplace, some judges are going to evolve claims against institutions in ways that wouldn’t have been obvious 10 to 15 years ago.”

WUWM:

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is set to lose 2,000 students and at least $4 million next year, as charter school network Milwaukee College Prep (MCP) cuts ties with the district.

MPS has contracts with 15 independent charter schools, including the four MCP locations. The charter schools are independently-run but publicly-funded, and are accountable to the MPS Board.

MCP’s departure is one sign of growing tension between MPS and the charter schools under its umbrella.

On a windy day in late April, staff at Milwaukee College Prep’s North Avenue campus are greeting students as they get dropped off at three separate entrances for social distancing purposes.

Someone asked me yesterday why schools aren’t mainly open in San Francisco (despite 30 cases in city of 896K yesterday (& they test), <10 hospitalizations) or California (hundreds of thousand of tests done, 1400 cases in state of 40 million, lowest case rate in nation).

— Monica Gandhi MD, MPH (@MonicaGandhi9) April 27, 2021

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Garret Lewis:

Hundreds of parents showed up to the Vail School Board meeting to demand the board make masks optional. The board didn’t want to hear it so they walked out of the meeting before it even began. So the parents, under Robert’s Rules of Order, voted in a new school board. Then, the new members voted to end the mask requirement in Vail Schools. The old school board members revealed exactly who they are and that includes GOP LD 10 Chairman, Chris King.

Jill Tucker:

Thousands of San Francisco students heading back to their classrooms this month will be carrying their computers to school each day and sitting in front of a screen to learn from their teachers — who will remain at home.

That’s because nearly 500 district teachers and classroom aides scheduled to return to in-person instruction won’t because they have a medical exemption, allowing them to continue teaching online even if their students are at school, where they are supervised by a credentialed substitute or other qualified staff member.

That’s an estimated 10% of eligible educators.

Parents call it “Zoom in a room,” and many are frustrated at the plan for kindergartners or other elementary students showing up to school only to stare at screens.

The arrangement is the latest hitch in a return to in-person learning in San Francisco Unified, which is already among the last large school districts in the country to reopen. The number of teachers and aides on a medical exemption far surpasses that of neighboring districts and is expected to cost San Francisco more than $40,000 per day for substitutes to supervise students in those classrooms, or about $1.5 million before summer break.

University of South Australia:

More sleep could offset children’s excess indulgence over the school holidays as new research from the University of South Australia shows that the same decline in body mass index may be achieved by either extra sleep or extra exercise.

The striking new finding is part of a study that shows how children can achieve equivalent physical and mental health benefits by choosing different activity trade-offs across the 24-hour day.

Conducted in partnership with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and supported by the National Heart Foundation of Australia, the team examined the optimal balance between children’s physical activity, sleep, and sedentary time across the 24-hour day to better inform tailored lifestyle choices.

On a minute-for-minute basis, moderate-to-vigorous physical exercise was shown to be 2-6 times more potent than sleep or sedentary time

Jessica Dickler:

“This year, due to Covid, students are making changes in the way they think about their college applications,” said Robert Franek, The Princeton Review’s editor-in-chief. “They are much more sensitive around cost and staying closer to home.”

To that end, The Princeton Review ranked colleges by how much financial aid is awarded and how satisfied students are with their packages. After nearly 20 years, the college admissions company also changed its criteria to include more in-state public schools. The report is based on data from its surveys of administrators at 650 colleges in 2019 and 2020, as well as students attending the schools.

“Never cross an expensive school off your list based on sticker price alone,” Franek said. “Financial aid is available and can make many, many schools so affordable.”

Patrick Marley:

Congress is showering Wisconsin and its local governments with $20 billion in help because of the coronavirus pandemic, a report released Friday shows.

Since last year, Congress has passed five major spending bills to address COVID-19 and its toll. The two biggest ones cost more than $4 trillion, deepening the federal deficit but softening the economic blow of the pandemic.

The spending packages have given Gov. Tony Evers wide latitude to spend more than $5 billion. They have also provided more than $4 billion in assistance for Wisconsin workers who were laid off and they have infused about $3.7 billion into schools, colleges and universities, according to the report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

Tom Bartlett:

The Yale Daily News reported recently that a professor at the university’s law school, Amy Chua, had been disciplined for allegedly inviting students to dinner parties at her house in violation of a 2019 agreement with the dean. Current and former students of Chua’s sent dozens of emails to the administration to protest the decision. Some high-profile supporters condemned her treatment: One deemed it “sinister,” while others suggested it might be racist and sexist. Chua herself called the whole thing “surreal,” denied any wrongdoing, and demanded an investigation.

At first it does seem surreal, if not absurd. How could such a seemingly trivial accusation lead to such public consternation? Was the law school, as some of her allies believed, targeting Chua because of her politics or her persona? Had her personnel file been leaked by the dean in order to discredit her, as Chua seemed to imply? What exactly was going on at the nation’s top-ranked law school?

Chua is probably Yale law’s most famous professor. She’s the author of the 2011 best seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a memoir of her attempt to raise her two daughters in a strict, traditional fashion. In 2018, Chua wrote an op-ed in support of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, praising him as a “mentor for young lawyers, particularly women.” (That op-ed was published before Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault when the two were in high school — allegations that he denied.) Stories also emerged about how Chua had supposedly told female students who wanted to clerk for Kavanaugh that they should dress “model-like” in order to win his favor. Chua has called those claims “100% false.”

The National Education Association and its affiliates take in more than $1.6 billion annually. They pay no corporate income tax, no capital gains tax, and no DC property tax. @The74 https://t.co/mhLflNSFpc https://t.co/fqImuUk2f0

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) April 28, 2021

Will Flanders:

1. The school finance structure is based on systems—not students. The testimony highlighted the archaic nature of school finance in the state in funding particular school districts and types rather than students themselves. School funding in Wisconsin is based on two student-count dates, and a three-year-rolling average of enrollment. The student count dates are in September and January. This means that funding is based on the number of students attending the school on those specific count dates. This means the current system continues to fund a student even if they no longer attend the school after the count date.

A three-year-rolling average requirement means that a student who leaves a school district today will still be partially funded by taxpayers for three years. Moreover, funding for our school choice and independent charter school students exists entirely outside of the system that funds public schools, even as more and more students take advantage of these programs.This archaic system fails to reflect the dynamic nature of modern education, where students regularly move between districts and sectors. Our system is essentially funding ghost students who are not actually attending the schools receiving the funding. Particularly in the aftermath of COVID-19, it is vital that education funding in Wisconsin be less tied to buildings, and more to where students live.

If you are a taxpayer in @MCPASD, this is what you are getting: “We believe…Our educational system is inherently racist.” – from the “District Strategy Map.” If you vote for the School Board, you voted for this. https://t.co/UB6M5EjOjI

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) April 28, 2021

Josh Taylor:

Facebook is allowing businesses to advertise to children as young as 13 who express an interest in smoking, extreme weight loss and gambling for as little as $3, research by the lobby group Reset Australia has found.

The organisation, which is critical of digital platforms, set up a Facebook page and advertising account under the name “Ozzie news network” to see what ad options Facebook would provide through its Ads Manager platform.

While Facebook will not allow the advertising of alcohol and other age-inappropriate content to people under 18, it does not prevent advertisers from targeting children determined by Facebook’s profile to have an interest in alcohol, for advertising that might not appear explicitly to be about those topics.

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

George Korda:

Being disgorged annually from schools across the Volunteer State and the United States is a virtual army of young people with limited or no education or skills, rendering them incapable of prospering – or economically surviving – in a 21st century economy apart from being supported by taxpayers. Add to that figure the hundreds of thousands who drop out of school each year.

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.

Alfred Ng:

But The Markup has learned that not only does the Android version of the contact tracing tool contain a privacy flaw, but when researchers from the privacy analysis firm AppCensus alerted Google to the problem back in February of this year, Google failed to change it. AppCensus was testing the system as part of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The company found no similar issues with the iPhone version of the framework.

It’s such an obvious fix, and I was flabbergasted that it wasn’t seen as that.

Joel Reardon, AppCensus

“This fix is a one-line thing where you remove a line that logs sensitive information to the system log. It doesn’t impact the program, it doesn’t change how it works, ” said Joel Reardon, co-founder and forensics lead of AppCensus. “It’s such an obvious fix, and I was flabbergasted that it wasn’t seen as that.”

“We were notified of an issue where the Bluetooth identifiers were temporarily accessible to specific system level applications for debugging purposes, and we immediately started rolling out a fix to address this,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in an emailed statement to The Markup.

Serge Egelman, AppCensus’s co-founder and chief technology officer, however, said that Google had repeatedly dismissed the firm’s concerns about the bug until The Markup contacted Google for comment on the issue late last week.

Asked if the vulnerability has been eliminated, Castañeda said the “roll out of this update to Android devices began several weeks ago and will be complete in the coming days.”

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

Yascha Mounk:

What has the pandemic told us about the state of our political institutions and the state of our economic institutions? Have you changed your mind about what’s working, or what’s not working, in light of the experience we’ve had over the last months?

Tyler Cowen: Let’s focus on the United States. Our early response, especially in that first two months, was essentially non-existent. It was from the Trump administration, but to be entirely fair, Democratic governors did the same thing. There were Democratic Party rallies up until some date in March. The voters did not rebel against this, so it is ultimately a failing of American society. The failures of our public sector are, in some ways, mirroring the failures of our private sector. For instance, if you take the libertarian critique of the FDA, which I very much agree with, I think one has to notice also [that] voters have not rebelled against various FDA decisions. The public health experts who are not working for the FDA often will endorse what the FDA is saying, and they are private sector individuals. The failings of our government are reflecting broader failings with the country, and I think you’ll find that in many other countries as well.

Mounk: Let’s start with the failings of the state institutions. I increasingly worry that this should really change our model of how well we’re going to be able to deal with a crisis. The institutions don’t seem capable of understanding when a situation has changed. And that failure seems to be reflected, as you’re saying, at the level of what people can actually imagine, what people can actually demand. Is that something we should just get used to?

Cowen: Part of the picture, especially for the U.S., is that on the vaccines front, we put in one of the best performances in all of human history, in terms of the science and eventually, after a bad start, the mobilization. We do need this bigger picture, where our government was incredibly good at one thing, and it needed to be something that the U.S. is culturally good at, which is a kind of mass mobilization of getting stuff out to people. It’s one of the greatest events in human history. It’s maybe a common pattern in American history that we close well and start off very poorly. Also, [with] the vaccines, it was something where you can hand out goodies to voters. And government, often for the worse, is good at that. In this case, obviously, it was for the better.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Austin Walsh:

Following hours of intensive deliberation, San Mateo-Foster City Elementary School District officials narrowly agreed to overhaul the school system’s sixth grade math curriculum, despite vigorous parent protest.

Board President Kenneth Chin joined trustees Noelia Corzo and Shara Watkins in supporting a proposal to offer a single sixth grade math class next year, doing away with an early acceleration program for qualified students.

Trustees voting for the proposal cited the support of district teachers who enthusiastically backed introducing the change in the coming fall, with claims a consolidated program will assure equitable access to rigorous curriculum.

Related: English 10.

John Timmer:

The study did genome sequencing for both those exposed and their children, which allowed the researchers to detect how many new mutations had been inherited from those exposed. A number of new mutations appear with each generation, so the team was looking at a higher rate than found in controls born after the event.

And the researchers found nothing. Their search was sensitive enough that they were able to detect the effect of parental age on the number of new mutations (old parents pass on more mutations to their offspring), but it saw no effect from the dose of radiation their parents had received. Parental smoking and drinking had no impact on their offspring’s DNA as well.

One of the radioactive elements spread widely by Chernobyl was a radioactive isotope of iodine, which causes elevated thyroid cancers. As expected, a number of people exposed to the Chernobyl debris have since developed this cancer, and the researchers obtained both cancerous and healthy tissue from them. Again, they sequenced the genomes and looked at the mutations that occurred in these cancers.

Andrew Webb:

“We get around 70 requests a week from all over the world from people wanting to come and see what we do here” says Rob Houben, manager of the Agora school in Roermond, Netherlands, and the closest thing school has to a principal or headteacher. “And I turn most of them down, I just don’t have the time to do all that!”

It’s clear such interest is a testament to Agora’s unconventional approach, which is why I’m glad to be here. I first met Rob at Bett 2019, when he wandered onto pi-top’s stand, and we quickly struck up a rapport. If pi-top designed a school, it would be this. It’s amazing not because it’s awash with cash and has state of the art facilities, but because their entire approach is centred around projects. This is a school focused on learning, not teaching.

“We give children the opportunity to play, because when children are playing with something they get interested. And then you don’t have to teach, and you don’t have to police them either” says Rob.

Joshua Coleman:

Over the past few decades, American parents have been pressured into making a costly wager: If they sacrifice their hobbies, interests, and friendships to devote as much time and as many resources as possible to parenting, they might be able to launch their children into a stable adulthood. While this gamble sometimes pays off, parents who give themselves over to this intensive form of child-rearing may find themselves at a loss when their children are grown and don’t need them as much.

Prior generations didn’t need to be as preoccupied with their children’s well-being or future. Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1960s, my brothers and I were as luxuriously removed from our parents’ minds as they were from ours. It was the gilded age of childhood freedom. My brothers and I consumed hours of television and ate staggering amounts of sugar—for breakfast. We vanished each summer morning, biked back for lunch, and then disappeared again ’til dusk. My parents also had a life. My mother played mah-jongg weekly with “the girls” and went out every weekend with my father without calling it “date night.” My dad played squash on weekends at the downtown YMCA and didn’t seem to worry about whether my brothers and I felt neglected.

Robert Chappell :

Muldrow and Castro both said the moment reflects a new commitment in the school district.

“Our community is coming together to prioritize Black children and to reconcile a history in which black children have been harmed by this district and this community and this country, and then denied education effectively,” she said. “It’s time to be honest about that. And I think that this community has selected people who could engage in that process of truth and reconciliation. I’m very proud of my board for coming together to elevate that work, because it’s part of the reason I ran for school board.”

“I think this means that we are being intentional about trying to correct the historical wrongs in terms of listening to communities that have been historically erased in our district,” Castro said. “And also try and be a model for the entire community in terms of listening to community, being bold in a vision, being bold about the issues we face in our district, whether it be racism or the way we speak, treat kids with special needs or English language learners. And being bold about dismantling those systems and trying to replace them with something better.”

In terms of policy specifics, Muldrow said her first priority is “to conduct a safe transition between virtual learning and in-person learning as we address the pandemic.” She also hopes to provide for support for arts education and opportunities for students to “express themselves artistically within their education.”

It’ll also be a top priority “to address the achievement gap, to make sure that the color of a child’s skin doesn’t determine whether or not they’re thought of as disruptive or intelligent in their classroom,” she said.

Tara Bahrampour, Harry Stevens and Adrian Blanco:

The birthrate has also dropped, and life expectancy has dipped in the past couple of years — a reversal that has been driven by factors such as drug overdoses, obesity, suicide and liver disease and that sharply accelerated last year during the pandemic.

The extent to which the coronavirus has contributed to population patterns is not apparent in the new census data because much of the related displacement and the deaths of over half a million people took place after Census Day. According to the Pew Research Center, 5 percent of U.S. adults said they moved because of the pandemic; it is not clear whether these moves will be permanent.

But it is clear that going forward, older populations, especially those over age 65, will continue to see far higher rates of growth than young ones. The percentage of Americans 65 and over has grown by 35 percent, based on census estimates released last year. In the coming decade, the large baby boomer generation will reach their 60s, 70s and 80s.

Choose life.

Caroline Downey:

Democratic Virginia state Senator J. Chapman Petersen is one of many parents voicing concerns about a new racial equity push that would eliminate certain advanced placement classes in the state’s mathematics curriculum.

The Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI) would replace the traditional mathematics progression of Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 courses with courses that teach so-called “essential” topics. Under the plan, all students would take the same courses through the tenth grade but would then be allowed to enroll in classes that correspond with their post-graduation career plans.

A major goal of the VMPI is to combat disparities in educational outcomes between racial and ethnic minorities. However, many Northern Virginia parents are mobilizing to reject the program, claiming that the new “pathway” will inhibit higher-achieving students and discourage academic exploration and performance among all kids, including the racial minorities the program is designed to help.

Related: Connected Math Discovery Math

Andrew Feiler:

The building, now a community center, is a surviving testament of one of the most dramatic and effective philanthropic initiatives the U.S. has ever seen. From 1912 to 1937, a collaboration between Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute built 4,978 schools for Black children across 15 Southern and border states.

Today, at a moment when America seems torn along racial and regional lines, when debates around opportunity, infrastructure and the American Dream ripple across the country, the remarkable success of the Rosenwald-Washington partnership is a reminder that people from divergent experiences can come together to effect real and lasting change.

The Brinkleys bear witness to the multigenerational impact of this program. The brothers attended the one-teacher school in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They went on to college and graduate school, and both became educators. They have four sisters, each of whom also attended the Cairo School and college; the siblings’ 10 children all went to college. Without this schoolhouse, that legacy may not have happened.

Shane Trotter:

A recent study conducted at the Naval Academy showed that students learn less from easy teachers. As the researchers state, “Instructors who tend to give out easier subjective grades… dramatically hurt subsequent student performance.” While a generalization, these claims support the intuitions of anyone who has ever been to school or met a human. When students can give less effort, they do. So, why have schools been moving toward easier grading?

Will be interesting to see how they’re blocking this time. In January when they blocked their first site, each carrier was doing it differently and in fairly rudimentary ways. Will be telling if there’s more consistency/capability. How long until they go after a more major site? https://t.co/PhWiM0tA7a

— Paul Mozur 孟建國 (@paulmozur) April 25, 2021

Clara Moskowitz:

Even when it is inscrutable, math is beautiful. Photographer Jessica Wynne set out to capture this appeal when she began photographing mathematicians’ chalkboards around the world in 2018. “I’ve always been interested in entering into worlds outside my realm of knowledge,” Wynne says. Without comprehending what the math on the chalkboards represented, she was able to appreciate it on a purely aesthetic level. “It’s a similar feeling as when I’m looking at an abstract painting. But it added more interest that beyond the surface there’s great meaning and great depth, and they’re trying to reveal universal truth.”

Wynne was first drawn into the world of math when she befriended two mathematicians who vacationed near where she spent summers on Cape Cod. As she learned about their research, she found many parallels between the process of math and the process of art. “I was really surprised to witness how they work and how creative what they do is,” she says.

As Wynne began to travel to different universities to meet more mathematicians, she discovered how diverse their chalkboard styles are. “Some were very clean and neat and very carefully considered,” she recalls. “And some were just this explosion and chaos. The chalkboards almost felt like portraits of the person and depended on the personality of the mathematician.”

Bruce Viemetti:

Two dozen small Wisconsin newspapers have sued Google and Facebook, claiming the firms’ grip on digital advertising threatens the publications’ existence and violates federal antitrust law.

Their 40-page federal lawsuit recaps the historical role of a free press in America, the decline of the newspaper industry and technical aspects of how it says Google controls the sales, purchase and placement of digital advertising.

“Google’s dominance of the digital advertising marketplace threatens the extinction of local news journalism across the country,” financial damage to publishers “and a profoundly negative effect on American democracy and civic life,” the suit states.

It was among about a dozen similar complaints filed by newspaper publishers in other states, said Michael J. Fuller Jr., an attorney with the law firm leading the effort.

Fuller said the team of plaintiffs’ lawyers hopes to follow a model it established suing pharmaceutical companies on behalf of local governments devastated by the opioid crisis, and that the many suits will be consolidated before a single federal judge and later attract participation of much larger newspaper publishers, like Gannett, which owns the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and more than 200 other papers.

Matt Feeney:

This year, Harvard applications were up 43 percent from last year. At Yale, applicants were up 33 percent. At Duke, 25 percent. The result is plunging acceptance rates. Harvard admitted just 3.4 percent of applicants; Yale, 4.6 percent; Duke, 5.8 percent. The deluge of applications poses a problem: Admissions officers at the most selective colleges increasingly must squint to discern any meaningful difference between thoroughly deserving applicants.

My wife is a high-school counselor, and her boss (the head counselor) conveyed a revealing tidbit to me: An Ivy League admissions dean told her that his office could simply replace the class they admitted with the next most competitive group of applicants, and the next several after that, and it would make no difference. In 2015 the undergraduate admissions dean at Tufts University made a similar confession, noting that 74 percent of the nearly 20,000 applicants to Tufts were deemed qualified for admission while 42 percent were recommended for acceptance. The school’s actual acceptance rate that year? Sixteen percent, a number that has likely only shrunk: This year, applications to Tufts ballooned by 35 percent.

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter, Monday, to Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Superintendent, Dr. Carlton Jenkins, urging the school district to address the racial segregation employed at Madison West High School for Zoom conversations on current events. This is the second occasion in the last year where WILL has warned MMSD that racial segregation in education is illegal under federal law.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “Racial segregation is never beneficial or benign. It is our hope that the leadership at MMSD take this opportunity to commit the school district to the principle of equality and end all racial segregation immediately.”

Background: Recently, an email originating from the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) invited families of Madison West High School to a conversation related to “all the police brutality and violence that is going on.” After asserting that it is “very necessary to have space for our families to discuss and process,” the email provides two different Zoom links: one for Parents of Color and another for White Parents.

West High School principal apologizes for email suggesting racially segregated meetings

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 incarcerati

Tracy Beth Hoeg,, Monica Gandhi and Lillian Brown

First, classrooms have thankfully been found — in studies examining schools in multiplestates — to be places of limited disease transmission, compared with communities at large. The rate of transmission within schools from individuals who test positive has been estimated to be on the order of 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent (and this includes people exhibiting symptoms).

A rate that low implies that a testing regimen would need to identify roughly 200 infected people to prevent one person from transmitting the disease in school. It would take an awful lot of tests to achieve those numbers. In New York City, where more than 234,000 asymptomatic students and staff members across approximately 1,600 schools were tested last fall, the overall rate of positive tests was only 0.4 percent. That suggests that — even during a time of high community spread — about 40,000 tests among asymptomatic individuals would need to be performed to prevent one in-school transmission.

And how accurate are these tests? Rapid antigen and saliva PCR tests, which are frequently used in schools, can have a false positive rate of 1 or 2 percent. That may sound low, but statisticians know that, when testing in a setting of low prevalence of disease, even a single-digit false-positive rate can be extremely problematic.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Noah Smith:

A “Sputnik moment” is a historical reference to the launch of the first orbital satellite in October 1957. Though this was a triumph for humankind, it also triggered a panic in the United States, as we realized that the Soviet Union had a level of technical competence we hadn’t yet achieved (and which might be used for weapons). Sputnik made the U.S. wake up and realize the need for large-scale STEM education as a matter of national security. The response was the National Defense Education Act, whose provisions included, among other things:

• financial assistance to public schools for STEM programs 
• funding for scholarships, graduate fellowships, and student loans
• testing programs to identify talented students
• funding for technical vocational training

Many believe that the NDEA was effective at making the U.S. one of the more scientifically and technically competent nations in the world. But it certainly shows the importance that the country’s leaders placed on STEM education.

Today, the U.S. is facing another kind of Sputnik moment — slower and less terrifying, perhaps, but no less crucial for our nation’s future. This is the shift of high-tech industries from North America to Asia.

U.S. prosperity depends on something called local multipliers. This means that stuff that we export brings in revenue from other countries, that then gets spread around the country via various service industries. In a 2010 paper, economist Enrico Moretti attempted to quantify this effect, and found the following:

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.

Amber Athey:

‘As we’ve come to know more about the virus, as vaccinations are ramping up, and as we’re trying to figure out how to live with some level of COVID in a sustainable way, masking up outside when you’re at most briefly crossing paths with people is starting to feel barely understandable,’ the author reasoned.

Mask enthusiasts melted down in response, insisting that Slate‘s article was ‘irresponsible‘, ‘going to get people killed‘ and ‘misleading‘. Others celebrated the article as ‘a good sign of progress‘. A Harvard infectious disease specialist asserted, ‘I am generally a hawk about maintaining rules with a clear benefit. Outdoor masking has notable costs and really no evidence of benefits.’

Meanwhile, the rest of us normal people thought, ‘wait a second, you guys were still wearing masks outside?’

Yes, outside of the Twitter bubble and large city centers where mask virtue-signaling reigns supreme, no sane person has been wearing a mask outdoors for months. The science doesn’t support it. As Slate noted in its late-to-the-party piece, the chances of catching COVID during a brief moment passing someone else on the sidewalk are lower than getting struck by lightning.

Still, leftists persisted because they didn’t dare upset their woke neighbors who believe a ‘culture of safety‘ is more important than a return to normalcy. In downtown Washington DC, bikers and runners double mask and veer into the middle of the street rather than risk passing another pedestrian in close quarters. In Arlington, Virginia, I still spot people wearing masks while driving in their cars or sitting alone in parks. Refusing to comply often means getting the stink eye from a still terrified traverser.

Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill:

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

To assess the slander’s impact, we wrote a software program to download every post from a dozen of the most active complaint sites: more than 150,000 posts about some 47,000 people. Then we set up a web crawler that searched Google and Bing for thousands of the people who had been attacked.

For about one-third of the people, the nasty posts appeared on the first pages of their results. For more than half, the gripe sites showed up at the top of their image results.

These were the Google image results for “aaron krolik nyc.”

Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru:

You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised India’s handling of the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. These tweets, which are now inaccessible to Indian users of the social media website, include posts by Revanth Reddy, a sitting Member of Parliament; Moloy Ghatak, a West Bengal state minister; actor Vineet Kumar Singh; and two filmmakers, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das. 

MediaNama has seen public disclosures of the orders made available by Twitter to the Lumen Database. Lumen Database receives and publishes disclosures from private entities, including social media companies, of legal takedown notices they get from governments and private entities all over the world. MediaNama has previously reported the withholding of Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament Sukhram Singh Yadav’s Twitter account based on a Lumen Database disclosure. Such orders are typically sent by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY).

Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven & Magne Mogstad:

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

Frank Miles:

A singular German word overflowing with length and precision can flummox an English speaker: from its number of letters to its complex meaning.

In the age of COVID-19, more than 1,200 words in German have been created.

“I can’t think of anything, at least since the Second World War, that would have changed the vocabulary as drastically and at the same time as quickly, as the corona pandemic,” said Anatol Stefanowitsch, a professor of linguistics at the Free University of Berlin. “I can think of many other examples of a huge cultural shift that changed the German vocabulary. But they didn’t happen within a few months.”

The list of new words was compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language.

“When new things happen in the world [we] look for a name,” said Dr. Christine Möhrs, who works at the institute and collects the words. “Things that do not have a name can cause people to feel fear and insecurity. However, if we can talk about things and name them, then we can communicate with each other. Especially in times of crisis, this is important.”

She noted the new words are helping reduce Coronaangst (anxiety about the virus).

Matt Feeney:

This year, Harvard applications were up 43 percent from last year. At Yale, applicants were up 33 percent. At Duke, 25 percent. The result is plunging acceptance rates. Harvard admitted just 3.4 percent of applicants; Yale, 4.6 percent; Duke, 5.8 percent. The deluge of applications poses a problem: Admissions officers at the most selective colleges increasingly must squint to discern any meaningful difference between thoroughly deserving applicants.

My wife is a high-school counselor, and her boss (the head counselor) conveyed a revealing tidbit to me: An Ivy League admissions dean told her that his office could simply replace the class they admitted with the next most competitive group of applicants, and the next several after that, and it would make no difference. In 2015 the undergraduate admissions dean at Tufts University made a similar confession, noting that 74 percent of the nearly 20,000 applicants to Tufts were deemed qualified for admission while 42 percent were recommended for acceptance. The school’s actual acceptance rate that year? Sixteen percent, a number that has likely only shrunk: This year, applications to Tufts ballooned by 35 percent.

A sane approach to this glut of qualified applicants would be for a college’s admissions office to take the names of all qualified applicants, spread them over a cork board, and start throwing some darts. Indeed, such a straightforward and compelling proposal to reform the admissions process — a type of lottery — has been offered in these pages by Barry Schwartz and Dalton Conley.

Bob Fernandez:

For over a year, lawyer Bob Heist, then-chairman of the Milton Hershey School’s board, says he sought internal financial records detailing the spending history of the $17 billion charity, which has a mission to educate low-income students for free.

He now says he is being denied records he needs as a board member charged with overseeing the Pennsylvania boarding school’s operations, and earlier this month he sued the school to obtain the documents. It’s an extremely unusual step for a sitting board member, taken against an extremely unusual institution: The Milton Hershey School is the wealthiest pre-college educational institution in the United States. It controls 80% of the Hershey Co. candy giant’s voting shares, and reaps profits from the sale of Hershey chocolate bars, Reese’s peanut butter cups and SkinnyPop-brand snacks sold in thousand of U.S. retail stores.

The dispute is the latest in a series of legal entanglements involving the nonprofit Milton Hershey School and the members of its governing board. Two previous financial controversies raised questions about whether the school’s spending was serving the needs of its roughly 2,100 students, as required by law and enforced by the state attorney general’s office.

Aaron Timms:

“Competition,” wrote Peter Thiel in his 2014 manual Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future, “is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.” The idea Thiel articulated in Zero to One—that achieving greatness and building the future means “avoiding competition as much as possible”—is among the most important of his many achievements of the last decade. Equally important was Thiel’s decision, in 2016, before he headlined the Republican National Convention and told the country to vote for Donald Trump, to invite one of the country’s most influential white nationalists to dinner.

On your path to becoming an intellectual in Silicon Valley, understanding these two lessons—the Peter Principles, we’ll call them, since that adds nothing to the conversation but sounds sophisticated—will be key to your success. First, the point of your interventions in the public sphere is not to “win” any “argument,” nor to attract new adherents or convince neutrals of the righteousness of your cause. It is to avoid competition. When competition seeks you out, as it invariably will, your task will be to lose the debate and propose ideas that “seem” (and often are) “shit,” since popular discourse is a test of conventional mindedness; to be truly radical, you must be wrong. Second, there is no absolute moral evil that cannot be playfully reframed on irrelevant grounds as a net historical good. Take, for instance, poverty: what looks to most people like a recipe for social inequality, resentment, division, and violence will be, in your spritely retelling, the most powerful mechanism for income mobility in the history of human civilization. Or consider, say, Pol Pot’s killing fields: bad for the people who got stuck in them, but good for Cambodia’s startup ecosystem? Nazis did bad things to the world in the middle of the twentieth century, but there’s no reason to think they won’t do wonders for agency culture at the Food and Drug Administration in the early 2020s. Your success as a Silicon Valley intellectual will depend on your ability to insert difficult but necessary conversations like these into the public domain. A couple of half-decent ratioed tweets about the beauty of population control or the necessity of transphobia, and you’ll be well on your way to securing your status among the Silicon Valley elite.

Beth A. Brennan:

While legal education unquestionably hones students’ critical thinking skills, it also privileges students who are faster readers and have prior background knowledge or larger working memories. According to the prevailing mythology of law school pedagogy, students learn by struggling to find their way out of chaos. Only then is their learning deep enough to permit them to engage in critical thinking and legal reasoning.

Learning theory and research suggest this type of “inquiry” learning is not an effective way to introduce novice learners to a subject. Lacking basic substantive and procedural knowledge, students’ struggles are often unproductive and dispiriting.

Initial explicit instruction early in a student’s learning more predictably creates stable, accurate knowledge. Because higher-order thinking depends on having some knowledge, ensuring students have a strong foundation of substantive and procedural knowledge increases the likelihood that they will develop critical thinking skills.

However, legal education uniformly dismisses anything that looks like “spoon-feeding.” If the academy is going to incorporate learning theory into its pedagogy, it must understand and articulate the differences between spoon-feeding and explicit instruction.

This Article examines explicit instruction as a pedagogical tool for legal educators. Part I examines cognitive psychological theories of thinking and learning to understand the differences between spoon-feeding and explicit instruction and explain why initial explicit instruction is useful. Part II delves into the cognitive differences between novices and experts that support initial explicit instruction. Part III examines experts’ cognitive barriers to effective teaching. Part IV provides examples of how explicit instruction can be used in the law school classroom.

Related: English 10.

John Roach:

I worked with Caire when he headed the Urban League of Greater Madison and on his effort to launch Madison Prep, the earnest but quixotic attempt to address Madison’s embarrassing racial achievement gap. The failure to launch that school was a bitter blow. And the gap has remained unchanged.

Madison Prep failed because the teachers’ union and other supporters of the educational status quo were motivated and powerful. But they are not invincible. Caire discovered that the best way to battle those who stand in opposition to righteous change is not to meet them head on, but to adroitly scoot around them.

It also helps to enlist allies.

Allies like the legendary Pleasant Rowland, who just donated $14 million to help address Madison’s stark racial reality by expanding Caire’s One City Schools to a bigger, better building in Monona. Like Caire, I am a Madisonian, born and raised, and cannot think of anyone who’s had a greater impact on our city in modern times than Rowland and her husband, Jerry Frautschi. There is simply no precedent for such philanthropy in Madison’s history. None. Rowland and Frautschi deserve a statue at the head of State Street, once we elect leaders who can figure out how to fix Madison’s shabby aorta.

Caire has other allies, like the UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity. This entity moved to alter the painful reality that its flagship university is in a town with one of the worst racial gaps in America. So, they chartered One City Schools. Yes, the C word. Charter.

Notes and links on Kaleem Caire.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

The scholar’s Stage:

Understanding changing perceptions of “great works”— what books are included in a canon at a given moment in history, why certain works make the cut while others fall to the wayside, and tracking down the individuals responsible for these decisions—is a hobby of mine. I have written about it many times on the Scholar’s Stage. This week I came across an interesting example of cannon formation in action. William Osler was one of the founding physicians of John Hopkins Medicine, creator of the hospital residency system, inventor of much of the hands-on medical pedagogy still used in medical schools today, and one of the most famous doctors of his day. On the final page of Aequanimitas, a collection of Osler’s lectures and orations published in 1904, is a list of books that Osler believes should be on every medical student’s bookshelf. He suggests that while in medical school young doctors-to-be should spend the last 30 minutes of their night reading from this chosen library.

Omenti:

Last week I sent a note to regular readers:

Perhaps it’s a sense that things are possible post-pandemic, but I’ve been asked for comments on the future of education three times since the beginning of the year. While I have some unscientific and undoubtedly biased thoughts I’m happy to share it occurs to me this group is exceptionally diverse.

So the request: Could you write a bit about what you’d like to see in education going forward? The subject is huge and readers represent at least seven countries so just pick a few and stay away from clear needs in some countries – like affordable and equitable education. Those are incredibly important, but perhaps some thoughts on curriculum, teaching, etc.. I’ll collect and post them with my comments in a week – say a cutoff on the 24th of April. Let me know if you want your name attached or not. And don’t worry about it if you don’t have time.

How much should you have to fight (and pay) to get information about your children’s schools? Yes, the conclusion to our week-long series about pandemic learning is a dive into Wisconsin public records law. Are you surprised? So let’s talk location fees. 1/

— Amanda St. Hilaire (@amandasaint5) April 23, 2021

Remco Zwetsloot and Zachary Arnold:

Kicking out Chinese students might seem like tough, decisive policymaking, but it’s exactly the wrong way to protect the United States’ scientific and technological advantage. Welcoming foreign talent isn’t simply a virtuous position to take—in fact, that openness is at the core of U.S. power. The United States gains tremendously from the inflow of Chinese students, and China loses from its top talent going abroad. The Biden administration should work to reduce the risk of technology transfer, including through intelligence and research security reforms. But driving Chinese students away could cripple U.S. innovation and supercharge China’s technological progress. The United States should make the most of its talent advantage, not throw it away on an ineffective ban.

Congress.gov:

04/22/2021Amendment SA 1456 proposed by Senator Cruz to Amendment SA 1445. (consideration: CR S2146; text: CR S2140) To prohibit Federal funding for any institution of higher education that discriminates against Asian Americans in recruitment, applicant review, or admissions.

Anastassia Fedyk and James Hodson:

How resilient are high-skilled, white collar workers? We exploit a uniquely comprehensive dataset of individual-level resumes of bank employees and the setting of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to estimate the effect of an unanticipated shock on the career paths of mobile and high skilled labor. We find evidence of short-term effects that largely dissipate over the course of the decade and that touch only the senior-most employees. We match each employee of Lehman Brothers in January 2008 to the most similar employees at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and UBS based on job positions, skills, education, and demographics. By 2019, the former Lehman Brothers employees are 2% more likely to have experienced at least a six-months-long break from reported employment and 3% more likely to have left the financial services industry. However, these effects concentrate among the senior individuals such as vice presidents and managing directors and are absent for junior employees such as analysts and associates. Furthermore, in terms of subsequent career growth, junior employees of Lehman Brothers fare no worse than their counterparts at the other banks. Analysts and associates employed at Lehman Brothers in January 2008 have equal or greater likelihoods of achieving senior roles such as managing director in existing enterprises by January 2019 and are more likely to found their own businesses.

Emma Bowman

In between the usual oral spelling rounds, “word meaning,” the new vocabulary portion, will ask the speller to answer a multiple-choice question during the second round of each competition level all the way to the finals.

Also new is the “spell-off”: For the July 8 finals, officials can now trigger a lightning round to rule out the possibility of a tie.

If, as time is running down in the last round, there is still no winner, all spellers left standing will be given 90 seconds to spell as many words as possible from a prepared list. Whoever spells the most words correctly wins the title.

J. Michael Durnil, who stepped in as the bee’s executive director in March, is overseeing the changes to the 96-year-old competition.

“The Bee’s competition format this year – inspired by proactive safety measures as the pandemic evolves – has allowed us to introduce new competition elements, aligned with our regular program review to ensure the competition continues to mature in a way that appropriately challenges the most accomplished spellers in the country,” Durnil said in a press release. “The spell-off, if activated, promises to be a gripping moment for both the spellers onstage during the finals and audiences on the edges of their seats at home.”

Article continues after sponsor message

This new feature will almost certainly prevent repeats of past bees, in which reigning spellers had to share their glory. In 2019, a record-busting eight contestants were named co-champions after enduring 20 spelling rounds. All three bees from 2014 through 2016 also ended in a tie.

Alex Nester:

School districts in recent months have increased their efforts to weave critical race theory—the idea that America’s political and economic systems are inherently racist—into K-12 curriculum standards. The Education Department’s proposal signals the Biden administration’s support for this trend.

The rule would allocate federal funding for education contractors who work to “improve” K-12 curriculum by promoting “racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically responsive teaching and learning practices.” The rule would also require the Education Department to encourage social studies curricula that teach students about “systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history.”

The Education Department claims that the coronavirus pandemic and “ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism” make changes to the education system necessary. The proposal cites the New York Times‘s 1619 Project and antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s criticisms of American education.

“Schools across the country are working to incorporate antiracist practices into teaching and learning,” the proposal reads. “It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students.”

Sam Dorman:

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).

“[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade,” he said. “That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses.”

His post included a chart with what appeared to be set math courses for 2022-2030.

The multidisciplinarian:

For most of us, there is a large gap between what we know and what we think we know. We hold a level of confidence about our factual knowledge and predictions that doesn’t match our abilities. Since our personal decisions are really predictions about the future based on our available present knowledge, it makes sense to work toward adjusting our confidence to match our skill.

Last year I measured the knowledge-confidence gap of 3500 participants in a trivia game with a twist. For each True/False trivia question the respondents specified their level of confidence (between 50 and 100% inclusive) with each answer. The questions, presented in banks of 10, covered many topics and ranged from easy (American stop signs have 8 sides) to expert (Stockholm is further west than Vienna).

I ran this experiment on a website using 1500 True/False questions, about half of which belonged to specific categories including music, art, current events, World War II, sports, movies and science. Visitors could choose between the category “Various” or from a specific category. I asked for personal information such as age, gender current profession, title, and education. About 20% of site visitors gave most of that information. 30% provided their professions.

Participants were told that the point of the game was not to get the questions right but to have an appropriate level of confidence. For example, if a your average confidence value is 75%, 75% of their your answers should be correct. If your confidence and accuracy match, you are said to be calibrated. Otherwise you are either overconfident or underconfident. Overconfidence – sometime extreme – is more common, though a small percentage are significantly underconfident.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The district is still reeling from a significant drop in enrollment due to COVID-19 during the 2020-21 school year and, despite the passage of an operating referendum in November, operating revenue is expected to be up only 0.8%, less than the annual cost of living adjustment. Any additional funding the district may get through the state budget will be used to cover the funding gap created by the enrollment drop of roughly 1,000 students.

“Had it have not been for the passing of the operating referendum, we would have been in a negative revenue cycle, based on our estimates, but the referendum is allowing us to stay stable as a school district through the effects of COVID-19 enrollment,” Ruppel said. “It’ll take us a couple of years to build this enrollment back up.”

The district is also expecting more federal funds, including $18.9 million meant to combat COVID-19 related learning loss, which has not yet been included in its preliminary budget draft. Those funds should be included in the next budget draft, to be released in June, Ruppel said.

The district said all funds from the referendum that passed in November along with $7 million in repurposed local funding will be earmarked for “Excellence and Equity projects” in the operating budget.

These numbers do not appear to include substantial redistributed federal taxpayer (debt) funds ($70m in the latest tranche!).

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts. This, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

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

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

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

For the last (and actually only) diversity session I attended before leaving The Intercept, the highly-paid outside consultant emailed everyone before saying employees would be divided by race into different rooms (white room & POC room) and it was shocking. Now it’s standard: https://t.co/0c6YmFMCX0

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Top donors, 2019-20:@GeorgeSoros: $490,000
Facebook co-founder @moskov: $85,000
Hedge fund manager @JohnArnoldFndtn: $230,000
Heiress Lynde Bradley Uihlein: $190,000
Former Milwaukee Bucks owner Herb Kohl: $81,000
Rockefeller heir Paul Growald: $55,000

Follow back! https://t.co/f9SU8dIShs

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 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.

Madison schools: Press #1 if you’re white, #2 if you’re not

Sarah Hauer:

Serena Williams’ venture capital firm has invested in Milwaukee education technology startup Fiveable.

Fiveable announced that the tennis star’s investment fund was backing the company in a news release. The education streaming startup has seen huge increases in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What impresses us most about Fiveable is how well they understand and are immersed in today’s students; that’s what initially piqued our interest. The way they’ve brought students in to help guide their roadmap is unlike anything I’ve seen,” said Serena Williams, founder of Serena Ventures, in a statement.

“Based on their growth in users and engagement, it’s evident that their social learning community has cracked the code on peer-to-peer learning.”

Fiveable’s online education platform focuses on Advanced Placement courses with most content available for free. The company has study guides for every unit in all 38 AP subjects, hosts a Discord server for students to study and livestream cram sessions. More than half a million students have used Fiveable in the last 30 days, according to the company.

Christopher Rufo:

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the twentieth century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

WILL:

Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony in support of Senate Bill 41. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) believes that every student in Wisconsin deserves access to a high-quality education and this bill advances that principle by removing barriers in the Open Enrollment and Wisconsin Parental Choice Programs.

Senate Bill 41 expands access to both the Open Enrollment and Wisconsin Parental Choice Programs by removing the zip code barrier, which locks students into limited educational options based on their address.

The Open Enrollment Program is the state’s largest school choice program with over 65,000 students last year choosing to attend a public school outside of their residential district. Our research1 found that demand and utilization of this program have grown over the past 20 years. In fact, overall participation increases each year 3-6% (or approx. 2,000-4,000 students). However, over 9,000 applications (24%) were denied in the 2019-2020 school year by districts and the overwhelming reason for denial was space.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted families’ interest and need for additional educational options. Without a doubt, more families are looking for the best educational options for their students outside of their assigned public schools. The program must be amended to respond to the increased demand. But the Open Enrollment Program limits applications to only three non-residential districts per year, which restricts families’ options even further. SB 41 expands options for families by removing the three application limit for the 2021-2022 school year so families can find the school that best meets the educational needs of their child.

The Open Enrollment Program also allows students to apply outside of the traditional enrollment window by submitting an “alternative application” under certain circumstances, including “best interest for the child.” Just last year, 14,000 of the 15,000 alternative applications were submitted for that reason. SB 41 prohibits a child’s resident school district from denying a student transfer to a nonresidential district if both the parents and nonresidential district agree it’s in the best interest of the child. This will help keep families seeking alternative education options from being denied access to a nonresidential public school.

Mark Jeftovic:

I’ve been reading Peter Turchin’s “Ages of Discord”, which tries to look at patterns of societal strife that he found in previous, pre-industrial civilizations such as Rome and France, and examine how it holds up in a post-industrial era. It bears some resemblance to other cycle theories like Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning” or other long-wave models like Kondratiev Waves (K-Waves). The basic premise behind these ideas are that societies undergo cyclical or pendulum-like dynamics between relatively steady states of prosperity and stability, the internal dynamics of which then produce the conditions that precipitate reversions into turbulent periods of strife and chaotic change.

The important thing to keep in mind is that to that the likes of Turchin and other historical statisticians, the periods of societal discord that they try to map may look like this:

Sean Cooper:

The ideological battles over California’s ethnic studies curriculum are finally over, at least for now. The disputed model curriculum was approved by the state legislature in March, and soon the guidelines for mandated high school programs will be disseminated to local school boards across the state.

Last summer, though, when it was still too close to call, the cadre of ethnic studies professors and education bureaucrats, the ones who were the primary instigators of the new curriculum, were furious that there was any resistance at all. “I’m pissed,” said Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, an ethnic studies professor at San Francisco State and key architect of the controversial curriculum. She was addressing a Zoom meeting, joined by concerned colleagues throughout the state. They were up in arms over proposed revisions to their plan, which they felt would undermine the political essence of the program. “For them to slap us in the face! That’s not cool.”

The revisions were minimal, and the legislature was almost certain to pass the bill—a state law requiring every public high school to teach ethnic studies, using their curriculum as the model. They were on the verge of achieving their dream. So why the panic?

For all the talk of this being a movement for social good, a new dawn for American students, and a solution to oppression, ethnic studies is also, crucially, very much a nascent but nationwide white-collar industry. Indeed, while evidence for its educational or even social value is hotly debated, what’s not in dispute is that the business of flipping the public education establishment on its head is beginning to pay—and very well.

County: “We don’t have authority over the school board.”

School board: “We follow the county’s mandate to avoid confusion.”

Experts: “We don’t make policy – we just provide information.”

Policy makers: “We’re just following the advice of the experts”

It’s all circular.

— Jennifer Cabrera 😀 #ForgetYourMask (@jhaskinscabrera) April 20, 2021

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Michael Petrilli:

If I had to name the most important institution in American life, and the one with the most potential for changing the course of our country, it would be the humble elementary school. Especially the 20,000 or so high-poverty elementary schools in the nation’s cities and inner-ring suburbs, educating millions of kids growing up in poor or working-class families.

Yes, of course, we also need to dramatically improve the other parts of our education system if we’re to help all young Americans fulfill their God-given potential. That includes making high-quality pre-K more widely accessible to those who need it most, upping the quality of our middle schools, and rethinking and improving our high schools. Not to mention revamping our post-secondary education system and overhauling our workforce training programs.

Still, if I were king for a day, or even just superintendent of a large district, I would spend at least twenty-three of my twenty-four hours in charge obsessing about elementary schools. And that’s for four big reasons.

First, these schools have the greatest potential impact on kids’ academic, social, and emotional progress. Partly that’s just basic math: Most children spend almost half of their K–12 time in elementary schools, usually six out of thirteen years. And those also happen to be the six years when kids tend to learn the most. To wit, the average student achievement gains during elementary school far outpace those seen before or after.

Max Kutner:

Early last June, Brentwood School posted an image of a black square on Instagram. This was eight days after George Floyd had been killed, and it was part of #BlackoutTuesday, a social media campaign against racism and inequality. Other Los Angeles prep schools also participated in the well-intentioned if largely symbolic online gesture, along with millions of other institutions, businesses, and individuals. But Brentwood’s black box got what’s known as ratioed; it received more negative comments than likes. Many more.

“Brentwood is a toxic racist cesspool for students of color, but an ivory tower for the wealthy, white elite,” read one of the scores of scathing remarks that kept popping up on Instagram throughout the day. “If you cared about racial justice, you would close your doors and redistribute your obscene wealth,” read another.

In the year since Floyd’s murder, the atmosphere at this bucolic, super-exclusive, $38,000- to $45,000-a-year private school has only grown more poisonous, with some Brentwood alumni of color not only hurling accusations of racism but also demanding that the school completely scrap what they see as a biased curriculum. Meanwhile, parents, teachers, and administrators spent much of last summer and fall wrestling over the value of books like To Kill a Mockingbird—a civil rights classic to some; an outdated, problematic text to others—in what’s shaping up to be an epic battle over the hearts and minds of the children of America’s one percent.

To be sure, scenes like this are not occurring only at Brentwood. Similar skirmishes are breaking out at elite prep schools all over—at Harvard-Westlake, Marlborough, and Archer School for Girls in L.A. and in New York at Chapin and Dalton—making headlines across the country in publications as ideologically divergent as the New York Post and The Atlantic. But it’s worth focusing on what’s going on at this particular school off West Sunset. Because it’s here at Brentwood that all the forces arrayed in this conflict—woke alumni who want to tear the system down; teachers who’ve had a hard enough time getting through the year on Zoom, let alone dealing with paradigm shifts in educational priorities; and angry, frustrated moms and dads who just want their kids to get into good colleges—are most dramatically and publicly clashing, like those stranded boys battling each other on a deserted island in Lord of the Flies, one of the novels Brentwood struck from reading lists last year.

Elizabeth Beyer:

When Monica Warren learned her church, Mt. Zion Baptist, planned to host an in-person tutoring program during the school day to supplement online learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she knew she had to get her 11-year-old son enrolled.

Jeremiah Warren, a normally shy and introverted student, blossomed in the church’s Schools Without Walls program, she said. He began to come out of his shell and strike up conversations with other students.

After schools closed in March 2020 and before Mt. Zion launched Schools Without Walls, Jeremiah struggled with online learning. In September, Warren said her son didn’t log in to his online classroom on the first day of school because he was nervous and hadn’t yet had a chance to meet his fifth-grade teacher in person.

“It was hard for him. I feel like he’s more of an in-person type of student because he needs, not constant supervision, but knowing that someone is looking out for (him),” she said. But she wasn’t able to give him the guidance he needed to support his online learning at home because she needed to return to work at Edgewood College.

Yaron Steinbuch:

A biotech entrepreneur assailed a growing “wokeness” that he said is “infecting schools,” after a dad decided not to re-enroll his daughter in an elite Manhattan prep school due to its focus on race.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 35, founder and executive chairman of Roivant Sciences and author of “Woke Inc.,” launched into a tirade on “Fox News Sunday” following Andrew Gutmann’s scathing letter in which he blasted the posh, all-girls Brearley School.

Gutmann, who accused Brearley of trying to “brainwash” kids with woke philosophies rather than teaching them how to think on their own, attacked the school’s “cowardly and appalling lack of leadership [for] appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob.”

In his missive to 650 families, the incensed dad compared the growing “woke” culture to the Communist Chinese Cultural Revolution.